Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (31 page)

Adythne was certainly spirited, but Kwasin had known that even before he laid eyes on her. Who else would abandon her mother’s totem in favor of adoption into a foreign one? He knew, however, that such things were done in certain rare cases. Sometimes, in a remote village, an infant’s or toddler’s mother died leaving behind no direct living matrilineal relatives. If no member from the mother’s clan stepped forward to adopt the child, the village priestess had leeway to reassign the child to another totem. There was almost always a great-aunt or a distant cousin able to adopt the child, and if the child was old enough, someone from the mother’s totem would adopt it, no matter the hazy nature of the relation—for were not all totem brothers and sisters of the same spiritual blood? But Adythne had not only switched totems; she had become a high priestess among her adopted people—how Kwasin would love to hear the tale behind that!

The thought of being spiritually separated from his birth totem disturbed Kwasin. Though he had not been among his bear brothers during his eight years in exile, he could not imagine cutting himself off from the Klakordeth forever. The spirit of the bear ran too deeply within him.

He could not, however, blame the woman for her decision to switch totems. The Thunder Bear Totem was of heady stock, the cream of the crop as far as Kwasin was concerned, even if its members did tend to indulge a bit too heavily in alcohol and, from time to time, killed one another in drunken rages, or in ritual games of strength and endurance. But they were bears at heart, his spiritual brothers and sisters—and bears liked their honey, and were also prone to outbursts of violence when the mood set upon them—so how could anyone hold it against them? Because of this, Kwasin did not begrudge the woman her stubbornness either.

And so, instead of arguing with Adythne, Kwasin merely bellowed with laughter.

“You are courageous, O Priestess, and I wish you luck,” he said, “though I doubt you will find it.” And with that he slung his ax over a shoulder and strode leisurely into the forest.

Through the trees he heard the priestess curse him, and then, loud enough that he knew she meant him to hear it, she said, “Come, Parbho, we shall free the village ourselves. You, at least, are no coward.”

Kwasin walked on through the cedars for some time, trying to keep his thoughts on his goal of reaching Dythbeth and seeking exoneration from his crimes. Soon, however, his conscience began to prickle. He could not keep Adythne’s final words from his mind.

Had he not accused Hadon of exactly the same sort of cowardice for failing to remain behind with him to fight Minruth’s soldiers in the capital? Had his desire to clear his name and abrogate his exile—strengthened by the dreams of his mother’s death that wracked his sleep—at last squelched his seemingly bottomless well of boldness and spontaneity? Not to mention—and here his pride truly stung—his fearlessness?

He muttered a curse. Then, he laughed.

Truly had the priestess worked a spell over him, one that had almost succeeded. No, he thought, not just Adythne, but her sister as well. Both, he mused, had shrewdly and cunningly worked their magic on him—the snakewoman had planted the seed and the bearwoman had sought to harvest it. But he would not be distracted from his mission. Maybe, if the oracle did pardon his crimes, he would return to the Saasamaro with a stalwart band of King Roteka’s soldiers and rout the enemy from Q”okwoqo. But not until he again walked free within the empire.

Kwasin continued on through the woods. Soon he found his mood had lifted and again he began to feel like his old self.

Then came the tart stink of death amid the strong smell of the cedars.

When he found the bodies of the children, blackness consumed him.

* * *

Kwasin knew now that he could not go to Dythbeth. Not yet anyway. He could not let the atrocity go unpunished, no matter his previous plans.

That so-called civilized citizens of the empire had committed such a profane act against the innocent made him feel ashamed of his desire to return to civilization—he had never seen such vile barbarism in all his years among the savages in the Wild Lands. But war, Kwasin knew, sometimes made people commit atrocities they would never conceive of enacting in peacetime. Still, that did not forgive the soldiers who had done this. He would make them pay for their actions. He had no doubt the corpses were those of the children abducted by the drunken soldiers about whom Adythne had raged.

What had set him on the path that had led here? He might have set off from the meadow on any number of paths through the forest, but he had taken this one. Had the Bear God truly guided him here, as Madekha had suggested, so that Kwasin would remain and help Old Father Nakendar’s people? Or perhaps the Goddess Herself wanted him to stay and fight, for Her own unknowable reasons. He did not know, but the end result was the same. One moment, he had been on the road to Dythbeth, caring little for anything but his own self-interest; in the next, a path of blood and death lay before him.

Though a dark rage had seized him, he set about the task of burying the dead innocents. He had no tool but the sharpened head of his ax to dig the graves, but he could not turn away from the unpleasant chore, notwithstanding the furious urge to take up the war trail straightaway. What these children could not expect of life, he would assure they received in death. When he could, he would hunt down a wild boar and sacrifice it so that their spirits would not hunger and thirst. But now he had only the time to bury their mortal remains.

The early afternoon having passed at his grim labors, Kwasin set off for the meadow where he had last seen Adythne. It took him longer than he would have liked to find the place, and when he did, the priestess was not there. He did, however, find her spoor, as well as that of the bear. The two had set off in different directions, the bear toward the southwest where the forest deepened as the valley widened, and the woman, not surprisingly, in the direction of the village.

After following Adythne’s trail for fifteen minutes, the spoor disappeared beneath the fresh bootprints of many men. He tracked the party a short distance before noticing a woman’s footprints diverging from the group. He followed her tracks but found they made only a little loop through the woods before rejoining the prints of the main party.

Standing beneath the vaulting cedars, Kwasin reconstructed what had transpired. Adythne had set off from the meadow and quickly parted with the bear. Perhaps she had commanded the bear to head into the deep woods, where the animal would be less likely to have a confrontation with the soldiers. About a half-mile from the meadow, Adythne had spied a group of soldiers in the forest, at which point she turned to the east. From the length of the woman’s stride, as well as the shallow impression of her heels, Kwasin could tell she was at this point running, as if the soldiers had seen her. She had gone a distance and then stopped beneath a sprawling pine amid the cedars before finally turning back in the direction of the soldiers. Then she had been caught.

But why had the woman detoured from the party of soldiers only to return to be captured by them? Unless...

Kwasin jogged back to the great pine and looked up into its array of widely spread limbs. He grunted approvingly when he spied what he sought, then pulled himself up among the branches and climbed high into the pine.

When he neared the top of the tree he plucked from between two joining limbs what the woman had cached there: the tightly wrapped antelope-hide bundle that contained the sacred bear pelt. Then he returned to the ground with his prize.

Kwasin removed the pelt from the waxen hide, eddied the pelt over his well-muscled shoulders, and sat down glumly beneath the great pine. His head couched in his hands, he sighed deeply. He thought of how he had abandoned Adythne in the forest against her urgings that he help her defeat the soldiers occupying her village. Now those soldiers had caught her.

That the all-too-determined priestess would have been apprehended by the soldiers sooner or later did nothing to assuage Kwasin’s guilt that he had not assisted her. He was not one to live his life imprisoned by feelings of remorse—he did what his heart told him and bore the consequences. But since he had returned from the Wild Lands, something had changed in him. His actions no longer seemed as certain as they once had. Perhaps he had become unaccustomed to civilized companionship. Or possibly the feeling of uncertainty was due to the dreams that plagued his nights, or maybe the furious battle between Great Kho and Resu that shook the land. Why, he wondered, had he so desired to return to the empire that spurned him to begin with?

Of course, he knew the answer. He had suffered a terrible, soul-aching loneliness while in the wilds. But when he had returned to civilization, a stark feeling of
nothingness
had rapidly descended upon him, even more smothering than the isolation he had faced in the far-flung land of the savages. In the hope of filling that void of nothingness, he had seized upon the idea of returning to Dythbeth and obtaining a pardon for his crimes. But now, in the mountains above his homeland, the emptiness remained and he wondered if he would ever find that which would satisfy the cravings of his soul.

As Kwasin sat brooding thus, his head cradled deeply in his hands, something cold and wet nudged his forearm. He lifted his head and nearly leaped to his feet when he found himself looking into the large and terrible dark eyes of a great brown bear. It was all he could do to keep from jumping up, but he knew that if he moved suddenly, the bear would become enraged and all would be over for the mighty Kwasin—the bear’s horrible fangs would devour both body and soul, and even dread Sisisken, goddess of the underworld, would be left wondering what had become of him. The nothingness that he feared most would blot him out forever.

And so Kwasin sat there, unmoving, watching the bear. That it was Parbho, the bear that had accompanied the priestess Adythne, he had no doubt. In fact, the bear had a forlorn look about it, as it sat on its haunches, snorting and nudging Kwasin gently with its cold, black nose. Almost, Kwasin thought, as if the bear understood its mistress had been captured by the soldiers—as if, finding Kwasin in the forest with the sacred pelt of the she-bear draped about his shoulders, the bear sought comfort from the man-thing. Did the bear believe, because its mistress had commanded it not to attack the man-thing, that Kwasin was consequently its mistress’s friend? And by extension, the bear’s friend?

Kwasin did not question his attribution of human emotions and motivations to the bear; all living things were by extension the children of Kho, the Mother of All, and even the deities felt love and hate and greed and sorrow. The bear was no different.

Of course, Parbho’s playful nosing of Kwasin might simply have been due to the pelt the human wore. As a holy artifact, it was likely used in the sacred rituals of the Klakordeth, and Adythne had said the villagers thought of their trained bears as spirit guides. Doubtless Parbho had taken some role in the totem’s rites and was accustomed to the scent of the pelt, which must have reassured the bear in the absence of its mistress.

Boldly, though hardly sure of the wisdom of his action, Kwasin reached out a hand and scratched Parbho behind an ear. The bear tilted its head and, if Kwasin was not mistaken, smiled at him as it whined affectionately.

Kwasin smiled back with genuine delight, but he was careful not to bare his teeth. He did not want the bear to mistake his grin for a threatening snarl.

For some time Kwasin sat with Parbho, caressing the beast as friskily as he dared. The bear even rolled onto its back in apparent jollity, and then back onto its feet to push Kwasin with a playful nudge that was at the same time forceful enough to almost send the human sprawling.

Finally, Kwasin decided he had to get to his feet and assert himself at some point or he might be trapped playing with the frolicsome bear until it grew tired of playing and turned on him. Slowly, the sacred she-bear pelt still about his shoulders, he rose. As he did so, the bear got to its feet as well and let out a deep growl that froze Kwasin where he stood.

Then inspiration struck him. He would not merely wait to see what the bear would do next. Adythne had, after all, said her people had trained the animals to dance. And so Kwasin crouched down on all fours and began to act out one of the ritual dances of the Bear people. As he danced, Kwasin also began chanting in gruff tones a primordial song of his totem. The ritual was, in fact, the Dance of Klaklaku, reputed to depict the same motions of that legendary hero of the Klakordeth, who, donning bearskins, had convinced a sloth of bears to adopt him. If the dance had worked for his ancient totem ancestor, Kwasin thought, perhaps it would work for him as well.

At first the bear just watched him. Kwasin thought that from its look the animal believed the human to be mad, that at any second the bear would leap upon him and tear him to bloody pieces with its great claws and teeth. But then, much to his surprise, Parbho jumped in behind Kwasin and began following him in his dance, acting out the same motions that had been passed from Bear brother to Bear brother down from the time of Klaklaku himself!

Kwasin was amazed. But he also understood he had been lucky. Bears, whether trained or not, were by their very nature wild and deadly animals, and he had encountered this one under just the right circumstances. The villagers must have taught Parbho just this same ritual dance, one of the most ancient of his people. Seeing Kwasin attired in the sacred pelt, doubtless worn by Adythne or another totem member during the local rituals, and then watching the man-thing enact the familiar dance of Klaklaku, the bear was probably only doing what he had been taught to do as a cub.

Just when Kwasin felt the day could not grow stranger, he heard a rustling from the forest. Suddenly, out walked another brown bear, just as giant as his brother Parbho. Still Kwasin did not stop his dancing and singing. He feared too much what would happen if he did.

In the same manner as Parbho had at first done, the newcomer sat on his haunches and watched Kwasin intently. Then, as if waiting for just the right timing in the ritual display, the newly arrived bear rose up on all fours and swayed in behind Parbho, mimicking the exaggerated motions of the dance.