The Gift (42 page)

It was definitely the camp. Between the caravans were the remains of a fire, and underneath the ashes the earth was still warm, with blackened cooking pots smashed and scattered around it. Then Cadvan wandered behind a big rock that jutted out from the tumulus and returned quickly, his face grim.

“They are there,” he said. “I would not go there, if I were you.”

Maerad gulped and then, strengthening her will, stepped slowly behind the rock. She had to see for herself. Cadvan didn’t stop her.

The sight hit her like a savage blow to her stomach. Even the brutality of Gilman’s Cot had not prepared her for this kind of violence. She gagged, breaking into a cold sweat of shock. There were four of them: two men, a woman, and a small child. They had been dragged and lay where they had been left, all facing the sky. They were horribly mutilated and already flies gathered about them. Maerad averted her face and walked quickly back.

Silently they looked about the camp. “Perhaps we should look in the wagons,” said Maerad shakily.

Inside, the caravans had been thoroughly ransacked. They did not enter the caravan that had been tipped over, but looked inside. Utensils and belongings were thrown everywhere, and bottles of oil and grains and pickles had been smashed on the floor. At the far end were narrow bunks; the mattresses had been slashed and the floor was covered with their stuffing of horsehair and straw. The caravans had clearly once been cozy; there were bright cloths, now torn and soiled, and hand-carved ornaments, and wooden toys. Maerad picked up a little cat made of black wood and held it in the palm of her hand.

“Who would do this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cadvan heavily. “I will never understand this. I never have.”

An image of Hulls rose in Maerad’s mind, their eyes flickering a baleful red. “Do you think it was . . . Hulls?”

“Hulls enjoy the suffering of others.” Cadvan’s face was expressionless. “It answers some lack within themselves.” Maerad shuddered, thinking of the corpses. “It’s possible they were looking for us,” he added. “I think we should not stay.”

They were bending their heads to leave the caravan when they heard a small noise, like a sneeze. Both of them were instantly alert. It came from somewhere inside the caravan. They returned and looked again; in such a tiny space it seemed impossible that anyone could hide. They went to the back, where the beds were, and could see no likely hiding place; and there was no more sound. It was as if everything held its breath. Cadvan stood very still, listening. Then he went to one of the beds and threw the remains of the mattress on the floor. Underneath was a plank of wood. It seemed to be merely the base of the bed, but he examined it carefully and finally found a little catch near the head, which he sprang. He then lifted the plank, which revealed underneath a narrow space as long as the bed and no more than a foot high. Out of the darkness stared two terrified eyes. It was a boy.

They stared at each other in shock, and then Maerad leaned forward to help the boy out. He made a noise like a frightened animal and cowered back into the darkness.

“We won’t hurt you,” said Maerad softly. “We’ve come to help.” She reached forward again and tried to pull the boy out of the space, but he clung desperately to the edge of the bed. He made absolutely no sound. Maerad kept making soothing noises, and at last he let go of the bed and allowed her to bring him out. He fell on the floor before them and began to sob violently, shaking uncontrollably. There were no tears. He stank of urine, and his face was filthy and streaked with dust. Cadvan lifted him up and they took him out of the caravan into the light.

Outside, they saw he was probably about twelve, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with dark olive skin. He was painfully thin and his face was shadowed with hollows. Cadvan found a pan and a cloth and collected some water from a small pool nearby. Gently he washed the boy’s face. Then he went back into the caravan and found some clothes: a shirt and some trousers and a jerkin knitted of raw goat’s wool and a cloak, stoutly woven in the Zmarkan style, with curious animals embroidered around the cuffs and hood. Carefully he took the child’s clothes off one by one and dressed him, washing him as he went. The boy still said nothing, accepting Cadvan’s ministrations passively, protesting only when Cadvan tried to undo a cloth bag on a string that he wore around his neck; but gradually, as Cadvan tended to him, the shuddering stopped.

“Can you speak Annaren?” Cadvan asked, when the boy was clean.

“Yes.” The boy stared down at the ground and would not look at them. He spoke so quietly they could scarcely hear him.

“Good, then. My name is Cadvan. This is Maerad. We were traveling nearby, and last night we heard screaming, so we looked for this camp; and that is why we found you. We mean you no harm.”

The boy gulped hard. “Were there only five of you?” Cadvan asked.

The boy nodded. He looked utterly vulnerable: his young face was twisted by grief and terror. The clothes they had found were too big for him; his bare feet stuck out the bottom of the man’s trousers, which they had rolled up and tied around him with a piece of rope.

“What is your name?” asked Maerad.

“Hem,” said the boy. He stirred and sat up straighter. “My name is Hem.”

“What happened here?”

The boy looked down at the ground again, and Maerad, biting her lip, was sorry she had asked. But after a while he spoke. “Men came on horses,” he said. “I hid under the bed, but there was no time. . . . They came out of the dark. They took everybody somewhere, and I heard them crying and screaming, and then . . .”

There was a long silence, and Maerad and Cadvan exchanged glances. The boy shuddered again convulsively and took a deep breath. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I heard Sharn and Nidar fighting, and then Mudil screamed and screamed. I think they killed the baby first. I think everyone is dead.” He spoke blankly, with no expression at all. “I don’t know how long I was in the bed. I didn’t know if they would come back. I thought you were come to kill me.”

He put his face in his hands and began to weep, curling himself into a tight ball. Maerad crept forward and put her arms around him. He didn’t push her away, letting himself lean into her, and she felt his thin body wracked with sobs. She shut her eyes and held him for what seemed like a long time. Like her, he was an orphan; like her, he was alone in a harsh world, homeless and kinless; but something within her that was deeper than pity was stirred by this strange boy.

At last Hem’s sobs subsided and he sat up and moved slightly away from her, rubbing his sleeve over his face. Maerad looked around. Cadvan was nowhere to be seen, and Darsor and Imi were grazing a short distance away. She looked up at the sky. It was already midafternoon, and they would soon have to move, or be forced to stay the night. She wanted to leave this place as soon as they could. She wondered if she should look for Cadvan, but she didn’t want to leave the boy on his own.

“Are you hungry?” she said.

Hem nodded and sniffed. Maerad went to Imi and took some biscuit and fruit out of her bag. She gave him some medhyl, and then watched as he ate hungrily. As he was eating, Cadvan returned and sat down cross-legged with them. His face looked grim, but he spoke gently.

“Hem,” he said. “We must leave very soon. We’ll take you with us, if you wish. All your family is dead. I haven’t been able to bury them, but I have done what I can, so at least they will not be disturbed by crows or wild dogs.”

The boy stared at him and said nothing.

“Would you like to see?” Cadvan asked.

After a slight hesitation, Hem nodded. “They’re not my family,” he said, standing up slowly.

“Who are they, then?” Cadvan said; but the boy didn’t answer.

Maerad followed Cadvan and Hem around the rock, steeling herself. Cadvan had put the bodies into a fissure between the rock and the earth, which shelved in about four feet underneath. The boy looked at them wordlessly.

“What were their names?” asked Cadvan.

“Mudil,” said Hem. “And Sharn and Nidar. The baby was called Iris.”

Cadvan bowed his head. “Here then lie the remains of Mudil, Sharn, Nidar, and Iris,” he said. “May the Light protect their souls, and may they find solace beyond the Gate.”

The three stood silently, their heads bowed, and the only sound was the thin whine of the wind over the rocks. Cadvan began to roll a boulder toward the fissure, to wall it over, and Maerad helped him, and last of all Hem; and before long they had covered it completely.

After that, there was nothing else to do. Hem went into the caravan that was tipped on its side and shortly afterward emerged, pushing some objects into the bag on a string that he wore around his neck. There was no food to salvage, and Maerad thought in any case she would have felt odd, eating the food of dead people. She kept the little wooden cat. Cadvan mounted Hem in front of him on Darsor, and they moved off.

They rode long into the night, moving quietly as shadows in the uncertain light of the moon. They all wanted to get as far away as they could from that lonely place, made ghastly by violent death. Maerad thought of Dernhil, murdered by Hulls, and her mind flinched. She could not get out of her mind the sight of the slain family, flung behind the rock like so much rubbish. She wished she had not seen them.

HEM was the most silent human being Maerad had ever met. He rode with Cadvan, because Imi was not big enough to bear two, and all day he said nothing. Cadvan was often silent, but his silence seemed calm, the wordlessness of abstraction or deep thought; Hem was tense, a jangle of nerves, watchful and wary behind his roughly cut hair. At times he seemed much older than his twelve years; his face was at odd moments world-weary, like an old man who’d seen too many horrors, and yet at other times he was disconcertingly a little boy. At night he twisted and kicked, and would wake sometimes out of a nightmare with a cry, until Maerad or Cadvan stilled him by stroking his forehead. He accepted their help and caresses, but passively, with no sign of gratitude; he ate what he was given to eat, and spoke when he was spoken to, but volunteered neither question nor information.

Maerad found Hem fascinating; he disturbed and attracted her. For the first time in her life she was in a position to help a human being more wretched than herself, and that made her feel stronger and more certain; but he was full of strange gaps and tensions she didn’t understand, and that sometimes, in their sheer bleakness, frightened her a little. She wondered what he dreamed about, and sometimes she asked him, but he would never say. She pitied his fearfulness, the wariness in his eyes that told of a harsh history. But more than anything, there was about him something she couldn’t define, a kind of
glow,
she thought, that puzzled her.

Tacitly Maerad and Cadvan agreed to keep quiet about Barding, and Maerad had no lessons the next nightfall. It was difficult to talk while the boy sat by them, and impossible to talk about him while he was there. Maerad tried to ask him about his life but he was not especially forthcoming. They learned that the people in the caravan were a family, two brothers, the wife of one of the brothers, and their child; and that they were Pilanel, the traveling folk who settled nowhere, but lived in their caravans and went from town to town working as minstrels, tinkers, cobblers, or farmhands. Cadvan had already guessed this. Hem said he had been living with them for about a year but would say nothing of his life beforehand, except that he was an orphan and they had taken him in out of kindness, because he had nowhere to go.

“What were you doing in the middle of the Valverras?” asked Maerad.

The boy said nothing and simply stared ahead of him, chewing the end of a piece of grass.

“How did you get there?” Cadvan asked him. Maerad had wondered this herself: how did they manage to drag two caravans over this trackless waste? Hem glanced sideways at them. “We had strong horses, four of them,” he said scornfully. “It wasn’t that hard. The raiders stole them.”

“Do you know who those men were?”

The boy glanced at them again through his eyelashes and looked as if he would not answer. At last he said, reluctantly, “Yes.”

“Who were they?”

“The Black Bards. They were hunting us down. Sharn thought we’d be safe in the Valverras.” He spat on the ground. “Sharn was a fool.”

“The Black Bards?” repeated Maerad, looking at Cadvan and thinking of Hulls. “Who are they?”

“People think they’re lords,” said the boy, with an edge of contempt in his voice. “But those with eyes to see can tell what they really are.”

“And what are they really?” asked Cadvan.

Hem turned and looked him in the eyes, and Maerad saw in his drawn face a bleak memory of horror. Cadvan winced slightly and then leaned forward and took the boy’s hand. “
Ke an de,
Hem?” he said gently.

Hem jumped violently and leaped to his feet. If Cadvan hadn’t moved more swiftly than Maerad could see, he would have dived off into the darkness and perhaps still have been running an hour later. Cadvan caught and held him, and Hem fought him desperately, kicking his shins and biting his arm; but Cadvan would not let go. Finally Cadvan said,
“Lemmach!”
and the boy stopped as suddenly as he had begun, and hung limp and panting in Cadvan’s arms. All this time he had not made a sound. Maerad watched the whole scene in astonishment.