The Margarets (23 page)

The pliers the Ghoss had found for me were useful in reaching seeds that had worked their way back inside the long, sensitive ears or pulling thorns from their strange feet: an almost complete circle of hoof surrounding a soft center made up of four stubby fingers that curled up, out of the way. Usually they could pull thorns from one foot with the fingers of another, but sometimes, especially among the old ones, their ankles had stiffened, and they could no longer do it for themselves. They came to me from all the plethers around, flopping down on their sides with a great whoosh of expelled air, holding up the painful hooves. Sometimes, also, they caught something in their teeth that their long, flexible tongues could not retrieve: a piece of fencing wire or a short length of the cord used to bind the hay. I asked the Ghoss to get me scissors and pliers that were more pointed. Time went on as I told endless stories of my worlds, of Naumi the warrior, and Margy the shaman, of the nameless spy and of Queen Wilvia, who ruled a far and wondrous land.

It had been summer when I arrived, and I had slept on a pile of hay beneath the shelf where the water buckets were kept. When the nights grew colder, the overseer told me I was to sleep in the same place, though he knew it was exposed to every current of air from above and below, a place where it was impossible to stay warm.

“The better to keep her wakeful,” the overseer laughed to his cronies. Since the Frossian knew well I was always wakeful from first light until the night bell, expecting me to remain wakeful through the night was mere persecution.

Deen-agern said so. “Mere persecution, Mar.”

“What’s mere about persecution, Deen? If you live under it, it’s not mere, believe me.”

“Well,” the older woman huffed, “we
all
live under it. All us Ghoss.”

“They don’t treat you like this, and I’m not Ghoss.” By this time, I spoke in the language of the Ghoss, not fluently, but understandably.

“The overseers think you are.”

“Well, they’re wrong, and so are you.”

The Ghoss had been right, however, about the enmity of the Frossian herdsman. He remained implacably hostile. He began by stealing my clothes, piece by piece, until I had only one set of trousers
and shirt to cover me. In the summer, it didn’t matter, but now that it was winter, the absence of cover was long torture through every night. The Frossians didn’t like the cold. According to the Ghoss, the Frossians preferred warm planets with high heat and humidity. In summertime, there were often only a few guards left on the place; their overlords were somewhere wet, basking in the sun.

The first wintry night below the bucket shelf, I stayed awake while cold breezes caressed my backside through the cracks and another ice-wind hand played its fingers over the rest of me. My second night, I dreamed of fire. Fire on hearths, fire in forges with hammers ringing, bonfire on the heath with people dancing, fire on eastern mountains glowing against the clouds in a false dawn more feverish than rosy. Fire anywhere, anytime, so long as it was warm.

During the day that followed, I decided to weave a thick blanket for myself from discarded rags, all wound about with tail wool from the umoxen themselves, tail wool I gathered from hedges and fences about the place. I would have to hide it somehow, so the overseer didn’t take it. If I had been Ghoss, the overlords would have been more cautious with me, but evidently they knew I was not, even though I looked just like them. No true Ghoss would have been ordered to sleep below the bucket shelf, so someone, or some set of someones, obviously regarded me as neither one thing nor the other. I myself had heard the least overlord, him of the twisty mouth, with nasty words dropping from it like spit, describing me:

“She’s an abomination, a
Mar.
The
frumdalt
want to get rid of Mar. We should get rid of it now.”

“Merely an aberration,” the middle overlord had replied on hearing this muck. “We haven’t enough bodies to do the work, surely not enough to go about killing this one and that one until nearer their time. We can get rid of it later, but not now. It still has work years in it.”

The word the least overlord had used,
frumdalt,
was unfamiliar to me.
Fruma
was the name of the carrion birds who frequented the river bottom.
Dalt
was one word used for a hilltop or tower. I asked the Ghoss.

“
Frumdalt?
” said Rei-agern. “I think it means ‘god,’ or perhaps something else to do with their religion, but we don’t pay attention to their religion.”

“A frumdalt might be something on high that eats dead things,” I suggested.

“Ah,” said Rei-agern with a puzzled look. “On Cantardene they have a god called Eater of the Dead.”

Next night I lay down on my bucket shelf, curled into a tight ball, waiting for the herdsman to make his last inspection, which he did, coming in to poke me in the process, to be sure I wasn’t asleep. Then, he went off to his warm bed in the snug quarters in the loft, leaving me to stand shivering by the shelf, pulling my scant wrappings around me. I dozed, fretfully, coming fully awake to find the little brown umox lying next to me, warm as a little furnace.

“Don’t,” I told it, looking into its eyes, deep and dark as those forest pools I had dreamed of as a child. “The herdsman will take it out on you. He wants me to suffer here. He mustn’t see you here, he might do something dreadful to you.”

The little one went back to the other umoxen where they lay tightly together in deep bedding, covered with their great, fluffy tails. It took a lot of cold to chill even one umox, much less a plether. I sat shivering as I heard the little one talking to the others, knowing its voice, slightly higher than the big ones, slightly sweeter.

“Mar-mar,” said a large umox, one or several of them. “Come here.”

“I’m dreaming,” I thought to myself. “I’ve been frozen under the damned shelf and now I’m dreaming.”

“Here,” said a deeper voice, joined by several others to make a low, harmonic sound in my head, as though great chimes were ringing there. “Here, young one.”

I rose like a puppet and staggered toward the plether bedded in the hay. As I came near, one shifted, then another, letting me fumble my way to the center of the plether, where a nest of hay was waiting, already warmed by the huge body that had lain there. “No need to go to the cold far,” whispered the voices. “Warm is here. Lay self down…”

Which I did, though it was more a stumble-flop than a graceful recline. The warm tails of half a dozen umoxen moved slightly to cover me from head to toe, leaving only a little space around my nose and mouth so I could breathe. “I’m dreaming,” I advised myself. “I’m in my own hay nest, and I’m dreaming.”

“Dream then,” whispered the umox. “Dream a thing we have meant for you and made for you. Dream what you will do when you wake.”

For the first time since winter came, I was comfortable. The thick tails of the umox were blanket-warm though light as air, feathered from tip to rump with the finest wool in any world known to man or Ghoss.

“Why didn’t you invite me before?” I murmured, half asleep.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were cold before?” the umox murmured in return. “You tell us stories of Queen Wilvia, you tell us about the nazeemi, you tell us many things we already know very well, but you do not mention to us that you are cold. If you cannot tell the whole world simply by being, as the Ghoss do, then you must tell us. Little one saw you shivering and went to warm you. You feared for her. She came and told us. We do not let those who care for us come to harm.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured drowsily. “I’m sorry I’m not Ghoss.”

“Even if you are not Ghoss, you are quite likely our good friend.”

I did not try to decipher this, for I was already asleep. In my dream, I wandered with umoxen, walking beside them as they trekked over vast green plains below ranges of snowcapped mountains, while high above us a golden bird cried strange words from the roof of the sky. I knew I was in an umox dream and had no wish to leave it.

Early in the morning, the herdsman came through with his staff, prepared to poke me again, but he found my space already empty. I, meantime, peered at the taskmaster through a fringe of tail wool that hung over my eyes. When the man moved away, gone to breakfast, the great bodies shifted again, making a way out. By the time he and I encountered one another, I was on my way back from the privies.

He stared at me with some suspicion, noting, perhaps, a certain unwarranted rosiness in my cheeks, a certain rested look around my eyes. “Cold last night,” he muttered in an evil tone, obviously hoping I would answer.

I pretended not to hear him, merely standing where I was with my jaw sagging witlessly until he moved away.

He said nothing more, though I noted several questioning glances during breakfast lineup. When I had eaten, I returned to the barn and
my winter chores, forking down the fragrant hay into the long troughs that lined the day barn before letting the umox into the day barn and starting the long job of cleaning out the night barn. Fine, rich hay for eating was the guarantee of high prices on the wool market, and there was plenty of it to be had on Fajnard. All the lowlands were grassland, all edible, sweet-smelling, and useful, and it never rained during haying season—so said the Ghoss.

As I had begun to do on my first day in the barns, I accompanied the rhythm of the pitchfork with a silent chant that kept my mind away from the past as the doctor had suggested. “Fifteen” pitchfork into the haystack, “more” pitchfork raising hay, “years” pitchfork tossing hay, one step along the road to understanding how I had come here and what it all meant. One step, then another, and another, and another, three steps more along the road to discernment. Fifteen long, long years.

Eventually, it was spring. Fourteen…more…years, I chanted to the pitchfork. And then fall, winter, and spring again. Thirteen…more…years. And so on, and so on, and only a few more years.

Night on B’yurngrad. A steppe wide as an ocean, rustling with grass. Far in the night a broken horizon surmounted by a toenail of moon and a spear blade of dew-bright stars, pointing downward at the cleft between two hills.

“See,” whispered the old woman, reaching to untie the long plait in which her hair was usually confined. “See,” fingers moving upward through that hair, casting it forward, letting it move in the wind to blow like a veil before her eyes. “See, there, where the spear points downward, where the lance falls to reach the heart of water…”

“I see,” I, who had been Margaret; I, M’urgi, whispered.

“This is the sign of the hunters, the skull-faced ones, who go wandering in the night. When this sign comes, they come eastward, running in the grasses. In this time when there are no wolves, they are the wolves of the night, they the tigers, the leopards, the swift-footed hunters. Prick your ears to the wind.”

I listened. At first I heard nothing. The old woman’s hand touched my ear, featherlight, and I heard. Through the wind-rustled grasses came the pant of breath, the fall of foot, the small rattle of bone beads strung on thong. One, at first, then several more.

“I hear,” I murmured.

“How many?”

“Five, maybe six, but if six, the other is far off, following.”

“If six, he is the one we want. Find him.”

I closed my eyes, laid my hands palms upward on my knees, straightened my spine as though it were a cannon barrel, and shot my perception upward, through the top of my skull. Looking down, I saw myself, the old woman, the tiny fire before us, the circle of amber light that ended just beyond our haunches. I laid myself forward upon a dark pillow of air to follow the night road, the road of discovery, sending my thought in the direction of the sound, swooping along the dark air to meet it, even as it moved to meet me.

I came first upon the five skull-painted ones, panting down a narrow cleft between two hills, feet thudding on the soil, one well in advance of the others, a long pole carried over his shoulder with a pouch of something at its tip, then three more men, then a laggard. The sixth was farther back, nearer the place they had begun, and I flew toward him, sensing the old woman at my side.

Almost we missed the child. A boy, perhaps ten or eleven. Not yet come to strength, certainly, howsoever he burned with purpose, the hard red glow of it easily visible, even from our height.

“M’urgi, if this one lives,” the old woman whispered, “over a thousand will die, for he will betray them and their good purpose. I have seen it.”

“How many times?” I asked.

“Ten times watched, five times seen.”

“Then it is equally likely he will not do the thing.”

“I will be dead before the time comes,” whispered the old woman. “I pass the burden to you, M’urgi. It lies before you.”

I shivered in the chill dark, in fear of night, in grasp of bloodshed, in danger of being mistaken. A long moment went by before I said, “I accept the burden.”

The night road retracted beneath us. The sky opened and dropped us beside the dim coals of our fire, which we covered with ashes before sitting down once more.

“What did the lead man carry,” I asked, “at the end of that long pole?”

“Ghyrm,” replied my teacher. “Ghyrm to use against another tribe, one he wants to do away with so he can take the women.”

“Will the ghyrm take only men?”

“The ghyrm will take those they are purposed to take.”

“Where did he get it?” I whispered.

“He bought it with pain, from someone who sells for pain. From Cantardene, most likely. Hush. They come.”

Five runners approached, darting past not far from us, eyes set on their own road, sparing no glance that might have discovered two smoke-faced, black-garbed women hidden downwind in the dark. The air moved to me, and I smelled their sweat. When they had gone, I built up the fire once more. Much later, another footfall, this time interrupted.

“Hey, boy,” I said. “Where you goin’ in the night?”

He spun, frantic, relaxing when he saw us women sitting there, amber light reflecting from our faces. “Find m’dah,” he said wearily. “I trail ’m this fah.”

“And where’s he gone, then?” I asked.

“Dunno. D’wanna be lef wit de women. No more.”

“Ah! Fahr sure.” I patted the ground beside the fire, inviting him. “He’ll be mazed, he will, come back this way and find how far you come! That’s a clevah idea.”

“Is’t?” he asked doubtfully. He had not considered whether it was clever or not. He had only thought of his shame, being left behind with the women, the babies. “Yeah,” he claimed, inflating his chest as he approached the fire. “Is clevah. D’you hab watah?”

“Hab tea,” I murmured, seating him by the flame, guiding his hands to wrap around the crude mug. “Y’know, some dahs don tell reasons propahly. You dah tell you his reasons, leavin’ you?”

The boy spoke from inside the teacup. “Nah.”

“Thot so. Prob’ly somethin goin on back in camp, your dah, he wants to know ’bout it. He wants to know do you keep you eyes open, you mouf shut. He can leave no mahn dere, for watchin. He can leave a son, though, son old enuf, smart enuf to watch. Thas prob’ly what he thinks.”

The boy put the cup down, obviously in the grip of unaccustomed thought. “You spose? An I muck it all?”

I, M’urgi, shrugged. “You make it back in time, he nevah know. An, if he ast, did somethin happen, you say nothin happen or somethin happen, jus the way you see it.”

I was speaking to the air. The cup lay empty and the boy was gone, back along the trail. The old woman said, “He may not make it back, tired as he is.”

“He’ll make it back,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”

“Ah. And when did that happen.”

“Last night. You took us along the night road to the north. I saw the encampment there, saw the coming shadow cover it, heard the second wife buying poison from a traveler, saw the boy lying behind a bush, listening. Same boy.”

The old woman smiled, though wearily. “I didn’t see it.”

“You were far ahead, scanning for whatever it is we’re always looking for.”

“It’s ghyrm we’re always seeking, and those who sell them,” the old woman said with a touch of annoyance. “And you didn’t mention the boy.”

I nodded, familiar enough with her to be unmoved by her irritation. “It meant nothing, until tonight. Who are they, Wolf-mother?”

“The hunters? Followers of the ghyrm-way since the first bondsmen came from Cantardene. On that planet some evil creature taught them this way they follow: brother against brother, family against family, tribe against tribe, never a peace long enough for them to grow numerous, but with strong taboos on killing the women so they can always recover their strength. Faces painted like skulls to show they fear no death, for he who dies for honor goes to the place of Joy. Death and honor lovers. That’s what moved the boy on the trail, honor.”

“He will tell his father about the second wife. What will his father do?”

“Fly and see,” the old woman whispered. “If you care enough to spend yourself on them. If you ask only for my guess, well then, the father will watch to see what she does. And she, she will try to poison him, so her own son can take that boy’s place. And the man, he’ll be so angry, instead of crying her crime aloud and sending her back to her family in shame, he will forget the taboos and will kill her. Her family will kill him for breaking the taboos. His brothers will kill her brothers. They will be much preoccupied with killing one another, and
larger conflicts will pass them by. The boy will not be responsible for a thousand lives. Perhaps.”

“To what purpose?”

The old woman shook her head. “We can see tomorrow, even next season or, for some things, a year. Farther than that, the road of discovery becomes a path of shadows, mere shades of portents of things uncertain. I saw that boy lead a raid a year from now, down from the hills into a village. I saw everyone in that village dead. Ten times I saw, five times I saw them dead. Perhaps in that possibility, the wife had killed her husband, the boy had laid blame and sought revenge. Whatever. It is your burden now, your duty to crouch over the fire and see.”

“Is this why they sent me, Wolf-mother? Is this my life?”

“Only those who sent you know why, M’urgi. Only they know what your life will be, though I have seen a shadow on it…”

“What sort of shadow?”

“One that kills. Someone wants you dead, M’urgi. Sometime. Not yet, but sometime. In the meantime, there are more chants for you to learn, and more herbs for you to pick, and many futures for you to see…”

I laughed, without rancor but without amusement, either. My hands and face were black with soot from the fire. My hair felt as though several generations of birds had been nesting in it, leaving their lice behind. The hides that warmed me stank to high heaven. I had been with the old shaman woman for almost ten years. Whatever my unknown benefactors might expect of me in the future, I sincerely hoped it involved bathing at more regular intervals.

And, ah, it would be nice to see Ferni again.

“You’re thinking about him,” said the old woman in a minatory tone.

“I have seen myself with him elsewhere, Wolf-mother. In a dream I saw myself among the tribes, many tribes, all gathered together. And he came out of darkness into light, carrying something mysterious. Then I blinked, and when I looked up, I saw my own face, three times. One me a lot like me. One me much older. And one me looking out of a man’s face.”

“Thinking of him, dreaming of him, that’ll get you killed,” said the old woman.

“How long since you’ve had to warn me of that, Mother.”

“A year or two,” she replied grudgingly. “Maybe more.”

“Maybe many more. You speak of dying. I have sworn to fulfill your burdens. When I have done so, then, perhaps, I may think of him? Find him in that place I dreamed of, among the tribes.”

“Then,” came the reply, a whisper in the night. “Only then. Perhaps.”