The Sword of the Lady (13 page)

The simple tapered sticks he and Edain were making had none of the walnut-root risers and polished antler-horn nocks and subtle reflex-deflex curve of Sam Aylward′s masterworks, or those of his many pupils. They might have made him laugh or frown, but they did have the true taper and D-shaped cross section, and an arrow-rest of sorts at the right point; they′d boiled a little glue from the hooves of a deer and attached tufts of rabbit fur for the shaft to rest upon, and to fasten the fletching feathers of the arrows.

And all the folk in Jake′s band exclaimed in wonder,
Rudi thought.
No
glue
, for the love of the Mother-of-all! The good part of these being so crude is that it only takes about half a day to finish the job, even without proper tools. And anyone handy with a knife and used to working wood can learn to do it. Well enough for rule of thumb, at least, if not to equal a true craftsman. A thousand times better than no bow at all. And it′s just the sort of gift they will value the most. It helps them in the long run, not just their present trouble. Help for help . . .

A young woman came in with a cracked rain poncho of dull yellow plastic over her shoulders, and a lopsided sort-of-woven basket full of greens and roots. She dumped it into one of the big pots that were kept going as long as the camp stayed put, and an older female—all of twenty-five or so, and looking easily forty—stirred them in with a long paddle. Which was fortunate, because it was hard to survive on an all-meat diet and stay healthy, unless you were careful and ate the whole beast.

My hosts know
some
of the wholesome plants,
he thought.

But even this far from home and the woods they knew, the two clansmen had been able to show them some new ones, though neither of them had anything like the knowledge of such a loremistress and healer as Aunt Judy. The Southsiders had no inkling whatsoever of which mushrooms were deadly and which were safe, for example, so they shunned them all. Or that you could make acorns edible by grinding the nuts to flour and then leaching out the tannins, which meant that they had no starch that would keep any length of time. Or that—

And to be sure, they
aren′t
very healthy.

From the state of their teeth he suspected scurvy was a regular visitor to the Southside Freedom Fighters, come winter; they certainly weren′t rotting them out with too much sugar, and there were cases of goiter and terrible scarring from infected cuts. Their carnivore diet would have made them taller and more muscular and less scrawny-tough, too, if they didn′t have times of dearth fairly often.

Impatient as he was, he wished he
did
have more time; a month here . . .

He was wearing only his kilt, to keep respect—the Southsiders might be primitive, but they were certainly hardy men—and also to show his scars, for the same reason. Jake sunna Jake handed him the string of hand-twisted sinew, and Rudi whipped the lower end to the bottom notch of the longbow. Then he slipped the other loop upward, and strung the stave Mackenzie-style—bottom tip over his left boot, right thigh over the center. He pressed down with his leg and pushed up with his right hand at the same instant, smooth and steady. Muscle stood out in long swells under the pale skin of his chest and arms like a slow wave of the sea, and the loop at the end of the cord slid into the upper nock.

″There,″ he said, running a finger down the back to make sure no splinters stood proud in sign of a fault that would snap the wood under strain.

″It needs to be well greased against the wet, but it will serve you well enough against anything but a knight in full harness on a barded destrier, and it might do for him as well if you were lucky.″

″Cool!″ Jake said.

Odd,
Rudi thought.
I′ve heard folk in Corvallis use the word that way, or Bearkillers now and then.

They′d ceremoniously given Jake all the bows, and he′d handed them out in turn to his favored followers—there had been cursing and jostling in plenty too. They′d all seen what the Mackenzie weapons could do, in the fight with the Knifers and in hunting since and they were panting-eager to have something like it themselves.

He handed Jake three arrows he′d also made; the little tribe′s notion of fletching was even more sad than their attempts at bowmaking. The heads were ground and crudely hammered from old spoons, but they would do; it had been straight shafts and the delicate, skilled work of fastening the flight feathers that they hadn′t mastered. Jake slipped on his bracer and looked around and spotted a dead chestnut fifty yards away, across the thinner grass growing in drifted soil over the old roadway′s pavement. He drew with an odd motion, pushing the bow away with his left arm as much as drawing with the right.

The shaft stood in the hard wood, buzzing like a malignant bee; the sound was distinct even through the quiet white noise of the rainfall.

The Southsiders had half a dozen of the pre-Change bows, fiberglass wonders that they couldn′t even dream of replacing, and they handed them around often enough that they were mostly reasonable instinctive shots by the time they were full grown. But the weapons had been made in all truth as what Edain had called them in scorn: children′s toys. Their draws were light, just enough to be useful for hunting rabbits or birds but nearly worthless for war or bigger game. Good pre-Change arrows were so scarce among them that no man carried more than one or two, with even the enduring plastic feathers growing more and more tattered.

Most of the time they relied on javelins for anything beyond arm′s reach. With those they were quite skilled.

″Can you teach us how to make bows like these?″ Jake asked. ″And arrers?″

Arrows
, Rudi thought.
I′m getting the hang of the way they shift the sounds about, so I am.

″Southsiders need it, Rudi-man. Need it bad.″

″That we can, my friend. It′s a help to your people, it will be.″

Though I can′t know how
much
of a help.

Jake grinned at him, showing gaps in his teeth. Suddenly for an instant Rudi was
elsewhere
, a dizziness that left him no time to even stagger. Jake screamed as he pulled against the bonds that held him to an ancient streetlamp. Wood around his feet smoldered, and ragged figures danced triumph—

Rudi blinked again and shuddered; the Southsider chief was still smiling, so it hadn′t been long. Cold sweat lay dank along his sides and under his chin. He′d been raised by Juniper Mackenzie, a High Priestess who walked with the Otherworld, and he′d been touched by it himself more often than most. More, the Old Religion made fewer distinctions between magic and the works of the gods and the stuff of common day than other faiths.

And still visions like that weren′t easy to bear, and they′d been getting uncomfortably common on this journey. Not to mention the Powers who′d walked the pathways of his dreams.

I think that was a sight of what would happen if I
didn′t
help these folk,
he thought.
The which makes me grateful to Whoever guided my steps here. But it gives my skin the crawls too, so. If a man knew every possible twist and turn his actions might bring to the world, would he dare to act at all? Yet it′s also a comfort; I′m not merely using these people for my own needs, urgent as those are.

Edain sang again as he went back to work on his own piece:

Several of the Southsider babies
were
howling and crying now and then, which wasn′t surprising. If Rudi had had to endure this damp chill with nothing but a rough rabbit-skin diaper stuffed with moss or leaves
he′d
have cried, even in his mother′s arms. When some of the tribe′s women began casting thoughtful glances at their infants, Rudi grew a little worried himself.

Surely they couldn′t take it
literally
? The fey don′t
really
do that. Not often, at least.

He wasn′t altogether sure about how the Southsiders
would
take it, though. If you had an empty place in your soul where such things should be,
something
would fill it.

″Tell′s another story, Rudi!″ one of the children said, as he took up the next billet of the hickory, spat on a smooth hand-sized rock and began to hone hatchet and knife before he began his work.

The hunters and warriors and women who were gathered around to watch him fashion the longbow murmured agreement. Jake unstrung his new weapon and scooped a little congealed fat out of a dish and began to rub the wood, squatting and looking eager for the tale himself. The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that prickled at his eyes. Without that tapestry of color and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary things, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

It surprised him as well as saddened him. Granted their pamaws had been young, any random group of Mackenzie children today would have known more and handed it down.

Though the Clan′s youngsters have had two generations of loremasters by now
, he reminded himself.

He remembered long evenings sitting at his mother′s feet with the others in the great hall at Dun Juniper, listening to her storyteller′s voice weaving music and magic as strong as any she made in the
nemed
, the Sacred Wood. Her hands shaping images and the light of the fires on the god-faces carved amid the rampant vines on the log walls; flame-crowned Brigid and Lugh Longspear of the clever hands, elk-horned Cernnunos, the triple Morrigan and the Dagda with his club, red-bearded Thor and Sif of the golden locks . . .

First he demonstrated how to measure the proper taper from grip to tip of the bow by the joints of your forefinger, and the length of the stave by multiples of your drawing reach, and how to calculate the proper fistmele between the belly and the string. A little to his surprise he was better at teaching the bowyer′s craft than Edain; the younger clansman knew so much he was impatient with their ignorance.

″Well, then,″ Rudi said, when he′d reached the working stage. ″It′s a tale you want, is it now?″

″Yah!″

″You betcha!″

″No shit, dude!″

Ah,
he thought, sorting through scores he knew.
Yes, this will speak to them. And there′s nothing like telling one of the old stories to put away your own worry and care and fear!

″Then you work on this one as I showed you, friend Tuk, and I will tell the tale—and correct your work if your hands go wrong. Now, the story! This happened very long ago, you understand, and far away, in a land across the oceans, among my ancestors and yours.″

″There was a man named Niall who was born to be King . . . to be the big boss . . . who later came to be called Niall of the Nine Hostages. And once in his youth he was traveling alone through the woods at night as he journeyed back to the hunting lands of his people.″

They all shuddered and leaned forward; to be benighted alone was a thing of fear to them.

″He came across a hut, and in the hut was a withered and ancient crone . . . ummmm . . . an ugly old bitch . . . of an ugliness which hurt the eyes to see—but unknown to him she was not just the poor old woman he thought her; she was the Sovereignty of Midhe, the eldest of the Threefold Morrigú, and herself the patron Goddess of that earth.″

″I thought you said there was this Lady and her stud who made everything?″ someone asked.

″That there is,″ Rudi said.

His voice was casually confident; he was as sure of that as he was of his own breath and heartbeat.

″One of her, or a lot of her?″

″Both! Her forms are more numerous than the stars! How not, when the stars themselves are but the dust scattered by Her feet as She and the God danced all that is into being?″

Many of them nodded. Nobody had ever told them to prefer either/or to yes/and, nor that it was impossible for something to be one and many at the same time. Which meant it didn′t drive them wild.

″Each form She takes, or the Lord, is true; yet each a part of a greater whole. As we put it—″

He paused, then filled his lungs and sang, a hymn his mother had made, the ″Farewell to the Sun.″ As might be expected of his parentage and rearing, at song he was better than fair even by the reckoning of Dun Juniper, where all the Clan′s best bards were trained and many outlanders as well. Here Edain was the journeyman to his master craftsman, and his deep baritone filled the cavelike space effortlessly: