The cliff was lower toward the northwest, and the Icefalcon recalled how squirreltail grass grew thicker in that direction, amid stands of juniper brush that masked the cliff’s rim from the direction of Bison Hill. Under cover of these junipers the two men scrambled up and glided through the thickets to higher ground.
At the cliff’s top a dark shaggy shape rustled up to them out of the grass, a yellow-eyed war-dog, burned like Loses His Way over his shoulders and back, like Loses His Way mourning his losses and his pain in silence.
He licked the warchief’s hand and wriggled with grateful joy to have his ears rubbed – sniffed the Icefalcon suspiciously but followed in silence. The Icefalcon raised up on his knees to put his head above the clusters of leaves but saw no sign of travelers as far as he could look west along the road.
They were evidently staying put for the day.
“For one thing, the Empty Lakes People never owned a thumb-breadth of the land in the North,” he pointed out. “The starlight wrote our names on forest and stone from the Haunted Mountain across to the Night River Country, and ours it remains, Ice or no Ice, forever. Will these take you and your brother here back to your people?” He nodded to the dog and held out to Loses His Way two tubes of pemmican and one of the several sacks of pine nuts. “I hunt this Wise One and his warriors, and in the North I am told the white filth grows thick. There is no hunting in it. I need all I can carry.”
The brilliant eyes narrowed. “You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko.”
“Gsi Kethko?” The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect) language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.
“The Wise One,” Loses His Way amplified.
“He was a member of Plum’s family,” remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he should be interested. “A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don’t think he was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek out the Antlered Spider?”
“I thought he might have spoken to someone else concerning the spells he laid on the dreamvine that your old chief Noon took, at the Summer Moot in the Year of the White Foxes, the year that you left.” Loses His Way turned the end of one of his mustache braids around his finger, but his eyes did not leave the Icefalcon’s face in the piebald shadows of the thicket. The Icefalcon felt a coldness inside him, as if he already knew what else his enemy was going to say.
“The draft is prepared on the night the chief takes it,” the Icefalcon said, his soft, husky voice suddenly flat. “He himself gathers the dreamvine before he goes up to the mountain. There can be no spells laid on it since no one else touches the pods.”
“According to Antlered Spider, Noon always gathered the pods in the same place,” the warchief replied. “Along Pretty Water Creek, between the white rock shaped like a tortoise and the three straight cottonwoods.”
The place flashed at once to the Icefalcon’s mind, and he realized that what Loses His Way said was true. Noon had taken him there a hundred times in his childhood and told him of the properties of the low-growing, innocuous-looking vine: how it was prepared by the warchief on the mountain and what it did.
“The Antlered Spider said that Blue Child took powdered elf-root and had him lay words on it, so that when the powder was mixed with water and painted on the pods of the vine, the face that Noon would see in his vision at the Summer Moot would be yours. And it was your face that Noon saw, wasn’t it?”
“How do you know this?” The cold in him deepened, a dream remembered and repressed – the old man’s face impassive, eyes dead, empty with grief. The Icefalcon, and his cousin Red Fox, and their friends Stays Up All Night and Fifty Lovers, sitting by the Moot Fire, the talk soft and nervous as it always was at such times. Then Noon walked out of the night into the red world of the firelight, the white shell held out stiffly in his hand and death in his eyes.
Always just stepping into the firelight. Always just holding out his hand.
“My son …”
My son.
But he had known almost before Noon spoke what he was going to say. They had all looked at him, his kindred. Looked at him, and moved away.
The cold crystallized within him to a core of ice, as the cold had then.
“Why did he tell you this?” It astonished him how normal his voice sounded. But he was the Icefalcon, and it behooved him not to show his feelings, particularly not to one of the Empty Lakes People.
“He was dying,” said Loses His Way. “Fever Lady had kissed him at the winter horse camp. The snow was deep outside, and I could not leave.”
“What was he doing in your horse camp?” The Icefalcon drew a deep breath. Far off over the badlands, thunder rolled, soft with distance. The scent of the storm came rushing at them on the blue-black cloak of the wind.
“He wasn’t really one of Plum’s family.” Loses His Way shrugged. “He was the son of my maternal aunt’s husband’s stepbrother. The Empty Lakes People drove him out in the Year of the Crows for putting a barren spell on his sister because she had more horses than he did. No one liked him. Blue Child took him in.”
“Blue Child took in a Wise One of your people?” The Icefalcon was shocked to the marrow of his bones. “Took him in and had him put a spell on the chief of her own people?”
Loses His Way nodded. The Icefalcon was silent. Winter-night silence. Death silence. The silence in the eyes of an old man who has just been told by his Ancestors that the boy he has raised from childhood, the young man he looked upon as his successor, is the one They want, the one They have chosen to bring a message to them written in the crimson extremities of pain.
The torture sacrifice, the Long Sacrifice of summer, that the people may live through the winter to come.
Lightning flared, purple-white against the nigrous mountains of cloud. Gray rain stood in slanted columns over distant hills. The wind veered: Bektis, at a guess, witching the weather to turn the storm away. Shamans of the Talking Stars People generally didn’t care if they got wet.
The Icefalcon observed it all, staring into distance, feeling nothing.
“I don’t know whether Gsi Kethko told anyone else of this,” said Loses His Way, after a time, stroking his long mustache. “But for two years now I have been watching for you, waiting to see if you will return to your people and claim your due.”
“Are you all right, honey?”
Tir sat back on his heels, trembling, small hands propped on his thighs. Hethya ran a competent palm over his clammy forehead, then helped him to his feet and led him away from the little puddle of vomit among the ferns at the base of the big cottonwood tree. Some distance off she knelt down again and took the boy in her arms.
She was a big woman, like the farmwives and blacksmiths in the Keep. Her arms were strong around him and the quilting of her coat smooth and cold under his face, and her thick braids, tickling his chin, smelled good. Tir rested his head against her shoulder and tried not to feel ashamed of himself for getting sick.
It was weak, like the little kids. He was seven and