Winterbirth (3 page)

MIST HAD DRAPED itself across the village, so that water, land and air had all run together. The domed huts were indistinct shapes, bulging out of the morning vapours here and there like burial mounds.

Dew lay heavy on the cut slabs of turf that covered them. A lone fisherman was easing his flatboat out into one of the channels that meandered through the reedbeds around the village. There was no other sign of life save the wispy threads rising from the smokeholes of one or two of the huts. Not a breath of wind disturbed their ascent as the trails of smoke climbed high into the air before losing themselves in the greyness.

One larger hut stood apart from the others on raised ground. A figure emerged out of the mist, walking towards it: a youth, no more than fifteen or sixteen. His tread left deep prints in the mossy grass. Outside the hut he stopped and gathered himself. He stood straight and looked around for a moment. He breathed the damp air in and out, as if cleansing himself.

As the deerskin that hung across the opening fell back into place behind him, the interior was cast into a deep gloom. Only the faintest light oozed in through the small hole in the centre of the roof; the peat fire had been dampened down to embers. The youth could make out the indistinct forms of a dozen or more people sitting motionless in a semi-circle. Some of their faces were touched by the glow of the embers, lighting their cheeks a little. He knew them, but it was an irrelevance here and now. On this morning they were one; they were the will of the place, of Dyrkyrnon. In the background, all but beneath the reach of even his acute hearing, a dolorous rhythm was being chanted. He had never heard the sound before, yet knew what it was: a truth chant, a habit borrowed from the Heron Kyrinin. They were seeking wisdom.

'Sit,' someone said.

He lowered himself to the ground and crossed his legs. He fixed his eyes on the firepit.

'We have sat through the night,' said someone else, 'to give thought to this matter.'

The youth nodded and pressed his thin lips tight together.

'It is a heavy duty,' continued the second speaker, 'and a sad burden that we should be called upon to make such judgements. Dyrkyrnon is a place of sanctuary, open to all those of our kind who can find no peace or safety in the outer world. Yet we came together to determine whether you should be turned out, Aeglyss, and sent away from here.'

Aeglyss said nothing. His face remained impassive, his gaze unwavering.

'You were taken in, and given comfort. You would have died at your mother's side if you had not been found and brought here. Yet you have sown discord. The friendship and trust you were offered have been repaid with cruelty. Dyrkyrnon suffers now by your presence. Aeglyss, you shall leave this place, and have no discourse with any who make their homes here. We cast you out.'

There was a flicker of response in the youth's face then: a trembling in the tight-clenched jaw, a shiver at the corner of his mouth. He closed his eyes. The peaty smoke was thickening the air. It touched the back of his throat and nose.

'You are young, Aeglyss,' the voice from beyond the smouldering fire said, a little softer now. 'It may be that age will teach you where we have failed. If that should be the case, you will be welcome here once more.'

He stared at the half-lit faces opposite him, a cold anger in his look.

'You came to us out of a storm,' said a woman, 'and you carry the storm within you. It is beyond us to tame it. It is too deep-rooted. When it is gone, or mastered, return to us. The judgement can be rescinded. You belong here.'

He laughed at that, the sound harsh and sudden in the still atmosphere. There were tears welling up in his eyes. They ran down his cheeks but did not reach his voice.

'I belong nowhere,' he said, and rose to his feet. 'Not here, and therefore nowhere. You are afraid of me, you who more than any should understand. You talk of comfort and trust, yet all I see in the faces around me is doubt and fear. The stench of your fear sickens me.' He spat into the embers. A puff of ashes hissed into the air.

Aeglyss cast about, trying to find someone in the enveloping darkness of the hut. 'K'rina. You are here. I can feel you. Will you deny me too?'

'Be still, K'rina,' said someone.

'Yes, be still,' Aeglyss snarled. 'Do as they tell you. That is the way of it here: tread softly, always softly.

Disturb nothing. You promised to love me, K'rina, in my dead mother's place. Is this your love?'

Nobody answered him.

'I loved you, K'rina. Loved!' He spat the word as if it was poison on his tongue. He could not see through his tears.

'I only wanted . . .' The words died in his throat. He sucked a breath in. 'This is not fair. What have I done? Nothing that another might not do. Nothing.'

The shadowed figures made no reply. Their obdurate will lay between him and them like a wall. With a curse that almost choked him, Aeglyss turned and strode out.

After he had gone, there was a long stretch of quiet. Almost imperceptibly at first, then louder, there came the sound of stifled sobs from somewhere in the shadows.

'Save your sorrow, K'rina. He is unworthy of it.'

'He is my ward,' stammered the woman.

'No longer. It is for the best. He has too much in him that is wild and cruel. We cannot free him of it, for all that we have tried.'

K'rina subsided into silence, muffling her grief.

'He's right in one thing,' someone else said. 'We are afraid of him.'

'There is no shame in that. He is stronger in the Shared than anyone we have seen in years, even if he lacks the knowledge to use that strength as he might. When he was only playing cruel games, whispering in ears and working a child's tricks, we might overlook it. But now . . . the girl still cries in the night. If he remained amongst us there would be greater sorrow in the end.'

'Wherever he goes in the world, there will be greater sorrow,' said a man with wild, dark spirals etched upon his face. 'It would have been better to put an end to him. Blood will fill that one's footprints.

Wherever he goes.'

Winterbirth

THERE ARE RITES and rituals sunk so deeply into the fabric of a race that their roots are long forgotten. In the northern lands, where the fierce cycle of the seasons rules life with a snow-bound fist, the Huanin have marked the arrival of winter since before there was a written medium to record the means of that marking. Across countless centuries the ceremonies have changed, remaking themselves according to the temper of the peoples who performed them, and the thread linking each to its predecessors has been forgotten. But the ancient theme lives on.

Before there were kingships, the cruel tribes of the Tan Dihrin practised bloody rites to win the protection of the Gods against ice and storm. When the Kings rose in Dun Aygll, their subjects in the north kept to the old ways though they forgot what they meant, and though there were no Gods left to witness their rituals. The kingdom fell, as the works of mortals do, but through all the chaos that came after, through the turbulent birthing of the Bloods, the seasons turned as they always had and the people of the north remembered that the turning must be marked.

Thus, to the Kilkry and Lannis Bloods, and to the Bloods of the Black Road in the farther north, there is a night late in the year that stands, more than any other, for the passage of time. On that night the world passes into cold and darkness to await its reawakening in the following spring. It is a night of mourning, but it is a celebration also, for in the slumbering of the world that is winter lies the promise of light and life's return.

From
Hallantyr's Sojourn

A HORN SOUNDED clear and sharp across the blue autumnal sky. The baying of hounds wound itself around the note like ivy on a tree. Orisian nan Lannis-Haig turned his head this way and that, trying to fix the source of the summons. His cousin Naradin was ahead of him.

'That way,' Naradin said, twisting in his saddle and pointing east. 'They have something.'

'Some distance away,' Orisian said.

Naradin's horse was stirring beneath him, stepping sideways and stretching its neck. It knew what the sound meant. It was bred to the hunt, and the horn pulled at it. Naradin jabbed the butt of his boar spear at the ground in frustration.

'Where are the cursed dogs we were following?' he demanded. 'Those useless beasts have led us nowhere.'

'They must have had some scent to bring us this way,' said Rothe placidly. The elder of Orisian's two shieldmen was the only one to have kept pace with him and his cousin over the last mile or so.

The forest of Anlane was open in these parts - good hunting country — but still it was forest enough to scatter a party once the chase was on.

If the hounds had stayed on a single course it would have been different, Orisian reflected. Instead, the pack had divided. It was only bad luck that he and Naradin had followed the wrong dogs. Orisian could not summon up much regret. He knew his cousin would feel otherwise, though. As of four days ago Naradin was a father, and tradition said he must put meat killed with his own hand on the table on the occasion of the baby's first Winterbirth. For a farmer or herder that might mean killing one of his stock.

For Naradin, heir to the Thane of the Lannis-Haig Blood, something more was called for.

'Well, let's answer the call,' Naradin said, tightening his horse's reins. 'They might keep the quarry for me, if we can get there quickly.'

Orisian started to turn his mount, struggling to couch the huge spear he had been given for the hunt. The Lannis boar spear was a weapon for a grown man, and though he was sixteen he did not yet quite have the strength to handle it as deftly as did Rothe or his cousin.

'A moment,' said Rothe.

Naradin glanced at the ageing warrior with something approaching irritation. 'We must be off,' he insisted.

'I thought I heard something, sire,' the shieldman said.

The Bloodheir did not look inclined to pay any heed, but before he could reply there came the distinct cry of a hound from the south. It was a cry of sighting, not scenting.

'It's closer than the others,' Orisian observed.

Naradin looked at him for a moment or two, wrestling to control his horse. Then he gave a quick nod and dug his heels into the beast's flank. Orisian and Rothe went after him.

The turf flowed beneath them. The fallen leaves clothing the ground shivered and shook. Birds burst from the treetops: crows, a raucous clamber into the sky. Orisian trusted his horse to find its own way through the maze of trees. It was a hunter, trained in the stables of his uncle, the Thane, and it knew more than he did of this kind of business. Over the crashing of their progress he could hear the hounds up ahead, not just one now but several.

They found the dogs at a thicket of hazel and holly. The animals were gathered where the undergrowth was thickest, jostling and snapping in feverish excitement. They bounded this way and that, lunging sometimes towards the bushes without ever venturing too close. Naradin gave a cry of delight.

'They have something, for certain,' he shouted.

'Sound your horn,' Rothe called to him. 'We need more spears.'

'They'll have answered the other call. We can't wait or we might lose it.'

Rothe scratched at his dark beard and shot a glare at Orisian, who in his turn felt a twist of unease.

Naradin's enthusiasm could get the better of his judgement at times. Boars did not come small or meek in Anlane.

'You hold here,' Naradin said. 'Give me a couple of minutes to work around and then set the dogs in.

And if something comes out this side, don't kill it. It's mine today!'

He urged his horse onward without waiting for an answer.

The boar came through the dogs like a hawk flashing through a flock of pigeons. It scattered them, some leaping high and twisting from its path, others darting aside. The beast was huge, its forequarters great grinding slabs of muscle, its tusks yellow-white blades the length of a man's hand. It ploughed after one of the hounds as the others snatched at its haunches.

Naradin spun his horse. 'Mine!' he cried.

The point of his spear swung towards the boar as it shook itself free of dogs and came towards him. It was an old, forest-wise creature and turned at the last minute, going for the horse's belly. The spear blade skidded off its shoulder, slicing through hide to bone. Naradin's mount sprang over the boar's head.

It almost made the leap. A tusk brushed its leg and it reeled on the soft ground. It kept its feet, but Naradin was snapped forwards. He lost his left stirrup and was thrown around the horse's neck. He hauled on the reins, the strength of his arms the only thing keeping him from falling. His weight twisted the horse's head around and it began to stagger sideways. It would go to ground in a moment. The boar closed again. The dogs were coming, furious and bloodthirsty, but too late.

Orisian and Rothe were side by side as they charged in. It was impossible to say which of their spears struck home first, Orisian's on the beast's hip, Rothe's parting its ribs. The impact jarred the spear out of Orisian's inexpert grasp. Rothe was better prepared. His lance knocked the boar on to its side and he put his own and his horse's weight behind it. For a few breaths he held it there, grimacing with exertion as the haft of the spear bucked in his hands.

Naradin had slipped out of his saddle. He drew a long knife from his belt.

'Quickly,' Rothe said through gritted teeth.

The Bloodheir did not hesitate. The boar reached for him. Its great, desperate jaws almost had his arm as he drove the knife into its barrel chest. He sought, and found, its heart.

Afterwards, as they sat on the ground beside the huge corpse with the hounds dancing around them, Naradin laughed. Orisian could see the joy in his cousin's eyes, and it made him laugh as well.

'That's one to remember,' Naradin said. 'See its tusks. That's an old master, that one. A lord of the forest.'