Raptor (18 page)

Without a sound, I fell flat on my face in the snow, and lay there, too winded and weak to try to raise even my own weight, let alone the weight on top of me. Wyrd went hiking on, unaware, and talking: “Iésus, but I smell more snow in the offing. We had best make haste…” until his voice was lost in the gale. Then I suppose he noticed that I was no longer wheezing behind him, for after a minute or two I heard the whispery fluff-fluffing of his strides through the snow. The sound stopped, and I had to assume—for my head was covered by the bale—that he was standing right over me when he said disgustedly:

“By Murtia, the goddess of laziness, are you pretending to be already tired? It is only barely past midday.”

I had regained enough breath to say, my voice muffled, “Pretending… I am not… fráuja…”

With one foot, and with no apparent strain, he turned the bale over, and of course me with it, so that I was lying face up. Wyrd regarded me as if he had overturned a rock and found a slimy slug stuck to its underside. My juika-bloth circled the scene, cocking its head to peer curiously at us.

“I am weary,” I said, “and thirsty, and the pack straps have rubbed my shoulders raw. Could we rest for just a little while?”

Wyrd grunted contemptuously, but he sat down beside me. “Only a little,” he said, “or your muscles will stiffen.”

Well, well, I thought, it was
he
who had been pretending—forcing himself to press on, to keep shouting his incessant soliloquy, feigning freedom from fatigue or breathlessness—until I should be the one to call a halt that was as welcome to him as to me.

He plunged an arm under the snow and felt about on the ground until he brought up a smooth pebble. “Here, urchin. When we move on, mouth this pebble while you walk. It will make you feel less thirsty. And before we move on I shall arrange two paw ends of the furs so that they pad your shoulder straps. In time, of course, you will get nicely callused there.”

“Perhaps, when we move on,” I suggested, “we might trade packs for a while?”

“Ne,” he said firmly. “You
said
you could carry that bale. You must learn, urchin, always to keep your word. And it was you who asked to accompany me. I was rightly apprehensive that you might slow my progress, but out of my great good nature I agreed to let you do so. You must learn, urchin, always to be careful of what you ask for, because you might get it. But, once having got it, you must learn, urchin, always to make the best of it.”

“Ja, fráuja,” I mumbled, though grudgingly.

“In my company, you may not be unremittingly happy or comfortable, but you will be hugely benefiting. Learning woodcraft, for example, and making strong both your body and your senses. Ja, urchin Thorn, get strong”—he thumped his chest—“as I am strong!”

Rubbing my lacerated shoulders, I made bold to say, “It takes no great strength to disparage another’s miseries.”

He threw up his hands. “By Momus, the god of grumbling, but you are an ungrateful whelp!”

I muttered, “I never heard of any such thing as a god of grumbling.”

“Ja, a Greek god, as you might expect of the Greeks. The grumbling god Momus once even chided Zeus for putting the bull’s horns on its head, and not on its shoulders, where the bull is the strongest.”

Simply to keep him sitting and talking, I said, “You are acquainted with so many gods, fráuja Wyrd, that I assume you are not a Christian.”

He replied rather cryptically, “I was at one time. I got cured.”

“You must not have had a very good priest. Or chaplain. Or pastor. Whatever.”

Wyrd grunted. “The word ‘pastor’ means ‘shepherd,’ and sheep are for fleecing. I chose not to be a sheep.”

“And the word ‘cynic’ comes from the Greek for ‘dog,’ ” I said disapprovingly. “Cynics are so called because they are forever snarling at men of rectitude.”

He did snarl then. “Much you know, puppy! The cynics gave themselves that name, because a dog—if it is offered any kind of tidbit—will sniff and scrutinize it carefully before swallowing it. Now, on your feet, urchin. We can still reach the cave before dark, if you do not do any more falling down. Atgadjats!”

We went on, he freely striding and I stiffly lumbering along. I was determined that I would finish our day’s march, to wherever we were going, without again faltering for any reason short of my sudden death. As I lurched along, I deliberately set myself enigmas to solve, such as: assuming that a bear weighs as much as a hefty draft horse, how much of the bear’s weight is bearskin? (And, for that matter, how much does an entire horsehide weigh? I had no idea.) Which kept my mind off my misery and fatigue, and I actually succeeded in completing that terrible march without again collapsing. I would have sworn it had lasted four years—Wyrd said it had been four hours of Church time—before he finally announced, “We are here.”

In my relief and gratitude, I almost fell down, but managed not to. I panted, “Where… is the cave? I shall not… unstrap this bale… until I get it there.”

“The cave is yonder,” said Wyrd, pointing to a heavily shrubbed hillside not far ahead of us. “But you may as well drop your burden right here. We shall not be going in until he comes out.”

“He?” I croaked.

“Or she,” Wyrd said indifferently as he laid down his own bundles.

Stung by the seemingly sly reference to interchangeable sex, I found breath enough to cry, “Are you making jape of me, old man?”

“Hush!” he said sternly. “Lest you wake him—or her, as the case may be. I speak of the bear, not
you,
you tetchy urchin. How do I know which sex it is? I know only that the cave is a favorable hibernating den for bears, and I have reason to believe that one of them is sleeping in there now.”

Sagging under my already agonizing load, I gasped, “You are… going to kill… another bear?”

“Well, not necessarily,” said Wyrd, with withering sarcasm. “He
might
willingly peel off his own skin and hand it out to me. By the Styx, urchin, I told you to let fall that load. Do it before you fall yourself.”

Feebly, I wriggled free of the straps and let the bale topple onto the snow behind me. I did not immediately sit or lie down, because I found myself still bent in a posture that I feared might be permanent. I staggered and stamped about, trying to unkink my spine, while Wyrd strung his war bow and tested its pull, then slung his quiver on his back so that the arrows’ feathered ends extended just above his right shoulder.

I asked, “Are you going in alone?” for I was more than a little uneasy at the possibility of his commanding me to go with him.

“Going in?” He glared at me. “I have told you, urchin, that I am neither insane nor feebleminded. Are
you?
A bear has the strength of twelve men and the wit of eleven. By Jalk the Giant-Killer, have you in your wanderings never seen a bear?”

I was pleased to be able to say complacently, “I have, ja. On a street in Vesontio, there was a gleeman leading a bear with a ring in its nose. The beast danced to the man’s flute music. It did not dance very elegantly, but—”

Wyrd uttered another of his laugh-snorts. “You might as well compare a farm ox to a savage úrus as compare a ringed bear to a wild one. Stay here and watch, and learn something.”

With narrowed eyes, he studied the hillside shrubbery, and muttered in his beard, “Let me recollect. There are so many caves. As I recall, this one has a bend about ten paces inside. Ja, a slight bend to the left. That affords only a narrow embrasure, so to speak, through which to shoot. I must edge around to the right of the entrance…”

He left me and, with an arrow already nocked to his bow, went cautiously up and across the hillside, walking bent over—rather in the position I was still in—so his head did not top the snow-laden shrubbery. I had not yet espied the cave opening, so I could not estimate how close he got to it, but I could see him clearly as he crouched behind one bush, fixed his gaze, slowly raised his bow and took careful aim.

I heard the distant thrum of the bowstring and the whir of the flying arrow as it disappeared into the cave, wherever that was. But then I was astounded to hear a rapidly repeated thrum-thrum-thrum and whir-whir-whir. The old man, with the speed and agility of a young athlete, was whipping other arrows from his quiver and nocking them to his bow and shooting them after the first, so fast that his right arm was almost a blur, while his left, holding the bow grip, stayed as steady as a statue’s. I could not count how many arrows he let fly before the very hill itself seemed to convulse and emit a mighty roar of outrage. Safely far away though I was, I quailed at the terrific noise, but Wyrd merely ceased his blur of movement and calmly, deliberately nocked one more arrow and stayed where he was, waiting.

He had to wait for only a moment. The hill that had bellowed like a volcano now erupted like one. From the invisible cave burst forth an immense brown object, momentarily as blurred as Wyrd’s arm had been, in a cloud of snow and a spray of twigs and branches violently torn from the surrounding shrubs. Roaring as it emerged, the great bear skidded to a halt and, when the upthrown snow cleared, I could see that it had an arrow through one of its forelegs. It stood still, except for shaking that wounded leg and swiveling its massive head back and forth, its red eyes looking for its tormentor, while it bawled its death challenge over and over again. Now, slavering white froth from its fearsome jaws, it reared erect on its hind legs, to see better over the undergrowth.

At that, Wyrd again took careful aim and shot. Although that final arrow, as well as I could see, only pierced the underside of the bear’s lower jaw, the giant beast concluded its roaring with a sort of strangled and hopeless bleat. Then, slowly, like a vast column crumpling, it fell over backward, rolled onto its side and lay inert, only its sickle-clawed paws still twitching.

I ran up the hill, along the trough Wyrd had broken in the snow—as well as I could run, with my spine and muscles not yet limbered—but when I got to where he stood, still behind the same bush, he motioned for me to stop.

“I have known a bear to have one final spasm,” he said. “And those claws, even in death, can rip both your feet off.”

So we waited until there was no least twitching still evident, and then warily approached and circled the gigantic brown mound of fur. My juika-bloth also came to swoop about us and peer down at the fallen beast.

“A male, this one,” Wyrd murmured. “We will find no cubs inside the cave.”

I could see, now, that Wyrd had not at all exaggerated when he spoke of the power of a Hunnish war bow. That last arrow had, as I thought, pierced the bear’s underjaw, but it had gone farther, through all the bones and muscles inside the bear’s head, to penetrate its brain and then smash through the incalculably thick and solid skull, so that the arrow’s point protruded nearly my hand’s span from the occiput of the beast’s head.

“Never will you pry
that
arrow loose,” I commented, as Wyrd knelt and worked to extract the other from the bear’s foreleg.

“I know of no better way to forfeit an arrow,” he said. “But you can retrieve those others from the cave. It will be dark in there, so first let us choose our camping place, and lay a fire, and you can take a brand into the den to give you light to search. I shot eight others; see that you fetch them all.”

“Ja, fráuja,” I said, with genuine respect. “And will you be cooking us a meal of good bear meat?”

“Ne, ne,” he said. “Look here.” He took out from somewhere in his clothes a small knife, parted the animal’s belly fur and made a slit in the leathery skin. From it bulged out a considerable blob of yellow fat. “Too lardy to be worth the trouble of brittling.”

“A pity,” I said. “You must be as hungry as I am. Perhaps a haunch…?”

“Ne,” he said again. “We cannot disjoint the beast until I have skinned it entire. That is no quick and easy task, and night will soon be on us.” He stood up and looked around. “Do as I told you and get a fire going. That looks the best place, down yonder.”

“Do you mean, fráuja, with all this fresh red meat lying here, we will dine on dry brown rashers?”

“Ne,” he said yet again, but absently still looking about. “I wager that the commotion we have made will bring some creature of curiosity—and akh, there
is
one.”

He had glanced past my own shoulder, but before I could turn, he had swiftly brought up his bow, snatched an arrow from the quiver behind him, nocked it, bent the bow and let fly. The arrow went by my ear so close that its sound was no mere whir, but a hair-ruffling flutter as loud as that of my eagle alighting. By the time I did turn, Wyrd’s new prey had already fallen, some thirty paces distant. It was something like a goat, except that it had horns much more impressive than any goat’s: thick, long, backward-curving, handsomely ridged on their fronts. I had never before seen such an animal, and said so.

“Ibex,” said Wyrd. “They usually stay high on the peaks of the upper Albos. Only come this far down in deep winter. Inquisitive as cats, they are, to our good fortune. Lean of meat, too, since they do not fatten up to hibernate. Better eating than the best mutton.
Now
will you light a fire, niu?”

I did that, and in the place he had indicated, and I was not greatly surprised to find, under the snow and a coating of ice, a rill of sweet water. When Wyrd commenced to skin the ibex, I noticed that his saying knife was Goth-made, one with the distinctive “coiling snake” pattern ingrained in the metal. The knife had been so often used and well worn that its blade was little more than a sliver, but he was employing it skillfully in the skinning—and most meticulously, too.

I asked, “Are you saving the ibex’s skin to sell also?”

He shook his shaggy head. “In summer I would. The coarse winter coat has not enough value to make it worth your carrying. The horns, though, I will get a good price for those. I am removing the skin only to cook the meat in.”

“Cook it in the skin? How?”

“Iésus!
You will see, when you have come back with those arrows of mine. If you ever do.”

I took a brand from the fire and went back to where the dead bear lay, and soon found the cave opening, which was quite high enough for me to walk in upright. There was indeed a bend to the left, as Wyrd had remembered, and I found three of his arrows in the leaf mold and litter outside that bend, where they had hit the rock wall; one of them had bent its steel tip double in doing that. Beyond the bend, the cave ended, and back there it was cozily piled with dry leaves and a great deal of dry moss, all collected by this bear or others that had slept here before it. I scrabbled among the leaves and moss, being careful not to set them afire with my torch, and eventually found all the other five arrows that had failed to hit their mark.