Raptor (44 page)

“Vái! Then he would have not even the small nourishment of the wine and beer.”

“I am sorry I can be of no help,” I said. “But I have seen Wyrd drink before, and for more days than he has so far done this time. It will end with him sick abed and remorseful and intolerably ill-humored, but it will end.”

On most days, I would get my Velox from his stable and ride up to the mine. Either I would leave Velox in the company of the mine mules, and Livia and I would go off on foot, or, if we were going far, we would go on horseback, she riding pillion behind me. I always took along my sling, which I tried to teach Livia how to wield. But she never got very adept at that, so it was I who brought down the small game—hares, squirrels, rabbits, partridges—that we always fetched back with us and divided. She would present her share to her family’s cook, and I would carry mine down to the taberna, where both Andraías and his wife, as well as myself, found game meat a welcome change from their more usual fish dishes. But even those viands did not tempt Wyrd to eat, even when he was comparatively sober and lucid.

“I simply cannot swallow,” he insisted. “Age has not only dampened my intellect and my sense of sight and my enthusiasm, but also has constricted my gullet.”

“Iésus,” I said. “There is nothing wrong with your throat if you can keep on guzzling strong drink.”

“Even that gets more and more difficult,” he muttered, “and less and less curative.” But he swigged some more of it, so again I stalked out of his presence.

Livia and I, in our peregrinations, went everywhere she could think to take me. Once, we went more than halfway up the highest peak in the vicinity—the Roofstone, which gave its name to that whole range of the Alpes—so Livia could show me what she called an eisflodus. The term “ice-flow” meant nothing to me, until we rode Velox up to its edge, and then I was enthralled.

Broad as a river, the eisflodus lay in a wide, winding cleft in the mountain, and had in it ripples and waves and eddies and cascades exactly like those in the stream of water that bounded down past Haustaths and into the lake. But all of these were motionless, for they were made of solid ice—or they were motionless to the eye, at any rate. Livia said that the ice did move, but only at a creeping pace, so slowly that if I were to make an ineradicable mark on the ice, it would not have moved downhill the length of my own body before my body’s life ended.

Except for wisps and whorls of old snow blowing across it like white spindrift, the eisflodus was almost as blue as the Haustaths-Saiws, and it was such an inviting novelty that I wanted to ride Velox out onto its surface. But Livia tightened her grip around my waist and warned me not to.

“This is summer, Thorn. There will be many runaruneis out there.”

Another word that meant nothing to me, so I ventured a guess: “Ice demons?”

“Ne, you goose,” she said, laughing at me. “Hidden crevices. During the warm daytime, the ice melts into rivulets that run here and there, and cut deep fissures, but the blowing snow at night can freeze gradually and bridge them over. You step onto what looks like solid ice, and find to your dismay that it is only a crust, and you fall and get wedged in a bottomless crevice and never get out again. I would not want that to happen to someone I—” She stopped so abruptly that I turned in the saddle to look at her, and she was blushing, and she said very quickly, “I would not want that to happen to me or you or Velox.”

“Then I will not hazard it,” I said, getting down from the horse. “Instead, I will chip both our names here in this flat slab of the ice, right by this black blade of rock, which is easily recognizable. One of us must come back here before dying—and you will outlive me, Livia—to see if the names have moved a body’s length.”

“Or moved closer together,” she murmured, as I began chipping with the point of my sword. “Or farther apart.”

“Or if our names have endured at all,” I said, and to that she made no remark.

I knew that little Livia was fond of me, and I did not believe she thought of me as an elder brother, because she already had two of those, and understandably disprized them. I supposed that she regarded me as an exceptionally congenial and indulgent uncle or—I have remarked that she was a perceptive child—even perhaps as an
aunt.
She often spoke to me as one female does to another, talking of raiment and ornament and the like, things that a girl does not ordinarily discuss with a man. And I frequently caught her giving me speculative sidelong looks. She was obviously obsessed with curiosity about me, and determined to satisfy it, because one day, at a secluded spot on the lakeside, Livia stripped to the skin to take a swim, and urged me to do likewise.

“I never learned to swim,” I said untruthfully.

“Then come in and wade, or just splash around,” she called, while she frolicked like a furless young otter. “It is delightful!”

“It is not,” I said, dabbling my fingers in the lake’s wavelets and pretending to shiver all over. “Br-r-r! You are accustomed to ice water. I come from a warmer clime.”

“Liar! You are either a prude or a coward or you have some hideous deformity to conceal.”

Well, she was near enough right about that, so I continued to resist her taunts and blandishments. I sat down on the shingle and just enjoyed watching her cavort until she tired of the sport. She left the water and sat beside me to dry in the sun before she put her clothes on again, and now
she
shivered, and snuggled close against me, and I held her in a warming embrace, and she cooed with pleasure.

And meanwhile I was thinking. I had long ago made a mental note that I must never—by changing from male to female, or vice versa—attempt the deception of anyone in the presence of a dog, because I knew that a dog’s keen sense of smell would disclose the imposture. Now Livia’s behavior caused me to add another cautionary note. Evidently a child’s instincts are as detective as a dog’s. I must ever be careful around children.

As it happened, I did not need for long to be careful in Livia’s company. The very next morning, when I rode Velox up to the mine, she was nowhere in evidence, but her father was. He told me that Livia had caught a catarrh, that the mine’s resident medicus had ordered her confined to her room—and it all shuttered and curtained and filled with medicated steam—until she was well. Georgius imparted that information as accusingly as if I were to blame, though I was sure that brave little Livia had told him of her swim, and that she had gone swimming of her own volition.

Anyway, I could see a chink between the shutters at the window of Livia’s upstairs room. I rode close to the house, and she cracked the shutters farther, and I could see how glum she looked, and that she was bundled in quilting. So I waved cheeringly and made gestures that I hoped indicated that I would be at her beck whenever she was free of confinement. Her face brightened and she replied with gestures of frustration, and then held up four fingers to tell me how many days she expected to be immured. Then she blew me a kiss and I rode away from her.

We never know when the last time comes.

I went down the hill, wondering how I was going to pass the day—the next four days—because I had become quite used to having Livia with me during at least half of the daylight hours. But then, when I went to the stables to return Velox to his stall, I was thunderstruck to see Wyrd there. For the first time since we had arrived in Haustaths, he was brushing his horse and grumbling tenderly at it. Now that Wyrd was not slumped behind a table or stretched out on his bed, I could see that he had got lamentably gaunt, and his voice was hoarse—whether because his throat was constricted, as he claimed, or because it had been abraded to rawness by so much wine—but he seemed sober and in full command of his senses.

“What is this?” I asked skeptically. “After Andraías and his woman and I have been trying for so long to wean you from your inebriating teat, now you have done it all by yourself?”

He hawked and spat in the stable straw, and said, “When I discovered this morning that I can no longer swallow even Romanly watered wine or thin beer, I decided my inwards must
really
be rebelling. Now I do not wish even to speak or hear about drink. I promised you a hunt, urchin. What say you? Are you too disgusted with this old wretch to accompany him one more time?”

“Ne, fráuja, ni allis,” I said humbly, feeling sorry that I had so repeatedly carped at him like a nagging wife. “I have been hoping for your recovery, so we
could
adventure again.”

“We will be out for some days. Will your Livia let you go? Can you suspend your cradle-robbing proclivities for that while?”

“Of course. It may be that I have had childish company too often of late. It will be good to sally forth once more without feeling like a dry nurse.”

“And I see you have your sword and sling. I brought my bow and arrows. Let us load the horses and be off, then.”

We did not have to return to the taberna for anything, because we had left all our outdoor equipment at the stables. We selected a sleeping fur apiece, and rolled into the furs what other supplies we would need, and tied the rolls behind our saddles, and mounted and rode out of Haustaths. Wyrd did not take the trail that had brought us into town—the one that I had just descended from the mine—but the one that had led Livia and me up to the Roofstone’s eisflodus.

While the trail was yet wide enough for us to ride side by side, I said, “You earlier remarked, fráuja, that we would be hunting some unique kind of game. What is it?”

“The bird called the auths-hana. Not really unique, but it is shy and seldom seen, and it does require a unique style of hunting. We have never yet encountered an auths-hana in our travels together, and I thought it time I showed you one, and how to track it, and what good eating you will find it provides.”

Its name, “wilderness cock,” told me nothing, but Wyrd went on:

“The bird has the fierce look and awesome beak and hooked talons of a raptor, and it is of a bulky size, and it has a cry like the bawling of a maddened úrus, but it is a harmless plant feeder. I should say that it is
only
at this season, when the bird has been feeding on bilberries and such, that it makes good eating. In the winter it feeds on pine needles, so a taste of it would pucker the mouth of even an Illyrian jackal. Some woodsmen call the bird the
daufs
-hana, because, when it is bellowing its horrifically loud cry, it is totally deaf to everything else. So that is how one hunts it, urchin. When you hear an auths-hana utter that ear-shattering noise, you make for the tree it is perched in. You keep always in concealment, and you pause whenever it is silent, then hurry toward it when it yells. It will not hear you during those moments, however heavy-footed you may be. Eventually, taking advantage of the auths-hana’s intermittent deafening of itself, you will get close enough to bring it down with an arrow.”

Wyrd went on talking, but the trail had narrowed by now, and I had moved my horse behind his, so I missed hearing any more of his lore of the auths-hana. I did not mind; I would probably hear it all again. Wyrd had always been talkative, as he said every woodsman came to be, purely from lack of someone to talk to. Of late, however, during his siege of despondency and drunkenness, he had seemed—when he was capable of speaking at all—to overflow with words, as if he had some urgent need to spill out every word there was in him, and not much time to do it.

Well, I did not mind his garrulity, either. I was just glad to have back again the Wyrd I had known, in his right mind and in his proper function of fráuja to me the apprentice. Of course, he was not
quite
the old Wyrd. He was pitifully lank and haggard, and his voice had coarsened, and his hair and beard were slovenly matted, and he slouched in his saddle, where formerly he had ridden arrow-upright. I cursed myself now for my recently having been such an ungrateful and unreasonable scold, deriding and denouncing him when he was drunk, in the foolish assumption that he was
enjoying
himself, because now I realized that he had been suffering. He probably was suffering still, but putting a brave face on it. I prayed that his being on the trail again would invigorate him to his once-formidable strength and health, and I promised myself that I would do everything I could to help him. However gruff and irascible and insufferably tyrannical he might be, I would not resent that; I would happily welcome it as evidence of his recovery. And perhaps our faring forth together this time would prove to be the resumption of all the many good times we had used to have.

But we never know when the last time comes.

Akh, do you see that?” Wyrd exclaimed in his newly hoarse voice, and pointed.

It was the morning of the next day, and we were riding around a flank of the Roofstone mountain, about halfway up it, where the old snow still clung in hollows and pockets shaded from the sun. What Wyrd was showing me was a track in the snow. It was not hoof or paw prints, but a sort of triple furrow down a snow slope, as if perhaps three animals had slid, side by side, from top to bottom of the slope.

“Can you tell what made the track?” I asked. “Surely there are not three otters frisking about at this altitude.”

“Ne. Not otters. And it was made by only one creature, not three. As you see, the track is totally different from that left by any other denizen of these heights. A woodsman recognizes it, but ignorant peasants are stricken with dread when they come upon it, because they believe it to be made by some kind of fearsome mountain skohl. However, that is merely the track of a single auths-hana.”

“The bird we seek, fráuja? How does a bird do
that?”

“It slides on its belly down a slope with its wings outspread and trailing. Purely giving vent to high spirits, as best I can judge. Anyway, there is obviously an auths-hana somewhere in the vicinity, for that track was made this morning. Here, urchin, take my bow and arrows, and go and hunt the bird. I fear I am too feeble, myself, to draw a steady bow. I shall descend below the snow line and bask my old bones in the warm sun and wait for you.”