The Reindeer People (19 page)

'What about Kerlew?'

Elsa frowned, then softened the gesture with a laugh. 'Foolish man. Is your heart so easily touched? He is nothing to us. The boy has a mother to care for him. He will be fine. You must leave them to their own lives, Heckram. If you interfere, you will only make things harder for the boy, make him want things that are beyond him. Let them live their own lives, Heckram. You and I have a life of our own to fill.'

She pulled his hand close, cradled it against her breast. Her smile was full of a tender promise. He found a smile of his own to answer it before he pulled gently free of her. She pushed off on her skis, moving silently down the bright hillside, and he followed. But a question followed him, a question merciless as wolves.

What about Kerlew?

Short hours ago, the night had been a comfortable place, folk gathered around the hearth, the men to play at wolf tablo while the women wove and talked. He and Elsa had gone visiting to her parents' hut. The yellow light of Missa's fire touched everyone, warming colors and softening lines. He and Kuoljok had set up the board on top of the traveling chest. The heavy wooden chest had once been incised with a brightly painted design. Now the patina of frequent moves obscured the pattern, and the colors were faded. Yet in the warm light of the fire, it seemed handsomer for its scars.

As did the parents' faces. Kuoljok's hair was thin and black and unruly, standing out in a halo about his seamed face. His black eyes were deeply set, the whites of them stained with brown as if by running dye. His sallow skin was reddened by the weather and made ivory by the firelight. He pondered his next move, hiding a shrewd smile behind a hand all knuckles and tendons. Heckram's mother, Ristin, was there as well. She worked at weaving trim for his wedding shirt, stopping often to compare it with the weaving Missa did. The ceremony at the Cataclysm in summer would be the formal one, requiring elaborate garments. The folk of many herds would gather there, and Capiam's herdfolk would be judged by the richness of the pledged couple's attire as much as by their reindeer. Mothers took pride in the weaving of such things.

Both women sat stiffly erect on the floor of birch twigs and hides. Their ribbon looms tethered them to the center pole of the hut. Weaving materials of grass and fiber and strips of fur, bright dyed lengths of wool yarn and leathers, whispered against one another as their busy old fingers danced them together. Small basins held beads of bone and horn and amber to be worked into the design. The two women spoke and laughed over their work, paying it little mind as the intricate patterns flowed from their fingers. Missa's trim would adorn Elsa's wedding garments of snowy white fur. The furs were lush winter-taken fox. Elsa herself sat with her head bowed over a basin as her fingers squeezed excess color from the fibers she was dyeing. The golden firelight highlighted the scene.

'You'll be too hot,' Heckram pointed out annoyingly as Kuoljok pondered his next move. 'The wedding will be at the height of the summer. No one wears fox fur then.'

'The beauty will be worth a little discomfort,' Missa assured him placidly. 'And Elsa wants the wedding to be in the evening, when the cool wind blows down from the ice packs.'

Heckram grunted his defeat and turned back to his gaming. The dice were made from the toe-knuckle bones of a reindeer calf, while his marker, the pursued wolf, was a larger knuckle bone stained black. Kuoljok tumbled the dice and then smiled as he moved his own markers closer to the fleeing wolf. Heckram picked up the dice and warmed them in his hand, pondering strategy. The smell of freshly carved new wood mingled with the homey smells of the hut. In one corner of the hut stood the beginnings of a traveling chest, chips and curlings of wood littering the area around it. Heckram had been doing the carving, under the watchful eyes of the old man, but both had decided their work had progressed far enough this night and had abandoned it for the game.

Heckram moved his piece grudgingly. Old Kuoljok snickered, cast the dice, and moved quickly. 'That traveling chest could be finished by tomorrow night, if we worked on it tomorrow,' he suggested.

Heckram shook his head slowly as he polished the dice between his hands. 'Lasse and I are going hunting.'

'Again?' Elsa asked in dismay. 'Can't you ever stay at home for two days in a row?'

He closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again, keeping them on the game board. 'Not if you still plan to slaughter two animals for our joining feast at the Cataclysm. If I can drag in a couple of young sarva now, they could be fattened by the time we reach the Cataclysm.'

'Heckram, you sound as if we were starving. One of your animals, one of mine: that's not going to deplete us. New calves will have been born by then. We'll return with as many animals as we started with.'

'I'd like to return with more,' he said softly.

Elsa snorted. 'There's but the two of us to feed. And we've plenty of animals for that. Why must you always be off hunting more reindeer and furs? We have everything we need.'

The dice in Heckram's hand ground against each other, 'I can remember when my father wore his talley string around his waist, and the ear flaps on it were thick as leaves on a branch. Every year he had furs and amber to trade south, and his tools were bronze, not bone. Every year he traveled south to meet the traders. He always had tales to tell, food to share. Always, we ate well and our tunics were thick.'

'Umm,' Kuoljok agreed softly. 'So we all did, in those days. No one had ever seen the herd so large. The wolves grew fat off the weak ones, but the strong ones were so many that they poured over the land like water. Folk held feasts for no reason, and all the meat racks were heavy. For three, four, maybe five years it was like that. More and more reindeer, every year. When they moved, we felt the thunder of their passage through the earth's bones. It was a time of plenty for all. Then, of course, came the plague. And the herd was smaller than I had ever seen it, and the wolves tore one another in their frenzy to feed off a kill. Heckram, there will always be fat years and lean ones, but I do think neither I nor you will see years as fat as the ones before the plague.'

'The wealth of the herd was the plenty of the folk,' Missa added softly. 'No man can hunt enough to create that level of wealth for himself in these times. Not even the best and most diligent hunter.'

Heckram sat silent, his eyes bowed to the board, and did not speak. A hard determination inside him grew, threatened to split his chest open in a roar of defiance for their placid acceptance of these times, for their dumb contentment in the predictable rounds of their lives. Didn't they want, didn't they wonder? He knit his brows over the game board. His teeth were clenched and he kept his eyes down. The silence in the room passed as Missa and Ristin conferred over their weaving.

'Are you ever going to cast those dice, or are you going to give up the game now?' Kuoljok asked slyly.

'I'm thinking,' Heckram said, trying to make his voice easy.

'That's it. Take your time. Never be in a hurry to lose,' the old man suggested with a cracked laugh, as Heckram warmed the dice in his hands. Heckram growled, but threw the dice anyway, knowing he had already lost. He moved the wolf conservatively, biding his time. Always biding his time.

'There. That's done.' Elsa rose from her work, shaking her fingers. Heckram let his eyes wander from the board to follow her movements. The firelight touched her hair, illuminating the blue highlights of its deep black. Her hands were stained blue from the dye, and there was an errant streak of blue beside her nose. Yet no herdman would have said the evidence of her diligence made her less fair. Her face was still thoughtful of the work she had just completed. But as she picked up the water bucket to pour water to wash her hands, her eyes caught his. She smiled at him, almost shy to catch him watching her. The genuine fondness in her gaze called up his own slow smile, but he dropped his eyes from her look. He felt his heart must break, not because he loved her, but because he did not. She warmed his bed and cooked his meals, she rubbed his shoulders when he came in cold and weary from the hunt, she stroked his hair as he lay breathing deeply after their mating. But the feeling he had thought would grow in him seemed more absent than ever. He liked the girl. But sometimes he longed to put her hands from him, to shake free of her gentle touch and stride alone into the night. She had so little understanding of the determination that drove him. Always she tried to lure him aside from the things he knew he must do, to make him content to sit out a stormy day by her warm hearth. Sometimes he felt he could not breathe. And sometimes he dreamed of another hearth, and a boy who sat beside it.

He had not been back to the healer's hut since that day. He felt ashamed to go back, as if he had committed a great and cowardly wrong there, one there was no explaining. He thought of Kerlew, crouched and sobbing in the snow, and sighed. He was too busy to go, really. He had a wife now, and a life of his own to tend to.

Elsa was right. He had no right to interfere in the boy's life, to make him hungry for things he could not have. He stared at the board and at the trap he had been maneuvered into.

'The bucket's empty!' Elsa exclaimed in annoyance.

'So fetch more water,' Missa told her daughter calmly, not glancing up from her work.

'I'll go for it,' Heckram volunteered. The sod hut seemed suddenly suffocating, closing him in like a sorting pen closes in a herd of reindeer. Like them, he felt the urge to gallop wildly against the boundaries, seeking some way out. But even as he rose, thinking of cool air and the black sky arching over all, Kuoljok's hand closed on his wrist.

'No you don't, Heckram!' Elsa's father cackled. 'You won't slip away from the game that easily. Stay and lose like a man!'

'Finish your game! I'll be back in just a moment,' Elsa promised them. She did not even bother to slip on her outer tunic for the quick dash down to the spring. Bucket in one hand, she lifted the door flap and vanished into the night outside.

'A word of warning, young man,' Kuoljok counseled him in a loud whisper. 'Never do for a woman what she can do for herself. Or soon there'll be nothing she does for herself!'

Missa gave a derisive hoot. 'Listen to the old man! As if this woman ever asked him to do for her! I do my own work, and half of his as well! Where were you when your vaja and calf nearly drowned in that stream crossing three springs ago? This one was in the water up to her shoulders, trying to hold onto the calf, and hold off the mother that thought I was hurting it! And what does he call from the stream bank? Looks like you can handle it, Missa. I don't want to ruin the new pants you made for me by getting them wet! Such a help he is!'

The incident had been herdlore for three springs now, but they all laughed anyway, Kuoljok loudest of all. Heckram alone frowned at the dice that had fallen in the worst possible combination. Slowly he slid his hunted wolf from the apex of one triangle to another. There was no winning this game. The old man had him, and he knew it.

Kuoljok shook the dice fiercely, grinning at Heckram's long look. Heckram looked aside, let his fingers idly trace the fading pattern on the trunk top. Joining Elsa had been like wedding Lasse, he thought to himself glumly. A fine and merry companion, honest, competent, skilled, and caring. What more could he ask for in a wife? he demanded of himself. And had no answer. A surge of anger and panic pulsed through him suddenly at the choiceless direction his life was taking. He found himself reaching, to snatch the wolf marker from the board just as Kuoljok's knuckly hand was about to capture it.

'Hey!' the old man exclaimed in surprise. Heckram forced a frozen grin to his face and dropped the wolf marker into the hand that opened to receive it.

'You've caught me, fair enough,' Heckram conceded. As Kuoljok grinned and scooped the markers and dice into their little leather bag, Heckram rose. He stretched, his fingertips brushing the rafters of the hut.

'Elsa has been gone a while, hasn't she? I thought she was just going to the spring.' He idly touched his fingertips to the long fibers of beaten root that she had hung to dry. They came away blue.

'Don't touch that!' scolded Ristin. 'You'll spoil her work. No doubt Elsa ran into someone and has stopped to talk. Don't fret so much over her. You're joined now! Surely you can be apart for a few moments.'

'It just seemed that she had been gone a long time,' he said lamely.

'So it does,' said Missa sagely. 'Put your mind at rest, then, Heckram. Go and fetch her.' Heckram didn't miss the conspiratorial look that passed between the two mothers. Had not they once been young women finding an excuse to be alone under the crisp winter sky with a handsome young man? 'And the two of you might bring some of the good blood sausage from the meat rack. A bite or two would taste good this evening,' Missa added.

'Mind you don't kiss her, Heckram. You'd be playing right into her hands,' Kuoljok suggested wryly, with a look that said that women were not the only ones who played such games.

Heckram snorted noncommittally and shrugged into his heavy tunic. Since he and Elsa had joined, they treated him more as a child than as a man. He, who was several years past the age when most herdmen wed, was addressed as if he were a moonstruck youth. It was but one more thing that rankled this evening. One more goad he would not respond to.

Pushing the flap aside, he stepped out into the night. The winter camp was quiet. Evening chores were done and folk were snug inside their huts. The village dogs slept close to the doorflaps of their owners' huts, savoring the warmth that leaked out. Heckram stretched in the chill night, drawing in a deep lungful of the cold night air. There was a moon tonight, nearly full. The snow reflected its silvering light, painting a world of blacks and silvers and grays. His kneeboots crunched on the packed snow of the path as he passed the crouching huts. Light leaked from some of them, voices flowing out with it to warm the night. One dog stretched and rose to greet him as he passed. A quick pat and a quiet word settled the animal again. He passed his own hut, silent in the darkness.