Penric and the Shaman

IV

Inglis woke in dimness, but not darkness. A bright square proved to be a small window on the wall of a hut, covered with parchment. On the opposite side, a rough stone fireplace gave off a red gleam and a few yellow flickers, like animal eyes peering out of a little cave. The walls were a mix of stone and logs, chinked with moss and mud. He lay tucked up in a nest of faintly reeky furs, on a floor of dirt scattered with crushed bracken. The big dog lay curled at his feet, sleeping, its paws loose and relaxed.

His boots and outer garments were gone, his chest bare. Convulsively, he felt at his waist, then sagged back down as his hand found his knife hilt. He still wore his belt and trousers. He had no memory of having arrived here, but he did have a dim recollection of someone feeding him warmed water, and of floating awake in darkness only to drown again. How much time had passed…?

And do you still have all your fingers and toes, fool? That was a question he might answer. He struggled up out of the furs—bear, sheepskin, others less identifiable. His hands were stiff and swollen, but not tipped white or scabbed black. His right leg was bruised dark purple from knee to bulging ankle; he couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but it did not move well. Sprained, certainly. Three of his right toes oozed, as if burned. The left foot was no worse than his hands.

How much time lost? Had he missed all of yesterday? Anxiously, he sat up straight, squinted, and began the familiar count down the red scabs crisscrossing his arms. Twenty-five, the tally of his nightmare flight. Had it been twenty-five at last reckoning? Yes. Had he lost a day, failed to blood his knife, like a lazy farmer neglecting to feed his pig trapped starving in its pen? Had he lost… everything? He pulled the blade from its sheath, cradled it in his hands like a child, crooned anxiously. Extended his senses as painfully as he shifted his body. Oh bless, the faint warmth still hummed… he wasn’t sure if he should thank any god for it. Or if any god would ever thank him. No telling. For twenty-five days, he had not dared to pray.

Except for this. He counted down the scabs, trying to recall which arm he had used last. He’d alternated strictly, to give time to heal between assaults. Infection was a constant risk. He should whet the knife again soon, to keep it sharp and make this easier. His right hand was steadier just now; so, left arm. He composed himself as well as he could, closed his eyes, and sliced: angled, shallow. He panted, waited for his head to stop swimming, the twist of nausea to settle. Opened his eyes again. Blood flow sluggish, but maybe if he squeezed there’d be enough that he wouldn’t have to take a second—

The hut’s door banged open, and he flinched worse than at the cutting. Blurry silhouettes swirled against the bright mountain air beyond. He blinked through tears more from the sharp pain of the light than the gash on his arm, and the figures resolved into a woman, sheepskin cloak bundled about her, carrying a small cloth sack and a copper pitcher, and a man in leathers wearing a sheepskin vest, fleece turned inward. The dog jerked alert and growled, but the growl trailed off in a few tail-thumps of recognition.

Seeing him sitting up, the woman said, “Oh, you’re awake,” but then, as she came closer, cried sharply, “What are you doing?”

He wanted to hide knife and arms beneath the furs, but he dared not stop this once started. “Stand back!” he commanded, and, as she made to swoop on him, “Stand back.” The dog scrambled up, fur rising along its spine. The woman stopped abruptly, staring in dismay. The man’s hand froze on the work-knife at his belt.

Whispering words under his breath that were supposed to help his focus, but really didn’t just now, he stropped the knife blade up and down along his arm, coating it thoroughly in sticky red. Would it be enough to buy one more day? The faint hum seemed to strengthen. Yes. Perhaps. He wasn’t sure but what a single drop would do the job as well, but he couldn’t take chances. He held the knife in his lap, trying to protect it from his intruders’ shocked gazes. When the blood smears turned brown and crumbling, all life sucked from them, he could clean the blade and hide it away once more.

The woman said tremulously, “I brought you food. And drink.” She held up her burdens as if in evidence.

The man, scowling at Inglis, stepped in front of her. “Suppose you just put that knife away, fellow.”

Did they think he threatened them? Inglis wasn’t sure he could even stand up just now, let alone attack a person. His eye drawn by the pitcher, he raised the fur across his lap and slid the knife out of sight down next to his right thigh. He licked dry lips and set both hands out atop the cover, spread and still. He most certainly didn’t want to frighten off that charitable young woman. Was the man’s voice one of those he had heard in his daze upon the rockslide? Vulture, or rescuer? The dog sat back down.

“What were you doing with it?” asked the woman in suspicion, coming no nearer.

“I… it… it drinks blood.” He wondered if that sounded as deranged to them as it did to him.

“All knives do,” observed the man, his hand not leaving his own hilt.

Not like this one. “I drink drink,” Inglis essayed hopefully.

“Travelers get dry in the mountains,” said the woman, in a tone of careful placation. “They think because they are not hot, they are not thirsty.”

“I… yes.”

She circled wide around him to the hearth, collected a clay cup faintly familiar from last night, and filled it from the pitcher. She extended it to him with a long reach. He took it with a hand that shook, then both hands, and gulped down its contents, an unstrained barley water flavored with mint. Invalid stuff, far from a noble beverage, but it was warm, seeming both food and drink. He extended the cup back. “Please…?” He drained it three times before he stopped guzzling. He caught his breath and nodded thanks.

“Who are you—traveler?” asked the man.

“I, uh… Inglis k—” He cut off his too-famous kin name. “Inglis.” Oh. Should I have offered an alias?

“Where were you bound?” asked the young woman. “Towards Martensbridge, or Carpagamo? Either way, you took a wrong turn.”

“Pass from Carpagamo’s closed,” said the fellow, “Unless he was the last man to come in over it.”

Inglis shook his head. He followed the dog’s interested gaze to the cloth sack. Gingerly, the woman held it out to him. His clumsy fingers found it contained generous lumps of some soft white cheese, sheep or goat, captured between parsimonious slices of heavy barley-and-oat bread, and strips of dried smoked meat of uncertain origin. Venison, perhaps. Inglis, after a moment’s hesitation, tore into it as if he were a wolf indeed.

After allowing the first couple of frantic swallows, the man asked, “Where’s your horse?”

Around his mouthful Inglis answered, “Left her lame on the Crow Road. Then I walked.”

“Oh.” The man’s mouth pursed in disappointment.

It came to Inglis that the young woman must have prepared this repast for him, with her own hands. He eyed her more closely over his chewing. Her face was mountain-broad, lips and cheeks rouged only by cold, her body work-lean; her youth lent her a passing prettiness. The fellow was not much older. Hunter, shepherd? Both? Up here, all men put their hands to all tasks, as the turning seasons ordered them. The two shared the light hair and blue eyes of this mountain stock, close kin surely.

“Who are you?” Inglis asked in turn after his next swallow. “Where is this place?”

The woman smiled hesitantly at him. “I’m Beris. That’s my brother Bern.”

Bern offered more reluctantly, “This is the summer grazing camp for Linkbeck, the village in the valley. Our hunting camp in winter.”

So, he’d not traveled quite so far back in time as the place’s crude look suggested. Not to the world of Great Audar’s era, when these mountain tribes had held their high fastnesses against the invaders as the Wealdean forest tribes had not. Or maybe the Darthacans had taken one look at the damp precipitous country and decided they didn’t want it that much. The Temple’s invasion in these lands, replacing the old ways with the new, had been a slower process, more a gradual weeding out than a violent burning over. With a chance, a hope, if not a prayer, that they’d not uprooted everything…

No. He eyed the great dog, its furry triangular ears pricked as it tracked the progress of the meat strips to his mouth. A certainty. “That dog. Who owns it?”

“Arrow is Savo’s beast,” said Beris. “Had him from his uncle Scuolla this past autumn.”

The dog lay down on its belly, wriggled up to Inglis, and shoved its head under his left hand. No pup, but a full-grown animal, mature—middle-aged and dignified, after a fashion. Absently, Inglis scratched it behind the ears. Tail thumping, it whined and licked at his bloodied arm.

“He seems to think he’s your dog, now,” said Bern, watching this play through narrowed eyes. “Hasn’t left your side since we brought you in. Why is that—traveler?”

“Was Savo with you when you found me?”

“Aye, we’d gone out hoping for red deer. I’m not sure you were a fair trade, since we can’t skin or eat you.”

They’d seemed willing enough to skin him; Inglis trusted they would have stopped short of the eating, yes. But there had been no shaman among the hunters, or they would surely have recognized each other, and this conversation would be very different. So, not Savo.

“That knife,” said the brother, Bern, looking at him sideways. “Are those real jewels? I bet Churr not.”

Inglis had never imagined they might not be real. He drew out the knife and stared at it. The slim eight-inch blade was hafted in walrus ivory; he could feel the echo of old life in it when he held it in his hand. The beautifully curving hilt widened to an oval at the end, capped with gold, flat face holding small garnets, one gone missing in some past time and not replaced. They encircled a cabochon-cut red stone he guessed might be a ruby. Tooth and blood, how fitting. His blood on the steel had darkened and dried already, its life sucked in as ravenously as he’d just wolfed down hard bread and cheese. He set about rubbing off the residue on his trouser leg. “I suppose so. It was an heirloom.”

The silence in the room grew a shade tighter. He glanced up to find a disquieting stew of curiosity, avarice, and fear simmering in his watchers’ faces. But… they had brought him in off the mountain, and given him food and drink. He owed them warning.

“Why do you, uh, give it your blood?” asked Beris warily. “Is it, that is, do you think it’s a magic knife?”

Inglis considered the impossibly complicated truth, and the need to quash that avarice before it created trouble—more trouble—and finally settled on, “It is accursed.”

Bern drew breath through his teeth, half daunted, half dubious.

Beris’s gaze tracked up and down the scabs on his arms. “Couldn’t you feed it, I don’t know, animal blood?”

“No. It has to be mine.”

“Why?”

His lips drew back in something not much like a smile. “I’m accursed, too.”

The pair excused themselves rather swiftly, after that. But they left the food and barley water. Arrow declined to follow, though invited with an open door, soft calls, chirps, a whistle, and firm commands. Bern circled back as if to grab the dog by its ruff and drag him, but, at Arrow’s lowered head and glower, thought better of the plan. The door closed behind them.

Like most people, they underestimated the keenness of Inglis’s hearing.

“What do you make of him now?” asked Beris, pausing a few paces beyond the hut.

“I don’t know. He talks like a Wealdman. I think he must be out of his head.”

“He wasn’t very feverish. Do you think he might be uncanny? Dangerous?”

“Mm, maybe not to us, the shape he’s in right now. Perhaps to himself. Churr could inherit that knife he coveted so much after all, if he goes from chopping up his arms to cutting his own throat.”

“Why would a fellow do such a thing?”

“Well, mad.” (Inglis could hear the shrug.)

“His voice was very compelling, did you feel it? It gave me the shivers.”

“Mother and Daughter, Beris, don’t be such a girl.” But the mockery was tinged with unease.

“I am a girl.” A considering pause. “He might be handsome, if he smiled.”

“Don’t let Savo hear you say that. He’s already annoyed enough about his dog.”

“I am not Savo’s dog.”

Siblings indeed, for then he barked at her, and she hit him, and their squabbling voices faded out of even Inglis’s earshot.

He coaxed the dog up under his arm with a bribe of smoked meat. Hugged him in, stared into the clear brown eyes, then closed his own and tried to sense. The animal’s spirit-density was almost palpable, hovering just beyond his present crippled reach. How many generations of dogs were poured into this Dog? Five? Ten? More than ten? How many generations of men had cultivated it? This could be a dog to make a shaman, immensely valuable.

And who was Scuolla, to give such a treasure away? Was the man an illicit hedge shaman, had he made Arrow? Intended this nephew Savo for his secret apprentice? Or was he unknowing of what he’d possessed? Horrifying, that he might be unknowing.

Appalling hope, that he might be wise.

“As soon as I’m on my feet,” he told the dog with a little shake, “let’s go find this ungrateful old master of yours, eh?”

Arrow yawned hugely, treating Inglis to a waft of warm dog-breath entirely lacking in enchantment, and rolled over like a bolster against Inglis’s side.