Wolf's Brother

CHAPTER SIX

There was so little to go on. Heckram touched a patch of crushed forget-me-nots.

Was it the size and shape of a small boy's foot? Or had some rabbit crouched here? He squeezed his weary eyes closed, shook his head, and then opened his eyes again, to concentrate doggedly on what might be Kerlew's trail. Or might as easily be a thing he imagined, a string of coincidental indentations in the earth, of broken tips of bushes and slightly bruised grasses. How far back was that one clear imprint of a foot in the soft earth near a spring? He paused again, straightened, and rubbed at his aching temples.

Useless to ask himself, useless to wonder if he followed a real trail.

Once more he made a slow scan of the tundra in every direction. He wished the boy wore a bright wool cap like the herdfolk youngsters did. A spot of bright color would show up against the tundra's wide patches of color. Even a bit of bright trim on his tunic would have helped. But, no, he remembered Kerlew's clothes; the simple leather shirt and leggings would blend in well. If the boy were flat on the earth, he could not ask for better camouflage. Even standing still in the distance, he would not be easily seen. He should have given the boy a bright cap. He would, he promised himself. If he could.

He lifted his voice in another hoarse cry. 'Kerlew!' He let the last syllable draw out and hang in the still air. Some distant waterbird honked in reply. Nothing else. He swallowed in a throat gone raw, and lifted his waterbag for a small sip. He wished again that he had brought a pack-harke with him. He had a feeling that if he did find Kerlew, the boy was not going to be in any condition to walk. But it had been difficult enough to slip past Joboam on the trail. The flat tundra offered little cover for a man his size, even in the dark. If it had not been for Ristin and Tillu alone in the camp, he would have taken a harke, and relished the encounter with Joboam. But it had not been the right time to anger the big man. He would wait until he was sure that the boy was safe, and that he alone would be the target of Joboam's anger. But his patience was wearing thin.

Tillu. He had all but promised her he would find the boy. And if he didn't, what then? He slapped wildly at the insects that had found him, venting his frustration. For a moment he thought of what it would be like to return and tell her he had found nothing. His eyes narrowed as he stared into the distance. Then he turned his eyes back to the ground again, looked for the next trampled patch of moss, the next snapped stem.

Step by slow step, he followed the meager trail. He did not like the direction it was taking. The seite skulked in the distance like a great gray beast. Surely the boy would not have been drawn to that chill thing. But here were small indentations in a muddy place that could have been three of his toes. Not two hands away were the well-defined tracks of a wolf. Heckram crouched to touch the clean edges of the imprint. It was fresh, no older than last night at most. It, too, headed for the seite.

The seite. He forced himself to look at it. It hulked in the distance, gray and cold. He shivered to look at it, with a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. How many years since he had last stood in the shadow of the great stone? The great gray stone reared up out of the tundra, a natural monument erected by nature herself to the forces that ruled men's lives. More ominous and implacable than any idol shaped by the hands of humans, the seite brooded in the midst of the tundra. He had wondered then what was the sense in chanting and dancing for so immense a power. As well to be a mosquito buzzing about it, a beetle crawling across the surface of the stone. What was a man to a thing as immense and old as the power-stone? He remembered the chanting of the herdfolk's last najd, the great fire built to honor the seite, to ask it to free the herdfolk from the plague that decimated their herds. Instead the najd's drum had split, and swallowed the luck-symbol of the herdfolk that had been dancing atop it. Heckram squeezed his eyes shut. The memories of his childhood were bright and sharp-edged, cutting into his adult mind. Hard days had followed the herdfolk's pilgrimage to the seite. Hard days, and many of them.

He stood up, frowning. Every muscle and joint in his body ached, his eyes were sandy from lack of sleep, and the horrid guilt of responsibility weighted his heart. He forced himself to gaze ahead, to look for what might be the next clue to Kerlew's trail.

Two or three steps at a time he went, never certain that he was following anything.

Except for the wolf. Here were more tracks. It meant little. Wolves crossed and recrossed the tundra this time of year, looking for the lagging calf or the old sarva that could be cut from the herd. They seldom bothered people. Some even said that they never did. They had found the bones of that one man, with the teeth marks of wolves plain upon them ... but that had been three years back, during a hard year. Even then, most of the herdfolk believed that wolves had but found the body and dragged the bones about as they fed on it. Wolves had a natural wariness of men. Why bother a human boy when there were easier prey in abundance? Young rabbits, fat ducklings that could not yet fly, sickly calves wearied by the long trek ... Heckram found he had increased his stride. He forced himself to slow down, to watch the ground carefully. But as soon as he did, he found again the tracks of wolves, this time obviously two. And there were a third set of tracks now, smaller than any of these. A pack on the move.

And here, where he least wanted to find it, a single clear footprint. A boy's innocent bare toes, outlined plainly in the soft earth. A wolf's tracks overclawed the heel-print.

Again Heckram lifted his eyes and voice. No reply. The seite loomed closer, and the boy's tracks seemed bound there. He scanned ahead anxiously, looking for the crushed and rumpled vegetation that usually marked a pack's kill site. He could see nothing.

The temptation to stop tracking and run ahead to the seite was strong. But if he missed Kerlew's steps veering aside? The habits of caution were strong. He moved on again slowly, watched with dull horror as the tracks of the pack converged on the boy's trail.

Here were the marks of a running foot; so Kerlew had tried to flee them. Heckram swallowed drily, raised his water-skin, but could not drink. What would he take back to Tillu? A scrap of the boy's shirt? If he turned back now, he could tell her truthfully that he had not found her son, didn't know what became of him. He wondered if that would be better. What little he knew of Tillu told him it would not. She would not rest until she knew her son's fate. And neither, he realized, would he. He had sent Kerlew out to whatever had found him. He would face up to that, now.

He pushed the pace of his tracking, followed the wolf tracks now as much as the boy's prints. Straight to the seite they led him, and he watched it grow larger before him. Yes, It would be there, he thought to himself. He was surprised how closely it resembled the seite of his vision. But a child's memories were clear ones, he told himself. He thought again of the old najd dragging the clacking antler around the gray stone flanks of the stone. If he blinked his eyes, he could sec again the bright emblems painted on its rough sides. And a hand-print? He told himself that if there were a handprint on the seite, it would mean nothing. Only that he had seen the mark as a boy and remembered it. No more than that. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the uneasiness he felt whenever he recalled his dream. The vision had come to him the same night that Carp had found him. Whenever he recalled it, he tried to believe his meeting with Wolf had been a dream, a product of a cold and lonely watch kept through the night. It seemed a thing apart from the rest of his life, an experience that had no common grounds with his reality. 'Such is the spirit vision of a man,' he heard the voice of the old najd echo down the years in his mind.

'Kerlew!' he bellowed, as much to fill his own ears with a real sound as to call the boy. But there was no reply, and his voice bounced back to him from the great gray stone that now reared up before him. He halted, no more than the length of two men from the stone, and looked up at it.

The seite. It radiated a powerful holiness, a sacredness that transcended the puny passage of men upon the face of the tundra. The seite had been here, had raised itself out of the earth's belly and stood up beneath the sky. Its godliness had nothing to do with the pitiful homage of the passing herdfolk. They might pay their respects to it with an offering of meat or fur or gleaming amber, but their honoring it did not alter or affect it in any way. It was the seite, implacable and unyielding in its awesome power. A man might visit it once or twice in his lifetime, coming in secret to offer thanks for a healthy child or a good year of calves. That women came here as well, he did not doubt, but he had no idea what they asked or offered or thanked for. He didn't want to know. The terrible ceremony of the antler and the drum had been the only formal gathering he had ever seen at the seite. Surely folk had visited it since then, from his own herd and from others. But he had not been among them, and he did not come willingly now. As if the seite knew that, it turned a chill gray face to him and greeted him with stony silence.

'Well, Kerlew, you were here. Where did you go?' His own words sounded thin in his ears, their casualness forced. The boy had paused here, letting his weight sink his tracks into the earth. And then, and then, he had walked over this way, circling the seite, now pausing, now dashing on. Heckram frowned to himself. This was not the behavior of a boy pursued by wolves. He had thought that Kerlew had run toward the seite hoping to clamber up it and escape the pack on his heels. But perhaps the wolves had not been pursuing him. Perhaps he could hope still.

And so around the seite, and then, here, the boy had turned and backed up to stand flat against the stone itself. Heckram scowled at the lush, crushed leaves and petals of a ranunculus. Kerlew had stood squarely atop that plant, not stepped on it in passing.

Why? What had held his attention so?

Then, as he stepped back from Kerlew's marks and glanced up, Heckram felt a sudden wave of dizziness sweep over him. The hand-print was red, the wolf's track below it black. Like a pledge marked together, like an agreement sealed with the gripping of hands. He swayed where he stood, denying it. Someone else had done it, he told himself, in some ancient time, and he had remembered it from his childhood in a bizarre dream. But another part of him laughed wildly inside his skull, demanding who else would have a handspan that wide and would set his mark so casually high. Who else would have been drawn, through a dream and across an impossible distance to Wolf and the Seite, to strike a bargain: Heckram's loyalty to Wolf, if Wolf would bring justice to Elsa's killer?

Without will he lifted his hand and spread the fingers wide, held it before him to compare it to the mark. It would fit. It was on a level with his eyes, an easy touch for him, but a difficult reach for almost anyone else. He didn't need to fit his hand in that print to know it for his own. But like an insect drawn to a flame, he took the steps that carried him into the seite's cool gray shadow. He set his hand in the print, saw the precision of the mark. Ice and fire in the touch of his flesh against the stone, and when he drew his hand back to himself with a cry, he was surprised to find the familiar calluses and lines of his palm intact. Yes, the hand-print was his.

Whose, then, the wolf-print?

Every hair on his body hackled, and he stumbled away from the seite's shadow, back into the sunlight and soft wind of the tundra day. But for long moments the warmth of the day couldn't reach him, and it took even longer before he recalled his present errand. He let his eyes scan the earth again, and his belly churned at the multitude of wolf-tracks that arched around Kerlew's track. There he had stood at bay, then, while the wolves circled round him. And then? And then any wolves he had ever known would have pulled down their cornered prey and torn each his share of flesh and bone.

But there were no signs of a grisly feast. Instead, there were the marks of the wolves packing up and moving off again. And among their tracks and on top of them, the bare prints of a young boy's feet.

Heckram let out a shuddering breath. What manner of boy ran with wolves by night? And what manner of wolves allowed it? His eyes strayed once more to his handprint, and the wolf print below it. The sudden kinship he felt for Kerlew astounded and overwhelmed him. He set out in the wake of the pack's tracks, suddenly certain the boy would be alive and well when he found him. That he never need have worried at all.

He trotted along, the wind and sunlight fresh against his face and hair. And there was Kerlew, tousled but whole, rising suddenly from a hollow in the earth. The boy's eyes were wide, pale as a wolf's, and the greeting he called to Heckram chilled his bones: 'Brother Wolf, I knew you would come for me!'

But Heckram found no surprise in himself at all.