Two there were who came before
To brave the deep for three:
The rider who flees,
The seeker who yearns.
And he who is king by the sea.
To forge the swords for three:
The warrior who heals.
The hunter who dreams,
And he who is master of mercy.
He who has captured the heart of hell
He who is king by the sea.
--- TASSIDA’S SONG
I am a madman, a murderer, a mystic and some say a god. But before I was any of those, and even before I was a fool, I am a storyteller.
Let me tell you the tale of the sea king, at first as the eye of sky saw it.
He waited alone in the midnight shadows. No bodyguard for the young sea king that night, no Eire, no faithful Rowalt. Once each fortnight, at the time of the highest tides, when the moon was at the full or at the new, it was required of him that he should keep vigil alone in the darkness of the great lodge. He, his tribe’s most precious member, waiting to fend off death, alone—no one clearly knew why. The practice reached back beyond memory into the times of legend, into ages even before the time of Sakeema, he-whom-all-we-seek, he who would come again. The young king could not call even on Sakeema for help. Pacing the shadows with his long knife of flint in hand, every nerve at the ready, or standing and hearkening for the approach of the unknown enemy in the black night, the footfalls masked by the soughing of the surf . . . Seven times challengers in disguise had come to meet him and he had bested them, not without wounds, but in grim silence, holding fast to a cutting point of honor: that the king in vigil beset must not cry out. Of necessity he had become a canny fighter, though never an eager one. And three times the devourers had come, the cold, swaddling, life-sucking demons from the stormy western sea, or certainly as cold as that greendeep, though they came at him out of wind and shadowy air. They had beaten him to the rocky floor with the corpse-cold folds of their winglike flesh. Their teeth had torn at his chest. They seemed to mind his knife no more than seawater would, and still he had not shouted out for help. And somehow he had driven them off.
But no such foe had ever come upon him as that which attacked him the night of the late winter’s new moon.
The sea was raging in bitter storm, so that there could be no warning. Lightning in the night sky, even at the time of year. Thunder like that of the surf, and then—hoofbeats, it was a maddened horse, the rider burst right in at the door! Half the wall came down with him—he was a man well thewed to be a warrior, one of the wild Red Hart hunters from the vast mountains that loomed eastward, half naked even in the freezing cold, his hair, braided, flying, the color of the lightning. Bearing down at the gallop he came—and in his upraised hand, lifted to strike, a long knife such as had never been seen, a knife of more than a forearm’s length! The blade was as smooth as ice, made of some strange substance that bore an edge sharper even than chipped obsidian, and it glinted as pale as the horseman’s hair. But the long knife-thing, the sword, was not the worst weapon the rider bore, not to the young sea king who sucked in a single breath and faced him. Far worse was the battering force of the stranger’s heartbroken rage, the grief that skewed his face, the pain that gave mountainous power to his blow.
Ducking, parrying that first mighty blow—the knife of flint broke off in his hand. The mounted attacker towered over him. Falling back, circling, the sea king screamed aloud for his followers.
He who came in the lightning, he of the long weapon, the pale hair, it was I whom folk called Dannoc, I the storyteller, Sakeema’s fool.
It was like coming up through black water, awakening. I thrashed and flinched, for my enemy stood at the surface, I knew that, stood waiting with knife poised to stick me in the gullet when I gasped for breath. I would die. I gasped anyway, and struggled, striking out with my fists to protect myself, and I felt an oddly quelling touch take hold of them, a touch as strong as my fear but far gentler. I awoke.
Dark, but not as dark as the black water—I was in a sort of cave. A young man, as young as I, had hold of me. He was no one I knew. I grew still with surprise, and he let go of my arms and looked down at me where I lay, his gaze unsmiling but not harsh. He seemed grave, as a deathbed vigilant might be grave. Beyond him white winter light slanted down like snow through the only entry—overhead. A pit, a prison!
The long arrow of fear darted through me, for all my life I had roamed the uplands and the highmountain meadows where the deer leap, and prison seemed the worst of torments to me. Or nearly the worst ... I wanted to leap up like a deer, whurr away like a partridge, but instead I flopped about where I lay, like a great fish. My legs and wrists were tied with thongs. The young man at my side put a hand on my chest to restrain me.
“Gently. You will hurt yourself,” he said to me, speaking my own language of the Red Hart tribe with only a slight hesitation. I grew still again and stared at him. His hair was dark brown, his eyes also of some dark color—it_
was hard to see what color in the dim light. He wore a plain tunic of rough wool such as the Herders weave. He was not of the Red Hart.
“What place is this?” I demanded of him.
“You are in a pit for the keeping of roots or prisoners-most often roots. Near the Hold of the Seal Kindred.”
“What?” I shouted. I struggled again, but in a more centered way. The youth took hold of me by my bound arms and helped me to sit up.
“But how can that be?” I exclaimed. How could I have come to the sea over the snowpeaks, and in the wintertime, yet? I had never ventured so far from the Demesne of my people. Yet I could not disbelieve him. Even as I spoke I could hear the cat-snarling of the surf.
“Why am I imprisoned?” I asked next. “For what misdeed?”
The young man sat back at a small distance and faced me. Even sitting, I overtopped him somewhat, for I was long of limb, rawboned and loose-knit, taller than most men. But I did not feel tall, sitting bound and helpless as I was.
“You are no prisoner. You are my guest,” he told me. “I have but to call, and they will let the pole down for us from above.”
He was not, then, a captive like myself? Perhaps not. He moved about freely, while I sat bound, and there was nothing of a captive’s despair in his look.
Or did they treat prisoners so well, here? My glance dropped to my hands. The rawhide thongs that bound the wrists were padded heavily with wrappings of fleece, as if to spare me discomfort. I sat on a thick bed of linden-bark matting and pelts—sealskins, they were, and they made a warmer, thicker bed than I had ever known. Someone had taken care for me, as if indeed I were an honored guest.
I could see that my companion had slept nearby. His bedding lay beside him, but it was only a single sealskin and a fleece for his head. Sitting half in shadow, he gazed at me steadily, as if waiting for something. “What is your name?” I asked him, for in my own silence I was beginning to feel the pressure of a blackness—I did not want to comprehend that blackness more threatening than the prison pit.
“Rad.”
It was a name of the Seal Kindred and told me little. “Is there a meaning to it?” I hazarded. “If you would care to tell me,” I added for courtesy’s sake.
He shrugged. “It is the foolish name my mother gave me,’sea otter.’ She often told me the tale, how on my infant naming day when she carried me down to the shore to ask the sea for a name, an untoward wave knocked her off her feet so that I was hurled into the greendeep. She dived after me but could not find me, and she raised the lament for the dead, for she felt sure that I had been drowned.” The youth who called himself Rad looked at me with straight-lipped amusement. “Babes of the Seal Kindred in their first moon do not swim, no matter what the Otter River Clan may claim. So the entire tribe lamented me loudly. But a month later a man searching for glimmerstones after a storm found me in a sea cave, being suckled by a seal, and he bore me home rejoicing.”
I listened, not knowing whether to believe him, or how much to believe.
“I was too scrawny to be called the little seal, my mother said. So she called me Rad. I had the look of a sea otter, she said, slender and handsome.” I saw his straight mouth twitch, as if he mocked himself, and I decided that the tale was not meant to be believed, though I should have known it was too foolish not to be true. “Also, my father was of the Otter clan. Though as for sea otters, she could not have ever seen one. Children watch the kelp beds, but none have been seen for generations.”
At once I felt my heart yearn. Another of Sakeema’s creatures, gone, like the wolves. Like the great red catamounts. My grandfather had seen such a mountain cat once, my grandfather now dead, but even in his dying age manly and proud in his bearing, his long braids, once as yellow-brown as mine, gone bone white—
“And what might your name be?” Rad asked me, and in the space of a quickly drawn breath it was as if my grandfather had disappeared beneath—the thing I would
not remember. I could no longer see him, any more than I could truly see myself, and I stared at the one who asked me the question.
“Your name,” he repeated, as if perhaps I hadn’t understood him. But my name lay hidden in the—deep, deep, glinting darkly like a weapon of sharp edge.
“I do not know,” I told him.
“But you must have a name,” he pressed me gently.
“I do not remember.” I truly did not, and I was not dismayed. In fact I felt glad, as glad as a captive of war might feel, excused from torment. My companion peered at me and nodded as if understanding something.
“We’ll call you Archer, then,” he said, “after those calluses on your hand.”
I looked down at the hand as if it were a stranger. Indeed, the marks of the bowstring roughened my fingers and thumb.
Then the one who called himself Rad came over, and, pulling a knife from its leather sheath at his belt, he began to cut my bonds.
It was a blackstone knife, probably traded from my own tribe, quite ordinary; but I watched it closely, feeling a queasiness I could not name. The youth released my wrists first, then my legs, which had also been thickly wrapped. In spite of the wrappings, I saw, there were bloody cuts on my limbs, in plenty, from the thongs. But the cuts had been treated with grease and did not hurt me. My prisonmaster offered his hand and helped me to my feet. If I had been myself I would have scorned his help, but I knew more than ever that something was wrong, for I could barely stand at first. He had to support me, and I swayed on my feet.
“You have not eaten,” he explained. I placed my palm against the stony wall, and he left me and went to stand under the entry.
“Eire!” he shouted. “The pole. And he’ll need a rope, I think.” I was able to understand most of this. The language of the Seal Kindred differed from mine in rhythm—the wash of a lulling sea was in it. But many of the words were the same. .
I did not need the rope to cling to. I scorned it, centered my strength and climbed the pole—a pine log with foot notches, creaking but solid—I managed. My folk had always said of me that I was as strong as a bison. Then they would add, nearly as clumsy. I stumbled out into the light to find a young guardsman warily eyeing me, spear in hand. Rad came up behind me and nodded at his tribesfellow.
“Run down ahead of us, now, and see that there is some food ready.”
Eire looked frightened. “My king,” he blurted, making obeisance, “let me walk with you.”
I saw him bow his head, saw his upraised hands, heard the word, “king,” and I staggered anew in my astonishment. But this—this youth wore no headband, nor even the armband of a warrior, no fur-tipped cloak, no ornament of any kind. And he was of no great height, being shorter than I. And his name—no fitting name for a warrior—but as he was of the Seal, he would have earned another name in vigil, an honored name . . . could it be? He caught at me with both hands to support me.
“Korridun son of Kela?” I whispered. “Seal king?”
He did not answer me except to nod. “Birc,” he said, annoyed, “there is no need to be afraid. Go do as I told you—oh, blast it to Mahela, I suppose you had better help me here.”
Birc was scarcely more than a boy, and plainly terrified. Of what, I wondered. Only later did I discover how truly loyal and courageous he was. He came to do his king’s bidding, and with one of them on either side of me we walked down the steep mountainside to the headland where the lodges stood.
Long, low huts of pine timber they were, thatched with reeds. I stared at them all the while we approached them. This was the strangest of tribes to me, these Seals who ate fish and lived in fixed dwellings within sight of the snarling sea. My folk were upland hunters, woodsfaring with the wandering of the deer. . . . The lodges were built atop the rock, overlooking the sea cliff where the waves beat themselves to foam. In a high storm, spray might have clawed the log walls. Nothing else stood atop that cliff but
a few contorted pines, and it was all, rocks, trees, and huts, thickly greenfurred with moss from the damp. The sky hung fishy white, breathing a cold, white fog. It chilled me—I, who walked bare-chested in the eversnow. I wondered why anyone would live within reach of that fog, that surf, so much under the eye of sky. But perhaps there was nowhere else to camp. The mountain slopes came down sheer to the sea.
“Look,” said Korridun to me with a slight quirk in his voice. “My cousins are hauled out.”
Even though he pointed down toward the sea I could not tell what he meant. I saw no people, only rocks mottled with lichen and weed. Then one of the rocks moved, and I blinked: there were seals lying at the base of the sea cliff, a throng of them, half a hundred or more.
“So many,” said Korridun. “My cousins prosper.”
Of all the tribes, only his people, the Seal Kindred, claimed such kinship with a creature of Sakeema. We of the Red Hart cherished the deer, but we knew our shortcoming, that we could not like them leap out of bowshot with a single bound. . . . But the Seal Kindred claimed a seal ancestor, Sedna, from whom sprang their royal line. They called seals “cousins,” as I had many times heard my people grumbling around a campfire—my people of the Red Hart, but I could not remember their faces. Danger, if I remembered their faces.
Korridun guided me by the arm. We were drawing near the lodges, threading our way along steep shelving rock, and the chill air had braced me so that I walked more strongly, without much help. But we did not enter any lodge. Instead, Birc left us and, running ahead, brought back a torch. Rad Korridun guided me under an pverhang, and I stood in such a cave as I had never seen.
Eerie, it seemed to me at the time, the smoothness of the rock walls, as if a sleek giant of an otter had made the place to slide in, had made tunnels everywhere running off at all levels, no pattern to them that I could discern. And the floor, if it might be called a floor, lay all in swells, like the surface of a quiet sea. I had experienced the jagged mountain caves where the mountain cats once denned, but this was of a different sort of stone, brown and polished, and far more open, so that a man could walk upright in it. But what man could have built it, or would have fashioned it so askew?
“The sea made this Hold, we think, ages past, and has since withdrawn,” Korridun said, as if I had asked him. “Perhaps one day it will take a notion to surge up again. There is no telling.”
I did not understand him, how the sea could make caves. Still less, how its level could change. I knew but little then of the ways of that vast, cold greendeep.
We came to a room, or rather a large hollow, which glowed warm and red with fire. There was a stone firepit built against an upward crevice, which made a smoke hole for it. Much food stood by the fire, and there were places for many people, timber stumps topped with thick pelts for sitting on and long, flat, timbers laid between supports for the placing of food. But there were no folk. Birc threw his torch in the fire and left the place, nearly running, and Korridun motioned me to a seat on one of the fur-topped stumps. But I settled myself cross-legged on the floor instead, as is the Red Hart custom, picking with my hands at the rushes that strewed it. Korridun dipped me food out of a basket of spruce roots, tight-woven and sealed with pitch to make a vessel fit for cooking in. It was a thick soup made of fish, boiled in the basket with stones heated in the fire, much as my folk would have made a venison stew and used the stomach of the deer to hold it. Korridun brought the food to me in a bowl of red clay, and I felt all the honor of that. Vessels of clay had to be traded from the Herders, from the far plains beyond the thunder cones. Most Seal folk, I thought, would eat from dishes of wood or shell. But perhaps Korridun himself was accustomed to clay. He was the king.
He handed me the bowl and a bone spoon. “Eat slowly,” he cautioned me.
I was ravenous, as hungry as I had been after the days of my name vigil, but I was not much accustomed to fish, and the odd, oily taste kept me from gulping it too quickly. Korridun got some of the stuff for himself and sat on a sort
of bench, setting his bowl on a flat timber. I eyed him, holding my own bowl on my lap, and we ate in silence. There were many questions I was not asking—how I had come into the prison pit, and when, and why I had been bound, and why were the marks of the thongs on my limbs, as if I had fought most fiercely, and why was he, Korridun King, attending me. For the most part, I did not want to know the answers. But when I had taken the edge from my hunger, silence began to press on me again, and I spoke.
“If you are king here,” I said to Korridun, “how is it that no one waits on you?”
He gave me a look so wry it might have been a smile, though in fact he did not smile. “It is the custom of the Seal Kindred to humble their kings,” he said.
I ate, and regarded him curiously. He was half a head shorter than I, and perhaps too slender to be very strong—so I thought at the time. But he was trimly thewed in a way that I never would be, with a centered look about him, a control. It was in his face, too, a quietness. Something about the glance of his eyes, as if Sakeema’s time looked out of them, deep time, creature time, the always now. And his face comely enough so that no woman, I thought, would scorn him. But for all that, he hardly seemed a proper king to me. A young shaman, perhaps, but a king should be thewed for war. I bore in my mind the image of a king—
And as I thought it, the fell arrow of fear pierced me again, and all seemed black.
“Archer?” Korridun inquired, seeing pain in me. So I supposed.
“Nothing. A cramp in my gut.” I straightened and faced him. A smoldering, reasonless anger started in me because he dared to be kind to me, so quaint are the ways of petty pride. And I decided that he might be king to others, but he was no king of mine. I would not call him by the king’s name, Korridun, an ancestral name of his royal line. Nor would I call him Rad, as his loved ones might. I would take his kingly name and make it smaller, as I felt myself lessened. I would call him Kor.
“Kor,” I tried it on my tongue.
His head turned to me, his face grave, courteous. “Yes?”
He was all comity, the courtesy so inborn that he was likely not himself aware of it. I ducked my head in angry discomfort, blundering for something to say. “Does—does no one call you Kor?”
“You may, if you like.” He got up and found me a slab of jannock, a sort of oatmeal bread. “Do you yet remember your own name?” he asked as he handed it to me.
“No.”
“A terrible loss. Your very self.”
It troubled me no whit, as it kept the blackness at bay. I did not answer.
“What do you know of yourself, then?”
I shrugged. “I am of the Red Hart.” Of course, with my hair as yellow as bleached prairie grass, the braids of it lying long on my bare shoulders—men of my people seldom wore much above the waist. Deerskin below, lappet and leggings. Boots of thick bison leather on my feet. These were gear such as Red Hart hunters wore. “I have shot the deer in the highmountain meadows, and I shoot them well.” Deer were the food and warmth of my people, but I hated to cause them pain, deer or any of the creatures of Sakeema, so I had shot my bolts at deer of straw through the hot suns of many summers until I had learned to kill cleanly with a single swift arrow to break the neck. This mercy lay close to my heart, and I remembered it. “I have hunted with the hawk also, and the hawks fly well for me. I have fought against the Otter River Clan when they held the Blackstone Path.” Again, I had tried always to kill with mercy, and I remembered that I had not liked that killing. “I have ridden against the Fanged Horse Folk when they raided us, and I have fought against the Cragsmen.”
“Do you remember your tribesfellows who fought at your side?”
“I remember in a general way only.”
“What are you doing in my Holding?”
“I do not know.”
“Did you come here to fight?”
For the first time I felt some small qualm, not knowing who I was or why I was there in the land of his people. As a shield, I turned the question back on him. “Have you given me reason to fight you?”
“No.” Soberly he studied me. “You look not much older than I,” he said after a moment. “Twenty, twenty-two ... Of what age were you when you made your name vigil?”
Days alone on the crags where only the wild sheep came, my straight, yellow hair newly braided, waiting for the vision that would give me my name—that much I remembered. But even the thought of a name of my own hurt me with a black pain, and I could not answer. I felt my shoulders sag, and I could not look any longer at Kor. My eyes shifted; I stared beyond him. And there, in the shadows of one of the several entrances, stood a stocky old woman, listening. Her head jutted forward from her stooped shoulders, her jaw thrusting at me like a weapon. Even as I saw her she strode toward me, hands knotted as if she would strike me, and I stiffened where I sat, for her creased and weathered face bore a look of such outrage as I had never seen.
Korridun turned on his seat to look where I was looking and saw her. “Istas!” he barked at her.
His tone must have served to warn her off, for she stopped. She spat at me some word I could not understand—such fury was in her, it twisted her speech as it twisted her face. I think even one of her own people might not have been able to understand her that day. Then she swung around and strode out with the hurried, scuttling stride of a strong old woman, and I heard her huffing as she left.
“That is Istas,” Kor told me, “my most valued counselor.” His voice seemed low, and there was no smile on his face, such as there might have been if her rage were a matter of no moment. I chose not to ask what it was that Istas had called me, for I felt very tired, and there was a deadness in me. Kor saw it at once.
“Come,” he said, rising, “let us find you a place to sleep.”
The place was a small chamber in the hollowed rock. A reed wick lighted it, burning dimly in a shallow stone lamp. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of fish oil, but only for a moment, for I had not been daintily reared. Moreover, the sweet rushes strewn on the floor offset that odor nicely. On a sort of wooden platform lay my linden-bark mat and a thick bed of pelts—I recognized them from the pit. Birc, perhaps, had brought them in here. I made for them wearily.
“Wait but a moment,” Korridun said, and he left me.
I lay down but did not close my eyes. A chamber of my own to sleep in—I could not help but feel honored. In the deerskin tents of my people we slept six and eight together, jostling each other, and only the king ... but I would not think of the king. I got up, pacing like a spotted wild dog. Perhaps the wolves had once paced in that same way. I had never seen any.
Korridun came back, carrying things for me: a furred doeskin by way of covering—or perhaps to make me feel at home, a clay basin of water for washing or drinking, a wooden cuckpot.
Perverse anger welled up in me. “Why are you nurse-maiding me?” I demanded. “You are supposed to be a king! Do you not have people?”
He set the load down—he must have been stronger than I had thought, to carry the heavy cuckpot, the pottery, the water. Then he stood and faced me, seeming not at all taken aback.
“I will not order my people to go where I would not go myself,” he said. I scarcely heard him. I was raving.
“Do you not have servingfolk? A king who carries a cuckpot!”
“The cuckpot is an improvement,” he said mildly. “I cleaned your ass many a time, up there in the pit.”
I doubled over as if I had been hit in the gut and sank down on my bed, the anger gone with my wind. Voiceless, I stared up at him.
“I will not command my folk to do the thing they^fear unless I am willing to do it as well. . . . You do not remember why they are frightened of you?”
I shook my head, remembering nothing of the days, the weeks before I had awakened under his care. It seemed very quaint that folk should be afraid of me when I was myself so terrified—no, I would not think of that fear. I had to speak, quickly.
“Why was I kept in the prison pit?” I whispered.
Thongs binding my wrists, padded, the cuts of them on my arms even so ... He stood silent for the span of a long breath, and I would not look at him for fear that I should see pity in his eyes.
“I do not call you madman, Archer,” he said finally, “but there are those who do.”
Madman! I was no madman—but how could I say that, I who could not remember my own name?
“Is that what Istas called me?”
Silence. A merciful exhaustion had numbed me, so that silence no longer troubled me.
“Will you sleep now?” Kor asked at last.
“I think so,” I muttered, still not meeting his eyes.
“Rest in Sakeema, then,” he said, and he went out and left me.
Sometime after the lamp had started to flicker and smoke I awoke and used the accursed cuckpot, and scowled at it. Then I blundered out. Sometime past dawn, for faint daylight filtered down into the passageway from fissures and from weapon slots fashioned in the rock where the walls were thin. Birc lay dozing just beyond the entry to my chamber. He jumped up when he heard me and pointed his spear at my gutknot, shaking so badly he could not hold it steady—the shaft wobbled crazily. But the flint head was chipped to a keen edge, fit to tear my innards out, not to be meddled with. And a scared man who stands his ground is as dangerous as a frightened horse. I stopped and leveled a look at him.
“I am going to get something to eat,” I told him, speaking slowly and hoping he could understand me. “I will no longer have your king playing the manservant.” I waited, watching the spearhead waver. “What, am I a prisoner after all?”
Losing patience, I sidestepped and pushed the spear away with my hand, then shoved past him. He could have attacked me from behind, but he did not. Instead, he trailed after me as I found my way back to the room with the cooking fire. It was full of people taking their morning meal, and for the first time I saw how the folk of the Seal Kindred looked. I liked them at once, for something about them made me think of Sakeema’s creatures, of trim-thewed animals with gentle dark eyes. Their faces were round and smooth, shell-brown with a pink tinge, their hair brown and soft and cropped short, man and woman alike, except that the maidens wore theirs in a long cloud. I saw several maidens whom I fancied, even at a glance, though they were clothed too modestly for me to see much. These people chose to keep warm, it seemed, and they had been trading with the Herders, for they all wore woolens as well as furs. This much I saw in a breathspan, and then they spied me and scattered with a noise and rush like that of startled quail, snatching up their babies and young children and crowding out of the several entries.
One of them did not run: Istas. She stood her ground and glared at me with a look of black hatred. But she did not speak, and in a moment she turned and followed stiffly after the others. I was left alone except for Birc, behind me. I looked around at him. He was keeping a cautious distance.
“Kor spoke to her, bidding her hold her tongue,” I said to him, guessing, and after a long pause he curtly nodded.
It gave me a peculiar feeling, that she hated me, that the others ran from me. But I shrugged and went to the fire. There was millet gruel. I got myself some in a clamshell, picked up an oat cake as well, nodded at Birc, and sat down on the rush-strewn floor to eat. Plying a shell spoon, I took my time, ignoring the half-finished food spilled or abandoned all around me, feeling, without looking up, Birc’s scrutiny and that of others who peeped from the entries. If they did not want to abide me, then they could well-come-hell wait until I was done. I ate stolidly. There was a heavy, knotted feeling in me that I did not yet recognize as anger. But I had to force the food down around it, as if a stone sat in me, and after all I could not eat much. I left it finally and went outside, hearing footfalls fleeing before me.
It was a foggy morning, with a fine rain drizzling out of a fishbelly-white sky hanging so low over the mountains that the steep flanks of them, dark with spruce and fir, faded into cloud and seemed to rise forever. I hearkened. Words echoed in the fog, and voices carried.
“Not fog. Smurr,” a fisherman said somewhere down on the narrow beach below the cliff. I could not see him, but from his tone he must have been instructing a youngster. “Smurr, when it makes small rain. Brume, the gray fog. Mist, the thin fog. Haze, thinner yet. Scarrow-fog, the high, white haze that makes a blurred spot of the sun.”
I smiled, feeling a goodness, as if something had centered for me. So the Seal Kindred knew many names for fog. And the Otter River Clan named the salmon with many names: the tiny fry struggling out of the gravel, then parr, the length of a man’s small finger, then smolt, turning from brown to graysheen before going to the sea. And then the great salmon, returning, the grilse, the peal, turning from graysheen to red and the jaws of the males growing into great hooks. A trader from the Otter had told me those things once, sometime when I was small. . . .
Blurred memories, hazy as the sun through scarrow. Myself, a child, my hair yet hanging loose, sitting cross-legged by someone far taller, reciting the many names of the mountains, north from the Sorry Horse Pass on south. Old Pogonip. Mika, the cold maiden. Coru, Shadzu, Shaman, Chital, Warrior, White Wolf, Ouzel. And the passes between them, the Blue Bear, the Shappa, the White Eagle Way along the Otter River. And the parts of mountains, as if they were great sleeping horses, dun or gray, furred with pine, maned with eversnow, their polls and crests, their brows where the icefields fell like forelocks, the high passes we called nagsbacks, where the trade trails wound through.
I stared eastward. Mountains stood there, somewhere, behind the fog—no, smurr, blast it. There, the great peaks, not even so far away, but I could not see them. I could not—remember my own name. . . .
I strode off at random, fleeing my thoughts, scouting the strange place where I found myself.
Some distance downshore I found the inlet where folk emptied their cuckpots, and I went back to fetch mine. No king was going to do that chore for me if I could prevent it. When I had returned the foul thing to my chamber I walked toward the sea. The tide was out. Waves crashed and foamed against the rocks far below me, and wind blew hard in my face, such wind as an eagle would joy to front.
Once the ernes, the great white sea eagles, had lived on rocky headlands such as this. But that was in Sakeema’s time. . . . There was a dark, homely, long-necked bird, a cormorant, the glutton among birds, perched to dry its wings on the rocks bared by the tide. There were people down there as well, some of the middling children, gathering mussels or sea lettuce or whatever they could find among the rocks. Nearly naked, their furs and woolens left in a lump...
widez2