Dawn of the Ice Bear (23 page)

IT WAS TIWOK, a shaman of the Raven Clan, who brought the news to Usam. “Do you feel the air?” Tiwok asked.

Usam was leaning against the log wall of a building, breathing heavily. His wounds screamed with pain, his muscles cried exhaustion, but two more of the soldiers lay dead at his feet. His war axe rested, head down, on the dirt beside him. At Tiwok's question, he paused to consider. “Warmer,” he answered after a moment.

“Much warmer,” the shaman said. “The Teeth of the Ice Bear is back in the cave.”

“How do you know this?” Usam asked, certain the man had been nowhere near the Bear Clan village.

“That is not your concern,” Tiwok said. “Only know that I do. All the shamans do.”

“But . . . how is it possible?”

“You ask many questions, Usam, to which you need not know the answers.”

Usam realized the shaman was right. He had not even known what function the sacred crown served until after its disappearance. If the shamans had known, they had kept quiet about it, in the manner of such people everywhere, he had no doubt. No surprise, then, that they would be equally enigmatic now.

He could not deny his own senses, however, and the warmth of the air—even a faint, sweet smell, like flowers on the wind—told him that the advance of the Ice Bear had been halted, or reversed.

“What you say seems to be true, Tiwok,” he said. “But it means nothing. I have vowed to drive the Aquilonians from our lands forever.”

Tiwok laughed at him. If the man hadn't been a shaman, he would have paid for that with his life, Usam thought. But the wise ones could get away with things that others could not. “That will never happen, Usam,” Tiwok said. “They are innumerable. Our world is changing, and the influence of the Aquilonians—particularly under their Cimmerian king—grows every day. No empire is forever, and theirs may yet fall one day. Not in your lifetime, though, or mine. Until that day, Usam, they will be our neighbors. You might as well accustom yourself to that fact.”

“Never,” Usam said. The thought was repulsive to him—living in peace with those pale, civilized people? It was absurd.

“Look in your heart, and you'll see I'm right,” Tiwok said. “They are too many, and more follow all the time. Our world is never stable for long, Usam. Kingdoms come and go, empires rise and fall, the sea snatches away lands even as it reveals others. We either adapt or die.”

Usam wanted to argue with the holy man, but the words wouldn't come. Tiwok spoke a truth that he did not want to acknowledge. Finally, he saw the wisdom in the shaman's ideas, and he nodded glumly. “If you're right, then we have no reason to continue fighting,” he said.

“Not only that, but Aquilonian troops will be here within the hour. If we stay, we'll be routed. Best to preserve as many lives as we can and go home.”

Usam nodded again. Perhaps the shaman was wrong about what the future held, in which case every Pictish warrior would be needed for the next battle and the one after that. No sense letting them die for a hopeless cause when they could retreat to their own lands and wait for another chance. “Spread the word,” he said. The knowledge that his brief reign as war commander of the united Pictish clans might be coming to an end made him sad, but it was tempered with happiness that the Ice Bear had been bested once again. “I will do the same. Tonight we will stay at the war camp and celebrate the crown's return. When the sun rises again we will break for our separate villages.”

Tiwok agreed, and both men set out to inform the rest of their people that the war against the settlements was over. Drums would signal to those attacking Thandara.

Silently, stealthily, like ghosts—as they had come—the Pictish warriors left the settlement, melted back into the welcoming trees. Once again, Usam knew, a fragile peace would grip the land. And once again, if the Aquilonians allowed it to remain intact, so would he.

 

 

INSIDE THE GUARDIAN'S cave, Kral looked at the Teeth of the Ice Bear, resting in its proper place of honor on top of a stone pillar. He smiled with satisfaction as he regarded it. He knew that its presence there represented an accomplishment of some sort, a struggle against long odds. He could not remember the nature of that struggle, though. The sense that it had happened was a lingering memory, like the scar of a long-healed wound, of which he had many. He could not recall the circumstances behind them, either.

This did not make him unhappy. He knew that it was as it should be. The Guardian had a sacred task, and a difficult, demanding one. He would be in the cave with the crown for decades. Longer. The oldest Guardian had served for a hundred hundred years, and most stayed in the cave for well over a hundred. Kral understood that with absolute clarity—he could picture the entire history of the crown and the Guardians who had protected it before him, as readily as if it had all happened just that morning. It was the things that had occurred in his own life before he became the new Guardian that were hazy. That was so that staying in the cave would be easy for him, he realized. He would not miss aspects of his former life that he could not remember.

He sat down in a comfortable chair, carved from the very wall of the cave by the first Guardian. Each successive one had sat in this chair, and somehow it conformed to each one's anatomy as it already had to his. Still looking at the crown, still with the residual contentment of whatever he had done to restore it to the cave. While he could not recall what exactly he had done, he could feel scabs on his head, just healed, and figured they were part of the whole story. His muscles still ached from some kind of intense effort, and he derived satisfaction from that as well.

And there was something else, an image that lingered just beyond his mind's eye. He kept trying to grasp it, and failing, like trying to catch and hold a handful of river water that just kept running out between his fingers. When he could snatch a piece of it, he saw a girl with hair of the finest gold and eyes as blue as the cloudless sky. A name almost came to him, then vanished.

It didn't matter.

The fragment of an image that did come brought with it unbelievable happiness. Instead of missing her, the simple fact that he had known her was good enough. If he could just hold on to that shred of a picture, or recapture it from time to time, he could stay in the cave forever.

Kral grinned and watched the crown.