Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
So weary was I that the apparition inspired very little fear in me, and after I had stared at it for some minutes, the floating glow took on a horizontal appearance. Soon it formed the lineaments of a white dog, and then it had the face of a white dog, very round-cheeked and pointy-eared, and the dog seemed to be laughing at me.
The ghost sniffed, snorted, and took one step closer.
My first thought was that hounds from Shelbruk Town had found me out, but then common sense took over and I realized that people do not track with fuzzy, sharp-nosed dogs like this one: the sort of dog that would have a curled plume of a tail. No, it was the smell of the dead rabbit that drew the beast on.
Even I could smell that odor, both from my clothes where I had worn the carcass like a cummerbund, and from where it lay now at my feet, as useless to me as ever. Dead rabbit grows old quickly.
I picked the corpse up by the hind feet, and with that movement of my white arm, the white dog vanished. I threw the rabbit to where the dog had been, wiped my hand on the fir boughs, and closed my eyes determinedly. In a few seconds I heard the crunch of bones. I must have fallen asleep then, for when I woke again the moon had gone on, but pressed back to back against me was the soft, odorous, and very warm white dog. I did not object.
The next morning he was not there, but the earth was pocked with dogprints half the size of my own hands. A number of the nearby trees, also, had known the dog’s attentions.
That day threatened rain, but before it could fall I came to a farmhouse and offered to split wood in exchange for tinder and a flint. I was more wary of the farm wife than she was of me, but in the end I broke so much oak to hearth size that she offered me dinner and a place in the kitchen to sleep as well as the fire tools. I took the dinner gratefully, but so disillusioned about my kind was I that I chose to sleep in the cow byre.
She was a large, kindly woman with many children and a mild sort of husband who came in from the last harvest late and approved of my work without suspicion. They told me they had enough for my hands to do for a good month, and money to take away when I left, but the contact with Satt versus Ekesh had soured me on farm families. I turned the job down.
I wish with all my heart, my king, that I remembered the name of these people, instead of Grofe’s.
That night the rain came down hard, but the byre of ten cows was steaming warm. I wrapped myself in straw and listened to the beating on the roof and the breathing of the cows and the squeaking of many mice. Before long one of the squeaks became a squeal, which ended in a snap, followed by butcherly crunching. I crawled up though my bedding and out into the aisle, where I beheld my white dog, catching mice by moonlight. I had to reassure myself that there were no hens asleep on the ground before I returned to bed, and with the dog curled beside me, it was almost too warm.
The next day was wet but not cold, and I steamed like a cow myself, in my coarse woolens. I found with some difficulty my own prints where the cut through to Satt Territory joined the Ekesh southern road, and I was back in Satt by midday.
Behind me down the muddy trail paced the dog again. First I felt him and then I heard him and last I turned and saw him in full daylight for the first time.
He was very dirty, more gray than white, and the tail I had always imagined as a high plume hung sodden behind him, almost touching the mud. (If I had been a dog at that moment, hungry and on a mud road going nowhere much, my tail
would have looked much like that.) His feet were large and his legs long, like sticks, but his ruff was very elegant and his eyes grinned.
On impulse I bent to him and made the usual kissing noises that men make to attract dogs, and the result was that he was gone from the path entirely.
When I could see before me the road down which I had followed the horse and up which I had led the Satt farmers, it was twilight already. I left the path and made a few of my birchbark snares and then a bed of pine branches, the softer fir not
being available. I heard a howl and a growl and a snap that told me the dog was yet with me, had discovered one of my snares, and had disposed of it. He was a large dog. The tree I used as a pillow had a squirrel’s cache of walnuts and hazelnuts in it, which I robbed and cracked in my hand. The next beast to fall into one of my snares was perhaps the same squirrel that had fed me, and I felt slightly dishonorable about eating it, but almost at the same moment I caught another rabbit in my one remaining trap, so I cooked the rabbit and threw the squirrel to my dog.
My dog, I say, though I could not even touch him.
It was bright morning when I came to the tree where my pack had been laid, and only then did I remember it had been brought to the farmhouse. I went after it.
There were horses and wagons tied in back of the building, crowded as a wedding. I went past them to the kitchen.
Quaven came to the door. I heard voices in conversation behind him, but there was nothing to be seen in that room but tables piled high with food. “We don’t need you today,” he said, and made to close the door in my face. My temper was almost ragged, and I gave the closing door such a blow that Quaven skidded half across the kitchen.
“No doubt you don’t, but I need my pack, if you please,” I answered him, and when he came on with his fists waving, I spun him to the floor and sat on him. “My pack,” I reminded him. “Optical supplies. Glass blanks. One grasswood stick.”
“I don’t know anything about a pack,” he said, and then he began to call for his master. Grofe came.
“He forced his way in,” said Quaven, as loud as he could with my weight on his stomach. Master Grofe looked at me coolly and without decision.
“Why shouldn’t he come in, Quaven? We owe the lad much.”
“All I want from you, master, is my pack, which I left here.” I stood up. The kitchen was filled with food, as for a wedding.
“I never saw it!” shouted Quaven, standing also. “I never, ever!”
To Grofe I said, “He had it when he brought my boots. Someone has it now.”
For a moment the dark man stood still and silent, and I could hear someone laugh in the room behind. As at a wedding.
Was it the older son who was marrying, so soon after the catastrophe of the raid? Or could it be Jannie? Sixteen was old enough for a girl to wed. Barely old enough. Perhaps they felt it important to wed her off now, before the story of her abduction could spread.
If that was so, it was a shame, I thought. Such a girl deserved a long, leisurely, silly wedding.
Grofe said, “I remember it. Not since that night, though. Let’s see.” He strode out of the kitchen, out of the house, I followed him and Quaven followed me, protesting. We came to the haybarn and Grofe went up a ladder. As I came up after, Quaven gave a yank back on my leg. I kicked him in the face.
There, in the man’s crude cubby, were all my possessions. They lay in disarray but not too badly damaged, although the jeweler’s rouge was smeared experimentally around the inside of the linen bag. The glass blanks had been too incomprehensible even to destroy, and the secret of the bow stick was intact.
Grofe said he was sorry for the inconvenience. He offered to pay—in kind, not cash—for whatever was broken. I gathered it up and told him I needed nothing except my knife, which had been appropriated. He went down the ladder to Quaven, and there were words between them. When Grofe came up again, he had the knife, slightly blade-nicked but otherwise usable.
He watched me pack all away, with measure in his eyes. “I’m sorry my man did that,” he said. “You can’t trust anybody these days.”
I didn’t reply.
“For instance,” Grofe continued. “We owe you a lot. I admit it. But still, I don’t trust you at all.”
I waited for him to go down the ladder first, expressing somewhat the
same sentiment. “It is not necessary that you do trust me,” I said at last “Or
that I trust you, thank the Three. All I want is to be quit of you people.”
“You’ll take food, though,” he said. “I like to pay what’s owed, and all we have to pay now is in food.”
I thought of the kitchen heaped with plates, and I remembered Mistress Grofe’s buttered marrows. I followed the man back into the kitchen. Quaven was nowhere around.
Grofe made me up a large napkin filled with things that would travel—hard sausage, breadsticks, and cheese—and as I was tying it onto my pack a young man of about my age came from the front room into the kitchen, slamming the door in his excitement and sliding on the tiles. “Twelve,” he said. “We have twelve men and twelve good horses, to leave at moonrise, day after tomorrow.”
He was waving a bag—a small bag with three holes cut into it as eyes and mouth are cut into a pumpkin.
Grofe didn’t look at me immediately. The young man did, with dawning uncertainty. He put the bag into his pocket.
I cleared my throat. “How long have you people been doing this to each other?” I asked Master Grofe as controlledly as I could. “I mean, raiding and killing each other at harvesttime?”
The tall farmer glowered but still didn’t look at me. “Ekesh has been raiding us for years outa count. And, of course, we retaliate. We have to.” Then he did look at me, “have to. I’m broken. Destitute. Without cash I won’t make it through another year.”
I dropped the wrapped napkin on the floor and turned to go, but though I was through with him, he wasn’t through with me. “By God’s Three Faces, you jug-handled ass! You got a right to be holy about it, don’t you? You didn’t have anything to start with. And you could have got my money back—you had the chance and you didn’t.”
I hadn’t known about the money then, of course, but what I said to him was, “I couldn’t run with that and your daughter, too,” and then I closed the door behind me.
Later, after a dry day without a job, a handout, or a wood to snare in, with the dog following behind me as hungry as I was, I wished I had dropped my pride instead of the napkin of food.
Between the last work and this, my king, has fallen a freeze, the
late corn harvest, and what I am tempted to call a plague of religion. You know the sort of event I
mean—it begins with the revival of old prayers and ends with villagers cutting the fingers off
their own children to bury beside the old circle “altars.” It is very Zaquash, this
periodic eruption of bloodletting, and deep-rooted in the peasantry. They feel that the little digit
will stand for the child itself and that the parent who is willing to sacrifice his own get to the
earth will encourage the spirits of nature to reciprocate. The year has been so unlucky that the
people are desperate, and I fear that this season there have been more than fingers put under the
earth.
Though I feel myself to be in some senses a personification of Zaqueshlon, still I have stood against this blood excess for all my adult life. It is against the law, against religion, and against the essence of Nazhuret, inside and out. I am sick of it, sir, and sick of opposing an ignorance as limitless as the ground I walk on. I don’t know if all my philosophy, my science, rhetoric, vehemence and slapdash heroics have changed one thing. Not in twenty years.
Forgive me one more dramatic digression, sir. And please don’t send troops to cut the fingers off the fathers in retribution. That was my first impulse, too, and it is exactly the wrong response.
It is my own belief that the earth spirits need no special propitiation. Having only to wait, they receive us all in the end. Even more ironical is that I have dug amid the circle ruins myself (thereby reinforcing in the local minds the conviction that old Nazhuret is both spirit-touched and simple besides), and beneath the good grass and the sad little digits I have uncovered old bits of weaponry and grommeted leather, which lead me to believe that the altars were no more religious in nature than are the fortifications of Settimben Harbor. By the angle of the blades and the size of one little horsebit (you see, I theorize from very little evidence) I am inclined to date these structures from the last strong Rezhmian occupation of the area, no more than five hundred years ago. I cannot believe that whatever dark southern soldiery happened to die in these places have any possessive interest in the fingers of Zaquash babies. I know very little about the last occupation, but I do know something about the dead. It seems to me sometimes that this whole territory with its suspicious people and all their
condemnable customs are only the offspring of Velonya’s and Rezhmia’s mutual and faithful hate: children a man is ashamed to have engendered.
My pen runs on about children today because they are dancing under my window. In the mud. They are loud and not well kept—three of the four were orphans too convenient for the public mood, and the last had a father who was very willing to trade her for a spell of good luck. What I shall feed them I do not know, unless I return to my earlier habits and go poaching in the royal preserves. I cannot believe I ever made as much noise as these creatures.
I did not walk south with the deliberate attempt to outrun the snow. Every Velonyan born knows the winter is inevitable.
I believe that knowledge makes of us the stolid, sour people we are. I went south because I had started out south, and nothing I did or saw on the road was so pleasant that I wanted to turn back and experience it over again.