“Every promise is like that,” she whispered to herself as she stopped counting strides for a moment. “Every promise has arms and legs and tentacles reaching off into other things and other places and other times, strange bumps and protrusions you don’t see when you make the promise. Then you find you’ve taken up some great, lumpty thing you never knew existed until you see it for the first time in the light of morning.” It was easier not to think of it.
Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven ...
A great lumpty thing one never saw before. Not only ecstasy and joy and an occasional feeling of overpowering peace, but also guiding and protecting and watching and hoping, grieving and planning and seeing all one’s plans go awry. “I did not agree to be tied to any great, demanding responsibility,” she said, surprised at how clearly this came. “I don’t want to be tied to it.”
“Come now,” said a commentator. “You don’t know what it is yet. You think it’s likely to be lumpty, but it might not be that bad. You haven’t seen it. How would you know?”
“I know,” said Mavin, scowling to herself. “Never mind how I know, I know.”
“She knows,” said the wind. “Silly girl,” commented the trees. Her inner voices agreed with these comments and were silent.
She tried to estimate how far she might be from the Lake of Faces. Two days perhaps, or three. The Lake was a good way south of Chamferton’s aerie, of course, and the road lay north. It was probable a great deal of distance could be saved if she could cut cross country southeast to intercept the canyons north of Pfarb Durim. Shadows lay beneath the trees to the southeast. Everywhere except on the road. Benign or malign. Both looked superficially the same until they moved, quivered, flew aloft in sucking flakes of gray. Better not tempt them. Run on.
Ninety-nine, one hundred, start over.
“You loved him as Fon-beast,” her internal commentator suggested, as though continuing a long argument. “When you ran wild in the forest. Why do you disavow him now, at the end of a halter?”
“Because,” she hissed, “I am tied to the other end of it! If he is tied, we are both tied. Now, voices, be still. Be done. I will think on it no more, care about it no more, worry it no more. I have leagues to run again tomorrow. I run to save my life and Himaggery’s life and Arkhur’s life, and there is no guilt in that, so be done and let me alone.”
This exorcism, for whatever reason, seemed efficacious. She ran without further interruption to her concentration until darkness stopped her feet. She thought she would have no trouble sleeping then, though the stone was of a hardness which no blanket was adequate to soften. She would still sleep, no matter what, she thought, but that supposition was false. She lay half dozing, starting awake at every sound, realizing at last that she heard a Harpy scream in each random forest noise. When she realized that, she remembered also that she was traveling back toward the Lake of Faces, back toward the Harpy’s own purlieus. It would be impossible to avoid them there. Impossibe to avoid those eyes, those mouths, those long, snaky necks. She fell at last into shuddering dream, in which she was pursued down an endless road, Harpy screams coming from behind her, and she afraid to turn and see how many and how near they were.
She woke to music, thinking for a time in half dream that the Band had come to chase the Harpies away, or had not gone on, or had come back for her.
“Now we sing the song of Mavin,” a small voice sang. Actually, it sounded more like “Deedle, pootie parumble lalala Mavin,” but she knew well enough what it meant. In half dream she knew that voice as from a time long past when she had wandered the shadowmarches with the shadowpeople, hearing their song. Half awake, she identified it.
“Proom?” she called, sitting upright all in one motion. “Is that you?” only to have the breath driven out of her as something landed on her lap. Proom. Plus several other shadowpeople, their delighted faces beaming up into her own from between huge, winglike ears while others of their troop pranced and strutted around her.
“Proom, you haven’t grown older at all.” She was astonished at this, somehow expecting that he would have turned gray, or wrinkled, or fragile. Instead he was as wiry, sleek and hungry as she remembered him, already burrowing into her small pack to see what food she had to share. “There’s nothing there, Proom. I’ll have to go hunting. Or you will.”
He understood this at once, rounding up half his troop with a few high-pitched lalalas and vanishing into the forest. She started to cry out a warning, then stopped. There were no shadows within sight. What had seemed ambiguous the day before was clear enough today. Where the shadowpeople had gone there were no shadows except the benign interplay of sun and shade.
A pinching made her gasp, and she looked down to find two of the shadowperson females with their huge ears pressed tight to her stomach. “I know I rumble,” she commented, a little offended. “I’m hungry.”
The two leapt to their feet, smiling, caroling, dancing into and out of her reach in a kind of minuet. “Obbla la dandle, tralala, lele, la,” over and over, a kind of chant, echoed from the forest, “lele, la.” They were back in a moment, one with ear pressed against her belly while the others paraded about miming vast bellies, sketching the dimensions of stomachs in the air. “Lele, la,” making a great arc with their hands. “Lele, la.”
She did not understand. Even when their miming became more explicit she did not understand. Only when Proom emerged from the trees to caress one of the females, gesturing a big belly and then pointing to the baby she carried, did Mavin understand. “No,” she said, laughing. “You’re mistaken.”
“Lele, la,” they insisted, vehemently. “Lala, obbla la dandle.”
“ Oh, by all the hundred devils,” she thought. “Now what idea have they swallowed whole. I am not lele la, couldn’t be. I haven’t...”
“In the lovely valley,” sang one of her internal voices, using the tune of a drinking song Mavin remembered from Danderbat Keep. “In the lovely valley, see the beasties run ...”
“That’s not possible. Himaggery was a Singlehorn. I was a Singlehorn. I mean, he thought he was. I really was. Besides, I was only there a day or two. Or ten. Or ... I don’t know how long I was there. How could I know?”
“Lele, la,” sang the shadowpeople, seeing her tears with great satisfaction. In their experience human people cried a lot over everything. It took the place of singing, which, poor things, most of them seemed unable to do. There was one group of humans who sang quite well—all males, back in a cliffy hollow west of Cagihiggy Creek. And there was a house of singers in the city of Learner. Other than the people in those places, most humans just cried.
One of the females crawled into Mavin’s lap and licked the tears off her cheek. “Lele, la,” she affirmed. “Deedle, pootle, parumble, lalala Mavin.”
She, Mavin, even while being sung of at great length and with considerable enthusiasm; she, Mavin, awaiting breakfast; she, Mavin, still disbelieving, stood up to look about her at the world. Some clue was there she had missed. She had been so focused on the shadows, she had not seen the purple lace of Healer’s balm under the trees, the seedpods nodding where yellow bells of startle flower had bloomed twenty or thirty days before. So. It was not a matter of a day or two. The startle flower had carpeted the forest north of Chamferton’s tower. Now it was gone to greenseed, the pods swelling already.
“It’s not possible.” She said this firmly, knowing it was a lie, trying to convince herself.
“Lele, la,” sang the female shadowpeople, welcoming the males back from their foraging in the woods. They came out singing lustily themselves, bearing great fans of fungus, skin bags full of rainhat fruit, and the limp forms of a dozen furry or feathered creatures.
“Celebration,” she said to herself in a dull voice of acceptance. “We’re having a celebration.”
Fires were lit. Mavin was encouraged by pulls and tugs to help prepare food; there was much noise and jollification until she laughed at last. This, was evidently the signal they had waited for. The shadowpeople cheered, danced, sang a new song, and came to hug Mavin as though she had been one of their children.
“Well, why not,” she wept to herself, half laughing. “Why not. Except that I should not Shift for a time, it is no great burden. And perhaps a child will be company.”
“Of course,” soothed an internal voice. “Except that you should not Shift for a time.” Which was what it had been saying all the while. So she had known it herself. With a Shifter’s intimate knowledge of her own structure, how could she not have known it? Known it and refused to admit it.
And that was it, of course. Her protection, her Talent, her experience—all useless for a time. Singlehorn and Arkhur behind her, depending upon her to do a thing which would be easy for a Shifter but perhaps impossible for someone without that ability. Harpies before her, threatening her, quite capable of killing her. If not easy, it would have been at least possible to defeat them so long as she could Shift. And now ... now!
If Shifting were simply impossible, the matter would be simpler. If she couldn’t do it, then she couldn’t—there would be no decisions to make, no guilty concerns about choices that should have been made the other way. She would live or die according to what was possible. But the ability to Shift was still there. If she abstained it was only that an internal voice had told her to abstain—in order to protect what lay within. Old taboos, childhood prohibitions, little brother Mertyn’s voice coming back to her out of time, “Girls aren’t supposed to, Mavin. They say it messes up their insides. ...”
Was that true? Who knew for sure? And how did they know? So now, Mavin, believe in the old proscriptions and you will not Shift until this child is born. So now, Mavin, do not Shift and it may be you cannot accomplish what you have set out to do, in which case Himaggery could suffer, even die because of it. Protect the one, lose the other.
“I did not want this lumpty thing all full of hard choices,” she cried, tears running down her face. “I did not want it.”
“Lele, la,” sang the shadowpeople, happy for her.
When the food was cooked, they ate it. The shadowpeople preferred cooked food, though they would eat anything at all, she suspected, including old shoes if nothing else were available. They licked juice from their chins and munched on mushroom squares toasted above the fires, nibbling rainhat berries in between with dollops of stewed fern. When they had done, with every bone chewed twice, they sat across the ashes, stomachs bulging, and looked expectantly at her. This was Mavin Manyshaped of whom a song had been made, and they would not leave her unless they determined that nothing interesting was likely to happen. There were babies present who had never seen her before, this Mavin who had been to Ganver’s Grave, who had saved the people from the pits of Blourbast. So they sat, watching her with glowing eyes, waiting for her to do something of interest.
At last, in a bleak frame of mind which simply set all doubts aside for the time, she stood up, brushed herself off, and waited while they packed up their few bits and pieces; a pot, a knife, a coil of thin rope, the babies clutching tight to their neck fur. Then she went to the side of the road and built a cairn there with a branch run through its top to point a direction. All the shadowpeople understood this. She was leaving a sign for someone who followed. They chattered happily at this opening gambit, then went after her as she ran off the road toward the southeast, shadows or no shadows. She thought it likely the particular shadows she most feared did not come near the shadowpeople. Perhaps the shadowpeople were immune. Perhaps, like the people of the marching Band, they created an aura which shut such shadows out. For whatever reason, she believed herself safe while with them and chose to use that time in covering the shortest route possible.
The hearty breakfast made her legs less weary, the day less gray than before. The members of the troop gathered foods as they ran close about her, the little ones darting ahead to leap out at them from behind trees or dangle at them from vines broken loose from the arching trees. Mavin stopped from time to time to leave sign along their way, though a blind man could have tracked them by the plucked flowers and the dangling vines. A warm wind came out of the south, carrying scents of grass so strong she might have been running beside mowers in a haymeadow. “Diddle, dandle, lally,” the people sang, skipping from side to side. One who had not heard their songs translated might think them simple, perhaps childish. Mavin knew better. Childlike, yes. But never simple. Their tonal language concealed multiple meanings in a few sounds; their capacity for song carried histories in each small creature’s head. ”Diddle, dandle, lally,” they sang, and Mavin made up a translation, wishing the translator-beast, Agirul, were present to confirm it. “I sing joy and running in the bright day, glory in the sun, happiness among my people.” She would have wagered a large sum that it was something like that. “I sing babies playing hide and seek in the vines.”
This was a good song to run by, and it kept her mind away from her destination. Away from Harpies. The shadowpeople were an excellent distraction and she blessed them as she ran, thanking their own gods for them. It was hard to be really afraid among them, for they faced fear with a belligerent, contagious courage.
When they rested at noon, she acted a play for them, showing herself sleeping first, then acting the part of one who came and stole her face, taking it away, placing it upon a high pole. When she had acted it twice, one of the people began to chatter, dancing up and down, gesturing at the trees, climbing one to a point above her head, hanging there as he mimed a face hanging there, touching the eyes, then his eyes, nose, then his nose, the mouth, then his own, showing them what hung upon the tree. At this they all fell into discussion some pointing eastward of the way they ran, others to the south, waving their arms in violent disagreement. When it was obvious they could not agree, Proom spoke sharply, almost unmusically, and a young one climbed the nearest tall tree to sing from the top of it toward the south and east. After a time, they heard a response, a high, feint warble like distant birdsong. Time passed. The people did not seem distressed or hurried. More time passed. Then, when the sun stood well after noon and Mavin was beginning to fidget, the high, feint birdsong came again, and the shadowman above them warbled his response before plunging down among the branches. He gestured the direction and all of them pounded into movement again, this time guided by infrequent calls which seemed to emanate from distant lines of hill.