Betrayals
dead. There was a sideboard, a table, a couch, but a bed stood near the fireplace. The tangled covers had slid to the floor, and Abberkam was naked on the bed, writhing and raving in fever. 'Oh, Lord!' Yoss said. That huge, black, sweat-oiled breast and belly whoried with grey hair, those powerful arms and groping hands, how was she going to get near him?
She managed it, growing less timid and cautious
as she found him weak in his fever, and, when he was lucid, obedient to her requests. She got him covered up, piled up all the blankets he had and a rug from the floor of an unused room on top; she built up the fire as hot as she could make it; and after a couple of hours he began to sweat, sweat pouring out of him till the sheets and mattress were soaked. 'You are immoderate,' she railed at him in the depths of the night, shoving and hauling at him, making him stagger over to the decrepit couch and lie there wrapped in the rug so she could get his bedding dry at the fire. He shivered and coughed, and she brewed up the herbals she had brought, and drank the scalding tea along with him. He fell suddenly asleep and slept like death, not wakened even by the cough that wracked him. She fell as suddenly asleep and woke to find herself lying on bare hearthstones, the fire dying, the day white in the windows.
Abberkam lay tike a mountain range under the rug, which she saw now to be filthy; his breath wheezed but was deep and regular. She got up piece by piece, all ache and pain, made up the fire and got warm, made tea, investigated the pantry. It was
stocked with essentials; evidently the Chief ordered in supplies from Veo, the nearest town of any size.
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She made herself a good breakfast, and when Abberkam roused, got some more herbal tea into him. The fever had broken. The danger now was water in the lungs, she thought; they had warned her about that with Safnan, and this was a man of sixty. If he stopped coughing, that would be a danger sign. She made him lie propped up. 'Cough,' she told him.
'Hurts,' he growled.
'You have to,' she said, and he coughed, hak-hak.
'More!' she ordered, and he coughed till his body was shaken with the spasms.
'Good,' she said. 'Now sleep.' He slept.
Tikuli, Gubu would be starving! She fled home, fed her pets, petted them, changed her underclothes, sat down in her own chair by her own fireside for half an hour with Gubu going roo-roo under her ear. Then she went back across the marshes to the Chief's house.
She got his bed dried out by nightfall and moved him back into it. She stayed that night, but left him in the morning, saying, 'I'll be back in the evening.' He was silent, still very sick, indifferent to his own plight or hers.
The next day he was clearly better: the cough was phlegmy and rough, a good cough; she well remembered when Safnan had finally begun coughing a good cough. He was fully awake from time to time, and when she brought him the bottle she had made serve as a bedpan he took it from her and turned away from her to piss in it. Modesty, a good sign in a Chief, she thought. She felt pleased with him and with herself. She had been useful. 'I'm
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going to leave you tonight; don't let the covers slip off. I'll be back in the morning,' she told him, pleased with herself, her decisiveness, her unanswerability.
But when she got home in the clear, cold evening, Tikuli was curled up in a comer of the room where he had never slept before. He would not eat, and crept back to his corner when she tried to move him, pet him, make him sleep on the bed. Let me be, he said, looking away from her, turning his eyes away, tucking his dry, black, sharp nose into the curve of his foreleg. Let me be, he said patiently, let me die, that is what I am doing now.
She slept, because she was very tired. Gubu stayed out in the marshes all night. In the morning Tikuli was just the same, curled up on the floor in the place where he had never slept, waiting.
'I have to go,' she told him, 'I'll be back soon
— very soon. Wait for me, Tikuli.'
He said nothing, gazing away from her with dim amber eyes. It was not her he waited for.
She strode across the marshes, dry-eyed, angry, useless. Abberkam was much the same as he had been; she fed him some grain pap, looked to his needs, and said, 'I can't stay. My kit is sick, I have to go back.'
'Kit,' the big man said in his rumble of voice.
'A foxdog. My daughter gave him to me.' Why was she explaining, excusing herself? She left; when she got home Tikuli was where she had left him. She did some mending, cooked up some food she thought Abberkam might eat, tried to read the book about the worlds of the Ekumen, about the world that had no war, where it was always winter, where
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people were both men and women. In the middle of the afternoon she thought she must go back to Abberkam, and was just getting up when Tikuli too
stood up. He walked very slowly over to her. She sat down again in her chair and stooped to pick him up, but he put his sharp muzzle into her hand, sighed, and lay down with his head on his paws. He sighed again.
She sat and wept aloud for a while, not long;
then she got up and got the gardening spade and went outdoors. She made the grave at the corner of the stone chimney, in a sunny nook. When she went in and picked Tikuli up she thought with a thrill like terror, 'He is not dead!' He was dead, only he was not cold yet; the thick red fur kept the body's warmth in. She wrapped him in her blue scarf and took him in her arms, carried him to his grave, feeling that faint warmth still through the cloth, and the light rigidity of the body, like a wooden statue.
She rilled the grave and set a stone that had fallen from the chimney on it. She could not say anything, but she had an image in her mind like a prayer, of Tikuli running in the sunlight somewhere.
She put out food on the porch for Gubu, who had kept out of the house all day, and set off up the causeway. It was a silent, overcast evening. The reeds
stood grey and the pools had a leaden gleam.
Abberkam was sitting up in bed, certainly better, perhaps with a touch of fever but nothing serious;
he was hungry, a good sign. When she brought him his tray he said, 'The kit, it's all right?'
'No,' she said and turned away, able only after a minute to say, 'Dead.'
'In the Lord's hands,' said the hoarse, deep
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voice, and she saw Tikuli in the sunlight again, in some presence, some kind presence like the sunlight.
'Yes,' she said. 'Thank you.' Her lips quivered and her throat closed up. She kept seeing the design on her blue scarf, leaves printed in a darker blue. She made herself busy. Presently she came back to see to
the fire and sit down beside it. She felt very tired.
'Before the Lord Kamye took up the sword, he was a herdsman,' Abberkam said. 'And they called him Lord of the Beasts, and Deer-Herd, because when he went into the forest he came among the deer, and lions also walked with him among the deer, offering no harm. None were afraid.'
He spoke so quietly that it was a while before she realised he was saying lines from the Arkamye.
She put another block of peat on the fire and sat down again.
'Tell me where you come from. Chief Abberkam,' she said.
'Gebba Plantation.'
'In the east?'
He nodded.
The fire smouldered, making its pungent smoke.
The night was intensely silent. When she first came out here from the city the silence had wakened her, night after night.
'What was it like?' he said almost in a whisper,
