Powers

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My aunt told everyone I was obeying her vision and would leave the day after tomorrow. When I went next day to the fish-mat for the last time, Tisso’s mother was waiting to offer me a blanket woven of reed treated so that the fibers were fuzzy and made a thick, soft texture, warm as wool. “My daughter wove it,” Lali Betu said, and I said, “I thank her for it and will think of you both when the nights are cold.” Tisso hung back and did not try to speak to me. I said goodbye to the women and spoke briefly with my aunt. She did not want to talk, she wanted me to be gone, to get across the second river and be safe.

I left early the next morning before my uncle got up. The puppy was sleeping on his feet. Prut was curled, up on my old blanket. I whispered, “Go with Me,” to them all and slipped out of the little house and away from my village. My heart was heavy in me.

I went overland, eastward. My aunt would have disapproved, wanting me to hurry straight to the north. I refused to let her fear drive me. I had no boat, and heading north on foot, I’d have to take a maze of a way through the Marshes, endless days of walking. I had no money with me and no means of earning it while I traveled.

But it was in my mind that I did have money. Blood money, guilt money, the payment for my sister’s death. I had left it with Cuga, hidden in his cave. It would be enough to take me to Mesun, if I lived light, and I was used to living light. I knew the way that I’d walked with Chamry and Venne; I could keep east of the Heart of the Forest, so as not to run into Barna’s guards, when I got that far north. The tricky part would be finding Cuga’s cave, south of the Daneran Forest. I was sure my gift of memory would guide me when I came among the hills and valleys I had known that summer—if I could find them.

I had a backpack stuffed with wayfarer’s food, dried smoked fish, hard cheese, hard bread, dried fruit: the women at the fish-mat had offered me more food than I could ever use, the men of my village had come to Metter’s hut to share with me their little hoards of travel supplies. I had no fear of going hungry for days to come. Besides the food and my new blanket, I carried as always my fishing gear, my knife, and the book, wrapped safe in waterproof reedcloth to protect it when I had to ford or swim. I was fit again, able to walk steadily all day and to enjoy it.

Within two days I came out of the Marshes into a rising, thinly wooded country. I kept bearing east now; as well as I could judge, I was not far north of the city of Casicar. I saw a few farmsteads in the distance, desolate- looking places. Cattle and sheep were scattered out in the valleys, not many of them. I passed orchards that had been burned, a ruined farmhouse. Armies had come through here, looting and laying waste, the endlessly warring armies of the City States… . There were no roads, only tracks, and I saw no people but an occasional herdsman or shepherd. We spoke or waved, and I went on.

The land continued to rise, and now I was in the hilly, broken, wild country I was looking for. The problem was finding the piece of it I wanted. I had no idea of the direction Cuga’s cave lay from where I was now. The woods were thick enough that there was never an overview of the hills. All I could do was go forward, following my nose. As the sun began getting low and golden through the trees that day, I felt myself completely lost—walking at random.

My plan was hopeless. I could wander in these hills till I became as weak and crazy as I had been when I first came into them. I sat down to eat a little and put some heart in myself, planning to go on as long as the light lasted before I found a sheltered place to sleep. As I sat down in a little clearing, my back against a young oak, I said with a sigh, “Oh, Ennu, guide me now.”

I split a lump of hard bread with my knife, laid a thin slice of smoked fish on it, and ate it slowly, tasting salt and smoke and thinking of my village. I looked up at some movement and saw a black lion come into the clearing about twenty feet from me. It was a lioness, pacing with her head and her long tail low. She stopped and looked straight at me. I said, with no voice, “Ennu-Amba,” naming her. She gazed a moment longer and then walked on. She vanished almost at once in the thickets.

After a while I finished my dinner. I wrapped up the fish and put it carefully away in my pack, I licked my greasy fingers and wiped them on the deer fern amidst which I sat. My mouth was dry, and I drank from the little bottle of lacquered reedcloth I had refilled at the last stream, I got up slowly It seemed to me that I had only one way to go: that was to follow the lion. It did not seem a wise thing to do, but I was in a place where wisdom, maybe, was no use. I followed the lion.

Once I was through the thickets, the way she had gone appeared to be a faint path that went through open oak woods along the top of a long, winding hill, easy walking with fairly good visibility. I did not see the lion again. I went on steadily for a long time. The sun was striking level through the trees when I recognised where I was. Cuga had led me through this glade—past that enormous, ancient oak—when he took me to meet the Forest Brothers. We were in Cugamand, I thought, and then wondered why I had thought “we,” not “I.” All I had to do to reach the cave was turn off the lion’s road and follow the way I knew, downward and to the right.

I stopped and thanked Ennu, then turned to the right and went down through woods I knew with increasing familiarity, until I came to the home stream and crossed it and stood before the rockslide that held and concealed the door of the cave. Sunset light was bright on the tops of the trees.

I started to say his name, but I knew with absolute certainty that he was not there. I said nothing. After a while I went in through the narrow entrance. My eyes found only darkness in the cave. The smell of smoke and badly cured fur, Cuga’s reek, Cuga’s stink, was there, but faint, a kind of echo of a smell. It was cold in that darkness. There was no light. I went back outside. The evening seemed marvelously bright and warm, and I remembered the blinding glory of daylight the first time I ever left the cave.

I put my pack down by the cave door and took my water bottle to fill it at the stream. I drank, and filled the bottle, and squatted there for a while; and as I watched the flow and movement of the water in the gathering twilight, I saw him on the bank of the stream.

Animals and the water and weather of a year or two years had not left very much of him: his skull, with the forehead broken in, and other bones, a couple of scraps of moldy fur clothing, and his leather belt.

I touched the skull where it lay, and stroked it a little, talking to Cu-ga. The light was failing fast and I was very tired. I did not want to sleep in the cave. I rolled up in my reedcloth blanket in a grassy bay of the great rock formation and slept deep and long.

In the morning I went into the cave, thinking to bury him there; but it was so cheerless that it seemed better to let him be where he was. I dug a small grave high enough above the stream to be out of the winter floods. I gathered his bones into it, and his belt, and one of his knives I found in the cave, and the metal box of salt that had been his greatest treasure. He’d kept it hidden all the time I was with him, and I was never to know where, for I found it lying out on the floor of the fireplace cave. There was still a little salt in the bottom of the box. In it also was one of his two prized knives, and the small, heavy bag of money that I had left with him and he had kept for me.

It was a relief to my heart to know that he hadn’t been killed for the sake of that money. From the fact that hed taken the things out and not put them away again, I imagined that maybe having been hurt or feeling ill, he’d wanted to look at his treasures. But when he knew he was dying, he left them and went to die outside, in the place he liked to sit beside the stream.

I covered the small grave over, smoothing the dirt with my hands, and asked Ennu to guide him. I put the bag of money in the bottom of my pack without opening it, I said farewell and set off, back up the way that led north and east to the hill where I had first met the Forest Brothers.

Ever since I left East Lake I had felt very lonely. Solitude had always been a pleasure to me, but it had been a rare and relative solitude—almost always there had been others nearby, in reach. This was different, this aloneness. To have once again walked away from my own people, from all I knew—to know that wherever I went I would always be among strangers—no matter how I tried to tell myself it was freedom, it felt like desolation. That day I left Cugamand was the hardest of all. I plodded on and plodded on, finding the way without thinking about it. When I got to the top of the hill where Cuga had left me, it was time to stop. I stopped, I made no fire, for I didn’t want to bring the Forest Brothers or anybody else. I had to go alone, and I would. But I lay there that night and grieved. I grieved for myself, and for Cuga. And I grieved for my people in East Lake, Tisso and Gegemer and my kind, lazy uncle—all of them. And for Chamry Bern, and Venne, and Diero, and even Barna, for I had loved Barna. And for my people of Ar-camand, Sotur, Tib and Ris and little Oco, Astano, Yaven, my teacher Everra, and Sallo, my Sallo, lost—all of them lost to me. I was heavy with tears I could not cry and my head ached. The great stars of summer slid slowly to the west. I slept at last.