Moonrise

– but better than no chance.' He broke a tendon thread, said 'Shit,' and knotted off the end… then rethreaded his needle, an impressive thing to accomplish in such soft light. 'Though perhaps Frozen Jesus may help us.'

'Frozen, Floating, or Mountain Jesus – they've spent a long time helping only armed men, and rich men, and clever men… and no one else at all.'

'Yes.' Richard raised his head from his work, his great crest of hair… of fur… powdered with moonlight as with snow. 'But that is only surface knowing; an old man with coyote in him, told me that truth-fishes swim beneath all surfaces.'

'Gulf sharks, perhaps,' Baj said. 'Except for the Coopers, I've known only decent people murdered.' Saying so, he hadn't meant the Robin woman as well, but saw that Richard took it so.

'Still, wrongs may be made right.'

'It seems to me, Richard – and not speaking of the Robin woman – that to go against Boston as is planned, is to win on a carpet of captive women's corpses. In what way is that not true?'

Richard set his needle down. 'It is true – true, and the only way the tribes and Person Guards will be freed to see to it that other daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters will not someday also be taken for hostage breeders… How can Frozen Jesus object?'

'How not?'

Richard bent to his slicing and sewing. 'Baj, you were a prince. What are high Sunrisers taught of Greats and Gods? Is there only Lady Weather, her sad daughter, Summer, and the Winter Lord?… Do the Jesuses speak together, or quarrel among themselves, so that many matters go badly? Or is there no Great at all, but only chance?'

'… I'm not the one to ask.'

'You must have considered those questions.' Richard bit his thread, knotted the end, and plucked at the stitching to test it.

'Mmm… Listen, Richard, I'm twenty years old, and was nothing but a whore-house, booze-house fool many of those years… though I did hope to become a competent poet. So, deep questions are still too deep for me, though at least I have the sense to know it.'

'But you were taught by wise people.'

'Yes. Yes, I was well taught – and paid no attention to any of it, though my brother did. Newton, or old Peter Wilson, would have been the ones you needed for serious questions. They both… both would have had good answers for you.'

'No thoughts, then, yourself?' Richard turned the moccasin in his huge hands, flexed the double sole.

'No. I've been… I've been too busy to worry about it.' The night wind was rising; Baj felt its chill through his cloak's thick wool. '- But if you want a child's thoughts, Richard, as to Gods and various Jesuses… well, when I was ten years old, I imagined that all Greats existed in a… a sort of swirling substance, like tumultuous water, like the river we crossed. I thought they all existed there, spinning and sailing this way and that – and if you called (if I, as a boy, called), I might catch one's attention while he or she whirled past. And if I caught them in an eddy, if they were still enough to hear such a minor voice, then they might command something done – or might not, if they thought that more humorous – before the currents of all things spun them away either to pleasures or more important duties – I wasn't sure which.'

'That's a picture.' Richard set cross-stitches, thick fingers deft, the curved needle sauntering in and out under moonlight barely bright enough for shadows.

'Only a boy's picture, imagining some explanation for the confusions of the world.'

'Yes, an unreliable place.'

'As I, so young, discovered at every festival, when perfect looked-for gifts – a champion racing stallion, a ten- crew iceboat built by the Edgars – could rarely be depended on… And I've found, recently, that a child's imagined currents may be only a single great whirl-pool, by which we, and every Jesus also, might be taken under.'

Richard sighed a deep sigh. 'You see, wisdom at ten years old. And grimmer wisdom at twenty.'

'Not wisdom. Only wishes and words, Richard – and either of my fathers would have been bored (one politely, the other likely not) to hear me. These aren't the sorts of questions that even Used-to-be-princes are meant to bother their heads with – which was one of the pleasures of being a prince.'

'Try the right.' Richard handed the moccasin over, and Baj stood to tug it on, cross-tie the lacings.

'… That's really… that's comfortable. Thank you very much, Richard.'

'I require a payment,' Richard said.

'Name it.' Baj paced back and forth through moonlight in his new moccasin-boots. They were very light on his feet, and so simply made – sized, sliced, folded and sewn. It was oddly pleasant, wearing them, to feel the details of earth – as he would, of course, also feel the details of sharp stones.

'You are to pay me… the beginning of forgiveness for the murder of the Robin lady.'

Baj stood still, and noticed that Richard, seated for his sewing, yet nearly met him eye-to-eye. That massive boulder-size seemed to hold sadness to match its muscle.

'Payment given, Richard.'

'And in your imagined rapids, your whirling pools,' the big Person shifted and heaved to his feet, '- in them, no ship of mercy sails?'

'Only, I suppose, as a Warm-time poet put it: 'in the narrow currents of our faltering hearts.''

Then a long, deep, considering hum. Baj supposed it was Richard's method for keeping the sounds of the world from troubling his thoughts.

'- I'd be more interested,' Baj said, 'in what you, and Nancy also, make of the world.'

Richard, looming over, smiled his grizzle-bear grimace. 'We make… do.'

When Nancy returned – still silent to Baj, as he to her – the three of them wrapped themselves in their cloaks and blankets under sheltering birches, Errol, innocent as any puppy, curled against Baj's side. And after a time, all – even a wakeful Once-a-prince, remembering a Robin woman's eyes – slept to the conversation of wind and trees.

Until, just before dawn, the rattle and thud of drums came to wake them.

CHAPTER 13

Patience thought the drumming was dreamed, aching echoes of her bruises and broken nose.

She woke still savage from the stone-fight the day before, shamed that she'd been driven like a badger into the hut, dragging the log-round's weight and hunched warding thrown rocks. Though she'd left injured children behind her – and would have killed some if she could, despite loving her own… her ungrateful son who hadn't visited since she fell.

The drums were rolling, grumbling away like a great departing wagon – already distant, joining others deeper into the hills.

The village seemed to stir and boil in the last of night around her, but no one disturbed the sheepskin at the hut's door.

Her strapped shoulder now only slightly sore, Patience got up from her pallet – with necessary courtesy to her chain-tether and log – and dragged that load to the entrance hide. Supposing she was being unwise, she paged the sheepskin aside to a brightening dawn, the sounds of men running, and women's click-clacking calls and scolding.

'Get back inside.' The sentry stared down at her over the shaped wooden beak of a war-helmet. No face to be seen there. but the voice familiar.

'… Peter Aiken?'

'Get inside.' The leaf-bladed javelin turned slightly in his

grip.

Patience stepped back into the hut, let the sheepskin fall, and stood by her log-anchor, waiting.

And as sure as if commanded, Pete Aiken-Robin stooped to enter… then stood tall, bare-chested and armed, his carved helmet's blue plume touching the rough wattle ceiling. She saw he belted a heavy hatchet, and a sword. The sword was a scimitar, and hers.