knowing with great clarity exactly where he was. The warm weight of her arm and leg flung across his body in possessive comfort were welcome. He eased his hands over her back and shoulders, crushing the mosquitoes that had come to feast on unprotected skin. The heat of the day was seeping away from the earth. He shivered deliciously, and tried to reach his tunic without waking her. But when he shifted, she stirred immediately. She opened her eyes and stared silently into his.
'It's late,' she said, and reached across him for her shirt, not casually, but contained.
She sealed off their hours together as a thing accomplished. He sensed that she neither needed nor wanted love words and compliments. Her calm acceptance made him wonder if he had not been cheated somehow. She leaned against him casually as she pulled her shirt on, but he felt she was no closer to him. Ten years ago, he thought to himself, a woman like this would have left me sulking, wondering if I had satisfied her, desperate to know what she thought of our mating. But today ... He shrugged inwardly as he found his own shirt tangled with her leggings. Given time, he thought, she would let him know exactly what she desired from him. In her own good time. Shaking the garments apart, he offered hers to her, and then donned his.
'It's late. We'll have to hurry and hope we catch the end of the caravan. I've a feeling I've called enough attention to myself lately.'
'Capiam said as much when I was healing Ketla this morning. He said ...' She paused, ashamed to repeat the hard words.
'The thing about my father,' Heckram filled in calmly. 'Again. I've heard it before, and the first few times it stung. Sometimes I think he resents a man he cannot control.
At other times, I realize that in my own way I am a danger to his authority.'
'I think he would rather you lusted after his power as Joboam does, instead of ignoring it,' Tillu observed.
She did not walk blindly among the herdfolk, he reflected. Would it please Capiam to know how easily this woman read him? He watched her as she dressed and pulled the hair back from her face. For a brief instant he remembered the silkiness of her hair across his face, different from the coarser tresses of the herd women. More like his own.
Absently he touched his hair and watched her as she gathered the straying harkar. Was this the woman who, days ago, had looked so shaken at the prospect of leading one harke? He watched her speak coaxingly to one, and grip the next by the coarse hair of its lower jaw: She would make a fine herdswoman. The thought displeased him. He didn't want her to merge with the herdfolk and lose her foreign ways. She was not curd to be packed into a cheese mold and shaped like a hundred others. He pulled his boots on and rose to help her.
They formed up the rajd and left the little glen. Shadows were lengthening across it.
It was a different place from the sun-filled hollow where they had paused earlier. Tillu strayed away, gathering sorrel, roots and all. He knew from his mother that it made a refreshing tea. But, 'What's that for?' he called as she dragged several ranunculus plants from the earth. Tillu cut the roots free of the greenery and flowers and wrapped them in moss before adding them to her pouch.
'For nosebleed,' she told him. 'And some use the root to blister the skin. They say it soothes the muscles beneath. But I think ...' She paused a long time, and then said softly,
'I miss Kari. She wanted to know so much. I felt as if I knew more, because I was sharing it with her. I don't understand why Capiam won't let her be a healer.'
'You said it yourself, earlier,' Heckram answered. 'It would make her less vulnerable to his authority. Others would be listening to her, following her advice. He likes control.'
Tillu said nothing more, but followed silently as he led the rajd on the winding path between boulders and gullies. Here a shelf of earth had been thrust up, there a wash of water had left bare a swatch of gravel down its face. He hurried the animals as the shadows lengthened and the warmth of the day slipped away. The overcast crept over the sky again, promising another night of rain. With the clouds came a wind that slunk amongst the broken earth to spring on them at unexpected moments. Whenever a drift of earth thwarted the wind, the midges and mosquitoes found them. The reindeer flapped their clownish ears in annoyance, and tugged their heads about to nip at sudden itches. Tillu stopped to gather anemones and stuff the whole plants into her bag. Then she ran to catch up, the shoulder pouch bouncing against her hip. She ran well, as if running swiftly were more natural to her than the bearing of heavy burdens.
He realized he was comparing her to the herdwomen again. Her bones were longer and thinner, and her hair floated airily in the wind of her passage. Like foxes and bears, he told himself. Speed and grace against strength and stamina. It eased his eyes to watch her.
She came up, not on the other side of the harke, but beside him. She walked close to him, matching her hurrying strides to his. He glanced down and across at her and smiled, but said nothing. Instead, he imagined. He and Tillu were journeying alone on the tundra. Their own small herd of reindeer followed them, and they were journeying, not to the Cataclysm nor to the talvsit, but to lands beyond, to a place where the people were taller and slender and lived a settled life. To places where folk spoke a different tongue and ... his imagination faltered. And what would he do among such a people?
And there was something else. Kerlew, they would have to have Kerlew with them, to be complete. Both of them, he realized, he wanted both of them, as if together they made up the whole of a new world for him.
Stars were dim against the still blue sky when he led the rajd from the rugged upthrustings of the earth and back onto the tundra. The lights of the night camp were lower stars against a blacker sky of tundra. 'No sense in hurrying anymore,' he muttered. 'We're coming in late and everyone can talk.' They slowed to a comfortable walk and looked ahead to the lights, not at each other, and suddenly she spoke.
'About Elsa.'
The name hung between them like smoke blowing from a moss fire. With its utterance, she seemed to move apart from him without changing her position at his side. He didn't know what she expected him to say, but the silence grew until he felt compelled to fill it. What was he to say about Elsa? He took a deep breath through a tight throat. Was he supposed to say that he understood why she had given Elsa the medicine that let her slide from sleep to death? Was she asking for forgiveness? Or was she asking how he could lie with her so soon after his loss?
'Elsa was my friend,' he said slowly. He paused, and was ambushed by the sting of tears. His throat went raw. He gasped for air and was blind as the sudden tears ran. He put his hand on the harke's shoulder. The depth and suddenness of his grief made him powerless before it. He stumbled beside the harke, his words running as freely as his tears. 'I don't know ... what is the use of my tears now? I don't know why I cry. I didn't weep for her then. I couldn't. If I wasn't going to kill Joboam for killing her, then I had no right to mourn. Do you see? If I was only going to miss her as a friend, not as a husband should, then ... she wasn't mine to mourn. The night she died, when I slept by her and held her hand, I dreamed of her. Not as 'Elsa my wife' but as my friend. I was on a hill, watching her, and she was going off to hunt, with her bow on her back and her hair blowing in the wind. I was glad to see her go, because she enjoyed hunting and was good at it. I didn't run after her, or call to her. I let her go.' He swallowed and dragged his arm across his eyes. 'I never told anyone about that,' he said in a strangled voice. 'I let her go.'
'Hush.' He felt her hands, touching his arm, and then her arm twined around his waist as they walked together. 'You didn't want her to die. You only wanted her to be free.' She spoke hesitantly, as if convincing herself.
Fury stormed up in him as suddenly as grief had. 'I should have killed Joboam. I didn't have to see him do it to know that he's the only one who could have done it. He cut Bruk's tendons, he killed Elsa, he tried to lose Kerlew and leave him to die. Why don't I kill him?' Bafflement filled his voice.
Her voice was calm beside him, coming out of the darkness. 'Is it so common, then, for your folk to kill each other?'
'No.' The idea disgusted him. 'It may happen, sometimes in an accident. Once, when I was small, Nes shot an arrow at what he thought was a bear near his vaja and calf. It was Oso, in a bear coat. Nes was sorry, but Oso died.'
'They do not fight, then, to the death? Over women or status in the tribe?'
Heckram peered at her through the gathering dusk. Her face was unreadable. He shrugged. 'Do other peoples do so? I've heard of such things but ... Why fight over a woman? She will mate where she will. One may be
