“You shouldn’t have hit her.” The same woman’s voice.
“She was tryin’ to get away!” A boy’s voice, a young man, uncertain but defiant.
“What good is she to you with her head bashed in?” The woman asked. “What were you going to do, kill her and then do your duty on her dead body? Cover her up for decency’s sake!”
The sound of a slap, a cry.
“Mind your words, woman. That was disrespectful of your son.” A man’s voice, heavy, ponderous with something lubricious and inflexible about it.
Stavia decided she had listened long enough. It was time to go search for the reindeer cows. The trail led into the darkness, into the trees, the forest, where the wind soughed in the branches and all voices were stilled. Even in the dark she could see the footprints. They shone like little fiery hearts in the shadows. She followed them.
“You’ll heal her, Susannah,” the man’s heavy voice demanded.
“I’ll do what I can.” A kind of stubborn dignity there.
“You’ll heal her.”
“Husband, I’ll do what I can. I’ve got no magic to heal wounds like this. Maybe if you’d of given her time to teach me the things she knew, I could do something. There’s things in her medical bag, but I don’t know what they are. Capable chops wood real good. He does skulls real good, too. You got to face it, Resolution Brome. He maybe killed this girl.”
“This devil.”
“Doesn’t look like a devil to me,” she retorted with that same perverse integrity, tears bubbling through it. Stavia wanted to laugh, but she couldn’t. “Looks like any worm an’s been abused bad. Looks like any wife. Beat and shaved and left hungry.”
Slap again. Cry again. Not a surprised sound, more a ritual one. Slap; ahh. Slap; ahh. The one following the other like an acknowledgment.
“You’ll heal her.” It was a command. There was a promise of pain in it.
Silence. Then, “I done all I can do with what I have here. I got to get some things from my wife-house.” Some new emotion in that statement. More than the words. An ultimate sadness. A finality. Whoever the woman was, she went away, into a distance too far to follow.
It was not Stavia’s concern. Stavia went back to tracking the footprints. They led down a long, winding pathway among the trees. Ahead of her was moonlight, come from somewhere. Not the sky. The earth, perhaps. Light from the snow itself. And there were the cows, their antlers curved twigs against the trunks of huge trees, standing like gray statues, as still as though carved from stone. Only their breath told her they were alive, little puffs of steam coming from their black muzzles, now, and again, and again. All she had to do was offer them the grain she carried in her left hand and drive them back.
The bellow came from behind her. She turned, seeing it all at once, the source of the light, the reason that the reindeer cows were here. They hadn’t run off. They had been stolen away and brought here, by him. His antlers swept back and upward like the edge of a breaking wave, foaming forward into a dozen lesser points of white bone. Over his forehead other points protruded, bright fringes of ivory. His muzzle pointed up as he called to her, telling her why he was here. The cows belonged to him. Now that she had come, she belonged to him, too. There would be no rounding up, no taking back. The white mane around his shoulders and down his chest was a royal robe, his kingship made manifest.
“Go find that fool woman,” the man’s heavy voice said. “She’s been gone long enough to cook a meal. Chastity, go find your maw.”
“Yes, Papa.” A girl. There was a girl there, somewhere.
It wasn’t important.
The bull deer bellowed once more. “Mine,” he said. “Mine.”
“I need them,” she said in a reasonable tone. “Don’t you see, I need them.”
“Mine.” He lowered his antlers. They pointed at her head, her chest. He scraped with his feet, finding solidity from which an attack could be launched. “They are mine.”
“You don’t even use them for anything,” she said. “You just own them. If they have bull calves, you fight them and kill them. You say they’re yours, but they aren’t useful to you at all!”
“Mine,” he said again.
The girl’s voice came back, frightened. “Papa, Papa, she’s dead. Ma’s dead!”
“What do you mean dead?”
“She’s hanging from the ridgebeam, Papa. On a rope. I can’t reach her to get her down….”
There was confusion. Stavia ignored it. The knife was in her right hand. Over her shoulder was a rope. “Will you let me have them?” she asked the bull deer. “I need them. More important than that, they need themselves. They have names, you know. Names of their own!”
“Mine,” he trumpeted. “Mine the power! Mine the glory! Mine the females! Mine the young!”
She threw the rope. It moved as though it could think its way through the air, a serpent which knew how to go where it had to go, looping around the mighty antlers and around the tree, a great slithering of purpose. She made it fast while the bull struggled and screamed. Then, miraculously, there was another rope in her hand to hold the bull’s back legs and another tree to tie them to. She had a knife. It was ready in her hand and she moved close against that hot, musk-smelling, muscle-throbbing beast, thrusting herself against it, her blade out to cut, cut, letting the parts fall on the snow where they steamed hotly while the great deer screamed and screamed and she said… something. What was it she said? A line from a play. Something about crying….
When she had done, she drove the cows back the way she had come. Behind her, the magical rope loosened and the animal went away. She could not hear it anymore. There was no bellowing but only
