A Hero's Tale (15 page)

Into a corner of my mind came a flicker of curiosity so faint that I almost disregarded it. Why would a hunter send an arrow through me without knowing who I was? Was every stranger here an enemy? Then I saw myself through the hunter's eyes. Wrapped in my wolfskin, to him I was a wolf, curled up asleep at the edge of the thicket.

If I was going to die, a wolf's death was not the death I wanted. I was a hunter of the forest people, and I would die standing on my own two legs. And if this hunter was about to kill me, let him know that he was killing one of his own kind.

Because I too was a hunter, I knew what he would do. He was making certain of his aim, taking care that he had a clear shot, with no leaves or twigs between that might deflect his arrow, but at the slightest movement of his quarry, he would let the arrow fly.

I rolled quickly to one side. The moment I began to move, I heard the bowstring and then the arrow as it struck the ground beside me. While the hunter nocked another arrow, I threw off the wolfskin and sprang to my feet. I had nowhere to run with the thicket at my back. I stood facing him and watched his eyes. He had drawn his bow and was staring at me over the arrow's tip.

At that moment I was as ready to meet my death as I would ever be. When he lowered his bow, I was both relieved and a little disappointed. Then I stepped back into the flow of time.

I made a sign to him with my open hand, the sign the forest people made when they greeted one another. He approached me, his bow lowered but with the arrow nocked, ready to draw again if need be, and stopped a dozen feet away.

He wrinkled his brow at me. "Who are you?" he said.

At least I think that's what he said. I recognized the word for "you." It was the same word used by the forest people.

"A traveler," I replied, using the word everyone understood.

He gazed at me, undecided.

"No harm," I said, in my own tongue.

He shook his head. When I repeated it in the language of the forest people, he looked puzzled, but I believe he understood.

"Lost," I said, in the language of the forest people. "I'm lost."

The hunter debated with himself.

"Come," he said at last, and took his arrow from the bowstring.

I didn't take time to open my pack, to put my wolfskin into it. I bound it to the outside of the pack as quickly as I could, before the hunter changed his mind. Then I looked around for my bow. At first I didn't see it. Lying on the forest floor, it looked like a fallen branch among the leaves. I did see the hunter's arrow, and when I bent to pick it up, I saw my bow beside it. At the same moment, the hunter saw it too. His shout of warning stopped me from reaching for it. I had the arrow in my hand. Slowly I straightened up and held it out to him. Still untrusting, he approached me and took the arrow before he bent and picked up my bow. He didn't offer it to me. Carrying both my bow and his own, he turned and started up the hill.

I had been wondering how the hunter found me, but when I saw the trail I made as I blundered about, lost in the mist, that puzzle solved itself. A wounded boar running from his pain and terror could not have left a clearer sign of his passing. I knew better than to leave a trail like that, and though it seemed that all was now well, my encounter with the hunter might have ended in disaster. While I berated myself for my carelessness, at the same time I was encouraged. I'd had a bit of luck. Perhaps the world hadn't turned against me after all.

When we crossed a stream, the hunter waited while I satisfied my thirst and filled my water gourd. Although I was still very hungry, I felt much better, and a little of my hope returned.

The hunter seemed to know where he was going. I followed him blindly. I had become so lost that all directions were the same to me. Whether we were going north or south, east or west, it made no difference. The hunter knew the way, and I did not. I decided to trust my luck a little longer.

We had been walking for several hours when we came to a bit of cleared land. I wasn't surprised that I hadn't seen the clearing from the ridgetop. Though it was quite large, several acres altogether, it was patchy and irregular, as it followed the contours of the hillside.

At one end of the clearing stood a round house made of wattle and roofed with a thatch of reeds. Before we reached it, the hunter called out a greeting, and a woman appeared in the doorway. A child came running out the door but stopped when he saw me and hid himself behind his mother's skirts. The hunter gestured to the woman to take the child inside. He made a sign to me to stay where I was and followed them.

The thought came to me that I now had an opportunity to run away. Then I thought again. The hunter had my bow, and I was more lost now than I had been before. If that were not enough, the smell of cooking would have held me there.

A few minutes later the woman came to the doorway and invited me inside. She offered me a place beside the hearth and handed me a bowl of soup. I was so hungry that I forgot my manners. I swallowed the soup down almost at a gulp and didn't make even a polite gesture of refusal at the offer of more. When I finished the second bowl, I found the courtesy to apologize for my greediness and thank the woman for her hospitality.

She seemed to understand me better than her husband did. She spoke a few common words of welcome and saw that my needs were met, for food and drink, for warmth and rest, before she let her husband question me.

He started by pointing at me. "Home," he said, and looked around at the four directions. "Where?"

I would have gestured to the south if I had known which way it was. The forest people had no word for south or any of the four directions. With no clear view of the sky, they didn't orient themselves by the sun or moon or by the stars. Instead they used features of the landscape. "The way the water runs," I said, and hoped that here the streams also ran from north to south.

Then the man said something I didn't understand about the common speech. I knew the phrase because I had learned from Maara, as well as from my own experience, that the common speech was whatever people around one spoke, while other ways of speaking were outlandish.

I shrugged and shook my head, to let him know I didn't understand what he was asking me.

He pointed toward the direction we had just come from and said, "The way the water runs speaks not."

I thought he was asking me why I spoke as I did, since I came from a place where nothing resembling his common speech was spoken. Whether or not he knew of the existence of the forest people, he would learn no more of them from me.

"A traveler," I said, pointing to myself. "A traveler speaks outlandish."

For the first time, the hunter smiled. His wife interrupted our conversation to offer me a bowl of tea. We sat in silence for a while, sipping our tea and enjoying the fire's warmth on this damp and chilly day. Then the hunter spoke again.

"Your bow," he said. "Is from?"

At the time it didn't seem like an odd question. I was trying to think of a way to explain its origin to him when I didn't know myself.

"A gift," I said. I hoped it was a word he understood. The forest people had no word for gift, not the way my people understood it. Among the forest people, no one owned anything. Whatever they had belonged to all, so a gift to them was just something held in common, and the act of giving consisted of someone who had a thing offering it to someone else who needed it.

The hunter thought that over for a while. Then he said, "Gift from who?"

I first thought of Maara, who had given me the bow, before I remembered what she told me. "Someone has left a gift for you," she said, and I knew now who it was she meant.

"The world," I said.

The hunter asked me no more questions. He sat still and silent for a long time. I woke many hours later, lying under my wolfskin with no memory of having gone to bed. Around me in the dark I heard the sounds of sleeping people. Feeling as safe as if I were at home, I closed my eyes.

When I woke in the morning, the hunter was gone. His wife offered me breakfast, and in the guise of idle conversation, she soon had out of me the whole story of my travels from the time I entered the forest until her husband found me. I also told her my destination. I didn't tell her why I was going to Elen's house, but I wanted to know if she had heard of it and if she knew where it was. Though she knew Elen's name, she told me she had never been there. When I asked her if her husband had, she shrugged and shook her head.

I was waiting for the hunter to come home before I took leave of them, partly out of politeness, but also because he hadn't returned my bow. It was nowhere to be seen within the house. When I went out to relieve myself, I looked around for it. I didn't see it anywhere.

It was growing late, and I was losing precious time. When I asked the woman when she expected her husband to return, she smiled and offered me more tea. At last, late in the afternoon, we heard him shout a greeting. We both went out to meet him. With him was a stranger, and the stranger held my bow. When he saw me, he stopped and stared.

"She is!" he said.

I had to wait while the hunter's wife performed the rituals of hospitality before I learned what he meant. I used the time to study him. He looked familiar. He must remind me of someone, I thought, because surely I've never encountered him before.

After all were greeted, warmed, and fed, the hunter's wife sat down with us beside the fire and drew her child into her lap. Holding him firmly between her knees, she began to finger-comb his hair.

I felt the stranger's eyes on me. I met his gaze. The warmth of his regard surprised me. He looked at me as he would have looked at a dear friend he thought he would never see again. He picked up my bow from where it lay beside him and with some ceremony offered it to me.

"I return to you my brother's bow," he said.

He took me so aback I hardly knew that my hands had accepted it. I had no words to make an appropriate reply. I stared at him, and began to see the man as I had seen him years before, a gaunt man in ragged clothing made of skins and furs, sitting on the floor of the men's house beside his wounded friend, the man whose pain had filled me with compassion, though he was my enemy.

Then I thought of that man's fate.

"I'm sorry he was lost," I said.

Although it took us a little time to become accustomed to each other's speech, by the end of the day, with the aid of signs and gestures I had learned from the forest people, we understood each other very well. The stranger, whose name was Finn, recognized me as the one who came with the healer to care for his brother. He remembered it was I who brought the medicine that eased his brother's pain. The hunter too had been among our prisoners, although he didn't recall seeing me.

Despite what Vintel had done, they and all who had been with them remembered with gratitude the treatment they received in Merin's house. They called it the house of kindness. They called Merin's people the kindly ones, and they judged us all, not by the vengeful act of one, but by the compassion of the many.

Of course they didn't know that it was I who interceded with Merin on their behalf. I said nothing to them about it. As it was, their warmth of feeling for me as one of Merin's people was more than I deserved. We too had reaped the benefit of what we did for them. They never returned to trouble us, they formed no alliance with our enemies to seek revenge against us, and they thrived on our gifts of grain and cattle, the loss of which we never felt at all.

Now I too had been nourished by the gift, and more precious than the gift of food, they offered me their friendship. I didn't tell them why I left Merin's house. It would have taken me forever to explain how I became an exile, even if I could have found the words. That didn't matter anyway. There was a much simpler explanation. I told them that someone I cared for had been captured by the northerners and that they were taking her to Elen's house.

The hunter nodded. "Our faithless friends," he said, and told me about their last dealings with their treacherous allies.

They had crossed the river into Merin's land at the urging of a chieftain of the northern tribes, with assurances that the northerners would divide Merin's forces by attacking from the north. A shiver went down my spine when I realized how close we had come to disaster. The northerners waited for news of the success of the river crossing. When it didn't come, they left their allies to their fate and went back home.

"You come to trade?" asked Finn.

He was asking me if I had come to negotiate Maara's ransom.

I shook my head. "I come to steal," I said. "To take her back."

The two men exchanged a look. Now they understood things that had puzzled them. If I had come to negotiate a ransom, I would have come with a guide, under safe conduct. I wouldn't have been wandering, lost in the mist, with no idea where I was going. The time had come to tell them the whole truth.

"My friend owes the people of Elen's house a blood debt," I said, "but she is innocent of the crime they accuse her of."

The two men stared at me and said nothing.

"Do you know Elen's house?" I asked them.

They nodded.

"Will you take me there?"

"Not alone," said Finn, and the two men put their heads together. They spoke for several minutes, loud enough for me to hear, but so rapidly that I could hardly understand a word. Then the hunter got up and left the house.

"He brings your friends," said Finn.

Before nightfall the hunter returned with three other men, and in the morning more arrived, until there were two dozen altogether, armed with swords and bows. All of them had once been prisoners in Merin's house.

By midmorning we were ready to travel. When I took leave of the hunter's wife, I thanked her for her hospitality and tried to reassure her that I wouldn't lead her husband and his friends into danger. I told her that, while I was grateful for their escort, I didn't intend to draw them into battles that were mine to fight.

She smiled at me and rolled her eyes. "Try and stop them," she said, and kissed me on both cheeks.