Raven Speak (9781442402492) (13 page)

Now it was hurt that flashed across Wenda's face. She was human after all, it seemed—not totally without her pride. She started to lift her arms again, exhaled sharply, and dropped them. Indignant, she drew her cloak tightly across her neck and looked away. Asa moved past her.

“Wait.”

Rune was already outside the cave, and the ravens must have been tormenting him because she heard an especially provocative
kra
followed by the clatter of scrambling hooves on stone. Somewhat remorseful, she hesitated.

“If your horse can carry provisions, I'll send some meat back with you.”

Asa inclined her head. “I would be very grateful for that.”

That made the woman swell a little and she immediately set about deciding which meats to pull down. She stroked the fuzz on her bony chin and pondered, pointing to one and ordering Asa to take it but then, just as she had clambered atop a barrel and was reaching for it, maddeningly changing her mind and pointing to another joint or shoulder on the other end of the rafters. When, after an aggravatingly long passage of time, a suitable pile of meat had been assembled, Wenda had to dig for and find two
large woolen sacks and a length of thin rope. Rune was brought back into the cave—Asa noted the fjord's lessening gloom; the sun was on the move, and so should they be—leaving the ravens to flap back up to their nest. Wenda, humming now, fitted the rope around Rune's belly and knotted it behind his withers. The flopping tails of the rope were then knotted around the sacks so that one bag fell along each of his shoulders. Into one sack Wenda shoved her generous allotment of mutton, venison, and pork, and in the other she carefully layered a dozen of the drying fishes, arranging them so gently that they might have been still alive.

“Don't leave them in here too long,” she advised. “Spread them out in the sun as soon as you get back, or string them near a smoky fire so that they can finish drying.” She caught herself, raised a hand, and backed away. “But you already know that, I'm sure.”

Asa offered a self-deprecating grimace. “Well, my mother does.” That is, if she was still alive. Resolved to believe it so, she added, “She'll be very appreciative as well.”

Wenda, who only the previous morning had pronounced Asa's mother dead, remained expressionless. She fussed with the position of the bags, making sure each hung evenly, then grasped the rope behind Rune's shoulder and gave it a testing tug. He staggered sideways and pinned his ears in irritation.

“You don't have a bridle.”

“I didn't have time.”

A frown creased the old woman's brow as she glanced around
her disheveled cave. “We can fashion something, I suppose, so you can lead him.”

Asa stood beside Rune, impatiently scratching the narrow hollow beneath his jaw. “There's no need,” she answered. “He'll follow.” And at that she felt the pale blue eye appraise them both and felt herself, at least, come up short.

“Ah, loyalty,” Wenda said coolly. “An admirable trait … and a prime cause of blindness.”

Asa swallowed. The cords in her neck tightened and her skin prickled with warning.
All right, time to leave.
“Well, thank you … for everything.” Hurriedly she nudged Rune out of the cave and onto the trail ahead. “If you ever get lonely,” she turned to say, “we're half a day's journey south of here, just beyond three fingers of land.” The strong-minded old woman remained at the cave's mouth, her prominent features as wind-worn as the rocks, yet she appeared so fragile and really quite small considering the expanse of the great, gloomy fjord. Surely she'd be better off in the company and care of others. Maybe if she joined Asa's clan she'd take to Ketil. But there was Tora; she posed a problem. Hardly a day passed that Tora didn't start an argument over some imagined slight. Asa couldn't imagine the two of them sharing the same longhouse. Well, she'd made the offer. It was up to the old woman to act on it. Nodding, she said, “Good-bye.”

She glanced up at the two ravens perched on the twiggy rim of their huge nest. They were silent for once, their beady brown
eyes marking her every move with an eerie intelligence.

Asa never heard Wenda's approach. Incredible, really, since the fjord was so silent, the breeze absent. Propelled by a violent, breathtaking shove, Asa suddenly found herself teetering perilously close to the edge of the precipice. The small woman possessed an unnatural strength.

“What is it you fear?” The words came hissing into Asa's ear. All she could register, though, was the dizzying height and the thought that no one would ever know what had happened to her.

“Is it death? Is it death you fear?”

Asa shook her head. A lie, of course, because she'd already pictured herself splatting onto the jagged rocks so very far below. No, she didn't want to die. Not yet. She held herself very still, fearing the woman would shove her into the air at the slightest provocation.

“But you're afraid of that skald, aren't you? You didn't gallop from your clan to seek food; you galloped to get away from him.”

“He was trying to hurt Rune,” Asa replied in a voice barely above a whisper.

“He was trying to hurt
you
.”

“He has … powers,” she stammered. “You don't understand. He can make things happen, make people do things.”

Wenda jerked her with such force that Asa lost her balance and went tumbling. She thought at first that she was falling down through the air and instinctively she flung out her arms,
but instead she smacked the flat stone entry. Though she gasped with the jolt, she felt its reassuring stability beneath her and welcomed life.

In her heart-pounding daze she heard Wenda laughing. Was this all a dream?

“He's not a god,” Wenda said. She offered her hand, a gesture Asa pointedly ignored. Gathering herself, she climbed to her feet, shaking off her skirts and gingerly wiping bits of grit from her reddened palms. In her dizzy state the cliff's edge appeared to vibrate, and she staggered a few steps backward.

“Come now,” Wenda cajoled, “I promised you a whale and, if you do as I ask, you shall have one.” She scurried into the cave, her excited talk temporarily muddied and muted, then emerged with another bulging sack. “We'll need your horse to carry this, too.”

Asa shook her head. This was absurd. “No,” she replied. “I'm not traveling with you any farther. I can't trust you.”

“Of course you can't.” Wenda made the statement seem obvious. “You can only trust yourself.” She looked over and grinned, her pink tongue waggling across her stubble of brown teeth. “So, are we going?”

If the old half-wit wanted to follow them back to the clan, then so be it. That had been her opinion when they'd set out. So how, Asa wondered only a short time into their journey, had Wenda managed to shoulder her way into the lead? Asa wasn't going to follow her anywhere except home, and she most definitely wasn't going to believe anything the woman said. Except for that part about not trusting her;
that
she was willing to take as truth.

The woman was certainly a mystery. Too many years living alone had no doubt addled her mind, along with too many years “speaking” with birds. But her cramped, birdlike walk carried her up the trail without mishap, and her singsong mumbling was shot through with happiness. There was no sign now of the violence that had nearly propelled Asa over the cliff, though the memory alone kept her eyeing the steep drop-off.

An ominous scraping sound behind her preceded a clatter of hooves and a grunt, and she turned to find Rune struggling to regain his balance. The woven bags he lugged made the narrow trail doubly difficult and he had to move carefully, his nose sweeping the ground, his eyes large and darkened in concentration.
Back and forth his ears flicked, marking the undulating pitch of Wenda's murmuring, the crunching grit of the granite path, and the irregular ping and pop of threads snagged on stumpy-fingered branches.

Turning back, Asa nearly collided with Wenda, who had stopped to ponder a cleft in the fjord. Asa followed her gaze up to where a faint foot trail within the cleft rose abruptly. “We'll go this way,” Wenda said, pointing. And without so much as a glance backward she clambered atop a boulder, then nimbly stepped across to another.

“No.”
It surprised her that the word had come out so vehemently.

From her vantage point Wenda looked over her shoulder.

“We didn't come that way,” Asa said.

“This way's faster. It's steeper at first, but then as straight as the raven flies.”

Asa hesitated for just a moment, weighing the facts. She needed to get back to her clan as fast as possible, not only because she carried precious foodstuffs, but also because she'd been away for far too long. The memory of her mother's feverish face stabbed her with guilt. Yet … the mountains were unfamiliar, and no matter what Wenda promised, Asa wasn't following her. “No,” she said again, firmly. “We'll go this way.” She made a vague gesture toward the path hugging the fjord. Wenda shrugged and returned, this time falling in behind, and they tramped on.

Retracing the narrow fjord seemed to go faster than yesterday.
Was it because she was headed home, with enough food to satiate the starved bellies of her people, or because she'd finally fled the confines of Wenda's weird, debris-riddled cave?

With each step closer to the ocean the gloom of the fjord lessened. The sea was at first a glimpsed jewel, its blue-green facets dazzling the eye, and then, gradually, a vast entity that at once inspired and overwhelmed. When the path finally dropped them onto the crunching litter of the shore, she felt some of the worry fall from her shoulders. They'd made it back to solid ground, to a world that was familiar to her and, more important, connected to her home. Rune seemed to share her relief. Compressing a sigh into a rumbling grunt, he shook his head so exuberantly that the vibration traveled the length of his body and sent the bags jumping and flopping in their own celebration.

That's when the two ravens soared into view. Asa imagined they'd remained in their nest, leisurely watching the plodding humans and their horse slowly circumnavigate the fjord, before winging their way directly across the dark waters. One of the birds spiraled downward to alight upon the same rock where it had awakened Asa the previous day, but the other bird flew along the coastline and disappeared. The raven on the rock, rather than taking up its usual scolding, folded it wings neatly and stood watching Asa with uncanny interest. She turned away.

The sun glared cold and white from a cloudless sky. Across the shore the wind came rushing; it tousled the hair around their heads and receded. Upon its return it playfully nipped their
reddened cheeks; it poked its icy fingers inside their collars; and it fanned Rune's tail into a black whirligig that slashed the air with the sound of whipping branches. This was a wind full of life, but it played a lonely game: The beach remained barren.

Cuckoo Month had always delivered gusty winds, but it was supposed to deliver warmer days as well. It was a time when the sun charmed the land into bringing forth life: green sprouts that blossomed and grew heavy with fruit; razor-winged birds that painted the cliffs with their nests and worked tirelessly to feed their raucous offspring; long-suffering cows and sheep and pigs that emerged from their dark byres to reproduce themselves in miniature. As she thought on the traditional order of her world, the wind smacked her face. She shielded her eyes and scanned the shore in both directions. Yes, the sun was shining and the day was noticeably warmer than those that had come before. But where was the new life? She saw no signs of it, and wondered if it was truly absent or if she'd grown blind to its possibilities.

The shrill two-syllable call of a bird sounded from somewhere down the shore. A tern? That was just the sign she needed. One tern would mean many terns, which would mean winter was finally ending. She had to go see.

Trying to quell the excitement bubbling inside, she spun toward Wenda. The woman immediately waved her on. “These old bones are going to rest awhile. You go have a look and we'll catch up,” she said, indicating Rune, who was nosing through some seaweed. Asa strode away in search of the strange call.

It was difficult to blend speed and silence as she traveled with one ear cocked, especially when the wind played around her head, alternately whispering and whistling and making it difficult to hear. But it had to have been a tern; she was certain of it. And she allowed herself to recall the summer when hundreds of nests had cupped thousands of delicious eggs. The nimblest boys had clambered up the cliffs to claim a great number of them. Helgi and Thidrick should be able to manage it this year. The way her mouth was watering she might just climb the cliffs herself if she spotted even a single egg. That happy thought buoyed her along, and she felt the sun putting a little more effort into warming her shoulders. The wind quieted, and she caught the tern's distinctive call again and hurried after it.

Her eyes scanned the cliffs as she traced the narrow shore. Though the winter's storms had scoured them with rain and wind, the rocks still remained streaked with bird droppings, and here and there a crevice stubbornly clung to the tattered remnants of a nest. A festive spurt of rainwater shot down the steep face of one gray bluff. Gaining ground, it surged along a narrow depression in the wet sand to meld with the sea. Among the surf's bubbles floated a thick, leafy strand of brown seaweed, and Asa dragged it to higher ground. She'd throw it across Rune's back when he got there and take it home to the other horses—if they were still around—and the pregnant cow. Caught among the leaves was a pretty shell, mottled a brownish purple. That made her think of Wenda and her collection of colorful stones, and she clutched
the smooth, weighty shell in her palm, musing on the strange morning.