Wolf Captured (38 page)

“She is a member of my birth pack, my sister, and so not a human at all, but a wolf.”

Firekeeper’s response upon hearing Blind Seer defend her mixed pleasure and discomfort. She was glad that Blind Seer had spoken up for her and named her a wolf, but she felt unsettled that he referred to her as his sister. It had been a long time since he had called her “sister” or she him “brother.” Yet that was the basis for their relationship. Why did the renewal of the term make her so uncomfortable?

The wolf-woman knew full well, but she could avoid thinking about it with an enormous wolf sniffing around her knees. The discomfort she felt flared out in her response.

“Wolf I am and wolf I will be, no matter who denies it,” Firekeeper snapped. “Would you still be wolf if some mischance cut off your tail? If you were missing an ear? If you were missing an eye? My shape may be wrong, but my heart is a wolf’s and I’ll fight any who deny it.”

Dark Death dropped lightly down onto all four paws and looked up at Firekeeper, his head tilted quizzically. Then he turned and surveyed the gathered wolves, where indeed there was one with a missing ear, another with a blinded eye, another whose tail had met with some misfortune.

The outlier’s reply was somber—not angry, as Firekeeper had expected. The seriousness of it touched her heart.

“True,” Dark Death rumbled. “Shape does not make a wolf, nor scent, nor anything we can touch. I am sorry, wolf. May I have your name?”

Firekeeper was so astonished she found herself sliding to the ground almost without volition.

“I am called Firekeeper,” she said. “As with Blind Seer, I am from lands very far to the north and west.”

Dark Death sniffed her, “You are very brave, Firekeeper, but then your name promises you would be so. I am pleased to have the opportunity to hunt with you.”

Firekeeper blinked and to her surprise realized that she was blushing. She hoped that none but Blind Seer would recognize the sign.

Then the moment passed and Dark Death once again concentrated on meeting and re-meeting the local wolves. Firekeeper, forgotten, found her gaze following him as he moved about. For the first time since their arrival, she even forgot to worry about Moon Frost, even when the other female crowded close to Blind Seer.

AS NECK BREAKER HAD EXPLAINED, the meeting meadows were neutral territory, bordered by lands hunted by several different wolf packs. In the winter, when the fish were not running, the elk clustered here, taking advantage both of the remnants of lush grass that remained under the snow and the proximity of so many of their number to keep their calves safe. Where the elk gathered, so gathered the wolves.

“It is an odd cycle,” Firekeeper said to Neck Breaker one afternoon when she was trying very hard not to notice that Blind Seer was involved in some rough-and-tumble with Moon Frost and Freckles. “We follow the elk, but the elk cluster because we follow, and in turn more of us come because there are so many elk.”

“And in time,” Neck Breaker agreed, “there will be too many elk and the surviving calves will grow too strong for the hunting to be good any longer. Then, too, there will be pups to be taught hunting on more manageable prey. So we will leave, and the elk, no longer feeling threatened, will also break into small groups, and eventually bear their new young. In the absence of both hunters and grazers, the meadows, well fertilized by shit and piss and blood, will recover to be hunted upon when the next winter year comes.”

“Are there rules?” Firekeeper asked. (Blind Seer had Moon Frost’s scruff in his mouth and was rattling her back and forth while she snapped and growled in ineffectual protest.) “Rules for who can hunt here and how many to take? I noticed that the latest-come pack even swam across the water to join in the hunting, but no one challenged their right.”

“There is no rule but that of having enough to eat,” Neck Breaker said. “Sometimes—sad as it is to admit—even Wise Wolves can behave like Cousins and kill more than they need, but such greed is unusual even for Cousins. It would be a violation of divine Earth’s goodness.”

Firekeeper fell silent, caught between the discomfort she always felt when the Wise Wolves employed the terms of what she felt should be a purely human thing—this religion that spoke of deities who somehow shaped events—and her unhappiness at Blind Seer’s play. Then, too, Dark Death had trotted out from the forest where he had gone earlier—presumably on one of the solo hunts that were not uncommon for a wolf who belonged to no one pack. She watched as ripples of awareness played over the gathered wolves at his arrival, finding it the easiest thing to accept.

The hierarchy of non-mated males was working itself out, readjusting with every new pack or outlier drawn to the meadows. Both Dark Death and Blind Seer remained at or near the top. Smoke Jumper had fallen some, though not to the bottom. Puma Killer, a male who would have been handsome but for the ear he had lost in the fight that had won him his name, was another high-ranking contender.

Firekeeper had paid less attention to the dynamics among the females, but she knew that Moon Frost’s standoffishness had done her no harm in the eyes of the males. Although—at least to Firekeeper—Moon Frost seemed to favor Blind Seer, she had bonded with no male. The males, with the contrariness Firekeeper had observed in both humans and wolves, were all the more interested in Moon Frost because she refused to fawn over them. Freckles and Beachcomber vied between trying to imitate her indifference and making themselves noticeable through their antics.

Though Firekeeper could not help but be aware of this unfolding drama, the wolf-woman strove to concentrate on the original reason she had come to Misheemnekuru. She still was not certain whether the wolves remained on the islands by choice or by some odd coercion. One thing of which she was certain was that this was a sensitive topic. Even the two oldest wolves, Neck Breaker and Cricket, drew back from questions on the matter. From the answers she received, Firekeeper pieced together that the wolves were pleased with their lands on Misheemnekuru, that they would fight to keep them, but that there were problems, problems of which they would not speak to a relative stranger.

Firekeeper kept seeking information, worrying at the problem like a teething pup on a strip of rawhide. However, as rawhide resists puppy teeth, so the problem resisted solution.

I wish I could talk to Derian about this, she thought, but Derian is far away across the waters, and we are a good day’s run even from where the humans have their outpost. Perhaps I could get one of the ravens to carry him a message, but how would I draw a picture of a problem? Certainly the few characters the aridisdu insisted on showing me will not serve. All is not well, but all is not wrong either.

But even as she thought such things, Firekeeper knew it was not Derian to whom she wished to speak—no matter that his human perspective might be useful. The one she wished to speak with was Blind Seer. He, however, sprawled in the sunlight, wrestling with Moon Frost as if there were neither problem nor mystery in all the world.

XVI

SHORTLY AFTER NOON three days following Rahniseeta’s talk with Harjeedian, Barnet, and Rahniseeta drove along the coast road toward u-Bishinti. She had chosen this route deliberately. Not only did it take them through some beautiful countryside, but some of that scenery would provide her with the opening she sought.

“You handle the reins well,” Barnet said.

Rahniseeta smiled her thanks. The somewhat chubby black gelding between the shafts was so well behaved that the young woman suspected a child could handle him in anything except an emergency.

“Do you drive?” she asked.

“No,” came the laconic reply. “Sail, row, paddle, and ride—the last barely passably. The land on which I grew up was so wet we moved everything we could by water. I don’t think there was a wheel on the place bigger than those on a child’s toy.”

By now Rahniseeta knew that Barnet was inclined to exaggeration. She also knew that though his family name was a high-ranking one in his birth land, his branch of the family had not owned one of the great estates. That was one reason Barnet had decided to risk the voyage of exploration which had ended so disastrously.

Really, she thought, his prospects are little better than my own.

She couldn’t decide if this similarity made her warm to him or despise him a little. She might not have many prospects, but she could ride, drive, write a good hand, make a snake dance to flute music, and do many other things that would advance her as surely as Harjeedian was advancing through the ranks in the Temple of the Cold Bloods.

And Barnet? He could tell stories—and sail, but it was clear that his heart was not in the handling of boats.

In our land he might have followed the same path as Harjeedian, but his people are ignorant of the deities. They go their way blindly trusting to ancestor spirits to guide them—as if such would be wiser after death than they were in life!

Rahniseeta realized she had fallen too quiet. Barnet, tired no doubt from hours of trying to teach Pellish when he himself spoke the language of the Liglimom only passably, was drowsing beside her.

“See there?” Rahniseeta said, pointing out into the bay with a tilt of her head.

“Where? What?”

Barnet had indeed been drowsing. Rahniseeta pointed again.

“There, out in the waters. See the land? Those are Misheemnekuru.”

Barnet expressed none of the surprise about the size of the islands that Harjeedian had reported from Lady Blysse.

“Nice looking,” he said. “Do I see buildings there?”

Rahniseeta nodded, well pleased. She had waited her comments until they had reached this point precisely for this reason.

“Yes. Those on the high point belong to the outpost maintained there by some of the disdum. However, the ones you see toward the end closer to us … You see there?”

“Yes. It looks like the top of a ruined tower, maybe a bit of wall.”

“You have sharp eyes,” Rahniseeta complimented him. “Those are ruins from the days when the Old Country rulers first came here. They made their first settlement on the island, and some continued to live there even after they had a foothold on the mainland.”

“No one lives there now?” Barnet asked. He sounded a bit disappointed.

“No one but the yarimaimalom,” Rahniseeta said, then dropped her bait, “except if there are the maimalodalum—the beast-souled.”

She had to translate the term for him, and when Barnet understood he still looked puzzled.

“I thought that was what the word must mean, but it doesn’t tell me anything. Do you mean someone like your kidisdum, someone who has a rapport with the beasts?”

Rahniseeta shook her head. “Don’t you have tales of the beast-souled?”

“Didn’t I just tell you I have no idea what you’re talking about?”

He sounded annoyed now, not merely interested, so Rahinseeta hastened to explain.

“Maimalodalum are supposed to be able to be both human and animal,” she explained. “There are all sorts of stories about them.”

The road was good here, so Rahniseeta turned to look at the minstrel. He looked interested and faintly puzzled—but not at all like she had surprised a secret out of him.

“Some stories,” she went on, “tell that they were friends of the yarimaimalom. Others make it sound as if they were allies of the Old World sorcerers and fought against the yarimaimalom. But all the stories agree on one thing. The maimalodalum could take the shape of a given animal—al—ways one animal only. They had an enchanted skin they used in order to do this. When they were in human shape they either wore the skin as a cloak or hid it away so they could pass undetected.”

Barnet was listening intently. “We have a few stories like that, but they always belong to the lore from the Old World, and never from our Old Country—always from another land. I wonder if the land mentioned was your Old Country. Do you know what it was called?”

“‘Homeland,’ usually,” Rahniseeta said. “It has a name of its own, but we never use it. Harjeedian could look it up for you.”

“That would be marvelous,” Barnet said. “Tell me more about these maimalodalum.”

Rahniseeta considered. She was fairly certain that Barnet was not pretending his interest. That meant he was probably not one of the maimalodalum himself, but then in her mind Barnet had always been considered the least likely candidate.

“Well, in addition to the skins they sometimes wore,” she said, “another way you could tell someone was a maimalodalu was that they bore some resemblance to the animal, even in human form. Sometimes they had an animal companion and, it was said, even animal families.”

Barnet laughed. “It sounds like you’re describing Lady Blysse. Is that what your masters think they have caught, a maimalodalu?”

Rahniseeta was indignant at hearing herself described as having masters.

“I do not have masters,” she said.

Barnet reached over and patted her arm, letting his hand linger almost a little too much for propriety.

“I’m sorry. Put it down to my lack of ability in your language. I haven’t quite figured out where you fit in the Temple of the Cold Bloods. You’re not training to be an aridisdu or a kidisdu—right?”