Wolf Hunting (38 page)

Firekeeper shuddered, imagining that somewhere in the darkness new briar beasts were forming, reducing fat, round Plik into a shriveled husk inside his fur.

“We check,” she said.

Blind Seer shook himself. “I
will go, Firekeeper, and perhaps Truth …”

“I will,”
the jaguar agreed.

“Firekeeper,
you
will
stay,”
Blind Seer continued. She made a sound of protest, and he bumped his head against her arm. “
We no longer hunt with a pack where only you and I need to understand each other, dear heart. There are others here who require you to be their voice.
”

Firekeeper nodded, reluctantly accepting this as the right allocation of their abilities, knowing she would be less than a wolf if she refused to serve where the pack needed her.

“Be careful, dear heart,”
she said, stroking the wolf.

Blind Seer replied without words, for there were no words in him to give a promise that could not be kept. He would be as careful as the situation permitted, no more, no less.

Then wolf and jaguar ventured into the darkness. Firekeeper remained, watching and waiting for the coming of dawn.

XVIII

THE FIRST THING PLIK WAS AWARE OF was the screaming thunder of surf so loud that it blocked everything else from his hearing.

It was not a sensation conducive to thought, but when he did think, Plik’s first assumption was that he had come home to Misheemnekuru and that the islands were being battered by a truly horrible hurricane. He wondered that he did not feel whatever tree or tower in which he had taken refuge bending and tossing beneath the force of that storm. At the same time he was grateful. The violence of thundering surf was such that already he felt physically battered. He did not think he could bear much more.

Then the illusion was broken by a solid thump followed by a metallic click, the sounds so clear and crisp that Plik realized that the sensation that continued to batter him was not being heard by his ears. For the first time he recalled he had other senses, and forced his eyes open.

He was in a room lit by the green glow of daylight filtered through leaves. He lay on his side on a bed made after the human design, his head resting on a cotton-cased pillow filled with goose down. The thump and click he had heard were the sounds made by the door to this chamber being opened by the young human who now entered. There was a clatter as the human lowered the latch into its place again, a chiming jingle of china on a metal tray as the human set the tray down on a table some paces from the bed. Plik smelled an infusion of rose hips mingled with honey, baked oat cakes, and chilled butter.

Plik’s senses seemed to be working well, but the sound, if sound it was, still thundered in his head, rising and falling with erratic yet regular pulses, very like the sound of waves against a .shore. The intensity of the “sound” was paralyzing, dominating Plik’s will so that he studied the human who had borne in the tray with mild interest. In contrast to the battering sound nothing else seemed very real.

“You’re awake,” the human said. “That’s good.”

Plik studied the creature. It was, he thought, forcing the thought through the reverberations, a human not long past childhood, but certainly no longer a child. It was a female, colored rather oddly by his standards, for until he had met Firekeeper and Derian, Plik’s idea had been that all humans were colored much like deer or bear, in shades of brown.

This young woman—the word came to Plik with a small flash of triumph—was browner-skinned than Derian, but not as brown as Harjeedian. Her hair was a new and interesting hue: too fair to be brown, too brown to be fair, but somewhere immediately in the middle. Her eyes were a warm brown, like those of a fawn.

Plik found that if he concentrated hard on something else, the thundering in his head faded, so he studied the young woman with new avidity. There were things about her that suggested that she had passed a long time indoors. Despite the natural brown hue of her skin, a pallor underlay it. The gown she wore was of a very simple cut, but excess flesh strained against the fabric, as if it had been sewn when she carried less weight.

Plik supposed that the gown might have been made for another person and appropriated by this young woman, but he did not think this was so. It had not the look of attire someone would appropriate. Her hair—from what he could see, for it was pulled back and braided—was of one uniform shade top to bottom. This also suggested a great deal of time spent indoors. Even beasts’ coats faded in the sun. Plik had noted how Derian and Firekeeper’s hair was lighter at the end of its growth than where it was new.

The young woman was pouring tea now, and Plik’s stomach made grumbling noises. He realized he was very hungry, but when he tried to bring himself upright so he might accept the cup being brought to him, he found his limbs did not obey him.

The young woman noticed and smiled kindly at him. It was a nice smile, warm and not without pity.

“I’ll hold you up, if you don’t mind,” she said. “The blood briars leave one weak.”

She spoke as from experience, and Plik wondered how she had acquired that experience.

“My name is Isende,” the young woman went on.

Isende!
Plik thought.
That is the name of the girl twin.
I
must have been carried within the copse. We were right that they were hiding there.

He studied Isende as she carried a cup of tea over to the bed, set it on a nearby stand, then seated herself on the bed. She lifted Plik with a certain amount of effort and then began to carefully feed him tea.

I feel like a doll,
Plik thought, trying not to resent Isende’s manner. From the way his body was soaking up the tea, from how he could feel the honey invigorating him, he needed the beverage desperately.

Isende fed him two cups of the tea, then broke one of the oat cakes into small pieces.

“See if you can chew these,” she said. “Sensation often returns to the trunk first, then to the limbs.”

Plik found he could manage, but only if Isende fed him the pieces. He realized he could not feel his fingers or toes at all, and that his arms, legs, and tail felt as if they had been encased in stone. Sensation was there, but muffled. Plik wondered if the surf still thudding somewhat less aggressively in his head had anything to do with the numbness, or if the two were unconnected.

When Plik indicated that he was finished eating, Isende dusted him off, then brushed crumbs off the bedclothes.

“I imagine you’d like to try sitting up,” she said, “but I’m going to ask you to be patient. The briar poison will disperse more quickly if you are all at one level.”

Plik decided to attempt talking. He tried to ask “Why was I brought here?” but all he managed was a bleat. Even so, Isende decided to take this as an invitation to chat. She brought a chair over by the bed, positioning it so that Plik could see her without moving his head. This was a good thing. Without the meal to concentrate on, the thundering in his head was growing worse again.

“I wonder what manner of creature you are?” Isende mused, not really asking him. “At first we thought you were a raccoon—one of the yarimaimalom, of course. But when we took a closer look, it was quite evident that you were not a raccoon.”

Plik made a noise that was intended to be “We?” but came out as another bleat, differently pitched. He supposed he should be grateful for that small difference.

“My brother, Tiniel,” Isende replied, encouraging Plik with this indication of understanding.

Isende looked as if she was about to add something else, but then she shut her mouth firmly, pressing the lips together. After a longish pause she resumed speaking again, her tones forced and bright.

“I wonder if you came here looking for us or merely by chance? You’re with others. We know that, but we don’t recognize any of them. They aren’t from Gak. One looks like he’s from Liglim, but the other two humans … They’re odd-looking.”

She gave a light, giggly laugh.

“But then Tiniel and I are odd-looking, too. Our father and mother were from two different peoples, one fair, one dark. We came out as sort of a mix of the two. There’s no one like us in all the world—other than each other. We’re twins, and except for him being a boy, we’re really very much alike. Tiniel is a little taller than I am, and broader in the shoulder. And me, well, I’m a girl, so I’m lots different, but when we were children, and even now if we dress in the right kind of clothing, it’s hard for people to tell us apart.”

Isende’s chattering, the words spilling over each other like water over rocks, was almost enough to drown out the pounding of the surf in Plik’s head. Plik wondered how long it had been since Isende had someone to talk to other than her brother. The twins had left Gak over a year before, in the late spring, or so Layo had said. That was a long time for even the most devoted brother and sister to have only each other for company.

Plik listened as Isende chattered about a favorite pet, a grey squirrel she had raised from a kit; about a walking trip with her mother when she was six; about building cities from wooden blocks with Tiniel.

Although Isende talked copiously, a veritable flood of words, Plik began to notice what she did not say. She never once mentioned the bond that Layo had told them made it possible for the twins to share experiences. Plik did not think it at all odd that Isende did not mention this directly. The twins must have learned early on that this ability made others uncomfortable. However, he did think it rather odd how carefully Isende edited any allusion to this bond. If she was doing so deliberately, then she was far more intelligent than she appeared to be.

He also wondered that she did not mention anything at all regarding the twins’ departure from Gak, their long journey to this place, and the year and more they had managed to survive on their own, just the two of them, with a little help (so he knew from Night’s Terror) from the local yarimaimalom.

As sensation returned to his body, Plik discovered he could turn his head side to side. Immediately, Plik noticed something odd about his surroundings. He had thought he was within the ruined house that Night’s Terror had mentioned, the one that had stood where the copse now seemed to be. Now he began to wonder. If this room was anything to judge by, either the twins were well trained in carpentry and masonry, or the sealed house had survived the passage of over a century impossibly well.

He noticed other odd things as well. The daylight was not being filtered through leaves as he had initially thought. The glass in the window was slightly tinted, creating a similar effect. An odd choice, surely, but humans often did odd things.

The thundering in his head was rising again, and the rambling narrative of Isende’s chatter was not enough to press the sound back. Then Plik noticed something that shocked him so much that for a long moment the pounding vanished completely, leaving him with thoughts uncluttered and focused.

There was a tree branch outside the window. It looked to be from an oak, but it might have been from some other tree inclined toward rough bark and gnarls. Plik couldn’t tell for sure, for the tree was mostly bare, shorn of all but a few brown rags of leaf and one tight knot that held a hint of russet and yellow. The green filtering was provided by the leaves of the blood briar that grew in a light tracery over the window opening.

Plik recalled the appearance of the copse perfectly, and not only of the copse, but of the forest in which they had camped as well. Despite the relative lateness of the year, the deciduous trees had still been in leaf, and mostly in green leaf at that.

The company—especially those members who had thick fur and would have welcomed the cooler weather of autumn—had mentioned how odd this continuing greenness seemed to them. In the land of the Liglim at the time of their departure there had been one or two signs of the coming autumn, whereas farther south the trees retained their summer leaves. The only sign of the lateness of the season was a certain raggedness about the foliage, as if the leaves were tired, ready to be shed and renewed.

But here without a doubt was an autumn bough, and a late autumn bough at that. It might be that the tree outside the window was dead, its ragged leaves banners from a summer gone by, but somehow he felt certain that this tree was alive.

And if it was alive, where did that leave him? Plik struggled for explanations, and as he did so the pounding in his head rose, pushing him under, shoving him beneath a wave of sensation so powerful that he drowned.

THE REPORT BLIND SEER and Truth brought back after sunrise the next morning was discouraging. They had found ample evidence—broken branches, bits of vine, a trail blazed directly through the undergrowth—that Plik had been taken to the copse. That was where the trail ended. What was disturbing was how that trail had ended. It had not ended because wolf and jaguar had been unwilling to follow, for Derian suspected that Night’s Terror’s ominous reports of the many who had vanished in that copse would not have stopped them if they had thought they could bring Plik back with them.

No. The trail had ended as neatly as if it had never been. There it was, the signs of something heavy going through the tall grass evident to the eye, Plik’s scent mingled with the sour blood scent of the briars evident to the nose. Then the trail had simply stopped.

“Wiped out,” Truth said, through Firekeeper, “like a wave wipes paw prints from the sand. Gone.”

“But not like it was covered,” Harjeedian asked. “Wiped away as if it had never been.”

“Exactly,” Firekeeper said, translating for Truth, her tone capturing an arrogant bluntness that Derian was certain was the jaguar’s own, for it had been present in Plik’s translations as well.

“They looked up into the trees,” Firekeeper went on. “I ask. Truth and Blind Seer both thinked Plik might be carried there, but there were no signs above. Bark would have been ripped, leaves broken if something so heavy as Plik go up, but there is nothing.”