“What terrible crime had so cruelly cast her out from her own people?” Calap went on, quoting word for word and thus impressing me with his memory. “The wind howled with the voices of a thousand spirits, each and all bemoaning this fair maiden’s fate. Tears from the sky lost the warmth of life and so drifted down as flakes of snow. The great herds in the distance had wandered down to the valley flanks to escape the wind and its dread voices of sorrow. She curled alone, dying.”
“But why?” demanded Sellup, earning venomous glares from Pampera and Oggle Gush, for in showing interest in a tale not told by Nifty Gum she was committing a gross betrayal, and even the Great Artist himself was frowning at Sellup. “Why did they leave her like that? That was evil! And she was good, wasn’t she? A good person! Pure of heart, an innocent-she had to be! Oh, this is a terrible fate!”
Calap raised a hand in which was cupped borrowed wisdom. “Soon, my dear, all will be known.”
“Don’t wait too long! I don’t like long stories. Where’s the action? You’ve already gone on too long!”
And to that criticism Pampera, Oggle and Nifty all nodded. What is it to trust so little in the worth of a tale well and carefully told? What doth haste win but breathless stupidity? Details of import? Bah! Cry these flit-flies. Measures of pace and the thickening of the mat into which the awl must weave? Who cares? Chew into rags and be on to the next, spitting as you go! I look upon the young and see a generation of such courage as to dare nothing more than the ankle-deep, and see them standing proud and arrogant upon the thin shorelines of unknown seas-and to call this living! Oh, I know, it is but an old man’s malaise, but to this very moment I still see Sellup and her wide-eyed idiocy, I still hear her impatience and the smack of her lips and the gulp of her breaths, a young woman who could pant herself unconscious in her haste to see her mind transported… elsewhere. A stutter of steps, a stagger of impetus, oh, so much she missed!
“Would she lie there unto death,” Calap asked, “nameless and unknown? Is this not the darkest tragedy of all? To die in anonymity? To pass from the world unremarked, beneath the notice of an entire world? Oh, the flies wait to lay their eggs. The capemoths flutter like leaves in nearby branches, and in the sky the tiny spots that are ice vultures slowly grow larger with their cargo of endings. But these are the mindless purveyors of mortality and nothing more than that. Their voice is the whisper of wings, the clack of beaks and the snip of insect mouths. It is fey epitaph indeed.”
Steck Marynd limped close to the fire and set down another branch collected from somewhere. Flames licked the hoary bark and found it to their liking.
“So we must turn back, outracing the cool sun of spring to the colder sun of winter, and we see before us a huddle of huts, humped upon the bones and tusks of tenag, thick bhederin hides stretched tight over the skeletal frames. The camp crouches not upon the highest hills overlooking the valley, nor upon the banks of the melt-water stream in the basin of the valley itself. No, it clings to a south-facing terrace a little more than halfway up the valley side. The wind’s fiercest force is cut in this place and the ground is dry underfoot, draining well into the soggy flats flanking the stream. The Imass were greatly skilled at such things; perhaps indeed their wisdom was a bred thing, immune to true learning, or it may instead be true that those not yet severed from the earth know full the precious secrets of harmony, of using only what is given-”
“Get on with it!” shouted Sellup, the words jumbled by the knuckle bones she was sucking clean. Spitting one out she popped another one in. Her eyes shone like candle flames awakened by a drunkard’s breath. “It was a stupid camp. That’s all. I want to know what’s going to happen! Now!”
Calap nodded. Never argue with a member of one’s audience.
Well, perhaps he believed that. For myself, and after much rumination on the matter, I would suggest the following qualifiers. If that member of the audience is obnoxious, uninformed, dim, insulting, a snob, or drunk, then as far as I am concerned, they are fair game and, by their willingness to engage the artist in said contest, should expect none other than surgical savaging by said artist. Don’t you think?
“These Imass in this camp had suffered a terrible winter. Their hunters could find little game, and the great flocks of birds were still weeks away. Many of the elders had walked off into the white to save the lives of their children and grandchildren, for winter spoke to them in a secret language only the aged understand. ‘In life’s last days, the white and the cold will lie in the bed of the old.’ So said the wise among them. Yet, even for this sacrifice, the others weakened with each day. The hunters could not range as far as once they could before exhaustion turned them back. Children had begun eating the hides that kept them warm at night, and now fevers raced among them.
“She was out, upon the high ridge overlooking the camp, collecting the last autumn’s mosses where the winds had swept the snows away, and so was the first to see the approaching stranger. He came down from the north, thickly clad in tenag furs. The long bone-grip of a greatsword rose behind his left shoulder. His head was bared to the winds at his back, and she could see that he was dark, stone-skinned and black-haired. He dragged a sled in his wake.
“In the time before he drew closer, hard thoughts rattled in her mind. They could turn no stranger away in times of need. This was a law among her kind. Yet this warrior was a big man, taller than any Imass. His hunger would be a deep pit, and weakened as her clan’s warriors now were, the stranger could take all he wanted if he so chose. And more, she was troubled by that sled, for bundled as it was, she knew it bore a body. If it lived it would need caring. If dead, the warrior was delivering a curse upon her people.”
“A curse?” Sellup asked. “What kind of curse?”
Calap blinked.
Seeing that he had no specific response to this question, I cleared my throat. “Death leaves such camps, Sellup, and that is well and as it should be. This is why the elders, when they decide it is time to die, walk out into the white. It is also why all kills are butchered well away from the camp itself, so that only meat, hide and bones intended to be made into tools-gifts to life one and all-enter the camp. Should death come into the camp, the hosts are cursed and must immediately make propitiations to the Reaver and his demon slaves, lest Death find the camp to his liking and so make it his home. When the Reaver finds a home, the living soon die, do you see?”
“No.”
Sighing, I said, “It is one of those rules couched in spiritual guise that, in truth, has a more secular purpose. To bring someone dead or dying into a small camp is to invite contagion and disease. Among such a close-knit clan, any infection is likely to claim them all. Thus, the Imass had certain rules to prevent such a thing occurring, yet those rules, alas, conflicted with that of never turning a guest away in times of need. So the woman was with troubled thoughts, yes?”
“But he’s evil-he has to be! He’s the Reaper himself!”
“Reaver,” I corrected, “or so the citizens of Aren so call the Lord of Death.”
Calap flinched and would not thereafter meet my eyes. “So she stood, trembling, as the stranger, who had clearly chosen her as his destination, now drew up to halt nine paces distant. She saw at once that he was not Imass. He was from the mountain heights. He was Fenn, a giant of Tartheno Toblakai blood. And too, she saw that he bore the marks of battle. Slash wounds that had cut through the woolly Tenag hide had encrusted the slices with the warrior’s own blood. His right hand and forearm were blackened with old gore, and so too was his face spattered in violent maps.