“I feel that I have been a man for only a year,” Perkar admitted. “Two at best. I don't know. I only know that I was not a man when I set out with the Kapaka.”
Sherye barked out a short, harsh laugh as he poured yet more woti. “We are never men when we say we are, son—it's only later, when we question our worth, that we stand some chance of finding it.” He tossed down the third cup, waited for Perkar to do likewise, and then poured a fourth.
“You intend for us to get drunk tonight, don't you, Father?” Perkar asked, already beginning to feel somewhat light-headed.
“Very drunk,” his father conceded. “Very.”
Six drinks later they were well on their way. Perkar felt his face numbing and softening, and to his horror, tears welled behind his eyes. In his months of self-enforced temperance, he had forgotten the power of woti to draw out the hidden, to release things best bound—to make hardened men bawl like mouseling infants.
His father swayed back and forth when he next spoke, the rustling of his rust-and-black quilted robe the only other sound.
“When will you take the land, son? When will you build your own home? Your younger brother—Henyi—is already gone four months.”
Perkar bit his lip. He had tried to remain silent on this issue, keep it in. But suddenly he felt the words bolt past his lips like a willful steed.
“When all have chosen,” he cried, louder than he wished. “When all whom I wronged have picked the choicest land for pasture. Then I will go.”
His father waved his hand impatiently. “Many whom you wronged are dead.”
“Their children, then.”
“How many generations will you pay, my son? You have redressed your misdeeds—stopped the war with the Mang and haggled new land for the Cattle Folk. Truth to tell, none of us would have known your blame, had you not returned to tell us of what happened. Yours is not the first expedition to go into Balat and not return.”
“Yes,” Perkar said. “I have heard some accused the Alwat—Akera and his brothers even went to hunt them.”
“And found none,” his father pointed out. “No harm was done.”
It seemed to Perkar that harm had been done, if the reputation of the Alwat had been further blemished. And even though the truth of the matter was now widely known, men like Akera would still count the imaginary grudge in a tally against the Alwat. Thus truth was the servant of desire. But the blame against the Alwat was not the worst distortion. “The most embarrassing thing is the way people treat me,” Perkar muttered.
“Like a hero? You are that. The songs are already spreading. How did you want to be treated? As an outcast, a pariah? Would that have made you feel better?” The older man smiled and reached to grip Perkar's shoulder. “The punishment of a hero is that he is treated like one. You will see that soon enough. Go take your land, son. You have waited long enough.”
“Perhaps.”
“And think about marriage. It's past time for that, as well. Bakume still has a finely dowered daughter …” He stopped when he saw the expression on his son's face. He drank another cup of woti. “Ah, well then,” he said. “A father might as well try. A man can have two wives, you know.”
Perkar blinked at his sire. What had the older man seen on his face?
But he thought he knew, and that should be dealt with soon. He had put it off too long.
HEZHI woke with a start, her heart racing. Her blood pulsed chill, like roots of ice digging through her skin, but already the dread images were fading away, her nightmare painted over by the rosy sunlight falling through the higher window onto her bed. She lay there, waiting for the last of the dream to evaporate, wondering if she would ever be entirely free of such sleep terrors. Before last night, it had been almost two weeks. The mare and the swan assured her that they could protect her from her nightmares, but Hezhi felt somehow that such aid would harm her more in the end. With each passing day the horror lessened, just as the tightness of the knife scar in her side lessened under the ministrations of Perkar's mother. The latter required bathing, stretching, and massaging the white lump with tallow; Hezhi had been assured that simply ignoring the scar would result in a stiff, unpleasant pucker that would trouble her for the rest of her days. She suspected that ignoring—or allowing her familiars to suppress—her dreams would have similar results. In the year and more since leaving Balat, the nightmares came fewer and with diminishing intensity. One day they would be all but gone.
Roosters were crowing, so Hezhi rose, dabbed her face at the washbasin, and sought out her robe, the gold-and-brown one she favored. Once dressed she trudged down the stairs to the great hall.
Perkar and his father lay there; Perkar was supine, mouth open, eyes closed. Sherye had nodded his head onto the table and remained there as if bowing to whatever god the wood had been cut from. The shadow of her nightmare was strong enough that a wave of horror washed over her, a fear that they were dead, but she saw the truth quickly enough in the woti bottle on the table, and the relief was so great she laughed. Perkar had relented at last and taken woti with his father. Perkar, too, was healing.
A soft sound caught her attention. Across the hall, Kila—Perkar's mother—gestured for her attention. Hezhi crossed the hardwood floor, treading lightly even in bare feet, wishing to make no sound to rouse the men.
Kila was a tiny woman, smaller even than Hezhi in stature and frame, and yet she seemed larger somehow, as if time had lent her eminence. Her face reminded Hezhi of a bird—not some large, beaky bird, but something delicate, like a sparrow. Her hair, worn in three long braids that nearly reached her knees, was that strange red-brown color that Hezhi was slowly becoming accustomed to.
“Thank you,” Kila said, whispering. “Best we let them sleep. They would not be pleasant if we awakened them now. Would you come with me to feed the chickens?”
Hezhi nodded and followed the older woman out into the yard.
“Normally Aberra and her daughter feed them,” Kila explained as she opened the wooden bin that contained the grain, “but they are away right now.”
“I'll help,” Hezhi said. She took a handful of the grain and began casting it about the yard in imitation of Kila. The red-and-gold birds appeared from every corner of the walled-in compound, converging on the two women, clucking about their feet like the courtiers who had once surrounded her father. Hezhi smiled at the image, then wondered more seriously what had become of that court, of the palace. With the River dead, did Nhol still stand? Did her father still rule? Despite herself, she felt again a longing for the city of her birth and, most surprising of all, a faint worry for her father, her mother, her sisters. Though she had barely known them, she understood now that they did matter to her in some small but real measure.
“What's troubling you, child?” Kila asked.
“Thinking of home,” Hezhi explained.
“From what Perkar says, I wonder that you miss it.”
“As do I,” Hezhi admitted. “But I worry about my family. Most of all, I wonder about Qey.”
“That's the woman who raised you?”
“Yes.”
Kila was silent for a few moments, throwing grain out toward the weaker birds that could not bustle up to her feet. “Will you return?”
Hezhi shrugged. “I don't know. I don't know what I will do.”
Kila looked at her frankly. “I hope you don't,” she said. “I hope you stay right here. I've never had a daughter—” Her face fell slightly. “—not one who lived, anyway. Having you around has been like having a daughter.”