“Nothing is, for me, it seems,” she replied dully.
“It may even make you happier,” he went on. “I've watched you, these past months. You took to camp work pretty well. In time, I think you could even be good at it. But you would never love it, would you? The only things that I know you love—that I can see you love—are your paper and your ink, your book. The thought of books.”
“What does this have to do with that?” she muttered.
“Mystery,” he answered simply. And in that small word, Hezhi caught a glimmer of something. Hope, possibilities—something to fill the growing emptiness in her heart.
“Mystery,” she repeated, a question really. Brother Horse nodded affirmation.
“That is what you find in your books, am I right? Questions that you had not thought of yourself? Visions you could not imagine unaided? I can offer you the same.”
“It frightens me,” she admitted. “What lives in me frightens me.
“It always will, unless you master it,” he said. “And probably even then, if you have sense, which I believe you do. But did your books bring you only comfort?”
She quirked an insincere smile at that. “No, not comfort,” she answered.
“Well, then,” the old man said. “Why do you hesitate?”
“Because I'm tired” she snapped. “Weary of new things, of being frightened, of being sick, of losing what I know! Tired of these things happening to me …”
He waited until she was done, until she chewed down on her lip, panting, fury replacing fear.
“What then?” she asked again, this time sharply, insistently. “How do we start this?”
The old man hesitated, then reached into a pouch at his waist. He withdrew a small dagger, its blade keen and silver in the shadowed shelter.
“As always,” Brother Horse replied. “With blood.”
HEZHI turned the knife over and over in her hand, as if inspecting it would allay her fears. Instead, she only grew more nervous as Brother Horse kindled a small fire in the stone hearth.
She was distracted by the process of fire-making itself, which relied not upon matches—the only way she had ever seen fire “made”—but upon a dubiously simple device. He placed a flat piece of wood on the shelter floor; the wood had grooves cut along one side, and these shallow cuts terminated in blackened depressions. In one of these depressions he placed a stick, about the length of her forearm, and began to twirl it briskly with his palms, starting at the top of the stick and working quickly to its base, returning his palms to the top again, and so on. In moments a coil of smoke sought up from the juncture of the two pieces of wood. The smoke grew thicker and thicker until Brother Horse removed the stick and blew upon the hole he had been twirling it in. Astonished, Hezhi saw a small red coal there.
“Hello, Fire Goddess,” Brother Horse said. “Welcome to my hearth. I will treat you well.” He shook the coal onto a small wad of shredded dry material of some sort, held it delicately in his fingers, and breathed upon it. In an instant, he held flame between his fingers. With that small blossom, he ignited a pile of twigs leaning together like a little tent and, as they caught, added larger pieces of wood on top. Heen, sleeping with his head between his paws, opened a single eye halfway at the scent of smoke, then closed it once more, singularly unimpressed by the birth of a goddess.
“Can you teach me that?” she breathed.
“To waken the Fire Goddess? Of course. It is simply done. I'm surprised you haven't seen it happen.”
“The women would never let me near, at the hunting camp; not when they made fire.”
“Women have some odd taboos about the goddess,” Brother Horse informed her, then added, “and about foreigners, as well.”
“That I know.” The wood crackled gleefully. Hezhi cocked her head and even smiled, despite the threatening edge of the knife in her hand, the nervous twitching in her belly. “I never thought of fire as a miracle before,” she breathed.
“See her in there?” Brother Horse asked. “Look closely.” He gestured with his lips, his gnarled brown fingers feeding bits of juniper twigs to the flame.
“No,” Hezhi said, suddenly understanding what she was being asked to do. She averted her eyes from the little tongues of light.
“The Fire Goddess is different,” Brother Horse reassured her gently. “She has lived with Human Beings for a long time—at least this aspect of her. Look, child. I will help you.”
He reached over and took hold of her hand; trembling a bit, she turned her gaze back to the fire. The evergreen tang of juniper smoke wrapped her as the wind shifted, and her eyes squinted over the sting and tears. Brother Horse tightened his grip on her, and in that instant the fire seemed to rush up, open like the shutters of a window. As through a window, she could suddenly see through it, to another place.
Once again, alien thoughts crowded her mind, and the scale upon her arm pulsed madly. She gasped and jerked to release herself from Brother Horse, but he kept his grip, and when she turned her head it was to no avail; the goddess was still there.
But after the first instant, her beating heart began to slow. Seeing the god at the cairn had been terrible, like suddenly understanding that she had pushed her hands into a nest of stinging worms, the shock before the pain. There was nothing of her in that experience, only the promise of dread and power.
The Fire Goddess was different. Hezhi saw warmth and comfort, an offer of aid rather than of power, an acceptance of her will and self that she did not fear. The Cairn God had threatened to sweep her away, like the River. The Fire Goddess only filled her with light and hope. It was still uncomfortable, but it was not terrible, not unbearable.
“Oh,” Hezhi murmured as comprehension waxed. She glanced at Brother Horse, to show him she understood, and her jaw dropped.
Brother Horse still sat watching her, but his body had gone gray, insubstantial, and within it, dark shapes swam about. She got the fleeting impression of fangs, of flickering yellow eyes, of hunger. There was also something there that reminded her of raw fish, of fish in the kitchen, just after Qey gutted them for steaming.
“What?” she gasped, and violently yanked her hand from his. She staggered to her feet, and, though Brother Horse called after her, she scrambled as quickly as she could out of the shelter and into the wide, bright eye of the sky. She did not stop running until she could no longer hear Brother Horse at all.
V The Blackgod
PERKAR watched the stranger advance, keeping his grip on Harka firm, despite his sword's assurance that the approaching god—or whatever it was—posed no immediate threat. Whoever it was seemed, at least, to be in no hurry to threaten them, ambling across the eighty or so paces separating them, pausing to examine the sky now and then.
As he watched this, Perkar caught a movement from the corner of his eye. He turned reluctantly and saw the Mang warrior whose leg he had injured crawling across the snow, a fierce determination shining through the glaze of pain over his eyes. Perkar started, wondered why Harka had not warned him. Stepping quickly back, he was able to put both the Mang and the approaching being in his field of vision, and then he understood Harka's lack of alarm. The injured man was not crawling toward him, or even Ngangata. He was clawing across the frozen ground toward his companion's downed horse, which, despite the fact that Perkar had severed both front legs at the knee, was still panting heavily.
As Perkar watched, the man collapsed, ending the crooked red trail he was painting in the snow an arm's reach from the stallion.
“Gods curse you, Perkar,” Ngangata hissed. “How could you—kill him. Now!”
For a moment, it was the old Perkar, the old Ngangata. What was the half man jabbering about? Why kill an injured man? And who was Ngangata to curse hunt