The chatter died away as they saw the pair approaching. Others came from the houses or ceased their amusements among them. Those were mainly men, off duty; they did the hunting and the brute-force heavy work while women handled the home chores. Children hung back. Corwin had related that they were greatly loved and generally brash, but were taught to defer when deference was due.
The scientists passed on through an obbligato of greetings and ritual gestures, which Corwin returned. Nobody tagged after them. Someone had apprised Red Wolf, for he waited at his dwelling. Two mammoth tusks flanked its doorway and he was better clad than average. Otherwise nothing marked him out but his presence, his panther assurance. He raised a hand. “Always are you welcome, Tall Man,” he said gravely. “Always may you have good hunting and, in your home, contentment.”
“May fair weather and kindly spirits ever walk with you, Red Wolf,” Corwin responded. “Here I bring her of whom I told you, that we may pay our respects.”
Tamberly followed the speeches. Corwin had downloaded his knowledge of the language, once he had a reasonable command of it, into a mnemonic unit uptime, and she had had it entered in her brain. Likewise had he painlessly acquired the additional vocabulary and nuances of Tula that she discovered for herself. (He “had!” No, he “would,” some fifteen thousand years in the future.) Eventually, when they had no further use for the knowledge, it would be wiped from them to make room for something else. That was a rather sad thought.
She pulled her attention back to the Ice Age. Red Wolf’s look lay keen upon her. “We have met before, Sun Hair,” he murmured.
“W-we have.” She rallied her wits. “I belong to no folk here, but go among the animals. I want to be friends with the Cloud People.”
“From time to time you may wish a guide,” he said shrewdly.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Such a one will find me thankful.” That was the closest this language could come to saying that he would be well rewarded. Let’s face it, with the kind of help available here, I can accomplish ten times what I was able to earlier.
Red Wolf spread his arms. “Enter and be blessed. We shall talk undisturbed.”
The interior was a single room. Flat stones at the middle made a hearth on which a fire smoldered; starting one afresh was toilsome, to be avoided as much as possible. Low clay platforms along the walls, richly provided with hides, could sleep about twenty adults and children. Hardly any of them were now on hand. Given daylight and reasonable weather, the outdoors had far more to offer. Red Wolf introduced his pretty wife, Little Willow. He went on to present another woman. Her eyes were red from weeping, her cheeks were gashed, and her hair hung unbraided, signs of mourning. She was Moonlight on the Water, Snowstrider’s widow.
“We plan how to provide for her and her small ones,” Red Wolf explained. “She does not wish to take a new man at once. Well, I think she can stay here until she feels ready to.”
He gestured his guests to sit on skins spread near the fire. Little Willow brought a leather bottle, not unlike a Spanish bota, that held fermented cloudberry juice. Tamberly squirted a little into her mouth, just to be polite, and learned it wasn’t bad. She was being treated more or less as a man, she knew, but then, her status was extraordinary. At that, Little Willow and Moonlight on the Water weren’t kept in purdah, but listened. If either thought she had something important to say, she would speak.
“I heard how you slew the terrible bison,” Tamberly told Red Wolf. “That was valiantly done.”—the more so when, in his mind, it must have been possessed by a malignant spirit.
“I had help,” he said, not modestly but matter-of-factly. He grinned. “By myself, I do not always win. Maybe you can teach me how to make a fox trap that works. Mine never do. I wonder if somehow I once offended the Father of Foxes. Toddling around as a baby, did I leave my sign on top of his?” The grin became a laugh.
He can joke about the unknown, Tamberly heard herself think. Damn, I believe I’m going to like him. No doubt I shouldn’t, but I believe I’ll have to.
III
She mounted her timecycle, projected a map with a coordinate grid, set her destination, touched the activator. Immediately the dome was gone from around her and she back at her old campsite. Locking the controls, though neither man nor beast would come so near so alien an object in the next few hours, she started off afoot.
Sky and sea reached steely gray, sunless. Even over distance and against the wind she could hear how surf crashed on Beringia and tore at it. The wind skirled across dead grass, dark moss, bare shrubs and trees, strewn boulders, out of a north where darkness had engulfed the horizon. Cold laved her face and searched for any opening in her clothes. The season’s first blizzard was on its way southward.
Lifetimes of feet had beaten the path she found and took. It led her down into the gulch. Depth walled off most wind, but the river, engorged by high tide, foamed dirty white. She reached the bluff, now barely above that violence, where three stone huts huddled by a spring.
Somebody must have spied her through the dwarf alder, for as she arrived, Aryuk pulled aside the bundled wattles that served him for a door, crawled forth, and rose. He gripped a hand ax. His shoulders were stooped under a carrion skin. Between mane and beard she saw a haggardness that shocked her.
“Ar-Aryuk, my friend—” she stammered.
He stared at her a long time, as if trying to remember or understand what she was. When he spoke, she could hardly make out the mumble in the roar of river and surf. “We heard you have come back. Not to Us.”
“No, I—” She reached toward him. He flinched before he stood his ground. She lowered her arm. “Aryuk, yes, I stay with the Mammoth Slayers, but only because I need to. I am not of them. I want to help you.”
He eased a little—less in relief, she thought, than yielding to his weariness. “True, Ulungu said you were kind to him and his sons when they were there. You gave them the Lovely Sweet.” He meant chocolate. In earlier days she had perforce handed it around very rarely. Else a van-sized Patrol vehicle couldn’t have brought enough.
She recalled the dull gratitude of those who no longer hoped. God damn it, I will not cry. “I have Lovely Sweet for you and everybody here. First, though,” since Aryuk had made no move to invite her in, not that she really wanted to enter the hovel, “why did you not come too, this moon?”
It had been the probable last month until spring for the We to bring tribute. After encountering the Bubbling Springs folk, she’d been glad she was away in the field when others appeared. What consolation she could offer was so tiny, and she hadn’t slept that whole night. However, she had asked Corwin to inform her of Aryuk’s advent. She couldn’t forbear to meet him. If need be, she’d hop a few days downtime. But he never showed.
’The Mammoth Slayers are angry,” she warned. “I told them I would find out what the trouble is. Do you mean to go soon? I fear a storm is about to strike.”
The shaggy head drooped. “We cannot go. We have nothing to bring.”
She tautened. “Why?”
“At the fall gathering I told everybody that I did not think we would,” Aryuk said in the rambling Tula fashion, but with none of the Tula liveliness. “Ulungu is a true friend. After he and his sons had made their own last trip, they came to see if they could help us. That was when I learned you had joined the Tall Man.”
Oh, God, how betrayed you must have felt.