On the viscous track behind him, Orbin detected a noise, and turned to see what it was. Something quivered grayly in the milky rain—and he thought of demons, banaliks—When he did see, his heart steadying, he was not well-pleased. “You stupid sow—what’re you doing here?” Tibo did not answer, she only came nearer, her hands extended before her, so he assumed she meant to show him something, and looked at them. But that was not actually her purpose.
He was still berating her and looking to see what she held out to him, when Tibo pushed him with all her force. Orbin was not a small man, but the blow caught him unprepared by the habits of a lifetime, and besides, there was ice underfoot. For a second or so he slithered and scrabbled, yelling, flailing with his arms. Then, as elsewhere and four months earlier his mother’s corpse had done, he pitched sidelong off the track and down a rocky little precipice below. Unlike his mother, Orbin screamed as he fell. But not for a great while.
The only problem with a child so handsome was to keep him out of the clutches of brothels. Katemval was well-practiced at eluding them, both the wealthy importunate and the kidnapping scavenger. Nevertheless, it cost him a few pains extra this time, not least in the rat-runs of Ly Dis, and all the other towns, through and including the Iscaian capital, to the port. Altogether, his hunch to delve the uplands, paying off one way in that one child, proved a stumbling block another. Delays and vile weather led to further delays and further, viler weather, culminating at the capital in the words of Katemval’s agent: “They say they never had such a sea for tempests. There’s not a captain on this coast will put out till the spring.”
“Oh, won’t they. We’ll see what a bribe will do,” announced Katemval staunchly, and off they went, to the most southerly port. Where it was discovered that bribes would do nothing. Viewing the enormous raging waters for himself, Katemval was not, at length, disposed to argue.
So there they wintered, he, his men, and two wagon-loads of bought children. Half an inn was required, as well as the services of women to tend the flock. At least, it was warmer.
There was an Alisaarian tower in dock, a ship on which Katemval’s agent negotiated first passage out. She would be making for Jow with a cargo of copper and common slaves. Katemval found this traffic disgusting; he himself traded in finer stuff, and for a nicer market.
The children fared very adequately, if the fretful slave-taker did not, kicking heels in Iscah. Blossoming on sufficient decent food, sleep, and care, many had already forgotten or dismissed their origins.
Not the Lydian, though, Katemval surmised. He was after all one of the youngest, and might miss his mother, too. Though death had got her before the Alisaarians took him, maybe the child equated that loss with the other.
The slave-taker was strict with himself, not to make a pet of this single boy. It would be all too easy, and then another parting, distressing for both, perhaps. But on the first sunny morning, when the bloody ocean conceded it might lie down again, Katemval, finding the boy in an upper window of the children’s room, pointed out the tower ship to him, lying at anchor, lovely as a toy after her winter cosset.
“That is how we’ll go to Alisaar. On that one, there.”
“Yes,” said the child.
“Tell me, Rehger,” said Katemval—for he knew what the boy’s name was intended to be, and pronounced it accordingly in spick and span Alisaarian—“What are you going to be, in Alisaar?”
“A man of glory,” said Rehger, the words Katemval had taught him to say, and hopefully to credit.
“Always hold to that, my dear,” said Katemval. “You are going to be a lion and a lord and a man of fame. Your life will be like a sunburst and your death a thing of drama and beauty. What are you making now?” he added, for he saw the boy’s fist curled about something. Whether this inclination for artistry—which sought expression in packed snow, mud, and bits of wood with a kitchen knife he should never have been given—would grow up with him or be at all serviceable, Katemval did not know. But he was intrigued nevertheless. Not hanging back, not hurrying, the boy opened his hand.
It was the left hand, with that wire of silvery scar around the wrist. More surprising still, perhaps, what lay in the palm of it: A triangular blazing coin. Almost all gold, only enough bronze there to harden the metal.
“Where did you get it, Rehger? Did you steal it?”
“No. My mother gave it me. My father gave it my mother.”
Katemval doubted this. Yet, intuitively, he doubted also that any theft had been committed by the boy himself.
“Where do you hide it, then?”
“Here.” The boy revealed a tiny leather fragment around his neck, the sort of thing in which valueless talismans were retained. All gods, it was worth ten times over what had been paid for the child.
“Put it back then, Rehger, and don’t let anyone else see. Someone might want it.”
“Do you?” said the boy, fist closed again on the coin, looking at him with utter directness.
Katemval laughed, a little hurt, the kindhearted taker of slaves.
“Of course not, boy. That’s yours, now. Remember your mother by it.”
“Yes,” said Rehger.
He had never spoken of his mother, and obviously would say no more of her now.
But that was as well, under the circumstances.
In five days they might be on the sea. Another month, and the real life he had been born for, there in that sty, would begin for Rehger Am Ly Dis.
When the rains paused, three priests of Cah came to call on Orhn and Tibo.
The priests seldom walked. In the snow they would have journeyed by dogsled; now the temple’s servants carried them in three litters, up the fearful track, over the valley, into the farmyard.
Tibo came to the door, kneeled down in the mud and bowed her head.
One by one the three priests were lowered to the ground and emerged, to stand there burning in their red and yellow, brass and beads.
“Get up, woman. Where are your men?”
Tibo got up. Head still bowed, she replied, “My husband Orhn is inside. Shall I fetch him?”
“Where is your husband’s brother?” said the priest who had spoken before.
“I don’t know, priest-master. Leave to speak?”
“I grant you.”
“Days ago, Orbin-master went to Ly, to offer to Cah. He didn’t return here. He took money, and maybe is delayed. He spoke of bartering or buying. Orhn lost cows this cold.”
“Did no one go to look for Orbin?”
“My husband—he never told me to go. Without his leave, I mustn’t. I did go a little way to look, but Orbin wasn’t there.”
“Enough,” said the priest. “I will tell you where Orbin is.”
He told her. Tibo listened, head bowed. When he ended, she lifted her bowed head and gave a huge appalling cry, but that was tradition. The priests waited until she stopped ululating, by which juncture Orhn, aroused from sleep and scared, had come to the door also, plucking at her sleeve.
A man of another valley, going over to Ly, had chanced to see Orbin prone at the bottom of a steep rocky ravine. There was no means to get to him, and anyway, the carrion crows of the uplands had already done so, and were feasting—their bustling presence it was which had caused the traveler to look down. The body, what with the depth of the ravine, and the crows, was barely recognizable. But the man, reporting the event in Ly, had thought he knew it by its boots. Then other farmers came to make sacrifice or to drink in the village, and only the regular Orbin did not. So the priests went to visit Orhn’s wife. It was true, without her husband’s direction, she could not leave the farm’s environs to search. Conversely, Orhn might not have been able to muster such an order. Orhn, though opinion differed on the extent, was not quite as he should be. And this in its turn clouded the death of his brother. That a child had been born here all Ly knew. That the child had been sold to slave-takers at the start of the snow, that was general knowledge, too. The Alisaarians had had their camp at Ly, and come back there with the child, though no one had seen much of it, wrapped in fur, up on the leader’s big black riding-beast. Had Orhn been capable of the wit to sell his son for cash? Or had Orbin sold the boy? And did that mean in turn that Orbin, not Orhn, had unlawfully sired it? And did it mean that Tibo had run mad and attacked Orbin?