Complete Short Fiction, page 57
“So you think Swern and his wife could farm that land on their own?” Tessa thought she was starting to get an inkling of where Alta’s argument was heading.
Alta laughed. “Oh, no, dear. Not at all. Any more than they could raise Malena. But still, they should be able to work more of the land than they do. . . .”
“I’m sure that whoever adopts Malena will allow that.” Tessa was making a political agreement on behalf of her family. She’d have to explain it to them later. “It only makes sense. As long as the result does not alienate the land from the proper owner.”
Alta eyed her. “Have some sweet bread. You look hungry.”
“No thank you. I should—”
“Really, Tessa. I made it myself. I think it came out rather well.”
Alta Dalhousie, Tessa estimated, had been making sweet bread for at least twice as long as Tessa had been alive. She better have figured out how to make it come out well. She took a slice, smearing sugar frosting on her hands. If the tension hadn’t been making her feel sick to her stomach, Tessa conceded to herself, it would have been good. Her mother, Sora, had had a tendency to fear underbaking it, and as a result it had always been dry. At least she hadn’t slathered it with so much sugar.
“Tell me,” Alta said. “Do you know where Malena is?”
“No,” Tessa said. “But I think I can find her.” The last words came in a rush.
“When all these search parties can’t?” Voices sounded on the path outside: searchers coming in for a break, some tea, some of Alta Dalhousie’s famous sweet bread. They stacked packs at the gate. Someone made a joke, and a couple of them chuckled.
“Yes.”
Alta smiled. “Well, if you find her, you may as well keep her, right? Since Perin and Gorr agreed. And the Toromas can no doubt be persuaded.”
Tessa stared at her in wonder. “I—”
Alta waved a hand dismissively. “We can discuss it later. We both have things to do.” She turned to the search party, and began to pour them tea.
It was late, and the mountains cast their long shadows across the farms of Cooperset Canyon. The air grew colder, and Tessa longed to move. Her blood felt as if it had pooled and crystallized. She shifted on her rock outcrop, and once again examined the Pong’s Defile trail, just visible through the jambles below.
It was time to get home before the trail disappeared beneath her feet. Lit house windows already glowed in Calrick Bend, far below her. A moving line of lights descended the opposite canyon wall on a switch-backed trail. Searchers, returning empty handed from their pursuit of a vanished little girl. Tessa had to find her and Lewis before the townspeople turned to searching for him.
Perhaps he wasn’t going to come tonight . . . but still she sat, watching her breath puff into the steadily darkening air. Pong’s Defile, up to born Canyon, was Lewis’s favorite trail. The Wolholme children had always known it. Lewis had taken Tessa some way up it when she was a child, a well-remembered first trip away from the settled logic of the canyon floor. And a trail at the edge of Cooperset Canyon, clinging high above any habitation, led straight to the cleft where the Merewin house stood.
Nothing of Malena’s had been taken from the house, not her clothing, not her favorite doll, not any of the food she liked to eat. She was no doubt suffering in silence, wherever Lewis had taken her, but he would know what she needed. No one was at the Merewin house but the neighbor Lessa Tergoran, and she would most likely be asleep by now.
Tessa pulled on the chain of logic, and it held. She only hoped it was actually attached to something.
Had Alta Dalhousie actually offered to allow Malena to be adopted by the Wolholmes if the Toromas were given access to the land? It felt that way to Tessa, though the sliding implications of Alta’s offer had left Tessa dizzy. But it all made a kind of sense. If the Dalhousies themselves tried to adopt Malena, the Toromas would fight, but the rights of Perin Wolholme in the matter were well known. The solution did not actually benefit the Dalhousies, but it didn’t harm them either, and settled several problems in the bargain. And it left Tessa in Alta’s debt. Alta Dalhousie had always taken the long view.
That is, if Tessa managed to find Malena, and Malena herself agreed to the solution. Were things really so complicated in Calrick Bend? Tessa had never realized.
She heard a purposeful chuffing of breath on the trail below her. She swung out precariously on her rock, supported by her fingertips, and looked down the trail. The dark figure, head down, shoulders hunched, could only have been Lewis. She looked into the darkness below her feet. She’d scoped it out before, decided that a jump would be easy, but now the earth seemed to have been swallowed up, leaving her with nothing to land on.
She drew a breath. Lewis paused and raised his head. Tessa jumped. For an instant it seemed that she had indeed been right, that the ground had vanished, then it slapped her feet. She almost lost her balance, then regained it, and darted forward.
Lewis stood calmly and waited for her.
“Good evening, Theresa Wolholme,” he said.
“Hello, Lewis.”
“You want to ask me a question.”
“What have you done with Malena Merewin?”
He turned, gestured, and she found herself walking with him, slightly behind, down the trail. She thought about putting on her head lamp, but he seemed to have no trouble finding his footing. She followed his lead.
“I haven’t done anything with her. Koola has done with her. I just live here.”
“Lewis!” She grabbed his shoulder and tried to swing him around. Despite the light boniness of his frame, he was immovable, as if his feet interpenetrated with the rock beneath them. “She’s a little girl. She’s lost her parents.”
“They’re not lost,” Lewis said craftily. “No. We’ve got some absolute coordinates.”
“Are they dead then?”
“Their journey is over.”
Tessa felt despair at his Koolan obstinacy. “Lewis. You can’t keep her.”
“I’m not keeping her!” He didn’t shout, but his voice grew less precise. He waved his arms. “The suns bum with their own fires. Their messages take forever to reach us, but reach us they do.”
Darkness had come completely, and the clear sky was bright with stars. Tessa stared up, wondering if he could see the star around which circled the flaming Simurad Tunnels. The wind blowing down the canyon grew even colder.
“All good places are hard.” Lewis had calmed down. “They slide into the flesh. Unite us.”
“Lewis!”
He sidled away. “The human world has rejected her. Koola accepts her. Accepts her with gracious hardness.”
“We aren’t rejecting her,” Tessa said in despair. She thought of the tug-of-war that Malena would return to, the tensions that pulled the net of social relations in Calrick Bend tight. And she thought of the solemn little girl in the tree, waiting for her parents to come home and knowing they never would. “We need her.”
“Koola needs her more! She’ll learn the ways, as I have. She’ll climb to the heights.”
For an instant, he almost convinced her. Malena could go with her war-uncle, learn to sleep on bare rock, to eat the edible lichens of the cliffs, to walk unafraid through the blizzards. Lewis would bring her to it, with love. It was a life as sensible as any other, more sensible than some.
“Lewis,” Tessa said. “Malena did not live through Simurad. Does she need to live through this?”
For the first time, she felt she had reached him. He peered at her.
“Perin has his own service to perform for Gorr’s daughter,” Tessa said. “So do I. I need to talk to her. Please.”
“Climb, then. Show who you are.”
“Will you talk to us?”
“Us?” Lewis seemed puzzled. “Who us?”
“The Wolholmes. All of us. You know who we are.”
“I’m cold,” Lewis said. “It blesses my flesh. Bring Perin, if he will come. We will talk.”
And with that, he was gone. He jumped up, slid over a rock, and disappeared into a silent void. Fingers shaking, Tessa pulled out her head lamp and clipped it onto her forehead. The beam showed dark-shadowed rocks and sternly undecorative plants, but Lewis was nowhere to be seen. She held her breath, but heard nothing but the wind.
Tessa began to slowly pick her way down the rough path toward home.
Dom bent over and adjusted his sister’s snowshoe. Tessa had thought it was set fine on her foot, but he had another opinion. She looked ahead, at the trail that led up into the high end of born Canyon.
“We’ll be side-stepping up that slope,” Dom said. “It’ll be easier if it doesn’t slide so much at the heel.”
“You’d know that if you did much winter hunting,” Benjamin said in a superior tone. “We can loosen it again at the top of the slope.”
Perin said nothing. He was clearly already tired, unused to the exertions of climbing the higher canyons in midwinter, but had voiced no complaint. He wiped his red, sweaty forehead with a handkerchief, then looked up into the heights. Tessa heard the ragged pull of his breath with sorrow. Her father was growing old. Hadn’t she noticed that before?
Dalka, though of an age with him, seemed unaffected by the climb. She had insisted on coming with them. She and Tessa had not had a chance to talk in private, and Tessa didn’t know when they would.
“Let’s go,” Benjamin said. “We’ve got to move.” He moved upslope with little steps, jerking his head like an animal straining against a leash. “You know where we’re going, Tessa?”
“Just up Born,” she said. “They’re up there, somewhere.” But how high? They would see.
When the going got difficult, as it did here, they roped themselves together and moved slowly. The sun was deceptively bright, glaring on the snowfields. The snowfields weren’t deep: there was never much water in this part of Koola, even in winter, but they were deep enough to impede travel.
“We don’t usually hunt this high at this time of year,” Dom said, with the air of confiding a male secret. “The game comes lower, which actually makes it easier for us than in the summer.”
“Ben didn’t make it sound that way.”
Dom snorted. “Well, he comes up here to prove something, not to hunt. That’s dangerous, but he’s been doing it since that wapiti got away from him in the summer. Hunting’s not for proving, it’s for food, and for fun. Or maybe I’m just saying that because I’m getting old.” He turned and pointed. “But hunting helps in everything. There, those dark spots? A couple of Lewis’s footprints, I think. Even he can’t cross a snowfield without leaving a mark, though some people think he flies. We’re still going right.”
As they climbed, the countless slopes and cliffs opened out around them, their edges sharp and blue in the moody winter light. Tessa wondered what it would be like to live and farm up here, far from the density of the lower canyons. She’d heard old stories that it was possible, that at some time not long after the initial settlement of Koola, people had lived at these heights, not yet having descended to the flood-prone depths of the canyons and subdued them.
They reached the top of the steep slope and unroped. Tessa readjusted her snowshoes before Dom could come over and do it for her. He nodded his approval when he saw, thus retaining some control over the situation. The land curved gently up from this point, up to the base of a vast vertical cliff about a mile away. The top of the cliff, thousands of feet up, was cleft into three, with the middle bastion the highest, hence its name: Telena’s Foot. Tessa had caught glimpses of it in the warmer months, but she had tended to climb well down-canyon. This was good territory for hunting: men’s country. Women tended to stay away from it so that they would not be interrupted and annoyed during their strolls by the wails of dying animals.
“Dalka.” Dalka had fallen back, and now she and Tessa were far enough away from the others to talk. “What was in those seeds?”
“Lessa Tergoran, left on watch at the Mere wins’, says she was attacked by ghosts last night. The house was filled with them. Actually, she fell asleep. I know her. Lewis could have lifted the entire house and taken her with it. She would never have stopped snoring.”
“Dalka—”
Dalka was silent for a moment, her face stony. “Damn it, Tessa, you do give me the most difficult things, did you know that?”
“I’m sorry.”
Dalka shook her head. “The High Plainsmen. They must be behind it. I see no other way.”
Tessa was surprised. She looked up the canyon, toward the heights behind which the High Plainsmen lived. “Why do you say that?”
“That liquid must have been the way Fila controlled Gorr’s fungal infection. It’s a fairly simple enzyme blocker, keeps the fungus from spreading but doesn’t kill it. Topical application, fairly straightforward. I don’t think it will be too hard for me to duplicate.”
“Then what—”
“I didn’t make it for her! And I don’t know who did, or who she got it from.”
“But you think it was Lewis.”
Dalka nodded. “But Lewis didn’t make it. That’s not his way. He got it from someone else. Someone high up-canyon. And he gave it to Fila, to control Gorr, as if he were some herd animal himself.”
Tessa remembered the argument Dom had recounted for her, during the trading trip. “Swern Toroma told Gorr about it, just before all this happened, about the infection, about Lewis.”
“Ah.” Dalka thought about it. “It was the balance between them, that infected wound of his. Her stake.”
“If he strayed from her, he would die.”
“Exactly. And that, in the end, was how he punished her.”
It took a moment for Tessa to realize that she’d lost track of the logic. “I don’t understand.”
Dalka smiled. “You don’t think Fila dumped the treatment in the sink, do you? She knew exactly where it was, she didn’t need to search the house for it. No, it was Gorr. Gorr, when he found out how he had been controlled, came home and destroyed his treatment. Without it, he would die, slowly and by degrees. I might have been able to help him, I don’t know. He didn’t give me a chance.”
“He never thought about Malena,” Tessa said.
“Indeed he didn’t. And he never would have, his whole life. The only person who was important to him was Fila. She was the beginning and the end. As long as he was in control, not she. To find that, for all those years, she had held his life in her hands . . . he punished her. Punished her by taking away her control.”
“And dying.” Tessa looked up the slope. A jambles lay at the cliffs base, with high square blocks sticking up out of the snow. “That was how he punished her.”
“She always did love him, whatever else there may have been.”
“He came up here to confront Lewis,” Tessa said. “He must have decided where the treatment came from.”
“And Fila followed. What else could she do?”
“And what happened then?”
“That,” Dalka said, “is something only Lewis can tell us.”
The jambles under the cliff turned out to be the foundations, of an ancient manor house, most of its structure long vanished. Tessa looked at the chisel marks on the hard rock and wondered who had built here, so long ago, and why. She climbed up on the highest part. The view down the canyon was tremendous. She could see Fulda’s and Angel’s Buttes in the distance, on the other side of Cooperset. The successive ranges of mountains that made up the Boss were crisp in the cloudless sky to her right.
Benjamin bounced around the rocks like an enthusiastic dog, but Tessa noticed the care with which he kept his feet on rock, off snow or soil that might hold some track or other evidence of their quarry.
Ignoring his son’s outraged protest, Perin walked right into the middle of what had once been the cellar.
“Lewis!” he called. Silence. “Lewis! It’s me, Perin Wolholme. I want to talk.” He turned to the rest of them, who stared silently at him. “Could the rest of you please go a ways back down the slope so that we can talk, Lewis and I?”
“He hasn’t even answered you,” Dom said, irritated. “He’s probably not even here. Why should we—”
“Please, Dom. He won’t answer to a crowd, which is what we are. You know that. It won’t take long, one way or another.” He pointed off to a rock outcropping about a quarter mile away. “There. You can all have your lunch. It’s a nice sunny spot.” Perin was as decisive as Tessa had ever heard him. His tone did not accept argument or contradiction.
Dom shrugged. “All right. But look here: there’s been digging at the base of these rocks.” Indeed, the snow had been disturbed and there were traces of dirt in it.
“I’ll discuss that with Lewis when he appears,” Perin said. “Tessa—could you stay? I may need you.”
“All right, Poppa.” Everyone else headed out into the snow, not saying anything, Dalka most reluctantly. Tessa watched them go.
Perin stood in the middle of the foundation, black against white, not moving, staring up at the looming Telena’s Foot. After a long few minutes, he bent and slung the pack from his back.
“Here, Tessa,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to do some work.”
He pulled out a shovel, handed it to her, and pointed to the disturbed snow and earth that Dom had noticed. Tessa accepted it. At least it would give her something to do. She started digging carefully.
Tessa warmed up as she worked, but suddenly she felt lonely. Usually she liked being alone, but not now, not with her father standing nearby, staring off at the cliffs, ignoring her. She cocked her head. Her brothers and Dalka were enjoying a companionable lunch on the outcropping, chatting over something. Probably something completely irrelevant, she thought jealously. Something that had nothing to do with life and death and adoption and land. Perhaps Dalka was retelling the story of Lessa Tergoran, mimicking her vigorous snores. Ben picked up a double handful of snow and let it glitter away in the breeze.
Something had appeared under the snow. A hand, frozen half-clenched. Tessa stared down at it, then began to dig carefully around, revealing the arm, the shoulder, and finally the head of Gorr Merewin. The details of his body were mercifully obscured by the snow. Fila lay next to him, with a wide cut in her chest.
