Friends (2013) - Adams, Robert

Uncle had parlayed with Lowlanders, the mighty Horseclans themselves, winning an honorable peace. Then again, the role of peacemaker came easily to the leaders of the Windrunners, whether such peace was won by treaty or force of arms. Ar’tor remembered seeing his uncle contending with the chief of the Steelteeth for water rights. His cudgel had broken on the second pass, but his mighty fists lashed out, striking Old Keeshan senseless by the light of the council torches! The Windrunners celebrated loud and long, the hills ringing with their songs and drunken revels until dawn.

No, that was not a role that he could claim for his own.

Ar’tor rucked his whittled bone pipe into the leather pouch at his waist and felt out around himself in the dark. His fingers closed on his spear. Had he forgotten anything? This was his hidey-hole, but if he ever made the mistake of leaving something edible it would be quickly discovered by the scavengers that haunted the hills.

Ar’tor crawled out of the crevice and looked around.

“Ar’tor! Where are you, boy?” Karls’s rough growl of a voice called him, echoed by the laughter of his two companions, Rollif and Marrin. Ar’tor knew that his backside would sting if Karls found out that he had been loafing again.

Ar’tor brushed the dirt and snow back into place, tidied up the trail, turned the rocks so that the damp sides were down, and prettied up the brush. There—anyone who came across it now wouldn’t know what was there.

The wind changed, and for an instant he smelled it. Oh, yes, it was a cat, and it was strong. Ar’tor was not the hunter that his uncle and brother were, but his senses were sharp in ways that theirs were not. And when the wind shifted for that moment, he smelled Old Cat, strong and clear. Ar’tor froze, sudden terror bitter in his mouth.

True, Old Cat had never been known to hunt Man, only cattle, only the wiry goats and chickens of the Hilltribes, and those mostly in the wintertime. But hunters sometimes vanished into the howling wind, never to return. When this happened some said that the ’Ginni Truce had been broken.

But there were also whispers that Old Cat had lost his taste for goat, and now found manflesh more to his liking.

The Hillpeople had hunted him for more years than Ar’tor had been alive. They had never found Old Cat. The flowing feline shape floated through Ar’tor’s dreams like a bleeding moon. Mothers hushed the cries of their children by telling them that Old Cat would hear and come.

Ar’tor slid his right heel back to brace himself and gripped his spear. Terror made his stomach feel heavy and hot, made his breath sour.

“There you are, boy!” Karls laughed. He grabbed Ar’tor and spun him around, spanking his broad hand against Ar’tor’s narrow leather breechbottoms. “Where’ve you been?”

Ar’tor winced, but threw his shoulders back. “Patrolling. Keeping the edge secure.”

Bearded Marrin howled with mirth. “Secure from songbirds, certainly. They flee when they hear that noise you call music.”

Ar’tor shaped a retort, then considered: Marrin was as large as two of him, and not renowned for his even temper.

His brother laughed. “Come along, little one, and we’ll get back to the camp.” Karls had two small goats roped before him, half frozen and three-quarters starved. They would be happy to be led back to the village, even if they were eventually destined for the stewpot.

Martin herded along three sheep, while Rollif One-Eye had two more goats at tether.

With his brother’s warm arm around his shoulders, Ar’tor feared nothing. Karls was almost as strong as their gigantic uncle, and he feared nothing. One day Karls would be leader of the Windrunners. Ar’tor would be content to be storyteller, to chronicle the adventures of his brother, and his uncle, and his uncle’s uncle, and one day passing on the job to his own nephews.

The two brothers climbed up through the ravine, by the fall of rocks that formed a staircase. Ice cracked and tinkled with every step.

They guided their strays through the shallow creek which fed into the river bordering their land from the Lowlanders’. The smaller waterway bordered their land from the Steelteeth, the wild men who traded with all and paid tribute to none.

“And what if I tell Uncle you’ve been slacking again? Dreaming?” Karls’s broad strong hand felt around Ar'tor’s belt, discovered the offending musical instrument. “Playing music rather than hunting goats.”

“Don’t,” Ar’tor wheedled. “And I’ll write you a love poem for Eloi.”

Karls barked laughter. “I might take you up on that, small fish. Hah!” Karls had a big, square face that resolved their mother’s fineness and father’s broad strength into an elegant but utterly masculine profile. The men followed him willingly. The women groomed and prettied themselves when he passed. He might choose a bride from them, but he would probably take his cousin Eloi in marriage, thereby sealing his succession. Whoever he chose, Ar’tor knew that he would make strong, healthy children.

Ar’tor could smell the cookpots before he heard the voices or saw the rise of the village fence. As they crested the hill, Ar’tor saw the Hollow, the home that his granduncles had carved here in the hills.

The houses down in the Hollow were built into the trees, carved into the mountain, pitched against shelves of rock. Snow was swept clear of the ground in patches, revealing the sunbaked adobe paths which separated the little clusters of sloped roofs. Feathers of smoke rose from a hundred rooftops, savory wisps from a hundred cookpots. They tickled his nose, made him suddenly, maddeningly aware of his stomach’s emptiness.

The gate dogs barked and squatted back on their haunches, welcoming Karls and Ar’tor with arfs and passionate licks, Ar’tor scratched one of the great hounds behind her ear, then froze as a ghastly howl rose up from within the encampment.

Rollif cursed. “What in hell is that?”

Karls banged his spearpoint against the earth at the row of wooden posts that made up the main gate. “Hear! Karls Windrunner, nephew of Syman, demands entry!”

Randii, the man on the other side of the gate, swung it open. He was normally a model of humor and warmth, but there was little save grave concern in Randii’s expression today. He chucked Ar’tor under his chin and fought unsuccessfully to force a smile. “It’s good you’ve returned,” he said. “Your uncle is sick.”

Karls’s eyes narrowed. “The bellyache again? Damn green beer ...”

“It’s no bellyache,” he said grimly, and spat through his beard. “ ’Tis something worse. Far worse.”

Karls’s back grew spearthrust-straight as he walked through the Hollow, and Ar’tor threw back his own narrow shoulders to match. This was no time for display of weakness, no matter how small. Now the village needed their strength more than ever.

Their uncle’s hut was at the far edge of the village, just past the pit of the great council fire. It was set into the bole of a great, broad-barreled fir tree. The house had been Syman’s uncle’s and his granduncle’s before him, and over the years the tree had twisted itself around the house, sealed up like a wound. It accepted the house as the hills themselves accepted the Windrunners and their kin.

Ar’tor was tautly conscious that every eye in the village was on them, on the four of them as they strode up to the door. Again he drew his shoulders back. They left their spears at the door and opened it gingerly.

The lights within were dim, the tallow candles allowed to bum low in their dishes.

Syman’s daughter Eloi met them. She was a tall young woman, healthily curved, and Ar’tor felt himself burn at her glance. Her hair was as yellow as the sun, and her smile brought an early thaw to the mountains. Ar’tor turned away in embarrassment, betrayed by his body. She was Syman's only child, and Karls’s betrothed, although she sometimes listened to Ar’tor’s songs with what seemed unsisterly intensity.

Karls gripped her shoulder, and she hugged him briefly. “How is Uncle?”

“Not well. It is good you return. Your mother is with him now.”

Karls nodded and then recoiled in shock as a bellowing cry rang from the back room, a brother to the cry heard at the gate. It was the sob of a soul broiling in the depths of hell. Through the pain and torment they could make out individual words: “Karls! Karls! Come to me, boy.”

The outer rooms of the house were filled with hand-carved items: trophies, weapons, gifts, little things that Ar’tor’s small clever hands had made over the years. Small baubles, images of tree and mountain and stalking cat, made for his uncle’s pleasure. Now they brought darkness to his heart. There was a low table where meals were taken and small councils kept, and a shelf, carved from the very substance of the tree itself, covered with trophies and mementos. Uncle had always kept these things more for his people than himself, and Ar’tor had wondered why. Now, for the first time, he caught an inkling. What did they matter? What did anything matter when all men’s lives hung by such a slender thread?

Beyond this was the master bedroom. They turned the corner, and Ar’tor caught his breath.

Whatever had struck their uncle down was no clean sickness. In three days the stench had become hideous, shrieking of corruption, and unclean things devouring him from within. His great,' strong hands gripped at the ribs of his bed, square blunt fingernails gouging splinters from the wood. He screamed, thrashed. A yellowish netting hung suspended from the ceiling, diffusing the candlelight into a coppery glow.

Spit and blood-speckled foam flew from Syman’s lips. His eyes glistened like hot glass marbles and bulged in their sockets. His entire body arched from the bed. “Ahhh. The bug. The cursed bug. Treacherous was its bite . . . ahhh!”

A vile, milky fluid leaked from a bandage on his side. Their mother, Syman’s sister Gretcha, rushed in at the crescendo of his scream and pushed the boys back. She gingerly peeled away the bandage. Ar’tor turned his head, gagging. The wound was infested, a gigantic swollen black mass that actually moved under his skin.

“Ahhh!” Syman’s eyes rolled to expose swollen-veined whites as Gretcha touched the wound. She turned to Karls, despair writ plainly in her face.

“There is so little that 1 can do,” she said in a low, flat voice. “Hand me the dish.”

She blackened the point of a knife over a candle flame.

then touched it to the dark pustule. The bad skin split like the flesh of a rotten melon. With nauseated fascination, Ar’tor watched a mass of tiny, legless grubs wriggle out of the wound. Gretcha cursed bitterly.

“Hold my brother,” she commanded.