Chapter Eighteen
Sira sat cross-legged across the campfire from Lorn, wondering how old he was. He seemed ancient to her, especially to be living the strenuous life of an itinerant. He had insisted on doing the quiru himself, and it wavered and faltered distressingly around them and their hruss. Last night she had wakened to find it almost dissipated. She had refreshed it with her own filla while Lorn slept on, unaware.
There had been no choice of traveling company. Lorn had been the only itinerant she could find who was not consulting with Magister Mkel or the Housekeeper about his departure, and now she understood why. Who would hire such a person?
It would only be a few days’ ride to Lamdon, she told herself. There she would declare herself an itinerant, and try to find an apprenticeship with someone else. It should not be hard to avoid Cantrix Sharn, if she came into the House through the stables, and attracted no attention to herself. She had hoped to learn something about the work beyond quiru duties, but two days with the old itinerant Singer had made her doubt his ability to teach her anything.
Lorn reached forward with his gnarled hand and stirred up the remnants of the fire. “Not so easy, starting a fire with flint and stone, is it?” he said. Even his voice seemed old and frail. She wondered if he could sing anymore.
“I will try it again tomorrow,” she said. “I need to learn.”
“You’ll get it,” he said, and gave a wheezy laugh. “You’ll learn to cook, too, or be awfully hungry. Hot food is important in the mountains.”
Sira said nothing. Lorn’s cooking had not been an inspiration, though she knew he was right about hot meals. Stars winked through the shaky quiru, and she decided to get into her bedfurs early, since she would certainly be up redoing the quiru before the night had passed. She thought that Cantors must not be the only Gifted ones in short supply, if this man was able to eke out a living as an itinerant Singer.
A long, wailing cry sounded through the hills, making Sira sit bolt upright. Lorn laughed again. “Don’t worry. Just a ferrel hunting in the dark. The fire keeps them away from us. We’ll build it up a little.” He dropped some softwood on it, and it blazed higher.
Sira lay back down, but her skin prickled uneasily. The comforts of her room at Conservatory seemed very far off. She tried not to remember Theo’s warnings. I am free, she told herself. I choose my own way.
She was glad she had not heard the ferrel cry when she had been alone in Ogre Pass.
She did not sleep until long after Lorn was snoring in his bedfurs. She renewed the quiru once he was asleep, and felt better seeing it strong above their campsite. The ferrel screamed again, making the hruss stamp and Sira shiver, but the fire burned steadily. She fell asleep at last under her warm furs, grateful not to be alone, even if Lorn was not an ideal companion.
The next day snow began to fall as the road led higher into the Mariks. Lorn said they would take the upper mountain route, going through Windy Pass to save several days, rather than travel east to the wider and more clement Ogre Pass. The softwood trees thinned out as they climbed, leaving only the huge ironwood trees and their network of thick, shallow suckers crisscrossing the trail. Lorn assured Sira they would be at the top of the pass before dark.
When night fell and the trail they followed had not yet opened into the narrow fissure that was Windy Pass, Sira began to suspect that Lorn had made a mistake. He was silent, and she did not ask, but she felt tension all around her.
She still could not start the fire by herself, try as she might. When it died out a third time, Lorn did it for her once again, but with none of the teasing there of the night before.
The next morning, Sira saddled her hruss without help. It groaned as if in pain as she drew up the cinch. Sira loosened it, thinking it must be too tight.
Lorn looked over at her, shaking his head. “You want to tighten that up. Pay no attention to the hruss. It thinks it wants the cinch loose, but it won’t like that saddle ending up under its belly.” He snickered. “And you’ll have a faceful of snow!”
Sira turned back to the saddle and saw that now the cinch hung loosely from the beast’s rib cage. As soon as she put her hand to it, the hruss took a deep breath and swelled out its ribs, tightening the cinch again. Sira laughed, and poked it gently in the belly. When it relaxed, the cinch swung free.
This time Sira pulled it firmly, then waited until the hruss had taken several breaths, to make sure the cinch was snug. She patted the animal, and went to get her saddlepack.
She had tried to cook breakfast, too. Her reward had been a bowlful of scorched grain. Lorn took a taste and frowned, eating cold dried meat with his tea instead. Sira, defiantly, ate every bite of her concoction. Now she could feel its weight in her stomach as she pulled herself up into her saddle.
When Lorn led the way out of their campsite, and turned into what seemed to be a road, Sira’s sense of direction was offended. It didn’t feel right to her, but she had made so many mistakes in their two days together that she hesitated to challenge the old man’s choice. They rode for several hours in an increasingly heavy snowfall that obscured the trees and obliterated the outlines of the road.
“Doesn’t usually snow so much about now,” Lorn muttered, half to himself. “Usually get clear skies when the deep cold is starting.”
Sira looked about uneasily. It had not been so many weeks since she had traversed Ogre Pass. These surroundings looked nothing like it. Could one pass be so different from another? The snow fell in curtains about them and the trees loomed close over their heads.
“Singer,” she said, as respectfully as she could, “I think perhaps our direction is wrong.”
He pulled up his hruss. “I don’t understand it. We should have been in the Pass by now.”
The hruss’s fetlocks were heavy with unseasonably wet snow, which Sira supposed would freeze unpleasantly when darkness fell. Their path, which looked less and less like a road, had grown steep and treacherously slippery.
“We must go back,” she said. “Retrace our steps until we strike familiar ground. We have missed the entrance to the Pass.”
Lorn shrugged. “Might as well,” he said. “Snow’s getting thick.”
Sira could not see the downslope to her right through the blinding snow, and it worried her. She had an impression of emptiness, that might mean a cliff or a talus slope, hidden by the storm. “Be careful!” she called over her shoulder to Lorn. She turned her hruss with difficulty in the close space between heavy rocks and trees on the uphill side and white blankets of falling snow on the other.
Sira had heard the expression “white weather” many times, but had never experienced it. The reality, she thought, was worse than the description. Sky, ground, rocks, and trees disappeared into pallid curtains of snow. She felt dizzy at the loss of perspective, only barely retaining her sense of up and down by watching her hruss’s withers. The animal felt its way gingerly down the trail, and Sira felt every bunch and quiver of its muscles in her own legs and arms. A sudden squeal from the other hruss chilled her, as if a handful of wet snow had been dropped inside her furs. She heard Lorn make one short sound, a grunt or a curse.
“Lorn? Are you all right?” she called. She pulled up her hruss to listen. There was only the hiss of snow and the huffing of her mount. For a moment, panic tugged at her, a familiar feeling of being utterly alone in the wilderness. Then she heard Lorn’s voice, shaky but audible.
“Sira, wait!”
She looked back, but could not see him or his hruss. Laboriously, she turned her own beast once again, and urged it gently back up the steep path. “Lorn!” she called again. Suddenly the hruss stopped, and Sira realized the other animal was down, sprawled in the snow at her own mount’s feet.
The enveloping whiteness made it difficult to see anything. Sliding down from her saddle, Sira could just make out Lorn lying beside his fallen hruss. Snow trickled under her hood to wet her neck. She kept a hand on her hruss’s neck to orient herself in the blank whiteness.
“Can you get up?” she asked.
Lorn’s figure shifted a little. “It’s my leg,” he said weakly. “Afraid it’s broken.”
“And your hruss?”
“He severed his hamstring.” There was a painful pause. “I cut his throat.”
Sira’s stomach lurched, but she nodded with respect for Lorn’s quick and merciful action. “I will make a quiru.”
She leaned back against her hruss, her mouth dry, her hand clutching at its mane as her boots slid on the icy ground. They would have to stay here until the snow let up enough to see properly. She had no experience with broken bones, and no confidence in her ability to deal with them. And how would they get down from here?
She pulled her filla from inside her tunic. Taking some snow into her mouth, she waited for it to melt. She squatted by the dead hruss’s body across from Lorn. When her mouth was moist enough, she put the filla to her lips and played until a strong quiru blossomed around them. In its light, and the blessed relief from the white weather effect, she saw Lorn clearly.
His face was gray with pain, though he made no sound. He lay limply against the still-warm body of his hruss. Her own hruss sniffed at the dead one, shifting its feet nervously as it smelled the blood pooling under the poor beast’s head.
Sira untied Lorn’s bedfurs from the back of his saddle and spread them with difficulty, working them under him. Snow fell into the slender quiru, dampening her face as she tried to work. Everything would be wet with melted snow in an hour. The quiru would have to be kept very warm, and Lorn’s leg would require whatever help she could muster. She wondered briefly how they could be found, so far from the traveled road, but thrust that worry aside. More immediate matters required all her concentration.
“Lorn, I will try to ease your pain. I do not know if I can do anything about the leg. Lie as still as possible and let your mind be open.”
The old Singer nodded, gritting his teeth. Sira’s earlier impatience with him dissolved in admiration for the unflinching way he accepted the accident and its consequences.
She began to sing, wordlessly, a simple melody in the first mode. His face smoothed and relaxed almost at once. She took up her filla and played in the second mode, with her eyes closed, trying to see the injured leg. Her psi encountered the chaos of broken bone and torn flesh, and collapsed, unable to go farther. She had almost no idea what to do.
The mountain hruss were heavy creatures, and it seemed Lorn’s had fallen with its full weight on his leg. Sira put her filla back inside her tunic, and dug through Lorn’s saddlepack until she found a large piece of softwood. She took a deep breath, put her hands on the crushed leg, and straightened it with one swift, strong movement.
Lorn gave a long, deep groan, but did not open his eyes. Sira bound the leg to the piece of wood with strips of leather cut from the injured man’s saddle. She felt along it with her hands, hoping it was more or less straight. The bone, she thought, was in bits, one of them breaking through the skin. The pain must be ghastly.
“I am sorry, Singer,” she muttered aloud. “All I can think to do is to try to get you down to the traveled road.”
She sat back on her heels, wet and exhausted and afraid. Around her quiru the whiteness was as blank and forbidding as a solid cliff of ice. Lorn lay quietly against his dead hruss, and her own beast nudged at her anxiously. Sira felt as if she had been in this spot forever.
Thirst and hunger finally moved her to action. She worked her way to her saddlepack and untied it, laying it out on her bedfurs. The hruss whickered at her, and she patted its big shoulder. “Be easy,” she said. “We will not be going anywhere today.”
She cleared a spot of wet snow and set out softwood twigs and a little tinder, and began to try again with the flint and stone.
For the first time, she succeeded. She breathed a prayer of thanks as a curl of smoke, no less white than their surroundings, rose into the quiru. There was a chuckle from Lorn. “Finally got it?” he said through pale lips.
“Finally,” she said. She was inordinately proud of her little fire crackling gently, melting snowflakes as they drifted into it.
“Can’t fix my leg, can you, Cantrix?”
Sira looked sharply at the old man. She had told him nothing of her background. “I am just a Singer,” she said lamely. “Like you.”
Lorn ignored that. His voice was weak as he went on. “Conservatory doesn’t teach that, I guess. It’s bad, though.”
“I am afraid it is bad,” Sira answered. “But I am not a good judge. Without a pukuru, it will be difficult to carry you back to the main road.”
Lorn’s eyes fluttered, and Sira hung her head, feeling useless. What would she do now? Food, she decided, was the first thing. Then she would think, long and hard.
As she busied herself with keftet in her little cooking pot, Lorn roused again. “You’ll have to go back without me.”
Sira shook her head. “You could die here alone, and the pain would be terrible.”
“I may die in any case.”
There was a long silence. Sira made tea, and handed Lorn a cup. She stirred the grain and dried caeru meat over the fire, trying not to burn it this time, adding snow when it looked dry. At last she said, “I will make a sled and pull it behind my hruss.”
Lorn managed another dry chuckle. “You can’t even saddle your own hruss!”
“I can and I did,” Sira reminded him. “When the weather clears, we will go down. Together.”
It sounded simple enough, except that Sira had no idea where they were, or if she would recognized the road if she found it. But she could bear no more deaths on her conscience.
Lorn closed his eyes, submitting. He whispered, “Thanks, Cantrix.”
“Just Singer,” she said, but very quietly.