Karluk · Bearclaw Territory, Frost Fang Highlands
1716
That spring Karluk’s son turned five months old and had just found out how loud he could be. Karluk had named him Detta. When Senna asked why, he said only that it had been a friend’s name and she did not ask again. He had spent those five months watching the boy breathe. He still wondered how anyone could hand something so small to a man who knew so little. The bow leaned against the tent pole. The boy had the lower end of it in both fists and was pulling with all his small furious strength at wood that would not bend.
“He wants the bow,” Senna said from the tent flap.
“He cannot have the bow.”
“Then you’d better explain that to him.”
Karluk pried the fingers loose one at a time. Each one clenched on empty air the moment it came free. He set his son back on the hide. The boy reached for the bow again.
“He’ll be difficult.”
Senna sat down beside them. “He’s yours. What did you expect?”
Sunlight lay warm across the hide at their feet. The breeze through the flap carried smoke from a cooking fire and the wet smell of thawing ground. When Senna offered the boy her finger, his angry cries died away. It was a good morning, and Karluk knew it. Two years ago, he could not have imagined such a life.
Those two years had given him a wife and a son. They also left him responsible for the two hundred and seventeen people on the eastern flat. His mother Ysolde and his sister Mira lived with Torg now at the outpost four days north where the grazing was better. His brother had hired a wagon to take them there and sent word after they were settled. At nineteen Torg wanted his own herd more than a place beside his brother’s fire. Karluk had argued with him about it for a week afterward before he admitted that a man was entitled to pursue what he wanted.
Karluk was on the last days of the western trail when it happened. The path followed Bearclaw’s western border and took about three weeks. Wherever he rode in the tribe’s name, he settled small quarrels over grazing and reminded the neighbors that somebody was paying attention. Borgün sent him because he was good at it. Lately the neighbors had started asking for Karluk by name, and neither of them talked about that.
He rode back into the main camp under a clear afternoon sky. Talk died ahead of him and people who saw him coming found reasons to turn away. At the drying racks a woman stopped turning a hide halfway and did not look up. He remembered that silence from the day Senna was taken.
Rulf came toward him faster than Karluk had ever seen him move. Karluk got off his horse to meet him.
“The outpost,” Rulf said. “Six days ago.”
Karluk stared at him. “How many?”
“Eleven taken and four dead. One of the dead was Vorlan’s boy.”
Rulf’s mouth tightened.
“They took your mother and sister. Your brother went after them and they took him too.”
The horse shifted behind Karluk and its bit clinked. When he put a hand on its neck, the hide was damp and warm under his palm. Rulf kept talking. His voice seemed to come from somewhere past the tents.
“Senna and the child were here the whole time,” Rulf said. “They’re safe.”
“Which tribe?”
“Karluk.”
“Which tribe?”
“Uhrs.”
Karluk smelled wet earth under a stretched hide and heard a guard shift his weight at the edge of the pit. For a moment he was fourteen again. Somewhere above him a man hummed the same few notes through his nose. Boys went up out of that pit one at a time to be traded for horses and nobody ever told the ones left in the dark where they had gone. His hand stayed on the horse’s neck. The sunlight had not changed but he could no longer feel it.
Three hundred men would have followed him if he asked Borgün for them. Instead, Karluk sat on a saddle at the end of the horse line for more than two hours while the camp gave him room. Behind him the horses ate the grass. The saddle smelled of old sweat and leather.
He worked it through. Six days. A raiding party slowed by eleven captives might make twelve miles a day if it drove them hard without driving them into the ground. That put the raiders somewhere between forty and seventy miles off. They would be heading northeast into Uhrs country, the broken heights between the Barak line and the Frost Fang Peaks. He knew six routes a party that size could use. The spring floods had closed two of them.
In the second hour his knuckles went white on the edge of the saddle. When he loosened his grip, his fingers ached. At least he knew where that pain came from. His mother was fifty-one and her hip had gotten worse every winter for the last three years. He had watched her get up from the fire in stages with one hand braced on whatever was nearest. She always scolded anyone who moved to help her. She could not walk twelve miles in a day. Every number he worked out assumed the captives were still setting the pace. He saw the flaw in that from the start, and for two hours he would not let himself follow it to the end.
He went back to the routes.
Borgün came at dusk, when the light along the horse line had gone blue. He did not offer any comfort, and Karluk was grateful. “You’ll want men. How many?”
“Twenty.”
Borgün’s eyebrows went up. “You took eighty into Kelgrim’s valley.”
“I knew Kelgrim’s territory. These men are moving through country I haven’t seen since I was fifteen. Twenty good riders can cover ninety miles in three days. With eighty I’d be waiting on the slowest horse every morning.”
“And when you find them?”
“Then I’ll have twenty men against whatever they have.” Karluk worked a strap between his fingers. “I can’t tell you how I’m going to be able to bring them back but I’m going after them.”
Borgün looked at him and said nothing. Farther down the line a horse stamped against its tether.
“The Uhrs took my father before I was born,” he said. “When he came home, almost two years later. Everyone who’d known him said he wasn’t the same person afterward. Nobody would ever tell me what they meant.” He paused. “I still wonder whether they kept it from me for his sake or for mine.”
Karluk’s fingers went still on the strap. He had nothing to say to that.
“Take thirty,” Borgün said at last. “Ten carry provisions so the other twenty can ride light.”
“Borgün.”
“You know I’m right or you’d have argued already.” He turned toward the camp. “Rulf goes with you. When he refuses, tell him I said so.”
“He won’t refuse.”
“He’ll refuse for four minutes to keep his dignity. Then he’ll pack.”
He had gone only a few paces when he stopped.
“Bring back whoever you can, Karluk.” He waited until Karluk met his eyes. “However many that is, and come home yourself. I’ve buried enough men this year who rode out after someone else.”
Senna found him packing by moonlight. She did not ask him for any promises. He was glad of that. It was one less way to fail her.
“How long?”
“If I catch them in two weeks, I’ll come home then.”
“And if you don’t?”
His hands stopped on the saddle strap. “I keep going.”
He made himself turn to face her. She stood just inside the flap with her face pale in the thin light.
“If they go past the Barak line I’ll follow them. I can’t name a day when I’ll turn around.”
“I know.”
“You won’t argue?”
“I argued about Torg’s herd.” Her jaw tightened. “I told you to let him keep it. You listened to me and this happened anyway.”
She looked over at the sleeping boy.
“I keep thinking there must be somewhere I could put him that nobody could ever reach. I know there isn’t. Thinking about it won’t help.”
On the hide the boy flung out one fist at the sound of her voice and settled again. Karluk waited while she steadied herself.
Her hands closed on the front of his coat. “I won’t argue about you going. But I’m angry that you get to do something while I stay here and wait. I didn’t choose that, Karluk. Don’t expect me to bear it sweetly.”
He covered her hands with his. “I never have.”
Her mouth trembled. It was not a smile. “Then come back to me.” Her grip tightened. “And don’t be gone for too long that I spend the rest of my life waiting.”
He pulled her in and held her until her hands loosened. Her hair smelled of the cooking fire, familiar enough to hurt. Four feet away their son slept with both fists closed.
Rulf refused for four minutes and then packed.
Yassa was not among the thirty. He came to the horse line after dark, when the animals were blowing and shifting against their tethers in the cold. “Thirty men,” he said. “And you couldn’t find a place for me?”
“You’re needed here.”
“Then give me a reason worth staying for.”
“Borgün’s keeping forty men in camp. If trouble comes while I’m beyond the Barak line, you’re the one they’ll listen to.” Karluk bent over the saddle again. “That’s the reason, Yassa.”
“Any man here can hold your place for a month. With you there’s usually another reason.”
The leather scraped as Karluk pulled a strap tight. Yassa dropped his voice and the anger in it got sharper.
“You’ve barely said a word since Rulf told you. You stood in front of the whole camp and took it. Then you sat out here for two hours while everyone pretended not to watch. Now you’re riding after your mother and leaving me behind! Who’s going to tell you when you’re being an idiot?”
“You want me to say I’d rather have you with me?”
“I want you to say something, brother!” Yassa stepped in front of him. “I used to know when you were grieving and when you were planning. Now I can’t tell.”
Karluk stood beside the half-strapped saddle with a man he loved waiting for an answer. He could not tell the difference himself anymore, and he did not know how to say it. Ever since Rulf said the Uhrs took his family, every thought of the road ahead had pulled him back to the pit and the hide stretched over it. If he started talking about it, he was afraid it would put him back in that pit for all eighteen months of it. Yassa waited long enough for him to say it. Karluk could not.
“When I get back,” he said.
“You call that an answer?”
“It’s a promise.” Karluk pulled the strap through its buckle. “You’ll have the answer when I get back.”
Yassa watched his hands for a moment. Then he stepped away.
“I’ll hold you to it.”
Karluk listened to his footsteps go off into the dark.
They rode out an hour before dawn. Past Bearclaw’s northern border the good grass gave way to gray slopes. The thirty had to pick their way up them one horse at a time. Hooves clattered wherever the soil thinned to bare rock. The wind coming down off the heights smelled of old snow.
At midday on the second day they found a fire someone had covered carelessly with earth. The ground around it was churned where a party had stopped to shift captives between horses. Karluk crouched and pushed a finger into the ash. It was dry all the way down.
“Five days ahead,” Rulf said. “Maybe four.”
“Four. They’ve been taking their time.” Karluk studied the trampled ground. “Most raiders spend the first three days putting distance behind them. These aren’t hurried.”
“They don’t expect anyone to follow.”
“No.”
“Should that please us?”
Karluk wiped the ash on his thigh. “It means they’re right about most people.” He mounted and turned northeast.
By the third day the high country had closed in around them, and the trails ran over ground too hard to hold a hoofprint for long. Meltwater ran loud and gray in every gully. Twice they lost the trail and spent a full day finding it again.
On the ninth day the trail climbed across a slope of loose stone below a cliff, and a horse plunged through it. Its rider threw himself clear. The animal went down screaming with its leg folded sideways under it. When it tried to rise, broken bone drove out through the hide. Blood darkened the pale stones.
The rider had raised that horse from a foal. He killed it himself and did not speak for the rest of the day. After that they led the horses over bad ground. It cost them four miles and killed three more animals. Karluk had kept them in the saddle on ground like this because every day counted against his mother, and a horse had paid for it.
The cold worked through their gloves. One man could no longer feel his fingers well enough to feel his grip. He knotted the reins around his wrist and said nothing about it. Karluk saw it and had nothing to give him but another day in the saddle. Thirty men were following him into country none of them would have chosen. Not one of them asked when the hunt would end. Their silence was harder to bear than any complaint.
On the eleventh night Rulf sat down beside him at the fire. Smoke stung Karluk’s eyes, but he kept his hands close to the heat.
“You’ve stopped talking again.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Counting,” Rulf said. “You walk the horse line twice before you sit down. You’ve done it every night for a week.”
He nudged a charred branch with his boot and uncovered a seam of red under the ash.
“How far behind?”
“Three days. Maybe less.”
“Better than four.”
“Better than four,” Karluk said.
He watched the flame catch along the branch while he fought his way toward the words. Rulf was the only man on the mountain he could bear to tell, and even so they came out flat.
“It’s the second week,” he said. “My mother is fifty-one.”
Rulf did not answer. The branch burned through in the middle and dropped into the coals in two pieces. They sat there until the fire burned low. Then Rulf went to check on horses that did not need checking and left Karluk alone with the embers.
At first light they rode northeast into higher ground. After that night he could no longer say how far behind they were. Each scrap of trail gave him just enough to choose where to look next, and the country kept climbing.
It took them forty-seven more days.