Karluk · The Suhkt River, Frost Fang Highlands
1714
It was midsummer and the Suhkt River still ran cold enough to stop a man’s breath. Snowmelt from the peaks fed the river in every season. Down on the lower slopes warmth lingered among the pines and the soft air could make a man forget for an afternoon what waited above the treeline. The river ran fast and iron-gray between the stones. Karluk learned long ago to distrust its smooth stretches. Beneath the surface the current could sweep his legs out from under him before he found a foothold. He waded across where the channel split around a gravel bar. The current shoved at his knees with a cold that went straight into the bone, and by the time he climbed the far bank he could barely feel his feet.
His boots were no help. They were poor boots even two winters ago when he took them off a dead man near the Barak border. He had mended the left toe four times since. Now the sole was opening again. Grit came in with every step. He sat beneath a pine and poured the water out of them. The air smelled of resin over the wet leather. Down the bank the river churned against the stones without pause.
He was twenty-two. He had lived alone in these mountains on and off for the better part of six years and he no longer resented his situation. Water was everywhere. Everything else had to be worked for and one mistake could kill him. He had gone three days without a fire.
Dry tinder stayed wrapped inside his coat. He had not seen a single Bearclaw scout in six days and that bothered him more than his feet did. Somewhere in these woods men were watching smoke. He wanted this tribe to take him in but he needed to learn how they guarded their ground before he approached it. He ate a strip of dried meat tough enough to make his jaw ache and a handful of sour berries from above the treeline. Afterward he climbed to a place where the pines thinned just enough to show him the valley and still conceal him.
Karluk had spent six years learning what happened to men who walked into a tribe’s territory carrying nothing but need and a hopeful expression. The answer was nothing good or occasionally nothing at all. So he watched. He counted their hunting parties and learned the rhythm of people going about their days. The trails mattered too. He marked which ones they favored and which they’d stopped using. Six days of watching had told him more about the Bearclaw tribe than a month of asking questions ever would have.
The Bearclaws were doing well. That mattered. A tribe scraping through a bad season had no room for a stranger. A tribe with full smoke-racks and unhurried hunters might.
Below him, four figures were following a deer trail. One of the hunters crouched beside a boy and pointed at a print in the mud. The boy reached for it too fast. The man steadied his wrist and showed him where to look. When the boy finally saw it, the hunter nodded. Karluk watched them longer than he meant to.
His father had never taught him to track. He had taught him to count, though. From the time Karluk could walk, his father stood him at the fold gate every evening to count the herd in, and a boy who came up one short went back out into the dark until he found it. Karluk was nine when his father died. His father was a minor chieftain who trusted a man to guard his door, but one winter night that man opened it.
The tribes moved through the Highlands all summer and returned to familiar ground in autumn. At the winter sites they built low longhouses of timber and sod, half sunk into the slopes. Plank floors covered narrow crawl spaces above the frozen earth. The chieftain’s family had the largest dwelling. Southerners called such places halls and the tribes never bothered to correct them.
His mother pushed him under the floor when she heard the killers come in. The crawl space smelled of damp soil. A split between the planks gave him four inches of the room to see. Boots passed over that narrow strip of light and a coat brushed the boards close enough for him to hear the scrape of its hem. Then a hand slapped down flat beside the gap.
The middle finger ended at the second knuckle. Its stump had been worn smooth and pale by years of use. He heard what followed. He had never forgotten the sound of it. Nor had he forgotten that he kept his mouth shut the whole time because she told him to be quiet.
Within a year the killers’ faces began to blur. He’d tried to remember at low moments, only to be met with the vague shape of a man pinning his mother down. The sound she made being forced on the ground while bearing the pain of what was being done to her was something he remembered clearly. The hand took no effort to remember. A scar could disappear beneath a sleeve. The owner of that hand could reach for something, and it would be noticeable.
The men who had followed Karluk’s father for ten years accepted another chieftain within a week. For a long time, that was harder to understand than the killing. Nobody argued over what had happened. Men who had eaten at his father’s fire went back to their horses. Whatever they thought of the new arrangement it did not stop them from living under it.
His mother Ysolde was never formally driven out. Nor were his sister Mira and his brother Torg. The family simply stopped being included. Nobody called for them when a hunting party gathered. When meat ran short, their share was the first to vanish. Staying offered no advantage over leaving.
They hunted their own food after that. Karluk learned the bow because it was the only weapon a boy could manage that might put food in a pot. He learned the way a starving child learned anything, tough and fast without anyone to guide him. His first kill was a grouse at eleven paces. He missed it four times before hitting it. By twelve he could hit a running hare. The winter after that, he kept four people fed while two families in the valley below them starved.
The Uhrs tribe kidnapped him at fourteen. It happened during a raid on a small village and Karluk wasn’t even from that village. He walked down to trade hides and had the bad luck to be standing in the wrong spot when riders came in at a gallop. They took seven boys that day. He was fifth in line and second oldest.
The Uhrs kept him for eighteen months. At night the prisoners were packed into a pit with a hide stretched over the opening. The pit stank of wet clay and too many boys. A guard sat at the edge. The boy who taught Karluk to tell the guards apart was named Detta.
He was the oldest of the seven, a potter’s son a year older than Karluk and half a head shorter. He never kept a thought to himself. On the first night he lay on his back in the dark and the younger boys wept into their knees while he remembered the guards by the sounds they made overhead. One hummed through his nose. The other sat down heavily and did not move again until his relief came. Detta said that one would sell a boy water if he had something to trade and kick it out of his hands if he didn’t.
“How do you know?” Karluk asked.
“I’ve been listening.” Detta sounded pleased with himself. “You should try it.”
Karluk had not had a friend since he was nine. There was his brother and after that the bow. He did not know what to do with a boy who talked to him like a friend. For the first month he said almost nothing back. Detta never seemed to care.
One night Detta said something so foolish about the heavy guard’s wife that Karluk laughed aloud. It was a short one in the dark. The guard’s weight shifted on the hide above them and both boys lay rigid until it settled again. Then Detta laughed beside him in silence for a long time.
By day there was always work. He hauled whatever the Uhrs told him to and dug until his palms split. When they put him with the horses, he learned which riders trusted their animals enough to leave the reins loose while they talked. At night he told Detta what he saw. Detta lay thinking about it in the dark and asked the questions Karluk never thought to ask himself.
Nobody bothered to hide the operations of the camp from a slave. Karluk watched how they moved. He learned who made the decisions as opposed to who looked like they did. The loudest man was usually easy to avoid. Avoiding the quiet one beside him took more care.
The watches taught him as much. Men who wanted to be noticed never volunteered for the boring watch, so the boring watch was always thin. The dull stretches went to whoever was left. Those men rarely lingered once their relief was due. Nothing had gone wrong at those posts in twenty years and the men who held them no longer expected anything to.
The Uhrs understood that thirst could make a boy surrender. During Karluk’s first summer in the pit, a captive taken in another raid told the heavy guard that the boy beside him had hidden a cord under his bedding. The informer was given water that night while the other boy was dragged to the horse lines and beaten until he could no longer stand. Afterward, no one in the pit kept secrets.
By the second winter, only Karluk and Detta were left of the seven. The rest were traded away for horses one at a time and the pit was never told where they went. Detta knew everything Karluk knew by then. He knew which gap in the watch Karluk was waiting for and when it would come. A word of it to the heavy guard would have kept him in water until spring. He went thirsty with the rest.
His father had trusted a man and it got him killed. Karluk had trusted no one outside his own family since. He lay beside Detta in the dark that winter wondering when that had changed.
Detta talked about the sea. A trader had come through the village with salt fish from the coast. Detta never forgot the man’s story of water that ran all the way to the edge of the sky and did not stop. He wanted to see it. He said so often enough that the others groaned whenever he began, back when there were others. Karluk never did. Some nights he lay awake afterward trying to picture it.
One night, a winter change of watch left the gap they were waiting for. They went out together under the edge of the hide where the frost had lifted a stake. Then they went across the horse lines while the new man was still settling into his furs. No one noticed they were gone until morning.
They ran for two days. They stopped once for an hour and sat back-to-back in a hollow under a fallen spruce. Detta whispered about the fish he would eat when they reached the coast until Karluk told him to be quiet. Detta laughed at being told.
On the second afternoon, they reached the Suhkt River. It had not frozen. The current ran too fast for ice to seal it and black water cut between shelves of snow along the banks. The men behind them had horses. Karluk knew they could not afford to search for an easier crossing. He found a place where the river divided around a gravel bar.
“I’ll go first.”
Detta gave him a thin smile. “Wasn’t going to argue.”
Karluk stepped into the water. The cold seized his legs so violently that his breath caught in his throat. By the time he reached the gravel bar his feet had begun to feel numb. He turned. Detta followed. The first channel took him only to the knees. The second looked calmer. Karluk knew better than to trust calm water.
“Stay left,” he called.
Detta nodded and took another step. The river tore his feet out from under him.
“Detta!”
Karluk lunged back into the current and caught him by the collar before the water could drag him downstream. Detta struck the shallows hard, coughing as Karluk hauled him toward the far bank. They climbed out together and Detta sank onto the stones. He was soaked to the neck. Water ran from his hair and sleeves. His hands shook so badly that he could not close them properly.
Karluk shoved one hand inside his pelt. Dry tinder that he had carried for two days. One spark under a little shelter would give enough flame to save a wet boy from the mountain cold. He pulled it free.
Detta stared at his hand. “They’ll see it, from the ridge.”
Karluk did not answer.
“They’ll see the smoke.” Detta’s teeth knocked together between the words.
“I know.”
Karluk opened the tinder bundle and Detta caught his wrist. Karluk felt how cold Detta’s hands were.
“Put it away.”
“Let go!”
“They’ll find us.”
“You can barely speak!”
Detta tried to laugh. It came out as a broken breath. “I’ve sounded worse.”
Karluk reached for the tinder again. Detta closed Karluk’s fingers over it.
“Put it away.”
Karluk looked at him. Detta’s lips had begun to pale.
“I’m warm enough,” he said.
Karluk glanced back at the ridge. Then he put the tinder back inside his pelt.
They moved until dark. By then Detta stumbled more often than he walked. Karluk kept an arm beneath his shoulder and dragged him whenever his legs failed. They finally found shelter beneath the cover of a boulder. No fire and no dry clothes. Only stone and the wind scraping across the mountainside. Karluk stripped off his outer coat and wrapped it around Detta over the boy’s own.
“Closer.”
“I am close.”
“Closer.” Detta moved against him.
His whole body shook and Karluk held him through it. The shivers came hard enough to rattle Detta’s teeth against one another. They weakened. After a while they returned. Karluk kept talking about the sea or the coast whenever Detta grew quiet. Detta would respond. Later, he only listened.
Sometime before dawn the shivering stopped. Karluk felt his body against him. Detta was warmer now. That had to be good.
Karluk tightened both coats around him and stayed awake as long as he could. He closed his eyes.
At first light, he nudged Detta’s shoulder. “Detta, get up.”
No answer. Karluk tried again and shook him a little harder. His head rolled against the stone. Detta did not wake.
For a long while he just sat there with one hand still on Detta’s shoulder. The ground was too hard to dig. Karluk covered him with stones and went on alone. He had never once considered those eighteen months wasted.
A scream came up from the deer trail. Karluk was moving down the ridge at a dead sprint, bow already off his shoulder. The hunters had been caught beside a shallow fold in the ground that could not be seen from the trail until a man stepped out of it. Their attackers had come through that hollow while the party’s attention was on the tracks. Uhrs. Karluk recognized the cut of those leather coats.
The man who had been teaching the boy was down. A spear stood through his thigh. The shaft dragged in the mud as he struggled backward on his elbows. The raider over him had let go of the spear and was drawing a knife. The boy stood in the open with his hands held out from his sides. He could not have been older than nine.
Forty yards. Karluk broke stride just long enough to draw. The raider raised his knife and Karluk shot an arrow before it came down. The arrow struck under the raised arm and went in badly. Screaming, the man folded sideways and clawed at the shaft. Karluk was already reaching for the next arrow.
A swordsman turned toward the trees to find the bowman. He was searching high for a man standing among the trunks. Karluk was lower on the slope and closing fast. He drew. The swordsman saw him just as he released. The arrow took him in the throat and his sword dropped. His hands rose to the shaft before his knees gave out.
The last raider was circling toward the other hunters. He saw his companions drop and ran for the trees. Karluk followed far enough for a clear line. At twenty-five yards he planted his foot and put an arrow into the man’s upper back. The raider fell face-first onto the trail where they had laid their ambush. For a moment the woods held nothing but Karluk’s own breathing.
Then the first man tried to get up. The arrow under his arm would kill him slowly. Karluk could hear it in his breath. There was no reason to leave him struggling. He drew his knife and knelt.
The wounded man found his eyes and stopped clawing at the arrow. Karluk had not killed with a knife in more than a year. The bow kept a stretch of ground between him and the man he struck. Here he could smell the stale sweat in the man’s collar and feel breath warm against his wrist. His hand was less steady than it was on the bowstring.
He finished it quickly. Blood ran hot over his knuckles and down his wrist. Then he wiped the blade on the dead man’s sleeve and stood. He came toward the hunters with an arrow nocked and the bow held low. He stopped at a reasonable distance.
The wounded tracker had gone the color of old snow. He gripped the spear shaft with one hand and kept reaching for the boy with the other. The boy was shaking too hard to take it. The two unhurt hunters had their weapons pointed at Karluk. He would have done the same.
“I’m not with the Uhrs,” he said. He kept his voice low and unhurried. It carried without being raised. “I’ve been following your party since midday.”
Neither weapon moved.
“He needs that leg bound with the spear left in for your healer,” Karluk went on. “And carry the boy. He won’t walk far like that.”
The older hunter had gray in his beard and half an ear missing. He kept his spear on Karluk while the other man crouched beside the tracker. The boy made a small furious effort to stop trembling.
“There’s no shame in it,” Karluk told him.
The older hunter looked at the bodies, then back at Karluk’s bow. “Three arrows.” He said it slow and blunt. “Three men.”
“The first shot was poor. I finished him with a knife.”
The hunter studied him more closely and waited for the boast that never came. “You could have stayed on the ridge.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Karluk glanced at the wounded man. “Ask me while we carry him.”
For another moment the spear stayed between them. Then the hunter lowered its point. “Borgün will want to see you. Before he decides whether to thank you or ask why you’ve been following his people.”
“Then take me to him. I’d rather explain myself once to someone who matters.”
“He may have enough questions for all of us.”
Karluk slid the arrow back into his quiver. They bound the leg and lashed a litter out of long branches. The older hunter gathered the boy against him and murmured to him too low for Karluk to hear. Karluk took one end of the litter while the other hunter took the second. They left the dead where they lay.
The Bearclaw camp occupied a broad hollow where two streams met. As they came in Karluk counted some sixty tents with more beyond the horse line. Fish hung beside venison on the smoke-racks and the tethering ground was kept clear of dung. Children ran between the cooking fires. That told him more than the full racks did. A camp that let so many children run around had not been worried in a long time.
People stopped to stare at the litter. Some stared at him. He knew what they saw. His left boot gaped at every step and there was dried blood along his forearm. The bow across his back showed more use than care. He stood half a head taller than most of the men he passed. His black hair was tied back with a string. It was his eyes that caught their attention. They were pale enough to look almost colorless in some light and in camp after camp they earned him the same lingering stare.
Men came forward to take the litter. Karluk gave his end and followed the older hunter toward the central fire. Borgün was shorter than Karluk expected. He was also the only man there who made no effort to show his rank. People moved aside as he came. The argument over where to carry the wounded man stopped long enough for him to hear the report. He was perhaps fifty. He had a compact build and gray through his beard. A knife rode at his right hip with a strap across the hilt.
Borgün looked toward the far end of the camp. “Take him to her.”
The healer was already on her way. Someone fetched her before the chieftain gave the order. She looked at the spear wound and said, “Keep that end level.”
The bearers obeyed. When one tried to explain what the argument was about, she pointed at the path and walked ahead of them. Karluk remembered a woman like her from his father’s camp. She would tend the wound and say words over it. If the man died in the night, she would be called back to sit with his family and tell them what the dead required of the living. People talked about such women as though their work began and ended with herbs. He knew how much a camp leaned on their words when the herbs failed.
Borgün laid a hand on the back of the boy’s head and turned him toward his mother gently. She came forward to take him, and only when they were gone did the chieftain face Karluk. “Rulf says you corrected him about your first shot.”
The gray-bearded hunter was sitting by the fire. Karluk put a name to the face.
“He hadn’t asked,” Borgün added.
“It seemed worth telling him.”
“Why? The man was dead.”
“He was judging my shooting. It wasn’t a clean kill.”
Borgün watched him across the fire. Resin cracked in the wood and threw a spray of sparks past Karluk’s knees. “Most men would have let him believe it.”
“He had eyes.”
“Eyes don’t always stop a man from lying.”
Rulf made a low sound into his beard. Borgün did not look at him.
“You look like you’ve lived a rough life.”
“I have.”
“Where did you learn to shoot?” His gaze moved to the bow.
“My father died when I was nine and we had no place left in our tribe. After that I hunted for my family bringing home whatever I could.”
“Rulf says you knew the raiders. How well do you know the Uhrs?”
“They kidnapped me when I was fourteen and kept me eighteen months.”
The fire snapped again. Meat was cooking beyond it, and the warmth was starting to bring an ache back into Karluk’s feet.
“You got away,” Borgün said.
“Eventually.”
“Few do.”
“They’re less careful than they think.” Karluk held the older man’s gaze. “I learned where they put their watches and which men could be trusted to sleep through them. I learned who actually gave the orders and who only looked like he did. That’s what I have to offer.”
“And now you’d sell what you learned.”
“I’d put it to use. Keeping it to myself won’t do me any good.”
“Where’s your family?”
“Two valleys east. They have enough to eat.”
“Without you?”
The question hit harder than Karluk expected. “My brother can hunt for himself now. My sister helps my mother with the herds.” He paused. “I stayed while they needed me and left when they didn’t.”
Borgün said nothing for a while. Around them, the camp went back to its business. A child shouted beyond the horse line. Near the tents two women were disputing the price of salt and neither lowered her voice in the chieftain’s presence. Karluk kept his hands where Borgün could see them. His stomach growled at the smell of the meat.
“Bearclaw doesn’t take in every wanderer who kills a few raiders and asks nicely,” Borgün said.
“I’m not asking. I’m telling you what I’m worth. What you do with it is yours to decide.”
“Hmph.” Borgün’s mouth twitched under his beard.
“Get him fed and find him a place to sleep,” he told Rulf. “We’ll know his worth soon enough.”
He turned away, then stopped. “Men who talk that plainly sometimes turn out to be exactly what they claim. The liars are more trouble.”
“Which one do you think I am?”
Borgün looked back. “I think you spent six days watching my hunters before you showed yourself. You would have spent six more if the Uhrs hadn’t shown.”
Karluk did not move.
“That doesn’t answer your question,” Borgün said. “It gives me a better one.”
He walked away without saying what it was. Karluk watched him go between the tents. He thought about the six days he had believed himself unseen and went back over them. He searched each one for a movement in the pines or a scout he might have mistaken for a deer. There was nothing.
Rulf touched his arm and nodded at the cooking fire. “Come. You can watch him just as well with a bowl in your hand.”
Someone put a wooden bowl of hot broth into his hands. Pieces of venison floated in it. The wood warmed his fingers before he remembered to loosen his grip. He meant to ask the woman’s name, but she was already turning to fill another. He remembered her cheerful smile. Rulf showed him to a low shelter beside the cooking place. Inside stood a sleeping pallet on a timber frame with room underneath for his boots.
For the first time in six years someone had offered Karluk a roof instead of taking one. He stepped under it with the bowl held close. The broth was hot enough to scald his mouth. He ate it standing where he could see every path out of camp.