Dust of Dreams
Onrack turned his attention back to Udinaas and Silchas Ruin, and saw that they were now walking towards him, side by side, and the Imass could read well enough Udinaas’s battered spirit, his fugue of despair.
No, nothing good was on its way here.
He heard the scrabble behind him as the emlava reached the point where the trail they’d taken would move them out of Onrack’s line of sight, and both animals bolted to escape his imagined attention. But he had no interest in calling them back. He never did. The beasts were simply too stupid to take note of that.
Elders sat on boulders and watched the camp and all their kin going about their tasks, and they dreamed of the hidden places and the pathways that opened in the fever of droning voices and drumming and swirling scenes painted on torch-lit stone, deep in the seethe of night when spirits blossomed before the eyes in myriad colours, when the patterns rose to the surface and floated and flowed in the smoky air.
The hunt and the feast, the gathering and the shaping. Days and nights, births and deaths, laughter and grief, tales told and retold, the mind within unfolding to reveal itself like a gift to every kin, every warm, familiar face.
In the camp behind him, his beloved mate, Kilava, reclined on heaps of soft furs, only days away from giving birth to their second child. Shoulder-women brought her wooden bowls filled with fat, delicious grubs still steaming from the hot flat-rocks lining the hearths. And cones of honey and pungent teas of berry and bark. They fed her continuously and would do so until her labour pains began, to give her the strength and reserves she would need.
He recalled the night he and Kilava went to the home of Seren Pedac, in that strange, damaged city of Letheras. To hear of Trull Sengar’s death had been one of the hardest moments of Onrack’s life. But to find himself standing before his friend’s widow had proved even more devastating. Setting eyes upon her, he had felt himself collapse inside and he had wept, beyond any consolation, and he had-some time later-wondered at Seren’s fortitude, her preternatural calm, and he had told himself that she must have gone through her own grief in the days and nights immediately following her love’s murder. She had watched him weep with sorrow in her eyes but no tears. She’d made tea, then, methodical in its preparation, while Onrack huddled inside the embrace of Kilava’s arms.
Had Onrack been there, in the blood-splashed arena of sand, Trull’s back would not have been unguarded. The murderer would never have succeeded in his act of brutal treachery. And Trull Sengar would have lived to see his own child growing in Seren Pedac’s belly, would have witnessed, in awe and wonder, that glow of focused inwardness in the expression of the Acquitor. No male could know such a sense of completeness, of course, for she had become a vessel of that continuity, an icon of hope and optimism for the future world.
Oh, if Trull could have witnessed that-no one deserved it more, after all the battles, the wounds, the ordeals and the vast solitude that Onrack could never pierce-so many betrayals and yet he had stood unbowed and had given of himself all that he could. No, there had been nothing fair in this.