Child of Flame (Page 165)

They made a silent procession, walking up through the ramparts girded with staffs, torches, and traveling pouches slung over their shoulders. Beor admired the Akka Walking One; Adica recognized his belligerent way of flirting. The Akka woman did not return his admiration. She paid no attention to him at all. Indeed, she seemed most interested in Alain’s black dogs. She had the broad features common to the Akka people and the broad shoulders of a woman who has tackled a lot of reindeer, and it was hard to tell whether she contemplated those dogs with such an avid gaze because they looked fit to serve her, or to be eaten for supper.

Adica made them wait at the base of the highest rampart while she went up alone to dig up the grave of bronze. Six months buried in earth had caused the sword’s metal to fur over with green, and its soul to slumber. But where the starlight’s gleam stroked the blade she felt it waken under her touch, felt it grope upward in the way a hand brushes aside a spider’s web that blocks the entrance to a cave.

War is coming. The sword had a seductive voice. Free me.

She had no spells to counter its angry soul, no way to bind it so that it would slumber again. Perhaps Beor was right. If war was coming, then they had to defend themselves. It wouldn’t be right to leave the village with anything less than what the Cursed Ones themselves carried. Perhaps the conjuring man of Old Fort could study this bronze sword and learn the secrets of its making. Perhaps he could make more such swords. Then the White Deer people would not always fight at a disadvantage.

It still wasn’t easy to give Beor the sword.

“Go,” she said to him. “I must weave the passage, and you must go back to the village.”

He drew her aside, looking restless. “I was a good husband to you, Hallowed One.” He pulled on his right ear, as he often did when he was irritated. “But you never said so.”

He went on without waiting for her reply. “Not that I begrudge you the man. I know he’s not like us. If the Holy One brought him to you, then I’m not one to say ‘nay’ to her wishes, but I won’t have it said that I wasn’t a good husband to you or that I went without protest when the elders made me leave your house.”

“No, you did not go without protest,” she murmured.

That satisfied him enough that he left, halberd and sword held triumphantly before him. She shuddered. Light flashed off the tip of the bronze sword, and for an instant she thought she saw blood. Then she lost sight of him.

“Quick, quick,” said the Akka woman.

“Stand there, to that side.” Adica stationed herself on the chalk calling ground and studied the stars. The passageway to the Akka loom was made most easily when the Ploughing Man’s Eye rose in the east, but there were other, more circuitous routes to every loom just as there were many ways to pattern cloth. It was too late in the evening to catch and hold the threads of the Bounteous One and her swift, shy child, Six Wings. But the Sisters were rising, and their twin lights could be woven in with the scatter of stars known as the Shaman’s Headdress and hooked to the Dipping Cup as it dipped into the north.

She raised the obsidian mirror, caught the light of the gold-haired sister and, by shifting the mirror slightly, the silver hair of her twin. Light caught in the stones. As she wove it in with the other stars, threads flowered to life among the flattened oval of the stones to form a passageway leading to another loom.

She picked up her sack and, with the others behind her, crossed through into a snow as light as feathers, spitting from heavy clouds. They stood on a high plateau composed mostly of boulders tumbled every which way, covered with lichens and mosses and a dusting of snow. The rocky land gave way toward the horizon to heaps of golden stones jutting up like huge tumuli, untouched by snow. No trees gave shelter against the cutting wind. Only the circle of stones and the gleaming hillocks defied the swirling snow. Mountains cut an edge along the eastern horizon. The light was cloudy and gray, lightening with dawn, although Adica could not see the sun.

Their guide trudged away down a path worn into scant earth, more pebbles than soil, and marked out with a trail of chalk that, curiously, was free of snow. Adica hurried after her. Alain took up the rear guard with his dog-headed staff raised and the dogs at his heels. The path cut down through rock that fell by degrees into a steep valley smothered in trees and snow. Winter still lay heavily on this land. After a time, she saw clearings that had been hacked out of the forest. Pigs and deer had made tracks through these snow-drenched clearings. Otherwise they were a featureless white.

Down by the valley’s mouth, near the arm of water that bounded the lowest reaches of the valley, rock corrals penned in reindeer. Three boats draped with felt rode high on logs, upturned above the shoreline. A half-dozen smaller, sleeker skiffs lay drawn up on the rocky beach. Ice rimmed the shallows, but the deep waters lay as smooth as glass, unfrozen despite the bone-chilling cold.