Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“I heard how you slew the terrible bison,” Tamberly told Red Wolf. “That was valiantly done.”—the more so when, in his mind, it must have been possessed by a malignant spirit.

“I had help,” he said, not modestly but matter-of-factly. He grinned. “By myself, I do not always win. Maybe you can teach me how to make a fox trap that works. Mine never do. I wonder if somehow I once offended the Father of Foxes. Toddling around as a baby, did I leave my sign on top of his?” The grin became a laugh.

He can joke about the unknown, Tamberly heard herself think. Damn, I believe I’m going to like him. No doubt I shouldn’t, but I believe I’ll have to.

She mounted her timecycle, projected a map with a coordinate grid, set her destination, touched the activator. Immediately the dome was gone from around her and she back at her old campsite. Locking the controls, though neither man nor beast would come so near so alien an object in the next few hours, she started off afoot.

Sky and sea reached steely gray, sunless. Even over distance and against the wind she could hear how surf crashed on Beringia and tore at it. The wind skirled across dead grass, dark moss, bare shrubs and trees, strewn boulders, out of a north where darkness had engulfed the horizon. Cold laved her face and searched for any opening in her clothes. The season’s first blizzard was on its way southward.

Lifetimes of feet had beaten the path she found and took. It led her down into the gulch. Depth walled off most wind, but the river, engorged by high tide, foamed dirty white. She reached the bluff, now barely above that violence, where three stone huts huddled by a spring.

Somebody must have spied her through the dwarf alder, for as she arrived, Aryuk pulled aside the bundled wattles that served him for a door, crawled forth, and rose. He gripped a hand ax. His shoulders were stooped under a carrion skin. Between mane and beard she saw a haggardness that shocked her.

“Ar-Aryuk, my friend—” she stammered.

He stared at her a long time, as if trying to remember or understand what she was. When he spoke, she could hardly make out the mumble in the roar of river and surf. “We heard you have come back. Not to Us.”

“No, I—” She reached toward him. He flinched before he stood his ground. She lowered her arm. “Aryuk, yes, I stay with the Mammoth Slayers, but only because I need to. I am not of them. I want to help you.”

He eased a little—less in relief, she thought, than yielding to his weariness. “True, Ulungu said you were kind to him and his sons when they were there. You gave them the Lovely Sweet.” He meant chocolate. In earlier days she had perforce handed it around very rarely. Else a van-sized Patrol vehicle couldn’t have brought enough.

She recalled the dull gratitude of those who no longer hoped. God damn it, I will not cry. “I have Lovely Sweet for you and everybody here. First, though,” since Aryuk had made no move to invite her in, not that she really wanted to enter the hovel, “why did you not come too, this moon?”

It had been the probable last month until spring for the We to bring tribute. After encountering the Bubbling Springs folk, she’d been glad she was away in the field when others appeared. What consolation she could offer was so tiny, and she hadn’t slept that whole night. However, she had asked Corwin to inform her of Aryuk’s advent. She couldn’t forbear to meet him. If need be, she’d hop a few days downtime. But he never showed.

’The Mammoth Slayers are angry,” she warned. “I told them I would find out what the trouble is. Do you mean to go soon? I fear a storm is about to strike.”

The shaggy head drooped. “We cannot go. We have nothing to bring.”

She tautened. “Why?”

“At the fall gathering I told everybody that I did not think we would,” Aryuk said in the rambling Tula fashion, but with none of the Tula liveliness. “Ulungu is a true friend. After he and his sons had made their own last trip, they came to see if they could help us. That was when I learned you had joined the Tall Man.”

Oh, God, how betrayed you must have felt.

“They could do nothing, for we ourselves had done nothing,” Aryuk went on. “I told them they should go home and care for their women and children. This has been a hard summer. Fish, shellfish, small game, everything was scant. We went hungry because we must spend time getting things and traveling for the Mammoth Slayers. Others suffered too, but the new hooks and spears helped. They are not much use here, where schools of fish and the seal that prey on them seldom pass by.” Shoal water in the estuary, currents, something like that, Tamberly guessed. “We must make ready for winter. If we worked any more for the Mammoth Slayers, we would starve.”

Aryuk raised his head. His eyes met hers. Dignity descended upon them. “Perhaps we can give them more next summer than we did in this,” he finished. “Say to them that I alone decided.”

“I will.” She wet her lips. “No, I will do better than that. Fear not. They are not as—as—” Tula had no word meaning “cruel” or “merciless.” It wouldn’t be fair to the Cloud People anyway. “They are not as fierce as you think.”

Knuckles whitened above the hand ax. “They take whatever they want. They kill whoever stands against them.”

“There was a fight, true. Do the We never kill one another?”

His stare became wind-bleak. “Two more among Us have died at their hands since then.” I didn’t know that! Corwin doesn’t bother to inquire. “And you speak for the Mammoth Slayers. Well, you have heard what I have to say.”

“No, I, I only … only am trying to … make you happier.” Give you heart to last out the winter. In spring, for whatever reason, the invaders will pull up stakes. But I’m not allowed to predict that. And you doubtless wouldn’t believe me if I did. “Aryuk, I will see to it that the Cloud People are content. They will want no more from Alder River before the snow is off the ground again.”

He stayed wary. “Can you be sure? Even you?”

“I can. They will heed me. Did Tall Man not make them give you back Daraku?”

Abruptly an old man stood there under the darkening sky. “That was no use. She died on the way home. The child that so many of them put into her, it took her away with it.”

“What? Oh, no, no.” Tamberly realized she had moaned in English. “Why did you not let Tall Man know?”

“He was never there when I was, afterward,” said the flat voice. “I saw him twice, but not nearby, and he did not seek me. Why should I go to him, then, if I dared? Can he call back the dead? Can you?”

She remembered her own father, whom she could gladden with a phone call and overjoy by stepping across his threshold. “I think you would like me to leave you alone,” she said as emptily.

“No, come inside,” where the rest crouch in murk, in fear and stifled, stifling rage. “I am ashamed at how little food we can offer, but come inside.”

What can I do, what can I say? If I’d grown up alongside Manse, or in some earlier era, I’d have known what, young though I am. But where-when I hail from, they send printed sympathy cards and talk about the grief process. “I … I should not. I must not, today. You need … to think about me, till you understand I am your friend … always. Then we can be together. First think about me. I will watch over you. I will care for you.”

Am I wise or weak?

“I love you,” she blurted. “All of you. Here.” She reached in her pocket and pulled out the chocolate bars. They fell at his feet. Somehow she smiled before she turned and left him. He didn’t protest, merely stood where he was and looked after her. I guess I am doing the right thing.