Megan Lindholm - The Reindeer People

His long narrow hands were clasped over his head, his eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth quavered as the long ululating wail of a very small and frightened child escaped them. Even as Heckram stood frozen by consternation, Joboam, unaware of them, stooped to grip Kerlew's tunic and drag the boy up. He lifted him high, his dangling feet clear of the earth, his leather shirt tightening about his throat and stifling his cries.

'When I tell you to do something,' Joboam said in a deadly, pleasant voice, 'you will do it. Swiftly.' The great muscles in his upper arm bunched, and then Kerlew was flying through the air. He landed, rolling, and curled into a ball. He made no sound, only gasping for the air knocked out of him. Joboam advanced on him, and suddenly Heckram knew that what he had witnessed was a repetition of what had gone before and was about to happen again. A rush of angry strength flooded him.

'Joboam!' he hissed as the big man reached again for Kerlew.

Joboam's attention twitched up from the boy to Heckram moving in on him. Joboam set his weight and crouched like a snarling wolverine, and the same unholy anticipation lit his face.

'Heckram!' wailed Kerlew with the first breath he drew. With the resilience of children and madmen, he scrabbled to his feet and raced to intercept Heckram, flinging himself at him. Kerlew gripped him around the waist, dragging at him, panting into his shirt, wordless with fear. Caught between strides, Heckram all but fell over the boy. He lurched to a halt and put his hands on Kerlew's shoulders. He tried to loosen the boy's grip, but he clung like lichen on a rock. Beneath his touch the boy was shaking still; Heckram glared wordlessly at Joboam, no words strong enough for the promises he wished to make the man.

For a moment Joboam was likewise wordless, expecting Heckram to cast the boy aside and come after him. When he knew that Kerlew's clinch had stopped him, Joboam bared a mocking grin. 'Two of a kind,' he sneered. Then, as he studied Heckram's frozen face, he added, 'The cut's an improvement. Wish I had done it myself. If you want Tillu, she's busy now. You'll have to come back later.'

'I can tell she isn't here,' Heckram growled so low that the words were barely intelligible. 'You'd never dare to treat the boy that way if she were.'

Joboam's smile never wavered. 'No? Things have changed while you've been gone.

The little healer has come to appreciate me. I'll be seeing that she travels comfortably when she joins us for the spring migration. And I think that the boy will have learned some manners by then.'

Kerlew made a fearful noise and buried his face deeper in Heckram's shirt. He tried to untangle himself and step around the boy, but Kerlew only gripped tighter.

'You are wrong, big man. I am the one who will be giving the boy his lessons from now on. Come, Kerlew. Look up. Have you no greeting for me?'

For a long moment Kerlew didn't move. Then his face lifted from Heckram's shirt front and he peeked warily at the source of the voice. 'Carp!' he cried out, relief and joy in his voice. Abandoning Heckram, he flung himself toward the twisted old najd. 'Every day I have sung the calling song. Every day!' the boy rebuked him gladly.

'And every day I have heard you, but some days not as loud as others. It was a long way for me to come. And some trails an old man travels by ways longer than a boy's, and somewhat slower. But here I am. I have come.' His old hands patted the boy, smoothing the tousled hair, lightly touching his shoulders and arms as if to reassure himself that the boy was real. Kerlew wriggled under his touch like a pleased puppy.

Heckram watched them, trying to decipher the emotion spilling through him. Hadn't he believed Carp when he said Kerlew was his apprentice? Hadn't he known Kerlew would be glad to see him? Then what was this he felt; surely not jealousy? His hands hung empty.

Joboam stared at the old man whom Kerlew greeted so strangely. There was appraisal on his face and bafflement. The scrawny little man spoke so boldly, but had nothing visible to back up his authority. He did not keep a wary eye toward Joboam; he dismissed him altogether. It made no sense. No one treated him so. No one dared to ignore him. As if reading his thoughts, Carp suddenly lifted his eyes from Kerlew and fixed Joboam with an ice-white stare. Joboam expelled air from his lungs as if he had been struck. He could not meet that stare. But when he looked away from Carp, he found Heckram, his arms now free, staring at him. He was not smiling, or glaring. His face was impassively cold as he stepped toward Joboam.

'Carp!'

The word that cut across the clearing was more a cry of disbelief than a greeting. All eyes turned to Tillu. She stood at the edge of the clearing, an armload of white moss held to her chest. Her face was as white as the moss, and she rocked where she stood.

Yet the old najd looked up with a grin to her cry, while Kerlew danced about him, fairly shouting, 'He's come, mother, he's come, just as I knew he would! Didn't I tell you he'd come to us! And this time he will teach me all of it, all the magic, all the songs!'

Heckram had halted at Tillu's cry. Now both men looked from her to the najd.

Silently she came across the slushy clearing. Bits of the moss she had gathered dripped from her arms; she paid no heed to it. Her face was white and strained. As if she looked upon a ghost, Heckram thought, and felt a night chill creep up his back. From what he knew of the old man, he very well could be from the spirit world. The najd gripped Kerlew by the shoulders, turned him to face his mother, and held the boy in front of him, like a shield or a hostage. There was defiance in the cold smile he turned on Tillu over the innocent boy's head. The contrast between Kerlew's ecstatic grin and the najd's sneer grated on Heckram and raised a strange guilt in him. What had he guided to Tillu's tent?

'You did not forget me so soon, did you Tillu? Surely you knew I would be coming for my apprentice?' Carp asked sweetly.

'Your apprentice?' This from Joboam. 'You've come to take him away?' There was appraisal in his voice, and Heckram didn't like it. Why was Joboam so interested in Kerlew?

'He is mine, yes. Mine to train. But not to take away. No. A shaman must have a people to guide. I have chosen the herdfolk for Kerlew.'

'Shaman?' Joboam tried the strange word on his tongue.

'Najd.' Heckram filled it in softly and enjoyed the look of sudden wariness that spread over Joboam's face.

But in another instant, Joboam was hardening his face and asserting an authority that was not his. 'And what does Capiam say to this?'

'Nothing, yet, for no one has told him. But I expect the headman will be most welcoming. I have never yet met a headman who was inhospitable to me.'

There it was again, that arrogant assumption of authority and power. This najd, with his manner so like Joboam's, already made Joboam's jaws ache. Heckram could tell, and he took a furtive delight in it.

'Kerlew,' Tillu said brokenly.

The boy reached up to pat one of the wrinkled hands on his shoulders. He seemed impervious to her distress as he asked, 'May I take Carp into the tent and give him tea and some of the salt fish that Ibba brought us? I am sure he is both hungry and weary.'

His speech had a new fluidity to it, his face a new confidence. As if his encounter with Joboam had never occurred.

'No, no,' the najd cut in. 'Heckram has fed me well and I have rested. I would rather walk with you, Kerlew, and speak privately of things that are not for women's ears.

Besides, your mother has a healing to do. Heckram has an infected cut on his face. Let her practice her craft while we discuss ours.'

Carp put his arm around her son, smiled at her as he turned the boy and walked him away, showing her how easily he took her child away from her. Kerlew did not look back, and Heckram felt an echo of the abandonment that sliced Tillu's soul. She aged before his eyes, the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes going deeper. She shut her eyes, shook her head slowly.