John Dalmas - The Lion of Farside

Two weeks passed before Hauser had a chance to visit Talbott again. He was back sooner than expected, and Macurdy knew why, for Hauser looked distressed.

He asked anyway. "What's the matter?"

"He's not there. The gate guard says he was taken away two weeks ago."

Put down like a wind-broken horse, Macurdy guessed. "It was his back," he said. "I think he was expecting it. He didn't say anything because he didn't want to grieve us."

"I suppose so."

"You meant a lot to him," Macurdy added. "He was proud of you, of what you've done."

He dropped the subject then, to let Hauser deal with his grief himself.

Each Six-Day evening a slave girl was brought to the house to spend the night with Arbel. It wasn't always the same one, but she was always good-looking. And whether her demeanor was demure or playful or bold, she never seemed unhappy to find herself there. According to Hauser, Arbel had told him that working with the spirit as he did, a lissome slave girl in his bed once a week kept his body properly grounded in the physical world-a necessity for a healthy shaman. On the other hand, twice a week would be to submit to the physical world; he'd limited himself even as a young man.

"How about you?" Macurdy asked. "Do you ever get any?"

Hauser smiled ruefully. "Four times a year-at each equinox and each solstice. As a reward; work keeps me physically grounded." Again Hauser smiled. "Sometimes I find myself counting the weeks."

Macurdy tried to picture Reverend Fleming, a widower, having a slave girl brought to the parsonage once a week. It was hard to imagine. Folks would be horrified.

Occasionally Macurdy was afflicted with unease at being here while Varia was-wherever she was. But he needed to learn, learn the language well, and enough about the country and the people to travel around without ending up a slave somewhere else, or dead.

Busy as he was, and as tired at bedtime, it was relatively easy not to dwell on the problems. His thoughts of Varia were mainly sweet fantasies.

Spring became summer, then late summer. Meanwhile Macurdy discovered a non-magical talent he hadn't known he had. He already knew he had an excellent memory and learned quickly, but now discovered an unexpected skill at duplicating sounds. With such intensive instruction, not only was he rapidly learning the local language; he was already pronouncing the words nearly as well as Hauser, and Hauser spoke them almost like a local. Now Arbel began to examine Macurdy more deeply, asking most of his questions directly, guiding as much on the responses of the big slave's aura as on his verbal answers.

Arbel's "instruction" lay only partly in teaching. Even more, it involved questions, the answering of which exposed and peeled off layers of opinions, beliefs, attitudes… like peeling an onion, freeing what lay beneath. And gradually, as Arbel worked on him, Macurdy became aware of changes in himself. He'd always tended to be confident. Now he felt stronger, bolder, more self-assured. And his natural charisma was more apparent. Even as a slave, his intrinsic dominance showed, expressed as competence, a comfortable readiness to act, a dominance more over situations than over people.

Gradually he became aware that others were treating him differently. Thus in dealing with Macurdy, even the overseer's assistant was-not actually courteous, but his brusqueness had lost its truculence and threat. Then one morning, Macurdy glanced at Hauser pulling on his breeches, and saw around him a sheath of warm light, mostly blue, but with elusive patterns of other colors. It glowed around him from the hips upward, flaring more widely around his head. Hauser's aura, he realized.

Before going to the woods, he looked in on Arbel, seated at his workbench. The shaman's aura was primarily shamrock green, and started about at his knees. As if he felt Macurdy's gaze, Arbel turned and looked at him with raised eyebrows. And grinned, almost the first smile Macurdy had seen on him; it lasted perhaps three seconds. Then without comment the shaman nodded and turned back to his work.

The rest of the day until quitting time, Macurdy was seeing auras of one sort or another around every living thing, mostly thin and simple, requiring conscious intention to notice. Varia was right about me, he told himself. I'll never doubt her again.

11: Blue Wing and Maikel

Well before adolescence, Macurdy had learned to use the ax. But in Washington County, the crosscut saw was the main tool for logging, while for cutting fuelwood, the homemade bucksaw was mostly used. The ax was simply used for swamping, notching, limbing, and of course splitting.

Now, working exclusively with it, he found his skills had improved; a given task took less time. Meanwhile, Arbel had peeled away layers of imposed and assumed considerations, and Macurdy no longer felt the need to prove himself, to show how much work he could do in a unit of time.

Thus, as his axman's skills improved, instead of turning out more wood, he commonly took a nap in late morning, allowing his mental clock and hungry stomach to waken him for lunch and to finish his day's work.

One noon, with the leaves showing the first tinges of fall color, he awoke aware of being watched. Getting to his feet, he looked around, and saw no one.

"Up here!" called a voice. "In this tree."

He looked up. At first he thought it was a vulture, but its head was feathered. Its crown was scarlet above the eyes, as if it had tried to become an eagle and gotten the colors wrong, while its strong beak was longish and nearly straight.

"There," it said to him. "You've found me."

Macurdy gawped. "You can talk!" he said.

"Of course I can talk."

Macurdy pondered briefly, wondering if this was another expression of his talent. "Could anyone hear you?"

"Assuming they're not deaf, yes."

Macurdy frowned thoughtfully at his hands, as if looking to them for enlightenment. "Back home," he said, "if I told folks I'd been visiting with a giant crow wearing a red…" He stopped, lacking the Yuultal word for "pompadour," and became aware of tittering.

"That was not funny!" the bird snapped. Not it seemed at Macurdy, but at someone else nearby. With the bird's irritated response, the tittering became laughter, and Macurdy looked around for the source. It seemed to come from the base of a walnut tree, but he could see nothing there. Then his hair stood on end. There was something there; he could almost see it. Relax, Varia had told him. Relaxing helps turn it on. And Arbel had said don't try too hard. Let things come.

And there it was, looking like a small, tight-furred man, a fuzzy creature naked except for a belt, and slender, wiry. Almost at once the halfling realized his invisibility spell had been seen through, and without an instant's hesitation, sprinted with startling speed to a slender ash sapling, scrambling into its top till his weight bent it, and he could transfer to the lower branch of an oak. There he sat; Macurdy could almost see his body tremble. When he'd climbed, a small knife and bag had been visible on his belt in back.

"So much for magic," the bird called after him. "I'll take wings any time."

The halfling said nothing, simply sat with his face working, somewhat as if palsied, somewhat as if chewing, his eyes glistening black as obsidian. Faster on the ground than a squirrel, Macurdy thought, and not too much slower up the tree.

"Though I'll admit I couldn't see you," the bird added. "I'm surprised this human could."

Macurdy's attention returned to the bird. About as big as a turkey vulture, he decided; far larger than even the biggest crow. It showed an aura much like a human's, when he thought to look. "What sort of bird are you?" he asked. "What breed?"