Lois Bujold - Passage

Slate said, “Will Crane hang with the rest, then?”

Remo, unfortunately sounding up on a high horse, said, “He’s chosen to die by our own rituals. Privately.”

Greenup stared distrustfully. “You Lakewalker fellers aren’t planning to spirit him away, are you?”

Barr rolled his eyes. “With a broken neck?”

“It could be some trick,” said Slate.

Dag said, unexpectedly even to himself: “It won’t be private. You’ll see it all, every step.”

“Dag!” cried Remo and Barr together. Remo’s appalled voice tumbled on, “Dag, you can’t!”

“I can and will.” Could he? Dag’s knife maker brother, Dar, worked in careful solitude, possibly for a reason beyond Dar’s general misanthropy.

“He should hang with the rest, to be fair,” said young Greenup.

“He’s chosen to die by sharing knife,” said Dag. “I promised to make the knife for it. To try, leastways.”

Wain’s eyes narrowed. “But don’t Lakewalkers think that’s an honorable death? That don’t seem quite right, either, when hanging sure ain’t. Patroller.”

“It’s not about honor. It’s about saving something useful from all this, this river of waste,” said Dag.

Slate said, scratching his chin, “I admit, it don’t sound quite fair to me, either.”

All the boat bosses were frowning suspiciously at the Lakewalkers now. Dag sighed. “All right, then let’s talk about something you do understand. Let’s talk salvage rights, which you all were divvying up in prospect a while back. I claim this knife as my salvage share.” He fished the bone blade from his shirt, twisted the cord over his head, and held it up. “This knife, and its priming.”

Slate’s brows flicked up. “That alone?” he inquired, in a very leading tone. Quick to scent a bargain, these Silver Shoals fellows. Greenup, too, looked intrigued, as if mentally recalculating something.

Dag added hastily, as the other Lakewalkers stirred, “I don’t speak for Barr and Remo, who also put their lives in the balance for this last night—as some of you may yet remember. This is just for me.”

“Oh, sure,” said Slate brightly. “Give the patroller his knife, if that’s all he wants.”

“And its priming. Its priming,” Dag went on, “for any of you who don’t realize what I’m talking about—although when this day is over I swear you will understand it through and through—will be Crane’s mortality. Crane’s heart’s death, which he will pledge to it.”

Faces screwed up around the circle in deep misgiving.

Breaking the silence, Bearbait drew breath. “The other patrollers can make their claims as may be, but give that medicine maker whatever due-share he asks, I say.”

Boss Slate, perhaps reminded of his crewman with the cut throat, shrugged in discomfort. “Well…I guess it’s all right. Maybe. I do say that Lakewalker bandit should die first, though. Where all those fellows he tricked can see it.”

“That’ll be a lifelong lesson to ’em,” Barr muttered. At least a few around the circle quirked their lips in some slight sympathy to his exasperation.

“Briefly, aye,” Dag agreed wearily. Ye gods. But it wasn’t the bandits he wanted to take the lesson. It was the boatmen. And everyone else. Because tales of this day’s doings would go up and down the river as fast as a boat could travel. They would inevitably end up garbled. But Dag swore that they wouldn’t start out that way, not if he could help it. So you’d better get this right, old patroller.

Dag returned to the Fetch, trying to remember everything he’d seen Dar do to prepare himself for his knife-bindings. Sharing knife makers generally, he reflected, were sheltered in the center of most camps, in the most protected and private of spaces. In the very heart of Lakewalker life. He would be turning that heart inside out.

He told his shadows Barr and Remo to go find something to do for half an hour, because any hint less broad would not have been taken, and led Fawn out onto the back deck as the nearest they could manage for a scrap of privacy. There, he explained what he meant to try.

She merely nodded. “Anything Dar can do, I ’spect you can do better.”

He wasn’t sure if all that confidence was well-placed, but he had to admit, it was warming. He gripped her strong little hand in his. “The groundwork will be up to me, but the thing is, some parts of the task are going to need two hands. Bleeding Crane, mainly, to bring his ground into the knife blank when I set up the involution. Much like the way you led your ground into my marriage cord back when we wove them. I would—could—ask Remo or Barr to help me, except that I’d really prefer to keep them clear of this task. In case there’s trouble about it later.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Why should there be?”

“Because I’m not just making a knife. I plan to make it a demonstration of Lakewalker groundwork for every boatman here who I can get to look and listen.” He added after a moment, “You could leave before I actually, um, prime the knife. You wouldn’t need to watch that part.”

“Ah,” she breathed. She looked up to catch his gaze square. “But, you know, it’s not impossible, if I’m to be a true Lakewalker’s kinswoman, that such a task might fall to me someday. It would be the worst thing to botch I can imagine. Don’t you think I’d better watch and learn how it’s done right?”

He swallowed, nodded, folded her in tight. “Yes,” he whispered. “That, too.”

At length, he let her go, and she went into the kitchen to fix him a meal with no meat, because he did remember Dar ate no flesh before a binding. When he came in after carefully washing up, she set before him a dish of potatoes, apples, and onions fried up in salt butter, took a little for herself, and passed the remainder on to Hod and Hawthorn, who would be staying in to keep watch on Bo. In an attempt to spare Dag, Remo had given a ground reinforcement to Hawthorn’s swollen nose, for the pain and bruising; Dag would release the trace of beguilement later, he decided, when he had the chance to set it properly.

As Dag scraped up his last bite, Fawn set down a cup beside his right elbow. He looked over in surprise to find it piled with oats.

“There you go. You sit there and ground-rip those till my hair turns purple, you hear?”

“Um?”

She sat quietly beside him, her back to the room. “Because it seems to me that when you take in something vile that you can’t hack up, next best thing for it is to take in something bland, to cushion it.”

“Ah. You, um…realized I ground-ripped Crane.”

“Pretty much straight off, yeah. So now there’s a bit of him in you, isn’t there? Till you break him down, at least.”

“Does that…bother you?”

“I think it bothers you. A lot.”

“True, Spark,” he sighed. He took her hand and pressed the back of it briefly to his forehead. “Stay near me through this. It helps me remember who I am and what I am about, when things get too confusing.”

He took up oat grains and rolled them between his fingers, tossing the ripped ones onto his dirty plate, until, indeed, the outlines of things started to look preternaturally sharp and strange.

If there was anything more he ought to do in preparation, well, he didn’t know what it was. After a moment of consideration he unbuckled his arm harness, set it aside, and rolled down his sleeve, buttoning the empty cuff so it wouldn’t flap. He adjusted the knife sheath on his chest, clasped Fawn’s hand, and rose.

Dag had the litter-carriers position Crane in the middle of the scree just a few paces from the shore, heart-side toward the river, so that the sixty or so boatmen could sit or stand on the slope that rose toward the cave and all hear and get a clear view. Whit, Wain, and two other keelers set down the litter and retrieved Wain’s poles, and Whit retreated to one side to wait with Berry. Remo and Barr sat a little way off on the other, at a deliberate distance chosen by Dag to mark them as witnesses, not participants. Dag folded a blanket for his knees and Fawn’s on Crane’s far side, where they would not block the boatmen’s view. She knelt and looked up at him expectantly.