Lois Bujold - Passage

The boatmen crunched around on the rocks of the incline, finding positions, hunkering or sitting or standing. None crowded all that close. The half dozen or so of the Snapping Turtle’s keelers who’d heard his talk on Lakewalker groundwork back at Pearl Riffle were amongst those toward the front, staring with interest. At least this afternoon they were all stone-sober. So.

Dag stood up, raised his voice to carry to the edge of the crowd, and began—again: “First I have to explain about ground, and Lakewalker groundsense. Ground is in everything, underlies everything, live or inert, but live ground is brightest. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it…” He’d made this explanation so many times down this valley that it felt as smoothed as stones in a streambed. Some here had heard earlier versions, but it never hurt to hammer it in again. How many hundreds of times had he repeated himself explaining patrol techniques to each year’s new crop of young patrollers?

Ground. Groundsense. Malices…That last caught any attention still drifting loose. The youngsters took it for tale, their elders who’d seen blight for an eye-opener; the Raintree men who’d brushed up against the malice war nodded and exchanged murmurs, both amongst themselves and with their curious neighbors.

Crane was staring—glaring—up at Dag with eyes gone wide with disbelief. Dag hadn’t asked Crane’s permission to make him the material of this demonstration, but he felt no qualms. If Crane hadn’t lost his choice with that first murdered farmer back in Oleana, he’d done so a hundred times since. His disordered life had done the wide green world a great deal of harm. Let his death do it some scrap of good.

If this is good.

Now Dag’s rattling chain of words came to the secret heart of things. He pitched his voice up again. “The creation of sharing knives is considered the most demanding of Lakewalker makings, and the most”—his tongue hovered a moment on secret, but chose instead—“private. The knives are carved from bones, Lakewalker bones, willed as gifts. Not robbed from graves, and not ever, despite the rumors, stolen farmer bones. These are legacies from our kin. The gifting is a solemn part of our funeral customs.” Also the messy part, but he wasn’t going to go into that yet. Because now came the most essential, most questionable part of today’s desperate lesson.

He drew the bone knife from the sheath at his neck and handed it to Fawn, who rose to take it. “My wife, Fawn, is going to go around amongst you now and show you a real sharing knife. Please touch it and hold it a moment.” But blight and absent gods, don’t drop it on the rocks. “All I ask is that you handle it carefully and with respect, because…because I once had such a bone blade willed to me by my first wife, and I know how I’d feel if…” He broke off with a gulp.

Fawn moved amongst the crowd, overseeing the knife being passed back and forth. Dag found his voice again and went on, “We found this knife lost in the cave cache with those Lakewalker furs. We figure some Lakewalker maker in Raintree made it, from the thighbone of one of his or her camp-kin. No telling whose—there was no identifying writing burned on this blade, as there sometimes is. It was bonded to a Lakewalker woman who was murdered by these river bandits just about on the spot where I’m now standing…”

Of all today’s revelations, the knife was the one Dag was most determined the boatmen should understand, body-deep—and so through their hands as well as their ears and eyes. How much closer could he bring folks without groundsense to the feared Lakewalker so-called sorcery than to actually let them touch the cool, smooth surface of that fraught bone, weigh it in their palms, pass it one to another? Dag, who never prayed if he could help it, prayed forgiveness of the unknown donor for this use of the gift. But to his immense relief, Fawn’s passage was marked not by repulsed groans, or worse, nervous laughter, but by reasonably reverent, or at least polite, quiet.

Remo’s and Barr’s mouths were tight, their eyes wide. They both looked ready to bolt, if only they knew where. But they held on.

Fawn at length returned, handed the blade back to Dag, and knelt attentively once more. He held it up. “The knife makers don’t just shape the surface of bone when it’s carved; they also shape its ground, both naturally as its nature changes from bone to knife, and through groundwork to prepare it for its next task—which is to hold a Lakewalker’s mortality as if sealed in a bottle. This knife was already dedicated like that, but with some groundwork and boiling water earlier today, I cleaned out the unused bonding. This is now a bone blank, same as if it just came from the carver’s hand. So the next step I have to show you is the new bonding.”

He knelt by Crane’s left side, his back to the muted gleam of the river. “Blood is ’specially interesting for groundwork,” he called up the slope, “because it bears a person’s live ground even after it leaves the body, at least till it dries and dies. In a regular bonding, the prospective heart’s-death donor would bleed a little into a new greenwood bowl, but we’re going to sort of skip that step.”

The knife to cut open the vein would be heated, too, to prevent infection. There were several refinements that Dag recalled from the time he’d been bonded to Kauneo’s knife that were just not needed, here. In a moment of wild panic, Dag wondered whether he could fake it if this didn’t work—stab Crane with the useless blade before he could complain, and pretend to his audience that he’d actually made and bonded a true knife. But Remo and Barr would know, blight.

Dag found himself settling cross-legged more comfortably, as if for a healing, which was disturbing—right, let it join the yapping pack of his doubts to deal with later. This groundwork had even less room for irresolution than did patrolling. He glanced at Fawn and relieved her of one concern: “He can’t feel a thing anywhere below his neck. You can’t hurt him.” She nodded grimly. He tipped the bone knife down below Crane’s arm as Fawn, holding up the dead weight a little awkwardly, took Dag’s war knife and scored a deep cut on the pale surface of skin, squeezing it to make it bleed and drip.

And then Dag dropped down into that other world, of inner essence seen from the inside, close-up. The material world—the light of the afternoon, the bare trees, the stone slope, the rustling men craning their necks—faded like a ghostly vision, present but formed of fog, and the coursing torrents of the ground beneath it all became palpable to him. The men were roiling complexities, Fawn a blazing fire. Dag was his ground. The knife in his hand was a knotted pattern of potential. Crane…Crane was a dark and furrowed mess, but his blood dripped brightly.

Dag extended his ghost hand beneath the vivid stream, casting his mind back over the involution he’d known best: the one in his own pledged knife, which he’d watched be made for him by the maker in Luthlia. He had himself unmade it again in Raintree as part of breaking the malice’s deadly groundlock. The involution was the knife maker’s greatest gift, the cupped hands to hold the offered mortality. He folded his ghost hand around a splash of Crane. His current unwelcome affinity with the renegade might well be rendering this easier—add that dark thought to the pack, no time for it now. He let his ground flow into the furrow along the inner edge of the blade, there to join with the knife’s own waiting ground. Let it all set, solidify.

He pulled back, parting from that piece of himself he’d turned into a cup for Crane.

And gasped in astonishment. Ah, blight! I didn’t know it was going to hurt this much! He watched in horrified fascination as his ghost hand tore away from the part of itself caught in the knife. It felt like biting off his own finger. Ye gods, and Dar went through this every time he bonded a knife? Brother, I beg your forgiveness.