Lois Bujold - Legacy

He went on in a casual voice, “I think I might skip the next patrol going out and take some of my unused camp time. Plenty to do here. Sometimes, between patrols, I help Omba train her young horses, get them used to a big man up. She mostly has a flock of girls for apprentices, see.”

Fawn looked unconvinced. “Do you suppose Dar and your mama will be speaking to you again by then?”

Dag shrugged. “The next move is up to them. It’s plain Dar doesn’t like this marriage, but he detests rows. He’ll let it pass unless he’s pressed to act. Mama…had her warning. She has ways of making me crazy, and I suppose the reverse is true, but she’s not stupid. And she’d be the last person on the lake to invite the camp council to tell her what to do. She’ll keep it in the family. All we need do is let time go by and not borrow trouble.”

She eased back in reassurance, but there remained a dark streak in her spirit, interlaced with the fresh brightness from her recovering body. Dag suspected the strangeness of it all was beginning to accumulate. He’d seen homesickness devastate young patrollers far less dislocated than Fawn, and he resolved to find familiar tasks for her hands tomorrow. Yes, let her be as busy as she was used to being, till her balance grew steadier.

Meanwhile—here inside Tent Bluefield—the task to hand was surely growing less frantic and more familiar, but no less enchanting for all of that. Back to taking turns. He sought her tender lips in a kiss, opening his heart to all the intricacy of her ground, dark and light together.

Dag vanished for a couple of hours the next morning, but returned for lunch—plunkin again, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then, as promised, he took Fawn to the mysterious Stores. This proved to be a set of long sheds tucked into the woods, down the road past the patroller headquarters. Inside one, they found what appeared to be a woman clerk; at any rate, she sat at a table scratching in a ledger with a quill, surrounded by shelves crammed with more ledgers. A toddler lay asleep in a sort of wooden pen next to her. More sets of shelves, ceiling-high, marched back in rows the length of the building. The dim air smelled of leather and herbs and less-identifiable things.

While Fawn walked up and down the rows of shelves, staring at the goods with which they were crammed, Dag engaged the woman in a low-voiced consultation, which involved dragging out several more ledgers and marking off and initialing lists therein. At one point Dag said, “You still have those?” in a voice of surprise, laughed, and dipped the quill to mark some more. His splints, Fawn noticed, hardly seemed to slow him down today, and he was constantly taking his arm out of the sling.

Dag then led Fawn up and down the rows and had her help him collect furs and other leather goods according to some scheme of his own. A half dozen beautiful dark brown pelts looking like the coats of some extraordinary ferret-shaped creature he explained as coming from mink, small woodland predators from north of the Dead Lake; an exquisite white pelt, soft as whipped cream, was from a winter fox, but it was like no fox fur Fawn had ever seen or touched. These, he said, could be bride-gifts for Mama and Aunt Nattie, and Fawn had to agree they were marvelously better than the local hides they’d rejected back at Lumpton Market.

“Every patrol usually brings back something,” Dag explained. “It varies with where they’ve been and what opportunities they’ve found. Whatever part of his or her share a patroller doesn’t want or can’t use is turned over to Stores, and the patroller gets a credit for them, either to draw the equivalent item out later or trade for something of use. Excess accumulations are taken down to farmer country to trade for other things we need. After all my years of patrolling, I have a long credit at Stores. You be thinking about what you want, Spark, and chances are we can find something like.”

“Cooking ware?” she said hopefully.

“Next building over,” he promised.

One at a time, he pulled three more folded hides from dusty back shelves, and Fawn staggered under the weight of each as they took them to the clerk’s table to be signed out. He also, after judicious study, selected a sturdy packsaddle in good condition from a rack of such horse gear. They hauled it all out through the double doors onto the end porch.

Dag prodded the three big bundles with his toe. “Now these,” he said, “are actually my own. Bit surprised to still find them here. Two were sent down from Luthlia after I came home, and the other I picked up about three years back during a winter season I spent patrolling in the far south. This one, I figure for your papa. Go ahead and unroll it.”

Fawn picked apart the stiff, dry rawhide cords and unfolded what appeared to be an enormous wolf skin. “My word, Dag! This thing must have been as big as a horse!”

“Very nearly.”

She frowned. “You can’t tell me that was a natural beast.”

“No. Mud wolf. The very one they found me under at Wolf Ridge, I’m told. My surviving tent-brothers—you’d say brothers-in-law—skinned and tanned it for me. Never had the heart to tell them I didn’t want it. I put it in Stores thinking someone would take it off, but there it’s sat ever since.”

She wondered if this same beast had savaged his left hand. “It would make a rug for our whole parlor, back in West Blue. But it would be rather horrible, knowing how you came by it.”

“I admit I’ve no desire to look at it. Depending on how your papa feels about me by now, he might wish it hadn’t stopped gnawing on me so soon, but on the whole I think I won’t explain its history. The other two are worth a look as well.”

Fawn unfolded the second big pelt, and recoiled. Heavy black leather in a shape altogether too human was scantily covered with long, ratty gray hair; the mask of the thing, which had a manlike look, still had the fanged jaw attached.

“Another mud wolf. Different version. Fast and vicious, and they moved like shadows in the dark. That one for Reed and Rush, I think,” said Dag.

“Dag, that’s evil.” Fawn thought it through. “Good choice.”

Dag chuckled. “Give them something to wonder about, I figure.”

“It’ll give them nightmares, I should imagine!” Or was that, I hope? “Did you kill it?” And for pity’s sake, how?

Dag squinted at the mummified horror. “Probably. If not that one, plenty like it.”

Fawn refolded and bound up both old hides, and undid the third. It was thinner and more supple, and hairless. She unrolled and kept unrolling, her brows rising in astonishment, until fully nine feet of…of whatever it was lay out on the porch floor. The fine leather had a beautiful pattern, almost like snakeskin magnified, and gleamed smoothly under her hand, bronze green shading to rich red-brown. For all that the animal was as long as a horse, it seemed to have had short, stubby legs; wicked black claws still dangled from their ends. The jaws of this one, too, had been set back in place after tanning, and were frankly unbelievable, like a stretched-out bear trap made of teeth.

“What kind of malice made that? And what poor creature was it made from?”

“Not a mud-man at all. It’s an alligator—a southern swamp lizard. A real, natural animal. We think. Unless one of our ancestor-mages got really drunk. Malices do not, thank all the absent gods, emerge too often so far south of the Dead Lake, but what happens when they do get hold of these fellows is scarcely to be imagined. The southern wetlands are one of the places you want to do your patrolling in winter, because cold makes the alligators, and the alligator-men, sluggish. That one we just caught on an ordinary hunting and trapping run, though.”