mutters in his den of your disrespect and Reindeer grows coldly angry. A great evil hovers over your folk, and you are blind to it. But I have come. I will help you.”
There was a white movement in the still room as Kari, the herdlord’s daughter, fluttered from her corner. She flitted closer to the najd and the fire that moved before him. Heckram caught the flash of her bird-bright eyes as she settled again. Avidity filled the gaze she fixed on Carp. No one else seemed to notice her interest.
“Spirits of water and tree are complaining that you use them and make no sign of respect. Reindeer himself has been most generous to you, but you ignore him. How long have you taken his gifts, and made no thanks to him?”
Carp’s rattles sizzled as he turned his gaze from one person to the next. Ketla was white-faced, Kari rapt, Acor and Ristor uneasy. Pirtsi picked at his ear, while Joboam looked sullenly angry. Rolke was bored. Capiam alone looked thoughtful, as if weighing Carp’s words.
“The herdfolk do not turn the najd away,” he said carefully. “But—” The sharp word caught everyone’s attention. “Neither do we cower in fear. You say the spirits are angry with us. We see no sign of this. Our reindeer are healthy, our children prosper. It has been long since we had a najd, but we keep our fathers’ customs. You are not herdfolk, nor a najd of the herdfolk. How can you say what pleases the spirits of our world?”
Acor nodded slowly with Capiam’s words, while Joboam stood with a satisfied smile. He crossed his arms on his chest, his gaze on Heckram. He nodded slowly at him. It had gone his way. But Carp was nodding, too, and smiling his gap-toothed smile.
“I see, I see.” The rattles hissed as he warmed his hands over the fire. Abruptly he stopped shaking them. The cessation of the monotonous noise was startling. He rubbed his knobby hands over the flames, nodding as he warmed them. “You are a happy folk; you have no need of a shaman. You think to yourselves, what need have we of Carp? What will he do? Why, only shake his rattles and burn his offerings and stare into the fire. He will eat our best meat, ask for a share of our huntings and weavings and workings.” Carp leaned forward to peer deep into the fire as he spoke. “Like a dog too old to hunt, he will lie in the sun and grow fat. Let him find another folk to serve. We are content. We do not wish to know…to know…”
His voice fell softer and softer as he spoke. The flames of the fire suddenly shot up in a roar of green and blue sparks. Ketla screamed. The men leaped to their feet and retreated from the blaze. It startled everyone in the tent, except Carp, who moved not at all. The fountaining of sparks singed his hair and eyebrows. The stench of burning hair filled the hut. Thin spirals of smoke rose from his clothes as sparks burned their way down through the fur. He swayed slightly, still staring into the reaching flames. “Elsa?” he asked, his voice high and strange. Everyone gasped. Heckram stopped breathing. “Elsa-sa-sa-sa!” The najd’s voice went higher with every syllable. “The calves are still! The mothers cry for them to rise and follow, but their long legs are folded, the muzzles clogged with their birth sacs. Elsa-saa-saa-saa-saa-saa-saa!”
His voice went on and on, his rattles echoing the sibilant cry. As suddenly as the flames had leaped up they fell, and returned to burning with their familiar cracklings. The najd’s head drooped onto his chest in a silence as sudden as death.
“Elsa! He saw Elsa!” Kari’s shrill cry cracked the silence. Acor and Ristor leaned to mutter at Capiam. Ketla sank slowly to the floor, the back of her hand blocking her gaping mouth. Every hair on Heckram’s body was a-prickle with dread. He swallowed bitterness in a throat gone dry and felt an icy chill up his back. It took him a moment to realize it had an earthly source. The unfastened door-hide flapped in a new wind from the north. Heckram pegged it down. Straightening, he noticed another interesting thing. Joboam was missing.
“Najd! What did you see in the flames?” Capiam demanded.
Carp lifted his head smoothly. “See? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. A happy and contented folk like yours, what do they care what an old man sees in a fire? Just smoke and ash, wood and flame, that’s all a fire is. Heckram, I am weary. Will you grant this old beggar a place in your tent for one night?”
His answer was drowned by Capiam’s raised voice. “The herdlord gladly offers you shelter this night, Carp. But certainly it will be for more than just one night?”
“No, no. Just for a night or two, for an old man to rest from his travels. Then I shall take my apprentice and move on. I will stay at Heckram’s hut. It’s a very large hut, for one man alone. A shame he has no wife to share it. Have you never thought of taking a woman, Heckram?” The old man asked innocently.
“Not since Elsa died!” Kari shrilled out. She flitted over to Carp, her loose garments flapping as she moved. She crouched beside him, her dark eyes enormous. “What did you see in the flames?” she asked in a husky whisper.
“Kari!” her father rebuked her, but she did not heed him. She peered into Carp’s clouded eyes, her head cocked and her lips pursed. For a long moment their gaze held. Then she gave a giggle that had no humor in it and leaped to her feet. She turned to fix her eyes on Pirtsi. Her face was strange, unreadable. Even Pirtsi, immune to subtlety, shifted his feet and scratched the nape of his neck uneasily.
“Heckram and I will leave now!” Carp announced, rising abruptly. He took a staggering step, then gripped the young man’s shoulder and pulled himself up straight.
“But I wished to speak to Capiam, about Kerlew,” Heckram reminded him softly.
Carp’s eyes were icy and cold as gray slush. “Kerlew is my apprentice. His well-being is in my care. He is not for you to worry about. Do you doubt it?”
Heckram met his gaze, then shook his head slowly.
“Good night, Capiam.” Carp’s farewell was bland. “Sleep well and contentedly, as should a leader of a contented folk. Take me to our hut, Heckram. This foolish old man is weary.”
A north wind was slicing through the talvsit. Icy flakes of crystalline snow rode it, cutting into Heckram’s face. It was more like the teeth of winter than the balmy breath of spring. Heckram bowed his head and guided the staggering najd toward his hut. The talvsit dogs were curled in round huddles before their owners’ doors. Snow coated their fur and rimed their muzzles. Heckram shivered in the late storm and narrowed his eyes against the wind’s blast. In a lull of the wind came the lowing cry of a vaja calling her calf. A shiver ran up Heckram’s spine, not at the vaja’s cry, but at the low chuckle from the najd that followed it.
It took two days for the storm to blow itself out. There came a morning finally when the sun emerged in a flawlessly blue sky and the warmth of the day rose with it. The storm’s snow melted and ran off in rivulets down the pathways of the talvsit, carrying the remainder of the old snow with it. Icicles on the thatching of the huts dripped away. Earth and moss and the rotting leaves of last autumn were bared by the retreating snow. As the day grew older, and the herdfolk sought out their reindeer in the shelter of the trees, the retreating snow bared the small still forms of hapless calves born during the late storm. Vajor with swollen udders nudged at little bodies, nuzzled and licked questioningly at the small ears and cold muzzles.
Silent folk moved in the forest, leading vajor away to be milked, leaving the dead calves to the relentless beetles that already crept over them. During the storm, the tale of the najd’s words had crept from hut to hut until all the talvsit knew. Carp sat outside Heckram’s door, stretching his limbs to the warmth of the sun as he fondled something small and brown in his knuckly hands. Those who passed looked aside in fear and wonder, and some felt a hidden anger. Heckram was one of them. What demon had guided this old man to him, and what foolishness had ever prompted him to bring Carp back to the talvsit?
“I lost two calves,” he said coldly, standing over the old man. “And my best vaja, who sometimes bore twins, cannot be found at all. I think wolves got her as she gave birth.”
“A terrible piece of luck,” Carp observed demurely.
“One of Ristin’s vajor died giving birth.”
Carp nodded.