Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

People remained in the coulee, which was just within bowshot of the hill. The boy probably knew that running away from Bektis would be a waste of time.

       Bide your time, son of Eldor. Watch for your chance.

       The coyote who waits can eat the flesh of the saber-tooth who plunges ahead into a fight.

      The attack was over before the shadows had shortened the last inch or so to noon.

      Leaning up on his elbows, the Icefalcon watched the three black warriors load the bodies of the slain onto the horses that remained in the grove and carry them out to the coulee to dump them. Then they returned to Bektis’ camp, tethered the captured horses, and set about gathering water and making lunch.

      Thank you, thought the Icefalcon. Now stay put so I can eat, too.

      He crawled through the grass – noting automatically that rains had been scanty here and so the herds would not be plentiful later in the year – to the edge of the coulee, which at that point was some twenty feet deep. Even a few years before, the stream at the bottom had been wider and stronger than it was now. Barely a trickle flowed over gray and white rocks, and the sedge and cattail along its verge were thin and weak, though on the whole the bottomland that lay for thirty or forty feet on either side of the water was lusher than the prairie above. Cottonwood and lodgepole pine made light cover from bank to waterside; lungwort, fleabane, and marigolds gemmed the grass.

      The half-dozen bodies lay jumbled below in a clump of chokecherry. Their dogs had been thrown down with them, the heavy-headed, heavy-shouldered fighting brutes of the Empty Lakes People. The Icefalcon took a very cautious look around, then slithered down the bank some hundred feet from the place, which he circled twice before coming close. Carrion birds were already gathered. He wondered if Bektis would notice when they flew upward.

      They settled again on the limbs of the cottonwood just above the bodies, below the line of the prairie’s edge.

      There had been six in the scouting party. Five lay here, fair-skinned like all the peoples of the Real World, bronzed from the sun, their hair – flaxen or primrose or the gay hue of marigolds – braided and dabbled with darkening blood. Four had perished of stab wounds, and one bore the same lightning burns that had marked Rudy’s face. The sixth would be the man who ran out of the grove with his shirt burning, to fall in the long grass.

      The Icefalcon waited, listening, for some little time more, then moved in and made from them a selection of trousers, tunic, jacket, gloves, and cap wrought of wolf- or deer-hide, whose colors blended with the hues of the prairie. He changed clothes quickly and buried his black garments in a muskrat hole in the bank, piling brush to conceal where he’d driven the earth in. His weapons and harness he kept; his boots as well, for none of them had feet of his size, and boots would outlast moccasins on a long hunt.

      He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh, pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.

      When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark of his boots.

      Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one expect from the Empty Lakes People?

      It was Loses His Way.

      Loses His Way was a warchief and one of the most renowned warriors of the Empty Lakes People. He had given the Icefalcon the scar that decorated the hollow of his left flank in a horse raid during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths. He’d been a minor chief then, and the Icefalcon had encountered him twice more, once in a battle over summer hunting and once at a Moot. If the Icefalcon hadn’t left the Talking Stars People, they’d probably have fought again at another Moot. He was a big man, some ten years older than the Icefalcon, with massive shoulders and tawny mustaches braided down past his chin; the finger bones of a dozen foes were plaited into his hair.

      He moved painfully now, and the Icefalcon saw the red blister of burned flesh through the black hole that had been the back of his tunic.

      When he saw the bodies had been disturbed, he looked around quickly, short-sword coming to his hand.

      Conscious of the possibility of sound carrying, the Icefalcon whistled twice in the voice of the tanager, a bird native to the oakwoods along the Ten Muddy Rivers, where the Empty Lakes People had originally dwelled, though it was never seen in the high plains. Loses His Way turned his head and the Icefalcon stepped from cover, crossed swiftly to the pile of bodies at the foot of the cottonwood tree. “I am an enemy to the people who did this,” he said, as soon as he was close enough that their voices would not be heard. “I am alone.”

      Loses His Way raised his head, grief and shock darkening gentian-blue eyes. “Icefalcon.” He spoke the name as it was spoken among the Empty Lakes People, K’shnia. He was like a man stunned by a blow, barely taking in the presence of one who was his enemy and the enemy of his people.

      “The air was full of creatures that tore at us,” he said, and turned back to the dead. “When we rode away, the horses threw us and ran back. Our dogs attacked us and savaged one another.” He touched the torn-out throat of a big gray dog, as if stroking the hair of a beloved child. “There was a Wise One, a shaman, among them.”

      “The shaman is called Bektis,” said the Icefalcon, framing the words carefully, haltingly, in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People, which he had not had call to speak for years. “An evil man, who has carried away the son of one who was good to me.”

      Loses His Way seemed scarcely to hear. His thick scarred stubby fingers passed across noses, lips, brows. “Tethtagyn,” he said, framing the name in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People; Wolfbone it meant. “Shilhren … Giarathis …” Under long, curling red brows his eyes filled with grief.

      “Twin Daughter,” he whispered, and touched the face of a warrior whose hair was as red-gold as his. “Twin Daughter.”

      Gently lifting the thick ropes of her hair – three braids, as was the fashion of his people – Loses His Way took from around the young woman’s neck a square spirit-pouch, decorated with porcupine quills and patterns in ocher and black. Worn under the clothing and out of sight, spirit-pouches were almost the only article decorated by any of the peoples of the Real World. With his knife he cut off some of Twin Daughter’s hair and put it into the pouch. Then he sliced the palm of her left hand, and with his thumb daubed the congealing blood in the open center of the pouch’s worked design.

      This he did for all the others in turn, saying their names as he did so: Wolfbone, Blue Jay, Shouts In Anger, Raspberry Thicket Girl. The Empty Lakes People, the Icefalcon remembered, did not revere their Ancestors, but rather the ki of various rocks and trees in the country of the Ten Muddy Rivers. It was to them that these spirit-pouches must be dedicated and returned.

      The Icefalcon privately regarded such customs as unnecessary and a little dangerous. Dead was dead, and any member of the Talking Stars People would have been able to find his or her way home without the assistance of a spirit-pouch. But he saw, in the big warrior’s face, the need to do these things for his own peace of mind.

      One of the things that the Stars had told the Ancestors of his people was that every people had their custom, and though all other people were wrong, it was not polite and frequently not safe to say so. At least Loses His Way didn’t feel it necessary to take fingers the way the Twisted Hills People did.

      “You took all the food?” he asked then, and the Icefalcon nodded. “Then let’s go away. I thought you departed from the Real World for good,” he added, as he and the Icefalcon followed the cliff wall northwest, seeking an inconspicuous place to regain the prairie above.

      “I departed,” said the Icefalcon. “Though I fail to see how my comings and goings are the affair of the Empty Lakes People.”

      “Blue