People of the Weeping Eye(31)

She used a doubled fold of cloth to move the pot back from the flames. “You’re a strange man.”

“Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to you.”

Power shifted, surged. It seemed to rise from the ground, to pulse in the air around her. It leaped with the firelight, and Sang with the breeze in the cottonwoods. Her heart skipped, then stopped dead in her breast. Breath caught in her throat. No, not now. Please. Not right at this moment. She closed her eyes, knotting her fists. Breath by breath, she made herself breathe deeply and calmly. Only when she was sure it was past did she open her eyes.

Old White was giving her an evaluative stare.

“I’m all right,” she said warily. “It comes and goes. Mostly I can’t control it.”

“The greater the gift, the more hideous the curse,” he said in answer.

“What was your curse?”

“A mixture of love and justice.”

Though a thousand questions crowded her tongue, his tone of voice left her mute. Pain and regret seemed to ride his shoulders like a too-heavy blanket. The lines in his face, the lack of any tattoos or ear spools, all bespoke a life interrupted.

Who is this man? And why did he come for me?

“All in due time,” he whispered softly.





Seven

Transporting furs was always problematic. Moisture was the enemy. When brain-tanned furs grew damp, circles of fungus would creep into the leather. Hair slipped and fell out by the handfuls. Any strength and resilience the hides might have had vanished. Smoking during the tanning process helped, but a thorough and comprehensive smoking took as much as a moon. Few of the northern tanners bothered with that. After all, why invest that kind of time when another pine marten was as close as the next forest.

Trader, however, was taking his two packs of expensive furs south. He scowled up at the misty rain that trickled down from the gray skies and low clouds. It came in spiraling stringers of mist, curling downward to chill and soak the river. It landed on the leaf-bare trees, collecting to drip on the soft forest floor. Patterns of it fell on the smooth roiling waters, only to be whisked away as the current eddied and sucked.

The world seemed to hunker down. The thick forest lining both sides of the river looked sodden and miserable. Even sound had disappeared, damped and heavy, gone to earth with the cascading droplets of water. The few birds Trader saw were perched on limbs, feathers ruffled, heads tucked low on their shoulders. This was the kind of day that even fish stayed undercover.

Trader glanced at his two packs of furs. He had fashioned a birch-bark cover for both, beneath which was a waxed leather sack that would divert any leaks. The furs had been pressed using leverage from a log that pivoted on a fulcrum, then had been tightly bound into a square bundle with double-knotted basswood rope. The packs rested on two aspen branches laid side by side on the canoe bottom to keep them out of shallow water and allow air to circulate. It had been raining for hours. A pool had collected in the canoe bottom.

Trader used his finger to measure the depth of the water. It reached up to his first knuckle.

Shipping his paddle, he bent and used a ceramic jar to scoop and bail until it was no longer worth the effort.

“Hope this breaks,” he muttered as he took up the paddle and corrected his course for the center of the current. He had been making good time, but then traveling downriver seemed like flying after the hard paddle upstream.

As he rounded one of the endless bends in the river, the forest gave way to a clearing on the eastern shore; several small farmsteads dotted the now-brown fields. Blue wreaths curled from the smoke holes, seeming to flatten against the endless drizzle. Four canoes had been pulled up on a landing where the bank had collapsed on the downstream end of the clearing. They looked disconsolate, crudely made from hollowed logs, unlike his sleek birch-bark vessel. No one was about—not that he’d have expected them to be given the conditions. It was only fit weather for idiotic Traders traveling late in the season. As quickly, the farmstead fell behind.

Trader sighed, imagining the friendly fires, and how warm and dry the interiors of those lodges were. A pot of deer or perhaps turkey stew would have been boiling, sending a warm aroma to combat the chill air.

His thoughts were thusly occupied when a shout from shore caught him by surprise.

“Greetings, Trader!”

He turned, seeing two men, each dressed in a wolfhide cloak with a bark rain hat on his head. They carried bows, fletched arrows filling the quivers on their backs. Their thick trail moccasins and leggings looked soaked.

“Greetings yourself,” Trader called back in pidgin. He backed water, sending his canoe toward their bank. He stopped several body lengths from shore. Traders were protected, guarded by the Power of the Trade, but one still didn’t take any chances.