III Snow Thunder

PERKAR eyed the sky dubiously. “I wonder if we should make camp now” he muttered.

Ngangata surveyed the ominous black billows edging in from the western horizon. “All bluff,” he opined. “It doesn't smell like a storm to me. Though …”

“Though what?” Perkar grunted.

“It has a strangeness about it.”

“Oh.” Perkar regarded the skyline once more, straining to sense whatever it was that Ngangata could feel. Nothing unusual came to him: the stormheads remained, to him, mere clouds.

“Sometimes I wonder if you say things like that just to be mysterious,” he grumbled.

“No. Unfortunately, life is already mysterious without any help from me,” Ngangata answered.

Sighing, Perkar leaned forward and patted his mount. “What do you think, T'esh?“ The charcoal-and-gray-striped stallion spared him a laconic sidewise glance before returning his full attention to tearing at the clump of grass protruding through the slowly melting snow. As far as he could tell, T'esh had no opinion on the matter.

“I'll assume you agree with Ngangata,” Perkar decided. “We'll push on.”

He urged T'esh to a walk, and Ngangata, abreast, clucked to his own mount in the weird, unhuman language of his father's folk. An eerie banging punctuated whatever he said, like a god hammering a moon-size sheet of tin—but in a distant sky, the black one on the horizon. Snow thunder, Perkar's father called it—rare and unnatural. A sign that gods were playing games with the heavens. Perkar nearly remarked on the sound—to show that he knew at least something of such signs and portents—but they had both heard it, and it seemed silly to point out so obvious a thing to a hunter and tracker of Ngangata's skill. Instead, he listened alertly for further noises. The distance, however, was quiet thereafter, as if the heavens had only a single word to speak before returning to stubborn, sullen silence.

The quiet itched at Perkar. His lungs seemed crowded with the necessity of speaking. He cast about for something to say and finally settled upon the obvious. “It's good to have you along,” he told Ngangata.

The halfling nodded. “I'm eager to meet this goddess, this maker of heroes,” he answered.

Perkar wondered if he should take offense at that—he knew Ngangata's opinion of heroes—but when he glanced over at his companion, there was no hint of malice on the broad, pale face.

“I don't know that she will show herself to you. Or to me, for that matter,” he said.

“Then we will have wasted a trip,” Ngangata answered simply.

“No. No, whether she manifests or not, she will hear me. That is all I want, to tell her a few things. To apologize.”

“In my experience,” Ngangata remarked, “gods have little use for Human apologies.”

“Perhaps,” Perkar said. “But she will hear one from me.”

Ngangata nodded as the wind gusted from the north, straight into their faces, numbing their lips into wooden clappers only vaguely capable of shaping speech. Perkar reached to lace his elkskin hood tighter and draw a thick woolen kerchief over his nose, so that only his squinting eyes were visible.

“Something odd in those clouds, ” said a voice in his ear, just as his face was warming.

“So Ngangata tells me,” Perkar mumbled.

“Eh?” Ngangata queried, catching his muffled speech.

“It's Harka,” Perkar explained, and Ngangata pursed his lips and urged his mount on up ahead. He knew that Perkar disliked talking to his sword when others were near.

“Odd, ” Harka repeated. “Too far away to see more. ”

“Let me know when you can say something useful.”

“Still bitter? At least you answered me this time. It is difficult for me to understand your attitude. One would think you would be grateful. I've saved your life many times. ”

“So you've told me before. And I should be, I admit. But my body remembers what has been done to it, knows that it has died several times now. There is a peculiar ache to that, Harka.”

“An ache I can feel well enough, ” the sword answered. “Find some way to free me, and both our problems will be solved. ”

“If I can find a way to do so, I will,” Perkar promised the blade. “If nothing else, I will return you to the Forest Lord.”

“How far will you go to make amends, Perkar? The Forest Lord will snap you down like a toad swallowing a bug. As Ngan-gata said, gods have precious little use for Human sentiment. I should know. ”

“It doesn't matter to me what the gods do or do not value,” Perkar remarked, very softly indeed. “I know what my father taught me: Piraku, the code of honor and glory. I have walked away from the path of my father for too long now.”

“You always command such endearing platitudes,” Harka replied. “Don't you ever tire of them? ”

“Perhaps they are all I have,” Perkar rejoined. “Now let me ride in peace, until such time as you sense danger.”

“Very well, ” the voice in his ear conceded, and was thereafter silent.

The dark clouds boiled and spread eastward; Perkar could sense the sleet in their bellies, feel the cold sucking at him from that quarter of the world. Yet, as Ngangata predicted, they did not advance, and by the time evening came, the sky had nearly frozen clear, indigo veined with copper and crimson where a few high, attenuated clouds still clung. When the first star winked brightly at them, Perkar and Ngangata stopped to make camp. They worked silently at erecting the small horsehide tent Brother Horse had lent them. Perkar searched out a few scraps of withered wood in the dying light as his companion tightened the straps of their shelter.

When he returned, Ngangata was chanting over his bow, thanking the god of the tree from which it was made. Perkar considered following his example, but his sword, Harka, was a god, and as they had argued that day, it would be disingenuous to chant a song of thanks to him. Still, he had bragged that he was returning to the path of Piraku, and so after a few moments, he sang the one song that seemed appropriate, though it was alien. He chanted “Thanking the Horse Mother,” what little he knew of it, to show proper respect to their tent, made as it was from the mortal remains of a stallion named Snakeskin. All Mang tents were made of horsehide, and so each had a name. The song he had learned by listening carefully to the Mang as they made and broke camp.

He and Ngangata finished their chanting at roughly the same time. They met back in front of the tent. In the ruddy remains of sunset, his companion's face seemed more alien than usual, stripped of its Human heritage. His dark sunken eyes and low, sloping forehead recalled the deep, awesome forest of Balat, where the Alwat dwelt. Perkar remembered the broken bodies of Digger and her family, the Alwat who perished because he offended the Forest Lord, and wondered what he could do for their kin, what solace he could offer, what apology?

“Ngangata,” he asked, staring out at the darkening rim of the world, “did you know the names of those Alwat who died in Balat?”

“I know their names,” Ngangata answered, and Perkar noticed, as he often did not, the faint burr in his voice that no Human Being had.

“I would like you to teach them to me someday.”

“Someday,” the other replied, “but only in Balat. Their names should be spoken only there.”

“Ah.” Perkar felt the cold eating into his legs, but he did not yet desire to enter the tent and start a fire. “The sky seems to drink me up here,” he confided instead. He turned to take it all in, noticed the bone bow of the Pale Queen climbing in the east.

“I prefer more crowded land myself,” Ngangata admitted. “Like you, my Human mother was kin to pasture, to hills, to mountains. Her blood was fast-running streams, red bulls, and snowmelt. The Alwat, my father's people, are kin to the trees; they despise to leave them. You and I will both lose our minds if we live long beneath this sort of sky.” He gestured at the heavens with the blade of his hand and half grinned to show that he half joked.