Her face became such a secretive mask that Sander ventured no more questions. So they journeyed in silence, the fishers playing scout, Rhin trotting at his shoulder.
At noon they halted, and Sander made a small fire while Fanyi stirred together some of the meal he had taken from the village, and moistened it with water from his leather bottle. She spread the resulting paste on a small metal griddle that she took from one of her own bags and set to bake before the fire. In a few minutes she deftly swept off a sheet of near-bread. Sander roasted the birds he had brought down while Rhin, stripped of riding pad and burdens, went hunting on his own. Fanyi said her fishers would do the same.
The fare was better than the dried fish he had eaten the night before. Fanyi held the water bottle to her ear and shook it vigorously.
“Water,” she said. “That we shall need by nightfall.”
Sander laughed. “Rhin shall find it. His breed does that very well. I have seen them dig into a bare streambed and uncover what no man would believe existed below. They come from a parched land—”
“Yours?”
Sander shook his head. “Not now, though it used to be. The Rememberers say we were all from the south and west. When the sea came in, all fled before it, even though mountains spewed fire from their bellies. Some men lived, and later Rhin’s people came. They were small once, it is said. But who knows now—so much is told of the Before Time.”
“Perhaps there are records.” Fanyi licked grease from her fingertips, imparting to that gesture a certain fastidiousness.
“Marks like this—” She plucked a long grass steam and with its tip drew lines in the dust.
Sander studied her pattern. He thought he could see a certain resemblance to similar lines that Traders made on bleached skins when his father had described kinds of metal he wanted them to bring up on their next trip.
“See—this means my name.” She pointed out the marks she had made. “F-A-N-Y-I— That I can write. And certain other words. Though,” she added with truthfulness, “the meaning of all I do not know. But it was part of my learning because it is of my Power.”
He nodded. The smith words were part of his learning, along with the work of his hands. The metal did not run nor harden nor work unless one chanted the right words—all men knew that. Which was why a smith allowed only his apprentice to be with him during certain parts of his labor—lest those without the right learn the work-words of his art.
“Even if you find such marks,” Sander asked, “what if they cannot be read?”
She frowned. “That would be a mystery one must master, even as one learns the healing art and how the moon works upon men and women, how to call the fish, or speak with animals and birds. It is one of the Shaman learning.”
Sander stood up to summon Rhin with a whistle. Shaman learning did not greatly interest him. And whether smith mysteries had ever been reduced to such markings—that he would not believe unless he saw them before his eyes. They were still a goodly distance from the forest, and he had little liking to camp out in the open another night.
He stamped out the last coals of their small cooking fire, kicking earth over the ashes carefully as any plainsman would. The fear of grass fires in the open was one danger that was more real in his mind than such raids as had been made on the village. He had seen the results of such devastation and known the horror of finding two clansmen who had been caught in such and died in the red fury no man could escape.
They plodded on. The fishers were not in sight, though Rhin had returned promptly at Sander’s call to assume pad and bags. But Fanyi seemed unconcerned at the absence of her animals. Perhaps they always traveled so.
It was close unto evening when the trees loomed ahead behind a screen of brush. Sander came to a stop, for the first time doubting the wisdom of his choice. It looked very dark and forbidding under that spread of green that was already beginning to be touched by the flames of fall. Perhaps it would be best to stay in the open for tonight and enter in the morning, rather than blunder into such a gloomy unknown in the dusk.
“Where are Kai and Kayi?” he asked the girl.
She had been squatting on her heels and now she glanced up. “They go about their own concerns. I do not rule them, as I have said. This woodland,” she pointed ahead with an uplift of her chin, “would be to their liking. They are not usually creatures of the open—but have a taste for trees.”
Well, if that was the way of it, what did it matter to him? Still, the more Sander looked into that darkness ahead the less he wanted to enter it with only failing daylight to guide him.
“We will stay here for the night,” he said, then worried if she would refuse his guidance.
“If you wish,” was all she answered, as she got to her feet to lift her bags from Rhin’s back.
3
Sander stripped the pad and his own bags from the koyot, and Rhin padded into the night for the food he would hunt on his own. Neither of the fishers had returned, and Sander began to wonder if Fanyi’s control over the beasts was as complete as he had believed. But the girl showed no signs of concern as she slipped out of her drab overdress. The first flickers of the fire turned both her girdle and massive necklace into bands of glitter.
Once more she made the cakes of meal and set them to bake on the thin griddle. Sander checked his supply of darts carefully, for he wanted to enter the forest with a weapon ready. Then he gathered a pile of wood, a supply he hoped would last the night.
As she watched her baking, Fanyi began to croon to herself. The words were strange to Sander. Now and again he caught one that had a meaning, but the rest—it was as if she sang in some tongue that was hers alone.
“Have your people always been by the river?” he asked abruptly, breaking the somnolent spell of her crooning.
“Not always—what people has lived always in any land?” she asked in return. “Were we not all shaken, dispersed, sent wandering by the Dark Time? Our story is that we were on a ship upon the sea—driven very far, carried inland by the waters that swept the world. Many of those aboard died or were dragged away by the lick of the waves. But some survived. When the sea withdrew, their ship was left rooted upon land.
That was in the days of Margee, who was mother to Nana, and Nana was mother to Flory, and she bore Sanna.” Slowly she recited names, more than he could count as she spoke them, until at last she ended, “and I am true daughter to the fourth Margee. The ship’s people met with others who wandered, and so was Padford born in the days of my grandmother’s mother. Before that we had lived by the sea to the south. But we came north because of evil in that place, for suddenly there was a new mountain born, even as it was in the Dark Time. It spewed out fire and running rock so that all life must flee or be utterly eaten up. What of your people, Sander-smith?”
“We came from the south and west, as I have said. Our Rememberers know—but they are the only ones with such knowledge. I am a smith.” He held his two hands into the firelight flexing their strong fingers. “My mysteries are not theirs.”
“To each man his own mystery.” She nodded as she swept the cakes deftly from the griddle and held one out to him. “It is said that the first Margee had the power of healing, and thus she taught those of her blood-line. But also we have other powers.” She bit into the round of hot bread, her ornaments flashing with every movement.
“Tell me,” she said after she had chewed and swallowed. “Why did you take out-rights, cutting yourself away from those of your blood-kin, to hunt what you may never find? Is it because you lost face when your people would not name you smith?”
Somehow she was able to compel the truth from him.
“I was tested and ready—my father would have spoken up if matters were otherwise. But Ibbets was his brother and long had wanted to be smith. He is good enough.” Though Sander grudged saying that, he must admit it. “Yet he never seeks beyond what has already been done. I would learn more—why there are some metals that we cannot handle though the Before Men did, what were the secrets that they held that we have lost. My father knew that this lay in my mind, but he always said that a smith has a duty to his Mob. He must not go off a-roving, hunting that which may not even exist.”