But was there a place for him among the Tanu?
He stood knee-deep in the cool water, his fists clenched. Lost. Belonging neither to one world nor the other. Outcast and alone.
Herilak called out to him, his words cutting through Kerrick’s dark thoughts. He waded ashore, then pulled his garments slowly on.
“We leave now,” Herilak said.
“Where do you go?” Kerrick asked, still torn by conflicting feelings.
“West. To find other hunters. To return with them and kill murgu.”
“They are too strong, too many.”
“Then I will be dead and my tharm will join the tharms of the other hunters in my sammad. But first I will have avenged them. It is a good way to die.”
“There are no good ways to die.”
Herilak looked at him in silence, understanding something of the conflicting emotions that Kerrick was feeling. Those years of captivity must have done strange things to the boy who was now a man. But the years were there, they could not be taken away. There was no going back. The way ahead might be hard—but it was the only way.
Herilak reached up to his neck and slowly lifted the leather thong with the pendant skymetal knife over his head, then held it out.
“This was your father’s. You are his son for you still wear the smaller boy’s knife made at the same time. Hang this one about your neck beside it. Wear it now to remind you of his death and the death of your sammad. And who killed them. Feel hatred in your heart and the knowledge that you seek vengeance as well.”
Kerrick hesitated, then reached out and took the knife, held it, then clenched his fist tightly about its hard shape.
There could be no going back to Alpèasak. Ever. He must teach himself to feel only hatred towards the murderers of his people. He hoped that would come.
But now all he felt was a terrible emptiness inside.
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR
Es mo tarril drepastar, er em so man drija.
If my brother is wounded, I will bleed.
The hunting was very bad. Ulfadan had been out since before dawn and had little to show for it. A single rabbit hung from his belt. It was young and scrawny, with scarcely enough meat on its bones to feed a single person. How was his entire sammad to eat. He came to the edge of the forest and stopped under a large oak, looking out at the grassland beyond. He dared go no further.
Here there were murgu. From here to the end of the world, if the world had an end, there were only these despised and frightening creatures. Some made good eating, he had once tasted the meat from the leg of one of the smaller murgu with bills that grazed in vast herds. But death was always waiting for the hunter who sought them out. There were poisonous murgu in the grass, snakes of all sizes, many-colored and deadly. Worse still were the giant creatures whose roars were like thunder, whose tread shook the ground like an earthquake. As he always did when he thought of murgu, though he did not realize it, his fingers touched the tooth of one of these giants that hung on his chest. A single tooth almost as long as his forearm. He had been young and stupid when he retrieved it, risking death to show his bravery.
From the trees he had seen the marag die, seen the repulsive carrion eaters that quarreled and tore at the creature’s body. Only after dark had he dared to leave the shelter of the trees, to pry this single tooth from the gaping jaws. Then the night-murgu had appeared and only chance had saved his life. The long white scar on his thigh was witness that he had not returned unharmed. No, there was no game to be sought beyond the protection of the trees.
But the sammad must eat. Yet the food they searched and hunted for was growing scarcer and scarcer. The world was changing and Ulfadan did not know why. The alladjex told them that ever since Ermanpadar had shaped Tanu from the mud of the river bed the world had been the same. In the winter they went to the mountains where the snow lay deep and the deer were easy to kill. When the snow melted in the spring they followed the fast streams down to the river, and sometimes to the sea, where fish leaped in the water and good things grew in the earth. Never too far south though, for only murgu and death waited there. But the mountains and the dark northern forests had always provided everything that they had needed.