The Reindeer People. Megan Lindholm

       CHAPTER TWO

      She made her own trail, threading between trees just far enough apart to permit passage of the travois she dragged. Behind her, her long trail meandered through the forest, swerving and winding among the trunks but always bearing north. Benu’s folk had been bound southward. She knew it was foolish to move north at this time of year, but Carp would not expect her to be foolish. Even if he guessed that she had gone north, Carp could not follow them, not unless he was stubborn enough to leave Benu’s folk and travel alone. Perhaps, she thought as she plodded on, perhaps he could convince a few of Benu’s hunters to track her, for a day or so. But they would be unwilling to trail her for longer than that, for they were anxious to get themselves south, to their own winter grounds. And despite Carp’s power over them, they would be reluctant to go after his strange apprentice. No. Carp would be the only one with any reason to wish them back. She moved her fingers inside her mitten. Six days since she had left, and two falls of snow. If he had been following her, he would have caught her by now.

      Safely out of Carp’s reach, she told herself. She waited to feel some lightening of her heart but only felt her burden dragging at her shoulders. Out of Carp’s reach, and into unknown areas and dangers. The straps of the travois cut into her flesh until she wondered if it was sweat or blood that damped her shoulders and back. Heavier than the drag of her tent and possessions was the weight of the task she had taken on. To do all, for herself and her son, in an unfamiliar territory devoid of human life. And to somehow change Kerlew, she reminded herself. To make him less strange, less difficult for other folk to understand To drive Carp’s strange notions out of his head and replace them with the skills he would need to live. To cleanse him of the magic Carp had started growing in him, just as she would cleanse a wound of an infection. Her determination set her teeth. She would do it. And until it was done, they would live alone and apart from other folk. No more Kerlew being hurt. No more hurting of others.

      Her mind traveled back through the catalog of folk they had lived among. Before Benu’s hunters, there had been a river tribe. Tillu had liked them, enjoyed their cleanliness and the songs they sang as they tended their nets. She and her skills had been welcome among them, until Kerlew had come seeking her one evening, walking boldly into the women’s hut where no male ever ventured, into the midst of a womanhood ceremony. When Tillu protected Kerlew from the flung stones, they had both been driven from the river tribe with little more than the clothes on their backs. She flinched at the memory, and the others that crowded up behind it. Kerlew eating the jerky a hunter had set out as a spirit offering, Kerlew following a hunter of Oslor’s folk and springing every trap he had set, Kerlew noting aloud that Trantor’s son looked more like Edor than Trantor, to the great dismay of Trantor’s wife. Kerlew, Kerlew, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong words in his mouth.

      ‘Kerlew?’ she called questioningly, realizing it was some time since she had last heard his voice. There was no answer. She halted, stilling the scrape of the travois’s poles over the frozen ground and thin layer of snow. Awkwardly she turned in her harness, looking back past her left shoulder. ‘Kerlew?’

      ‘I walk where no one else has ever walked before.’

      She snapped her head about, found him just slightly behind her and to her right. ‘I thought for a moment I had lost you,’ she told him. She began walking again.

      Some moments passed. Then, ‘Not me.’ The boy chuckled.

      ‘Not you what?’ she asked absently.

      ‘Not me you lost. Carp and Benu’s folk. We should find them soon?’

      ‘Maybe.’ She walked on a little faster. The first night they camped she had tried to make him understand why they had to leave Carp and Benu’s hunters behind. But as he realized she meant that they were running away from Carp, he had become agitated. The more she explained, the more upset he had become, swiftly reaching a point where he was not hearing anything she said. ‘Carp, Carp!’ he had wailed, rocking back and forth as he crouched on the frozen ground beside the small fire. ‘Carp! Carp!’ Until she had feared that if there were any of Benu’s hunters tracking them, the sound would attract them.

      ‘Hush, hush,’ she had comforted him, choosing any words that would quiet him. ‘Tomorrow, then, we’ll go back. Just be quiet now, Kerlew, and tomorrow we’ll go back to find them.’ And then, cruelly, because he wailed still, ‘Hush! Or a bear will hear you!’ That had silenced him, leaving him shaking with his pale eyes wide. ‘We will go back tomorrow,’ she had assured him, repeating the words until he slept. But when morning came, she had continued on her trek away from the hunters’ camp, Kerlew none the wiser. A few times each day now he asked when they would find Carp, and she gave him nebulous answers. Soon enough he would forget. She knew her son that well; nothing stayed in his memory for long.

      ‘I walk where no man has ever walked before!’

      She glanced over at him. His smile was too wide, too wet. Sometimes she longed to slap it from his face, make pain chase away the vacuous, idiot smile and the foolish words. But she did not. She knew only too well the consuming self-disgust that would follow such an act. ‘You chose to keep him with you,’ she reminded herself. ‘You could have left him to Carp. You know you cannot beat sense into him.’ To Kerlew she said, ‘That’s silly. Just because you cannot see a trail does not mean that no man has ever walked there before.’

      ‘On this snow!’ Kerlew explained, smiling at the thought: ‘On this snow, no one has ever walked before, for the tracks would be here. This snow fell new last night, and the first tracks on it are mine. I walk where no one has walked before.’

      ‘Mmm.’ Tillu kept walking. There were times when the boy almost made sense, when she believed that, to him, his observations and statements followed some mysterious logic of his own. Carp’s shamanic instruction of the boy had made him more vocal; there was that she could say for it. Unfortunately, what Kerlew vocalized was the mystical gabble he had picked up from the old man.

      She glanced across at her son. If only he would stand straighter, not drag his feet when he walked. If only his eyes would not wander and stare through things, he would not be such an awkward-looking boy. Not handsome, perhaps, but no worse than some she had seen take wives and build homes. Perhaps she could change the way he moved and spoke. Alone and apart from all others, perhaps he would turn once more to her, listen to her again. She would teach him, and this time it would be different. This time he would learn and grow. He would walk at her side through the forest and learn, not only her herbs of healing, but a hunter’s skills. He would learn silence, and swiftness, and skill with a bow. As he grew, he would stand tall and move as a man should move. And one day she and Kerlew would be hunting, and they would come across strange hunters. Kerlew would be standing straight, having just brought down a fine deer, and the hunter folk would smile at the sight of the tall young hunter, and there would be a young woman who would look at him just a little longer than was quite proper, and she would be the –

      ‘I’m hungry.’

      The complaint broke the dream. Tillu sighed, both at her own foolishness and at Kerlew’s request. She had taken what supplies she could, but already they dwindled. The boy ate so much, so fast. She glanced again at him. Skinny. Perhaps she should give him the worm tea again.

      ‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated into her silence.

      ‘Soon.’ One more hill, she promised herself, and then, if the valley beyond it were a likely one, she’d stop for the night. This time she’d set up their tent and stay a few days. Carp’s seamed face came suddenly to her mind. Well, perhaps not just yet. Sleeping in skins was not so bad, it was not all that cold yet. Tomorrow she would push on for a day or so more, or perhaps three. She shivered. If Carp did come after