We take what we need!” the Hárugur King shouted, his cheeks showing red with rage under his beard. “We do not ask!”
“Trading is not asking, Father Sire,” Nyr said, a little less patiently than the last three times he’d said it. He took a breath to calm himself and tried not to cough when the smoke hit his lungs. His father refused to have a chimney installed in the Council Cave—no breaking with tradition, even in the cause of fresh air. Tradition. Maybe that was an argument he could use. “Our ancestors traded,” he said.
His father paused and shot a quick glance toward the circle of gray-haired men sitting cross-legged, each on the skin of a wolf he had killed himself. The Hárugur King’s council had no power to gainsay the king, but they did have influence. Particularly Bren, his father’s best friend and closest adviser. Bren lifted one shoulder, as if to say, “Hear the boy out,” so his father nodded at Nyr to go on.
“The old songs often talk about trading. Taking the Dragon’s Road to the Wind Cities, for example,” Nyr reminded them.
The old men were nodding.
“That’s true,” Garn said. He was the songkeeper, who taught the boys all the traditions. “And not just the Wind Cities. Over the mountains, one song says. That one about the big blond warrior from the south who led his people out through Death Pass. We traded with them for a long time before they closed the passes.”
That caused a deep silence. Nyr felt his heart beating strongly. Over the mountains—the land of plenty, where ice came only in winter! The land of sun and green grass all year around, they said. Where a child—a child—could go for a walk quite safely, with no fear of wolf or wolverine or even storm. And they said that the wind and water spirits had never been in that country. The soul-eating monsters had disappeared from his own land twenty or so years ago, but he could remember them, just, remember the fear as the wind wraiths had chased him and his big brother Andur once, long claws out and hungry teeth gnashing. Nyr shivered with fear and revulsion. They had only just made it to the shelter of the stable in time. The greatest fear anyone in Mountainside had was that the wraiths would return as mysteriously as they had disappeared. But the southerners, it was said, did not need to fear them at all.
He had been to the country over the mountains, twice now, with raiding parties, and he had seen the green fields and the rich farms, but that had been high in the mountains, which was enough like his own country in summer to be disappointingly ordinary. But if they traded… he might actually get to a place where it didn’t snow. Or see the real ocean. The free ocean, where waves slapped the shore, as they did in the sagas.
The silence in the cave stretched on. No one was prepared to comment before the Hárugur King spoke.
“The easterners cannot be trusted,” his father said eventually. “They are selfish, and greedy, caring not for others. If you go there, they will take your trade goods and kill you, and we will be left with nothing but grief.”
Tears stood in his father’s eyes, and there was a murmur of sympathy from the council. They had all lost sons or nephews in the raiding parties. Nyr’s brother, Andur, had been killed only two years before. His father had grieved thoroughly, as a man should, to put the pain behind him, but the thought of losing another son was perhaps too hard, Nyr thought. Particularly him. He had always been his father’s favorite, much to Andur’s disgust.
“Will you keep me home forever, to keep me safe?” Nyr asked gently, matching tears standing in his own eyes. “Like a young maid, waiting for a lover who never comes?”
His father scratched vigorously at his beard, a sign he was trying to avoid answering.
“I will consider it, and ask the King’s guidance,” he barked, and rose, so that all the council had to stand up too. Nyr covered his eyes with his hand, the mark of respect due to a king, and kept them covered until his father strode from the cave.
Members of the council milled around a little, talking in low voices. Bren came up to Nyr and pulled a sympathetic face.
“He’ll let you go,” Sami said. “He knows it’s his duty, but he won’t like it.”
Nyr sighed.
“We need this,” he said. “It’s the first time ever we have a surplus of skins and tusks. We could lay the foundation for a decade’s prosperity.”
“What will you ask in return?” There was a gleam in Bren’s eye that Nyr knew.
“Whatever the council directs,” Nyr replied promptly, too old to be caught out. Bren laughed and patted him on the arm.
“Right answer,” he said. “But make sure it includes some of those new bows they’re making. The mountain valley archers are getting amazing range with them.”
Nyr made a face.
“You think they’d trade us weapons? I doubt it. Not the first time, anyway.”
“Then try to get a look at the bows, at least. We know that they’re not using one single piece of wood, as we do. Figure out how they bind the pieces together. That’s the secret.”
Bren could talk about bows all day. Nyr nodded before he could get properly started on his favorite subject and slid away to the curtained arch which led to the main hall.
The hall was full of women and children, as usual, and the old people sitting by the big central fire. No need for a chimney here—the hall had been chosen a thousand years ago because it had a natural chimney, a high crack of rock which sucked all the smoke—and the warm air, too—out the top. It was always chilly in the hall, but never cold, and there was always the sensation of air moving across your face, which was the most reassuring feeling in the world to a cave dweller. It meant the passageways were open; there had been no rockfalls.
The hall was full of smells, too, as it always was: sweat and newly tanned leather, a faint smell of stale urine from the sleeping old ones by the fire, the rich scent of roasting meat, babies and baby vomit turned a little sour, and underneath, always, the smell of rock, the rock of home.
On a scaffold made of lashed bones, high up on the eastern wall, Urno was still painting the new scene he’d started at the beginning of winter. The lower walls were all covered with scenes painted by earlier artists—ancestral treasures, his father called them. Urno’s work was of the highest strata, and Nyr could trace the slow development of pigment and technique merely by running his eyes up one column of paintings. The long tradition had changed mostly in small steps, but Urno’s work—bold splashes of color, strong lines, distant perspectives—broke sharply with that tradition. He liked to hold forth about how the detailed, intricate drawings of the past were based on the carvings ancient peoples had done on narwhal tusks, and how paint did not have to follow the restrictions of line and cross-shading.
He had lost that argument a hundred times before his master, Grilsen, had died and left him in undisputed possession of the craft. So now he was painting a vibrant, swirling scene of the butterfly migration, great curls and curves of wings against a summer blue sky.
“Say what you like,” his mother’s voice came from behind him, “it cheers the place up.”
Nyr grinned and turned to kiss her thin cheek. Halda, his mother, was always wistful in winter. She was a creature of the open air, and by the end of the dark season she had fretted herself to skin and bone. The first clear day saw her tramping off into the wilderness, desperate for solitude. As a child, Nyr had thought she was trying to get away from him because he had been naughty (in winter, it seemed he was always being naughty, even when he didn’t mean to be). Now he knew that she had the spirit of a wild bird, and should have been able to migrate with the flocks of geese and ducks which flew overhead each spring and autumn.
He wondered, often, what had brought his loud, belligerent father and his subtle mother together. There was no doubt they loved each other, even if his mother was more reticent about showing that in public. His father, of course, bellowed how wonderful she was, and threw his arms around her on the slightest excuse. Half his grief for Andur had been the knowledge of her deep, distracted sorrow. But she was better now.
As if to prove it, she said, “Dalle has been talking to me.”
Dalle was the mother of Larra, a slender girl who’d been making eyes at Nyr since she was four years old. He’d have been more impressed if it hadn’t started the day someone explained to her that he was the king’s son. Even at four, Larra had liked the idea of being a princess. She still did, especially since Andur’s death meant that Nyr was likely to be elected king after his father’s death. He had cousins who would be eligible for the election, but they weren’t likely to oppose him. He made a face at his mother.
“I hope you told her I’d taken a vow of celibacy.”
Halda laughed. “As if she’d believe that!” He was known to have dallied more than once—but only with girls who would never be accepted as a wife; the daughters of craftsmen or hunters. Girls who would understand it was just for fun.
“You should think about a wife,” Halda said. “Your father has no heirs but you. Even if one of your strawbacks had a son, he’d be out of the election.”
“I know,” he said soberly. “But—who?”
“One of the chief’s daughters from a tribute tribe, as I was,” his mother said firmly. “The Hot Pool People, or maybe the Wolf Fold. It would be good to bind them more closely to us.”
He made a face and she slapped his arm lightly.
“You’ve got your other girls for pleasure,” she said. “Marriage is about duty.”
“Was it for you?” he asked, genuinely curious.
A shadow painted her face with darkness for a moment.
“I hated your father,” she whispered. “Until Andur was born. When I saw how much he loved his son… I began to know him.”
The idea made him profoundly uncomfortable. Halda put her hand on his arm, her hazel eyes serious.
“Before you go on this trading trip, talk it over with your father. Start negotiations. Trust him to choose you a good girl, someone you’ll be comfortable with.”
Nyr sighed. He’d always known it would happen, sooner or later.
“All right,” he said. “If the Hárugur King approves the trip, I will agree to a marriage.”
Halda smiled. “Did you think he wouldn’t?”
“He’s gone to ask counsel of the king,” Nyr said, reluctantly, knowing it would frighten her.
Shivering, Halda rubbed her hands along her arms under her sleeves, and looked back up to where Urno’s butterflies cavorted across the high wall, as if seeking hope in their pictured freedom.
“Father will be back soon,” he comforted her.
“If it pleases Him,” she said. “And then, you’ll be gone. Who knows if you’ll ever come back?”
“I’ll be back, Ma,” he said, hugging her. “Like a hungry wolverine after a food cache. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
But her face stayed troubled as she moved away to help prepare the evening meal. Nyr wondered what the king would say to his father. That was something he was not looking forward to doing when he became Hárugur King. Asking counsel of the Ice King was always risky, and sometimes, in winter when he was at his most vicious, it was deadly. The end of winter was worst… Nyr waited for his father to return, more troubled than he wanted to admit. What if his father was struck down by the Ice King for suggesting something which went against tradition? It would be his fault.