Passage tsk-3 Read online

  Dag’s voice slowed in new thought. “Hickory Lake Camp doesn’t deal with farmers, only our patrols do, because Hickory’s off in the woods still north of farmer expansion. Here at Pearl Riffle ferry, you’ve been dealing with the problems for decades. You must have learned something about how to rub along.”

  “Not really,” growled Amma. “Think about those stupid pots, and what it says about how afraid and suspicious these folks are of us. And you think we should hand them proof of what we could really do to them? If the farmers can’t be shifted, we should move. Five miles upstream at least. That’s my answer.” She glowered at Nicie, who glowered back.

  Dag shook his head. “Farmers will fill this valley, in time. If it’s hard to keep separate now, it will be impossible later, when there’s nowhere left to move to. We may as well figure it out now.”

  “Who is we, Dag Bluefield No-camp?” said Amma. “Your happy idea of dealing with farmers nearly got our medicine maker murdered this morning.”

  Verel raised a hand in faint protest, though apparently only of the notion that he’d come so close to being slain.

  Amma went on belligerently, “I’d have told them at the Bend that only Lakewakers with gold eyes could heal farmers, which they might have bought, except I worried for the next fellow to come down the road with your eye color. I should have told ’em it was only folks from Hickory Lake, and let your people cope with the knife-wavers.”

  Nicie said slowly, “Really, healing farmers is the same problem as fighting farmers. The burden would put us behind, drag us down.”

  At least she’d been listening. Well, she was a councilor, maybe she was used to hearing folks argue. Dag tried, “But we could keep the balance if the farmers, in turn, took over some of our tasks. Not a gift but a trade.” He glanced at Nicie, and dared to add, “Or even a cash business.” Dag’s own secret notion for making a living in farmer country, before this beguilement problem had taken him so aback.

  Nicie raised her brows. “So, only rich farmers would get healed?”

  Dag’s mouth opened, and closed. Maybe he hadn’t quite thought it through…well, he knew he hadn’t. Yet.

  Verel was giving Dag an indecipherable look. “Not many can do deep groundsetting.”

  “Not everyone would need to. Lots of folks can do minor groundwork. We do it for each other on patrol all the time.”

  “Just what did you do for that wagon-man?” Verel asked. “Patroller.”

  Dag shrugged. Gulped. Described, in as few words as he could manage, the trance-deep groundwork that had pulled Hod’s bone fragments, vessels, and nerves back into alignment and held them there so that they might begin healing. He was careful to call his ghost hand a ground projection, since that was the term Hoharie had so plainly preferred. He hoped the medicine maker would approve his techniques, if not his patient. He didn’t continue into the unexpected later consequences, although he did allow a plaintive note to leak into his voice when he described his wish for an anchoring partner.

  “The Hickory Lake medicine maker knew you could do this sort of thing, and let you get away?” asked Verel.

  Hoharie had seen Dag do much stranger magery than that, in Raintree. “Hoharie tried to recruit me. If she’d been willing to accept Fawn as my wife, and maybe as my spare hands, she might have succeeded. But she wasn’t. So we left.” Verel was regarding him covetously as well as charily, Dag realized at last. Would he take the hint? Between them, Dag and Fawn might add up to a medicine maker and a half, a valuable addition to a straitened camp.

  Maybe, for Verel’s ground flicked out to touch Dag’s wedding cord, concealed from ordinary eyes by his rolled-down sleeve. “It seems just like a real cord,” he said doubtfully.

  “It is.”

  Verel was plainly itching to get Dag alone and ask how they’d woven it. Dag longed even more to take the medicine maker aside and squeeze out everything he knew about healing, groundlock, beguilement, and a hundred other complexities. But that wasn’t the reason the irate camp captain had tracked him here.

  Amma Osprey said grimly, “The old ways have worked for better ’n a thousand years. Nothing lasts that long without good reason. Let farmers keep to farmers, and Lakewalkers to Lakewalkers, and we’ll all survive. Mixing things up is dangerous. Which is fine if it falls on your own fool head, but not so fine when it falls on someone else’s.” She gestured, inarguably, toward Verel’s bandaged hand.

  “Is that all you want?” Dag challenged. “For the problem to go somewhere else?”

  She snorted. “If I tried to shoulder the troubles of the whole world, I’d go mad. And Pearl Riffle would be lost. I run Pearl Riffle patrol. My neighbor camps run their territories, and their neighbors do the same, all the way to the edge of the hinterland and on to the hinterlands beyond, and so we all get through. One by one and all together. I have to trust them; they have to trust me. Trust me not to go haring off after swamp gas, for one thing. So I’ll thank you, Dag No-camp, to keep yourself to yourself and not stir up these people worse in my territory.”

  “I’ll be gone on the rise,” said Dag. He pointed to the windless sky, chilling gold-and-blue as the sun slanted. “Though I can’t control the rain.”

  “That works for me,” said Amma Osprey. She stood abruptly, signaling an end to the talk. The other two rose as well, though their brows seemed wrinkled as much in troubled thought as in irritation.

  Clearly, this was not a good moment to bring up the matter of a spare sharing knife again. Dag sighed and lifted his hand to his throbbing temple in polite farewell.

  9

  Fawn kept an eye out, but Dag did not return to the scavenging site before the coal boat boss came by with a barrow and bought back their pile. Berry scrupulously divided the scanty handful of coins five ways. On the walk back upstream to the Fetch, Bo silently split off and disappeared up the hill in the lengthening shadows toward Possum Landing village.

  Berry just shook her head. At Fawn’s noise of inquiry, she explained, “Bo and I have a pact. He don’t drink the boat’s money. He’s kept to it pretty good, so far.” She sighed. “Don’t suppose we’ll see him again till morning.”

  Still huffing with the chill despite dry clothes, Whit and Hawthorn built up the fire in the Fetch’s hearth while Fawn and Berry dodged around each other whipping together a hot meal. Dag, looking troubled, strolled in as Fawn was dishing out beans and bacon. He met her questioning look with a headshake.

  “Maybe a walk after supper?” she murmured to him as he sat at the table.

  “That’d be good,” he agreed.

  A walk and a talk. There was something pressing on Dag’s mind, sure enough. Fawn was distracted keeping her good food coming, happy just to have a real, if cramped, kitchen to cook in after a summer of smoking herself as well as her meals over an open fire. She encouraged the hesitant Hod to eat up, and then he lurched to the opposite extreme and gobbled as if someone were going to snatch his food away. Whit chided him, and Fawn bent her head and grinned to watch Hod earnestly taking Whit for an authority—on table manners, of all things. Hawthorn chattered on about all the different ways he might spend his coal-salvaging coins. Berry encouraged him to save them; Whit advised him to invest them in something he might resell for a higher price downstream.

  “Something nonbreakable would be smart,” Fawn suggested, winning an irate look from Whit. Dag smiled a little in his silence, and Fawn’s heart was eased. A nippy night was falling beyond the cabin’s square glass windows—frost might lace them by morning—but inside it seemed cozy and bright in the light of the oil lantern. Comfortable. It felt like friends in here, and Fawn decided she liked the feeling very well.

  Dag’s head turned toward the bow; he laid down his fork. In a moment, heavy feet sounded crossing the gangplank, and then a thump as someone jumped to the deck. The boat rocked a trifle. A fist pounded on the front door—hatch, Fawn corrected her thought—and a male voice bellowed, “Boss Berry, send out that long Lakewalker you got
hiding in there!”

  “What?” said Whit, as Dag grimaced. “Someone for you, Dag?”

  “Quite a few someones, seems like,” sighed Dag.

  “Bother Bo for not being here,” muttered Berry, and stood up from her bench. Whit and Fawn followed her through the cabin; she motioned Hawthorn back. Hod hunched fearfully, and Dag did not rise, though he ran his hand through his hair and then leaned his chin on it.

  “Berry!” shouted the voice again. “Out with him, we say!”

  “Hush, Wain, you’ll wake all the catfishes’ children with your bawling,” Berry shouted back irritably. “I can hear you fine, I ain’t deaf.” She pushed open the hatch and strode through. “What’s this ruckus, then?” Whit followed at her elbow, and Fawn at Whit’s.

  One of the big keelers loomed on the front deck between the goat pen and the chicken coop. Dag had left Copperhead tethered for the night to a tree up on shore, well away from the path, with an armload of hay to keep him occupied, but Daisy-goat bleated nervously at the noisy visitor. The man—Wain? — held a torch aloft. The orange light flickered over his broad face, flushed not with exertion or cold but beer, judging by the rich smell wafting from him.

  On the shore, a mob of perhaps twenty people had gathered. Fawn stared in alarm. She recognized some of the keelers who had passed them going down to Pearl Bend earlier—you couldn’t forget those red-and-blue striped trousers, more’s the pity. The others might be townsmen, with one or two women. Some held oil lanterns, and a couple more had torches. Against the shadowy bank, the crowd seemed to glow like a bonfire.

  The keelers routinely wore knives at their belts, some of a size to rival Dag’s war knife, but not a few were also gripping stout sticks. Six of the keelers were holding up a door on their shoulders, hinges and all, and on it lay a shape bundled in blankets, whimpering. Their frowns ranged from tense to grim, their grins from wolfish to foolish. Fawn thought they seemed more excited than angry, but their numbers were disturbing. Stirred up by the noise, several men came out from the neighboring boats to lean on their side-rails and watch.

  “Mark the boat carpenter says those high-and-mighty Lakewalker sorcerers refused to heal his wife. She’s in a fearsome bad way.” Boss Wain jerked a thick thumb over his shoulder at the huddled shape on the door. “So we ’uns from the Snapping Turtle took a show of hands and offered to make this one do it!”

  A murmur of agreement and a surge forward rippled through the crowd, followed by a sharp cry as the door was jostled. The broad-shouldered keelers holding it up looked awkwardly at each other and steadied it with more care.

  Fawn wondered if she should claim Dag wasn’t here, and if a violent search of the Fetch would follow, but before she could open her mouth, Dag ducked through the front hatch and straightened up to his full height—a good hand taller than the keeler boss, Fawn was happy to see.

  “How de’,” he said, in his deep, calm, carrying voice. “What seems to be your trouble?”

  The keeler’s head sunk between his shoulders, like a bull about to charge. “We got us a real sick woman, here.”

  Dag’s glance flicked toward the shore. “I see that.”

  With his groundsense, he doubtless saw a lot more than that, and had done so even before he’d stepped out into the torchlight. Fawn clutched that thought to herself. Did Dag know what he was doing? Maybe not. But he’d know a lot more about what everyone else was doing than they could guess.

  “You healed that wagon-boy’s busted knee,” Wain went on. “He showed it around at the Bend tavern last night. A lot of us saw. We know you can help.”

  Dag drew a long breath. “You know, I’m not a real medicine maker. I’m just a patroller.”

  “Don’t you try and lie your way out of this!”

  Dag’s head came up; the keeler stepped back half a pace at his glinting glare. “I don’t lie.” And added under his breath, “I won’t.” He rubbed the back of his neck, looked up, and sighed softly to Fawn, who had crept close under his left shoulder, “You see any horse-tails up there in the moonlight?”

  The long, wispy clouds that heralded a change of weather. She followed his glance. A few faint bands like skim milk veiled the autumn stars to the west. “Yes…well, maybe.”

  He smiled down at her in would-be reassurance. “Guess we’ll take our chances.” He turned his head, raised his voice, and called to the shore, “Bring her here onto the bow and set her down. No, there’s not room for the all of you! Just her husband and, um, she got any female relatives? Sister, oh good. You come up, ma’am.” The crowd rearranged itself as the keelers threw down a couple more boards to make a better gangplank, carried the door across, and grunted onto the deck.

  “Whit, stay by me,” Dag whispered under the cover of this noise. “Fawn, you stick real tight.” She nodded. “That the husband?” Dag muttered on, as a pale young man with dark circles under his eyes came forward. “Crap, he’s hardly older than Whit.”

  Despite the risk of dropping the woman into the mud, the move onto the boat served to thin the crowd considerably. It also shifted the visitors onto Berry’s territory, for whatever authority she might have in what was shaping up to be a dicey situation. Once they’d set the door down, Berry was able to shoo most of the keelers back to the bank for the plain reason that there was no room for them aboard. Boss Wain remained, his jaw jutting in resolve. Fawn supposed this expedition had been organized in the Pearl Bend tavern. A good deed combined with a chance to beat someone up seemed an ideal combination to appeal to a bunch of half-drunk keelers. Twenty to one—did they think they could take Dag? He was staring down expressionlessly at the woman. Maybe not.

  The boat carpenter’s wife reminded Fawn a bit of Clover—before this dire sickness had fallen on her, she might have been plump and cheerful. Now her round face was pallid and sheened with cold sweat. The brown hair at her temples curled damply from the tears of pain that leaked from the corners of her eyes. Breathing shallowly, she clawed at her belly, skirts bunching in her sweaty hands. Fawn was aware of Hod creeping out of the cabin door to stare, and Hawthorn as well.

  Her husband knelt down and caught up one of her frantic hands; they clutched each other. He looked up at Dag in heartbreaking appeal. “What’s wrong with her, Lakewalker? She didn’t cry like this even when our baby was born!”

  Dag rubbed his lips, then knelt down by the woman’s other side, pulling Fawn with him. “Happens I’ve seen this trouble before. In a medicine tent up in Luthlia, a long time ago.” Fawn glanced up at him, knowing just when he’d spent a season in such a tent. “They brought this fellow in, taken sudden with gut pain. Did this come on her sudden?”

  The carpenter nodded anxiously. “Two days back.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dag rubbed his hand on his knee. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a person’s insides”—not the best choice of words, Fawn thought, with maybe half the people here suspecting Lakewalkers of cannibalism—“but down at the corner of most folks’ entrails there’s this slippy blind pocket ’bout the size of a child’s little finger. The medicine makers never could tell me what it does. But this fellow, his had got twisted around or swollen up or something, and took a roaring hot infection that blew it up like a bladder. By the time he came to the medicine maker, it had busted clean open. No, not clean. Dirty. It spilled his guts into his belly just like a knife wound would.”

  The keeler boss, at least, looked as though he knew what this entailed, and his lips went round in an unvoiced whistle.

  “The infection spread too fast for even the maker’s best ground reinforcements to stop it, and he died about three days on. Funny thing was, when his gut busted, his pain actually eased for a while, since the pressure went down. I guess it fooled him into thinking he was getting better, till it was too late.”

  The carpenter’s voice went hushed. “Is Cress’s belly going to bust inside like that, then?”

  “It hasn’t yet,” said Dag. “This is a right dangerous sickness. But the groundw
ork to fix it isn’t really that deep. There’s a host of belly-ills no medicine maker born can cure, especially in women, but this…” He let out his breath. “I can try, leastways.” He nudged Fawn. “Spark, would you take off my arm harness, please?”

  Dag could manage that himself, but having Fawn do it directed their spectators’ eyes to her, the patroller’s farmer bride. Purposely? She unbuckled the straps and drew off the wooden cuff and the fine cotton sock beneath that she’d lately knitted for Dag to stop the cuff rubbing up blisters, and set them aside. The presence or absence of the arm harness made no difference to Dag’s ghost hand as far as she knew, but she supposed Dag thought it would alarm the carpenter less not to have that wicked hook waving over his wife’s belly.

  “What I can do—what I can try to do…” Dag looked up and around, and Fawn suspected only she realized how much uncertainty and fear his stern face was masking. “First I want to wrap a ground reinforcement around the swelling. Most of you don’t know what ground is, but anyway, you won’t see anything. Then I want to try and pry that swollen end open so’s the pocket will drain back into the gut the way it’s supposed to. That part I think may hurt, but then it ought to ease. There’s a danger. Two dangers. Look at me, you husband, sister.” His voice softened, “Cress.” He smiled down at her; her pain-pinched eyes widened a trifle. When he was sure he had their attention, he continued, “That little pocket’s stretched really tight right now. There’s a chance it’ll bust while I’m trying to drain it. But I think it’s like to bust anyway pretty soon. Do you still want me to try this?”

  They looked at each other; the sick woman squeezed her husband’s hand, and he wet his lips and nodded.

  “There’s another hitch. For later. Subtler.” Dag swallowed hard. “Sometimes, when Lakewalkers do deep groundwork on farmers, the farmers end up beguiled. It’s not on purpose, but it’s part of why the Lakewalkers here won’t treat you. Now, I’ll be gone on the rise. There’s a good chance that a touch of beguilement would do no worse to Cress than leave her sad for something she can never have, which can happen to a person whether they’re beguiled or not. So, I don’t know if you’re a stupid-jealous sort of fellow, Mark-carpenter, or more sensible. But if that mood should come on her, later, it’d be your husband-job to help her ease it, not to harry her about it. Do you understand?”