Year of Miracles, page 8
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
Megan gave Eoin a curious glance, but he was smiling. "Of the valley and water," he whispered in response. "A fine name, my rose. A fine name." Then he lifted his eyes to Megan, who folded the seal skin and, offering it to him, nodded once.
The blood bred true.
Half a dozen selkies, females all, went into the sea with that knowledge held close to their hearts.
Glendyr was preposterously weak and slow to grow, by selkie standards. Their children were born and lived their early lives as seals: Glendyr lived his as a human, only occasionally slipping into the skin that was his heritage. Selkie pups might nurse for three months, or four; Glendyr was at the tit for over a year. He swam naturally, even in human form, but it took a full turn of the seasons before he walked. Eoin watched with astonishment through all of it, equally horrified and delighted at the child's slow growth. Selkies kept closer to their parents than seals, forming a more lasting bond, but even so it was nothing to the years of dependency a human child had on its parents. Glendyr needed so much, so constantly, that it seemed incredible he could survive at all. But he did, and thrived.
Within a year, Megan came from the sea and Eoin built her a house of her own, and then more as other selkie females caught with human fathers and birthed children in whom the blood ran true. In five years Glendyr had a brother and a sister, and the selkie exiles had a village at the river's mouth, standing small but strong between two worlds.
The eighth summer, the warriors came.
None of them, not even Eoin, recognized them for what they were, not in the first minutes. Familiar faces, long-since unseen. Mostly males, coming out of the sea with their skins already set aside. Coming out of the sea with such weapons as the selkie used in human form: spears and nets, knives and sharp shells. Megan was the first to shore, the first to greet them, her smile wide.
The clan chief, her own father, gutted her.
She fell, blood spilling bright and red against the sand, and the children, screaming, ran for the water. Ran for the safety of the waves, the one place human fighters could never catch them.
Later, Eoin still did not know how Róisín did it. How she was there so quickly, when the selkies were among the slowest of the Old Races and humans were by far slower still. But she was there, red hair flying loose from its plaits, and she went not for Megan, not for the selkie warriors coming from the sea, but for the children who saw nothing of danger in a pod of seals splashing in the waves. Her voice rose and carried, sharp over the sound of screams: "High land, high land, not the waters at all! Get ye's to the hills now, go, go on with ye's, go!"
Glendyr, as red-haired as his mother and wise enough to listen, spun on his heel and grabbed the two nearest children to drag them with him. He was oldest, most respected, most adored by the younger pups, and they wheeled after him like sharks chasing fish. The smallest of them who could walk, the toddlers, were close enough to the village that their mothers scooped them up and ran while human fathers, knowing what their wives and children were, went to face the males on the beach with sword and shield and rage.
Róisín, between sand and sea, snatched the last of the children from knee-deep water and sent them running after Glendyr before turning to the oncoming selkie with all the courage of a warrior herself.
She saw it, Eoin thought. She saw the sleek-headed spear that caught her in the chest, though when it was thrown it had been intended for her back. Saw, but could not escape: its force collapsed her in on herself, arms flung forward as her shoulders caved, as her feet left the earth, as her spine bent and she fell. She had saved the children, and died facing her enemy.
Much, much later, Eoin thought she would have liked that, his bold and beautiful Róisín, but in the moment he thought nothing, only felt the pain of life going out of him, and ran to do battle.
"Eoin. Eoin, wake up. You've slept two days, and your children need you. Wake up." Familiar voice, but the wrong one. Eoin opened his eyes slowly, saw the thatch of his rooftop by the dim light of embers. Saw Megan sitting beside his bed, thin-lipped with grief and worry.
"You should be dead," he said after a time, and touched his own chest, his own belly, his own thigh: places where he remembered, almost, that pain had scored him. Not so deeply as the hollow in his chest, the emptiness of where Róisín had been, but deeply enough that life should have fled his body. "I should be too."
"Glendyr." The name broke from Megan's lips. Eoin sat up, stomach clenched with fear, and his age-mate, his oldest friend, wiped tears away and put her hand on his shoulder. "No. No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. He saved us. He got the children to higher ground and came back to the village to get our skins. The fighting was over then, I think. It was so fast, and you were..."
Her silence was louder than any words. Eoin had only sketchy memories, images of violence. He had seen seals fight one another at mating season, even kill one another. He had known the same capability, the same astonishing strength and potential for rage, lay within a people who shared so many aspects with the sea mammals, but had never imagined it within himself.
"Our men," Megan said, "they fought well, they protected the children, but some of them have left now. You're the only male who has left the clan," she said awkwardly, as if it was explanation enough. "We females aren't as strong as you. We frightened them, I think, with our strength, but you terrified them."
"But the warriors struck me down." Almost a question. The idea that his mortal friends had turned on him was too much to bear, in the fresh raw shock of survival and loss.
"My father," Megan said bitterly. "The same as he did me, and we would both have died, and most of the others as well, if Glendyr hadn't brought our skins so we could change." She swallowed. "My father and his warriors were less fortunate. They'd left their skins safely in the sea. By the time the others brought them..."
Shifting healed. They all knew that; it was part of their longevity, and more, it was part of what made the Old Races so very difficult to kill. It also, perhaps, had led the clan chief and his warriors to overconfidence: they would have imagined they could retreat and heal long before a puny army made mostly of mortal men might ever do them real damage. They had come, Eoin was certain, for the children, and had not imagined that those childrens' mothers would fight. They had struck Megan down, breaking one of their few sacred laws, and yet had not thought females who had chosen motherhood and exile over the clan might disregard those other ancient laws as well. "Róisín had no skin to save her."
Megan closed her eyes. "If she hadn't been so brave, I don't know if the rest of us would have been, ourselves."
Eoin's fingertips found new scars across his body, and thought they would heal more quickly than the sick emptiness in his chest. "You would have been. For the children."
"If Róisín hadn't been so quick, there might not have been children to fight for. She was...you had better come to see, Eoin. You'd best come and see." Megan offered a hand and Eoin rose with her help, moving stiffly and knowing he shouldn't be walking at all.
Glendyr and his brother and sister waited in the next room, pale faces streaked with tears that flowed anew when their father joined them. He knelt and held them all, wordless with the same shock and sorrow they shared. Megan left them for a long time, but finally said, "There's more, Eoin. More you need to see."
They went together, Megan ahead and Eoin with his children hand in hand behind her. She stepped aside as they left their home, and for long moments Eoin did not understand what he saw.
Selkies, male and female alike, working to restore the village, patrolling the nearby water's edge, laughing and playing with children. Faces he knew and face he didn't: strangers from other clans, dozens of them. They slowed as they noticed him, facing him with respect, with hope, with pride, and Megan whispered, "They've been arriving since my father's defeat. They're telling tales of schisms within the clans, of the battle here being a breaking point. They've come to see our people survive, Eoin. They're here to fight for us, because other warriors will think as my father did and will come to try to wipe us out, because this isn't over, it can't be over, not until those like my father change their minds or die away. They're here for the children, Eoin. For the hope of children, when we've had none for so long."
He was nodding, had been nodding since before she began to speak, understanding not just what the new arrivals meant, but what Róisín had meant as well. She would be the death of him, he had thought, but no. Instead, he had been the death of her, and she, she, his bright and clever Róisín, she had been the life of him.
The life of him, and of all their future to come.
MOUNTAIN'S DAUGHTER
In so far as yeti names translated to human words, her name was Little Patch of Darkness Against Snow Shadowed by the Great Mountain, and in the tongue she had grown up speaking, it sounded quite beautiful. When, as a young adult, she left the mountains to learn about the people she'd been born to, she was sufficiently appalled at the ad-hock translation that she had chosen to simply take the last of it, the mountain's name for her own: Denali. But in her heart she thought of herself as Little Patch, and it would be the name she was known by in the long memories of the Old Races.
She did not, of course, remember the incident that had separated her from human parents, or at least not clearly. It came to her in dreams: a slide into crystallized snow, shadows blue and deep and dangerous all around her. The air was thin in those dreams, snow pressing on her, taking her breath away; she could not, try as she might, claw her way free as more snow piled up around her, above her, taking the world away until she wrenched awake with a gasp. She would lie awake, then, feeling air fill her lungs again until she trusted it hadn't abandoned her, and then she would shift in the furs, trying to find a space different enough from how she had been sleeping that the nightmare couldn't return. Even so, she would often go back to sleep with that shade of glacial blue burned behind her eyelids, never quite releasing her from its grip.
It had been an avalanche, late in the season, that spawned those dreams. Her mother, Rekka, still spoke with surprise when she mentioned it: the human tribes rarely risked the mountains at all until the brief northerly summer had settled well in and what rotten snow that intended to fall, had. Perhaps the winter had been unusually harsh, or the summer before, unusually sparse; for the mountain-bound yeti, who survived, in truth, more on magic than on food, it made little difference, but something had driven Denali's tribe to the mountain pass weeks before it was truly safe. Rekka did not know, to this day, whether any of the older humans had survived, only that Denali herself had been thrown clear, and that against all wisdom, Rekka had crossed the broken snow field to collect the shivering, sobbing human child: the little patch of darkness against snow shadowed by the great mountain.
The others, deeply disapproving, had dug through the snowy rubble in hopes of finding survivors so Rekka could be forced to give the squalling baby back to them. They found bodies, seven of them, swiftly, because no other creature on earth could sense heat or sound beneath the snow as the yeti could, but there were no living humans to be found, not all the way to the avalanche's leading edge. Nor were there footprints to suggest anyone had gotten away, but even the elders would not discount the possibility; perhaps a cloud of snow had snatched someone up and flung them a far distance, or perhaps the cold between, the space where yeti stepped to hide from prying human eyes, had seized a few humans and cast them out again elsewhere. It happened; the Arctic peoples had legends of the cold between, and how it sometimes saved a hunter in a storm, or a child lost on the tundra.
When Denali returned to the human world, that was where she told them she had been: the cold between, caught there for so long that she had grown up from an infant into a child, and from a child into a woman, all under the watchful eyes of the spirits who lived there. It was not even a lie, but it was not until much later that she understood that the people to whom she had returned did not, quite, believe her. Not when she had, with unintended arrogance, taken the Great One's name as her own, and not when she had been raised by spirits. She was old before she understood that human tribes half-believed her to be the spirit of the mountain itself, given mortal flesh and come to judge whether the People were respectful enough of the land they lived upon, the beasts they hunted, and the spirits who guided them, and that she would grant them the mountain's bounty if they were found worthy.
They were worthy; within the range of human fallibility and generosity, they were, but she could no more influence the caribou run or the berries flowering than any mortal, and perhaps less than some; and the Great One's weather did as it wished no matter what a human might do. And like a good spirit, she went back to the mountain, in the end: but that was the end, and she had so many years between.
She was too young, when she became Rekka's daughter, to remember much of the world she had left behind: growing up in the Great One's shadow was all she knew, and the gentle, enormous shaggy creature who had adopted her was the only parent she could recall. Her earliest memories were of combing through Rekka's fur, laughing with delight as she found threads changing to summer brown and grey, for the yeti changed coats with the seasons like ptarmigan or hares. In winter, Rekka was white with blue shadows; in summer, beautifully patterned and mottled to walk unseen against the bare stone.
To Denali's practiced eye, all of her adopted tribe were distinctly individual, easy to tell apart, though if she tried very hard to think as a human, she could almost imagine they looked alike. Almost; it was easier to think the humans she'd seen from a distance all looked alike, with their black eyes and black hair and brown skin. Sometimes whole tribes of them looked generally different from another whole tribe: that group was taller and darker of skin; this group, more broadly built and more golden than brown—but within them the individuals were difficult to distinguish, and she had no idea if she looked more like one group of them than another, or what people might have once been her own.
It didn't distress her, the wondering. She could imagine no happier life than running, in clothes woven from fur shed by the whole tribe, across snowscapes, or scaling cliff faces that her fingers adapted to, the tips flattening and widening as she pulled herself from one tiny ledge to another. She could hold her body's weight from any fingertip, although not from the last two for long, as she had discovered the hard way more than once. Her finger and toenails were thick and strong, accustomed to being jammed into small spaces so she could climb, and at night she would compare her own funny, small hands with their blunt thick nails to Rekka's long graceful hands and claws so filled with power. The yeti were too large to look as though they moved quickly; large enough that they should seem ponderous, but instead they looked like dancers, every motion effortless, even—as happened far too often—when they were lurching to save Denali from her own latest antics.
There was no fear in falling, when she knew the tribe would be there to catch her. She grew strong and bold and tall, or at least, she thought she was tall. It was hard to tell, when surrounded by adults of a species that grew half again the height of men, and there were no other children. She had asked why, once, guilelessly, and Rekka had frowned at the Great Bear glittering in the sky and said, "I think we must live on more than magic, to breed. We Old Races," for she had long since told Denali of the different ancient, magical races that peopled the world along with humans, "breed slowly anyway, in exchange for our long lives. But I think we yeti are especially slow to have children, perhaps because we live so close to the edge of the world." She had put her hand out then, like she might reach into the cold between, and Denali had grabbed her long fingers and held her in place.
Denali could herself travel into the cold between; she had learned how when she was too young to know she couldn't, which was, she imagined, the way of all magic. But she wanted Rekka to stay, then, to tell her more stories of the yeti people, and her mother obliged, as she always did. "We do not fight," Rekka murmured. "Humans fight so much, and the Old Races in general, somewhat, but we yeti have eschewed conflict. It's easy, perhaps, when we can always step into the cold between and avoid it, but even if it was not easy…" She shivered, which yeti rarely did.
"You're too big to fight," Denali said with airy confidence. "Too much energy to bother."
Rekka laughed, a warm whuff of sound. "Dragons are much larger, and far more combative."
"But they go out into the world, too," Denali replied shrewdly. "We don't. Maybe if we did we would fight, too."
"I hope not. I think it would lose us what we are. And you, my daughter," Rekka said with a gentle nudge, "are not yeti, no matter how much you look like one in your cloak of our fur and your clawed snowshoes that mimic our feet."
Denali extended her toes, wiggling them, then tucked them back under Rekka's warmth. "I'm not human, either. Perhaps someday I'll bridge the worlds, if I can do it without sending them all into the mountains to hunt you."
"They've hunted us before," Rekka murmured. "We simply step away."
"Do you ever step to another mountain?" Denali demanded. "Is the cold between a gateway between one place and another? Could I visit yeti who live in low green mountains far away, or the very tallest mountains in the world, or on the walls of the smoke-spitting mountains? Would they be brown and grey in the summer too, or would the ones who live in forests be brown and green, and only grey in the winter? Do they live on magic alone too, or do they gobble rock and thank the spirit of a fallen deer when age or accident has taken it, and eat its flesh? Or leaves? Do they eat leaves? We eat leaves and berries and fish and—"
Rekka laughed louder, a rumble that made rocks shiver, and Denali gazed at her with surprised innocence. "You eat fish and berries and thank the spirit of the caribou when it falls and feeds you," Rekka said. "I think no yeti needs those things. We haven't partaken of them in aeons, not since humans came to our remote lands and hunted us when they saw us."
