The Steel Remains полностью

This time, Poltar could not entirely hold back the sigh. It was a major effort, in fact, not to roll his eyes. In a couple of hours, he had to go out into the chilling northern breezes and caper about dressed only in buffalo grease, his wolf-skin robe, and a Ynprpral mask that weighed as much as an ax. He had to squawk and screech himself hoarse, and be chased around by small children, and submit to being ceremonially driven out of the camp, where he’d have to squat for at least an hour in the cold until the celebrations got well under way, and everyone was too drunk to notice him slip back in.

In his father’s day, of course, the shaman stayed out on the steppe the whole night. But in his father’s day, there was respect. In his father’s day the self-same children who chased Ynprpral from the camp went out later with food and wine and blankets for the shaman’s vigil. Later still, the younger warriors might come and keep Olgan company, shyly ask him advice on how to garner or keep the attention of this girl or that, how to bid shrewdly for a horse or a sword, how to resolve tricky issues of honor and family and ritual.

But Olgan was long gone on the Sky Road, and there would be none of that old respect in these times. Stay out all night for vigil, the most Poltar was likely to get was some stumbling drunk herdboy come out to take a piss and driveling inebriated nonsense at him. Everyone else would be busy cavorting. Since Egar returned from the south, the old ways simply held no sway. There was no sense of honor or tradition now, no respect. Ishlin-ichan beckoned, the young men went there often, and the girls around camp acted like the whores they mostly were these days. No one felt the need to listen to the shaman anymore; they’d rather have cheap advice and tales of the south from those Skaranak who had been there and returned, as if riding a horse over the horizon and back was some kind of fucking achievement.

And this moping idiot wanted to talk about his dreams.

Poltar got them both seated in the alcove, pulled the curtain, and put on a show of patience he didn’t feel.

“Dreams are the path onto heights we may see afar from,” he intoned tiredly. “But the view can be uncertain. A rock may look like a horse and rider, a river like beads of glass. Tell me what you have seen.”

“It was outside the camp. At night.” Ergund was clearly uncomfortable with all this. He was, Poltar knew, a blunt, pragmatic man, a herdsman all his life and pretty much content to stay that way. “I think I’d gone out, you know, for a piss. But the weather was warm, like spring, maybe even summer. I was barefoot and I kept going, kept walking into the grass, trying to find a good spot.”

“A good spot to piss?”

“Well, that’s what it felt like, yeah. Then I turned around and the campfires were gone, there wasn’t even a glow on the sky where they’d been. It was cloudy, so there was no bandlight, or not much anyway. There’s this cold wind blowing, I can hear it in my ears all the time. And there’s something in the grass, and it’s watching me.”

“Watching you?”

“Yeah, I could feel its eyes on me. I wasn’t worried at first, you know, I had my knife. And I got the feeling this thing was a wolf, and they generally leave you alone unless it’s a bad winter.” Ergund stared at the ground, held up his hands. He seemed to be trying to frame his thoughts between the blades of his palms. “But then I see it. I see the eyes in the dark, and just like I thought, they’re wolf eyes, but they’re, like, way above the height of the grass. I mean, four or five feet off the fucking ground.”

He shivered a little. Tried on an unconvincing little smile.

“That’s got to be the biggest fucking wolf anybody’s ever seen, right?”

Poltar made a noncommittal sound. He’d heard sightings of every kind of monster out on the steppe in his time, from the long runners to spiders the size of horses. A gigantic wolf wasn’t all that original.

“So now I’m worried, right? I pull my knife, I stand there, and then this fucking thing just comes walking right out of the dark toward me.”

“And was it a wolf ?”

“Yeah. No. I mean.” Ergund’s expression was still queasy. “It looked like a wolf, a she-wolf, I think. But it was walking on its hind legs, man. You know, like one of those beggar’s trick dogs you see in Ishlin-ichan. But—big. Tall as a man.”

“Did it attack you?”

The herdsman shook his head. “No. It fucking talked to me. I mean, its mouth didn’t move or anything, but I could hear this voice in my head, like really soft snarling. It just stood there all reared up on its back legs with its paws held out like it wanted me to take hold of them, and looking me in the eyes the whole time. Close enough I could smell its fur. Close enough to lick my fucking face if it wanted.”

“So it spoke. What did it tell you?”

“It told me to come to you. Told me that you were waiting for a message.”

Poltar felt the faintest shiver of his own now.

“It called me by name?”