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her leggings, lifted the tunic s bottom, raised her brows at the neatly
pleated loincloth, the points of the leggings tied with flat smooth knots to
the leather belt that held the loincloth. She folded the tunic back down,
crooked her right leg, inspected the sandal, fingered the lacing that tied the
straps together. She stretched her leg out again, scratched a fingernail
through the thin layer of moss on the rock, sniffed at the finger, pulled up a
stem of grass and cleaned the green muck from behind the nail. She smiled.
Threw back her head again. Laughed at the clatter of the beads. Shook her head
until the thin braids danced wildly and the wooden beads clacked like rain on
a rooftop, her chuckling diminishing to small triads of gurgles. She swung
around, drew her legs up and wrapped thin arms about them.  Oh, I m drunk with
this, Lee. Drunk. So drunk. Drunk on smells and sounds and feels and
oh everything. It s a great body, it s a marvelous body, it s a splendid body.
It sings. She shook her head again and laughed with the noise of the beads.
Then she lifted her hands and pressed their backs against her eyes.  I m
tired.
 Busy day. How are you fitting now? Shadith yawned, looked startled.  I m
hungry. Aleytys pushed away from the tree.  Haven t done any hunting, you
know that. We ll have to catch some fish. You want to do the catching while I
get the fire started? Shadith yawned, nodded.
Aleytys busied herself with the pack.  I think I ll distribute these things
among the saddlebags. We can dump out the weapons or whatever else we can t
use. That later, though. She drew out the sections of fishing pole, dug
deeper for the coil of line and the packet of hooks.  Anything at all left of
that girl?
 You asked Swartheld that. Something like that. I remember. Shadith sounded
drowsy. Her voice dragged a little, the words were slurred. Aleytys glanced
anxiously at her, frowning. She had her arms crossed on her knees, her cheek
rested on her forearm, her eyes blinked slowly as she stared at the lacing of
light and shadow drawn around the trunks of the grove.  Some habits ... I
think ... don t know ... got the language ... from you ... before you
transferred me ... I think ... no ... memories ... no ...
 Shadith? Aleytys dropped the rod and ran toward her as she began slumping
over.  Harskari, help me. As the amber eyes came open, Aleytys lifted
Shadith s head, her palms firm against the delicate hollows of Shadith s
temples. She felt the uneasy flutter of life in the shell beneath her hands
and reached frantically for the power to shore up that life. With Harskari
supporting and helping shape the force, she shook Shadith into a sort of
alertness and funneled that energy into the body.
Gradually the Shadith entity woke from lethargy and began to seize control
again. The body seemed to fight them all, to try rejecting the new indweller.
At times the body trembled with sudden flashes of intense pain, at times the
young flesh glowed with a fever that burned Aleytys s hands, at times the body
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convulsed and though she was by far the stronger, she had much difficulty
keeping it from doing injury to itself. The night deepened about them. The
wind fell. The intervals between spasms lengthened as the fragile fluttering
of life within the body settled toward a low but steady burning.
3
Aleytys dipped the rag into the pot of riverwater and drew it once again
across the still, small face, noting that the colors and fine black detailing
of the hawk s head had worn away with the sweat and tears and the passing of
the rag as she sought to cool away a little of the fever. Though the colors
and the finelining were gone, the outline of the head remained, a medium brown
line not too much darker than the skin, tattooed or set there with some other
process that permanently melded pigment with flesh. She dipped the cloth in
the pot again, wrung out excess water and draped it across Shadith s forehead,
scowling as she did so, staring down into the face that was no longer the face
she knew so well. She moved her shoulders impatiently.
Shadith made a small sound, nothing like the animal noises of the fit where
her voice had turned harsh, shapeless, ugly. Aleytys lifted the rag, looked
anxiously down. The girl s eyelids fluttered and opened. Dark, dark, chocolate
dark eyes a shock like a small jab of electricity to see brown where she
unconsciously anticipated lavender. It was the same with Swartheld, the face
she knew from the inside of her head; both faces now, Swartheld s and
Shadith s, different, the eyes different she had to will herself to recognize
them each time she looked at them.
Aleytys shook herself out of her depression and touched the girl s cheek just
below the hawk s image.  In the saddle again?
Shadith blinked. Her lips worked like a baby s mouth hunting for the nipple,
then spread in a weary but triumphant grin.  Almost thrown, she whispered.
She moved her hands, tried to push up, shook her head when Aleytys sought to
persuade her into staying stretched out on the grass.
With Aleytys s help she sat up.  Ah. That s better. She lifted her hands,
held them out, watched them tremble, then smoothed them over the multitude of
tiny braids with their noisy wooden beads. She smiled, rubbed her stomach.
 I m hungry.
4
Aleytys woke to rustling darkness, not knowing what it was that roused her.
She sat up, her extra senses sweeping in a circle scan and finding nothing to
justify her sudden wakefulness. She smiled, shrugged, brushed tangles from her
eyes and looked about. Only starlight played with shadow under the trees.
Shadith lay beside her, wrapped in the blankets she found tied behind the
saddle pad of the mount she d adopted. Beyond Shadith the river glimmered
black and silver in the icy light. Aleytys ran her fingers through her hair,
scrubbed at her eyes. I ought to go back to sleep, she thought. Madar knows
what we ll have to face tomorrow.
But she didn t lie back and pull the blankets about her. She got to her feet
and went to sit on Shadith s rock where she could watch the endless changes of
the water flowing past. Unthinking, lost in the sinking of the starlight,
deep, deep into the water, her breathing slowing with her pulse, she felt
unmixed the weariness of the ancient land, its weariness and its patience.
Having endured the millennia of assaults, having been bombed and burned and
raped and poisoned to near sterility, it had outlasted finally the malevolence
of its parasite humanoids; slow and slow and slow the grass grew over the
sores though the healing wasn t finished, no not yet, oozing ulcers still
pocked its surface. But the grass had time now. The metals were gone,
corroding slowly back into the soil, the last of the tanks and bombers and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]