“You have another visitor,” Jorik said, quietly. He only attended the hut where Arn lay recovering twice each day now. During each visit, he helped Arn slowly walk around the circumference of the hut, once or twice. This morning was different, he tapped Arn’s forehead until the wounded hunter awoke, and said, “You’ll want to sit up for this one.”
Arn complied easily enough, though not as easily as when he’d been in full health. Jorik stepped to the doorway and pulled open the animal hide flap. Arn tensed when he saw the old bearded man that strode inside. Stone Spear looked around the cluttered healing hut and waved a hand in front of his nose. “It’s thick in here,” he said. “Can you walk?”
“Sort of,” Arn said. He rose to his feet, tilted off balance, and straightened himself without use of the wall. His muscles were improving, he noted. It would please him if he had not wasted an entire Moon in a wretched infirm bed.
Stone Spear nodded. “This way,” he said, and led the way through the door.
The light was blinding. It took Arn a moment or two, leaning in the doorframe, before he could see at all. Jorik’s shacks were built on the outskirts of the village, and he looked down across the rocky slope toward the cliff overlooking the beach. The Embalmer had disappeared, and only a few of the women were visible, sitting in front of their huts and making string from sinew, baskets from reeds.
Arn glanced at Stone Spear. The man stood a head taller than him, but bore more scars than the healing hunter. The beard folded as Stone Spear pressed his chin downward and spoke with his breath. “You had a woman before? Seen what they got down there?”
It was not unusual talk among the hunting band, but it was surprising to hear Stone Spear ask about such things. “I have,” Arn replied. Young people were young people after all.
“Yet you have no interest in starting a family?” Stone Spear asked.
Arn shrugged. Given the chance, he would not say no to an encounter of such sorts. If he sired children, they would be raised by their mother and by the tribe like any offspring, but caring for a family was not something on Arn’s agenda. “It’s not a priority,” he said. “Legacy is important, and so to are children.”
Stone Spear sighed. “Then let’s walk a little further.” The leader of Razaad led the way, down a dirt path and into the surface structures of the tribe. Most of the caves were also occupied, but many buildings supported the tribe’s population. Stone Spear spoke again, when they were out of earshot of the craftswomen. “Is it killing you desire? Are you like Torr or Loklar, and the satisfaction of driving a blade into some creature’s flesh is all the purpose you need?”
“Killing is part of life,” Arn replied. “Same as weaving reeds or repairing a house. I don’t love it, but I’ll do it when it needs to be done.” It needed to be done more often than some such life tasks.
They walked on again, and paused in front of Stone Spear’s hut. “Do you aspire to leadership? Power?”
Arn pursed his lips. Leadership was as much a tool or a task as killing. Action, the ability to act, the good of the tribe, the betterment of them all—these were close descriptors of the sense that drove him, but they went unvoiced. “What is it that you want?” he asked. His body ached, and he had walked further than he should have.
“I’m stripping you of your position. You will no longer command the hunting band,” Stone Spear told him. Although Arn was so wounded he could not ask, the big man seemed to give him a pause to retaliate, but Arn did not. He regarded his leader with an instinctive scowl. “If you want to still serve me, and the tribe, follow me inside. If your anger is blinding and your other desires demanding, do not follow to strike me down.”
As Stone Spear parted the animal hide flaps and strode into his shack, Arn said, “I’ll follow to learn why.”
Stone Spear quietly led him across the leather-strewn floor to one corner and knelt. Even bent over, his back was as tall as Arn’s legs. The broad man yanked the floor covering free of the wooden planks of the wall and revealed a few wooden boards in the dirt beneath. They lifted out from well-warn troughs in the mud and soon Arn was staring down into a black pit. Stone Spear found a torch from a small slot dug into the dirt shaft, and, after lighting it with a fur-wrapped flint, he dropped into the hole without a word.
“I’ll ease you down,” he said to Arn, and offered his hands as a support for Arn’s weak muscles.
A few wooden beams held up the dirt hole under his house. It was primarily a crevasse between two jagged rocks, Arn realized, part of the cliff face that the leader’s hut overlooked. Across the stone walls was scrawled a hundred little marks.
“Those were made by Stone Spear before me,” the burly leader said. “And those by the one before him.”
“What are they?” Arn asked. If he had to guess, some lines were made from smeared berry and paste of black soot powder, while others were a pale, smoked umber.
“The red is us. The tribe on Razaad. This is my wall,” he said, holding out the flickering torch toward it. Arn leaned closer—he had good eyesight in the dark, but the stone was splotched in pattern before the paint had even been applied. He glanced at the others again, after seeing the numerous markings on Stone Spear’s section, and the torch moved to help him. “Yes,” the big man said, his voice muffled by the congesting walls. “There’s more on each, and the most on mine. The tribe is more numerous now than ever before.”
After all the strife over the last year, Arn was surprised. “And the brown?”
Stone Spear put his hand on the wall, pressing against the paint. “The straight lines are animals, and the bent ones are herbs, wood, other supplies.”
Arn inhaled. “There’s less on each section,” he said. Each of the leaders kept a tally in this room, he realized, of the growing tribe and their shrinking potential. He let out his breath and found it hard to breathe. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because the boat you are making must work. For Razaad, it must,” Stone Spear whispered.
“I…” Arn trailed off and leaned against the wall as his pounding muscles grew sorer. “You’re in charge of the tribe! Tell Jorik to make it work! Why did you let Logern say it can’t be done, when he was working on one?”
“If you really think that a simple rock pole gives you that kind of power, you’re wrong,” the big man said, and, in that moment, he descended from the powerful ruler and wise man that Arn had frequently considered him. He was just a muscular man with a thick skull, who was doing his best to maintain a pack of schemers. Of course, Arn was one of them—that was what a good life was, on Razaad. Wit, cunning, deceit: without these, the red lines would have dwindled away from the rock wall down here long ago.
“I’ll do it,” Arn said. “But they’ll mock me, and they’ll try to kill me.”
“Only if you get in their way,” Stone Spear said. “Learn what you must, but do it all yourself. Harvest what you need, don’t borrow it from one of the bands. Give them no reason to fight you.”
Arn shrugged. “They hate what they don’t know. There’s a dozen more like Shar—and he’s still alive!—and they’ll go out of the way for me.”
“Arn,” Stone Spear sighed. “We have to try, and you know it.”
The stone wall was cold against Arn’s back, but not as cold as he felt inside. In his dreams, he had drowned, but standing here, after a walk across the village he could barely endure… he’d be lucky to find his fate in the Deep. He tapped his skull against the dwindling brown patterns and muttered, “I’ll do it.”