The Steel Remains

chapter 14

It was on Greasing Night—night of masking and unmasking, night of Ynprpral Walking and the cold that strikes through like a blade, night of acknowledging the wheel of the seasons and inevitable change—that the sign Poltar had been waiting for finally arrived. He supposed it was appropriate in its way; he grudgingly approved of the symbolism it drove home.

Mostly, he was just glad the waiting was over.

He’d watched the sky for weeks after his encounter with Kelgris, gnawing on his hate and his lurid dreams of vengeance. The Dwellers make their will known for those with eyes to look above, his father had schooled him, long before Poltar had properly understood that he, too, would one day wear the wolf-eye robe. Where other men see only to the rim of the world, you must learn to look beyond. You must look to the sky.

Deeds followed words not long after—Olgan was a shaman in the old tradition, and he intended his son to one day wear his robes with the same conviction. From his father, Poltar learned the seasons and moods of the Sky Road, its colors and the sparks that Urann’s iron-shod steed sometimes struck from its surface when the Gray Master rode in haste from the Sky Home to earth or back. He learned why the band might wrap itself in cloud and hide, why it would at other times stand clear and bright from horizon to horizon like a promise in shimmering gold. Learned the humor of storms and the visiting aurora, what they intended and whose business they were habitually about, learned the meaning of each wind across the steppe and what it could tell those with ears to listen. He learned where to find the sky iron, to know when it was most likely to fall to earth, and in what season it could be safely touched. He learned the names and the tales and the invocations and once, when he was still very young, he saw his father raise Takavach the Many Faced from the surface of a crystal mirror tilted to face the darkening eastern sky at dusk.

Look to the sky.

But for weeks, the sky had given him nothing.

And then Ergund came to call.

“MY BROTHER ERGUND?” EGAR FROWNED, NOT REALLY FOLLOWING THE sudden digression, not really wanting to. “Well, why should he? Pay you respect, I mean? You’re barely sixteen, and you’re a milkmaid, for Urann’s sake. You’re nothing to him.”

“To him, maybe not, or to that clamp-mouthed bitch wife of his. That’s not the point.” Sula laced fingers that had until a moment ago been otherwise —and better— employed, and sat back where she straddled him just above the knees. The view was superb—she was naked but for bangles and the bone-carved necklace he’d given her a couple of weeks ago. But above it all, her face had turned suddenly sulky.

“Ergund knows damn f*cking well what I am to you. F*ck it, I was on my sky-fisted way to your f*cking yurt when I passed him. And, like I said, he just f*cking shoves right past me, without a sky-shat word.

Piece of shit wouldn’t even f*cking look at me. Face all f*cking screwed up like he’s pissed off about something I’ve f*cking done to him.”

Egar sighed. His abruptly untended erection slackened, flopped sideways across his thigh. He reached out for the rice wine flask by his head, swigged at it, grimaced and swallowed.

“Look, he’s probably just jealous,” he said. “I doubt he ever had his hands on a pair of tits as gorgeous as yours his whole f*cking life.”

That seemed to work. Sula sat forward again with a grin, tilted her shoulders at him, side-to-side, and back again. Like most of his conquests, she was a well-endowed girl. Her breasts swung heavily in the warm, speckled light from the yurt’s iron-mesh brazier. A coiling snake tattoo she had from collarbone to cleavage seemed to wriggle on her flesh with the motion. She licked her lips.

“Yeah, and a wife with a mouth closed that f*cking tight won’t be much for blow jobs, either, right?” She chortled delightedly. “Bet he’s lucky if he gets three of those in a f*cking year.”

“Strictly feast nights only,” agreed Egar, reaching up and cupping a callused hand to each of the breasts under discussion. He thumbed the thick, rope-end nipples back and forth, squeezed gently at the jellied weight with his palms. Dropped another broad hint. “And of course, she’s a woman of leisure, so, you know, probably got no strength at all in her fingers like you have.”

Sula’s eyes smeared wide with renewed lechery. She put her hands back on him, gathered up his prick, and began to work it slowly up and down. Ahhh, milkmaid’s fingers. He felt himself slam back to fully erect in seconds. Sula felt it, too, grinned again, leaned down and brushed one breast softly back and forth across the head of his prick, then across his face. He gaped after the nipple, twisting his head to catch it and suck it in, heaved up and grabbed after her hips. She swayed sharply back up and shook her head.

“Oh, no. First things f*cking first. We’re going to get the edge off. I’m not looking for a two-minute drunken herder’s f*ck out of you, just so you can head off to the ceremonies in fine f*cking form. You just f*cking lie there and do as you’re told, Clanmaster. I—” In time now with her slow, rippling strokes. “Am going to milk you f*cking dry. Just like one of my f*cking buffalo, yeah? You like that?

Then we’ll see what you can do for me.”

Egar chuckled. “You make me suffer, bitch, you know I’m going to hand it straight back. I’ll have you yowling like a steppe fox.”

Sula lifted one hand from her work, made a flapping mouth with fingers and thumb. “Yeah, yeah—talk, talk. You’re all the f*cking same, men. Clanmaster or herdboy, you tell me where’s the f*cking difference.”

The clanmaster tipped a meaningful glance around the trappings of the yurt, the rich tapestries and rugs, the brazier in the corner.

“Bit cold to be sneaking out and tumbling herdboys in the grass this time of year, I’d say. That’s one big difference.”

A shadow crossed Sula’s face, a light, watchful tension, and her hands slackened a little in what they were doing. She didn’t know him well enough to read his moods yet, to know rough humor from genuine displeasure, a growl from a drawl. He had to force a smile, stick his tongue out at her and clown the moment away before she eased.

In the end, he had to remind himself. Tits and milkmaid’s fingers notwithstanding, this is just one more foulmouthed Skaranak herdgirl you’ve got here milking your cock for you, Clanmaster.

It made him unaccountably sad. Sula was gorgeous, supple, succulent in his mouth and hands, utterly joyous and abandoned in her f*cking. But afterward, afterward . . .

Afterward, as they lay sweat-stuck together, the inescapable truth would seep back in. That Sula was less than half his age, had been nowhere, seen nothing, knew nothing beyond the big sky limits of the steppe—and was eminently content to stay that way. That she had nothing much to say about anything but herding or f*cking or the current clan gossip or the endless f*cking squabbles of her extended family.

That she could not even read. And—he’d broached the subject once—that she did not much want to learn.

Oh, you were hoping for book-learned p-ssy, perhaps? Some Yhelteth-bred courtesan with an astrolabe out on the balcony and an illustrated binding of Tales of the Man and the Woman on the table beside the bed?

You were hoping for Imrana, maybe?

F*ck it.

Yeah, f*ck it. You can take Sula to Ishlin-ichan when the ceremonies are done. She’ll love that, marching into all those fabric places down Rib Whittle Row with a clanmaster’s purse at her disposal. You can bask in her reflected squealing joy as she buys everything in sight, and call it happiness.

And now she had him up in the near reaches of his own brief joy—the heat of orgasm pulsing and pooling in his groin, the strong-fingered strokes coming shorter and harder, his own grunts and gasps in his ears, his thoughts fading out in the clamor for ecstasy and release.

C’mon, how bad can it be, Clanmaster? As the feeling rushed him, stormed up the column of his prick and he exploded, splashed hot salt white into her hands, and she cackled and smeared it over her throat and breasts and belly with one hand, the other still pumping at him hard. How f*cking bad can life be?

“YOU SEEM UNHAPPY, ERGUND.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

Poltar stifled a sigh. He didn’t much like Ergund, any more than he did any of the clanmaster’s other brothers. But they were influential and must be catered for, the more so given Egar’s demonstrated blasphemy and lack of regard for the traditions. And Ergund did at least show a modicum of respect. The shaman put aside his flensing knife, nodded at his acolyte to go on with the work, and wiped his hands clean on a rag. He indicated a curtained alcove at one side of the yurt.

“In here, then. I can spare a few minutes. But the ceremonies are almost upon us, I have to get ready.

What is it you need?”

“I, uh.” Ergund cleared his throat. “I had a dream. Last night.”

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 f*cking 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 f*cking ground.”

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

“That’s got to be the biggest f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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?”

“Yes. It said it knew you. That you’d been waiting for a message, a second message, it said.”

Kelgris’s words, in the shadowed upstairs room, out of the dead girl’s throat. I bring a message from my brother Hoiran, the one you call Urann. That message is wait and watch. Poltar recalled the languor in that voice, the searing pain as his prick split and bled, the tethered helplessness. He felt an inexplicable stirring in his groin at the memory.

He moistened his lips.

“So tell me the message.”

Ergund looked down at his hands again. “It said . . .”

His voice died on the syllables, the breath hissed out of him unused. The shaman felt a slow pounding begin in his chest. He held himself in check, and waited.

Finally, Ergund looked up, and now there was something almost pleading in his face.

“It said my brother’s time as clanmaster has come and gone,” he muttered.

The quiet descended like the finest muslin cloth, coating everything in the curtained alcove and, as it seemed, beyond. Poltar felt it tick through his veins, settle in his ears, send everything commonplace away.

He sat rigid.

Ergund opened his mouth. The shaman raised a hand for silence, then got up quickly and went back into the main space of the yurt. The acolyte looked up from his flensing, saw his master’s expression, and set down his tools immediately.

“Master?”

“That knife looks as if it could do with sharpening. Why don’t you take it over to Namdral and see if he can’t put a decent edge back on it. Or better yet, see if he’ll dig you out a couple of fresh blades and edge them up for us. Tell him I’ll settle with him after the ceremony.”

The acolyte frowned. There was nothing wrong with the flensing gear, and they both knew it. And new knives weren’t cheap. But he knew better than to argue with Poltar or expect explanations. He bowed his head.

“As my master desires.”

Poltar waited until he’d gone, watched from the yurt’s entrance as the man moved away through the firelit bustle of the camp, then pulled the hangings tight and went back to Ergund. He found the clanmaster’s brother getting to his feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Look, it’s . . . I shouldn’t have come. Grela talked me into it, she said you’d know what to do.”

“Yes. She’s right. I do.”

“Well,” Ergund grimaced. “I mean, it was just a dream, right?”

“Was it?”

“It felt like a dream.”

The shaman trod closer. “But?”

“But I . . .” Ergund shook his head. It was like watching a buffalo only halfway stunned by some incompetent butcher. “When I woke up, there was grass matted on the bottom of my feet. Still damp.

Like I’d really been out there.”

“You were really out there, Ergund.”

“In this cold?” The herdsman snorted, common sense shouldering through the press of arcane fear. “In bare feet? Come on, I’d have f*cking frostbite by now. My toes’d be turning black.”

Poltar crowded him back to his seat, stood over him. Kept his voice low and hypnotic.

“The dream world is not this world, Ergund. It echoes this place, but it is an otherness, another aspect. It has its own seasons, its own natural laws. You did walk there; the grass on your feet is a sign. It’s the Dwellers’ way of showing you that what you dreamed is real. It’s a warning to take this seriously. Your wife was right to send you to me. This is a path we must walk together.”

“But, I mean, this thing, the upright wolf. It might have been a demon, sent to trick me. Sent to sow discord in the clan.”

Poltar nodded as if giving it consideration.

“That’s a good point. But demons do not have the power to cross the expressed will of the Dwellers. If it was a demon that drew you out there and spoke to you, then it did so with the Sky Home’s blessing.”

And inwardly, he recalled something his father had once said, in an unguarded moment as they sat out at vigil together one spring night. Poltar’s mother had passed away the previous winter from the coughing fever, and Olgan had changed with her passing in ways the young Poltar was still trying to fathom.

Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things.

The shaman’s path is negotiation, nothing more. We tend the relationship with the powers so they bring us more benefit than ruin. We can do no more.

And quickly, glancing guiltily up from his brooding, Never speak of this to anyone. Men are not ready to hear this truth—though sometimes I think women may be. Sometimes, I think . . .

But he lapsed into brooding silence again, staring at the fire and listening to the ceaseless wind off the steppe. And he never spoke of the matter again.

“You really think,” said Ergund uncertainly, “that the Sky Home has taken against my brother?”

Poltar seated himself with care. He leaned forward. Spoke softly. “What do you think, Ergund? What does your conscience tell you?”

“I . . . Grela says . . .” Ergund stared down at his hands, and his expression suddenly turned harsh. “F*ck it, he doesn’t behave like a clanmaster anymore. You know, coming here, I passed that little slut Sula on her way to his yurt again. I mean, she’s what, fifteen? What’s he doing with a girl like that?”

“I don’t think you need a shaman to answer that,” Poltar said drily.

Ergund didn’t appear to hear him. “It’s not even like it’ll last. This is going to end up just like that half-Voronak bitch that threw herself at him last year. Couple of months, he’ll get bored and drop her. If there’s a child, he’ll use his mastery privileges to claw settlement for it out of the clan herds, and then he’ll move on to whichever big-titted slut next widens her eyes at him across a feasting board.”

He stopped, appeared to rein himself in. He got up and tried to move about in the alcove. He threw out the blade of one open palm.

“Look, if that’s how Egar wants to piss his time away, I won’t gainsay him. A man pitches his yurt where he will, and then he has to lie in it. I’m not some f*cking southern priest, trying to nitpick every ball-scratching moment of every other man’s life. But this isn’t just about Egar and how he lives. I mean, it’s f*cking Greasing Night, for Urann’s sake, it’s a ceremony. He should be out there with his people, showing himself, setting an example. Showing the children how to do their faces for the cold. Inspecting the masks. Not . . .”

“Getting greased in private between the legs?”

It got a weak laugh out of Ergund. “That’s right. Taking Greasing Night all the wrong way, isn’t he?”

“He is neglecting his duties, yes.” More seriously now. “Not all men are born to lead, there is no shame in that. But those who are not must accept the fact, and cede to those who can carry the responsibility better.”

Ergund’s eyes darted to the shaman’s face, and then away.

“I don’t want it,” he said quickly. “I’m not, this isn’t—”

“I know, I know.” Soothing now. “You have always been content to tend your herds and your family, Ergund.” And be driven and harried by that nagging, malcontent bitch of a wife. “To raise your voice in council only where necessary and otherwise stay out of such matters. You are a man who understands his strengths, the paths the powers have laid out for him. But don’t you see, that is what makes you the perfect intermediary for those powers.”

A hard stare. “No, I don’t see that at all.”

“Look.” Poltar tried to quell a rising sense of moment, of destiny that must be handled with painstaking care. “Suppose one of your brothers had come to me with this, Alrag, say, or Gant. Then, I would have to question whether this dream were true or—”

“My brothers don’t lie!”

“Right, of course. You misunderstand me. I say true in the sense of meaningful. Truly sent by the Dwellers. Alrag is an honorable man, of course. But it’s no secret he’s always wanted the clan mastery for himself. And Gant, like you, questions Egar’s suitability to lead, but he is not circumspect like you. He speaks openly of these things. The word in camp is that he is simply jealous.”

“Ungoverned women’s tongues,” said Ergund bitterly.

“Perhaps. But the fact remains that both Gant and Alrag might well dream such a dream because it speaks to their own personal desires. With you, I know that’s not true. You want no more than what is best for the Skaranak. Through such vessels, the Dwellers speak best.”

Ergund sat, head down. Perhaps he was dealing with the weight of Poltar’s words, perhaps simply with the unwelcome idea that a steppe wolf really had gotten up on its hind legs and walked out of the darkness to find him. When he finally spoke, his voice shook slightly.

“So what do we do?”

“For the moment, nothing.” Poltar kept his tone carefully neutral. “If this is the Dwellers’ will, as it seems it is, then there will be other signs. There are rites I can perform for guidance, but they take time to prepare. Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”

“Only Grela.”

“Good.” It wasn’t—you could trust Grela about as far as you could herd campfire smoke. But Poltar knew she had little enough love for Egar. “Then let’s keep it that way. We’ll talk again, after the ceremonies. But for now, let all three of us be servants of the Sky Home with our silence.”

LATER, WHEN THE CHILDREN HAD FACED DOWN YNPRPRAL WITH THEIR grinning, freshly greased firelit faces and their pummeling barrages of half-delighted, half-terrified shouting and their running about at their parents’ urging, when they’d chased the ice demon from his flapping, haunting circuits of the great bonfire and back out into the cold dark he belonged to, when all that was done and the Skaranak had settled to their customary drinking and singing and tale telling and staring owlishly into the spit-crackle warmth of the flames . . .

. . . then Poltar crouched out in the windswept chill of the steppe, staying later away from the camp than he could remember himself doing for a dozen or more years, biting back his shivers and hugging himself beneath his father’s wolf-skin cloak, muttering under his steaming breath and waiting . . .

Out of the darkness and bending grasses and the wind and the cold, she came walking. Bandlight broke through cloud and touched her.

Grinning, tongue lolling, all sharp white puncturing fangs and eyes, balancing back on legs never made for walking upright, wrapped head-to-foot in wolf the way she had in Ishlin-ichan wrapped herself in whore.

She did not speak. The wind howled on her behalf.

He rose, the chill in his bones and on his face forgotten, and he went to her like a man to the marriage bed.