‘Doesn’t matter,’ she shrugged. ‘Here.’
She swung a bag from her back and offered it to him. It was leather, of the kind the White-Wings used to pack their kit in when marching off on a campaign. The shape inside pushed against the leather.
‘What?’ Bleda said, fighting a frown from his forehead.
‘Just take it,’ Riv said, shaking it at him.
He did, hesitantly, then opened the drawstring and peered inside. It was hard to see, the shadows of the forest dense and heavy, light shifting about them as branches swayed high above.
‘Take it out, then,’ Riv said impatiently.
Even her voice betrays her emotions!
Bleda glanced up, saw her studying him with a deep intensity.
He reached his hand into the bag, felt something smooth, a curve. His stomach lurched as within a heartbeat his confusion turned to shock and joy, for he knew in an instant what it was.
A Sirak bow.
He drew it out of the leather bag slowly, disbelievingly, and held it before him in his hands.
Not just a Sirak bow. My bow.
And in his mind he was back in Arcona, nine years old, sitting in an open-fronted ger and watching his brother shape this same bow with a feeling in his belly close to worship.
‘Hand me the sharkskin rasp, little brother,’ Altan had said to him. ‘Now the sinew’s dry we need to take these rough edges off. Otherwise it can feel like a fistful of thorns, which won’t help when you’re aiming at a Cheren arse-wipe, eh?’
Altan had laughed and shown him how to rasp the sinew that had been glued to the bow’s back, using sharkskin they’d traded from merchants come up all the long way from Tarbesh, far, far in the hot south. Another world, Bleda had thought back then, his whole existence consisting of Arcona and the Sea of Grass.
He’d loved his brother so deeply, the sudden rush of this memory so vivid and clear in his mind’s eye, that he thought for a moment he could smell his brother’s sweat. It was like a punch in his gut. A groan escaped his lips and his vision blurred, tears filling his eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ Riv asked him.
Bleda blinked, swayed in and out of tree-cast shadows.
‘I . . .’ he said. ‘My bow. How?’
‘I saw it in the dirt, that day in Arcona. Just picked it up, I don’t know why. I should have given it to you a long time ago, I don’t know why I didn’t. I just . . .’ She looked at him strangely, then shrugged and dropped her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
And looking at her, hearing her words, Bleda felt almost overwhelmed by another rush of emotions. Anger, that his bow had been so close, all these years, this physical, touchable link to his brother, to his home, when all else he had was fragile memory, faint and transient as morning mist. But the other emotion surging through him was joy. It was almost like having his brother back, ghost-like memories wreathed about and through this bow like the sturgeon glue they had used to bind it. Joy at seeing his bow, touching it, a feeling of wholeness that he had lacked for so long he hadn’t realized it was gone. Until now.
Staring at Riv, these two emotions warred within him, back and forth, rage and joy, joy and rage.
Joy won.
‘My thanks,’ he whispered, and allowed himself the ghost of a smile as he looked upon the bow in his hands, his fingertips moving from the worn, leather-bound grip to the smooth, recurved lines of its limbs, horn on the belly, sinew on the back, all washed in countless coats of lacquer, the last flick of the bone ears where the gut string was attached.
‘I’ve tried to care for it,’ Riv mumbled, and Bleda could see that she had. He gave a little tug to the gut string, felt the dryness of it, knew it would fray and snap with much more pressure.
That’s simple enough to remedy.
The rest of the bow looked almost the same as it had ever been.
‘You have, I can see,’ Bleda said. ‘It is in fine condition.’
She smiled at him, then, warmth and happiness radiating from her.
She is like the sun when she is happy, like a furnace when she is angry. I have never known anyone so utterly opposite to my people. All seething emotion bound within a sack of skin, blood and bone. Only when alone with our kin or Clan are we Sirak able to be like this. When in front of our enemy the cold-face is king.
There was something appealing about it, almost, if not for the countless years that discipline and control had been drummed into Bleda’s every waking moment.
A freedom to being like that, no secrecy, no hiding who you are. And sometimes the effort to keep that control is so exhausting, the sense of failure at just the slightest slip crushing.
‘You’re pleased, then?’ Riv said, frowning.
‘I am,’ Bleda said, an inner chuckle at the understatement in that.
‘Well, you could at least be a little grateful,’ Riv said.
‘I am,’ Bleda said. ‘Very grateful.’
‘Really? You sure?’ Riv said, eyes narrowing.
‘Yes. I have never felt more grateful in all my life. Words cannot express my thanks.’
‘Well, you don’t look it,’ Riv said, ‘but I’ll take your word for it, then.’
‘I would do something for you, to repay this debt I now owe you,’ Bleda said. He felt immediately and profoundly indebted to Riv, and compelled to try and do something about it. Although by his reckoning nothing could ever repay Riv’s act in full.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Riv said with a shrug. ‘Just wish I’d done it sooner, now.’
‘There must be something I can do for you,’ Bleda said, though in truth he could think of nothing at that moment.
‘Is your aim as good as Jin’s?’ she asked, a gleam coming to her eye.
‘Better,’ Bleda said, no hint of boast or bluster in his voice, only an utter conviction.
‘Teach me, then. To use a bow. I’m not very good.’
‘You’re not,’ Bleda agreed, remembering her efforts that day with Jin. ‘I will try, though I cannot promise miracles.’
‘Ha.’ Riv barked a laugh. ‘I’m not expecting any.’
‘And I do not know how well I will be able to teach the use of your bows. They are like a giant’s club.’
‘Well, I’d appreciate any help I can get. Don’t want to miss the straw man during my warrior trials. If Israfil ever lets me take another one,’ she muttered.
They stood there in silence, then. Bleda unsure what to say. Riv shuffled her feet. The sun was gone now, only different degrees of darkness about them.
‘Why did they do that to you,’ Riv asked him, touching her lip, ‘in the weapons-field?’
‘You would have to ask them,’ Bleda said. ‘I was not very good at your shield wall, slow to manoeuvre. It threw their timing. I kept bumping into Sorch, the one who started . . .’ He touched his own lip.
‘I know Sorch,’ Riv said. ‘A high opinion of himself.’
‘Pride, that’s the first step on the road to defeat,’ Bleda quoted from the Sirak code. For a moment he was astride a horse, the wind in his hair, his mother and father either side of him, Altan and Hexa, his brother and sister, riding the wind. He could hear their laughter.