Deep in the forest, Evanescent’s cat-smile widened.
Isaac’s band hadn’t gone very far from the wood; they were milling about, discussing something with more emotion than sense. Isaac looked up, saw her coming and cried, “There you are! Thank Heaven! We couldn’t find you and thought the Belinkuns had captured you.”
“I’m sorry to worry you.” Alea joined them. “You told me to stay well back, so I climbed a tree. I thought I should wait until the Belinkuns were gone before I came down.”
“That you should, but we were worried nonetheless.” Isaac turned to his band. “No need to follow the Belinkuns now. They’ll not come too quickly to our borders again. Home we go.”
With a shock, Alea realized they’d been arguing about whether or not to follow the Belinkuns, thinking they had kidnapped her. No wonder they hadn’t gone very far.
“A moment,” Alea said, and went over to the litter where Joram lay, jaw clenched, a length of bloodstained cloth tied about his thigh. With her thoughts, she reached inside the wound to explore, then asked, “Has he been tended?”
“All that we can do in the field,” one of the women answered, “a poultice and a bandage. Back at the house, we’ll have that bullet out with the long forceps and cauterize the wound.”
Alea nodded, but she didn’t like the sound of such primitive treatment. As they walked back toward the house, part of her mind was knitting muscle fibers inside Joram’s wound, pushing the bullet closer and closer to the surface. By the time they took the bandage off, it should be only an inch deep.
The rest of her mind, though, was engaged in conversation. Walking beside the litter, she fell back to the woman who had spoken of the bandage. “I’m Alea.”
“Don’t I know it!” the other answered. “I’m Susanah.”
“It must gall you to heal folk only to have them go out and argue with bullets again.”
Susanah grimaced and answered low, “You wonder why you do it sometimes. Of course, there’s delight when they recover, but there’s dismay when next they march out—not that there’s much choice.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were,” Alea said with a sigh. “Wouldn’t it just,” Susanah said grimly. “At least Joram’s the only one hurt bad in our band today, and no one died.” She frowned. “Wonder why the powder failed?”
“Maybe there’s a god of gunpowder,” Alea quipped, “and he didn’t like your fighting today.”
Susanah looked up, staring. “You don’t really think so, do you?”
Alea didn’t, actually, but she felt a ghost of inspiration and followed up the thought. She shrugged her shoulders and said the vaguest thing she could. “Who knows about gods?”
Susanah looked away, muttering, “I always thought they were just stories, never real. Everyone does.”
But Alea read in her a deep, almost desperate desire for something to believe in, and chose her words carefully. “You never can tell. There’s no proof the gods exist, but there’s no proof they don’t, either.”
“Grandma Em says you don’t have to talk about gods to explain how everything started,” Susanah answered, “that the Cosmic Egg hatched, and everything grew out of it as chicks grow into hens.”
“It seems hard to believe,” Alea said, “but there’s a lot we don’t understand.”
“A great lot,” Susanah muttered.
“Still, just because you can explain the world without the gods—well, that’s not proving they don’t exist, is it?”
Susanah turned to frown at her. “How’s that?”
“We can prove that the world exists without me,” Alea said. “In fact, up until yesterday you didn’t even know I was alive. But that didn’t prove I wasn’t, did it?”
Susanah turned away, glowering.
“Gunpowder, now,” Alea went on. “That’s something men invented. There wouldn’t be a god for it.”
“Well, no,” Susanah said, “but Morrigan, she’s the goddess of war. Gunpowder would be hers, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose,” Alea said, “but I think she’d be happy with fighting, not wanting to stop it.”
“Not if we did it wrong,” Susanah said. “Besides, there’s oak and ash and rowan in that forest. They were sacred to the old gods, weren’t they?”
“I-I really don’t know,” Alea stammered. Then inspiration struck again. “You’d have to ask a Druid.”
“If there are any left,” Susanah said with a sour smile.
Alea moved about among the clansfolk, chatting with one, listening to several others, and was amazed at what she heard. Only a few of the young ones were really eager for another battle, and Alea wondered if they would have been so fiery if they had been hit by a bullet. She looked into some of their minds and saw that they had been, and they now burned for revenge.
That same vengeful fire smoldered in several of the older ones too, for they’d seen loved ones killed in battle. One of the older men lectured a handful of his juniors. “There’s no choice, you know, no way to deal with Belinkuns except by rifle. They’re snakes, they’ll turn on you as soon as you try to make peace. They’ll bite the hand of friendship, for they’ll take it as a sign of weakness.”
But to Alea, his words rang hollow, for deep within him, beneath the layers of bitterness and hatred, she read a longing for a world in which neighbors could be friends.
The two band met at the house. Old folk and children embraced sons, daughters, and parents with cries of delight. Susanah was amazed how shallow Joram’s wound was, and Alea managed to catch Gar alone outside when they went to wash their hands in the trough.
“For a culture based on war,” she said, “there are a surprising number of people here who don’t want to fight.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I talked with a few on the way home and listened to a few more…”
“What they said, or what they didn’t say?”
“Yes. No one is actually willing to come right out and say they want the feud to stop—they’re afraid of their relatives thinking them cowards or, worse, even traitors.”
“So the feud goes on because all the people who want it to stop don’t dare speak up,” Alea said grimly.
“It seems so. Everyone over the age of thirty wants to stop the feud, even the ones who talk tough, but no one can figure out how to do it.”
“I found a few who weren’t willing to let it go,” Alea said slowly. “They’re too bitter about friends and loved ones killed in the fighting—or absolutely convinced there’s no way the Belinkuns would ever honor a treaty.”
“That’s sad to hear,” Gar said with a grimace.
“I do have to say they’re the bravest fighters I’ve ever seen,” Alea said slowly.
Gar heard what she didn’t say—that the clansfolk were braver than her own people, who had fought giants and dwarves out of sheer bigotry. It took little enough courage to fight those who were smaller than yourself, and not much more to fight giants when you outnumbered them so thoroughly. “They aren’t all as brave as they seem, but they don’t let their fear show, they’ve been raised that way.”
“You mean some of them really are afraid of the fighting?” Alea asked.
“When they’ve seen fathers and aunts die in combat, yes. There are more of them who are simply disgusted with the pointlessness of it.”
“Fear, disgust, outrage—and the list goes on,” Alea mused. “How many don’t want war?”
“Most of them, judging by what I hear,” Gar said. “The women are sick of seeing husbands, sons, and lovers die. Even the ones who burn for revenge are disgusted with the carnage.”
“And the men have stopped seeing the point of it,” Alea said. “When they’ve been fighting half their lives, they begin to ask why, and what happened to their ancestors stops seeming important. The past is dead.”