Growing with the plenty of his mother's and father's reindeer, Joboam's size seemed a credit to their wealth. His tunics were never too short; he was never solemn and anxious. By comparison, Heckram was gaunt as a wolf in hard times, and in his eyes was always the hunger of the wolf. He was a brooding youth, staggering under the burden of his manhood, the intensity of his dilemmas burning in his eyes. The herdfolk compared him with casual, confident Joboam, and in the comparisons he suffered.
Failing too often, being less than competent at a man's skills, made him wary. To keep from losing, he would not compete. Even now, grown and competent, he hunted alone and did not boast of his kills. He was most comfortable when he moved unnoticed, whether he was stalking an animal or moving about the tent village. His solitude and his silences worried his mother.
Tonight her worrying had taken on a new barb. He shook his head grimly, his mouth set. 'Twenty-four years old, and what do you have?' she had rebuked him as she mended a mitten by the fire. 'Where is your wife, your children, my grandchildren? Do you think you can wait forever? Other men your age have three, four children at their hearth. Not yet, you say, and another year slips by. Do you think you have forever? Elsa is patient, perhaps too patient with you. But a woman cannot wait forever. No honorable man would ask it of her. She is a pretty girl, a good herdwoman, all a man could ask. She is strong and clever, a good hunter, too. Do you think no one else sees her worth? You will wait too long, and another will not ask her to wait. And then you will be too old to catch the fancy of the younger girls. You will be alone.' She shook the mitten at him.
So he had risen, to drag on his heavy tunic. As he had pushed open the door flap, she had demanded, 'Where are you going? To Elsa?'
'No. To practice being alone,' he had retorted, and left. To climb the pingo and think.
Now he regretted his snappishness. It wasn't like him and would only upset her more. But too many of her words had been nearly true. He had wanted to answer her, but the habit of silence had grown strong. Talking was an effort, especially the painful talk of explanation. She didn't want to hear his truth. She wanted his agreement; she was so sure it would make him happy. He knew it wouldn't, but couldn't tell her why.
His thoughts turned reluctantly to small, dark Elsa. She was all his mother said she was. And more, for in their childhood, they had shared friendship. He knew her. There was gentleness in her, hidden behind her self-sufficient toughness. And a warm ardor she had shared with him more than once, when they were children no longer but not yet grown. And yet... He did not want her to wife. He didn't want anyone to wife. Not yet. He wished his mother had not been so openly hopeful of a match. Already folk had asked him if he and Elsa would join by the Cataclysm next summer. And Elsa herself blushed whenever he tried to speak to her. When he approached her, her friends drew aside that he might be alone with her. And then he wouldn't be able to speak at all, for the bright hope in her eyes. He wanted to tell her not to wait, to look elsewhere for a mate. But how did one tell a friend that he didn't want her for a wife, no matter what his mother had noised about? Soon, he'd have to. Soon. His heart went out to her with fondness and sympathy. He hoped she wouldn't hate him.
Without conscious thought, he reached inside his shirt and drew out a length of sinew with tiny flaps of skin strung on it. This was the tally of his calves this year, the soft bits of ear cut from each miesse to mark it with his own private mark. It was pitiful.
Five tiny flaps, and three of the calves were male, good only to neuter into the load-bearing harke, reindeer oxen, or to slaughter for winter meat. He would leave but one a sarva to service his vaja. His animals multiplied so slowly. Each vaja could bear but one calf a year, and there was no guarantee that it would survive the winter. The mysterious coughing sickness still claimed animals every summer. The diminished wild herds had forced the wolves and wolverines into new cunning and boldness as they preyed on the herdfolk's domestic animals. Heckram felt a twinge of despair as he wondered how he would protect his beasts from the marauding carnivores, and still find time to steal calves from the wild herd.
His mother's reindeer had done little better. Her tally string had but eight flaps, and five of the calves had been male. How could she urge him to take Elsa to wife? How did she think they would manage? Heckram reached up a mittened hand to rub at his face, to force the tightened jaw hinge to relax. He eased his heart by looking out over the herd and tents of his people.
The kator had been pitched in a village for the night. All had smelt the snow in the air, and sensed the storm to come. Better to set up the tents now, in the lee of the pingo, and be in shelter when the blast hit, instead of trying to struggle on toward the forest and be caught in the sweep of snow across the plain. Glows and streaks of light escaped from the simple hide tents, and he smelled the smoky fires of dried lichen and dung that warmed them tonight. It was a homey smell. The hobbled strings of harkar scraped away the shallow layer of snow to graze on the lush lichen of the tundra, awaiting the morrow when they would once more be loaded with the possessions of their owners and led on, toward the sheltering forest.
The herd, too, sensed the approaching storm, and had drawn themselves into a moving huddle of beasts. Their gray and brown backs were like a rippling sea in the moonlight as they shifted and stirred. The exhalations of their warm moist breath created a mist that drifted and rose from the herd in a cloud. The cold air carried the softly distinctive sound of their clicking hooves as toe bones flexed against stretched tendons. Their light-tipped tails flicked in an ever-changing pattern. Most of the great sarva had lost their antlers in their fierce autumn battles over the vaja. Gone were the great bulging withers of the bulls, their fatness battled away. In contrast, the neutered harker still carried their proud crowns, and their fur rippled sleekly over their muscles and fat. One would have thought them the monarchs of the herd. Even the vaja still bore their smaller, sharper antlers. The females would carry their antlers longer than the males, and would use them to full advantage for much of the winter, to make sure they and their young ones were not driven away from the best feeding. Heckram could imagine the soft grunts and mutterings of the settling herd, and the warm smell of the living beasts in the cold night. Wealth uncounted grazed there, his own paltry fortune among it.
'Heckram!' A thin panting voice sounded in the night behind him. His eyes sought and found the struggling figure that had ventured up the pingo to find him.
'I'm here,' he called back softly to Lasse. The boy made his careful way across the broken crest of the frost heave. Heckram found himself studying the boy as coldly as he would study one of his yearling calves. His short legs were already acquiring the typical bow of the herdfolk. When he finished growing, his head might reach as high as the point of Heckram's shoulder. But he would never fill out to be a sturdy, thick-shouldered herder like his father and mother had been. His body had known too much privation, too soon. Had he been a calf, Heckram would not have considered him worth gelding into a harke, let alone using as a stud. With a snort of self-mockery, he shook such images from his mind, and once more saw Lasse as Lasse. As reluctant as he was to have his solitude broken, at least it was Lasse who had come to do it. The boy seemed to sense his mood, for he was silent as he approached. Lasse was nearly ten years younger than he but Heckram never treated him as a boy. Lasse, like Heckram, had become a man before his time. If anything, Lasse and his grandmother lived in circumstances even more straitened than Heckram's. But Lasse never complained.