Rudi blinked and swallowed, daunted but not glancing aside. The deep voice went on:
"Shall I show you your fate, boy? Shall I tell you if you die untimely or live long?"
"No, my lord Wanderer," Rudi said softly. "My mother is a weaver, and I know that every thread has its place and is part of the whole. All men die. None die untimely, and no man may live a day longer than he lives. So if you've come to lead me away, I am ready."
He dared a smile. "Though I've heard you send your daughters for that job."
And there's a good deal I'd rather do first… he thought.
Suddenly an image came to him, painfully bright; a room with a bed, and Matti's face exhausted and triumphant as she looked up to him from the red crumpled-looking infant cradled in the crook of her arm, and a shadow of his own exultant joy.
The Wanderer laughed, and though it was a soft chuckle there was an overtone to it like the crackle of lights over the mountains in winter. There was approval there, but by something greater than men or their hopes and sorrows.
"Good! Though you won't be meeting Gondul, as your father did. You've pledged yourself to another, and I'm not inclined to quarrel with Her."
Rudi's mouth quirked. "It seems you've something else in mind then, my lord the Wanderer," he said.
The figure nodded. "But unasked, I will tell you this: you won't die in the straw of sickness, nor of an arrow in the back, even a cursed one. Though you will not live to feel your shoulders bend with age, or see your hair grow gray."
"How, then?"
"You will die by the blade, sword in hand. The King's death, the given sacrifice that goes consenting with open eyes, dying that his folk may live."
"As my father did, whose blood renewed the land. Thank you, then, lord Wanderer. Though I've seldom called on You by name."
The Wanderer flicked away the grounds in his tin cup and tossed it to the damp earth beside the fire. "No?" he said. "But your mother has called on Me, in her grove, when you lay wounded and near to death. And you have as well. Come."
He put his hand on Rudi's shoulder. They took three steps to the edge of the trail to look downward, and his poncho flared in the wind, seeming longer now. A dead leaf flickered out of it as it masked Rudi's face for a moment, and then he sucked in his breath.
I know that path! he thought.
It was nightfall on the roadway that ran westward from the waterfall and mill to the gates of Dun Juniper, where the schoolchildren practiced an hour or two shooting at the mark most evenings. The trees beyond and below were Douglas fir, taller and thicker and closer-set than the pine forests of the Tetons, each dark green branch heavy with its load of snow. It was a softer fall than the blizzard about him, of flakes larger and wetter… the snow of a winter in the western foothills of the Cascades, one that would lay a few days at most, not grip the land like cold iron until the end of May.
Close at hand a column of kilted children were walking through the gathering dark, cased bows and capped quivers over their shoulders, with a few adult warriors among them-one had a lamp slung on a spear over her shoulder, a globe of yellow light in the fog white of the snow.
"That's Aoife Barstow," he said slowly. "She and her lover died fighting for me when the Protector's men came, only a little later.. . I offer at their graves every year."
The children started singing. He recognized one clear high ten-year-old's voice. It was his own.
"Upon his shoulder, ravens
His face like stone, engraven
Astride an eight-hoofed stygian beast
He gathers the fruit of the gallows trees!
Driving legions to victory
The Bringer of War walks tonight!"
"By the name you invoked, by the blood she spilled, by the offering made beneath the tree where she died," the man said softly. "By these you called, and I answer at the appointed time."
"She… named others than you, lord Wanderer. As have I, full often."
Images passed before his eyes; he couldn't be sure if they were shapes formed in the swirling snow, or his own imaginings, or as real as the blood he could feel beating in his throat… because that too might be illusion. A tall charioteer's shape edged and crowned with fire, tossing up a spear that was a streak of gold across the sky and kissing it as he rode laughing to battle as to a bridal feast; a woman vast and sooty and bent, wielding a scythe that reaped men; a raven whose wings beat out the life and death of worlds. His hand went to the scar between his brows, where a real raven's beak had touched him in the sacred wood.
"When I hung nine days from the Tree, I became a god of death," the one-eyed figure said. "When I grasped the runes of wisdom I learned many names."
He looked up. One of the great black birds moved in the skeletal branches above them. It cocked its head and gave a harsh cry and launched itself away, gliding down the slope on broad-stretched wings.
"And Raven and I are old friends."
They turned back to the fire. If this isn't the final journey, then I must be dreaming, Rudi thought, as they crouched by the red flickering warmth, across from each other, sitting easily on their hams.
The gray-haired man reached into a pocket, brought out tobacco and papers, rolled himself a cigarette single-handed, then lit it with an ember he picked out with a twig. He handed it across the fire; the Mackenzie took it, and inhaled the smoke-he'd done the same before, visiting with the Three Tribes. For a flickering instant as he inhaled the harsh bite across his tongue the shape on the other side of the flames had a prick-eared, long-muzzled face, and two braids of hair beside it beneath the hat.
"Are you truly that One men named the Wanderer?" Rudi asked boldly.
He could feel his fear, but it was slightly distant, like the cold of the wind. And well might a man be afraid, to meet Him on a lonely mountainside. He was a god of death; the lord of poetry and craft who'd given the runes to men and established kingship, but also bringer of the red madness of battle, of everything that lifted humankind beyond themselves. His favorites got victory, but they died young, and often by treachery.
A puff of smoke. "What would your mother say?"
She'd answer a question with a question, some distant part of Rudi thought wryly. And if I complain, say that you can only truly learn the truth you find yourself. Aloud:
"That the forms the God wears… or the Goddess… are many.
And that they are true, not mere seemings or masks, but that they're not… not complete. As are the little gods and the spirits of the land, or the Fathers and Mothers of the animal kind. They speak to us as we need them, if we'll but listen. For how can a man tell all his mind to a child, or a god to a man?"
The other nodded. The great wolf raised its head and looked at him, then put its massive muzzle on its paws again.
"A wise woman, Lady Juniper, a very wise woman… and not least in knowing that what she knows isn't everything that is."
"You'll be talking to me in riddles and hints, then, I suppose, lord Wanderer?"
The eye pierced him. For a moment he felt transparent as glass, as if he could suddenly see his entire life-not in memory, but through an infinity of Rudis-stretching back like a great serpent to the moment of his birth… and his conception… and before. As if all time and possibility were an eternal now.
"Look, then," the Wanderer said. "If you can bear it."
For a moment the mountain about him stood stark and bare, only here and there a charred root exposed by the gullies cut by long-gone monsoon floods. Heat lay on it like a blanket, through air gray and clear and thick with the tears of boiling oceans. Then it changed and was green once more… but different, somehow; there was a wrongness to the way the trees were placed, a regularity that held patterns as complex as those you saw in a kaleidoscope, layer within layer. A rabbit hopped by…