Even I feared him
And so armed myself…
Brother, thought Perkar. But a brother not trusted, a brother to arm against. Perkar felt something in his grasp, for who could this brother be but the dreadful River, the one that ate her? There was a weapon, and it must be nigh. His enemy and the weapon, here together.
He was scarcely aware when the earth began to rumble with the Forest Lord's speech.
"It is good," Balati intoned. "We can add another verse to this song. What will that verse be about?"
The Kapaka stood, spoke a trifle too loudly, a king of instants confronting a lord of epochs. "In the Human lands, more and more sons go landless. We begin to turn on ourselves, and I fear troubled times. The local gods tell us that you have asked them not to bargain, as in days of old. They tell us that we must petition you for new lands and holdings to cherish and worship. So here we have come."
The Forest Lord seemed to swell larger, like a shadow moving farther from the sun. Above them, the sky darkened with twilight.
"It is good that you heeded my word," Balati said. "It is good. Many valleys and hills, many gods have I given into your care, and you into theirs. It has been well enough, but Balat is smaller than it was, and I will only give so much. You understand this; you are a lord of your kind."
"Yes. I understand. But I must request it."
"You have respect, you honor the memories of your fathers," Balati said. "We will talk, you and I. We will talk here, tonight, and we will decide. But I will tell you, I cannot give you much. Not much."
He hunched down, became a hillock of darkness, horned, single eye of flickering foxfire. A nighthawk cried, somewhere.
"Come," a voice whispered, and a gentle tug at his sleeve. "Come, Ngangata says we must leave them." It was Atti. The Alwat were visible again, at the edge of the clearing; they seemed to be waiting. Ngangata was already walking toward them, leading his horse.
"Come," Atti repeated.
"And leave the Kapaka with that?" Apad demanded.
But the Kapaka was waving them away, as well. Perkar rose up reluctantly, went to recover Mang. He let Atti go ahead, lagged back to make sure Apad and Eruka would follow. Behind them, neither the Kapaka nor the Forest Lord spoke; it was clear now that they were waiting for the others to leave.
"I don't care for this at all," Eruka said.
"It doesn't sound good," Apad said. "Did you hear him? He won't give us anything. We'll have to fight, as we planned."
"Shhh." Eruka gasped. "We might be overheard. Who knows what gods might lurk here? Or even Ngangata and the Alwat."
Apad nodded tersely, in agreement, acknowledging his mistake.
But Perkar leaned very close to Apad's ear. "The caves, Apad. We must look in the caves. We have the time, and we must take it."
Apad did not meet Perkar's eager gaze. "Yes," he answered. "I suppose…"
"Hurry," Eruka urged. "The Alwat will lose us here if we don't keep up."
Perkar nodded and quickened his pace, but he marked everything in his mind, tried to paint a map as they moved away from the clearing. He must find the trail up to the caves, in the dark. With or without his friends.
V
Blindness
The Alwat did not lead them very far from the clearing, only to the base of the valley wall, where the trees climbed steeply up the slope. There, on the gentle rise clinging to the base of the precipitous one, a little fire was burning, a cheerful sight in this web of gods and power. The Fire Goddess was always friendly to Human Beings, always on their side.
The Alwat had also erected shelters, simple lean-tos roughly covered in sheets of birch bark.
"Do they expect rain tonight?" Perkar asked Atti, gesturing at the huts.
"Not tonight," he answered.
"Not tonight? What other night? How long will this take, this negotiation?"
To his surprise, it was Ngangata who answered him. The two of them had not spoken since their fight, and Perkar did not expect to speak to him ever again.
"The Forest Lord has little sense of time," he said. "It could take a night or many nights. There is no way of knowing."
"Why did the Forest Lord send us away, then? Why can't we attend our king?"
Irritation flashed across Ngangata's broad features, as if his answer to Perkar was meant to be singular, a gift to be accepted but not a precedent to be taken for granted. Perkar felt his face burn, but not with anger. He stepped back from the fire lest it show.
"The Forest Lord doesn't really understand Human Beings or even Alwat, I think," he said. "He believes we are like the Huntress, like Karak."
"He thinks we are gods?" Perkar asked, unwilling to stop now that the half man was speaking.
"No. The Raven and the Huntress are gods in their own rights, but they are also aspects of Balati, parts of him. As leaves are parts of a tree. Better yet, they are like aspen trees. Each aspen is a tree itself, but all of the aspen in a forest are part of the same root."
"And he thinks we are like that? All aspects of the Kapaka?"
"It is his habit to think that way," Ngangata answered. "Besides," he went on, "the king is wise, and he has been schooled in this kind of negotiation. We will be allowed to fetch him water and food when need be; Balati will not notice our presence."
"You say that the king is wise," Apad said, his voice low and flat. "Do you mean to imply that we are not?"
"I mean only to imply that you are not as wise as the Kapaka," Ngangata said softly. "That is no insult, only a fact."
"Who can dispute that?" Atti added, a little too quickly.
Apad's expression said that he might, but he kept his peace. For days, Apad had been trying to goad Ngangata into a fight, following Perkar's example, but with no success. Ngangata's answers to him were always couched in words just short of insulting, and Perkar realized now that when Ngangata openly insulted someone, he meant to do so. The fight at the cave had been no accident, no slip of the tongue. The half man had invited Perkar to fight him and then let himself be beaten. Apad and Eruka would never see this—but they had not felt the strength behind Ngangata's half-hearted blows. What Perkar still didn't understand was what the little man was up to. What shamed him was the suspicion that it had been some sort of test, one he had failed.
And why did he care about that? Ngangata was not a warrior, had no Piraku. Having his respect gained one nothing.
But he did know one thing; he would rather have Ngangata with him tonight than Apad or Eruka, though he liked the two Human men better.
"I'll make my offerings now," he told them. He gave a little incense to the Fire Goddess, then moved off into the shadows crouching about the camp. There he offered to his sword, to Ko who made it. He offered to his armor, too, unfolding it as he did so. To the gods of the mountain, he made no offerings at all; he did not want to attract their attention.
His oblations were hurried, as he began to feel a nagging urgency. If he was going into the caves of the Forest Lord, he must do so now; for all he knew the Kapaka and the Balati were even now concluding an agreement. Best, in fact, not to go back to the fire at all. Ngangata and Atti might become suspicious; if he left now, they would think that he was displaying more piety than usual. It would be a good while before they actually began to look for him, and then it would be too late. Or perhaps they would go to sleep and not realize he had been gone at all. Part of him wanted Apad and Eruka along, but he was forced to conclude that he might be better off without them; after all, he had no intention of seeking battle, save with the Rivergod himself. He had no quarrel with the Forest Lord nor any god in his domain. Nor, he realized, did he really seek glory or a place in some epic. All of that was just his friends talking. It sounded good at the time, but growing fear and apprehension was stripping it away. After all, he had seen the Forest Lord, knew something of the being from whom he intended to steal; and at the moment, he felt like little Perkar, not like some Giant from one of Eruka's songs.