The Dragon Book (57 page)

“I have twenty-seven fish, Kulvok,” said Kulvok’s ice-cold fosterson. His voice was cool but not unhuman. His heart-of-ice eyes blinked once, in a human way.

“We’ll eat well then,” said the shaman. He knew that Anlut too would eat, if less than any other man of his years. And he knew that the fish Anlut carried would not be frozen, but frosty, and also that when they were cooked, everyone reaching for the food-pot would be wary not to brush against Anlut’s bare hands. Anlut’s bare skin did not burn you with its coldness, yet cold he was, colder than new snow. You could not bear to touch him or—Kulvok wondered—was it that he could not bear to touch
you
? If he had ever loved any of them, he had never been able to express that physically. He would never marry, nor himself sire children. But, anyway, Kulvok did not think that Anlut loved them. Anlut had been saved from certain death and remade by some uncanny force for quite another task. Which, naturally, he had been told from the start.

SUMMER was nearing its end that night. Clouds drifted over the stars, and in the far sky was a rippling and banding that was not Ulkioket but only the wild winter lights beginning to practice their weaving.

After the evening meal, Anlut sat apart from the tent and gazed at this, while the other young men sat laughing and playing a gambling game with horn-pieces, the children scampered after a rag ball, and the women salted meat and gossiped. Even the young women never glanced at Anlut. Only the fire paid him attention, glimmering hypnotically on the contours of his hands and face.

He could, like any other man, draw close to fire. It had no bad effect on him. But neither did it warm him. Once, in the earliest days, when Kulvok sometimes questioned him, Anlut had said he felt no heat from fire and had no need of it to preserve him. Yet he liked it, its colour and rhythm, the dances it performed in a lamp or on a hearth. When the young women danced, he watched them also, but in a detached and solemn way. As if, again, simply meaning to be polite.

Kulvok felt his own age. He was thirty-four years now, practically an old man. His back was growing humped, and he had grey strands in his black hair. He had fathered no sons that he knew of anywhere, and decidedly none here. Nuyamat, he understood very well, resented this, and that—worse—instead of a proper baby she had had this monster thrust on her. A demon who might sit naked in a snow gale and not come to harm.

Kulvok had never, either, been sure if the distance the band kept from him distressed Anlut. The shaman was unsure, in fact, of all things to do with Anlut, save that one paramount thing, the reason for Anlut’s life.

“Anlut,” said Kulvok now.

“Yes?” said Anlut, looking up at him.

“Come with me to my other tent. Tonight, my powers tell me, is a time that you and I should talk together.”

Anlut rose. He was graceful, although not in a human way at all. His movements reminded Kulvok of the flow of plate ice on the sea, the passage of a cloud. Or the dance of fire, or of the Northland lights. Or the scintillance of a dragon.

For a moment, they stood quite still. No one else glanced their way.

Yet from the corner of his eye, Kulvok noticed Etuk bending to one of the little portable shrines of Ulkioket, which Etuk set up always in the doorway of his tent or his ice-tower. All Nenkru’s Kimolaki did that still. And all through these years, once he had been old enough, Anlut had gone out with them to follow after the ice dragon as well, and to thieve what had been left frozen by him in his blast-ice. Anlut therefore had even seen Ulkioket, now and then, though always in the distance, for none of the rest of them would attempt the suicide of going close. Anlut had not questioned or resisted, not spoken of these excursions, ever.

Despite being warned by the shaman early of his nature and his future role as hero, and, ultimately, dragon-slayer, Anlut had never expressed misgivings, never apparently wanted to learn more—and never once vowed himself ready for the quest, let alone
un
ready.

When Kulvok and Anlut turned off from the camp towards the shaman’s other tent, where he communed with his sorcery, only Etuk squinted after them. Then he rubbed more meat fat into the shrine. “Not I,” said Etuk to Ulkioket, “I never agreed to nurse this strangeling. None of us agreed. It was the shaman’s business. We thank you always, lord. You are our god.”

THE other tent was dark and had no fire.

Kulvok kindled the single small lamp that only gave up a one-foot flame, but that flame white as snow.

“You may sit or stand,” said Kulvok. But he stood. Anlut stood also.

Is he only a mirror? His skin reflects, his hair—is that the clue to the ice-hero? He has learned our life by copying, not through instinct or feeling. He does as I do now, just as my reflection in an ancient piece of polished metal would do if I kept one in my tent.

This uncomforting idea might be part of his prescience, Kulvok decided. Yet too, in the past year, he had sensed his shamanic powers waning, as they had at first, when he was eight and had lost his father.

“Since you were able to hear,” said Kulvok, “I told you of your birth, and of the function that some god or spirit gave you.”

“Yes, Kulvok,” said Anlut’s cool voice.

“What then do you think of such a destiny?”

Anlut said nothing. Then he said, “That it must be mine.”

Kulvok frowned. He glared into the turquoise eyes that seemed almost fiery with their alien iciness.

“Then you are to seek the dragon and kill it. Since only you, that are yourself ice-formed, as he is, can face him, his scorching pad-marks, his untouchable surface, his breath-blast of freezing death. And you will destroy him, and thereafter any others of his kind you come across.
Ulkioket,
” said Kulvok, slowly. “Say his name.”

“Ulkioket.”

“Say your own, now.”

“Anlut.”

“The gods made you for this. Even the day before the dragon struck your village, when you were only hot flesh and blood in your mother’s womb, I heard the beating of your heart, and we ran to find you, there in the path of the dragon.”

“And now,” said Anlut, who seldom spoke save when spoken to, “I am cold and in the world, and he is in
my
path instead.”

Kulvok stared.

Then he grunted. He was surprised by the assertion. A hero’s statement of intent. It lifted his spirit slightly, and the flame of the small lamp too rose, becoming for a second almost two feet in height.

And in the lamplight, Anlut glowed for a moment with a bronzen skin like a proper human man. But the flame sank.

Outside, eerie as wolves, the women began to sing some chant of summer’s end.

“The time is now,” said Kulvok. “Now you must go to him. He’s out on the edge of summer and winter, stirring from his summer sleep, starting to move about and flex himself as men do when
warmth
draws near. I have traced his whereabouts through my magic. I’ll show you which direction you must go.”

“No need,” said Anlut. “It’s eastward.”

“How … do you know?”

“I’ve followed him in the past, have I not, Kulvok, with the Kimolaki? I’ve learned his ways. Perhaps he
calls
me now, if the
time
is now. You summoned me first. Otherwise, I should have sought you also tonight.”

Kulvok heard this avowal in a stony amazement. Anlut, between one hour and the next, had altered. But the ritual of sending must conclude.

“Go then, Anlut. My kind have given all we might to you, and I can give you nothing more, for you need nothing of mine, nor did you ever need it.”

“That’s true,” said the young man, the hero, the creature of the ice, cold and level, heartless—even though his heartbeat had shouted and howled at this other man over sixteen years before, calling him to find him. “Farewell then, Kulvok. Fare well then, band of Nenkru.”

Without another word, he went out, pausing only to dip inside the home tent, emerging presently with spear and knife. Anlut left their camp. Thinking him off to some lonely night hunt, no one paid heed. Nuyamat was singing with the women. She did not look up. Impervious, the wolves gnawed bones, ignoring all.

Kulvok himself withdrew again into his tent of magic. He lit the fire-pot, but not in order to see anything in it. He felt the going away of Anlut like a weird silver strand that pulled out of him, unravelling as it went, fraying to nothing on the brown grassland beside the tear-shape of the lake. Death, Kulvok believed, must feel similar. Nor, he thought, would he have long now, before he knew for sure how death must feel.

PART THREE

ANLUT trekked eastward.

He progressed at a measured, striding trot, covering miles relentlessly, pausing only at sunfall and sunup, when he would sleep on the bare tundra, each time for less than an hour.

Sunpasses went by, strung pale beads on the black thread of night, which night all the while grew stronger and longer and deeper.

Then gales came and filled the black night with the different white beading of swirling snows.

Ice formed and shouldered against ice, grumbling, sometimes splitting with enormous shrill cracks.

As he ran, Anlut looked often about him. He had been taught to search like this, for the Kimolaki did so, checking the terrain for pitfalls, thicker ice or thinner, or for the danger of predators other than themselves. Once or twice then, he saw the deer streaming away along the land’s edge, and once two lone wolves, or a white bear shambling far off in mist, and, on the limit of the horizon, the great bear-like bergs, lit with unreal blue lamps inside. The sun began to be only an eighth high along the sky.

It was again winter’s time.

The season of the ice dragon. Ulkioket.

MEN think, even when they pursue something, hunt prey, an enemy, the mystic beat of a signalling heart.

Did Anlut think? Consider?
Remember?

For sixteen years, he had grown up among human men and women, who nurtured him the best that they were able. Lovelessly, naturally, nothing else could be expected, and often fearfully too—as with Nuyamat in her gloves, forcing the bone reed of milk into his mouth. And mostly with a fearful lovelessness demonstrated by the manner of not approaching him, of keeping distant physically, and in all other ways. Yet they taught him their skills. Otherwise, they believed, he could not have survived, and their code was always to extend the techniques of survival.