Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [178]
“Dalla, will you answer me one question?”
“About what?”
“Dweomer, I suppose you’d call it.”
“Well, if it’s not a forbidden thing to answer, I will.”
“Fair enough. Let me think.”
For a long time he stared at the floor, while the shadows grew in the room round the pool of candlelight.
“Jill said she’d answer if I ever had the guts to ask,” he said at last. “When a man dies, is that the end of him?” He turned to look at her. “Or does he live again, in some other life?”
She was too surprised to answer at first. He waited patiently.
“Well, he won’t live again, exactly, but his soul will take on another body and another life.”
“Huh. I’d come to think that it must be true, but I wanted to know, you see.”
It occurred to her that it was probably grief driving him to ask.
“It’s not like Jill herself will ever return,” Dallandra went on, “but another person with somewhat of Jill about her. Although they say, truly, that the greater your dweomer grows, the more you become your soul, not just some mask for it, and then, or so they say, you do come back again in some true sense.”
“I’m not sure I understand all of that.”
“I don’t suppose you need to.”
“Probably not.” Rhodry smiled, just faintly. “But if you know that the men killed here today will live again, why are you so distraught?”
“Didn’t they suffer as they died? And won’t their kin and clans suffer because they’ve lost them? Besides, it won’t be them come back, not in any real sense. The men they were are gone. It’s like a seed, a grain of wheat, say. The seed bursts and dies, a stalk of wheat grows, and there’ll be another seed—but the first one’s gone forever.”
“I see. In a way. Ah, well, the bards will sing of them, not by name, truly, but they’ll sing of this battle down the long years, and so we’ll all live a little while past our dying.”
She could find nothing to say to that, and weeping again seemed too great a luxury to allow herself. He looked out the window, where the stars glittered in the vast drift of the Snowy Road, sat studying the sky for a long time, so long that she began to wonder what he might be thinking, and how much he’d understood. Finally, he got up, walking over to face her.
“You never answered me,” he said. “Do you want me to go?”
She had one brief struggle with her dignity.
“I don’t,” she said. “I’d rather you stayed the night.”
He smiled, then slipped his arms round her waist to draw her close and kiss her.
After the feasting and the assigning of praise, after the bard songs and the salutes with the last of Cadmar’s mead, the army stumbled to its tents late. Jahdo had fallen asleep under one of the tables, but woke when the men began to leave. He crawled out and trotted through the crowd, looking for Rhodry, but he was tired enough to give up fast. When he carried his lantern back to their camp, he found Arzosah still awake, preening her claws with her enormous tongue.
“Ah, there you are, little hatchling,” she remarked. “Where’s our master?”
“I couldn’t find him. He did tell me that he were going up to the dun to look for Dallandra, but he never did come back.”
“Ah.” The dragon made the thundering sound that did her for laughter. “Well, then, I wouldn’t worry about him.”
“Be you sure he did not fall into some danger?” “Very sure. You’ll understand when you’re older.” “Here! You do sound just like my mam!” “Didn’t I tell the master that you’d be as a hatchling to me? Now go wash that sticky stuff off your face with stream water and then get to bed. We’ll be having a long morning of it.”
“Oh, I doubt me that the army will be a-marching at dawn. They did have a fearsome lot to drink.”
Arzosah laughed again.
“No doubt, no doubt. But they’ll be mustering and suchlike, and the master will need you to pack up his gear. So off to bed you go.”
When Rhodry woke in the morning, he found Dallandra up and dressed, kneeling on the floor and sorting out packets of medicinals. He lay in bed and merely watched her for a while, the delicate way her hands moved at her