Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 18 of 21

Mercedes reached the herd near sundown with the hide under her arm. The bull stood at the post. The cows grazed the thinning hay. She sat by her small fire and unrolled the hide across her knees. Thirty-one lines. She read them in order and heard the gaps like missing teeth. A line about the bull's shadow, then nothing, then a song for the cows in calf. She did not know what came between. If she spoke the rites with the wrong words in the wrong places, her grandmother had warned once that the bond would break the other way. The herd would hear the call as a dismissal and drift back over the pass before the snow closed it. She could not guess the missing lines. She would not guess them. A boy stepped out of the trees before full dark. He was thin, gray-haired for his age, green-eyed, and he carried a short bow across his back. He said his name was Theren Elkwatch and that his mother had sent him when word came that the herd had returned. His people had watched elk before the herds left. He knew some of the old words. Mercedes did not stand. She held out the hide and asked him to read. He knelt by the fire and read each line aloud, slow, testing them against something in his own memory. He stopped four times. Each time he said a phrase she did not have. She wrote them down as he spoke, checked each one against him twice, and made him say it a third time before she set the ink. When they finished the hide held thirty-five lines. Theren said there were still two he could not remember and one he had never known. Mercedes looked at the fire and made her choice. She would speak only what she had. She would leave the gaps silent rather than fill them wrong. She stood and walked to the post. The bull lifted his head. She spoke the lines she was sure of, in the order Theren had set, and where a line was missing she waited the length of a breath and went on. The bull did not move away. The cows did not lift from the hay. When she finished, the herd stood as it had stood before, feeding, drinking, settling for the night. Nothing broke. Nothing bound, either, not fully. Theren said the rest would have to be found or made, and soon, before the thaw pulled the ground open and the herd tested the edges of the camp. Mercedes rolled the hide and tied it. She had held the herd through the speaking. She had not sent them away. The rest of the words were still out there, in someone's mouth, or gone.