Naamah's Curse by Jacqueline Carey Read Free Book Online

lift my spirits.
    At night it was different. It was cold—gods, so cold! It frightened me to think how much colder it could get. I slept in my clothing beneath a fur blanket in the small tent of felted wool that was the bulk of the burden my pack-horse, Coal, carried. Inside the tent, the warmth my body generated was enough to sustain me for now, but every night seemed a little colder than the night before.
    The Tatars may have lived behind felt walls, but their walls were thicker and they had one gift I lacked: fire.
    It wasn’t for lack of skill. I carried a good flint striking kit. And I’d helped my mother tend our hearth since I was four or five years old… but, of course, I’d grown up in a forest.
    There were no trees on the empty plain.
    From time to time, I passed through an abandoned pasture where I could collect dried dung. Not often, for the Tatars scoured the plains and left little behind when they moved to new pastures. On those occasions when I was able to collect enough to build a campfire, it seemed like a profound luxury. I would fill the little iron pot I carried with water, dried noodles, and bean curd and nestle it amid the burning dung-coals. The resulting soup was chewy and flavorless, but it was wonderfully warm in my belly.
    Alone save for the horses, I would huddle over my tiny, smoldering fire, watching the immense sky change colors as the sun sank below the horizon.
    Most days, I made do with tough strips of dried yak-meat, gnawing as I rode, chewing and softening it until my jaws ached.
    Most nights, I crawled into my narrow tent without the comfort of a fire, tying the flaps tight against the bitter cold and burrowing under my blanket.
    It was harder than I had reckoned. Anywhere else in the world, I would have been well equipped to survive. I’d grown up in the wilderness. If there had been edible plants to forage, I would have found them.
    There weren’t.
    I was skilled with a bow. If there had been game to shoot, I could have shot it. But mostly, there wasn’t. Such birds as I saw were poor eating—buzzards and raptors. The small game mammals of the plains were already hibernating.
    There were the occasional wild gazelles, growing shaggy with the increasing cold. If I’d had fodder for a proper fire, it might have been worthwhile.
    But I didn’t.
    It is a thing we take much for granted, fire. When all is said and done, it is the first, most primordial thing that separates humans from animals. Being children of the Great Bear Herself, the folk of the Maghuin Dhonn are closer than most to the animal realm; and yet, deprived of fire, I craved its reassurance.
    I found myself scheming ways to attain it. I eyed the fresh, steaming turds of dung Ember and Coal deposited on the plains, wondering if there were some significance to the fire-names I had given them, wondering if I might rig some manner of woven rack that would allow their dung to dry as it was transported.
    Of course, if I had had the materials to build such a rack, I would have had materials to build a fire.
    I didn’t.
    So I gnawed on my strips of dried yak-meat while we plodded westward, ever westward. I did my best to meditate on the lessons Master Lo had taught me. I cycled through the Five Styles of Breathing. I measured the dwindling distance between my
diadh-anam
and the spark of Bao’s.
    I let my thoughts wander as far away as Terre d’Ange…
    Jehanne.
    It was at night that I thought of her most, when the immense canopy of stars flung itself across the night sky. As fair as she was, with silver-gilt hair and skin so pale it was nearly translucent, blue-grey eyes that held an impossibly charming sparkle, I’d always thought of Jehanne in terms of starlight and moonlight.
    She would have been appalled to find me here.
    But she would have understood it.
    I pictured her, her fair brows frowning.
This peasant-boy, do you love him?
    I think so
.
    Jehanne would have shrugged, her slender shoulders rising and