Spirit Walker

by David Farland

  “You’re lower than the dung on my moccasins,” Scandal said in bastardized Pwi. He slugged the warrior in the belly, doubling the Neanderthal over.

  Phylomon grabbed Scandal’s arm. “Leave him,” Phylomon said. “The kwea of what has happened here will kill him.”

  Tull saw it then—the defeat in the man’s posture, the dullness of his eyes. He’d lost everything, and the pain of it was so great, he would not be able to eat.

  Even the Okanjara let themselves starve if a spouse died.

  Phylomon reasoned with the warrior, “You call us cowards for running,” he said. “Yet you ran, too. I imagine it did not take you long to wipe off your skull paint in the dark.”

  The young man frowned, as if Phylomon’s words had been a blow.

  Ayuvah and Scandal stayed outside to guard the Okanjara while the Tull and Phylomon went into the tent to retrieve the women. They were both unconscious, yet had their eyes open. Beside them lay the drugged pot that the Okanjara had eaten from.

  Phylomon looked them over. “They’re in a nasty storm,” he said. “We’ve got to get that poison out of them.”

  He flipped Tirilee on her side, put his finger down her throat until she gagged up bits of mushroom, tiny white cucumber seeds, and bilious green leaves from the stew.

  Tull did the same to Wisteria, then ran out and found some bits of blood-stained tent. They wrapped the women up and carried them back to camp, leaving the last two Okanjara to grieve at Frowning Idols.

  When they returned to the wagon, Phylomon felt as if he carried a great load. He had wanted so much to get some cattle to pull the wagon. Between the two teams at the Idols, there’d been a dozen oxen. And now all the oxen were dead before he’d got a day’s pull from them.

  We’re still seven hundred miles from the river, he mused. Perhaps farther. By coming north to Frowning Idols, we’ve lost four good days. He could think of no place to get another animal—except from the Hukm, the giant ape-men riding their woolly mammoths. There’s a place to get draft animals, if you’re bold enough.

  But would the others go for it?

  He looked at Tull: the face of the young Tcho-Pwi was drained white. The boy worried for his wife.

  Frowning Idols, with the flayed ivory trader and children smashed to a pulp, was among the most grisly battlefields Phylomon had ever seen—enough to scare the wits out of a Pwi. Add that to the shock of watching a child’s murder, and the fact that the boy had just killed his first man—the image flashed through Phylomon’s mind of the first man he had killed some 640 years earlier, a slaver who was acting as guard to the estate of a powerful Slave Lord. It had been different then, an official war with devastating casualties on both sides, and Phylomon had knifed the man at night, from behind, in the dark.

  Phylomon looked at Ayuvah. There is only so much you can ask a Pwi to do. The kwea of this place was bad enough. If he were alone, Phylomon might try to steal a mammoth, but you couldn’t ask the Pwi to steal one and then ride it all over hell with the Hukm chasing you.

  Still, there was another chance.

  Tull took the women to the wagon, and he filled their mouths with wine again and again, making them vomit.

  Phylomon made a pretense of examining the women. “Those Okanjara, they’re not too smart,” he said. “The effects of their stew won’t be permanent—not on a human. The wild cucumber seeds are the worst. Might take as much as a week for them to wear off. Still, Tull’s got the bulk of the stew out, and the women didn’t have time to digest it. I’ll bet they break free of the worst effect by morning.”

  Tull knelt and gingerly held Wisteria’s shoulders, studied her face hopefully for sign of recovery.

  “Ayaah,” Scandal said, gazing at Tull. “Maybe. Most of this stuff will wear off by morning. Sure wish to hell I knew what the leaves in there were, though.”

  “A mild narcotic, a pain killer,” Phylomon said. “That’s why they stare without blinking. It wears off quickly.” He didn’t know for sure what was in the stew, of course. The Okanjara were notorious for adding anything to their “dream pots” that would cause hallucinations.

  Ayuvah put his arms around Tull’s shoulders. “They are right, little brother. The women will be fine by morning.”

  “We should bundle them up warm and take them down to Benbow—if not back to Smilodon Bay,” Scandal said quietly, looking to Phylomon for confirmation. “We can reoutfit. It will put us a month behind, but if we hurry …”

  “If we hurry, we’ll miss the serpent hatch up on the Seven Ogre River and we’ll all freeze trying to climb the Dragon Spines,” Phylomon said. He’d hoped to avoid this. “But if we put our backs into it, we can push this wagon ten miles by sundown and get over the mountains before the snow flies.”

  “What in the hell would be the point?” Scandal said. “We might as well leave the wagon, reoutfit in Craal!”

  “I suppose you’ll carry the food while we carry the women? We need the wagon if only to cart them.”

  “Why bother?” Scandal asked. “Let’s go home.”

  “We’re going east,” Phylomon said, “to Sanctum. If we hurry, we can catch the Hukm on their migration south at Sanctum. Perhaps they’ll give us a mammoth.”

  “Hah! The four of us push this wagon over the Dragon Spines? Three hundred miles? We’re already four days behind schedule, and Sanctum’s another hundred miles off our course. Without draft animals, we’ll just get farther behind! We’ll miss the serpent run by two weeks!”

  Phylomon countered, “By the time we reach the Dragon Spines, the women might be better. That would make six of us to push. We’ll have less food, and we can tear off the running boards, lighten the wagon. If we push fast and keep at it all day long, we can make up the time we’ve lost. We won’t miss the serpent hatch. We can’t miss it!”

  “God bugger you with a carrot, you’re a stubborn man!” Scandal shouted. “You think the Hukm will just give us a mammoth? Right! And maybe they’ll give us their daughters while they’re at it! We’ve had enough bad luck. My belly's aching for a decent meal and I haven’t had a woman for so long that even you are starting to look pretty! Tull, Ayuvah, let’s go home!”

  Phylomon slugged Scandal in the mouth, pulling his blow just enough to loosen the man’s teeth. Scandal fell back on his rear, and jumped up, but Phylomon pulled his long knife from his leg sheath, and Scandal just stared. Until this moment, Phylomon had been content to leave Scandal in charge. Now, they needed someone with internal fortitude.

  “Get the women bedded down on the wagon,” Phylomon said. “We’ve got ten miles to make by sundown. You’re going to push! And if you try to run away, I’ll gut you!”

  By sundown, they’d made fifteen miles. Phylomon didn’t tell them, just pushed them harder, and most of the time he felt as if he were pushing the wagon alone, yet whenever he checked, the others were grimacing under the strain, sweat flowing freely.

  By evening the women regained enough control of their reflexes to scream in terror at their hallucinations. When Phylomon signaled for the Creators that night, standing on a lone hill with his photo-converters, he flashed for hours with a new sense of desperation.

  For a moment, Tull came to Phylomon and said, “In the camp, two nights ago, I spoke with Tchupa. He said that the armies of Craal are moving in the Rough, that he believes that next year at this time, we will be fighting them here.” Tull let the meaning of his words hang in the air. They’d have to be careful, keep a good watch.

  His signal lights would likely draw any Crawlie within miles. Sometimes, there is no right thing to do.

  Phylomon gritted his teeth, flashed his lights into the night air. “One always hears such evil rumors out of Craal. Try not to worry.”

  Tull looked significantly at the lights, then made as if to leave. Phylomon stopped him, grabbing his arm a moment. “Try not to worry the others.”

  “We need them to worry,” Tull answered. “We must all be careful.”

  Phyl
omon studied Tull’s profile in the night. The young man stood tall. He was big chested, and over the past week his muscles had grown strong and knotted.

  This trip is changing him, Phylomon thought. He’s seen more horror in a week than some men witness in a lifetime. I wonder what it is that Chaa is trying to make of him?

  He must become a general. That is why Chaa sent him with me.

  Phylomon promised, “We’ll keep our eyes open. And we shall practice your battle training more heavily.”

  That night, by the light of triple moons, Phylomon brought a new level of intensity to the training. He was no longer satisfied with Tull’s bashing attacks and Ayuvah’s feints. Those might suffice in a brief skirmish, but not in a drawn-out battle.

  He watched the young men fight, circling and thrusting, jabbing and leaping away. After a bit, their technique seemed dull, repetitive. How many men had Phylomon seen in his lifetime who could fight better?

  Too many.

  “Both of you are getting stiff from all this work,” he observed. “You need to learn dexterity, work on stretches. You must be capable of moving in ways that your enemy can't anticipate.

  “Here, Tull, when you bring that sword in, a smart opponent could still turn your attacks. Instead of just hitting him, you must practice your strike angles. Power is fine, but it must be controlled.”

  He grilled Tull and Ayuvah ruthlessly, making them twist and dodge, teaching them various attack and defense routines, methods for gaining initiative in battle, deflecting attacks, and a series of ripostes.

  Ayuvah complained, “No one can learn this much. My head can’t remember it all.”

  “Nonsense,” Phylomon countered. “The body oft learns what the head cannot. Besides, if you remember a tenth of what I teach you, you will do well.”

  After practice, Ayuvah and Tull stayed up with the women, talking softly, trying to feed them. For once, Ayuvah showed compassion even for the Dryad.

  The women would have none of it—neither food nor comfort. They were too far gone into their hallucinations. They cried out against the blood, the maggots, and the heads.

  Phylomon realized that after the Okanjara drugged the women, they must have dragged the girls through camp, showing them horror after horror, to make sure that their hallucinations took an evil turn. Long past midnight, both women fell asleep, whimpering.

  The next morning, Phylomon went through the food—mixed the beans with the rice, the oats with the wheat, threw out anything that wasn’t necessary.

  Scandal shouted in horror at the loss, and insisted on carrying his valuable spices. Yet the day’s journey became much harder than the previous. The ground turned rocky and furrowed, when it wasn’t boggy. It became a broad plain where shallow rivers and creeks meandered and regrouped. The men were forever lifting the wagon from potholes or pushing it through muddy creek bottoms. Thick clouds of mosquitoes followed the sweating men. And both women screamed out at their worst nightmares.

  In the afternoon they reached a small camp of wild Pwi, a tribe of fifteen people in buckskins, living in mud huts, much as their ancestors had done on Earth.

  They feared the Dryad and would not let the party camp near them. In the middle of the night, Tirilee suddenly shouted and jumped from her bed. It took the four men nearly an hour to run her down and drag her back to camp.

  In the morning, they pulled off the sideboards to the wagon, threw them out, along with the double tree they’d kept in case they found a place to purchase oxen.

  Twice that day dragons began to circle them in curiosity, roaring out cries of warning, and Phylomon drove them off by firing the cannon.

  Tull was washed out and quiet, spent his time fawning over his wife. Yet the women had not eaten in three days, and the only liquid they drank was a small bit of beer and water the men forced down their throats in their sleep.

  Both women burned with low fevers, and Scandal, finally disgruntled, said, “I don’t believe they’ll live through another two days of this.”

  That night, as the women gibbered and pled for deliverance from the gore that surrounded them, Phylomon looked at the wagon from his bedroll and watched Tull, Scandal, and Ayuvah take turns helping to guard the women. They were so concerned that Tirilee would get up and run again that the men had become jailers as much as nurses.

  But Tull continued to work all through the day, then watch all through the night. The Pwi was wearing thin. His hair was unbrushed, his eyes fixed, his face dead.

  If Wisteria dies, Phylomon thought, Tull will follow her to the House of Dust. It was obvious that the young man’s world revolved around her. He'd have no more passion for life.

  Phylomon thought long into the night, wondering what the Okanjara had given the women. He’d never cataloged all the natural hallucinogens. If he’d studied it in his youth, while he was still under the influence of memory enhancers, the information would have been permanently fixed in his brain. But Phylomon did not know what compounds might be antidotes for the drugs, and he did not know all that had been put in the stew. Yet it seemed that the women’s livers weren’t capable of excreting the drugs, nor did they break down into harmless elements. Wisteria's calls to her dead father did not cease through the night. May you be forever robbed of peace!

  Chapter 23: The Dragon and the Crow

  On their fifth day out from Frowning Idols, they headed into the foothills leading up to Heartbreak Pass in the Dragon Spines.

  Though their journey was all upward, it seemed easier somehow, for they were not constantly pulling the wagon through bogs. Though the trees had been lively in the valley, with the dull greens of late fall, the maples and alders on the hill were changing to red and gold, and the cones on the pines were turning from green to brown.

  That evening they headed up a long hill full of yellowed buckbrush. Deer scat was almost as evident as sabertooth dung, and Phylomon watched the hills with interest. For an hour before sundown, a dozen tawny sabertooths paced the wagon, their great teeth nearly scraping the ground as they scurried from cover to cover, waiting to make an attack.

  When the group set camp and Phylomon knew that the cats were ready to strike, a great-horned dragon flew in low to eye the wagon, wheeled and dropped behind a line of alders a hundred yards away, beating its great wings against the brush. One sabertooth yowled in fear, and the cats scrambled for cover downhill.

  Ayuvah looked around questioningly at the others. All he had to do was fire the gun to frighten the dragon away, but to send it away would only invite the cats back. The men pulled their weapons, formed a front by the wagon.

  The dragon stalked clumsily through the brush, cracking branches in its wake.

  “God, what a loud one!” Scandal laughed. “I’ll bet he doesn’t sneak up on many dinners!”

  A branch cracked loudly, followed by the sound of a huge body stumbling, and then the quieter, stalking noises renewed.

  Phylomon caught a glimpse of the dragon behind some twisted scrub oak forty yards out; the great horns upon its head cracked some limbs as it hunkered down, ready to pounce.

  Phylomon got to the gun, fired once into the brush. But the dragon didn’t jump into the air. Tull swung his sword overhead and shouted, and Scandal ducked under the wagon to hide. Ayuvah simply stood still, his mouth open, while Phylomon fumbled with the gun.

  A twig snapped, and an old Neanderthal woman cackled and stepped from the bushes.

  “O zhetma!” Ayuvah cried, a warning that roughly equated to crap. “She’s a Shape-Changer!”

  The woman walked clumsily, using a stick for a cane. She dressed in the style of old people among the Pwi, wearing a black cloak with a hood to show that she was a widow.

  She hobbled up to Ayuvah, peered up into his face, and shouted, “Graawk!” a deafening roar that could only have come from a dragon, then laughed,

  “You believe in shape changers? I would laugh, but at my age, my teeth might fall out.” She turned to the wagon. “I have never seen so many
fools gathered in one place. One would think you to be a bunch of silly girls.”

  She walked up to the wagon, arched her neck as she looked into the barrel. “Oh, you do have a bunch of silly girls here.”

  Phylomon had seen powerful sorcerers before among the Okanjara, but none like this. He wasn’t sure if this woman really had changed shape, or if this were some kind of ruse. Yet every instinct warned him to beware the old woman.

  “Mother,” Phylomon said in the Pwi language of respect, “what are you doing out here? Is there a village nearby?”

  “Oh, yes, there is a village. Far by land. I have been walking many days to get here. But I suppose if you were a Shape-Changer and could fly, it would not be far!”

  “What are you doing out here alone?”

  “A Spirit Walker asked me to come,” she answered. “To comfort these two silly women.”

  “My father!” Ayuvah shouted. “Did he tell you his name?”

  “He appeared in a dream, riding the back of a crow,” the old woman said.

  “Chaa tsulet ixa-zhet!” Ayuvah shouted in glee. “My father’s name is Crow!”

  “Then you must be his son, Ayuvah,” she answered. “Your father is saddened by the death of Little Chaa. He said to tell you that your daughter Sava cries because her father is not near. The kwea of Etanai’s love for you is undiminished by time.”

  Tull stepped forward and asked, “My name is Tull. Did he have any words for me?”

  The old woman blinked, as if in surprise. “No.”

  Scandal crawled from beneath the wagon, still searching for the dragon. Phylomon studied the old woman. Her eyes were deep, more deeply set than those of Tull or Ayuvah.

  The skin of her face was stretched tight, so that wrinkles showed only around her mouth. Ah yes, Phylomon realized, she is one of the pure breed, one of the Pwi whose blood is unmingled with humans.