Forbidden Land

by neetha Napew

  The headman had come close and bent to provide the nearly inaudible directive: “The winter ahead will be long and dark. Rise now, Magic Man! You have made an aging, wounded woman happy, but you will need all the tricks of a shaman to keep my people from bickering in the long night of endless cold that lies ahead of us. Rise up, I say! Get up off your hunkers to make a show of your magic!”

  Startled by Torka’s sage but insulting advice, Karana looked at him, and had everyone else not been staring, he would have said: I am not Navahk! Magic is not a show! Would you have me beguile our people in order to keep them content throughout the winter?

  Torka smiled. “Yes,” he whispered.

  Had he read Karana’s mind? He suspected that Torka had. And now Karana read the headman’s mind. He knew what Torka wanted, and scowling as he rose to his feet, the young man gave Torka what he asked for.

  In the light of the fire circles of his people, Karana stood tall. In the dancing shadows of the flame-lit cave, Karana danced. And suddenly, as he moved to a powerful inner rhythm, he felt the magic rising in him .. . filling him . taking him out of himself as a transformation of spirit took place within his skin. He was no longer Karana at all. He was the great bear. He was twelve feet tall, and his blood was pounding with the power of his song.

  He whirled. He roared. He postured with his arms up, neck arched, and hands curled into taloned paws.

  His people cowered. Lonit was appalled. Never had Karana resembled Navahk more. Dak and Umak exclaimed with boyish delight as Mahnie gasped with pride and a woman’s long-un sated hunger for her man. Beside her, lana shivered as she also noted the magic man’s resemblance to Navahk, as did Wallah, who shrank back within her fur as Grek put his arms around her, lest her shivering bring pain to the still-scabbed and oozing stump.

  Demmi blinked and frowned, not wanting to acknowledge the power or handsomeness of a brother whom she had once adored but who had betrayed her trust with lies.

  And Summer Moon, at nine almost a woman and already a beauty like her mother, gaped in wonder at the perfection and magnificence of a man whom she would never think of as her brother.

  Outside, the wind dropped and snow fell as the evening passed. Beyond the storm a mammoth trumpeted, and its kindred answered. Within their cave Karana completed the headman’s bidding, and the people bundled in their furs close to their fire circles slept.

  Karana dreamed of another cave ... of the wanawut standing in the darkness ... its hideous face illuminated by the light of the rising sun.

  “Karana?”

  Did the monster speak his name? No. The dream was shifting now, deepening. The wanawut was gone; everything was gone; there was only blackness. A whisper, warm, languorous, and trembling, floated in the darkness . the warm seeking hands that stroked his body were trembling.

  “Karana?”

  Beneath his sleeping robe, a moist, sweet breeze fluttered at his neck and back, touching him, licking him, rousing him, enfolding him, melding with his flesh .. . moving .. . accepting as, in his dream, he was the bear again, dancing, thrusting, twelve feet tall and burning with power .. . until his body suddenly burst wide like river ice cracking open at spring flood. But the flood that rent him was not ice but molten fire—until he heard his name whispered again, and, gasping, he opened his eyes and .. . froze.

  Mahnie was in his arms. She was joined to him, caressing him and kissing the hollow of his shoulder and looking at him with tears in her eyes and lashes. “Karana ...” she whispered. “My magic man again.”

  ‘”Never again!” he shouted, shoving her away as he rolled out from beneath the bed furs and, drawing one of them around himself, went to stand at the edge of the cave. He knew that the eyes of everyone in the cave were on him. Let them look! He was beyond caring. Soon enough they would realize that there was nothing interesting about a man staring out into the night, and they would turn away and return to their dreams.

  He drew back one of the hides and allowed the falling snow to touch him; he shivered but doubted he could ever be any colder than he was already. His face was flushed, his body throbbing. But his heart and spirit were of ice.

  He did not know how long he stood there, glaring sightlessly at the night, through the snow that fell straight out of the clouds, as silent as death, as white as his thoughts were black. He heard the mammoths call to one another again, the sound far away and muffled.

  The wind was rising within him. It was the spirit wind, and it stroked his mood as tenderly as the hands of his woman had stroked his body.

  A muscle twitched at the right side of his mouth, raising the corner of his lip into an expression that, in an animal, would have been taken as a snarl; but it was not a snarl, it was a smile—a dark and bitter and malevolent smile. What a fool is Karana, chided the spirit wind. Always he broods. Always he turns his back upon his woman. Go back to your woman, Magic Man. A man must be a man. And if a child is put into the belly of Mahnie, why should you deny yourself the pleasure of its making? Because you fear that Navahk’s spirit will find life again in its body? The life spirit of a man cannot be reborn into a female child. If it is a male child .. . true, it will be of the flesh of Navahk, but so are you. And as you sought to kill your father, so too may you seek to kill a boy-child of his flesh before it is ever accepted as a child. This is your right. As the son of Navahk, this will be your obligation. And what sweeter vengeance could you have upon him than to prevent his life spirit from ever being born into this world again?

  “None,” he said aloud, smiling as he answered the spirit wind and, without hesitation, turned and walked back across the cave to Mahnie.

  He did not notice the watching, sleepy eyes of little Umak, or note that as the child yawned and stretched, his face shone round and healthy in the soft glow of Torka’s well-banked fire ... a glow in which the boy’s small, white serrate-edged teeth flashed bright for a moment before he rolled over and went back to sleep.

  PART V. MAMMOTH MOON

  At the northeastern edge of the valley, less than half a day’s walk from the encampment that Cheanah’s people called the Place of Endless Meat, a reed-choked marsh surrounded several small tundral lakes. An old bull mammoth wandered into the wetlands by moonlight. Now, in the light of day, with vast wedges of white geese winging southward overhead, he was dying.

  For hours he had lain on his side in a bog, fighting to rise from the swamp, but he made no sound during his travail except exhalations and whoofings of supreme effort and, eventually, huffings and sighings of despair. At no time did he expand his great lungs and lift his shaggy trunk to trumpet to others of his own kind who might have come to his aid. Perhaps he knew that it was his time to die.

  Soon after the first of the carrion-eating birds had begun to circle his exhausted form, three hunters, sighting on the birds, had entered the marsh. Ank and Yanehva, sons of Cheanah, had refused to follow their brother as far as the russet, wind-combed shade of the reeds. They had hung back, reminding Mano that the northern edge of the valley was off-limits to them by their father’s decree. When they warned of potential dangers, he had ignored them and plunged ahead.

  “Mammoth!” Mano named his prey.

  For a moment he thought that he had stumbled upon Life Giver, but a quick squint through the reeds convinced him otherwise. Its tusks were worn, discolored, and broken at the tips. And it was small for its kind; compared to the great mammoth spirit that had walked ahead of Torka, this bull might well have been mistaken for another species entirely.

  But it was a mammoth, and Mano had never killed a mammoth. Anticipation of a kill excited him. His left hand encircled the slender shafts of the three stone-headed spears that he carried balanced across his shoulder, and slowly he shifted one into his right hand and readied himself for a throw. “Wait!” Ank implored sharply.

  The boy’s voice had been no more than a whisper; nevertheless it broke Mano’s concentration. His head swiveled to the right, and his small, sharp eyes fixed not only Ank but
Yanehva, as well. They had changed their minds about following their brother and were standing ready to protect him and themselves against unseen carnivores who might turn from the dying mammoth and decide to dine on man instead.

  Mano’s brow arched. He should have heard them coming. Yanehva was no longer the lean stretch of a youth who had been able to slip through the grasses as though he were a stalk himself; at nearly sixteen, he was a man now. And Ank, almost eleven, was throwing a much longer shadow than he had in the days before Man Who Walks With Dogs had been banished from the Place of Endless Meat. Several autumns had come and gone since then, and now the time of endless light was gone, and another autumn was on the brink of becoming winter.

  “Come away,” Yanehva said evenly. “Soon night will darken the land, and Cheanah will be wondering about us.”

  Mano’s eyes narrowed. He did not like being told what to do, and Yanehva, although two years his junior, had fallen into a pattern of doing just that. “Has Yanehva lost his vision or only his nerve? That is a mammoth out there! A mired mammoth! We could kill it and bring much meat back to our camp. Cheanah would be proud.”

  “Of what?” Yanehva inquired coolly. “If memory serves me, mammoth is

  not the best meat. Cheanah has never expressed a hunger for it. I do

  not think he will be pleased

  to know that we have come so far north. And it takes no skill to kill a beast trapped in a bog.”

  Ank’s eyes were wide. “It is forbidden to kill mammoths! Besides, mammoth meat is stinking, tough meat!”

  Mano glowered at the boy. Now Anh was telling him what to do! He told him to shut his mouth. “What do you know of it? You were a suckling at our mother’s teats when last we tasted mammoth!”

  Ank wilted, and Yanehva put a consoling hand on the young boy’s shoulder.

  Beyond the screen of reeds, the mammoth tried to lift its head. Failing, it exhaled a mighty sigh as its massive skull settled more deeply into the bog. Water splashed and rippled outward. It sloshed around the hunters’ heretofore relatively dry boots. Mano barely noticed. Yanehva looked down and shook his head, reminding his older brother that when men trekked into a marsh, they needed adequate footwear.

  Mano squinted at Yanehva. There was a subtlety to his brother that eluded and annoyed him. The days had long since passed in which Mano had been able to bully him successfully. “Well?” he queried impatiently, looking up as the wings of a circling tera torn sent shadow across the marsh. “Are you going to hunt with me, or are you going to stand here while the creatures of the sky feed on what should be ours?”

  Yanehva did not reply. He remained standing shoulder to shoulder with Mano, leaning forward, staring through the reeds.

  Mano rolled his eyes. As always, Yanehva was taking more time than necessary to assess a situation. “Well?” he pressed again, irritably.

  Yanehva straightened. “We must ask Cheanah.”

  Anger flared hotly within Mano; his temper had never needed much to kindle it. “Why? We are hunters. That is why we are out from camp—to hunt!”

  “We are out from a meat-rich camp to teach our brother Ank to perfect

  his hunting skills,” Yanehva corrected Mano coolly. “One of the most

  important things that we can teach him is the value of self-control: of

  when to hunt and when not to hunt, of—“

  “It is always a good time to hunt! It is always a good time to kill! It is always a good time to take meat!” His face was flushed, his eyes bulging, and his right hand curled so tightly around the haft of his spear that his knuckles were white. “If we go back to camp and leave the mammoth here, it will be meat for the carrion eaters!”

  “Then that is the will of the spirits who have brought it here to die!”

  “Ngyah!” Mano spat a sound of pure disgust. “How does Yanehva know that we have not been led here by the will of those same spirits so that we would be the first to find this mammoth?” “I do not,” answered Yanehva. His hand was on Ank’s shoulder again as he turned and began to walk away. “That is for Cheanah to say. He, not Mano, is headman of our band!”

  It was the sight of the circling tera torn that drew the eyes of the beast ling from the little circles that his finger was tracing in the thick dust that layered the floor of the wanawut’s cave.

  There were three circles in all: neatly drawn images of the full moon, half-moon, and quarter moon. And now, with his index finger poised over a partially completed rendering of a new moon, the beast ling frowned, squinting against the glare from the hole in the sky and watching the tera torn circle above the distant marshes.

  His brow furrowed. The tera torn was no longer alone. Others of its kind were winging out of the distance to join it in its circling. Something was down there in the marsh country—something dead. Maybe something good to eat. But he would never know what it was.

  Nowadays when Mother left the mountain, she took Sister to hunt in the world below. Since he had nearly managed to feed himself to the wolves, he was not allowed this privilege. He sighed, miserable.

  His belly gurgled with emptiness. Mother would want him to alert her to the gathering teratorns. Three days had passed since he had last eaten. Although his mind had begun to fill with images of meat, he did not want Mother to leave the cave today. The marsh country was far away, and Mother was tired. So tired, in fact, that he was frightened for her. He turned to look into the shadowed recesses of the cave, where Mother was in the nest, asleep with Sister in the curl of her arm. For two days she had been off the mountain, hunting with Sister. When at last she had returned, it had been in the depth of the previous long night, and without meat. There was a deep gash on one of her upper arms, and her face had looked so drawn and full of hurt that he had wondered how she had managed to return at all.

  But she had returned. She always returned. Only this was the first time that he had realized that a time might come when she would not. Now he exhaled a worried sigh as the enormity of this realization washed through him. What would happen to him then? And to Sister? If Mother were to become meat for some other animal .. . No! He would not think of this!

  He turned and faced into the light of the hole in the sky. The teratorns were still circling. The air seemed colder than it had a moment before. He moved his hands over the moons that he had drawn in the dust, erasing them. Mother did not like it when he drew in the dust. It was the drawings of the beasts that upset her the most. He did not know why. They were merely little stick figures, as were his representations of animals, but when she saw them she always growled and stepped on them and rubbed them away before she sat on them as though the weight of her body would keep them from re-forming in the dust.

  A sound of irritation formed in his throat, but he choked it back. He did not want to wake Mother, especially with vocalization, for his tongue-twisting attempts at articulation never failed to frustrate him as much as they irritated her. Why did he always manage to do things that annoyed Mother?

  He swallowed hard, with great and ponderous resolve. If Mother did not want him to draw in the dust, he would not. If Mother wanted him to stay in the cave upon the mountain, he would stay. He would be as obedient as Sister until, at last, he regained Mother’s trust.

  Suddenly startled, he looked up to see that he was not alone on the lip of the cave. Sister had awakened and come out of the nest to stand beside him. How long she had been there, he could not guess. But she had sighted the circling teratorns, and with no thought of anything but her own hunger, she screeched a series of high, happy hoots as she jumped up and down and gesticulated wildly.

  Mother awoke, arose, and limped heavily to the front of the cave. Her low sounds of distress told the beast ling that the gash in her arm was still hurting.

  Sister was so excited by the promise of a future meal that she paid no heed to Mother’s strained stance and oddly pink, watery eyes.

  The beast ling was irked. What a self-serving creature Sister was, attuned only
to her own immediate urges, fears, and needs. He cocked his head as he got to his feet. Sister was hungry, but so was he, and hunger was not such a bad thing. She could wait to eat until Mother was rested and fit to hunt. Somehow, he knew that the bare skin of Mother’s broad, callused palm would be hot and dry with fever even before he rose and took her hand in a vain attempt to bring her back to the nest.

  Mother pulled her hand free. Sister took it at once and, yanking hard, urged Mother to come to the very edge of the cave. Mother obeyed dully, responding to Sister’s excited hoots and jumps and waving.

  The beast ling glowered. He shoved Sister, slapped at her long, gray-furred arm to keep her from pointing toward the circling teratorns, but it was he who was slapped away ... by Mother. She did not hurt him—at least not physically. Her slap had been gentle and controlled. His inability to communicate his fear for her was excruciating as Sister rubbed her belly and made Mother know that she was hungry, that it was imperative that she be fed now.

  Mother sighed with acquiescence. With a low huff that told the beast ling that Sister had won the day, she went into the depths of the cave to retrieve her man stone. She gestured to him that he was to remain in the cave as she turned and, with Sister at her side, began the descent.

  He slunk back into the nest in despair. But suddenly his own feelings seemed unimportant. He was out of the nest and across the cave, standing at the lip of their aerie, watching Mother and Sister as they climbed downward. Mother was dragging her lame leg and favoring her injured arm. How slowly she walked! The droop of her shoulders betrayed the extent of her fatigue. She should not be out of the cave today! Instinctively, the beast ling knew that she was in danger.

  Leaning into the wind, with his hair blowing back over his shoulders and his bald little face puckered into an expression that fully revealed the depth of his fear for her, he screeched after Mother, pounding his fists against thin air until she turned and, with a wave of one of her own fists, warned him to stay where he was and be silent.