The tree had crashed down years before, dragging down its part of the bank and flopping its head into the river, so that a little sandy spit had formed in its shelter upstream. From the top of the bank, Corban looked down on the child Ahanton, sitting on the sandy spit, her head bent, the back of her neck to him.
She was molding something in the mud. Her head was bowed and he could see only her shoulders and back, the knobbed spine like a string of beads under the skin. As always when he saw her he saw his sister in her and his heart went to her. He thought she knew he was there but she made no sign of it. Finally he went on along the bank, to where long usage had worn a gullet of a path to the river’s bed, and went down, and walked along the damp shoal and climbed over the fallen tree trunk to where she sat. The damp sand yielded under his feet. The river sang as it went by and the air was rich and moist.
Ahanton gave him a dark look. “Go away.”
She was leggy, thin-boned, her hair wild and curly like Mav’s, Mav’s eyes in the coppery brown of her face. Miska’s jaw. Miska’s heavy brows. Corban sat on his heels beside her, watching her shape the mud, her hands long and her fingers deft, a woman’s skill already in the little girl.
He frowned. She was making something particular, not just a pile of mud, but a carefully edged square, and on it another, smaller square, and on that another, so that they rose into a stepped hill.
He said, “What are you doing, Ahanton?”
She said, “Go away. I don’t like you.” Then in a flurry of temper she struck at the hill with her hands, and when that only dented what she had made leaned back and kicked it apart with her feet.
He clasped his hands together, still frowning at the shapeless mud. He said, “We’re going into the forest to see your mother, and you should come with us.”
She pulled impatiently at her hair, her eyes on him. Her lips thrust out. He knew she wanted to order him away again but the mention of her mother held her. In bad temper she kicked at the heap of mud, splattering it, and when he jerked back out of the way, laughed.
“My mother.” She put her long narrow feet down flat on the ground and stood up. “I will go. But stay away from me, Corban. I will walk by myself.”
“Your father is going also,” he said.
“My father.” Her face glowed. She leapt forward, her feet dancing. “I will walk with my father.” She ran on ahead of him up the path to the riverbank. There she turned and scowled back at him. “I hate you. Why don’t you stay gone?” She scrambled up the bank, back toward the village.
C H A P T E R T W O
In the evening, when the gate was shut, Epashti stood by the fence and watched them go out into the forest. Miska went first, tall and lean as bone, and the child danced along beside him, holding to his hand. Then Corban, solid, his square-set shoulders topped with his wild shaggy hair, following after.
The dark was settling over the forest; the air above the fields and meadows was a deep blue, through which spirits moved, and evil vapors, a time when the Bad Twin walked and ruled. She stood there a long while anyway, watching. She ached to see them go, not knowing why.
Her son Kalu, beside her, said, “I wish I could go.”
She said, “Yes, I know, you’re a fool.” But her eyes were fools also, yearning to follow Corban and the others, walking away through the deep blue gloom.
“Mama.” He tugged her hand.
“Shhh.”
She knew that Corban made his way happily in the forest, day or night, another of the ways he was not like a real human. It was in the village that he suffered.
She thought about when he had first come here. Miska had brought him back from the edge of the world-water, yet from the first it was obvious to everybody that Miska hated him. Easy to see why. The strange creature seemed little more than a beast, a joke of a man, a mistake. Hair covered him, thick and curly, and his skin was washed out of color like fish meat, as if he had been long underwater. His eyes were strange, with light centers, holes where he should have had eyes, seeming empty of any sense. He spoke only a few words and those were garbled. The women decided he was a lump and ignored him. His name was ugly on the tongue, and as close as it came to any real words meant something like witless. They expected him to die, left to take care of himself.
He did not die. The women noticed this. The men tormented him endlessly, whenever they were in the village, but he did not die of that either. When the men left on their endless roaming and fighting he stayed behind and did very well.
At first he hardly came into the village at all but when winter fell he cleared out an abandoned hut near the fence around the village and fixed its walls and began to live there. That this hut was close by Mother Eonta’s longhouse was lucky for him, or very clever, since she tolerated no men fighting or shouting around her. The women noticed this also.
He had powers beyond human. He had a small box he used to make fire, and he had a knife with a magic blade. He made a stone-thrower of thongs, which at first they all derided, but soon came to respect. Anyway he was clearly not witless since he paid close heed to the proper ways of life and began to fit into the village. Soon he was making gifts of meat, such as any man who hunted did. Corban gave meat to the poorest, to old blind Kastia who lived in a corner of Mother Eonta’s house, and crippled Lasicka, who had been a warrior once, taken a terrible wound, and not died, the worst fate of a man.
Epashti had come on him during that first summer when Corban stayed away from the village. All the women went into the forest sometimes for herbs and barks and stems to make baskets and here and there caught glimpses of him. He asked nothing of them, and he offered them no harm, and they grew used to him. Then, one day, Epashti went far off down the river, to a place where few others ever wandered. There she found a dead porcupine, and while she was making an offering of twigs to the spirit of the porcupine, so that she could take the quills home with her, Kalu wandered off.
He was just starting to walk. She knew he could not have gone far. She went quickly up and down the marshy wood, in among the empty tree trunks, looking, and then calling frantically for him, and then as she came down the path abruptly the strange wild man led the child by the hand out of the trees in front of her.
She screamed, and grabbed Kalu up in her arms, and Corban went away. The child wiggled in her arms, wanting to follow him. Epashti left the porcupine quills behind and fled back to the village.
That night she dreamt that a great porcupine led her child out of the woods to her. She told this dream to no one.
She came out of her lodge one morning, soon after Corban moved into his hut, and found him sitting with Kalu on his lap, the two of them talking gibberish to each other. Corban put the child up onto his feet, when he saw her, and shooed Kalu toward her, and went into his hut.
Her sister Sheanoy said, “What is he teaching him? He’ll turn the child into a white demon. We should get the men to kill him, that’s what Miska wants, anyway.”
Epashti said, “Why doesn’t he do it, then?”
They were sitting in her sister’s chamber in Eonta’s longhouse. The men had all gone off days before on one of Miska’s raids and the women had the work of the harvest. Sheanoy said, “I don’t know. Maybe because of—”
She fell silent, but her eyes sharpened, and with her fingers she made two legs walking in the air. Epashti leaned forward, intense with fresh interest. “Have you seen her?”
“No.” Her sister bent to meet her, her eyes shining, and whispered in her ear. “But I heard that Hasei was out by himself hunting and heard someone singing, a strange, high song, like a woman’s voice, only he said just hearing it struck him so cold with fear he could hardly draw breath, and he ran all the way back to the camp.”
Epashti said, “Hasei loves to make stories.” Hasei was her brother, who should have been taking more interest in her sons than he was doing. She pressed her lips together, looking off. She had heard other stories of the Woman Who Walked in the Forest; several pe
ople claimed to have seen her, and some claimed to have seen her with Miska. She said, “You think he has something to do with her. Corban.” But she had not come with him, Epashti thought. She came earlier, the Forest Woman.
Her sister nodded at her, solemn. “I see the name comes easily to your lips. I’ve heard—” Sheanoy glanced away again, her face sleek, stroking her secrets. “In the forest, there are glades now full of flowers that were barren rocks before. And she lies there, and with sweet perfumes and songs she lures the men there, one by one—”
“Be quiet,” Epashti said sharply. “You know nothing.”
“Miska loves her.” Her sister watched her steadily. “And he hates the other. Don’t be foolish, Epashti. Something is going on here, more than you know. Don’t start caring about the wild man. You should get married again anyway.”
Her sister went away. Epashti sat in the compartment, musing over what her sister had said, and thinking of the porcupine dream.
Of course her sister was right; this was more than they knew. Corban was not one of them, but surely he was here for some purpose. She thought of the little box that made fire, the magical knife. Someone had given him these special gifts, to help him to some end. He was on some path of power. Through him, somehow, they could all gain some power, if they only knew how, and being the medicine woman, she should be finding that out.
She watched him sitting in the cold sunlight, making himself new boots with his magical knife that cut so true and well. She had no idea how to approach him. He could hardly speak, his tongue formed mostly gibberish still, and of course she had no kinship with him. But the dream of the porcupine lumbering out of the trees stayed always in the back of her mind.
Miska came back soon after that with all the men in a great uproarious gang, singing and dancing about their victory. They had fought over a village somewhere in the east, and driven the people out, burning their houses and carrying off all their new harvests.
They had taken several prisoners, but two of their own had died in the fighting. The women of the dead men began to cry out for the prisoners, and Miska gave them over. That night two of the prisoners were bound to the stake to give up their lives for the dead.
In the morning Corban stood before Miska’s lodge and shouted at him, nothing anybody understood. The people gathered behind him to see what would happen. Miska came out of the lodge and sneered at him, didn’t even bother to explain the ceremony, waved him off with disdain.
Corban shouted some more, and Miska struck him, and Corban immediately reached out and struck him back.
From all sides then the men leapt on him, dragged him down and kicked and beat him with their fists, and finally dragged him up, pounded like a deerskin, in front of Miska. Epashti watched this from the edge of the crowd and thought Miska would kill him finally, and some fierce will rose in her to speak out. She bit her lips together. She reminded herself she was nobody, only an herbwoman, and not very good at that. She remembered the porcupine dream. Maybe she had misunderstood. Tears muddled her vision. She saw Miska draw his knife and raise it and in the swimming glossy vision of her tears she thought he looked over at her.
He said something she could not hear, and struck, hard, slashed down, slicing. The men holding Corban screeched and leapt back, and he flopped down on the ground, but he was not dead. Miska’s knife had slashed his face open from the temple to the chin. Corban braced himself on one arm, his head hanging, and the blood sheeting down into the dust.
Miska threw the knife down before him, where he could reach it easily. Everybody fell utterly still, even the babies, watching to see if Corban would fight back now. Corban gave a shiver, and pushed himself up and sat with his knees up and his arms over them and his head hanging, and his back to the knife. With a grunt, Miska went away down toward the river. The blood on the ground soaked dark into the pale dust.
The crowd began to stir, puzzled, the men wondering out loud if they should kill the wild man now. Epashti went out of the women and knelt down by Corban and put her arm around his shoulders, and spoke to him, and got him to rise and go off to his house, quickly, before the men decided to do something.
In his lodge where Eonta’s closeness would keep the others away she tended his hurts. He was bloody and banged up but nowhere near dead. He began talking, while she staunched the blood running down his face and pressed the edges of the wound together, and although he spoke only a few real words mixed in with his nonsense she began to pick up some sense from it.
She got his shirt off—it was made of a strange hide that rubbed apart into wisps—and cleaned up a scrape on his back, and he said, in some way, “Miska is bad, I came here to get away from Miska.”
Describing Miska he used the word for spoiled meat, and she stretched her mind to understand him, and still was unsure. She said, “Then you went strange-footed, Corban, to come here where he is.”
“Men like Miska,” he said.
Suddenly, forcefully, he spat across the lodge. The wound on his face opened and she got two fingers of the salve out of its pot and slapped it closed again. He stared stonily away from her, rigid with anger. She pulled the remnants of his shirt around him and went out of his lodge, her hands shaky.
Miska was the sachem; spitting at the sachem was spitting on her. She had tried to help him, to draw close to him, and he had spat at her. Now she half-expected Miska to kill him. For the next several days she and the whole village watched to see what would happen.
Yet Miska did nothing. Corban healed, the great wound closing to a livid scar that slowly disappeared into the tangled black curly hair that covered his face.
Then a few days after this Epashti was coming out of Gallara’s lodge, where she had been tending the older women’s fall-time aches and pains, and she heard a loud outcry down by the gate. She turned to see, and the Woman Who Walked in the Forest came into the village.
She seemed just a woman, like any of them, except that her skin was as pale and clear as moonlight, her eyes shed light like stars, and her feet walked mostly in the air. As she came into the village everyone stopped and stood still and watched her. Even the children were silent. Some of the women sank down onto their knees on the ground.
She walked up through the village, past Epashti, toward the council tree. In her arms she carried a bundle wrapped in a white deerskin. As she went by the women began to chant the birthing song; they knew right away what she held. Epashti’s lips parted also and the song came forth unbidden as the Forest Woman passed. And now before her, under the council tree, there stood Miska.
The Woman of the Forest went straight up to Miska, holding the child in her arms. He stood shining before her. Epashti had never seen such a light in his face as when he looked at her. She opened the white deerskin and showed him the baby, and all the people crowded a little closer, to see that it was a girl child, and all saw that this was his child, and there went up a great sigh from every throat.
But then the Woman stepped back, and turned, and called a name, and they all shuddered, astonished, because it was Corban’s name. Now they saw that he had come up through the edge of the crowd toward her. The stunned people all turned to stare at him but he paid no heed to them.
He said something to her, some word no one knew. A great smile broke upon his face, and she went to him with laughter, and he put his arm around her, as if she were a mortal woman.
Then looking at them, they all saw that they had the same face. She was made of wind and starlight, and he of flesh and bone, but they were the same, brother and sister.
She put the child into his arms, and smiled up into his face, and laid her head a moment on his shoulder. Then she turned and walked out of the village, and outside the gate, some said afterward, she rose into the air, and flew away.
Corban took the baby up in his arms, with all of them standing there staring at him, and Miska watching, for once helpless, his hands at his sides useless. The baby began to wail. Then Epashti felt her limbs unlock, and h
er mind quicken, and she went up and took the baby from Corban, and put her to the breast. Kalu was still nursing a little and so there was milk in Epashti’s breast.
Miska came then, and stood leaning over them, saying, “I will call her Ahanton; she is my daughter. Care for her, then, Epashti, and this one too.” And he went away, but after that everybody understood why he could not do anything about Corban, and why he hated him.
So Epashti moved into Corban’s lodge to nurse the little girl. It was best to stay there, she told everybody, since the Woman had clearly meant the child to be there. They should all come there to find Epashti to help them with their coughs and hurts and birthings. They grumbled but they needed her; they came.
The baby thrived at her breast. Between her and Corban something else throve also. She taught him much speech, and she slept in his blankets. By the spring, she was growing round with a baby of her own.
Eonta summoned her, sat her down in the vast dim messy compartment at the head of the longhouse, thumped her belly, and said, “This baby, now. How has it gotten there?”
Epashti had to laugh, and she covered her mouth with her hand, out of respect for her grandmother. “What happens,” she said.
Eonta’s eyebrows rose. “Are you married, then? How am I to speak of this child?”
Her face was round like the moon; everybody fed her, everybody told her all their secrets, everybody was hers, in some connection, sister, grandchild, niece or nephew, second cousin on the father’s side, wife’s brother’s son’s nephew; Eonta like a spider sat at the heart of the web of the people.
Gazing on the broad, mild face, Epashti felt no fear. She had known this would come, and was ready. She said, “Have you not taken meat from him, Grandmother? And what of Ahanton? Who dares tell me to give her up?”
Her grandmother said, “He is not one of us. How do you know what you bring in among us?”
The Serpent Dreamer Page 2