“I don’t,” Epashti said. “Nor do you. But Miska himself did not kill him.”
Eonta shrugged. “Miska’s ways are no clearer to me than yours, my girl. The wild man has brought me meat. And the Woman is of great power, and he is her brother, and she has chosen us to nurture this child. Whatever this means, I don’t know, but what she wishes I must bow to.” She leaned forward and thumped Epashti’s belly again. “Welcome, great-grandson.”
Now the baby under the belly Eonta had thumped was thunderfooted Finn of bawling words and endless appetite, and Ahanton was old enough for her green bough ceremony, if she would ever sit still long enough for the preparations, and another baby son tugged and fisted at Epashti’s breast.
She still knew nothing of Corban. Sometimes in his sleep, or in his lust, he spoke another name, that she dared not ask him about. She loved him but she did not think he loved her. And what his purpose was among them, she had no more notion of than before.
She lingered at the gate looking out across the fields. Corban and Miska and Ahanton had disappeared into the darkness. The night sealed itself against her eyes like a hand over her face. The cold wind brushed her, sharp-edged, nudging her inside. Kalu was already halfway home. Still she kept her eyes on the dark out there, where they had gone. Far down there, beyond the fields, maybe in the edge of the trees, she saw a white light suddenly shine forth. In a blink it was gone again. She turned and went back through the village to her lodge and her children.
C H A P T E R T H R E E
Ahanton held tight to her father’s hand; the cold made her skin rough. Her father was tall and walked fast and she had to skip to keep up, pulling herself along by his hand; she glanced up at him once and saw him smiling down at her and laughed, happy. He gripped her hand hard. His hand was warm.
They were coming to the edge of the forest, where under the darkness of the trees the fireflies winked. The wind was rising, seething through the upper branches, which rose and fell in the air like waves. Some night bird twittered a warning. Abruptly a bright cool light shone all around her.
She gasped, blinked against the blinding glare, throwing her free hand up before her eyes. Her father stopped, still solid beside her, and said, in a voice she had never heard him use before, “Thank you for coming to me. I needed to see you. Thank you for coming to us.”
Ahanton opened her eyes into the pale radiance. It was still dark but now she could see everything around her, the air clear but colorless, except where the shadows deepened to a night blue, as if she saw through water. She clung tight to her father’s hand. Before her stood a tall woman, shining white as moonlight, and her eyes were fixed on Ahanton’s.
The child gulped. She felt her father’s hand leave hers; alone she stood there in the blue radiance. The Woman sank down to sit on her heels before her, took her hands, and looked into her face. She said nothing but Ahanton heard words in her mind, her name, and sounds of love, and a rush of warm feeling came over her.
She stopped being afraid. She looked into the face before her and thought that she herself would never be so beautiful as this. She closed her hands over the warm hands holding hers. She thought, I want to be like you.
The Woman laughed; her eyes sparkled like a quick stream in the sun. She raised Ahanton’s hands and kissed the fingers. The warm feeling swept over the child again; she tingled all over her body, she felt as if she had left the ground, and hovered in the air. Then the Woman gave up her hands, and stood and stepped back.
Ahanton folded her arms over her chest, suddenly lonely. She watched as the Woman reached her hand out to Miska, and with him walked away under the trees. Ahanton sank down on the ground, small and cold.
Corban was there, sitting on the ground. She hated him, her not-father, the stranger, but she had to speak, and he was there. She kept her eyes from him. She said, “I could hear her talking. But she wasn’t talking.” Her eyes stung, teary. She wished the Woman had said more to her. She could remember no words, only the feeling. She wanted to remember every word but she could only remember the feeling.
Corban said, “Sometimes she still talks to me in a real voice.”
“I don’t have to tell you what she said,” Ahanton said.
“No.” He sounded as if he were laughing. She frowned. Reluctantly she glanced toward him, sitting there, his face all wooly and ugly, like a beast’s.
She said, “Where did she come from? My mother.”
He stirred, a little, sitting there, and turned his gaze away. “There is a great water east of here, larger than any river. We lived on the far side of it.” He spoke in a mix of words and sounds, as he always had with her, as if he could drag her across the boundary between them with his stranger words. “She was carried off by wicked people. They hurt her. Somebody told me once that her mind broke, like an egg breaking, and her mind spilled, it ran out everywhere into the world. We came here, and here she healed.” He made a little cupping motion with his hand. “But she healed outside the shell.”
Ahanton shook her head, the words slipping past her, useless. She looked away from him, exhausted. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
He said, “This place makes people larger. Some people.” Then he was standing up, and through the dark Miska was coming toward them, while the shining Woman waited behind, under the trees. Corban said, “Go back, I don’t need you,” and went away toward her.
Ahanton began to shiver. She longed for that rush of warmth again, that hovering in the air. Her heart ached. Everybody else had a mother. She wanted her mother back. Miska stooped and picked her up in his arms, and carried her away back toward the village.
Corban went into the shelter of an oak tree, grown thick around as a house, its branches heavy with leaves towering away into the sky, and its roots running in knobs and veins across the ground. The ground crunched under his feet, giving up a fresh breath of rotten mast. The forest spread away from him, shadowy and impenetrable, full of rustlings and groanings, every leaf stirring. Out in the meadow, some small animal gave a last shrill despairing scream.
Mav followed him under the tree. They said nothing for a while. Corban could not think how to speak to her. He yearned toward her but she had gone utterly beyond him. She was there but she was not there. When he looked at her he sometimes saw right through her, as if in the ease of his presence she forgot to keep up her corporeal disguise. He shared nothing with her anymore, no words would come to him, all he had was the great ravelled fabric of their lives flowing back from this moment, a cloak of memories, insubstantial as the wind.
It had been so with Benna, at the end, when she too had passed on beyond him. He felt worn to nothing with loss, left behind, unworthy of their flights.
Mav turned to him, smiling, and said in a real voice, “Ahanton is wonderful. I’m glad you brought her, thank you. She seems very quick and apt.” She reached out, and took hold of his hand, and her touch was warm and real.
The pressure of her hand freed him from himself. He faced her, meeting her eyes, and words came unbidden from him. “She is, her understanding already runs deep. And she takes orders from no one.”
“Certainly not you, mean old uncle,” Mav said, and her arm slid around him and hugged him. “Does she dream?”
“If she does she will not tell me, she really does not like me.”
Mav’s smile widened. “You love her.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all that matters,” she said. And when he growled at her, annoyed she was so careless of his caring, she hugged him again, warm and young, his flesh-and-blood sister, all the years melted away back to that long-ago oneness, when they had known each other’s minds so well they had spoken with looks and touches. She said, “Should you leave her to Miska? Your wife loves her.”
“Epashti loves everybody,” he said, and put his hand to his face, thinking of Miska.
She moved in his arms, to look at him. “What’s wrong?”
He moved a step away from h
er, and glanced behind them. He had meant to keep from this, for fear of angering her, but it burst out of him “Miska. Why do you help him? Why have you made him so great? He’s evil, Mav, he leads them to war and blood and evil rites.”
She took hold of his hand again. “I have less to do with that than you think. He is who he is.” She smiled at him, unconcerned. He thought, I am asking the wrong question. That made him angry, too, because it seemed not a question to him, what Miska did, flat evil, impossible not to hate. He looked into her eyes and saw there for an instant the whirling into the abyss.
She still held him by the hand. She said, “Do you want to go home, Corban?”
“Home!” He twitched, startled. “You mean—to Denmark, or Jorvik, or Ireland again? I am home here. This land—” He bit his words off, looking around. The darkness of the forest lay around him, the immense aliveness of the trees, the cool edge of the wind; when he set about trying to gather his feeling into words the world multiplied away from him in all directions, everywhere he looked more various and new. He gave up trying to say how he felt about the place and went on. “I want to live somewhere the people don’t devour each other.” His mind slipped on past that. “I want justice. I want to be where I belong.”
She watched him with her head tipped to one side, her eyes deep. She said nothing, but put her arms around him and hugged him again.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, in her arms.
“You never know what to do, Corban. You do it anyway.” She held him, her arms around him; he felt in her an immeasurable inhuman strength, as if she could have lifted him up and up into the vault of the sky and set him on the moon. Her voice spoke in his ear. “Miska needs you to go west. Do that. If you go into the west, you will find what you seek.”
She stepped back, her hands on his arms, then rising to his face. Her fingers stroked down the scar along the side of his face and a little blaze of feeling ran from his ear to his lip, a cold thread of fire. She said, “Take my daughter with you. She needs to see the world.” She took a single step backward, away from him. Her gaze held his a moment longer. She said, “Corban. What she dreams is true.” Before him, under his eyes, she vanished into nothing, into air, into space.
“Mav,” he said, expecting no answer. He stood a moment, holding on to seeing her, trying to understand, to pack it into memory. She had put him off about Miska, but she loved Ahanton. And she had said—his heart leapt at what she had said. He would find what he was looking for, somewhere to the west, in the heart of the country. He walked back out of the forest, toward the village, already impatient to go.
C H A P T E R F O U R
Ahanton fell asleep in Miska’s arms, and he carried her across the darkened village to Epashti’s house, her warm weight delightful in his grasp. The herbwoman met him outside the door, and at once took the child from him, long-legged and drowsy.
“Where is Corban?” she said, looking up at him.
“Do you think I’ve killed him?” Miska said, with a snort. Epashti understood nothing. He said, “Back in the forest. His sister wants him. He will come in when he’s done. Tell him then that I will see him.” He laid his hand on Ahanton’s wild hair. “She was brave. You raise her well, Epashti, I’m pleased.” He went off, not waiting to see how she answered that. It lay like a hot coal in his gut that he could not bring his own child into his lodge.
Corban’s little rat nest of a house was close by the fence. Miska could have walked straight up along the fence and come quickly to his lodge by the gate but instead he turned and went the other way, to make a circuit around the whole village. He did this every evening, sometimes more than once. This was the real fence around his village, his walking around it, making it his, making it safe.
He could have gone the whole way with his eyes closed. He knew every stone, every root worn polished under passing feet. Every smell was familiar to him, the midden just the other side of the fence, the cold ash of the big hole where the women cooked their pottery. He understood everything, he heard the soft grunts and clicks on the midden and knew the raccoons were hunting for scraps, he listened to the way the leaves rustled and knew there would be no rain for a while. As he came up to the river the sound of the water running by grew louder, clearer, as if he could hear each drop as it passed.
Behind him now was Eonta’s longhouse, where as usual people were arguing, the noisiest people in his village, Eonta’s kindred, the biggest troublemakers. He loved them anyway, because he knew them, they could hide nothing from him, his people. They were bad sometimes and stupid often but they were his people, always.
He went on along the bank above the river, as it sloped down toward the flat beach. The moon was rising higher over the trees, frail bad twin of the sun, drowning everything in its baleful light. From here he could see up through the center of the village, in past the longhouses and the lodges, to the big oak tree. The people were all going to sleep, no one else walked on the beach and no one walked the pounded open ground beneath the broad spread of the oak tree. The sharp smell of woodsmoke still clung to the air but the night mist was gathering over the river and the wind was falling calm, and the woodsmoke had the stale taste of banked fires.
He went by Merada’s longhouse, the smallest of the dwellings of the women; a baby let out a wail in there, and someone comforted it at once. He stood by the wall of the longhouse and listened to the low sleepy laughter and chatter of people going to their beds. As he went off again, walking, a woman cooed to him from the shadows, low and sweet, but he ignored her. This night the Forest Woman had touched him, even kissed him, and he would go days before he could endure the embrace of someone else.
He went on down along the river, the wind rising now, damp and cold. The course of the water came in close against the bank here, and then turned and crossed the riverbed to the far side, leaving a pale wedge of a beach under the moonlight, the glinting black water sweeping by. Near the top of the beach was the broken-backed hut where Lasicka lived. The cripple was sitting in his doorway still, in the dark, staring away toward the river. Miska went by there, and stopped, and said, “What has you up after sundown, old man?”
Lasicka stirred, his good hand clutching the withered arm, trying to rub life into it. “I was watching the light on the river,” he said. “Such are the things old men come to.” His voice quickened a little, eager. “Can I help you, Miska-Tonanda?”
Miska looked away, hiding his smile in the dark. “Maybe soon. I will remember.” He went away, still smiling, remembering how once Lasicka had despised him.
Still, Lasicka was a Wolf, and so Miska loved him, loved them all, not even in spite of how they had scorned him once—all but a few—but because of it. Because he had been so low here, and now he was so high.
They had risen high with him. The shell belts in his lodge were promises not just to him but to his whole people. In the fat moons of autumn other villages, other lineages and clans brought in their harvests, and from every basket of beans, the gourds and berries and sloes, all the fur and horn and flint, they set aside the best for Miska, and they brought it here to his village, so even Lasicka had all he needed.
The village was safe, and fat, and no one dared come to attack them here, not because of their fence, but because of Miska. Children could walk for days away to pick berries or willow stems, the women ranged everywhere looking for their herbs and seeds and grew their beans only in the most perfect garden places, the men fished up the river as far as the Long Lakes and down the river as far as the salt, and no one would hinder any of them, because of Miska. He gave them back good for their evil to him, and on that his power over them stood like a great tree growing from a rock.
He walked along the top of the beach; two young men coming the other way saw him and stopped, lowering their eyes in respect. As he passed by them, he said their names. “Ayana, Lopi.” They wheeled, upright as birches, as eager as Lasicka, but he paid no more heed to them. He would have use for their eagerness s
oon enough, now that the moon was almost full.
He walked up from the river, past the clutter of boys’ huts in the angle of the fence, and cut between the back of Gallara’s longhouse and the fence past another of the boys’ stick-pile huts; the fleas had driven the boys out of the hut and they were sleeping outside on the ground. He circled around behind one of the two men’s lodges, and when he rounded the corner was in sight of the gate.
Corban was coming in.
At the sight of him the old hate swept back. Miska stopped, furious. He remembered how she had come to him, to this brother, this low hairy ugly thing, and leaned on him and whispered to him all loving, as Miska longed for her to do with him, and which she never did anymore. He felt as if Corban coming in through the gate made a hole through Miska’s side. The sachem’s jaw clenched; he took hold of his knife, and the urge rose to leap on Corban and hack him, take Corban’s own magic knife and cut him into pieces with it.
The heat faded. He could not do it. He could taste the blood on his tongue and his belly was hungry for it but he thought of Corban’s sister and he quailed. She loved Corban and not him, Miska knew that she hardly cared about him, he wondered often why she still protected him, but she loved Corban. He wanted to tear Corban apart, to tie him to the stake and burn him with hot fire until he died, but the thought of bringing her anger on him turned his will to water.
He let go of his knife. Corban had come inside the gate, and swung it closed behind him. Miska stepped forward, and said the stranger’s name, sour in his mouth.
Corban wheeled toward him, abrupt, edgy as he always was; Miska thought his long habit of living alone in the woods had made him jumpy. Corban said, “Where is Ahanton?”
Miska grunted at him, annoyed. “I took her to your lodge. Epashti has her. I have a task for you to do.” He wondered if Corban would put his back up at that, doing Miska’s will, and he said, “She in the forest has required this.”
The Serpent Dreamer Page 3