Ahanton dreamed of a great tree, so dense with leaves and branches she could move all around it by her hands and feet.
She saw, through a gap in the leaves, a white mountain, sharptopped, blazing in the sun. She saw, off across some branches, a huge lodge. She saw, beyond a curling sideshoot, a clearing full of people, fighting or dancing. None of these places was in the tree, but the tree led to them.
She crawled down along the branch until she came to the great trunk, with bark seamed in ridges her fingers fit into, and branches sprouting out in all directions, some thick as her whole body and covered with leaves, and some small and bare. Drawing herself in between the branches she crept down along the trunk, which widened and spread under her until it seemed no longer round, the branches dense and leafy as a forest, chattering with birds. The webs of spiders hung in the little twigs; a coiled snake hissed at her and dragged its glistening red and yellow length off across the trunk.
She stepped down finally onto the ground. There the tree burst down into the rock and dirt, and the tops of its roots bulged like knobby fingers clawing into the earth, and in between two roots she found a hole. She crawled in through the hole into a vast dim underworld, with the roots of the tree all dangling down through it, and everywhere, the place stirring with ghosts.
Like luminous smokes, like mists, they hovered in the air among the roots. Some were alone, some together, some were talking, some going at some work, and some just sitting quietly, but as she went by them they began to notice her. She saw faces turning toward her, a mouth falling open, a finger pointing. She scurried down along the root, trying not to see them.
Through the mass of roots there gleamed, for an instant, a face half-living and half-dead, a woman, one eye bright, one cheek warm and flushed under the fine pale skin, half the lips lush and moist. The other half a skull, bare teeth, the eye a hole in the bone. Ahanton for an instant met this gaze and her head felt pierced, as if a sheet of light went through her.
She kept on climbing down, afraid to stop, afraid to look around, picking her way down the tangled roots. Now there were fewer ghosts, and the roots were thinner also. She could hold two and three strands of the roots at once, then ten or twelve. Something below her was like sunrise, brightening, yellow-white. The roots were disappearing out of her hands. She looked down past her feet and saw the last strand of the tree stretching down away from her, on down into the hazy glowing center of everything. Looking around, now, and up, she saw other threads dangling into the indefinite light, like an upside-down forest of roots into the earth.
She began to worry she would not find her way back, and she looked up, and saw above her the whole world, all spread above her at the end of the strings of roots, like a cloud island in the sky. She thought she might find her father there, and began to climb up, and then she woke.
Dawn was still breaking. She was lying on the ground under an overhang of rock, with Epashti’s arm around her. Up past the edge of rock, through the still patterned leaves, she could see the sky like milk. Epashti was sleeping deeply behind her, keeping her warm and safe, and she felt too good to get up. She thought of the dream, wishing she had gone on down to the bottom of the root, to see what was there. Then Corban was coming toward her, his great shaggy head bobbing through the trees, and she saw he had caught fish, and she got quickly up, ready to be fed.
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
Corban was glad now that Epashti had come. She slowed him less than he had expected—Ahanton held them up far more—and she helped him find food and she took care of the little girl, who liked Epashti better than him.
She was good company, too, with her stories, her notions, her constant camp work. He did not think of her as his wife. Whenever that idea came to him, even for an instant, there rose between him and Epashti the memory of his real wife, Benna, buried on the island, back at the ocean’s edge.
He missed Benna like part of the world gone, the ears that had listened and understood him, the eyes that had known who he really was. Whatever lay between him and Epashti, it was not understanding.
They had left their village in the waxing of the Buck Moon, and now that moon had grown and gone. For a while, after they left the Wolf country, they saw no other people. They walked westward along the paths of the forest, following the river backward as it trickled and dwindled down its valley. Near the top of the valley they came on five or six men gathered to hunt woods bison.
Corban hung back, wary, and the men stood up at once and faced them, weapons in their hands. But without hesitating Epashti went forward, stretching her arm out and her open palm toward them, and called to them in greeting, and used Miska’s name, heavily ornamented.
At once the men put down their weapons, and beckoned her in. Corban went slowly on toward them; Ahanton came out of the woods. The men poked at him with their eyes, and at first kept away from him, even when he was sitting down by their fire, but soon they were reaching out slyly behind his back to touch his hair, or the red and blue cloak, and he heard bursts of their laughter behind him, and went hot all over, and wished he was still in the forest.
Epashti paid no heed to this. She got out her basket of herbs and potions and the men gathered around her. She put salve on their cuts and bruises, her touch alone soothing them. Ahanton hung close by, still for once, watching everything. Corban sat with his face to the fire, and two of the hunters came up and sat down by him, the oldest of them, their hair braided with feathers, their ears hung with curved bones and cords.
They had smoke, and passed him the pipe. It was old, and of clever workmanship, with woodpecker scalps along the stem, and bits of shell laid into the wood, and he looked it over before he drew on it. They aimed the pipe here and there before they smoked it, but he did not; it reminded him unsettlingly of crossing himself.
One of the men said, “You are Haka-ta-Miska’s—” and said some word Corban had never heard before.
“Miska sent me here,” Corban said. He didn’t like the idea he was Miska’s anything.
The other said, “Haka-Miska is the greatest man under the sun. We long to join his war band. What does he wish of us? Why has he sent you here?”
Corban said, “He sent me to find some people who live west of here.” He paused, collecting himself. He had thought out how to speak this and it was still hard. “They are newcomers, big fighters, big talkers. They wear a lot of fancy decoration, and they keep their hair knotted up, like this—” He pulled his own hair up on the top of his head with his hands. “They have long broad noses.” He paused, watching the faces before him; another of the hunters had come up to join the first two. He saw no recognition in their looks. He said, “They fight when the thunder booms. They are very strong, big men. Maybe they have a big village.” He was running out of words. He had no way to say that these people made things of gold, that possibly they had many more things than these forest hunters knew of. He said, “Sometimes they’re called the Sun people.”
The three men before him stared back a moment, and then turned to look at each other, and one by one shook their heads. Their leader spoke. “I have never heard of any of these things. The hair, of course, many people knot their hair.” His eyes glinted in the firelight; he wore his hair bound at the nape of his neck and hanging down his back. He looked pointedly at Corban’s hair, long and tangled over his shoulders and into his beard. “Even the people of Haka-ta-Miska sometimes knot their hair.”
Corban said, “Anybody who wants to knot Miska’s hair may try.”
The hunter’s face settled, and he stretched his head up, as if he wanted to be taller. He said, “All honor to Haka-Miska-ka!”
Corban laughed, looking away, toward the fire. “We will go on, then. We have a long way ahead.”
“You must stay here and share our meat. We want Haka-Miska to know how well we honor him. So share our meat and we will give up our whole shelter to you and your woman and the child.” He waved his hand at the lean-to, half-full of gear. “You
must tell Haka-Miska this.”
“I will,” Corban said. “He’ll know it all, when I see him again.” The words were acid on his tongue, outright lies; he was hoping never to see Miska more. Whatever he found, out there to the west, it would be better than Miska.
In the dawn they went off again, now following along the foot of an endless ridge like a great dark fence to their right; there was good water and hunting all the way. Epashti found patches of some kind of mint she valued, and a purple flower she called wolf-weed. They came on more people, who again knew Miska, and at the mention of his name brought the wanderers into their camp and fed them and gave them honors, but knew nothing of the Sun chief.
After many days of walking westward, someone came to them, having somehow heard of Epashti that she was a healer, and asked for her help: a child had fallen into the fire. Corban went with Epashti to a village of three little round huts, made of straw mats, on a bench above a creek. Long before they reached it he could hear the child’s hoarse, agonized, exhausted cries. Ahanton went white as ash at the sound, and turned and went back into the forest.
In the little village the women were sitting there on the ground weeping. The child, only a baby, lay facedown on her mother’s knees, her skin red and blistered over all her back and legs, charred black on her shoulders, oozing horrible matter. Corban stood back, horrified, shrinking away.
Epashti went straight to the mother and sat beside her, and lifted the child gently, trying to touch only what wasn’t burned. She laid the baby facedown on her own lap, with its head turned a little. At Epashti’s touch the child’s cries lessened, her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her mouth opened round as if she would suckle at an unseen breast.
The mother clung to Epashti’s arm, her face aslime with tears. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Epashti said, “Don’t thank me. I have done nothing. She will die. I’m sorry.”
The mother wept, and her sisters came on either side of her and held her in their arms, and one said, “But she doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“That’s all I can do,” Epashti said. “Corban.” She glanced around toward him. “Bring me my pouch and some water.”
Corban obeyed her. She told him what to do, what to get from her pouch, and how to mix it. She soaked knitbone leaves in salve, and settled them gently on the baby’s burns. The little girl whimpered now and then, and Epashti stroked her head and murmured to her.
Corban sat with her and brought her what she needed. He thought somehow she would save the baby, that she could not struggle so hard and not triumph, no matter what she had said. He brought her food, and slept there beside her, and she ate but did not sleep, she watched over the child all the rest of the day and that whole night, and in the morning the little girl died.
The women all wept together. Epashti got up and went straight away, out of the village, her face like a piece of wood, her eyes vacant. She walked away into the forest, and Corban gathered up the pouch and followed her. As he stretched his legs to catch up with her, ahead of him among the stands of upright birches Epashti suddenly slumped down onto the ground.
He dropped the pouch and went and gathered her up. “Epashti. Epashti.” Her eyes fluttered at him, her cheeks sunken with exhaustion.
“She was a baby, just a baby. Why can I do nothing?”
Corban lifted her up, cradled in his arms, and carried her off into the forest; she was asleep in his arms before he put her down on the grass under a big oak tree. Ahanton came immediately out of the trees and stood there.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“The child died,” Corban said. He touched Epashti’s face, amazed at her, who had always known the child would die, and yet fought so hard anyway. “Go back to that camp and find something for us to eat. I’m too tired to hunt. They’ll give it to you for Epashti’s sake.”
Ahanton’s narrow little face darkened with temper. “They will give it to me for my father’s sake,” she said, and left.
She came back soon, with meat and acorn cakes and berries, and with one of the villagers, a man who sat beside Corban and thanked him as if he and not Epashti had done the work, and as if something good had come of it. Corban talked with him a while. The villager knew Miska’s name only, and shrugged at it, but he recognized the description of the Sun people, and then his face stilled and his lips pressed together. He would say nothing much about them, except that they were somewhere to the west, but he was obviously afraid of them. He gave Corban good directions to travel, and when Epashti woke up, they went on.
Miska went into the forest at night, or maybe he dreamed it.
The Forest Woman came to him, walking toward him down through the trees, her skin shining like rain and her hair tangled with starlight. She stood before him; he could not speak, he could barely stand against the streaming radiance of her look, running him through and through.
She said, “Soon Corban is going to find what he’s looking for. You have to go quickly, to be there when he calls you.”
“Calls me,” he said, annoyed. “But I sent him there.”
“Come with me,” she said, and she put out her hand to him, and suddenly she grew up into the sky, with him so small he stood on the palm of her hand, and she rose up high above the trees, her face against the moon, the night whirling her hair into winds and clouds, and she lifted him up high to see. He stood on her fingertip and looked out across the dark land and could see it all clearly as daylight and as far as his eyes could reach.
He saw the land rippling away in great still waves under the heavy cover of the trees, he saw the big rivers rushing glossy into the south, he saw the wide plain beyond, going on to forever. Far down there, in the sprawled forest, he saw the red and blue hide that Corban wore, moving along.
Beyond, where the hills rolled down to meet the river, the treeless creases and slopes of the land swarmed with men, coming toward him like crawling ants.
His spine tingled up. Coming toward him. He saw their topknots, their long noses. He smelled the smoke of burning villages. More in his memory than his eyes now, he saw their hands grabbing for everything, killing everything, leaving burnt rubble behind them.
His heart clenched, not from fear, but because if he could get there he could strike at them.
She said, “Be wise, Miska. Be patient. They have far more warriors than you. When Corban calls you, only then, you can win.”
He said, “I will.” His belly stiffening as if he swallowed ice, he watched the hateful swarm creep closer. His blood sang in his veins. “I will.”
Then they were descending, she lowered him down to the ground, and stood beside him again, face to face with him. He reached out for her.
“Lie down with me. Lie with me again. Please.”
She laughed. He saw the laughter sparkling in the air between them like fireflies. She put her fingertips against his face and his body quickened all over.
She said, “I will. But then, after, I am going on. We shall not see each other again, not as we are.”
Miska brushed that off, not caring, just wanting her, and she slipped into his embrace, and they lay down together, and he coiled himself around her and into her. But when he was spent, lying still beside her with her hair across him, he said, “Why are you going? I need you.”
She kissed him, her lips unbearably sweet and tender. “You never needed me, you just wanted me. Pay attention to Ahanton, she will give you good advice someday.”
“Please,” he said. “Please stay.”
But she only laughed. She rose, leaving him there, and walked away. He watched her until his eyes hurt, until he could see nothing except the air she had blessed with her passage, all the while the ache growing in his chest, that she did not love him, she had never loved him, if she could leave him like this. Tears lay on his cheeks and he struck at his eyes, furious, that he wept like a child.
The ache quieted slowly to a ruthless appetite. After a while he found himself on his feet, and back in hi
s village he sent messengers around to all the villages that paid him tribute, to summon every warrior to him.
“What happened to the baby?” Ahanton asked, again. “When Sky Woman fell.”
Epashti glanced at Corban; she had been reluctant to tell this story, for his sake, and yet it was one of her favorites. She turned back toward the fire, and began.
“When Sky Woman fell to earth, which the animals had all made for her on the back of the Turtle, she was with child with two babies. The babies were one good boy and one bad boy, and they fought together even in the womb. The bad child, whose name was Malsum, determined to get out into the world, and he burrowed out through his mother’s armpit. But the Good Twin, Kooska, was born the right way.
“As soon as her boys were born, Sky Woman died. The Twins used her body to build the world. But they worked in opposite ways. Kooska, the Good Twin, took her hair and her blood and made rivers and meadows full of grass and trees. Malsum, the Bad Twin, stirred the blood into waterfalls and whirlpools, so that the rivers were treacherous, and he piled up rocky crags where nothing grew. Kooska made deer and bison and fish, and Malsum made poisonous mushrooms and rattlesnakes.”
“Did they make people?” Ahanton asked. Beside her, Corban sat silent, watching.
“I’m coming to that. When they had filled up the world with trees and animals, Kooska wanted to make people, to enjoy everything, and be his family. So he took his bow and he fired arrows into the ash tree, and the bark of the tree split and out came the first people, just as we are now.
“But Malsum saw this and he hated the people Kooska made. He hated everything about Kooska, and he decided to kill him.”
Ahanton gasped. Corban started to say something, but then was still, and at the point of their rapt attention Epashti went on.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 10