“Now, the Twins had been made so that only one thing could kill Kooska, and only one thing could kill Malsum. Malsum knew this, and he began to nag and worry his brother to find out what the thing was that could kill him. And eventually Kooska, who was good-hearted and could not lie, told him that he could only be killed by the feather of an owl.
“Then Malsum went and got an owl feather, and made a dart of it, and he cast it at Kooska, and Kooska died.”
Ahanton cried out, her hands to her face. Epashti sat a moment, watching them, Corban’s gaze fixed on her, Ahanton’s eyes wide above her hands; she enjoyed making them wait.
She said, “But the goodness in Kooska would not die. Sky Woman his mother would not let him die. She plucked out the owl feather and took him into her body, and there healed him, and the animals all came and brought herbs to heal him. And soon Kooska was alive again, and going around the world making good things, and helping his people.
“But he knew that Malsum would not give up. So he knew he had to kill Malsum.”
Corban now let out a spate of gibberish, like words but not. He was frowning, indignant, as if the story were going wrong somehow. Ahanton gave him a swift, piercing glance. “Go on,” he said. “Go on.” Ahanton turned to face Epashti again, her face blazing.
Epashti thought a moment, startled, about Corban’s reaction. Nobody else had ever seemed to object to Kooska killing Malsum, which seemed so obvious and right. The thought rushed over her that he really was the Evil Twin, that he was Malsum, and wanted not to die again. She pushed this away. The story carried her on.
“Now Kooska knew that Malsum could be killed only by the root of a certain fern, which grew along a stream. He went down by the stream, and stood there, talking loudly about how he himself could be killed, this time, forever, by a white flower that grew nearby. Malsum heard, and crept up, determined to pick the flower and kill Kooska again. But when he came near Kooska threw the fern at him, and the root struck him, and he fell down dead.”
Ahanton gave a huge whoop, flung her arms up over her head, and turned to Corban and stuck out her tongue at him. He was still frowning, he ignored Ahanton utterly, and said, “Is that all? There’s more, isn’t there?”
Epashti said nothing a moment, staring at him, startled. “Yes, of course. Malsum could not die forever either, because evil does not die. Sky Woman made him live again. But she forces him always to stay in dark places, in shadows and in the forest, in caves and at night, and he goes around making trouble then, which is why we people don’t like to go around at night, and why we always clear away the forest where we live so the sun reaches down.”
Corban rubbed his hands together, one over the other, his shoulders hunched. His face was gripped with some thought. He said, “We have—the people where I was born had a story of two brothers who fought, but the bad brother killed the good one.”
She said, “Well, you see, they were wrong. Because they are far away, perhaps.” She ran her tongue over her lips. She had thought, if he remembered more of who he really was, that it would be a good thing. More and more she was wondering differently.
He was still watching her keenly, hunched, and his hands churning together. He said, “They have also a story about someone too good to die, and that’s their big story. They make—”
Now his hands moved, trying to shape something in the air. He straightened, and his voice was surer. “He came and went away a long time ago, but they keep him at the middle of everything, to remind them how to live. All important things are done in his name and every day they make offerings and ask him for help in everything.”
“Is he still there, then?” Epashti said.
“No. He’s in the sky. But they have special ways of summoning him among them, a great”—he used some strange sound—“and they have special water, and stuff like cakes, and they say these things become him, and—”
His jaw fell open. He blinked at her, his whole face slack, as if something had just bitten him between the eyes. He said, in a strange, strangled voice, “And they eat him.”
Her breath left her in a startled gasp. He turned his head, looking away, the frown deeper on his brows. Ahanton was looking from him to Epashti and back, bewildered.
Presently, when Corban said nothing, Epashti said, “What does this mean?”
He jerked. His mind had led him somewhere else, far off, and she had brought him back. He glanced at her as if he hardly saw her. He said, “I don’t know. I’m sick of meaning anyway. I have to find us something to eat, I’m very tired of acorn cakes.” He looked hard at Ahanton. “Don’t stray off. And stay away from where I’m fishing.” He took his gear and went away down toward the river.
Ahanton turned to her. “That’s why he’s mean.”
Epashti swelled up, furious, all the pent feeling of the problems with Corban welling up in her, and reached out and gripped the child by the chin. “You foolish, selfish brat, how can you talk? There is no meanness in him, and he loves you. Go find me firewood. Now.” She pinched Ahanton’s chin and let her go. Ahanton glared at her, and then plunged away into the forest. Alone, Epashti finally let herself relax.
The story explained everything, Ahanton thought. Her father and Kooska were alike, even their names sounded alike, so her father was the Good Twin. And Corban then was the Bad Twin, so Epashti herself thought, Ahanton had seen that in the way her foster mother looked at him while she told the story.
She went away into the woods, out of Corban’s reach. Day after day Corban and Epashti followed a path that wound along beside the river, but Ahanton hated the river. During the days she saw them seldom, but wandered along as she willed.
They were travelling through high steep hills, the place very strange to her, and yet she felt no fear. The great trees that loomed around her were different from the trees of her village, but when she laid her hand against them she felt through her palm the same thrill of their attention. They bent over her, their leaves rustling, and they played with her; a stand of trees opened its boughs up, luring her in, and then when she went running through, the leafy arms swung closed behind her, and she had to find another way back. Sometimes she got so lost she had to sit down and listen and smell the air until she knew which way to go. Always the trees stood around her like big sisters, swaying and whispering.
She wore their leaves in her hair, she curled up in their roots, she gorged herself on the big meaty mushrooms growing in ledges from their north-facing bolls.
The river frightened her. She remembered how it had chuckled, dragging her down into its cold darkness, wrapping her around and around in its arms, smothering her with its wet kiss. Whenever she went near it now it called to her again, jeering, promising her it would have what it wanted of her, and she felt the cold wet arms around her again and her breath stopped in her throat and she ran. Now she could not cross any water, not even a little stream, the rippling water no deeper than her shoes, and she stood there and wept and could not move.
Corban carried her across. She clutched handfuls of his mossy hair and sobbed, slung over his shoulder, until he put her down again on the far side. Her father would have done it better. She told him that. But she remembered what Epashti said. He was mean and evil but she could make him do what she wanted because he loved her.
The valley narrowed, as they walked westward, the steep walls pinching together ahead of them, and she could not go along on her own course or avoid the river anymore. From hill to hill it filled the valley. She walked behind Corban, behind Epashti, picking their way along the foot of the southern ridge, the sound of the river plunging along over rocks growing louder in their ears.
“There,” he said, and led them through spindling trees toward the river. The ground was wet long before they came to the bank and she began to shiver. They came to the bank and the heavy dark green water was rushing by, its surface breaking into leaps and chops, and all the while laughing, laughing to see her so close.
She clung to Epashti. �
�No—I won’t go—I won’t go—”
Corban picked her up then, and set her on his shoulders. She coiled her fingers in his hair. He walked into the river and she felt him shudder as the water struck him, and she lifted her feet up and screamed at the water.
Here great rocks littered the river, the water plunging and foaming around them, and Corban walked upstream of them, the water climbing to his waist. She felt him lean against the current. The water burbled and laughed at her, calling her, mocking; then he went down deeper, to his chest, and the cold wet reached for her.
She lifted herself all up onto his shoulders, gripping his hair tight, screaming, and he staggered and she swayed, unbalanced, feeling herself fall. He caught her arm and held her. He pushed on, each step separate, shouting at her something she could not understand. One foot at a time he came up out of the water, to his waist, to his knees. She sank down onto his back, slack with relief, half-crying. She turned to look back to jeer at the river and saw Epashti there, halfway across, not moving, the water high and swift around her, shoving her sideways.
“Epashti,” she said. “See there, Epashti!”
“Here.” He put her down on the bank and went back down into the water, to bring Epashti; she saw how he pushed upstream against the river, and it yielded and broke around him.
Ahanton thought, my father would do this better. But when he came up out of the river, his arm around Epashti, and the water streaming from him, she took hold of the end of the red and blue hide he wore, and followed him away to the west.
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
Beyond the gap in the mountains, the river led them steadily southwestward. The craggy mountains flattened into hills, drowned in forests of oak and hickory, where the racket of the birds in the canopy sometimes made Epashti put her hands over her ears, and the wide-spaced trees opened now and then into sun-blasted meadows of grass and dense brush. They ate as they walked along, picking nuts and berries and mushrooms almost without pausing. At night they camped with the sound of the rushing water in their ears. Day after day, the river braided itself into other rivers, streams big and small running in from either side, until it made the greatest stream Corban had ever seen, a tremendous sprawl of water, copper-brown, coiling back and forth but always pushing steadily toward the southwest.
Corban had never been so far from the ocean. He had always thought, in the back of his mind, that he had come ashore into this country in some hinterland, at the very edge of some greater realm or other. Every day as they moved westward he looked for signs of it—for roads or watchtowers, bridges or castles.
There was nothing. One day when Epashti wanted to camp early, he climbed up a sheer crag that jutted out toward the river, and from the narrow point looked across the rolling heads of an oak forest riotous with birds, the infinite leaves tossing and fluttering in the wind stretching as far as he could see, until on all sides the rising hills carried it beyond the reach of his eyes. Only the river broke it, ranging in its broad coils along the west-running valley. The sky was clear as heaven.
He sat there a while, staring toward the sinking sun, which was cupped in clouds like an old man wrapped in his nightclothes. He knew why Epashti had wanted to stop early; she had been sick earlier, she was with child again, she needed to rest. He felt the baby in her belly like a part of him she held to ransom.
He drew his mind from that, from the attending worry of what he would do with her and Ahanton, when he found what he was looking for. They could find their way home, he thought. They knew the way as well as he did. He fixed his mind firmly on what his sister had said, that he would find what he was looking for, somewhere to the west.
Somewhere out there, he imagined, there would be a city, like Jorvik or Hedeby, but better, a place of justice, a place—
He tried, as he had tried so many times before, to form into words what this was, but every frame of words failed him. In his mind he saw the cluttered wooden streets of Hedeby, the high spire that stood over Jorvik. But he thought of other cities, too, places he had never seen, white-walled Rome, and Miklagard the Great, shining with gold, halfway between heaven and earth, and Jerusalem itself, at the center of the world, with its seven-ringed ladder up to heaven.
He could imagine spires and streets. It was when he thought of the people in this city, his mind stuck, baffled. He could think of all that a just people was not; he could think of the evil, but he could not imagine the good. All he knew was that they would not be like any of the people he had met so far.
Justice, he thought. He would know when he saw it.
They walked down through the folded land, the hills like loops up and down, bending the river this way and that between them. Where another river poured in from the north he took them across again, struggling upstream two days to a ford across the big river, and then swimming first Epashti and then the screaming kicking Ahanton over the swift-charging water coming down from the north. On the far side, they went along the big river again. The hills were milder here, broken at their feet into seeps and bogs slicked over with an eerie rainbow touch, and the river’s western edge spread out in a broad rolling plain. Trees grew along the riverbank but the plain was open rolling grassland. Every once in a while clumps of salt broke up out of the lower ground, and around these sinks, and all over the curly browning grass, were scattered bison beyond counting.
They walked along through the loose scattering of the beasts, picking the way carefully among them, Epashti murmuring charms, and Corban always watching for some place to go if the bison turned on them and charged.
The smell of the bison hung over the land, deep and musky, like all the world’s wildness gathered up into one stink. The beasts all moved steadily, step by step, toward the west, only a little slower than the people. In spite of the summer heat the bison still carried patches of wool clinging to their massive humps. Their heads were enormous. Their slender, smooth-coated hindquarters seemed to belong to another, much smaller animal. In their wake they left the ground trampled to dust, strewn with shed hair and enormous excrement. Wherever the river’s banks ran low, the shore was trampled down into a mucky swamp. Where the salt broke out they clustered in mobs, fought and groaned and pawed up the ground into clouds of dust.
After days of walking Corban could still see no end to the herd. Most were cows with their calves. This year’s young were well grown now, light brown and still humpless, and they dashed around and butted each other and gamboled, which made Ahanton laugh, and gambol too. She ran fearlessly around the cows, and they snorted at her, and tossed the shaggy horned blocks of their heads, but none ever charged her, and Corban gave up trying to keep her away from them. She played games with the calves, running up to slap their rumps and then wheeling away as the babies bucked and swung their heads. The cows ignored her, munching along.
Corban always camped by trees, often walking well into the night to find trees to camp by. Wolves howled all around them in the dark. During the day, buzzards followed the herds, circling over the broad sky, and bones littered the bison trail, old ones and new. They passed a rippling mass of sleek black feathers, only at one end a little tail showing of whatever lay underneath. Once heedlessly they came up close to an old bull, which marched at them, snorting, and shaking its head, and pawing the ground, until they had edged away far enough.
On the river, one day, Corban saw a boat, long and slim, gliding into sight around a bend; he crouched down in the shelter of a tree and watched it pass. It was much like the boats Epashti’s people used sometimes, double-ended, narrow as a fish; one man in the stern paddled it along past Corban and around the next curve.
Corban watched it go out of sight. His heart was beating hard. Ahead, up there somewhere, there were more people. The man in the boat had looked like one of Epashti’s kind, dark, his hair bound back. He wondered how they would take him, Corban, when they saw him.
He wondered how he would talk to them—if he would even be able to talk to them. He waited a long wh
ile by the river, watching, but no more boats appeared, and finally he went off again, running to catch up with Epashti, out on the bison-strewn plain.
Epashti wanted to go back to the forest; the open plain oppressed her. The sun was hot, and the day grew steadily heavier on her, every day, until in the afternoons suddenly the sky would blossom with clouds, and the clouds banged together and the thunder rolled.
Then the bison stirred and gathered, snorting, and Corban pushed Epashti and Ahanton along up toward the hills to the west, dragging them by the arms when they lagged; she did not understand this, wanting the shelter, the sinks down out of the sudden rushing wind, until she saw how the water gushed down and flooded all the low ground.
They crept in under a fallen tree, with Corban’s red and blue blanket around them, and looked out across the streaming plain. The rain turned the air dark. The thunder sounded like stones rolling around in the sky and the rain fell in sheets that blew back and forth in the wind. Epashti told the story of the flood, how Michabo, hunting with his wolves, saw them run down into the magic lake and disappear, and then the whole world vanished under the water.
Corban listened, but he said nothing, although when she spoke of the raven that Michabo sent out to find land, he gave a sudden laugh, and looked down. He told no other story, but soon after she had finished, the sun came out again, and they walked on.
Two days after, coming along the riverbank, they came on some people.
Corban had been walking ahead of her; he stopped where he was, the river on his left hand, and the bison on his right, arid Epashti went quickly past him. The river’s bank was overgrown with brush but she could see a boat drawn up on the shore.
Out there before them, five or six men were standing around a bison carcass they were breaking up. They all had knives in their hands, blood covered them, and as they swung out to face Epashti, she saw Corban through the corner of her eye, moving forward a step, ready to defend her, and she put out her hand to stop him.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 11