The hunters were staring at them, open-mouthed, wiry, brown men, like Wolves, their hair braided, wearing only loincloths. She walked toward them, her voice high and firm, her hand stretched out, palm forward, in the sign of peace, and said Miska’s name. The men made no sign of recognition. But one of them suddenly thrust his hand out, pointing at Corban.
She stiffened, looked back, saw Corban there with his hand on his knife, and Ahanton, behind him, wide-eyed. But then the men were backing away.
She turned around toward them, startled. They had not known Miska, but Corban they knew. They were backing away from their kill, bending their bodies in deep respect, waving their arms at him, offering him their meat. “Ixewe,” they called him, in several voices, a name she did not know, and words she did, white bison, and sky messenger.
She turned her gaze to Corban, standing there at the center of everybody’s looks, and saw him differently. A shiver went down her back. With his great shaggy head, his hair and beard, he did look like a bison. She wondered how she had missed this, all along.
And he knew what to do. He went straight up toward the bison, and drew his knife. The hunters had just gutted the huge beast, which lay in a great pile of green intestines, its gaping belly already buzzing with flies. He reached into the slippery mess, up under its arched side, and pulled out the beast’s heart, a great dripping mass in his hand. He backed away, and with his free hand he beckoned to the hunters to take their kill back.
They came eagerly forward, all the while bending and spreading their hands and speaking words of honor to him, the white bison. Corban turned to Epashti, calm as if this happened to him always, and said, “Let’s go make a fire and eat this.”
Ahanton sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms around them. Although the night was still far off, Corban had taken them to camp by the riverbank, in some trees. Epashti stooped over her fire, turning the spitted slices of the bison heart. Over there, out on the open plain, the strangers worked steadily at the bison carcass, peeling off the hide and cutting the meat into pieces they could carry.
Epashti said, “Are you this Ixewe they speak of?” Her voice quavered with uncertainty.
Corban said, “So long as they believe it.” He sat down on his heels beneath the nearest of the trees.
Epashti licked her lips, and aimed her eyes elsewhere. Ahanton could tell she was worried. She said, “They have no women with them.”
“They are just boys. Here come some of them.”
Two of the hunters were walking up toward the camp, bobbing like feeding quail as they came. Ahanton drew herself tighter into her knot. It shook her to see Corban so honored. She glared at the young men, trying to send them away with her looks, but they never noticed her, their gazes fixed on Corban.
He bade them sit down, which they did. Ahanton shut her eyes, pretending she was sleeping, and watched them steadily through the slits between her eyelids. The boys had feathers braided into their hair, and one’s cheek was deeply scarred, two ruts in a row, like claw marks. Epashti took the meat from the fire, and laid out strips of it for Corban, and Corban gave of the meat to the boys.
They were amazed, she saw, none of this happening as they expected. They sat staring wide-eyed at him, while Corban calmly ate his own meat, and then he waved at them again, impatient.
“Eat. What did you kill it for, except to eat it?”
The boys fumbled and stammered and reached for the pieces of bison heart. Ahanton, watching Corban, saw how keenly he studied them and knew he wanted to ask them his puzzles, but he said nothing. He would let the boys speak first, and in fact when he was done eating, the claw-faced boy licked his fingers, and bobbed his head, and said, “We have heard of your coming, Ixewe, but I didn’t believe it until I saw you.”
The boy chuckled, as if this were some huge joke. His eyes moved constantly, taking in Corban’s whole looks. Corban sat back, his hands loose before him, and said, “I saw your boat on the river a few days ago. Where are your people?”
The boy shrugged, nodded toward the north, indifferent to that. His hand moved slightly toward Corban, finger and thumb pinching. “I would touch your fur, Ixewe.”
“No,” Corban said sharply, and at that the other boy reached out and gripped the first one’s arm and shook him and growled at him, and they both bent over and lowered their heads to him.
“We are sorry. We are sorry. We eat dirt before you.”
“Sit up,” Corban said. “Stop talking foolishness and tell me who you are.”
The boys straightened. The claw-faced boy spoke briskly. “We are Shawuno, the People, and my clan is the Fox and my lineage is the western river. We have always been the keepers of the White Bison. When we heard you were coming, other people didn’t know who you were, but we knew.” He nodded, pleased, and turned to his friend, who smiled and nodded, his eyes watching Corban.
Corban said, “I have not come to you, to the Shawuno.”
The boys both nodded, adamant, and the claw-faced one spoke with many gestures of respect. “We know that, Ixewe, we are blessed that you have passed among us at all. We honor you, the White Bison, come in man form, although your messages are not for us.”
Ahanton started; Epashti had come up beside her, and sat down, and put her arm around her. When Epashti touched her she realized she was sitting clenched tight as a fist. Epashti’s arm settled around her and Ahanton thought, Epashti is afraid too, and wondered what they were afraid of.
“You know where I am going,” Corban said. He sat calm and motionless, like a rock, but Ahanton could see he was clenched tight too.
The boy leaned toward him, intent. “We have heard you go to find the Itzen. The people of the Sun.”
“The Itzen,” Corban said, his voice drawn out like a sigh. His eyes glinted. “You have seen these people?”
“I haven’t,” the boy said, and glanced at his friend beside him, who shook his head also. “They are far down the river here, where meets the Water Father.”
Corban leaned forward a little, his voice taut with excitement, and he said a word she had never heard before. “Do they have a city there?” The boy gaped at him, puzzled, and Corban said, “A village? A big village.”
“Cibala,” the boys said, together. “Yes, Cibala.” The clawfaced boy with a dark look at the other went on, “The sacred mountain is there. Where maz comes from.”
“At the end of this river,” Corban said, his voice crackling.
The claw-faced boy said, “They are coming this way now, though, so you won’t have to go that far.”
“Hunh,” Corban said. “Coming where? Up this river, toward us?”
The boy nodded. “My people have already gone on into the north. We’re just getting meat, we will go join them when we are done here. The people down the river”—he nodded downstream—“they’re the ones in trouble.” He smiled, not particularly anxious for the sake of these others.
“Who are they?” Corban asked.
“Kisko people.” The boy made signs with his hands. “They have maz growing, they have to stay there to pick it.”
“What is maz?” Corban asked.
The boy shrugged. “Maz is good.”
Corban said nothing more, his brows pulling together, but ate of the meat, and drank water Epashti brought him. The boys left, with many bobs and murmured words and wavings of their hands. Ahanton thought they might move on, although the day was old and ready for the night to come, because he often made them walk on in the late day. But he sat there only, staring into the fire, and Epashti laid the camp around him, and they slept.
Ahanton dreamt.
She stood in a mist, on a field of flat stones, the stones fit together perfectly, smooth under her bare feet. The day was corning. The rising sun filled the mist with light, and the mist dissolved, and through it something large began to appear, as if it solidified from the gloom before her, stone out of fog.
First she saw a huge corner, two smooth sides coming togeth
er exactly, so smooth that her hands ached to touch it. Higher than her head, heavy as the whole world. The day brightened, and she saw the corner’s steep edge, rising away from her, marking where two of the four sides met of a great hill that tilted up away from her into the sky. The mist vanished. Now she could see the whole stone hill, all the way up to the four-sided fence at the very top. The long courses that ran up the center of each face to the top were still slick with dew; she knew that another such way went up each of the other two sides of the hill.
She stood on the flat stone field and thought, People made this, and even in the dream she was amazed. Nothing the Wolves made was anything like this; not even the Sky people, in stories, made such things.
Corban had known. Corban had even called this by some name. She shuddered. She thought somehow Corban’s word had spun this dream for her.
Now that, in the dream, the sun was rising, she looked around her and saw other people. She started. She realized these were the people Corban was asking about, people with sloping heads, long noses and thick lips, their hair bound up behind.
Malsum’s people. A surge of fear went through her.
She was standing in the middle of the broad flat field, all the stones fit together tight, and she saw nowhere to hide. Carefully she went on through the dream, through the ‘people, hoping if she went softly but quickly no one would see her.
Nobody paid any attention to her. She grew bolder. She stood and watched a line of men and women dance by her, some shaking gourds, and others blowing on reeds and banging things, from all this making a fine sound, like singing. After these came a line of people dressed in feathers, dancing each with his hands on the shoulders of the one in front, going back and forth like a snake.
The procession went off through the crowd that filled the stone plain. All the people around her wore skirts, like Epashti’s, and the skirt Ahanton herself was supposed to wear. She did not recognize the skin the skirts were made of. She looked down at herself and saw she was not wearing anything, naked, as usual, her body flat like a reed.
This made her unhappy, and she went looking for a skirt. Turning her back on the stone hill she went down along a path, very straight and broad and even, made of big stones like the field she had just left. On either side stood stone tree trunks in rows, and in between, stone monsters, with long gaping toothy jaws, and stubby legs. Here also were people, walking up and down, and others sitting on the ground, with all their goods around them.
On the round stone tree trunks there were patterns of colors. She went to look, and gradually she saw that the colors made pictures, streams of pictures climbing around and around each of the trees.
She stared at a picture of the night sky, with the stars and the moon, and across it two men paddling a boat.
In the next picture the same two men were making a house for a star. She stared at them and stared at them, trying to see some difference between them, but she could not. They were the same, in picture after picture, although sometimes one of them had animal hair, or an animal head.
She went along the column, looking backward, going downward; she saw them playing with a ball, she saw them cooking a rat over a fire, she saw them playing in a tree, and she saw them being born, and they were born together.
They were twins. But they were not enemies.
She opened her eyes, awake now. She tried to remember the word Corban had said, that she had thought again in the dream, but what clung to her mind was the memory of the two twins who did not fight.
The sun was rising, washing the whole plain with its ruddy glow. She pushed herself up on her arms. Still sleeping, Corban lay there, Epashti beside him, his arm around her. She thought, maybe the story is wrong, or we are hearing it wrong. Maybe he is not Malsum, or maybe Malsum is not bad. Or maybe there has to be both Kooska and Malsum. In her mind she saw Corban and Miska, paddling a boat across the stars. This felt good to her, and she got up and went to stand in the sun, to get warm.
C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N
In the morning the boy with the claw marks on his cheek came to say good-bye to them; he brought a basket woven of straw, which he laid down reverently at Corban’s feet. Off behind him, at the edge of the plain, his friends were packing up the meat and hide of the bison they had killed, getting ready to move on. A crowd of buzzards waited patiently in the nearby trees, the upper branches bowed under their weight.
The boy lingered, his eyes sharp, and pointed to the south. “You are going on along the river, Ixewe, aren’t you?”
Corban nodded. He stooped to pick up the basket; inside it were some flat meal cakes, like acorn cakes. He handed the basket to Epashti. “I want to find the Itzen.”
“You will, going as you are. But the Kisko people, south of here, they are probably not friendly.” The boy smiled, leaning toward him, sharing some joke, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “This is the time when their maz is ripe, and people come to steal it, see.” He laughed again, and Corban knew he was one of the thieves; he wondered again what maz was, that they all wanted it so much. “Probably they are stupid, since they are Kisko,” the boy said, “and they won’t know the White Bison.”
“How far south are they?” Corban asked.
“Two, three days hard walking.” The boy bobbed up and down a few more times, his hands pressed together. “We are honored, Ixewe. You have blessed us.”
“We’ll see about that,” Corban said. He started away down the riverbank, Epashti and Ahanton coming after him.
When they had gone a little way down the riverbank, so they were away from the hunters, Corban flung his head back and laughed.
Epashti walked along behind him. She thought she knew why he laughed.
She said, “You let them call you by that name. Ixewe. You did not deny it.”
Corban was still smiling. He did not look at her, speaking, but his eyes searched along ahead of them, eager. “So what? We’ll never see them again.”
She said, “But—”
“Leave me alone, Epashti.”
Epashti fell still, insulted. She glanced at him as they walked along. He seemed different somehow; his temper was odd, fit to this new Corban, who walked in the disguise of somebody else. Who was burning to get somewhere, somewhere he believed could be just out of sight over the rim of the land, somewhere his feet could not get him to quickly enough.
Up in the distance ahead of them, the hills pressed down high and close along the bank of the river, pinching off the plain, and the bison were turning steadily westward, drifting off through the gaps between the rounded hills. In the distance thunder growled all afternoon, and when the rain struck, they burrowed in under a tree and spread the red and blue cloak over their heads.
Epashti had been carrying the hunters’ straw basket with her other gear, and she put it on her lap and opened it. “Is this food?”
“Acorn cakes,” Corban said.
Inside the basket was a stack of flat soft cakes. She pulled off a corner of the top one. Ahanton was watching her open-mouthed.
“You’re going to eat it?”
Epashti said, “Do you have anything else?” She put the piece of food into her mouth and chewed.
A sweet nutty taste flooded her mouth, so delicious she stopped chewing abruptly, savoring it on her tongue. Corban and Ahanton saw this, and both reached out for the basket at once. Corban took a whole cake, and folded it and bit into it.
He gave a startled cry. “Bread. This is bread.”
Ahanton was stuffing her mouth with her cake; she paid no heed. Epashti gave him a sharp look. Once again she suspected his gibberish was supposed to make sense. “Do you know this stuff?”
“Not this. But it is like, very like something else.” There were several more cakes in the basket. “This is good,” he said, and his eyes glinted; she saw he was hearing a memory. “This is maz, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, eating. “But it is very good.”
“I want mo
re,” Ahanton said.
“Here,” Epashti said, and gave her the basket. Corban was already peering away to the southwest, impatient to get going, but he reached for another cake. They ate all the rest of the cakes in the basket, until they were stuffed full, and when the rain stopped they went on.
Twice in the next day Corban thought he smelled smoke, and on the far side of the river stands of dead trees showed like bare bones in the woods; he thought there were people around here. By early afternoon they were walking into the narrow end of the river valley, where the hills came down and choked the river into a narrows, and Epashti wanted to stop. Reluctantly Corban agreed; he went down to the river, looking for a good place to fish.
The river had shrunk down from its flood, leaving a dry rim of its bed along the foot of the bank. The bank stood up high over his head, tendrils of roots dangling down through it from the trees above. He climbed over a huge spiky clump of branches and brush wedged against the bank, and on the other side saw something wrapped in some dead twigs.
He poked at it, a web of fibers, and saw it was a fish net.
He stood up, looking around him, remembering what the claw-faced boy had said: these people would be unfriendly. The river’s channel was along the foot of the far bank, deep and green: on this side the water rippled past him only knee-deep, curling through a line of rocks. Where it broke around the rocks it heaped up into pale green curves, beautiful in the late sunlight.
He went on along the foot of the bank, watching the far shore. The river leaned into a broad curve; just beyond the top of the curve, on the far shore, the bank was broken down and a deep trail made, down to the water, here and there using tree roots to form steps. He climbed up the steep bank on his side, to the top, and from that height he saw across the river.
He was expecting a village but he saw only the flat meadow in the elbow of the river bend, spotted with green growth. Something moved on it, and he stretched his eyes and was patient and soon made out the people there, going back and forth through the green patches.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 12