Back and forth they went, back and forth, and he realized they were harvesting something.
Maz, he thought, unsure. He thought to himself, If you were really a God you would know what’s going on.
Thinking that didn’t help. He stood up, looking around; he had come up the bank into a stand of massive-bodied trees, the ground under their spreading crowns littered with crunchy bits of shells. The wide spaces between them lulled him, churchlike, safe. He was walking out of the deep shade, going back to Epashti, when something hit him hard from behind.
A faint sound warned him, just before the body slammed into him, and he was already crouching, going down, his hands rising. He went down flat on his face but with his hands out, and he was flipping over even as he hit, kicking out, throwing off the man on top of him.
He bounded to his feet. Just beyond the rolling body of the man he had cast off, in the trees, another man stood, half-naked, a bow in his hands.
That man’s eyes were as big as eggs. His mouth hung open. The arrow was locked halfway to the nocking point in his hand. The other man was staggering up, already to one knee.
“Shoot! Shoot!”
Corban rushed them; he hit the rising man first, got him in the chin with his knee, and then kicked him in the chest going down. He dodged as he leapt. The arrow hissed in the air. He felt a sharp rap on his side, but no hurt, and with a yell he charged the bowman.
The man with the bow scrambled away, drawing another arrow, and Corban, lunging after him, got hold of the bow and tore it out of his grasp. The other man shrieked. He had the arrow still in his hand and he threw it at Corban like a dart and crouched down into the underbrush, his arms over his head.
Corban thought of the first man, behind him; he wheeled around, and caught that man just rising dazedly up again, and whacked him over the head with the bow. Whirling, he faced the bow’s owner.
He was gone. Corban saw only the flash of motion through the dim shade under the trees, flying away toward the river. A quavering yell carried back to him. He looked around; the first man to attack him was lying flat on the ground, groaning. Corban stepped over him and went off toward his camp. After a few steps, he began to run.
The ground here was rolling, and he ran along the foot of a hill and along the edge of the trees that lined the river, headed for the low ground where his camp was. When he rounded the hill he jerked to an abrupt halt.
He was too late. Down there on the dry grass under the tree where he had left them stood Epashti and Ahanton, their arms around each other, surrounded by strange men with bows and spears.
He stood a moment, watching, his back prickling up, and his guts wound into a knot. They had seen him, down there. Someone pointed. He tensed to run. But there was nothing to do, he could not leave his family there alone, and finally he walked out toward the camp.
He squared his shoulders up. He held his head high. He called out, “You down there, let no harm come to those people, if you know what’s good for you.”
Among the crowd of men, two or three bows went up, flexed taut, ready to shoot. The crowded men were pointing and talking. He walked steadily toward them, his eyes on them. Something was banging his side, and he looked down, and saw an arrow stuck in his red and blue cloak. He reached down and pulled the arrow out of the cloak, and threw it down.
From the crowded men a low cry of amazement went up. He walked on toward them, his mouth dry, fumbling out what to say, and went in among them, as if he were not afraid of them, as if they could not hurt him. He went straight up to Epashti and Ahanton, in their midst.
“I am Ixewe,” he said, looking around at the men, “If you hurt my family I will take bad words of you to Cibala!”
The men closed in around him, babbling to each other. “White,” he heard, over and over, “white.” He felt them touching him from behind, tugging at his hair. Epashti and Ahanton stood before him, their faces rigid with fear, their eyes fixed on him. He reached out to them and put his hands on their shoulders. He felt the men around them, their murmuring and poking that could turn any moment into jabs and blows. He drew the two women toward him, into the shelter of his body.
“Come,” he said to Epashti. “Come now, let’s go.” Something prodded slyly at his side, where the arrow had struck his cloak, and then a hand plucked the knife out of its sheath on his belt.
He spun around with a yell, stepping away from Epashti and Ahanton. A boy with feathers in his hair stood there, turning the knife in his hands. Corban had been carrying it for years and the blade was worn white from the hone, a thin tongue of steel in a mended haft. The boy touched the edge With his finger, and it cut him.
With a cry he dropped the knife into the dirt and sprang away. Suddenly the space around Corban and the women was clear, the other men stepping back, staring at him, at the knife. He stooped, and picked up the knife and put it away on his belt, and swung a broad look over them all.
“All I want with you is peace. You attack me. You take my family.”
“We want peace.” An older man came up to the front of the crowd; his face was painted with streaks of red clay and he had a fancy bead collar around his neck. He leaned on a stick. “Are you then Ixewe, as the Shawuno say?”
“I am,” Corban said, “and I am going to see the Sun chief, and if you hinder me I’ll tell him. So let my family free, now.”
The old man held to his stick with both hands. “Yet you look weary and hungry, Ixewe. Come to our village, across the water. We will honor you and feast with you.”
Corban said, “I am going on.”
The old man’s eyes hardened, his face tightened, and he tilted forward on his stick. “Yet we want you to honor us, Ixewe. We must do you honor.”
Corban knew then what he intended, and smiled. He said, “The Sun people are coming, are they not? If I do not go on, if they come here before I reach them, how can I carry good word to them of you?”
From the men behind the elder came a low murmur. The old man turned his head a fraction of the way toward them, and the mutter silenced at once. Corban said, “I am going, with my family, and you will not stop me, because it is your one chance.” He reached out to Epashti. “Come.”
She walked forward at once, reaching for his hand, and leading Ahanton along. Still her face was thin with fear, and her eyes wide. No one spoke. Corban took her hand and turned and walked away, up the sloping way he had come, going southwest again. Behind them was only silence. None of them turned to look back.
When they went up over the top of the hill, Corban felt his back muscles ease, and his whole mind turn forward again, back to where they were going, and away from what might be coming after. He let out his breath in a rush. He said, “Let’s go that way,” and pointed away from the river; from the top of the next hill, he thought, he would see how the river went.
They followed him along, leaving the grassy meadows behind, following a narrow trace between two hills. Deep in the woods, and in the low ground, the night was coming, and they made a camp in the lee of a craggy hill.
Epashti had not spoken since they had walked away from the river people. She laid out the fire, while he dragged some branches around to shelter the camp. The sky was still pale up beyond the tops of the trees but the camp was in darkness. When he came in and sat down to light the fire, she said, “You have taken the name. You have said you are this person.”
“What?” he said. “Now you complain, when that’s how we got away from them. Didn’t you hear that old man? He wanted to hold onto us.”
She said, stubbornly, “You don’t even know what this name means and you have taken it on.”
He wheeled on her, angry. “Leave me alone. Would you rather they sneered at me, like your people?”
Even in the dark he saw her recoil. He had the tinderbox in his hands, and he sparked up the flame, and bent down to light the fire.
She said, “See, you are already different.”
“Epashti,” he said, between his teet
h, “leave me alone.” Then, as he stretched out his hands with the little blossom of fire, his ears picked up something in the distance that made his skin prickle up.
He sat back, the tinderbox forgotten. Epashti had heard it too, rigid in the dark, her head lifted. Ahanton crept in between them.
“What is that? Is that thunder?”
“Shhh.”
It was like thunder, but steady, rhythmic, like walking, boom boom boom at the very edge of his hearing, like a giant walking toward him. Then abruptly it stopped.
He drew in the sweet cool night air, realizing he had not breathed for moments. Beside him, Epashti’s voice burst out, ragged with fear. “It’s them. It’s them.”
Corban stood up. “You stay here.”
“No—” She leapt up, grabbing for him. “You can’t go. Corban—” She gripped his shirt in both hands. “Please, I’m afraid. It’s like the stories. Please don’t go.”
He let her drag him down, although his heart was thundering now, like a drum, and did not slow. Ahanton sat still there. He took the tinderbox and lit the fire, and Epashti crept close against him, putting on bits of kindling, all the while whispering charms under her breath. They had only a few mushrooms and nuts to eat, what little they had found on the way. They lay down in the shelter of the camp to sleep.
Corban did not shut his eyes. He lay listening to Ahanton fall at once into a deep sleep, and to Epashti struggling to stay awake, her breathing ragged, her body shifting on the ground; but they had walked all day, and at last she too drifted into sleep.
Then he got up, quietly and carefully. He felt his knife in its sheath, the tinderbox tied into the corner of the cloak. Then he took the cloak and laid it down over them, to cover them, to keep them safe. He thought, I will be back before they wake up. He knew he was lying. He crept off into the woods, and started west, toward the sound of the drums.
Ahanton wanted to dream of the two brothers, and the stone village with its painted trees, but instead she dreamt of a forest, dark as night, and her wandering in it. And something was chasing her. A snake was chasing her. She stirred herself, trying to wake, and got out of the dream, and went back for the dream of the brothers, paddling their boat through the stars. But she came always to the night forest, and the snake, a snake made of people, with hundreds of legs, a snake with wings, that lunged out of the darkness to devour her.
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
Corban followed a little creek through the darkness of the forest, going upstream until he could scramble up through brush and saplings to the peak of a ridge. From this height he looked out through the clear dark air. The moon was just rising over his left shoulder, a cat’s eye, with the greatest of the wandering stars close over its brow. The wind rose into his face, damp from combing through the trees on the hillside.
He tasted smoke in the wind, bitter under the earth smell. Low in the southwest, beyond the next hill, the sky blurred down into haze, underlit with a faint yellow glow.
His body felt like a suit of lead, dragging him down; he had to sleep. Yet it lay there, surely, just before him, if not his golden city, the way to it, and he began down the hillside, going toward the light.
As he went down the slope the darkness swelled up around him, the forest deepened, and he had to walk one step at a time, groping forward. Now that he had somewhere to go he could not follow the natural course of the land; he fought through dense brush, and climbed up and down a steep rocky slope, blind in the dark, his hands stretched forward. His body ached for sleep but he went on, steadily, one foot at a time, until, at last, he began to be able to see: the dawn was coming.
He was climbing another ridge, now able to see the shapes of trees and rocks, the line up there of the edge of the sky, and when he reached the sunlight at the top, suddenly a swarm of men in topknots surrounded him.
“Stand where you are!”
He raised his hands up, too tired to be afraid. “I’m not armed,” he said—nobody ever noticed the sling wrapped around his belt. He looked around into their faces, expecting to see the golden face.
Disappointed, he let his hands sag to his sides. These men around him were plain brown forest hunters like all the others he had seen coming here.
One of them was shouting at him, and a spear jabbed at his chest. “Who are you? Who are you?” But another man pushed up beside the first, out of the ring of them surrounding Corban, and reached out and gripped Corban’s beard in his fist.
Corban jerked back, angry, and reached up and grabbed hold of the man’s forearm. “Let go of me!”
At that they all lunged at him. He shouted, striking out with his fists as they clutched at him, tore at his shirt, pulled his hair and beard; when they bore him down on the ground he kicked out and thrashed around to turn over, and they ripped his shirt half off. Then suddenly they were jerking him up onto his feet again, and backing off, leaving him there panting and angry and exhausted, his shirt around his waist.
“White,” one said. “Look how white it is.”
“See the fur,” somebody else said. “It’s on its body, too.”
Their language had a strange accent but he understood it well enough. They were no different than Epashti’s people. His belly turned over; they would kill him, he would never find the Itzen, he would die without seeing his city.
But then he saw they wore armor, close-fitting leather breastplates over their chests. They carried long spears with tips that looked like earth’s blood, which he knew to be sharp as his own knife. These weren’t hunters, these were soldiers, and he said, with a little hope, “Who are you?”
The man before him reached out and banged him with the haft of his spear. “Don’t try to run! I’ll kill you!”
“No—” Another pushed up eagerly. “Temuscah, take him to the Great House. You know how they like odd creatures, they’ll give us anything we want. We can go home!”
Corban jerked his head up, his excitement rising even through his exhaustion. “Yes, take me to the Great House!”
Temuscah glowered at him. “Be quiet, thing.” He shoved the other man. “I’ll decide who—”
Very close, suddenly, there was a rolling patter of sound, like thunder, like thunder underground, and all the leather men stiffened and twitched around toward it. Temuscah reached out and gripped Corban by the arm. “I’ll take him. You hear that, we have to go back, they’re getting ready to march. Come on! All of you, move! You, come with me.” With his men all rushing along with them, he dragged Corban along after him, on down the hill through the rising sun, toward the steady pounding of the drums.
Epashti lifted her head, wakened by a soft trembling in the earth she lay on, a muttering against her ear. She sat up. The dawn was just breaking. Corban was gone. Ahanton lay curled beside her on the red and blue cloak, still asleep. Epashti got carefully up and went to the spring and washed her hands and face in the water. The soft, soft sound went on, but far away, and maybe thunder.
The water was sweet and cool, and she felt the goodness here, and sat a moment asking whatever being was here to help her, to tell her what to do.
The warmth of the rising sun filtered in through the trees. She went back to where they had slept and gathered up her pack, thinking what she might find to eat. Then, with a rush, the thrumming in the distance was suddenly louder.
She got to her feet. The sound was even, pounding, deepthroated, not thunder, not an animal. More like the pounding the men made on logs when they danced.
The hair on the back of her neck prickled up. She thought, They are not dancing. They are hunting.
She went quickly back to Ahanton, who had sat up, wiping her long hair back from her eyes, looking around. She reached down and wrapped the ends of the red and blue cloak around her, and tipped her face up toward Epashti’s. “What should we do?” She reached out and took Epashti’s hands and pulled herself onto her feet, the cloak around her. “Where is Corban?” She clung to Epashti’s hands. “What’s that noise?�
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Epashti gripped her hands. The sound was steadily closer, and it seemed to come from all around her, out of the trees, from the ground itself. Her skin fluttered. Her heart banged along with the thunder. She said, “We have to wait for Corban.” She clapped her hands over her ears, trying to keep out the oncoming sound.
“No,” Ahanton cried. Her eyes were huge and dark, her cheeks sunken, her hair wild. “Run—this way—” Jerking free of Epashti, she ran away into the woods.
“Ahanton!” Epashti slung the pack over her shoulder and rushed after her, following the bright patch of color through the deep green of the forest, calling after her. The drums were coming louder and louder, everywhere but in front of her, a wild pounding in her ears, and suddenly her mind emptied. A fire of panic filled her. Dropping her pack, she fled away down a beaten little path, crossed a stream, followed the path uphill.
Everything else in the forest was running too. A big deer lunged and crashed through the underbrush off on her right, birds flashed and fluttered up through the branches. A raccoon went right down the path ahead of her for a while. She stopped, panting for breath, her sides knifed with pain, and something small pattered over her toes. In her belly the baby rolled furiously, as if it ran with her, as if it still ran. She put her hand over it; the drums were so loud, surely the tiny thing heard the drums also. She blundered on, her arms ahead of her fending off the swinging branches. Then suddenly she was among other people.
She stopped, dazed, at the sight of faces watching her, strangers, women with babies, two or three men, all standing in a clearing. She let out a cry of relief, and put her hands out. No one moved to greet her. Even the children were silent, staring at her, as if she brought news of death. Then, behind them, she saw the men standing around them, and their spears.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 13