Ekkatsay hung his war club on his shoulder, stretching his hand, working the fingers. They had struck the unwary longnoses like a fall of boulders, he and Miska, and shattered them to nothing. For a moment he longed for another enemy to kill.
He had seen some of them go off, carrying a hut on their backs, but the others had fought to the death. There were no prisoners then to make the trip home more of a problem than it had to be. He laughed again, his blood cooling, remembering how he had smashed down one of the longnoses—a huge, shining man; fighting empty-handed, he had still knocked other Bears down, until Ekkatsay himself laid into him with his club, and toppled him.
The rain was suddenly slacking off. The clouds broke apart and a burst of brilliant sunlight flooded the camp. Their camp, now. Ekkatsay began looking around for something to eat—all these people, he hoped, had something to eat that had not burned. Then Miska was coming toward him, frowning.
Ekkatsay straightened to meet him. He said, “Some Bears died. And I have wounded men.”
Miska nodded. “Some Wolves, also.” He was stroking his hand down his ribs, his arm, idly fingering his body, as if looking for hurts. Ekkatsay saw no hurt on him; he remembered the stories and thought they were true, he could not be wounded. Miska was looking away down the plain.
“Where did they all go?” Ekkatsay said. He wanted Miska to remember how Ekkatsay had run across the plain, roaring, and struck his enemies, and killed them. He wanted Miska to admire him.
Miska shrugged. He seemed uninterested, his face a little sunken, as if he went inside himself. His eyes poked away down the plain again. Indifferent, he said, “They’re gone now. We did what I came here to do. Now we have to get home.” He looked steadily away down the plain, over the camp.
Ekkatsay turned to look where he was looking. Some people were walking up the plain toward them. One, he saw at once, was the strange child, Miska’s child, leaping and running, bright faced. After her came a woman, and a man with a great shaggy head, like a bison.
The Bear sachem started up with amazement; he turned toward Miska, now steadily watching these people approach, and said, “This is your shaman.” So all the stories were true, he thought.
Miska’s lips twisted. “He is nothing of mine,” he said, his voice low, and harsh. His hand stroked slowly down his side, feeling for wounds. Ekkatsay stepped away, uneasy, wondering why the air felt cold here. He glanced over his shoulder at the animal-headed man and went back toward the camp, back into the company of his own.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E
Miska had lost, and he knew it. Nobody else knew it; they all believed him greater even than he had been before, now that he had won such a triumph over the Sun chief and gotten the Wolves their revenge. That only made it worse. All the way back from the Big River country, whenever they came on other people, those people had come offering belts of honor and loyalty, because he had beaten the longnoses. Whenever he came to a village the people rushed out to meet him and offered him everything they had, bowing and spreading leaves and branches on the ground before him, that he should not tread even the same dirt as other men. So he had come home to glory.
But he had lost his joy. He walked in the forest, and it was only the forest, empty and ordinary; the feeling was gone that he might at any moment see her, that she might come to him with her smile and her eyes and hands and lips, and warm him to a sunlight heat, and lead him into sacred places. She was gone, gone forever, she had left him behind. She had never loved him.
She had left Corban behind, too.
He could not have beaten the Sun chief without Corban. Nobody knew what Corban had actually done but everybody knew without it the Wolves would never have broken through the spells that protected their enemies. The other men had stopped hating him; all the long walk back home, when he was around, they had shown him an open respect. Miska had even once heard Hasei call him Corban-ka, which had made the sachem laugh.
Corban laughed also. They had looked at each other, and for a moment between them there had been only the joke.
But she had loved Corban, not him. In his heart, like a worm in a nut, the suspicion gnawed that for Corban, she was still here.
Corban almost never killed a deer, but he had been lucky this time, getting close enough to a young doe to hammer her behind the eye with a slung stone. He killed her almost half a day’s walk from the village, and the deer far outweighed him. He built a drag out of poles, and began to haul the carcass along, not getting very far, even out, in the open, with the dense woods between him and the river home. He began to think of cutting the deer and carrying home only the best, and coming back later for whatever the wild things left him.
Then ahead of him, where the trees came down close to the yellow grass, two men appeared. He knew they were Wolves by their shaggy hair, but they were too far for him to make out which. They stood watching him for a while, and at last one of them went off, but the other trotted toward him across the dry grass.
It was Hasei, Miska’s second hand. Corban relaxed, watching him jog up, a solid, square-faced man with lively eyes.
Hasei said, “I’ll help you. We should carry it between us,” and they slung the deer onto the drag poles and lifted the poles on their shoulders, the way the Itzen had carried their palanquins. Corban thought about this a while, going along. Carrying the deer was certainly much easier.
They went down through the thick woods along the river, where the winter already had laid its hands on everything, the leaves turning and falling, the deep thickets frostbitten back to masses of tangled rotten stalks, many of the creatures gone to bed. Twice floods of birds rushed by overhead, casting long flickering shadows over the sun; their hoarse calls trailed after them like ghosts.
The two men crossed the river at the broad ford, and on the far bank, without talking about it, they stopped. Hanging the deer between the forked branches of two little trees they sat down in the late sun to rest. Hasei took a pipe from his belt pouch; while he packed it with fragrant leaf, he glanced weightily at Corban. Corban took out his tinderbox. When the pipe was ready he lit it and they smoked in silence for a while. The tinderbox had gotten bent somehow and Corban used his thumb to push the metal sides straight again.
“Thank you,” he said, tying the tinderbox back into the corner of his cloak. “I could never have brought all this meat back by myself.”
“It’s a good thing for everybody,” Hasei said. “And Epashti, you know, we have the same mother.”
Corban glanced sharply at him. “I didn’t know that.” He realized he should know this, but he had never lived much among the men. Certainly Hasei looked nothing like Epashti.
Hasei leaned comfortably against the rock behind them, looking up into the high tops of the trees along the riverbank. They smoked a little more, saying nothing. Corban sat enjoying the warmth of the sun, the sweet fragrances of the air around him. He noticed how Hasei’s eyes moved, looking up at the trees, and that his lips moved also.
Corban said, “What are you thinking about?”
Hasei’s gaze jerked toward him, wide-eyed, and he frowned; Corban saw he was unsure about talking, and wondered if he should have kept his own mouth shut. But the Wolf gave him a long look, and then gestured up toward the tops of the trees.
“See how they move in the wind?”
Corban looked up; the young trees were spindling and naked, and the wind swayed their tops like fish baskets in the air.
Hasei said, “That’s like seeing the wind blow. You can’t see the wind, ever, except like that. Like seeing the music from the drums, you only do that when people dance. It’s like music, the wind. Except it never ends, and it’s never the same.”
Corban blinked at him, as startled as if Hasei had just peeled his skull back and shown Corban the inside of his head. Then the Wolf said, “When you came here, you couldn’t talk. Don’t the Sky people talk?”
Corban laughed. This was easier than dealing with the inside of Hasei’
s head. He said, “I’m not from the sky. I come from another place on the Turtle’s back. And I could talk, but not in Wolf words.”
Now it was Hasei who blinked at him, who saw, maybe, into Corban’s head. He lowered his gaze to the pipe, and packed it again, and they lit it again and smoked.
Hasei said, “You mean, you have different words for things than we do.”
Corban nodded. He had gone back to thinking about Hasei ‘s wind music.
“Where do the words come from, then?” Hasei said. “If not from the things they mean.”
Corban turned his head and stared at him. Finally, he said, “That’s an interesting question. I never thought about it before, and I don’t know.”
Hasei smiled at him. “I don’t know anything. It’s safer that way.”
Corban laughed, and Hasei laughed also. The Wolf reached out and palmed Corban’s shoulder, brotherly. He busied himself over the pipe. Corban leaned back against the rock, content.
Old Eonta groaned in long breathy exhalations, as if Epashti’s hands pushed the air out of her. Under Epashti’s fingers the old woman’s muscles felt stiff and knotted, and her joints were swollen, her knuckles like nuts beneath the skin, her elbows shapeless knobs. Epashti rubbed up and down her grandmother’s back, making her sing.
“Oooowwwaaaaa,” Eonta moaned. “Ah, Ehia does not have your hands, my child. Oooooooow.”
Epashti was vaguely glad that while she was gone her apprentice had not pleased people very much. The girl knew the most important herbs but she had no touch, as her grandmother said. “I will teach her.” There was no way to teach someone’s hands.
They were in Eonta’s compartment at the end of the longhouse, with the door open; no one else was around. The cold weather was coming but the lodge was snug, smelling warmly of past meals, of new hides and curing leaves, of fires kept alive for generations. Epashti, working with her fingers at her grandmother’s knotted shoulder muscles, felt again how good this was, that she was here now, that she would be here the next day, no longer walking and walking, that she would never leave again.
Eonta said, “It wasn’t easy while you were gone, you know. No spring fruit pickings. Especially with the men all away. I sighed for you often. Are you done? What a pity.”
“I’ll come tomorrow,” Epashti said, smiling
She helped the old woman roll over and sit up, her wispy hair tousled around her, and found a comb. Eonta’s body hung around her in wrinkled sacks. Her skin looked thin and shiny. She turned sideways so that Epashti could comb her hair.
“Where did you go, anyway? Was it so important?”
“It was far away,” Epashti said. It felt like a dream to her now. “The men all seemed very excited.”
“You know that the Forest Woman has gone.”
Epashti lowered her hands. “Really? How do you know?”
“They found something. I’ve heard, anyway, they found her body.”
“How could that be?”
“Exactly,” said Eonta. “It wasn’t a real body, just a shape. Like a mask, but for her whole self. It had an outside but no inside, it was smooth inside, like a clay pot. So they say. I never saw it.” She nodded gravely, her eyes sparkling. “She left it for us to find. To let us know she was gone.”
Epashti wondered if Corban was aware of this. She said, “What does that mean?”
Eonta shrugged. “I don’t know. Lasicka is worse, you should go see him. Sheanoy thinks she might have a baby in the summer.” She turned her look pointedly away from Epashti, up into the top of the lodge, her lips pursed.
Epashti said, “I will keep this baby.”
“You say so now. But when the time comes you will do what must be done.”
“I did not walk halfway across the world and back again that I could leave a child out for the ants.”
Eonta faced her. “You’re a woman, and this is what happens. When a baby is born, it has only a little heart. But the heart grows and grows. In a man, it stops getting bigger, when he has his hair bound. But a woman’s heart keeps growing, because of all the pain she must bear.”
Epashti met her stare. “Then I shall bear the pain, and the child not.”
Eonta’s gray eyebrows folded down; she pursed her lips, and shook her head. “Such a sweet, gentle girl you were, when you went away.” She touched Epashti’s cheek. “I am glad you’re back, but someone I don’t know has come back in you, I think.”
“One who loves you,” Epashti said, and the old woman’s face softened, surprised into tenderness.
“I love you too, girl. Go, now, you have many charges.”
“I’ll come tomorrow,” Epashti said.
“When you do,” her grandmother said, “bring me some more of the elderberry tea.”
Epashti went around the village, seeing to everyone who needed her. When she reached her own little lodge again, Corban was there, sitting in the warmth of the doorway, turning something over in his hand. There was no sign of Ahanton, who had taken to staying in Miska’s lodge. Epashti sat down next to Corban, her great belly resting on her thighs.
He put his hand out, to touch her belly, and she took his wrist and pushed his touch away; from the beginning she had kept him from the baby. She thought he understood why; he gave her a long look, but kept his hands away.
She said, “What is that?”
He held out the little sack he was holding. “I found this. Back—after the Itzen ran away.”
He kept things from her, too, she thought; he had had this all that long way back, and never showed it to her before. She took the sack and opened it, and spilled out a few grains of the stuff onto her palm. They looked like teeth, yellow and spotty. When she sniffed them, her mouth watered.
“Maz,” she said, excited.
He laid his hand against hers, tipped her palm so that the seeds rolled down, and caught them in the Itzen pouch. He said, “Maz. What should I do with it?”
“Give it to me,” she said. “I will plant it.”
“But—” His fist closed over the pouch. He faced her, intense. “It’s not all good, the maz. Look what it brought to the Kisko, and those other people.”
She sat back; she glanced over her shoulder at the village, seeing her sister Sheanoy, with a crowd of children down by the oak, and several men coming in through the gate, carrying strings of fish. They had been home only a few days and the village still made her heart glad just to see it. She could not think the maz would change it. She said, “Go speak to Mother Eonta.”
He shrugged that off, putting the pouch away inside his shirt. “I’ll ask Miska what he thinks about it.”
She put her lips together, annoyed; she wondered why he asked her to talk if he would not hear what she said. She said, “Have you seen your sister, since we have been back?”
His shoulders hunched over; he lowered his eyes. He put his empty hands together, cupped, like a bowl. “She’s gone,” he said, and spread his hands apart.
“What do you mean?” She looked around the lodge, and saw he had brought meat, a thick roll of a deer’s backstrap lying on her chopping plank, and she knelt down to get it ready to cook.
He said, “What else can I say? She’s gone. I’m hungry. I’ll light the fire.”
Ahanton shuddered awake, gasping, coated in sweat. She sat upright, the cold dream clinging to her. For an instant, staring around her in the dim light, she did not know where she was. Then her gaze came to Miska, sitting beside her; she jumped, and gave him such a look of terror that he recoiled, his face falling open.
“Ahanton.” He put out his hands to her. “What is it?”
She took hold of his hands, but she turned her face away; she dared not tell him, so she said, “I saw you take Tisconum.” She had said this before; he loved to hear it.
“Ah,” he said, perhaps not believing her.
He gathered her close to him, as he always did after a dream, and held her in the circle of his arm. Leaning her head against his chest, she co
uld hear the drum-thump in there, the lifebeat. She fought off the last of the dream, stuffing it down into a hole in her mind.
“Was there anything else?” he said. “You looked at me so strangely.”
“No,” she said. “Only that.”
She leaned against him, his arm around her, her father, who held up the world. She was falling asleep again, she willed herself not to dream, at least, not that dream. Miska laid her down again on her bed, and pulled the blanket over her, and she went to sleep.
When she woke, Corban was there.
At first, stiff with fear, she thought it was another part of the dream. She could not move. She lay on her side, facing the long empty lodge with its streamers of belts, its cold hearth, the light pale as birch through the bark walls. Her father and Corban stood face to face by the hearth. Corban had something in his hand, and they were talking about her mother.
Miska said, “Have you seen her? Since we came back from the Big River country?”
Corban said, “No. She’s gone, Miska.” He tried to sound indifferent but Ahanton could hear the sadness in his voice. Her mind settled; this was not a dream.
Miska half-turned away from him, his face shadowed, his hands crooked in the air. “You mean—” He broke off.
“Either she’s gone,” Corban said, “or she’s somewhere we can’t know her.”
Miska wheeled back, sharp-edged again, cold. “So she is here, then. You have seen her.”
Corban grunted at him. “What did I just say to you? She’s gone!”
“You even said she might be here, somewhere.” Miska stalked away from him. “There’s been talk. Rumors. I can’t get it straight. While we were gone, the women had a free run, you know how they make stories. Maybe she’s gone, maybe she isn’t. You said you had something to give me?”
Corban stared at him a moment, his eyes gleaming above the tangled mass of his beard. Finally he said, “Yes. Back, where we fought the Itzen, I found this. It belonged to the chief of them.”
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