He held out something, a big lump; Ahanton could not see what it was at first.
Miska said, “What did you call them?” He took the lump, which, she saw now, was a sack of something. “Is this more of that shiny stuff?” He spilled some of the sack’s contents onto his hand.
“No, it’s—”
“These look like seeds!” Miska’s voice rose in an irritated whine. “What do you bring these to me for? Do you take me for a woman?” He flung the sack off across the lodge, spraying a trail of bits through the air.
Corban reared back, his eyes blazing. “You idiot—that could be the saving of your people, maybe, if you do it right—not killing everybody and these stupid bead strings.” He flailed one hand up at the nearest dangling string. He thrust his face at Miska; Ahanton remembered what they had called him, Animal-Head, shaggy and fierce, and he was shouting at Miska, fierce.
Miska sneered at him, stiff at the challenge. “Don’t tell me what to do, rodent. If she’s gone, Corban, remember, I don’t have to put up with you anymore!”
Corban took a step toward Miska, face first, the words like stones from his sling. “That’s all you want, though, isn’t it? You don’t really want to take care of your people, you just want to fight, and kill, and win.”
Miska stood nose to nose with him, talking over him. “I’ll fight you, and kill you, if you don’t remember you are in my village!”
“You’ll never stop, will you?” Corban shouted on. “There’s still Tisconum, isn’t there? Take him, there will be someone else. You’ll go on fighting until there’s nobody left, you’ll eat the whole world up.”
Half of what he said was in a mix of strange words, that only Ahanton and Epashti understood, and even as he yelled, Miska was roaring at him, their voices colliding: “That’s the end, Corban—”
Corban fell still, and the sachem’s voice rang out. “You’re a rodent, you’re a worm, you aren’t a Wolf, you don’t belong here. I’m giving you until sundown, for her sake, to get out of my village. After that, we will kill you where we find you.”
Corban straightened, his head back, his face flushed with anger, and his fists clenched. Then he turned, and saw Ahanton watching; she saw him stiffen with surprise, and he swung back to her father.
“For her sake, I won’t say anything more. And I’ll go, for all their sakes. Only: you will rot, Miska, if you touch my family.”
He turned and went. Miska watched him go, and then swung toward Ahanton, his face blank, rigid. He stared at her, and she stared back, for a long moment, and then he wheeled around. He plunged away, out of the lodge, going another way he had, a secret door in the back wall, and even before he was gone he was shouting to the other Wolves. Ahanton got up, her legs shaking. He never shouted like that. Even in the war he had not shouted.
The little leather pouch lay on the floor, and the bits from it were strewn around the whole lodge. The bits were square, dark chunks, and when she put one in her mouth, the taste flooded her memory, the river, the delicious golden cakes, and the drums, and the fear. She gathered them up, as many as she could find, and put them into the pouch.
Then she went out of her father’s lodge, and through the village to Corban’s little hut.
He was there with Epashti, who was crying. Corban, holding her in his arms, looked near to crying. He said, over and over, “I’ll come back. Somehow.”
“No,” Ahanton said. She went into the back of the lodge, and gathered his red and blue cloak up, and took it to him. “Go. And never come back.”
They both gaped at her, surprised. Corban said, “I thought you loved me now.”
“Go,” she said. “Go.” And thrust the cloak at him.
Epashti began to cry louder. “Go,” she said. “Before they kill you. Before they kill you in front of us.”
He gave her one more look, and went around the lodge getting his things. Epashti sat with her hands twisting together, her body huge with the baby, crying. Ahanton went into the back of the lodge and sat down; her heart hammered in her chest. She could not speak. The little sack was in her hands and quietly she put it away against the wall of the lodge, to think about later. When he left, she could not bear to watch. She kept her eyes down, hearing his footsteps go, hearing Epashti sob and wail. Her chest hurt. Her mouth opened, a hollow with nothing in it, only the empty wanting to call him back.
She could not call him back. He had to go. She knew he had to go. Now she had dreamt, three times running, the same dream. She saw the village, and at the center of the village she saw the stake, and there was a man bound to the stake, and the man was Corban.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O
Corban crossed the Wolf river and went east, through the low wooded hills, already winter-blackened, the nights still and cold and starry. He followed the next river southward, scrambling over the steep slopes of its gorge, fishing in the cold pools, and crossed where the rush of water spread out onto a boggy little plain among the hills, and kept on going east.
The death of the year lay on him like his own death, the light shrinking away, the sun’s course lower and lower in the sky, and some mornings he lay shivering in his cloak and thought not to get up and go on. He had lost everything, again, and he saw no hope he would live through the winter; the thought of Epashti gnawed at him like a rat. He had abandoned her again, pregnant and with winter coming. Always in the back of his mind he saw Ahanton casting him out, her wide gray eyes remote, ruthless, Mav’s eyes, telling him, finally, even her: Go.
Mav was gone, that was the root of it, she who had bound him to the world.
He got up, always, and plodded away toward the sunrise. One afternoon as he was groping along a creekside looking for something to eat, the air darkened, as if the meadows all around had suddenly slipped into twilight, and snow began to fall. There was no wind; white as stars, the flakes fell silently through the deep blue air, clustering together into crystalline bundles, vanishing into the dark ground. He stood like stone, watching, engulfed in this beauty, and a sense of peace came over him.
But he slept that night without eating, and the next day, starved, he ate carrion and was sick for a while. He trudged on, heading steadily east, his mind streaming with bad thoughts; he thought over and over of his father, who had cursed him to this aloneness.
He thought of the old man as he had last seen him, a stinking corpse, who had stayed where he was and died.
The shapes of land he knew began to appear—the slope of the hill there, a boulder. At last he walked out onto the shore of the great bay, where he had first come into this country.
He stood looking out at the islands strewn over the expanse of dark water. The sea lay just beyond and the fierce wind was raking the trees and lashing the bay to whitecaps. The first incoming drops of rain stung his cheeks. Along the shore the tall dry reeds were bending and singing, little waves lashing up through them onto the mud. The sun was going down. All around the bay, huge flocks of geese were settling down into the marshes on the shore and on the islands. Their hoarse croaking made a constant uproar, rising and falling, windblown, sounding on all sides, and the flocks came down in such masses they seemed like great dark banners of smoke across the fading sky. He went west along the shore until he could see his island, the biggest of them all, which here came so close to the shore that he and the boys had often made a game of trying to throw rocks across it.
The boys. Somewhere on the other side of the world, his boys lived their unknowable lives.
The tide was in. Dark was falling. He went to find something to eat, and a place to shelter for the night. In the morning, at slack tide, he swam across to his old home.
He waded up onto the shore where he had lived for fifteen years. The shape of the shore was different, beaten around in the winter storms, part of the bank crumpled down, a broad arm of rocks and driftwood and weeds raked out across the edge of the water. Drifted stumps lay like wooden sea monsters basking on the low strip of sand at the island�
��s foot. On the slope above, the grass and brambles grew up high as his waist. He found the wall, which he thought Euan must have built, all fallen down now, stone from stone. The walls of the old house had worn down almost to ground level, and the thatch roof was gone entirely, blown down, rotted, carried off by birds.
He could still see it all, the roots of the walls where he had dug them down into the earth, and the hollows of the rooms, even, ghostly, the shape of his bed.
Above the house, on the hill, he found Benna’s grave.
He was wet from the swim and cold, and he began to shiver and he pulled the red and blue cloak around himself, even over his head; he sat down on the ground and put his face in his hands. He thought over and over of Benna and his children and their, life here, hard but good, too hard and too good to last.
He sat there the day and the next night, going away only to piss or find something to eat, and he sat there the day and night after that, and the day following, and on the third night, as he sat there, Benna rose up out of her grave and stood before him.
He called her name, glad. He put his hands out to her; she was so truly there, her pale heart-shaped face beneath the cap of black hair, the direct intensity of her look, as if she captured everything she saw. But when he tried to touch her, his hands went right through her.
She said, “Corban, why have you called me up here, where it’s so cold and dark? I’m happy where I am, and I can’t do anything for you.”
He tried again to touch her, unable to stop himself, and felt only the cold air. He sat back, holding her with his gaze. “Benna, I’ve failed again. I have nothing here. The Wolves have driven me out. I’m alone, I don’t want to be alone anymore. There must be somewhere I belong, and I know I belong with you, Benna. Take me with you.”
She smiled, and his heart cracked at the beauty of this smile and every other she had given him, layer on layer of memory all wakened by her smile. She said, “Corban, you’re alive. You have more to do here.”
“Benna, please.”
Her eyes gleamed suddenly with tears, the smile fixed. Her gaze roamed over his face, and her hands rose, as if she wanted to touch him too. Then, firmly, with a little shake of her head, she drew back. “Go away, Corban,” she said. She turned back toward the grave.
“Ah, you can’t tell me this,” he cried. “Where did I call you from? Where are you going?”
She looked over her shoulder at him. She had not changed, he realized. She was no older than when he had seen her last. He touched his beard, where the black was grizzling.
She said, “I am here, before, when it was good, before Euan came.”
“I want to go there too, Benna,” he said, but his hand curled in his beard, he felt all the scars he had gained since she had died, and he groaned, the living years between them carrying him away like the current of a river.
“Corban,” she said, and smiled at him. “You’re already there.” She slipped away into the grave again and was gone.
He groaned, sank down on his knees, hollowed out like an acorn shell. If he died, would he join her? He thought he would just go on, an old old man, knocking on the earth, trying to find the way in.
The night went on. She did not come back. He remembered what she had said, that he had more to do. That meant he was not going to die yet. He thought of Mav, who was likely here, somewhere, who had probably not gone after all. Passed beyond his sight. But here.
So, when the dawn came, he got up, and swam back to the mainland, and he went off to find Tisconum. He had promised Tisconum something, long ago, and now he thought it was time to deliver.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E
The women were making a long strip of the lowland on the far side of the river ready for new gardens. To begin, the year before, they had cut away the bark from the trees. Now the trees were all dead, although still standing in the ground, and with the winter on them the boys were breaking them up for firewood.
Finn was one of them. Since his mother left at the beginning of the summer, he had done as he wished, his aunt Sheanoy bothering very little about him, and his uncles soon gone also. Now his mother had come back, but she was sick, and nobody kept after him about anything. With his brother Kalu and the rest of the younger boys from the village he was scrambling up and down the dead trees, breaking off branches, and looking also for grubs, bugs, worms, moss, anything he could put in his mouth. He was starving all the time now, and anything he found by himself he did not have to share with anybody.
He followed his brother Kalu up a dead tree the color of bone, climbing up above the snowy meadow. The trunk of the tree was smooth and gleaming. The sky blazed blue. He clung with both hands, panting, looking out over the snow, all tracked around with the boys’ running, toward the river and the village on the other side. A pang went through him; he should help his mother.
A snowball smacked and burst against the tree trunk in front of him. Kalu, above him, gave a howl of indignation; the other boys were ringing the tree, pelting Finn and Kalu with snow.
“Come on!” Kalu dropped by him, swinging nimbly from branch to branch, the dry sticks cracking under his weight. Finn followed, almost missed the branch below, slipped and hung by both arms from the one below that, helpless in a hail of snowballs. Just below him, in the crotch of the tree, Kalu was throwing bits of wood down at the other boys, screaming- insults and dodging snow. Finn flailed out with both legs, trying to get back up onto the branch, and it cracked and split, the lower half still attached to the trunk, so the branch swung down vertical.
With a yell, Finn slid down the branch into the snow. The other boys swung around and began pounding him at close range. He curled his arms over his head; something struck him on the ear hard enough to make him dizzy for an instant.
Then other boys were reeling back, and he was in the open again. From the edge of the trees a small girl was rushing down at them, screaming. She threw snowballs as she ran, but like all girls she couldn’t throw; half of them she didn’t even pack right, so they fell apart in the air.
Nonetheless the other boys shrank back, not from the snowballs. They turned, elaborately unconcerned, and jogged off. Ahanton trotted up to Finn, panting. Her face glowed from her rush through the cold air.
Kalu jumped down out of the tree and stood next to them. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get all this wood before they come back.” He flung a hard look down the meadow, toward the riverbank, where the other boys were loitering.
Ahanton said, “I have something else,” and ran back up toward the trees. She ran in long-legged leaps, like a deer, her arms flying.
Kalu followed her with his eyes. Turning to Finn, he said, “Letting a girl save you, now.”
Finn started picking up dead wood, glad Ahanton had come. The wood was shiny and smooth, good to touch. “She’s not really just a girl.” He carried a load of broken branches to the drag they had made. Ahanton was coming back, carrying a hemp bag over her shoulder.
“We should show you how to throw sometime,” Kalu said. “You throw like a girl.”
Ahanton hardly glanced at him. She set down her bag and began to pick up wood.
“What have you got?” Kalu asked. Ahanton was better than any of them at finding food.
“Nuts,” she said, and glared at him. “Stay away from them, Kalu, they’re for my mother.”
“She’s not your mother,” Finn and Kalu said, together, since she truly was theirs. Ahanton ignored them. When they had loaded the drag high with wood, she hoisted her bag again, and walked with them back to the river. Finn kept glancing at her bag, so heavy it took her whole strength to carry it: the thought of the nuts made his mouth water.
Kalu said, “If you take them back to the lodge, you’ll have to give them to everybody.”
She said, “That’s why I got so many, so my mother would have enough.”
Finn saw Kalu’s face work; the little boy knew his brother wanted to snatch away the nuts, but like them all, he wa
s afraid of Ahanton. The other boys came silently up and helped them get the wood onto the float to carry it across the river.
On the far shore, the other boys drifted away again, leaving Finn, Kalu and Ahanton to unload the wood. Kalu’s head turned, watching them go; Finn saw he waited until they were out of earshot before he turned to Ahanton.
“We’ll go up to the lodge with you.”
“Whatever you want,” she said, and the boys followed.
“I’ll have to send Raki to get more wood,” Sheanoy said. She twisted, looking up the dim corridor of the lodge. Eonta was taking her afternoon nap, in the head compartment, and everybody else had left or shut their own doors, to give her quiet. “Where is that boy?”
“Shhh,” Epashti said. She leaned against the wall of the compartment behind her, exhausted.
When Corban left, Epashti had moved back into Eonta’s lodge, taking over her mother’s old sleeping compartment and the one across the aisle from it and the hearth in between. That had been in the fall, when there was still food, and she had been strong and able. Now she sat by the hearth, barely able to hold her head up, and watched her sister Sheanoy feed chips of wood into the coals. The little boy Aengus, just starting to walk, sat by Sheanoy playing with sticks; Sheanoy, who had taken care of him while Epashti was gone, liked him much, and he hardly knew his mother anymore. Epashti had heard her sister call him by another name, too, a Wolf name.
Ehia came in, Epashti’s student, with one of her sisters from Anapatha’s lodge. With a murmur of welcome the two girls settled in by Epashti and Sheanoy, and offered a few scrapings of dried meat.
“It’s not much,” Ehia said, her gaze on Epashti. Down the corridor a door opened, and someone looked out, and then shut the door again: not enough to come out for.
“Everything helps,” Sheanoy said. She took the meat and divided it, so that each of them got the same tiny sliver: the four women and Aenghus, with a bit for Eonta, too.
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