“Make your lodges in the Bear way,” Miska said.
Another of the young men said, “We have no women.”
Miska smiled. He drew hard on the pipe and sent it around again, trailing smoke, and they all smoked. Then he said, “You’ll have it hard here, then. If you do not get on with the women who live inside my wall, then you will not stay in the village, no matter what I say.”
Ako glanced at the young Bear who had spoken, and faced Miska again. “We will honor the Wolf women above all others, if they will accept us. Otherwise we can go back to our old village for wives. But we will follow you, in your war band.”
Miska said, “I will lead you. I remember, last summer, how you fought against Tisconum and then in the long raid. The long raid, that took me from Tisconum for the while, but I have not forgotten him. What do you know about him?”
Ako sat back, his hands on his knees. “He’s finished. You broke him in the fight in the burnt tree pass. His people have left him, gone down to the Turtle villages near the salt.”
Miska grunted. “Strong villages.” No belts from the waterland villages hung in his lodge. If Tisconum had lost his sway over them, then beating him meant less.
Ako’s eyes gleamed. “They have much wealth there. And they don’t fight.”
Miska took the pipe and laid it aside. In his mind, to think about later, he laid aside also the young man’s ambition. He said, “Where is Tisconum now?” He faced Ako, his expression bland, knowing an enemy when he saw one.
“Up the long valley, there, east of here, by the Shad River. His band is—” Ako made a shrinking motion with his hands. “Only bad men nobody else will have and desperate people follow him.”
Behind him, one of his friends spoke. “Tisconum has a great shaman with him, though, I have heard.”
Miska slid his gaze over Ako’s shoulder, at the man behind him. “Who?”
“I don’t know anything, save he has fire in his fingertips.”
Miska could not help but smile. “Aaah.” He sat back, gathering himself. “Where is he?”
“They are wintering at the Froggy Bend of the Shad River.”
“Aaah,” said Miska.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F O U R
From this hill, the waterland spread away toward the south, gilded under the late spring sun, the broad fiat bay spangled with islands heavy with trees. On the water the slanting sunlight picked out the shimmering of currents. Smokes rose on the distant shore, trailing upward in the still afternoon. Corban could see only the shoulder of his island from here, and nothing of his old home. He looked as long as he could into the south, remembering how he had fished these waters, taught his boys to sail, come home every evening to his wife, a happy man.
Beside him, Tisconum groaned, caught in the same haze of memory. “I was chief all over this place once, remember?” Tall and gaunt, the Turtle sachem leaned on his stick and pointed toward the gleaming water. “Everywhere, I went in first, I spoke first, everywhere.”
Corban said, “What matters is now. What we do now.”
Tisconum said, between his teeth, “I have nothing now, because of Miska. I will not forget that. I told you, I want only to see him dead on the ground.” His eyes glittered, he looked at Corban over his shoulder, his gaze slanted.
“He’ll come here,” Corban said. “It may take him some while but he’ll come.”
Tisconum turned straight again, looking toward the bay. Presently, he said, “There are whales.”
Corban looked where he was pointing, and saw, in the open water past the first island, a tall divided spray like a flower hanging in the air. The warm air touched his face, smelling of the salt. In the channel between the shore and the island a fish suddenly jumped—a splash, a widening ripple. The marsh along this shore clamored with birds nesting in the reeds, and birds by the thousands swam and fed in the shallows.
Mav had loved this country; Benna had refused to let it go. Like a knot, he thought, thinking of the twined figures of his birthplace, the bay was a knot of water and land, an endless curve. He remembered the terror of the winter, when the wind howled and the snow swept down over everything, and how the hills blazed in the autumn when the trees let go their leaves; he thought the Turtle sachem was right, and this was the center of it all, where life welled up into the world.
Tisconum said, “They hate me here. I hear the stories they tell of me in the lodges.”
“They’ll hate Miska worse, when he comes at them.” Corban nudged him; it unnerved him how Tisconum gnawed on himself like a dog on a bone. “Let’s go, Ofra and those won’t work long if we aren’t there.”
Tisconum hung still a moment, wound around his staff, staring at the bay. The foul mood twisted his face. “I’ll see him dead on the ground,” he said.
Corban started away down the trail. He had come to Tisconum too late. The last battle had left him a dry husk, and the people he had with him were worthless. Still, he had to start somewhere. Defying Miska satisfied him Thinking of defying Miska, which so far had not come to any action.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw Tisconum coming after him, and stopped to let the sachem catch up. Tisconum had not wanted to come back here, a place he considered doomed; Corban had talked him into it only for a hunting trip. The Turtle sachem was bent on recapturing control of a pass in the northwest, which he had lost to Miska the summer before. This meant staying north on the Shad River all spring. He would go back as soon as Corban let him.
He trudged up past Corban now, each foot deliberate. “Have you done that girl yet?” Leaning on the stick, he paced on by Corban as if stopping would mean staying there forever.
Corban followed him. “I have a wife. Two wives.”
“Everybody else has had her. You wouldn’t be the first. Or the only.”
Corban said nothing. The girl’s attentions were a steady embarrassment. He imagined suddenly that Tisconum ahead of him walked under the great heavy shell of his grievance. They went through a forest bursting with the brilliant green of new spring leaves and thunderously loud with birds. A dragonfly buzzed past his head. Lumpy black deer shit littered the trail. He kept a watch out for sign of gobbler-birds, which he liked to hunt. Beyond a screen of thin saplings a big moss-coated maple tree reared up its massy leaves; deep new slashes marked its trunk, high over Corban’s head, four furrows ripping down into raw new wood.
“There’s a lot of game here,” he said. They could camp in this area for the whole summer: he had seen no recent trace of other people. From his years here, he knew the smokes across the bay were other Turtle villages, whose ranges extended on down the coast. He followed Tisconum out onto the bench above the little river, where the village lay.
The ruins of the village, anyway. Where the houses had been there were now only grassy humps on the ground like little howes, overgrown with weeds and brambles. When Tisconum and Corban came in, the five men were standing around the center of the clearing, watching the two women scrape the ground clear and set up a hearth. The men looked up at the sachem’s approach, but they didn’t start working.
Tisconum walked up toward the hearth, which the women had built with a minimum of ceremony in the open ground in the midst of the old village. The lumpy mounds of the huts stood all around as if the old village still watched them. The women had scraped together some kindling, and Tisconum turned and beckoned to Corban.
“Come light this. My bones ache.”
Corban said, “We need more wood.” He glanced around, seeing nothing gathered. The women had begun to pull together a wall of branches and trash broken out of the old huts, to form a nest for them all around the fire.
One of the other men stepped forward suddenly, rubbing his palms together, his eyes going between Tisconum and. Corban. “There’s that dead tree over there, what about that?”
Corban stepped back. Tisconum waved his stick. “Do it, Ofra,” and sank down by the half-laid fire. Ofra with a bellow took the other men toward the de
ad tree, which stuck up like a stubby pale tooth at the north end of the village.
“Light the twigs,” Tisconum said to Corban. “I’m cold.”
“There’s no purpose in lighting it before we have wood to keep it going,” Corban said mildly. The women, working steadily, had piled up enough brush and branches to shelter the sachem, who squatted down behind it. Corban stayed on his feet. He had already seen the strangers coming toward them, up along the creek.
Tisconum had not. “Nobody obeys me, not even you! How can you say—” He stopped, seeing Corban staring away toward the riverbank, and his head swivelled, craned up on his neck, aiming his gaze over the top of the wall. He exhaled a loud sigh. “What’s this, now?”
“I told you we needed sentries,” Corban said.
Tisconum sneered at him. “Would they do any better as sentries than they did gathering wood?”
Corban laughed at that, which was entirely true. The women had stopped working on their wall, and were standing in a little group on the far side of the unlit hearth, watching. Off by the dead tree, even Ofra and the men had seen the newcomers.
These were not enemies, it seemed, although there were more of them than Tisconum’s band. Three were older men, and the rest looked like their followers. Their hair was knotted high on their heads, gummed together with colored clay, and stuck with feathers, and the first two of them wore breastplates of white and purple beads in fine designs. They carried staffs clubbed at the top with gobbler tail feathers. They walked up from the creek bank onto the open ground at the edge of the village, ranged themselves nicely in rows, and waited.
Tisconum, gripping his staff, struggled to his feet. He swept a hand up over his head, where his hair was falling out of its bonds, and pressed the same palm to his naked chest. His face twisted. He stalked forward out of the shelter of the low wall, toward the newcomers.
“So!” he shouted. “You recognize me still! I know you—” He began to volley names, and with each name one or another of the older men before him stirred a little, struck. “Masito! Eskanto! Meeksanum!”
“Enough.” The first of the elders stepped forward, his hand out. Tall, and taller by the height of his feathered headgear, he spoke in a loud declaiming voice. “We know you know who we are, Tisconum. We know also who your enemies are. We’ve come to—”
Standing behind Tisconum and a little to one side, Corban crossed his arms over his chest. The motion instantly drew everybody’s eyes, as if he had suddenly popped up out of the earth, and the thunderous voice broke off, the big man goggling at him a moment. Behind him, among his followers, a murmur ran.
Tisconum said, “He’ll be your enemy soon enough, Masito. And then he’ll be your sachem.”
Masito straightened up, frowning, and sneered down his nose at Tisconum. “We’ll see. You cannot come here. You lost your place here, when you gave this village up to begin with.”
“Bah,” said Tisconum. “Nobody else is here. Everybody who has ever died here was of my lineage, and their spirits are all around us here, I tell you that, I can feel them. The huts and the hearths were all raised by hands of my lineage. Who else can live here but me?”
“He can’t stay,” one of the men behind Masito called. “If he’s here when Ekkatsay comes—”
Corban said, “Ekkatsay is coming here?”
Masito stared at him again, his jaw dropping open; the man behind him who had just spoken clapped one hand over his mouth. Tisconum swung around to glare at Corban, and faced Masito again, bristling.
“You can’t throw me out. Over there—” he flung one long skinny arm out, pointing “—my birth-mate is buried over there. I belong here. I will stay. Him—” His arm suddenly twitched toward Corban, and his head split into a cackling laugh. “Throw him out. Try. Hah.”
Masito glared at Corban and then at Tisconum. “You are ever unwise, Tisconum. We shall be back.” He turned, erect and proud, and walked away through the midst of his followers, off down the riverbank again. The other newcomers turned to follow, each one pausing a moment to stare angrily at Tisconum and give Corban a brief intense look of fearful curiosity. Then they were going.
Tisconum sank down behind the wall. “You see,” he said to Corban. “We should never have come down here.”
“Well,” Corban said. “I don’t know about that.” He stood watching the last of the other villagers go. Tisconum’s people were all still standing around, doing nothing, their gazes on him. Corban turned and gave them each a hard look and the women went back to building their wall and the men started breaking dead limbs off the tree again in a sudden enormous flurry of work.
Tisconum fell asleep. The nest finished, the wood gathered, the other people came in around the fire. The darkness crept in around them on all sides. The girl Arl sank down beside Corban, who was sitting on his red and blue cloak with his back to the wall, considering this matter of Ekkatsay. The girl reached out one hand to touch the cloak.
“Do you want something to eat, Corban-ka?”
“Leave me alone, Arl. I’m thinking.”
She sat still, patient, unoffended, unrebuffed, still touching his cloak. He could feel her gaze on him. His temper rose; it was hard to think with her there, like a rock in his eye. He wrenched his mind back on course. Ekkatsay was certainly coming here on some business of Miska’s. His mind kept turning back to Masito and the other Turtle chiefs, with their feathered staffs, their ceremonial approach, their expectation of being heard.
Tisconum’s band had brought deer meat with them from the Shad River and the women cooked it over the fire. The smell wakened Tisconum, who demanded to be fed. The older woman brought him the first pieces. A few minutes later Arl brought back a flat piece of bark with strips of meat on it, and set it down before Corban; her gaze searched his face. He was hungry and he ate, saying nothing to her. She was little more than a child, much younger than Epashti, an orphan; and he had seen how the other men were with her.
Night had come, the wind sweeping in off the bay tingling with salt, owls calling in the forest. Under the trees the fireflies began to twinkle, rising in flocks of little lights up into the dark blue air. Most of the people huddled closer to the fire but Tisconum went off into the darkness. Corban watched him go, knowing where he went, the old man’s nightly round, circling the camp, setting up snares and traps and alarms all around the edge of it.
He tapped Arl on the hand that clutched his cloak. “Go bring me Ofra.” The girl leapt up, her face shining, and ran to fetch Tisconum’s warrior.
Ofra was a solid, square man, past his youth, with a hard jowly face, pitted cheeks, and narrow eyes; his hair was always tied back at the nape of his neck, like a woman’s. He wasn’t a Turtle but Corban had never heard where he did come from. When Arl brought him he stood in front of Corban, smiling and bobbing his head.
“Tell me what I can do for you, Corban-ka.”
Corban said, “Sit down, for one thing. You hurt my neck, looking up at you.”
Ofra sank down on his heels. “Whatever you say. Anything I can do to make you happy, Corban-ka, just mention it.”
Corban said, “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” He sat still a moment; he wished suddenly for a pipe, and some smoke, but of course Tisconum’s band which had no gardens had no smoke either. He said, “That, before, with Masito and the other Turtles—” He paused, wondering how to talk of this, his words uncertain. “What did it mean, the feathered staff, and how they came up, and just stood there?”
Ofra’s shoulders twitched. “That they’re chiefs, wanting to talk. No weapons. You can’t fight. Not until you put the staff down.” He watched Corban steadily, his sharp shrewd look the real Ofra, peering through the oily deference like some kind of shield.
“I see,” Corban said. “Thank you. How well do you know the land around here?”
“Like the back of my hand, Corban-ka. Like the insides of my eyelids.”
Corban grunted, half-amused. “How would somebody come down to the
waterland from the Bear country, then?”
“Aha.” Ofra smiled at him. “Somebody like Ekkatsay?”
Corban shrugged. “I went once by a way that led west from there. I remember, for a good day’s walk after we left the shore, there were ponds and swamps, it was hard to get through, the trail wasn’t good, and the water stank. Then we turned north into a long winding valley, and there was an old, deep trail that went by some big rocks.”
Ofra chewed on his lip. “Yes. Brother Rocks, they’re called.” His eyes narrowed, his eyebrows curling in the struggle to remember. “You go between them, to go north.”
“What about somebody coming from Ekkatsay’s village?”
Ofra’s brow smoothed, and he nodded. “Yes. He would come down from the north also, between the Brothers.”
“Good,” Corban said, although he saw Ofra obviously knew little more about the ground than he did. He said, “Around there, at the Brothers, that’s where somebody coming down would likely stop overnight, wouldn’t he—he wouldn’t want to overnight in the swamps.”
Ofra made an indefinite noise in his throat. His eyes were sharp black points in the meaty square of his face.
Corban said, “I want you to go down there.”
Ofra said, “And do what?” His voice was weighted with doubts.
“Watch for Ekkatsay. See where he camps.”
“How am I to send you word, from way over there?”
“When you see him, come back up the trail, I’ll meet you.”
Ofra thought this over a moment; Corban could see he was looking for an excuse to refuse. At last, he said, “What about Tisconum? I’ll follow you, you know, anywhere, Corban-ka, but Tisconum, frankly—” He twirled his finger beside his ear.
Corban smiled widely at him. “Frankly, Ofra-ka-ka, you talk too much.”
Ofra’s face slumped. He lowered his hand to his knee. Corban said, “Can you find the Brother Rocks?”
“Yes,” Ofra said, clipped.
“Then go down there, and watch for Ekkatsay, and see where he camps.” Corban had travelled back part of the way from the long raid with Ekkatsay, and had seen how the Bear sachem made his camps; he liked comfort. “Near the water somewhere. In the open. He’ll likely be there in a few days.”
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