At that everybody pushed closer to hear, so that before Miska spoke there was a packed wall of bodies around him and Ako both. Epashti went up to the front of the crowd, holding the baby tight. She thought this would come down some way to Corban.
Miska said, “Where is Ekkatsay? Did you even get to the Turtle villages on the bay?”
Ako lifted his hands. “There were too many of them! And they had the shaman with them—Animal-Head.” He paused, seeing them all around him watching. “They may have killed Ekkatsay.”
The crowd let out a harsh gasp. Epashti slid her hand protectively around the baby’s head. Across the open space between them, Miska turned his gaze to her, and met her eyes.
“Tisconum is treacherous, I knew that already. For that reason I will hunt him down. What’s this about Corban?”
“He was with them.” Ako’s eyes glittered, and his mouth worked fast. “Maybe he was why they could strike us down. Maybe he used his powers.” His gaze was fixed on Miska.
Everybody else had turned to look at Epashti, and Corban’s name ran back and forth. Epashti thought she should have gone the other way. Then she felt someone brush against her, and started, and looked; Ahanton had come up beside her, and slid one arm around her waist.
Miska lowered his eyes to the Bear before him. “Corban has no spells. He has no power. We all know him better than you, and we know he is nothing, Ako. How many men did Tisconum have? Why couldn’t you fight back?”
“I’m telling you—the shaman—” Ako stammered a little, and then bit his mouth shut. The crowd murmured, and somebody laughed.
Miska’s voice went on, quiet. “What Wolf would run away from a Turtle? Even a Bear ought to be able to defend himself against a Turtle.”
Ako shouted, “He cast a spell on me! My legs wouldn’t work!”
“Except to run,” Miska said. “Anybody can run from a Turtle.”
Now everybody watching was beginning to laugh, and Ako hung his head down. Epashti felt sorry for him; she thought he would never be able to live in the Wolf village after this.
Miska said, “Ekkatsay didn’t come back with you.”
Ako said, looking at the ground, “No.”
“At least you run fast, Ako.”
The laughter swelled again. In the center of the crowd, Ako stood with head bent, looking straight down at the ground; Miska moved a little to one side, so that his shadow lay on him.
He said, “Ekkatsay was probably running too. Go back to your village, Ako. You’ll find him there.”
Ako straightened up, his eyes wide. “Should I bring him back?”
Miska shook his head. “No. We won’t need Ekkatsay. We’ll go after Tisconum ourselves, when the moon turns full.”
At that, all around, the Wolves gave up a howl of excitement, all the new bound men with their flowing hair. Epashti started at the yell. She saw Lopi and her nephew Raki leaping and shrieking, one on either side of her, and then, in front of her, Kalu was leaping up and down and screaming too, his hair streaming free like theirs.
“I want to go! I want to go!” He rushed toward Miska, with Finn on his heels. “I want to go!”
Epashti clutched the baby tight, her gaze following her son, running so far out of her reach. The drums began to beat, pounding out the measures of the dance, and the men wheeled toward the fires. Miska stood still facing Ako, his hands on his hips. He spoke; in the din Epashti could not make out what he said, only saw his lips move, but she guessed at it, when Ako lowered his head again, and went off toward the gate.
The rest of the men were gathering around the fire. The women were drawing back, gathering their children, turning for home. Around the fire the stamp and lunge and howling of the dance began. Anapatha, big-bellied grandmother of half the village, turned and padded off toward her lodge. Eonta collected herself; Ehia brought her shawl.
The drums thundered in Epashti’s ears, reminding her of the other drums, in that other place; she caught at some connection, just out of reach. Ahanton pulled on her sleeve.
“Let’s go. Let’s go.” The girl’s strange pale eyes were shadowy with memory. Epashti held her baby close against her. These girls at least would stay hers. She took Ahanton by the hand and went away to the shelter of the lodge.
Two days after the ceremony, Epashti went across the river by the float, to go to her new garden.
She had chosen this place because of the plants that grew there already, which meant it was a strong place. In the previous autumn, when she got back from the long raid, she had burnt over the dead stalks and leaves to make sure the spirits of the plants remained. It was on a slight slope above the river, much of it facing south. When she reached it, she sat down there for a while, as she always did, and looked around and listened.
Once some oak trees had grown here, but the women had girdled them, and then the boys had stripped off all but the stumps to feed the winter fires. She could see straight away to the river and the village, and through the village, every lodge was under her eyes, all the way to the gate. She thought about Miska, who had surely meant what had happened to Ekkatsay—maybe not exactly that, but something—as an excuse to attack Tisconum again.
Not Tisconum. It was Corban he was after now.
She had decided already that if he wanted her to go on his raid as the medicine woman, she would agree. That way she would see what happened. But her heart sank at what she thought would happen.
She got up, after a while, and hung the sleeping baby from a tree and went around the patch clearing away rocks. She had been picking up rocks all along, setting them in a wall along the side of her garden, but new ones came up whenever it rained. Under her feet the soil yielded, warm and deep, chunky with rotted leaves. She marked where the sun shone, how the daylight moved over the slope. Ahanton came up from the river, and Epashti pulled up a handful of grass and showed her daughter the pink and purple worms squirming out of the moist dirt clumped around the roots.
They worked all the rest of the day, moving stones, and making hills for the beans. The next morning, before dawn, they came back to the garden and Epashti planted her seeds, kept all through the Hunger Moon in a sealed pot in Eonta’s compartment. She showed Ahanton how deep to put the seeds, using her finger to make the hole, one knuckle, two knuckle, three knuckle. She put her beans where the sun would be, and the squash behind that; and in the very back, where there was some shade all day, she planted four holes of the smoking leaf plant.
She sang while she did this, happy for the first time since Corban left. She sat in the garden afterward and fed the baby; Ahanton went off into the trees. Epashti told herself if Miska had his intentions, so did Corban. They had been set on this from the beginning, and without the Forest Woman to stop them, they would go to the death.
She looked out over the river flowing brown between its banks, the long lines of the float crisscrossing it, the children splashing in the shallows on the far side, and the disorderly sunlit bustle of the village on the bank. It seemed never to change, any of it. Yet it was always changing, always turning into something else.
Maybe she turned into someone else with it. Something Eonta had said once nudged her mind. The sun was high in the sky now. She got up and tied Corban’s child to her back, and set off into the forest to look for mushrooms and eggs.
Ahanton waited in the trees until Epashti was gone. Out of her sleeve she took the pouch of maz seeds that Corban had found among the Sun people. Seeds filled it still, because she had picked them up when her father had cast them away. Now she went along through Epashti’s garden, and in every hole where Epashti had planted a bean seed, Ahanton planted maz.
“I was there,” Tisconum said, pointing to a boulder on the side of the pass opposite the burnt tree. “They came up from there—” He pointed to the west, the far side of the pass. “And from there.” Swinging his arm toward the bulging rock behind the tree. Tisconum walked on into the saddle of the pass, looking west. “We had no chance.”
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nbsp; Corban looked around at the broad bowl of the pass; he wondered how Miska had gotten down the face of the rock, saw a thread of a trail down one side, and thought, A sentry on top. He turned slowly, looking also at the high slope opposite, deep in flowering brambles. It looked impossible too. A sentry there too, high. That, he saw, was the trouble with passes. Glancing to the east, he saw the older woman, climbing the last steep way to the pass, her bundle on her back, and Arl trudging after her.
There was water up here somewhere, Tisconum had said. Under the burnt tree the ground was blackened and scattered with charred stones; they would likely want to make a camp there. But they should not. Everything in him itched to get out of here. He turned back toward Tisconum, who was still morosely wandering around the old battlefield.
“This is where they killed Palla, beat his head in like a rotten squash.” The sachem walked with his head down, his arms cocked out, his back round.
Ofra and the other men were coming into sight on the trail below the pass. Corban walked over toward Tisconum. “We shouldn’t stay here. This is a trap. All he has to do is surround us.”
Tisconum said, “This is where he will come to attack us. This is where we have to fight him. And I will be readier than I was last time.”
“He will be readier, too, and he knows this ground.”
“I know what to do now,” Tisconum said. “I will take his hair, this time.”
“He knows you are a Turtle, that you will fight by drawing into your shell, and so he can come whenever he wants and try to get into your shell from any way, and now that you are set in this place he will try every way there is.”
Tisconum lifted his eyebrows. “Where? I will put men at the top of the rock.”
“Think of this the way he sees it. Where else can he come at you?”
The sachem’s eyes wavered slightly. “I can’t think his way. His way is evil, even to allow it in will rot me.” He turned, starting away, toward the women now gathering under the burnt tree with their bundles. The last of the men were finally reaching the pass. Some had brought a few sticks of firewood. Supplying them up here would be a constant problem. Corban said, pitching his voice after Tisconum, “He probably knows already where you are.”
Tisconum stopped, turned, caught again. “We just came here. Is he so magic?”
“No, but he’s powerful over everybody, and you aren’t. A powerful man hears everything, a powerless man has nothing but enemies. He will come another way. We have to be watching every other way. Or go somewhere else.”
Tisconum took a step toward him, angry suddenly. “I am the sachem. I will decide what we should do.” He pumped up his chest, sticking his jaw out. “Like down by the Brothers. Masito and those, they probably think much differently about me now, don’t they?”
Corban said, “Likely they do, yes.” He folded his arms over his chest.
Tisconum sneered at him. “I’ll show you I know best. I will make a camp here, but one also on top of the rock. Up here we can watch for a long way. It will cost them to come at us. Few can defend against many. We will stay here. I like it here. That’s what I’m saying to you.” He turned and walked off toward the burnt tree.
Corban stayed where he was, morose. He saw Arl watching him from by the fire and turned his back. He wondered how many days it would take Miska to attack them. There had to be some way out of this. Later, just before sundown, he saw Tisconum going off to walk around the outside of the camp, building his shell, layer on layer.
He went in under the tree, over to the vertical surface of the great bulging rock, and sat down with his back to it. The men were sitting around the fire talking and picking ticks and lice out of each other’s hair. The two women were tending the fire and cooking acorn cakes. Watching them, their quiet purpose, reminded him of Epashti; he fell to worrying about her and the baby, and about his other children. His thoughts pushed further back, to his wife Benna, and their children, and wondered what had become of them, scattered over the world. When Arl came over and sat down beside him, and slyly stretched her fingers out to touch his cloak, he almost slapped her hand away.
She saw his mood; she drew her hand back, but she didn’t leave. Her eyes searched over his face. “Are you hungry?” Her first offer, always, to feed him.
He said, “Leave me alone, Arl.”
She sat still, not moving, not talking, leaving him alone, but not. He turned his face away. The sudden impulse swept through him to hurt her, to see what would make her cry, what would drive her away forever. He clenched his fists against his thighs, his mind roiling, until the feeling passed. Night was on them. He got up and went around the foot of the rock, until he found the thin trace of a track going up, and climbed up to the top of the rock, to keep watch.
Ahanton shared the green bough ceremony with three other girls her age, two from Anapatha’s lodge and one from Merada’s. They went together into the new gardens, where all the ground smelled ripe with growing things, and their mothers and aunts brought green branches from the woods and each of the four girls made a lodge.
This was harder than Ahanton had imagined; the boughs bent too easily and also would not stay bent, so her framework was constantly coming apart. She began to wish she had helped Epashti more, and learned how to do this. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the other girls had already raised their lodges, neat little mounds of leafy green in their mothers’ gardens, and gone inside.
Her lodge fell apart again. Looking down at the mound of twigs and leaves she wondered if she could just crawl under it. No one was allowed to help her. She picked up the long boughs again and began again to force them into a dome shape, either end in the ground, and all bound together in the middle, but as she tried to hold the first and second boughs together they slithered out of her grip and fell on the ground.
Ahanton wanted to cry. The sun was going down and soon the old women would come, to do the next part of the ceremony, and they would see that something was wrong with her, and she could not become a woman. She thought of Epashti, who did such things as this every day without any fuss at all, her hands so sure and knowing.
The wind stung her damp cheek. Into her mind leapt the memory of her real mother. She remembered the pine tree, where she had dreamed of the serpent and the frog, and the cold night air, and the stars. She took her green boughs, and she heaped them around in a circle on the ground. She made no door. She climbed over the pile and sat down in the middle. As soon as she did, a cool calm fell over her.
In the blue evening, the old women came. They went from lodge to lodge, speaking through the door of each. They came to Ahanton’s circle and stood, their faces seamed with uncertainty.
She said, “I am Ahanton. My lineage is the Frog. My signs are the pine tree and the river. Epashti is my guardian but not my mother. Miska is my father but not my guardian. I have said this, in this place, and it is true.”
The women faced her; two of them hung back, reached out to one another and held each other’s hands tight, but the third, Eonta, came forward to the wall of Ahanton’s circle.
Eonta, everybody’s grandmother but hers. The old woman’s round face was serene, as if she had expected all this strangeness. She held out both hands, palms up, nuts on one, an egg on the other, and recited.
“We feed you, Ahanton, because you are one of us. We bless you because you are one of us. We ask your blessing because you are one of us.”
Ahanton’s chest swelled; she felt some power flowing into her, something passing between Eonta to her, from Eonta and all those before her; she could not look away from the old woman’s eyes. “I give my blessing, because I am one of you. I am grateful for your blessing, because I am one of you. I eat, because I am one of you.”
She took the nuts and egg, and the women went away. Night fell over her. She wished suddenly for the red and blue cloak, gone now, gone with Corban, wherever he was. She felt the tug of sleep but was afraid, for fear of dreaming, again, of the stake.
The
n, in the dark, she heard a whisper. She lifted her head, startled. Someone was speaking her name, just the other side of her wall.
“Ahanton!”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled, recognizing the voice. It was one of the younger women from Eonta’s lodge.
“Please, Ahanton, give me your blessing for a baby.”
She was silent a moment, unknowing what to do. What it meant. No one had told her anything about this. Then she said, “I bless you.”
“Thank you.” That woman went away.
But a few moments later there was another.
“Ahanton! Ahanton!”
“I want your blessing to get the man I want!”
She put her hand to her mouth to stop the laugh. She knew this woman too, of course, and longed to know what man she wanted. But she held her tongue. “I bless you.”
So it went, on through the night, people creeping up to beg her blessing; she got very tired of it, and wanted to sleep, but at least she did not dream.
In the morning, Epashti came, and Ahanton made a way for her through the circle. Epashti had a smooth stick with her. “Do you know about this part?” she said.
Ahanton nodded, but she was afraid.
“Lie down, then, and spread open your legs.”
Ahanton lay down; her thighs wanted to clench together, but she made them open. Epashti said, “From now on, you may go with a man. But you should be careful. Don’t let in a man who is not clean and strong and upright.” Cool and bony, her hand slipped between Ahanton’s knees. “Don’t let in a man who has no reverence for you, who wants only to use you.” Ahanton shut her eyes, rigid, feeling the stick at her body’s edge, almost in. “Don’t let in a man whose babies you don’t want.”
The hand moved, sharp; she felt the stick glide into her and then a hard bright pain. The stick withdrew. Epashti sat back on her heels.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 27