by neetha Napew
The assembled elders saw her eyes go blank. The words of the supreme elder had struck her deeply. Her beautiful head rose. Her face remained impassive. “Lorak’s powers grow as weak as Sondahr’s if he imagines that it is Torka who keeps the mammoths from this camp,” she said.
“Then who? What?” screeched the old man, so vexed that he nearly came at her with his fists.
“I am Teacher. I am Healer. I am Seer. But as Lorak has said, I am also a woman, and it is true I hunger for the flesh of that which nourishes. Without it, all that I am is lessened. But even with it, Lorak has made it quite clear that Sondahr must not offend the masculine spirits of this council by suggesting that she might possibly know what Lorak, the supreme elder, does not.” This said, she turned and strode regally from the shadowed space and into the falling rain.
In the rain, under a leaden sky, Karana walked with Aar across the land, and as the distance slipped away he wished that he had not been so impetuous. He had stalked out of the encampment without his rain gear. Beneath his boots the tundra was soggy as he sloshed along, thinking that soon his feet would be quite wet while his waterproof leggings and over boots sat warm and dry beside his bed furs within the pit hut, not far from the fine new raincoat of oiled bison intestines that Lonit had sewn for him. That had a hood, which could be pulled snug about the face with a sinew tie, and an effective water baffle, which projected well outward over the eyes and sent rainwater funneling off his head without spattering into his face.
But there was no use lamenting now. At least he had his spear, and although his clothes would soon be soaked, the rain was not unduly cold. He would be uncomfortable, but he would not freeze. He looked up. Water sloshed into his eyes and sheeted off his face. He grimaced at the rain, at the sky, at himself, and at Torka, for having been the cause of the anger that had driven him to leave the warm, dry pit hut without thinking about where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there.
Aar looked up at him, blinking against the rain, his mouth straining back into that stressed smile that dogs displayed when they were confused and nervous. Woofing softly, Aar circled, pointing the way back toward the encampment.
Karana felt the blue eyes of the animal censuring him when he did not move. He looked down and shook his head. “I am sorry, Brother Dog. I will not go back yet—not until I think things out. Lay the blame on Torka for your soggy coat. Would you ask Karana to stand back in silence when Torka is wrong? Who else will speak the truth to him? Not that he listens. He will always look upon me as a boy, no matter what I do or say.”
The dog’s eyes were steady in its sodden, black-masked face as it cocked its head, trying to understand the words of the youth. Again Karana shook his head, sending rainwater flying. His mood was no better than when he had left the encampment.
He walked on, full of anger, pounding across the land, complaining aloud, imploring the spirits of the great mammoths to hear him, to heed him, to ignore the chanting and dancing of Torka, to stay away from the camp of the Great Gathering where men were waiting to kill them.
The tundra was sodden and treacherous beneath his feet as he walked on, lost in thought, paying no heed to the fact that he had blundered into an area of tussocks. Each mound of grass was a wide, spongy island of new growth sprouting from a near knee-high clump of accumulated years of now-dead growth. To move through this pyramidal forest of grass required either hopping from tussock top to tussock top or finding surer, albeit soggier footing between the clumps. Because his mind was on his argument with Torka, Karana did neither. Instead he slogged blindly forward until he tripped and went down hard onto his face and belly. He felt the uneven, mounding surface of the tussocks against his chest and gut and thigh, and heard his spear snap beneath him. He was certain that its obsidian head had slit through his clothes to pierce his shoulder—not because of the pain, which was minimal, but simply because he knew that in his carelessness he deserved no better luck.
Cursing, he levered up and shook himself like a wet dog; pain flared, so intense that he fell again and lay still until it passed. With caution now he rose to his knees, knelt back, stared a moment at his broken spear, then examined his injury. His clothes had blunted what might have been a major wound; as it was, with clenched teeth and fixed will, he drew two inches of spearhead from the flesh of his left shoulder and, gasping, nearly fainted as blood spurted along with pain.
Then the pain ebbed; the flow of blood did not. He sat still, gathering his thoughts. He packed the wound as best he could with grass and mud and watched the blood continue to ooze through, making a mockery of his efforts, informing him in its own hot, red terms that he must get back to the encampment and have someone knowledgeable tend him.
Lonit! Her adept and gentle fingers would have it stanched and stitched in no time. He felt better just thinking of her. But if he returned to the pit hut, he would have to face Torka and endure another tongue-lashing. This one he would deserve, but he was in no mood for it. Until Torka was willing to listen to reason concerning his compromising attitude toward the mammoth hunters, Karana would not listen to any criticism from him.
Aar whined and hunkered close. Karana lay one hand on the dog’s shoulder while the other pressed his wound, trying in vain to slow the loss of blood. He began to worry. He had come so far from the encampment. He felt weak, but from the bleeding or from fear, he could not tell. The wound was starting to ache cruelly now. He must get help. But could he make it back to camp? And if he could and did not go promptly to Torka’s pit hut, old Pomm was bound to see him and pounce upon him. After that, no other healer in the encampment would be able to come near him, unless .. .
His thoughts drifted. He felt less weak. Shakily he got to his feet and began to walk. “Come, Brother Dog. We will go home now ... to Sondahr.”
She was standing in the rain outside the wall of bones, as though she knew that he would come and would need her. She was strong for a woman, and he was glad to have her arm about him and her shoulder to lean on, because he could barely walk as she guided him around the peripheries of the wall and into the encampment through a narrow break in a piling of great, weatherworn tusks.
“It would not be good for either of us if any of the elders should see me with you now,” she explained. He did not understand or care. With Aar following, she led him upward along the back of the Hill of Dreams and into her hut before anyone saw them.
He was weak and shaking with cold as she guided him through shadows. The dog watched protectively as she helped him to strip out of his clothes. She gentled him onto a fur-covered pallet and covered him with soft, combed pelts beneath which he shook himself warm, watching as she exposed the wound to her scrutiny and then, still without a word, brought a bone bowl of water and began to cleanse it with the ends of her hair.
“This will need fire now,” she said at last.
He stared at her, wondering if any flame could burn as hot as he now burned at the sight of her .. . even now, in his pain and weakness. And then, suddenly, he knew that the answer was yes as, with tongs of fire-hardened antler, she pressed a burning coal to his wound and he half leaped through the roof of her hut in agony. Then he fell back and knew nothing at all for hours.
When at last he awoke, Aar was sleeping peacefully in the shadows. Days or weeks could have passed and Karana would not have known or cared, for he awoke with Sondahr naked beside him beneath the bed furs, touching him as no woman had ever touched him, guiding him to touch her as he had not even dared to dream that he might ever touch a woman. Trembling with pleasure, he knew that he must be dreaming and gave himself fully to the dream .. . and to the woman.
His wound ached dully, but his dream balanced above him, murmured above him, pressed so lightly that he barely had to move at all as he was enveloped in moist warmth, throbbing, moving, dancing—yes, it was a dance—and when it was complete he awoke and stared into the face of Sondahr and knew that it had been no dream.
“Again ...” she whispered.
And although his wound brought pain, somehow it enhanced the pleasure that was now real to him, alive to him, as Sondahr arched back, still joined to him, moving and leading, then being led as Karana’s world caught fire. His hands gripped her, moved her, and he was a man with her, taking her as he would, slowly, surely, plunging and withdrawing and then plunging again, ascending to heights of passion that carried them both away until at last they lay exhausted and fulfilled within each other’s arms.
Karana slept again and dreamed of mammoths being driven across the tundra by a pale, savage stallion whose hooves cut the earth and made it bleed.
“Navahk!” he cried, and within his dream he leaped upon the stallion’s back and called to the mammoths to follow, to come forth to die upon the spears of the hunters of the Great Gathering. “No!” He awoke with a start.
Sondahr knelt before him, offering a horn of liquid. “A bad dream? I have them often. Here. Drink. This will ease you and give you strength.”
He complied. He drained the horn of its watery brew that tasted of blood and the sap of spruce bark. “Mammoth blood!” He spat out what was left in his mouth and threw the horn away. “Have you given the blood of my totem to me to drink?”
“Yes. Old and dried and cherished from last year’s hunt. And now it flows within you, a part of you, and in your dreams you have called the great tusked ones forth to die.”
He was so angry that he could barely see. “This is what you intended all along! Yes, of course! I should have known better than to trust you!”
Her hand rose to touch the packing that she had placed into his wound. It was oozing again. He did not care. He slapped her hand away.
“Do not be angry with me for tricking you, Karana. But your powers are greater than you know. I have seen this. The mammoths must come, Karana, for truly Lorak is right. Although this camp may be stocked with other meat, it will not nourish my people. They will die without the flesh of the mammoth, as I die now—slowly, day by day.”
“Meat is meat! Flesh is flesh!”
“Then you should have no repugnance at consuming the flesh or blood of that which you claim is forbidden to you.”
He covered his ears and shook his head in furious negations of her claim.
She persisted, pulling at his hands. “If the mammoths do not come, Torka and his people—you, Karana—will be driven from this camp. And Aliga will die the sooner.” The threats rattled him, but he would not allow her to have the satisfaction of seeing it. “Lorak will not know unless you tell him,” he snapped, and almost added that he did not care about Aliga; yet that was not true. He did not like her, but he wished her no ill. And what he saw in Sondahr’s eyes now was so sobering that it cooled his anger.
“There is no child in her belly?”
“No.”
“And you could not heal her?”
“I could not even if I had the powers of all Creation. But in this camp, with the company and gossip of other women, the tattooed woman will not die alone or afraid. By the power that names you shaman and allows you to see into my thoughts, you know I would never betray you to Lorak. Yet I swear to you now, Karana, that with mammoth blood to strengthen me, I can heal others and will teach you to form your powers into such spears of insight that such as Lorak will be rendered into melted fat that will burn transparently before all, thus depriving them of the authority they have no right to possess! You are a seer, Karana, but you have not yet learned to focus your sight any more than you can control your temper. And until you do, you will be as a man in fog, sensing but never quite knowing what danger lies ahead. But it will be all right now: The mammoths will come; you have called them. And in time you will forgive Sondahr for her trickery.”
“They will not come! What is said from dreams is not heeded by the spirits!”
“We shall see....”
He glared at her. Throwing the bed furs aside, he swung his legs off the end of the sleeping platform and demanded his clothes. She brought them to him and would have helped him to dress, but he backhanded her away and did not thank her even when he noted that she had tended them with great care, so they were neither stained by blood nor stiffened by water.
He dressed quickly but not easily or without rousing pain from his injury. She stood in silence, watching and waiting. He swept by her without a word and, pulling the shaggy door skin aside, bent and strode impatiently out of the hut into the clear light of early morning.
From the smell of the cold air, several days had passed since the last rain. The sky was clear, cloudless. He walked boldly to the crest of the Hill of Dreams, ignoring the hateful stare of Lorak and the envious glances of several magic men who were lounging before the entrance to the council house. He looked beyond the encampment to a world gone red and gold and umber with the full fiery splendor of autumn .. . and saw with a start what no one else had yet seen: A large band was approaching from the west, led by the unmistakable staff-carrying figure of a magic man dressed all in white, except for a robe of gray and the head of some huge and misshapen beast upon his head.
“Navahk ...” He exhaled the name.
He remembered his dream and knew that the mammoths would not be far behind.
PART V. SPIRIT KILLER
For endless days it seemed, the child had followed the beast as he led his kind across the world—hunting, camping, then moving on eventually to hunt and encamp again. As his kind moved from one place of shelter to another, the beast would always pause and look back, making certain that the child was following, and would leave meat when he could not come away from his kind to deliver it himself. And when he did come, he stayed longer and longer each time, making sounds and offering no threat—only food, only sustenance. In the dark he would hunker low and purr like a great white lion, his eyes fixed, pupils huge, and garments as pale as ice glittering beneath the stars.
The child would look at him and think about how one day she would leap out of the shadows of the shrubs in which she always hid herself, and the man would be her meat. And she would dance in his skin, as he had danced in the skin of her mother. Soon now, very soon.
When she looked at her body, she saw her mother gradually taking form before her very eyes. She sensed that her kind must grow much faster than the little ones of the beasts, for she had watched them walking close to their mothers, perceptibly no larger now than when the beast in white had first led them off across the world. They were very small. Sometimes they would fall behind the other beasts, and the child would observe them and measure the many heartbeats that passed before their mothers would come shouting after them. It would be easy to leap at them, to drag them off and eat them. But the child was well fed. It was the beast in white that she wanted.
She mewed in sudden confusion. When she ate him, his meat would soon be gone and she would have nothing left to hate. And when she danced in his skin, he would be a limp, lifeless, silent thing that did not purr and speak and, through his presence, take away the loneliness for just a little while. And once he was eaten, who would leave meat for her?
The wind of fear ran within the child again. The beast had always left meat for her. Always .. . but no more. Not since he had led his kind into their new country of broad outwash streams and distant hills that sometimes glowed blue upon the horizon. Not since he had begun to follow the huge tusked creatures that the child recognized but had no desire to eat because memories recalled their bitter and unpleasant taste. She hoped that the beast would hunt other meat, but if he did, the child never tasted it. He and his kind pursued the tusked ones but made no move to raise their flying sticks against them. They seemed to be driving them instead, shouting, keeping them moving away from water courses and the forested hills toward which they seemed to want to go.
And all the time they drove the tusked ones, the beast did not look back to see if the child was following, nor did he leave meat for her or come to purr to her in the night.
And now the child was hungry and afraid. The tusked ones
had been driven into a dead-end canyon. The beasts had dug a long hole in the earth and made piles of sticks and bones and grass, and in the night light leaped and danced from those piles and the child heard the tusked ones bellow with fear.
That night the beast again brought no meat to the child, and the next dawn, when light seeped into the world through the hole in the sky, the child had awakened to discover that the beast in white was gone, and most of his kind with him. Only a few still sat with their flying sticks before the smoking, stinking piles of light behind which the tusked ones still bellowed. In panic the child followed the beast. For a day she walked, and for another, resting only in the deepest dark, and even though she cried for him to bring her meat, he did not come.
And now, at last, the child had found him. She stood upon a tundra rise and looked at the great camp toward which the beast was leading his followers. Bones surrounded the camp. Dogs ran out of it. And many beasts came forward with flying sticks to greet the beast in white.
Together they walked toward the circle of bones over which the air was filled with smoke, as though the tundra burned beneath it from a summer grass fire. The child’s belly lurched with hunger, and fear kept her in her hiding place. But it was rage and hatred that made her scream. Once again, as he had not done since the first day the child saw him, the beast walked in the skin of her mother.
“Mammoths! The new band speaks of mammoths not two days’ walk to the west!”
The words moved through the Great Gathering like slingshot stones rebounding off canyon walls as Zinkh came running into camp shrieking the news. Sitting with Pomm inside her little hut, Lonit winced as though one of the stones had struck her. Pomm saw her reaction. “You will have to go out now. The men will hunt. The women will be called to butcher. Your man will want you.”
“Torka will never hunt mammoths.”
The fat woman scrutinized Lonit and shook her head. “You cannot hide here with Pomm forever. Does Lonit not miss her children?”