by neetha Napew
“And since when does Navahk hunt at all?” retorted Torka with no attempt at affability.
“Torka would be surprised at what Navahk had stalked and killed since he left the band of my people.”
Torka measured him coldly. “Nothing you could do would surprise me, Navahk.”
Lorak’s face collapsed about his nose, as it always did when he frowned. “Torka will make ready to hunt. This man Navahk, he speaks of many mammoths mired in a bog, driven there by his hunters as a gift for the people of this camp!”
“Navahk and his hunters are generous. Why have they not killed these mammoths for themselves?”
Navahk’s eyes narrowed at Torka’s question, but his smile never quavered. “We are few compared to the many who will winter at the Great Gathering. In lean times like these, we thought it would be a good thing to share this kill with those people who look only to the spirits of the big tuskers for sustenance.”
His words were so well received that the din of appreciation did not quiet for several minutes. Lorak waved his people to stillness. “It is a good thing! Thanks to the spirits and to Navahk, at last we will hunt!” His eyes fixed Torka. “And all will be mammoth hunters in this camp. Not to hunt when the mammoths await our spears would be to offend their spirits. So Torka will join in this hunt, or he and his people will winter in a camp of their own, far from this place.”
“Torka’s ‘people’?” pressed Navahk, his smile benign, his eyes malicious. “You were one man, a child, and three women when last I saw you, and only one of those women was worth keeping—the tall one with the eyes of an antelope’ and the grace of a swan. And I see you have brought one of my band along with you. Or has Karana somehow managed to stumble onto this place on his own?”
Navahk’s reference to Lonit caused jealousy to erupt within Torka. Memories flared along with anger. This man has shamed me. This man has tried to take my woman. If he tries again, that smile will not be long upon his face, nor will any woman want to look at him when Torka has given to him what he deserves. Deliberately avoiding the mention of Lonit’s name, he replied with open disdain: “Karana is called Lion Killer in this camp. This he has done, and in this killing he has saved the life of a man. He has hunted the great horned rhinoceros. He has shown that he has the gift of healing. Karana left his people of his own accord. He has come to the Great Gathering at Torka’s side, and Torka is proud to call him son, since the members of Navahk’s band, at Navahk’s urging, abandoned him to die.”
The tension between Torka and Navahk was palpable. Everyone felt it. The two men measured one another. Lorak measured them both, then looked toward the Hill of Dreams, where Karana was still standing with Sondahr at his side. The old man’s jealousy was overwhelmed by his impatience. Although strong, dangerous winds of hostility were blowing between Torka and Navahk, Navahk spoke of hunting mammoths, and Lorak had been fasting for far too long.
“Enough talk! There will be time for that later! Now, come! It is time to hunt!”
When the hunters reached the mammoths, they were greeted by Navahk’s watchman. As night slowly fed upon the last light of day, they ate traveling rations together, resting before the trench that Navahk’s people had dug across the narrow neck of the canyon lest any of the animals struggle
free from the bog and attempt an escape. Navahk’s hunters related how Grek had led them to the bog; along with Stam and Rhik, he recalled killing an entrapped mammoth there many years before. It was spruce country, so the mammoths had turned toward it almost gratefully. With Navahk in the lead, the hunters had driven the creatures into the dead-end canyon, setting fire to the dry summer grasses that surrounded the lake. This forced the animals into the water, where their great bodies sunk to the knees in the treacherous, quicksand like loess that lay below. Hurriedly, the men had felled young trees, stripped them of leaves and branches, and carved them into stakes sharp enough to keep even mammoths at bay; if the tuskers tried to cross the trench, the stakes would allow them no footing.
From where they sat at the peripheries of the large group of hunters, Torka and Karana could see the mired animals-several cows and calves ranging from yearlings to adolescents. Their low, weary moans told the hunters that there was little fight left in them. One of the older cows was already dead. She had lost her balance, the hunters said, and had fallen onto her side. Using their trunks and tusks, the other mammoths had tried to help her up; nevertheless, unable to right herself in the deep ooze of the lake bottom, she had soon succumbed to exhaustion and drowned. Now her calf leaned against her enormous exposed side, shoulder deep in the muck, its head down, its trunk moving listlessly.
Lounging and speaking in the slow, mellow tones that tired men on the verge of sleep will use, the hunters droned on about meat and hides and killing, while the magic men sang softly to the spirits of the night, asking that tomorrow’s hunt be all that their people desired. Torka and Karana listened in silence. Then the youth spoke, his voice low and urgent. “I have come because Torka has asked it. But Karana will not wet his spear in the blood of his totem.” Torka nodded. “I have told Lorak that we would hunt. I have not told him that we would kill.”
“Is consenting to an act of killing truly different from taking part in the act itself?”
Not for the first time, Torka was taken aback by the youth’s wisdom. The question stung him because he knew the answer as well as he knew that he had never been a man to hold patience with expedience. Nevertheless, Lorak’s threat weighed heavy on him. He repeated it to the youth, only to have Karana shake his head. He seemed older since he had come down from the Hill of Dreams, somber and more reflective. He sat with his back to the magic men.
Since returning from Sondahr’s hut, he had avoided Navahk completely, refusing even to speak his name. Now he gestured toward him with a snap of his head. “Do you really think it matters to Lorak whether you kill mammoths or not? He only threatens you to prove his authority over you. He has disliked you from the first because you see through the thin mists of his magic. And now he is here, just as I warned before we left the Valley of Songs. I have seen him in my dreams a thousand times since we turned our backs upon the land to which Life Giver led us. With Navahk in this camp, it will be as before: Navahk will turn the others against you. You will see. Already he has Lorak on his side.”
That night the wanawut howled in the nearby hills, and men awoke to listen to her cries while Navahk stood motionless with Lorak, beneath stars veiled by thin bands of ice crystals. As magic men of lesser status circled and chanted, Navahk and the old man raised their voices as one, asking the forces of Creation to grant the hunters a clear dawn that would give birth to a good day to hunt.
And it was so. The killing began at dawn—an orgy of killing led by Navahk and Lorak. With the hunters whooping and yipping at their heels, they swarmed into the canyon, scrambling for footing on high ground that allowed them to rain spears down into the trapped mammoths. The lake turned red with blood, and the frenzied screams of dying animals filled the world. On that day Torka lost much of his reputation as a magic man, for Navahk and his hunters used spear hurlers that he had taught them to make. And since he had also instructed them in their use, their skill was great, but not so great as Navahk’s, who boldly claimed the invention as his own.
“Come, Lorak says you must join with us. You must not stand back from the kill!” Stam cried to Karana, gesturing Torka and him forward. Karana had never liked Stam. He was a dull, indecisive hunter who had always deferred to the magic man, carrying his pack and sharing the best portions of his kills with him. Karana glowered, pointing at Stam’s spear hurler, which the bandy-legged man held balanced over his shoulder. “It was Torka who taught you to use that.”
Stam looked at Torka with wide-eyed innocence. “Was it?”
“It was.” Torka’s tone was as cold as his rising anger was hot.
Stam shrugged. “Navahk says not. Stam does not argue with Spirit Killer!”
Torka clen
ched his teeth. His hand tightened about the grip of his own spear hurler as Stam turned and ran into the canyon where Navahk could be seen climbing a high promontory that jutted out of the canyon wall. It was a gray, lichen scarred slab upon which the agile, graceful magic man found solid footing from which to lever back and make his throws. Below him most of the hapless mammoths were already dead or dying, their bodies riddled with the spears of the hunters who stood in howling, arm-waving ranks along the shore of the lake. Torka saw Zinkh and his men among them and wondered where their undying loyalty to him and dislike of mammoth meat had flown.
Beside him Karana pointed, drawing Torka’s glance away from the hunters and back to where, bellowing pitifully in the mud-thickened lake of blood, the little calf that had moved so listlessly beside the body of its dead mother the night before now slipped beneath the water. Only the bubbles of its dying breaths and the spears embedded in its side were visible.
With a shudder of empathy, Torka allowed his anger to surface. The body of the little animal was lost now, its meat irretrievable, and, hence, its death useless and an affront to the spirits. At his side he heard Karana exhale a hiss of contempt and knew that the youth shared his thoughts and feelings. He put his free hand upon Karana’s shoulder, wishing to communicate his sadness and discontent with the killing. He was startled when the youth shook himself free, turned violently, and glared at him with his teeth bared and his tear-filled eyes wide with rage.
“Karana will not stand and watch this!” he shouted. “Karana has not called the mammoths! No matter what Sondahr may believe, Karana has not called his totems to this!” He was sobbing like a child. “If I truly possessed the power of calling, as Sondahr believes, know that I would call Life Giver from across the far land, upon the back of the winds. I would call him and name him Destroyer and command him to kill them all. All!”
He wheeled and fled from the scene, back toward the encampment, as a defiant shout from Navahk caused Torka to turn back toward the lake just in time to see the magic man, his last spear spent, hurl himself into space. Torka stared, only half believing his eyes as, with arms out, Navahk appeared to fly to a perfect landing upon the back of the largest of the cows. Riddled with spears, with blood pumping from her wounds, the animal was weak and near death, but she still had enough life left in her to try to rid herself of the weight of one of her killers. Her eyes rolled madly as she trumpeted in outrage. Tossing her massive head, she gored the sky with curling, twelve-foot-long tusks, and as Navahk withdrew one of his weapons and with triumphant cries of pleasure drove it deep again and again, the cow, enraged by pain, managed to pull a single forelimb free of the muck that imprisoned her and, with all of her failing strength, reared up—but then, still screaming, finding no footing in the bog, fell sideways.
Navahk leaped straight into the air like a great, white bloodstained lion. He roared and laughed with delight as he landed once again, this time on the heaving side of the beast. The cow lay nearly immobile now, her great, domed head straining to remain above water. Failing, her trunk twisted upward for air as her head went under. And Navahk, mad with the joy, stabbed his spear deep into the shoulder of the mammoth, withdrew his butchering blade, and bending, set himself to flaying open her hide, to eating of her flesh while she jerked and spasmed in agony beneath him.
Torka could not have said just when he entered the canyon and, in an explosion of rage and hatred, ascended the promontory. He only knew that suddenly he was standing above the lake, breathless from his run and climb, watching as his spear went flying, falling, its broad, lanceolate, deadly sharp head burying itself in the flesh of the helpless mammoth, striking deep, striking true—killing instantly, and mercifully ending her agony.
And only the depth of his love for Lonit and his children prevented Torka from hurling one more spear .. . into the throat of Navahk.
“Lonit ...”
She turned, startled by the sound of her name, and was more startled to see who had spoken it.
Sondahr stood at the entryway to her pit hut. “Come out,” she beckoned swiftly. “This woman would speak to the woman of Torka.”
Within the shadows behind Lonit, Aliga stirred on her pallet. She was sitting upright, her tattooed face all but invisible except for the yellowish whites of her eyes. “Torka has three women,” she said belligerently. “Lonit is only one of them.”
Sondahr’s features remained expressionless. “Lonit is Torka’s first woman. My words are for her alone.”
Lonit’s heart sank. She has come to tell me that she wants my man. She has come to win my understanding. Look at her, standing with the sun behind her. Could any woman compare with her beauty? Is there a man alive who would not want her as his own?
“Feather woman .. . pretty ...” piped Summer Moon, pointing to the crowns of swan’s down that circled Sondahr’s brow. The little girl sat between Lonit and lana, playing with a buckskin doll that Lonit had made for her and with a blunt, baby-sized needle with which Lonit was teaching her the basics of sewing by allowing her to mend a rip in the waistband of the doll’s feather skirt.
The little girl held up the doll and dimpled as she waved it at Sondahr. “This girl’s doll wears feathers too! Like feather woman! Do you make magic?”
Sondahr smiled tenderly at the child. “There are many kinds of magic, little one. I do what I can to help others, that is all.”
Aliga snorted. “It has not been much, not for me! But now that Navahk is here, we will all see what a true magic worker can do! In the end, it takes a man to make real magic.” With the mention of Navahk’s name, Aliga’s features changed, her voice softened, and she fairly glowed with anticipation. “He is like no other man. He will make my child come forth. You will see. When the hunters return, when the women have done with the butchering, and all gather together at the feast fire, you will see what Navahk can do.”
“Lonit, come. This woman must speak with you now.”
Lonit winced against Sondahr’s command and knew that she was behaving like a child. She could not put off the inevitable. With a sigh of acquiescence she rose and went out into the light of the ebbing day, following Sondahr through the camp, onto the Hill of Dreams, and into her hut.
A tallow lamp burned in the center of the little shelter. It smelled of old fat scented by oils pounded from the leaves of artemisias. Inhibited by the confines of the unfamiliar interior, and intimidated by the presence of the magic woman, when Sondahr bade Lonit to be seated, she obeyed, albeit hesitantly. She was almost painfully aware of her surroundings. Mammoth bones. Mammoth teeth. Mammoth tusks. Mammoth hide and hair and’ You are a stupid, foolish woman.” Sondahr’s accusation was spoken evenly, directly, without malice. She had seated herself opposite Lonit, on an identical raised platform. Its base was the grinding tooth of a mammoth. Its seat was softened by moss and lichen-stuffed cushions of mammoth hide, overlaid by shaggy skins that had been brushed to a sheen no mammoth had ever known in life.
Lonit was so taken aback by Sondahr’s words that she stared, unable to think of a reply—perhaps because she half agreed with them.
“You fear losing your man to me?”
Again the directness of the magic woman was unsettling. Lonit felt ashamed but could not quite understand why. “I...”
Sondahr’s left eyebrow arched toward her hairline. “You should be ashamed,” she said, in the same disconcerting way of reading thoughts that Karana had. “Do you truly believe that Torka thinks that he danced with me instead of you on the night of the plaku? Can you imagine that he is such a fool that he could not tell us apart because of a few feathers and strokes of paint? Believe me, Lonit, when Sondahr dances for a man, he knows with whom he lies, and any woman who cannot say the same for herself is indeed unworthy of any man at all!”
Lonit stared, aghast.
“Are you unworthy of Torka, Lonit?”
Her mind was swimming. “I—I-He is so fine a man, and I am .. . am ...”
Sondahr’s head went u
p. “You are young, woman of Torka. You are beautiful. You look strong, and your skills are many for one who is blind, and deaf, and very, very dumb. If you believe yourself unworthy, you will be.”
Lonit blinked. She was suddenly angry. “You have no right to speak so to me!”
Again Sondahr’s left eyebrow arched. “You have given me the right, through your silence and your stupidity and your misdirected jealousy.”
“I—I—“
“Stop stammering. If you want to keep your man, you must learn to be bold, to fight for him against anyone or anything that threatens him.”
Now it was Lonit’s brow that arched. Her fingers curled against her palms so tightly that her knuckles went white. “What does Sondahr know of fighting? Lonit has fought for Torka! Against wolves, storms, and the forces of Creation that nearly took his life spirit after he dared to stand against Thunder Speaker. Lonit has fought for Torka until her body bled, and she would fight again—to the death, if the spirits would ask it of me! But Lonit is only a woman. Lonit has no rank! No authority! No power! Lonit cannot fight against you, a magic woman! If Torka chooses Sondahr over Lonit, that is his right. Lonit cannot—“
“—be as blind as she seems!” Sondahr’s beautiful head swung slowly from side to side. Her features relaxed. She sighed, rose, crossed to Lonit’s pallet, and sat beside her. “Lonit, this woman does not want your man, and even if she did, his heart is yours. His spirit is one with yours. Never has Sondahr seen a man so loving of one woman. Can it be that Lonit truly does not see or understand this?”
Lonit’s anger shriveled. Again she felt ashamed and confused. “But I have seen him look at you. He has been with you alone in this place of magic.”