by neetha Napew
“Child?” He smiled. “Would the woman of Torka like to see her child?” When Pomm saw his smile, she was stunned by terror and could not move.
Nor could Aliga escape him as he fell upon her, using the shell that had struck out his eye to rip open her belly as his free hand quested deep and pulled out a handful of truth—a hideous mass of formless, malodorous, and malignant tissue.
“Here is your child, woman of Torka. Look upon your child. Suckle it as you die! As Lonit’s children will die. As all those who walk with Torka will die for what they have done to me!”
Pomm backed out of the pit hut on all fours. It had been years since she had moved so quickly or had snapped to her feet without conscious effort or had accelerated her girth into an actual run. It did her no good; Navahk was after her, a lion pouncing upon an aging, hornless rhino. She went down with a gasp and stared blindly into wind and snow as he dragged her back into Torka’s pit hut by one of her ankles. She screamed for help; but the wind carried her voice away into the storm, and no one heard her. She screamed as he closed the door skin behind her. Sprawled on her belly, she was unable to right herself until he jerked her upright by one of her stubby arms, half-dislocating it as he did so.
“Do not dare run from me!”
Her chin wobbled in terror. Her bright little eyes bulged as she saw the lifeless form of Aliga sprawled upon her bloodstained bed furs, her throat as well as her belly cut.
“Do not look so appalled, fat woman! Was it not your knife that opened the veins of Sondahr and hastened the departure of her life spirit so that your flat little feet might tread in the tracks that she had made in the hearts of men?”
“At her request was the cutting done! And with her own knife and—“
“Stop squealing! Are you not what you have lusted to be—magic woman of the Great Gathering?”
She blinked, confused, frightened, anticipating where his words were leading. “For h-how long?” she whimpered.
“That is up to you. Help me to eclipse Lorak, and you will live. But run away from me with a loose tongue and an accusing voice, and I will turn you out from this camp and slaver your naked flesh with blood after I have bound you fast by your own innards to a tree. Then the carnivores will come to devour you. This I swear by the forces of Creation.”
She could not still the hammering of her heart, and that frightened her almost as much as the man who loomed over her, for it leaped and fell wildly within her breast, leaving her dizzy and breathless. He crouched before her, smiling. One hand lay over his ruined eye. The other found her face. His index finger traced her brow slowly, sensuously. “What Pomm has witnessed has not been the work of Navahk. You must tell the people that the wanawut killed the tattooed woman, and it will kill all who oppose Navahk in the days to follow.”
Her heartbeat quieted. With his one hand held over his mutilated eye, and the other fingering her features as a lover might, his beauty was as before—perfection, a maturer Karana, so intense and compelling that she found herself a captive of his one dark eye, nodding mutely as his smile deepened.
“Yes, Pomm, we know what you desire, do we not? Perhaps I can give it to you. Or perhaps, when I find Karana, I will make a present of him to you upon the Hill of Dreams. His body yours to command. You would like that, would you not?”
“I would have these things .. . and more.”
He heard the pitiful desperation in her voice and knew that he had not misread her; she wanted him. “Pomm will have more,” he purred, thinking of the pleasure that wringing her neck would give him. “But first Pomm must speak for Navahk and affirm all that he will say to the assembled bands from the Hill of Dreams.”
Slowly her hand rose to his, pressed softly, questingly. “Your eye .. . does it bring much pain?”
“I feed on pain, woman. It gives me strength. As meat nourishes other men, so does pain nourish me.” He moved his hand from beneath hers and rose. The words had been easy to say, but the wound was stressing him. There were poultices in his hut that would ease his pain, but only a little. The wound must be cleansed, but he would allow no one to tend him, lest someone bear witness to any sign of weakness. He must have time alone.
He stood above Pomm, fighting back the impulse to kick her. “I will go to the Hill of Dreams to commune with the forces of Creation. Stay here with the corpse of the tattooed woman. When the day yields to dusk, you must burst from the hut crying to all that the wanawut has slain the tattooed woman.”
She looked uncertain. “But how will they believe that this woman Pomm has escaped unharmed?”
“Tell them that by Navahk’s power were you spared .. . that the beast comes and goes at my command. And when you have said this, I will affirm before all that because of your magic ways with the soothing of my injury, no harm could possibly come to you from the wanawut unless—or until I say so.”
“Get in out of the storm, woman. What are you still doing huddled here upon the Hill of Dreams? This is no place for you!”
Naiapi looked up through blowing snow to see the fur blanketed figure of Lorak standing over her—a dark blur, like a mud stain on snow. Disappointment flooded her; she had been waiting for Navahk for hours. “To whose hut should this woman go, then? I am the woman of Grek. My man has abandoned me and taken with him everything but this bedroll and my few belongings. I am shamed before all. No man of my band will take me in. So I wait here for Navahk, headman of my people and brother to one who was my first man. Navahk will tell me what to do. And he has said that I would be his woman someday.”
She looked so lost, so cold sitting there in the snow in her shaggy robe. Sondahr’s robe? He could not be sure—there was too much snow on it. Her face was handsome, well defined even through the gauze of snow. Beneath the shaggy, frozen robe, her body would be handsome too; he had no doubt of that if Navahk had spoken for her.
Lorak’s face collapsed about his nose. He was annoyed with Navahk. He was happy to think of him minus an eye. That would ruin his looks and wilt his arrogance! The man had virtually taken over at the feast-fire celebrations before Lorak realized what he was doing. True enough, he had been delighted to drive Torka and his undisciplined whelp from the encampment, but Lorak had wanted to instigate the action. He had not liked the way Navahk had willed evil spirits into Sondahr without his approval. Now the magic woman was dead, and Navahk had enjoyed Torka’s antelope-eyed woman. But Lorak would never have the pleasure of easing his lust upon Sondahr—a lust that Navahk must have sated years before.
Frustration and jealousy pricked the old man. He would fix Navahk and teach him not to trifle with his elders. He put out his hand to Naiapi. “So Navahk has spoken for you. Well, he is a one-eyed man who will be long recuperating under the care of Pomm. Lorak is supreme elder in this encampment, and Lorak now speaks for Naiapi. Come, woman. Grek has abandoned you, and the storm grows worse. This man has no woman to warm his bed skins. I would wager you know a few tricks to warm a hungry old man, eh?”
She accepted his hand with only momentary hesitation. “I know many tricks, Lorak, especially if you are truly hungry. Many would be amazed at the magic that Naiapi has been able to work with meat.”
They went out across the land together. Although they heard the howling of wolves and the wanawut, they did not look back. Falling snow covered their tracks. Torka, Karana, and Lonit were battered and bruised, but they walked boldly, with Grek, lana, Wallah, Mahnie, and the children following.
They dragged two sledges now: Aar rode upon the one that Mahnie had taken, along with her well-chosen supplies; the other, quickly constructed of caribou antlers by Grek before he had left to join Torka and Karana, had two mammoth-rib runners. These would double as roof supports when they encamped. In the cold, driving wind, Grek had iced them with his own urine so that they would glide atop the snow as the group fled across the land.
Grek marveled at the luck that had intensified the storm and kept the people of the Great Gathering inside their pit huts, then at h
is own good fortune, having such a one as Wallah for his woman. He looked back at her now as she trudged with head bent forward against her brow band. She had not hesitated for a moment when he had whispered his intentions of following Torka; she wanted to leave the encampment as much as he did, not only to find Mahnie but to be away from what she believed to be a place of very bad spirits.
With lana and Lonit at her side working hurriedly and efficiently, she had broken down their pit hut in record time. In silence the women had prepared carrying packs and stacked upon the sledge the remaining rib bones, hide coverings, dried meat, packets of fat, and the few belongings that Lonit had brought from Torka’s pit hut—including his spears, bludgeon, and spear hurler—plus all those things of Grek’s that would mean life to them on the long trek. At last they were committed to their course. As he walked beside Torka into the rising storm, wolves howling in the distance and the wanawut shrieking closer at his back, Grek walked confidently, without fear, for the first time in more years than he cared to remember.
The child watched them go. Through cold, white wind and snow, the eyes of the child saw them—warm, brown, furs, and flesh. The child’s wide, splayed nostrils quivered. These were the sweet smells of life—creatures moving in unison. A pack. Young. Old. Many equaling one. One stronger because of many. Many stronger because there was one among them who was not afraid to lead.
The child shivered and tasted bitterness at the back of its throat. Loneliness always tasted bitter. Loneliness was a muddy color in the child’s mind, blue around the edges, like a bruise that would not heal, cold at the thick, dark center that fell away to nothing—empty, like the eyes of Mother Killer.
Mother!
Leaning forward, staring through the ice-rimed, wind-broken grasses, the child mewed softly.. The beasts were well away now. The one who looked like Mother Killer walked with them. But he was not Mother Killer. He was Star Eyes, a gentle beast—a memory from long ago. The child thought of Mother and pack, of times long gone by, of warm arms and soothing sounds, of breast milk as warm and sweet as blood.
Its mewing increased. The air was cold here by the lake in the white world, with the wind whipping at the child’s fur and no hole in the sky to send sweet warmth to the earth below, and no Mother—or even Mother Killer—to offer comfort in the storm.
The child took a step forward through the grasses, heard ice crack along the stems and smelled the slightly acrid, dusty scent of the dried stalks. It wanted to go forward, to follow the beasts into the storm, but only moments ago it had heard Mother Killer howling with pain from within the circle of piled bones. He was hurt. Perhaps he would never bring meat again. Perhaps his breath would leave his body, and one of his own kind would gut him and skin him and dance in his flesh, as he had danced in the flesh of Mother.
A cramp bit deep within the child’s belly. It hunkered down, still mewing to itself, confused by its own pain and the smell of its own blood. A massive, hirsute hand moved to explore the source of the scent. The child fingered warm redness against its inner thighs. The blood was scabbing there, en crusting within the thick, gray, downy fur. The child uttered a series of low, confused little hoots. Mother had bled, too, and not just at the time she had ceased to breathe. Mother howled and mewed at these times of occasional blood, as the child howled and mewed now.
Confused by the blood that came from no wound, the child ran its bloodied hand back and forth across the snow-carpeted floor of grass. It cried out. Something sharp had sliced its finger. The child sucked at it, tasting and smelling wound blood now. The cut was small but deep. The child kept on sucking, easing pain as it flailed its free fist angrily into the snow. Something hard bruised the heel of its hand. Curious, the child huffed and circled, still crouching, bending close, blowing snow away, extending the index finger of its uncut hand to touch the offending object, shaped like an elongated willow leaf.
The child recognized it at once. The object was the lanceolate, meticulously carved dagger of obsidian, left behind, along with a flying stick, by one of the beasts that had come out from the piled bones carrying fire. Evidently when the child had dragged Star Eyes, the wounded beast that looked like Mother Killer, into the circle of grass, the oddly shaped stone must have been dragged along with him, tangled in the fringes of his garments. The child carefully lifted the stone, smelled it, and licked it. There was no doubt that it was a thing of earth formed by the hands of man to a new purpose.
The child cocked its head. It lay the edge of the dagger alongside its wound, measuring, defining the dagger’s potential, understanding just how and by what its hand had been cut.
It grunted now in satisfaction, gripping the sinew-wrapped end of the dagger, remembering another such man stone .. . buried in the breast of its mother.
Torka led his people on through a world where sky and land were one, where snow and wind were the one wailing reality. At last he was forced to stop lest he become guilty of leading them in circles.
They erected a crude shelter against the storm, a mere lean-to that broke the back of the wind and allowed them to sleep huddled together until, at last, the wind veered and dropped. Torka awoke, with Lonit still dreaming in the curl of one arm and Summer Moon asleep in the other. lana was a Demmi-protecting mound with a fur-clad arm and mittened hand. He could hear the pull of Grek’s breathing, the light exhalations and inhalations of Mahnie, and the rather profound snores of Wallah.
He saw Karana standing alone in the white, silent world. Snow was still falling. Aar was at his side. Relief flooded Torka. The animal would live! He had feared that it would not.
Wincing against the pain of his tightly bound ribs and many bruises and moving carefully so that he would not awaken the others, Torka climbed to his feet and went out to Karana.
The youth did not acknowledge his presence. Torka put up his hood and adjusted his ruff so that snow did not fall into his face. For a long while he and Karana stood in silence.
“They will follow. If they find us—“
“They will not.” Torka interrupted Karana before, once again, he inadvertently gave voice to words that might cause terrible things to happen.
Ahead of them, through the snow mist, the faintest diffusion of golden light glowed far to the east.
“The sun rises,” Karana observed.
Torka nodded. “I will tell the others. We must go on.”
All that day the snow fell. The voice of the wanawut was heard, and the wind blew in intermittent, vicious squalls into which no man at the Great Gathering wished to venture.
Within the council house of bones, the supreme elder was not feeling well. He looked gray and pinched and made no attempt to hide the fact that his belly ached. He adamantly refused Navahk’s request to lead hunters in pursuit of the woman who had maimed him.
“The people of Man Who Walks With Dogs must be dead by now,” Lorak wheezed. “Forget them. The wanawut has invaded this encampment to take the life of one who dwelled among us. The bodies of Stam and Aliga and Sondahr have been put to look upon the sky forever. Now wolves and lions or owl close to the walls. Bad spirits walk the world, Navahk.
Lorak says that it is good that the people remain within the wall of bones.”
All the hunters and elders who had gathered to counsel within the great, smoke-filled room murmured in agreement.
From beneath the skin of the wanawut Navahk fixed the supreme elder contemptuously with his one good eye; the other was hidden beneath a wide band of white caribou skin cut from the inside seam of his surplice. His head ached. His ruined eye was a bottomless pit of pain; but he had rested and cleansed the wound and packed it with painkilling poultices of fat saturated with willow oil, and he was in control of it now.
He was surprised when the old man was not visibly intimidated by his glare. Anger and frustration showed on Navahk’s face because he had been certain that the credulous elder and equally gullible magic men and hunters would have been his to command once Pomm screeched her story about
the attack of the wanawut. But although they had been sobered, they had not been without questions, and he was in no mood to hear them. “Unlike Lorak, Navahk does not walk with fear. This man has brought mammoths to the hunters of this camp. This man walks in the skin of the wanawut. It will hurt no man who hunts with me.”
From where he sat among the men of his own band, a scowling, thoughtful Zinkh spoke out: “Zinkh says that if Navahk wishes to hunt the eye-taking woman, that right be his right, yes! But with Navahk has come more than mammoths. With Navahk has come the thing we fear—the wind spirit wanawut. This man Zinkh does not hunt in the land of wind spirits. And this man Zinkh does not hunt women. If, as Navahk says, Lonit struck out his eye in order to escape, this man says that perhaps the spirits have punished her already. The storm is bad. The cold is worse. Lonit is only a woman, and Torka must be dead by now. A female must always do as she is told, so for her disobedience the spirits will punish Torka’s woman. If Lonit was willing to risk walking the wind to be with her man, this man would not risk his life in the storm to stop her. And the man Grek has but one aging female and one girl child. What loss to his band is such a hunter?”
“Bravely and generously spoken. I wonder if Zinkh would be so forgiving if it was his eye that had been taken.” Navahk’s one eye narrowed. They had all accepted the lie that Lonit had maimed him. They had all been outraged by Grek’s unprecedented behavior. But Navahk had been unable to infect them with his own need for vengeance. Zinkh was a particular annoyance to him, in the elaborate, grotesquely moldering headdress crowned by a mutilated, headless fox. Beside him several hunters, both young and old, looked at Navahk out of fixed and wary eyes. Zinkh’s band was small, but his men were loyal to their headman. Not one had participated in the violence against Torka and Karana with any enthusiasm. They had hung back, hesitating when Lorak had commanded them to follow him into the night by torchlight. Alone of all of the hunters, the banishment and beatings had set Zinkh’s men on edge.