by neetha Napew
She was not quick enough to escape the forward thrust of the spear that struck out and pressed against her thigh, not piercing her flesh but pinning her to the nest. The child screamed in outrage, confusion, and terror, a roaring scream that usually sent predators fleeing for their lives, a scream that rent the still air of morning as only the scream of the wanawut could do. But the scream did not frighten the beast in white. The scream made Mother Killer smile.
Navahk froze, feeling the power of the beast through the spear in his hands. The fire-hardened bone shaft was close to snapping, but the creature held position and did not fully stress the spear. It could have leaped at him. But it did not, nor did it try to run. He was speaking to it now, whispering, his eyes devouring not only its power, which could have been hurled against him if it chose, but encompassing an even more amazing and intriguing truth.
He had been close to the beast before, but never this close. Always shrubs or grasses stood between them, revealing only suggestions of its hairy form. Now Navahk saw it clearly for the first time. It was hideous and loathsome, half human, half animal, and completely female.
She had matured at an astounding rate. He could see her breasts and smell her sex. And slowly, as he met the wide, lustrous gray eyes of the thing, he realized with growing wonder that she feared him as much, if not more, than he feared her.
“Wah nah wut ...” he whispered, moving the spear relaxing its pressure on her thigh, slowly withdrawing the shaft. The creature blinked. She looked to the spear, then to the man. Her grotesque head tilted to one side. “Wah .. . nah?”
She copied his sound, questioning with it.
Navahk felt smug and victorious over the stupid thing. “Wah nah?” he echoed, his eyes moving over the animal, taking in the incredible power of her musculature, the size of her hands and arms and massive jaws, her bent and foreshortened lower limbs, and the hairy, barrel-chested torso out of which two bare, fully human breasts flared tender and pale like the budding breasts of a nubile young girl. He was stirred by them. Carefully, slowly, his free hand reached forward; his single fingertip traced a large taut nipple that crested and hardened at his touch.
He laughed, at once amused and disgusted but more deeply stirred than ever before. He resented his reaction; it revolted him. This thing was not a woman, not a girl. She was not even human! This beast nourished herself on the blood of man. Sondahr’s blood had been sucked dry by the creature; Sondahr’s blood gave her strength.
“Sondahr!” His exhalation of the dead woman’s name surprised him. He had not intended to speak, and certainly not with such longing.
The beast frowned. Her head tilted in the opposite direction. “Suh ... dahh ...”
Navahk was stunned. The beast had done more than imitate his voice. She had captured the tone of desire that had seemed to bleed from his spirit when he had spoken. The tone had created a response in the animal. Again she cocked her head, looking at him, studying him with her impossibly human and beautiful eyes .. . reaching out to touch his breast, as he had touched hers, with a gently questing finger.
He did not move. He allowed the touch. The thing’s hand drifted to his face, explored, lingered so gently, so tenderly that he could barely feel her touch. His own hand rose, hesitated, then slowly reached to touch the face of the beast. The animal made no move to resist him. She moved closer, closing her eyes and quivering with pleasure at his touch. A surge of power swelled in him like flame rising to explode outward. No man has done this! he thought. No man has touched the wanawut and lived. No man!
His hand moved, caressed the beast. Her eyes opened. He saw fear, confusion, and need in her face. Fear of the stranger.
Confusion in this new and astounding situation. Need to be comforted, to be touched ... to be loved? Even by a man?
It was then that the madness took him. He knew it for what it was and did not care, for the need was suddenly as great in him as it was in the beast. He trembled at the thought of what he was about to do. No female was his equal. None had satisfied him. The beast was young. For the rising of many moons she had been alone, with only him daring to come to her, to feed her, to mouth utterances of her own sounds to her. She would not understand what he was doing now until his intent was accomplished, and even then she would not grasp that she had been mated.
Beast to man, flesh to spirit, Navahk to the wanawut—to power, to the very physical manifestation of all that men feared.
He lay the spear aside. He was afraid, but fear was sweet and stimulating as he cautiously moved into the nest with her. She did not stop him. He saw his image reflected in the eyes of the animal. Even with his ruined eye, he was as beautiful as the beast was ugly. No man in the world could equal him now—not Torka on a hunt, not Lorak at magic making, and not even Karana when it came to calling the spirits. For the power of the wanawut was in him; he could feel it pumping in his heart, surging in his arms and limbs, and rising in his loins. He had slain a wind spirit and danced in its skin, and now he would master the beast and teach her to respond to his command.
His smile became a carnivorous leer. “Come .. he invited, cautiously touching her, beginning to lead her, wondering if Sondahr also felt his touch, for within the flesh of the animal was the blood of the woman.
Not understanding, the wanawut leered back at him. “Kuh . mmm ...” she repeated, and as he stroked her, her skin quivered again, the skin of an animal responding to the stroking of her own kind.
“It is early for such a hard freeze,” observed Grek when they reached the Big Milk River. “This big river usually roars longer than most.”
“The spirits are with us,” said Karana.
“It seems so,” agreed Torka, and he led them across the river.
They rested on its banks that night. They made no fire lest others see it or smell its smoke and thereby fix their position. Ahead of them lay the broad Plain of Many Waters. Under a clear, brutally cold sky, they ate dry traveling rations and observed the treacherous expanse of ice that lay between them and the country to the east.
“We dare not cross,” said a weary Wallah. “Perhaps it is just as well. We could all do with a rest. Such an early cold cannot last much longer. Soon the ice will melt and—“
“Navahk will close the distance between us with ease,” interrupted Karana, his tone stern with warning.
“But once the river thaws, they will have to journey far to the south to cross it,” reminded Grek. “Besides, we have seen no sign of anyone. Perhaps no one pursues us after all.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Torka without enthusiasm, “but we will not stay to find out. Tomorrow we will go on, and the ice will be no hindrance to us.”
He gestured to Lonit, who went to her traveling pack and brought out a pair of stone-studded leather nets. Before long Lonit had showed Wallah and the other women how to fashion their own special thong-webbed soles for their boots; studded with sharp bits of antler broken off from Grek’s stalking cloak and bound securely across their insteps, these cram pons allowed excellent traction on the ice.
The next day they crossed the broken, treacherous terrain of the Plain of Many Waters, glad for the frozen ground, and Demmi, riding with Aar on one of the two sledges, cried and pointed in frustration, wanting to join Summer Moon, who proudly high-stepped between Lonit and lana in her own pair of ice walkers.
Straining to maintain her balance as she tried hard to keep up with Karana, Mahnie smiled to see the pride and joy in the little girl. “This morning Summer Moon told me that she is glad to be going home. Tell me about the forbidden land, Karana.”
“It is far,” he replied obliquely, looking over his shoulder as he often did, his handsome face grim with concern.
Her feelings were hurt. Again and again she tried to be a friend to him. He was never rude to her but merely preoccupied, except when she had mentioned her fear of Navahk after the way he had killed Pet. He had looked at her as though she had struck him, and for many hours he had spoken to no one but had wal
ked on ahead, brooding and alone. She sighed. The bone barbs of her ice walkers snagged on a rough outcropping of muddy ice. She nearly fell. He caught and held her, but with less interest than he would have shown to his dog. She looked up at him, her feelings hurt until she saw the depth of his fear in his eyes. Now, for the first time, her confidence in her elders flagged. Memories swam within her. “Do you really think he will follow us? Grek says that the storm must surely have given us time to gain many miles on him.”
“No storm will stop him. And if he finds us—“ He stopped before he spoke words that he had no wish to conjure into reality. “You ask a lot of questions for a girl.”
“I am not a girl!” she told him emphatically. “I am a woman!”
He looked her up and down. “If you say so.”
“I do!” she declared, and in a huff pushed him so hard that his ice walkers went out from under him, and he fell down.
Lorak was dead.
Navahk danced in the firelight, in the skin of the wanawut, with all the assembled bands looking on. He danced as he had never danced before, whirling, leaping, the power of the beast in him. All who watched him were amazed.
Navahk smiled at the women, children, and elders. As the hunters listened, he sang to the women of their brave men, of past hunts and good winters, of full bellies and fires burning warm in the winter dark.
And then, with his staff in one hand and spear in the other, Navahk circled the feast fire and chanted of Lorak, whose body had been put out to look upon the sky forever.
“Great was Lorak! Proud will be the hunter whose woman next bears a son into whose body the spirit of Lorak will come! Who will this woman be whose man will name their child for Lorak?”
The women looked meaningfully from one to the other, and among the women of Zinkh’s band, all eyes went to Simu’s young, pretty woman, for her time was fast approaching. Her face turned down. Her eyes stared with embarrassment into her lap.
Across from her, seated with the men on their side of the circle, Simu was proud and troubled all at once. He wished that Zinkh had never brought his people to the Great Gathering. Things had been bad in the encampment since the banishment of the People Who Walk With Dogs. He had been shaken by that; never in his life had he seen men brutalized in the way that Torka and Karana had been. He had liked and respected Torka and had learned more about the hunt on one day’s trek onto the tundra with him than he had in a lifetime of hunting with Zinkh and the men of his own band. He was glad that Torka’s women had run away to be with him. Simu hoped that his own Eneela would do the same for him. He admired the strong old hunter Grek for daring to risk his own family in order to help them, and he wondered if he would be as brave as Grek had been—or as unflinching before pain and certain death as Torka, or even the youth Karana.
He watched the dance of the magic man and sensed a falseness in him. But these shamans were all that way—aloof, disdainful, overbearing, all show and sparkling fires and strangely scented smokes. Having grown up in a band with Pomm as magic woman, he believed with a certainty that her healing ways were clever diversions.
Nevertheless, he wondered why old Pomm looked so nervous as she sat in the position of supreme rank in the center of the women’s half of the circle, next to Naiapi, who had become old Lorak’s woman during his last days. Pomm had never made a secret of her longing to sit someday in that spot, to outshine the legendary Sondahr. Now that Sondahr had died and Navahk had proclaimed the great powers of Pomm, Simu would have expected her to look smug. But instead her pudgy little hands plucked at her headdress of feathers in the way men and women pluck at the air when they fear that death is near. There was fear in her eyes as she observed the dance of Navahk.
Beside him Zinkh made a low guttural sound as he crossed his arms over his meager chest and shook his head. Simu saw his scowl and knew that he was not the only man feeling unenthusiastic about Navahk’s display. True, there was not a band that would not covet such a shaman as Navahk; nor was there a man or woman who would dispute his right to become supreme elder in Lorak’s place. But something set Simu on edge when he looked at him. He had not forgotten the way the man had threatened him. More, Navahk had blamed the death of Stam on Torka and his dogs. Yet Torka was long gone, and now Het was dead as a result of a freak accident in which he had tripped over air, it seemed, and fallen into Navahk’s fire circle. The man had been so dirty, his clothes and hair so greasy, he had caught fire instantly and run through the camp. By the time anyone had been able to tackle him and try to smother the flames, it was too late.
Simu’s mouth tensed. That was no fit death for a man. Yet others had died worse deaths since then: three old men and two old women among whom Navahk had generously portioned the meat of Torka’s slain dogs. They had died screaming, like Sondahr. The magic men had not been able to heal them. In the end Navahk had commanded Pomm to end their misery, and after many hours spent in a trance, he had announced that bad spirits would walk the camp until Torka and his people were found and slain.
And now, suddenly, Navahk’s dance changed. No longer chanting to honor the memory of Lorak, he set to loose fear within the hearts of the People, and when the bladder flask the men had been passing around came to Simu, he passed it on without drinking. Somehow, he sensed that to be drunk on this night would not be a good thing.
Yet the others drank as Navahk sang a dark song of bad spirits and an encampment that must be purged. His potent song caught fire in his listeners, and before Simu could fully grasp what was happening, the circle of watchers broke wide around him. Men, women, and children, urged on by Navahk’s maniacal song, scurried to fetch their precious stores of bison and mammoth meat, to hurl their hard-won winter food supply into the communal fire.
“Torka has hunted this meat,” cried the magic man, encouraging their madness. “It is bad meat, cursed by his bad spirit. All who eat it will die!”
Aghast at the appalling waste, Simu stood beside an equally incredulous Zinkh. How could the people believe what the magic man was saying? Sondahr had supposedly died of Navahk’s own curse! Lorak had most likely succumbed to the infirmities of old age. Het had stumbled into a fire pit, and for days people had been eating bison and mammoth meat with no ill effects. Only those who had eaten of the flesh of the dogs had been .. . poisoned?
A coldness pricked at the back of Simu’s shoulders as the young man understood. The flames, fed with fat and bone and dried flesh, grew high, giving birth to smoke that smelled rich and sweet with the aroma of roasting meat that would feed no one during the time of the long dark that was nearly upon them. In the wake of the storm, the land surrounding the encampment would yield little nourishment.
And still Navahk danced. At last he had the excuse to pursue Torka’s people into the Corridor of Storms, where no doubt he would seduce others into helping him to kill them all.
The short, clouded days grew suddenly warm. Near the well-remembered River of Caribou Spring Crossing it rained hard, just as it had rained before. They passed old fire circles and the depressions of long-abandoned pit huts, and although there were no signs of recent camps, it seemed to Karana that they were being watched from the silent, bleak land. The tracks of many bands overlay each other, bleeding away into mud so that neither Torka, Grek, nor Karana could determine when they had been laid. Among them Torka found the footprints of two adults and a child heading east; and not far away, headed in the opposite direction, he saw the fresher prints of one of the same two adults, a male burdened with a heavy pack frame, if Torka was judging correctly by length of the stride and the depth of tracks. But even as he knelt to examine them, recalling the despicable Tomo and Jub and the pitiable little slave boy whom they had jerked along in their wake, the rain flooded the prints and pounded at them until they disappeared.
Torka rose, disturbed by his memories of the two slavers and the frail, beaten-looking little boy. What had happened to them? He looked around through rain and the gray, brooding cloud cover. This was bad co
untry. Like Karana, he felt himself being watched. But by whom? The ghosts of Hetchem and her malformed infant? He urged the others to move on, and they walked quietly across it, not wishing to linger lest they inadverently offend the restless spirits of the dead.
For two days it rained lightly. Torka led relentlessly on through the mist, avoiding the tundra barrens, which would be a vast mud wallow now.
“The sky spirits behave as though they cannot make up their minds whether it is spring or winter,” commented Lonit, eyeing the sky.
Walking beside her, Torka noted that despite their grueling journey, her step was sure. Indeed, it seemed that the farther they went from the land of men and the closer they came to the Corridor of Storms, the stronger she became. Her bruises were healing. He looked at her with love and pride, until Karana darkened his mood.
“It will be winter soon enough,” said Karana grimly. “And if Navahk catches us, for this band it will be winter forever!”
They took to the misted hills that climbed gradually through scrub country and the thick, miniature forests of the Land of Little Sticks. Here they rested as they looked back across the land for any signs of followers.
Nothing.
“This would be a good place to camp,” Grek suggested. “For the sake of our women and the little ones, we must take time to rest. And in these woods and clouds we could risk a fire.”
“We cannot rest until we reach the Corridor of Storms. Not even Navahk will be able to convince others to follow us there!” insisted Karana.
Torka saw exhaustion on the loyal, uncomplaining faces. His own weariness was heavy in him. Once again he took note of the vast, empty land that lay behind them. “We will rest,” he decided. “For a little while.”
They raised a shelter against the rain and judiciously built a nearly smokeless little fire beneath it, huddling close to eat their first hot food in days. The women and children slept, and Torka, Karana, and Grek took turns keeping watch over the western land from the high hills. They saw no sign of life—not even of game.