Shadows in the Cave

by Caleb Fox

  To the devil with Shonan. At least she could take a look at the dangerous present, could use the other gift, the one she’d never given up, regardless of what he said—this was the time to defy him. The sky was beginning to shade from black to gray, so she would have to act fast.

  She padded, one slow step and one gentle shift of weight at a time, to the back of the boulder. She crawled up toward Shonan, deliberately making a little noise. He turned around with brows furrowed, concentration broken.

  She pointed to herself, made a flying motion with her arms, drew a big circle around her head, and pointed to her eyes.

  Shonan shook his head vigorously—No! He understood well enough. But he didn’t want a spy in the sky, not if it was magical. He didn’t want women to do men’s fighting. Most of all, he didn’t want his wife at risk.

  Meli backed away from him on all fours. When she felt grass beneath her feet, she raised to her full height and began. She was pleased to see how he fixed his eyes on her. Did he object to what she was doing? She didn’t care.

  The twins crept close to her and watched intently. She was glad of that. Salya had been the one who guarded her secret. Meli turned her attention to Aku. Look, she thought, behold this power that also belongs to you.

  She shifted the shape of flesh to feather. Nose became beak. Feet turned into claws. Arms became wings. Blood and brain, eyes and instincts became an owl’s. She raised her wings, took two quick steps, and launched into the air.

  She loved flying. As a child she dreamed of nothing else, not that she could remember. Her first flight as an owl, when she was twelve, had been the most marvelous experience of her life. Her heart shot higher than her wings. She jiggle-jaggled in the air. She dived, just to feel the exhalation. She soared.

  She turned her head back toward the twins and her husband and let out a single hoot. It was a pretend bit of playfulness to relieve her fear. Of tonight’s owl hoots, only hers were genuine.

  She turned her disc of face to business. Owls saw well in the dark, and in the half-dark around her now. She would spot their enemies, count the number, note their positions, and signal the news to her husband. Her gift would protect her family.

  Aku watched from below. His mind didn’t believe or disbelieve—it flamed in amazement. His mother an owl. The mother he loved, a hoot owl. By her will. By her power. Awe lifted him higher than her flight. Salya smiled and squeezed his hand.

  Meli arced to the left and sailed a graceful line across a sky the color of dove feathers. When she got to a gully, she made three quick dips of her head.

  Three enemies in that gully, no doubt creeping downward.

  Aku looked at his father. Shonan was glaring at his airborne wife. He certainly didn’t mind knowing where the attackers were, but …

  Meli turned and flew straight down the trail the party had walked. Two dips—two enemies right on the trail.

  She circled behind the boulder where Aku and Salya were hiding. One dip there.

  In a flash the enemies ended the game. A voice barked a sputter of ugly, guttural words, like axe blows. A gang of voices erupted with the same sounds, a war cry. Men—Brown Leaves, Shonan saw—dashed into camp and swung weapons at empty bedding. Finding nothing, they looked at each other in mystification. Shonan decided they should die puzzled.

  He sucked in oceans of air and howled them out in the Galayi war cry—Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI! His comrades joined in at horrific volume. At the same time they bounded down from boulders, out from behind trees, and from rocky crevices. The enemy closest to Shonan was squatting next to the hides he and Meli had slept under. Shonan kicked him in the head so hard he heard the man’s neck crack.

  He whirled, his stone club cocked. A Brown Leaf was foolish enough to charge and thrust with the point of a spear. Shonan swept it aside with one hand, spun, and clubbed the man fiercely in the back of the head. He loved the clamor of battle.

  Shonan’s comrades shouted, roared, swung, slashed, stabbed—they roused themselves into an orgy of slaughter. He himself jumped across several empty beds, grabbed a Brown Leaf from behind, and slit his throat. Then he said to Yim, who was winding up with his own club, “Sorry to interfere, you get the feather.” Galayi warriors were awarded eagle feathers for brave deeds like killing enemies.

  Shonan, Yim, Fuyl, Feyano, and his son looked around. It was over.

  Shonan corrected himself. It might be over. Six enemies, Meli’s count had been right, but maybe she hadn’t seen them all. His eyes found her in the skies.

  Aku spied her, too. She slowly glided around the camp, still checking. Then she wingflapped her way upward, so that she could see further.

  At that moment Aku noticed far above his owl mother the dark shape of a high-flier, wings fixed, body sailing imperiously above all. Though the light was barely enough, he saw it was a hawk. Yes, a red-tail hunting in the predawn light.

  Horror strangled him. He tried to cry out loudly, but his voice clotted in his throat.

  The hawk hurtled down. At the last instant, points jutted out below its belly. Talons and the hurling weight of the predator hit his mother at full ferocity. Aku thought maybe he heard a sound like a hiccough, or the first squeak of a hoot.

  Several owl feathers spurted into the air.

  The hawk winged off, feet clutching a dark lump.

  Aku, Salya, and Shonan looked at each other, eyes glassy with agony. No words were possible.

  Dead enemies were strewn around the camp, but Aku’s eyes were fixed on the real enemy winging away. He sent Meli a thought—Change back into a human being and you’ll be too heavy for him. But he knew the talons had pierced her heart in the first instant. The lump got smaller, to him a mother, to the hawk a meal.

  Aku and Salya held each other and wept.

  When that was over, the brother and sister walked out onto the hillside and spent endless time meandering around. At last they found three of their mother’s feathers.

  “Do you want these?” Aku asked Salya.

  “No,” she said, “but I ask you to wear them in your hair.”

  Aku gave her a wild look.

  “Aku, say out loud why you must honor our mother.” Her brother was kind and sensitive, but he often needed coaching.

  “She died to save her children.”

  “And her husband,” said Salya. “And because?”

  He looked at her foolishly.

  “Mother gave you the gift she had, the gift to change shape, like she did. Now you will wear these as a sign that you know she was an owl as well as a human being. To honor that.”

  She tied them into his long hair in back, tail feathers properly pointing down.

  When they got back to the group, ready to go, Shonan stared at the feathers. Aku and Salya stared back.

  Finally, their father said in a raspy voice, “We don’t have a body to bury.”

  He meant that they could hold no proper ceremony for their mother, give her no food or water or even moccasins for her trip to the Darkening Land. They could do no proper mourning. She was gone without a farewell.

  Shonan grabbed Aku roughly by the shoulders. “Remember what got her killed. It was that damn magic.” The father glared at his son. Aku said nothing.

  “I see you’re wearing her feathers. Take them off.”

  Salya spoke first. “No.”

  “This is how I honor her,” said Aku.

  Shonan’s face contorted. “I know, she used to say you have it, too, you could be a shape-shifter. I made her promise she wouldn’t teach you. Look! Now you know where that so-called gift took her.”

  His father’s eyes held Aku harder than his hands. “Promise me now. Promise you’ll never do it.”

  Salya spoke with defiance in her voice. “Aku, promise me and our mother that you will do it.”

  Father and daughter glared at each other. At the same moment both of them repeated, “Promise.”

  Aku started to stammer something out, but he was tongue-tied
. Finally, he said, “I am my mother’s son.”

  3

  You have to eat by yourselves,” Shonan told the twins. “I won’t be here.”

  “Even tonight?” Aku said. Salya wanted to say something about “your great mission,” but she knew it would sound sarcastic.

  Salya thrust Shonan a strip of dried meat and waved him away. She and Aku never liked it when their father skipped eating with them. Their mother dead six years, their grandparents gone, they were already a family of only three, the smallest in the Tusca village.

  “I’m sorry,” said Shonan. “I have to be alone.” To think, to plan, to anticipate, to revel in his success.

  In the last of the day’s light Shonan the war chief slipped invisibly from the village, made use of every bit of cover to glide around through the woods, climbed high, and then crept downhill. He padded one careful step at a time toward the boulder. “As silently as a leaf falls,” he always taught his young men. Finally Kumu was within an easy toss. Shonan underhanded a pebble and plinked him on the shoulder.

  The young man whirled, spear cocked.

  “Easy,” said the Red Chief, both hands up and palms forward.

  Kumu let out a burst of breath. “You caught me again.”

  “It’s my job,” said Shonan. “And you’re dead.”

  They both laughed. Kumu was silly-looking because one of his two front teeth was turned a quarter sideways. The dark gap on each edge made the enamel look whiter. And he liked to joke with everyone. His name meant “clown.” Though he had been on a vision quest and surely had been given a grown-up name, he preferred to stick with Clown.

  Tonight, though, was serious business. As war leader, Shonan chose the village sentries for each day, assigned them their places, and taught them the double-faced skill, patience combined with alertness. At least once every quarter moon he sneaked up on one of them, as a lesson. He always fooled them, and they never caught him.

  “Well,” said Kumu, scrambling down the boulder to join Shonan, “at least this will be the last time you kill me in this village.”

  “It will,” said Shonan. “Get along. Enjoy the evening.” Whenever he caught a sentry like that, Shonan did the fellow the service of taking the rest of his watch.

  The war chief settled down atop the boulder, leaning back against part of it, so he wouldn’t make a human silhouette in the dark. He had mixed feelings about the watch from sundown to the middle of the night. Along with keeping his eyes out for enemies, he half-liked seeing the village settle down to sleep. On such a warm summer evening no plumes of smoke streamed from the tops of the dome-shaped huts of sticks and mud—the women cooked outside. The men ambled back from wherever they had been, making weapons or telling stories or hunting, and squatted down to share supper with their big families. A while after dark the women put out their fires and gathered the children inside. The dogs curled up against the outer walls. The men slipped in to join their wives on the hide pallets.

  For Shonan the scene struck a poignant chord. His heart and his bed had been empty since his wife was killed six years ago. He would never stop missing Meli. Lying down at night would be hard for as long as he lived. Even the twins strummed sorrow in his chest. Aku probably was heir to the gift for shape-shifting, which had gotten Meli killed. And Salya had exactly her mother’s form and movements. True, mother and daughter had opposite temperaments, Meli water and Salya fire, but Salya had the same way of twirling a finger in a hank of hair while she thought. She had her mother’s long, delicate neck. The shape of Salya’s shoulder blades and the gentle arc of her spine sometimes gave Shonan a pang.

  He had no intention of marrying again. For him there was only Meli. When his body ached for touch, he let it ache.

  His answer to all this sorrow was ready: tomorrow he would launch his mission.

  He’d been dreaming of it from last spring’s Planting Moon dance to the one just past. It was ambitious. It would accomplish something big for the Galayi tribe. It gave him a satisfaction that would mean something in the coming winters of age. He would be an important leader. He would probably be elected a member of the Great Council, Red Chief of the entire tribe. Until now he’d been a fighter. Time to become a governing elder.

  It had been his idea—he might have used the word “vision.” The Galayi were a growing tribe. When his grandfather Zeya was born, it was the opposite. The people had broken their covenant with the spirits, committing the sin of killing other members of the tribe. As a result the villages were dwindling.

  Zeya rescued the tribe. He made a great journey to the Land Beyond the Sky Arch to set things right and get a new eagle-feather cape. When Tsola listened to the music of the cape and got its wisdom, the band came together in peace. Soon the Galayi filled the mountains and valleys of their native land, and expanded into the foothills.

  Now everything was different. They needed more hunting grounds, more fertile plots to plant, more wombs to bear Galayi warriors-to-be and Galayi mothers-to-be. It was Shonan who had seen the logical next step—to expand from their native mountains to the eastern sea.

  He went with armed men to visit the Amaso people at their village, a small cluster of huts on the coast. They were a weakening people. He proposed to them that the Galayi send fifty families to join them, more citizens than they already numbered. The fighting men of those Galayi families would offer protection against enemies. The newcomers would teach the sea-dwellers the Galayi language, which was the one spoken by the Immortals themselves. In turn the Amaso people would show the Galayi how to take food from the water-everywhere, where the supply was infinite. The Galayi would have easy access to the shells of the sea, which all tribes prized in trade. And the Galayi would gain more land for planting. A good bargain all around.

  The Amaso people came from their village to the Planting Moon Ceremony just past, and the two tribes had made the agreement formal. Tomorrow Shonan would lead the colonizing party to the ocean. It would be the great achievement of his life.

  Now he let his eyes go for a moment to a place where no enemy would ever be spotted, the rose-colored twilight lingering on the tops of the western mountains. Governor. Hero. That would feel good. He missed Meli.

  In the middle of the night he eased through the door flap into his own home. Though he could see nothing, he found his pallet easily, empty as ever.

  In the darkness he didn’t see that his daughter’s pallet was also empty.

  “Where the devil is she?”

  Aku told his father, “Salya never came home last night.”

  Shonan looked Aku straight in the eyes. “You’re calm. That means you know where she is.” Otherwise he’d have sounded the alarm.

  Aku started tying the owl feathers into his hair.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She’s mad at you for taking her away from her friends. And her suitors.”

  Shonan swallowed bile. He was doing something great for his people, but his own daughter didn’t see that.

  “Stop that and go find your sister,” said Shonan.

  Aku kept on tying the feathers. Every day of the last six winters he’d made this statement, in his mind a tribute to his dead mother. He didn’t care if it irked Shonan.

  Aku pulled the last knot tight, rose, and ducked out the door flap. Shonan followed him.

  “First, we have to make sure she hasn’t been kidnapped,” said Shonan. He thought like a military man. Unmarried women didn’t disappear for the night, not ever. Though they might well violate the custom of waiting for marriage before sex, they always came home. “Is she with Fuyl or Kumu?”

  These two young men had been courting Salya for the last few months. Ever herself, Salya put off choosing between them, and put it off, and put it off, until …

  Her father’s great plan had fouled up her love life.

  “She’s just trying to annoy me,” said Shonan.

  He looked around Tusca village. “I’ll organize some men to go out into the forest to l
ook for her.”

  “What do you want me to do?” said Aku.

  “Go from house to house and ask if anyone knows anything. Start with Fuyl’s house, then Kumu’s.”

  Aku smiled to himself. If he wanted to, he could tease the hell out of his father. He could suggest that he transform himself into an owl—assuming he really did have the ability—and wingflap over the woods, looking for Salya. If she was out there, or there were signs of her, he’d find her a lot faster than any search parties. But he didn’t mention it. First of all, Shonan was already too roiled up to cope with. Second, Aku had never practiced shape-shifting. He didn’t know if he could do it. He might turn himself into something with one wing and four fins.

  Fuyl’s family knew nothing, and the young man was right there, taking his morning tea. His name meant “beautiful,” and his face, caught in the firelight, looked just that.

  When Aku scratched on the door flap of the hut of Kumu’s family, his father Zinna immediately cried out, “Kumu?” The man never had any idea how loudly he spoke. The mother intervened at half volume. A moment’s conversation told Aku that Clown had been missing all night, and they were worried.

  Aku said, “I think he’s with Salya.”

  Aku inquired in half a dozen more huts—no one knew anything—before Shonan reappeared.

  “Kumu didn’t come home last night either,” said Aku.

  His father cursed. After pondering for a moment, he said, “Where did they go?”

  Aku shrugged.

  “Where would you go?”

  Another shrug.

  “We’ll ask the other families.”

  “I’m sure they’re together,” said Aku.