by Caleb Fox
She spoke casually, but the words petrified Aku. He was tongue-tied.
“If you watch the animals, you will know which one you can become, or more than one.”
Aku stared at his knees.
“It’s not hard, for those who have the gift. Look at your feet and picture them as talons. Look at your arms, hold them out, and see them as wings.”
Aku shuddered. His great-grandmother had guessed that he pictured himself as winged.
The expression on her face changed. “When you’re older, when you want to know more, come to see me. I will help you.”
He’d never been back.
Now, following his father on the trail along Big River, he reminded himself: he was about to get a real home. Iona would give him one. Even if she didn’t have many relatives—just Oghi—it would be a real home because she would be there. In rhythm with his steps he daydreamed about her.
Shonan’s voice interrupted his reverie. “There’s the trail.”
They stopped at the crest of a hillock and looked carefully at all of the path they could see, which wasn’t much. It sloped to the river from the hills on both sides. No one was in sight.
“They’re well ahead of us,” Shonan said. He was impatient today, and moving fast eased his mind.
“Let’s have a look at the ford,” he said. The crossing was probably at the shallowest place in the river that was handy, because women and children sometimes had to cross, too. “Full and fast,” Shonan said. They’d gotten a lot of rain over the last week.
Without hesitation, Shonan stripped to his breechcloth, tucked his shirt and moccasins under Tagu’s lashings, held his spear and club two-handed over his head, and waded in. If Shonan ever got hurt, at least he wouldn’t suffer from fretting about it first. Aku did the same with his clothes, lifted his spear and blow gun, and followed his father. Why he bothered carrying weapons he didn’t know. He couldn’t do any more than scare someone with them.
A third of the way across, Aku stepped into a hole and went down. He scrabbled along the bottom like a crab, felt for something higher to stand on, pulled himself up onto a rock, and stood up. Then he had to swim several strokes to catch up with his weapons. When he got them, he turned to look at Shonan, who was grinning. Aku grinned back.
As they got to the far side, Big River curved toward them, and the current clawed hard at the bank. The stream deepened and picked up speed. Waves splashed Aku’s underarms, his neck, his chin. He sloshed his way forward hard because there was nothing else to do.
Shonan got to the bank, reached his weapons onto the grass, hoisted himself up with both hands, and raised a knee onto the lip. At that moment a spear ripped through his thigh.
Shonan splashed backward into the river, bleeding. The spear floated away.
Without thinking, Aku leapt for his father and missed. He lost his footing and banged to the bottom. When he surfaced, he leapt for his father again. He barely caught the floating hair.
Two enemies howled out of the trees, jumped off the bank, and landed on top of Aku and Shonan feet first. Father and son went under. Aku flailed at enemy legs with his fists. When he managed to stand up, pain lightninged the back of his head, and the world went topsy-turvy.
When his mind stopped reeling, Aku felt himself being lifted onto the bank. Shonan was sitting up, a hand on his torn thigh and both legs splashed with blood. Tagu was raising a ruckus.
The enemies laughed at the dog and slapped at its face. Tagu barked louder and jumped harder. Two men got in good rib kicks. A commanding voice stopped the play.
The commander stood over Aku and Shonan. “Good,” he said in the Galayi language. “You came after us—that showed courage.” He smiled his victory. “In return you get to see your woman die.”
“Where is she?” demanded Shonan. His voice sounded a little shaky.
The commander pointed north. “Headed up to—”
His words turned into flying vomit. A rock the size of two fists bounced off his skull, and he collapsed.
Aku heard a pffsst and a dart stuck into the neck of the warrior behind him.
A buffalo dropped out of a tree. No, it only looked like a buffalo—it was a shaggy human being with a hump. “Get the bastards!” he yelled, but his words were smothered by everyone’s yelling and hitting.
The nearest enemy turned to run. Aku grabbed his ankles. The man fell and twisted his feet free by rolling.
Flat on the ground, Shonan flung himself across the enemy commander, grabbed a rock, and banged it onto the man’s skull again.
A skinny soldier swung his war club at the buffalo man. The monster grabbed the handle of the club, twisted it out of the skinny enemy’s hand, grabbed him, hefted him into the air, ran at the tree yelling, and rammed his victim headfirst into the trunk.
One warrior skittered away like a mouse.
The one Aku had grabbed tried to run away, but Tagu fastened his jaw into the man’s calf.
The last enemy swung his club and caught the buffalo man on the point of the shoulder. The man-beast bellowed, lifted a leg high, and smashed his enemy in the face.
Shonan banged the rock down on the commander’s skull one more time.
Aku found an enemy club, got next to Tagu, and whacked the dog-bitten man on the back of the head. He fell like a dropped rag.
The humped beast stomped the smashed man.
It was over.
Aku breathed.
Shonan took some lashing thongs off the dog and tied the dazed, skinny man, hands and feet. Then he rolled onto his back and looked up at his son. “That was a lucky blow. Maybe you’ll let me show you how to swing a club so that it delivers next time.”
For the first time in his life Aku tasted a coppery bloodlust on his tongue. Yes, maybe he did want to learn the skill of using a war club.
He said, “Let me treat that wound.” Aku got out a salve of mountain allum he carried in a skin bag on his belt and poulticed his father’s thigh. Finally, he cut a hand-span swath off the bottom of Shonan’s breechcloth and bound the wound.
Shonan tried to stand up and couldn’t manage it. “No walking for a while,” said Aku.
“While they take Salya further and further away,” said Shonan.
The buffalo-looking man just stood there, mute, watching. He was a giant. He had thick, matted, curly brown hair. As Aku was half a head taller than Shonan, the buffalo man was a head taller than Aku, and twice as thick and broad. The hump on his back look uncannily like a buffalo’s.
The man-beast walked up to the three figures, raised his huge foot, and smashed their necks. The sound of snapping bones told the end of their story.
Aku stifled a spasm of nausea.
As Buffalo raised his foot above the skinny one, Shonan said, “Let him be. We’ll question him.”
Buffalo stomped the man’s neck anyway, and the bones cracked.
Shonan started to spit words out, but Aku stopped him with a hand.
“Stranger,” Aku said formally in the Galayi language, “you saved our lives. Thank you.”
Buffalo said, “I want to help you.” His speech was a little odd, but it was in the Amaso tongue.
Aku thanked him again, this time in the Amaso tongue.
“You are welcome. My name is Yah-Su.” Shonan and Aku looked at each other, amazed. It was the word for “buffalo” in both the Amaso and Galayi languages. The big warrior tapped his breastbone with his fingers, the way Amaso people did when they introduced themselves.
“Strip the bodies,” Shonan said.
Aku hesitated. He’d never been to war, never had to denude an enemy of everything, so that the dead man would have nothing to help him get to the Underworld, no weapons, no clothes, no food.
First they collected the weapons. Aku threw the spears, clubs, and blow guns into the woods—they had no way to carry them. Yah-Su tested a couple of the clubs for feel and set them with his own club and spear.
“Always room for another knife on your belt,”
said Shonan.
Aku started keeping the knives, which had blades of stone and handles of bone or antler.
At that point Aku had to face up to the ugliness of dead bodies. He started undoing the belts, which he kept for lashings, and throwing the shirts and breechcloths away. He avoided looking at the dead do-was. But on the skinny man he found something clever.
“Look, I found this hidden inside the breechcloth.” He handed it to the prone Shonan. It was an obsidian blade no bigger than a thumb joint, scabbarded in rawhide. “He hung it on a thong from his belt.” Aku patted his backside to show where. Nothing was sharper than obsidian.
Shonan inspected it and held it out to Aku. “It’s a prize, keep it.”
“I don’t want to keep anything … down there.”
Shonan smiled and shrugged. “By the spirits, I will.” He tied the thong to his own belt, stuffed the holstered blade into the top of the cleft at his rear, and gave his reluctant son a fine grin. “It’s a clever idea,” he told Aku.
“Let’s see if any of the moccasins fit,” said Shonan. “Good to leave tracks that look like the enemy.”
Two pairs worked for Shonan and one for Aku. Yah-Su’s feet were much too big. Father and son put on two pairs and tucked one into Tagu’s load.
When they were finished, they backed away. “Leave the bodies in plain sight,” Shonan said. “I want to make some Brown Leaf hearts shiver.”
Aku turned his attention to the humpbacked Yah-Su. “You followed them.”
“Yes. They stole the pretty girl.”
“Do you know the girl?”
He jiggled his big head from side to side. “Yah-Su saw her twice.”
Aku and Shonan looked at each other, trying to make sense of this.
“Yah-Su … Yah-Su lives in a cave,” the buffalo man said.
Aku nodded to Shonan. A man who didn’t live in the village. A hermit, maybe ashamed of not being smart. Kind? Maybe. Violent? Maybe.
“They stole the pretty girl.”
“Did you see them get her?”
“No,” said Yah-Su. “Saw them carry her. Too many of them.”
“How many?” Aku went on.
Yah-Su thought, then held up two hands plus one hand. Fifteen.
Aku held up the same number of hands. “This many?”
“Yes, too many. Yah-Su wants to help.”
“You helped tremendously. You followed them, but there was no way to get the girl.”
Yah-Su nodded, his eyes drooping with sorrow.
“When they left an ambush, you thought you might be able to save us.”
“Yes. Yah-Su wants to help.”
“Yah-Su,” repeated Aku, “you saved our lives. Thank you.”
“So what are we going to do now?” said Shonan, stroking his bandage.
“Yah-Su wants to help,” said the buffalo beast.
Aku looked at Shonan’s bleeding thigh, thinking, We’re desperate . Then his great-grandmother’s words popped into his mind. “If you ever need help desperately, say out loud, ‘Little People, save us.’ ”
Aku said the words. He and Shonan disappeared.
Standing there alone, Yah-Su waggled his head back and forth, shuffled his feet, and said, “How’d they do that?”
10
Aku looked up at the sky through the leaves of thousands of ferns. The light of the sun came through them filtered, gentle, softly radiant. A stream tumbled in from the top, creating a fine mist. Millions of droplets of water wept from the tips of the leaves, creating myriad sparkles of water-diamond light.
He gasped.
“We like human beings who appreciate beauty,” said a melodious voice. “Your father doesn’t seem to notice it.”
Aku looked up to find the speaker and saw no one.
“Here.”
Behind Aku stood a smiling young man or woman with the loveliest, most perfectly formed face and frame Aku had ever seen, scalloped by cascades of curly yellow hair. He or she looked exactly like a human being, except for being only knee-high. The Little People had come to help.
“My father is hurt,” said Aku. He knelt next to Shonan, who was gripping his leg with both hands, teeth clenched, breath sucked in and blown out hard.
“I think your dog bumped that leg on the journey. I apologize—we should have been more careful.”
Tagu growled.
“My name is Kayna,” the tiny person said. “Welcome to the land of the Little People.”
Shonan said, “Have you kidnapped us?”
“You asked for help,” said Kayna, “and we came.”
“I did ask, Shonan. Grandmother gave me the words.”
Shonan thought, Her again.
“Would you kindly calm your dog?” asked Kayna. “I’m immortal, but injuries can be messy.”
Aku rubbed Tagu’s ears. The dog kept his eyes fixed on Kayna but stopped growling.
“Immortal?”
“Just as you’ve heard.”
Every Galayi knew the tales about these extraordinary creatures who, like the inhabitants of the Land Beyond the Sky Arch, lived forever. They had magical abilities and would help Galayis who got into trouble. Their special power was protecting Galayis who performed the purifying ceremony Going to Water. Sometimes these tiny folk appeared in desperate battles and saved warriors from defeat. The Little People were mischievous, though, and tricky. You had to be careful in your dealings with them. Aku was sure there was a lot he didn’t know about them.
“I can treat your father’s wound. Perhaps you’d like to look around.”
Kayna’s smile was rich with implication. Aku was getting uneasy about someone who knew more about him than he knew himself.
Still, he stood up. Tagu moved so that he was between his master and Kayna. “Do you mind if I ask?” said Aku. “Are you a man or woman?”
“Little People are neither male nor female,” said Kayna. “But go see everything for yourself.”
“Thank you,” he said. He looked at the light-enchanted room. Something stirred in him. “It’s incredible.”
“Go. Take it all in.”
Dazzled, Aku wandered off.
“How long before I can walk again?” muttered Shonan.
“I will heal your wound right now. Then we need to make sure you don’t have a fever.”
“I haven’t got that much time.” He sounded churlish even to himself, considering the gift Kayna was making him, but his mind was on Salya.
“We brought you here because Aku has things he needs to learn.”
“My daughter, his sister—her life is in danger.”
“All mortals are in danger of their lives.”
Shonan was irked. “But …”
Kayna held up a hand. “You’ll go when Aku is ready.”
“I demand to go now.”
“Do you?” said Kayna. The healer’s eyes flickered, and a violet light emanated from them. A hand reached out and made a gentle, downward motion.
Shonan sank to the ground and slept.
Aku walked with his head cocked back, studying the immense grotto. It was shaped like a cup, top and sides a little wider than the bottom. The enchantment seemed to Aku to come from two sources, the extraordinary flood of sunlight from outside and the small waterfall that curled over the edge. The lip of the cup was a profusion of ferns which diffused the light. Farther down, the waterfall splashed onto a rock shelf and burst into a delicate spray. Gradually, as the sides of the cup descended, rich green mosses took over from the ferns.
The lower grotto walls were honeycombed with small pockets which appeared to be homes. On the floor of the grotto Little People went about their daily tasks. All of them were robed in white cloth. Though Aku well knew the dark cloth woven from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, he had never seen cloth in a luminous white. The robes were trimmed in lilac, blue, orange, and red—none were the green of the grotto. He wondered if the trimming indicated ranks or skills of some kind. Though each face was different,
any one would have been the most attractive human visage he’d ever seen, reduced to the size of a palm.
Aku had never imagined such a place, or such people. He had heard that the Land Beyond the Sky Arch was beautiful, but he didn’t think anything could surpass this grotto, which, instead of being high above the earth, was actually beneath.
At that moment amazement blossomed inside his head. A kind of music he’d never heard before piped its way to his ears. He’d always known music—every Galayi ceremony had the beat of the drums, the rattle of tortoise shells, the throbbing melodies from human voices. But this was something entirely new. He walked toward the sound in a trance. Tagu traipsed along, looking strangely at his master.
It came from what looked like a workroom. River canes leaned against all three walls. A big flat stone served as a kind of table, and a Little Person—Aku reminded himself that they were neither men nor women—seemed to be blowing the melody from a length of cane. The musician’s fingers jumped up and down on the cane, and Aku saw holes beneath the flying pads of the fingers. The tones reminded Aku faintly of the tinkle that shells made when they were strung together and moved by a breeze. The rhythm made him want to dance.
“Friendly greetings,” said the piper, a twinkle in his eye—its eye?
“I’m astonished,” said Aku.
“Very few human beings have heard this music.” He tipped his head. “I am Rono, at your service.”
“How on earth do you do that?”
“I don’t know that we’re properly said to be on Earth, but I’ll be glad to show you. Here, let me have your blow gun.”
Aku had forgotten he was toting his weapons. He handed the piper his gun, which was nearly as long as Aku was tall.
Rono plucked the dart out of one end, eyed it with a sour expression, and set it aside. “Now we’ll transform something that kills to something that lifts spirits.”
The musician put the cane to its lips and blew hard.
Aku jumped. The cane made a kind of blasting sound, a little like the bugling of an elk, but cruder.
The musician picked up the small, holed cane again and twittered out a little melody, very high. “I can make one like this for you, if you like.” Rono reached for Aku’s long cane again. “Would you like me to make this bringer of death into two bearers of music?”