Shadows in the Cave

by Caleb Fox

  The game of life and death began. He eagle drifted down toward the fox, further and further down, until he saw he’d caught the fox’s eye. The wily one pranced up the hill, toward the jumble of rocks. When He Eagle turned off toward the river, the fox started hunting again.

  Aku stepped to the edge of the nest and looked back at her shiny black eggs.

  Now He Eagle wheeled and made a fake dive toward the fox. The sly one skittered sideways about fifty steps, an extraordinarily graceful maneuver. Now it was at the base of the rocky slope, and could slip into a crevice.

  He Eagle turned away and hovered over the river. The fox watched the eagle with sharp eyes, wary. As He Eagle drifted downriver, the fox’s gaze followed it intently.

  This was the moment. Aku launched off the nest and hurtled downward at a speed that made her blood pump. She hit the fox from behind with both talons, and in an instant had it high in the air, legs flailing. She squeezed its neck and felt the body go limp.

  She laid the carcass on a flat stone near the nest. She ripped open the belly, and again felt a hollow clang in her chest. She took several pecks into the liver. Something in her felt odd and glorious at once.

  Her mate lighted beside her. After a few more sharp strikes with her beak, Aku scooted onto her eggs and watched He Eagle feed. The clang still resonated in her chest.

  Something must die? said Tsola.

  Someone must be born, Aku answered.

  A week later two white eaglets were eating hungrily. Aku could hardly believe how much they consumed. She and her mate no longer spent any time perched in the tops of pines watching the world turn. One of them hunted every moment, and the little eagles screeched for more morsels. Sometimes, when the sun told her to sleep, Aku’s belly howled for more food. The mother and father took turns, one hunting while the other fed and guarded infants, and then switching jobs.

  Her own offspring dazed Aku. Soft and downy as they were, the babies weren’t a bit dainty or innocent. They ate voraciously. The older chick, the girl, often twisted around to get her gaping mouth under the meat as Aku brought it down to her brother, guzzling the drops of blood. In his previous life Aku the human being had thought animals should be more like plants, and not devour each other in crimson gore. Aku the eagle knew better.

  The male eaglet, the small one that hatched second, lay scrawny and lifeless on the sticks. The big female chick yawped for the mouse innards Aku dangled from her beak. She dropped them, and the chick pecked at them avidly. The reason the smaller eaglet was dead, in fact, was that the bigger one fought harder for food. Aku looked at her dead child and ached. This ache—agony—had been her entire existence since daybreak, when she woke up and found her dead boy. She hurt until she wished she wasn’t alive.

  Why?

  Tsola’s drum tapped out the sound of a heartbeat in the back of Aku’s mind. The she eagle whispered, “This is not my true world.”

  It is true, but not earthly, said Tsola in his mind.

  “I want it not to be true.”

  Where you are, birth and death rule. On Earth, birth and death rule.

  “Why aren’t we immortal, like the Powers who live above, beyond the Sky Arch?”

  You know.

  Her mate hovered overhead and dropped the carcass of a badger next to Aku. She slit open its belly and picked out innards with her beak to feed her daughter.

  Tsola chuckled.

  Aku did, too.

  Her mate gave her a look that might have been empathy, picked up the dead eaglet in his beak, and dropped it over the side. Then he launched off the nest to hunt.

  Aku looked at her remaining child. The eaglet finished the scrap of food and looked at her mother for more.

  Tsola said, What do you need to live here? And on Earth?

  Aku fed her daughter the badger’s heart.

  “More courage than I have.”

  The nest itself constricted subtly, but Aku didn’t see it, and Tsola saw only through eagle eyes.

  Tsola said, Say it in its full truth.

  Aku stalled. “In one moon, we will teach this chick to fly. It will follow us and learn to hunt. Then we will never see it again. But we will produce two more eggs late next winter, and the race of war eagles will go on.”

  The nest constricted again, unnoticed.

  Say it in its full truth, repeated Tsola. Both the voice and the drum sharpened.

  The nest coiled tight. Aku didn’t see that her home of sticks and grasses had become a serpent. Tsola was absorbed in the mind and emotions of the adventurer.

  Aku wanted to look her grandmother, her teacher, in the eye. She said, “The courage to be mortal.”

  Directly behind Aku, the dragon head rose from the serpent body.

  Aku turned her head and saw too late.

  Tsola flashed herself into the Land Beyond.

  Maloch the Uktena struck.

  Aku screamed at the penetration of its fangs.

  Tsola began to chant the words.

  The entire nest wrapped itself tight around Aku. As the serpent squeezed, Tsola shouted the last phrase of the ancient formula.

  Maloch the Uktena and Aku fell limp, dazed, numb.

  Tsola swept Aku up …

  21

  Aku lay tumbled next to Tsola in the cave of the paintings, exactly where he had downed the tea, bleeding and unconscious.

  Tsola cursed. “Get your son and a hide,” she snapped. Bola jumped to his feet and ran.

  She set to work to stanch the flow of blood on his arms. Then she realized that the fang wounds were too wide. She got her bone awl and some thread made of buffalo sinew and stitched. “Good thing you don’t know what’s happening,” she murmured. It was a crude piece of work, but without it the patient might bleed to death. She felt his arms and chest and decided a rib was broken, with luck nothing worse.

  She cursed again. She was a healer—the Wounded Healer of the tribe—but her skill was to heal the spirit, not the body.

  With difficulty she lifted Aku’s trunk into the air, slid close behind him, and wrapped her arms around him. Then she breathed with him. She believed that breathing along with a patient helped keep his body and life-fire together.

  In a few minutes Bola and Bota cat-scampered in, carrying a hide. Quickly, they transformed themselves into human beings so that they could use their hands. They put Aku on the elk hide and lifted it as a litter.

  Bola said, “He’ll be all right, Mother,” and they were gone.

  As twilight faded to darkness, from inside the entrance to the Emerald Cavern, Tsola watched her son and grandson help Aku out of the Healing Pond. Tsola could watch him only at night—sunlight was more than her cave-shaded eyes could bear. He had had two full days in the cold waters, and they reported that he was better. “Stubborn,” she muttered.

  They helped him walk across the stone in the darkness to the entrance of the cavern and set him down next to his great-grandmother.

  “You’re better,” Tsola said.

  “They won’t tell me what happened.”

  “They didn’t see it.” She paused. “Maloch the Uktena followed you into the Land Beyond the Sky Arch—he has powers in both worlds. While you were sleeping, he transformed himself into your nest, a very clever disguise, sticks and grasses. Remember, he can make himself into any shape—he once made himself into your sister.

  “Then he started constricting, getting closer and closer to you, there in the center of the nest. He likes to toy with his victims, not just kill them. I was hoping you would see beyond appearance to reality. I almost underestimated him.

  “When he bit you and coiled himself around you, I invoked an old power that confuses everyone. Maloch let go, you fell, and I grabbed you.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “I don’t have that power.”

  “How can he be killed?”

  Tsola shook her head. That wasn’t a question she wanted to get into.

  Aku stared into space and said n
othing.

  “You weren’t ready. I should have been quicker. I told you all this is dangerous. What did you learn?”

  But her grandson was asleep. She eased him to the floor.

  When Aku woke up groggy, Bola and Bota carried him and dropped him into the cold, healing waters.

  Aku exclaimed something like, “A-a-guppff!”

  The father and son laughed, changed themselves back into panthers, and walked back to sit with Tsola.

  Soon Aku climbed out of the pond and joined them. He walked with a hand supporting his rib, which clearly hurt. His cuts were healing. Bola backed into a shadowed corner. Bota went to help pilgrims who’d come for healing.

  Tsola brewed tea and talked gently to her great-grandson. She gave him cakes of chestnuts mashed with blueberries. The tea was a draft that made people more alert. She talked to him about her memories of Meli as a child. As she talked, she could sense Aku putting parts of himself together emotionally, becoming himself.

  “I have to move somewhere darker,” she said. First light was on the world. After they sat down in a side room, she asked again, “What did you learn on your adventure?”

  He seemed to think. Finally, he said, “I am really me. I’m me when I’m an eagle. I’m me when I’m female. I feel like me.”

  Tsola waited.

  “I loved my children. Loved them totally. I had no idea …” His eyes turned far away. “How I will love my child from Iona.”

  Tsola waited and watched him sort through things. Finally she said, “And …?”

  Aku said thoughtfully, “A Galayi knows his family, he knows his family is the same as him, you can’t think of yourself or any one member without thinking of all. But it seems to me that all of us animals, people and other animals, must be much more closely related, more knit together, than I realized. We’re … the same thing.”

  Tsola smiled hugely. She was delighted with Aku. And the longer he lived, the more he would experience this connectedness, know it in his heart, where it mattered.

  She waited.

  “I have lots of thoughts, but I think you’re looking for something in particular.”

  She said, “What did you learn from being a war eagle? Of all birds of prey, he is the great hunter. What did you learn about living and dying?”

  He paused. “It’s hard to be mortal. Things die. Your children die. Your mate dies. You die. It’s hard.”

  Tsola pitched in. “Also you have to get food. You have to build a nest, sew clothes, make a fire, teach your children how to live. And what you need for all that is …?”

  Aku nodded several times. “Courage. You need courage.” He shrugged. “It’s a struggle to live.”

  “For where you are now, as you are now, courage is the first virtue you need.”

  Aku looked into the darkness of the cavern for a long time. Then he smiled crookedly at her. “Okay. And you want me to go back to the cave of paintings and learn something like that from each of the animals?”

  “Over the course of your life, as much as you can.” She hesitated. “Right now I want you to learn something more from War Eagle.”

  Aku cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “The owl was your mother’s bird. If your father was a bird—or if he had a bird spirit in his heart—what would it be?”

  No hesitation. “The war eagle.”

  “You have been a war eagle in the spirit realm. Can you become one here on Earth?”

  “You mean …?”

  “One of your gifts is to be a shape-shifter. Just as you turn yourself into an owl, make yourself a war eagle. Here. Now.”

  Aku immersed himself. Feet into yellow toes, toenails into black claws. Legs into feathery stumps. Skin of torso into feathers. Arms stretched out into long, long wings. Neck skin into feathers of red-gold. Head small and feathery, mouth a beak, eyes amber, the world taking on a crystalline sharpness.

  “Yes,” said Tsola warmly. “And here on Earth it is not enough to borrow the form of the war eagle. You must feel its spirit. You must taste its desire to hunt. You must feel its love of riding the air high, high, high, even above the mountain-tops. You must know you’re in the purity of its courage—”

  “Hello!”

  It was a shout from outside. Tsola stiffened. Aku recognized the voice. His eagle heart felt a stab of panic. Feathers to flesh, beak to mouth, wings to arms …

  Bola padded toward the cavern entrance, muscles aquiver.

  “Hello? Aku?”

  “Ada?” It was first time Aku had used that name out loud.

  Tsola smiled at Aku.

  He said, “Give me a moment.”

  When he was ready, Aku jumped up and ran. His father and Yah-Su stood at the cavern entrance, next to Bota, in panther form and on guard. At the far end from Bota was Tagu, wagging his tail and wriggling his whole body. Behind was someone half-blocked from sight.

  Aku leaped into his father’s arms. Then he stepped back in embarrassment. Shonan grinned at him.

  “Yah-Su,” Aku said, bewildered.

  “Aku,” said the buffalo man shyly.

  Tagu came forward to be petted.

  The smaller figure came around from behind the buffalo man.

  “And Oghi? What are you fellows …? What …?”

  Shonan said, “You’re hurt.”

  Aku’s eyes shadowed. “Maloch the Uktena. I’ll be okay. Tell you in a minute.”

  He looked back into Shonan’s eyes. “We’re both alive!”

  Father stepped forward and hugged son again.

  “Have you come to see the Wounded Healer?” Aku asked hopefully, doubtfully.

  “Hell, no,” said Shonan. “We’ve come to find you and go get your sister.”

  “That’s what I want.” But his tone was drab. “Oghi, I’m glad to see you.”

  “Iona says to tell you she’s well, she’s missing you, and your child is growing fine in her belly.”

  Tsola’s voice from within was surprisingly strong. “Bola, Bota, bring our visitors in.”

  She came partway to meet them, tying a loose-woven mask over her eyes. Aku knew that she could see through it a little.

  Aku introduced Shonan and Yah-Su. The Wounded Healer said to Oghi, “Hello, my friend,” and greeted them all in a kind way. Bola and Bota flanked her closely. Aku wondered how she knew Oghi.

  “I’m sorry, the light hurts my eyes. Will you …?”

  The panthers led everyone to a shadowy side chamber. Their hostess unmasked and said, “I think you all have stories to trade.” Both panthers hovered close to her.

  Aku begged his father to tell first how he’d escaped from Maloch the Uktena and the Brown Leaves. Shonan told the tale enthusiastically, without a hint of exaggeration, and giving Yah-Su plenty of credit. Though invited, the buffalo man had nothing to say.

  While they talked, Tsola herself built a small fire and started some tea. When Shonan told about the attack on Maloch, he ended with, “The bastard is really something, getting away from us.”

  “You were really something,” said Aku, “getting away from him. But how did you get here?”

  Tsola served the tea in horns and put out bowls of berries in sweetened water.

  “We ran like hell from the Brown Leaves. You’d be amazed by how Yah-Su can cover ground, and how he knows the country between the Brown Leaf village and ours, every nook and cranny.” He paused, and father and son just looked at each other. “When Iona told us you’d come here, we followed. Time to get moving. My daughter is lying in the Underworld with no life-fire. Your twin is lying in the Underworld with no life-fire. Let’s go.”

  Oghi said softly, “I want to hear Aku’s adventures.”

  The young man told slowly, diffidently, how he searched for Shonan but couldn’t find him, how he flew back to see Iona and then on to visit Tsola. He said nothing about the cave of paintings but mentioned vaguely that Tsola had sent him on a trip to the Land Beyond the Sky Arch, where Maloch momentarily got him in his coils. He
didn’t need to add, ‘And damn near killed me.’

  Shonan didn’t want to hear about the spirit world anyway. “I want to get going.”

  “Pray tell,” said Tsola, “where would you go?”

  That put a stop to conversation.

  Finally, Shonan said, “To the Darkening Land.”

  “And where is that?”

  “I’m sure you know, of all people.”

  “This is rash,” said Tsola. “None of you is prepared for the Darkening Land. All of you will be killed.”

  “What preparation are we talking about?”

  The hard feelings between Shonan and Tsola had started the day he married Meli. Aku felt like he could eat the tension between his father and his great-grandmother.

  “Physical skills, ones some of you have and some don’t. Emotional strength, for what you will see there. Wisdom, to understand. Strength of spirit, to know what to do and how to get back out.”

  “I don’t think we’re weaklings.”

  “No one has ever gone into the Darkening Land and returned.”

  Shonan grinned like he’d caught her out. “One of your old stories says the seven men who went for the daughter of Grandmother Sun came back.”

  “But they failed to bring the girl back.”

  Besides, it was an unfair comment. Everyone knew things weren’t like they were in the days of the oldest stories.

  Shonan advanced his case. “Seriously, a warrior who dies in battle goes to the Darkening Land and is immediately reborn on Turtle Island. You yourself teach that. And whatever happens down below will be a battle.”

  “Reborn as an infant, which means failure. You are a good man, Red Chief Shonan, but you are ignorant. To deal with spiritual worlds, you need to be a spiritual warrior.”

  Shonan made his voice blunt. “I’m tired of this magic stuff. It killed my wife, his mother. If I let Aku go that way, it will ruin him. I know what he needs, and it’s action.”

  Tsola looked at Aku. “ ‘If he lets you. He knows what you need.’ How do those words sit, Aku?”

  Aku held his grandmother’s gaze. “I go my own way. I am not a tool of either one of you.”

  Shonan seemed to wince.