by Caleb Fox
Koz’s jibber-jabber was a godsend. Not only “Watch your head there” and “a bit slippery here” but chitchat about the amazing things he’d seen people do. “People, to me, are the most curious creatures ever invented. I know what goes on up there, you know. All us Immortals know without even having to look in your direction.
“When Thunderbird sent you to a different world and slipped mortality in with you—now there’s a nasty bit—he must have temporarily lost his mind. The mischief? It boggles the imagination.
“So there’s death, it’s waiting. Rebirth, yes, you know that, and it takes some sting out of death. So you carry on through your days on Earth frozen stiff by another fear, living. The one big gift, your chance to jump over the moon, and you’re boo-hoo scared of it. Whatever you’re doing, the song in your mind, it’s, ‘Be careful now, you might get hurt. You might mess up right in front of everybody.’
“Well, as you see, you pay for playing scaredy cat. Listen to your comrades, oh, ain’t they sufferin’, same in death as in life—ain’t that a hotsy paradox for you?
“Oh, the chorus of suffering.” He started dancing while he walked and got a chant going—“Illness, old age, hunger, thirst, war, drowning, lightning, sea storms, childbirth, attack by bears or panthers, floods, fire, cold, and the worst bugaboo of all—embarrassment. Oh, what a multitude awaits you, every part of it a little reminder—things might go wrong!
“And the way you obsess. You remember the quarter moon you were sick, or limped from a cut in your foot, not the twelve and a half moons you felt fine. You remember the baby that died, not the six brothers and sisters you’ve got. You dwell on the great-grandparents who died, not the ones still ticking, or the four grandparents and two parents you still got. Brother, you human beings, you are something to watch.”
He let a moment of silence hum, and all four of his followers got nervous.
“I tell you what, though, there’s a favor mortality does you guys that is really something. Sometimes you sneak around some way and get past your fear. I don’t just mean warriors going into a fight—”
“About time you mentioned that,” said Shonan.
“Hey, who’s the guide here? Yeah, fighting for your family and tribe,” he went on to Shonan, “that’s good. Hunting animals for meat that might turn around and hunt you, that’s good. But what I mean is, there are some people who stand more on the foot of what they like than what they’re afraid of. Like people playing with kids in a totally carefree way. Like a woman making up a song to sing a child to sleep, and feeling something warm for that child. Like a guy who loves his wife so much he gathers shells and makes a necklace for her. I’m talking about people liking the world they’re in—it’s a beauty, you know, and nothing more beautiful than the way it comes back to life every spring.” He stopped chattering for a moment, and they could hear his tail scraping along the stones. “I’m talking about people really liking each other. That’s when they rise out of their fear for the moment and enjoy. We Immortals, we gave you life, too, you know. And we gave you Mother Earth—oh, don’t she bring forth life! We gave her to you. Some of you appreciate instead of being afraid.
“Well, mouthy as I am”—he clacked his awsome teeth—“I must say that human beings, while being the nuttiest and most disgusting things on Earth, they still make me marvel. I’ve seen it over and over, they come down here to retrieve the ones they love. They never get out—they know they’ll never manage it, though they always hope they will, and I hope so, too. I even hope you boys might. Never seen anybody learn what you have learned, but I don’t know if it’ll be enough for the big owl, no way of figuring that.
“Anyway, they come down here out of love. Nothing else, love, pure and simple. They surround someone with such special feelings that they … There’s no explaining it, no understanding it, I just have to stand back and admire it, I do. They fill the world with ill will above and come down here bearin’ love. That’s human beings for you.”
“It’s better than the boss of the Underworld does,” said Aku. Everyone held his breath. Aku was surprised at himself. “Why should you make us give up a life to get one? Is that love?”
Koz sat up on his tail, whirled his awesome head, and snapped the air in front of Aku’s beak. The owl fluttered back a few feet. Then Koz laughed, a fine belly-rumble from the gut. “A boy oughtn’ta get in the face of the boss. Even a boy who’s out of reach.”
Koz turned casually, slithered for a moment, and said, “Okay, pay attention, this is a rock slide. I get down it easy, but not you, not in the dark. Light a lamp and see where to put your hands and feet.”
He started down and looked back. “Yeah, that’s good. Now when we get to the bottom, you’re gonna fall a ways, maybe as far as I am tall. You’re gonna land in a river up to your chests. So your stuff, hold it tight and keep it high.”
But Aku flew above the water clutching his flutes.
They took a rest and some food. Before their sleep, away from Koz, Aku forced the issue. “I cannot sacrifice my father to get my sister back.”
Shonan looked impatient. “I’m the one. It’s obvious. Our two friends here are only friends. They’re generous beyond bounds to take these risks with us at all. It would be appalling to ask either of them to take one further step.”
Aku opened his mouth to speak, but Shonan stayed him with a hand on the knee.
“And you? What are you going to do, abandon your child before he’s born? Abandon your wife?”
“You’re abandoning me!” Aku sounded immature even to himself.
Shonan spoke peaceably. “You are a man. You are a father. You can take care of yourself, and in fact take care of a wife and children. No one depends on me anymore.” He paused. “No, not even you.”
“Ada …”
“Enough,” said Shonan. “We are in a great battle here. I will die a warrior’s death and return to Earth immediately.” He made a downward motion with both hands, meaning, “No more.”
After their sleep, and the next sleep, and the next, the rock slide and the river were only a start on their troubles. Aku had a much easier time, able to fly where the others had to climb and able to see when they couldn’t. Shonan and Oghi wore themselves to a frazzle and got considerably scratched up on the arms and legs. Yah-Su seemed tireless, and was too hairy to get scratched much.
Aku was cruising along until he got really scared.
“Nothing to do but swim it,” Koz said. “Bit of underground river, not too awful.”
Aku studied it. The entry made the stream look like a tube, and that seemed terrible.
Immediately, Oghi started changing into a sea turtle, nose to beak, arms to legs, fingers to claws, back to carapace. Aku was just as busy changing into his human shape.
“Water’s high sometimes, low sometimes, occasionally there’s a bit of air along the middle stretch, you can get a big breath and go back down. Looks high today, though.
“What you do is, breathe in and out two or three times, suck up the biggest bit of air you can, and go, go, go. Current’s with you, there’s a break. Keep kicking and you’ll make it.
“The one rule is, do not try to turn around and go back. The current will flush you out backwards, but it will take a lot longer, and you’ll get the long lease here. Meaning get killed, understand?”
“Let’s go.”
Aku slipped in last and hesitated a long while. He breathed in and out until he began to feel dizzy, waited a moment, filled every speck of space in his lungs with precious air, and dove.
Right away he was totally disoriented. He had no sense of what direction was up, down, or sideways. A couple of times he scraped his fingertips on the sides, and once he bumped his head.
After a while he began to see colors, a lot of colors, pure, like the ones you see in a rainbow, floating across his mind in bars, very beautiful, perfectly lovely, everything was lovely, he was very well, he was …
Rough hands grabbed him and heaved him forw
ard.
When his head came out of the water, he heaved in a canyon full of air, eased it out slowly, and did the same again.
Yah-Su was holding Aku in his arms, and he said a whole lot of words in a row. “What did you do, stop kicking? When I grabbed you, you were drifting.”
Shonan explained to Aku that Yah-Su got worried, dunked down in, and walked a few steps up the river before he bumped into the limp Aku.
“I got fascinated by the lights.”
“They shine your way to being dead, guy,” said Koz. “But, hey, you’re welcome here.”
After they followed the stream a while, they had to jump. Koz insisted that Aku not change into owl shape and fly down. “No place to light,” he said. “It’s all been slicked smooth as bat dung by hundreds of winters of runoff. If you try, you’ll just wing it back up here and have to jump anyway.”
Aku believed him. He went last, hearing splash after splash of body into water. Then he was sorry because he was left alone at the top in the dark, about to hurtle into absolute darkness. “Hello, down there,” he called. They all called back. “Will someone please come back up here and push me off?”
They all laughed, and Koz hollered, “Jump, you coward!”
He did. Judging from the infinity in the air, it was about as high as a mountaintop reaches above a valley. Flying would have been glorious. Plummeting into darkness was … The water saved him. Air, water, back to air.
The rest of the day they swam two more underground rivers, and the party made Aku go first, so they could shove him if he slowed down. But he didn’t. Scared into good sense.
When they woke up, Koz said, “It’s not far now.”
The group walked in a hush. They had come so far to see Salya. What would she be like? Fear jiggled in their minds.
They climbed a short hill. Koz stopped beside an alcove, “Aku, Shonan—your sister, your daughter.”
Shonan barged forward, and Aku peered around his father at his twin. She was a dead thing. Salya, face up, naked, arms and legs akimbo, head dropped back. The stillness in her felt like something hard and immovable, a boulder.
Shonan knelt and put a hand on her heart. “Still pumping,” he said.
“Body alive, spirit gone,” confirmed Ohgi.
“Every once in a while we get one of these,” said Koz. “After a long time, what I guess you would call many winters up on the surface, the body quits, and there’s nothing. Until then we just leave them be.”
Aku felt like he had been hit by a flash flood. For the first time the enormity of what Maloch had done crashed into his mind, into his emotions. The dragon had eaten Salya’s life. Even the wraiths down here, however miserable, were alive. They felt, they moved—even pain was a kind of energy. Salya was dead, her spirit-fire gone. The wraiths would return to Earth and walk and jump and see and smell and laugh. Salya was dead.
He sat down and looked at her. For a long time he didn’t hear whatever his father and Koz were talking about, didn’t notice what Oghi and Yah-Su were doing. Waves of awareness swept over him. Salya’s dead face. My dead face. That’s what I’ll look like when I’m dead. For a long time he was struck immobile.
Slowly, tentatively, he got out his red flute. He touched his father’s elbow and got his attention. “Now I have to do something.” He held up the flute. He swallowed with difficulty. “This is the song the Little People taught me that brings people back to life.”
Shonan started to speak, but Aku’s glance cut him off.
He launched into the sound. His fingers and ears took over the song, and his mind sailed away. He saw pictures floating on the stream of notes. He saw the first leaves on oak trees unfurl, the ones with their green still silvered by fuzz. He saw the wildflowers of spring—gaywings, the dwarf iris, Salya’s favorite, in royal purple, the scarlet trillium, his own favorite, with its three points, the suns of marsh marigolds. He saw flocks of blackbirds swimming through the sky, whirling together beautifully, a single creature dancing.
The next drifting picture shocked him, a glimpse of the future. He saw Iona, legs split wide and a tiny head with a tinsel of hair emerging. He wanted to cry out, “My child.” He nearly spoiled the melody he was playing, but his devotion saved the song for Salya.
Now he saw the elusive denizen of the deep woods, the brown wood thrush with its spotted belly. When he listened for its haunting song, he heard instead the song of healing he was playing for Salya. And that song was coming to an end.
She didn’t stir. She didn’t blink. Her mouth didn’t move, or her fingers twitch. She didn’t breathe.
He looked into his father’s face and tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Notice,” said Koz, “she don’t even breathe. Air feeds the fire of spirit, and she’s got no spirit. She’s, like, frozen.”
“Let’s get going,” Shonan said. “Let’s get her out of here.”
He got a buffalo hide, stretched it out, and rolled Salya onto it. Aku started to help, but one touch of Salya’s arm made him jump back. Somehow he hadn’t expected her to be cold.
“It ain’t the heart, boy, it’s the spirit-fire. Life ain’t physical.”
Incomprehensible. Not breathing yet heart beating. Dead but potentially alive. Impossible, but this was a different world. He looked into her face, his face, her death, his death.
Shonan’s tone was gentle. “You yourself said that your song only works when the person has just died.” They both wondered whether that meant when the spirit was still in or near the body.
Shonan and Yah-Su hoisted the dead weight. “Where to?” said Shonan, looking at Koz.
“Well, boys, we can’t go back the way we came, against the river current and up long drops and through the squeezed alleys. There’s a way, and it’s not as hard, but it’s long. Very long.”
The alligator looked at Salya and her bearers. “Carrying her is gonna get old,” he said, “real old. You big ones can’t do it all the time, and you two can’t pair up. We’ll put a big one with a little one.”
They accepted.
They marched, marched, marched. They switched off carrying Salya and marched.
“By the way,” said Koz, “you’re going to run out of candles soon. Then we get to walk in the dark. And you”—he pointed his snout at Aku—“Put out your candle.” Koz said to Oghi, “I said put out your candle.”
Oghi did.
The darkness was appalling.
“That’s just right,” said Koz, “that’s just right.” His voice was eerie. “Now, when we’re walking in the absolute darkness, you’ll know where I am. I’ll jabber, I’ll keep the words coming straight out.” Silence and darkness. “If I fall silent, watch out.”
“Why?” said Aku.
“Because this is coming!”
Koz clacked his teeth what seemed a dozen times. The sound was like an avalanche of stones hurtling out of the darkness. Aku fell down and barely kept himself from crying out.
“Now that you’re all proper scared,” said Koz, “light the candle.”
Oghi did.
Aku breathed again.
“Stick it up to my mouth.” He gaped his jaws wide.
Oghi thrust the candle near.
“Come on,” said Koz, his voice completely normal even with his jaws open, “stick it right in.”
Oghi did. The teeth gleamed like knives in the full moon.
“Teeth are handy, you see.”
Koz started off again, and the four adventurers followed, Shonan and Aku carrying Salya in the litter.
“Need a break,” said Aku. They set her down. Aku shook out his aching fingers. “Lucky alligator,” he said, “born with no hands.”
“Teeth are better,” Koz agreed merrily. “This way I don’t have to help the fools who come to the Underworld.”
That night they camped beside a small stream of clear water. While everyone else slept, Aku lit one of the horns for a moment, sat close to Salya, and blew it out. She was wrapped in one of his robes,
but she needed no decency in the darkness.
He changed into owl form and just sat. He didn’t know what to do, what to think, what to feel. He looked at his own face on her bones, a dull face, inert. He searched for words. Not animated by life. That phrase didn’t do it either.
He wondered whether she slept. He didn’t think so. When you slept, your awareness went from outside to inside, world to dream. Salya had no awareness, nothing inside there that could sleep.
She wasn’t dead, either. Dead was something that happened to the body, and her body was whole. The catastrophe, what befell her, happened to her spirit.
He looked at her and again saw his own face deprived of its spirit-fire. He felt himself teeter on the edge of something unimaginably awful. He felt hollow, empty, a hole.
He closed his owl eyes, looked where he knew she was, and pictured the presence of his sister, of his twin, his companion through the years of his life. The sassy girl who played with him, shared his feelings, endured the death of their mother, even defied their father when necessary. He thought of the time she stayed out all night with Kumu. They weren’t a bit apologetic, either, not Salya, not Kumu, and not his father Zinna, who declared himself glad that she was full of Kumu’s juice. No, they were full of fire and dare. Salya backed Shonan down. Aku loved her. He missed her. He wanted to save her. For himself.
He thought again of his two flutes. They were also empty holes, but if a man blew into them, if he poured his spirit-breath through them in that way, they made beautiful songs. Hollow as he felt, he could use his breath to make a story for Salya.
She used to like for Crani to tell her stories, the stories that came down from the oldest times, when all the animals, including people, were first on Turtle Island and were discovering who they were and how life on Earth might work. He remembered that she liked the one about how the people lost tobacco and got it back, so he told it now to her limp form.
“In the beginning,” he said, “the people had plenty of tobacco, and we smoked it at all the dances and ceremonies and whenever we wanted to pray and have our breath carry our prayers to the sky. Before long, though, we used up all the tobacco, and everyone started suffering. People felt listless and lackadaisical. Some felt ill. And one old man was dying.