by neetha Napew
“Because the women do not sing their own songs. Always Lonit would hear them when she was a little girl. This woman would listen and try to imagine how it must be for the women within the birth hut. The hut was always so far away that Lonit could not hear the words of the women, but she could hear the rhythm of their song. It went like this.”
She sang softly, searching for the right tone, for the perfect cadence. She found both. Her voice was as sweet as clear water running over smooth stones on a summer day. It seemed to cut the chill of the cave, to bring the sun back into the sky.
Within the cave, everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look and listen. Torka’s heart swelled with love and pride. The song was no more beautiful than the woman who sang it.
lana sighed. She was soothed until the next contraction. Then she cried out, gripping Lonit’s hand so tightly that the younger woman winced but made no move to pull away. lana was weak, exhausted, and beyond comfort. “Go from this woman, Lonit. There is no help for this slow-to be-born child. Birth is like death. It must be endured alone.”
Lonit would not leave her. For what seemed endless hours, she stayed with her friend and sang her sweet songs of life until she had no more voice. Was it day or night, morning or afternoon? In the nearly perpetual twilight of the beginning of the time of the long dark, it was impossible to tell. The wind drove thick, storm-heavy clouds between the earth and the sky. Darkness consumed the world. lana’s moans and cries went on and on. Umak did his best to continue chanting, but like Lonit’s, his voice was gone.
“Your magic is no good, old man,” Ai openly derided him.
Hours passed. lana’s ordeal continued. The people of the band began to murmur about bad spirits. Weelup and Ai complained that they could not sleep. A disconsolate Manaak defied the others of his gender by going to his woman and cradling her in his arms. An equally disconsolate Lonit wept when she saw the grief on his face and crept from lana’s side to seek solace in Torka’s embrace.
It was Ai’s incessant wheedling that finally drove Galeena to his feet. Even when he picked up one of his spears his intent was not clear to Torka, Umak, or Lonit; but Karana knew, and the members of Galeena’s band made sounds of approval.
He advanced purposefully, telling Manaak to step aside. “That woman’s noise making has gone on too long. It is not a good thing.”
Manaak saw the spear poised in the headman’s hand. He did not move. For love of lana, he had forgone his need to track and kill the great mammoth that had crushed the life from their tiny daughter. For love of lana, so that she would be assured the protection of a band when the birth of their third child became imminent, he had stayed with Galeena’s band. For love of lana, he had not slain the headman when he had forced him to abandon his injured little son. And now, for love of lana, he would fight Galeena to the death before he would stand aside and allow a spear to be thrust into her.
Galeena did not misread the challenge or the hatred that he saw in Manaak’s eyes. Manaak had always been trouble. It would be good now to put an end to him. He readied to thrust his spear.
But it was Manaak who thrust himself at Galeena. Younger, leaner, and faster, Manaak sprang at the headman, who went down with a who of of surprise and a curse of outrage. But he was strong, and anger made him doubly powerful. He managed to free himself of Manaak’s hold, and in a moment both men were on their feet, glaring at one another.
Galeena called back over his shoulder, demanding that one of his hunters silence Manaak’s woman forever while he did the same to her man.
Torka did not remember getting to his feet; but he was standing with his whalebone bludgeon in his hand as Lonit broke like a startled doe and raced to lana’s side. He called her back, but it was too late. Instinct born of affection and loyalty to the only female friend she had ever had in her life drove her to throw herself protectively across lana.
“Galeena is a hunter of game, not of women with babies in their belly!” she cried, looking up at the headman with fire in her huge, round eyes.
The women cried out in dismay, amazed at her audacity. The men picked up their spears and glared at her menacingly as they closed ranks around their leader.
Galeena, comfortable with his armed hunters behind him, smiled his wide, ugly, gap-toothed smile at Lonit. But it was not truly a smile; it was a malicious leer of intimidation. “Long time back, this man warned Torka’s wuhman to remembeh who is headman of this band. Galeena thinks maybe she will learn now. This man thinks, more than one baby in belly will not live to take its first breath. if Lonit does not get out of Galeena’s way.”
“And Galeena will not live to take another breath if he threatens Torka’s woman again!” said Torka, and suddenly Umak was beside him, a spear in both hands, looking enormous in his bearskin; and beside him, looking very small and very bold, was Karana, brandishing the spear that he had retrieved from the body of the slain saber-toothed cat. Manaak joined them, his face congested with fury.
“This was Torka’s encampment before it was Galeena’s!” snapped Karana.
“By right, Torka is headman here!”
The tuft of hair on the top of Galeena’s head shook as his brows expanded toward his temples. He laughed. “This man sees two huntehs, a boy, and one spirit mast eh who has lost his powers! Galeena says that by might this encampment belongs to whoever can hold it!”
His men, over a dozen strong, looked at one another, then grinned malevolently at Torka as they shook their spears in his direction. Their women set up a brief ululation in support of them.
“Strike them down,” hissed Ai hungrily. “They have challenged Galeena fah too often. It is a bad thing that they live. It will be good to see them die. They will make meat for us in the dark time winteh.”
Galeena appreciated her words. She reminded him of the leaping cat that had disemboweled the boy and nearly eaten Ninip. If that boy’s mother had been more like Ai, he would never have turned her out into the winter dark after she had completed suckling the boy. He would have kept her for inspiration. Ai made him feel young and bold, but not quite bold enough to ignore the expressions of resolve on the faces of his adversaries. He and his hunters easily outnumbered them, but their spears were sharp, and he had seen what Torka could do with his bludgeon.
The wind was rising beyond the cave. Its sound distracted Galeena. Wild dogs were howling in the distance, and their voices gave Galeena as much inspiration as the cruel, vindictive advice of his younger woman. He cocked his head. He would like to kill. He would like to see Torka and Manaak and their allies dead and on his women’s roasting spits; but Galeena preferred confrontations to be weighted in his favor. If he speared Torka’s woman, he would be likely to be speared himself, and there would be no pleasure in that.
So he said with cloying sweetness as he gestured broadly; “Why men fight over wuhmen, uh? Torka, Manaak, and old man whose magic is as weak as his old bones, you take your wuhmen, and your little lame boy. You go. Now;.” It will be good thing!”
The implication of his words was obvious. Nevertheless, it took his hunters and their women a few moments to realize that Galeena was condemning Torka and his people to certain death. He stood with his spear poised to strike Lonit. His men adjusted their weapons so that, if it came to a contest, there was no way that Torka and the others could hope to come out of it alive. He laughed again. They laughed with him.
“Torka not happy? Manaak not happy?” he slashed them with the questions. “Galeena is reasonable headman! He not keep people in band when they are not content! So go! Take your wuhmen with babies in belly! Take your old man who makes no magic! Take your lame little one! Go into the storms of the time of the long dark. Galeena, he does not care what you do, or where you go! Galeena will stay in this safe, high khamp foreveh!”
They could stand up to Galeena and die in the cave or take their chances on the open tundra. The latter was their only option. Reluctantly, they took it.
Manaak descended the wa
ll first, to steady the guide ropes as first lana and then Lonit were lowered in the sling. Umak followed after making the appropriate curses upon Galeena. The headman and the people of the band laughed at him. Ai squawked at him like a riled goose and told him to save his magic and his curses; he would no doubt have need of both before his spirit left his body to walk upon the wind of time of the long dark.
He growled back at her and pulled his bearskin close. He would descend the wall like a man, not like a pregnant female; but before he did, a wailing Naknaktup begged to accompany him and would not be dissuaded, although she keened as she was lowered from the ledge.
Torka stood alone, facing Galeena, asking to be allowed to take what was
his by right: the barest makings of a new life. “I ask you only for
those things that were mine before you came to this camp—a few skins,
the rib bones to make a sledge, the—“
“The dead have no rights in this khamp or any otheh. You go with what you have on. This man gives you your life. Everything else, Galeena takes as his own.”
With the spears of every man of Galeena’s band leveled at him, Torka began his descent of the wall. Eager to join the others, he took hold of the pulley ropes, inserted one foot into the sling, and began to lower himself.
On the ledge, Galeena leered, and a laughing Ai took up a butchering blade and begafTto saw away at the rope.
“Stop!” Ninip rose from where he had been sitting immobile beside Torka’s fire circle. He had been watching in silence as the man who had saved his life had been degraded by his father. As he looked at his father now, Ninip wondered dully why the affection and respect of such a man had ever seemed so important. Beside Torka, Galeena cast a filthy, twisted shadow. Although Ninip was stiff and sore, he stood tall and straight as he shouted at Ai to leave the rope alone.
Everyone else yelled at her to keep on cutting. She looked toward Galeena, awaiting his command. He told her to keep on with her work. She made a little exhalation of pleasure and did as she was told.
This time, to the shock of everyone who watched, Ninip hurled himself at her and knocked the blade from her hand. She fell in a heap as Galeena cried out in outrage.
“Torka will die if she does not stop!” shouted the boy.
“That is the idea!” Galeena shouted back.
Halfway down the wall, Torka heard their words, jerked inward on the rope to force it to swing back toward the wall. It was rimed with ice, but he grabbed for a hold, found one, and kicked loose of the sling. He clung off-balance for a moment before the hold ceased to be a hold.
Facing into the wall, he slid a good twenty feet before he managed to
stop his fall and cling tightly, breathing hard
Above him on the ledge, Ninip looked down and sighed with relief. “Torka has saved this boy’s life at the risk of his own. Ninip will follow Torka now! Never again will this boy claim Galeena as his own!
The statement of intent and defiance was Ninip’s last. Caleena threw his spear with all of his power behind it. It drove straight through the boy’s back, into his heart, and stopped only when its bone head pierced his chest. At Galeena’s signal, his hunters followed suit. The force of the many direct hits drove Ninip straight off the ledge.
Night had fallen. It wrapped the outcasts in a protective blanket of darkness as they drew the spears from Nimihs broken body. In silence, Manaak took the weapons, as Umak said that they would mean the difference between life and death in the new life that they must now face together Above them, Caleena and his people were howling as they threw stones and refuse down from the ledge. One of the hunters took up Torka’s bludgeon, menaced them with it, and began to descend the wall by way of the pulley. It was a mistake. Ai’s dagger had done its work. The rope broke the moment he trusted his weight to it. He fell like a rock and landed like one.
Torka retrieved his bludgeon, then left the man moaning and twitching where he lay. Torka lifted Ninip and held him in his arms as he led his band of outcasts away from the mountain. As long as it was dark, Galeena and his hunters would not follow. They would not put themselves at risk. They would stay in their high, safe encampment, not even venturing from the cave to bring the fallen hunter back up the wall so that he could die in the arms of his woman, safe from night-stalking predators.
They came soon enough. Dire wolves. The man named them as he screamed for Galeena to help him. He screamed for a long time. Neither Galeena nor the wolves heeded him. Torka and his people heard him, and although they walked on into the hostile night without looking back, they knew that as long as the wolves fed upon him, their small band would be safe from predators. They buried Ninip on the outwash plain, in a little burrow that they dug and lined with evergreen branches of spruce. It was a pungent, fragrant grave. They laid him down in it, and because it was small, they curled him up like a fetus. Umak made songs of thanks to the boy whose brave spirit had overcome its inherent nastiness and had, through his gift of weapons, through the sacrifice of his death, given them all a chance to live.
It was a solemn moment. Naknaktup wept in memory of the boy’s mother who had not been allowed to live past the days of his weaning, and Lonit was filled with a terrible empathy for one who had known the pain of a childhood devoid of love. Karana was troubled, sorry that he and Ninip had not exchanged so much as a friendly look in all of the time that they had lived together. They might have been friends ... in time. But now there was no time. Ninip’s life was over.
They piled many stones over the little grave so predators would not eat his flesh or scatter his bones. Not one of them had ever buried another human being. Always the bones were put out to look upon the sky forever; but somehow, that did not seem right. On the tundra, the skin of the land was too thin to allow for the digging of a grave, and the permafrost was rock hard. In the black, shadowing presence of the mountain, the ground seemed to welcome Ninip’s body. For reasons that none of them could name, it seemed right that he should be placed here, safe from predators, within the flank of the mountain upon which he had given up his spirit for them.
Torka took one of the spears. With the stabbing dagger that he carried at his belt, he notched out its maker’s identification mark and inscribed his own. Across it, he incised the double lateral lines that had been Ninip’s mark of ownership. Then he broke the spear across his thigh and placed the pieces upright upon the grave.
“So that the spirits of the mountain will know that Torka claimed this boy as his own. So that Galeena will know. It is as Ninip claimed. Not even in the spirit world would Ninig claim Galeena as his own. Ninip is of Torka’s band. Forever!”
They went on. Manaak carried lana. The shock of the past few hours had stilled her pains, but in the blue haze that was all that would be of the next day’s light, her labor began again. One great contraction broke the water in which the unborn child was cushioned from the jolts of life; and the infant came forth in a gush, so quickly that Umak had no time to frame a single child-come-forth chant. He made a praise song instead while Manaak nearly fainted with relief, and Karana said that the newborn boy would grow to be a very wise man because he had the good sense to refuse to be born into Galeena’s band.
They rested only long enough for lana to be tended by the women.
“We must go far from this place,” said Manaak. “It is not Galeena’s way to be forgiving. He will come for us if he can. Like a pack of wolves, his huntehs will fall upon us while we sleep. We must go on.”
For a day and all of a nearly endless night, they walked and rested, rested and walked. Manaak carried lana until she insisted that she was strong enough to walk on her own; and this she did, although it cost her dear. Nevertheless, when Umak offered to make a litter of his bearskin robe, she refused.
“Your magic lives in that, Spirit Masteh, she told him, holding her infant close. “It may not work quickly, but it is a strong and wonderful magic that has given this son to me.”
Two days later, th
ey came upon the carcass of a large bison. It had been old and sick, and whether it had died of natural causes or been killed by wolves was impossible to say. Only a small portion of it had been eaten; belly, throat, exes. tongue, and the upper flank. The rest was intact, and it was an easy task to drive away the smaller carrion eaters that had evidently just arrived to feast upon it. From its ribs they erected a framework for a small pit hut and draped its hide and Umak’s bearskin over it.
lana made no objection; in fact she smiled as she gratefully lay down within it, out of the wind.
“We will all dwell within the life-sustaining warmth of Umak’s magic, she said.
And so they did.
It began to snow. And the snow kept falling, a soft, windless snow that covered the land and filled the world with silence .. . until a terrible roaring shattered that silence. The earth shook, and their little shelter shivered as though against a wind, but there was no wind.
In terror, they clambered from their shelter and squinted against miles of white stretching away forever all around them. In all those miles, nothing moved. In all those miles, there was no color at all except the black, soaring bulk of the Mountain of Power, Galeena’s mountain. They stared, perplexed and then awed. The entire upper quadrant of the mountain was moving. The vast, mile-thick skin of the summit ice pack was fracturing, slipping, sliding downward as the supersaturated underlayers of scree and till, overstressed by the weight of the new accumulation of snow, suddenly refused to support their burden. In great, dark sheets of debris, the underpinnings of the glacier were giving out, causing the glacier itself to override them.
As Torka and his little band of outcasts watched in stunned silence, the entire east-facing flank of the mountain, including the cavelike ledge and all of its occupants, was buried forever beneath the geological debris of centuries.
Karana tugged gently at Umak’s hand, and then at Torka’s. “The mountain was warning us.”
The old man harrumphed as Torka nodded, drew Lonit close, and said quietly: “Galeena was right. He will stay in his high, ‘safe’ encampment forever.”