by neetha Napew
Aar’s black-masked head was unmistakable amid his tawny eyed, gray-haired cousins. He was very thin, with ribs showing and scars across his nose and high at his shoulders; but he was clearly an animal in his prime now, the second largest clog in the pack, with broad, slavering jaws and a wild, halt-mad look in his eyes.
“Brother’ Dog .. . we meet again. This man sees that you have reverted to kind, as he always knew you would.
Aar’s head went down, neck outstretched, ears hack. Beside and slightly ahead of him, the largest male growled, and, as though by command, every animal in the pack followed suit.
Slowly, Torka loosed his bludgeon and raised it with his left hand while holding his spear at the read) in his right. The dogs understood his threat. Several took a few halting steps back, but their leader, the largest male, snarled. He took two steps forward and froe, his hair bristling along his shoulders and spine.
Torka stood immobile, allowing the dog to perceive no lear in his stance. “Come, he invited. “You are the biggest. You will make the most meat.”
The dogs head twisted a little, as though it tried to understand the words of the man. Aar moved up beside it, shoulder to shoulder, tension rippling in his muscles as he strained to hold himself back.
“Ah, Brother Dog, Umak would not be happy to see you now or to know the fate that you have chosen. Come, try to feed upon Torka, and Torka will make certain that you are never hungry again!
Starvation had made the dogs bold. They closed ranks behind their leader. The big male led them to attack, and yipping and yowling they came at Torka without hesitation. They poured up the slope toward him, and he swiped down and across with his bludgeon. But even as his weapon came in contact with the side of the big clog’s jaw, he saw to his amazement that the leader had another enemy.
Aar was at his throat. If the weapon had not killed him, the slashing teeth of Brother Dog would. The big gray dog fell sideways. Others swarmed over him to meet the swiping death dealt to them by Torka’s club. Not once did he have to use his spear. With Aar fighting by his side, turning on his own kind in defense of Brother Man, Torka was able to brain the most aggressive members of the pack. The rest ran in whimpering retreat. All but one—a shaggy, heavy-bellied female, who had stood back from the melee, stared up the slope at Torka and the dog, as bewildered by Aar’s behavior as Torka was overwhelmed by it. For the first time since Umak had insisted that Aar was his spirit brother, Torka knew that the old man had been right all along. Stunned, he dropped to one knee. The dog stood close, but not too near, staring at him out of a bloodied face. Tentatively, Torka extended a conciliatory hand.
“Brother Dog ...” he acknowledged, and although he did not understand how it could be, he knew that somehow the dog was more than an animal.
In a strange and bewildering symbiosis, the dog had chosen to place its
loyalty with Man. “We have not been friends, you and I,” said Torka,
“but from this day on, truly we will be brothers,”
Torka would have prepared the slain dogs for transport to camp, but as he began to do so, he saw the tracks. Frozen in the bottom layer of hard snow, the wind had blown away their covering of soft powder. Torka stared, touching them, noting their differences.
Many men.
Aar sniffed at the footprints with interest, and the female dog did the same. Torka was struck cold with dread: The furred, armed men that had walked along the rim of the ravine at the height of the storm had not been figments of his imagination. They had been real. Karana’s words came raging back into his head as his eyes fastened on the distant signal fire that he knew was not a signal fire at all.
The Ghost Band , .. it comes in the time of light to steal women and boys, then to vanish .. . leaving burning encampments and the bodies of the dead and dying as the only proof that they existed at all.
With Aar at his side and the female dog trailing at a wary distance, Torka raced for home. The pit hut was a pile of charred, stinking rubble by the time he reached it. He stood in shock, cold and immobile, as memories of another encampment raked his soul. Death .. . death .. . everywhere. A voice screamed within him. No! Not again! No!
He moved forward quickly, hoping that the bodies that he saw would rise to mock him, parties to some obscene jest. They did not rise. Manaak was dead of massive spear wounds, but the weapons had been drawn from his corpse, and he lay in a frozen pool of his own blood. Naknaktup sprawled where she had fallen, on her back, hideously mutilated, with her unborn child ripped from her belly and placed in a position to suckle wounds where breasts had once been.
Had there been food in his belly, Torka would have vomited. He used his spear to steady himself, searching for Umak and Lonit and Karana, half hoping that he would not find them, then going mad with blind, directionless rage when he could not. He cried out their names, and lana’s. The wind blew them back at him out of miles of empty, desolate darkness.
Aar’s soft whimpering drew him to Umak’s body. The old man lay half-buried in the rubble of the pit hut, so blackened by burns that he was unrecognizable until, from out of the ashes and charred skins and bones, softly slurred but unmistakable sound reached Torka’s ears.
“Hrrum .. . mphh ...”
Frantically Torka cleared the rubble of the hut away, and when he looked down at his dying grandfather, he bowed his head and wept like a child until a. blackened, bony finger poked at his tears.
“Tears are the blood of a man’s spirit. Do not let it bleed. Strength is born in the spirit. Torka will need his strength to track Lonit and Karana and Manaak’s woman....”
“They live?”
“No thanks ... to this old man. They took them east .. . in the last waning hours of the storm....” A deep, low garble rose to choke him. His hand fell to grip Torka’s lore arm as he willed himself to endure his pain. “Torka .. . must go ... now....”
Gently, as though he held an injured child, Torka gathered his grandfather into his arms and held him close, as if, through the power of his love, he could keep death away. “We will go together, as Umak once brought Torka out of the way of the wind, to a new life, so Torka will carry Umak until he is well and strong again. “Hrrmmph! That would not ... be ... a good thing.” His lungs had been seared in the fire; blistered tissue made every word an agony. But he was Umak. He mastered the spirits of his pain, and although he fought for even- phrase, he smiled as he spoke, knowing that even now, at the very end of his life, he icas a spirit master. In a rasping whisper, he spoke to Torka of the past, and of the future that now rested with him. “The People .. . they live in you .. . forever.” “Forever ...”
Aar lay down and nuzzled his snout beneath the old man’s hand while the female dog, still untrusting of Man, lay down at the edges of the ruined encampment.
“My brother, once more it is time for this old man to walk away upon the wind. But this time, Brother Dog will not stop me....”
The wind rose. The darkness thickened. Far off within the distant eastern ranges, there was a roaring within the wind, a trumpeting. Torka listened to the easily recognizable voice of a mammoth. Thunder Speaker? World Shaker? The Destroyer? Or Death itself, he thought, filled with hatred for the beast whose predations had ultimately brought him here, to this terrible moment of absolute despair.
“Listen. It walks before us ... into the face of the rising sun!” Euphoria lightened Umak’s voice. Within Torka’s arms, his body rose, then fell back.
“Father of my father?” Torka dared not ask the question.
Aar answered it. With his head pointed skyward, Brother Dog cried a high song of mourning for the spirit of an old man who walked the wind at last. Within the freezing dark, a light glowed like a cold white eye that stared unblinking across the miles. The furred, cowled men pointed and grunted with obvious appreciation as they prodded their captives with their spears.
“Klamah! Klamah!”
“Hurry! Hurry! echoed Karana in his own tongue, belligerently leaning into
the wind and walking as slowly as he could.
Ahead of him, lana tripped, and when Lonit bent and tried to assist her to her feet, her reward was a brutal spear poke to the back that sent her sprawling. Infuriated, Karana sprang to her defense, but his hobbles brought him up short, and now all three captives were on the ground.
Those who had taken them were not amused. Long, barbed spears gave clear commands that words did not have to speak. The two women helped each other to their feet. Karana rose, made a grab for one of the offending spears, and was kicked so hard that he ended on the ground again.
Was it the blow? Or was it something else? The boy sat clutching his gut, gasping for breath as something moved deep within his chest and belly. Like clouds scudding across a full moon, he saw shadows, felt them within himself, and knew with a bleak, expanding emptiness within his heart that Umak was dead. The spirit of the old man who had touched him now moved within him and around him. He reached out to grasp it, to hold the invisible substance of what had once been the soul of Umak, but such things could not be held. And yet, as he was booted to his feet and pushed along by his captors, somehow it was still with him. He cocked his head and realized that it would be with him always, a part of him forever.
“Hmmph!” he exclaimed, and did not wince when the blunt end of a spear was rammed hard into the small of his back to silence him.
They walked for hours. The cold white light was a beacon toward which the fur-clad men directed their steps until, toward dawn, the light disappeared and they paused to rest, hunkering down in the snow to eat their traveling rations before curling up to sleep. When they awoke, one of the heavily garbed men took the infant from a passive lana and handed the baby to Lonit. He said something to the others, low and grating words that made them laugh with dark intent. Several of them came to his side to join him in taking turns sating themselves upon lana. Manaak’s woman neither yielded nor resisted. She lay with them like a limp, vacant eyed doll. Lonit closed her eyes and held the baby close. She knew that it lived only as long as lana complied with her captors’ wishes. Memories of death—terrible, bloody, purposeless death—ran red behind her lids. She opened her eyes and sat shivering, close to Karana.
“Why have they not killed us? And why did they not gut me along with poor Naknaktup?”
The boy, cross-legged beside her, stared out across the darkening miles. “Karana knows only what he has heard others say of the Ghost Band. They steal women and boys. Naknaktup was older than you, and no beauty. When we reach their encampment, the Ghost Men will take us down into the earth and we will die to this world forever.”
Lonit’s mouth worked with bitterness as she listened to the animalistic grunts and moans of pleasure that her captors made as they found release within lana. “They are men, not ghosts,” she said. “So we must continue to walk slowly, to drag our feet so that our tracks are clear. Our captors think that they have killed or captured us all. They do not know of Torka. They must never know what gives strength and hope to Lonit and Karana.”
The boy nodded. Unconsciously, he mimicked his beloved spirit master as he crossed his arms over his chest, jabbed his chin skyward, and turned his mouth down. “Hmmph, it is so,” he said in a whisper of what he wished was absolute certainty. “Torka will find us!” But the weather changed and the wind turned. Once again it blew with a demonic intensity that whipped fallen snow into smothering rivers of air. Travel was impossible. Footprints were erased from the world, and after two interminably long days and nights of storm, a bereft Torka emerged from the lee of a tundral hillock, where he and the dogs had curled against the cold, to look upon a tundra that was wiped clean of any trace of those who walked ahead of him.
For a long while he stood staring, listening, his heart as empty as the land that stretched before him. Then resolutely he went forward into the face of the rising sun. The dogs snuffled as they trotted beside him, as though querying his reasons for traveling into unknown land.
“Lonit is there, and Karana,” he informed them, unaware that he was doing the very thing for which he had so often criticized Umak; he was talking to the dogs as though they were capable of understanding his words.
The days that followed were brief intervals of pale, wind tattered light through which Torka loped with Aar at his side and the female dog following at a wary distance. The nights were long spans of wind-chilled darkness through which he tried to sleep so that he could travel with little or no need of rest in the hours of light. But on the third night, he awoke in the deep darkness that precedes the dawn and, for the first time, fully focused on the bright star that burned cold and white on the mountainous horizon. The star did not move! It was not a star. It was a beacon! He cursed himself. The marauders were traveling by night, gaining the extra hours, following a signal fire that could not be seen by daylight.
He was immediately on his feet, scooping up his weapons, then moving toward the light. The dogs whined, but he ignored them. The mountains were near—long, hulking ranges smothered by glaciers. There was the strong smell of ice in the wind, but he caught neither sight nor scent of travelers or encampments. If those who had taken Lonit, Karana, lana, and little Ninipik were members of the Ghost Band, they were well named. Trailing them was like trying to follow a cloud after it has vanished from the sky. But now, at least, he had a light to guide him.
He traveled all that day, keeping his course straight for that part of the mountains where he had seen the light. He stopped only long enough to appease his exhaustion, sleeping little, eating less. Although the land was rising, the mountains seemed no nearer. He went on, into the night and the next day until fatigue dropped him and he lay upon the tundra, watching the dogs hunting for themselves. They worked as a team, sharing their food and their sleeping place. He thought of Lonit, and his pain over her loss was unbearable. He buried his head in his forearm and slept without bothering to eat. When he awoke, it was to Aar’s nuzzling of his hand. The dog stood over him. The animal had placed the midsection of a hare, with head and extremities chewed off, before his face. Aar stared at him, apparently waiting for him to eat the offering. Torka was hungry enough to comply. As he gnawed the unexpected gift, he recalled the many times that, at Umak’s insistence, the food of the band had been shared with the dog.
The light was close now. The marauders strode forward with confidence. Exhausted, Lonit again felt the deep pull of pain creep from her lower back around her pelvis. She had listened to enough woman talk within Galeena’s encampment to know that such pains were the onset of labor.
Her infant,
Torka’s infant, was ready to be born. Torka! She bit her lip to keep from crying out his name.
The mountains were dead ahead of them, and the land beneath their feet was slowly rising to meet them. Karana had been walking apart from the women. Now he came to walk beside Lonit.
“From the crest of the hills, I saw him!” His voice was a whisper that somehow managed to roar with triumph. “A man with two dogs running at his side! It was dark, but in the starlight, I saw him! It has to be Torka!” For the first time since the raiders had come to the encampment, he saw Lonit’s face dimple into a tremulous smile. For the last two days, she had looked so pale and wan, he had begun to fear for her; so he did not tell her that what he had seen had been so far away that the image had appeared to be no more than three tiny shadows moving upon the snow-whitened land. Not one of the Ghost Men had noted the movement. But Karana had seen it. He had known that it was Torka because, as on the ledge when the spirit of the mountain had warned him of danger, something within him had spoken the truth of Torka’s presence to his soul; but he did not think that Lonit would believe him. “We have only to slow our captors down for another night—perhaps two—and leave whatever signs of our passing we can, to help him follow us.”
Her smile faded. Her eyes strayed to the hulking, shaggy forms who stalked out ahead of her, using their spears as prods to assure the firmness and depth of the snow that lay beneath thei
r feet. Behind and to each side of her, other men walked—ugly, tattooed men with hideous bone labrets piercing their lower lips and protruding downward over their chins like carved, saliva-slickened fangs. Killers, she thought. Men who carry spears and daggers not only to hunt and protect themselves from predators, but to enable them to be predators of their own kind. “If Torka comes for us .. .” She stopped herself before she spoke her fear aloud and thus assured that it would come to pass, but the words were in her eyes as she looked at the boy. If Torka comes for us, they will kill him.
Ahead of her, the man in the lead suddenly stopped, raised an arm, and called out what sounded like a greeting. Lonit and Karana looked ahead, puzzled, but glad for the opportunity to rest .. . until they saw figures coming toward them out of the foothills. They carried torches of what appeared to be tallow-soaked grasses and skins bound onto the rib bones of large game animals. Soon they were there, breathless, smiling, ugly men who embraced the marauders as though they were long-awaited brothers returning from a hunt.
And so they were. Only their quarry had not been game; it had been slaves. Dizzied by a concept too alien to comprehend fully, Lonit found herself the object of their scrutiny as they pulled back her hood and passed her from man to man. Each of them handled her, touched her belly, and seemed pleased as they exchanged animated words of congratulations to her captors. They put their hands on lana then and examined her strong, bawling little son, nodding, grunting all the while. Then they turned their attention to Karana, poking at him, leering as though he were a nubile young girl, handling him as provocatively as they had handled the women, until the boy screamed in outrage and made one of them regret that he had removed his gloves before beginning his trespass into Karana’s garments.