Children of the Dawn

by Patricia Rowe

  CHAPTER 40

  SURPRISES AWAITED SPIRITS NEW TO THE OTHERWORLD. The best of these, to Ashan, was the ability to travel great distances in an eyeblink. She could choose from endless places and times, moving with the speed of lightning, by the power of desire—an invisible collection of energy that was everything essential she had ever been, without the burden of a human body.

  Spirit travel did not always work as Ashan expected. She couldn’t be in two places at the same time. Sometimes she went places without desiring it. Unasked-for travel seemed random at times, full of purpose at others. Like humans, spirits had to sort through the meaningless to find meaning.

  This time the Spirit of Ashan arrived somewhere without knowing she was coming. She found herself inside a long, narrow shelter. It was built on a mound instead of in a pit—as Teahra huts were—and was much larger. Twenty or more could sleep without touching on the swept earth floor. Foggy daylight seeped through a low door opening in the center of a long wall. Piles of skins and furs leaned against the opposite wall. Cooking fires rimmed with round stones rested near each end.

  The roof of lapped cedar splits would keep rain out and warmth in. The walls were made of slabs of cedar so massive that Ashan wondered how they’d been cut. She couldn’t smell without borrowing the nose of some living creature—and she was alone in this place—but she imagined the clean scent of all this cedar.

  The Spirit of Ashan had never visited a finer living place. Though she didn’t yet know where this was, she considered staying awhile, to learn about the people who lived here, how trees so large were cut and slabbed—

  Two men crawled through the low door. They didn’t look alike, but they shared a blue aura that said they were brothers. Young, healthy, bursting with mating desire, they spoke a language unlike Shahala or Tlikit. Ashan understood them, as she did everyone she visited in her new life.

  The older one said, “It’s crazy. What’s wrong with the women of our tribe?”

  The younger one rolled his eyes… they must have talked about the women of their tribe before.

  “If you had seen these two,” he said, “you would understand.”

  “These people don’t guard their women?”

  “No.”

  “And there are two exactly alike?”

  “Exactly. Perfect beauties. A man could trade them for ten women.”

  “Are you sure you can find them again?”

  “If not, we’ll find some ugly ones to trade for beauties.”

  The brothers laughed.

  Suddenly, the Spirit of Ashan was at her rock in the cliffs above Teahra Village.

  She focused on returning to the cedar slab hut and the brothers planning evil. Instead, she found herself watching a dream that Kai El was having about his forbidden sister.

  Ashan would have wept, if spirits could.

  She tried desperately to enter his dream and change it, as she had done many times before, but the power of human love was too great to overcome.

  She fled to a mountaintop on the other side of the world, and ran with a red wolf in the dawn-colored snow. The wolf howled to greet morning. Ashan sang with the wolf, until she forgot what she couldn’t bear to remember.

  CHAPTER 41

  TOR GOT WORSE. EATEN BY RAGE, DROWNING IN UNSHED tears, he danced alone on the edge of madness. He marked each day after Ashan’s death with a firecoal on the hut wall. When he realized that the number of days in forever didn’t matter, he stopped counting, and time blurred. He separated from the world, like a caterpillar inside an invisible cocoon. Things looked flat. Sound and taste were blunted. Nothing seemed real. He could stare at a nearby bush and a mountain behind it, and they both seemed the same distance away, as if they were painted on the sky. If he reached for something, he might miss it. Thinking was difficult. The smallest decision loomed gigantic. At times words made no sense. At times, he felt invisible. Unfortunately he wasn’t. People saw the miserable man, but didn’t know what to say to him.

  Weary of inflicting himself on others, Tor spent days and nights away from Teahra Village. He wandered through mark-less time, as he had long ago after man-eaters massacred his Shahala tribesmen. But now there was a difference: He could go home. People would feed him. It was a good thing: No longer a youth at the mountaintop of cunning and strength, Eagle from the Light was slipping down the slope of old age.

  A long way from the Great River one day, Tor hurried along a barren plateau with a strong wind at his back, using the butt of his spear as a third leg to push himself along. High, dark clouds filled the sky. “Find cover,” the clouds said to all creatures, “and soon.” Tor didn’t know where he was, so he ran before the wind, hoping to find shelter before the coming storm’s fury caught him.

  Even if I don’t find shelter, he thought, rain won’t kill me. Though all this running might.

  The clouds had turned day into almost-night when he reached a cleft between plateaus. He scrambled down a rocky decline, and into a narrow gully carved by runoff from higher ground. Farther down, where the gully widened, he saw the gray-green of a grove of trees, and ran for it.

  Over the treetops, the wind howled. Inside the grove, the air was still, except for Tor’s huffing. He grabbed branches and propped them against a tree trunk—leaving the side away from the wind open—then covered the frame with his sleeping skin, tied it down, and settled in to wait for the storm.

  His breathing and heartbeat quieted as he looked around. Dull as he’d become, it took a while to realize the importance of what he had found.

  Trees. Not just any trees, but pine trees.

  No—not the majestic grandfathers of Shahala land—tall and proud, with long, limber needles in groups of three. These were old and twisted, with short, sharp needles grouped in twos. The stunted things were far from his mind’s picture of pine trees, but by smell and taste, he knew they must be.

  Spirit of the tree who gives medicine for many ills, we thank you… Tor remembered Ashan’s song as she gathered pine in the fragrant forests of their youth. He sighed for that other life.

  The only pine found in the new land was far up in the mountains, where the huckleberries grew. Tenka used what she could get for coughing sickness. There was never enough for sap tea to soothe the pains of old age, or inner bark for warriors to soak and put on their wounds.

  On the side of a tree away from the wind, Tor cut pieces of rough bark with his stone blade, stripped off the thin inner bark, and replaced the outer bark so the tree could grow a scar around it. He filled his waist pouch with moist strips. His nose came alive. The inner bark smelled like health.

  As wind and clouds had foretold, rain pounded the land for days and nights. Tor’s shelter kept him dry. Runoff cas caded from higher ground, but missed the pine grove. The trees lived in the only place they could, proving that they were smart, as well as good medicine.

  One morning Tor awoke to see the sun rising into a cloudless sky, and he knew the storm was over.

  Sunlight sparkled from an ancient trunk, caught by a rounded glob stuck in the bark: a drop of hardened pitch. He pried it out, turned it over in his fingers, held it up to the sky. Smooth, clear and golden… like sunshine seen from the bottom of a pool.

  Tor could never resist the magic created by sun and water. It made him think of Kai El. The piece of golden pitch took him back to Keecha Creek—the waiting; the sound from the Home Cave that terrified him until he realized it was his child’s first cries. He remembered raising his arms to the sky as men had done since the Misty Time, shouting:

  “Spirits of all who love people! Kai El, Sun River, is born! Give this child a better life than mine!”

  Tor sighed. So long ago…

  Inside the hard glob of pitch, a small beetle slept forever.

  Once, Tor would have run to Ashan with the treasure. His curious mate had loved things with a story, and what a story this could tell. No one had seen such a beetle. Maybe the creature with shimmering green wings had died out like
mammoths and horses.

  Turning the drop of pitch over in his hands, Tor imagined the long-ago attack: the beetle crawling up the tree, stopping to sleep in the sun. The drop of pitch creeping down. Wing tip caught. Legs trapped one by one in a frantic, hopeless struggle.

  “We’re not so different,” Tor said. He expected no answer, just wanted to talk about how he felt. But who knew? Maybe its spirit heard him.

  “Like you, I get a thick, glazy crust that smothers desire, and leaves slowly swirling pain. And I get heavy, and tired, and it would be so easy to give up.”

  Tor’s food would soon be gone. Hunger knew better than to bother him. To die by starving would be so easy, it tempted him.

  As a young man, Tor had fought self-destruction more than once. He beat the demon, but he never destroyed it. No longer powerful enough to make him kill himself, it still tormented him. He would fight this fight as long as he lived, and die the moment he stopped fighting. Like the beetle.

  “How long did you fight destiny before you gave up?”

  He thought he heard an answer: As long as I could. Then longer.

  “Too long,” Tor said. “Sometimes it’s better just to give up, when you know what the end will be. I think of it, you know.”

  But you promised.

  “Yes,” he said, forced to remember. Whether he had promised the spirits or his mate, he couldn’t recall, but it didn’t matter. He had promised.

  “A warrior’s promise can be trusted,” Tor said, and went to sleep with the piece of pitch in his hand.

  In the morning, he was ready to head home, where someone would make sure he kept living.

  Tor would never be free of his glazy crust, but the beetle could be. He crushed the pitch and the bug, made a fire, and threw the dust into it.

  “You are free.”

  On the way home, he lost most of a day sitting on a hilltop, angry at himself. Kai El would have loved the drop of golden pitch that was like his name. It was a sign sent to Tor to give to Kai El, and he had destroyed it. Why did the son always come last in his father’s thoughts?

  In the late afternoon, Tor came down a trail into the canyon of the Great River, Chiawana. Heat pressed on Teahra Village like an unwelcome fur robe. Nothing stirred. He walked by his father’s hut. On the shady side, Arth and his last living mate, Tashi, rested on a grass mat.

  Tor greeted them in passing.

  “My father and his mate, are you well?”

  “I am,” Tashi answered. “And you?”

  “Very well,” Tor lied. People didn’t want the truth if you were less than well—and the man whose soulmate was dead would never be well again.

  His father said nothing. Tor wanted to keep walking, but he stopped because of the guilt called “respect.”

  “Are you well, Arth?” he repeated.

  Arth’s grunt could have meant “yes” or “no.” He had lived fifty-four summers—much longer than most men—but his father had never learned to say what he meant. Tor had spent his whole life guessing.

  Without looking up, the old man spoke in a surly voice.

  “It’s not that I need younger men to take care of my hut. I’m strong as ever.”

  “So you would like us to think,” Tashi said.

  “I could do these things if I wanted to, woman, but they do it out of respect for my age! Should I steal their good feelings?”

  Arth’s anger is for me, not her. What have I done now? Or forgotten to do? Tor couldn’t think. If the old man had something to say, why not just say it?

  Arth looked at his son with eyes as wounded as his voice.

  “You, Tor? You, of all men? I told you this was the day. Everyone came. My other sons, my friends, men I hardly know. Even my grandson Kai El came down from his high place. Tashi made everyone gifts of dry-smoked salmon. The piece behind the head she made for you. She picked out every bone.”

  What are you talking about? Tor almost asked. Then he smelled new leather. He stretched his eyes to see more than usual.

  He sighed. New skins on the old man’s hut. I have defeated myself again. His webby cocoon returned. His vision narrowed back to the ground in front of him. Arth’s accusing voice came from a distant place.

  “Where were you that was more important than the roofing of your father’s hut?”

  Tor could have said, “Finding pine trees,” but that didn’t seem important anymore.

  “Nowhere,” he said. “I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  Arth sighed, huge and sad. “I know, son. I too have suffered losses.”

  Tor nodded.

  Tashi went in the hut, brought out a bundle wrapped in grass and handed it to him.

  “I made this for you, son of my mate.”

  Tor shook his head.

  “Take it,” Arth said. “You wouldn’t make one good meal for a man-eater.”

  Tor said, “Thank you, Tashi. I know how good it will taste.” He took the gift and went home.

  People still called it the Moonkeeper’s hut, though now it sheltered only a man and his son. He opened the doorskin, stepped into the round space dug knee deep in the ground, rested his spear near the door, and tossed the food bundle on the work shelf.

  Evening light, broken into pieces by a skeleton of branched wood, showed dimly through the covering of old horsehides in need of patching. Kai El had offered a deerskin made into leather by some girl—not as good as horsehide, but there were no horses anymore.

  “Fine,” Tor had told him. “Do it before winter.”

  Of course, a boy of seventeen summers had more exciting things to do than work on his father’s hut.

  Tor ate as much of the salmon as he could. It should have been a blend of delicious flavors: smoke, white rock, and honey, almost covering the taste of fish. But it tasted like the dry grass wrapping. Not worth the effort of chewing. The fault was in his mouth, not in Tashi’s work. He disliked food—no, he hated it. How could he enjoy eating, knowing Ashan would never eat another thing? Tor had been denying himself for so long, his mouth had forgotten how to taste.

  Too bad his nose didn’t forget how to smell. The hut he and the boy shared stank of old sweat. When Ashan lived here, it smelled of herbs, medicines, all kinds of things that changed with the seasons as she dried and stored the plants needed by the tribe. Tor refused to change anything, trying to keep the illusion that she might come home. But he couldn’t keep her scent.

  He pounded his palm with his fist. He could not remember her scent! Time should lessen his sense of loss. Instead, he lost more of her each day. What would go tomorrow? The depth of her eyes? The whisper of her sleep-breathing?

  Stripping off his moccasins and loinskin, Tor lay on their raised earth bed. He didn’t bother with the oil lamp—easier to sleep than to keep the darkness away.

  Ashan… Tor sighed, aching as he always did when her name ran through his mind. Ashan had slept on the inside. Danger would have to come past a fierce Shahala warrior to reach her. Now Tor lay in her place, imagining that he felt the shadow of her shape beneath him in the hard-packed dirt covered by skins, the indentation of her hip, her shoulder, from all those seasons of resting there.

  The bed was too wide now, and too empty, but he lacked energy to haul the extra dirt away.

  “To-or! I see you!”

  Tsilka peered through the open doorway.

  Exactly what he did not need!

  CHAPTER 42

  TOR PULLED SOMETHING ACROSS HIS NAKED MIDDLE.

  Tsilka stepped into his hut and stood there staring: A slim dark shape against the lighter sky of the open door; lines of long legs, short skirt, hair wild as the woman herself; the details of her face hidden in shadows. Turning slowly, showing herself from the side, she closed the doorskin.

  Tsilka had a body that would always tempt men.

  Tor was ashamed that he could even think of a woman’s body.

  “It’s like a cave in here,” she said. “I don’t know which is worse, the dark or the smell, but the d
ark I can cure. Where is your oil lamp?”

  Too tired to argue, he pointed to the shelf he had made for Ashan’s work—a large, flat piece of wood thrown out by the Great River, held at waist height by two wood chunks. When her back got sore from sitting bent over, she would go to her shelf and continue to work standing up. Underneath the shelf, she kept things needed for another season. Tor’s idea was so admired that other women asked their mates for a working shelf.

  Crossing the hut as if she owned it, Tsilka struck the spark-stones over the lamp of hollowed stone. The firefish oil flared. In the sudden glow, Tor didn’t like seeing her there among Ashan’s things.

  “I want you to go,” he said.

  Tsilka sauntered toward him carrying the oil-filled lamp. She placed it carefully on the end of his bed. Bright flames danced on the wad of fiber in the center. Comfortable shadows fled before the light.

  She sat on the unswept floor, looking up at him.

  “There! That’s better!”

  “Tsilka, I have no interest in—”

  She laughed. “Don’t be stupid. We’re too old for that.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  She held up a white feather, its quill wrapped with thin leather for tying in the hair.

  “It’s time to be friends.”

  The war between them was old and tired, but Tor knew she enjoyed it. Why would she want to end it? He hadn’t trusted Tsilka since she speared him through the leg and kept him for a slave. Why should he trust her now?

  He said, “I have many reasons not to be your friend.”

  “I know, Tor. It’s for our children that I came.”

  He didn’t believe her. Tsilka was here for her final triumph over Ashan. She must think it had been long enough, that by now any man would be starved for lovemaking.

  “Go away,” he said, turning his back.

  The stirring he thought was the sound of leaving was Tsilka creeping onto his bed.

  “You and I, Tor, each of us with half a family. It’s not right. I live in a tiny hut with two girls. You live in this fine, large hut, with only Kai El. Look at all this space not being used.”