“Isn’t the weather fine?”
“It’s good to see you. Are you feeling better?”
“Tahna is doing a fine job. Aren’t you proud of her?”
She forgot what they said as soon as they said it, too, but thought she answered like an ordinary person would.
After that, Tsilka left her hut on many spring days—sitting at first, then taking walks. The weakness and pain in her body lessened. Her thoughts were just as confused—even mad—but she hid them.
“Oh, Mother,” her daughter said every day on her stingy little visits. “I’m so glad you’re getting better.”
Why would anyone think that a stronger body could help a shattered mind?
When Tsilka emerged from her isolation, she was astonished to find that her surviving daughter had become an important woman in the village. She watched Tahna work, saw respect given to her that Tsilka had always craved. She began to see her daughter as the chief she would have been: like Timshin, the great Tlikit chief, and the last; feared and wise; not bothered all the time with spirits. The great Tlmshin—Tlsilka’s father, Tahna’s grandfather.
Tahna—not Tenka—was the rightful chief of the Tlikit people. Now her mother saw how capable she was. The girl who should be chief should have her mother to pass on Tim-shin’s ways, to pass on what she herself had learned about power. But, no—her mother wasn’t with her. Her mother was all alone in this stinking little hut.
Moonkeepers always have what I should have, Ashan kept Tor and me apart. Now Tenka is keeping Tahna and me apart. It’s wrong for someone to do that.
If Tenka was gone, the people would look to Tahna to take her place. Tsilka would move in with her daughter, into that nice, large Moonkeeper’s hut. Everything would be so nice.
If Tenka was gone…
“I am done with having my life ruined by Moonkeepers,” the bitter, ugly, hateful woman said.
The next day, Tsilka approached the Moonkeeper. She hid quivering excitement under a calm voice.
“Tenka, I found something you should see.”
“What?”
“I can’t explain. I must show you.”
“Where?”
She pointed to the cliffs.
Tenka said, “I wouldn’t have thought you could get up there.”
“I’ve been getting stronger.”
Tenka shook her head. “I’m too busy. If it’s a medicine plant, why don’t you bring me some?”
“It’s medicine, but not a plant. It isn’t something I can bring. I can only show you. You won’t believe that it was there all the time and you never saw it.”
Tenka’s expression said, “crazy old woman.”
“Come on, Tenka,” she begged. “I promise you will thank me.”
“Oh, why not?”
Tsilka led the way up the Moonkeeper’s Path, walking slowly, pausing often to rest, her strength still not half what it used to be. She was afraid Tenka would become impatient and go back. But Tenka stayed with her, pleased to see the progress she had made.
“Just two moons ago, you could barely walk,” the Moon-keeper said. “Look at you now.”
“Hummingbirds and vultures came to set me free,” Tsilka said.
Tenka gave her a strange look.
“Well, I’m proud of you, Tsilka. I know it took a lot of work to get your strength back. I know how you grieved for Gaia.”
Oh do you? Tsilka thought. Do you know the other things I grieve for?
But she said, “Yes, it took a lot of work.”
High in the cliffs, Tsilka stopped in front of the stone seat where Ashan had disappeared. Her breathing was ragged. Every part of her hurt.
The stone picture loomed over them.
“She Who Watches doesn’t frighten you?” Tenka asked.
Tsilka snorted. “It’s only a picture on a rock. Come, we must go higher.”
“Let’s rest until you can breathe easier.”
“No!” she snapped. “I’m fine.”
She took off again, climbing until she came out at the flat land on top. A fierce wind howled across the open prairie, tearing at her hair and clothes. She leaned into it, walking along the edge, looking over, with the Moonkeeper behind her.
Tsilka said, “Right here. Down over the edge.”
Tenka gave her a doubtful look.
“I’m starting to think you made the whole thing up. What could be down there?”
Tsilka thought fast.
“It’s a stone that gives off its own light. A red light. I know it is powerful. In the hands of a powerful woman like you, who knows what it could do?”
How could a shaman resist the idea of such a stone? The Moonkeeper edged toward the precipice on her knees.
“I don’t see—”
Tsilka kicked her. Tenka screamed, pitched forward, disappeared. A thump and a clatter of falling rocks cut off her scream. The only sound was the howling wind.
Tsilka crept to the edge of the cliff on her hands and knees, and looked down.
The Moonkeeper was coming back up. Tsilka lunged backward, but too late. Tenka grabbed her long hair and tried to haul herself up on it. Tsilka’s elbows gave way. Her head smashed down on the rock.
“Let me go!” she screamed, grasping at the rocks with her hands, digging in with her knees against the pull on her hair.
The Moonkeeper hissed, “You evil witch! I’ll kill you for this!”
Not strong enough to hold the weight of two, Tsilka was dragged to the edge, and over.
The screams of the two women mingled and died.
People heard the screaming. They found Tsilka’s body first, lying broken on the Moonkeeper’s Path. Farther up, they found Tenka on the Moonkeeper’s stone seat, with a clump of hair clutched in her dead fingers.
Who could ever know what really happened up there?
Tahna thought she did. Evil and good fought, and both lost.
CHAPTER 54
KAI EL HAD LEFT TEAHRA VILLAGE CARRYING A HEAVY pack of warm clothes; winter was coming. He took dried food for many days; he didn’t want to waste time hunting; his weapons would kill humans, not animals. He found that he didn’t need much to eat. His body fed on rage.
His anguish over the loss of his beloved could have only one cure: revenge. Gaia had taken her revenge on the ones who killed her. But the savages belonged to a tribe.
The Masat.
Kai El remembered what Tsilka said about them: people who saw no wrong in stealing the loved ones of others, keeping them as slaves, killing them for pleasure, throwing their bodies into endless water to be eaten by giant fish. Kai El was going to find this evil tribe, and kill every man, woman, and little one. People like that did not belong in Amotkan’s world.
Even their name was ugly. Masat. It sounded like spitting.
They lived far away in the direction Where Day Ends, at a place where land stopped and water began. Between Kai El and his enemy lay an immense mountain range, the home of Takoma, Pahto, Lu It, Tiyak, and others whose snowy peaks touched the sky and made clouds. Between the great peaks were smaller ones. Together they made a barrier that people believed uncrossable, until Tsilka came back from her travels with Masat warriors.
Rattlesnake Woman said the Great River slashed through this mountain range on its way to the endless water. She said the only way to get to the home of the Masat was to follow the Great River—a difficult, dangerous journey. Tsilka told of long times with no shore to walk on; rugged cliffs; deep gorges; vast rock slides; and many wild rivers to cross.
It would be slow to follow the Great River, and Kai El was in a hurry for his revenge. There must be other passages through the mountain range. He traveled on the high plateau where the going was easy and fast, catching sight of the distant river now and then. The plateau with its yellow autumn grass rose to hills where scattered trees were losing their leaves. Foothills rose to forested mountain slopes. Kai El did not see the Great River again. Another, higher mountain loomed beyond each mountain he
climbed. Every day was colder than the one before.
The first snowstorm caught him by surprise—though there was no reason why it should have. His soulmate died on the first day of the Autumn Feast—ten and seven days ago, as his counted fingers told him many times a day. Winter followed autumn. The seasons didn’t stop for death, any more than Kai El had.
The snowstorm was not a pretty or a peaceful thing. Wind howled down the mountain, blowing sharp, heavy flakes that stung his flesh. Head down, leaning into the wind, into the rising slope of the land, he plunged through ever-deeper snow until he could go no farther in the blinding, shrieking white.
Kai El huddled beneath a cedar tree, shivering in his bison robe. How stupid he’d been in his blind chase after revenge. Maybe these mountains could be crossed in summer, but not in winter. He would just freeze to death up here, and the evil Masat would go about their evil ways.
Well, then, he would try Tsilka’s way, find the Great River and follow it… if this storm ever stopped… if this mountain gave him another chance…
He thought about the Masat to keep his blood boiling so he wouldn’t freeze.
I will kill every man, woman, and little one! Stamp them out as if they were a hill of ants! Chase down every last one!
For now Kai El didn’t worry about how one man would do this. For now it would be enough just to get there.
The blizzard went on. The sagging branches of the cedar dumped snow on him. The wind seemed to go right through his bison fur. Kai El shivered uncontrollably. His teeth chattered so hard he thought they would break.
With frozen hands and a stick, he dug a hole in a deep drift—a snow cave just high enough to sit in and wide enough to lie in. He covered it over with a thick layer of boughs, got in, and the blizzard sealed it.
In the dark, silent womb, cold and exhaustion conspired to drain off the rage he needed for revenge. Thoughts of Gaia leaked through… his beloved Gaia… never to be talked to, touched, held in his arms. Never again. Sorrow filled the hole inside him where rage had been. Kai El wept, holding her necklace to his face.
He didn’t know how many days he had been in the snow shelter before he dug himself out. The sunshine made him squint at first, but it was beautiful, sparkling on the white world. The cold air was deliriously fresh after the stale air he’d been breathing.
Not knowing where he would go or what he would do, Kai El struggled back down the mountains through snow that, at first, reached his chest.
As he walked across a rocky ridge where the snow was as deep as his knees, he found the entrance to a cave. He went in with his spear ready. In the near-dark, he heard a deep rumble: the breathing of a bear, asleep for winter. He speared the beast, and it died without waking. He cut up the meat and put it outside where it would freeze. It was much more than he would eat that winter.
Days slipped by in the snug cave. Kai El did only what he had to do to keep warm and fed, not noticing the passing of time much more than the bear would have.
Searing rage had turned to sorrow. Sorrow’s unbearable pain had given way to numbness. Now he felt hard inside, frozen up, like his heart was solid ice. He would sit and hold the necklace Gaia had given him, but no tears got through the ice. So he told himself that feeling nothing was better than feeling pain.
For all the numbness of his days, Kai El’s nights were busy with dreams. Sometimes he ran and fought, but could not save Gaia from an awful fate. In other dreams they were together. She would say that it was all a mistake, she wasn’t dead, and he’d scoop her into his arms and run, not touching the ground. These were the dreams that made him feel the worst when he awoke—cruel lies that they were.
One night Kai El dreamed that he was standing on a rock-strewn cliff above the Great River. He dreamed he saw his mother walking toward him, holding out her arms. They hugged long and hard.
“Look,” Ashan said.
Kai El looked down. Ice covered the Great River.
His mother’s voice was sad.
“The river is blocked. It can’t move.” She picked up a rock. “We should break the ice and get it moving again.”
She lobbed the rock over the cliff. It dropped slowly, hit the ice and cracked it. She picked up another rock and handed it to Kai EL He threw it, and a crack jagged off from the first. They stood side by side, raining rocks down on the frozen river. The ice broke up and floated away.
Mother and son picked up the last rock together, and cast it over the side together. The last of the ice was gone. The river flowed free again. She hugged him, then turned and walked away.
Kai El remembered the dream with perfect clarity. He knew what it meant. His mother was telling him that the hardness inside him—the ice—was bad. She would help him break it up, help him get moving again. But he would also have to help himself. He would have to allow himself to feel, even the bad things. If he would not feel pain, then he could never feel pleasure.
Kai El held Gaia’s necklace to his face, closed his eyes, and called up pictures of her into his mind. He felt something wrap around him, a slight warmth, and he imagined that it was his mother’s arms. Tears came hot and blinding. After they stopped, he felt washed.
When the snow melted for the last time and green things burst to life outside the bear cave, Kai El felt life within himself.
His feet yearned to travel. But where?
Not through the great mountain range and on to the endless water. Winter had killed autumn’s passion for revenge.
Not to Teahra Village, where everything would remind him of Gaia.
Kai El thought about the ancient home of his people. The Shahala homeland lay in the direction Colder, on the other side of a smaller range called the tabu mountains. He’d left there as a little one too young to remember. All he knew was what people said, and it sounded like a good place.
He wondered if other people lived in the Valley of Grandmothers now. He knew he would never mate—his soulmate was dead, and Kai El was like Samar, the goose who mates for life—but he might find a new tribe to belong to. There would never be another Gaia, but there was still life to be lived.
When hummingbirds told the coming of spring, Kai El set off to find the home of his ancestors, leaving much of his burden of grief in the bear cave. Opening up to the lustiness of spring, he carried his furs on travel poles instead of wearing them, walked barefoot on green grass, found himself singing with throngs of returning bluebirds. Traveling purposefully, eating well, his young body responded with strength.
His thoughts of Gaia were less often about her loss, more often about good things he remembered, happy things, the sweetness of the love they’d known. He talked to her, and didn’t mind that he sensed no answer; spirits led very busy lives.
Not that he didn’t miss Gaia, and long for her. But it felt as though he could live without her. He told himself that they’d be together again in the otherworld.
CHAPTER 55
KAI EL FELT HE WAS BEING GUIDED BY AN UNSEEN force—the same force that had led him, as a little one on his power quest, to sacred ground. Now it pulled him in a straight line, to the direction between Colder and Where Day Begins, across the spring-green prairie, into the tabu mountains.
On a mid-spring morning, Kai El crested a hill. Before him spread the valley of the grandfather Ehr, where he had lived with his mother so long ago.
“I don’t believe it!” he shouted, jumping around like an excited child.
He ran down the hill to the river he and Ehr used to fish in, crossed it on a log that was still there, walked up the creek that ran into the river, past the pool where he used to feed animals. He climbed the slippery rocks to the waterfall and splashed into the Home Cave.
Kai El smelled the old good smells, saw the rays of light coming from above, heard the water dripping into the pool…
He saw movement from a dark recess and readied his spear.
A man stepped from the shadows.
“My son?”
“Father?”
/> Kai El dropped his spear, rushed to Tor, and threw his arms around him, hugging him so hard he lifted the old man off his feet.
“Father! How can this be?”
Tor gasped. Kai El put him down.
“I thought you were dead! I saw a horse carry you into the sky!”
“A horse? No, son. I… I just walked away one night.”
Kai El was furious.
“How could you? I needed you!”
“I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“If you’d been there, maybe Gaia would still be alive!”
“Gaia?”
“She’s dead.”
Moaning, “Oh, no… ” Tor put his head in his hands, sunk to his knees, and sobbed. The depth of his despair took Kai El’s anger away. They held each other and cried for Gaia. Tor exhausted himself and slept. Occasional sobs shook his body but didn’t wake him.
How old he looks, the young man thought. How frail.
How crushed to hear of Gaia’s death.
Kai El didn’t sleep that night. As first light peeked through the roof of the Home Cave, he made a fire. He took dry berries and honey from the storage place—impressed by all the food his father had stored—and heated water with stones to make berry mush.
As he stirred the mush, his eyes feasted. His mother had called it the Home Cave. He always thought of it as Ehr’s cave, though the beloved old grandfather died when Kai El was only three or four summers.
The sloping sides disappeared in shadow. The roof, taller than four or five men, was pierced by several holes that let in shafts of light, and gave smoke a place to go out. Water trickled from a hole in the center into a small pool. The water came from a creek that ran along the ground over the cave. His mother called it Silent Creek because it made no sound until it dropped over the waterfall that hid the cave entrance.
Kai El loved the sound of the waterfall. It was as much a part of Ehr’s cave as the roof or floor, a soft splashing that had soothed him as he went to sleep.
Morning light touched the painting place, a smooth wall covered with pictures that Ehr had spent a lifetime making. Pictures that looked like the animals whose spirits they cap- tured, their lines so graceful it seemed they might leap from the stone. Horses, wolves, and bears. A woman with lightning streaking from her head, holding a snake in one hand, releasing a bird from the other.
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