At the nape of the hill, he teetered one bound away from a rock ledge that overhung the lion and his prey. Before he leaped for the ledge, he removed the sling that Yaqut had made for him from the underbelly of a marten and grasped two sharp rocks.
With a violent growl—that almost toppled Timov from the edge—the lion found a shorter route among the granite blocks and scampered onto the ledge where Hamr and Kirchi cowered.
Hamr swung his spear and thrust. The creature pulled back, coiling to lunge. Teeth set, Hamr braced his spear against the wall, and made himself small.
Before the lion could leap, a rock struck its brow. Its roar bruised hearing.
Hamr glanced back at Kirchi, caught her despair, and realized she had not thrown the rock.
Above, in the trees of an overhanging ledge, Timov whirled his sling, and let fly another stone. Again, this one cracked against the crouching lion's head.
Bellowing raw pain and anger, the lion pounced, claws splayed.
Hamr pressed back against Kirchi and, with alacrity and deftness inspired by terror, drove his spear hard into the beast's eye.
The lion thundered rage for a black instant as it rose in fury. Then, front paws grasping the spear, it sagged to its belly before spinning off the ledge in a shower of rubble.
Timov whooped from above, and Hamr gazed numbly down at the scope of the disaster, the price of his own safety—staring beyond the dead lion to where the pride continued to devour Blind Side of Life.
Timov shouted again from above. When Kirchi turned her attention to him, she noticed that he leaned against a pliant juniper so that its branches hung down to the rockpile: They could climb to the hillock. Gently, she tried to make Hamr understand, and he brushed off her grip, transfixed by the horror of the feeding lions.
Emotionless, almost as if dreaming, Hamr drew his knife and leaped down the staggered rocks to where the dead lion lay. Slashing at it with vengeful strength, he worked down from the tail and the back legs, peeling the skin from the hot, pliant muscles. While he worked, he chanted to the Beastmaker in almost incoherent gasps: "Blind Side of Life is dead. My animal is dead—my soul is fed to the Lion. Now the Lion feeds me."
Before he could slit the belly of the beast—and reclaim his soul by eating its heart—he had to skin the creature whole. He fulfilled the way the great men of old when they wanted to take an animal's power with them. The Beastmaker would expect him to do no less for Blind Side of Life.
Tears hampered Hamr's vision, and before he made the delicate cuts at the front toes and the head, he had to wipe his eyes, leaving bloody streaks on his cheeks. Since Neoll Nant Caw's attack he had begun carrying the Moon Serpent. The obsidian blade could cut tissue as his wooden blade, now lost with his satchel, never could.
The nose and lips came free. Hamr stood and stretched the wet skin of the face above his head and shouted down at the two lionesses that still lingered over the broken body of Blind Side.
They ignored him and continued to pull the meat from the horse's underside and tear at what remained of his haunch. Half-hidden among the twiggy growth of birches, a pack of hyenas waited, where crows gathered. Hamr knelt again and cut the mastoid tendons, severing the lower jaw. Then, he set to work lopping the paws before he cut open the belly for the heart and liver.
Finally, the heavy lion-skin pulled around him, teeth, claws, heart and liver wrapped inside, and his spear in one hand, Hamr slowly made his way up the stack of rocks.
Watching in mournful silence, Kirchi and Timov pushed down a juniper branch with their weight, and he passed his spear and the lion-skin to them. He pulled himself up to the rock ledge, and looked back.
Jubilation and grief mixed convulsively in Hamr. Throughout the walk across the stony back of the hill, he moved hunched over and shuddering, like a poisoned man. The riotous clash of emotions felt like sexual contact that peaked but could not release.
The animal soul that had saved him from the Boar, that had brought death to his tribe's ancient enemies, that had led them north to this land of the auroras, had departed now—and in place of the strong, melancholy, and loyal horse, a dead Lion's skin hung heavily on his back, gummy with drying blood. Where the Horse had been life to me, and alive, the Lion's soul is death.
Though he implored all through the night, Hamr did not see the Beastmaker in the darkness that clamped tightly to the tearless grief behind his eyes—yet he knew the Maker dwelled there as the darkness itself, black as every beginning and every end.
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Baat lay shivering in a ditch beneath heavy pines. Water had once run through here before a rockslide clogged the flow upstream and left only egg-smooth rocks in the grooved earth, where the ghost dancer had curled up to sleep. Duru watched him anxiously. Always before, he had slept silently. Since yesterday, when she had found him squatting on the ridge-rock, entranced in his own muttering, he had not been as before. During their night run, the light around his body had glowed dully and red, the deep, dark red of drying blood.
No voices had come to Duru when she had slept wrapped in the deer hide carried in Baat's arms and no flight outside herself. She had slept deeply and woken to find Baat here in the ditch, shivering.
After covering him with the deerskins, she had built a small fire upwind of him, though she well knew that would signal the others. If he is dying, what does it matter if the others find us? Let them come. She thought that maybe, if they knew his need, they would help.
From inside his sleep, Baat heard Duru's concern. The hunger music he had used to reach the ul udi had worked: The Dark Traces had used him to house themselves at daybreak, instead of returning to the sky and going forth from him, as he had directed, into the lions. When Timov and Hamr had killed the lion that the Dark Traces rode, the ul udi had suffered the death of the beast, and they had made Baat suffer with them.
Knives of pain had stabbed Baat, had flayed the skin from his muscles as he writhed in the ditch. From without, it had appeared as though he shivered, while within, he had thrashed and howled with the agony of being skinned alive. The Dark Traces had exulted, feeding off his suffering. Now, gorged, they slept, waiting for night to return them to wakefulness.
Baat floated in the afterpain. This wearied anguish almost became bliss now that the torture had ended. Partaking of the ul udi's telepathy, he could feel all the small lives around him: mice avid with hunger after the chilly night, red fleas torpidly fat with the blood of the mice, ready for their winter sleep, and a hawk circling above, searching for mice and seeing smaller birds flitting on fog paths among the trees in their endless tumult of feeding.
And there sat Duru under a pine, where the small birds rested from flight, chattering about the hawk they had glimpsed in another corner of morning. She listened not to them. She feared for him.
He could feel her fearful caring, and that calmed the hurt in his big body. He had found his companion. The Bright Ones had truly led him to the one who would watch over him. Tonight, when the Dark Traces wake inside me, will I be able to protect her from their evil?
A memory returned to Baat with the pulsing of a fever, a memory of the Dark Traces and their usefulness to the People. He beheld himself again as a child during the summer wanderings. He had been confused then by the hurried pace across the tundra, the wild wailings of the women, the sudden absences of some of the best hunters, their bodies not laid out with their spears, not blanketed in flowers as men who had died on the hunt. They had simply gone.
Looking back, Baat realized that had been the terrible summer when the People had fled before the smallheads, and not escaped. He understood now that the People had been falling back from the smallheads since before his grandfathers’ childhoods.
Always before, there had been room on the tundra to hide. This mournful summer, the smallheads had encroached to the last possible border: to the door of the mountain, the sacred burial site of the People.
Back then, Baat had been too young to understand. He remembered bei
ng carried among the giant stones of the icefield and the People shouting with anger and pain. And he remembered the hunger music that the old ones sang.
That had been the first time he had heard it—the numb voices of the singers chanting to Crow and Hyena with the languor of the dying, inviting the Dark Traces down into their flesh.
From high on the tall rocks, held firmly in his mother's arms, he watched as the men, possessed with the Dark Traces, lured the smallheads among the boulders and hurled stones at them. His mother did not hide his eyes or turn him away when the killing began. She let him see the men leap among the wounded smallheads, rip limbs from their bodies, smash skulls to bloody bonemeal. She let him see the Dark Traces do their frenzied killing, for she knew that someday he would have to sing the hunger music himself.
His mother had not foreseen that he would have to sing it alone, without the others to call down the Bright Ones when the killing ended. He, alone, would have to carry the Dark Traces tonight and, at the same time, protect the child Duru from their bloodlust.
And if he and Duru did survive the madness that would rise out of him tonight, what lay ahead?—the journey north to the door of the mountain, to the ancient cairn of the old ones, the journey that walked straight into winter. He could hear the birds talking about winter coming, when insects hid and seeds became less plentiful. Soon, the birds promised, soon they would find their own way south.
The immense sadness of approaching cold rode on the wind, and he could feel its disconsolate energy in his bones: bones too old now to survive another winter. The wind blew through him as through the stark trees, carrying darkness in which stars and snow hid, carrying a whole new season and its secrets.
Eating Darkness
In the poor glow of the waning moon, Neoll Nant Caw sat on the ground outside her burrow. Three other witches circled her, raven-beings, all silent and preternaturally alert, pacing swiftly back and forth. Each held a chunk of crystal. The facet-seams shone violet as they passed before her.
Neoll Nant Caw stared flatly at the running witches and the cold energies in their hands. The death of the Moon Bitch had nearly been her own death. Too weak to participate in the building of another wraith beast, she relied on these women. They had come from their lairs in the Forest to help preserve a ghost dancer from hunters—or, if they failed, to bury the crone in her burrow and take her crystals for their own.
The old witch, proud that the others had come so eagerly for these rocks, waited passively for death. Her real life dwelled in those crystals, mixed with the power of the ul udi. Many of the stones, several generations old, carried light from the first witches, the outcasts and strays of the Forest's early tribes.
She had long feared that when she died the ignorant might discard her crystals among the wild rocks, and she gladdened to see they would be taken up in able hands.
A thermal mist, red-black in color, made a shadow between Neoll Nant Caw and the circling witches. A smear of face appeared in the dark mist: an eye-glisten, fang tremor, saliva thread of ravening strength.
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"When I left you with Neoll Nant Caw," Hamr said to Timov, "I promised the Beastmaker I would initiate you myself when I came back."
They sat by a rain-pool in sight of the feeding pride. At their feet, the lion-skin soaked in mud and leaf-mash. Hamr, still grimed with the Lion's blood, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, red hands tangled in his hair. Tired, yet smiling, he stared with eyes bright with jubilation, not tears.
Glad he had come back for the boy. Glad even to sacrifice Blind Side to the Beast-maker, he thanked his guardian power for sparing Kirchi and Timov. They lived, to hear the roars and masticating of the ravenous beasts. They lived, as he did, because they had struggled together.
"This skin is yours," Hamr declared. "It is the sign from the Beastmaker I knew would come when you were ready."
Timov squinted at Hamr, baffled that he was not mourning his animal, yet pleased to receive praise. "You killed the Lion."
"No, Timov. You've earned your initiation. When the skin is dressed, I'll present you to the Beastmaker myself." He reached over and put his hands on Timov's shoulders. "Young brother, the Blue Shell will not be separated again."
Timov nodded, his heart suddenly big in his chest, squeezing against his ribs. "We will get Duru back," he asserted and felt his clansman's grip tighten with certainty. "We will be a tribe."
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At midmorning, the lionesses decided they wanted no more of the horse and sauntered back to their caves among the rocks. A few cubs lingered but when the hyena pack began closing in, they scurried off.
Hamr, who had spent the time stretching his lion-skin on a rack of pine boughs and scraping the inside clean with an edged rock, stood up, took his spear, and walked out of the thicket into the clearing. Timov and Kirchi followed.
"Where are you going?" Yaqut yelled from his place under a crook-backed pine. "Hyenas will jump you."
No one had spoken to Yaqut since they found him waiting in the thicket, watching the lionesses devour Blind Side of Life. Feeling their withdrawal from him, he had wanted to explain: Not cowardice had stayed him but willingness to die for either a horse or another man. He lived his devotion: hunting the ghost dancer. The Beastmaker did not want him vainly sacrificing himself. No one had asked; so, he had sat in silence while Hamr dressed his lion-skin.
To show his respect for what Hamr had done, Yaqut had collected oak leaves and soaked them in a nearby rain-pool. After he boiled away the water with hot rocks, the tannin-rich sludge that remained served well for toughening the skin and keeping it from rotting.
Hamr had used it, but with not a word of thanks. The boy and the witch, too, had offered Yaqut only skulking glances—as though he should be ashamed for saving himself for the one hunt that mattered.
Now, Yaqut squatted under his pine and watched the others driving off the hyenas with shouts and thrown rocks. What do they want? To bury the dead beast? To weep and chant over its red bones? Let them. The ghost dancer is nearby. In a day, two at the most, I will find him, and then they will need all the courage that has been tempered in them this day.
Hamr desired no lamentation for his horse. The Beastmaker had given him the animal and now had taken it away. So be this, Hamr thought to himself. Rather, he wanted his and Duru's satchels and the pelts that Blind Side of Life had carried since they left the Blue Shell.
Kirchi followed, looking for her moonstones.
Timov alone stood over the torn carcass of the horse and wept. Alone in the woods with Yaqut, he had missed Blind Side's big, snorting presence and now would never know again the companionship of Horse. His grief for the animal made his chest heavy with melancholy music.
"Cut it out," Hamr called coldly over his shoulder. "Blind Side's returned to the Beastmaker—and he's weeping for us. We're the ones got left behind."
Timov wiped away his tears, saw the back of his hand come away with the Lion's blood, and smiled. Blind Side is dead, but he has also been changed, made into the Lion's skin. Now any tribe will proudly make a place for us!
Except, he realized, the Thundertree, who knew he had ghost dancer ancestors.
Looking back at Yaqut, where he hunched under the dark green shade of the pine, Timov remembered the poppet Duru had left for him on the ridge. He told Hamr about it and Yaqut smashing it.
"Maybe Yaqut's right," Hamr said. "It's possible Duru's possessed. The poppet could have been left to make you think she's all right and caring for the bonesucker when, more likely, she's his slave. The spirits—these ul udi—are more powerful than anyone from our tribe could ever have known." He found his satchels and most of the pelts unmolested and pulled them free of the dead horse. As he scanned the ground for Kirchi's moonstones, he related the attack of the Moon Bitch.
Timov listened in dismay. "What if she comes back?"
"She will," Kirchi said. "Very likely, soon. She'll know we're together again, and will want to stop us f
rom going after the ghost dancer. We must find the moonstones. They're the one thing that might stop her attack."
Timov joined the search, pausing only to throw rocks at the hungry hyenas. Soon, they had found all four stones. One had been fractured. Kirchi fingered the spalled moonstone nervously. "There will be no circle to protect us now."
"But three are intact," Timov noted hopefully.
"Three are not enough." Kirchi's eyes despaired. "Neoll Nant Caw will know it instantly. Tonight she will attack."
"What can we do?" Timov whined.
Kirchi shook her head. "Nothing." Then, she looked at the two men with a desperate new hope. "Unless we simply give up the hunt."
Hamr glared disapprovingly. "I don't care about the ghost dancer, but I won't abandon Duru."
"What if the poppet she left is not a ruse?" Kirchi pressed. "What if she wants to be with the ghost dancer?"
Hamr frowned with disbelief. "Why would she want that?"
"To care for him, as her poppet said," the witch answered. "Baat's among the last of his tribe. And he's old. All summer, Yaqut and the Thundertree have stalked him. Why hasn't he fled? Why has he stayed in these woods? Because this Forest is his ancestral home. This must be the reason."
"Perhaps he's come home to die?" Timov wondered.
"Yes, yes," Kirchi said. "Of course. He's dying!"
"Then why hide?" Hamr asked. "He should let the hunters finish it for him."
Yaqut, who had been watching them confer, walked over. "What are you three gibbering about? Let the hyenas eat in peace and let us move on with the hunt."
Kirchi held up the broken moonstone and explained about the Moon Bitch.
Yaqut scowled at Hamr. "You stole the damn crystal. You face down the Moon Bitch!"
Coldly disregarding Yaqut, Hamr turned to Kirchi. "I want to find Duru. If she's helping the ghost dancer, I want to hear that from her."
Hunting the Ghost Dancer Page 28