“Never!” she said, but her eyes showed that she lied.
Chaa turned to the daughter. “And you, did you guess your father was a slaver?”
“Maybe,” the child admitted.
“Do you know what we do to slavers?” Chaa asked the child. “Do you know the penalty?”
“You chop off their heads,” the girl answered.
“That’s right,” Chaa said. “Behind the wall in your kitchen, I hear muffled cries. There is a passage behind it where your father takes his slaves. He has one there now. Can you show it to me?”
The girl only stood, unmoving. Chaa put his arm around her. “I will not harm you. Please, show us the passage.”
The girl led them to the kitchen, pulled back a cupboard to reveal a secret tunnel. A dozen Pwi boys rushed into the hole and soon returned with Farranon, chained hand and foot.
“The passage comes out at one of the warehouses by the docks!” One boy reported, so excited that he shouted, “but Garamon has already left!”
Tull looked down the passage in the darkness; rage filled him.
For an hour the Pwi searched the docks, until it became evident to all of them that the mayor was gone. Some thought that he must have sailed away. Others suspected that one of his friends and hid him in town. Others thought he had gone to the woods.
Tull felt powerless.
When Chaa returned from the hunt an hour later, Tull took his arm and snarled, “Teach me how to find Garamon.”
***
Chapter 11: Friendly Knives
The morning after the attack against Uknai, the men of the village hunted for Garamon. Tull drew guard duty on the north end of town and took Wayan with him, while Fava went at her father’s house and painted a toy for Wayan—a sabertooth cat she had carved.
She’d already daubed a coat of soft tan stain over it with a piece of wild cotton, and now she painted its teeth and underbelly white.
Her clumsy Neanderthal hands were not designed to perform such detailed work, so it took great patience. But she found that Tull’s pliers and clamps and other watchmaking tools made the job easier.
As she invested care into painting the sabertooth, she could feel the kwea of the figurine becoming stronger. The figurine itself was becoming a token of power, and it emanated beauty in the same way that a fire emanates heat, until Fava felt suffused.
After a long time, she heard someone outside. Tull clapped his hands and said, “I am here.”
Fava hurried to hide the figurine. Wayan rushed into the house, racing down the dark passageways, looking for Itzha, the youngest of Fava’s three sisters.
“Did you find Garamon?” Fava asked as Tull stepped through the door.
He hugged her and held her for a long moment before answering. “Not yet. Some boys took the mayor’s own hounds and set them to tracking him. They went southwest of town for about a mile, then circled back to the north part of town. They lost his scent just inside the mayor’s cloth shop. We’re sure he went there to get something—money, or maybe clothing. After that, I don’t think he could have left town. We’ve set the Pwi guarding every entrance and patch of bushes. I think he’s hiding in someone’s house.”
“In the house of a human?”
“Probably,” Tull said. “It would have to be another slaver. Uknai is still holding on, and getting better. He drew stick figures to show that at least seven others were with Garamon.”
Fava felt uneasy, shifted on her feet. Eight slavers in town. So many. “Are the Pwi searching the humans’ houses?”
“Not yet,” Tull answered. “I don’t think it would be a good idea. It would frighten them. Besides, all those houses were built a hundred years ago, when the slavers still used to try to sail into the bay. They all have escape holes and secret passageways. We might hunt for weeks and never find him.”
Fava nodded, decided to change the subject. “Are you ready for lunch?”
“If you want,” Tull answered, and they went to the kitchen and made small talk while Fava mixed cornmeal, dried pumpkin, salt, soda, and cream together to make thin cakes. As she worked, Tull seemed nervous. He paced the room, peering out the windows. She asked him to go to the ice house out back and cut some steaks from a haunch of giant elk.
Tull got an old rusted blade from the knife shelf. “Don’t use that knife!” Fava warned. “Tcho-kwezhet! It isn’t friendly.”
“It’s the only one here,” Tull explained.
She studied the knife, feeling the kwea, the residue of her accumulated emotions, black and seething. The knife did not like them at all. “That knife has a bad heart,” she said. “My father must have taken the others to the smith’s to sharpen. You had better go there and get one.”
“This knife is all right,” Tull said, heading out the back door.
“No!” Fava shrieked, imagining Tull with that evil knife, falling and gutting himself in one motion. “Please, get another knife.”
“I’m not going across town to get another knife. This one is fine,” Tull hurried out the door. Fava ran and looked after him.
He crossed the yard to the ice house, which was dug into the back of the hill behind the main house. Tull unbarred the heavy door and went in. Fava kept expecting Tull to fall, kept expecting to see him come out covered with blood, but he returned safely with the steaks.
Still she watched each step, afraid he’d stumble, slit himself open. It seemed that he only made it to the door by some great fortune. She could feel the malevolence from that knife, hissing and steaming like soup boiling over into a fire.
When he reached the door, she took the knife, carefully with both hands and set it back on the shelf. “Please,” she said, “don’t ever touch that evil thing again.”
“It isn’t evil,” Tull said. “It’s just a knife.”
“It isn’t just a knife!” Fava shouted. “It’s an angry knife!” Tull looked at her oddly, and Fava asked, “What’s wrong?”
“You don’t understand? Do you?” Tull said, and he paced the room, “How does the sky feel today?” It was a common greeting among the Pwi, meaning ‘How do you feel?’
Fava took his hand, placed it between her breasts, just holding it. “The sky feels good today, because you are with me.”
Tull shook his head, led her to the hall. “Look at this room. What do you feel? What do you feel when you look at that mammoth skull?”
Fava looked up. Above the hallway that led to her father’s Spirit Room was a mastodon’s skull, and its long tusks curled down to the floor on either side of the hall. The kwea that issued from it was one of enjoyment; she had climbed and slid down those tusks many times as a child, so that the tusks were still ivory-colored on top, but had yellowed underneath. She said, “I feel happy.”
“Aren’t you afraid of those tusks?” Tull asked. “One of your sisters could fall on them, could even get hurt, couldn’t she?”
“Yes, but it has never happened before.”
“Still it could happen,” Tull said. “So why don’t you take the skull down?”
“But it has never happened. The skull likes it there. It has always treated us well.”
“And what of the knife?” Tull said, waving toward the kitchen. Icy fear washed through her. It was a knife she would never touch. Tull was being cruel to keep referring to it, to have displayed it. He knew that it held vile kwea.
“That knife is very dangerous,” Fava said. “It does not like me.”
“How do you know? Because it cut you?”
“Yes. It also cut Zhopila once and almost took off her finger! You should not trust it. It is very dangerous!”
“It’s sharp,” Tull corrected. “You have other knives in the house that are just as sharp, just as deadly, yet you feel no evil kwea emanate from them.”
Fava simply stared at him. She could not see his point. That one knife might like you while another would not was well known.
“I don’t see the world like you do,” Tull said. “I don’t
feel the kwea that you feel. I can’t, not completely. The knife does not have any intent. It doesn’t emit emotions. You just imagine it. You Pwi all live in the past. You see the world, and everything is shrouded with kwea—an alley may frighten you because a dog jumped out of it once, but the alley next to it makes you feel secure because you found shelter from the dog there. Phylomon the Starfarer explained it to me. He says that part of your brain, called the hypothalamus, is very large. It makes the Pwi feel everything more deeply than humans do—fear, love, despair, loneliness, joy. And all these emotions color your world. When you touch my hand, I don’t really radiate love, do I?”
Fava touched him, felt the invisible waves of joy radiating, tangible as a lover’s cry issuing from his mouth. She knew that humans claimed not to feel kwea, but that seemed hard to understand.
Humans claim there is no kwea only because they feel none, she thought. They are all like blind men who teach that there is no light only because they cannot see it.
“Yes, you radiate love for me,” Fava said.
“Yet I haven’t always loved you,” Tull said. “I loved Wisteria.”
“Even then, your spirit radiated passion for me,” Fava countered. “Always. Even if you only felt hechazho, cattle love, for me, you always enjoyed my presence.”
Tull shrugged as if at his wit’s end. “Who rules Bashevgo?”
“Adjonai, Him We All Fear.” It was a question any child could answer.
“And can you feel his kwea? Can you feel him reaching out to snatch you?”
“The redwoods hide us,” Fava said uncertainly. She did not like thinking about Adjonai. It made perspiration rise on her forehead.
“But the redwoods can’t always hide you, can they? The slavers find us sometimes and take us to Craal.”
Fava trembled. She could feel the dark god beyond the mountains, searching for her, stretching his long hands across wilderness like a cloud. She choked back a sob.
Tull stepped close and held her. “Adjonai is not really here,” Tull said. “He’s an illusion, created by your fear. He’s not real. I’ve been to Craal. The sun shines just as brightly on Denai and Bashevgo as it does here. People laugh and fall in love there. But their fear is strong. They fear the Blade Kin and the Slave Lords. They are so frightened that their feet would not carry them if they tried to run away. There is no Adjonai. He is only the sum of your fears.
“Yet,” Tull said, “you don’t fear the Blade Kin enough. That is not your fault; it is the fault of kwea. You don’t believe they will come in force, only because they have never done it before. They are a knife that has never cut you deeply. They’ve never attacked a town this large. Yet the humans here fear such an attack.”
Outside, the gulls wheeled over the ocean and cried. The sound came through the windows distantly, almost like the startled cries of children, and Fava could feel the blood pounding in her veins. “You are saying the humans are smarter than us. I don’t think they are smarter. They just have clever little hands. They are just lucky that their ancestors lived among the stars. Now they rot down here on the ground, just like we do.”
“No,” Tull said. “I think that our ancestors on Earth could never have gone to the stars. We Pwi, because of kwea, because our thoughts are so strongly tied to our emotions, we always live in the past. We surround ourselves with the people we love, with the things we enjoy, and we live off the accumulated kwea. As long as we had our huts and our families and our favorite meat on the fire, we would have been overwhelmed by pleasant kwea, and we would have been content.”
Fava looked at him, and everything he said seemed so obvious. Who could want more than that? It should be enough for anyone.
“We cannot think like the humans do,” Tull said. “We don’t look to the same source for happiness. The humans, because they are seldom aware of kwea, they live only in the future. They look ahead and plan to be happy somewhere in the future, at some distant time, when they have accumulated all the wealth and power they think they will need. For them, a family and a hut and good food on the table is not always enough.”
Tull squeezed her hand, and Fava looked down. Tull had huge hands, big paws like a Pwi, with robust joints on fat fingers and a thumb that was not tilted like a human’s.
“If they can never be happy, then we should pity them,” Fava said. She suddenly realized what he was saying. “You mean to say, you are Pwi, but your heart is human? You find it hard to be happy today because you live for tomorrow?” She saw it was true. Tull was like her father, like a Spirit Walker, always scheming and thinking about tomorrow. The similarity had never occurred to her. She had married someone like her own father.
“I am neither human, nor Pwi,” Tull said. “I am Tcho-Pwi, No People, the Un-family. I can wear your clothes, even look like a Pwi, but I cannot be Pwi at heart, just as I can never be completely human. I don’t feel kwea as strongly as you do. I feel no animosity emanating from the knife as you do. To me, it is just a piece of wood and metal. Yet, in some things I do feel kwea. I feel love emanating from you. I feel the kwea of our time together, and even though I love you, I fear that perhaps the human part of me will never let me crave you the way that you crave me. I am not a Pwi. Even if I were, you know how I have lived. You know how my father beat me, and kept me chained to the wall as if I were one of his dogs. My past is so dark, I cannot find pleasure in it. And when I look at the future—I cannot see much reason to hope for happiness.
“Maybe that is why, when I’m with you, I wish time would stop, so every moment would become endless. I guess that what I want most of all is for just a few days to forget about the world, all of its past and all of its future, so that I can enjoy you.”
Fava stood for a long moment. “I understand … I think. If I could give you those days, I would. But I don’t know how to do it.”
“Fava,” Tull said, “your father has asked me to become his student, to learn to Spirit Walk.” Tull touched her shoulder. For a moment, Fava felt a foreboding. Chaa would take Tull from her as certainly as if he were a slaver dragging Tull to a distant land. By the tone of his voice, Tull was asking permission to go.
Fava nodded thoughtfully, considering whether to give that permission. “He asked you this two nights ago, when he took you aside at the lake. Didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Tull answered softly.
Fava watched him standing there, a little too far away by Pwi standards, and his face was closed, secretive. Tull still hid something from her. She could read him for the moment, read him as easily as if he were a Pwi, and something in her craved to be able to read him always, hungered to grow so knowledgeable about him that his body would become like a paper with words written on it.
“You are hiding something from me,” Fava said. “You keep doing this to me. You keep secrets, and the secrets keep us apart.”
Tull sighed deeply. “I didn’t wait for your permission,” Tull said. “I didn’t ask for your advice. Last night, I crept out of the house and met your father. He gave me seer’s tea to help open my spirit eyes.”
Fava’s nostrils flared, and the blood ran hot and angry in her veins. She tried to control her words, to keep from saying angry things, but the words seemed to fly from her mouth. “Am I even a wife to you? Do you pretend to give yourself to me in the wedding circle, and then sneak out of our bed?”
Tull stepped back, his face a mask of surprise, as if he had never imagined that Fava was even capable of becoming angry. “I’m sorry,” Tull said. “I just wanted to protect you!”
He stepped close as if to hug her, and a strangled cry escaped from deep in Fava’s throat. “You don’t need to protect me!” Fava shouted. She slapped him in the chest, hard. Fava knew her Pwi strength. If Tull had been a full-blooded human, the blow might have broken some ribs. As it was, he stepped back, obviously stung.
“Can’t you see? Can’t you see what you are doing?” she said, and she stood, gasping, struggling for words. If Tull had been a Pwi, he’d
have known. He’d have seen the hurt and hopelessness in her eyes when she learned that he had kept a secret of such magnitude. If he had been a Pwi, he would never have picked up an unfriendly knife and showed it to her. If he had been Pwi, Tull would have felt the kwea of her love radiating to him, across space, across any distance, and he would never dare to violate her trust.
But he wasn’t a Pwi. He was an emotional cripple, half-blind to kwea. If Tull were a legless beggar sitting outside the inn, his injuries could not have been more horrifying.
She turned, ran out the back door and stood in the full sun, there under the redwoods, wondering what to do, almost choking on despair.
The air seemed cold with the afternoon chill, and Fava sat on a chopping log and stared down at the cream-colored chips of alder by the woodpile. She could see no way to make Tull understand what she felt for him. She’d always known that his human ancestry made him different, made him somehow difficult to communicate with, but she’d always hoped he would overcome it. Now Fava saw the truth: Tull could never love her as deeply as if he were a Pwi. They would always have a chasm separating them.
Tull came out and stood behind her, his shadow making a cool spot on her back. Fava cried uncontrollably for a while, and Tull did not try to touch her. The kwea of love seemed to radiate from him, as if his warm fingers stroked her hair, played down her shoulders.
“I love you,” Tull whispered.
Fava remembered something her father once said when she was a child. “Humans must explain their emotions so much, because they feel so little.” Her father had said it as a joke, but now Fava saw the bitter truth hidden beneath the words. Words. They seemed such an inadequate vehicle.
Fava wiped the tears from her eyes, and realized that Tull could not read her. If he was ever to understand her love for him, she would have to speak it, instead of relying on him to read her emotions. “I know that you love me, and I know you are different from me.”
Tull came and stood behind her, wrapped his arms around her. She took his big hands and just held them.
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