Forbidden Land

by neetha Napew

  Then he had entered the Forbidden Land, and his powers had dwindled into mere shadows. Now that he refused to stand before his people and command the death of Torka’s twins, the spirits had abandoned him entirely. How could he condemn the babies of those whom he loved most in all the world? He could not! He would not! And if the spirits could not understand his reasoning, then he would die, cursing them all to the end.

  Levering against the frozen earth, Karana pushed up with all his strength against the weight of the great cat and gained just enough space for his lungs and throat to form a shout.

  “Father Above! Mother Below! Spirits of this world and the world beyond this world, if you are ever going to help this magic man, now is the time. I swear by the blood of my life, if I die now, I will come after you in your spirit worlds and make you pay!”

  Suddenly the leaping cat drove him flat to the frozen ground—not with paw or claw or fang but with the abrupt collapse of its own weight. Air exploded from Karana’s lungs. He waited for what he knew must follow:

  The cat would get at his belly and throat, rip through his garments, and feed on him. And he would lie opened and gutted like an antelope, twitching and staring and making garbled sounds until the end.

  But the cat merely lay on him, breathing hard. Its stench was overwhelmingly foul. The stench of blood—his own blood, he assumed—was overridden by the stench of musty, old fur and sore-blistered skin, of thick mucus, infected gums, and of time-worn teeth thick with plaque.

  Old! The cat was old! It must be so! Otherwise the curving, serrated fangs of the animal would surely have pierced clear through him by now. Hope flared within Karana. The spirits had listened! They had been impressed by his curse! If there had been enough breath left in him, he would have shouted with joy and gratitude. The cat was not killing him; he was killing the cat, not through any physical action but with the pure, driving thrust of his will. He could feel the life of the animal flow out of its body. He was a magic man, and his powers had saved him and Brother Dog from certain death! He had at last found the magic that he sought! And what an extraordinary magic it was!

  With all the strength heightened by his rising sense of euphoria, Karana forced the cat’s corpse to roll off him. After a two-day fast, the effort left him breathless and dizzy. He remained hunched on the ground, gasping and checking himself for injuries. He was infinitely relieved to find only a ripped surplice.

  The dog was running in excited circles, then ventured to take brazen nips at the motionless cat. Karana saw blood on Aar’s muzzle and shoulders—the cat’s blood, for other than this well-spattered stain, the dog’s coat was unmarred.

  Brother Dog is lucky, running with a magic man whose powers are so great.

  Karana felt smug. It was an emotion he always found repugnant in others; but with the cat dead at his side, he found the feeling sweet indeed: Instead of threats, he offered thanksgiving to the spirits; they, not he, had killed the cat. But they had done so at his command! The realization intoxicated him with pride and renewed purpose.

  He rose shakily and stood leaning slightly forward, hands resting just above his knees, drawing in the welcome, pungent scent of the surrounding hills. The wind was pouring down from the heights. Cold, bitter, and thick with mist, it blew away the cat’s stench and replaced it with the odors of ice and snow, rotting stone, lichens and mosses, spruce trees and the spoor of mammoths, and .. . something else that quickened the beat of his heart even though he could not identify it.

  It was familiar and oddly soothing, yet threatening at the same time. It made him think of the smell of crushed tussock grass, a long-lost nephrite dagger, and silver eyes filled with reflected starlight. But whose eyes? He could not remember. His reaction made no sense to him. He told himself that he was not thinking clearly.

  He shook his head and willed the beat of his heart to slow. It obeyed. He smiled. The spirits were with him. Calm satisfaction flooded him as he looked at the body of the cat.

  It was larger than average and lay on its side. The last vestiges of life were still visible in its glazing yellow eyes and the twitching of its massive paws and short, lynx like tail. Along its back were wounds inflicted by Aar’s tearing teeth. But along its side were massive lacerations that gaped wide, allowing the guts of the animal to extrude in shining, bubbling, bloodied coils. No dog could have inflicted such injuries; it was as though the cat had been disemboweled by an animal of at least its own size or power.

  Spirit power. The power of the forces of Creation. Yes! They had killed the cat, and they had done a good job of it! Karana had come too close to death not to be amazed and grateful to be alive. If he had survived the attack and willed the beast to drop dead, perhaps he could help Lonit, after all. Even without a complete knowledge of ritual, with the forces of Creation on his side, there was nothing he could not accomplish! Not even Navahk, his hated father and legendary magic man, had ever demonstrated such power! Men would sing songs of Karana’s magic for generations to come!

  He would skin this old, dead cat, using one of its own fangs as a tool, then hurry back to camp, resplendent in its skin and his renewed sense of worth! Men had called him Lion Killer once, and they would do so again! Let old Zhoonali and Cheanah and the other hunters doubt his powers now! A lone hunter, unarmed, and weakened by days of fasting, was no match for a leaping cat unless he was a magic man ... a shaman .. . one who found favor with the spirits and could bend the will of the forces of Creation to suit his own desires! Lonit and Torka’s twins would live! By the powers of this world and the next, he would see to it.

  In that moment, the dog stopped circling and began to back up. Its lips pulled back to show its fangs as a dreadful growl of fear and terror reverberated within its throat.

  “Aar?” Karana frowned and turned. Suddenly he was a boy again, speechless with horror.

  The wanawut was moving toward him quickly, walking upright with an oddly rolling gait. In the wind-torn mists of morning its body seemed to be clothed, for it was thickly maned across its shoulders and along its spine, and its entire body was furred, with long, shaggy guard hairs that disguised the form of its enormous torso and made the entire beast appear frosted. Its massive neck sloped into equally massive shoulders from which long, powerful, shaggy arms swung and sliced through the air. Its hairy, blood-matted hands—not the hands of a beast but of a man, only three times the size, and clawed—were curled into fists.

  Aar charged the creature. Karana watched in disbelief as, for one moment, Brother Dog was a snarling blur of fur leaping upward toward the wanawut; then Aar was flying through the air, turning head over tail and yipping.

  The wanawut kept on coming, closing on the magic man without a break in stride. Karana stared, immobilized by terror. The features of the thing were clear now: a flattened, sloping cranium; mist-gray eyes set deeply beneath a projecting brow; pointed, grotesquely human ears, a bare, bloodied, cylindrical muzzle; and a broad-lipped mouth pulled back to reveal glistening canines that were nearly as massive as the stabbing teeth of the great leaping cat.

  With a sick, sinking feeling that would easily become a faint if he allowed it, Karana knew that neither his threats nor his pleas had anything to do with the death of the leaping cat. This—the wanawut—was the spirit that had gutted the cat and sent it running in its last moments of life in blind panic .. . into the path of a foolish youth who had dared to imagine that the forces of Creation would care whether he lived or died.

  Beyond the shadowed confines of Torka’s pit hut, the red aurora of the previous night had faded into the ripening morning—a benign gold-and-pink morning misted with low clouds of blowing ground fog ... a morning devoid of omens ... a morning that allowed the headman to retreat into his shelter in the hope of gaining a few hours of much-needed sleep until Lonit’s labor began again. As the unsecured hide door snapped in the rising wind, light trespassed into the interior. It backlit lana’s long, loosely plaited hair and shimmered in the well-matched silvery lynx
skins that formed her dress. She knelt before him, offering skewered wedges of roasted fat on a platter fashioned from a bison’s pelvic bone.

  Her voice was as soft and full of worry as her dark, perpetually sad eyes. “Lonit’s pains did not begin again. Wallah gave her a horn of crushed green willow bark, blueberry root, and marrow broth, so she sleeps now. Xhan and Kimm have gone to tend to Cheanah and their children. Unless the magic man returns to make the baby come-forth magic, Zhoonali says that it may be long before the second child is born. The second baby has yet to move into the upside-down, quick-to-come-out position. Now Torka must eat. It has been too long since he has gone without food and sleep.”

  In the rear of the hut, he sat cross-legged on his unmade bed of thickly piled caribou furs. His under tunic of bison calf skin, cured and chewed by his women to the softest consistency, kept him warm. In spite of his physical comfort, he had been too concerned about Lonit and Karana to sleep. He had been able to soothe his frightened little girls with wonderful stories of the beginning of the world, of First Man and First Woman, of adventure and magic, which distracted them from their mother’s plight. Now, sprawled over his thighs and nestled in the hollow of his lap, Summer Moon and Demmi slept, curled like a pair of furless little cubs. Hungry and irritable from worry and lack of food and sleep, he waved away the woman’s offering and made a conscious effort to distract himself from the rich smell of the heated fat. It was not easy.

  The sounds and scents of a slowly stirring encampment were evident above the low but constant whine of the wind. With the rising of the sun and the cooling of the fires in the sky, the people of the encampment had sought sleep; because of painfully short days at this time of the year, however, the women were already awake, making their fires, cooking their meals, and tending their children and the needs of their men. lana had been at her cooking for some time now, and Torka had been disturbed by the sound of her preparations as she arranged her fire stones and the kindling of dung, dried tundral sods, and bones, and then hacked slabs of frozen fat into cubes with her broad-bladed stone knife. The whirring of her bow drill had been followed by the low cracklings of fire. When he smelled the oily, richly rancid fat, he had salivated, imagining the little cubes swelling, softening, dripping into the flames. He had envied the meal that his children and second woman would soon consume, never expecting that lana would offer any food to him.

  “Torka must eat,” lana said again. “Torka must have strength in the day to come.”

  “I cannot!” He was visibly annoyed. The fat smelled wonderful; his stomach growled. He absently stroked his girls’ hair as he scowled at lana. “You may eat! The children may eat. But Torka cannot! lana must be very tired indeed to have tempted her man with food that is forbidden to him as long as his woman is in labor!”

  His rebuke was sharp. She was cut by it even though it had been spoken in little more than a whisper lest it rouse the children. She hung her head. He saw the weariness in her, the repentance, and something else—fear, intense fear. It paled her features and tightened the corners of her lips. He knew that she shared his worry over Lonit. He was sorry for having spoken so impatiently and was prompted to speak from his heart to his second woman. “We are both tired and filled with worry. Tell me, lana, among your own people, have you ever heard of a birth taking so long?”

  She shook her head, looked up briefly, and then hung her head again. “This woman cannot say. It is not one birth, Torka. It is two. Never was this allowed among the people of the band into which lana was born or among any of the bands that lana has ever known. As Zhoonali has said, such a birth was always ended before it was allowed to begin.”

  It was not the answer that he wanted to hear. He glared at her. “Then why did you practically drag me into the hut of blood to put a stop to such an ending? The claw of taking was unknown to the band into which I was born, so I had no idea that the old woman would try to take the life of the child. Had you not come, the second twin would be dead by now. Zhoonali would be happy. Everyone would be happy. Except Lonit and me.”

  She thought a moment. “lana could not stand by and watch Lonit die. Torka now has one son. The fate of the second twin can be decided later by the magic man.”

  “Karana would not speak against the life of my child.”

  “He may have to. And it is not a child until it has a name.” She paused, silenced by the sudden anger in his eyes. And he looked so painfully tired. Balancing the bone platter across her folded thighs, she went on, knowing that she must risk his anger: “This woman has not forgotten the ways of the people, Torka. But she wonders if perhaps the forces of Creation would not mind if Torka broke his fast just a little, between the coming of the babies. Today of all days the headman must have his strength and wits.”

  “When the second child is born this man will eat. Not before.”

  She drew in a ragged breath of frustration. “Zhoonali’s is not an unkind heart, Torka. She is a wise old woman who has come to know that traditions, no matter how painful, must be obeyed for the good of the band.”

  “I will not abandon my newborn children simply because the traditions of other people demand it. I am headman of this band. I care not for Zhoonali’s understanding. I care only that she does as she is told.”

  “Zhoonali would never disobey the command of a headman—not when so many of her ancestors, brothers, husbands, and sons have been headmen themselves.”

  “She has made that clear enough, often enough,” he grumbled. “As has Cheanah, the only son she has left. It must be a bad thing to live as long as Zhoonali, to see so many of her loved ones die and yet herself living on and on.”

  “Torka, you must listen. lana has brought more than food to Torka. She has a warning.”

  “Of what?”

  She swallowed, then spoke quickly. “In a camp without a magic man to confirm the Tightness of the headman’s decisions, Zhoonali’s words are powerful in ways that frighten the people. Eneela trembles with dread as she suckles Torka’s son against her will, and Simu, her man, turns his back upon her in anger.” “His anger will fade soon enough. When the second twin is born and Lonit has rested, she will suckle her own infants. Torka grows weary of your words, lana. Eat. Rest. Renew your strength. Lonit will soon have need of you again.”

  “It is Torka who must eat! It is Torka who must renew his strength! And do not interrupt this woman again before she can speak her warning!” Amazed by her uncharacteristic outspokenness, he stared wide-eyed at his usually subservient woman.

  “While Torka rests within the darkness of his hut, Cheanah stands tall and bold beneath the light of day! While Torka fasts, Cheanah eats raw meat and draws his sons to him. The other hunters of the band circle close and listen to his words.”

  Torka’s brow arched. “This birth vigil is mine to keep, not theirs. They prepare to hunt before the dark comes down again. Before a hunt, men must eat.”

  “But what do they hunt, Torka? They sharpen no spearheads. They make no songs to the spirits of the game. They gather before the hut of Cheanah and talk low, like women gossiping over a flayed skin—Torka’s skin! It is no secret in this camp that Zhoonali constantly prods Cheanah to think fondly of the days when he was a headman. Perhaps now that Torka has dared to challenge the forces of Creation, Cheanah thinks that soon he will be headman again. And if this happens, Torka will have no say in the fate of his children or of his women.”

  He stopped her with a scowl and a wave of his hand. Now he understood the fear in her eyes. His scowl eased as he looked at her with love—not the love of a man for his woman, for that love was for Lonit alone, but of a brother for a sister. In the years since lana had come to share his fire, she had never been more than that to him. He doubted if she would ever be more to any man as long as she was allowed a choice, for men had used her cruelly in the past. At Torka’s fire circle, the choice would always be hers; he had sworn it long ago, and she had wept in gratitude.

  He gazed into her sad eyes, rem
embering that she had suffered more than most. In a world where starvation, marauding beasts, and natural disasters compassionlessly snuffed out the lives of boys and girls, men and women, most became inured to suffering. Others, like lana, did not. Her wounds were concealed by her lovely, superficially imperturbable appearance, but Torka knew better. Nightmares frequently woke her in the early hours and caused her to stare wide-eyed in terror, panting like a panicked doe pursued by men who would tear her to pieces. She had lost to violence all her children and Manaak, the man who had sired them.

  Torka saw the terror in her eyes. He reached to wipe it away with a tender touch. “lana, you are Torka’s woman. Whatever Cheanah may think, you are Torka’s woman, not his.”

  “But he has looked at me. And if he and the others stand against you, with Karana gone from the camp—“

  “Cheanah has an appetite for women. If you were meat, he would eat you all. But lana will be Torka’s woman until she willingly chooses another man.”

  The corners of her mouth quivered, but with relief or tension, Torka could not tell. “If Torka stays too long within this hut and grows weak from fasting, that choice may not be mine or his to make.” Steadying the platter of fat with one hand, she reached with the other to trace the forms of the sleeping children. Her eyes caressed them with love, then moved to beseech Torka. “And so this woman says that although it is against tradition, Torka must eat, must put upon his body the paint and raiment of his rank. In the skins of lions, with the teeth and claws of wolves about his neck, Torka must go out to his people and show them his strength before it is too late for us all.”

  The cave was dark and rank with the stench of feces and urine, spoiled meat and moldering bones and grass, and something big and alive lurking close in the shadows.

  Karana awoke with a start, sat up, banged his head, and fell back as consciousness spun away into dreams of a mewling beast leaning over him .. . breathing on him . lifting him with monstrous, gray-furred arms .. . drawing him close .. . and rocking him as a mother would rock an injured child. Somewhere in the dream, a dog was growling, while the beast made low grunting sounds of deep distress as it exhaled meat-eater’s breath across Karana’s face.