by neetha Napew
Torka did not flinch against the obvious rebuke. He looked at the young hunter evenly. “That decision, Siinu, was not hers to make.”
“You forced her to make it!” snapped Cheanah. He walked beside Torka, his face congested with rage. “If she has been hurt in any way, know now that I will have your life for hers.”
Torka eyed him impassively. He felt no animosity toward Cheanah; they hunted well together and had shared many a kill, many a meal, and many a good night’s talk while stalking the great herds far from the fires of their women. He understood Cheanah’s mood. Torka had always found it admirable when a man cherished the woman who had given life to him. Many did not.
“If my infant is alive when we find it, I will overlook your words,” he said.
“If your infant lives, I will kill it with my own hands!” Cheanah replied. “The sky burns! The earth shakes! The wanawut howls! And now an old woman risks her life with the hope that the forces of Creation will not destroy her people because Torka’s arrogance will not allow him to admit that his twins are forbidden things, fit for nothing more than to be meat for wolves and dogs and the carrion eaters of the night!”
Torka stopped. No man could ignore such a threat, and no friend would make it. “The child that this man has put to suckle at Eneela’s breast and the infant that Zhoonali has taken from Torka’s encampment are my sons. And I warn you now, Cheanah, that I will make meat out of any man who tries to harm either of them.”
Zhoonali was exhausted. She could not go another step. She put the hide-wrapped infant on the frozen ground at her feet and seated herself on an outcropping of rough, lichen-clad boulders.
The wind was rising out of the west—a cold wind with the bitter taste of distant smoke and snow in it. She drew her bearskin robe close about her scrawny, bone-weary frame and looked up at the high, thin ribbons of cloud lacing the sky. The aurora turned them red. Stars shone through, glinting dully like the mist-veiled eyes of the very old. She wondered if her own eyes looked like that. No. Her eyes were clear. She saw things sharply, as well as she had when she was a girl.
She sighed. Youth did not seem so long ago. She remembered it all. She could focus back through time to see her parents, to feel the strong, loving embrace of her first man, to hear the laughter of her long-dead children and grandchildren. Remorse struck her so deeply and suddenly that she gasped. So many children gone! So many good men lost to this world! Zhoonali felt the spirits of the dead watching her, whispering in the late-winter dark—sons, daughters, lovers-calling her name on the vast, invisible tides of time.
Zhoonali!
Mother!
Beloved Woman]
Come! Join us! It is time!
She listened, but try as she might, although her sole purpose in walking so far from the encampment was to encounter death—it was the only thing that would motivate Cheanah into taking action against Torka on behalf of his people—she could not bring herself to yield passively to the spirit voices.
Die she would, and soon. She was old and tired, but she was still Zhoonali, and passivity was against her nature. She sat resolute on the boulder, glumly feeling tiredness ebb, wishing that it would not. Fatigue would help her to accomplish her purpose. But how did one die? She had seen the life spirits of ancient ones sometimes simply slip away. But how? Exactly where did they go?
She looked up, squinting, and tried to see the wind and the spirits of the dead and the invisible world they inhabited, but it was no good. The wind stung her eyes with cold and grit, reminding her that she had witnessed enough deaths to realize that the world beyond this one was an unknown thing over which the living had no control. Did the dead fare any better? Were they given choices in the spirit world? She did not know, and her lack of knowledge was more troubling to her than the actual premise of death.
Again she sighed. She had always avoided situations that she did not understand. She had learned early in life that-only through understanding could control be attained, and Zhoonali liked to control—people, situations, her own life, and the lives of those around her. Perhaps that was why she had lived so long. Perhaps that was why she had failed to control Torka—she had never been able to understand that man. But she did understand Cheanah, and so she knew that she had done the right thing.
“Soon he will come,” she told the spirits of the wind. “But he will not find me. And in his anger, he will become the man that he was born to be—headman of his band.”
The wind grew colder. She wondered how the smoke from the encampment could have come so far and still remain so sharp. The smoke had the smell of burned meat and the stink of feces to it. Somewhere close, a wolf lifted its voice, and far away, miles down on the rolling tundral steppe that she had left behind, another wolf answered, and then another.
Zhoonali listened. As she sat alone in unfamiliar country, the wolf song sounded hostile, threatening.
She looked down. At her feet, the infant kicked and fussed within its wrapping of caribou skin. It was such a little baby. And such a good baby! Not once had it cried. It had lain content in the fold of her arm all these many hours, making smacking sounds as it tried in vain to draw life from its own tiny fingers. Zhoonali sighed yet again. The baby would cry when the wolves came. She wondered if she would do the same.
The thought was intolerable. She snapped to her feet. No! She would not have such a death! Die she would, and what happened to her spirit after that, she could not say or hope to control. But she was still Zhoonali, daughter and granddaughter of headmen, woman of headmen, mother of headmen, and as long as there was breath in her body, she would order her life as she had always ordered the lives of those around her!
She bent and took the wrapping of caribou hide from the infant. The eyes of the newborn were still closed, but she could feel other eyes watching her—wolf eyes, spirit eyes. Hackles rose on her back and neck and along her arms as she placed the tiny form upon the frozen tundra and rose, tossing aside the caribou skin. She had broken her promise to Torka that she would not be responsible for the life or death of this little one. Nevertheless, she would not allow herself to participate actively in its death. She would not break its neck or pack its mouth, nostrils, and body cavities with mosses and lichens in order to suffocate it, and also prevent its life spirit from escaping its corpse as a crooked spirit, which might haunt those who had denied it a place within the world of the living. At least a portion of her promise would be kept; the forces of Creation would take the spirit of the little one.
She still sensed eyes on her as she quickly hurried away. Soon the wolf would have the little one. She would hide within one of the high mountain caves that she had seen not far to the east. She would take refuge and die there, her body safe from carnivores, herself in control to the very end. She lengthened her stride, wanting to be far from the spiritless suckling when the wolf came to feed upon it. She did not want to hear its cries. Instead she heard her own. Although she had not gone far, she had come face to face with Death.
It loomed bigger than a man before her. But it was not a man. Nor was it a spirit. It was huge and gray and female, and the massive bulk of its hairy body smelled like the combined refuse pits of every camp that she had ever lived in. In abject terror, she fled, arms up, screaming its name again and again until she collapsed in a heap and could run no more.
She was still muttering its name when Torka, Cheanah, and the other hunters found her: “Wanawut ...”
The hunters listened as Zhoonali spoke the wind spirit’s name. Their hands curled tightly around their spears, and their eyes shifted nervously in all directions.
Only Cheanah appeared unafraid, his concern focused totally upon the object of his search. He found no cause to conceal either his relief or joy as he knelt, scooped his mother into his arms, and held her as though he would never let her go. Torka stood staring down at her. “Where is my son?”
She looked up at him, then away, burying her head in the wind-ruffled fur of Cheanah’s surplice.
“Where is my son!” Torka demanded.
Zhoonali peered up at him, her eyes wide, the pupils dilated with terror. “Wanawut ...” she whispered, and gestured toward the high, stony hills from which she had come.
Torka followed her gesture with his gaze. The expression of anguish on his face was such that Simu, standing behind Cheanah and directly across from the headman, found himself regretting his earlier hostility; he was deeply touched by the visible depth of the headman’s pain. He could not help thinking of Dak, his own yearling boy. He pictured his fat, glossy-cheeked son snuggling close to Eneela’s bosom. What if the consensus of the band had decreed that little Dak be taken from his woman’s arms without either his knowledge or permission? What if it had been his son who had been taken across the wild hills, stripped of its swaddling, and abandoned upon the cold, com passionless earth to become meat for beasts and for . the wanawut? Would his face not look like Torka’s-pinched and twisted with grief and frustration?
“Come, Mother. We will go back to the encampment now.” Cheanah was helping Zhoonali to her feet.
She had caught her breath and recaptured her dignity. She stood erect in the shadow of her bear of a son, her head high, her eyes steady and cool as she looked from one hunter to another until, finally, her eyes rested upon Torka. “The forces of Creation have held against you, Man of the West. That which was born out of the belly of your woman has been put out from among the band, but still the sky burns and the wanawut walks the land.”
The headman stood unmoving. His head was held as high as the old woman’s, and his eyes were as steady—but they burned. “It was not for you to take the life of my child, old woman.”
“It was not a child! It had no name, no life! And this old woman gave; she did not take. The spiritless suckling still moved and breathed when she left it, but the—“
“My child was alive? You left him alive, to be torn to pieces by predators?”
“It was born to be meat. What else should she have done with it?”
The coldness of Cheanah’s query struck Torka with the force of a northern gale. Had the man been closer, Torka would have dropped him where he stood. As it was, he hefted his spear and threatened with it, his lips pulled back into a snarl of warning as Cheanah’s sons formed a defensive circle around their father and old Teean reached out to grip Torka’s throwing arm.
“Hold, Torka! Would you kill a brother over this?” asked the old man.
Torka trembled with rage. His eyes never left Cheanah’s face as he said, “No brother of mine would speak as Cheanah speaks. And no child of mine is meat to be fed alive to animals.”
“It is dead by now,” assured Zhoonali, pity in her eyes.
Torka glared at her. “You cannot know that.”
She shook her head. “What this woman knows or does not know is of no importance. What matters is that for the good of her people, Zhoonali has done what her headman and magic man would not do!”
“It is for this man to accept or deny life to his child!” Torka was emphatic. “And no child of mine or of my people, in starving times or in times of plenty, be the child perfect in all of its parts or blemished, will ever be abandoned alive to be food for beasts!”
“It is dead by now.” Mano, Cheanah’s eldest boy, echoed his grandmother, boldly answering Torka as he looked to his father for approval. Cheanah had no chance to give or deny it.
Torka’s reply came quick and sharp. “Until I see the bones of my son, until I place his body to look upon the sky forever with my own hands, I will not accept the death of one whose name has already been chosen and whose spirit lives within my heart.”
The hunters murmured restlessly in the rising wind. They looked up at the red sky, then at their headman. Then they looked at Cheanah as if they were not certain who should speak for them.
Zhoonali’s breath caught in her throat as she waited for her son to
draw himself up and speak as a headman once
again. But the moment passed, and he stood silent. She looked ready to scream at him as he stood scowling above her.
It was old Teean who broke the silence. “If Torka goes into the country of the wanawut to seek that which should never have been born, he goes without this man.”
His statement inspired others to voice their agreement.
Torka eyed them all darkly. “Then I will go alone.”
“No!” It was Grek who spoke. As bearlike as Cheanah but twice the age, he stood forth boldly in the meticulously pieced garments that Wallah, his woman, had made for him. “Torka is this man’s headman. This man has chosen to walk with Torka across the long miles and has learned that Torka’s ways are good ways. If Torka would seek the body of his son, Grek would walk at his side. Grek is not afraid!”
The others muttered in resentment of the obvious insult, and Zhoonali exhaled a low hiss, like a riled old gander, when Cheanah made no reply.
“So be it, then,” said Torka, and, with Grek at his side, he turned and strode away.
At last the baby cried, against the cold, killing touch of the wind.
Crouching over the remains of the dead leaping cat, the wanawut stopped feeding. At her breast, her cub dozed contentedly, but there was no contentment in the cub cries that wailed upon the wind.
The wanawut, unmoving, was disturbed by what she heard. The distressed cries were much like those of her own cub. She hooted softly in confusion. How could this be? She had seen the last of her own kind slaughtered by the flying sticks of the dreaded beasts that walked upright in the skins of animals—beasts such as the one she had left within her cave, the one that had come back to life even though its skin shielded her nest inside the mountain cave.
A tattoo of excitement beat within her massive breast. When she had eaten, she would bring food back to the beast. When it had fed, the wildness would go from its eyes, and it would love her again, stroke her again. Then she would not be alone in the gray world, with only the cub to make the soft, golden breeze of happiness rise within her spirit. Again the baby cried. A high, screeching spate of angry wails. The wanawut stood, twitching against the pain that rose from a dog-inflicted bite high on her thickly maned shoulder, and listened intently to the cries of the baby. She sniffed the night and drew in the scent of the dark, the cold, the distant smoke, and the cub.
Whose cub? Hope filled her. Were there others of her kind left alive, after all? Others to hunt with, to den with? Had her mother returned from the dead to care for her, to share her joy and ongoing puzzlement in the strange, furry little life that had poured so unexpectedly from her body one day on the tide of a great, gushing cramp? Mother!
Ambling forward, her cub protected in the curl of her arm, she moved across the high, cold hills, scenting the crier, listening for its whereabouts. She stopped at last, cocking her head and making low grunts of puzzlement when she saw it. What was it?
It lay on its back. Its legs were bent upward and pulled over its belly. It was no longer crying. Its face was contorted. It was still, so very still. She was certain that the breath of life had left it.
Curious, she ventured closer and stood scowling over it. It was shaped like her own little one, but it had no fur except for a thick, black tufting like new grass on its head. And it was so punt!
She bent forward and sniffed, then drew back in revulsion, knowing from its bland stink that it was a beast cub, abandoned as the beast cubs were often abandoned.
It might make a meal, but she was not hungry and the meat of their cubs was soft and tasteless, as were their bones. Her brow worked. Beasts were cruel and uncaring of their own. Mother had taught her that. Her muzzle worked with disappointment. It was not one of her own kind, and it was not even worth eating.
She would have turned away and left the thing where it lay, but it moved suddenly and stiffly. Its tiny, claw less fingers flexed. A pathetic sheep like bleat came from its blue little mouth. There was life in the thing. She could smell its warmth but little else in the bit
ter chill of the wind. She bent again, sniffed again. She poked curiously with the tip of her finger at the thing, toying with it, amused by its frailty until, to her amazement, the tiny hands grasped her finger and drew it forward into a fiercely sucking mouth. Amazed, she allowed the thing to have its way.
As it sucked, it did more than grip and draw upon her finger. It gripped and drew upon her maternal instinct, so that abruptly she squatted where she was, took up the little hairless sack of bones, and drew it close, warming it with her breath. And with a sigh of amazement and delight, she felt it latch hard and imperatively to her nipple . and to her heart.
Karana watched it happen. He froze where he was. The wind was in his favor, so the beast caught no scent of him. Torka’s baby? It could be no other. So the birth had taken place.
Vision was swept to him on the Seeing wind: The firstborn was alive! A boy, as was the other twin a boy! He could see the firstborn now, sucking dreamily at Lonit’s breast. And he could see Lonit’s face—so sad, so infinitely sad. So they had allowed her one twin but had condemned the other.
Remorse swept through Karana. He should have been there; perhaps he could have saved them both. Beside him, the dog growled as it caught the stench of the wanawut. It hunkered low and would have leaped to the chase had the magic man not stopped it with a single command.
Far below, Karana could see a group of hunters moving due west slowly and surely. He frowned. Zhoonali walked with them. He recognized her cloak. What was she doing so far from the encampment? Meanwhile, ascending into the high hills, Torka and Grek were coming toward him.
He frowned, knowing that there must have been dissension in the camp over the birth of the twins. Had Torka stood against the decision to abandon the second child?
Had he defied them? Yes, Karana knew that he had. Torka could not have done anything else.
Love and admiration for his adopted father filled him. He almost cried out: “Hurry! The baby still lives! The mammoth has called me home to help you! The forces of Creation have decided in favor of Torka’s sons!”
