Forbidden Land

by neetha Napew

  It was time for the magic man to come home.

  Karana stopped dead in his tracks. What had drawn him from his trance? He could not tell; his mind was too thick with black, substanceless dreams. He shook his head, willing the dreams away. They retreated sluggishly. He looked around, puzzled by his whereabouts and shocked that he was no longer fast asleep, curled up to the lee of a lichen-encrusted boulder within the lowlands.

  It was quiet. The only sound was that of the wind and the restless lapping of semi frozen waves against a shore of stone and ice. The huge, ice-choked highland lake was behind him. As he turned to scan its miles-wide surface, a warning beat at the back of his brain. There was something black, ominous, and unsettling about this wide, cold body of water. The knot in his gut grew tighter as his eyes took in the soaring, weather-eroded sides of the glacier that walled its far shore. With a startled cry, he jumped back. The wonderful valley was directly below him. Had he taken one more step forward, he would have plummeted to certain death. He knew that he should be grateful to be alive, but a deep, all-pervasive emptiness told him that he was not.

  Suddenly weary, he hunkered down, resting his forearms across his thighs. He had been searching for the elusive magic of his shamanistic powers so that he might use it to ease Mahnie’s labor and ultimately to determine the gender of their baby. Instead he heard the high, frenzied yapping of dogs moving to a kill somewhere in the valley far below. He wondered if Aar was with them. Missing Brother Dog, he sighed, hoping that all was well with his boyhood friend.

  His throat felt raw from endless chanting. Or was it from the inner spirit voices biting at his throat and whispering in the winds of his mind?

  You do not seek! You do not search! You run from your people when they need you, Magic Man. You will never find the magic. Never! It is not for such as you .. . not for the son ofNavahk .. . not for Karana, who has sworn to kill his own son and is afraid to do so!

  The foulness of that oath was suffocating. He rose, drew in deep, steadying breaths of the frigid morning, and faced directly into the rising sun. He shivered despite the warmth of the exquisite garments that Mahnie had stitched for him. Mahnie! By now our child must be born! By now your pain must be over! By now you must wonder why I am not at your side! The cold within his heart solidified into a vile, choking bitterness. Be glad that I am not, for when I return to your side, if our child is a boy I will take it from your breast and kill it. I must! Even though I know that it will cost me your love and my place within the band if the killing is witnessed by others.

  He gasped, so miserable that he could barely breathe.

  “I cannot allow his spirit to be reborn!” he cried aloud. “For in the end, he will see us all dead if he can!”

  The sickness overcame him. He released it, violently. But there was nothing in his gut except the bile of his own commitment to his terrible purpose. Try as he might, he could not purge himself of it.

  When Torka came upon him, Karana was on his way back to the encampment. His face was gray. He looked old and haggard and ill. Until Torka spoke. Nine words—nine briefly stated words that caused the freshness of youth to flood back into the magic man’s handsome face as tears of joy overflowed his eyes: “Mahnie is well. She has given you a daughter.”

  The daughter of Karana and Mahnie was called Naya, to honor the life’ spirit of her great-grandmother.

  “A good and loving woman was Naya, who carried Grek in her belly and gave him life,” the old hunter informed the band as they gathered to witness the acceptance of the newest daughter of the band by her father. “Grek thanks Karana for allowing his firstborn to honor the memory of Naya by carrying on her name.”

  Karana nodded circumspectly. Better your ancestors than mine, he thought as he raised the infant in his two strong hands and proclaimed before all: “I, Karana, accept this newborn girl child of my woman, Mahnie. May the ancestral spirit of Naya come to live again in the flesh of her great-granddaughter.” The baby stirred in Karana’s upheld hands. The white caribou skin upon which she lay was smooth against his palms. His jaw tightened as the glow of first light washed the infant in a faint red-gold sheen. He thought of another child and of another caribou skin, red and sullied by the lies and blood of the magic man’s self-inflicted wound.

  He turned and looked at Torka as custom demanded, hoping that Torka would not see the haunted look in his eyes.

  “Does the headman of this band accept the girl-child of this man and his woman?” he asked, continuing the ritual.

  “With the permission of the band, the headman accepts this child of Karana and Mahnie,” replied Torka.

  “With our permission!” exclaimed the members of the band in full assent.

  Karana watched dully as the infant was passed tenderly from one member of the band to the next. Each breathed into her nostrils, enacting the ancient custom that symbolized the sharing of life. Karana wished that he could share their joy and feel something other than relief and cold desolation—relief because the baby was not a boy, and so he would not have to kill it—desolation because, as he looked at Mahnie, he loved her and wanted her more than ever.

  Their eyes met. His heart ached. Never again would she lie in his arms or feel the heat of his passion. Never.

  He could not put himself through this torture again. This time the spirits had been kind. But they had also planted the seeds of warning in his heart: Next time Mahnie would bear him a son.

  And so it was that later, when night filled the cave and the people slept content within it, Karana did not turn to look at Mahnie when she came from her bed furs to kneel beside him as he sat looking out across the night.

  “Is my magic man sorry that his woman has not given him a son?”

  “I am not sorry. I am glad for a daughter.”

  “The baby is a good baby. My breast milk flows for her. She sleeps and does not fuss.”

  He closed his eyes and thought of her breasts, of her soft, warm breasts.

  “She is a strong, pretty girl.”

  Like her mother, he thought.

  “Soon my time of birth blood will be over. Soon we will make another baby—a son .. . many sons would Mahnie give to her magic man.”

  Now he looked at her. “No!”

  “I—I do not understand. I am your woman.”

  “No more!”

  She shrank back from it. “I have offended you.”

  You could never offend me, my Mahnie.

  “The child .. . you are displeased by the child.”

  He heard the quiver in her voice. He saw the look of despair in her eyes. He knew that he could not ease her heart, lest he lose his own. “I must be what I have been born to be, Mahnie. I was wrong to take you as my woman in the first place. A shaman needs no woman. Nothing must distract me from my magic. Not even—“—my love for you. He ached to speak the words. “There are too many distractions here for a magic man!” he said as he snapped to his feet and, wrapping his sleeping furs around himself, stalked out of the cave and into the night.

  On the morning of the third day of his absence from the cave, Torka appeased a worried Grek and Mahnie and Summer Moon by taking up his spears and those of the magic man and following. He went alone, assuring Grek and Simu that he had no need of their assistance.

  Karana had made no attempt to conceal his tracks. Torka caught up with him on the ridge where he sat alone overlooking the wonderful valley.

  “Your woman worries about you,” Torka told him.

  “She need not.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Karana looked up, frowning at the drollness of Torka’s tone.

  “Here,” said the headman and dropped Karana’s spears across his lap. “With these in your hand, Mahnie will have less cause to fear for you.”

  “I have no need of them.”

  Torka shook his head. “A magic man is made of flesh and blood, as any other man. I doubt if the spirits will be offended if you seek to assist them in the protection of your hide.
And even a shaman must hunt to eat once in a while.”

  Karana scowled, but he did not disdain his spears, nor did he refuse when Torka offered to share his traveling ration of cubed fat and dried meat.

  They sat together in silence for a long time before Torka said thoughtfully: “You are alone too much. A new father should rejoice in the birth of his child.”

  Karana drew in a deep breath. “Go back to the cave.

  Tell Mahnie that she has no cause to worry. I commune with the forces of Creation ... on behalf of her and our child. I am a shaman, a magic man. This is what magic men are supposed to do.”

  Impatient with Karana’s sullen mood, Torka left him to his meditations and headed back toward the cave. It was late, but days were longer than the nights at this time of year, and he was not concerned about traveling or sleeping alone. Trailing Karana at an easy jog, it had taken him nearly two days to reach the pass. It would take as many to get home. He stopped and turned back, taking in the awesome beauty of the heights before gesturing to Karana in hope that he would reconsider. If only he could teach the haunted, harried young man to put his sad, cruel, and tormented past behind him and learn to rejoice in each day as it came, for soon enough the final darkness must come to each man, and nothing—nothing—could stay its course.

  The young man raised an arm and waved him away. With a sigh, Torka waved back, turned, and continued on. His mind was still filled with images of the ridge, with its wild vistas of the valley below, of open steppe and tumbled, encircling mountain ranges, of sprawling, distant ice fields, and of the strange, troubling beauty of the highland lake.

  He frowned as he thought of the lake. He did not know why it should trouble him, except that if there were fish in its depths, no birds fed upon them. Nor had he seen sign of animals feeding along its stony shore. Now that he thought about it, he realized that it was like no lake he had ever seen before: a bleak, lonely place, devoid of the usual marshy embankments ... a cold, barren stretch of iceberg-ridden water with ridges of stone and steep, discolored, weather-worn glacial walls surrounding its mountaintop basin.

  He went on, glad to put the lake behind him. Somewhere within the trees ahead, a flock of small birds flew upward, startled by the sound of Torka’s footfall. Glad for the distraction, he paused and looked back, hoping to see or hear Karana moving behind him. But there was no sign of him. For a moment, Torka regretted not insisting that Karana accompany him back to the cave. Then he rebuked himself. Karana was a man, and a man had a right to seek solitude when he had need of it .. . especially if he was a shaman. Torka went on, smiling again, amused that he was thinking like a father. When he was old and bent, with Karana growing old right behind him, would he still worry over him as though he were a boy whose life depended upon his father’s protection? Yes, no doubt he would; it was the way of fathers. It did not matter that Karana was not the son of his own blood. He had raised him as his own. No father could love him more.

  He deliberately forced the thought away before it brought him a ghost that he had no wish to see. Nevertheless, for an instant, the haunting was there: a whirling, dancing, obsidian-eyed ghost in the white belly skins of winterkilled caribou .. . Navahk .. . smiling his wolfish, carnivorous smile across the bleak, misted miles of time .. .

  “You are dead, you treacherous, murderous, woman stealing son of the past!” he shouted at the apparition as he found himself turning around and looking up through the trees into the gathering night. Was he there? Was Navahk there ... in the mists ... in the gathering clouds of the impending night? “No!”

  He felt foolish for having shouted, and then more foolish because there was no mist. But something was moving in the undergrowth somewhere to his right. Whatever it was, it was large enough to make the tops of the shrubs sway and to send the little birds flying again. Torka wheeled. The ghostly vision of Navahk was so real that he hefted a spear and shouted in defiance, “I have seen you die! Stay dead! You are not welcome in this land!”

  The undergrowth quivered, as if a wave of living shrubbery were moving toward him. He threw a spear. Hard.

  Something yipped. The wave reversed itself, and now, through the gloom of twilight, Torka saw a tattered pyramid of grizzled fur moving atop the scrub growth, through it, away from him.

  “Aar! Come back, Brother! Let me see what harm I have done to you!”

  Although Torka called and called, the dog did not come back. Torka followed and retrieved his spear. To his relief he found no blood on the shaft, spearhead, ground, or shrubs. The dog’s tracks were headed up the gorge, and two sets of smaller tracks were running alongside him.

  Torka paused in the thickening dark and smiled. He sensed that the dog was watching him from the heights. With his spears in his hands, he raised his arms in salutation as he called: “Brother Dog! May you forgive a foolish man his moment of fearful impetuosity! Torka promises that there will always be a warm place at his fire for Aar and his females. Always!”

  Night found Torka within the gorge. It was dark, very dark. He knew that it would be a while before moonrise allowed him to move on in safety. He seated himself with his back to the canyon wall. With his spears across his lap, he ate a wedge of fat and several slivers of dried meat before drifting off to sleep. Then he slept briefly, and not so deeply that he could not instantly wake up from the shallows of unconsciousness should danger threaten. When dogs began to howl high above him on the ridge he woke. The moon was up and full, so the gorge was bathed in cold blue light that was nearly as bright as day. Fully rested, Torka rose and walked on.

  It was not quite dawn when he left the gorge and entered the broad, heavily forested alluvial hills that fanned downward toward the broad, rolling valley floor. The scent of mammoth was heavy in the air. Torka walked cautiously past a small herd of cows and calves. Then, cresting a heavily treed rise, he came to a clearing and found himself face to face with the Life Giver.

  Squinting against the glare of dawn, Torka stopped dead. The mammoth stood so close that had Torka extended his arm, he could have touched the tips of its tusks. The animal towered above him. Eighteen feet tall at the shoulder, when it raised its twin-domed, shaggy head and lifted its hairy trunk, the earth shook beneath Torka’s feet. Gasping in awe, he took an involuntary step back.

  He had seen what death and destruction this animal could deal. Since time beyond beginning, surely no mammoth had ever been larger, more cunning, or more deadly. But long ago a mystical covenant had been made between these two, so Torka respectfully stood his ground before the mammoth. Slowly, the great mammoth extended its trunk. Slowly, Torka extended his free hand. They touched. The moment was magic. Man and beast were one.

  Without a sound, the mammoth turned and walked away. Without a word, Torka followed into the foothills where his people watched his approach from the cave.

  When he entered the encampment, his heart was full and his blood was singing. As long as Life Giver walked ahead of him, his path would be the right path, for his woman, his children, his people, and himself.

  “Where is Karana?” Summer Moon asked before Mahnie could speak.

  “He will come soon. He seeks the magic .. . for us all,” he told her, striding purposefully past her to his fire circle to embrace Lonit. As Torka held her, Umak smiled up at him in welcome, displaying teeth as white and even and serrated as Navahk’s. The headman’s mood went dark, and for the second time he was almost overcome by the knowledge that this boy might not be his son after all, but the spawn of Lonit’s rape by Navahk.

  Far away, Karana stood upon the heights and stared into the dawn. Aar was at his side. Two thin, leggy female dogs sat watching their big, grizzled, one-eared master of the pack in absolute puzzlement as he stood beside the man.

  Karana barely noticed the dogs; he was transfixed by the sight of Torka walking into the sunrise with the mammoth. Their contact should have made him smile, for he could have asked for no better omen for his people.

  Instead his spirit was dark,
because last night, before the moon had risen, he had watched the stars and had known in his heart that the red star would return, the black moon would rise again .. . and in its shadow Manaravak would return to his people. Would he be as a man or a beast? And would Karana’s half-human sister walk at his side?

  What did it matter? Karana would keep watch. He would be ready for them lest Torka learn the truth of his betrayal. He would kill them both, as surely as he would have killed his own son. What else could he do?

  PART VI. SUN OF ANGRY SKY

  Many moons rose and set over the Place of Endless Meat. Two long, bitter winters and brief, cherished summers came and passed away, but still Cheanah had not fulfilled his promise to kill the white lion. He made excuses for himself: “It is a ghost lion. A man cannot kill a spirit.”

  Alone with him now outside the headman’s pit hut, Mano eyed his father with thinly veiled contempt. “Long ago, Navahk killed the wanawut and danced in its skin. Surely if Cheanah wanted to, he could kill a lion, even if it is a ghost.”

  Cheanah glowered at his son. Mano’s watchful avaricious ness put him on edge. “Navahk was a magic man!” he defended himself hotly.

  “He was also headman of his band.”

  As I am headman of this band!” Cheanah reminded him, furious at his son’s obviously intended insolence. “Never forget that! Never!”

  “I will not forget,” replied Mano. “The question is: Do you always remember?”

  In the autumn days that followed, Cheanah led his hunters and sons to stalk and kill with a wanton abandon that allowed Mano no doubt as to who was leading the band. Cheanah was a brave hunter and superlative tracker. Any animal that left so much as a hoof or paw print, a mound of scat, or an indentation in the grass or scrub growth was hunted and killed. Small or large, all were game to Cheanah and his hunters.

  Soon the encampment was well stocked with meat and hides and the women were exhausted from overwork. Although their men still hunted, the women saw no cause to prepare the meat of their kills for storage. They took no sinew. They fleshed only prime pelts and ate only of tongue and eye, of intestine and haunch and hump. The rest was left for carrion.