by neetha Napew
Cheanah waited. His people watched. But the spirits did not take back the skin or the head of the wanawut. Trembling, he nodded as if to some inner voice, then pointed a finger at Seteena,
“That boy is not fit to live. That boy will not eat the food of this people! That boy will walk the wind forever!”
Ekoh stiffened and put a protective hand on his son’s shoulder. “He will not walk alone!” he said boldly, but Cheanah was not listening.
The headman was advancing toward Honee. He dragged her by her hair and flung her toward Teean.
“Take her! She is yours! Pierce her now;, before us all Zhoonali is right. The spirits are watching! Let them see that the people of Cheanah honor their ancestors and the customs of those who have gone to walk the wind before us! Let them take back the bad luck that has come to this band!”
“No!” Honee screamed and turned to run, but Cheanah’s fingers curled into her hair again and pulled her around.
As the band stood staring, Teean hesitated, for in these past few moons starvation had stripped away his arrogance. Now he stood sickly and shivering, loosening his clothes. His organ was flaccid. He worked it frantically to no avail.
Honee heard her father exhale a low hiss of frustration. He turned her and began to rip her garments away as she fought against him until, with a single slap, he sent her sprawling naked into the mud at his feet.
“Spread yourself! Now!”
Bitterly cold, sleet-driven rain stung her as she rolled to her hands and knees and tried to get up. But the ground beneath her was slippery, and she fell, gasping as Teean mounted her from behind.
“Mother! Zhoonali! Make him stop!”
Neither woman said a word as the band closed a tight circle around Honee and the old man. They stared down at her expressionlessly as old Teean grasped her breasts in a bony, pincer-hard grip and held her fast as he rammed his withered organ against her backside, seeking penetration . pumping but not penetrating. Honee, sobbing and shivering against cold and shame, deliberately lurched forward and rolled sideways in the mud hoping to shake off the old man. It was no good; he lay locked to her, grimacing as he worked on her to no avail.
“The forces of Creation no longer give life to that old bone.”
Honee looked up. Mano was standing over her, his own organ unsheathed and rigid in the rain. “No ...” Honee moaned. Yet it would be done. She knew it. She put back her head and screamed but knew it was no use. The eyes of the men of her band had taken on the strange, fixed look that had transformed Mano’s face. They were set and ready for rape. Starving they were, and weak and devoid of energy, but the sight of an unpierced woman lying naked and vulnerable in the rain had been enough to invigorate them. Even Cheanah was exposing himself.
She stared at him. “M-my father ... no ...”
His face was set. The circle was growing smaller; the women were no longer here. Even Ank was threatening and ready. Only Yanehva hung back until Cheanah raged at him.
“No! The forces of Creation are watching! It must be all of us!
All!”
Yanehva slowly shook his head. “This is not right. She is a virgin.”
“She is nothing!” Cheanah roared. “The potency of the band is everything!” He was like a great bear lowering himself, snarling impatiently as he forced a protesting Teean back and away.
“Time ... a little more time!” begged the old man. Honee hated them both as she sobbed and went lax beneath her father’s cruelly questing hands. She wished that Mother Below would pull her down into her protecting embrace. But it was not Mother Below whose command caused Cheanah to halt in the rape of his own daughter; it was Zhoonali. Honee looked up, hope flaring brightly. Then the girl saw the long claw of the giant ground sloth poised in her grandmother’s hand.
“In the way of our ancestors, Teean will blood his woman—if not with his own bone, then with this!” declared Zhoonali. “No!” screamed Honee, her eyes fixed on the claw. Twice the length of a man’s hand, it was an oiled, blood darkened menace. With a shriek, the girl flung herself ferociously free of her father’s grasp and tried desperately to rise.
It was no use.
Cheanah caught her, brought her down again, and forced her onto her back as Mano grabbed her limbs and parted them wide—so wide that she thought she would go mad as young Ank and Ram took hold of one of her feet and Mano continued to grip the other.
“Hold,” he whispered. “Imagine that I am entering you.”
“Never!” she screamed, and then was amazed when her voice made no sound but a croak.
Zhoonali had given Teean the claw. He was coming toward her.
“Do not fight this, Honee,” advised the old woman. “It will be done in the way of your ancestors since time beyond beginning, for the good of the band.”
The star was rising out of the east and setting in the same place as the sun when it slipped over the edge of the world to the west. By night, Torka stared at it long and hard. By day, he thought about it long and hard.
“What troubles you, Torka? The star is a good omen, yes?”
He looked at Grek. “I don’t know. The weather does seem to be improving. Come. Help me to train Aar’s pups to carry a pack.”
“Pups? These dogs are as big as wolves! And they do not smile at this man the way they smile at Torka, Karana, and Umak. You work with the dogs, my old friend. Why do you want the dogs to carry packs?”
“I have been thinking of moving next year to another camp, either across the valley or out of it entirely.”
“My Wallah cannot walk.”
“We will carry her, on a sledge, pulled by the dogs!”
Grek frowned thoughtfully. “It would be good to hunt in new lands again. But I am an old man, Torka, and this is good country. Why would you want to leave it?”
Torka sighed, suddenly irritable. “I have come to know that you are right: Men can stay too long in one place. I sense it. I grow restless with the need to walk into the face of the rising sun again.”
Mano was livid. “Ekoh is gone, and Bili, too. They dropped their pit hut in the night and walked off with the boy!”
Cheanah sat cross-legged within his hut. They were alone. Cheanah had been dark and sullen since Klu’s death; people tended to avoid him. “I sent the boy to walk the wind. It is his parents’ right to walk it with him.”
“You swore that I could have any woman that pleased me if I would keep your secret. I want Bili.”
“Go after her, then. Bring her back ... if Ekoh will allow it. But not the boy. Now that he is gone, the weather is improving. Now that Honee has gone to Teean and spreads herself for the men of this band, the game will return. Now that I have returned to the ways of our ancestors and put off the skin of the wanawut, the spirits will smile upon our people again. You will see.”
“Hurry. I want to be in the eastern hills by nightfall,” Ekoh urged.
Seteena, pale and panting, strained under the weight of his pack frame.
“Mother is too big with baby to go so fast. Why would they follow?
They wanted me gone from the band.”
“It is not you they will come after. It is your mother.”
Bili paused and looked back, then gave a startled cry. “Look! It’s Mano and Ank!” Her face hardened as she remembered the hungry way Mano had been looking at her and the perversions he had worked on her before his father had forced all other men away, including her own Ekoh. She shivered with loathing. “We have a good start. If we hurry we can reach those stony slopes up ahead, where they will not be able to track us.”
“But Mother, can you go fast enough?”
Bili smiled. Within a moment the bundle that she had secured under her tunic was exposed for what it was: a well-stuffed backrest. Ekoh and Seteena stared in amazement. “I’m sorry, Ekoh. I should have told you. But it has kept the wolves of Cheanah’s band off me! I feared that you would have guessed. Mano was suspicious. So was Cheanah. No woman carries a child for over twelve
moons!”
Ekoh pulled her close and winked at their son. “We will make our own band, my boy!”
They walked until the boy faltered and fell flat. Fighting against exhaustion, he tried to rise, but his malnourished body failed him. Bili took his pack, Ekoh hefted him in his arms, and they went on quickly. Only now and again did they stop, distracted by the sensation of being watched—by something above them in the gathering mists.
As the sound of the beasts’ footfalls had come closer, the beast ling had taken up his throwing sticks and his man stone, covered Sister with his lions king to keep her warm, and walked naked out of hiding. He crouched behind boulders and observed the beasts.
They walked as if they were tired, yet they were hurrying, and he could smell their fear. The updrafts also brought him the scent of two other beasts walking far below. They were walking very fast, angrily, and there was no stink of fear on them.
Soon the shadows grew long, and the dark came down. He watched as the three beasts paused. They sat very close, ate something, and sounded softly to one another. Then they lay down and wrapped their arms around each other, much as Sister and he did when they sought warmth on a cold night.
It occurred to the beast ling that this would be a good time to kill them, but their tenderness toward one another caused him to hesitate. With a sigh, he went back to the nest. Sister was feverish and howling for him. He hooted a greeting and put on the lions king again. He was grateful for its warmth as he stayed by her side, stroking her until she fell into troubled sleep. He was afraid she might die from the wound in her snout.
For a long while he lay awake, thinking of the three beasts sleeping on the hills below .. . and of the others that were climbing toward them. He took up his throwing sticks and his man stone and went from the nest to watch them again.
Snow fell heavily. He could find no sign of the three beasts; they had evidently continued on into the east. The two pursuers had turned back. He followed them. When the smaller slipped, the larger one kicked at it. The wind brought the mean, nasty edge of their vocalizing to him. It inspired him to hurl one of his throwing sticks at them.
He took careful aim at the larger beast, but the smaller went down screaming. The beastling grunted in disgust. He showed his teeth and screeched loudly in frustration. One of his throwing sticks was gone forever. The larger of the two pivoted, scanned the snow-driven heights, then bent, hefted its companion over its shoulders, and ran off into the driving snow. The throwing stick projected upward, out of the small one’s back. Once again there was mourning in the camp of Cheanah as a body was put out of camp to look upon the sky forever. In a driving snowstorm, Mano, standing above Ank’s body, placed the spear that had killed his brother across his father’s palms.
“This is what killed him! Your spear! Ekoh not only steals the best woman of the band, he dares to steal the weapons of our headman and then kill us with them when we follow!”
Cheanah stared at the spear. Mano had not guessed the truth, and mercifully, Zhoonali did not speak it. Cheanah broke the spear across his thigh and laid it over the body of his son.
Mano fixed his father with burning eyes. “When the weather clears, we must hunt Ekoh down. We must make him pay with his life!”
“There is not a man in this band who has the strength for such a trek,” Yanehva pointed out soberly. “Let us mourn our dead in peace and leave Ekoh to his fate.”
Cheanah frowned. It was difficult to think clearly. He was too hungry, too overwhelmed by the death of his children. He was headman of his people, and they were dying all around him. Why? Suddenly he knew the answer. It came to him with such cruel intensity that it staggered him. Yanehva had warned him long ago to hunt as Torka had hunted---to waste no meat, to decimate no herd. Within Cheanah’s empty belly, hatred and resentment toward Torka rose like storm clouds boiling on the horizon of his thoughts. He would deal with them later. Now was the time to speak to his people of what must be.
His people closed a circle around him, sensing the change. He felt their eyes watching him.
“The bodies of our dead speak to Cheanah,” he announced. “Have we eaten the last of the foxes that live in this land? Have we cracked the bones and spit the feathers of the last eagles and hawks and teratorns? Is there not one creature left alive to eat our dead? No! There is not! This is no longer the Place of Endless Meat. It is the Starving Land, and we must leave it! We must follow the animals to the east if we are to survive!”
Zhoonali’s head went up within her snow-frosted bearskin hood. “We are too weak. We have no meat to give us strength to walk.”
“We have meat,” Cheanah said, and gestured downward toward the bodies of the little ones who had been placed to look upon the sky forever. “Our children will feed us. Our children will make us strong for the trek that lies ahead. We will feed on their flesh. It is for this that they have died—so that their people will live.”
The beast ling had been watching them in puzzlement as they knocked down their nests, packed them upon their backs, and walked away toward the east. They moved so slowly that by dark they still were not very far from where they had started. They stopped, put up some smaller nests, then crawled beneath them—to sleep, he supposed.
With the rising of the hole in the sky, the beasts were up again, taking down their nests, then walking around and around, gathering up things they had taken from their backs the night before. He was confused. Where were they going? Why?
As the days passed, only by moving greater and greater distances along the spine of the hills had he been able to keep a constant watch on them. Sister consistently refused to accompany him from the cave. Her wounded snout had healed, although it had left her with an ugly scar and a bad wheeze. She was well and strong and sound of appetite again, but it seemed to the beast ling that somehow the experience had injured her spirit.
He was always able to find a good spot from which to view the beasts’ progress, although sometimes he would have to walk for the equivalent of a full day and part of a night before he caught sight of them. Today he had traveled very far indeed. Sister would be upset with him when he returned.
She was always upset with him when he returned! And all of the long while that he was gone, when she was not sleeping, she howled and howled until he returned to assure her by his soundings and strokings that he would not leave her.
He fought against the fiercely protective thoughts that would not allow him to leave Sister. She needed him too much. But he had needs, too—to leave the nest, to walk the world in search of the beasts. He could not live in a world without beasts! He could not live in a world with no hope of killing them when he had learned all that he hungered to know.
He would kill them for what they had done to Mother. To Sister. To all the animals that lived beneath the hole in the sky. But until that day, he could not stay where he was while they walked away over the edge of the world. Sister would have to understand and follow ... or she would have to stay behind.
Miserable but resolute, he turned and began the long walk back to the nest. He would gather up all his throwing sticks, his chips of stone, his drinking bowl He stopped. Sister was coming toward him. His spears were tucked under her arm, and his stone chips were chattering away in his drinking bowl, which she held out to him in one furred and massive hand.
For the first time in her life she sounded to him. It was the tremulous, quiver-lipped sound of one who fears that she is about to be abandoned. “Man-nah-rah-vak!” she cried, and as she stumbled into his welcoming embrace, he saw the completely unwanawutlike streams of moisture running from her eyes. He held her close, rocking her, but he did not try to wipe the wetness from her face. Tears were falling from his eyes, too.
In a world full of light, Karana felt much less like dying. The dark, twisted hauntings of his madness were diminished in the constant light of day. Now that the first signs of autumn were on the land, he spent most of his time gathering and gleaning, assembling a large medicine b
ag that was to be an offering to his people. True, they wanted no part of him or his magic, but healing ways and magic ways were two different things. His knowledge of healing was wasted upon the mountain, and he knew that it was not his to keep.
He owed his life and everything that he knew to Torka. If he had lost the gift of the spirit wind that had once opened his mind to the future, that was his fault, not Torka’s. The spirits chose the vessels out of which they would be poured into the lives of men. They had chosen him, and he had proved unworthy. But before the time of the long dark came down again upon the world, Karana would give his healing gift back to Torka so that those whom he loved—most especially Mahnie and Naya—would know the ways to heal themselves.
The old restlessness stirred in him. He could see them as they went about their lives in the valley far below. As long as he could see them, he felt a part of their lives. They were safe from the evil machinations of Navahk as long as he stayed here. His purpose in life now was to protect his people from Navahk. And to protect himself from Torka’s wrath, for the living lie, for which he could never be forgiven, was coming out of the west: Torka’s son.
His head suddenly ached with confusion. He sensed danger walking with Manaravak. Should Torka not be warned of it? He lay back against the warm stone of the ridge and stared up at the sun. Light poured into him, warming him, and yet when he closed his eyes and fell asleep, his dreams were cold and dark and filled with falling stars. He was drowning in them.
Aar wakened him, rooted under his palm with a cold, wet nose. Karana smiled and sat up. Aar often saved him from dreams of drowning in darkness. Come down the mountain into the world of men again, the dog seemed to say.
“I cannot, my brother, for if I come, Navahk will come with me.”
The dog and man rose and walked together along the ridge, then back around the huge gray lake that gave life to nothing except icebergs, which broke off from the towering glacial cliffs that stood against its northern shore.
