The Serpent Dreamer

by Cecelia Holland

  “Good.” She wiped blood off the stick.

  Ahanton sat up, with one hand brushing her hair back. “Is it over now?”

  “Yes.” Epashti threw one aim around her neck and hugged her. “Whatever you said last night, it was very strange. Merada has not stopped moaning. But Eonta is very pleased with you.”

  “Hunh,” Ahanton said, surprised. She went to help Epashti work in her garden, where the first green shoots were appearing. That night, she slept in Epashti’s compartment, as usual, in Eonta’s lodge, and she dreamt that Epashti had broken her open, and that a river ran out of her, which flowed on ahead of her, on into the distance, on forever.

  And she looked back over her shoulder, and behind her sat Eonta, and behind her, Eonta, and behind them another and another Eonta, the river flowing through all of them, out of the infinite past.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S I X

  In spite of what he had said, Miska did not go after Tisconum at once. He took the war band up to the Long Lakes for the spring hunting, leaving the women to their fields and their gossip and their little female rituals. The spring was very hot and the hunting went well, and the men came back with meat and hides, bear teeth and wolf teeth and other, rarer things, shells, horns, clear stones like little eyes, bits of mysterious rock.

  The whole village celebrated the turning of the year, which was the time also that other villages often sent gifts to Miska. Miska gave all these gifts away, as always—the soft deerskins decorated with beadwork, the baskets and pots he gave to the women, and the war clubs and the armbands and breastplates he gave to the men. The food he gave to everybody, in one endless feast through the long day and the short night and the long day after. Then he gathered the war band, and he went east, toward Tisconum, going slowly, as if he were only hunting. But he sent Hasei out ahead of him, to find a way around the burnt tree pass, a way that would bring him into the pass from the east.

  The day’s heat bore down like a blast from the sky. Hasei tried to stay under the trees; he was working his way up a long sloping valley, where a creek ran. The trees clustered along it gave him shade almost all the way, but here and there their high sprawling canopies opened up and the sun got in and struck him. He was tired, and moving too slowly, and not caring too much, even, what Miska thought of that.

  He stopped to wash his face in the creek, and sat there a moment, squatting on the bank, watching the water clear.

  The creek ran over pebbles, streaming green weed into the current; stick-legged striders scooted along near the bank, where the water was quieter. Their feet made little dents on the water, like puddles of air. On the surface the clouds in the sky appeared, past the dark reflections of leaves, so that he saw everything at once, the sky, the water, the land underneath.

  He thought, I will never get up, I will stay here.

  He felt pressed down into the ground, under a huge darkness over him like an invisible web. He could not keep from thinking about Yoto, his brother, dead without revenge in the last raid. He had never felt as alone as this before. There was no one beside him now, no one to share meat with, or a pipe, or a word, no one to shield him from an enemy or a north wind. Even the sun-yellowed forest around him seemed far away now, beyond a grim surrounding layer of cold and death.

  He pushed himself up and went on. Miska expected him to do this work, and he was nearly there now, although he was a day past when he should have been going back—Miska would be impatient. He pushed on up the valley, toward the burnt tree pass.

  His mind sank down again under the gray murk of his grief. Yoto had foretold his own death, and Hasei thought over and over of that, how his brother had said, “We’re all going to die, he’ll kill us all, like this.”

  It would not be this time. Tisconum was a weakling. He had only a few followers.

  Hasei trudged up through the trees, wishing he could get away from the memory of his brother’s voice. Off to one side the sun glowed on the meadow, and a bird flew up; he saw the sun flash on its wings, and his mind rose with it. Fire-dappled feathers, he thought, walking. Fire-spangled feathers—

  His foot touched the ground; something grabbed his ankle and whipped around and up. His feet went out from under him and he flew up, upside down in the air, caught by the ankle, hanging from the top of a young tree swaying wildly back and forth above him, turning and swinging him until his dizzy head whirled. He doubled up, grabbing for his trapped foot—for the snare line above it. Caught the line, a braided thong of rawhide, and groped at his belt for his knife.

  His fingertips met air where the haft should have been, then the edge of the empty sheath. He did not look down, to see the knife lying on the ground under him. Hanging folded up in the air, he clutched for the tree above the line and could not reach it, and held onto the line itself instead. He couldn’t get his weight off the rope. He began to gasp for breath, his back muscles aching, his arms burning with effort. His fingers tore at the loop around his ankle. His breath harsh in his ears, swinging and swaying back and forth, he picked desperately at the noose and couldn’t get even a grip on it.

  He lost his hold, fell down straight again, bobbing and swinging back and forth in the air. He felt his strength running out of him like an upended bucket. With a great gulp of air, he doubled up again, drove his body upward toward his snared ankle, and struggled again uselessly with the thong, tightening and tightening steadily under his weight. His strength was giving out. His fingers slipped off the thong again, and he gave up, let himself fall, and dangled down.

  From the height of the ridge, Corban saw the great burst of birds scatter up from the trees, in the valley below. He went down the steep grassy slope, sliding some of the way on his backside. Where the hill broke off in a sheer drop he crept down the side of the rock hand over hand and cut across a long sliding apron of smaller stones toward the valley floor, all the little stones and earth slipping away in showers under his feet, moving the hillside down.

  He reached the swampy edge of the meadow and circled it to the dry land. The birds were still racketting up over the trees along the creek. He went out through the meadow, watching with half his attention for signs of deer. Before he even reached the line of trees, he saw something big was caught in one of Tisconum’s snares. When he came in under the trees, he knew it was a man, and when he went up to the edge of the trail he realized it was Hasei.

  His belly clenched. A ripple of fear went down his spine. He turned quickly and looked all around, backed up out of the trees to look away south down the valley, seeing nothing unusual, no signs of any big group of men coming toward him. Quickly he went back in to deal with Hasei.

  The Wolf poet was hanging upside down from a sapling snare, caught by one leg, the other hanging off at an angle, bent at the knee. His eyes were closed and he was breathing hard. Corban drew his knife. He remembered that this was Epashti’s brother; he thought of what Hasei had said that one time, about words.

  If they came this way, he thought, that was bad, there would be no escape for Tisconum and his people. He had to kill Hasei, or they were all finished.

  He went over to the sapling, found the end of the snare line, and cut it. The snare jerked loose, dumping Hasei facedown on the ground. Corban squatted down beside his head, his knife in his hand. Hasei was not moving, his ragged breathing catching in sobs and gasps, but his eyes opened, glistening in a mask of dust, looking at the knife blade inches from his face.

  Corban said, “Is she alive?”

  “She lives.” Hasei’s voice croaked like an old door.

  “The—the baby?”

  “The baby lives.”

  Corban groaned; he wiped his hand over his face. He stuck the knife into his belt sheath. He put one hand on Hasei’s head and pushed him down again, to show he could, and stood up, and went away up through the trees.

  He went to Tisconum, in the new camp in the pass, and said, “I found signs of Miska’s scouts in the valley back east of here. Fresh signs. They’re lookin
g to circle around behind us.”

  The sachem was sitting under the burnt tree, half-asleep in the sun. He did not sit up. He smiled serenely at Corban under his drawn black brows. “I told you he would come here. You were wrong, you see.”

  Corban looked around the camp. As usual the women had laid it out very roughly, using stones and clumps of brushy branches to make a circle around the fire. Nobody else was there, not even Arl. He sank down on his heels, facing Tisconum. His red and blue cloak was tied around his waist, and he pulled up one corner to wipe the sweat off his face.

  “Yes, but he knows we’re here. Which is why he’s coming. You’re not as good a prophet as you think.”

  “We’ve only been here since midsummer,” Tisconum said. “How does he know we’re here?”

  “Because he knows you,” Corban said.

  “Well, anyway, I know him, too. I’ll be more ready this time Tisconum straightened, swinging his gaze around the pass, remembering the old battle, Corban knew, figuring out how to have won that old battle. “I am sachem here. I have the men out hunting for meat for us, and the women looking for food on the ground, as they do. The spring is still running well here. We can stay here for a long while.”

  “Until we all die,” Corban said.

  Tisconum laughed, his face clear and bright as a sunny sky. “Or they do.” He reached out and clapped Corban on the shoulder. “Will it be you who gets him, Corban-ka? What an honor that would be! People all over the world would talk of that around campfires until the last generations of men.”

  Corban said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Here they come,” Tisconum said. “See what Ofra says.” He nodded down the western slope.

  Ofra and the other men were climbing into the pass, carrying a deer slung on a pole, three struggling with the pole and Ofra pushing on the deer itself. They looked tired but as they came into the pass they began to sing and wave their arms. “We have meat!”

  “Great hunter—” Ofra wasted no breath in extra words. “Meat! Meat!” He gave up trying to help and plodded along behind the others.

  Tisconum flung his arms up. “Good. We’ll eat.”

  The men hauled the carcass into the camp, and stood around bragging about how mightily they had killed it, the most ferocious deer ever, and them almost bare-handed. Corban went around toward Ofra, who was standing with one foot on the carcass declaiming louder than anybody else.

  “I found signs of the Wolves, in the valley east of here,” Corban said.

  Aiming his words at everybody, Ofra shouted, “We struck him down! Down!” His voice wavered; he lowered his gaze to Corban. “Where?”

  “In the valley down at the foot of the trail.”

  Ofra stepped back; the other men were gathering around the deer, to break it up. Ofra wiped one hand across his forehead, his mouth loose. He gave Corban a black look for bringing him this news.

  “What does he say?” He jerked his head toward Tisconum.

  “What he usually says. He’s all ready to die, and the rest of us with him.”

  “I’m not ready to die yet,” Ofra said.

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” Corban said.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “I doubt we can move Tisconum. And here at least we know he’s coming. We know where he’s going to be. We turned things on him once before, maybe we can do it again.”

  Ofra gave him a suspicious look. “That was luck, and you know it. And that was Ekkatsay.”

  A hoarse yell jerked them both around toward the western side of the pass again, where the trail came up. The women were climbing the last steep slope there, bent down under baskets on their shoulders. As they walked, the first of them, the old woman who tended Tisconum, was shouting and pointing back behind them. Corban went out onto the broad saddle of the pass to see.

  From here he looked out over the broad varied green of the trees on the lower slopes, into the next valley. At the far end of the valley, the late sunlight glinted on the water of a pond. From somewhere around there, near the pond, a thick stream of brown smoke was climbing into the air.

  He grunted. Tisconum was beside him, one hand to shield his eyes from the slanting sun, staring toward the smoke. “What’s that?”

  “Announcing his presence,” Corban said. “Are you listening to me yet?”

  Ofra came up to join them, saw the smoke, and muttered something under his breath. “He does that to make us run,” Tisconum said. “Like flushing deer.”

  Corban kicked savagely at the ground, scuffed and broken from people walking back and forth over it. He said, “He’s giving you something to look at. Which means he’s doing something somewhere else.”

  Ofra rubbed his hands together, squinting at the sun. “Maybe he is flushing deer. This deer thinks we have enough daylight left to get pretty far away.”

  Corban shook his head. “Only until the next time.”

  He looked into the camp; the men were sitting close around the fire, talking, their hands idle, and the women were cutting up the deer meat to cook. Their tiny fire made no smoke. The first aroma of cooking deer meat reached his nose. They could break this camp in a few moments and be gone before the meat was cool. Perversely he resented that, their lack of weight, as if Miska could blow them away with a puff of his breath.

  He turned to Tisconum. “How did he beat you the last time?”

  Tisconum blinked at him, his jaws working. “He won’t do the same thing again.”

  “Why not?”

  The Turtle sachem’s eyes narrowed. Finally he turned and looked around the saddle of the pass.

  “He came from there.” He pointed up at the top of the rock. “If he comes that way again, I will be up there first.” He chuckled. “Then I will be over him, and looking down.”

  Corban glanced at Ofra’s heavy face, still gnawed with worry, and turned back to Tisconum. “How did he get up on the rock?”

  “There must be some trail up from the back, somehow.”

  “Find this end of it,” Corban said. “Make sure you watch it. Where else did he attack you from?”

  “Up from the west, as you would expect, a big rush up into the pass. That kept us all looking that way, we never saw the ones coming over the rock.” Tisconum waved one hand toward the broad rise into the pass from the west. “And—” He took a step forward suddenly, remembering, his eyes going to the far side of the pass. “There were men with bows. Up there. I don’t know how.” He jabbed with his chin toward the slope.

  Corban twisted to look where he was pointing. In the late light the far slope looked sheer as a cliff. Thick brush shrouded the lower half; knee-high wiry trees grew from the rubble of collapsed rock at its foot.

  He said, “I’ll go there.” He nodded in the other direction, up at the rock bulging above the burnt tree and their camp. “You should get there now.”

  Tisconum grunted at him, his hands on his hips. “Not yet. He’s not that close yet.” He waved at the smoke in the valley. “See how far.”

  “He’s not there,” Corban said, clipped. “He’s anywhere but there. Likely right now he’s waiting down in that valley to the east, to pick off any of us who try to run from his smoke.” Ofra twitched, his eyes white. Corban went on, speaking to Tisconum. “Go up on the rock. Take everybody else up there with you.” He turned to Ofra. “You come with me.”

  Ofra’s jaws moved, as if he were chewing. He said, “Where?”

  “We’re going to find a way up onto that slope.”

  “It’s getting dark. We can do it in the morning. Smell the meat. I’m hungry.” Ofra’s head bobbed, his hands rising, pleading. “He won’t come at night, will he?”

  Corban said, “Go get some of the meat and some water and come after me. Hurry up.” He walked toward the opposite slope, looking for a way to scale it.

  As he crossed the saddle of the pass, he noticed the air around him turning pale and pink, like blood in water. He stopped and looked around.
The sun was setting, flowing its long red light across the whole sky, soft ribbons of color that brightened before his eyes to a fierce orange, streaked with glistening gold, as if some baleful fire burned in the west, swelling unstoppably toward him. A shiver went through him, in spite of the heat.

  The red light faded. He stood at the foot of the rocky slope, looking up, and saw no path. The twilight was creeping up out of the valley, a wind rising with it, warm and moist. He worked his way through the thick thorny brush along the foot of the slope, watching for any seam, any handhold he could use to climb. Through some wispy branches he saw a tilted ledge of rock over his head, and scrambled up over loose shale and brambles toward it, groping with his toes for footholds.

  Ofra came grunting and moaning along after him, a hide sack slung over his shoulder. Corban squirmed up onto the ledge and stood, and worked his way along the sharply tilted rock. The ledge rose steadily higher, angling back across the face of the hill; when he looked down over his shoulder he saw only the thick tops of the trees between him and the camp. Brushy stems and grass sprouted from the slope beside him. Ofra still followed in spite of his grumbling.

  The ledge narrowed until he could slide only the edges of his feet along it, leaning against the slope to stay on. Then through the soles of his shoes he felt the narrow rim of stone vanish entirely. Ahead, twenty feet away in the twilight, he could see a thick green patch of brush that seemed level, but between him and it was only a stretch of open slope so sheer nothing grew on it but a single wiry little shrub.

  He looked up; the slope overhead bent out slightly over him, impossible. With one foot he groped forward along the ledge, feeling for the seam of it, a continuing thread. Peering through the gathering dark he thought he could see where it went on, like a stripe across the slope. He took a deep breath and went straight out along it, scrabbled and shambled along the steep pathless slope, grabbing with the edges of his feet, his toes, his hands, clawing at the brittle slippery stony earth. Sliding down, he lunged sideways, throwing his body onward, got hold of a thorny bramble with an outstretched arm, and heaved himself into the green clog.