by neetha Napew
As always, Aliga’s face flushed at this invitation, the merest suggestion of color seeping between the black swirls that covered her face. “This woman is not a fish! This woman does not strip naked to flop and splash in water! What would others say?”
Lonit laughed. “But there are no others in this world that we have made our own!” Even now she thrilled to think of their golden days in this valley, where Torka had taught her to use a spear, to hunt beside him, as finely honed to the dangers and excitement of the hunt as any man.
“One day others may come,” snapped Aliga. “One day we may choose to walk out of this far land where there are no people! What will others say then, if Lonit forgets herself and takes up a spear as though she were a man or encourages her children to peel off their clothing and leap into water to splash like fish in a net?”
“Too much does Aliga speak of leaving this valley! Does she long for the Ghost Band? Does she yearn for such bands as Galeena’s people, who smelled like fresh dung? Or does she miss the peaceful life within Supnah’s band, when each night the headman and the magic man thought of new ways of shaming Torka!”
Aliga’s head went up. Her eyes narrowed, and her mouth turned down. “When this woman’s baby comes, it would be good to have wise women and a magic man beside her to help her bear it.”
Now Lonit’s head went up. Her mouth narrowed and turned down. “Lonit will help Aliga, as Aliga has helped Lonit. We have learned much woman wisdom. We need no others. Because we have chosen to walk with Torka, we are the wisest women of all!”
“But we have no magic man,” lamented Aliga piteously.
“Then, indeed, we are wise!” retorted Lonit, turning her back upon the tattooed woman and heading for the pools with her child.
Suddenly, sharply, the world moved. It flexed like the skin of a living beast, knocking Torka, Karana, and the dog off their feet while the great, short-faced bear went running by them, disappearing into the sea of grass, not to be seen again, as the earth rolled like the surface of a turbulent lake.
And then the roaring came—a terrible, all-pervasive growl that rose from deep within the earth, far below the fragile skin of the permafrost that now buckled and cracked. One crevice yawned wide directly below the hunters, and they fell into it, fighting desperately for footing in a world that allowed them none, reaching and grasping for holds that were not there. Paroxysms of heaving earth pressed in against them until they were certain they were being buried alive.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake was over. Torka and Karana scrambled out of the fissure and, spitting earth from their mouths, reached down to help the frantic dog. They stood amid the broken grassland, too stunned to retrieve their spears or the carcasses of the antelope that still lay within the fissure; too shattered by the enormity of their experience to realize how fortunate they were not to have been pierced by their own weapons when they had dropped into the heaving earth.
Dust gauzed the air. On the western horizon the smoke that issued from the bare, scabrous mountain was a boiling cloud of steam and ash that filled the sky as it rained fiery fragments of its inner core on the world.
“We must go!” Torka commanded, his mind filled with images of a ruined camp and of his women and children consumed by the earth that had nearly swallowed him and the boy.
Lonit screamed.
The pool dropped. The water rose, covering her, then fell away, rolling out of the pool entirely, while just upstream, in a broad, shallow pond she had created by raising a semicircular dam that captured many fat, lazy fish, the fish were leaping and splashing madly. The earth shook as though it would never stop. Summer Moon clasped her little arms about her mother’s neck and matched Lonit scream for scream. Lonit saw Aliga fall as the fish in the weir pond were washed onto dry land and the pit huts and the drying frames collapsed and the sods that lined the fire pit tumbled into disarray.
Lonit found her footing, and with Summer Moon gripped under one arm, leaped from the now-empty pool. The earth threw her down. She rose again, holding the sobbing child as, sobbing herself, she forced her way across the rolling earth, staggering to where her baby and lana were trapped within the collapsed pit hut. The framework was heavy enough to stun a woman or crush a child. They had built it of caribou antlers from recent kills and of mammoth ribs and tusks that they had taken from the long-dead carcass of a woolly mammoth they had discovered in the willow grove behind the pools. Lonit’s heart was in her throat as she fell upon her knees before the rubble of hide and horn and bone, calling to lana, crying her baby’s name.
When Aliga joined her, relief flared in her heart that the tattooed woman was all right. The convulsive movements of the earth had lessened. She put Summer Moon down and told her that she must be a big girl and help to save her little sister. The child gulped down her tears.
Together they ripped away the hides and hefted the massive bones until, at last, lana’s face stared up at them, blinking, and they saw that little Demmi lay curled in the protective fold of lana’s arms, still gurgling happily, as though the rolling of the earth and the collapsing of the hut were a new game devised for her pleasure. With a cry of relief, Lonit lifted her infant, and as a dazed but unhurt lana was helped to her feet by Aliga and Summer Moon, Lonit wept with joy.
Then her eyes swept over the ruins of the encampment, and her happiness faded. Everything had been leveled. With the huts and frames down and the small, ordered world of their encampment a shambles, a terrible sense of vulnerability fell upon Lonit. Where was Torka?
Roarings now reached her from the distant mountains.
“Look! Mountains come down!” exclaimed Summer Moon, clutching Lonit’s bare limb and pressing close.
Lonit’s eyes widened. The white plumes of enormous avalanches tumbled from the heights. Far to the west a great, gray cloud was filling the sky like smoke rising from an impossibly huge fire. The smoke was dark as though with grease, and the wind that now blew into the valley from out of that cloud was foul and reminiscent of the sulfurous mists that occasionally lay upon the pools.
A black fly found the bare skin of her back and bit deep. She hardly felt it as she held her little one, tensing as the world once again rolled beneath her feet. It was not enough to throw her off balance, but her mind expanded with fear.
Aliga stepped cautiously across the jumble of fallen drying frames, meat, and skins. She was holding her belly again, as though afraid that her unborn child would fall out. Her eyes were dilated, and her tattooed lips were pinched against her filed, tattooed teeth. She paused beside Lonit, took off her doeskin apron, and wrapped it around little Summer Moon. “Lonit had best cover herself. Her skin is as black with biting flies as this woman’s is with tattooing.”
Lonit saw that Aliga was not exaggerating. She handed Demmi to lana and hurried to retrieve her garments.
“Will Torka come back?” lana asked.
Lonit was wiggling into her under tunic when lana’s question caused her to pause, startled. lana had not spoken to anyone except the children since she had been rescued from the Ghost Band. Lonit ran to embrace her. “Of course he will come back!” Any other answer was unthinkable. And yet her mind swam out across vistas of broken, earthquake-devastated land upon which she visualized her man and Karana both lying dead. No! She would not let herself even think it!
Torka barely said a word when he returned to camp with Karana and Aar. His face spoke -his relief when he saw the children and Lonit safe. She ran to him, declaring that she and the others were well. He held her as though he would never let her go, but his features tightened when she declared that all would soon be made right again.
“It is so!” Karana agreed, fending off the welcome of the pups, Sister Dog, and other members of Aar’s ever-growing canine clan. Over half of the once-wild dog’s progeny had run off to join the wild dogs in the valley’s distant hills, but Aar and his mate and the rest of their strong, eager-to-learn pups stayed. The unnatural alliance between the
dogs and the people of this band was strong; its roots lay deep in the bond that Aar had forged with Umak, spirit master and Torka’s grandfather,
Torka gave no sign of having heard Karana. The man’s eyes had taken on a sudden guarded look as he looked at Aliga, sitting cross-legged and mumbling to herself on bed skins that Lonit had dragged out of the ruins of the main pit hut. Rocking herself and her unborn child, Aliga still supported the weight of her belly within her folded arms. As Torka walked toward her, she did not even look up at him.
“It is well with you?” Torka knelt before her, placing a gently questing palm across her abdomen. It was not like Aliga to sit when others were on their feet. She was usually up before the dogs in the morning and the last to close her eyes at night.
“It is well.” She shivered and looked up at Torka reproachfully. “As well as it can be for any woman with child in a land that shakes! Lonit has brought to this woman a horn of brewed willow, and she has cracked a marrow joint for me to eat—as though these things would make me forget what has just happened! Lonit is so determined to live forever in this land, she is willing to overlook everything.”
Lonit came to stand beside Torka. She had put the children into lana’s doting care in order to bring Aliga’s favorite robe to her, which she had made when they had first come to the valley. Lonit had worked long hours to sew the many strips of fur, which were taken from the prime skins of animals that she had stalked and killed herself, for the express purpose of making a gift for Aliga that would be a gesture of sisterhood. Aliga loved it so much that she wore it even on days when it was really too warm to wear such a garment; but now, even though the late afternoon was still warm, she was trembling against an inner cold. Draping the robe around her shoulders, Lonit stepped back, not understanding why Aliga had taken such a hostile tone.
“But this land has been good to us,” Lonit told her. “We have known no hunger. This valley has sheltered us against storms. We have filled it with songs of praise and have shared it with all the creatures that warm themselves beside its hot springs in the time of the long dark. We have seen Life Giver lead his children and his females close to our encampment, and we have seen him walk away, leaving Torka and his people to live without harm from him and his kind. How can Aliga have forgotten these things?”
“Aliga has not forgotten,” the woman responded thoughtfully. “Torka has led his people well, and this has been a good land. But now this woman is troubled. We are wanderers . seekers .. . who should join other bands to make great hunts together. Navahk told us before the great feast fire that we must prey upon the weak and the unwary among the game animals, so that always they will be strong and able to flee before the hunters who, in turn, are made strong by the chase! Aliga says that Mother Below has grown angry with Torka’s band! She has shaken the ground to tell us that it is not good to stay in one place. Torka’s people must go back into the country from which we have come. If we do not, Mother Below will shake the world and swallow Torka’s people, and we will be spirits moaning forever within the earth and—“
“Say no more.” Torka’s words were gently spoken as his hand moved from Aliga’s belly to her mouth, closing her lips. “Be cautious, Aliga. Remember that among this man’s people, to speak of a thing is, sometimes, to make it happen.”
Karana was angry. “Be wary, woman! Do not let your female fears control your tongue!”
“Female fears? Watch your own tongue, boy! The next time you are pregnant in a land that shakes, with no wise women or magic men around to help you, then you may talk of female fears’!” She disliked Karana these days. He was beginning to look too much like his father’s brother, and Navahk walked her dreams in ways that Torka would not have approved. Somehow, she had the feeling that Karana knew this. His wide black eyes saw too much for a boy, private things that were not visible to anyone else—sometimes not even to her until he made her aware of them. She knew that he was angry enough to speak his inner thoughts, and fearing them, she attempted to silence him with her glare.
Karana would not be intimidated. For all of his pretentious to maturity, Karana was a youth; wisdom was as alien to him as the apprehensions of the pregnant woman who sat before him. “Aliga fears giving birth in a band with no wise women or magic men to attend her. It has been on her mind since she first knew that she was with child. She does not care about Torka or his people. Aliga cares only for herself!”
“Karana!” Torka exploded. Although the youth had displayed remarkable intuition on a hunt, had seen the yellow sickness in old Hetchem, and had warned of her death, Karana had failed to note the unnatural dilation of Aliga’s eyes. Torka had learned enough about healing to know that something was wrong when eyes looked like that in the light of day. How deeply wrong, only time could say. He felt sick with worry, remembering how she had wept and laughed with incredulous delight when she had found herself to be pregnant. Then, in the days that followed, her mood wilted and she had grown ill.
He could not blame her for wanting to go back. “Would Aliga truly have Torka lead her back into the land of other people, where women are not allowed to hunt beside their men, where one band preys upon another, where babies are eaten in the winter dark or thrown away at the word of a headman? Does Aliga believe that the birth of her baby would be less painful or dangerous, or that her child would be better off among strangers in a starving land than here, among those who love her?”
Aliga chewed her lower lip petulantly. “Torka has met bad people. But not all bands are so. Supnah’s band was not so bad. There were wise women among them, and a magic man.”
Karana’s mouth curled into a sneer. “All of the women of that band who were old enough to be truly wise were sent walking the wind long ago. Supnah’s band is a bad band. And Navahk is no magic man at all!”
“He is!” she retorted, as though flying to the defense of a maligned loved one.
Torka did not miss the underlying implications of her reaction. He felt no jealousy, only a sad, oblique pity. He had come to like the tattooed woman. He was sorry that she could not have had the man of her choice. “Navahk is far away, and this baby is very near. It sleeps now, as Aliga should sleep,” he told her as he placed his open palm across her distended belly. If his unborn child stirred beneath his hand, he could not feel it.
The earth trembled. On the western horizon the Mountain That Smokes sent up an enormous plume. Even from this great distance Torka saw the glow of falling debris that must have been the size of boulders. It was a sight that allowed no argument. “The land of Navahk and Supnah’s people and of the Great Gathering lies there, far to the west, beyond the Mountain That Smokes, beyond the cloud that rains fire. We cannot go back, Aliga. Neither Mother Below nor Father Above will let us.”
For three days the distant mountain smoked, but the earth did not shake again. Soon the pit huts, drying frames, and fire circle were reassembled. The sky cleared and the encampment looked the same except for a thin, gray ash that continued to fall from the sky, coating everything. Torka and his small band remained on edge. Only the little ones slept well through the ever-shortening nights.
The days passed, and the weeks. Now there was no night, and after the first summer rain, the dust disappeared and the Mountain That Smokes became dormant. Its summit was no longer conical but concave, rather. like a grinding tooth with a great cavity in one side.
Torka stood with Karana at the edge of the rebuilt encampment. Although the hot-springs pools had filled again with warm, steaming water, no fish swam downstream to become trapped in Lonit’s rebuilt weir, and it seemed to Torka that the waters smelled more consistently sulfurous than before, so he could not bring himself to bathe in them. Lonit displayed none of his reticence. Now she bathed with lana and the children, and it did his heart good to hear laughter echoing across the land.
Aliga sat glumly in the sun. Torka had not heard her laugh or say a positive word since he had told her that she must bear their child here. Torka wished that the b
aby would be born. Its time was near, and it would be good to see Aliga smile again, even if her teeth were filed and black.
A soft, cooling wind blew across the valley from the distant, snowcapped ranges. It was gentled by the encircling hills, yet still strong enough to keep the biting flies at bay. Not for the first time Torka noted that the wind was untainted by the stink of smoke from the far mountain; it had been many days since ash had fallen from the sky.
“The wind will be strong on the sea of grass,” said Karana. “It will be a good day to hunt. In his dreams this boy has heard the great mammoth walking in the hills to the east. And where Life Giver walks, the spirits of the game are strong with favor for Torka’s people!”
With Aar, Sister Dog, and three of the older pups at their sides, they hefted their spears and loped through the narrow arm of land that bent out of the valley and through the encircling hills, to open at last onto the wide, windswept sea of grass.
Torka had learned long before that Karana’s visions of where the game would be were usually correct; as a result, he rarely challenged them. When they skirted the pit traps and snares that lay at the entrance to the valley, they headed east, into the wind.
The sound of battling horses drew them on, and although they ran, it was with the measured pace of experienced hunters alert to danger. The grasses grew tall, as golden and brittle as the manes of young lions. Torka drew his razor edged bludgeon of fossilized whalebone from its sheath of tanned leather at his side. He scythed the grasses aside with it; the blade cut through them as easily as it cut through warm fat. It was a unique weapon, one that he had brought with him from a wide, rolling land that smelled strongly of salt. It, too, had been rich grassland, yet troubling somehow, rousing nightmares of great, roaring black waters that swept across the world, drowning all that lay before them. They had found the carcass of the great fish; but it was stone—as were the shells Lonit had found—and it was from one of the whale’s ribs that Torka’s bludgeon was made.
