by neetha Napew
Karana ran straight into Mahnie. Looking back over his shoulder, he did not see the girl plodding toward the lake, foundering now and then where the snow was forming drifts on the lee side of the tussocks. He went down on top of her, and neither knew which was the more startled as they looked into one another’s eyes.
It was Aar’s yip that broke the silence. Karana knelt back, grimacing against the excruciating pain of his bruises, then forgetting all about them as he saw Brother Dog lying on the sledge.
“He is all that is left of your pack of dog brothers, I am afraid,” said Mahnie, sitting up, watching as Karana embraced the dog, earnestly checking the extent of its injuries as the animal whimpered happily and licked his face and hands with joyous recognition. “He will be better now, being with you. He was the only one not speared by Het.”
“You dragged him by yourself? All the long way from the camp? A little girl like you?”
“If I had not taken him from the camp, someone was sure to kill him once they saw that he was still alive. And I am not so little. I am a woman.”
She did not look like a woman as she sat there in the wind and falling snow, amid the spilled contents of her pack, looking much fatter than he remembered her, as though she had dressed herself in every garment that she owned.
“I knew you would be alive, Karana. I was sure of it. It was Grek who left you his spear and knife. And I have brought food and boots and warm clothes and—“
That explained her extraordinary plumpness! She was wearing her entire wardrobe, and some of her father’s too! He recognized Grek’s winter parka and his boots where they lay upon the snow beside her. Then his mind went blank.
“Spear? Knife?” He felt suddenly sick. What was he doing here in the snow with Mahnie and Aar when Torka lay back along the shore? Had he truly seen the wanawut, or had he been dreaming? He had to be certain.
She saw the expression on his battered face and was struck with foreboding. “Where is Torka?” Her voice was tremulous. “Does he live?
“
“I don’t know!” His reply was a cry ripped from his heart. “Stay here with the dog. Keep a weapon handy. And do not go near the lake or the grasses until I call.”
With a skinning knife hastily given to him by a wide-eyed Mahnie, he ignored his injuries to race through wind and snow, not slowing his steps until he entered the grasses and areas of shrub along the shore. The way was clear to him; led by Lorak, the men of the Great Gathering had flattened a broad pathway to where he and Torka had been beaten and left to die.
And there, before the motionless body of Torka, Karana collapsed onto his knees. The bold, brave hunter who had named him son lay with his back to him. He was so still. There was no sign of breath in him. He saw the knife that Grek had left. Mahnie must have been mistaken about his leaving a spear. Grek .. . kind, steady, trustworthy Grek. If only he had been named headman instead of Navahk, Torka would be alive and Suddenly Karana knew that Mahnie had not been mistaken about the spear, because the point of it was leveled at his throat as, in one whirling motion, Torka had rolled away and around and up on one knee, holding the weapon out and ready. His face was horribly swollen and bloodied, and he was snarling until he saw who it was who had come up behind him. Lowering the spear, he shrugged apologetically and winced with pain.
“I thought you might be Navahk, coming out to make sure his work had been done properly by Lorak and the others.”
Karana nearly collapsed with relief. “I thought you were dead. I thought the wanawut had killed you.”
“The wanawut? We’ve faced worse terrors than that, you and I.”
“It was here, in the grasses of the lakeshore, in the snow and the wind. I saw it.”
Torka nodded. “And in the night, in the light of blazing torches, I saw it too—in the eyes of Navahk.”
“My father ...” Karana bowed his head and spoke the acknowledgment with infinite despair.
“No, my son, the night and the fire and the distances we have walked together have made us one—two men, one heart, one spirit. Navahk has neither. He is father of no one but himself.”
The youth did not understand and said so.
Torka climbed slowly to his feet now, leaning on the spear as though it were a crutch, one hand open against his torso, gentling the pain of two cracked ribs. He looked at Karana’s bleeding, swollen face. “You look terrible.”
“So do you.
“We are alive.”
Karana’s expression contorted with loathing. “Navahk will not be able to say the same for long.
“It would not be a good thing for a son to kill his natural father, Karana.”
“You have said it, not I. Karana is son of Torka. And together, for the sake of Lonit, lana, and the children, we will make the magic man pay with his life for what he has done.”
“That will not be necessary!” Grek said with an authority that surprised them.
Torka and Karana stared as the others came through the grasses. They had run all the way, abandoning their packs when Mahnie told them of how Karana had run off in search of Torka.
“Lonit, lana, and the children are here!” It was lana who spoke, breathless from her run. Demmi peeked over her shoulder from out of her furry-hooded back sling.
Torka stared at her, disbelieving and delighted. The woman positively glowed with pride in her newfound tongue and assertiveness.
Wallah held Summer Moon, who cried out her father’s name and reached out to him with little mittened hands, but it was Lonit who ran to Torka. They stood together in each other’s arms for a long time, and no one spoke. Wallah sniffled sentimental tears as Torka touched his beloved’s bruised face, and she touched his.
“Always and forever?” he whispered.
“Always and forever!” she affirmed.
The backs of his fingers lingered over her swollen, darkening eye.
“Navahk has done this to you?”
She saw the murderous hatred in his eyes and felt fear for him and for them all. “It does not matter. It is the past. Navahk is there, behind us. Lonit is here, with Torka. Surely you are not thinking of going back?”
He looked back across the snow-driven land, squinting against the wind, his mouth set, his eyes hard.
“You are one man, Torka. Navahk is the manipulator of many,” reminded lana. “And whenever this woman remembers Navahk, she will thank him for forcing this woman to find her voice and clear her eyes to look upon the world as it is without fear.”
Grek grunted to himself and shook his head. “We must always fear the world, woman. But not so much that it makes us cower before those fears. And so this man says now to Torka that he will not take his women back into a camp where Navahk dwells. That man is worse than the beast in whose skin he walks, and we have no need of such as those who follow him. We are a band as we stand. Look: I see three hunters here:
Grek, Karana, and Torka. Even though your woman Aliga was too ill to travel and refused even when this man offered to put her on a sledge and carry her, we nevertheless have the hands and backs of three strong women to help carry loads and butcher meat and—“
“Four women,” injected Mahnie shyly.
“I knew it!” Wallah moved to her daughter and hugged her hard.
“Sondahr’s powers were great! My hopes were answered through her magic! Poor woman. To die such a death, to suffer so after doing only good for others all of her days!”
Mahnie saw the look of grief that swept over Karana’s face. Her joy in the moment was gone.
“Sondahr .. . dead? How?”
Wallah’s sadness and regret showed in her expression. “Naiapi said that it was Navahk’s enchantment on her for daring to challenge him. But Sondahr’s symptoms were those of a poisoning, and I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that Naiapi was responsible. She took such time preparing the meat that she brought to the magic woman and wouldn’t let me help with it or see what she was doing.”
Lonit was cold despite the warmt
h of her traveling clothes. Sondahr, I will remember you always. She looked from Karana’s tortured face to Torka’s embittered one. He will go back. He will seek vengeance against Navahk. And he will die. Unless I stop him now. “Sondahr foresaw her own death,” she told him, and in the telling, spoke firmly and loudly so that all might know her heart. “She foresaw what would happen on the night of feast fire and told this woman that when it happened, Lonit must go forward with her people, beneath a new sky and a new sun. We cannot go back, Torka. And why should we? Grek is right:
Let those who choose to walk with Spirit Killer walk with him. When this storm is over, we must go forward into the face of the rising sun, with Torka as our headman and Grek his strong and steady right arm. Karana will be our spirit master, for like Sondahr, the gift of Seeing is his. His warnings have all come to pass. The world to the west is not a world for us.”
Torka was amazed by her bold assurance. It was as though Sondahr had spoken through her mouth. Her face was as battered as his and Karana’s, but as he looked at her now, he knew that she would never seem more beautiful to him. He actually smiled as he nodded his agreement, looking northwestward, back toward the encampment of the Great Gathering, into the wind and the still-rising storm.
“Woman of Torka,” he said, “you speak with the wisdom of Sondahr. But we will not linger in this land until the storm is over. We are all weary, but there is no safe resting place for us in the country of the mammoth eaters. We will walk eastward now, into the storm. It will cover our tracks as we return to the forbidden country, back to the Corridor of Storms, where the Valley of Songs awaits us. And Torka will say this once to Karana before all, so that his son will know that Torka is a man who knows how to admit when he has been wrong. This has been a bad camp for us, and Karana has been right about the magic man. He is bad. Perhaps someday someone will kill him. But it will not be one of us.”
Lonit embraced him. But, to Torka’s surprise, Karana was not pleased by his long-owed admission. A black, unforgiving hatred had congealed within the youth’s eyes. “Navahk is not a man,” said Karana. “He is a spirit—a dark and crooked spirit—and not one of us will live in peace, here or in the far country, as long as he is left alive.”
The wind rose sharply and blew the words away, but not before they were heard by all. Torka felt the wind of warning rise within him. Once again Karana had broken the ancient taboo by speaking Navahk’s name and, in his hatred, thereby imputing terrifying powers to it.
Navahk, magic man, spirit killer, and now, thanks to Karana, a crooked spirit—half flesh, half phantom, a creature more malevolent than the man himself, more powerful and dangerous than the wanawut, more savage and less forgiving than the most brutal storm—would follow. Only Father Above and Mother Below could stop him now.
“Lie still, Spirit Killer. Lie still and it will soon be as well with you as Pomm can make it.”
The trembling voice of the fat woman brought Navahk to his senses. He sat upright, momentarily disoriented. Where was he? Where had the night gone? In the dull, vague luminescence of a full-blown snowstorm he heard a high, shrieking wind batter the exterior walls of a pit hut that was not his own. Another wind shrieked within his right ear, scratching like a captive animal trying to claw its way through bone and flesh. The entire right side of his face was an agony.
He stared at the feathered fat woman, wondering why she was looking at him with such revulsion and .. . pity? In all of his life no one had ever looked at him with pity! He was Navahk! His physical perfection was legendary. He could feel that his face was thick with caked blood, but if this fat old bag was a healer, she should be used to that. He would have frowned, but it hurt too much; and then, suddenly, he realized that he was in Torka’s pit hut and looking at the woman out of only one eye—his left eye. The other was-He reached to touch it with questing fingers and sucked in a gasp of incredulity and horror. The socket was concave—a well of pain, of congealed blood and fluid, with one of the shells of Lonit’s bola still buried within the collapsed and ruined eyeball. He needed no one to tell him that the weapon had done its worst. He would be half-blind and half-deaf from this day on.
“Here .. . from her own hut in the camp of Zinkh, Pomm has brought a good drink that will make the pain less when the shell is withdrawn from the eye and—“
He backhanded the bladder flask from her with such power that she was knocked off balance and the container went flying, splattering dark, sweet liquor all over Aliga, who lay on her side upon her bed furs, her tattooed head propped on her bent arm.
“Where is the woman who has done this to me?” Navahk raged, on his feet now and ripping the offending shell from his face, the resulting pain nearly dropping him where he stood.
Pomm had landed on her side and was now huffing against the strain of her own weight, unable to speak as her palms pushed against the floor skin in a vain attempt at leverage. Thus it was Aliga who answered.
“lana has run away into the storm with Grek and Lonit and the children of Torka. But this woman has stayed. Even when her child comes forth, she will always stay at the side of the one who has healed her.”
He stood as still as though carved of stone; her obvious adoration of him was not appreciated. “Lonit has run away?”
“Many hours ago,” Pomm affirmed belligerently, not at all happy with the rough and undeserved treatment she had suffered at his hands. She was sitting upright now, rearranging her bedraggled feathers, still trying to catch her breath. The morning was not yet over, and already the day was growing bleaker by the moment; if events did not start righting themselves soon, the coming night would be as disconcertingly troublesome as the one before it. Karana was gone from her life. She had failed to heal Sondahr. Although she was glad about this—for now she was magic woman in Sondahr’s place-she had truly done her best for the magic woman, not out of compassion for Sondahr but in consideration for her own reputation.
“Navahk must forget Lonit,” Aliga urged softly, jarring the fat woman’s thoughts out of reverie.
Pomm’s little mouth twitched. She sat with her back to the loosely secured door skin, and a cold wind was seeping into the pit hut. She shivered as she looked from Aliga to Navahk. The tattooed woman was trying to ease Navahk’s mood. He stood like a spear poised in an invisible hand, and it would not take much to send him flying into rage again.
In the strangely diffused storm light, Aliga was still looking at him with adoration, seeing past his ruined eye and bloodied face to the man whom she had long dreamed of having at her side. “Lonit will never look upon another man but Torka. Everyone knows that. She will be loyal until she dies, even as Aliga will be to Navahk, the finest and handsomest man of all. I knew you would heal me. Time and again I told Torka that it would be so. And when this woman’s baby is born, she will name its spirit in honor of someone of Navahk’s line, someone whose life spirit now walks the wind, someone whom you have loved and would have at your side again—perhaps Supnah, if it is a boy.” She paused, shrinking back, sensing something within him that had heretofore eluded her-something sinister and threatening.
“Would another of Torka’s women dare to mock Navahk?” Through rage and pain and torment at his disfigurement, he saw Aliga as Torka’s woman—like lana, who had maimed him; like Lonit, who had spurned him. From where she sat petulantly upon the floor skins, Pomm saw the change in Navahk and instinctively scooted back when he looked at her, until her body was against the door skin. The wind that blew beyond the hut was cold, but somehow the confines of the shelter had grown much colder.
“Gone for hours, you say? And you lay here like a great, swollen tundral sod and sent no one after her? You let me lie unconscious in my own blood and pain while Lonit escaped me?”
Aliga was frightened. Suddenly Navahk’s transcendent beauty was bleeding from his face, transforming him. A bloody-eyed monster was glaring down at her, loathing and blaming her for letting Lonit escape. As though she could have stopped her!
&
nbsp; She stared at him, trying not to cower as she saw his hands working the blood-blackened thong of the bola that he had ripped from his eye. The sharp-tipped, shell-weighted end dangled from his hand, its lovely, elongated configurations hidden beneath dark gore and fragments of tissue.
“I did try to wake you, Navahk,” she told him, wondering for the first time if she had made the right choice by electing to stay. Grek had offered to carry her, and Lonit had implored her to come, warning her of Navahk. But she had not listened. She was so near to giving birth. So near. The child that she had so long despaired of ever bearing could not be risked—not when Navahk had sworn at the feast fire that it would be born as soon as the forces that impelled it to remain within its mother’s womb were banished from the encampment.
His words had struck her to her heart, but because the need to bear this child was greater than all other needs, more important than anything or anyone, she had rationalized his demands. Torka and Karana had behaved in an unprecedented manner, as had Lonit. They had brought their punishment upon their own heads. And she truly believed that Navahk’s magic had healed her, although in the ensuing hours the weakness had returned, along with the deep, nagging pain in the small of her back. But she was convinced that when he was himself again, he would work the magic again, she would be well, and her baby would be born. Yes! And surely Navahk’s anger would disappear when he understood why she had not sent anyone after Lonit and Grek.
“This woman did call out to others to bring help for you,” she assured him, wishing that the strained, bestial look would leave his face, that his hands would stop stressing the thong. “And so Pomm is here to heal you ... to ... to ... but surely Navahk must understand that not even a magic woman such as Pomm would dare to wake the great spirit killer! And Lonit is the sister of Aliga’s heart, and Torka was my man. If they must die, that is the will of the elders and Lorak and the forces of Creation. But Aliga thought that it would do no harm to allow my sister time to run away into the storm. What does the great Navahk care for a handful of women and children, an aging hunter, and two men who seem to make trouble everywhere they go? It was Lorak who drove them into the storm. He will die soon, then Navahk will become supreme elder of the Great Gathering! Torka, Lonit, Grek, lana, Wallah, Karana, and the children are nothing in the shadow of the great Navahk! So Aliga thought that it was best if Navahk rested and regained his strength for what is to come—and for the child that Aliga will offer to him as his own.”
