by neetha Napew
“Why would he have left us?” Grek asked, unable to comprehend the motives of one whom he had expected to come to him that morning to ask for Mahnie.
“Always that one Karana has funny ideas in his head,” said Zinkh. “But he took the lucky hat of this one man. All right will he be.”
Torka was not so sure; before he had led the others off, Lonit had drawn him aside. Nearly beside herself with worry, she had confided: “I fear that it must have been something I said to him about his Seeing gift, about facing his dreams. We all know that he dreams of Navahk following
us, dreams so troubling that he will not speak of them except to say that we must go on. Can it be that he has gone to find Navahk, to stop him, to—“
“Kill him.” He had finished her sentence, as he finished it again now, in silence, walking ahead of the others, following the dog. His left hand tightened about the hafts of his spears. His right sought the bludgeon of fossilized whalebone at his side. The weight of the weapon was comforting. How many times had the bludgeon saved his life? Memories surged through him of that vast, bewildering, salt-smelling land across which he had come with Umak and Lonit, while a frightened little boy named Karana had watched them from a cave. That cave was high on a mountain that had groaned and shifted.
Torka stopped dead.
That mountain’s ice pack had fallen. It had broken loose and come crashing down, taking half of the mountaintop with it, burying the entire eastern flank of the peak, including the cave and those who had taken it from Torka for their own. Now his eyes swept the mountains of ice that rose in high, jumbled disarray on either side of him.
“What is it, Torka?” pressed Grek, frowning. “You look as though you have seen a spirit.” “I have,” replied Torka. “A spirit of the past ... a spirit of warning .. . we must walk quietly and find Karana as quickly as we can. We must not linger here.”
They hurried on through the extremely narrow land that had troubled them days before. Less than a mile wide, the tundra was frozen through, from the uppermost edge of the permafrost to the top of its matted, tenuously rooted skin of mosses and lichens. With the mountains murmuring around them, they lost the trail and stood together as Aar circled intently, tail up and curled over his flank, nose to the ground, sniffing.
Not one of them saw the spear that struck Zinkh until he pitched forward, its shaft protruding through his neck and its head buried in the permafrost with most of his larynx. His spine severed, suffocating on his own blood, the sounds he made were those that no man who called him friend wanted to hear, and although Grek and Torka wanted to run to his side, both men knew that it was too late to help him. Instinct propelled them back and away from the dying man. Torka grabbed the ferociously barking Aar by the scruff of his neck and dragged him into the protecting walls of the nearest icefall, where neither dog nor men would be vulnerable to attack from above.
Torka cursed himself. He should have expected this. He had come armed and ready to stand against predators such as bears and lions, but he had been so certain that Navahk and his followers were nowhere near, that he had allowed himself to be lulled into carelessness.
Yet as he stood beside Grek within one of many deep, narrow, vertically aligned fissures in the icefall, holding Aar in check beneath an overhanging cornice of blue ice, Torka looked back across the narrows to where Navahk stood high above them atop the opposite icefall and knew that he was looking at an animal.
His heart went cold as the magic man threw back his head and howled. Silhouetted against the towering glacial massifs that soared behind him, Navahk’s high shriek of defiance was more like the cry of a wild and vicious animal than a man. It went out through the glacial canyons, and as it echoed across the miles, he delighted in its sound. He howled again, louder, more defiantly, hunkering down, then leaping high as he began to dance. The raw, savage power of the beast was in him. Beneath the dangling left arm of the dead wanawut, his own left arm hung useless at his side as he whirled and whooped and, with his good right arm, shook his staff at the sky as his howls continued to echo like thunder reverberating in the surrounding ranges of ice.
“He is alone,” observed Grek in a whisper.
“And wounded,” added Torka in an even lower tone.
“And as mad as a north wind sweeping down upon the tundra from the top of the world. Look: He holds only his staff. No spears. Do you think he’s used them all?”
Aar strained to be free. Torka knelt, put a strong restraining arm around the dog’s chest, and stroked him reassuringly with the other, wishing he could convey the same sense of calm to himself that he was trying to give the dog. Dread was growing in him as he looked at Navahk and his lack of spears. Against what had he used the spears? Or whom?
“Karana!” Navahk hurled the name as he would a spear. It struck Torka to the heart. He could not breathe. The man had read his mind. The man had sensed his dread. The man had killed his son! Grek’s strong body blocked Torka’s forward movement.
“You search for one you will never find! Torka! Man Who Walks With Dogs! I have killed the one you seek, just as I have killed the dogs who once ran at your side! Just as I will kill your women and your children and all who are foolish enough to walk within your shadow! Come, Torka! Do not hide from Navahk! I have one spear left for you!” He threw down his staff, bent, and in one graceful, sweeping motion, turned, and retrieved a spear from where it lay behind him. “Come! Or are you afraid? You should be afraid! Now is the time of your death!”
“Hold, Torka! You cannot hope to win against him now. He holds the high ground. He will kill you if you do! You—“ Grek’s imperative warning stopped.
Deep within the permafrost the earth shook violently. Torka and Grek heard the icefall groan and crack around them as, from out of the mountains of ice, a roaring rose as though in answer to the howling of the man. Beneath Torka’s hand every hair on Aar’s back bristled as the dog went rigid.
Behind Navahk the mountains shook. One great tremor. And then, as Torka and Grek and Aar stared in horror, the icefall around Navahk shifted once more. Navahk was dropped to his knees, and a wordless cry of disbelief and despair escaped from his lips.
As they watched in macabre fascination, the magic man clung desperately to the wall of ice and struggled to his feet. He backed into a narrow vertical fissure and braced himself with rigid arms and legs. The moment had passed. All was quiet. The magic man relaxed and smiled.
“Torka! Now, Torka! I would kill you—“
With a crack that pained their ears, the icefall collapsed as the leading edges of the Mountains That Walk began to fall. They ran. They had no choice. The Corridor of Storms was collapsing behind them. Navahk was gone, buried in the rubble, still howling like the wanawut, still brandishing his spear toward the sky as he had disappeared into boiling ground snow and falling ice. They ran, Torka and Grek together, sobbing against terror and the agony of leaving Zinkh and Karana behind.
On and on they ran out of the narrow land, with hearts pounding, lungs near to bursting, and muscles burning with over exertion while the dog raced ahead of them. Behind them and on either side ice falls and cliff faces were tumbling, pouring across the tundra in clouds of white mist and falling glacial debris, forever closing off the western land.
At last the tundra widened ahead of them, opened into the bleak area of broad rolling hills and promontories of talus in which they had last encamped. But on either side of the low hills the Mountains That Walk were lost in spuming mists that were rising from uncountable avalanches. The sound of their tumultuous movement was nearly deafening, and as Torka raced forward, Cheanah had the band on their feet, pack frames on, and ready to move.
In spite of the pain in their limbs, Torka and Grek raced on beside their women, heads down, bent forward, gasping as Aar ran beside Mahnie’s booted limbs and panted.
“Karana?” The unformed question came from Lonit and Mahnie at once. Torka and Grek shook their heads, despair in their faces. Lonit and Mahnie
came to a stop and embraced, sobbing. Lonit closed her eyes tight and held Mahnie close, wanting to comfort her; but there was no comfort in such a loss. Lonit felt as though her heart had broken. Karana’s death would be a scar upon it forever.
Karana awoke to darkness and to sound, to a pounding headache and innumerable bruises. He lay on his side, a freezing little ball. He was so cold that he could not feel his fingers or toes. His hand drifted absently across his face and encountered a lump of ice that was on his nose. In the pitch blackness of the interior of the glacier, he sat up and rubbed his extremities until life came back to them.
Then he sat still, listening to the underground river rushing past him in the dark, while somewhere far above, the sound of distant roaring reached his ears. It occurred to him that he might be dead. But then, as his fingers and toes and nose began to ache with life, he knew that he was still among the living. He hurt too much to be dead. His fingers explored the large lump on his head. He thought of Zinkh’s hat, and memories returned in a rush.
Suddenly he was crying hot tears and choking sobs of anguish. He had not been able to kill Navahk. For a lifetime he had wished Navahk dead, and yet when he stood above him and-could have thrust a killing blow into him, he had hesitated. He had sought the eye of the man who had tried to kill him so many times, the eye of the man from whose loins had poured the gift of his life, and had seen his own face looking back at him.
Father. Within his heart there had been a longing to call out that name, to forget the past, to heal the wounds that lay open between them. But then Navahk had thrown his spear, and Karana had loosed his.
Now, rubbing the lump on his head, he knew Zinkh’s ridiculous hat had absorbed the brunt of his fall and probably saved his life, but it had fallen off after his initial impact, and it was gone now, into the dark womb of the world.
He drew a deep breath, held it, drew nourishment from it. He looked around and realized that never in his life had he seen such blackness. Straining in vain to see made his eyes throb. He closed them tight.
Now, within the cold and dark, he listened to the sound of water rushing away to his left. A river, shallow from the sound of it, but very fast. Where was it going in such a hurry? To the light?
He gasped again, short of breath, suffocating in the confining darkness. He rose too quickly. His head came up hard against a low ceiling of icicles that punctured his scalp as they shattered. They made light, crackling sounds as they rained down around him. He barely heard them as, stunned, dizzied, and disoriented, he staggered forward, tripped over he knew not what, and went sprawling forward into the river.
He screamed as he went down with a great splash and was swept away, away, through the blackness, choking, gasping, swimming even though he did not know how to swim, fighting every inch of the way, calling upon the spirits of Creation, upon the powers of his totem, Life Giver, to be with him, to hold him up, to strengthen and carry him away to life—to life—not to a lonely death in darkness beneath the ice where his spirit would be trapped forever, never to be reborn into the world of men!
“Thunder Speaker! Hear me!” he screamed, but as he did, water filled his mouth and ears and took him down, down, filling his nostrils, searing his sinuses. He could not tell if his cry had rushed on ahead of him above the water or if it was going down with him, drowning with him in the terrible roaring dark. “No!”
Holding his breath, he fought the river with all of his strength, found buoyancy, and forced himself up for air. Gasping, spluttering, he floated on his back, gave himself to the current, and felt his body rushing on, on, on through the endless dark. He could see the ceiling of the underground riverbed, fanged with ice, black and blue, slipping past him so quickly that he could not completely focus, and Light If there was light, it must be coming from the world of men! The forces of Creation had heard his plea! He actually laughed, until, for the first time, he felt the cold seeping through his now-saturated clothes. He could fight the dark. He could fight the river. But he could not fight the cold. He tried, but it was an insidious and insistent predator. When at last the river came roaring out from beneath the glacier and deposited him at the edge of a broad, stony flood plain under the pungent shadows of a thick grove of spruce, he was barely conscious, so cold that he could not move, so cold that his heartbeat was a slow, unsteady murmuring in his chest, not strong enough to motivate his lungs to breathe. Unable to move more than an eyelid, he stared at Death as it approached, red, shaggy, a moving mountain of a mammoth. It would crush him and be a fitting death for one who had betrayed his totem, for one who had drunk the blood of a beast that he had named.
“Life Giver?”
He saw the scar on the animal’s shoulder, the fragmented stalk that was all that was left of the shafted end of the projectile point. Torka’s spearhead!
It was Life Giver!
He closed his eyes to the most impossible dream that he had ever dreamed and waited to die.
The mammoth came forward to stand over him. Its great body broke the back of the cold wind as Life Giver breathed the life-giving warmth of its breath through its trunk and onto the figure of a youth who had once stood before him and bravely named him Brother.
Exhausted, Navahk lay on his back in a rubble of snow and ice, his left leg still buried up to the hip in the debris of the icefall. For hours he had dug and worked himself up and out of what at first he had been certain would be the end of him. But there had been pockets of air trapped within the collapsed icefall, and the mountain snow that had fallen over this had fallen as powder, in oddly shaped blocks that might have crushed him had they fallen directly upon him. As it was, the icefall had sustained the weight of their impact, allowing him space to maneuver up through cracks and spaces, twisting his body in contortions that half dislocated his joints, squeezing himself through fissures that would have wedged in a mouse. But he was Navahk, and the power of his will was extraordinary. He had dug his way to life, scraping with his fingers until the nails were split and the tips worn raw to the bone. What was a little blood and pain compared to slow and certain suffocation? He had worked consistently, losing all track of time, and now, at last, he lay exhausted and too weak to try to remove the last blocks of ice from his leg.
Later. He would do it later. There was plenty of time. Now he must rest, sleep. He succeeded for a few moments, but the wound in his shoulder was aching. He had forgotten all about it, his last gift from his son.
Karana. He sneered at the thought of the name, then smiled and stared at the sweet, living sky of night. It was red with bold, auroral rivers of light. How beautiful they were to him now, when he knew how close he had come to never seeing them again. His smile became a leer of satisfaction. Karana would never see them again; he had seen to that. At last! Karana was dead, and he had killed him! And soon, when he had freed his leg and recovered from his ordeal, he would follow Torka and Lonit, and he would kill them, too, and their children. Yes. First the children.
The child saw him and hurried forward. For hours she, too, had been digging herself from potential death within the suffocating masses of snow. She was glad she had paused to feed off the female that Mother Killer had left behind to be meat for her. The meat had given her the strength to free herself, and the man stone had allowed her work to go quickly. Now she held it, curled in her fist, close to her breast. She had not slept but had hurried on the moment she had freed herself. Her thoughts were focused entirely upon the beast as she mewed and cried softly to herself. If he were dead, she would be alone.
Alone. The thought was more terrifying than the premise of her own death, more terrifying than the world around her that had suddenly shaken itself, then had collapsed in roaring, tumultuous fury. But there was Mother Killer, lying in the snow. Her heart beat faster at the sight of him. He would hold her. He would stroke her. He would take away her fear. He did not move as she came to kneel in the snow beside him. He was so still. So very, very still. Beneath her sloping, bony brow, her prominent lids narrow
ed over her gray eyes. Fear and perplexity moved in the grayness. Why did he lie motionless like that in the snow? Men did not sleep buried in the snow. Men slept under the skins of the animals they killed.
Troubling memories rose within her. Painful memories. She whimpered softly, remembering her mother ... so still so very, very still, and then not breathing, not moving, not living! She leaned over Mother Killer, sniffed his face, and hunkered back, relieved and yet still troubled. He was alive! He was breathing, but so shallowly that she feared that any moment he would stop, and then he would never move again. He would never come to her to speak to her, to stroke her, to take away her loneliness.
She frowned, noticing for the first time that there was blood in the snow just above his shoulder. She leaned close again, sniffed it, and drew back. It was his blood. The long, powerful, hairy-backed fingers of her right hand flexed about the man stone while her other hand reached to flick the bloody snow away from him. She did not have to lean close to see that, beneath the snow, there was a wound below his shoulder. She had seen its kind before, in her mother’s breast. A wound made by a man stone.
Thoughtfully she uncurled her fist and appraised the lanceolate stone. Stones took away the breath from beasts and from mothers. Perhaps they could give back what they took. It had not been so with her mother, but her mother’s wound had been much worse than that of Mother Killer. His was only a little wound. If she used her stone deftly and surely, perhaps she could put the strong breath of a healthy beast back into his body, and he would rise and stroke her andNavahk screamed and awoke in horror to see the child straddling him, stabbing him again and again, driving a dagger into his wound at an oblique angle that took it deep into his chest cavity and toward his heart. She was looking at him out of her guileless eyes, making cooing sounds to him, softly and gently, as though loving him at the very moment’ that she was killing him. He felt his heart leap madly as it was pierced, and he screamed again and tried to pull away, but his leg was held fast and he could not move as an amazing, awesome lightness filled him. He fell back, staring, witnessing his own death reflected in the eyes of the beast.
