Shadows in the Cave

by Caleb Fox

“Assume nothing,” said Shonan in a grim tone.

  After an interminable time, Aku saw several men coming down the river trail.

  “Father!”

  At the front of the band came Salya, sashaying like an innocent. Kumu trod behind her with a half-sure step.

  “I’m sorry to be late, Father,” said Salya. Her sassy eyes said she wasn’t sorry.

  Shonan saw immediately that Kumu’s grin would have stretched across a river, and his crooked tooth made him look wild with glee.

  “Who fooled who?” Shonan said to the young sentry.

  “For the first time,” said Kumu.

  Salya giggled. The clown had tricked her formidable father.

  Shonan glared at her. She didn’t want to go to the sea coast. Kumu’s family wasn’t going, nor Fuyl’s, so she was losing both her suitors.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess you finally chose.”

  “I knew all along,” she said. The play in her eyes was very much her mother, which touched his heart, but her audacity was infuriating.

  “Shonan, Red Chief of the Tuscas”—Kumu’s word “Tusca” had a tease in it—“I ask permission to marry your daughter.”

  “How dare you—” Shonan began.

  “Who dares what?” That blast of sound was Kumu’s father Zinna, walking up. More accurately, staggering toward them and keeping himself upright with his war club. Shonan stiffened. Zinna reeked of fermented corn liquor. The Galayi people drank it at ceremonies. Maybe Zinna had saved some back. Or maybe Kumu had, to make sure his father was out of the way. Shonan seethed.

  “Now calm down, Red Chief,” blared Zinna. This burly, middle-aged man had been through a score of battles with the war leader. He was a whirlwind with that club, and Shonan counted on him. He’d earned the right to talk familiarly, but not to have trouble staying on his feet, and not to go into a giggling fit.

  When the fit subsided, Zinna roared on, “You wouldn’t want us to think you’re better’n us.”

  Shonan relaxed his face. Airs of superiority weren’t accepted among the Galayi.

  “It’s true, now, my boy has filled your daughter with his juice. He’s been wanting to for a long time. Just think how great that is—the first child born in your new village may be a full-blooded Galayi. And I think he’s got something to say.”

  Kumu repeated, “Shonan, Red Chief of the Tuscas”—no tease this time, but the formality of a serious man—“I ask permission to marry your daughter.”

  Shonan glared at them all. It ran straight against his plans. Zinna’s family wasn’t supposed to go to the Amaso village. Salya wasn’t supposed to go with a husband, a new member of Shonan’s family. Shonan wanted to present her to the village as marriageable. He had planned to give her to the son of the Amaso chief, a symbol of the joining of the two peoples. What better gesture?

  Besides, though he liked Kumu, who wanted a clown for a son-in-law?

  He looked his daughter in the eye. “No.”

  “I say yes.”

  “And I say no.”

  “How do you think you’ll find me? When you’re ready to go, where will Kumu and I be?”

  “You’ll be tied to a drag.” The Galayi moved their belongings tied to poles pulled along behind their dogs.

  “And Kumu will be walking alongside. My husband stays with me.”

  Shonan considered. Salya had chosen the one time she could get away with saying something like that. He couldn’t delay the great journey.

  Still, the word “husband” was foolish. Marriage was an important ceremony. The man’s family made substantial gifts to the woman’s. The village joined in singing songs of blessing for the new couple. A pair who got married without the families’ permission would be ostracized, would probably have to leave the village and beg another to take them in.

  “Get out of my sight,” said Shonan.

  The war chief had bigger things on his mind than his daughter’s boyfriend. He also didn’t care what his son thought. They’d lost half a day. Since he still intended to get started today, there was work to do. He walked around Tusca organizing everything. He encouraged people. He reassured them. He painted pictures of Amaso as an adventure, a new life. The families who were going stopped moping and set to lashing their clothing, their kitchen utensils, their clothes onto the drags. Their spirits rose.

  Shonan was achieving the great task the top chiefs had set for him. He gathered young men—families were picked which had lots of young men—and organized them into groups that would scout ahead and behind for enemies, and walk the ridges to the sides. He helped women lash the poles to their dogs. He helped young men gather river cane for blow guns, for such cane didn’t grow near the sea. He was helpful, encouraging, firm—a good leader.

  He looked at the sky. Not enough time before dusk, but he thought it was important to get moving.

  When the great congregation was organized, his daughter was standing at the front, between his son and the man she intended to marry.

  4

  Shonan walked observant. The mountains of his native country were a wild country, steep, rugged, heavily wooded. His migrants followed a twisting creek eastward, toward the sea. At will, though, it snaked around to point northwest or southwest, turned by the shapes of the great ridges. The rhododendrons and mountain laurel were thick as fur on the hillsides, blocking vision. Scouts walked ahead and behind. Others flanked themselves to each side and followed trails that led to observation points. Spotting enemies in this country was almost impossible, but Shonan and his soldiers had driven all enemies back to distant borders. He might have felt safe if he did not remember, every day of his life, that his wife was taken from him in an enemy attack in country just like this.

  His duty now was to pay attention, but his daughter was making it hard.

  “What?!” she said. “What do you expect? You’re making us leave everything we love. Our friends? Most of them we leave at home. Our uncles, aunts, and cousins?” She spread her arms toward the forested mountainsides. “Why don’t I see them? Every place I played as a kid, every place I stooped to get water, every place we gathered onions or seeds—where is it all?”

  Shonan walked silently. Aku said, “Lots of our relatives and friends are here with us.” A third of the village, in fact.

  “Yes, being tortured. Walk three quarter moons to a place we’ve never seen and don’t give a damn about, and then stay there forever.”

  Only Shonan and a score of soldiers had visited Amaso.

  “Salya,” said her twin, “you have your lover.” Unlike me. “You will have a husband, children, your family.”

  Shonan and Kumu glanced at each other, but neither even whispered.

  Salya plunged on. Sometimes she was like the drummers at a ceremony—carried away with their own rhythms and then wilder and crazier until dancers fell on the ground laughing, unable to move to such a beat. And the drummers loved it. They banged on until … who knew what made them stop? Who knew what would make Salya stop?

  Shonan strode along on one side of her, her clown lover and twin brother on the other side. None of them cared if she banged out her mood. It was half anger and half play, and would wear down. Shonan’s mind was on the country. He couldn’t see far to the rear, high ridges shutting out half the sky. He couldn’t see past the forest to the next region they would reach, the piedmont, the foothills of the mountains. He knew it, though. It was a good country, full of oaks, chestnuts, silver maples, sweet gum and black gum, and lots of game. They would spend a night in a Galayi village in the piedmont, Equani, where three narrow streams joined into one broad river. Everyone had relatives there. It was the last time they would sleep inside for the three quarter moons of their walk.

  “When we’re happy where we are, you ask us to start all over in a village of strangers! Why? So you can be important? You want to be a hero like your grandfather?”

  Shonan gave her a sharp glance. Smart remarks about the hero Zeya were out of order.

&nb
sp; Salya stopped as if she was out of breath, but she always had enough breath to start a fire. She could have gone on about all their neighbors, the babbling and shouting of the children they knew, the roughhousing of the boys, and her girlfriends and their chance to smile slyly and gossip about boys their own age.

  Shonan and Aku knew Salya’s barbs well, and in their way they were friendly. She liked to stir the pot. But she didn’t often run the wolf of her anger this long.

  “Kumu,” said Shonan, “would you run ahead and speak to Yim and make sure things are all right? Wait for us there.”

  It was a gesture accepting Kumu as part of the party. The clown trotted off.

  “You done?” said Shonan to Salya, knowing he shouldn’t ask.

  Those words pricked her into rambling on. No one listened.

  Aku, especially, had other things on his mind. His father had indicated that things would work out with Salya and Kumu.

  Aku was silent because his mind was far away. He was the twin who was glad to go to Amaso. Salya thought he wanted to get away from a gang of teenage boys who didn’t like him. They were preoccupied with being manly and muscular, devoted to the ball game and to weapons and learning to fight. They thought Aku was strange because he was built like willow limbs lashed together at the joints, and had about the same strength. Worse, there were the owl feathers in his hair—when people saw owls they thought of death. “You hate this village,” Salya had said yesterday, “but I love it.”

  She was wrong about him. He was elated to move to the sea. He dreamed of smells, embraces, and caresses at the eastern village nestled against the great waters. Though he had told no one, his lover waited there.

  That night Shonan slipped out of camp and went hunting for fresh meat. On a long trip, carrying parched corn and ground seeds and dried flesh, people longed for fresh meat. Shonan would get a deer—he always did—and then say the prayers for forgiveness that kept the deer people from getting angry. When he brought it back, he would give most of the meat to other families, saving only a few scraps for his own. That was the way of a good leader.

  “Poor Father,” Salya said, “does he think he’s fooling us?”

  “He’s a good man,” said Kumu.

  “The last six years have been hard,” said Aku.

  “Hard for him,” said Salya, “and he makes it worse for himself.”

  “He’s a good man,” Kumu repeated.

  Salya squeezed his hand.

  Everyone had seen what Shonan had done since their mother died. He led war parties at every season, even when the snows should have kept every sensible man at home by his fire. He beat all their enemies back from the edges of Galayi territory. He claimed new hunting grounds for the Galayi. He won every battle and lost none. Sometimes, as soon as men of other tribes merely heard the Galayi war cry—Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!—they ran for their lives.

  Now he was going to be the war leader and surely the most influential man of Amaso, turned into a new Galayi village. The Amaso people seemed likable enough, though they were touched by the spirit of beggars. They needed Shonan.

  Which brought everyone to this day. Salya was playful with her lover and twin, but with her father it was different. Kumu stayed silly. And Aku … He liked walking alongside his father and learning things. He like ambling along with Salya and Kumu, because they were all laughter, as long as Shonan wasn’t close by. But half the time he avoided his father and sister and dreamt his dreams. Shonan was carrying his ambitions, which crackled like lightning. Salya was preoccupied with the man she wanted.

  In the half-blue, half-gray of the evening he watched Salya and Kumu shoulder their elk robes and head off into the twilight. Salya glanced back furtively.

  Aku studied his father. He’d known all along. “You wanted to build a bridge by giving Salya to the chief’s son,” he said.

  “Grandson,” Shonan corrected.

  Silence. “He’s good-looking. I thought he was a catch, but …” Shonan looked in the direction of the lovers, who had disappeared.

  “I have an idea,” said Aku. He hesitated. “Let me be the bridge. My … She’s the daughter of the seer, Oghi. Her name is Iona. She’s …” He made a point of talking about things other than her smells and caresses, and emphasizing that she was the daughter of the second chief.

  When Aku finished, Shonan said, “All right. You want her.”

  Aku stopped himself from saying “Wildly” and only said, “Yes.”

  “She wants you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m happy for the two of you. Let’s think about it,” said his father. “Meanwhile, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

  In the middle of the third night the waters flooded camp. “Put it higher, in the crotch of the tree,” someone yelled. People were trying to protect their dried food. When it got soaked, it was useless. The campground clattered with curses at the river. Clothes were wet, bedding was wet, firewood was wet—the rest of the night would be miserable, and a couple of days would be lost.

  Shonan glanced up at the stars and saw that dawn wasn’t far away. A little good luck to take the edge off a lot of bad luck. It happened sometimes. A hard rain would pound the mountains several ridges over, where you couldn’t see the clouds. The river would rise in its narrow canyon, and the few wide camping spots would get flooded.

  A hand touched his elbow. Salya. “I’m sorry, Father, it’s my fault.”

  True enough. If Salya hadn’t pulled her trick, if they’d started on time, they would be in a fine campground downstream, where the mountains opened into foothills, and the riverbed was wide enough to stand some flooding.

  Shonan said to his daughter, “Just help take care of things.”

  In the early morning light the men scrounged up enough tinder to get fires started. People stripped out of some clothes—nudity was no issue among the Galayi—and got into others. They ate the mushy corn which had once been parched, because it wouldn’t last anyway. The grass seed they’d ground into flour they threw away. They laid their soggy meat strips across branches—in a couple of days the meat would dry out fine, unless it rained again.

  Spirits were as soggy as the ground, emotions muddy. Salya made tea, and Shonan’s little family gathered around to warm up from inside. Aku stuffed his belly with corn mush. Kumu munched idly, looking distracted, and then addressed Shonan.

  “War Chief, let me run back to Tusca and get us food.”

  Salya caught her breath. Clearly, she hadn’t been warned.

  As he spoke, the early sun caught Kumu’s twisted tooth and he looked silly. But Aku knew this clown was serious. He had watched Kumu play the ball game. He was a natural athlete. More important, he played like a demon of determination.

  Shonan looked at the man who wanted to marry his daughter. Kumu had a good idea. The party could walk slowly, underfed, to the Equani village and ask for food. Any Galayi village would help out. But Shonan didn’t want to come into Equani as a beggar. He wanted this journey to be a triumphal march, a procession led by a strong leader to benefit the nation. And Kumu wanted to be the hero of the moment.

  “I can be up there tomorrow before the sun sets, back here by the end of the next day.”

  That was a stretch—the first half of the journey was uphill, and on the return trip he’d have a load. Still, Kumu might do it. “I will send six other young men along,” said Shonan. “You will lead.”

  Kumu resisted smiling.

  “But this is a trade.”

  Both Salya and Kumu frowned.

  “You go home.” That word struck Aku as odd. “Tell people what happened. They’ll see to it that you get food. Then, when the party returns, six men come back and you stay in Tusca.”

  “Father!” snapped Salya.

  Shonan held up a placating hand.

  “If you will grant me this favor, I will give permission for the two of you to be married at the Harvest Ceremony.”

  Salya still looked mad, but K
umu’s eyes lit up. The three great annual ceremonies, the Planting Moon, the Harvest Dance, and Sun-Low Dance, those were the traditional occasions for weddings, with all the Galayi people there to celebrate.

  Before Salya could object again, Shonan said, “Aku and I have a surprise for you.”

  Aku told his twin sister and Kumu about his lover, Iona, daughter of Oghi, seer of the Amaso people. “When I saw her the first time at the Planting Ceremony,” Aku said, “we …” Salya put her hand on her brother’s and squeezed it.

  Shonan said to Salya, “I had intended to give you to the grandson of the chief. But I am willing, instead, to give Aku to Iona, the daughter of the seer.”

  Salya covered her face with her hands.

  Shonan turned to his son. “But you can’t be like these two, and spend every night together before the ceremony.”

  Aku grinned and nodded. He thought, The afternoons will do fine.

  “Let’s do it like this. We’ll have two marriages, twin brother and twin sister, at the Harvest Ceremony, marrying two good partners, Kumu and Iona.”

  Salya peered at Kumu between her fingers.

  Taking her gently by the shoulders, Kumu said, “Let’s do this,” he said.

  Salya crumpled into his arms, which was daring in front of her father. “I guess so. I’ll miss you too much. I guess so.” She broke into big sobs.

  Kumu held her until she stopped crying.

  Shonan said, “You’re my daughter. I want you to be happy.”

  Kumu’s eyes hinted of challenge. “War Chief, you mean this truly.”

  Shonan smiled broadly. “Yes.”

  Kumu lifted Salya’s face to his own. “We’ll join together with all the Galayi people singing for us.”

  Her eyes and her voice said, “Yes.”

  5

  In her family hut at the Amaso village, beside the river that curved into the sea, Iona woke when the first hint of light lit the smoke hole. She sat up wildly, feeling like all the hairs would fly off her head and then her head would sail away from her neck. She groped inside for … what? The feeling of being herself? What she found was craziness. In a quarter moon, or perhaps a half, her lover would come to her. Until then, craziness.