by Caleb Fox
One stroke, two—his feet were free!
One bound, one swing—the neck of the old chief was slit and pouring out crimson.
Shonan leapt away from the fire and into the crowd. Action blotted out his own hurt.
Eyes saw the chief fall, the neck gouting blood. Voices raised piteous cries.
Of the hundreds of spectators, several score glimpsed or felt Shonan. He sprinted between squatting figures, kneeing them, shouldering those who stood up, outshouting those who yelled with a terrible war cry—“Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!” This Galayi war cry had frozen the hearts of soldiers, and Shonan gloried in seeing what it did to the faces of the Brown Leaf villagers.
He stepped on chests, bounced off shoulders and even heads like stepping stones, stomped men, women, and children, and slashed a path of horror with his small knife. Instead of confronting him, they pell-melled away, screaming.
The rest of the circle of villagers crushed their way toward the center, the stake, where their chief lay fallen. They moaned and wailed.
One man depended on boldness and blade. As he went, he lashed those in his way with his fury—“Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!”
Shonan rolled into a ball, clutched himself, and shook. From pain? From the chill night? From fear? Relief? His disbelief that he’d gotten away with it?
No, he was shaking with laughter.
For years he’d told his young warriors that surprise and daring were everything. Now his whisper felt like a shout of triumph—“Oh, did I prove it, did I ever prove it!”
He sat up, refused to let the burn make him scream, and sobered himself. He listened carefully. A few warriors had run after him. In the darkness he’d been able to slip off. Very gradually, staying in moon shadows, he’d worked his way to a muddy ravine. Now he was hiding among the exposed roots of an oak that leaned out over the ditch. One spring before long, when snowmelt came cascading down from the mountains and ripped through this gully, it would undercut the oak far enough and the great tree would crash into the raging waters.
Shonan would crouch here for a few hours, until he believed the search had stopped for the night. The scrunched-up position eased the agony on his belly. Later he would make his way uphill to the cave where he and his son had hidden, and where they’d tied Tagu. His owl boy. That was still hard for him, a tang of bitterness swirled with love and fear—my great dusky owl son.
Shonan knew the Earth in darkness. He had spent many nights hunting and many nights approaching enemy camps. He knew the sounds of the winds in the grasses and the leaves, the noises of the creatures of the night. Best of all, he knew the padding of two-footed predators. And from time to time now, he heard them. They were footfalls slipping by on the grass over his head, circling around the tree he hid under. They were scuffles and mud-sucks as they trod up and down the ditch. He was a shadow in a cave shielded by a waterfall of roots, invisible. He kept perfect silence. Sometimes he thought he could sit silent for days, and maybe not breathe for hours.
Then he noticed that the world had gone silent. Where were the sounds of the hoot owls? The other night birds? The katydids? Thousands of rustlings usually echoed through the night, maybe as many as in the day. Except when the animals were stilled for a cause.
An enemy creeping up on me?
Shonan closed his eyes. He ignored his taste, his touch, even his smell. He made his ears as sensitive as taut drum heads, ready to magnify any sound. He heard an impossibility—nothing.
Perhaps some animals could deceive his ears, like a breeze too slight to feel. Shonan had watched a playful fox approach a sunning blacksnake from behind, ease down paw after paw until he neared the serpent’s head, and stretch forward a paw into the air beside the serpent’s ear. Delicately, the fox touched the ground with that paw but put no weight on it. He raised it high, changed his mind, laid it gingerly on the earth again, waited, eased his full weight onto it, regarded the unmoving snake for a long moment, and backed away with a sly smile.
No human being could elude Shonan’s hearing the way the fox fooled the snake. And the forest might not go dead silent in fear of a human being, a creature with such poor night vision that he was more likely to hurt himself than his prey. Only for something very dangerous.
Shonan raised his bottom, balanced on his feet and hands, and holding his belly as still as possible, crabbed backward to the very rear of the root cave until his hair touched the wall. Then, bit by bit, he fitted himself to the dirt like moss.
The killer didn’t come. Stopped above, waiting?
A panther, maybe? Panthers hid from the ears of the night creatures, but not their eyes and not their noses. They smelled him first, then watched him glide along, black undulating on black. Leaf bugs ignored the cat. So did tree frogs, caterpillars, and moths. He wanted nothing from them. Buzzards and other roosting birds were out of reach and out of his mind.
The panther wasn’t looking for these creatures, or looking for anything. He hunted with his nose, and he sniffed especially for those who denned up at night with their young, like coyotes and wolves. He wanted to find them in their cuddly sleep. His paws would slay the mother with two thunder strikes, perhaps three. Essential to kill her immediately—not because she could actually whip him in a fight, no prey of the panther could do that. But a wolf or coyote mother would battle fiercely for her pups. The panther didn’t want to pay for his supper with a thousand bites and scratches.
This killer hunts dens with his nose, and I am crouched in a den. Shonan got his weapon ready. A knife the size of a fingernail.
The biggest warrior Shonan had ever seen crashed through the roots.
Shonan slashed with his baby blade. His heart pounded its drum head. He thought, I might as well fight a war club with a feather. He loved it. He lunged toward the killer and sliced the air.
A paw strong as a bear’s grabbed his wrist.
“Shhh!”
Shonan froze at the odd sound of the voice.
“It’s Yah-Su!”
Shonan’s pulsed drummed, Strike!
Yah-Su clapped a monstrous hand over his mouth. “Shhh!”
Shonan’s belly yelled.
Yah-Su pushed, slowly but irresistibly, until Shonan crunched against the wall. Then the buffalo man-beast slipped back outside the cover of the roots and immediately reappeared. Tagu was with him, on a lead. The dog curled against Shonan’s leg. “I got him from your cave,” Yah-Su said, and signed the words.
Shonan’s rubbed the dog’s ears. He didn’t dare ask, “Did you see my son, too? In human form or in owl form?” He wondered where his bird son was. Probably winging his way toward the woman he loved—that’s what young men did.
Yah-Su crouched next to Shonan. The beast was taller, and the dirt ceiling crooked his head down awkwardly. He put a finger the size of a baby’s forearm to his lips, slid to the floor, and was asleep.
Shonan petted Tagu until his own blood stilled.
Both men woke when they felt water lapping at their skin. Tagu was already sitting up, on guard against the rising rivulet.
They crawled plish-plash through the curtain of roots. High in the sky, the constellation of the Six Pigs said it was far past the middle of the night.
Shonan put a finger to his tongue—the water was salt. He rubbed some on his belly, and the coolness felt good.
This ravine was a steep-sided cut made by the pounding waves of the sea. When the tide came in, the gully was wet, maybe even full. When the tide went out, it was empty. The sea was new to Shonan, and mysterious, but he intended to learn all its ways.
Yah-Su parted the roots, motioned to Shonan to come along, and waded upstream. The Red Chief wasn’t used to following, but Yah-Su was quick-minded about the ways of war.
They hurried along in silence. Yah-Su didn’t hesitate to walk on the sand, trusting the rising tide to cover whatever tracks they left. Shonan put his life in the buffalo man’s hands.
Before first light, th
e creek made a sharp left turn toward the sea. There Yah-Su lifted Tagu onto a head-high stone slab and gave Shonan a hand up. The quick lift was a lightning bolt of agony.
They padded across rock and into an overhang. In the darkness Shonan couldn’t tell how much of a cave it was, but they walked back twenty or thirty paces. Yah-Su pulled on Shonan’s hand to get him to sit down.
Deep in the darkest shadow Shonan found some surprises. Yah-Su had a couple of untanned deer hides here for mattresses, and soft, tanned elk hides for blankets. After some shuffling around, Yah-Su dropped a slab of dried deer meat into Shonan’s hand. Evidently he intended to save the meat lashed to Tagu’s back.
Altogether, Yah-Su had a camp, an outcast’s camp.
One skill Yah-Su had was sleeping. He was already rolled up in one of the bed rolls and snoring like a bull.
Shonan hurt too much to sleep. He sat and thought things through. When father and son disappeared, whisked away to the land of the Little People, Yah-Su must have gone on ahead to the Brown Leaf village and waited for them. No question he was their friend. After a few days in the world of the Little People and nearly a week’s travel, Shonan and Aku turned up. Yah-Su probably saw them—he seemed super-observant—and he certainly knew about the sentries. He didn’t show himself, just as he didn’t reveal himself at the river crossing, but let the Brown Leaves spring their ambush and then helped out when he could do some good.
But why did Yah-Su have a camp near the Brown Leaf village? Shonan thought again, outcast. Among the Galayi, villagers punished by banishment were utterly cut off from their people—not even relatives would spare them the slightest help. Usually such people went crazy and disappeared forever. Occasionally, the strong ones became bitter enemies of their own people. In that case Yah-Su might have a series of invisible animal dens. Shonan wondered if he would soon find out.
The notion of an outcast bothered him. The Galayi people banished members for only one reason, killing a fellow tribesman. He looked at the beast sleeping next to him. A killer? Definitely. A killer of one of his own? Possibly.
But a friend to me and Aku.
Shonan would have chewed on the problem longer, except that his breaths fell into rhythm with Tagu’s, and the Red Chief drifted off.
The morning showed why this was a camp. A seep oozed from under the rock at the uphill end. Yah-Su picked up two of several gourds of water beside it, handed Shonan one, and drained the other. No water had ever tasted better. Shonan had gone all night dry.
The angle in the sharp turn of the ravine formed a huge triangular room with a flat roof. The stone of the earth shaped the sea here as much as the sea shaped the earth. The water from the seep never even reached the bottom of the gully. Apparently the tide was going back out—the ravine was mud-bottomed now.
Yah-Su gave Shonan a dab of fat to rub on his belly. The war chief did it very gingerly.
The buffalo man handed Shonan another slab of dried buffalo meat and took one for himself. When he finished eating, Shonan whispered, “When you got the pack dog …”
Yah-Su clamped Shonan’s mouth and nose so hard he felt like he couldn’t breathe. After a long moment he let go of Shonan, who felt full of fire—no one treated the Red Chief that way.
Then he realized Yah-Su didn’t know anything about Galayi positions of honor, and just wished the beast knew his own strength.
Yah-Su pulled out his knife, drew the point along his own throat, and then made the same motion toward Shonan’s throat. Then he clamped a hand over his own mouth.
All right, thought Shonan, we shut up and stay put.
And hope that Aku got back to the Amaso village of the Galayi tribe safely.
15
It took four nights of flying. Days were no good. Aku could see the raptors cruising the skies—hawk, eagle, osprey, and the buzzard to clean up afterwards. He didn’t have to remember how his mother died. The pictures of her and the attacking hawk played bright and deadly in his mind. He was left with nothing of her but the three feathers he wore in his hair when he took human form. Her legacy was this lesson—owl shape and night flight.
In the first moments of the day’s light, from above, Aku watched Iona walk toward the river carrying two water gourds. His heart was already beating fast from wing-flapping—now it zoomed. He wanted to grab her, roll on the ground with her, laugh with her, kiss, make love. Except that she wouldn’t make love to an owl.
At an eddy where the river was still, Iona bent and dipped the gourds into the sweet water.
He lit in a snag. As fast as he could, he put himself through the transformation. When he was finished, Aku felt behind his ears, under his arms, and in his groin, places where, if he wasn’t thorough, he sometimes left feathers.
He ran. Iona was walking briskly, barefooted. The earth was cold in the dawn. He ran faster, thinking how he’d grab her waist and swing her around and she’d see his face and they’d both shriek with excitement. But she turned left, away from the circle of huts of the Amaso village. She headed for the brush hut where the moon women stayed.
He felt a pang. If she was on her moon, he would not be able to touch her until it was past. He could talk to her from a couple of steps away, but the medicine of moon blood was strong. Even touching a moon woman might ruin whatever medicine a man had.
Aku stopped. He had the power to metamorphose into an owl. He had some ability to see beyond appearance into the spiritual nature of things. His grandmother had told him what great gifts these faculties were, and his own experience told him some of the truth of her words. No question—he couldn’t go near the moon women’s lodge.
He felt a jolt. What on earth was he thinking? She was full of his child. She couldn’t be …
“Aku!”
She set the gourds down, ran, and slammed into his arms.
He swung her. He felt a drum-flutter of joy rise in his chest, and quelled it. He set her down. “Your nose!” she cried. She barely touched the scab running down it. He started to explain, but his face collapsed. “My father is dead,” he said.
Holding hands, sometimes stopping to kiss, they made their way down to where the river ran into the sea. At a glance Aku saw that the tide was flowing out, sucking the river into its immensity. They sat, and over the shush of waters, he told her the story. He wept. She wept. They lay down, held each other, and grieved.
And after a while another feeling, wild, strong, uncontrollable, rose in Aku, and they made a declaration with their bodies—I am alive.
Aku slept on the sand for most of the day, Iona lounging comfortably nearby. Sometimes she drew a breath in so far it hurt, and eased it out. She’d been scared. She hadn’t let herself know how scared.
Once she slipped away to get some water and balls of cornmeal rolled in honey. She thought Aku must yearn for something other than dried meat.
When he woke up, only a glimmer of sun stole through the treetops on the western hills. He wolfed down the cakes. They held each other and kissed and cooed for a few minutes more.
“Harvest Dance,” said Aku, a solemn promise.
“Harvest Dance,” said Iona.
At that ceremony their families would sing the songs that would tell everyone that their son and daughter were become one flesh. At the council there the new, combined village would elect chiefs. But what stirred their blood was the thought of making a life together. What people would remember would be the first marriage between the Galayi and Amaso groups of the Amaso village.
What great luck. He loved Iona, and she loved him. At the Harvest Dance his great-grandmother Tsola would give them a special blessing, and they would move into Oghi’s house, and sleep together in hide blankets. Iona would be his new home.
“I have to show you something,” said Aku.
“I’ve already seen it,” said Iona. She grabbed. “When it was better.”
“This is something not every man has,” he said. He was tickled at himself. With great ceremony he unrolled the flutes from the
ir hide wraps. Her expression was mystified. When he played a few tones on the green flute, silvery beauty agile as sunlight on rippling waves, her eyes seemed enchanted.
She was also enchanted by the story of his visit with the Little People. “Knee high?” she exclaimed.
“Knee high,” he repeated.
He explained the power of the green flute’s song.
“It heals any wound?” Iona asked. “Any illness?”
“Wounds are of the body. I can’t do anything for those. Sickness is of the spirit, and this song restores the spirit. That’s what the Little People said.” She ran her fingers up and down the flute, and her eyes glowed.
“Now I want to play the red one for you,” he said in a different tone. He played part of the song. Rono had warned him never to play all of either song, not for anyone, unless it was being used for its sacred purpose.
Iona looked at him uncertainly. The section he played was slow, grave, with only hints of something celestial. “What’s it for?” she murmured.
“Raising the dead,” said Aku. “If someone dies and I get to them before the spirit has left for the Darkening Land, the song will bring them back to this world.”
Iona looked at the father of her child, who came to her bearing greatness.
“Or so the Little People said,” Aku said softly.
Grave-eyed, they squeezed both hands, looking, seeing, and feeling. Aku had lived for a couple of weeks with the understandings that were opening in Iona’s mind.
Could he tell her about his ability to become an owl? Not yet, he thought—one crash of realization at a time.
He decided to tell her about getting captured by the Brown Leaves, threatened with torture, and cut on the nose. He didn’t mention how the witch and the shaman united into Maloch, a new incarnation of the Uktena, and he just plain fabricated a story about how he slipped his bonds, treading carefully around the revelation of shape-shifting.
When he finished, she cocked her head skeptically. “That’s not what you wanted to tell me.”
