by Meredith
Su-Li said inside her mind, He will be fine, better than fine.
Still, he lingered in an unconscious or half-conscious state. Sunoya took Su-Li outside. While he looped up the sky, she sat and watched the twilight reflect in the Healing Pool. Tsola’s daughters went about their business quietly. No one was here for healing right now. “Except,” Sunoya said out loud, “for my son, the hero of the people.” A hint of bitterness spiced her words.
And me. Being apart from Su-Li had weakened her. Her life energy was interwoven with his. She would have to spend time in the Pool. But now her son needed her.
Inside the Cavern Zeya finally woke up enough to reach down and feel his belly. When he didn’t find a wound, he drifted back to sleep.
Later he whispered, “Thirsty.”
Sunoya gave him broth. Klandagi said with a chuckle, “He won’t want any more of that special tea for a while.”
Zeya’s first sentence was, “How long was I gone?”
Tsola spoke up. “Not even long enough for my arm to get tired from drumming.”
Zeya blinked at his companions, the Cavern, and this world that was not beyond the Sky Arch. He shook his head as though to chase memories away. “I went a lot of places. I did a lot of things.”
“I know,” said Tsola, “I was there.”
The panther raised his purr to a hum.
“I told Sunoya and Klandagi everything,” said Tsola.
“I am in awe of what you accomplished,” said the big cat.
Zeya shook his head again. Clearly, he didn’t know what to make of that, or anything else.
“I died,” he said.
“And came back to life a new man,” said Tsola.
Zeya gawked at her. Then he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.
“We’d best take our time, talk to him only as he’s ready for each part.”
“Yes,” said Tsola. She looked urgently at the Cape. “Waiting is hard. I’m dying to put it on.”
Piecemeal, Zeya came to understand what had happened. Or at least he listened attentively to what they said and marked it in his mind. He would ponder it in his own time.
“I guess I’m all right with the journey across,” he told the two women, his mother and his teacher. “The enemies I met—the dogs, the snakes, all that—I created them myself. They were my fears, so I had to deal with them. I got the new cape.” He looked at the bundle. And I got a gift”—the next words were hushed—“I can turn into an eagle.”
Both women nodded. They’d been over and over these things.
“And I had to die to come back?”
“Yes.”
“But when you went, you didn’t die.”
“No.”
“Because…?”
Tsola said, “Over time, you will know. You are still called on to do great things in the future.”
“And a better man was needed to do them?”
Tsola chuckled. “You might put it that way.”
“It’s too much.”
“Let’s give him something,” said Klandagi. He looked at his mother and Sunoya. “Zeya, here’s an idea, this will be good. Change yourself into an eagle. Do it. Right now.”
Zeya looked at the panther hesitantly. He started to speak.
“Just do it,” said Klandagi.
Zeya did, foot to claw, arm to wing, flesh to feather. “I can’t imagine ever getting used to this.” As though to convince himself, he pecked at his neck feathers, looked at his companions, and flashed his wings out.
“And what do you want to do now?”
“Fly!”
“Go to it.”
The eagle hopped toward the cave entrance and launched into the sky. Su-Li flew with him, wing tip to wing tip.
“Bring him back soon,” called Sunoya.
47
Winging over his home country was spectacular. He knew the Cheowa village, the path up to the Emerald Cavern, the trails to the Soco and Cusa villages to the south, and to the Tusca village in the east. He knew the mountains, he knew the rivers. But to see them as a pattern, how everything flowed together, was amazing. The landscape came together with a kind of sense he had never known. The river started in the mountains high above the Cheowas, came crashing down to the broad, flat valley where the houses stood, and wandered in snaky curves to the south. Halfway down the valley the stream turned fast and roily. In the distance he could see where the trail from the Tusca village dropped in and the river trail ran on south, with a sharp bend westward and then south again, to the Soco village.
He could see how the ridges came down from the balds. They divided as they descended, and a creek formed between each two ridges. A mountain, he realized, had a logic all its own.
What do you want to do? said Su-Li.
I don’t know. Dweller-in-the-Clouds looked wide-eyed at his companion. How are you talking to me?
The same way you’re talking to me.
We can communicate directly now, mind to mind?
When you’re an eagle.
Believing—accepting this fact—was swallowing a big lump for Zeya. Can you do this with Klandagi?
When he’s a panther.
I didn’t know that.
No one else does. Best to keep some things to yourself. So what do you want to do?
They were gliding south along the river, not even flapping their wings. Go see Jemel.
She’s back home in the Soco village, with her parents.
Let’s fly.
Easily, comfortably, they flapped and floated down the valley.
How far can you go in a day?
About a week’s walk.
I can’t believe this.
Do you realize we’re flying down the route you took to get to the Socos twenty winters ago? Let’s circle down, and I’ll show you something.
Zeya hadn’t realized Su-Li could be so chatty.
Here’s what’s funny, said Su-Li. When you’re a human being, you’ll go back to thinking I can’t talk. Okay, there it is. That’s the waterfall where the caves of the Little People were, and were not. Also the frozen waterfall that shattered and saved your life when you were a tiny baby.
Zeya had heard the story a hundred times, how he, Sunoya, and the dog swam the flooding river and Inaj’s men got bashed by the icefall when it crashed down.
The first time your grandfather tried to kill you, said Su-Li. One of many.
He’ll never quit, will he?
No.
Zeya felt blood lust in his heart. He had to be honest. I want to kill him.
Yes.
But I can’t commit a crime against the new Cape.
No.
They flapped along in silence.
Let’s do something about your blood lust.
Zeya looked at him nervously.
Hunt.
They glided along the grassy hillsides. Su-Li saw the rabbit before Zeya did. Dive, the buzzard said, fast and hard. Use your talons, not your beak.
Zeya shook his head to clear it, and found out that didn’t work with an eagle’s neck.
Dive! said Su-Li.
Zeya did. He was thrilled at his own speed. He eyed the rabbit fiercely and felt in his blood the old fever of the hunter for prey.
He made a clean miss.
His wings carried him up while his heart sank. He didn’t know whether the rabbit darted away at the last second, or whether his aim was bad.
Wheeling back toward Su-Li, he spotted a gopher. Without thinking, he hurtled toward it. He hit it with one talon but didn’t get a grip on it. The gopher scurried off.
Another rabbit. Zeya used himself like an arrow plummeting to the ground. And this time he hit. The rabbit squirmed, but Zeya used his other talon to break its neck.
He arrived at the height of the mountaintop to fall in with Su-Li, rabbit dangling.
Dweller-in-Clouds? said Su-Li.
I am now.
Let’s light on a bald.
They did. Zeya started to inv
ite Su-Li to join him in eating, then interrupted himself. Is this carrion?
It is now.
Have you gotten to like carrion?
Mortality stinks, said Su-Li.
They fed.
As they lifted off, Zeya said, Small but good.
When you’re a human being, you’ll need more to eat.
They flapped downriver.
There it is, said Su-Li.
The Soco village, his home. Zeya glided sideways a little to get the best view of where he grew up. He felt his heart touched. He pictured childhood friends playing in the creek, racing across the fields to see who was fastest, giving and getting bloody noses. He remembered seeing Jemel for the first time…
After he got oriented, Zeya started wheeling in tight circles over Jemel’s house. That will be my house soon, he thought. I hope.
Nothing. No sign of anyone.
Across the village he saw Ninyu walk away from his house, maybe to talk to someone or do one of a hundred chores. He felt a longing to see everyone again, his grandfather and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins.
He let himself glide down toward Jemel’s house—he was good at flying now. Still he saw no one from her family.
I think that’s enough, said Su-Li.
Has our marriage been arranged?
That’s a question to ask Tsola.
They winged back up the river. Zeya thought of the woman he wanted. She was a Moon Woman, full of wild feelings. He had no doubt that if she saw a man she wanted, another man, she would take him.
Zeya was worn out by his flight and, from the look of the light outside the cave, slept from dusk one day to dawn the next. Or was it dusk the next? He went to the cave entrance, looked at the world, and saw that it was dawn.
“I’m starved,” he told his mother.
She gave him plenty to eat.
“I think you need to understand better what happened on your journey,” said Tsola, sitting in the shadows.
“I need to talk to Jemel.”
Tsola started to protest but said instead, “Whatever you want.”
“Inaj is looking for you,” said Sunoya.
“I’ll fly,” Zeya said.
“He’s got spies in the village,” his mother said. “Count on it.”
“Do you want me to go along?” said Klandagi.
“Tsola needs you,” Zeya said.
Tsola was picking up the wrap that held the Cape. “No,” she said, “I’ll be in the Emerald Dome. It’s safe there.”
But Zeya had had a guard for too many years. “I’ll be all right.”
“You want Su-Li with you?” said Sunoya.
He kissed his mother. “You need him,” he said, “and I don’t.”
“Fly,” said Klandagi. “Fly away home.”
Where is Jemel?
Zeya watched the village from the top of the snag. People coming and going, children playing, dogs running around, young women walking to and from the fields to gather the last of the harvest, young men making spear heads and old men sitting with them, probably telling hunting stories. He knew many of the old women were sitting inside, near the light from the doors, sewing. They liked to be near the fire.
All day long he’d sat here—no sign of Jemel. Her family was here. Her mother, aunts, and sisters traipsed back and forth from the cornfields constantly. Where is Jemel?
Zeya was full of odd feelings. Jemel, himself, his journey, the future—everything tumbled around inside him like pebbles in a rattle.
Maybe that was why, for the first time, he felt funny about these routines of daily life. They were the patterns of days he had lived during his twenty years on the Earth. And they were good. He felt nostalgic about them. But he also felt separated. He was different. He murmured to himself, “Sitting here in the shape of an eagle—that’s as different as things get.”
More than his body had changed. His spirit had shifted, though he couldn’t say how. His awareness was altered. Everything within the sweep of his vision seemed to him a blossom of mortality, bright and brassy and ignorant. The children who now played were on the way to turning into the old men and old women. The crops grew in the summer and died before winter. People gathered them because they lived by feeding on other living beings that they killed. The men slew the deer and sang a prayer asking forgiveness. The breath that carried their words bore the intimation of their own deaths, and their fear of it.
Even a seed bore the inevitability of death. Everything that lived died and became food, so that other creatures might live. It struck Zeya as a bizarre mixture of beauty and horror.
Where is Jemel?
He remembered to check the skies around him. Eagles had few enemies in this world, none he knew of, but he was still mortal. Klandagi reminded Zeya that Su-Li could not be killed, but the two of them could. Born to die.
The day itself was dying. The sunset oozed colors on the edges of the mountain ridges. The night would be cold.
Just then something caught Zeya’s eye. His heart quickened. It was Jemel, walking away from the house toward the creek. It looked as if she was going where the women went to pee. But why had she been inside all day? Why hadn’t she been working in the fields with the other young women?
She was with child.
He could tell by the way she walked. Though she wasn’t near birth time yet, it was unmistakable.
Humiliation flash-flooded through his veins.
He intended to speak to her. He intended to challenge her.
Jemel stilted toward the stream. She hated the way she walked. Her back hurt all the time, carrying this baby, and she felt like she had to hump each hip upward to get her foot off the ground to clomp forward.
She hated her life. When her father threw a fit about Zeya, she’d been whisked off to live with relatives in the Cusa village—no choice. The relatives clearly didn’t want her around. Once they saw she was with child, they treated her like a pariah, and everyone in the village snubbed her. Everyone except Awahi. He was kind.
Then, suddenly, she was brought back here without any explanation. She might as well have been a pack dog. She had to go where she was told, no choice—“Just do what we say.”
She was fierce to be finished with living this way.
She clung to one thread that kept her sane. She thought about Zeya. She fantasized about the passion of their reunion. She imagined the birth of their child, with Zeya properly there and performing the Going to Water ceremony. She pictured husband and wife hovering over the baby, cooing, enjoying seeing it learn to turn over, sit up, take a first step, speak a first word. She thought of herself and her husband getting up in the morning, starting the fire, eating breakfast together, and telling each other their dreams. Even more often she imagined what she would do with Zeya in the blankets. Thoughts like that were her salvation.
She allowed herself no doubt that they would be husband and wife. She was a Moon Woman, she had found her passion—she had found her life.
She shut out all challenges to her conviction except one. At night sometimes, in tatters of dreams or half-dreams, she saw Zeya dead. From the time Zanda’s head was dropped into the village, these dreams romped through her sleep.
That day Inaj went wild with fury, and she exulted. But tales raged like fire through the treetops. They were only bits and pieces that came to nothing, but they twanged her fear.
Inaj had sent men to kill her lover. She wished she could kill him.
What Jemel did, in her dilemma, was build a dam against her emotions. She went through the days aloof, pretending. In the evenings she sat with Awahi. He was good to her, he knew her heart, he was a friend. Unfortunately, he had no information that would help.
Sometimes she found herself angry at Zeya. Yes, she knew that was stupid, and acting stupid only made her more angry. Sometimes she circled back in a bad temper to the old questions: When her lover visited the village to see Awahi, why hadn’t he talked to her? As far as she was concerned, no explanation ma
ttered. He should have found a way. She would have.
At night she lay in the blankets telling herself she’d been snubbed, perhaps abandoned. Fury volcanoed in her chest. Her passion pendulumed from love to hatred.
Now she wandered along the stream bank further than she needed to. Finally she peed, and emptied the gourd holding the pee she’d made all day. But she needed more time out of the house. She hated the custom of confining child-carrying women to their dwellings. She wanted air. She knelt by the water, scooped it up with both hands, and bathed her face.
Just then a war eagle lighted in a dead tree nearby. She was surprised. The great birds usually stayed away from people. She stared. And then the bird spoke.
“Unfaithful,” said the bird. “False-hearted. Deceiver.”
The bird made its words more savage by using the voice of her lover. It went on cruelly.
“Traitor. Betrayer. Villain….”
Jemel wailed to keep herself from hearing. She slammed her forehead to the grass, stopped her ears with her fingers, and screamed. Other words rasped forth, but she drowned them out.
When other women came running to see what was wrong, the bird flew off.
She told them nothing.
Zeya lifted himself high into the air. The winds were gentle, his emotions turbulent. He flapped away from the Soco village hard and fast. Then he hesitated and glided. He wanted to visit with his mother and Su-Li. He wheeled about and coasted downwind toward the village. He yearned to talk to them more about what he’d seen and done in the Land beyond the Sky Arch. It was the most extraordinary event of his life—that was a wild understatement—and who could he talk to about it except for Sunoya, Su-Li, and Tsola?
Far off his eagle eyes saw Jemel clomp the last few steps to her parents’ house. He hated seeing her struggle along with the burden of another man’s child in her belly. She ducked into the house. He hated the thought that his rival, his conqueror, would soon be moving into that house—or already had moved in.
He executed such a sharp turn that he swerved down a few feet. He’d be damned if he’d go down into the village. What if he saw Jemel again? What if he saw her with her lover? What could he do, squirt droppings at the man’s head? Or worse, at his back while he topped Jemel?
