by Sharon Sala
One day not too long after the final descent, Tyhen saw a woman step out of the line with a young boy, and knew they were seeking a bush for privacy.
Something about the lay of the land and her inability to see what was behind the small line of trees made her hesitate to go on and so she stopped to watch and wait for them to come back.
Yuma was ahead of her a few yards, walking with Montford and didn’t know that she was no longer in line.
She stepped up on a rock so that she could see above the people’s heads, and in her mind, she also saw the big cat on a ledge above the mother and boy that they did not see. She sent a silent but urgent message to Yuma as she pulled her knife.
There is danger. Follow me!
She saw Yuma spin around and then lift his spear over his head so that she could see him. She pointed, then leaped off the rock and made a dash toward the trees where the mother had taken her son.
Yuma was only a few yards behind her and she knew he was closing fast because she could hear his heartbeat, but she couldn’t wait because she could also feel the bloodlust of the cat ready to pounce.
Without a clear path to see where everyone was standing, she couldn’t take a chance and use the wind without harming the mother and son, too, so it was going to come down to how far Yuma could throw his spear.
She saw the mother and son as she rounded the tree line at the same time she saw the cat. Its ears were flat, the long tail twitching, and even before she could shout a warning, it pounced.
She leapt forward, sailing over the mother’s head and caught the cat in mid-flight. Her knife went into its back near the right front leg as they hit the ground at the same time. Tyhen lost the knife and her grip on the cat, and when it happened, the cat pounced and she was holding a hundred and fifty pounds of an angry animal with sharp teeth and long claws. And then it had her by the throat and everything went black.
Yuma rounded the trees less than five steps behind her, and when he saw her feet leave the ground, he lunged forward to try and stop her, missing her by inches.
The moment she landed on the cat, it rendered his spear useless. He couldn’t throw it without hitting her. He was already running toward them with his knife in his hand, passing the woman and her son, who were running away.
The cat had Tyhen by the throat when Yuma reached them, and he had Warrior’s Heart in his hand.
He drove the knife into the back of the big cat’s neck just as the fangs sank into her throat. He was praying to the names of every god he’d ever heard of as he dragged the dead cat off of her body.
He dropped to his knees, saying her name as he began to assess her wounds, but she was covered in so much blood he couldn’t tell what was hers and what belonged to the cat. There were scratches on her legs, on her arms, and a long deep scratch down the side of her cheek. But it was the bite marks on her neck gushing blood with every beat of her heart that scared him.
He picked her up in his arms, pressed his hand against the neck wounds, trying to stop the blood flow, rocking her back and forth in his arms and begging her not to die.
“No, Tyhen, no. You are my heart! You are my life! You cannot die! You said you cannot die. Please, please, hear my voice. Stop the blood. You have to stop the blood because I cannot.”
Within seconds the place was teeming with armed men and weeping women. They took one look at her limp bloody body in Yuma’s arms and began to wail. They thought she was dead. She looked dead. She wasn’t moving, and it didn’t look like she was even breathing.
****
Pain rolled through her in waves like the water that had lapped at the banks of Rio Yaqui. She knew the cat was gone because she’d felt the spirit leave its body.
Then she felt Yuma’s hands and heard his voice. She tried to concentrate on the words but the pain was deep.
“Snap out of it, Tyhen! You kept me from burning to death. Now stop the blood leaking out of your body and do it now!”
Evan?
“Yes, it’s me. Stop the blood. You can feel it leaving your body. It is that warmth you feel running down your skin. Stop it now.”
So she did.
****
When the flow of blood began to stop, Yuma thought it was because it was all gone. But then the scratch on her cheek began to close, and then the ones on her belly, and then her legs, and then her arms.
Someone saw and shouted out to the others.
“The bleeding stopped. The scratches are going away. It is true! It is true! The Windwalker’s daughter cannot die.”
Yuma heard. He was witnessing the healing, but he needed to see her eyes. He needed to see her looking back at him. He was covered in her blood and his voice was shaking as he tried to wake her up.
“Please, my love, please. Open your eyes and see me.”
So she did.
He took a quick breath. “Do you see me?”
“I see you,” she whispered.
He gathered her up into his arms and then carried her out of the draw, and he continued to carry her in his arms until they found water in a swift-running creek.
While the New Ones were filling their water jugs and drinking their fill, he walked downstream with her and stripped her where she stood.
The cuts and scratches from the wounds were completely healed, but there would be scars. It made him think of the scars Laya Birdsong wore when she took them into the canyons to escape Firewalker.
“I will have bad dreams for the rest of my life,” he said shortly as he helped her down into the water and began to wash away the dried blood. Even now, his hands still shook just thinking about what had happened.
“If I had waited, at least one of them would have died. There was no time to think,” she said as she sluiced water onto her face.
“I know that in my head, but my heart is not happy about the decision,” he muttered.
Her hair was wet and clinging to her face and neck as she wrapped her arms around his neck. Now he was as wet as she and he didn’t care.
“I am sorry you were afraid, but I will never leave you. I swear on my mother’s life I will never leave you.”
He closed his eyes as their foreheads touched. Today had been too close to call.
****
And so they kept moving; one day much like the next and the next until one day the New Ones called a halt.
The elders gathered with the Nantays and with Yuma and Tyhen, and they studied the geography of their location against the maps that had been drawn, and then in the end, turned to Tyhen for the final verdict, but the result was all the same.
For the first time since the journey began, they would no longer be traveling due North. They were well into the land once called North America, and as close as the elders could guess, somewhere between what had been New Mexico and Arizona. They showed her their approximate location on the map.
“Where to from here?” Yuma asked.
Tyhen put her finger in the middle of the space.
“We go here. Into the heart is where we go.”
The men looked at the map and then at each other.
“That’s right about where Kansas used to be,” Johnston said. “Why there?”
She hesitated then quickly closed her eyes, picturing it in her head before she answered.
“Because of the gathering.”
“The gathering. What do you mean by that?” Johnston asked.
“Many tribes are on the move. They will be waiting for me there. That place has space and water for many people. It is where we have to be.”
“Then that is where we go,” Yuma said.
****
They moved on, stopping when they could to replenish their stores and making clothing for the time they called winter.
She didn’t know yet what that meant, but if it was colder than it had been on that mountain in the snow, she was not going to like it.
She remembered the vision she’d had back in Naaki Chava, where her feet and legs had been wrapped in fur
s and also cloaked in heavy fur. It was yet another thing to dread.
The march had taken on a life of its own. It became a thing that lived, powered by the feet and hearts of the people in it, and the mark they left on the land in their passing was like a slow-healing wound. There was grass beaten beneath so many feet that a blind man could have followed their path and dead trees gleaned from the woods to make their fires. Animals could not run fast or far enough to escape their arrows. And even though they longed for the fruits and vegetables readily available from the jungle, they were rarely hungry. With that many hunters, people were always fed.
Only once did they stop because of a death. One morning a man who had called himself Coyote Charlie did not wake up. When they went to check on him, they found his heart had stopped beating. He had been ailing for some time and talked about this moment with his friends and now he could walk no more.
At his request, they left his unburied body on the highest rise around them, so that he would have a shorter distance to travel on the road to the Great Spirit, and then they kept on walking because there was nothing else to do.
Life now was a kind of limbo like the time when a baby dwells in his mother’s womb, growing bigger and stronger until the day of birth when it moves into a different realm. So it was with their lives as well. They were simply doing what they had to do to keep moving, growing leaner and stronger for that day when they would leave the protection of the Windwalker’s daughter and do what was needed to make the change.
On this day when the sun had been slow to show its face and the wind had a bite as it breathed down their necks, they came over a rise and then stopped as if they’d run into a wall.
Slowly, the people began to fan out from behind, wanting to see what was holding everyone up, and they kept moving toward the front until they were three deep and stretched along the ridge for almost a mile.
Below was a sea of black moving as one across the slope of a hill and down into a valley and the thin ribbon of water that ran through it. They kept spilling across the land and with no end in sight.
Tyhen knew what they were because she’d seen them in her dreams. “I know this animal. It is the animal with many names,” she said.
Yuma nodded, pleased that she had remembered. “Yes. Each tribe has a name for this animal, but the white man called them buffalo.”
Tyhen was struck by the silence around her, and by the expressions on the New Ones’ faces. Some were quietly weeping. Some had fallen to their knees. She leaned closer to Yuma, afraid her question would somehow be misconstrued as rude.
“Why do the people cry?” she whispered.
“It is our first sight of how the world used to be before the strangers destroyed the balance between earth, animal, and man. Our ancestors took this world as normal, and by the time the New Ones were born, this was no more.”
“What should we do?” she asked.
“We wait until the animals have moved on. We do not want to get caught in their stampedes.”
And so they stood on the ridge staring down into the valley below and watched the herd as it fed and watered, and the day grew colder and the wind blew harder and they took the clothes with fur out of their packs and put them on, and as the herd began to move, Tyhen began to hear drums.
At first they were faint, and very far away, but as they came down off the ridge into the valley, intending to camp by the water for the night, the drums seems louder.
Her heart skipped as a knot coiled low in her belly.
In this foreign place where nothing, not even the weather, stayed the same, she felt a sudden sense of the familiar.
“Yuma!”
He turned at the sound of her voice. “I am here.”
“Do you hear them?”
He cocked his head. “Hear what, my love?”
“Drums. I hear drums.”
His eyes narrowed. They must be getting near the place of gathering. “No, I don’t hear them. What are they saying?”
She sighed, her gaze sweeping out across the vast plains of the land before them.
“They are calling me home.”
The End
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
