“Yet you have made the decision to be one with them. Oh Anka, how can you be so grumpy on such a night? And don’t you think that down there, near the lights, right now, there are others watching the sky and feeling the cool breeze? Perhaps cuddling?” She snuggled up to him, draping an arm across his broad chest.
“No use trying to arouse me. I’m getting too old for that, too,” he said, giving her a toothy grin.
“Teasing again!” She slapped his shoulder hard, then snuggled close again. “All I want is to keep you warm out here. You’ve been sick.”
“I’m fine, now; you don’t have to be my mother.” He didn’t tell her about the horrible, bloody mass he’d spat up earlier in the evening, and how when he breathed it felt like something was loose inside of him.
“What else can I do? Our children are grown, and you’re the only baby I have left.”
Anka glared at her in mock anger, but before he could touch her she reached out with her own love feeling that made his heart quiver and loins stir, and then her hands touched him there as well. “Ah, the wind and the sky lights make you young again tonight,” she said, eyes bright with anticipation.
He seized her, but gently, pulling her around so she was straddling him, and he was instantly inside of her, thrusting hard as she wrapped strong arms around his neck, pulling his face to her withered breasts. He wanted her so much, feeling her passion and her need and wishing to satisfy her, but again he could not. As quickly as it had become hard and proudly erect, his organ was limp and he could do nothing more to revive it. He ceased his thrusting, feeling old and ashamed, burying his face against her shoulder as she caressed his neck and back. His breathing was now a wheeze, and there was a dull ache low in his back. Face against his chest, Tel could hear a rattling sound from deep inside him.
“My love,” she said, squeezing him tightly, “you keep me young, but I’m getting cold out here. Can we go in now? I told the children I’d find you for them, and now it’s my sworn duty to bring you back.”
“If you insist,” wheezed Anka.
“I do.” Tel stood up, then inched her way back along the ledge, fearful as always of the long fall to the rocks below. Anka followed closely behind, his breath escaping in gasps, head spinning by the time he knelt to squeeze through the narrow entrance to the tunnel leading below.
“The trail grows narrower each year,” she said.
“The trail is the same. Perhaps your feet are growing larger.”
“From chasing you,” she said, holding out a hand to guide him through the entrance.
The tunnel sloped severely for several yards so that they crouched in a duck-walk position until the rock was reasonably level and the ceiling high enough for standing. The walls and ceiling were lined with crusts of tiny quartz crystals, clear and white, but streaked with the yellow of citrine and purple of amethyst. The floor was worn smooth by countless footsteps of those who climbed upwards to see the sun or the moon, smell the sweet scent of pine, hear a bird, or stick a tongue out in falling rain, for except for the great vent carrying hot air, smoke and body odors directly to the top of the cliffs, this was one of only two entrances to the caverns.
They spiraled downwards on a gentle slope, squinting ahead in dim light of torches placed in the walls several meters apart, acrid fumes of burning sap stinging their eyes and nostrils. The noise was faint, at first, growing steadily louder until they could hear individual voices, especially those of the children playing some kind of hiding game. Odors of cooked food and sweaty bodies wafted through the tunnel, along with faint, sweet smoke of hard wood fires. Anka scowled as senses once again saturated, and then ahead of them a shadow raced along the walls, squealing. A pubescent girl, naked and long-legged with blonde hair tumbling in a tangled mass down her shoulders, came around a corner and nearly ran into them. She stopped short, seeing Anka and Tel, her generous mouth spreading into a smile that showed delicate, even white teeth.
“They’re back!” she shrieked, startling both Anka and Tel, and then she raced back down the tunnel.
“They’re back! They’re back! She found him!”
Anka put a hand over his pounding heart. “Spirit of the world, my heart might explode. Catch me.”
Tel laughed. “Dear Baela, always running. Her spirit is our youth, my heart.”
“She looks like a water lizard, and runs like one.”
Tel frowned. “She, and the children like her are the true immortality of the Tenanken, my heart. Not us.”
“I know, I know, but appearances must count for something. She should cover herself, Tel. She is not a child anymore.”
The tunnel ended at last, and they stepped out onto a flat shelf overlooking the great bowl of the main cavern thirty meters below them, a vaulted ceiling rising sixty meters above their heads to a single fumarole going up hundreds more to the outside world. The cavern was round, over a hundred meters across, a series of concentric shelves dropping down into the bowl until at the bottom there was a large, flat area worn smooth by community meetings and ceremonies. The spiral of shelves began where they stood, and ahead of them raced Baela, spreading the word that Anka had returned.
Children of all ages cascaded down from rocky shelves, spilling into the bottom of the great cavern where the eldest Keeper of The Memories would take them once again into the past. Most were clothed in shirts and pants brought to them by Pegre, but all had cast aside the heavy footwear for the moment, and were bare-footed before him. The only connection to the past was visible in the elderly, sitting high above the babbling throng, wrapped in heavy robes and dozing after a satisfying meal.
“Already we are as the Cousins,” said Anka. “I do not see Tenanken here, but something foreign.”
“You see their clothing, and ignore their hearts and minds,” said Tel. “All are Tenanken, even the Cousins, but we have The Memories, dear heart. You give us that.”
“And after you and I are gone, who will be Keeper of The Memories? Where are the Tahehto faces among the young? Where are the heavy features promising remembrance of the ice days, and the great sea, and the long trek south? I see only Hanken features, and a future for the mind touch, but without memories what will there be to tell? We have lost all examples of ancestral purity, Tel. We have become Hinchai.”
“Dear heart, the gifts come and go, and the bloods of Tahehto and Hanken are in all of us. You rely too much on appearances. It is a curse of The Memories you bear. Now go to the children who await their favorite teacher.”
“Very well,” said Anka wearily, “but it is an effort tonight.”
“The strength you need will come to you as it always does,” said Tel. “Besides, they will not go to sleep without some kind of story, and it is you who have given them the habit. Go, now, so we can all sleep!”
“Enough!” grumbled Anka, and he shuffled off along the spiral shelf with an expression of painful resignation on his face while Tel grinned after him. In retaliation he took his time getting there, stopping to share a greeting with each family unit perched on the shelf, for even the adults were gathering to share The Memories, and he loved being the center of so much attention.
Tel settled herself at a tunnel exit near the top of the great room to cool in the gentle breeze from outside, watching her mate of two generations move ponderously downwards while the children scrambled aside to make a path for him to the center of the gathering place. He held himself with great dignity, though she knew his knees ached when slowing the descent of his bulk, and it had become so bad he occasionally allowed himself to complain about it.
Tiny hands reached out to touch him as he followed a winding path into the center of the gathering place. Anka enjoyed cuddling with Tel and close relatives, but was ordinarily not a toucher, preferring to express himself most intimately with the Mind Touch, and finding the grabbing and pulling by the children an irritating distraction to his thoughts. But he was careful to hide such feelings, for this would hurt the children terribly, and he knew
he could not bear to do that.
He allowed them to grab at his beard, but their hands were gentle. They withdrew a little when he reached the center of the gathering and carefully lowered himself into a sitting position, and then they were rustling and bustling about, jostling each other to try to get as close to him as possible. As movement subsided, he found himself facing Baela at such close range he could see his face reflected in her amazingly blue eyes. He made the sign for quiet, and all movement ceased in the cavern, even to the high shelves where the elders sat dozing in the flickering light of exhausted cooking fires, stomachs full of meat and vegetables taken in during the bountiful summer.
Anka looked up at Tel, and she smiled, and then he closed his eyes, reaching out to slow the heartbeats of all around him, drawing from them all anxieties that might interfere with their vision experience. He held this posture for several moments, sneaking a look once to find the children relaxed, hands folded peacefully in their laps, eyes closed and chins up to look inward where he would meet them. Far above him, a faint snore was interrupted rudely by a sharp jab from an elbow, and then it was quiet again.
Shadows danced on yellow walls. There was the smell of wood smoke from dying fires, and a moaning sound as the great cave breathed out through a tunnel to outside night air. These sensations were the first to disappear as Anka drew them deep within themselves for a moment of rest and inward focus. When at last he felt them together he gave them a vision of the sun rising over mountains and in the foreground was a forest of pine. Birds with long beaks, colored in reds, blue and yellow were flying to and fro, calling to each other. Small animals with long, furry tails raced up and down the trees and along the branches. He heard a collective sigh from the cavern, then took them beneath the trees where they looked up through a forest canopy towards blue sky, and felt the ferns and grasses beneath their feet. A large, blue bird with a hooked beak shrieked at their presence, and followed them from above as Anka recalled in complete detail another day of his youth when the Tenanken lived beneath the blue sky and the sun.
Before the caves.
A rushing sound filled their ears, and mist hung before them like fog. They came out of the forest at a cliff’s edge where a river cascaded down a steep slope into a green pool surrounded my meadows filled with flowers saturating the mind with color and scent. There were fish swimming in the pool. With effort, Anka suppressed his memories of catching the fish with his bare hands, eating them raw after playing with the slithering animals. Living in caves, the new generations of Tenanken had little contact with forest creatures, and feared them. The Visions were like a dream, and when there is fear the dream can be a nightmare to be escaped by awakening, and so Anka avoided anything that might cause fear. Instead, they only watched the fish swimming, and felt hot sun on their faces. It was an unusual vision, for they did not see each other in it. It was as if each was suddenly alone in the outside world, exploring it for the first time. It was, in fact, the world as seen by a young Tenanken child over a hundred years in the past.
They stayed in the meadow until the grass turned golden, and shadows stretched around them, and then they climbed a steep slope to the base of slate cliffs where they watched the sun turn red and disappear behind a ridge. Birds settled for the night, and antlered creatures with large eyes emerged from stands of trees to browse before them on the hillside. High up on the cliff was the yawning maw of a cave, which they reached by climbing wide, ascending slabs of green rock, and when they had entered it an unseen hand pushed a large tangle of leaves and vines over the entrance so that it was very dark, and then—
They opened their eyes to flickering torchlight and yellow rock walls, and the smell of wood smoke. For some, back in their world-cavern, it was a welcome return, for they felt secure here surrounded by rock on four sides. But for others Anka could feel sadness, could read it in their faces when they opened their eyes. The world of the caves was surely not for them. They needed to be free in open air and sunlight, or they would wither away. And suddenly the plan to infiltrate them into the outside world was good, and newly justified in Anka’s mind. He wondered why he had ever doubted Pegre’s wisdom. Now he was tired, and yawned mightily.
The gathering broke up quietly, everyone going to his or her place on a shelf somewhere in the cavern, and always in view of the others. Baela remained behind for just a moment, smiling at Anka, then lowering her gaze to the floor and rushing away from him. He suspected she had been about to say something to him before suddenly deciding to remain silent. A welcome change from the noise of talk barely understood. Now it was time to sleep, and he struggled to stand, looking up as Maki, his oldest and only living son, made a loud entrance to the cavern, carrying a huge piece of meat over his shoulder.
“Ho, everyone, see what I bring! While all of you are dreaming, some are hunting so that all can eat!” There was a murmur of approval as Maki paraded around the top shelf of the cavern with his burden until reaching Tel, who regarded him coldly. He walked up to her with a wide grin and dropped the huge, bloody mass of flesh at her feet with a grunt. “See, Mother? Not only is it enough here for a feast, but Han and Dorald soon arrive with more like it. Eh?”
“You’ve done well, son of a proud mother. I’m surprised to see you’ve completely butchered the animal. It was an antlered creature, or a boar?”
“A large boar, Mother, fat and choice. They are difficult to find, and fierce to bring down, but my sling found the mark again. We butchered it on the spot because it was so large, and there were only three of us to carry the meat.”
Tel looked closely at her well-muscled son, the square, brooding face and amber eyes, strong shoulders and long arms lightly covered with reddish-brown hair. A beautiful child, as the others had been before dying in a landslide that had nearly broken her heart as well as Anka’s. Maki himself had narrowly escaped death in the accident, and so his life she regarded as a miracle of The World Spirit. Maki’s success in the hunt was far beyond anyone’s, and she had every reason to be proud, but she despised his good-for-nothing friends, and worried about their influence on him.
Tel prodded the chunk of meat with one foot. “There is more, you say? Most boars I’ve seen have been the size of this one piece, and were much leaner.”
“Much more, Mother, a large herd running together. Enough meat for many months, but they move fast, and we will chase them again tomorrow.”
“Be careful, Maki, and don’t allow yourself to be seen by our Cousins. It could be dangerous for all of us.”
Maki’s mouth curled into a snarl. “The cousins, as you call them, are deaf and blind. Why do you make relatives of our enemies?”
“Because we are related, my son. The Plan has said so. We must avoid all contact until the proper time. Please honor this.”
Maki’s face softened. “We disagree about The Plan, Mother, but I will honor what you say. I want only to please you, and my father.”
Tel smiled. “And you do please us, Maki, very much. Here comes you father now. Anka, see what our son has returned with!”
Maki turned, and embraced his father, who was puffing hard from the climb back to the high shelf. Anka clung to his son, patting him on the back, his breath a wheeze again. “Maybe some strength will flow into me if I hold my strong son long enough. It is not so nice to become old.”
They parted, and Anka looked down at the meat. “A choice morsel, but I am also too fat. Someone please take this temptation away from me. I’m going to sleep, now, and as a privilege of my age I will leave the hunting chores to those most capable of performing them.”
It was a strong compliment, and Maki beamed proudly, his mother quietly gratified and soothed by the obvious strong bond between father and son. It neutralized to some extent her worry over his activities with his friends.
Anka shuffled away towards their sleeping cove above the shelves as Maki jerked the meat to his shoulder again. “I’ll leave this in the grotto to cool, Mother. We leave again early in the mor
ning, and I promise you much more of this.” He stalked away with his burden, his mother smiling after him, but her smile faded when she saw Han and Dorald, unkempt and dirty as usual, enter the cavern bending over from the weight of meat slabs on their backs.
Tel’s heart sank as she watched them greet Maki noisily then follow him towards the grotto. She had seen many boar in her advanced age, and no two of the largest had yielded such a quantity of meat. Sadly, she knew with near certainty what kind of animal her son and his undesirable friends had slaughtered.
It was not a forest creature.
CHAPTER THREE
NIGHT RAIDERS
Maki awoke at the first sign of fire in the eastern sky. He had slept by the cave entrance the entire night, lulling himself to sleep by watching the sky-lights, and straining to hear sounds rising from the distant town. Twice he had heard laughter, loud and boisterous, had felt a growl of vain anger at the existence of those who lived beneath the sun.
The impotent leaders of the Tenanken, old, wobbly and locked in The Memories, had fled to the caves instead of claiming their heritage under the trees by killing the newcomers when they had first arrived. Now there were too many Hinchai for them to wage war against. Even individually they were dangerous when carrying the pointing weapons that hurled tiny, penetrating missiles at blinding speed. He had first seen such a weapon dropping an antlered one at a distance of hundreds of paces; hiding in a nearby tree, he had stifled a cry, watching the great, bloody hole gush open on one side of the animal. And the sound! His heart had beaten erratically for several minutes after that.
But the ones his father and mother called The Cousins could be taken individually, for they were physically weak, and slow afoot. Someday he would surprise one carrying a weapon, and in one violent moment that weapon would be his. Then he would determine who ruled the Tenanken.
The fantasy had kept him awake for several minutes, but then he’d succumbed to the rigors of an exciting day and slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep from which he now awoke alert and refreshed. Han and Dorald were still asleep nearby, two bulky chest-mounds rising and falling in near darkness. They were with him wherever he went, would do whatever he told them to do, he using their strength and easily manipulating the feeble minds of orphans born to inferior parents unable to survive. Both were throwbacks to the days before The Plan when births of the slope-heads were celebrated. The Tenanken elders had been ready to let them die at birth, but Anka had insisted they be suckled by those who had milk, and so here they were at his feet, snoring. He despised them both, but they were useful.
Visions Page 2
