The remnants of last night's stew lay in the firepit, furry with ants. Duru had wanted to dry the meat, and Hamr had laughed at her efforts to do so over the fire.
"We need salt to do it right," he said as though she did not already know.
She shrugged when he dropped her meat skewers into the flames and doused them with broth.
"Let the Forest eat, too—She feeds us well enough."
Duru had shrugged, because she had enough work curing the numerous skins and strings of gut and sharpening wooden knives for that day's certain kill.
The Beastmaker had filled the Forest with many animal powers, nimble teachers of the Hunt. Not only squirrels, the easiest to kill, but dwarf pigs, thick black snakes more like eels for their lack of fangs and poison, and weasels, ferrets, sloths, and porcupines. So much to hunt that hunting had become more like foraging.
Hamr and Timov no longer bothered to rise with first light. They slept on soft leaf litter in root coves until sunlight rayed like spears among the trees. They leisurely nibbled berries Duru had gathered the previous day, while Hamr sat under a tree and plucked hairs from his chin with the clam shells he carried in his satchel.
Timov liked to explore the sunstruck corners of the Forest. He startled mouse deer and tree foxes. And once, he brained a surprised ptarmigan with a shot from his sling. He wore its feathers in his hair.
Now better endowed to ascend toward the Sky World, he climbed tall trees, looking for bee hives. With smoking bundles of leaves prepared by Duru and lifted by twine, he drowsed the bees, then broke open the hives for the amber combs and sweet larvae.
Timov stared out over the spires of the Forest. He marveled at the undulant green vastness and at snow mountains in the far purple of the east.
North, the Forest ended. He could see the seas of grasslands, the drifting herds, and a blue-white curve to the world's icy edge.
West, the land opened to flat, torn terrain and herd trails.
South, the trees ranged forever.
That panorama always left him giddy, even when he found no honey to loot, and he came down into the gloom of the Forest with the wind shining in his eyes and ran among the trees on springy legs, yawping like a bird.
At nightfall, all three sang out the daycount and watched on Cyndell's bracelet their approach to the cold chambers of the moon. They had to find a strong, friendly tribe before winter, and they hoped that their fire-chant would alert others to their intelligence and worthiness.
After the chant, when no answering call came, Hamr told proud adventure tales to bolster the courage of his young companions and keep his mind off their plight. Duru and Timov participated, embellishing the fantasies, until sleep compelled and they drifted into dreams, sometimes without the hurt of remembering where they wandered, or why.
Only Blind Side of Life moped, overtly unhappy in the Forest. He missed the herd scent of the migratory trail and the prairie grass he preferred to the bitter tangled weeds that sprouted from tree-rot in these tight spaces.
The cluttered smells here sometimes confused him, and he always had to be led, for fear of breaking a leg among the numerous roots and fallen branches. While the men hunted, he moved between the trees, nibbling here and there, mostly sulking.
Occasionally, the wind shifted from the north and delivered memories of minty grass and stale yet comforting odors of the herd, which he sorely missed. He lifted his nostrils and turned his body into the wind and stood, head high, like a sighted horse, until the wind slipped away.
The morning of their ninth day in the maze of trees, Blind Side whinnied nervously. A harsh stench of decay spoiled the blossom fragrances. He tried to turn away, and Hamr took him by the rope tied about his neck and led him closer.
Since entering the Forest, he and Timov had been finding bent blades of grass and nicks in the treebark that might have been tribal messages. Perhaps Blind Side sensed other people—or, if nervous about a beast, they should move anyway.
They walked over a small rise and through a thicket of alders before they began to smell what the horse had sensed—the feculence of dead bodies.
Hamr mounted his horse and Timov and Duru fell behind.
The thicket opened to a grove of blue-shadowed fir, where a woman in a plaited grass robe stood with her back to them. Arms raised, she gripped a skull-sized rock in both hands. Before her, hanging by their hair from low limbs of the fir, three human heads dangled. Crows had gouged their eyes, and from their tattered necks hung juts of bone and blackened cords of flesh.
Duru gasped, and Blind Side of Life whinnied and stamped nervously.
The woman started, turned to face them, and they saw her pregnant profile—at least four moons. Long locks of yellow hair fell to her shoulders and twined into the grass of her robe, which parted to expose large breasts circled in red and black paint. She held the rock toward them and backed off. "Away!" she shouted. "Here be tainted ground."
She spoke in words more roughly hewn than the speech they used, yet the wanderers understood her.
Hamr lowered his spear and opened his arms in greeting. "No harm," he promised. "We are Panther people, seeking the Thundertree."
Duru put her hand on his thigh, wanting him to turn around and retreat from the horror. Instead, he walked Blind Side closer, and Duru and Timov followed reluctantly.
Now they could see the entire grove and noticed, under a haze of flies, beheaded corpses slumped under trees, torsos ripped open and limbs mangled by scavengers.
Beside them lay the carcasses of two panthers reduced to heaps of torn fur and exposed bone. In the trees, the birds that had been feasting fretted angrily at these additional intruders.
"Leave here or be cursed!" the pregnant woman yelled as she backed between the firs.
Hamr dismounted to pursue her, and Duru grabbed his arm and pointed to where a small wooden bowl wisped a burnt offering. "She is a priestess," the girl said. "She is burning resins to free the spirits of the dead. Let her go or she will curse you."
Timov took Duru's hand and pulled her behind Blind Side and back into the alder thicket. The priestess had fled, and Hamr hurried forward, to see which way she had run. Blind Side whinnied a warning, and Hamr pulled up short before a brisk rustling in the brush.
Ahead, a barberry shrub parted, and a black stump of a head emerged, ears laid back, green eyes glaring, fangs opened around a sizzling hiss.
Hamr shouted and thrust his spear. The panther jumped from its cover, a living shadow, and moved noiselessly under the trees, circling toward where Timov and Duru cowered.
Blind Side cried out and kicked his front hooves. Hamr dashed to him and quickly pulled him back into the thicket.
Duru clasped Hamr, while Timov, his back toward the horse, held his spear with both hands ready for attack.
The panther vanished. Blind Side's jittery pacing indicated it circled nearby. With Timov watching in the rear, and Duru close to the horse, Hamr led them back the way they had come. Warily, they edged through the Forest until they arrived at a brook, where they paused to orient themselves.
"Who are those dead?" Timov asked.
"You saw the big cats that died with them," Hamr answered. "They must have been Panther men."
"That’s a stalking panther stopped you from chasing the priestess," Duru observed. "Its tail is bobbed."
"Who killed the men?" Timov searched the shadowy chambers of the Forest for movement. "Their enemy must be nearby. They are dead less than a day."
"If it is war," Hamr said, "everyone will think we are enemy—both the Panther people and their foes."
"What do we do?" Timov whined.
"We should make an offering to show we are outsiders," Hamr answered.
"The priestess would be near her people," Duru said. "The Thundertree will know about us soon."
"We're getting out of the woods," Hamr decided, playing his alert stare across the nearby branches, searching for spearmen in the treetops. The bountiful, sunshot woodland menaced them with every
wind-blur and bird squawk.
Shadowy streams crisscrossed the Forest, swollen with glacial melt and the thunderstorms of summer, and the noise of their watery tumult charged the air. Previously, the sound had been comforting, reminiscent of the sea. Now Timov's and Duru's ears ached, trying to listen past the rapids for threatening noises.
Hamr watched Blind Side, even though he could not entirely trust the stallion's more acute ears, since the horse did not know the Forest. They followed the brook north, without stopping to pick up the cured squirrel-pelts even though Duru pleaded. By afternoon, they stepped into the brazen light of the open plains.
Blind Side whinnied, delighted, and waded eagerly into the sighing grasses. While he frisked and grazed, the others lay in the open, staring at clouds toppling across the enormous sky.
Yet even with sunlight hot on their faces, fright chilled them. They listened hard and often raised their heads to scan. The darkness of the Forest had soaked into their senses, and as they sat on boulders that rose above the tasseled rye, they heard the lowing of the Great Bear in the wind, the cough of the Panther in the soft clop of Blind Side's hooves, and the dead-leaf slither of the Serpent in the hiss of wind through grass.
"A rival tribe would've taken the heads," Timov said, around the stick of grass he nervously chewed.
"No beast tied their heads to the branch," Hamr responded. He lay on his side atop a lichen-splotched boulder, watching his horse drifting slow as a cloud through the rye. "Had to be a tribe did it."
Duru grunted agreement from behind Hamr's sandal, tugging on a stitch with her teeth. "At least we should've gathered the pelts."
"We were scared," Timov said.
"Careful," Hamr corrected. He accepted his sandal from Duru and put it on.
"At least the priestess honors the dead," Duru said. "They must have some respect for the living, too. Maybe they'll come for us when the priestess tells them we're Panther people."
"Unless," Hamr suggested, "she was the enemy's priestess, catching her adversaries' souls."
"Then why did the Panther stop you from chasing her?" Timov asked.
They fretted the rest of the day. At night, they retreated to the edge of the Forest, to forage and shelter from the soft rains. With Blind Side of Life to warn of beasts, they succumbed to weariness and slept deeply, huddled in the embrace of root ledges, blanketed with leaves and branches.
Usually on this wearying journey, sleep ranged dreamless or illuminated with radiant memories of that day's wandering or the persistent undertow of fleeing perilous shadows among the trees. That night, thrumming with fear of the severed heads, Timov suffered a unique dream.
Thunderheads, racked with lightning, burned in the night. Hot rain fell in sheets. Thunder squashed him, and he lay pressed against a tree, watching the torn rain part around a man, a hideously huge man with a block head and hair like hackles, beard short and stiff as pine needles. Long eyes stared from under a shelf of brow, above flared nostrils and a sinewy mouth. Rain streamed from naked, solid shoulders that in gray light looked hammered from rock. A hard pulse beat in a neck swollen as a puff-adder's.
Sudden strong hands reached for Timov, and the blunt fingers pulled him close enough so he could see a fish-skin scar parting the beard of the giant's right jaw. He met the giant’s velvet breath, musty as new earth, and heard words, gruff as two stones clacking, "Go back!"
Timov lurched awake, those long eyes still visible in a flash of dream-lightning—wolfish, ice-green eyes, nailing him with cold rage. He sat up into whispering rain, noticed pink twigs of dawn among the trees, and hugged himself.
Hamr laughed at Timov's dream. "The ancestors are taunting you."
Duru rubbed her brother's hunched shoulders. She had slept restlessly, too, too frightened to let herself sleep deeply. Every owl hoot and wind-rubbed branch defeated fatigue, and she had lain awake in the watched dark.
"Hamr," she said to his broad back as he urinated against a pine, "all night I felt we were prey."
"That's why Timov needed that dream," Hamr explained through a yawn, tightening the antelope-hide about his waist. He squeezed the back of the boy's neck. "We are prey for whatever can catch us, aren't we? Come. Let's see if we can find a meal without getting eaten."
A short while later on the grasslands, while trying to run down a black snake for a meal, they found the site where the ghost dancer had killed the tribesmen earlier in the spring. Their bones had been scattered by scavengers and glowed white as pieces of cloud in the emerald shadows of tundra rye.
Hamr picked up a skull, smashed at one side like a piece of pottery. He examined the broken cranium, held it out to Timov, who shrank from it.
"It's just bone," Hamr said.
"Human bone, Hamr. They died violently. Their spirits—"
"Put it down!" Duru yelled.
"Spirits can't hurt us anymore than your dream can." Hamr dropped the skull, smiled at the others' diffidence, and waded through the rye. "Better to fear what's living."
In a lush patch he found a few charred twigs the rains had half buried and, nested among them, a black knife. The bone grip, though scorched, remained intact. Its leather bindings had burned away, and the seared handle had opened its white interior like a pod to release the volcanic-glass haft of the knife.
"Duru," Hamr called from where he knelt. "Look at this." He pointed with the blade to a wavy line etched in the handle. "This is a Mother sign, isn't it?"
She recognized the Moon Serpent, who each month molted her two skins, of light and of darkness. Hamr had uncovered a birth knife, used to cut the umbilical. At midnight, it etched the protective circle in the magic ashes around the last tooth of fire, freeing the Sun from the womb of the Earth. Only a birth-knife could wound spirits.
"It is Snake," she whispered. From her satchel, she withdrew a length of chewed tendon. "Will you bind it?"
Hamr fitted the bone halves together over the knife's haft, and wound the string about the grooved throat and butt of the handle. With his teeth, he tightened the bindings, then cut the tendon cleanly at the knots.
He admired this beautiful, mirror-black blade as he buffed it with his antelope-hide. Though far sharper than wood or flint, it was brittle, impractical for the hunt. He handed the knife to Duru. "Use it well."
Duru took the Moon Serpent in both hands, touched the tip to the charred spot in the grass where the fire had stained it. The knife's omen signified the cutting away of their old life and a new life promised.
Giving Hamr a pleased smile, she placed the Moon Serpent in her satchel, carefully sheathed between leaf-packets of dried plants. Someday this knife would gleam before the fire of their home among new people, and she would tell their grandchildren how Grandfather Hamr retrieved the Moon Serpent from the Land of the Dead.
Timov called from a nearby gully. More bones lay there, with a spear hollowed by termites. They studied the spear and noted Thundertree markings.
The wind shifted, and Blind Side nickered. They climbed the scarp of the gully, searched upwind. Duru cried out, pointed into the glare of the rising sun where a shadow moved in the rye, larger than a panther, big as a deer but low, slinking under the grassheads. A moaning cry rose with the wind, reboant as a bull.
Timov clutched his sister, and they backed away along the edge of the gully. Duru flicked nervous looks toward the Forest, wondering if they could make it to the trees before whatever it was attacked.
Hamr lifted his spear and approached the shadow. Blind Side had backed off. With no way to reach his steed. he waved for Timov to back him up.
Timov left Duru behind a rock half her height and loaded his sling. He followed several paces behind Hamr, leaning back, ready for flight.
The moaning darkened to a bellow, and a figure rose from the grass, ox-shouldered, black-furred and big as two men, with a gruesome head and a cankerous craw of fangs. Ghoul eyes glared from a visage of pale, fungoid flesh.
Duru screamed. Timov whipped his slingshot,
sending a rock whizzing wildly past Hamr's ear and into the grass. Hamr had ducked, expecting the creature to pounce. His spear left his hand of its own will, and gouged out earth beside the monster. It shambled forward with a mighty roar, and the two hunters ran.
Hooting cries assailed them as they sprinted for Duru, snatching her, each by one arm, and bolting for the Forest. Hamr glanced back once, to see the monster's head fall away and reveal a scowling man in panther-skin sitting atop another man's shoulders.
A third man stood up in the grass and whirled the bull-roarer he had devised from a vine and a thick piece of bark. Then they were off, bounding like pronghorns.
Stupefied at first, Hamr stalked to where the Panther men had duped him, and kicked the crude mask of birch bark, moss and shabby furs. The tribe of the Forest had just tested his courage, and found him wanting. He grabbed his spear, shook it over his head, and shouted furiously at the fleeing men.
Laughter and jeers trickled back on the wind as the men disappeared into the ravines and gullies.
Part Two
SLITTING THE BELLY OF THE MOON BITCH
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
—Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno
Ghost Dancing
Baat lay on his back, staring through branches of the Forest, watching the sun's light dapple with each breeze. He wanted to sleep, though he dared not during the day, when the smallheads prowled about.
Since the spring, after he had killed that smallhead band on the tundra and violated their sorceress, he had slept fitfully by night, and never by day. Under the sun, the smallhead men stalked the Forest in silent gangs, with poison-tipped spears and knives.
Baat hid from them in the gloomiest enclaves of the Forest, among tangled briars and snake-infested meres, where the smallheads feared to follow. Yet here, too, in these dark hollows, he could not sleep. He blinked up at the sun, listening for the sounds of their narrow bodies slithering through the bramble.
Hunting the Ghost Dancer Page 13
