The men, who wanted simply to kill the Old People and were afraid of the dire spirits they called down from the sky, did not care that sunlight had become grass and then beasts. They wanted only to know where the herds grazed beyond the horizon. So long as the witches could tell them that, they left the women alone with their ghost dancers and crystals to learn how sunlight broke into rainbows.
That was long ago when many more of the Old People lived. In those times, a dozen witches lived together in the Forest, working with three or more ghost dancers at a time. The ul udi taught them how to store celestial energy in crystal rocks and how to use those stones to speak with them and learn what they knew.
The crone huffed a sigh at all that had been known and now lost. During her lifetime, most of the Old People had disappeared from the Forest, and without them to call down the ul udi, the craft had withered. The tribes, busy with the hunt and the Ways of Wandering, thought it foolish to sit around sipping dreaming potions and gazing into crystals, so few women chose the craft. Now merely a handful of stray ghost dancers like Baat remained, three or four aging witches, and these few crystals that had not yet been broken.
Neoll Nant Caw lifted the moss-plaited cover from a small heap before her and revealed a cluster of quartz chunks. Blue light from the burning circle scattered in bright grains and glassy shadows as she picked up one of the rocks.
She searched its rough facets for a way in, found a radiant seam and gazed into its hot glare. After a lifetime of trancework, she no longer needed dreaming potions to use the crystals. One deep breath opened her to the energy in the rock.
With dazzled eyes, the crone stared into invisible kingdoms, and saw. Bare trees against a gray sky wreathed a vision of herself bundled in fur, walking among shifting paths of snow. She bowed before the wind, protecting something from the gusty cold. The wind lifted the fur from the crook of her arm, exposing the squinty face of a newborn—and the shock of seeing its small body broke the trance.
With a trembling hand, Neoll Nant Caw lowered the crystal and shut her eyes, trying to reason through what she had glimpsed. She had intended to seek knowledge from the ul udi about the boy and had not expected to see herself carrying an infant. The ul udi in these stones did not deceive. What else could it mean but that, sometime in the icy months ahead, such a one would come into her care?
The crone touched her cool fingertips to her eyelids and let her flesh hang heavy on her bones. She was far too old to rear a child. Her own children, three girls, she had given to the families of their fathers so as not to distract herself from the craft. Whose child could this be, come to trouble her last days?
The possibility grew in her that this might foresee the young wanderer's child, begat on Kirchi. The witch had come to the crystals to ask about Timov. The boy could attract ul udi like a ghost dancer. A rare being, he should be bred to preserve his skill.
Neoll Nant Caw muttered a prayer of thanks to the Great Mother, wanting this to be true. If Kirchi mated with Timov in the spring, after they had tested his usefulness and proven him worthy, then her vision would be fulfilled the following winter. She could not hope to survive much longer than that. Yet that would be enough, for then there would be others to continue the craft.
The witch picked up the stone and squinted at it again. The trance did not work as deeply. Fatigued, she witnessed only the usual fretwork of energies, the frozen lightning of the ul udi in the stone.
You are made of light, the soft voice spoke to her. Everything is made of light. Each grain of sand is a world of light squeezed to a mote.
Neoll Nant Caw had heard this story many times, and she put the rock down. Later, when she had rested, she would enter the crystal again and try to scry the future. The Great Mother had delivered to her a young man who could carry the ul udi. For the first time in seven years, she would once more have the chance to speak directly with the spirits and to make more crystals.
Vital as the stories in her crystals had been for her, she knew them too well, and her heart hummed with excitement that soon she would hear new stories and learn more about the invisibles.
Moon Bitch
Dawnlight lit the mists of the Forest to golden vapors, and Duru peered through them, looking for the ghost dancer. She had woken in the dark to find herself alone, yet still leashed to the fir. Nuts and berries that the monster had gathered still lay within grasp on a pelt of silver mink. At first, she ignored the food and waited nervously for the giant to return. As the Forest grew brighter, her hunger increased.
Duru had never seen mink before, and she let her fingers crawl over her bed of pine needles to the bright hairs of the pelt. The fur felt softer than she had guessed, and the many subtle colors in the pelage impressed her. She wondered what manner of creature wore this skin, as her fingers walked among the hazelnuts and mulberries.
The fur reminded her of the weasel pelts that the Mothers used for trimming mantles in the wet season. She remembered her own mother had once lined a tunic with weasel for her and she had worn it several winters before she outgrew it.
Sadly, lost in memory, she carried a mulberry to her lips and mashed it between her tongue and palate, sifting the tiny seeds with her teeth. The berry's sweet ripeness exploded in her mouth and reminded her she had not eaten all day. She helped herself to several more of the purple drupes.
Then she sampled the nuts and noticed that they, too, had reached perfect maturity. Their husks peeled away easily. She found two rocks under the duff of fallen needles and used them to smash open the hard shells, exposing meats dark yellow and oily. She began eating avidly.
Baat watched with satisfaction from a covert of dense undergrowth. With the rising sun, the voices of the ul udi had entirely vanished, leaving him weary and clear-headed. He felt proud that he had not succumbed to the murderous insistence of the Dark Traces, prouder yet that he had offered her food she found appetizing.
He observed her nimble way of shucking the nuts with her fingers and cracking them with rocks, sparing her molars. Apparently, the mouths of the smallheads were not as useful as those of the People, so they had to find ways to employ hands for simple things he and his kin would do with their teeth.
Intrigued, Baat studied the way his captive broke off the cap of each nut to expose the hard shell and then how she braced several nuts together on one rock and bashed them with the other. Among the People, only children with immature teeth did this, and for a brief moment Baat imagined her as his own daughter.
Strings of sunlight dangled through the branches, and several touched the girl, lighting the crow-black of her hair, the tawny hue of her flesh. All the smallheads Baat had seen before had hair red as his own or paler. Their eyes pooled the blue light of heaven, whence came the clearest light.
This one's eyes seemed like chips of night, and her look puzzled him, as though she gazed with the mirror-depths of a still, dark pond. Looking at her, he experienced a tinge of fear. After all, wasn't she something more than a smallhead? She had seen him in his body of light, which no other smallhead had done—except her brother.
Who are these exotic smallheads? If he had the strength, he would dance with the ul udi this next night and ask the Bright Ones to tell him. To do that, he would have to sleep now in daylight. Certainly, the smallhead hunters were already tracking him, especially the beardless one, who had dared trespass the night Forest to pursue him. And the beardless one had allied with Yaqut. Evil Face had stalked him all summer in these woods and denied him his flight to the cairn of the ancestors in the north.
Baat rubbed the ache of fatigue around his eyes and tried to think clearly. If he fled now with the girl, he would be too tired at night to call down the cold fire of the sky. Then he would have to spend another day in ignorance, unsure of this girl’s identity and what he should do next.
Besides, another run through the woods would only heighten the unwilling girl's fear. Perhaps if he stayed here for the day, she might come to see that he meant her no harm.
Then travel would go easier, and she could help him. The Bright Ones intended that.
His decision felt just, even though it played into the vulnerability of his exhaustion. He sighed—a frustrated sigh. Let the smallheads come. Let them find me if they can.
During his run last night, he had been careful to leave few tracks behind, loping much of the way through the swift course of streams and on boulder paths of extinct riverways. Finding him would not be easy.
Before he could let the weariness in his muscles claim him, Baat had to show himself to the girl. He stood up and stepped slowly through the shrubs. For a while, he just stood there and let the smallhead see him in the misty morning light, eyes lowered so he would not have to meet her dark stare.
Duru started back at the sight of the giant and hugged the fir. In daylight, he appeared even more gruesome than he had in the smudged boreal glow of night.
His garish red hair stood up like bristles from his large head, stubbled along the broad curve of his pike-thrust jaw. A crescent scar scored his right cheek. Flame-flared tufts twisted above down-sloped green eyes that, to her great relief, did not stare at her but looked away, inviting her to study him.
She had seen enough of his brutish features, the lump of his nose, the cruel slash of his mouth. She rested her gaze on the broad stoop of his bare shoulders, glinting with red hairs.
Unlike the hunters of her tribe, the giant did not wear fur but deer hide, like Yaqut. Where Yaqut secured his buckskin in straps across his waist and sinewy limbs, the ghost dancer had wrapped a complete skin about his body, tying the leg-strips off at his shoulder and hip. And, like the Tortoise people, like Hamr before he wed, he used no bodypaint.
The giant advanced, and a mossy odor came with him. He knelt before her, hands open before him, huge against his wall of a chest. "Baat," he groaned. Then he lay down nearby, facing away from her, the long hackles of his ruddy hair streaked like a mane down the muscled curve of his back. In moments, his breath soughed with the rhythm of sleep.
Duru's fingers flitted among the nutshells she had cracked until she found the shards she wanted. While she ate, the idea had leaped in her that the sharp hazel shells could cut her leash, and she had been about to test her idea when the giant appeared. Now that he had fallen asleep, she immediately set to picking at the reeved twine that bound her.
The shell shards proved too dull to slice the vine, but sharp enough to separate the fibers, which she could cut tediously between the two rocks she had used as a nutcracker.
Morning mists burned away. Jays swirled among the trees. The wind turned and delivered the red leaf of a nearby maple and a shadowy hint of rain. Overhead, a woodpecker tapped persistently, and Duru used its noise to mask the sound of the gnashing rocks as she crushed the last fibers of the twisted vine between them.
The vine snapped. Duru sat still, waiting to see if the ghost dancer had heard. His breath flowed deeply, and she crept away crabwise from his hulk. Once she had crawled past another fir, she leaped to her feet, running as silently as she could.
Where to run? Duru had no idea in which direction the giant had carried her during the night. She moved west, following a ridge-back above a snaky stream whose water swirled to foam among black rocks. Jay screams alerted the whole Forest to her flight. Finally, she slid and skidded her way down the embankment to the stream and the riffle of water that seemed to mute the noise of her downstream run.
She clambered over beech trees felled by erosion. When the stream pooled to a mire of kelp-like grasses and bearded hemlocks, where sunlight layered but did not reach, she climbed out.
She crossed the stream along the peak of a cluttered beaver dam, teetering on shaggy logs. Halfway across, she paused as the beaver, huge as a bear, slithered out of the black water and shambled ashore. It paid her no heed, and she hurried over the crook-backed dam and into a fern grove.
Burly oaks stood among rocks above the bracken. Their interlocked branches looked sun-chinked and dark as the legendary roof-trees that held up the sky.
Duru decided to wade through the fern holt to the giant oaks. She hoped to find edible mushrooms in the damp dark there. As she crossed through the sedge, a stupendous shadow rose from the field.
A bear reared from the reed bank and the hackleberries on which it had been feeding. Its bellow made Duru's teeth clack. She scampered away, and the bear lumbered through the bushes after her.
She headed for the oaks. Struggling up the steep rise, the bear loping after her, she heard a whooping cry. The ghost dancer stood on the far shore of the stream.
Baat called again, "Doo-roo!" He waved her toward him. Knowing that bears ran faster uphill, he tried to signal her toward the stream.
Duru understood. And though she had been fleeing the ghost dancer, hope and desperation burst together in her at the sight of him. She turned sharply and dashed down the hill.
The bear yowled and banked after her. She slogged through rush grass, where the bear's pursuit slackened, slowed by mud. When she heaved herself into the stream, the beast shambled two lengths behind, groaning with the effort to catch its prey. It splashed in after her.
Baat stood on the bank and threw rocks at the pursuing bear until it dove. "Doo-roo!" he cried once more, and signed for her to hurry. He knew she could not outswim a bear. A rock in each fist, he sloshed in, and stood waist deep, shouting her on.
The beast's air bubbles frothed just behind the girl's splashing legs. She scrambled upright in the water, a terrified look on her face, then sank again out of sight.
Baat ducked under but could discern nothing in the turgid stream. He bobbed upright. The surface churned, and Duru reappeared, gasping. Beside her, streaming water, the bear rose, fangs bared.
Baat hurled his two rocks and struck the beast's snout squarely. It dove again, hoving into view farther away, retreating to the distant bank.
Duru twisted onto her back and stroked to shore. Blood ribboned behind her. Baat lifted her from the water and carried her through the canes to the mossy slope. Her right sandal was gone, and her calf had been split open like a gutted fish.
Swiftly, Baat unstrapped his clan belt and lashed it around her wounded leg. She clutched at his arm. Gritting her teeth, she gnashed back the pain.
"Doo-roo," he said, softly to allay her fear, and put a broad hand to the side of her face. He took the leather sheath of his flint knife and placed it between her teeth. Then he set to work splitting canes to extract the soft punk, which he mixed with the bast from a nearby poplar.
Removing his clan belt from Duru's leg, he plastered the gash with the mucilage. He wrapped the calf securely using long strands of sedge grass, then gave the girl a chunk of the poplar bast to gnaw.
Duru struggled with unconsciousness. When Baat lifted her, she put her arms around his thick neck, glad for his strength, for his lonely smell of sodden earth, and for the pain that hooked her precariously to life.
)|(
"Wake up," Kirchi whispered in Timov's ear. She had come to collect the large pile of pine seeds he had shucked. The two other workers had already cleared away the empty cones and gone to their own burrow for the night.
Timov watched from far inside his head as Kirchi used a slice of smoothed bark to scoop the white seeds into a basket. The rhythms of the pine-husking continued to tremble in him, and he heard the young witch's voice weave in and out of the sizzling rain: "Wake up, Timov. Evil Face and your friend are lost. We must save ourselves." And the noise of the rain carried her words into the hissing blood in his ears.
Kirchi leaned close and gave Timov the juniper bough that Neoll Nant Caw wanted shaved for tinder. As she fitted it and the flint scraper to his dull hands, she said in chant-voice: "Timov, your body is equal to the sunlight. A star baked your bones. Your blood is red with dust from the center of that star. So are my bones, my blood. So is everything on the Earth, everything made from fire and ash. Wake up and look around you at all that's come from inside a star!"
Kirchi began Timov's new work rhythms by moving his hands through the actions of scraping off the bough's bark and shaving strips of green-white pith. Once the rhythm asserted itself and he began doing the work without her guidance, she picked up the basket of pine seeds and left her charm to do its work.
Everything made from fire and ash ... your body has come from inside a star. The words disappeared into the seethe of his pulse and blood echoing in his ears, circling through its thick night.
)|(
Thunderheads brooded over the Forest. Violet billows piled high into the ether, blotting out the afternoon sun and casting everything below into eerie, luminous darkness. Lightning streaked, and birds fluting in the treetops went silent, waiting for the thunder.
Yaqut had found shelter beneath the overhang of a terrace strewn with juniper. The stream that had cut the rock shelves meandered below. It chortled loudly as it foamed among rocks fallen from above.
Overhead, caverns gaped from the hollow faces of the worn-away land. Their refuge belonged to Bear and Lion. Yaqut built a lean-to among dwarf trees clinging to the stone ledge, and Hamr gathered dried grass and branches of deadwood to spark a fire.
Thunder pealed, and Blind Side of Life shuffled nervously and tossed his head. He smelled the lightning on the wet wind and neighed with concern. Hamr stoked the fire to a blaze and watched Yaqut pace with the tracking stone in his hand, absorbed in feeling the direction of his prey.
"I'm taking Blind Side to a patch of milk grass I saw on our way up here," Hamr said. "It'll calm him."
Yaqut grunted, staring at the stone in his hand as though he could see the ghost dancer in it. "Hard rain is coming. Look out for washes or you will be riding the river."
Hamr untethered his horse and led him back along the shelf the way they had come. Soon as they got out of sight, he mounted and drove his sightless horse harder. They had a long way to go, and the rain already closed upon them. Pellets of water smacked among the rocks and fluttered the leaves of the claw-rooted junipers.
Hunting the Ghost Dancer Page 21
