Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  “And the wolves?”

  “All dead of arrows.”

  “I trust you killed these expert bowmen?”

  “Yes, sir. Except for this one.” He pointed again to Arn. “He killed one of the wolves.”

  Mori looked down from his throne-chair at Arn. His eyes were hard and bright as he frowned. Arn was chilled by the power this one man seemed to have, yet he was surprised to feel so much fear in the air of the room, in its locked and guarded doors, and even in the muscular lean of Mori’s great shoulders. Though Arn was afraid, the fear he felt was not all his own.

  “This is the child that came from under the mountain,” Mori said. “And that one is his sister.” He looked at Jen. “And the other is the daughter of Amu. Now I have them all. But tell me once again: Amu and his woman are dead? Did you feel their still hearts? Did you look into their dead eyes?”

  “Yes …” the leader began, but he was interrupted by a shout from a corner of the room.

  “Amu! Runa!” It was a child’s voice, and it was Bren’s. As Bren came into the light his eyes were pouring tears. “Amu! Runa!” he cried.

  “Bren!” The command came from behind Bren, a deeper voice even than Mori’s. Andaru came forward and pulled Bren back, his brow-hooded eyes so much like Bren’s though they were stern and cold. Andaru wore the cattle-skin tunic now, and he was armed with the Chigai broadax.

  16. Wolf, Boar, Bear and Man

  At a signal from Mori, Jen, Arel and Arn were led from the room on their thong. As they were pulled away they all looked at Bren and Andaru, but in Bren’s eyes they saw only grief, and in Andaru’s a distant coldness.

  They were taken down a narrow, muddy street toward the sounds of the fearful cattle. They began to hear other animal voices, too, all unhappy—the squeal of boar, the yapping of wolves, and a deep roar that could only be that of an angry bear. By torchlight they were led along, running and stumbling through the mud, trying to keep from falling and being dragged.

  At a gate they were handed over to another man, this one wearing a grimy leather apron splotched with blood, new and old. His fingernails were caked with a dark sludge and he smelled of spoiled meat.

  “Put these in an iron cage and see they don’t die or escape, or Mori will have your gizzard for breakfast,” the guard who had led them there said.

  “Yes, Master! Yes! Yes!” the grimy man said. He cringed in fear; trying to smile, his mouth looked like the slash-mark of a wound. His eyes were round and simple-looking. Even his short-cropped hair and the bristles on his chin were stained with old gore.

  “What’s your name, so we’ll know who to hang on the racks if they escape.”

  “Doro, Master, who always does what he’s told, pardon me.”

  “I should pardon you for being alive, you greasy scum of a butcher,” the guard said.

  “Yes, Master!”

  With an expression of disgust, the guard turned and went away. Doro led them inside the gate, then to a cage among other cages. Here the lowing, growling and moaning of the animals was all around them, for in all the cages and pens, large and small, were the prisoners of the Chi-gai. As Doro shut them in their cage he looked at them closely in the light of the torch he carried.

  “Why, you’re children!” he said. “Is Doro to butcher children now? Well, what does it matter? On the inside we all look alike. But,” he added with a sly grin and a look over his shoulder, “only birds have gizzards. Doro knows what’s in the insides!” With that he clanged the iron-barred door shut and secured the latch with an elaborate knot of chains. As soon as he left, Arn tried to undo the chains in the dark, but found that while his fingers could just touch them, his arm was so bent that his fingers hadn’t the strength to move the chains at all.

  They were weak from hunger and their long march, but they could at last talk as they untied the thongs from their necks, and they told each other what they knew. Amu was still alive when they left; the Chigai had lied to Mori when they said Runa was dead. Arn told Jen how Arel had stabbed Gort when Gort was about to kill him. But they didn’t talk long because they were so tired they couldn’t hold their heads up any more. Animals moved restlessly in cages all around them, and over all was the moaning of fear, now muted, as if the fear itself had grown exhausted. But they were so tired. The floor of their cage was covered with musty old straw, so they pushed it into a pile for a bed, then snuggled together as closely as they could, for warmth, and fell into deep sleep.

  When the light came out of the east they awoke, shivering, and looked around them. Their cage was about six feet square, with a wooden floor beneath the straw. In a similar cage next to them a large gray wolf, quiet now, lay on its stomach, its head on its outstretched paws, and looked at them with bright yellow eyes. On the other side in its cage a great black-haired boar stood, moving its head back and forth, back and forth as it uttered short grunts or snarls of frustration. In back of their cage what at first looked like a black stump suddenly rose higher than the height of a man—a black bear. Its head, too, moved back and forth, back and forth, its paws on the bars of its cage. Other cages and pens contained shaggy cattle, still restless and moaning at the pervasive smell of blood, their eyes rolling in their broad faces, showing the whites all around.

  Jen said, “I’ve got something for you, Arn, if you can use it.” She pulled her leather-wrapped knife from her boot and gave it to him. He quickly hid it in his own boot. “They never thought to search me,” she said. Then she thought how Arn and Arel had come after her to try to save her when they might have stayed with Amu and Runa, and how much more frightened and how lonely she would have been right now without them. Arn had saved her once before when she was freezing on the meadow; he was her brother, who seemed to have grown right out of childhood. But Arel, her friend … With that thought she began to cry because of gratitude and fear and hunger all mixed, and they tried to comfort her.

  Doro came soon after with a bucket that he slid under the door of the boar’s cage. The boar’s eyes grew red as it stared at the bucket and then at Doro, but it didn’t touch the food.

  “Too proud to eat, eh?” Doro said. “Well, in six days when your head’s fresh on the sentry stone you’ll be beyond eating then! I’ll have looked in your eating hole and out the other side, my friend, and the rest of you’ll be food!”

  Next he brought a joint of raw meat for the wolf, but the wolf merely stared at him. “Oh, Great Leader of the wild pack,” Doro said sarcastically. “What a fine coat you have—to keep Mori warm in his cold house!”

  For the children he brought a disc of hard bread and a bucket of water, which they accepted. Doro watched them eat and drink, his round eyes blinking once each time he looked from one to another of them.

  When Arn had eaten his share of the bread and washed it down with water, he asked, “What does Mori want to do with us?”

  “They look down on me and my kind,” Doro said, “but we know what’s inside. We cut the throats and watch the dying and then we slit the bellies open. We know all about that.”

  “But what’s going to happen to us?” Arel asked.

  “We get the grease and the bile in our fingernails and blood in our clothes and they say we don’t smell good, so we can’t go into the houses.”

  They saw that he was not talking to them, just talking as he talked to the boar, the wolf and the other prisoners. Soon, still complaining about how they treated him, he went away.

  Jen watched the boar’s long, hairy face with its yellow tusks and its small red eyes that peered through the black hair. It seemed evil, murderous; but then the red eyes caught hers and there was a recognition that contained no evil or murder. This was the boar who had stopped in the tunnel of juniper and looked so long and quietly up at her before he went on. She hadn’t been able to read his thoughts then, but now, faint yet sure, a deep signal of intelligence came from the red eyes and the sudden stillness of his head. The small human in the tree, not one who would trap me, the boar thoug
ht, not in words, but that was what his recognition meant. And now we are both trapped by a common enemy.

  A common enemy, Jen thought. She turned to Arel, who was staring at the great wolf in his cage. “Can you hear his thoughts?” she asked Arel.

  “He’s the leader of the wolves,” Arel said. “And now he’s been betrayed by the half-wolves. They led him into a trap.”

  Then they looked to the bear, who, as if he felt their probing of his mind, stopped moving his head and looked straight at them. He, too, had been free not long before. Now, sorely hurt from the wounds he received in a deadfall trap, he would not eat the food his jailers offered him. When you are trapped, you fight. You do not eat.

  None of the powerful animals was afraid. Each watched and waited for a chance at freedom.

  “I wish they could understand us,” Jen said.

  Arel said thoughtfully, “I wonder if some of the animals have the forbidden gift, like us.”

  It was the wolf leader who replied. They both felt his mind and turned at once to see his yellow eyes regarding them calmly.

  It is Ahneeah of the Deer who gives us our gifts, yours and mine. That is what his mind told them. He knew them to be afraid of his kind, as his kind was of theirs, but in the wild it was a different fear, not the kind that swept away all dignity, and dirtied the air of this prison.

  Jen and Arel had a thought in common: If we could set you free, we would.

  I know that, the deep yellow eyes told them. We all know that now.

  “What are you looking at?” Arn said.

  They told him what the wolf had told them.

  “Well,” Arn said, “I have Jen’s knife now. All we can do is wait and watch for chances.”

  The wolfs wide eyes blinked in assent.

  Over near the gate where they had been given over to Doro by the guard, Doro sat in the doorway of his small hut, staring in his round-eyed, vacant way at the pens and cages. Then there was a noise at the gate, a rattling of the bars and a shrill, querulous voice. “Hey, Doro, hey! It’s your old friend come to see you! At least you can open up and say hello!”

  Through the bars of the gate they saw something low and brown jiggling and moving from side to side like a spider. Doro got up with a curse and opened the gate. It was old Ganonoot, his brown snaggletooth protruding from his face that was so squashed and creased they could hardly tell his mouth from the other wrinkles. He came scooting in, bent over, leaning on his bow, and sat right down in Doro’s spot. Doro picked him up by the scrufF of his neck and kicked him over to the side.

  “That’s my place, you filthy old beggar, so have a little respect for your betters!” Doro said.

  Ganonoot ignored the kick. “If you please, Master Doro, Ganonoot is hungry! Hungry! Now, would you have a joint of roast beef, perhaps, with squash pudding and currant jam and a loaf of your excellent round bread for your old friend?”

  “Old friend! You miserable wretch, you stringy piece of dried gut! I ought to feed you to the boar—maybe you’d be to his taste!” In spite of his words, Doro was enjoying himself, and soon he had given Ganonoot a piece of bread, which Ganonoot soaked with water from his leather water bottle before tearing off pieces of it and stuffing them into his mouth. Doro watched him eat, his round eyes blinking each time the long tusk tore into the bread. When Ganonoot had eaten all the bread, they talked in quieter voices. Ganonoot was evidently telling Doro a story, because he stood and sat down, gestured with his bow and his hands as Doro laughed or grew serious, wonder in his simple eyes.

  When the story was finished, Ganonoot looked around the yard for the first time. “A wolf, a bear and a boar!” he said. “But what’s this, Master Doro, master of the cleaver and bone-saw? Some small children in your cage?”

  “Yes, and watch out you don’t go too near. They say a soldier named Gort did and he thought he’d swallowed a porcupine.”

  Ganonoot came scooting over to their cage and squatted on his haunches.

  “Don’t get too close!” Doro called from his doorway, where he sat, his eyes droopy now in the winter sunlight.

  “Ah, now!” Ganonoot said to them in a voice Doro wouldn’t hear. “Arn and Jen and fair Arel, all in a cage!”

  “Ganonoot,” Arel said. “What are you doing with the Chigai?”

  “Ganonoot, he comes and goes. Nobody cares about old Ganonoot except to give him a kick in the rear and maybe a moldy piece of bread. Ganonoot can go wherever he wants, because nobody cares.” A tear came to his eye.

  “Can you get us out of here?” Arn asked him.

  “I can tell you a story, that’s what Ganonoot can do. Do you want to hear a story, now? Ganonoot knows all the old stories, the best stories. Sometimes Ganonoot can’t remember when he’s eaten last, or what direction he ought to be going in, but he knows all the old stories, every one!”

  “We just want to get away from here,” Arn said. “We don’t know what Mori wants with us …” Arn saw that Ganonoot wasn’t bothering to understand, so he trailed off hopelessly.

  “I will tell you more of the story of Ahneeah and the People Who Left the World,” Ganonoot said in his story-telling voice, which was lower and less squeaky and crotchety, as if another person spoke through his lips. “Once upon a time, long ago, when the Tree was young …”

  “Please, Ganonoot,” Jen cried. “The Chigai shot Amu and caught me, and then Arn and Arel followed them and tried to cut me loose, but …”

  “… a man was made insane by power.”

  “Ganonoot!” Jen said. “Please listen!”

  “The power of life and death was his, he thought, so he came to believe he owned the world. But he came to have small doubts, and the small doubts made him anxious and cruel. Now, we will call these small doubts children, and there were four …” Ganonoot stopped, seeming per-plexed. He pointed a thin old finger at them and counted. “Didn’t I say four? Yes, yes. But here are only three, and the story must have four, so the tale can’t be told.”

  Behind Ganonoot, Doro lay slumped in his doorway, asleep. Suddenly their eyes caught a movement at the gate, and a small figure in brown buckskin quickly climbed the gate and jumped down, then looked around carefully before running toward them. It was Bren. He pressed himself against the bars of the cage and reached in to touch Arel’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face tight, his lips quivering with tension, as if his face were about to break apart.

  When they told him that Runa was not hurt, and that Amu, though shot through the lung, was not dead when they left, he put his hands over his face.

  Ganonoot counted again. “One, two, three, four; now the story can be told.”

  “I’ll find a way to get you out of here,” Bren said. “Tonight Mori and all the Chigai start for the place of the Great Tree. I’ll hide somewhere and when they’ve gone I’ll come and get you out.”

  “That is not the way the story goes,” Ganonoot said. “Perhaps you should listen to old Ganonoot’s tale, for many lessons are learned by the ears, and old stories do not always have to repeat themselves.”

  “Ganonoot,” Bren said, “we don’t have time for stories now.”

  “But your father …” Arel said to Bren.

  “Never mind my father now,” Bren said. Anger and sorrow fought in him. “I will not see my friends in a cage. I will not.” He clenched his fists. “I am myself.”

  “Yes,” Ganonoot said. “That is in the story.”

  Bren said impatiently, “Be quiet, Ganonoot. We must make a plan for tonight.”

  “Wait, Bren,” Arel said. “I want to hear more of Gano-noot’s story. The wolf is speaking to me. Can you hear him, Jen?”

  “Yes,” Jen said. She felt the chords of a memory that was so old it went back through generations of paws and fangs and kills, moonlight on frigid snow and the fearful respect of wolf for man and man for wolf. The wolf leader had risen to his feet, the hair along his back rippling and erect. He stared at Ganonoot. Then they saw that the boar and the bear regar
ded Ganonoot with the same intensity. We remember, the fierce animals said. Listen.

  Ganonoot’s voice, calm and sad, seemed now the recalling of all the memories of animal and man. All of them listened; even the animals seemed to listen.

  “And this man who was driven mad by power had once been a wise hunter and a good man, kind to his fellows, fair in the sharing of what he had, strong in the fields and orchards of his people, wise in council, and loved by children. When he was still sane, Ahneeah came to him in the form of an old woman and said to him, ‘Great trials are coming for the animals and the people, and you will not be the least of their trials.’ ‘Me?’ he said. ‘A trial to my people? But I am a good man. I am respected and even loved. How could I cause trouble for my people?’

  “‘You are a man,’ Ahneeah said, ‘and no man may take what you will be offered by your people. I give you a choice: do not take what they will offer you, even though it is offered freely.’ But when trouble came, when a harsh winter, a winter of iron ice came, there was dissension among the people, and they asked him if he would lead them. He did take that gift, and it was the gift of absolute power, and it made him mad. In the name of the people, people were murdered. In the years that followed, always for the good of the people, the land was trampled by ten thousand slaves, and the lowing of death-fear was a pall across the world.”

  From the cattle pens that same lowing came back to their ears: I am helpless, but I don’t want to die. Other caged animals added their own doleful voices, high and low, to the unending sound of fear.

  “In his madness he changed; he was no longer loved, only feared, but at first he was unaware of the change. The people lived then in a large village on the meadow by the shores of the warm lake, below the Great Tree (which was a sapling then). The leader of the people grew afraid of anyone he thought opposed him, so the village was walled within and without. He was afraid of the leaders of the wild animals, so he trapped them and enslaved them.”

  From the wolf, bear and boar came the deep resonance of anger.