Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  The guard who had caught her held her up to Mori, whose broad, cruel face came close to hers as he looked into her eyes. “Yes, this is the other strange one. You have done well; you are now the sub-leader of your patrol.”

  Another guard entered then, visibly nervous and shaking. “Sir,” he said. “Sir …”

  “Are you a woman? Speak up!” Mori frowned down at him.

  “The wolf, the bear and the boar …”

  “Continue, before I have a wolf rip your throat out!”

  “They’ve escaped, Sir.”

  Mori’s face suddenly looked like a fist; he looked sickly, his forehead almost a shade of green. “Have the guards responsible disemboweled at once.”

  “They’re already dead, Sir. Torn to pieces.”

  “Feed their bodies to the wolves. How did it happen? Tell me!”

  “Their bonds were cut by a knife. A small flap was cut in the back of the tent …”

  Mori’s head jerked toward Jen. “A small flap? Where was she found? Near the place?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said the guard who had caught Jen. “And she carried this knife.” He handed Jen’s knife to Mori, handle first. Mori took it in his hand without looking at it, his eyes still on Jen. “I would kill her now,” he said to no one. “Why did she come under the mountain? But she must die by the bronze knife on the altar, when her time comes.” He pointed the small blade at her heart and sighted down it. “I don’t like to have my plans disrupted, and my likes and dislikes mean life and death. lam Mori!” He shouted the last, and all the guards present blanched and straightened until they were as stiff as wood.

  “Bind her wrists and put her with the other two!”

  She was taken by hard hands, her wrists bound, then pushed through a hanging bearskin into another part of the tent, where she tripped and fell on the trodden grass that was the tent floor.

  “Oh, Jen,” Arel said sadly. She and Arn stood side by side, a burly guard standing behind them with a hand on each neck. Nearby three old women moaned softly as they sewed two sets of ornate clothes, the beading glittery in the lamplight. First Arn was forced to try on his tunic. Then Arel had to try hers on. When the ceremonial clothes seemed to fit, Arn and Arel were tied again and the old women left. Arn tried to speak, but the guard slapped him hard.

  Only their eyes could speak in the dim light. They said fear, but they also said we are friends and at least we are together.

  In the night, kept awake by the pain in her wrists and hands, Jen thought how the handsome doe had spoken to her mind and helped her escape the village of the Chigai, and how she should have gone to find Tsuga and Aguma. Once again she had acted without thinking, just on impulse, and here she was, captured again, having helped no one. Now she and Arn would die with Arel, and their mother and father would never know what had happened to their lost children.

  18. The Evening of the Seventh Day

  Toward evening of the next day, when the sun approached the western mountains, Arel and Arn were dressed by the old women in their fine new clothes of beaded borders and white trim of the winter weasel. The tents of the Chigai were struck, for after the sacrifice they would begin the journey back to their somber village. It was in the confusion of packing the carriers, changing the orders of the guards, posting the half-wolves to the patrols, that Bren appeared and was able to speak to them. Guards surrounded them, but the parts of the tent were piled on the grass, and the guards who might have heard them couldn’t see them where they crouched among the piled skins, for a moment not under close watch.

  Bren was dressed in the shaggy cattle skin of the Chigai. “Quick,” he said to Arn. “Take those clothes off.” He was taking off his cattle-skin parka as he spoke. “Quick! Do it!”

  Am began, but then stopped. “But, Bren! You don’t have to …”

  “ake them off,” Bren said in a voice so unchildlike, so full of command that Arn did as he was told.

  They made the switch of clothes quickly. Bren said, “This is not your home, it is mine, and Arel’s. You have done enough for us. When you killed the half-wolf you saved Runa’s life, and Arel’s, and even Amu’s if he’s still alive. One child dressed in cattle skin will be allowed to leave here, and it will be you. Find Tsuga or Aguma as soon as darkness falls. Maybe they can think of a way to save Jen.”

  “Yes, Arn,” Arel said. “This is not your trouble. You’ve done enough.”

  “Go quickly,” Bren said. “Keep your face to the east until the sun sets, then go west, to the Tree and the Cave of Forgetfulness.”

  Arn took his hand, but couldn’t speak.

  “Hurry, Arn,” Jen whispered.

  Keeping his face from the low sun, Arn walked as casually as he could past the ring of guards. They saluted him and let him pass. “Andaru’s son,” they said with respect.

  Arn walked slowly through the camp to the southeast until he reached the border of the meadow, then turned west until he came to the shore of the warm lake. The wind had changed so that the mist rolled from the lake over the meadow and kept him hidden from the eyes of any patrols. This wind would bring his scent to the half-wolves with the patrols, but because he had been with the Chigai for many days and wore the cattle skin, they would have no reason to find his scent unusual or dangerous.

  The warm mist swirled around him as it had when he and Jen first crossed the meadow looking for Oka. It seemed so long ago, their troubles so small then. He walked faster, stumbling sometimes when the mist thick-ened in the falling darkness. Perhaps Aguma and her people were already at the Tree, beginning the council fire.

  As he came up the shore of the warm lake the mist receded, as it had before. He climbed the long slope toward the Tree. The dark foundations of the ancient village loomed up before him, the village in Ganonoot’s tale of the man driven mad by power, and of the people who once lived here before the pestilence came and killed the impounded animals. He left the silent foundations behind and soon could see the top of the Great Tree rising higher as he climbed, a dark tower against the dim sky. He yearned to see a warm fire at the base of the Tree, to find the gentle people who called themselves nothing except the people—hunters, fishers, gardeners and gatherers. He ran for a while, but lost his breath on the steep slope and had to walk again. Always the Tree rose higher.

  Finally he came over the rise so that the Tree and its ledges were wholly in his sight. There was no fire, only blackness so empty he caught his breath. The silent, ominous sentry stones stood before him in their circle, receding on each side into dimness, each carved of dead stone, yet stone shaped like headless men, with the stiff postures and ghostly dangers of men. He was lonely and afraid.

  He went on past the ring of sentry stones toward the Tree. He had nowhere else to go, though nothing but cold darkness waited for him there. Maybe the Chigai patrols had waylaid the people and their councillors before they could assemble here, and killed them or taken them prisoner. Then Mori and his cruel power would be the only justice in this world.

  But just as his courage was gone, just before he was about to give in to hopeless fear, a small spark appeared near the base of the ledges, followed by a bright flame that wavered and grew, and then grew taller and warmer and multiplied into yellow light that revealed all the people sitting there on the meadow grass, then the ledges and the councillors on the stone platform below the thick rising roots and trunk of the Tree, whose broad high branches turned green in the new light.

  He ran the rest of the way, so relieved and grateful for their presence he began to sob, then forcefully made himself stop it. He had things he must tell Aguma and Tsuga, and little time. His heart was beating in his throat as he came through the sitting people and climbed the ledge to the platform where Aguma and the councillors sat. Aguma stood, her thick body leaning toward him in apprehension and concern, and made him sit down beside her. “The Chigai,” he said, but found he hadn’t the breath to go on. “The Chigai …”

  “Wait, Arn,” Aguma said. “Wait unti
l we have given the bread to the Stag, and then you’ll have your breath again.”

  “But Jen and Arel, and Bren …”

  “Hush now.” Her heavy arm came around his shoulders and squeezed him.

  The fire rose up in its first surge, then fell into itself to burn more evenly. Only then did Arn realize that it was Tsuga who sat on his other side. He looked up into the lined old face that shone red in the firelight, the skin so transparent with age he thought he could see the bones of the skull shining through. Tsuga’s bone-white hair hung to his shoulders, and his deep black eyes glanced down at Arn, just for a moment, before he rose to begin the council.

  “Let the council begin,” he said in his sad old voice. “I am Tsuga Wanders-too-far, and what I know I will tell you.” Then he sat down again.

  The man in the deer mask with the broad antlers appeared at the edge of the fire. Aguma rose, holding the loaf of bread. “Dona and Fannu have been chosen,” she said, and broke the loaf in two.

  Dona and Fannu got up from their places and climbed up to receive the bread from Aguma. They gave small, worried looks at Arn before they went back down to give the bread to the Stag, then resumed their places before the fire.

  Tsuga rose to his feet again, leaning on his long, unstrung bow. “I am old enough to call you my children,” he said in his dry, penetrating voice, a voice that seemed as old as the north wind. “And I say to you, what will happen tonight at the council fire, by the Great Tree and the Cave of Forgetfulness, will decide the future of the people. I cannot help you, for I am of another time, as you can see. I can give you advice you will not take, feel sorrow you will not share until it is too late. But I will ask you to listen to this boy who has just come from the camp of the Chigai. Do not be too impatient for that.”

  Aguma rose to her feet. “We must all listen to Arn, who came to us from under the northern mountains, who has seen Ahneeah in the form of an old woman.”

  From the people came sighs of wonder and also jeers: “We don’t believe it! When did he last see her, in his sleep?”

  Arn was afraid he couldn’t speak to so many people, his voice would die to a breath; but the jeering question made him angry and he said in a high, strong voice, “I saw her last six days ago, in the pine forest west of the winter camp, just after Lado shot Amu in the back.”

  Silence from the people.

  “And after Runa had shot Lado through the neck and a Chigai named Tromo through the body.”

  Tsuga spoke: “Perhaps you are more interested in the boy’s story now.”

  There were jeers, but the people hushed them; they had heard Arn’s strange accent, and seen the anger in him that was also strange in a boy his age who stood before so many. So they were silent as he told them about the sad village of the Chigai, its stench of carrion and the lowings of fear that were a pall over the village; how the Chigai patrol had left the wounded Gort to suflFer; how Mori ruled by fear and would sacrifice children to the spirits of the animals he imprisoned and had killed and butchered by other hands.

  But then Arn looked out to the meadow and was silent, because in the distance came the flickering of hundreds of torches. A chanting, like the wind in a hollow tree, rolled faintly from the east, where the people of the Chigai approached across the winter meadow.

  As the chanting came nearer, all the people stood and looked down the meadow at the approaching torches; the torches themselves outnumbered the people around the council fire.

  “There are so many Chigai,” Tsuga murmured. “So many.”

  First came Mori’s guards, the big men seeming even bigger in their tunics of shaggy cattle skin, their broad-axes hanging at their belts. They came walking abreast and surrounded the stone altar, moving the people away from it by pushing them with the ends of their bows, firmly and slowly, as if they knew their great strength could not be resisted. When the ground around the altar was cleared, the guards backed away to make a wide circle around it, admitting to the circle the masked men—the men in animal skins and the masks of bear, cattle, boar, antlered deer, wolf, lynx, crow, porcupine and the white mountain goat.

  Then a thick, tall man, his black hair tied back away from his face, his chest naked and shining with oil, walked to the altar. It was Mori, and he held a bronze knife in his right hand. As he raised his knife to the sky the people of the Chigai, spread across the field, chanted their toneless chant of sorrow. “Hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh,” the voices sang, neither rising nor falling, sad as the wind.

  When Mori brought his knife down to his side the chanting stopped. All that could be heard was the creaking of the council fire as it burned, and the faint soughing of the wind high above in the Great Tree.

  Aguma spoke, her husky voice carrying out over the meadow and the people. “Mori of the Chigai,” she said. “We have come here to discuss your ways and to decide whether or not we will adopt them. Each of us will vote, each person equal in his decision. Tsuga has said that we are all one people in the world, and we must agree upon what is right and what is wrong …”

  “Vote?” Mori said, interrupting her. He laughed. “Shall Ishow you some votes?” He nodded to his guards; each man stepped aside to let a half-wolf leap forward and stop, all teeth and slaver, upon the end of a thong. “And here is another,” he said. A huge half-wolf in a studded collar leapt into the circle and sat at Mori’s feet. He was the largest of all the half-wolves. He seemed to grin as he looked around him, yet one brawny shoulder was slightly turned down in deference to his master. “Vote?” Mori said loudly. “Vote? Mori is the only one who votes, and his vote is law!”

  Aguma said, “You are not greater than Ahneeah’s justice.”

  “There are more powerful gods than your old woman who is never seen, and they have made me strong,” Mori said. “I please them with blood, as I please my people with meat.”

  “Ah, Mori,” Tsuga said, coming forward to stand with Aguma. “The gods of murder are simple, and voracious, and fickle; that is why you are afraid.”

  Mori laughed again as he looked around at his half-wolves, his guards, his thousand people covering a wide circle of the meadow. He raised the bronze knife again, and his people resumed their sorrowful chant.

  Two men in cattle skins and masks then brought two children into the circle, the children dressed in clothes decorated with black and white beaded designs, trimmed in the white fur of the winter weasel. The children’s hands were tied, their faces blank and cold, as if they knew their fate and must in their helplessness accept it. They were placed side by side on their backs upon the stone.

  Then came the man holding the young evergreen tree, to place himself between the children and the bronze knife. The chanting grew in intensity, within its sadness a high call of hope, but when the bronze knife descended upon the tree and the green branches fell, one by one, the hope died back into the windy moan of despair.

  “Bren!” came a deep voice from among the guards. Two of the guards in the circle were pushed aside, and Andaru, dressed in the cattle skin and armed with bow and broadax, came striding to the stone. “Bren!” He looked from the child on the stone to Mori, his black brows low over his glittering eyes. “You have my son upon the stone!”

  Mori looked then at the children for the first time. He stared: again his plans had warped and changed before his eyes, and it was the children who caused it, always the children. He turned to Andaru and stabbed him in the side, then signaled to his half-wolf to kill him. “Your son will have to do,” he said to the fallen Andaru.

  Mori’s half-wolf leaped at Andaru’s throat, but Andaru rolled away. The half-wolf skidded on the grass as he turned to try again, snarling and snapping his white teeth. Then he froze still, for a long cry as thin and fine as a steel blade came from above, by the tree. This was neither the snarl nor the fawning howl of a half-wolf, but the clear, free challenge of a wild creature, cold as a winter moon reflected in ice.

  At the sound, all the other half-wolves cringed and looked sm
aller upon their thongs. Mori’s half-wolf didn’t cringe, but turned toward his challenger, grimacing, the hair along his back stiffly erect, shivering as if in a rage to find a throat with his teeth.

  Down across the ledges came the wild wolf, slowly and carefully. He was long and gaunt from lack of food; his yellow eyes were directed only upon Mori’s half-wolf. He never turned his head, as if unaware of all the people.

  Mori signaled his guards to let the wild wolf through, then took a bow from a guard and nocked an arrow to the string. “We will watch this,” he said.

  Mori’s half-wolf, fed on beef, was the heavier one. His jaws, as he yawned in nervous anticipation, seemed wide enough to crush the wild wolfs skull. But the wild leader came steadily forward, his steps precise and firm, even delicate. Only his eyes shone with his fierce purpose.

  When they were six feet apart they both leaped forward in attack. The half-wolf screamed in his rage, but the wild leader made no sound but breath and the clack of fangs. They met at an angle, in a blur of gray and black, and when they parted, a puffy cloud of cut gray hair settled to the ground. For a moment they were as still as two stones, then they met again, blood a new color in the blur of their bodies. Mori followed them with a half-drawn arrow, waiting. Many more times they met in a rush of slashing, until the ground beneath them was gray with shaved hair and spotted with blood. The half-wolf lost an eye and his studded collar, the wild leader two of his teeth broken off at the base. But after the last meeting there was stillness and silence, for the half-wolf lay on his back, his throat and scarred belly exposed in surrender and supplication, the wild leader’s fangs around his throat. He had surrendered forever, as is the way of wolves. Though the half-wolf would have killed his enemy if he had won, the wild leader did not choose to close his jaws and kill.

  Mori drew his arrow to kill the wild leader, but before he could let it loose, another cry came from above, along with the hiss and twang of a bowstring. “For Amu!” a woman’s voice cried. “For Amu!”