Forbidden Land Page 8

  He could have charged down from the high, misty neck of the pass in which he stood and scrambled madly across the gray, stony scree directly at the beast. He could have screamed and waved his arms, diverting the wanawut, frightening the creature off, and driving it into Torka’s path, where the unerring spears of the headman and Grek would surely kill it.

  But he did not move because he realized that after Torka and Grek killed the beast, they would discover the thing .. . and looking upon it, they would know that it was Navahk’s child .. . Karana’s half sister ... an affront to life.

  And when Torka saw it, their relationship would forever be different. When Torka looked at Karana, he would always see the thing in him and know that Karana was not his son but the son of Navahk, a. man who coupled with beasts and had raped Lonit.

  Shivering against shame and revulsion, Karana did not move. Torka and Grek had seen him. As his hand held the dog steady, he stole a glance at the wanawut. She was rising, ambling away across the slope, and the infant remained clutched in her arms, along with her own cub, as she disappeared into a deep, cloud-shrouded defile.

  Aar trembled, bristling against the desire to pursue the beast.

  “Let her go,” whispered Karana. “Her and the monster she suckles. The baby she carries was doomed anyway, even before it was born.” Even as he spoke, he felt the Seeing wind ebb away within him as, on the misty spine of the ridge directly ahead and to his right, the mammoth Life Giver paused, looked at him, and turned away.

  The magic man was sitting cross-legged in the mists when Torka and Grek finally reached him. His face was ashen, his eyes looked old, and in his lap was the bloodied caribou skin in which Zhoonali had carried the baby from the camp. The blood was Karana’s, not the child’s, but Torka never asked the question, and so the magic man kept the self-inflicted wound on his inner arm concealed and was not forced to speak a lie.

  They stayed awhile on that high, cold hill while Torka mourned and brooded. The little one had died cruelly, and now, without a name, the child would never again be born into the world of men. Torka listened to the wind and felt the weight of the gathering storm mists. From the very moment that he had known of the second child’s existence he had known that it would be a son, and he had joyously, secretly named it for his long-dead father, Manaravak, a brave hunter killed by a great white bear so long ago!

  Torka’s heart went cold.

  “Manaravak! Your spirit will live again in the spirit of one who has come after you! Manaravak! Father! Although his tender flesh and tiny bones lie in the black belly of the wanawut, the son whose life Torka could not save is named for you. Together may you walk the spirit world of mists and endless wind until, beneath a sky that shows favor to the People, Lonit may give life to you once again!”

  In the silence the three men began the long walk back to the encampment. The storm was on them now, shrieking and wailing and driving hard, stinging pellets of snow before it. Only once did Karana look back. The heights were shrouded, but he saw what he did not want to see . yet would always see ... a haunting that was not a haunting, a gray-furred beast veiled in the swirling clouds, the wanawut, holding his half sister in one arm and Torka’s son in the other.

  PART II. LIFE GIVER

  The wanawut watched the beasts disappear into the lowering mists. Seen from the heights, they appeared so small that she could make out no individual characteristics; they seemed no larger than the black, featureless shapes of birds winging by the bright yellow hole in the sky. She had been able to make out their throwing sticks. Her heavy, sloping brow furrowed. The beasts were dangerous. They were always hungry. Always hunting. Always ready to kill.

  The sky was darkening. The underbelly of the clouds had a thick, milky, pinkish glow. The wind continued to rise, and the snowfall was intensifying. The wanawut longed for the shelter of her cave.

  With a haunch ripped from the dead leaping cat held in the bend of one elbow, she walked easily through the storm. She was a creature born to the heights and their mists and the rough, cold scree slopes and mountain glaciers. Storms were more commonplace here than good weather.

  Within the hairy protection of her arms, the two cubs suckled contentedly. She looked at them now and again as she walked, comparing the puny, hairless little suckling to her own large, sleekly furred cub. She saw similarities and noted differences—not only in the construction of their bodies but in their size, bone structure, and alignment of muscles and features. Indeed, on close observation, they seemed more like one another than like her. She grunted, not understanding.

  Lengthening her stride, she remembered the beast that she had walled into her shelter. She did not know what to make of him. Was he the same beast that had killed her mother and danced in her mother’s skin? Was he the same beast that had brought food to her when she was a cub, spoken to her in the odd voice of a beast, and stroked her and joined his body to hers? When he lay dying, she had inadvertently hastened his demise, then skinned him and brought him back to her cave in the hope that life would return to him so that she would not be alone. How could he hang over her nest while living in the skin of another? Or perhaps he was another? Perhaps he was Star Eyes, a beast that she remembered from the far land beyond the white mountains ... a beast that looked like Mother Killer but was younger ... a gentle beast in whose eyes the night swam with all of its stars ... a beast who had looked directly into her eyes. Why, then, had he attacked her with the bone, stabbing and slashing and hurting her?

  Because he was a beast. Beasts were killers. She would have to let him go or eat him before he turned on her and her cubs.

  The thought of them was comforting. For the first time since the death of her mother, she did not feel alone. She was Mother now, and from the instant that the little hairless one had taken suck upon her breast, she had ceased to think of it as a beast. It was a cub, only a cub, and it was her cub now.

  She turned her full attention to the icy path that she must follow to the cave. Her broad, well-arched, thickly callused feet did not lead her astray. Her acute sense of smell alerted her to danger. Burned grass. Burned bones. Burned refuse. Burned skin. She stopped, the odor offending her nostrils. The cave! Fire had come to the cave! Fire terrified her. She had seen what it could do to the summer grasses of the tundra when it was given power from the crackling white fingers of heat that struck from the sky. Memories made her cry out as she hurried on, imagining flames and the captive beast blackened and smoldering.

  Her breath was rasping in her throat and both cubs were crying when at last she reached her burned-out den.

  She stood in the wind and snow, noting that the stones she had used to wall up the entrance had been moved.

  She sniffed the rank air. The stench of the beast’s fear was strong on the stones and on the ground all around the entrance to the cave. She bent to smell it. It was red with his terror, with his hatred of her, and with his intent to escape.

  The wind was bitterly cold as it combed through her fur, parting the long, silvery, thickly shafted guard hairs and driving straight through her downy undercoat to her skin. She shivered, cooed softly to calm the bawling cubs, and went inside.

  Now her mouth curled back in anger, for the beast’s scent told her that he had set fire to her lair. She inhaled deeply through wide, splayed nostrils, and in the essence of his scent she could re-create it all: the thoroughness with which he had gathered dried scrub from outside, the way he had carried it in and viciously piled it all around her nest below the skin of Mother Killer, the way he had worked a stick around and around between his palms, faster and faster until they bled, the way the fire had taken life and scourged the cave and all that was in it.

  Everything was black and fouled with the cold, acrid stench of smoke. The skin of Mother Killer was now a heap of ashes with a jawless, blackened skull gaping in the middle of it. Her caches of food—voles mostly, a few hares, a half-eaten, well-aged marmot, and a pile of dried berries, tubers, and well-aged animal droppi
ngs—had been reduced to a smear of greasy black powder, speckled with tiny traces of burned bones and teeth. She fingered it and growled. Beneath the ashes lay her man-stone dagger, the one that she had taken long ago from the ground near where she had discovered the wounded Star Eyes, beaten and left for dead by his own kind.

  Suddenly tired and hungry, she put down the haunch of the leaping cat and sat at the back of the cave, rocking the cubs, urging them to suck while she used the man stone to cut away a slab of wind-dried, frozen cat meat.

  She ate as the cubs slept in the warmth of her thick gray fur. Leaning back against the charred stone wall, she listened to the wind and gazed into the darkness. Her breath formed a mist before her face. She listened for the familiar drip-drip of moisture oozing through the ceiling, but it was so cold that the water had frozen. She dozed for a little while. The yapping of wild dogs somewhere far below the mountain awoke her. She thought of the wild dog that walked with Star Eyes. Would the dog and the beast come back, now that they knew where she took shelter? Would they come with flying sticks and man stones and other beasts to kill her and her cubs? She looked down with remorse at her sleeping cub and the beast ling The force of life was strong in this puny, ugly little thing.

  Had the beasts she had seen on the lower slopes of the mountain been seeking it? Were they making certain that it was dead? Were they going to eat its tiny body? There had been such an urgency to their steps and a ferocity to the shriek of the one who had called out. She remembered the cry. Man-ara-vak. She imitated it. “Mah .. . nah .. . rah .. . vahk .. . mah .. . nah .. .”

  She stopped. She feared this Man-ara-vak sound, because she instinctively understood that it had been a shriek of pain, a demand that the cub be returned to its pack—as if she would do that! They had abandoned it. She had found it. From the moment that it had eagerly sought the milk of life from her, she had known that it would be a part of her “pack.”

  And now as she drifted into sleep, cuddling her cubs close, she knew that this was the last storm she would endure within her cave. When the wind and the weather allowed, she would go from this man-infested land and would teach her cubs to live, to hunt, and to endure in the way of the wanawut.

  The storm raged for a day and a night and well into the dull, bone-cracking cold of a sunless dawn. Within the hut of Cheanah, his three sons by Xhan played a sullen game of bone toss on their shared pile of sleeping furs as Honee, his daughter by Kimm, offered a compress of fat-impregnated willow leaves to her mother.

  Cheanah lounged in the shadows on his own pile of furs, watching glumly as Kimm, by the light of Zhoonali’s tallow lamp, accepted the poultice with no word of appreciation. With her short, plump fingers, she placed it into her mouth and bit down carefully, still managing to complain, through the mouthful, to her man.

  “Look at me. My jaw remains swollen, and my gums still bleed where the woman Lonit kicked me. Two teeth are gone forever—two! Everything is bad—my pain, this storm; they will never stop because of her! Because of him! And here you—“ Cheanah’s frown silenced her. His mood was as bleak and as chilling as the weather. Yet, although she wisely held her tongue, her unspoken accusation hung in the air for all to hear: And here you sit, you who were once headman, doing nothing!

  Had she been sitting closer to him, Cheanah might have caused her to lose another tooth. He had never hit a woman before, but his hand twitched with the desire to do so now. What did she expect him to do? What could he do?

  Torka, Grek, and the magic man had returned at the height of the storm with the wild dog but without the second twin or a word to anyone. They had gone to their own pit huts to sit out the blizzard, and the threats between Torka and Cheanah remained unsettled while the wind rose and howled.

  Zhoonali’s old eyes drew his gaze, which clearly indicated that his patience with his woman was wearing thin. She turned to look purposefully at Kimm. “A woman who loses a tooth is a woman who loses a year of her life. You can thank Woman of the West for that. You are right: It is bad. Very bad.”

  “She should be punished. If Cheanah were headman, he would make certain that it was done!” said Kimm petulantly, pressing her swollen jaw. She moaned and looked expectantly at Cheanah.

  He glowered at her, thinking of striking the woman bare-handed across the face. She had been nagging him far too long.

  Yanehva, Cheanah’s middle and most thoughtful son, looked up from his game and took measure of his father’s mood. He was a gaunt, stringy boy despite the fatness of this camp and the endless meals served by the women of his father’s fire. “Woman of the West has been punished. She has suffered the death of a son.”

  Cheanah nodded, approving and agreeing. At eleven years, Yanehva was showing signs of maturity. His even tempered, reticent nature pleased his father as much as it annoyed his mother, troubled Zhoonali, and irritated Kimm.

  “What does a mere boy know of such things?” she snapped, glaring at the youth.

  “It is said that when Karana was my age, he could call the rain and summon the game to die upon the spears of men, cause the—“

  “Karana!” Kimm spat the name back at him. “That magic man speaks only for the good of Torka and Lonit—not for us! Woman of the West may have lost one twin to the wanawut, but where is the other twin? Kimm will tell you where it is—at Lonit’s breast! Both twins should be dead, as my twin sons are dead.”

  Five-year-old Honee, as fat as her half brother Yanehva was thin, appraised her mother with infinite sadness. “I would be a son for you, Mother,” she whispered. “Once, this girl asked Magic Man to make it so, but Karana said that my father would not have named my spirit unless he wanted me to live among his people. And so, because of this, Magic Man would not change me.”

  “Could not!” Xhan corrected the child disdainfully.

  If Kimm was touched by the confession of her only child, she did not show it. She continued to hold her jaw and to moan, as though she had not heard the girl at all.

  Mano pointed at his half sister. “Honee loves Karana! Ha! Some magic man he is! He disappears when he is needed! And now he hides inside his pit hut and will not speak, not even to stop the storm—“

  “He could if he wanted to!” the little girl interrupted hotly.

  “Ha!” goaded Mano. “Our father has wondered if Karana’s powers are as juiceless as his manhood. What kind of magic man cannot even put a baby in the belly of his woman?”

  Honee’s backward-sloping chin trembled. “He could if he wanted to!” Cheanah’s features expanded with surprise at Mano’s recollection of his words; he did not recall being in the presence of his sons when he had spoken them. He would have to watch what he said. Mano could just as easily have repeated his entire statement—including a strong willingness to take young Mahnie in trade for either of his women or simply to take her, with or without the consent of the magic man. He would accomplish with her what the magic man had failed to do.

  “Karana can do anything! Anything!” There was unmistakable defensiveness as well as adoration in his little girl’s quavering voice.

  “Could he give you a chin and smaller ears?” taunted Mano cruelly, rolling away with giggling, six-year-old Ank on top of him while Yanehva struck out in annoyance at them both.

  Honee wilted. Cheanah saw her sideward glance at him. No doubt she was wishing that, just once, he would come to her defense against the endless teasing of her brothers. He did not. She was no longer the pretty baby who had proved an amusing variation in a family filled with the constant brawling and competition of Xhan’s sons. Honee was no longer pretty at all. The realization disturbed Cheanah. He had come to care deeply for her, even though he had initially accepted her only with the thought that as his two women grew older, they would need assistance with their woman’s work.

  Kimm would just as soon have exposed her firstborn rather than waste precious boy-bearing time nursing a girl. Indeed, Kimm often displayed unveiled antagonism toward the child, as though it were somehow Honee
’s fault that she had not been born male.

  Cheanah felt a growing hostility toward his second woman. She had grown too plump with the years, and too demanding. And while poor little Honee had taken on her tendency toward fat, she had inherited none of Kimm’s one-time good looks. Nevertheless, Cheanah could see himself in Honee’s wide features, and like his sons, she was a brave, strong little thing. He found it a pity that she was not a boy. But thanks to her brothers, she was fleet footed fearless in a fight, and as nasty as a badger when riled. She would have made a hunter with skills to envy. Unfortunately, despite her faith in the magic man, some things simply could not be changed. Honee would never be able to win a man with her appearance or personality; she would have to do it on strength alone, and so Cheanah made no attempt to interfere with her brothers’ teasing. Their taunting would make her stronger than she already was, and Zhoonali could soothe the child later, as she always did.

  Now Cheanah felt pride for the little girl as she glared defensively at Mano and informed him boldly: “This girl does not care what you say!

  Karana has said that the daughter of Cheanah is pretty! As pretty as Summer Moon! As pretty as—“

  “And so she is, and so she is,” interrupted Zhoonali with all the fervent love and blind-eyed assurance of a grandmother. “All of Zhoonali’s children are beautiful! Since time beyond beginning always the people of Zhoonali have been beautiful people! Zhoonali herself, her daughters, her sons, her granddaughter .. . her grandsons .. . especially the twin sons whose lives Kimm so bravely sacrificed for the good of Zhoonali’s band when Cheanah was headman. It is so! The twins were the most beautiful sons of all.”

  Xhan and her boys glowered. Feeling the drag of the old woman’s well-baited hook, Cheanah gritted his teeth, refusing to rise to it or be taken in by it. Kimm wailed. “My babies! My sons! How can Cheanah rest when even one of Torka’s twins draws the milk of life from his cursed, man-willed woman?”