Death Chants (17 page)

He had within him a
great answer but no question to unlock it.

He passed the
borders of the wild places and entered the world of men.

He learned their
ways and as much of their languages he did not yet know. He tried to be one of them, to be as
they were.

For he sought a
secret. In the new tongue, he asked all he met, how to be a human being.

They did not
understand him and he got no answer. And struggled all the more blindly among them.

If he did not learn
the answer to that question, he learned many other things. They were things written in the sad
face of a mother losing her firstborn, things written in a boy's first ob­served bravery or
cowardice. He learned lessons of despair and hope and shame and sorrow. In the people he met, he
found kindness and cruelty in equal measure. He found wisdom and stupidity, greed and
selflessness.

The shield of his
own life was formed on a frame and that frame was the will of a man, wanting to be human and not
knowing how.

As he built the
shield of his life from the lives of those around him, the sun and rain of their lives stretched
the frame, changing its shape beyond Yasheya's willed guiding.

Though Yasheya
began upon a firm frame, the hide of his experience tautened and twisted until he was not as he
willed himself to be.

He was a wild
animal skin, tormented into the only shape it could be, human, as the pattern was once and for
all time woven.

Long was his
struggle to be human.

When a great storm
lashed the village of his people, Yasheya walked the night, looking for answers in the wind and
storm. Rain and wind tore at the roofs of the lodges, like stinging whips. Lightning crashed to
earth in great anger. Thunder cracked the stone faces of the great mountains.

He was among his
people but not truly of them, so he be­lieved. In the face of the storm, he sought the face of
another, the shadow being that was his father.

"Father in the sky,
why do you hate me?" he cried into the teeth of the stinging wind. "Why have you abandoned
me?"

The storm was the
only answer he got. And he wept in the cold and he felt not half so cold on the outside as he
felt inside.

He tried to stare
into the heart of the lightning, to see the secret face of the thunder. He tried to embrace that
cold lover, the powers of sky and night.

"Shadow father," he
called out and his heart was breaking. "I have seen into the hearts of human beings. I journey
now with them into the great dark. Shadow father, why did you not tell me how terrible the world
is?"

Did a shadow answer
him?

Yasheya thought he
heard a voice in the thunder.

Yes, a voice.
Asking a question in shadow father's voice.

"What is so
terrible about the world?" asked the thunder.

"Becoming a human
being!" cried Yasheya, seeking answers.

But the thunder
never spoke to him again of becoming a human being, because he had become one.

"This game does not
please me," said the ancient rat. "Only blood pleases me. Must I see all of your life? I grow
hungry."

The old man laughed
in the dark and his shadow turned around three times in the corner, looking for a comfortable
place for a wolf to sleep.

The rat jumped
back, his eyes glaring red with hate, his tail like a dark snake dragging in blood.

"Come play with my
teeth, friend rat," said the wolf, and slowly began moving toward the dark scurrying
one.

"See my true face,"
growled the wolf. "Feel the crushing strength of my jaws."

And leaping, the
wolf Yasheya, seized his ancient enemy in his gapingjaws and shook the hated one. But the rat was
like sand in his teeth and slipped from his grasp.

But the rat, taken
by surprise, had not escaped uninjured.

Before the
shape-changing escape, the wolf had heard the dry-twig snap of bones.

The rat limped to a
corner of the room, eyes glaring balefully in the hideous dark. Its thick yellow tongue licked
its shoulder, already stiffening with the broken bones in it.

"You've hurt me,"
said the rat of death. "Wolf child, through
all the centuries, though many have tried, none have fought me as you have done, and done
as you have done."

"I have just
begun," snarled the wolf Yasheya. "I mean to snap your rotten backbone. I'll tear your head off,
friend rat, go into final darkness with the foul taste of your rotted flesh on my
tongue."

The wolf began to
move again, clever as the stalking moon and lightning-swift in the dark.

But rat was far
from dead.

"Her name. What was
her name?" asked the dweller in night.

Yasheya opened his
wolf jaws, poised to spring, to strike with killing force.

The ancient eater
of the dead made no move to escape.

"She of the newborn
dead. Tell me her name, Yasheya. Does not her life call to your life? Even now!"

The wolf hesitated
and the rat moved in the dark, circling to the left.

"Remember her as
she was, Yasheya," said the rat.

The wolf stood
still in the center of the ruined room of the pueblo.

"Where are your
sharp teeth now, Yasheya?" asked the rat with triumph. "I await your coming but you do not seem
to be here any longer. Where are you, wolf? Do you journey back to see her?"

The wolf lowered
his head. Yasheya, bleeding in the dark, cried out, "NO! NOT THAT!"

"I see her now, in
your eyes and in your heart." And the rat moved forward, limping in triumph.

The wolf seemed to
grow feeble in the dark. His back legs wobbled and then he fell to the floor. His breathing was
shallow and hoarse.

He whined once as
if in great pain and then slowly rolled over on his side. The wolf Yasheya could no longer hold
up his head.

"Wait for me,
Yasheya. I'll bring someone to meet you, some­one who waits for you."

The rat turned and
scurried away, limping back down the dark tunnel from where it had first come, back to its dark,
foul nest of death.

Yasheya tried to
put out a hand to touch the dying body of the wolf that was himself but he was too
weak.

The wolf stopped
moving, his legs stiffening in death. He sighed his last and final breath. He began to dissolve
in the pool of Yasheya's blood.

"Magic, do not
forsake me," cried Yasheya. "Thunder and lightning, hear me, and dance yet in me!"

Outside the pueblo,
the sky darkened. Black clouds began to climb the heavens. First the thunder crashed and Yasheya
felt a new storm in his bones, surging with new life.

Lightning struck
the ruined roof of the pueblo and set it afire. It struck again and again and each place it
struck, new fires sprang up.

"I thank you for
not forsaking me! Burn, storm-brought fire, eat me and enemy rat," said Yasheya. "And dying, I
shall yet, in fire, win over my ancient enemy!"

In the tunnel, the
rat moved eagerly, despite the stiffening shoulder. Its great hunger was about to be appeased,
and hun­ger made its journey quick.

It pushed something
white and round ahead of it, something lopped with black strings.

Rat poked its head
into the ruined room, seeking its prey.

Above, the fires
raged, beginning to eat downward into the walls.

Yasheya smiled in
secret triumph.

"I've brought
someone for you. A final comfort for you in your last defeated hours," said the ancient one, and
the vile creature shoved the object out of the tunnel into the room.

It hit the floor
with a soft thud and rolled toward Yasheya.

It was a snow-white
skull with traces of black hair.

A turquoise-studded
hair tie still bound up the sides of the dead hair. The blue-stone ornament gleamed in the dark,
as undimmed and unchanged in its beauty as it was on the long-ago day when Yasheya had placed it
gently in her hair.

His hands had
shaken when he tied it on for the last time  before the earth closed over her
forever.

And Yasheya's wolf
mouth spoke her human name once again, and it was the death of sleep and a forgetting.

And she lived in
him again.

She was like she
was in the first summer, almost a child, but still a woman.

Yasheya put his
arms around her in the dark and she was like she had always been. It was the greatest wonder of
all. With one touch, all of the glory of having been with her returned.

His hand played in
the net of her thick black hair, embroider­ing stars into it from the nights of their lives
together.

"Are you sorry we
never had little ones?" she asked as they lay in the soft summer grasses and held each other
tenderly.

"No," said Yasheya.
"If I were human, we might have had children, but I am not, so the fault is mine and mine alone.
But it is something I do not mind, for I had you, and you were enough. All any man would
want."

"You seem human
enough to me," she said, and she kissed him softly on the cheek.

"If I were a human
being I would know how to use the power I have been given. I use it, as it uses me, but I am not
human, as my shadow father was not, so I cannot do the one great thing my power was shaped to do.
I have failed in this as my shadow father has failed in his teaching of me," said Yasheya, and he
felt desire and longing for her rising in his youth-quickened blood.

"I wish we had all
the nights of the world, to be just here, together like this," she said.

"The world may end
someday because I could not be human. My shadow father was a storm. I was to be both human and
world-saving storm but I am neither," said Yasheya with sorrow.

"Yasheya, you must
stop punishing yourself. You are as hu­man as I," she said, and her tears were hot on his face as
she pressed against him.

Her long black hair
seemed to caress him as her head rested on his shoulder. His heart was burning with a stealing
tide of great feeling.

"Yasheya, if you
are not a human being, then you can never die."

"Perhaps," he said,
looking up into the night. "Maybe it is my path. To wander forever, to never know the rat bite of
death, to
be neither human nor storm,
and being neither, roaming for­ever between the two worlds."

She rose up next to
him, coming up level with him. She forced him to stare into her eyes.

He held her tightly
and he saw that her eyes were burning with tears, soft as the sugar moon. Yasheya's own eyes
filled strangely with tears that had never fallen in his life.

"Search your heart,
Yasheya. If you are not human, now in my eyes you will find that you are not. If you are human,
tell me with the truth that can only be spoken in the language of the wolves, tell me if you love
me."

Yasheya stared deep
into her eyes, losing himself as com­pletely now as he had lost himself that first day so long
ago when she had given birth to her dead child and he had held her for the first time.

"If you are a human
being, tell me that you love me. But speak to me in the language of the wolves, which never
lies," she said. "I will not know the words, but my woman's heart would know the true
meaning."

"And if I cannot
tell you that?" said Yasheya, afraid of what he might say in a language that held no
lies.

"Then I will leave
you," she said, and the hot tears rolled clown her face and melted his heart.

In the tongue of
his mother wolf of time past, Yasheya said, "I love you."

The words were
true.

But the white skull
Yasheya clutched in a gruesome embrace could not hear his words.

Only friend rat had
ears in this darkness.

"You know you are a
human being now and so must die. I could not beat you until you knew what you are, remembered
what you had become," said the rat, and his teeth found Yasheya's flesh.

The rat of death
was ready to begin.

"My magic! My
power! All gone!" cried Yasheya, dying in the merciless dark.

And he wept
blood.

Alter the thunder,
after the lightning, came the gentle rain.

It fell like the
tears of a woman, caressing the earth, putting out the fires in the roof of the ruined
pueblo.

Yasheya's last
magic was gone.

"I lost all my
power because of a woman," said Yasheya, feeling his bones crumbling in the dusty mouth of the
ancient rat. But even in that moment of despair, he remembered many things then, things of a life
lived, and a great light seemed to shine in the growing dark.