Shadows in the Cave (15 page)

Yah-Su crouched next to Shonan. The beast was taller, and the dirt ceiling crooked his head down awkwardly. He put a finger the size of a baby’s forearm to his lips, slid to the floor, and was asleep.

Shonan petted Tagu until his own blood stilled.

Both men woke when they felt water lapping at their skin. Tagu was already sitting up, on guard against the rising rivulet.

They crawled
plish-plash
through the curtain of roots. High in the sky, the constellation of the Six Pigs said it was far past the middle of the night.

Shonan put a finger to his tongue—the water was salt. He rubbed some on his belly, and the coolness felt good.

This ravine was a steep-sided cut made by the pounding waves of the sea. When the tide came in, the gully was wet, maybe even full. When the tide went out, it was empty. The sea was new to Shonan, and mysterious, but he intended to learn all its ways.

Yah-Su parted the roots, motioned to Shonan to come along, and waded upstream. The Red Chief wasn’t used to following, but Yah-Su was quick-minded about the ways of war.

They hurried along in silence. Yah-Su didn’t hesitate to walk on the sand, trusting the rising tide to cover whatever tracks they left. Shonan put his life in the buffalo man’s hands.

Before first light, the creek made a sharp left turn toward the sea. There Yah-Su lifted Tagu onto a head-high stone slab and gave Shonan a hand up. The quick lift was a lightning bolt of agony.

They padded across rock and into an overhang. In the darkness Shonan couldn’t tell how much of a cave it was, but they walked back twenty or thirty paces. Yah-Su pulled on Shonan’s hand to get him to sit down.

Deep in the darkest shadow Shonan found some surprises. Yah-Su had a couple of untanned deer hides here for mattresses, and soft, tanned elk hides for blankets. After some shuffling around, Yah-Su dropped a slab of dried deer meat into Shonan’s hand. Evidently he intended to save the meat lashed to Tagu’s back.

Altogether, Yah-Su had a camp, an outcast’s camp.

One skill Yah-Su had was sleeping. He was already rolled up in one of the bed rolls and snoring like a bull.

Shonan hurt too much to sleep. He sat and thought things through. When father and son disappeared, whisked away to
the land of the Little People, Yah-Su must have gone on ahead to the Brown Leaf village and waited for them. No question he was their friend. After a few days in the world of the Little People and nearly a week’s travel, Shonan and Aku turned up. Yah-Su probably saw them—he seemed super-observant—and he certainly knew about the sentries. He didn’t show himself, just as he didn’t reveal himself at the river crossing, but let the Brown Leaves spring their ambush and then helped out when he could do some good.

But why did Yah-Su have a camp near the Brown Leaf village? Shonan thought again,
outcast
. Among the Galayi, villagers punished by banishment were utterly cut off from their people—not even relatives would spare them the slightest help. Usually such people went crazy and disappeared forever. Occasionally, the strong ones became bitter enemies of their own people. In that case Yah-Su might have a series of invisible animal dens. Shonan wondered if he would soon find out.

The notion of an outcast bothered him. The Galayi people banished members for only one reason, killing a fellow tribesman. He looked at the beast sleeping next to him. A killer? Definitely. A killer of one of his own? Possibly.

But a friend to me and Aku.

Shonan would have chewed on the problem longer, except that his breaths fell into rhythm with Tagu’s, and the Red Chief drifted off.

The morning showed why this was a camp. A seep oozed from under the rock at the uphill end. Yah-Su picked up two of several gourds of water beside it, handed Shonan one, and drained the other. No water had ever tasted better. Shonan had gone all night dry.

The angle in the sharp turn of the ravine formed a huge triangular room with a flat roof. The stone of the earth shaped the sea here as much as the sea shaped the earth. The water from the seep never even reached the bottom of the gully. Apparently the tide was going back out—the ravine was mud-bottomed now.

Yah-Su gave Shonan a dab of fat to rub on his belly. The war chief did it very gingerly.

The buffalo man handed Shonan another slab of dried buffalo meat and took one for himself. When he finished eating, Shonan whispered, “When you got the pack dog …”

Yah-Su clamped Shonan’s mouth and nose so hard he felt like he couldn’t breathe. After a long moment he let go of Shonan, who felt full of fire—no one treated the Red Chief that way.

Then he realized Yah-Su didn’t know anything about Galayi positions of honor, and just wished the beast knew his own strength.

Yah-Su pulled out his knife, drew the point along his own throat, and then made the same motion toward Shonan’s throat. Then he clamped a hand over his own mouth.

All right,
thought Shonan,
we shut up and stay put.

And hope that Aku got back to the Amaso village of the Galayi tribe safely.

It took four nights of flying. Days were no good. Aku could see the raptors cruising the skies—hawk, eagle, osprey, and the buzzard to clean up afterwards. He didn’t have to remember how his mother died. The pictures of her and the attacking hawk played bright and deadly in his mind. He was left with nothing of her but the three feathers he wore in his hair when he took human form. Her legacy was this lesson—owl shape and night flight.

In the first moments of the day’s light, from above, Aku watched Iona walk toward the river carrying two water gourds. His heart was already beating fast from wing-flapping—now it zoomed. He wanted to grab her, roll on the ground with her, laugh with her, kiss, make love. Except that she wouldn’t make love to an owl.

At an eddy where the river was still, Iona bent and dipped the gourds into the sweet water.

He lit in a snag. As fast as he could, he put himself through the transformation. When he was finished, Aku felt behind his ears, under his arms, and in his groin, places where, if he wasn’t thorough, he sometimes left feathers.

He ran. Iona was walking briskly, barefooted. The earth
was cold in the dawn. He ran faster, thinking how he’d grab her waist and swing her around and she’d see his face and they’d both shriek with excitement. But she turned left, away from the circle of huts of the Amaso village. She headed for the brush hut where the moon women stayed.

He felt a pang. If she was on her moon, he would not be able to touch her until it was past. He could talk to her from a couple of steps away, but the medicine of moon blood was strong. Even touching a moon woman might ruin whatever medicine a man had.

Aku stopped. He had the power to metamorphose into an owl. He had some ability to see beyond appearance into the spiritual nature of things. His grandmother had told him what great gifts these faculties were, and his own experience told him some of the truth of her words. No question—he couldn’t go near the moon women’s lodge.

He felt a jolt. What on earth was he thinking? She was full of his child. She couldn’t be …

“Aku!”

She set the gourds down, ran, and slammed into his arms.

He swung her. He felt a drum-flutter of joy rise in his chest, and quelled it. He set her down. “Your nose!” she cried. She barely touched the scab running down it. He started to explain, but his face collapsed. “My father is dead,” he said.

Holding hands, sometimes stopping to kiss, they made their way down to where the river ran into the sea. At a glance Aku saw that the tide was flowing out, sucking the river into its immensity. They sat, and over the shush of waters, he told her the story. He wept. She wept. They lay down, held each other, and grieved.

And after a while another feeling, wild, strong, uncontrollable, rose in Aku, and they made a declaration with their bodies—
I am alive.

Aku slept on the sand for most of the day, Iona lounging comfortably nearby. Sometimes she drew a breath in so far it hurt, and eased it out. She’d been scared. She hadn’t let herself know how scared.

Once she slipped away to get some water and balls of cornmeal rolled in honey. She thought Aku must yearn for something other than dried meat.

When he woke up, only a glimmer of sun stole through the treetops on the western hills. He wolfed down the cakes. They held each other and kissed and cooed for a few minutes more.

“Harvest Dance,” said Aku, a solemn promise.

“Harvest Dance,” said Iona.

At that ceremony their families would sing the songs that would tell everyone that their son and daughter were become one flesh. At the council there the new, combined village would elect chiefs. But what stirred their blood was the thought of making a life together. What people would remember would be the first marriage between the Galayi and Amaso groups of the Amaso village.

What great luck. He loved Iona, and she loved him. At the Harvest Dance his great-grandmother Tsola would give them a special blessing, and they would move into Oghi’s house, and sleep together in hide blankets. Iona would be his new home.

“I have to show you something,” said Aku.

“I’ve already seen it,” said Iona. She grabbed. “When it was better.”

“This is something not every man has,” he said. He was tickled at himself. With great ceremony he unrolled the flutes from their hide wraps. Her expression was mystified. When he played a few tones on the green flute, silvery beauty agile as sunlight on rippling waves, her eyes seemed enchanted.

She was also enchanted by the story of his visit with the Little People. “Knee high?” she exclaimed.

“Knee high,” he repeated.

He explained the power of the green flute’s song.

“It heals any wound?” Iona asked. “Any illness?”

“Wounds are of the body. I can’t do anything for those. Sickness is of the spirit, and this song restores the spirit. That’s what the Little People said.” She ran her fingers up and down the flute, and her eyes glowed.

“Now I want to play the red one for you,” he said in a different tone. He played part of the song. Rono had warned him never to play all of either song, not for anyone, unless it was being used for its sacred purpose.

Iona looked at him uncertainly. The section he played was slow, grave, with only hints of something celestial. “What’s it for?” she murmured.

“Raising the dead,” said Aku. “If someone dies and I get to them before the spirit has left for the Darkening Land, the song will bring them back to this world.”

Iona looked at the father of her child, who came to her bearing greatness.

“Or so the Little People said,” Aku said softly.

Grave-eyed, they squeezed both hands, looking, seeing, and feeling. Aku had lived for a couple of weeks with the understandings that were opening in Iona’s mind.

Could he tell her about his ability to become an owl? Not yet, he thought—one crash of realization at a time.

He decided to tell her about getting captured by the Brown Leaves, threatened with torture, and cut on the nose. He didn’t mention how the witch and the shaman united into Maloch, a new incarnation of the Uktena, and he just plain fabricated a story about how he slipped his bonds, treading carefully around the revelation of shape-shifting.

When he finished, she cocked her head skeptically. “That’s not what you wanted to tell me.”

Aku flushed. Caught. He juggled thoughts, possibilities. “No,” he said, “I … I have to go see my great-grandmother.” He rearranged thoughts in his mind. “I don’t know where Salya is. The witch and shaman, if they were telling the truth … If my sister is a body without a spirit, where is she?”

She eyed him warily. “When will you leave?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight? You haven’t even seen Oghi.”

“I have to.”

“At
night?
”

“It’s safer that way,” he fudged.

Iona put his hands on her hips and stared at him.

All right, evasion wasn’t going to work. “The truth is, there’s things I can’t tell you yet.”