Shadows in the Cave (34 page)

Aku transformed himself, mouth to beak, arms to wings, flesh to feathers.

Oghi gave a little whoop and jumped feet first into the water. An unruly wave sluiced up onto his privates, and both of them laughed.

“Come on, Aku.”

Aku fluttered down and watched Oghi transform himself, covered by his carapace. When he stuck his turtle head out, his eyes were merry. “Let’s see this place where the sea spumes into the earth,” he said. “I’ll swim, you fly.”

Aku winged his way slowly, from outcropping to outcropping. The angled walls were rough and bumpy, with lots of places to light. Oghi swam with only the top of his back touching the surface, red-brown against the green sea.

The cave was lit in a way that seemed mystical. Near the seaward entrance, light glowed off the emerald water. In the middle was a web of shadows and reflections. Toward the back was something strange. Aku didn’t make it out until they were most of the way there. The rear of the cave was lit somehow. Oghi pulled himself with his front flippers onto a big rock there, and Aku perched beside him.

A crooked shaft gave an eerie light. Aku peered up through the curving, jagged hole but couldn’t see the sky that must be the source of the light.

“Here’s what you really need to notice,” said Oghi. He crawled across and flipper-tapped a vertical corner of rock. Aku fluttered, landed on Oghi’s carapace, and took a look. Oghi stuck his flipper straight through the corner.

Aku craned his head. It wasn’t a corner. Two walls of
rock overlapped. When you looked at them from the side, the slit was easy to spot.

“Kind of looks like the place where you came out, being born, doesn’t it?” said Oghi. “That’s our story about it. That the Amaso people emerged from the earth through this hole to the ocean, and that’s why we’ve always lived at the shore. Amaso means ‘sea.’ ”

Aku took a short flap through the opening, which was a weird sensation, considering Oghi’s story. He landed on an outthrust rock and looked around with his owl eyesight, excellent in the darkness.

Immediately beyond the slit, the ground level rose and was dry. After a few steps it made a hard left turn.

“We need to show the Red Chief this part,” said Oghi. “Let’s change back to human.”

They both did.

Oghi scrambled easily up some rocks and stuck his head into the open air. He picked up a pebble, tossed it, and a half dozen steps away hit Shonan in the neck.

“Hey!”

“Hello to you, too.”

“Hah,” said Iona, “you sat right by the entrance and didn’t even spot it.”

Shonan surveyed the lay of the land from the sea to the narrow hole in the rock. “I don’t know what good this is going to do.”

“Come see.”

When all four had clambered down, Oghi climbed through the slit above the sloshing sea and his voice sounded from the other side of a solid wall. “Come on! Follow!”

They did, and stood up into utter darkness. Aku felt a bolt of panic.

They heard some scraping noises and knew what Oghi was doing. In a moment he lit a torch.

Here was a completely different kind of cave. This one had the limestone walls and muddy bottom Shonan and Aku knew from their home mountains. They didn’t recognize the rock the sea cave was made of.

“It’s a complicated cave,” Oghi said. “We don’t know how vast it might be. We have food and fresh water stored further back, enough for about one quarter moon.”

“So you hide until your enemies go away.” The edge in his voice was contempt.

“Unfortunately,” said Oghi, “we stay inside until they take everything we own and leave.”

“Yeah.” Shonan pondered. “Why don’t they come in here after you?”

“They don’t see the little entrance we just used. That’s why my great-grandfather chose this spot. Now, I have one more little surprise.” With the torch blazing, he led the way down the left-hand passage for about twenty paces. “This leads a long way and opens into much larger rooms. If you go far enough, you come to an underground river. Except for the darkness, a whole village could live here.”

“Maybe your ancestors did,” said Aku.

Oghi said, “We came onto Earth from this cave. Anyway, our enemies have never come in here. They look into the sea cave. If the tide is out, they walk up here and give up. If they didn’t, we’d kill them one by one as they squeezed through the slit.”

Iona said, “See, my father has it all worked out.”

“My great-grandfather, actually,” said Oghi.

“You’re a lot better prepared than I thought,” said Shonan. Still, there was reserve in his voice.

Aku thought,
He can’t stand the idea of hiding from his enemies.

“And we know ways out, far up above. We can always escape.”

Shonan gave him a long look. “I guess it works.” He looked back into the passage but showed no inclination to explore it. “Let’s go.”

Oghi led the way out of the slit and up the crooked hole.

When Shonan stood in the open air, he looked all around, took in the sea, the tidal plains, and the hills. Finally he said, “When’s the next low tide?”

“It’s going out now. It will be low tomorrow afternoon.”

“In the morning, get the women and children to walk the beach and come through the sea cave into the other cave. The sooner the better.”

“All right.” Oghi spoke uncertainly.

“The men, all the men of both peoples of Amaso, will stay aboveground and fight.”

Iona flinched. Aku spoke like a man slapped in the face. “You intend to go to war against Maloch the Uktena and two hundred men?”

“You said you went to the Land Beyond the Sky Arch to learn courage.” Shonan gave him what might be called a smile. “Now’s the time to use it.”

“We may need more than you think,” said Oghi, studying the sky. They followed his gaze to sea. “That looks big.”

“I don’t understand,” said Shonan.

Oghi’s voice wavered. “Looks like a hurricane.”

Red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black, poison lack.”

Maloch chanted this little ditty over and over. He adored it. He lolled it on his snake tongue before he hissed it out. “Red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black, poison lack.” A common rhyme for the least common of beasts, himself. He hiss-laughed.

Maloch was supremely satisfied. He had transformed himself into one of his favorite creatures, the coral snake banded red, yellow, and black, definitely the “kill the fellow” variety, where the red and yellow bands touched. Unlike the ordinary earthly examples, which he scorned, Maloch the Uktena was huge in his coral snake form. Like theirs, his venom worked by stopping the breathing of his prey. While theirs took hours to start working, his was instantaneous. He loved watching his victim’s eyes grow huge as the breath wouldn’t come, and wouldn’t and wouldn’t come—
A sky full of air, and none at all for me?
He liked to slither back and forth across the victim’s body as the lips turned blue, the body writhed, and finally went into convulsions. At this sovereign moment Maloch crawled to the face and went nose to nose with his victim, glaring directly into the poor creature’s eyes, so that the dying man could peer deeply into the
black iris, into the abyss of evil as his own vision clouded into death.

Now Maloch arrived at the top of the last hill and raised his head into a stiff breeze. Good—exhilarating. He liked it. High winds felt right. He would descend upon the village like a scourge and cleanse it. Let the winds blow away the debris.

He looked across the plains at the Amaso village. He was surveying a great banquet, and he could already taste his greatest triumph. He raised his head high. He was privileged as leader to ride coiled around a pole held overhead by one of the war leaders of the Brown Leaf army, his head swaying above its top like an emblem or a flag. But Maloch was no symbolic threat. He would crawl down from the pole and enter the fray. If women and children were foolish enough to face him, he would bite every one of them he could reach and would terrify the rest. When he faced warriors, he would return to his dragon magnificence, protected by scales of slate, and work havoc. He chuckled—
hisss!
—at his mental pictures of the warriors turning tail and running. He did not need this army to defeat these poor villagers. He could do it by himself.

Eventually, of course, he would kill Aku, the one with the seeing gift, the greatest threat in the village, though he was too childish to know it. Then he would kill Shonan, the man who had dared to attack the great Maloch. He would add their life-fires to his own. Since they were powerful men, he would make a great gain in strength. Then, like an afterthought, he would consume the body of their precious sister and daughter, destroying all trace of her anywhere in the universe. Very satisfying,
yesss
, very satisfying.

He turned his snake head slowly from southern horizon to northern horizon and back, lingering on where he knew
the village was. Whether in his snake form or as a dragon, he did not have the gift of superb eyesight, and from this distance Amaso was nothing but a smudge. But he had excellent intelligence from his scouts. The village was another quarter day’s march away, and he had overwhelmingly superior forces.

Out to sea he noticed some dirty clouds of an odd olive color. They didn’t matter. Today and perhaps tomorrow Maloch would administer a gory triumph. The flowing blood would belong to the Amaso soldiers, not his.

“Maloch?”

The speaker, Mor, was the tall man with the crooked nose who held Maloch’s staff high. This man was the son of the grand old chief whose throat Shonan had cut. Now Mor was the chief in name only. Maloch had taken all leadership for himself. He was finished with living alone in the high mountains. He liked ruling people. He liked making them bow, watching them cringe. The man who wanted his attention was no worse than most human beings, but then it was a species barely to be noticed.

“Yessss?”

Mor said, “Those clouds out there might be a storm.”

“Yessss?”

“The wind is stiff, sir. This could be a hurricane. They can be rough.”

“How rough?”

“I haven’t seen one myself, sir, but there are stories.”

Stories, nothing could be sillier than the stories of human beings. Maloch himself had spread stories among them. The creatures were easily frightened.

“What are wind and rain? We will make them help us.” Maloch had heard of big storms but had never seen one that impressed him. Until a few winters ago he had been a
mountain dweller. Human beings were afraid of the silliest things.

“Let us march,” said Maloch.

“Yes, sir,” said Mor. He had seen how quickly Maloch killed men who disagreed with him.

“We will march straight into the village,” Maloch said. “No running. We are not assailants, we are conquerors.”

The wind was rising. Strangely, it came not from the east, where the the storm prowled closer and closer, but from the north.

Shonan had to shout to explain the battle plan to the men squatting around him. The Galayis just nodded their acceptance. The Amaso men murmured among themselves, unable to believe that they were going to fight back. It would have been rude to speak up, but the winds whipped their mutterings out to sea anyway.

Chalu, their venerable chief, rose and stood next to Shonan. He cupped his hands and called into the gale, “Pay attention. Get ready. This man is our war chief now. It’s a good plan.” He brandished a fist. “It’s about time we fought.”

A few men chorused under their breath to their neighbors, “About time.”

Many more men whispered to each other, “Why?” Since the time of Oghi’s great-grandfather, when enemies threatened, all the Amaso people, men included, had simply taken refuge in the limestone cave, up behind the sea cave, and waited until their foes left. True, they had losses. No family ever got all its belongings into the cave, and the marauders walked away with whatever they could grab. Stomping around, unable to find their prey, they got frustrated and even took children’s toys and threw them into the river. And they
destroyed the huts. But since the dwellings were only made of brush, who cared? So these men were thinking,
Why are we going to fight now?

Chalu raised his fist again. “We have good news. Our spies say that Maloch is not with their army.”

Some of the men cheered lustily, some sardonically. Shonan smiled to himself at this foolishness.

“What next?” came a voice from the rear.

Shonan gave them all a hard look and summed things up in a commanding tone. “My job is to think and then lead. Yours is to join in and fight. So let’s get ready.”

Getting up, the men looked at their women and children trekking toward the entrance to the sea cave, carrying all the belongings they could. Then most of the men retired to their huts to make medicine to get psychic strength for this afternoon’s fight. They said prayers and sang songs. They tied feathers into their hair. They fixed headresses onto their heads or shoulders, carcasses of small animals like ravens and foxes, the entire heads of bears and buffalo, emblems of their animal guides. The preparations were meticulous and time-consuming. When they were ready, they would finish helping everyone and carrying everything into the cave.