Shadows in the Cave (29 page)

Shonan’s tone was gentle. “You yourself said that your song only works when the person has just died.” They both wondered whether that meant when the spirit was still in or near the body.

Shonan and Yah-Su hoisted the dead weight. “Where to?” said Shonan, looking at Koz.

“Well, boys, we can’t go back the way we came, against the river current and up long drops and through the squeezed alleys. There’s a way, and it’s not as hard, but it’s long. Very long.”

The alligator looked at Salya and her bearers. “Carrying her is gonna get old,” he said, “real old. You big ones can’t do it all the time, and you two can’t pair up. We’ll put a big one with a little one.”

They accepted.

They marched, marched, marched. They switched off carrying Salya and marched.

“By the way,” said Koz, “you’re going to run out of candles soon. Then we get to walk in the dark. And you”—he pointed his snout at Aku—“Put out your candle.” Koz said to Oghi, “I said put out your candle.”

Oghi did.

The darkness was appalling.

“That’s just right,” said Koz, “that’s just right.” His voice was eerie. “Now, when we’re walking in the absolute darkness, you’ll know where I am. I’ll jabber, I’ll keep the words coming straight out.” Silence and darkness. “If I fall silent, watch out.”

“Why?” said Aku.

“Because this is coming!”

Koz clacked his teeth what seemed a dozen times. The sound was like an avalanche of stones hurtling out of the darkness. Aku fell down and barely kept himself from crying out.

“Now that you’re all proper scared,” said Koz, “light the candle.”

Oghi did.

Aku breathed again.

“Stick it up to my mouth.” He gaped his jaws wide.

Oghi thrust the candle near.

“Come on,” said Koz, his voice completely normal even with his jaws open, “stick it right in.”

Oghi did. The teeth gleamed like knives in the full moon.

“Teeth are handy, you see.”

Koz started off again, and the four adventurers followed, Shonan and Aku carrying Salya in the litter.

“Need a break,” said Aku. They set her down. Aku shook out his aching fingers. “Lucky alligator,” he said, “born with no hands.”

“Teeth are better,” Koz agreed merrily. “This way I don’t have to help the fools who come to the Underworld.”

That night they camped beside a small stream of clear water. While everyone else slept, Aku lit one of the horns for a moment, sat close to Salya, and blew it out. She was wrapped in one of his robes, but she needed no decency in the darkness.

He changed into owl form and just sat. He didn’t know what to do, what to think, what to feel. He looked at his own face on her bones, a dull face, inert. He searched for words.
Not animated by life.
That phrase didn’t do it either.

He wondered whether she slept. He didn’t think so. When you slept, your awareness went from outside to inside, world to dream. Salya had no awareness, nothing inside there that could sleep.

She wasn’t dead, either. Dead was something that happened to the body, and her body was whole. The catastrophe, what befell her, happened to her spirit.

He looked at her and again saw his own face deprived of its spirit-fire. He felt himself teeter on the edge of something unimaginably awful. He felt hollow, empty, a hole.

He closed his owl eyes, looked where he knew she was, and pictured the presence of his sister, of his twin, his companion through the years of his life. The sassy girl who played with him, shared his feelings, endured the death of their mother, even defied their father when necessary. He thought of the time she stayed out all night with Kumu. They weren’t a bit apologetic, either, not Salya, not Kumu, and not his father Zinna, who declared himself glad that she was full of Kumu’s juice. No, they were full of fire and dare. Salya
backed Shonan down. Aku loved her. He missed her. He wanted to save her. For himself.

He thought again of his two flutes. They were also empty holes, but if a man blew into them, if he poured his spirit-breath through them in that way, they made beautiful songs. Hollow as he felt, he could use his breath to make a story for Salya.

She used to like for Crani to tell her stories, the stories that came down from the oldest times, when all the animals, including people, were first on Turtle Island and were discovering who they were and how life on Earth might work. He remembered that she liked the one about how the people lost tobacco and got it back, so he told it now to her limp form.

“In the beginning,” he said, “the people had plenty of tobacco, and we smoked it at all the dances and ceremonies and whenever we wanted to pray and have our breath carry our prayers to the sky. Before long, though, we used up all the tobacco, and everyone started suffering. People felt listless and lackadaisical. Some felt ill. And one old man was dying.

“This man’s son, Walelu, knew that his father had been surviving for some time on smoke alone, and he loved his father very much. So he decided to make the long journey to tobacco country and get some more.

“It was a hard journey. Tobacco grew in a place far to the south, over high mountains, and the mountain passes were guarded.

“Walelu, though, was a shaman and a shape-shifter. When he got near the passes, he opened his medicine pouch, took out the skin of a hummingbird, and slipped it on. Up he flew over the mountains, as hard to see as a whirlwind. The guards
at the tobacco patches didn’t see him either. He took a whole plant, tucked it into his medicine pouch, and sailed back over the mountains.”

Aku looked at his twin, or rather the husk that was not his sister. He wished he could tell her that he had done what she wanted, and what their mother wanted, and become a shape-shifter.
I am owl.
But the husk had no way to feel glad.

He went on, “When Walelu changed back into a man and was walking home, he saw a very beautiful woman looking out of a hole next to the lowest branches of a tree. Immediately, he wanted her. He tried to climb the tree but slipped back. Walelu wasn’t stumped by that. He took medicine moccasins out of his pouch and scooted right up the tree.

“When he got to the hole, it wasn’t there. He looked up and saw that it was higher. Up he climbed, and the hole was still higher. No matter how high he climbed, the hole was always higher.

“Walelu had no choice. He put his lust away and climbed back down. As he walked, he pondered. Walelu was a shaman and knew that he had seen the beautiful woman and the hole in the tree with his spirit eye, not his physical eye. The spirits don’t appear to human beings idly—they always have a purpose. So Walelu thought about what that purpose might be.

“When he got home, he immediately gave his father some tobacco to smoke, and the old man perked right back up.

“Then Walelu thought about that beautiful spirit woman and how he wanted to plant his seed in her, and suddenly he understood about tobacco. He took the tobacco seeds and planted them. The people knew what seeds were, but no one had ever tried to grow a plant from a seed on purpose. The people have been planting it ever since.”

Aku waited, but his audience didn’t respond to the story. His voice just rattled off the walls of the cave and echoed down the long passages.

He transformed himself into his human shape, took a deep breath, blew it out through his hollow self, and rolled up and went to sleep.

This is the easy way?” Aku tried to make the words sound light, but everyone heard the undertone. At the moment Aku was in human form, helping his father carry his sister.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” said Koz.

“We have been walking for days,” said Shonan.

“There are no days or nights in the Underworld,” said their alligator guide. “No time. Well, time as you know it. All times forever are here, past to future.
If
you get back, it’ll be the same day you left, ain’t that handy?”

“You are our torturer,” said Aku. Quick as a snake Koz turned his head as far to the side as he could, straight toward Aku. “And guide and executioner,” the alligator said with a smile.

This “easy way” out of the caverns of the Darkening Land seemed four times the length of the long walk they took to find Salya. They ran out of lamps, which slowed them down painfully, Koz and Aku directing every step of the three blind men. They ran out of all food but Tsi-Li’s chestnuts, which they got sick of eating. At one point they traveled two and a half days without water.

“I may as well toss you a bone,” said Koz. “Before we sleep, you’ll be in the big owl’s house.”

“All but one of us,” said Aku.

“Exactly,” said Koz.

Mouldywarp said, “Aren’t you the ones? To make it back when the others didn’t.” His pink nose twitched.

“Don’t do that thing with your nose, okay, Mouldywarp?” said Koz. “Just make a path for us, would you?”

Mouldywarp had a kind of magic. He was only the size of Aku’s hand, but when he nosed through a dusty, root-crossed passage his own size, human beings and alligators could follow him. So could men bearing a litter.

Tsi-Li, Great Dusky Owl, materialized as from nowhere and looked the adventurers over. “Thank you, Mouldywarp.” The mole disappeared. “Well, behold. I see you pilgrims have damn near killed yourselves. Mean to save me the trouble?”

Aku was feeling drained and mopey. He didn’t need his great-grandfather’s grim idea of humor.

Suddenly Tsi-Li’s owl visage was huge, looming. Aku didn’t expect any leniency from him. Probably in Tsi-Li’s mind justice worked in the world the way a rock fell, impersonal and inevitable. Between the Great Dusky Owl and the Boss of the Underworld, none of them would get out of here alive.

Inside their heads Aku and Oghi heard Tsola whisper,
You don’t need me for a while now. Good-bye.
Aku flinched at these ominous words.

Tsi-Li said in a soft boom, “Let’s see the prize you brought forth.” He regarded Salya’s limp, gangling body for a long moment. “What it inevitably must be.” Though the master of life and death probably intended to sound neutral, Aku heard the sorrow in his voice. Salya was his grandchild, too.

The great owl put his head closer to her, his attention acute. Aku wondered if he was trying to enter her mind. Surely the immortal owl had that power.

“Truly dead,” he said.

Tsi-Li opened a portal that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“Come into my home.” Suddenly, magically, they all saw the house, there in the thicket of roots. It looked magnificent.

“You’ll need to leave the young lady,” said Koz. “If I have her, one of you will come back for her. Our little bargain.”

“Well and good,” said Shonan.

“This way,” said Tsi-Li, still holding his door open.

“You go ahead,” Yah-Su said to the others. “I want to stay with Salya. I don’t trust this alligator.”

“As you wish,” said Tsi-Li.

Aku thought,
That’s odd
. He said, “You should be with your friends.”

The buffalo man looked sheepish. “It’s wonderful to have friends.”

“This way,” the owl repeated, nodding Aku, his father, and Oghi into a large room with a smaller one on each side.

Aku went ahead. He suspected that Yah-Su felt uncomfortable about going into such a fancy place.

“Have you ever been in a house with three chambers?” said Tsi-Li, knowing perfectly well that none of his guests had. He invited them to look into one of the side rooms. “For sleeping,” he said. It had a perch with plenty of head room for a bird the size of a man, and something bowl-shaped straight below.

He led them back into the large room and across to the door of the other small chamber. It had a fire in the center, a
spit with a roast, and various cooking utensils. “I cook here, on the rare occasions that I cook. We owls like our meat as nature makes it. We have our feathers to keep us warm, and we don’t take to flames.” He shuddered, as though at the thought of fire brushing at his feathers.

“Thank you, then,” said Shonan, “for making something for us.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll have food and drink. It is a special occasion. Afterward, we’ll have some questions. Perhaps even some answers.”