Shadows in the Cave (5 page)

Now he was going to be the war leader and surely the most influential man of Amaso, turned into a new Galayi village.
The Amaso people seemed likable enough, though they were touched by the spirit of beggars. They needed Shonan.

Which brought everyone to this day. Salya was playful with her lover and twin, but with her father it was different. Kumu stayed silly. And Aku … He liked walking alongside his father and learning things. He like ambling along with Salya and Kumu, because they were all laughter, as long as Shonan wasn’t close by. But half the time he avoided his father and sister and dreamt his dreams. Shonan was carrying his ambitions, which crackled like lightning. Salya was preoccupied with the man she wanted.

In the half-blue, half-gray of the evening he watched Salya and Kumu shoulder their elk robes and head off into the twilight. Salya glanced back furtively.

Aku studied his father. He’d known all along. “You wanted to build a bridge by giving Salya to the chief’s son,” he said.

“Grandson,” Shonan corrected.

Silence. “He’s good-looking. I thought he was a catch, but …” Shonan looked in the direction of the lovers, who had disappeared.

“I have an idea,” said Aku. He hesitated. “Let me be the bridge. My … She’s the daughter of the seer, Oghi. Her name is Iona. She’s …” He made a point of talking about things other than her smells and caresses, and emphasizing that she was the daughter of the second chief.

When Aku finished, Shonan said, “All right. You want her.”

Aku stopped himself from saying “Wildly” and only said, “Yes.”

“She wants you.”

“Yes.”

“I’m happy for the two of you. Let’s think about it,” said his father. “Meanwhile, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

In the middle of the third night the waters flooded camp. “Put it higher, in the crotch of the tree,” someone yelled. People were trying to protect their dried food. When it got soaked, it was useless. The campground clattered with curses at the river. Clothes were wet, bedding was wet, firewood was wet—the rest of the night would be miserable, and a couple of days would be lost.

Shonan glanced up at the stars and saw that dawn wasn’t far away. A little good luck to take the edge off a lot of bad luck. It happened sometimes. A hard rain would pound the mountains several ridges over, where you couldn’t see the clouds. The river would rise in its narrow canyon, and the few wide camping spots would get flooded.

A hand touched his elbow. Salya. “I’m sorry, Father, it’s my fault.”

True enough. If Salya hadn’t pulled her trick, if they’d started on time, they would be in a fine campground downstream, where the mountains opened into foothills, and the riverbed was wide enough to stand some flooding.

Shonan said to his daughter, “Just help take care of things.”

In the early morning light the men scrounged up enough tinder to get fires started. People stripped out of some clothes—nudity was no issue among the Galayi—and got into others. They ate the mushy corn which had once been parched, because it wouldn’t last anyway. The grass seed they’d ground into flour they threw away. They laid their soggy meat strips
across branches—in a couple of days the meat would dry out fine, unless it rained again.

Spirits were as soggy as the ground, emotions muddy. Salya made tea, and Shonan’s little family gathered around to warm up from inside. Aku stuffed his belly with corn mush. Kumu munched idly, looking distracted, and then addressed Shonan.

“War Chief, let me run back to Tusca and get us food.”

Salya caught her breath. Clearly, she hadn’t been warned.

As he spoke, the early sun caught Kumu’s twisted tooth and he looked silly. But Aku knew this clown was serious. He had watched Kumu play the ball game. He was a natural athlete. More important, he played like a demon of determination.

Shonan looked at the man who wanted to marry his daughter. Kumu had a good idea. The party could walk slowly, underfed, to the Equani village and ask for food. Any Galayi village would help out. But Shonan didn’t want to come into Equani as a beggar. He wanted this journey to be a triumphal march, a procession led by a strong leader to benefit the nation. And Kumu wanted to be the hero of the moment.

“I can be up there tomorrow before the sun sets, back here by the end of the next day.”

That was a stretch—the first half of the journey was uphill, and on the return trip he’d have a load. Still, Kumu might do it. “I will send six other young men along,” said Shonan. “You will lead.”

Kumu resisted smiling.

“But this is a trade.”

Both Salya and Kumu frowned.

“You go home.” That word struck Aku as odd. “Tell
people what happened. They’ll see to it that you get food. Then, when the party returns, six men come back and you stay in Tusca.”

“Father!” snapped Salya.

Shonan held up a placating hand.

“If you will grant me this favor, I will give permission for the two of you to be married at the Harvest Ceremony.”

Salya still looked mad, but Kumu’s eyes lit up. The three great annual ceremonies, the Planting Moon, the Harvest Dance, and Sun-Low Dance, those were the traditional occasions for weddings, with all the Galayi people there to celebrate.

Before Salya could object again, Shonan said, “Aku and I have a surprise for you.”

Aku told his twin sister and Kumu about his lover, Iona, daughter of Oghi, seer of the Amaso people. “When I saw her the first time at the Planting Ceremony,” Aku said, “we …” Salya put her hand on her brother’s and squeezed it.

Shonan said to Salya, “I had intended to give you to the grandson of the chief. But I am willing, instead, to give Aku to Iona, the daughter of the seer.”

Salya covered her face with her hands.

Shonan turned to his son. “But you can’t be like these two, and spend every night together before the ceremony.”

Aku grinned and nodded. He thought,
The afternoons will do fine.

“Let’s do it like this. We’ll have two marriages, twin brother and twin sister, at the Harvest Ceremony, marrying two good partners, Kumu and Iona.”

Salya peered at Kumu between her fingers.

Taking her gently by the shoulders, Kumu said, “Let’s do this,” he said.

Salya crumpled into his arms, which was daring in front
of her father. “I guess so. I’ll miss you too much. I guess so.” She broke into big sobs.

Kumu held her until she stopped crying.

Shonan said, “You’re my daughter. I want you to be happy.”

Kumu’s eyes hinted of challenge. “War Chief, you mean this truly.”

Shonan smiled broadly. “Yes.”

Kumu lifted Salya’s face to his own. “We’ll join together with all the Galayi people singing for us.”

Her eyes and her voice said, “Yes.”

In her family hut at the Amaso village, beside the river that curved into the sea, Iona woke when the first hint of light lit the smoke hole. She sat up wildly, feeling like all the hairs would fly off her head and then her head would sail away from her neck. She groped inside for … what? The feeling of being herself? What she found was craziness. In a quarter moon, or perhaps a half, her lover would come to her. Until then, craziness.

She pulled on a doeskin dress, slipped out the door flap, walked up and down the ocean sands, searching for something, but she didn’t know what. The village where she’d lived all her life, the sands stretching to the north, the cliffs rising to the south, the great water blasted with the light of the rising sun—she cared nothing for this familiar world. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the air had been sucked off the planet.

Yes, she knew Aku was on the way. She knew he felt the same passion, bigger than anything she had ever thought people could feel, a force rough and crazy, like the white-frothed waves that racked the sea. She knew that when he came to Amaso, she would give him all they both wanted, they would fulfill the promise. But she felt empty
now
. She wanted something
now
.

She got an idea. She saw her father, Oghi, walking away from the hut they shared—only the two of them lived there. He was headed for the tide pools and soon would come back with his hands full of shells. He was the village seer, and he used shells as tools of divination to get glimpses of the future. She didn’t understand how it worked. Now she ran after him.

Though she called him “father,” he was no more than a dozen winters older than she, and he was the brother of her first father. Two winters ago her mother died giving birth, and last winter her father died of the coughing sickness. Oghi had never married and lived alone in a small hut about a hundred paces from the village. Though he declined to move into the village—the closeness made him uncomfortable—she moved in with him. Neither of them had any other family left.

“Father,” she called, “what are the tides today?”

Oghi meant “sea turtle” in the Amaso language, and her father knew more about the ocean than anyone else in the tribe. In a vision he’d seen himself as an ocean-going turtle. Then he learned to shape-shift into the common turtle with the smooth red-brown back and the fine-tasting green fat. Though he was a monster as a turtle, the weight of two men, as a man Oghi was slight and looked boyish, except for his ancient eyes. His hair, oddly, had been red-brown from birth. He kept track of the weather and everything about the sea for the village.

“The tides will be big,” he said. Sometimes the incoming tide pushed halfway to the village and deepened the separate fingers of the river until no one could walk across them, or the outgoing tide exposed long stretches of sand and rock, and sucked the river almost dry.

“Really big. Flood tide way upriver tonight. Go get some water. We’ll cook these mussels.”

“What about the ebb tide?”

“Biggest one in a moon tomorrow at midday. Bring back plenty of water. You’ll want to stay away from the river in the morning.”

Will I, now?

At dawn she was ready. She shoved the log off the sand into the river, stood in the water naked, and held it back against the current. The outgoing tide shooshed around her thighs. If she didn’t launch on the log, the force would take both dead tree and passenger, ready or not.

She looked at the sun, gathering itself on the eastern horizon far, far out to sea. She felt the river running out to … no one knew where, not even her father. It was against all wisdom, yes, it was. Of all Amaso people she, daughter of Oghi the sea turtle, knew that best. It was what she wanted—to be swept away by an immense force, to be
taken
.

She pushed the log and flopped onto it. The current seized both of them and for a moment snatched her breath away. Once, several years ago, she’d felt loss of control like this. She’d dared some other girls to climb an oak tree that stood on the edge of the high river bank, roots peeping out below. Taunting them, Iona crept further and further out on a thick limb. She was agile as a squirrel and as sure-footed. Her best friend scooted out onto the branch and—

It snapped off. The friend fell the height of two men to the flat ground and hollered like she’d been wounded mortally. Iona fell onto the sloping bank and tumbled head over heels all the way to the river sand. Her friends shrieked in fear. Iona stood up and roared like a bear, beating her chest. Not because she’d survived unhurt, but because of a feeling.
During the moment of the fall—the moment that lasted half a lifetime—she had felt absolutely out of control. She exulted in it.