Shadows in the Cave (10 page)

15

I
t 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.”

“You …”

He raised a hand. “Not yet,” he repeated.

With a canny edge in her voice, she said, “Let’s go see Oghi.”

“No!” he said too loud and too fast. Oghi would give away his owl secret immediately. “I need to leave.”

“You want to make me really mad?”

“Iona, there are other things going on here. I can’t talk about them. I’ve got to go see my great-grandmother.”

Iona studied his face. At last, with the wisdom of generations of women who watched their men act bone-headed, she nodded. “I’ll pack you some food, so you can go out and slay the world’s demons.”

16

A
ll day Shonan and Yah-Su crouched in the shadows of the cave and listened to Brown Leaf warriors walking up and down the hillsides, searching for the Red Chief who cut a swath through their people.

Shonan supposed he was safe. The enemies were damned unlikely to find this camp. It crouched far back in a corner of the ravine, and on both sides the rock walls were overhanging. Anyone peering down would see that the muddy bottom showed no tracks. Clearly Yah-Su had camped here for years. If the Brown Leaves hadn’t found his camp in all that time, they wouldn’t find it today.

Shonan hated hiding. He wanted to
do
something. He wanted to find Aku. He wanted to fight. He put more fat on his raging belly burn.

At full dark Yah-Su motioned that they should go. They moved out by stealth.

It was impressive, in the Red Chief’s mind, that a man the size and shape of a buffalo could weave through the forest with less noise than Tagu made. The fellow had survived for a reason. By the time the moon came up, they were tucked deep in another cave, this time with few supplies and no water. The next night they traveled until dawn and came to a cave behind a waterfall.

Yah-Su grinned broadly, jumped behind the curtain of water, jumped back out, grinned bigger, and with a hand invited Shonan in. With a couple of deft steps, you could get in without getting wet.

This looked like Yah-Su’s main camp, if he had such a thing. A lovely, liquid light gleamed through the falling water and showed a room that got wider as it deepened. Yah-Su had stacks of rolled hides, all protecting dried meat. The man clearly was a good hunter, and he must have learned to tan hides himself. Against the walls leaned weapons—clubs, spears, spear throwers, all with well-flaked heads nicely lashed to the bodies. He had a pile of knives of flint and obsidian, with handles of everything from wood to a bear jawbone.

Shonan looked around curiously. Because of the water-reflected light, this was a remarkable home.

He realized they could talk—the water would cover the sound. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

Yah-Su smiled sweetly and said something in the Amaso tongue. Shonan resorted to signs—he hated it when people didn’t speak Galayi, as right-thinking people did. “Good place.”

“Thanks.” Tagu came to Shonan, who rubbed his ears.

Awkwardly, he told Yah-Su with signs and gestures what was what. “I want to go back to the Brown Leaf village and kill the shaman.” He spoke aloud the shaman’s name, Maloch.

“No,” signed Yah-Su.

“I’ll do it alone,” signed Shonan. Signing cut speech to the basics.

Now Yah-Su was stumped. After a few minutes he fingered, “
Big
want to?”

“Yes.”

“Maloch is also the Uktena.” He spoke the name of the
dragon. Evidently the two tribes called the monster by the same name.

“Yes.”

“We die.”

Shonan sighed. He would be glad to have the man beast as a war comrade. He fixed Yah-Su with his eyes. “A warrior dies maybe any day. A warrior, okay to die.”

Galayi tradition said that two kinds of the dead were quickly reborn onto the Earth, warriors who were killed in battle and women and children who died in childbirth.

Yah-Su looked at Shonan with huge brown buffalo eyes. “They stop looking for us. Then we go.”

That simple.

They talked. It was damned awkward, in Shonan’s mind, to talk with your fingers. But they were stuck inside, they were safe, they had nothing to do, so they talked.

Shonan told about his war exploits. If he read Yah-Su right, the young beast was fascinated. He was another man of action, he understood. You come to situations that have to be faced. You clear your mind for moments of pure action, without thought, in a way moments of pure beauty. If you kept things simple and true, if your actions were bold and quick, you probably lived. And you felt real. The rest of life wasn’t like that.

Those meanings underlaid Shonan’s tales. He had the impression that Yah-Su understood.

But Shonan didn’t understand Yah-Su, so he asked him, “Why do you live alone?”

“I don’t like to be alone,” said the buffalo man. “I plan to get a dog like Tagu.” He turned the dog over and rubbed his belly.

The beast was evading. When Shonan pressed him, he wouldn’t answer, not really. He fingered a lot of things. He threw out quite a few words to go with them, but the words were in the Amaso language, and Shonan didn’t understand them. Shonan did learn for sure that Yah-Su was from the Amaso village.

Shonan got the picture that Yah-Su had been mocked by other boys when he was an adolescent because he was humpbacked. Yah-Su felt humiliated, probably thought marriage would be impossible for him, and for that reason he could never truly be part of the village, one of the people. So he ran off and started living by himself.

“That was before you got so big?” sighed Shonan.

“Yes.” Yah-Su always seemed polite and considerate in the way he conducted himself. The people who thought he was a beast had the wrong fellow.

“You learned to hunt, make lamps, everything else by yourself?”

“I saw it around the village. And my mother’s brother, sometimes I would go see him at night. He helped me get good at making weapons.”

“You still go there?”

“One of my relatives trades things to me. For meat. But she … she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

There were more details, but that was the story.

Yah-Su wanted to know the particulars of what happened when Shonan and Aku were captured, more than he’d been able to see from the distant shadows. Shonan told him how a creature tricked up to look like his daughter lured them into a trap, how the “daughter” taunted them with whorish talk of what she did with Maloch. She was no daughter, but a false creation of Maloch shaped like Salya. Then the two
of them did an obscene dance and melded themselves into one creature, Maloch.

Then he told how Aku shape-shifted into an owl and escaped.

Shonan asked, “You don’t think we can kill Maloch?”

Yah-Su shrugged the most massive shoulders Shonan had ever seen and shook his shaggy head.

“Then why are you going with me?”

“Maybe you’ll be my friend.”

On the second afternoon Shonan asked Yah-Su if he wanted to leave that night. The buffalo man shook his head no. Shonan thought the man’s reluctance was odd. He knew Yah-Su was not afraid of a fight. Bluntly, he signed, “What is it? What are you afraid of?” He didn’t believe such a warrior had a great fear of being killed.

Yah-Su shrugged.

“Do you like Maloch the Uktena?”

“I hate him.” The buffalo man’s eyes flickered with fire. Then he lowered his head. “He took over the village. He kills the pretty girls.”

Shonan nodded. Yah-Su had watched what happened. He saw the warriors go to neighboring villages and steal girls. He watched as Maloch the Uktena ate their life-fires.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has armor,” Shonan agreed.

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has teeth like knives.” Shonan didn’t think the dragon’s short arms and small claws were a big factor.

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has that diamond eye. If you let it blind you, you’re dead.”

Yah-Su said nothing.

Shonan regarded Yah-Su. In this world everything could be killed—everything died. Death made Earth different from the world above and the Underworld. He liked it that way. Battle, the risk of life, death right in your nostrils—it was exhilarating.

“Let’s wait one more day,” he said.

“I want to practice with your spear throwers.”

Yah-Su nodded.

Yah-Su had a place for his own practice. You could hurl a dart into a mound of dirt twenty paces away or arc a dart to the far end of the meadow a hundred paces away.

The weapon was a kind of spear given the speed of a shooting star. You used a lever with a cup on the end to hold the dart, a slimmer, lighter spear the length of a man. With this thrower, which increased the length of your arm hugely, the dart became the deadliest of weapons.

Shonan knew damn well that a spear-thrower dart would kill any living creature.

Yah-Su had three spear throwers—he was a real warrior—but Shonan didn’t know them. He needed to throw with each one, feel its heft, test its balance, learn which one suited his arm and style. He practiced at twenty paces, not a hundred. He intended to drive the dart head clear through the dragon.

He knew by noon, and chose one. The dart was heavy for his arm, but it was the lightest of the three.

Yah-Su signaled that he would carry the others.

Shonan smiled, clapped the buffalo man on the shoulder, and they walked back to the cave behind the waterfall.

They had three shots. He would need only one.

Shonan was amazed by Yah-Su’s strength and agility. Not only did he have trouble keeping up with his comrade on the way back to the Brown Leaf village, they wore Tagu out. In the dark Shonan couldn’t figure out the route Yah-Su was taking. Like any good fighting man, as he and Aku walked the trail, Shonan had made a clear picture in his mind of the creeks and ridges. But he couldn’t puzzle out where Yah-Su was headed. He shrugged and followed. This was Yah-Su’s territory, and he was its master.

The second night they camped in sand. Since the moon was dropping behind the mountains to the west, Shonan couldn’t see the ocean, but he could hear it and smell it. When he crawled into his blankets, he was comfortable. He liked the soft shush of the sea on the sand.

At dawn Shonan saw nothing but the rocky point above him and an infinite ocean. Yah-Su led the way up the point, and from the top Shonan got a look across the bay at the Brown Leaf village. Their hiding place was tucked behind rocks opposite and jutting into the sea. Did Yah-Su mean for them to make their move from the ocean side? Did he have a plan?

Yah-Su signed, “Let’s watch.”

Watch was what they did all day. They saw nothing out of the ordinary—men, women, kids, dogs, people doing the ordinary tasks of life, others crossing the village common to visit friends or relatives, adolescent boys playing the ball game. Assuming they had quit searching for Shonan, the men were
mostly out hunting deer. Dried meat, parched corn, chestnuts, acorns, and seeds would get them through the winter. A few old people wouldn’t be able to chew the meat well enough to get enough nourishment, and some of them would dwindle away. That was the way of the world.

Shonan intended never to reach such a point. He wanted to die
living
, to go out in a glorious fight, all juices pumping, and then receive a warrior’s honor, quick rebirth.

Maloch came out of his house three times, wandered around, and talked to a few people. Mostly, though, he stayed inside. The smoke flagging out of the hole showed that he had a good fire and probably a cozy home. Shonan got a kick out of that idea—a dragon comfortable by the fire. Since the old stories said he was male and female at once, maybe he was having sex with himself.

Yah-Su pointed out the tide several times during the day. When it came in, some of the sandy tidal flats were covered, and the bay was deeper. Though there was an outlet, it was like a saltwater pond fed by the river at low tide and the sea at high tide. Now, at high tide, the ocean came into the bay and up the river. The stream might be hard to cross. When the tide receded, the river turned into several braids of shallow water. One of the braids fed the bay, and bay water flowed out to sea.

Shonan wondered why Yah-Su was so keen about knowing the tides. Maybe he was afraid the river would cut off their retreat.

Right after the sun came down, when the tide was all the way out, Yah-Su got very excited. He started pointing and kept signing, “Watch.” Maloch came out of his house, strode to the bay, took off his clothes, and bathed in the bay. Not only bathed but lolled, splashed, and played. Unarmed.

Shonan signed, “Every day at sunset?”

Yah-Su nodded yes.

“How long does it take him to change from a man to a dragon?”

Yah-Su signed, “Underneath he is a dragon.”

“Beneath his human skin?”

A nod yes.

Shonan considered. He considered longer. Then he said, “We’ve got the bastard.”

They watched another entire day. Shonan wanted to see everything again, soak it all up, make sure of his plan. He liked it. It was bold and decisive. Best of all, it wasn’t to be executed by the mixed bag of a war party but just two good fighters.

That night, before the moon came up, they walked upstream, found a place to tie Tagu by the river, and left him enough meat. Then they roamed the coastline in the dark looking for flotsam. Shonan wanted a hunter’s blind. Finally they found a thick log as long as two men. One on each end, since the tide was against them, they slogged their way toward the bay on foot. Before long Yah-Su snatched the log, slung it onto his shoulder, and stalked forward bearing the entire weight. They slid it into the bay well away from the outlet and crept back to their hiding place. The next tide would wipe out all tracks.

From first light on they watched the village as fish-hunting birds watch the sea. All the normal things happened, including a catch-as-catch-can ball game without the full number of players. Shonan thought it was odd that the Brown Leaves played the same game as his people, a ball thrown with long-handled rackets, very rough, a way of preparing boys for the violence of war. Though he observed scrupulously, nothing happened to change Shonan’s plan.

At midafternoon, they walked upstream behind their ridge of land. Shonan carried the one spear thrower he was familiar with, Yah-Su carried two. Shonan was confident that his single dart would do the job.

At the spot he’d picked out, they eased up to the top of the ridge and watched. Normal village activity. When the two were sure they wouldn’t be seen, they slipped down the hillside and into the river.

Yah-Su signed, “Success or failure, we stick together afterwards.”

Shonan answered, “And go to the Amaso village.”

Yah-Su pursed his mouth and gave a reluctant yes.