The Dawn Country (14 page)

Sonon let out a shaky breath and plodded on down the shore.

He could not say why it began. Not exactly. He knew only that by the age of six, his sister, Jonodak, had seemed to spend all of her time wandering an unfathomable labyrinth that twisted down forever into her own souls.

He remembered with perfect clarity the day Jonodak suddenly looked up at him, squinted, and snapped, “What are you doing sitting there?” As though Sonon should have known it wasn’t his place and he ought to move.

He and his sister were twins. They’d been inseparable. For the first time in his life, he’d felt like an outsider looking through a thin veil into her world. A visitor from a hazy place where Jonodak had once lived, but no longer did. And he knew at that moment that she had left him behind and traveled beyond to the realm where no one could reach her.

The horror began when they turned eight.

He’d awakened one night to feel a sharp chert blade slicing through his throat. Then, just before dawn, she had picked up a rock and slammed it into his face. It was impossible to set the shattered bones, so the village Spirit elders had just left it alone. Since that night, his nose had bent to the right like one of the False Faces.

A few days later, his sister had attacked three other children in the longhouse.
Poor Skaneat.
He’d seen barely four summers. Sonon’s parents had been hysterical. They’d called in every Healer in the village and demanded to know what was wrong with her. One old man told them that Jonodak’s afterlife soul had wandered away and gotten hopelessly lost in the forest. He’d said her body was nothing more than a slowly deteriorating husk.

Human souls were things of mystery. One day a person felt fine. The next day, an overheard conversation, or the loss of a beloved friend, turned the world into an alien wasteland where death seemed less strange than simply going on.

Sonon understood, of course, that he was just as mad as Jonodak.

The difference was, he didn’t mind. For him, the madness was a kind of sanctuary, a sacred cocoon spun in the dark emptiness of his heart. Properly guarded, the madness became rock-solid armor. It kept out pain. It protected him from the reflection he saw in people’s eyes.

It allowed him to simply go on.

His sandal slipped on a patch of hidden ice, and his feet went out from under him. He fell hard, landing with the boy’s stone-cold body still clutched to his chest. The wind had been knocked out of him. For a time, he just lay gasping, staring up at the moonlit Cloud People who blew across the heavens with their bellies gleaming.

When he could, he sat up and gently laid the boy aside so that he could struggle to his feet. His legs shook. He spread them to brace himself.

The fragrances of the river smelled powerful here. The earthiness of waterlogged wood mixed pungently with the tang of frozen plants and moss.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he reached down and twined his hand in the boy’s bloody shirt. “I can’t carry you any longer.”

He dragged the boy across a frozen rivulet and up a low rise … and stopped. Ahead of him, a dark shape moved through the moonlight.

The other boy
. As he walked along the bank, the child wept inconsolably.

Even from this distance, Sonon could smell the child’s fear-sweat. He forced his trembling legs to move faster. The dead boy’s body thudded over rocks and sticks and finally caught on an upthrust root. Sonon had to jerk hard to dislodge it. By the time he’d freed the corpse, the younger boy had disappeared among the shadows.

Sonon straightened. For a few brief instants, he did not hear the river or the wind sighing through the willows. The sanctuary in his heart had transformed into a vast realm of dust and darkness. For more than twenty summers, he’d been trying to save them, to make sure their families found them so they wouldn’t have to face the torments that he …

The torments that every lost soul endured.

He looked down at the dead boy. Long black hair covered his face. Sonon knelt and tenderly brushed it away; then he slipped his arms beneath the boy and staggered to his feet.

As he carried him down the shore, he murmured, “When you see me at the bridge, remember that tonight one person cared.”

Fifteen

S
indak spread his feet and yawned. He stood half-hidden behind a spruce trunk near where they’d made camp on the western bank of the Quill River. The sound of rushing water filled the darkness.

To the north, above the smoldering ruins of Bog Willow Village, stringers of smoke stretched like the fingers of doom. Every now and then the sky gleamed suddenly orange and Sindak knew flames had burst to life again. Had it only been a few hands of time ago that he’d been sneaking around the huge warriors’ camp, trying to find the stolen children? It seemed like days. At dawn, when they could see, he assumed they would trot north along the river to try to pick up Gannajero’s trail.

And probably find nothing.

“
Will
find nothing,” he hissed, barely audible.

By the time they arrived, the camp would have broken up and the warriors would have trotted off toward home. Hundreds of feet would have trampled the ground, leaving thousands of tracks and trails shooting off in every direction. Many of the departing warriors would have been pushing captive Dawnland children before them, so finding a child’s track would be of little help. In fact, picking out Gannajero’s trail in the chaos would take a miracle.

Sindak turned to stare at the small clearing thirty paces away where four adults and four children lay rolled in blankets. The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing coals. Gonda and Koracoo lay to the north of the children, Wakdanek and Cord to the south. Everyone appeared to be asleep. Though Sindak found it hard to believe that either Cord or Wakdanek could sleep in close proximity to the other, apparently both were beyond caring about debts of honor.

He swung his war club up and propped it on his shoulder. Across the clearing in the copse of white cedars a faintly blacker splotch marked the place Towa stood.

Sindak wondered what they’d do if they failed to find Gannajero’s trail. Atotarho was not known for being gentle and kind. In fact, his enemies accused him of being the most powerful sorcerer in the land. They said he had an army of
hanehwa
that hunted down his enemies. When he’d been a boy, Sindak’s mother had seen a skin-being in the forest just outside of Atotarho Village; it had been human-shaped, translucent and shiny, floating through the trees as though sculpted of mist.

Movement caught Sindak’s attention. No more than twenty paces away, through the weave of thick bayberry trunks, eyes flashed. A wolf. A real one.

Sindak slowly pulled his war club from his shoulder and gripped it in both hands. The leafless, gray branches of the bayberries resembled skeletal fingers reaching for the sparkling campfires of the dead. The trunks grew closely together, too closely.

“I thought we’d lost you,” he whispered.

Right after they’d left the ravine, a pack had dogged their steps, appearing and disappearing loping along their back trail. But as they’d neared Bog Willow Village, the animals had vanished. Sindak had assumed they’d been drawn away by the odor of dead bodies rising from the burning village.

A barely audible “huff” echoed, the sound made by a startled deer. Towa’s signal. Sindak turned to look at his friend and saw him pointing to an especially thick bayberry copse, where another pair of eyes glinted.

“Yes, I see them,” Sindak whispered.

He and Towa both started walking slowly back toward the camp, and the shining eyes flashed between the trees, paralleling their courses.

When they stood three paces in front of their sleeping comrades, Sindak whispered, “Why aren’t they at the village gobbling down freshly roasted meat?”

Towa’s brows quirked. “You’re a sympathetic soul tonight. Do you think we should try to shoot one? It might scare away the pack.”

The two pair of eyes joined, then separated again, and shone like four small silver moons. More eyes appeared, weaving through the brush. A big pack. The bayberry trunks were barely a hand’s width in diameter, but there were hundreds of them. “Those saplings are as thick as dog hair. An arrow will collide with a trunk or branch long before it pierces flesh.”

Towa gripped his war club in both hands. “They’re staring straight at us.”

“Impudent, aren’t they? Sindak watched the eyes coalesce into a line just inside the trees.

“There must be ten or twelve of them.”

“Well, if we can’t shoot them, maybe we should charge out there and try to scatter them?”

Towa calmly replied, “I saw a buck do that once. He charged right into the middle of the pack with his antlers swinging. He managed to gore several before they brought him down and chewed out his still-quivering heart.”

Sindak irritably shoved a lock of hair behind his ear. “You never like my ideas.”

“Maybe we should wake Koracoo? Her ideas are generally better than yours.”

“I’m not waking Koracoo until the wolves have my heart in their teeth. But you can … if you have a death wish.”

Towa shifted his weight to his other foot. “On second thought, the wolves could just be passing through, headed for the village.”

“You want to let them surround us, eh?”

Towa scratched his cheek. “Let’s just watch them for a while. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Sindak had known Towa his entire life. He could tell from his friend’s expression that lives might depend upon this discussion. “Are you finally going to tell me?”

“I’m not telling, I’m discussing. Or rather, asking questions. Why would Chief Atotarho have been in the warriors’ camp last night?”

“How would I know? Maybe he went there to Trade. Maybe he went there to visit old friends. Maybe he—”

“Maybe he went there to meet Gannajero?”

Sindak turned to stare at him. Towa was grinding his teeth. Sindak could see Towa’s jaw moving in the starlight. “Why would you say that?”

“Well, if Koracoo is right, and Gannajero is Atotarho’s long-lost sister, I was thinking that maybe they’re working together.”

The silence stretched until Sindak thought his nerves might snap. The wolves were slowly twining through the trees, coming toward them.

Sindak said, “That’s the kind of thinking that makes men do desperate things.”

“Think how I feel. I’ve been working on this problem for almost a moon.”

“How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know what your secret orders are?”

Towa seemed to be wrestling with himself. “My friend, each day that passes, I like these orders less and less. If I tell you, then you’ll be obliged to keep the confidence, and I don’t want to put you in the position of—”

“Having to disobey them? Which is what you’re considering doing?” He could tell when Towa was second-guessing orders. He’d seen him second-guess often enough in battle.

One of the wolves yipped, and two others answered with barks. As though grateful for the chance to change the subject, Towa said, “Somebody needs to decide whether or not we ought to move on. You know how wolves are. If they’re really starving, the rest of the night will be a cat-and-mouse game. They’ll sneak up and surround us; then two will charge snarling and yipping to keep us busy—”

“—while three or four others dart into camp and drag off our packs, or maybe one of the children,” Sindak finished.

Despite the care they’d taken to be quiet, Wakdanek sat up in his blanket and expelled a long breath. “Where are they?”

Sindak pointed to the undergrowth of bayberry. “Over there. Why?”

Wakdanek threw aside his blanket and rose to his feet. The roughhewn angles of his gaunt face looked eerie in the moonlight. Almost … not human. More like a carved wooden mask. His size added to the effect. Towa and Sindak both had to look up to him. “Why don’t you two build up the fire while I handle this?”

Sindak blinked. “What do you mean ‘handle’ it?”

“Just wait here.”

Wakdanek stalked toward the trees, and Sindak said, “Do you think he’s going over there to scold them?”

“Maybe he’s the one with the death wish. I say we circle around behind the bayberries, just in case he needs rescuing.”

“You’re in favor of
rescuing
a Dawnland warrior?”

“It’ll give me more time to consider what else I want to say to you,” Towa said, and silently trotted south, toward the deer trail they’d followed to get here.

Sindak grumbled and tiptoed into camp to gently lay a few branches on the glowing coals. In less than ten heartbeats, flames licked up and sparks flitted into the night sky. Sindak waited for someone to wake. No one did.

When Towa slipped into the striped forest shadows, guilt overwhelmed Sindak’s good sense. He trotted to the north and entered the trees just above where the wolves congregated. Black shapes slipped through the darkness less than ten paces away.

Strangely, the Dawnland Healer never bothered to turn around and see where Sindak and Towa were. He marched straight ahead with his jaw clenched. When he reached the edge of the bayberries, Wakdanek started whimpering. It was a low pathetic sound, like a hungry pup calling for its mother.