The Dawn Country (19 page)

Koracoo softly said, “Gonda?” and walked over to him. “We need to—”

“When we find the old woman, she’s mine,” Gonda hissed in a shaking voice. “Do you understand?
Mine!
”

“She’s yours. If possible.”

With sudden violence, Gonda grabbed Koracoo and crushed her to his chest. In her ear, he hissed, “Dear gods, what are we going to do? How can our son ever find—?”

“If you want to help him,” she said without a shred of emotion, “show him how a man faces something like this.”

Admiration filled Cord. How could she stay so calm, so focused? The boy was a stranger to him, and still every fiber in his muscles longed to lash out at something. Being able to defer emotion in the most emotional of circumstances was the hallmark of a great war chief. A goal he had never quite managed to achieve.

Gonda’s shaking embrace slackened. He released her and wiped his face on his sleeve. After he’d sucked in a breath, he said, “You’re right.”

Gonda stalked over to the fire and piled on more wood. When the blaze roared, he turned. Odion and Baji stood at the edge of the trees, watching wide-eyed. Gonda called, “Odion, come over here.”

Odion shook his head.

Gonda shouted, “I told you to come over here. Do it
now
or I will drag you over here!
”

Odion’s contorted face resembled a winter-killed carcass as he marched forward with Baji at his shoulder.

When he got close enough, Gonda grabbed Odion’s hand and forcibly led him to the severed head.

“Put away your stiletto, and pick that up. Throw it in the fire.”

“No. F-Father …
please
! I don’t want to touch—”

“Pick it up!”

Odion shook so badly his body seemed to be spasming as he tucked the stiletto into his belt, twined his fingers in the man’s hair, and staggered forward to toss it into the flames. By the time he’d finished, he was sobbing openly, and turned to run.

Gonda grabbed him by the back of the shirt, swung him around, and forced him to stand there.

“Watch,” Gonda commanded.

The hair burst into flames, and a stinking black cloud of smoke rose. Next, the skin began to peel and char. When the frozen eyes shriveled into black husks and sank into the skull, Odion leaned heavily against Gonda. The smell of burning meat rose on the air.

Through the entire thing, Koracoo stood silently by, watching her son and former husband with sober eyes.

Finally, Gonda crouched in front of Odion and gently smoothed tangled hair behind his son’s ears. “His family will never find him. Together, we have made sure that no one will ever be able recognize his body. His people cannot call up his afterlife soul and perform the Requickening Ceremony to place it in another human being. No one can save him now. He will never travel to the afterlife. He will be a homeless ghost, condemned to wander the earth alone, forever. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Odion wiped his runny nose with a blood-coated hand, then looked at his fingers. Tears filled his eyes. As though to get them as far away as possible, he extended both hands to Gonda. “Father? His blood. I—”

“Come on. Let’s go down to the river.”

Gonda took Odion by the hand, and they marched down to the water.

Koracoo silently removed her red cape from around her waist, shook it out, and slipped it over her head again, as though cold to the bone. The cape made a great bloody smear against the sickly haze.

No one said anything until Wakdanek murmured, “That was difficult to watch. More difficult for the boy.”

Koracoo blinked as though she’d just awakened from a nightmare. “Was it?”

“Well … yes,” Wakdanek said in confusion.

“It was necessary.”

“Really?” Wakdanek said as though in disbelief. “I doubt that …”

When she turned to look at him, his voice died in his throat. Her black eyes were hard and clear. “For the rest of my son’s life he will see two faces: one living and one dead. Every time he starts to relive what happened to him, he will see that charred head. He can hold onto that image. Eventually, the dead face will blot out the living face—and he’ll be all right.”

Wakdanek swallowed hard. “I just … I don’t think I could do that to my own child.”

Koracoo looked out across the camp and seemed to be weighing whether or not to continue the conversation. Finally, she added, “Children need to know that evil can be killed, Wakdanek. They need to know
they
can kill it. That’s what war is about. Killing evil.”

Koracoo walked away and began moving through the other bodies, searching the ground for a sign. Towa followed her.

When Cord, Sindak, and Wakdanek stood alone, Wakdanek shook his head, and Cord asked, “What’s the matter?”

Wakdanek gestured weakly. “I was just thinking about words. In the most terrible of moments, they are everything. They lend form to horror—define its contours and shape—make it real so that it can be borne. Though I think she’s wrong about the heart of war.”

“You’re a Healer. What do you know of war?”

“I know that the aim of war is revelation, not the destruction of the enemy. Not killing evil.”

“Revelation? Really?” Sindak’s brows plunged down over his hooked nose. “That’s not what my war chief tells me. Is that what you tell your warriors, Cord?”

Cord laughed softly. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Please enlighten us, Wakdanek. What needs to be revealed?”

Wakdanek remained silent. Probably because he thought discussing anything sophisticated with savages would be an exercise in futility. After all, Sindak was from the Hills People and Cord was worse: a man of the Flint People. The Flint People and the Dawnland People had always been enemies.

Sindak pressed. “
What
needs to be revealed?”

As though annoyed, Wakdanek expelled a breath. “My friend, we all have an amnesia of the heart. We’ve forgotten that we were once the same people.”

For a moment, the strange purplish smear of wood smoke shifted, and wan sunlight penetrated the haze, falling in streaks and bars across the abandoned warriors’ camp. Cord took a moment to appreciate the beauty; then he said, “Well, if we were one people, it was a long, long time ago. What does that revelation get us now?”

“Get us?”

“Yes. Does it put more food in the mouths of our families? Will it bring back the rains, or make our crops more productive? Will it make our enemies stop killing us?”

When Wakdanek just stared at Cord with a sad expression, Sindak made a low disgusted sound and walked away to join Koracoo.

The Healer said no more, and Cord turned to follow Sindak.

Behind him, very quietly, he heard Wakdanek reply, “It might.”

Twenty

Odion

By noon I’m shaking so badly, I can’t keep my head still. I try to focus on the tawny velvet distances, but they possess a fuzzy gleam, as though the sky is a golden painting that someone has tried to erase with a rough piece of hide.

The other children who sit on the riverbank don’t know what to do. Baji and Tutelo glance worriedly at me and try to pretend nothing is wrong.

I pull my knees up and hug them to my chest. Cedars and white pines surround us, casting wavering shadows and scenting the cold air with sweetness. Green water flows before me. I shift to look at the adults as they search for Gannajero’s trail. For six hands of time, they’ve followed out one set of tracks after another, then returned again and again to start over at the old woman’s campsite. Strains of conversations drift on the cold breeze. They sound irritable. They’re losing hope. All across the abandoned camp, Dawnland People also wander, searching the discarded items left by the warriors, hoping to find some cherished belonging, or the trails of those who were taken captive.

Throughout the day, Wakdanek has spent most of his time with his relatives, but now he crouches on the riverbank ten paces from me. His gaze seems to be searching the brush on the opposite bank, but I frequently see him staring at me. The cap he wears—made from the shoulder skin of a moose—creates a bristly crest down the middle of his skull. The two feathers tied to the cap flit in the wind as though trying to fly away. I study the sheathed knife that rests on his breast, hung from a cord around his neck. It is large. Much larger than knives carried by the Standing Stone People.

I wipe my shaking hands on my leggings. I’ve already wiped them so many times my fingers are swollen.
But his blood is still there.
It soaked into my skin and has been filtering, like a paralyzing numbness, through my hands and up my arms. I can barely breathe. In another hand of time his blood will seep into my heart and stop it from beating.

“Odion?” Tutelo pats my arm. “Why don’t you let me go get Mother?”

“No. I’ll be all right.” I hold my hands out to her. “But, Tutelo, do you see any blood?”

She grabs my hands and studies the palms carefully, then turns them over. “No, Odion. Your hands are very clean.”

I scrub them on my leggings again, hard, but it doesn’t help. The numbness continues spreading. If I could only forget last night, I might—

“Stop ordering me around!” Father shouts. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve been a tracker all my life!”

I spin to see Mother staring at Father. She glances at those close by, then whispers something to him. Whatever she said, it wasn’t pleasant. Father’s face contorts in anger. He gestures wildly with his hands, whispering to Mother through gritted teeth. The other warriors keep their distance, but War Chief Cord’s eyes narrow, as though, if he were in charge, he would not be so nice to Father.

Mother walks away and starts searching again. Every time the wind breathes, ash swirls up and resettles, covering the tracks she’s just made.

As I watch her, an inexplicable panic surges through me. I rise and hurry down to the river, where I kneel and scoop handfuls of sand to wash my arms and hands. My skin is raw and red; it hurts. But I keep washing, scouring my flesh, hoping to remove the soaked-in blood. “Just forget,” I whisper. “It never happened. That part of last night wasn’t real. It never happened. Never.
Never.
” I repeat it silently to myself several more times.

But when I stand up, my knees wobble. After all the beatings, and the days of marching with almost no food, I can’t seem to—

“Can I help?” a soft voice says from behind me.

I turn too fast, and stagger sideways. Wakdanek is two paces away, studying me with kind eyes. “Why? What do you want?”

He kneels, and the ball-headed war club he carries tucked into his belt thumps the ground. The blunt angles of his starved face are shadowed with ash and make it look like a skeleton’s. He reaches for his belt pouch. “You know I am a Healer, yes?”

I lick my lips nervously. “Yes.”

“I think I can help you, if you want me to.”

As though trying not to frighten me, he slowly pulls out a chipped cup and two leather bags. One has a red spiral painted on it. The other has a green lightning bolt.

“What’s in the bags?” I ask.

Wakdanek sets the bags and cup aside, and smiles gently. “Among my people, touching a dead body can cause ghost sickness. Many of the dead are angry. Especially those who die violently. They know they can’t travel to the Land of the Dead to be with their Ancestors, and they’re lonely and lost. That’s why they come around in the afternoon and at night to rattle the cooking pots. They want others to die and join them. But there are Spirit plants that drive ghosts away, and keep them away.”

Wakdanek gently places his hand on the bag with the red spiral. “This is a powder from the root of the bear’s foot plant.” His hand moves to the green lightning bolt bag. “And this is dried water lily root. Both are powerful ghost medicines.”

I wipe my nose on my sleeve. It’s running, and I have tears in my eyes, though I do not know when this happened. I choke out the words, “What do I have to do?”

Wakdanek pats the shore. “Sit beside me. We’ll get started.”

I cautiously ease down to the shore and pull my stiletto from my belt again. It comforts me to hold it.

Wakdanek glances at the stiletto as he removes a small pot and empties some coals from the morning’s fire onto the sand. “We need to purify you first,” he says as he gathers up a handful of white pine needles. While he sprinkles them over the coals, he blows until the needles catch and flames leap through the tinder. “Please come closer, Odion.”

I slide across the sand until I’m practically on top of the tiny blaze. As the dark smoke rises, he instructs, “Lean over the smoke and use your hands to smooth it over your face and arms. It will purify your skin.”

“My skin?” I cup my hands and pull the smoke toward me so that it soaks my hair and clothing. My movements are awkward with the stiletto held between my thumb and forefinger.

“Yes, when a ghost touches you, or anything else, it’s like a poison. It seeps inside you, trying to drive out your soul.”

I blink. He is blurry. “I knew it. I feel the poison. It’s been climbing up my arms ever since I touched—”