Zadayi Red (2 page)

She twisted her mouth. All she could do was repeat lamely, “Right now I have to go to the Emerald Cavern again.”

Kanu wondered what the devil was bothering his niece. Did she doubt herself? With her preparation and talent? Madness. Or was it something else?

Galayi manners didn’t let him pry into her mind. When she wanted to tell him, she would.
If
she wanted to tell him.

She said, “Maybe you will get your sons to take me.”

“Of course,” Kanu said. He pivoted away and looked at the setting sun. That was that. His family’s effort would be considerable. She’d have to be escorted, even though all the territory was Galayi. His two sons-in-law (Galayi men always married into the woman’s family, not the other way) would have to pack food, moccasins, blankets, and winter coats on the dogs, take their wives, and walk with Sunoya for five days across several mountain ridges to the Soco River, up the river to the Cheowa village, and up Emerald Creek to the Cavern. Then they would visit relatives in the village and wait while Sunoya did something he didn’t understand.

He turned to her and caught a flicker of fear on her face. She controlled it instantly.

“Do you want to leave tomorrow morning?” Kanu asked.
You who frighten yourself. You who hold yourself to standards no one else meets
.

“Yes.”

“I’ll speak to my daughters’ husbands now.” He walked away, his step uncertain.

As Sunoya followed him, she shivered again.
If I am flawed, how can I help anyone?

By birth she had been bounteously blessed or hideously cursed, she didn’t know which. It was a secret she had to keep. If the people knew how she was born, they would kill her.

W
hen Sunoya was thirteen, her mother Lyna knew she was dying. “Come sit close to me,” she told her daughter, her only child. Sunoya snugged up against her mother and leaned down close to her lips. Since her mother believed the old story about skunk smell keeping sickness away, the last person in the village to credit it, the creature’s stink glands hung above the door. Sunoya wondered whether, except for that, she would be able to smell her mother’s death. She could see it in the jaundiced face.

“This story, it’s your story,” Lyna said, “you deserve to know. But if you tell anyone, the villagers will kill you.”

Sunoya flinched. Her mother clutched her hand, as though to keep Sunoya from running away. She wanted to run, from her mother’s death, and from her dangerous knowledge. Lyna had been a difficult mother. She insisted on living alone, just the two of them, in a hut outside the village circle. Sunoya never had many friends, never got comfortable being around most people. She and her mother were misfits, loners.

Lyna said, “Before your birth I had terrible fears.” She’d often told this part. She had a husband for ten winters. She
yearned for a daughter or son, and she and her husband did what makes babies, laid for hours in each others’ arms exchanging breaths. Yet no children came. When she got a baby in her belly, she spent every day fantasizing about holding it, rocking it, tending to it. Then her husband, Sunoya’s father, was trampled by a buffalo and killed.

But now Lyna went into a new part of the story.

“I started having foul dreams where I gave birth to something unnatural, something horrible. I could never quite see what it was.

“When my time came and at last I felt the big pain and the big letting go, I heard the midwife gasp. Fear grabbed me. I looked and saw her staring at your right hand.

“I shrieked—I guessed it.”

Sunoya could barely hear the whisper as Lyna spoke.

“The fourth and fifth fingers were webbed. Both hands.”

Sunoya felt dizzy, like she’d fallen and hit her head on a rock. The webbing of the left-hand fingers was the best of omens, of the right-hand the worst.

“For a long time afterwards I wondered what I did, how I offended the Immortals like that.

“ ‘A girl,’ the midwife told me. Luckily it was my aunt Oyu.” Lyna’s voice was graveled thick with emotion. “ ‘Both hands are webbed,’ said Oyu. It is true.

“I couldn’t get air. When I did get it, I couldn’t let it out again. Finally I made wheezing words. ‘So long, so long’—I gasped for breath—‘Want child.’

“Oyu raised her belt knife. Then I saw she was only going to cut the cord.

“ ‘Girl . . .’ I coughed and threw words like rocks. ‘Cannot lose my baby. Cannot stand it.’

“I watched Oyu tie the cord off. Her face was set hard.

“ ‘Both hands webbed,’ I said. I was afraid she wouldn’t
understand me. ‘Maybe the double sign, it’s new, it’s a good sign?’

“Oyu set you down with her back to me and examined the hands.

“I hissed out, ‘Let me see my daughter’s face!’

“Oyu’s lips trembled and then began to move in a silent prayer. I thought, It must be the prayer that cleanses her from the taking of a life.

“‘Be like the warrior’s
zadayi
?’ I wailed. ‘Fail or succeed, could be either?’

“I kept babbling, like my words could grab Oyu’s hands and keep her from wringing your neck. ‘Maybe this is a gift, a great gift, twice a gift. Both hands webbed, never happen before.’

“Oyu looked at your fingers with a sour expression.

“ ‘Blessing
and
curse. Can’t we
make
it what we want?’ Hard time saying so many words in a row.

“Oyu made a grunting sound, sliced the web of your right fingers, and stitched the skin with sinew. She was good with a needle. Then she laid you on my breast and hurried out.

“A mother, me! Then I had a panic. Was my aunt hurrying to give out the good news or fleeing from a shameful act? Or both?

“I decided that, whatever the medicine man named you, I would call you Sunoya. Do you know why? You were born under a bright, full Grandfather Moon, a huge
sunoya
. I kissed your forehead, wrapped you in a hide blanket, and tucked your right hand out of sight.”

Lyna smiled and squeezed Sunoya’s left hand.

“The family was so happy. About you, and even more about your left hand. In return for the loss of my husband, another medicine bearer born, a gift.

“We fooled them, Oyu and me. I have never known if it was right thing to do. I will never know. At the end of your life you will know. Are you a gift of red? Or blue?”

Lyna’s face rolled away, toward the flickering fire.

Sunoya could hardly believe that her mother was suggesting that . . .
Maybe they should have killed me.
She thought of her name. It meant “moon,” or what her people called “sun living in the night.” Was she a sun? Or was her life enveloped in darkness?

Lyna turned her face back to her daughter’s. “Oyu is dead now. Soon I am dead. You bite your tongue. If you tell, they kill you.”

In two days her mother was gone to the Darkening Lands, and after another week the family sent Sunoya to the Tusca village to live with Uncle Kanu. On the way she had her first moon time. That meant that when she got to her new village, she was immediately given a becoming-a-woman ceremony. At that ceremony she revealed the name given her by the medicine man, and from then on she was called by that.

Her medicine name was Ay-Li, meaning middle, or half.

She never told anyone, but she thought it had a bitter perfection. Her mother called her Sunoya—moon—so her proper adult name was Half. Half Moon.

But was the moon waxing toward bright fullness, or waning toward darkness? Was her life painted red or blue?

Sometimes at night, when she thought about that, her fear gave her a wrenching pain from neck to crotch.

She would stick to the name Sunoya. She would
make
her life red. The first step was to go back to the Emerald Cavern to ask for a blessing for the people.

T
he panther Klandagi led Sunoya through the dark stone passages toward the room where Tsola, the Seer and Wounded Healer of the Galayi people, made her home. Blind, Sunoya kept her hand on the rising and falling shoulder blades of the black cat. Even when they walked in the cool water of the small stream that followed the tunnel, or got down on their hands and knees to crawl, Sunoya had complete confidence in Klandagi—he saw perfectly in the dark.

She remembered the legend about how at the beginning of this life on Earth, all the animals had been challenged to stay awake for seven nights. Only Panther and Owl managed not to fall asleep, and their reward was good night vision. Though Klandagi was also Tsola’s son, few people had ever seen him in human form. His role was to guard the Cavern and its mistress, and no man could match a panther at that.

Sunoya saw the low fire that was Tsola’s hearth, and made out the dark shape of her mentor next to it.

“Welcome, Sunoya Ay-Li,” came the voice, Half Sun Living in the Night. Tsola was always formal.

“It is good of you to see me, Grandmother.” Among the Galayi any respected older person was called “grandmother” or “grandfather.” Tsola was said to be over a hundred winters old. In the firelight she looked about fifty, slender, still beautiful. She wore a dress woven of the inner bark of the mulberry tree and dyed in colors Sunoya couldn’t make out in the dark. Mulberry weave was the rarest cloth the Galayi had. Tsola also wore a necklace of discs of gleaming mother-of-pearl, cut from sea shells and very valuable. Sunoya admired this woman who
lived deep in a cave and received very few visitors, aside from her family, yet dressed like the wife of the richest man. After all, she was the Medicine Chief. For her own part Sunoya dressed plainly.

Tsola could barely leave the Emerald Cavern. Decades of living in its miles of corridors had sharpened her sight in the darkness and made her blind in the sunlight. Usually her family, who lived in a hut beside the pond just outside the entrance of the Cavern, came to visit her. If she went to see them, it was at darkest midnight.

Tsola poured tea for the two of them and offered Sunoya cakes made of grass seeds and honey. She sipped the tea and declined the food. Klandagi crouched off to one side, curling his tail up and down on the cave floor. Except when he transformed himself into a human being, he ate only meat, and not flesh cooked over any fire.

When courtesy allowed, Sunoya said, “I have come to speak of troubles.”

“Yes.” Tsola knew that. Why else would Sunoya be back so soon? Often she saw her initiates only once in their lives.

“Grandmother, I have seen. . . .”

She waited. Torment shuddered through her body. She leaned on Tsola’s confidence in her.

“I have seen the Cape of Eagle Feathers desecrated. Spotted with blood. Smeared with dirt. Ruffled. Ruined.”

All three of them froze. Even Klandagi’s tail was rigid.

“You saw this after you drank the tea of the
u-tsa-le-ta?
” It was a hallucinogen known only to shamans.

“Yes, then. Also in my dreams. Also when I am wide awake and alone, looking at the sky or into the river water. I see it over and over. It will not let me alone. I see it every day.”

Tsola considered. In her long career as Seer and Wounded Healer, in entire her life, she never expected to hear such terrible news. The Cape was made of eagle feathers because eagles
carried messages from the Galayi to the Immortals, and more important, from the Immortals to the Galayi. Only she could listen to the Cape, or put it on, or even look upon it. Once a year she did this, deep in the Cavern, while the tribe was beginning the Planting Moon Ceremony. She sent whatever guidance she received to the people. This had been the chief responsibility of all the Galayi Seers and Wounded Healers for a thousand winters.

“Granddaughter,” said Tsola, “I will have to ask you to leave the Cavern for a while. Go with Klandagi to visit my family for a few days. I must look at the Cape. I must put it on and listen to it.”

Sunoya stood up and put her hand on the panther’s shoulders. Tsola was doing what had to be done, but Sunoya could hardly bear the thought of several days on tenterhooks.

A small stream flowed out of the Cavern entrance and formed a pond a short distance below. Tsola’s two daughters lived in a hut just above the pond. These waters were known as the Healing Pool, and they were a place of curing for all Galayi. Aches, fevers, stomach and bowel troubles, all could be improved if a pilgrim drank from the waters, or immersed himself in them. Tsola’s daughters helped the pilgrims and taught them songs for healing.

Sunoya drank from the stream just above the hut. She sat in the waters for as long as she could bear the cold. She chatted with the family. Eventually Klandagi came and led her back to Tsola’s home in the Cavern.

Tsola said, “We have to talk.” Her face was grave, stricken.

So what I saw is true
, thought Sunoya. Her chest quivered like a plucked string.

Tsola had mounted her teapot, which was a buffalo stomach, on a tripod over her fire. Sunoya saw her crumble in the
u-tsa-le-ta,
a lichen. That meant Sunoya would make the longest
journey any human being could make, except for going to the Darkening Land.