Children of the Dawnland (North America's Forgotten Past Series) (22 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: Children of the Dawnland (North America's Forgotten Past Series)
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Fluid as a ghost, her white cape swaying around her white moccasins, Cobia grabbed Greyhawk’s hand as she passed, dragged him to his feet, and hurried for Twig. “Take my hand!”
Twig gazed into those huge haunted eyes and, for the first time in her life, knew true terror. Power like a writhing living thing filled those black depths. She choked out, “Where are you taking us?”
“Come with me! Now.”
Twig grabbed her hand, and Cobia dragged both children back into her cave just as the earthquake struck like the enormous fist of the Creator.
The impact tossed Twig high into the air and then slammed her facedown on the rocky floor of the cave. The air went out of her lungs, and stunning pain flashed through her entire body. When she looked up, she saw Cobia and Greyhawk lying a short distance away.
Cobia immediately rolled to her side and got on her hands and knees.
“Follow me! We must get deeper into my cave!”
She started crawling.
Greyhawk was right behind her, but after five heartbeats, he turned back to look for Twig. “Twig? Come on!”
She still couldn’t breathe, couldn’t seem to make her lungs suck in air. She tried to call to him for help, but no sound came up her throat. Her mouth moved in pitiful cries that no one could hear, not even Twig.
Outside, the Thornback raiders screamed. Twig jerked to look and saw a huge green ball of light tumble across the sky right over their heads, followed by what sounded like millions of lightning bolts crackling through the air at once. For long moments, the raiders just stared up. Time might have stopped.
Then, there was a blinding flash … and a searing wave of heat struck.
Without thinking, Twig threw up her arms to cover her face, but her skin seemed to catch fire! It was like being thrown into raging flames!
An instant later, hurricane-force wind blasted the world. It picked her up like a feather and hurled her back into the cave, where it bashed her into solid rock and kept her pinned there. After one hundred heartbeats, the wind stopped. Just stopped.
Twig fell to the floor, gasping for breath, and saw the huge blisters that covered her arms. Her face must look the same way.
She tried to get to her feet, but the Ice Giants let out a magnificent, terrifying roar, and the earthquake smashed her down again. The land itself seemed to be splitting wide open, shattering into splinters of rock and ice that no one could ever piece together again.
Fog rolled into the cave, thick, as though the Ice Giants were vaporizing outside.
Twig tried to shout at Greyhawk, and could tell he was shouting back. His mouth was moving, but his voice was drowned out by the earthquake.
Greyhawk and Twig madly slid forward on their bellies until they could clasp hands.
Ahead, deeper in the cave, Cobia was waving them forward and shouting, though they couldn’t hear her.
Together, they scrambled across the heaving floor to get to her … and she led them back, deeper and deeper into the darkness.
When Twig dared to glance back through the mouth of the cave, she saw the fog burning red and glowing gravel raining down … and water. Water was filling Hoarfrost Canyon.
The Ice Giants were flooding the world.
H
OWLING WIND BLEW clouds of dust and smoke up the trail, and the air had a lurid crimson gleam. Screech Owl pulled Riddle’s good arm over his shoulders and supported her as they followed the lake trail behind the rest of the Buffalobeard Village survivors, fifteen in all. Each had been badly burned when the sky exploded two days ago. But they were alive. Everywhere he looked, he saw devastation. The Ice Giants, covered with dust and soot, had turned black as night. Vast clouds of steam rose from them and shrouded Ice Giant Lake with fog.
Right after the explosion, the lake had started rising,
and by the next morning, all of the charred remains of Buffalobeard Village were underwater. They’d no choice but to leave, to search for another place to start a new village. Screech Owl feared they would have to travel west for a very long time before they escaped the choking haze that filled the world here.
Riddle winced and moaned.
“How are you doing?” Screech Owl asked her. “Do you need to rest?”
“No. We can’t afford to fall behind.” She’d broken her arm when the roof collapsed on top of her, and wore it in a hide sling. Clearly in pain, she kept uttering soft sounds of anguish. “The dust is so thick, we may get lost. But thank you for asking.” She tipped up her blistered, soot-coated face to smile her thanks at him.
He smiled back, and they kept walking.
From somewhere up ahead, he heard Halfmoon call, “Everyone, stay within sight of the person in front of you! Hold your children’s hands. We don’t want to lose anyone!”
Screech Owl kept his gaze on Reef’s muscular back. The tall warrior had his atlatl in his hand, as always, and a quiver of spears slung over his shoulder. He kept turning around to look back, making sure everyone was still in sight. Many of the old people and children were stumbling, having trouble breathing, and many more were wounded. Now and then Screech Owl caught sight of a bloody bandage encircling an arm or leg. A constant noise of coughing, wheezing, and crying children filled the air.
Oddly, the pack of dogs that trailed in the rear were silent as ghosts.
The orphaned children walked in a single group near the front. Through the blowing dust, he saw Grizzly towering over the others. The boy had his thumb in his mouth, sucking it for comfort. Poor child. He had lost both his mother and father. At least his brother Little Cougar was standing beside him, holding Grizzly’s sleeve in a tight grip. Rattler carried a baby girl in her arms. Screech Owl had no idea who the baby belonged to. But it didn’t matter now. They had only one goal, to survive. And to do that, they had to take care of each other.
When they reached the crest, Halfmoon stopped and shielded his eyes to look up the trail. Had Searobin returned? At dawn, Halfmoon had dispatched the warrior to scout the trails ahead.
They were under no illusions. If they were fleeing westward to escape the fiery destruction, so were the Thornback People. As well as every short-faced bear and dire wolf that had lived. And all of them would be hungry.
Riddle asked, “What’s Father doing?”
“I’m not sure.” Screech Owl thought he saw a dark shape moving farther up the trail. “I think he’s waiting. There’s someone on the trail ahead.”
“Searobin? He’s back? Is he safe?”
The man came into view, trotting steadily forward.
“I don’t see any wounds, but let’s go find out.”
He carefully led Riddle down the hill and into the group. Halfmoon spoke briefly with Searobin before he
turned, looked around with his white-filmed eyes, and said, “Reef? Is everyone here?”
“Yes, Elder. All fifteen of us. We’re still together.”
People stood with scraps of hide pressed over their noses to block the dust and smoke, and their eyes squinted against the icy wind. Tears had mixed with the debris to form muddy trails down their faces.
Halfmoon held up a hand and called, “I know you are all exhausted and hungry, but we have to keep moving. Searobin just brought news that it’s much worse to the south. There are fires everywhere. The forests are all blazing. That’s where the smoke is coming from.”
Searobin coughed and cleared his throat before calling, “We are lucky to be at the edge of the lake! You can breathe here because of the fog. It keeps most of the smoke away. Farther south, I saw dead animals and people lying everywhere. It looks like they suffocated where they were standing when the star exploded.”
People shifted and stared. No one knew what to say. It sounded like the end of the world.
Halfmoon said, “So we must keep moving west. Now! Let’s go.”
He turned to start up the trail again, and Riddle called, “Father? Father, please wait. What about Twig and Greyhawk? They are out there somewhere. Alone. Shouldn’t we wait for them?”
Halfmoon’s mouth tightened. He must be as worried about Twig as Riddle was, but as a warrior, he probably assumed his granddaughter was dead. He squared his
shoulders and called, “We can’t. It’s too dangerous. We don’t know where the Thornback People are. The safety of everyone is at risk. We must keep moving. But …” He coughed and looked around at the scared villagers. “You should all know that my granddaughter dreamed this. She told me about the exploding star a quarter moon ago. I—”
“Yes,” old Bandtail agreed. “Halfmoon told us of her dreams, but we didn’t believe him. Twig was so young—”
“
Is
so young,” Screech Owl corrected. “Twig may be the greatest dreamer our people have ever known. She’s alive. I know it. The Spirits of our ancestors would not have let her die.”
Bandtail exhaled hard. The old woman’s blackened face looked strangely purple. “If only we had listened to her dream, by now we would be far to the west, away from this destruction.”
Murmuring broke out, and people began nodding their heads.
Riddle bowed her head and nodded, too—but Screech Owl saw the tears that cut lines through the mud on her cheeks. She whispered, “I should have told the elders about her dreams long ago. We would be even farther to the west. And Twig would be with us.”
Screech Owl said, “She will find us, Riddle.”
Riddle gave him a brave smile, but she clearly didn’t believe him. How could she? Wind blasted the trail, scouring it clean every instant. There would be no tracks to follow.
Halfmoon led them down the trail into a dense choking cloud of red-hued dust.
Screech Owl repositioned Riddle’s arm over his shoulders and whispered, “Twig will dream her way to us. You’ll see.”
“Do you think so? Truly?” Her voice trembled.
“I
know
so.”
T
HE FOG BLED pink, then burned orange, and finally became a shimmering scarlet blanket.
As Twig marched through it behind Cobia and Greyhawk, she no longer felt human. She pressed the hide over her nose and fought to breathe. Her senses had sharpened like those of a threatened animal. She could hear, smell, and taste the danger that ghosted by on the howling wind. The ground almost never stopped shaking, and the deep-throated groans and shrieks of the dying Ice Giants were constant.
Over the past three days, she had seen things she never wanted to see again: charred headless corpses blown into
a tangled heap by the hurricane, and herds of animals moving with their noses to the ground, trying to sniff out trails because their eyes had been roasted in their heads.
Twig and Greyhawk picked up weapons every chance they got. Both of them carried atlatls in their hands and quivers of spears over their shoulders. They had stone knives tied to their belts.
Only Cobia had no weapons. Perhaps because she didn’t need any.
Twig lifted her nose and smelled the air. It was heavy with the scents of burning hickory and spruce, and a strange sulfur-like smell that reminded her of rotten eggs.
All day long, she had thought about Bison Calf, wondering if this was how he had felt on the last day of his life. She remembered the desperate sound of his cries, as though he’d been calling for his mother, or his herd, praying someone would come and save him from the human hunters. Bison Calf could not have known he was the last of his kind in the world. He must have been terrified.
As Twig was.
Twig closed her eyes and prayed that Bison Calf’s soul had found its way to the Land of the Dead, and that he would never be frightened again, or hungry, or lonely.
Greyhawk shouted, “Who is that?” and Twig jerked her eyes open.
A human figure appeared to Twig’s left, startling her. She grabbed for her knife.
It was an old man. He stepped out of the dense fog, and Cobia stopped to speak with him. Twig could hear
their voices, but not the words. The man clutched his elk-hide hood tightly beneath his chin.
Cobia shouted something in his ear, and the old man shook his head and shouted back,
“All dead … the end of the world … nowhere to hide.”
Had she asked him about his family, or his village?
Cobia said something else, and it seemed as though she was trying to talk him into going with them, but he shook his head again and drifted back into the fog, disappearing as though he’d never been.
Greyhawk turned around and through the hide held over his nose, said, “Did you hear that?”
“No. What did he say?”
“He said that evil Spirits rode in with the bursting star and were roaming the world killing every human still alive. His entire village was slaughtered.”
Sensibly, she answered, “His evil Spirits are probably Thornback warriors.”
“Yes, probably.”
Greyhawk turned back when Cobia continued down the trail, and they walked in single file for another four hands of time without saying a word to each other.
Just before nightfall, when the temperature began to plummet, they came to a river. A black river. Dead fish floated on the surface. So much soot and ash had mixed with the water it ran like liquid coal. If Twig lived long enough to have children, would they ever believe her?
“Are we stopping?” Greyhawk called to Cobia.
She turned around with her long white hair, turned
gray with ash, whipping around her face and shouted, “No! We keep going until we are ready to drop in our tracks. We must get away from this devastation.” She waded the river. It came up to her knees, and to Greyhawk’s hips.
When Twig stepped in, she gasped at the cold. The water was absolutely freezing, as though it had just poured from the mouths of the Ice Giants. On the other side, she stood shivering. She had totally lost her bearings, with no idea whether they were headed north, south, east, or west.
She said, “Greyhawk, what direction are we headed? South?”
“West,” he corrected. “Due west.”
“How do you know? There’s too much fog and smoke to see the sun.”
He shrugged. “I just know. We’re headed west.”
In another twenty paces, the fog suddenly parted and Twig blinked. Ten paces away, there was a mammoth perched on a boulder. Cobia and Greyhawk saw it, too. They both pointed.
Mammoth’s shaggy hair had been burned off, leaving red blistered hide behind. It was seated on its haunches, staring out at the dust storm, as though totally lost and trying to find some familiar landmark to lead it back to its herd. When Mammoth spotted Twig, they studied each other; then the mammoth again looked at the dust and lifted its trunk to trumpet into the storm. It cocked its head, waited to hear an answer, and trumpeted again.
The only sound Twig heard was the shrill howling of the wind.
But Mammoth seemed to hear something else. It stood up, listened, and clambered awkwardly off the boulder. It started walking out across the vast wasteland.
Cobia’s eyes narrowed. She watched the mammoth as though their very lives depended upon it.
Then she turned. “Do either of you have Mammoth as a Spirit Helper?”
Greyhawk said, “Not me.”
Twig shook her head.
Cobia hesitated a few heartbeats longer before stepping into the tracks of the mammoth and following. In the eerie, gaudy light, the animal seemed magical. Its big body faded in and out of the fog, and often it seemed to be waiting for them to catch up. They would lose sight of the mammoth, then find it standing still in the wavering mist, looking back. When they caught up, it started walking again.
As they wandered through the smoke and fog, they coughed until their lungs ached. Their bellies gnawed at their backbones from hunger, but they kept going.

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