CIRCLES OF STONE (THE MOTHER PEOPLE SERIES) (25 page)

Darkness
descended, and the sounds began to diminish.  Slowly, the pounding of hoofs,
the bellows, became more distant, and the dust settled.  Then there was
only silence.

Lotan touched
Zena's shoulder gently, and pointed to the ground.  But now she could not
bear to go down.  She did not fear the wildebeests; they had spent their
passion.  She feared what she would find.  The branch that supported
her seemed infinitely comforting in contrast to the horrors that might await
her below.  She clung to it doggedly, and would not move.

All night, she
stayed there, desperate with uncertainty and fear.  At intervals, she
called out to the others.  Once, she thought she heard an answer, but she
could not be sure.

When the light
came again, she forced herself to move.  Slowly, reluctantly, she lowered
herself from the tree and ventured into the clearing.  Lotan and Sima
followed.  The child was weeping quietly. 

Zena tripped over
a body and knelt to look, but she rose again quickly.  Once, it had been
Lett.  She had loved him dearly.  In his quiet way, he had helped
them almost as much as Kalar.  By his side lay a shapeless bundle. 
It was one of the children, she thought, but it was hard to tell.  Its
head had been trampled.  Another small form was sprawled near the
trees.  Zena did not stop to examine it. 

A warm nose
nuzzled her hand.  Zena jumped and whirled around.  It was
Three-Legs!  She must have run away, terrified by the commotion.  She
hugged the little gazelle briefly, and then went on.  She was glad
Three-Legs had not been trampled, but it was the others she wanted most.

She came to the
remains of the shelter.  It was nothing more than a bundle of flattened
sticks, covered with the bodies of wildebeests.  A few still
struggled.  Arms and legs stuck up through the carnage - arms and legs
that did not belong to the  wildebeests.  None of them moved. 
Zena looked at them almost dispassionately, and wandered away.

A wildebeest calf
rose on wobbly knees, bleating piteously, and stumbled off toward the burned
hillside.   Zena paid no attention.  She walked slowly into the
clearing as if she were not there at all.  None of this seemed
possible.  Last night, they had sat together, talking, and now there was
nothing.

Cere, she thought
suddenly.  Surely Cere had escaped.  She must have heard Kalar's
warning, must have known she should go to the trees.  She had been
standing near Nyta, and Nyta had run for the trees.  Bran had been there,
too; she was sure he had.

As if reflecting
her thoughts, a cry suddenly came from the edge of the woods on the far side of
the clearing.  It was Bran calling, and Lupe was behind him.  Bran
had recently become Lupe's hero, and he followed him everywhere.  He must
have followed him last night too;  his devotion had saved his life. 

Zena ran to them,
rejoicing.  If they were alive, Cere and Nyta must have escaped too. 
She looked eagerly into the woods behind them, but no one else emerged. 
The hope that had been in her heart sank heavily, and she broke away from
Bran's warm hug.

Lotan called
sharply from the trees.  She ran to him, hope flaring again.  He
pointed to the ground.  Nyta lay there, the infant in her arms.  No
sound came from the baby, usually so lusty and demanding, but Nyta's eyes were
open.  Tears squeezed from them when she saw Zena's face.  She tried
to get up, but dizziness swamped her, and she fell back, moaning.

Zena knelt beside
her anxiously and started to examine the wound on her head.  Nyta pulled
her hands away and gestured towards the infant.  Zena took it from her,
and knew immediately that the baby was dead.  Its tiny body was cold,
already stiff.

"He has gone
back to the Mother," she told Nyta gently, as she placed the infant beside
her.

Nyta turned her
face away, and made no further effort to rise.  But then Sima saw her
mother.  She burst into loud and happy weeping, and flung herself against
Nyta.  Zena left them there together and went toward the clearing
again.  She had to find Cere, Cere and Kalar.  Theirs were the faces
she most wanted to see.

A vulture flapped
noisily over her head, as if to land beside her.  Zena waved her arms and
shouted.  It rose again and perched clumsily in a tree.  Its eyes
were fixed on the ground near her feet.  Against her will, for she was
terrified she would find something she did not want to see, Zena looked
down. 

It was Cere. 
Zena knew her immediately, though she could identify her only by her hands, the
long-fingered, nimble hands that had made such perfect baskets.  The rest
of her had been trampled beyond recognition.  Why? Why had she not run for
the trees?

Zena pushed her
fists hard against her eyes to stop the tears, to stop herself from looking at
anything else.  She did not want to see, did not want to know.  She
wanted only to be left alone, to be taken from this place of horror, to run
away, not to look for more of the ones she loved, especially not for Kalar.

Kalar was
dead.  She knew that.  Kalar had to be dead, because she would have
tried to save the others before going to the trees.  Kalar was near here
too.  Zena could sense her presence, even in death.  But she did not
want to see. 

She looked up at
the sky.  It was brilliantly blue, cloudless, as if nothing had
happened.  But the vultures knew.  They soared in lazy circles,
awaiting her departure.  Zena kept her eyes fastened on them so she would
not have to look down as she wandered on. 

But when she came
to the place where Kalar had died, Zena looked down anyway, compelled by a
sense that the wise woman's face might tell her something, might give a reason
why these terrible things had happened.  And she was right.  Kalar's
face was buried in the earth, and when Zena turned it over, it was almost
intact.  Her eyes were closed, and her face wore an expression of
reverence, as if the last thing she had done was speak to the Mother.

Anger suffused
Zena, unexpected, boiling anger.  It overwhelmed her, filled every part of
her.  Nothing was left inside her but anger.  She jumped up and
stormed around the clearing, picking up everything she could find, bits of
tools and baskets, smashed now beyond recognition, pieces of wood from the
fire, from the shelter, and flinging them wildly into the air.  When she
had thrown every object within reach, she pounded the earth with a rock, and
screamed at the sky.

"No,"
she screamed.  "You cannot have her.  You cannot have any of
them.  You are Mother, the Mother we trusted, and this is what You have
done.  No! No, no, no!"

She screamed until
her voice was hoarse, then flung herself against the ground and wept.  Her
body shook with anguished sobs.  But just as abruptly as they had started,
the sobs stopped, and she sat up, a stubborn expression on her face.

"No,"
she muttered again angrily, between her teeth.  "This cannot
be.  You are Life-Giver.  Kalar loved You.  We all loved You. 
No.  You cannot do this.  It must be changed."

She waited, fists
clenched, as if she expected that at any moment the clearing would be as it had
always been before:  Kalar would appear, and so would Cere, and Lett would
be there, and all the others.  The sound of their voices would come, and
the babies would wail again.

Zena whirled. 
A baby
was
crying.  She heard it clearly, just for a moment. 
But she couldn't have heard it.  They were all dead; she would have heard
an infant before now if any were still alive.

She ran in the
direction of the sound.  It had come from the shelter, from somewhere
beneath the horrible battered bodies, the broken limbs and mangled flesh, the
blood and bone and bits of wildebeests and people that littered the trampled
ground in unimaginable mixtures.  She began to paw through the refuse, but
bile rose in her throat, and she had to stop.  No further sound had come,
anyway, and she thought she had only imagined the cry, as in a dream.  But
Lotan and Bran were there, too, searching frantically beneath the bloody piles.

It was Lupe who
found the infant.  Less horrified by the litter than the others, for he
was too young to understand fully, he dug without inhibition beneath a battered
carcass.  He felt something move and pulled it out.  Zena ran to him
and grabbed the tiny female.

Filar! It was
Filar, Cere's infant.  Sobs constricted Zena's throat as the infant
nestled at her neck.  She swallowed them determinedly.  Perhaps the
Mother had helped a little, by giving her Cere's child, but She had still
killed Cere herself, and Kalar, too, and most of the others. 

Miraculously,
Filar seemed unhurt.  But she was terribly hungry, and once she felt
herself free of the body that had saved her life even as it pinned her to the
ground and made breathing difficult, screaming nearly impossible, she took a
deep breath and yelled.  The sound roused even Nyta, who came hobbling out
of the woods.  She had twisted her ankle when the wildebeests had knocked
her from the tree, as well as hitting her head.

She looked gravely
at the screaming infant.  It was not hers, but she would gladly feed
it.  Her breasts were painful with unused milk, anyway.  The little
one could take it.

Zena went back to
the place where Lupe had found Filar.  She felt compelled to know who had
saved the baby with her body.  But when she looked more carefully, it was
hard to tell.  She thought it might have been Tempa, or maybe Agar.  Perhaps
Cere had handed the infant to one of them and then tried to come back to
retrieve it.

She would never
know now, but Zena knew she would always wonder.  The knowledge that she
had been more important to Cere than any other lay heavily within her. 
Always there would linger in her heart the terrible thought that Cere had been
looking for her, not the infant, that she had not seen her reach the trees, and
had come to find her beloved Zena.  Instead, she had found a cruel,
unnecessary death.

Zena's anger
hardened, obliterating all other feelings, even her guilt because she had
refused to listen when the Mother had tried to warn her.  Her tears dried
with her anger; after that day, she did not weep, or even mourn.  There
was no room inside her for anything but rage at the Mother for allowing those
who loved Her to die such horrible deaths.  The anger churned deep and
strong within her as she and the other survivors traveled far from the verdant
clearing by the river that had sheltered them so many times.  Overnight,
their peaceful refuge had become place of terror and death, of mangled bodies
and the smell of rot. 

She would never
return, Zena vowed, never think of this place again, of the horrors that had
happened here, or even of the loved ones she had lost.  Especially, she
would not think again of the Mother.  The Mother had betrayed her, had
betrayed all of them, and that she would never forgive.

*********************

The vultures
descended, the hyenas and wild dogs came, and a lioness that passed by fed
herself and her cubs.  Other predators joined her, drawn by the
scent.  For once, they did not have to fight for a chance to gorge on the
carcasses.  There was plenty for all.  When they had finished,
smaller animals gnawed the bones, and hordes of insects cleaned them.  And
after that came heat and dryness, and fires, and finally the rains. 
Brief, savage storms sent the river seething over its banks, depositing silt and
debris that further erased the signs of destruction.  Soon, all that was
left to mark the place where Kalar and her tribe had lived was the blessed
circle of stones in the secluded glen beyond the clearing, where Zena had been
plucked from the belly of her mother.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Two months
earlier, Lotan had sat quietly beside his mother, Ralak, and watched her face
harden with worry as the hours passed.  The men had left before the sun
had come over the horizon, to look for the carcass of a zebra one of the women
had spotted the day before.  Now night had almost fallen, and still they
had not returned.

Ralak rose to
gather more of the pungent twigs she had put on the fire so the men would smell
it from afar.  She handed the infant to Lotan, to free her hands for the
task.  He accepted the baby gladly.  Her funny smell and the cooing
sounds she made amused him.  He tried to elicit a few noises by jiggling
her gently, but she was sleeping soundly and did not respond.  He
contented himself with watching her eyelids flutter and her tiny mouth purse up
as if she were sucking.

She had been born
only a few moons ago.  Lotan remembered the night well.  His mother
had struggled all through the day, all through the dark hours, to bring the
infant forth.  When it still had not come at daybreak, Toro, the other
adult female, and her almost grown daughter, Metep, had looked at each other
with despair in their eyes and quietly muttered a word.  Lotan's heart had
gone rigid with fear.  He was certain they had said the word for death.

But Ralak was
strong, and refused to give up.  She was the tribe's wise one, and she
knew the others needed her.  Digging her fingers into the earth, she
called upon the force that lived deep in its bowels, the force from which all
life emerged, and asked for strength to bear the pain, but even more, she
called on her own reserves of stamina.  Steeling herself to endure still
more of the brutal contractions, she gave up her body to the labor.  Each
time her muscles tensed, she pushed with all her might, ignoring the terrible
ripping of skin within her.  Finally, when the sun had almost reached the
top of the sky, she felt the baby's head between her legs.  She called to
Toro.

"Pull!"
she commanded.  Toro placed her hands on each side of the slippery skull
and pulled as hard as she could.  Her hands slid off.  She rubbed
them against the earth and tried again.  This time the infant came
out.  It wailed immediately.