People of the Nightland (North America's Forgotten Past) (40 page)

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

BOOK: People of the Nightland (North America's Forgotten Past)
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S
kimmer stared at Ti-Bish in disbelief.
The Paradise of the Long Dark? It was real?
The Council chamber was silent for a moment, the expressions of the Elders that of shock. Even Nashat was speechless.
Khepa and Ta’Hona were on their feet in a heartbeat.
Satah walked up to Ti-Bish, and in a reverent voice said, “You’ve found the way to the Long Dark?”
“Raven Hunter showed it to me. He said I’d been good.”
Gasps were followed by cheers; then laughter rose. Tears streaked their elderly faces. Nashat, however, sat to the side, fingering his chin, eyes narrowed to slits.
Ta’Hona asked, “When can we leave?”
“Soon. Raven Hunter told me that our people must start packing. But they can only take their most precious things. The trip is long and difficult.”
Satah spun around, and the other Elders smiled toothlessly at him. “We must tell our people immediately. We’re going back. Back through the hole in the ice to the Land of the Long Dark, where we will never be hungry again.”
Laughter again, joyous. The Elders rose to their feet, and as they filed out, each gently touched Ti-Bish’s shoulder.
Skimmer watched, amazed.
They are old fools! Men who no longer think, no longer walk in the world like the rest of us!
The image of puppets, the sort that adults used to entertain children, flickered in her soul.
And the one who guides them … ?
Only Nashat remained. He waited until the voices of the other Elders had vanished before he said, “Now that the foolishness is over, let’s discuss Headswift Village.”
Skimmer blinked. His entire demeanor had changed. His cold eyes fixed on Ti-Bish, and he said, “Guide, come and sit down. It makes me nervous when you stand by the door as though you’re going to bolt at any instant.” He pointed to the buffalo hides.
Ti-Bish came forward with a frightened look on his face and sat down as he’d been ordered.
Skimmer frowned, the memory of stone hammers whistling in the night, sounding in her head. Where once it would have brought horror, it now stirred a terrible anger.
Nashat … someday, I will repay you for all of this.
Nashat said, “First, what’s this idiocy about the hole in the ice?”
Ti-Bish bowed his head. “I found it.”
“You’re going to have all of our people racing around stuffing their packs full preparing for a journey they will never take.”
Trembling, Ti-Bish had the courage to lift his gaze and look at Nashat. “We need to go soon. Very soon. Raven Hunter says—”
“Oh, Blessed Spirits, you’re talking to
me
now, not the fools who believe you’re going to lead them to the promised Long Dark. We have more important issues to discuss.” He thrust an arm out at Skimmer. “It’s a good deal more critical that we push the Sunpath People out of the nut forests, than it is—”
“We’re going,” Ti-Bish whispered. “I’m going to lead our people through the hole in the ice and back to the Long Dark, where tens of tens of mammoths, giant buffalo, and bears live. We don’t need the nut forests. We’ll never be hungry again. Raven Hunter will be there to watch over—”
“Ti-Bish.” Nashat propped his hands on his hips and shook his head as though terribly disappointed. “Try to listen for a time.”
Ti-Bish kept quiet.
Nashat turned to Skimmer and malevolently said, “What’s the last thing you saw at Headswift Village?”
Skimmer wet her lips. She could sense his hidden joy, as though he was about to reveal some terrible bit of knowledge that he knew would hurt her. “Windwolf was preparing to fight Kakala.”
Nashat walked to the tea bag and dipped himself a cupful. He took his time swirling it before he said, “After that, Kakala overran the place. He tortured Windwolf to death, then hunted down and killed every man, woman, and child who had sheltered Windwolf. Including your daughter,” he said pointedly.
Skimmer had to lock her knees to keep standing.
No, he’s lying. He’s lying!
Ti-Bish shakily got to his feet, and stared at Nashat with his mouth open. “You … you ordered Kakala to kill the Lame Bull People?”
“Of course I did. They deserved it. But I also did as you instructed and told Kakala not to harm any Sunpath People. Though that was certainly a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Ti-Bish asked in a tortured voice.
Nashat heaved a breath. “Ti-Bish, did Skimmer tell you that her friends, the Lame Bull People, sent her here to kill you? Did she mention that Windwolf was planning on attacking these caves, and hoped to kill us all?”
“What?” Ti-Bish whirled to stare at her. Every line in his face tensed with hurt.
She gave Ti-Bish a narrow-eyed appraisal, saying, “Don’t worry, Guide.You’re still alive. I think we both know the source of the problem.” Her voice hardened. “And so does Raven Hunter.”
Nashat ignored her, continuing to say, “Oh, yes, they sent her here specifically to keep you distracted while they organized their forces; then, at the last instant before they attacked, she was supposed to assassinate you.”
Ti-Bish gaped at her. “Is that true?”
“I came to kill you in revenge for the murder of Nine Pipes women in the pen just south of the Nightland Caves. You ordered Kakala to destroy the Nine Pipes and have me brought here. Nashat took a woman called Blue Wing from the pen. The rest were clubbed in the head by Karigi’s warriors. Murdered. When Nashat ordered it, he said it was
your
wish.”
Nashat was giving her a slit-eyed stare. “Then how did you survive?”
“By hiding under the corpses of the dead, you piece of filth. If so many hadn’t died of thirst, hunger, and cold, you would have got us all.”
At the still, ravaged expression on Ti-Bish’s face, she walked toward him and knelt at his feet. “I am telling you the truth, Ti-Bish. I came to kill the person responsible. And you are not he.”
Nashat squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Don’t be a fool, Ti-Bish. She’s using your emotions against you. Can’t you see that?”
Ti-Bish stuttered, “If S-Skimmer says she’s telling the truth, I trust her.” He looked up, stunned, tears beginning to leak down his cheeks. “But these other things? All of these horrible things? You have
murdered
in my name?”
“Of course,” Nashat laughed, throwing up his hands. “It was necessary. We needed the supplies. What do you think you’ve been eating for the last two winters? It’s food taken from the Sunpath camps! And as to your friend, Kakala, a rumor has come that the fool managed to get himself trapped at Headswift Village. I have sent runners for Karigi and Blackta. We’ll deal with the Lame Bull threat once and for all.”
“No.” Ti-Bish stiffened. “Send runners to bring our warriors home so that they can prepare for the journey to the Long Dark.”
Nashat rolled his eyes and grinned, inspecting Skimmer. “With a bath and a clean dress—”
“No!” Ti-Bish cried. “You send those runners! If you don’t I—I’ll tell the other Elders that you’re trying to leave members of their clans behind!”
Nashat stopped and gave Ti-Bish an evil look. “Do you wish to challenge me?”
Skimmer stepped between Ti-Bish and Nashat. “He does. Come on, Nashat, you and me. Right here. Let us see who serves the Guide. I call on Raven Hunter’s Power to aid me. What do you call on, you foul wretch?”
She saw his eyes widen, the first tremble of fear glittering behind his eyes.
“I need only call the guard,” he said softly. “And you will be servicing the warriors one after another until you come to wish you’d died in that pen.”
“I
did
die in that pen. I came here for justice, you pus-licking scum. And now I’m going to
have
it.” She stepped forward, all of the anger washing up through her soul.
Nashat scrambled back, hands up, eyes wide with disbelief.
Ti-Bish grabbed Skimmer’s collar, pulling her back. “No, no, let him go, Skimmer. This isn’t the time.” She heard him swallow, desperation in his voice.
“Please, Skimmer!”
She hesitated, trembling with the desire to choke the very life out of Nashat.
“Skimmer?” Ti-Bish asked weakly. “Please? It’s not the time.”
“But it will be,” she promised. “And soon.”
Nashat fled to the doorway, calling, “Time, Guide, is a very fluid thing.” Then he was gone, running for all he was worth.
Tears welled in Ti-Bish’s eyes. Softly, he said, “Skimmer, come. We’ve got to go.”
He pulled her after him, taking a side passage out of the chamber.
When they’d followed the tunnel around the first curve, he broke into a run.
“Why are you running?”
“Because as soon as he finds the right warriors, they’ll be coming to kill you.”
N
ashat hurried down the tunnel and out the front entrance, heading straight for the Night Clan’s camp. He hadn’t been so frightened in years. He’d looked into Skimmer’s eyes and seen death there.
She would have killed me!
The knowledge sent a shiver down his spine and turned his guts runny.
The round lodges made of bent saplings tied together at the top and covered with hides looked tawdry in the bright sunlight. The paintings had faded to dull, indistinguishable images. And the soot of many campfires had furred the lodge tops, turning them black.
Get a hold of yourself!
He forced himself to slow, to breathe normally. Gods, he was Councilor Nashat! Not some simpering slave. For a moment, he stood, letting his heart resume its normal beat. Here, out of the caves, his old self returned.
The tall man standing with his friends before the fire stopped suddenly when he saw Nashat.
“Elder,” he said, and bowed deeply. “You honor us with your—”
“What’s the last thing you saw at Headswift Village, Homaldo?”
The muscular warrior straightened, fear behind his eyes. “War Chief Kakala was preparing to attack Headswift Village.” He waved
his hand uncertainly. “After that, Kakala ordered us to leave immediately, to bring Skimmer to the Guide.”
A stiff wind gusted off the lake, flapping Nashat’s cape around his long legs. “Would it surprise you to hear that Kakala walked into a trap? Perhaps it would shock you even more to learn he’s holed up in some rocks, surrounded?”
Homaldo looked at the other warriors in the circle. They shrugged or shook their heads. Homaldo said, “Alive? He’s alive?”
“That seems to surprise you?”
“Well, I mean … if what you say is true.”
“I’ll know soon enough. I’ve sent a runner to have Karigi’s deputy, Ewin, take a war party to Headswift Village on his way back here.” He enjoyed the expression of terror on Homaldo’s face. “But I have another task for you and your friends.”
Homaldo swallowed hard. “Y-Yes?”
“You can go to the cages—you Kishkat, Tapa, and the other one. Or you can do me a slight service. Which would you choose?” When Homaldo just stood there looking at him, Nashat barked,
“Which!”
“Yes, Elder, of course. We are honored to do you any service. Let me get my weapons and my pack. Kishkat, Tapa, and Tibo will be most anxious to help.”
While Homaldo ducked into his lodge, Nashat gazed around the camp. Curse the other Elders. The news must have already reached the people. Everywhere he looked, men and women ran from lodge to lodge, and happy voices rang out. Several people Danced and Sang. Before he knew it, they would be taking down their lodges and packing up for the journey through the hole in the ice to the Long Dark.
The fools.
Homaldo ducked out of his lodge carrying his weapons. His small warrior’s pack rode his back beneath his cape, making him resemble a hunchback. His wife ducked out behind him, and gave Nashat a scathing look. A little boy came out behind her with tears in his eyes. He gazed up at Homaldo and started to sob.
Homaldo knelt and hugged the boy one last time, then said, “Elder, what do you wish us to do?”
Nashat flipped up his hood against the ferocious wind. “You will take your friends and search the tunnels under the ice until you find the woman Skimmer. I think you remember what she looks like? Then, you will bring me her head.”
 
 
“
W
here are we going, Ti-Bish?” Skimmer called up to him. The trail that twisted through his “secret” crevasse was steep and slick. Rivulets of meltwater ran down the trail. Her moccasins kept slipping on the wet ice.
“We’re almost there.” Ti-Bish gripped her hand and pulled her out into the bright gleam of Father Sun.
Skimmer climbed to the crest of the dirty, gravel-encrusted ice, and gazed westward. A rocky ridge thrust up in the distance, rising perhaps ten tens of hands above the tundra. Sunlight sheathed the boulders, turning them into a glimmering wall. To the south, lodges covered the tundra. Already, runners were sprinting from lodge to lodge, probably relaying the news about the sacred hole in the ice.
Ti-Bish sank down onto a boulder and lowered his face to his hands.
Skimmer said, “Are you all right?”
“No.” He looked up at her, soul sick.
“I’m sorry you had to hear those things,” she said, laying a gentle hand on his head. “But you needed to know. Nashat has done terrible things in your name. Half the world hates you. I hated you.”
In a tight voice, he replied, “I just need to pray for a time.”
“I don’t think praying is the answer, Ti-Bish. Nashat obviously disdains you and your Dream.”
He paused as though judging his words before he murmured, “Prayer is always the answer. The problem is that humans no longer know how to pray.”
She studied his tormented face. “Probably because so few people try these days.”
“I know.” His voice was small. He lifted his face and gazed out across the tundra at a herd of caribou grazing its way along the distant shore of Thunder Sea. Their shiny coats glinted in the sun. “Humans don’t pray. But the world prays all the time.”
“It does?”
He gestured to the lake. “Prayers are Sung every moment on the lips of breaking waves, and windblown branches, the whispering of leaves in the moonlight.”
A strange tingling sensation began in her hip. She looked down at
the old Spirit bundle tied to her belt. A mixture of fear and curiosity tormented her. Very faintly she heard a voice. A man’s voice, deep and rich.
“Ti-Bish, I—I …” Her gaze was glued to the bundle as though attached with boiled pine pitch. “I hear …”
“Yes, I hear him, too.” Ti-Bish swallowed hard. “No wonder he wished you to have it. He wants to speak with you.”
“Who does?”
As though trying to decide if he should tell her or not, he twisted his hands in his lap. “Skimmer, I didn’t tell you the whole truth when I gave you that bundle. I’m sorry. I was afraid of what you might do.”
The tingling sensation had grown fiery. “Tell me now.”
“Raven Hunter gave me that bundle, and told me to give it to you. He wanted you to have it.”
Blood began to pound in her ears. “Why?”
“He didn’t tell me that. I think he worried that I was too stupid to understand.”
“You’re not stupid, Ti-Bish. Just innocent.”
“No, but there are times when I—I lose the”—he waved a hand uncertainly—“the boundary between myself and the world; it melts away, and I’m no longer sure if I’m seeing with my own eyes, or hearing with my own ears. I get confused.”
Skimmer looked down at the bundle. The tingling had stopped. The voice was gone. Had she merely imagined it?
“Ti-Bish, whose eyes would you be seeing with if not your own?”
He grimaced down at his hands. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. There are times when I feel as though every rock and river, bird and buffalo, everything that has ever lived, has always been there in my soul. I could be seeing through any of their eyes. And they through mine.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re stupid.”
Ti-Bish said, “
Stupid
may have been the wrong word. What I meant is that Raven Hunter can’t rely on the fact that ‘I’ am actually there when he explains things to me. So”—he sighed—“often he doesn’t.”
Skimmer flinched at the pain in his voice. “Why do you think he wishes to speak with me?”
“He speaks to a person when they need to hear him. Perhaps today you needed him.”
In the villages below, voices had risen and there was a flurry of activity. People raced around shouting and weeping in what sounded like joy.
“The word is traveling,” she said.
Ti-Bish nodded, then tenderly asked, “Skimmer, why didn’t you kill me?”
As though all of her strength had vanished in a heartbeat, she hunched forward and braced her elbows on her knees. “I …” The words came hard. “I came to get justice. To pay you back for the horror in the pen. For the dead babies and husbands, and ruined lives.” She paused. “Instead I found an innocent, a holy man. One doesn’t kill the innocent and holy, Ti-Bish. No matter how many lives your death would save.”
“My death would save lives?”
She made a sweeping gesture to the villages. “The warriors would no longer have a reason to kill. You were the symbol, the heart, the Spiritual reason that drove them to do terrible things.” She sighed. “And all along, it was Nashat.”
“He is the leader of the Council of Elders. I am just the Guide. I have no right to give orders, though sometimes I make requests, and hope that Nashat will approve them. As he did when I asked for War Chief Kakala to bring you here.”
“I have hated you for summers for things that were never your fault,” she said. “Forgive me. If I had known the truth moons ago, my people would have assassinated Nashat, or the other Elders, but not you, Ti-Bish. I’ve never wished for the innocent to suffer evil—”
“Suffering is not evil, Skimmer.” He turned to her and his mouth smiled, but his eyes remained sad abysses. “All suffering forces us, in utter humility, to return to our own hearts. And that is where truth resides.”
“You think suffering leads to truth?” She stared into his wide, appealing eyes. He seemed to beam at her with an inner peace that touched her soul.
“Oh, yes. Truth can never be found out there.” He waved a hand to the world. “It’s here, and here alone.” He tapped his chest.
Her heart began to swell. “I don’t know why your own people haven’t killed you. What you say sounds like a rejection of Nightland beliefs. They should consider you a false Prophet, not a sacred Guide.”
He tilted his head and nodded. “Some do. But not as many these
days. It’s taken so long to find the hole in the ice. And so many warriors have died. People lose faith when fathers, sons, and brothers are taken from them.”
“As did I.” She sighed. “Perhaps, since I’m not going to kill you, I should go home. My daughter needs me.” She looked back at the soaring spires of the Ice Giants. “And something tells me Nashat isn’t going to let me get my hands around his throat, or sneak close enough to run a dart through his pus-dripping heart.”
Ti-Bish stood up. “You will go home. Soon. Raven Hunter told me you can’t go with us to the Long Dark. But there’s something magical I wish to show you before you go.”
He extended a hand. She took it and got to her feet. At his touch, a sensation of peace and longing filled her. When had Ti-Bish wound himself so deeply into her heart?
“Where is this thing?”
“Deep in the belly of the Ice Giants.” He fixed his warm eyes on hers. “It is the last, and greatest, wonder. I have longed for it, and now, I will be able to share it with you. For that, my soul is filled with joy.”

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