Raven's Choice (5 page)

She asked Leaf to tell the captive to stand with his back against a post. Leaf said a few words, and the Longhead complied by going over and facing a post, ropes trailing. Exasperation flashed through her. Either Leaf hadn’t said the correct words, or the Longhead hadn’t understood them.

Raven wanted him firmly in position before she did anything. Instead of asking Leaf to try again, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

At first worried that Bear would interfere once more, Raven quickly forgot him in her efforts to situate the captive. She pushed and prodded so that he moved with her in a shuffling dance, the dangling ropes writhing like whip snakes. To the touch, his flesh was more like fire-hardened wood than skin and muscle. Places on his back and chest that had been exposed during the journey were sunburned. But where his lower skins had slipped some from his middle, the skin was shockingly white under her darker hands.

When he was in place, Raven took his injured arm, which his good arm was cradling possessively, and carefully moved it so that it hung down. She took a big swallow. That had gone well, but things would soon get difficult. It would help if he stopped looking at her. His eyes distracted her. If only he would look away…

She stood so the arm was centered directly in front of her and grasped his wrist with one hand. With her other hand, she moved the dangling ropes aside and pressed her palm against his bad shoulder, pushing him firmly against the post. The head of the dislocated bone made a lump against her lower palm as if it wanted to come through his skin—she fought an urge to shudder. Next was the hard part, possibly the dangerous part.

Ever so slowly, pulling from the wrist and rotating the whole arm, Raven raised his arm up and out to the side, away from his body. Nothing happened. The bonehead still poked into her palm. She lowered her thumb and pressed it into the lump.

Although the morning was cold, Raven felt a flush of heat as she again realized that, although the Longhead’s arm was hugely muscled, it was shorter than those of most men. She wondered if she was indeed doing the right thing for his kind of arm as she desperately slid more fingers onto the lump and pressed harder.

The Longhead’s face turned a stinging red, and his shoulders heaved with labored breathing. When Raven thought she could not possibly keep pressing any longer, she heard a
pop
. Although muted, the sound seemed to fill the quiet morning air.

Instead of screaming, he howled, jerking his face toward the sky, neck tendons straining. The ear-numbing wolf sound wailed into the day, full of pain yet saturated with relief. She dropped his arm and stumbled backward.

Raven had once been facing a tree just as lightning struck it. His howl did the same thing to her that the lightning had done to the shuddering, leaf-shaking trunk. She quivered from head to toe and felt she might split in half.

Upon hearing the sound, some of the men had run a short distance. Others were still stabbing their spears about with rabbity jerks as the howl trailed off. A few, including Bear, were laughing weakly—he was bent over, his arms crossing his middle as if trying to hold in the laughter.

Raven took up her cape as well as the gourd and walked shakily past them all. She found her way back to the hearth. No one was around when she arrived, not even the children. Willow was avoiding her. She felt a desperate thirst and scooped water from the bottom of the almost-empty vat. It felt gritty in her mouth, but she swallowed anyway and then spat out bits of rock, making sounds like a frightened lion cub.

Maybe the family had gone to haul more water from the lake. Raven followed a trail to the water’s edge while chewing dried meat from her dwindling supply. The hard, slightly salty strips were mildly rancid. Her thirst came raging back, so she knelt on the lakeshore and lowered her head to the water.

Willow and the children were nowhere to be seen—nor was anyone else, for that matter—so she stripped for a quick, cold dip. Afterward, she lingered near the forest edge and gathered herbs. A gentle breeze blew, whispering soothingly through the new spring leaves. Calmness settled over her, so she was caught off guard when her eyes momentarily overflowed like springs, dripping onto her cheeks.

When Raven returned to the pen a short while later, the posts had been rewound with ropes, and gawkers surrounded it on all sides. The men were sizing him up, she thought, just as male animals did, seeing which one had the largest antlers or tusks. The women stood in small clusters, taking care not to stand too close to the pen. Perhaps, to them, he was only a curiosity like a white hyena. Raven herself wasn’t clear about how she viewed him. All the stories she’d heard as a girl and then from Reed still filled her head.

Children ran in and out of the crowd, and several boys jabbed long sticks through the wound ropes. The captive grasped a stick poking him in his ribs and broke it in half, to their whooping delight.

“Stop your torment,” Raven yelled at them. “The Longhead needs rest before he leaves. If he doesn’t get back soon enough, his brothers may come looking for him and find you instead.” The threat was a variation of what exasperated parents said to their children.
I’ll leave you out on the steppe, and the Longheads will get you.

The grownups and some of the children gave her hostile looks, but most of them left, as if her words or maybe her presence made them uncomfortable. “Unwind the ropes,” she told the guards. “I need to treat him.”

His grassy eyes focused on her hands while she stirred the water and ground valerian. When she handed him the gourd, he gulped the mixture down, not wincing at the bitter taste, and then noisily sucked out the last drops. She passed him the last of her dried meat. He devoured it, barely pausing to chew.

Raven realized, from the smell coming from a small dirt mound nearby, that he’d dug a hole with his hands to cover his wastes. With his lack of mobility, the area would soon become fouled. She couldn’t clean this up herself. The jokes made about that would last for many seasons—she would never gain any esteem with the band, and she had a feeling that Bear would be furious if she did such a thing.

“His enclosure needs to be cleaned,” she said, filling her voice with authority. She turned to one of the guards. “Go fetch a slave—and he needs something more to eat and drink.” The guard pulled a sour face but left to do her bidding.

A voice beside her said, “That is what they made me. A slave.”

Raven hadn’t realized that one of the loiterers was Leaf. He stood with his head on his chest, his stance very unlike his usual scout’s alertness.

“And you are no longer a slave,” she said gently. “It should never have happened to you, but there is no slavery in your blood.”

His head swiveled, birdlike, and he gave her a long look from the corner of an eye. His lips parted, and she thought he would say something, but he smiled wanly and turned away.

“What is their word for
eat
?” she called after him.

“
Aulehleh
,” she thought she heard him reply, the beginning sound lilting up slightly more than the rest.

Sounds of children playing came from behind the double tent, and Willow was moving around the clearing when Raven checked to see if anyone had returned. Her sister had the appearance of a wilted flower. Her shoulders slumped, and her long hair fell forward around her bowed head, unbraided and messy. Clearly, she hadn’t slept well due to Bear callously spending his first night back not with her but out in the lean-to. A pang went through Raven. Willow was suffering because she’d cared enough for her younger sister to want her close by.

She remembered with shame how, after the first onslaught, she’d all but invited him to continue. They’d coupled as thoughtlessly as rabbits several times during the night.

Willow began stoking the fire, bending over the hearth. She didn’t look up or respond when Raven entered the clearing and warmly greeted her. Neither did she make any comment when Raven began telling her about straightening the Longhead’s arm. She finally finished with the fire and squatted before the hearth opposite Raven, her face a frozen frown. Raven stopped talking.

Light clouds crossed overhead, their shadows webbing the clearing while Raven’s heart went cold, like an icy stone, as she understood that her sister regretted sending for her. Willow might even have said certain things about Raven so that Bear would cast her out as he’d threatened.

Excited laughter burst from where her nieces and nephews played. Raven looked at the neat clearing, the well-built double tent and lean-to, and the warm, cozy hearth from which she might soon be banished. She wondered how she could have been so stupid as to not listen when her father talked about the importance of tribe. Raven grasped now that without the tribe, she would be nothing, an animal dead on the steppe.

She pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth, probing the gap, and anger sparked through her. Surely Willow had suspected that could happen. With so many men dying, not only from disease but also hunting wounds, it was common enough for a bereft woman to be taken in by her sister’s mate, sometimes as his additional mate or most often only temporarily.

Raven flung her words across the fire: “I am like a newly crafted spear, a just–knapped quartz blade, a fresh kill. One day soon, I will be as a worn spear, a chipped blade, an old kill. The freshness will be gone. I assure you that things will soon become more like they were before I arrived.”

Willow’s eyes flipped up. For a long beat, she looked through the smoke at Raven, her face astonished. Then she sighed. “You always were full of words. Sometimes they worked for you, and sometimes they didn’t,” she said sharply, but her face relaxed.

Willow had thawed, and she remained so, even when Bear returned to the lean-to, night after night.

For four days, Raven visited the enclosure, making sure it was cleaned regularly and the captive was being given food and water. On the fifth day, she went by later than usual. She’d been collecting plants daily and taking them to the camp healer, Old Cloud, a timeworn woman who welcomed her help. The day before, Raven had interrupted her gathering to set traps near the burrows of steppe hamsters that had moved into the valley.

According to Bear, the trackers who’d followed the Longheads would probably return soon, and then the captive would be released. She didn’t say anything to Bear—he would make some jab about feeding lions—but she’d decided the Longhead should have fresh meat for his journey. The string traps were set to catch the hamsters at dusk when they left their burrows, so she went to check them first thing upon awakening the next morning. Willow could always use any trapped hamsters for a meal if the trackers hadn’t returned by late day.

She hurried, hoping that predators hadn’t found the traps during the night, but she needn’t have worried. She found four large adult hamsters with their legs noosed. Raven picked up a nearby hand–sized rock. “In this manner, the Earth Mother feeds her children,” she murmured, touching the rock to forehead and chest. She ended the hamsters’ struggles with quick blows and took out a small quartz blade to clean them.

But before she could begin, a strong feeling came over her that she should go immediately to the pen and check on the captive. She could clean the hamsters later or, if he was released sometime during the day, he could clean them himself after he left. She decided to gift him with the blade. He would at least have something ready-made to take with him.

Yet she lingered at the burrows, kneeling in the grass, rubbing small ripples on one side of the knife, left from its crafting. She rarely used the blade for anything. It had been her father’s.

The reddish color was unusual for quartz. It looked as if it had been dyed with red ochre or as if blood had soaked into the stone. He’d handed it to her from his death pallet, saying, “You were born with well-sharpened edges, but no matter how much I struck you, I was never able to shape your core. You’re made up of something that’s too hard in some ways and too soft in others.”

She placed the blade in her smallest bag and attached it to the bound hamsters using the bag’s drawstring. The captive would know what to do with her gift.

When Raven got to the pen, the hamsters hidden in her herbal pouch, the guards were dismantling it. “When did he leave?” she asked, trying not to sound frantic.

“Right after the trackers arrived,” one of the guards said. He grasped a post and with a groan pulled it out of the ground.

“And when was that?”

“The sun had only just topped the lake trees,” he said.

Raven stepped back as the post thudded onto the ground.

“We followed him until he passed the boulders, then we came back.”

She looked at the sun, barely over the trees. He hadn’t been gone long, and she remembered an area with large boulders from when she’d first come down the valley. If she hurried, she could catch up and give him the hamsters.

Raven nodded her head. “Very well, I’ll leave you to your work.” She swatted lazily at a beetle trying to land on her tumble of hair, which she hadn’t taken time to braid that morning, and then she sauntered away as if what he’d said was of little importance.

At the camp’s edge, her fingers quickly secured the pouch’s leather straps so it rested tightly on her back. She began running and soon spotted the large boulders a short way up the valley.