Shadows in the Cave (8 page)

“Morning’s spirit, set free, took herself as far from mortal life as she could get—she turned herself into Morning Star, farther from Earth than even the Sun. She is remote and beautiful, and that satisfies her.

“At last Grandmother Sun shone again. But human beings had lost their chance for immortality forever.”

Aku felt dazed. He had heard splinters of this story, but to hear it all, and from the lips of the immortals…

“Yes, you’re charmed,” said Rono, “but Kayna told you this story for a reason. Your great-grandmother sent you here to get two gifts.” The musician held out the flutes, the short one painted green and the other red. “You scared me when you hesitated to let me cut up your killing instrument—you would never have known what you lost.

“Yes, green and red. If you look more closely, you’ll see that the holes on them are spaced differently. That’s because each one is made to play a different song, and each song has a different purpose. The green one plays a song that heals spirits. It does nothing for wounds or illnesses. The red one resurrects the dead. If you’re with someone who dies, before the
spirit sets off for the Darkening Land, the red flute’s song can bring them back to life.” Rono looked at Aku’s blanched face and chuckled. “I didn’t mean you have to go to the Darkening Land and rescue them yourself.”

The piper gave Kayna a certain look. “Why don’t you check on your guest and tend to other things? Teaching a student to play a song is tedious.”

In fact, for Aku the learning seemed quick and delightful. He said, “I’d like to stay here and make music forever.”

Rono said, “Human beings can’t. You will stay until you learn these songs, regardless of the passage of Earth time, and leave at the next sunrise.”

“My sister may be killed.”

“Then be glad,” said Rono, “that you will gain power over death.”

11

T
he Brown Leaf village looked like any Galayi village. Wattle-and-daub huts surrounded a village green. People began to crisscross the green on the business of life, heeled by their dogs. Mothers let children romp out of the huts, now that day was coming on strong, chasing away the cold and perhaps dangerous spirits.
Or enemies
, thought Aku.

The bay was guarded by a crooking arm of land, and farther out by two finger-shaped islands. The eastern side of the village circle opened to the ocean. On the western side rose the council lodge, an arbor with a roof circling an open space the way a fringe of hair curled around a balding man’s head. From his angle on the crest of a hill, Aku couldn’t see the fire at the center of the lodge, but a faint line of smoke rose from it and was blown to rags by the sea winds. The fire priest must have just renewed the sacred flame, as he probably did every morning and evening.

They may not look that different from us
, Aku thought,
but they are
. He chased away a mental picture of Salya spread-eagled in front of the fire, the knife gouging her heart out.

He put a hand on Tagu’s head and rubbed his ears.

Again he cast an eye around. They’d slipped past guards on the trail to get to this knob, and they were sitting in the bushes. Which didn’t mean they couldn’t be spotted.

“See any sign of her?” said Aku.

“No,” said Shonan. “I doubt we will.”

“The huts on both sides of the eastern entrance are painted,” Shonan said.

Aku looked carefully and saw that his father was sharp-eyed. He could see just an edge of painting on the side of the huts toward the entrance. It probably ornamented the doors. At least that’s the way his own tribe did things.

“Those have got to be the huts of the peace chief and the war chief,” Shonan said.

“The colors are yellow and blue,” said Aku. Among the Galayi, the peace chief’s ornamentation would have been white, the Red Chief’s red.

Shonan’s voice had an edge. “They’re different from us.” He waited. “She’ll be in one of those huts, probably the war chief’s, whichever one that is. They’ll have her tied up and probably guarded.”

Father and son had a tacit agreement to speak as if they were sure she was alive. Privately, each doubted it. They had no idea how many Earth days they’d been with the Little People.

“What do you want to do?”

“Find out which hut she’s in, tear her out, and go like hell.”

Aku snatched his breath in.

Shonan heard it and smiled. “In war, daring is everything.”

Aku voiced the calm version of his thoughts. “Incredibly dangerous.”

Shonan took his time answering. “If I watched my daughter die, I could not go on breathing the air of this world.”

Aku nodded. He understood. “I have an idea. I’ll take my owl shape, fly down there, look and listen from the smoke holes, and find out what hut she’s in.”

His father humphed. After a long while, he said, “Maybe.”

Aku said nothing. He intended to do it, regardless.

“Whatever, for today we just watch. Always learn everything you can about your enemy.” Shonan thought. “Tonight we move. Unless they bring her out.”

Both of them pictured her being dragged to the sacred fire for the sacrifice.

“And then?”

Shonan smiled. “Then we will taste their blood, and they will taste ours.”

All day they saw nothing that helped.

In the twilight they sneaked carefully uphill to a cave they’d spotted. The Galayi liked to make camp in caves—the name of their tribe meant People of the Caves. They needed to make sure of a place where they could hide with their freed captive, and tie Tagu. They would have enough problems creeping into the village without him getting the dogs stirred up.

Then they slipped down the hill toward the place the guards stationed themselves to watch the trail. Shonan wanted to kill the sentries. Why, Aku wasn’t sure. To ease his anger, probably.

Aku told himself,
It’s my job to help, and I have to share the risk
. Nevertheless, as soon as the guards were taken care of, he would enter the village as an owl. He didn’t care whether his father liked it or not. Salya was
his
twin, and owls flew at night.

Mere shadows in the twilight, sliding down from bush to bush, tree to tree, they saw an opportunity. Fifty steps above where the guards stood loomed a boulder with a split on the uphill side. Shonan nodded toward it, and Aku understood.
Using the boulder for cover, they got to its back side, crawled into the split, climbed to the top, and looked down on the guards.

The appearance of a luminous god could not have shocked them more. Even in the last of the light Aku could see her clearly. Lounging, chatting with the guards, laughing, sat Salya.

For a long moment Aku felt like he’d turned, through and through, muscles, blood, and brain, into river ice.

Shonan rose to let Salya and her companions see him. Then he climbed down the boulder and stepped toward them. He held his spear and club uncertainly, neither ready nor at rest.

Aku slid down the boulder and followed his father. His legs were wobbly.

Salya jumped up, ran, and flung herself into Shonan’s arms. “Ada, Ada, I’m so glad to see you. I was so scared.” “Ada” was a fond equivalent of “father.”

Shonan looked over his daughter’s head at the two guards. “Why are you dallying with these enemies?” he asked. His speech got stilted when he was ill at ease.

“Ada, these are the furthest thing from enemies. These are my friends.” She mentioned names Shonan didn’t make out.

Shonan looked at the two young men with hard eyes and barely inclined his head. Aku nodded to them and said, “I am Aku.”

“Oh, Ada, I’ve been coming out here with them each night, hoping you would show up. They said you wouldn’t. They were worried that you might come later with an army—they wouldn’t have grabbed me if they’d known I’m Galayi. But if you followed right away …” She hugged him hard again. “Oh, Ada, I was so scared.”

“I think there’s a lot to be explained.”

“In the village. You’ll be treated as special guests—they’ll give a feast for you. I’ve told them about my father and my brother.”

She let Shonan go and hugged Aku. In the last of the light he couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Then she took both their hands and danced, pulling them gaily toward the village. Shonan kept glancing back toward the guards. He didn’t like having them behind him.

“Ada, these are wonderful people. Whatever you’ve heard, it’s not true at all. I’ve met a wonderful man. He’s a shaman.” She turned to Shonan, took both of his hands, and held his eyes with hers. “I’m going to give you grandchildren by him.”

Shonan kept rotating his head in every direction. “But they stole you. They’ve stolen lots of women. And none of them were ever seen again.”

“That’s because they’re living in the Brown Leaf village, married to good Brown Leaf men, bearing children and living happily.”

Shonan knifed her with his eyes.

“Ada, your doubt hurts me. I know what I’m doing. And you’ll see. It all has to do with a revelation…”

Warriors rushed out from every tree in the forest. From behind, the guards tackled Shonan and Aku. In an instant they were on their faces in the dirt, their hands being tied behind their backs. Feet bore down between their shoulder blades. Their weapons disappeared into the crowd.

Shonan twisted his head to the side and looked up at Salya. From the edge of his mouth, he squeezed out, “What’s going on?”

“It’s classic, Father. You’ve been betrayed by a woman.”

12

“M
ake them face each other,” said Salya, “so they can see each other’s pain.”

Aku fought his fear—he had to understand. He looked into the evil in Salya’s face, a fire that consumed everything good. Her eyes were his, and they made him teeter on the abyss of his own darkness.

A man of authority nodded to his warriors, and they sat Aku and Shonan, firmly bound, face to face. In the dark they could hardly see the hundreds of people gathered around, a pack of hungry dogs at a slaughter.

“It is worse than terror,” Salya said. “You are father and son. Each of you will feel the other’s agony more than his own.” She made a sound that mixed cackling and chuckling. “Until pain floods the mind to oblivion.”

Even through the waves of dread Aku understood. In the council lodge guests were greeted. Here on the dance ground enemies were tortured. Salya stood next to a thick post sunk into the middle. On one side of her stood a white-haired man of great beauty and dignity. Aku did not need to see his headdress clearly to know that he was the chief of chiefs. On her other side gangled an enormous man, hooded, and robed in a cloth rubbed black with ashes. A shaman, presumably, though
Aku had never seen a costume like that and couldn’t imagine the face of a holy man beneath that cowl.

Father and son held each other’s eyes. Though men were building a fire to hold the darkness away, there was little else the two could see, and nothing else in this world they wanted to see.

Salya touched the elderly man on the hand. “This man who condemns you to death is Guna. If you were not Galayi, an ignorant people who live in caves in the mountains, you would know him as a great chief, none greater in the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men. Our people revere him.” Aku didn’t even glance at the chief—he was transfixed by the triumphant wickedness in Salya’s eyes, evil mirrors of his own.

Now she caressed the shaman on the neck, shocking behavior at a public gathering. “This is the man I told you about, Father, Maloch, the most powerful shaman in all lands between where the sun rises and where it sets.” She looked at Maloch lasciviously. “His power has entranced me.” She slid in front of Maloch, embraced him with both arms, wound a leg around one of his, and rubbed her body against him indecently. Women in the crowd trilled. Men shouted or laughed.

Aku could not look away from her.

“Understand, my father, understand, my brother, Maloch is not my husband. I am his whore. I open my legs to him as the ground splits in an earthquake. His seed floods me as the ocean tides turn a river back up its own channel. He volcanoes forth his seed and fills my belly.

“Oh, oh”—her moan was a song and she writhed in a wicked ballet—“never have I felt such pleasure. Every day of my life I will degrade myself before him. Every day I beg for his humiliation.”

Shonan heard only half of it. His eyes flicked over the chief, who seemed mesmerized by the fire. There lay the beginning of the pain.

“Sing for death,” he said quietly to Aku. The tradition wasn’t to ask for death, but to be ready for death if it came, as it did to all things.

“Yes!” said Salya, and again in exultation, “Yes! Sing for death.”

A drum started, and Salya danced around them. “Our women will bring it to you now, first as a seduction, then as a rape, and last as the holocaust of fire.” She waved a languid hand toward the blaze, which now burned brightly.

Shonan said quietly, “Remember that a warrior who dies fighting the enemy goes quickly to the Darkening Land and immediately is reborn on earth.”

Salya cried, “Do you, the war chief, believe such an old wives’ tale?” Her laugh exploded up and down in great arpeggios.

“Reborn immediately,” Shonan repeated. Then he sang,

“All things pass away,

Plants must die,

Animals pass on,

Even the rocks crumble

And blow in the wind.

All things pass on.

Only spirit is eternal,

Only spirit.

Only spirit.”

Salya stepped close to her father, a burning stick in her hand. “Only spirit?” she asked with a sneer. “Let me remind you of body.” She jammed the flames into Shonan’s belly.

Shonan howled. Salya cackled.

Shonan croaked out,

“Only spirit.

Only spirit.”

Aku could only pretend to sing. He stared at the hideous burn on his father’s belly. He gazed at the lewd, shadowy dance of Salya and the shaman. From the burn to the dance, back and forth. The sinuous movements of the dancers made their bodies look like one, her face grinning out from the shaman’s cowl.

“You will wish your life was more frail,” Salya chanted. “You will yearn for the embrace of death. You feel a splinter driven through your nipple. You get a hint of the flame as one of our women lights it. Slowly, the flame eats the wood. At last it takes the flesh in its fiery mouth.”

By the flickering firelight Aku now began to see. Many times he had gotten a glimpse of what resided beyond the apparent, beyond the physical. For the first time he welcomed this sight. It stirred his heart. It was possibility.

“All things pass on.

Only spirit is eternal,

Only spirit.

Only spirit.”

“Yes,” sang Salya, “it will make you croon for the solace of death, but the slut has no ears. Ten times you will sing to her, but she enjoys your begging. ‘More!’ she demands. ‘More! More!’ A hundred splinters and your body lives on. Oh, what a bitch death is, how evil! But not as evil as your daughter Salya. Let me show you.”

She bent over Aku, a sharp knife in her hand. She cut a thin line from his widow’s peak down his forehead and his nose, to the edge of his upper lip. He moaned, and Salya cackled. Aku felt the blood run into his eyes, and he could not wipe them.

Salya’s dance turned obscene now, her hands wildly suggestive. In the red light of the flames she was evil incarnate.

Something strange happened to Aku. With his vision blurred he began to see the truth.

The crowd doubled its uproar.

Shonan sang,

“Only spirit.

Only spirit.”

Aku noticed that his father was twisting his hands against his bonds. Probably he wanted to use the half darkness to free them.
Foolish
, thought Aku. He turned his mind back to seeing what his eyes could not, the essence of things that lay beyond appearance.

“When our women tire of burning your flesh,” Salya chanted, “when they see that the pain is too familiar to you, they will inflict an agony you never imagined. Its strength will be as the blazing sun is to starlight. They will bring stone knives, force them under your fingernails, and hammer them deeper and deeper, until the nails peel backward. And when they finish with all ten, they will eagerly remove your toenails.”

Aku’s mind was torn between his pain and what he was struggling to understand.

“All this time the crowd will cheer. By the time they are working on the toenails, their bloodlust will be the very air you breathe. They will glory in your pain.

“As you will exult in it. Galayi warriors like you seek nothing more hungrily than a call to show courage. A warrior rejoices in pain. As pain rampages, honor swells, courage soars. As the body suffers, the spirit triumphs.”

Women raised tortoise shell rattles to spur on Salya’s dance with Maloch. In the firelight the scene was phantasmagoric.

“Only spirit.

Only spirit.”

“After the toenails, our women will cut you wherever they like. From your lower eyelid down your cheek. Across the arch of your foot. Between your toes. Inside your nostrils. Eventually they will cut your fingers off, joint by joint. And while you can still see, they will chop off your balls, and your cocks. While you can still feel pain, they will gouge out your eyes.

“All this time only they will touch you, our men will not. Meanwhile I will stroke Maloch. I will dance. I will sing. I will arouse him. I will suck his nipples. My depravity will inspire the women watching to depths of savagery with their own men. But none of them will be as black as the evil that inspires your Salya, your sister, your daughter.”

In a booming voice Aku said, “You are not Salya!”

Silence. Salya stopped dancing, the drum stopped, the rattles stopped.

Now louder: “
You are not my sister
.”

Salya smiled nastily at Maloch. “Clever boy, isn’t he, this twin of mine?” She stooped and ran her fingernail along his cut. It screamed.

“You’re not my twin, not my anything. Where is Salya?”

Now the shaman spoke in a crawling, lascivious voice. “You’re right, young man, quite right. This marvel is not Salya. She is whoever I want her to be. As I myself am.”

Salya-who-wasn’t-Salya pulled her dress over her head and tossed it away. Underneath was … Aku couldn’t have said what. Something yellow-green that was turning itself from flesh to scales.

Subtly, Aku began his own transformation.

The shaman said cheerily, “I’ll join you, my dear.” He dropped his ashen robe and hood. His naked body was greenish yellow and serpentine.

Aku concentrated hard—feet to claws, and claws out of the rope. Maybe the shadows, and their self-absorption, would blind the evil ones for long enough.

Salya called out, “Drum! Rattles!” and undulated back into her dance. Her body was a dragon’s, head held high, pulsating forward and back, gliding from side to side, tail undulating behind.

Wings
! Aku shouted in his mind.

To the rhythm of the drum Salya and the shaman slithered toward each other, their reptilian bodies swaying to the beat, their tongues flickering. Their heads began to sprout horns.

“Yes,” cried the creature that had once been a shaman, “unite with me, my love!”

Hundreds of pairs of eyes were transfixed by the serpentine twins, all except for Aku’s.

Now a hideous chartreuse, the dragons slowly entwined their bodies like the tendrils of ferns. They squeezed each other and melded into one saurian monster, thick as the torso of a big man. Thick fish scales with spots of every color popped out on their skin.

“Where is your sister’s body?” roared the whore’s dragon head. “In the Darkening Land.”

“Where is her spirit?” cooed the shaman’s reptile head. “I ate it!”

Aku flapped to the top of the torture pole.

The two serpents were wholly one. They grew a single eye, and it was a diamond, one said to have the power to foretell the future. In sunlight the diamond would have blinded the hundreds of people. In the firelight it shone enough for the monster to see Aku.

Aku raised his wings to take to the air.

The monster let out a hissing roar and, faster than anyone’s eye could follow, sunk its fangs into the owl.

Aku rowed the air, hesitated, faltered, fell a few feet, and with a burst of effort pulled away. His tail sent up a rip of pain. The monster had only feathers in its maw.

Aku felt the night air give lift to his wings. Over the pounding drum Aku heard his father cry out, “Meet me in the Darkening Land!”