Shadows in the Cave (9 page)

13

H
igh in the charcoal sky Aku circled the dance ground. It was bedlam, bodies surrounding his father, arms flailing, legs flying. Maybe in its indignation at losing one of its victims, the crowd loosed its rage on the other.
If so, maybe my father is lucky. Ada, I wish you the blessing of the warrior’s death and rebirth
. Aku meant these words, but they gave him no comfort. With a start he realized he had called Shonan “Ada” for the first time, in his mind.
As I am losing you
.

He circled a second time but saw only riot. If he flew close enough to tear at his father’s bindings, the dragon would kill him.

He noticed something very odd. His tail hurt, but his face didn’t. He left that pain behind with his human body.

“Meet me in the Darkening Land!” Those were his father’s instructions. Aku couldn’t think what to do. He had never felt so confused. Pathetically, he winged toward the cave and landed just outside the entrance.

“Hello, Tagu. Good Tagu.”

Silence.

“Hello, Tagu.”

Nothing.

Shards of thoughts broke in Aku’s mind. Tagu, run off.
Tagu, dead inside. Tagu dead inside and an enemy hiding behind him, waiting.

Aku’s breath seized up.

Think
, he ordered himself.

Nothing.

Think
!

Nothing.

All right, human or owl? Go for surprise
.

He went in, flapping his wings and flashing his talons.

The cave was empty. No enemy, no dog, no blankets, no lashings, no meat, no nothing.

Someone stole Tagu
.

Which meant they knew his hiding place. They could be waiting outside right now.

He shot out the entrance high and hard. No enemy shouted, no enemy struck him.

He floated back into the cave and got the flutes out from behind the stones where he had hidden them. When he had them in one claw and stood on the other, he looked around.
This is the home of my enemies
.

He launched into the air. He circled. He sought to order his thoughts. Instead wild pictures and insane sounds inflamed him. Twisting flames scorched his mind. Rampaging drums tore his thoughts to tatters. Screams howled within him like wild winds. His mind shrieked with gales that were songs and songs that were screams—in the racket he couldn’t tell which was which. He thought he would go mad. He circled. What choice did he have?

He lit in a snag. He commanded himself to calm down, but his body didn’t obey.

“Meet me in the Darkening Land!”

Surely that meant Shonan accepted death. Did it also mean he wanted Aku to die? Or did it mean that Aku was somehow to make his way to the Darkening Land and enter as a living being? Once before, in the most ancient times, that had been done. Seven men went there to bring back Morning, the daughter of Grandmother Sun.

Aku got out both his flutes, stroked them, and held them up in the moonlight. The red one had the power to resurrect the dead, but only in the moments just after death. Maybe he could help his sister, his twin. But her body wasn’t dead—her
spirit
was. And it was not in the Darkening Land—it was in the heart of the Uktena, adding fire to the dragon’s life. His green flute healed spirits, so the piper told him.

It was all bewildering. “What am I supposed to do?” He was shocked and hurt by the wail of his own voice. He sounded so young to himself, and so helpless. He hated that.

He thought. After a few minutes, he told himself,
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I’m going to take action. Take action
, he repeated to himself.

He threw himself off the snag and flew in a wobble down the hill. Ahead, far ahead, he could see the bay, and beside it the village. He exerted himself and mounted into the sky. He had made up his mind. He would fly over the dance ground until his father was dead. The Brown Leaves would abandon his father’s body—they would not give it the honor of burial. Then he, Aku, son of Shonan, would bring his father back to life.

Yes, I’m disobeying you. And if we go to the Darkening Land, we’ll do it together
.

He flew along the trail to the village and…

The dance ground was empty.

No human figure, living or dead, hung from the stake.

The village was asleep.

They had already killed his father.
And where did you put his body?

Aku spent all night and all the next night winging from tree to tree across the plains and through the hills that surrounded the village, always carrying the flutes, the instruments of hope. Aku was no buzzard or eagle, able to soar with fixed wings, attaining great heights on warm winds, capable of covering ground ten times as fast as a man, or faster, and surveying enormous expanses of country. He was a wing-beater, flapping from spot to spot.

Part of what he learned in those two nights was that his owl sight was very keen, and he was a lethal hunter. His belly yearned for rabbit meat. As twilight slid into darkness each day, he easily spotted hares, dived on them in aerial silence, and killed them with a squeeze of obsidian-sharp talons. He relished the bloody meat.

At the earliest glimmer of light the first morning, he found still water in a creek and looked at himself. Orange face, beak like a tiny dagger, outcroppings of feathers where his ears might have been but weren’t. Most important, he was huge. His wing span was wider than his human arm span. He had never seen an owl so big. Maybe he could intimidate other beasts—that would be good.

All night, each night, he flew over, through, and around the village. He learned nothing about his father. Presumably, they had stripped him naked and left him with no food and no weapons to make the journey to the Darkening Land. Presumably, they had dumped his corpse in any convenient place, vulnerable to wind and rain, to insect, rodent, and scavenger.
Where is it?

He saw no body, no buzzards circling, no ravens hopping around on the ground.

When he checked the village at dawn and dusk, he only saw people going about the usual tasks of living. He circled farther and farther away, into the hills, well beyond where anyone would have gone to the trouble of carrying an enemy.

Frustration twisted in him, like a rag wrung tight and tighter until the last drop of hope was squeezed out.

As he settled onto his perch the second morning, the sun streaked itself across the eastern horizon far out to sea. And with the light, he got the idea. Probably the Brown Leaves had thrown his father’s body into the sea. He had heard of barbarous peoples who did such things.

Though he should have avoided the visibility of daylight, he beat his way up and down the shoreline. He looked at every rock that jutted out of the ocean. With his extraordinary vision he studied the tide pools. He saw nothing. On a double-check he saw nothing. But no other explanation was possible.

He winged his way to the hills, downhearted. He would sleep all day and start tonight. He had lost his father. Now he couldn’t do anything but go home, home to Iona.

14

T
he serpent monster roared hideously at the huge owl in flight. Several hundred people craned their eyes starward, but Aku was invisible in the darkness, and his flight silent.

Shonan didn’t waste time looking for his owl son. He seized his opportunity. For some time, as he sang the death song, he had slowly tugged on the thong that concealed the scabbard in the top of his butt crack. Every movement made his belly burn scream. He ignored the pain.

When the blade reached his belt, he eased it out by its handle. Awkwardly, gradually, barely moving his fingers, he sliced the rawhide ropes that bound his hands. Now, with every pair of eyes on the sky, he threw himself into action.

One stroke, two—his feet were free!

One bound, one swing—the neck of the old chief was slit and pouring out crimson.

Shonan leapt away from the fire and into the crowd. Action blotted out his own hurt.

Eyes saw the chief fall, the neck gouting blood. Voices raised piteous cries.

Of the hundreds of spectators, several score glimpsed or felt Shonan. He sprinted between squatting figures, kneeing them, shouldering those who stood up, outshouting those
who yelled with a terrible war cry—“Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!” This Galayi war cry had frozen the hearts of soldiers, and Shonan gloried in seeing what it did to the faces of the Brown Leaf villagers.

He stepped on chests, bounced off shoulders and even heads like stepping stones, stomped men, women, and children, and slashed a path of horror with his small knife. Instead of confronting him, they pell-melled away, screaming.

The rest of the circle of villagers crushed their way toward the center, the stake, where their chief lay fallen. They moaned and wailed.

One man depended on boldness and blade. As he went, he lashed those in his way with his fury—“Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!”

Shonan rolled into a ball, clutched himself, and shook. From pain? From the chill night? From fear? Relief? His disbelief that he’d gotten away with it?

No, he was shaking with laughter.

For years he’d told his young warriors that surprise and daring were everything. Now his whisper felt like a shout of triumph—“Oh, did I prove it, did I ever prove it!”

He sat up, refused to let the burn make him scream, and sobered himself. He listened carefully. A few warriors had run after him. In the darkness he’d been able to slip off. Very gradually, staying in moon shadows, he’d worked his way to a muddy ravine. Now he was hiding among the exposed roots of an oak that leaned out over the ditch. One spring before long, when snowmelt came cascading down from the mountains and ripped through this gully, it would undercut the oak far enough and the great tree would crash into the raging waters.

Shonan would crouch here for a few hours, until he believed the search had stopped for the night. The scrunched-up position eased the agony on his belly. Later he would make his way uphill to the cave where he and his son had hidden, and where they’d tied Tagu. His owl boy. That was still hard for him, a tang of bitterness swirled with love and fear—
my great dusky owl son
.

Shonan knew the Earth in darkness. He had spent many nights hunting and many nights approaching enemy camps. He knew the sounds of the winds in the grasses and the leaves, the noises of the creatures of the night. Best of all, he knew the padding of two-footed predators. And from time to time now, he heard them. They were footfalls slipping by on the grass over his head, circling around the tree he hid under. They were scuffles and mud-sucks as they trod up and down the ditch. He was a shadow in a cave shielded by a waterfall of roots, invisible. He kept perfect silence. Sometimes he thought he could sit silent for days, and maybe not breathe for hours.

Then he noticed that the world had gone silent. Where were the sounds of the hoot owls? The other night birds? The katydids? Thousands of rustlings usually echoed through the night, maybe as many as in the day. Except when the animals were stilled for a cause.

An enemy creeping up on me?

Shonan closed his eyes. He ignored his taste, his touch, even his smell. He made his ears as sensitive as taut drum heads, ready to magnify any sound. He heard an impossibility—nothing.

Perhaps some animals could deceive his ears, like a breeze too slight to feel. Shonan had watched a playful fox approach a sunning blacksnake from behind, ease down paw after paw until he neared the serpent’s head, and stretch forward a paw into the air beside the serpent’s ear. Delicately, the fox touched
the ground with that paw but put no weight on it. He raised it high, changed his mind, laid it gingerly on the earth again, waited, eased his full weight onto it, regarded the unmoving snake for a long moment, and backed away with a sly smile.

No human being could elude Shonan’s hearing the way the fox fooled the snake. And the forest might not go dead silent in fear of a human being, a creature with such poor night vision that he was more likely to hurt himself than his prey. Only for something very dangerous.

Shonan raised his bottom, balanced on his feet and hands, and holding his belly as still as possible, crabbed backward to the very rear of the root cave until his hair touched the wall. Then, bit by bit, he fitted himself to the dirt like moss.

The killer didn’t come. Stopped above, waiting?

A panther, maybe? Panthers hid from the ears of the night creatures, but not their eyes and not their noses. They smelled him first, then watched him glide along, black undulating on black. Leaf bugs ignored the cat. So did tree frogs, caterpillars, and moths. He wanted nothing from them. Buzzards and other roosting birds were out of reach and out of his mind.

The panther wasn’t looking for these creatures, or
looking
for anything. He hunted with his nose, and he sniffed especially for those who denned up at night with their young, like coyotes and wolves. He wanted to find them in their cuddly sleep. His paws would slay the mother with two thunder strikes, perhaps three. Essential to kill her immediately—not because she could actually whip him in a fight, no prey of the panther could do that. But a wolf or coyote mother would battle fiercely for her pups. The panther didn’t want to pay for his supper with a thousand bites and scratches.

This killer hunts dens with his nose, and I am crouched in a den
. Shonan got his weapon ready.
A knife the size of a fingernail
.

The biggest warrior Shonan had ever seen crashed through the roots.

Shonan slashed with his baby blade. His heart pounded its drum head. He thought,
I might as well fight a war club with a feather
. He loved it. He lunged toward the killer and sliced the air.

A paw strong as a bear’s grabbed his wrist.

“Shhh!”

Shonan froze at the odd sound of the voice.

“It’s Yah-Su!”

Shonan’s pulsed drummed,
Strike!

Yah-Su clapped a monstrous hand over his mouth. “Shhh!”

Shonan’s belly yelled.

Yah-Su pushed, slowly but irresistibly, until Shonan crunched against the wall. Then the buffalo man-beast slipped back outside the cover of the roots and immediately reappeared. Tagu was with him, on a lead. The dog curled against Shonan’s leg. “I got him from your cave,” Yah-Su said, and signed the words.

Shonan’s rubbed the dog’s ears. He didn’t dare ask, “Did you see my son, too? In human form or in owl form?” He wondered where his bird son was. Probably winging his way toward the woman he loved—that’s what young men did.

Yah-Su crouched next to Shonan. The beast was taller, and the dirt ceiling crooked his head down awkwardly. He put a finger the size of a baby’s forearm to his lips, slid to the floor, and was asleep.

Shonan petted Tagu until his own blood stilled.

Both men woke when they felt water lapping at their skin. Tagu was already sitting up, on guard against the rising rivulet.

They crawled
plish-plash
through the curtain of roots. High in the sky, the constellation of the Six Pigs said it was far past the middle of the night.

Shonan put a finger to his tongue—the water was salt. He rubbed some on his belly, and the coolness felt good.

This ravine was a steep-sided cut made by the pounding waves of the sea. When the tide came in, the gully was wet, maybe even full. When the tide went out, it was empty. The sea was new to Shonan, and mysterious, but he intended to learn all its ways.

Yah-Su parted the roots, motioned to Shonan to come along, and waded upstream. The Red Chief wasn’t used to following, but Yah-Su was quick-minded about the ways of war.

They hurried along in silence. Yah-Su didn’t hesitate to walk on the sand, trusting the rising tide to cover whatever tracks they left. Shonan put his life in the buffalo man’s hands.

Before first light, the creek made a sharp left turn toward the sea. There Yah-Su lifted Tagu onto a head-high stone slab and gave Shonan a hand up. The quick lift was a lightning bolt of agony.

They padded across rock and into an overhang. In the darkness Shonan couldn’t tell how much of a cave it was, but they walked back twenty or thirty paces. Yah-Su pulled on Shonan’s hand to get him to sit down.

Deep in the darkest shadow Shonan found some surprises. Yah-Su had a couple of untanned deer hides here for mattresses, and soft, tanned elk hides for blankets. After some shuffling around, Yah-Su dropped a slab of dried deer meat into Shonan’s hand. Evidently he intended to save the meat lashed to Tagu’s back.

Altogether, Yah-Su had a camp, an outcast’s camp.

One skill Yah-Su had was sleeping. He was already rolled up in one of the bed rolls and snoring like a bull.

Shonan hurt too much to sleep. He sat and thought things through. When father and son disappeared, whisked away to
the land of the Little People, Yah-Su must have gone on ahead to the Brown Leaf village and waited for them. No question he was their friend. After a few days in the world of the Little People and nearly a week’s travel, Shonan and Aku turned up. Yah-Su probably saw them—he seemed super-observant—and he certainly knew about the sentries. He didn’t show himself, just as he didn’t reveal himself at the river crossing, but let the Brown Leaves spring their ambush and then helped out when he could do some good.

But why did Yah-Su have a camp near the Brown Leaf village? Shonan thought again,
outcast
. Among the Galayi, villagers punished by banishment were utterly cut off from their people—not even relatives would spare them the slightest help. Usually such people went crazy and disappeared forever. Occasionally, the strong ones became bitter enemies of their own people. In that case Yah-Su might have a series of invisible animal dens. Shonan wondered if he would soon find out.

The notion of an outcast bothered him. The Galayi people banished members for only one reason, killing a fellow tribesman. He looked at the beast sleeping next to him. A killer? Definitely. A killer of one of his own? Possibly.

But a friend to me and Aku
.

Shonan would have chewed on the problem longer, except that his breaths fell into rhythm with Tagu’s, and the Red Chief drifted off.

The morning showed why this was a camp. A seep oozed from under the rock at the uphill end. Yah-Su picked up two of several gourds of water beside it, handed Shonan one, and drained the other. No water had ever tasted better. Shonan had gone all night dry.

The angle in the sharp turn of the ravine formed a huge triangular room with a flat roof. The stone of the earth shaped the sea here as much as the sea shaped the earth. The water from the seep never even reached the bottom of the gully. Apparently the tide was going back out—the ravine was mud-bottomed now.

Yah-Su gave Shonan a dab of fat to rub on his belly. The war chief did it very gingerly.

The buffalo man handed Shonan another slab of dried buffalo meat and took one for himself. When he finished eating, Shonan whispered, “When you got the pack dog …”

Yah-Su clamped Shonan’s mouth and nose so hard he felt like he couldn’t breathe. After a long moment he let go of Shonan, who felt full of fire—no one treated the Red Chief that way.

Then he realized Yah-Su didn’t know anything about Galayi positions of honor, and just wished the beast knew his own strength.

Yah-Su pulled out his knife, drew the point along his own throat, and then made the same motion toward Shonan’s throat. Then he clamped a hand over his own mouth.

All right
, thought Shonan,
we shut up and stay put
.

And hope that Aku got back to the Amaso village of the Galayi tribe safely.