The Valley of Horses (53 page)

The delta was a morass of quicksand, salt marsh, and insecure little islands. Some of the silty islets stayed in place several years, long enough for small trees to send down tenuous roots, only to be washed away at the vicissitude of seasonal flood or eroding seepage. Four major channels—depending on season and happenstance—cut through to the sea, but their courses were inconstant. For no apparent reason, the water would suddenly switch from a deeply worn bed to a new path, tearing up brush and leaving a sinkhole of soft wet sand.

The Great Mother River—eighteen hundred miles and two glacier-covered mountain ranges of water—had nearly reached her destination. But the delta with its hundreds of square miles of mud, silt, sand, and water was the most dangerous section of the entire river.

By following the deepest of the left channels, the river had not been hard to navigate. The current had taken the small log boat around its sweeping northward turn, and even the final large tributary had only pushed them to midstream. But the brothers didn’t anticipate that she would break into channels so soon. Before they realized it, they were swept into a middle channel.

Jondalar had gained considerable skill in handling the small craft, and Thonolan could manage one, but they were far from being as capable as the expert boatmen of the Ramudoi. They tried to turn the dugout around, retreat back upstream, and reenter the proper channel. They would have done better to reverse the direction they were rowing—the shape of the stern was not so different from the shape of the prow—but they didn’t think of it.

They were crosswise against the current, Jondalar shouting instructions to Thonolan to get the front end turned around, and Thonolan becoming impatient. A large log with an extensive root system—heavy, water-soaked, and lying low in the water—was washing down the river, the
sprawling roots raking along everything in their path. The two men saw it—too late.

With a splintering crash, the jagged end of the huge log, brittle and blacker where it had once been struck by lightning, rammed broadside into the thin-walled dugout. Water rushed in through a hole punched into the side and quickly swamped the small canoe. As the snag bore down on them, one long root finger just below the water’s surface jabbed Jondalar in the ribs and knocked him breathless. Another barely missed Thonolan’s eye, leaving a long scratch across his cheek.

Suddenly immersed in the cold water, Jondalar and Thonolan clung to the snag and watched with dismay as a few bubbles rose while the little craft, with all their possessions lashed firmly to it, sank to the bottom.

Thonolan had heard his brother’s grunt of pain. “Are you all right, Jondalar?”

“A root jabbed me in the ribs. Hurts a bit, but I don’t think it’s serious.”

With Jondalar following slowly, Thonolan started working his way around the snag, but the force of the current as they were swept along kept pushing them back into the log with the rest of the debris. Suddenly, the snag caught on a sandbar under the water. The river, flowing around and through the open network of roots, pushed out objects that had been held under by the force of the current, and a whole bloated reindeer carcass rose to the surface in front of Jondalar. He moved to get out of its way, feeling the pain in his side.

Free of the log, they swam to a narrow island in midchannel. It supported a few young willows, but it was not stable and would be washed away before long. The trees near the edge were already partly submerged, drowned, with no green buds of spring leaves on the branches, and, with roots losing their hold, some were leaning over the rushing flow. The ground was a spongy bog.

“I think we should keep on going and try to find a drier place,” Jondalar said.

“You are in a lot of pain—don’t tell me you aren’t.”

Jondalar admitted to some discomfort, “But we can’t stay here,” he added.

They slid into the cold water across the narrow island bar. The current was swifter than they expected, and they were swept much farther downstream before they reached dry
land. They were tired, cold, and disappointed when they found themselves to be on still another narrow islet. It was wider, longer, and somewhat higher than the level of the river, but soggy with no dry wood to be found.

“We can’t make a fire here,” Thonolan said. “We’ll have to keep going. Where did Carlono say that Mamutoi Camp was?”

“At the north end of the delta, close to the sea,” Jondalar replied, and he looked with longing in that direction as he spoke. The pain in his side had become more intense and he wasn’t sure if he could swim across another channel. All he could see was surging water, tangled pockets of debris, and a few trees marking an occasional island. “No telling how far that is.”

They squished through the mud to the north side of the narrow strip of land and plunged into the cold water. Jondalar noted a stand of trees downstream and made for it. They staggered up a beach of gray sand at the far side of the channel, breathing heavily. Rivulets of water ran from their long hair and soaked leather clothing.

The late afternoon sun broke through a rift in the overcast sky with a wash of golden brilliance but little warmth. A sudden gust from the north brought a chill that quickly penetrated wet clothes. They had been warm enough while they were active, but the effort had sapped their reserves. They shivered in the wind, then plodded toward the scant shelter of a sparse stand of alder.

“Let’s make camp here,” Jondalar said.

“It’s still light. I’d rather keep going.”

“It will be dark by the time we make a shelter and try to get a fire started.”

“If we keep going, we could probably find the Mamutoi Camp before dark.”

“Thonolan, I don’t think I can.”

“How bad is it?” Thonolan asked. Jondalar lifted his tunic. A wound on his rib was discoloring around a gash that had no doubt bled, but had been closed off by water-swelled tissue. He noticed the hole punctured in the leather then, wondering if his rib was broken.

“I wouldn’t mind a rest and a fire.”

They looked around them at the wild expanse of swirling muddy water, shifting sandbars, and an unkempt profusion of vegetation. Tangled tree limbs attached to dead trunks were pulled by the current unwillingly toward the sea, digging
in wherever they could find purchase in the fluctuating bottom. In the distance a few stands of greening brush and trees were anchored to some of the more stable islands.

Reeds and marsh grasses took hold anywhere they could root. Nearby, three-foot tussocks of sedge, whose clumps of sprawling grassy leaves looked sturdier than they were, matched in height by the straight sword-shaped leaves of sweetflag, grew between mats of spike rush that was barely an inch tall. In the marsh near the water’s edge, ten-foot-tall scouring rushes, cattails, and bulrushes dwarfed the men. Soaring over all, stiff-leafed phragmite reeds with tops of purple plumes reached thirteen feet or more.

The men had only the clothes on their backs. They had lost everything when the boat went down, even the backframes they had traveled with from the beginning. Thonolan had adopted the dress of the Shamudoi, and Jondalar wore the Ramudoi variation, but after his dunking in the river when he met the flatheads, he had kept a pouch of tools tied to his belt. He was grateful for it now.

“I’m going to see if there are some old stalks on those Cattails that are dry enough for a fire drill,” Jondalar said, trying to ignore the pain in his side. “See if you can find some dry wood.”

The cattails provided more than an old-growth woody stalk for a fire drill. The long leaves woven around an alder-wood frame made a lean-to, which helped contain the heat from the fire. The green tops and young roots, baked in the coals along with the sweet rhizomes of the sweetflag and the underwater base of the bulrushes, supplied the beginning of a meal. A slender alder sapling, sharpened to a point and hurled with the accuracy of hunger, brought a couple of ducks to the fire as well. The men made flexible mats of the large, soft-stemmed bulrushes, then used them to extend the lean-to and to wrap around themselves while they dried their wet clothes. Later, they slept on the mats.

Jondalar did not sleep well. His side was sore and tender, and he knew there was something wrong inside, but he couldn’t think of stopping now. They had to find their way to solid ground first.

In the morning, they seined fish out of the river with wide mesh baskets made of cattail leaves and alder branches and cords made of stringy bark. They rolled the fire-making materials and flexible baskets inside the sleeping mats, tied them with the cord, and slung them over their backs. Taking
their spears, they started out. The spears were only pointed sticks, but they had provided one meal—and the fish baskets had supplied another. Survival depended not so much on equipment as knowledge.

The two brothers had a small difference of opinion over which direction to go in. Thonolan thought they were across the delta and wanted to go east, toward the sea. Jondalar wanted to go north, sure there was yet another channel of the river to cross. They compromised and headed northeast, Jondalar was proved right, though he would have been much happier if he had been wrong. Near noon they reached the northernmost channel of the great river.

“Time to go swimming again,” Thonolan said. “Are you able?”

“Do I have any choice?”

They started for the water, then Thonolan stopped. “Why don’t we tie our clothes to a log, the way we used to. Then we won’t have to dry clothes.”

“I don’t know,” Jondalar said. Clothes, even wet, would keep them warmer, but Thonolan had been trying to be reasonable, though his voice betrayed frustration and exasperation. “But, if you want …” Jondalar shrugged acquiescence.

It was chilly standing naked in the cool damp air. Jondalar was tempted to retie his tool pouch around his bare waist, but Thonolan had already wrapped it in his tunic and was tying everything to a log he had found. On his bare skin, the water felt colder than he remembered, and he had to grit his teeth to keep from crying out when he plunged in and tried to swim, but water numbed the pain of his wound somewhat. He favored his side while swimming and lagged behind his brother, though Thonolan was pulling the log.

When they crawled out of the water and stood on a sandbar, their original destination—the end of the Great Mother River—was in sight. They could see the water of the inland sea. But the excitement of the moment was lost. The journey had lost its purpose, and the end of the river was no longer their goal. Nor were they yet on solid ground. They were not quite across the delta. The sandbar where they stood had once been in midchannel, but the channel had shifted. An empty riverbed still had to be crossed.

A high wooded bank, with exposed roots dangling from the underside where a swift current had once undercut, beckoned from the other side of the vacated channel. It had not been vacated long. Water still puddled in the middle,
and vegetation had barely taken root. But insects had already discovered the stagnant pools, and a swarm of mosquitoes had discovered the two men.

Thonolan untied the clothes from the log. “We still have to get through those puddles down there, and the bank looks muddy. Let’s wait until we get across before we put these back on.”

Jondalar nodded agreement, in too much pain to argue. He thought he’d strained something while swimming, and he was having trouble standing up straight.

Thonolan slapped a mosquito as he started down the gentle gradient which had once been the slope leading from the bank into the river channel.

They’d been told often enough. Never turn your back on the river; never underestimate the Great Mother River. Though she had left it for a time, the channel was still hers, and, even in her absence, she left a surprise or two behind. Millions of tons of silt were brought down to the sea and spread over the thousand or more square miles of her delta every year. The vacated channel, subject to tidal inundation from the sea, was a soggy salt marsh with poor drainage. The new green grass and reeds had set roots in wet silty clay.

The two men slid and slipped down the slope on the finegrained sticky mud, and, when they reached level ground, it sucked at their bare feet. Thonolan hurried ahead, forgetting that Jondalar was not quite up to his usual long-strided pace. He could walk, but the slippery descent had hurt. He was picking his way carefully, feeling a bit foolish to be wandering through the marsh naked, making an offering of his tender skin to the hungry insects.

Thonolan had gotten so far ahead that Jondalar was about to call out to him. But he looked up just as he heard his brother’s cry for help and saw him go down. Pain forgotten, Jondalar ran toward him. Fear clutched when he saw Thonolan floundering in quicksand.

“Thonolan! Great Mother!” Jondalar cried, rushing to him.

“Stay back! You’ll get caught too!” Thonolan, struggling to free himself from the mire, was sinking deeper instead.

Jondalar looked around frantically for something to help Thonolan out. His shirt! He could throw him an end, he thought, then remembered that was impossible. The bundle of clothes was gone. He shook his head, then saw the dead
stump of an old tree half buried in the muck and ran to see if he could break off one of the roots, but any roots that might have come free had long since been torn off in the violent journey downstream.

“Thonolan, where is the clothes bundle? I need something to pull you out!”

The desperation in Jondalar’s voice had an unwanted effect. It filtered through Thonolan’s panic to remind him of his grief. A calm acceptance came over him. “Jondalar, if the Mother wants to take me, let Her take me.”

“No! Thonolan, no! You can’t give up like that. You can’t just die. O Mother, Great Mother, don’t let him die like that!” Jondalar sank to his knees and, stretching out full, reached out his hand. “Take my hand, Thonolan, please, take my hand,” he begged.

Thonolan was surprised at the grief and pain on his brother’s face, and something more that he’d seen before only in infrequent passing glances. In that instant, he knew. His brother loved him, loved him as much as he had loved Jetamio. It was not the same, but as strong. He understood at an instinctive level, by intuition, and he knew as he reached for the hand stretching toward him that, even if he couldn’t get out of the mire, he had to clasp his brother’s hand.