Tsuga's Children (13 page)

Arn stared at the carcase of the cow and the sated wolves, full after their hunting. He turned to Jen and she saw their triumph in his face. She thought only of the cow that had been taken from life and brutally changed into meat, but Arn had been running with the hunters all the while.

She moved away from him, feeling alone. At her movement the cattle raised their heads and stamped nervously, their large eyes upon her. Some of the wolves raised their heads, their ears straight up, staring directly at her with an alert curiosity that was neither fear nor aggression.

Arn watched the wolves, his eager curiosity matching theirs.

“Arn,” she called to him as if he were far away. For a long time he didn’t answer, and when he did speak, he said, “Did you see that? Did you see the wolves hunting?”

“She said Oka was out there!” Jen cried.

Arn turned, the excitement of the hunting fading from his face. “She pointed that way, that’s all we know, Jen.”

They turned back to the archway, but the old lady was no longer there. The sun had gone down, the earlier snow flurries had ceased, and the moon was a bent sliver among thin clouds that moved silently across the sky. Darkness had begun to settle in. The black archway now seemed as palpable as a wall. They peered into that blackness, but it was like a curtain of fur, something they might reach out and touch, and they were both struck again by the old lady’s admonition not to enter. Never, when she had stayed at their cabin, had she seemed so stern, powerful and unfriendly.

They had to find a place to spend the cold night, and it was Jen who found a protected place beneath a whorl of the great tree’s roots. Arn went to gather fallen twigs and branches so they could have a fire, while Jen gathered together the fallen needles of the tree and heaped them beneath the sheltering roots.

When Arn returned with an armload of wood he put it down and said, “Listen!”

They held their breaths, hearing a distant sighing, at first the wind in the high branches of the tree, but changing, coming now from the meadow. They crept over to the edge of the stones. The sighing, or chanting, came from across the meadow, where many flickering lights, small moving fires, came toward them.

“Those are people,” Arn whispered.

The stone of the ledge and archway, and the gray trunk of the tree, became visible in the flickering orange light. Several of the dark approaching figures carried bundles of branches. Crouching down, Jen and Arn watched while several bonfires grew at once in a half-ring around the central ledge. As the fires ate brightly through their kindling and branches, figures stood or crouched around them, strange shapes half men, half animal. A chant, dry and toneless as the wind, came from the figures behind the fires. “Hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh,” the chant went on, neither rising nor falling.

“Those
are
people!” Arn whispered.

As the fires grew higher they saw that the figures were human, but the heads and upper bodies, all shaking up and down in a dance to the rhythm of the chant, were animal. The men wore animal skins with the masks of animals. There were the shoulders and head of a black bear, the fangs gleaming white in the gaping mouth, and there was the huge head of a boar with its ivory tusks. Other figures wore deer heads, antlered and without antlers, others the heavy heads of shaggy cattle, or the sharp muzzles and stiff ears of wolves. One figure was half the tawny head and cape of a lynx that grinned in the flickering light as all cats grin. Firelight glinted on fangs and hair as the creatures danced in place.

Just below the stone platform on which Jen and Arn crouched, a long stone, high and flat as a table, was set in the ground, the higher flames of the fires reflecting across it. It was toward this stone that all the animal heads gaped and nodded as the chant went on. The fires made a great room out of the darkness, so that the thin moon glimmered faintly high above. Behind the dancers were the dark silent shapes of others who didn’t move. Their human faces shone as dimly as the moon.

The chant ended all at once, so quickly and simultaneously Jen and Arn were startled, as if the steady noise had hidden them and now they were about to be discovered.

From the darkness at the side came a figure whose arms were long black wings, whose head was that of a giant crow. It approached the table rock. Following the crow came a stooped figure wearing a cape of long needles and quills, with a stubby, furred face—a giant porcupine. These stood silently beside a stone, waiting. From the people in the darkness of the meadow rose a high, faint humming that changed into the sad keening of women. It was not so much a moan of immediate sorrow as a formal imitation of that long, hopeless wail. It rose and fell in slow waves. Jen felt the sound within her as if she had been born to hear that song of infinite loss. She thought of her mother, who might be uttering just those mourning sounds over her lost children. She felt that she, too, was born to someday feel that same intensity of grief. As the keening rose and fell she became Eugenia, bereft of her children. Her own throat sang with the strange women on the meadow.

Two men dressed in cattle skins, with cattle heads, appeared at the edge of the dark. Each held a child by the hand, the children dressed in buckskin with bright designs made of dyed porcupine quill beads sewn all over their clothes. Their dark hair was braided and oiled. Jen and Arn could see that one was a girl, the other a boy, the two children about their own ages. The mourning song rose higher as the cattle men led them toward the stone.

The little girl’s face was rigid with fear, though she walked steadily, the cattle man’s hand on her arm. Jen trembled with her and couldn’t breathe. She had never known a girl her age but she knew this girl in the deepest possible way, fearing for her as if she herself were approaching the unknown ceremony.

Arn saw the fear and bravery of the boy, who walked erect, his dark face set against any weakness. He would never cry or try to run away from what he had to do, though whatever it was caused hidden terror. Arn felt it in his bones like a chill.

Without a sound a deer—a man wearing the head and coat of a great antlered buck—appeared at the head of the stone. The cattle men, still holding the children’s arms, took their places next to the crow and the porcupine. To the foot of the stone came a figure all in long white fur, with a white animal face, bearded in white, with narrow curved horns. This one wore the skin of a mountain goat.

The fires grew tall, their orange flames, higher than the men, wavering as their highest wands burned out in the upper air. The keening grew as a man came forward, naked to the waist except for a long necklace of polished teeth, holding in his right hand a knife that shone copper or bronze. The knife was short, like the sticking knife at home, with a sturdy broad blade. The man’s dark hair was pulled back and tied with rawhide behind his stretched, grim face.

The cattle man who held the girl lifted her to the stone, where she lay on her back. Her chest and arms trembled but she made no sound. The cattle man holding the boy lifted him up and placed him beside the girl, where he, too, trembled but his stern young face didn’t change. The man with the knife stepped forward and raised it over the children, point down.

Jen started up, ready to cry out and run to the stone, but Arn held her arm, whispering, “Quiet, quiet!”

Just then a tree, moving on human legs, came out of the darkness and stood between the man and the children. It was really a man holding a young evergreen, the soft needles and branches hiding his upper body. The small cones and short needles of the tree were like those of the great evergreen of the ledges, though this tree was so young and soft it was hard to compare them. The tree stood quietly, not moving, hiding the children from the knife. The mourning song faded, but underneath was still a low hum of sadness, muted but not gone.

The goat and the deer raised their heads to the night sky, their front hooves out over the children on the stone. All was quiet except for the low humming of the women and the windy crackling of the fires. Black clouds moved past the thin moon without changing shape, silent in a wind that was far above this place.

With a harsh cry like a cough the knife man hacked a branch from the tree, then another, the soft boughs falling lightly to the ground. The keening song rose again with each falling branch until the tree was naked and the women’s song was a cry that filled the night. The knife rose high above the children. As it began its swift plunge Jen cried out but could not be heard above the rising chant of grief that came from the men and women on the meadow. The men in animal masks had surrounded the stone so that the two children could not be seen. The waning fires flickered orange and red, staining the moving edges of the animal heads as if their light were blood.

Then several of the animal men lifted the two bodies to their shoulders. The people, now silent, followed the bearers of the children back across the meadow into the darkness. The embering fires glowed in a wide half-circle around the stone.

Arn and Jen crouched side by side behind the jagged rim of the stone platform. A cool mist moved over them, coating the stones and their faces with moisture. In the soft dimness of the mist and ember light, they were still, staring at each other, feeling small and abandoned. “The children,” Jen whispered. “The children.”

Arn could not make his feelings clear to himself. Those had been people. He didn’t know, yet he must know, what had happened to the children. The children were still with him though ages seemed to have passed since he watched their fear and trembling. It was their acquiescence that filled him with doubts about his own judgement and made his feelings hurtful and deep. What had happened did not seem all wrong, but how could it not be wrong? He himself had killed, stopped life and revealed, with the sharp blade of his own knife, those inner parts of animals that made them live. Killed them and eaten them. He, too, was an animal, alive and seeing, as was Jen. They, too, could die as easily as he had killed. And it was not easy for those people. To the animals they pretended to be on that dark night, whose skins and meat they had taken, they would prove their kinship by sacrificing two of their own kind. But it was wrong. The brave boy and the brave and fearful girl, willing to die. He felt deep hurt, a round, swelling hurt inside because of feelings he could not understand.

Jen thought of that boy who would not show any fear in his face. She admired his bravery but she wanted to shout that it was wrong, all of it was wrong. And the girl—if only she could have known her and had her as a friend. But even in her loss she felt responsible, as if she had something to do with the ceremonies she had only observed. The girl had not cried out that it was wrong. Though the women mourned, no one tried to stop it. It seemed Jen’s own failure too. Then there was Oka, whose presence in this world, or in this valley, now seemed to fade, as if the wolves’ kill she had seen was Oka, and that death natural and inevitable, unlike the deaths she had just witnessed, done by her own kind to her own kind.

Though the mist was damp and uncomfortable, it was much warmer than the night before. The valley seemed, perhaps because of the lake of warm water, to vary a whole season in its temperatures. Arn took Jen, who was sobbing and shuddering, to the protected place they had found beneath the great tree’s root. He didn’t dare light a fire, so they lay down next to each other, for warmth, and shut their eyes.

It seemed a long time, but it was no more than minutes before they were asleep. Then, sometime before dawn, they were taken, slowly and easily, by a dream in which a calm, dry voice, neither kind nor cruel, spoke to them. They were high in the air, with the meadow spread below them, the grasses moving in swathes that changed from green to gold in rolling movements of the wind as the grass bent in warm sunlight a hundred feet below. They were cradled in soft green arms, though in the dream this did not seem strange. “What you have seen and are seeing and will see is true,” the voice told them. The language was not theirs, though it did not seem strange that they could understand it.

“The people, after they understood what they had done, went away,” the voice said in the whispery tones of the wind.

Each child, without speaking, asked what the people had done.

“They changed in their hearts,” the voice said. “They came to believe they owned the valley and all its creatures.”

I’d never do that, each child thought. The green arms were strong and soft around them.

“In the other world they forgot what they had done, and lost each other. They remembered nothing.”

Are the Old People all gone?

“The world is merciless yet not cruel. All living things must die. Change is the law. It is the law that gave you birth and what joy you have had.”

We want to go home.

“All you will be given is knowledge.”

But we want to go home.

“They held the creatures prisoners in pens, fed them and gained their trust, only to betray them at the end. Others they changed through generations until their only desire was to kill their own kind. They made of the wild a slaughterhouse. They became worse than what they most feared.”

Home. We want to go home.

The green arms that held them faded with the voice, became a coolness that was the damp needles and the gray rock where they lay. They were cold, and as they woke they felt mean in their discomfort, angry without anyone to blame. Jen felt a pout upon her face. Arn felt that he had had enough; he shouldn’t have followed Jen in the first place. He got to his knees, shrugging off his old feeling of responsibility. He had to get out of here. He must get up and look, be careful, hide, escape. Dawn was just breaking.

As he rose cautiously to peer into the mist, Jen watched him. He moved slowly, silently, like a hunter, his eyes alert and cold. While he looked out into the mist he was so still he might have been taken for a stone. His eyes were simple, instruments as pure as the eyes of a bird. He reminded her of her father at those times in the woods when he would freeze to look and listen. He seemed not to exist, then, as her father, not even to exist as a person, just as eyes that observed. In his immobility Arn seemed more a part of the horror they had witnessed than the brother she knew, who had saved her life from the cold and built shelter and a fire to warm her.