Tsuga's Children (14 page)

Arn climbed down the stones at the edge of the platform to the wet meadow grass.

“Don’t, Arn,” Jen called. “Come back.” But she seemed so far away, her voice so whispery and thin he could barely hear it.

The sentry stones were dim figures out on the meadow. As he left the ledges he felt as though he were floating out upon a broad lake, leaving the land behind. Mist and fog surrounded him as the ledges receded. The stone figure he approached grew more substantial. It turned from mist-gray to a darker color and had a sharper outline. It grew in height and width. In its immobility it was a presence that beckoned to him, half against his will. To his left and right other sentries faded into the mist in a wide circle. He had started toward this one and he would go right up to it and examine it. He would go straight up to it and look at it where it loomed, ancient and inscrutable in the half-light. It seemed to approach him as he walked toward it. Now he saw that it was different from the other stone sentries. It was not squared off at the shoulders, but had a head. Would there be carved stone eyes to look at him? He didn’t want to see their frozen expression, but still he approached. Then he saw, with a chill of fear, that this one was not all made of stone. Upon its granite shoulders sat the head of a boar, its red eyes gummy and spoiled. A wrinkled tongue hung out over the yellow tusks on one side, and along the black lips was the glint of somnolent maggots. He turned away from the sudden cold stench of carrion and ran back to Jen.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We must stay together,” he said.

They sat down side by side on the needles where they had slept. “We’ve got to go home,” Arn said.

“I had a dream,” Jen said, looking up into the ascending boughs of the tree, so high they seemed to be in another world where all was gray and green.

“So did I!” Arn said. “There was a voice …”

And then they heard a voice, a cracked, cackling old man’s voice, and looked around to see a bent, bony old man watching them and laughing, nodding and shaking his gnarled old face. Sparse silver hair stuck up above his ears, and his mouth was all black when open, except for one crooked yellow tooth at one side. They were afraid, and got up to run, but the old man shook his head and put his wrinkled hands out to reassure them, as if to say, “Now, now. How could I hurt you?” So their fear receded and they noticed how his buckskin tunic was ragged and split in places, his buckskin trousers stained with grease and dirt and worn clear through at the knees. His back was so bent that his head seemed at first to be growing out of his chest. Even looking down at them he seemed to have to raise his head. He leaned on a short, crooked, unstrung bow, and at his belt hung a quiver of arrows, some of their feathers missing.

But his eyes were bright, and the wrinkles at their edges were friendly.

He spoke to them in a strange language that at first sounded harsh, most of the words clipped and guttural, though others were longer, smooth as the words of a song.

Arn sat cross-legged, and so did Jen. The old man put down his bow, pushed his leather quiver aside on his belt, and sat cross-legged in front of them.

“Ah nee ah, no ah nee,” he said. When they shook their heads he raised his old hands and made them into pictures and actions as had the old lady so long a time ago, it seemed, when she sat on the bench by the hearth at home.

Arn answered with his hands, saying that they were Arn and Jen, pointing to himself and to Jen as he spoke their names out loud.

“Arn to Jen nee ah,” the old man said, nodding.

“Jen nee ah,” Jen said.

The old man smiled, pleased, but shook his head. “Jen ah nee,” he said, pointing to her.

“Jen ah nee,” she said, and he nodded, smiling so hard the bottom half of his face shortened and widened.

“Ganonoot ah nee,” the old man said, pointing to his chest, then to his one long yellow tooth. He made more signs with his hands.

“Snaggletooth,” Arn said.

“Ganonoot,” the old man said, smiling and pointing proudly at his tooth.

Arn asked him in hand language what this valley was called, and was he one of the Old People? As Arn moved his hands he spoke the words aloud so Jen could understand, and Jen found her own hands following Arn’s, learning each word as it was formed.

As the old man answered with his hands he spoke the words of his own language. “Nee a no notomanay … This is the world,” he said. “Have you been elsewhere? Yes, I am certainly old!”

Arn and Jen found that they learned each word of the new language as soon as they heard it once, that the rhythms of meaning grew deep into them.

“But we’ve heard stories about the Old People, and about Tsuga Wanders-too-far, and the Black Gate,” Arn said.

The old man’s eyes were still for a moment as he looked straight at Arn’s eyes, then he smiled and giggled, his dark gums clicking together. He told them he was so old, all he could do was tell stories. His bow, that once had the reach of a hundred paces, was as crippled as his back, and his arrows were warped and their fletching ragged.

“Only the old stories now, mind you!” he said. “These new stories, you can’t trust them at all. I mean you can listen to them, but you can’t trust them the way you can the old stories. I don’t know the new stories and I don’t
care
if I don’t remember the new stories. They can have the new stories, for all I care!”

He seemed to be getting so upset, Jen put her hand on his arm and patted him.

“I’m hungry,” the old man said. A tear followed a complicated track down beside his nose, out along a wrinkle to the corner of his mouth, back across another wrinkle to the middle of his chin, where it stayed.

“So are we,” Arn said. “We had porcupine the night before last but a lynx stole the rest of it.”

“And trout yesterday morning,” Jen said.

“But nothing since then?” Snaggletooth asked. “Your people didn’t give you food?” He got slowly to his feet, leaning on his bow, which by its worn places seemed more of a walking staff than a bow. “I thought,” he said in a whiny voice, “you might have a little bread, or bannock, or maybe a little smoked venison, or some dried apples, or some beef jerky, or some pemmican in your pack.”

“No, nothing to eat at all,” Arn said, “except for some powders to make tea.” He looked at Jen, and they exchanged a glance of dismay that the old man was so childish.

“Well!” Snaggletooth said. “I’m only an old man and don’t deserve respect like the others. When I lose my last two teeth I won’t be able to eat and that’s the end of it. Then they can forget the old stories, for all I care!” With that, tears came to his old eyes again and found various channels down his wrinkles.

“But what about your people?” Jen asked.

“People, people, they’re all the same. They don’t care about an old man.”

“If we had some food we’d give it to you,” Jen said, “but we just don’t have anything to eat.”

“Ha!” Snaggletooth said. “Have you eaten rotten boar head? I can smell one now. Have you licked the rim of the winter moon? Chewed on your own leather? I can tell you about hunger—that’s an old story if you want one.”

“We just want to go home,” Jen said.

Then something seemed to change, to harden in Snaggletooth, as if he remembered an old responsibility or maturity, and he said, “You’re just children. You won’t hurt anyone, will you?”

“No, we won’t,” Arn said.

“But you came with
them
last night, didn’t you?” He seemed shy as he pointed to the east, smiling without any mirth. “You came with the Chigai, didn’t you?”

“Chigai?” Arn said.

Snaggletooth spoke with his hands as he explained, though his eyes slyly doubted the necessity of explaining. “Chigai ah nee nonomen … The makers of prisons, the slave-keepers. You came with them last night, didn’t you?”

“No,” Arn said. “We were already here when those people came. We hid over there and watched them.”

“Did they really kill the boy and girl?” Jen asked.

“Kill? Kill? Do you call it kill when one can’t run away?”

Half mumbling to himself, his long tooth pushing his thin lip down, he said that there was a word for that kind of death, but no one could say it. None of the hunters could say it, so they had another word, and even that one was hard to say: murder. Snaggletooth shuddered as he said it, his hands quivering like oak leaves on a winter tree.

“Cold and hungry, cold and hungry,” he said. “Well, come with me, then. We’ve got a way to go. Can you walk, can you jump, can you crawl and creep and slip and slide? Hungry, hungry makes the feet go!”

“We want to go home,” Jen said.

“Home? This is home,” Snaggletooth said, pointing as he turned all the way around. “And the Tree is the center. Don’t you know anything at all? Didn’t Ahneeah give you any brains?”

In spite of his fear and hunger and lostness, Arn grew irritated. This old man seemed always to be talking about something beside the point. They were weak from hunger, and in danger; death seemed all around them. “We’ve never heard of Ahneeah and this is
not
our home!” he said, raising his voice and getting to his feet. Because of the old man’s stoop Arn was nearly as tall as Snaggletooth, who backed up in surprise and nearly tripped over his bow.

Then a deep voice from above called, “Over here, Bren. I’ve found him.” The voice was firm, with a calm authority in it that reassured Arn and Jen even before they knew who it might be. It was a grown-up voice, with no fear or craziness in it, and they were so exhausted and hungry they were ready to be children again.

A sturdy man in buckskin jumped down the ledges and stood looking at them in surprise. “Chigai nee ah?” he said. “Are you Chigai? I can see by the blood on the altar that they were here last night.” He carried a short, thick-handled bow, and at his waist hung a quiver of arrows and a stag-handled knife in a sheath. “Ganonoot—Snaggletooth—if you have your brains together, who are these children? How did you find them?”

“I’m hungry, Amu, hungry!” Snaggletooth said in a whining, quavering voice.

A boy Arn’s age came jumping down, rock to rock. He, too, was dressed in buckskin, and carried a strung bow. He had a fierce look, and when he saw Arn he strode forward aggressively and stared him in the face. “What have we here—Chigai?” he said. He seemed to be measuring Arn for a fight.

“We’re not Chigai,” Arn said. “We never heard of Chigai until this old man told us the word.” Arn stared back at the boy. He understood the fierce challenge he saw in the other’s bright brown eyes, but he had never seen a boy his own age and he was so curious he didn’t answer that expression at all.

“Come, Bren,” the man said. “Let’s sit and talk.” He reached into a pouch in the lining of his tunic and brought out several long brown pieces of smoked venison. Snaggletooth took one and immediately wet it with his tongue and lips, then hooked at it busily with his long tooth. Jen and Am each received a piece and thanked the man.

“Go ahead and eat; I can see you’re hungry. I am Amu, and this is Bren, my brother’s son. You can tell us your names when you’ve eaten,” Amu said. They all sat cross-legged, Amu and Bren watching Jen and Arn. “The Chi-gai are rarely hungry,” Amu said, “and they are of the People and don’t speak strangely, with strange rhythms, the way you do. No, go ahead and eat before you talk. We will wait.”

Snaggletooth, working on his venison, drooled out of one corner of his mouth. He had another tooth, a flat one, on his lower jaw, about an inch to the right of his long one, so to make them meet his jaw slid over so far that he drooled on his shirt. Occasionally he would gather up that place on his shirt, bring the buckskin to his mouth and suck the juices from it.

“Waste not,” Amu said, smiling at Jen, who had been watching this as she chewed.

When they had finished their meat, its strength growing warm in their blood, Jen said, “Thank you, Amu. That meat reminds us of home, and my father’s smokehouse.”

“You are very sad,” Amu said. “But who are you?”

“I’m Arn, and this is my sister, Jen,” Arn said. “We came here past a waterfall and through a long cave.” He pointed toward the northern mountains, now hidden in the cold mist.

“Ah!” Snaggletooth said. “There is an old story,
Ah-neeah and the People Who Left the World.
I will tell it now!”

“Wait, Snaggletooth,” Amu said, smiling and putting a hand on the old man’s hunched back. “Eat your meat. It’s not time for the telling of stories.”

“It has a waterfall and a cave!” Snaggletooth said. “It’s got bats and time and sorrow, and the longing of men to find out who they are!”

“I’m sure it has, old Clown, old Ganonoot,” Amu said affectionately. “And sometime you must tell it at the evening fire. But now I think we must go. The world is uneasy, and Tsuga will want to speak to Jen and Arn.”

“Tsuga!” Jen and Arn said at the same time.

“He is coming here in three days, for the meeting of the People and Council.”

“Here?” Arn said, remembering what they had seen in this place.

Amu looked at him for a moment, his wide face open and calm with its brown eyes and high, ruddy cheek-bones. “Don’t worry, Arn, we don’t leave blood on the stone altar. That is something new with the People—with the Chigai. But you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to; we do not have prisoners.”

“We should go home,” Jen said.

“But why did you come past the waterfall and through the cave?” Amu asked. “If your father lives through the mountains and beyond, why did you come here?”

“I almost can’t remember,” Jen said. “I thought it was to follow Oka, our cow, but now I don’t know why. And Arn followed me, to bring me back.”

“You must be brave, then, both of you.”

Arn saw that the boy, Bren, in spite of his challenging look, was impressed by Amu’s statement.

“Your father keeps cattle, then,” Amu said. The word “keeps” was a new one, and Jen and Arn saw that it was a polite word for holding prisoners.

“Just Oka, for her milk, and Brin to pull the sledge and plow,” Jen said.

“Ah,” Amu said.

“You don’t even have a bow with you,” Bren said to Am. “Do you have a knife?”