Tsuga's Children (24 page)

The guard had pointed to Arn and Arel. The “other one” was Jen. The children huddled together in one corner of the cage as Doro, mumbling through his hurt jaw, undid the chains that secured the door latch. Jen felt something being pressed into her hand; it was her knife Arn was giving back to her. While she was shielded by Arn and Arel, she hid it again in her boot. “If you’re going to be alone, you should have it,” Arn whispered. “Maybe you can get away and find Tsuga.”

The guards pulled Am and Arel out of the cage. One of them had asked a question the children couldn’t hear, but they did hear the reply: “Mori says they can’t be brother and sister—it’s an old law. Anyway, what business is it of yours?”

Again thongs were looped about Arn’s and Arel’s necks. Arel began to say goodby to Jen, but a guard said, “Quiet!” and threatened her with his fist. They tried to say goodby with their eyes; then Arn and Arel were led away.

Doro retrieved his water bucket from the cage. As he watched the departing guards he absent-mindedly shut the door and wound the chains around the latch.

But Jen, as he had looked away, had slipped out of the door and gone around behind the cage, so he shut the door on no one. He gave a cursory glance at her then, but didn’t notice that there were two sets of bars between him and the small figure, who seemed to be still inside. Jen waited behind the cage until Doro had returned to his hut, then long enough after that to hope that he was asleep. She had read his inattention to her as he shut the door, and acted upon it at once. It was her way.

But now where to go to escape this unhappy village and find Tsuga? She felt so small, and the world so large.

Someone was watching her. She knew it all at once. She moved her head slowly, looking for the eyes she knew were bent upon her. In the cattle pens eyes would see her, from here and there through the bars, but they were terrified, unwondering eyes, not the one intelligence she felt directed solely upon her. Then she saw the two brown eyes, deep and luminous. They were the eyes of a deer, a large and handsome doe that stood inside the cattle pen. The presence of the doe made a place of calm and silent intent within the pen of frightened animals. Jen had seen no other deer in the pens or cages, nor heard a deer’s whistle or blat. But here was the one doe within a fence it could easily jump, if unwounded. Then the doe did rise effortlessly into the air, with seeming slowness clearing the bars and coming down first on forelegs that bent gracefully, then on all four legs. Her white flag stood high; she was proud and unwounded.
Follow me,
the eyes commanded.

Jen followed as the doe walked slowly between the pens until they came to an empty shed. The doe entered. In the shadows of the dark shed the doe’s message to her was
We will wait here until dark.
The doe lay down in the darkest corner, curled as deer lie.
Rest here, upon my side, and sleep.
Jen lay down within the curl of the doe’s warm body, and put her head against her flank. Here was the warmth and strength she had known next to her mother, so long ago. She felt the deep rhythm of the doe’s heart, and fell smoothly into a sleep like the sleep of home.

It was full dark when the doe’s muzzle touched her face and woke her.
Come now,
the doe said without words, and they left the shed to find the sky strangely lighted, a flickering orange light reflected back downward by smoke and mist that hung over the village. They went past the pens, over a fence, and came to a street full of people, many carrying torches. The Chigai, men, women and children, were assembling now for a journey that would begin tonight.
They go in sorrow to the Tree,
the doe answered Jen’s unspoken question.
Against their deepest will they go to witness the deaths of children.

Arn and Arel! Jen turned to the doe.

All things must die,
the doe’s sad eyes told her.
When the columns move, you will walk among them in the shadows. You will do what you will do.
Then the doe turned and was gone into the dark.

That was how Jen left the village of the Chigai, walking silently among the people, her hood shading her eyes from the flickering torches. None of the subdued people spoke to her, and they spoke little to each other. From some of the older women came long sighs that were the beginnings of a chant of sorrow Jen had heard before.

The people traveled slowly, resting by day and, as befitted the dark purpose of their journey, moving only at night. Before dawn Jen would lag behind, then hide during the days. At dusk she would rejoin them and eat the evening meal, the food handed out freely to her as it was to everyone.

After four nights of walking and four days of rest, the Chigai came to the meadow of the Great Tree and set up their tents on its southeastern border. Now, with the people not moving in the night, she had a chance to go among them in search of Am and Arel. She had thought to go westward to try to find Tsuga and Aguma, but she had no idea where they might be, and the next night would be that of the seventh day, when the council fire would be held again. No, she thought, she must find her brother and her friend, who had followed and tried to rescue her.

Along the border of the meadow the dark forest rose, the leafless winter underbrush thick at its edges. Here by the warm lake the snow of the last storm had melted, so the earth was soft and the going silent. She passed through brush a larger person would have been caught in as if by snares, and began her search along the eastern edge of the camp. She knew when she had come near Mori’s headquarters by the numbers of brawny guards in their cattle skins, with their heavy bows and broadaxes. They stood around fires, laughing and talking in raucous voices that seemed to brag with every burst of sound. They were so different from the people of the Chigai, who had offered her food without question, and who were sad but resigned about the coming sacrifice. She had heard them talking, saying that Mori was the leader and knew best. They might wish for this, and that, but there was nothing they could do about it, and how sad it was, the necessity to sacrifice children to the spirits of the animals. All this she had heard in passing.

Ahead of her was a large tent surrounded by four campfires, one at each compass point, two guards standing at each fire. These were huge men who stood stiffly, not speaking to each other, with their strung bows held upright before them. Although there were more than a hundred tents along the edge of the meadow, some as large as this one, she thought this must be Mori’s. There was a chill here, a pervasive fear that she could almost smell. The air itself told her to go away, run away, don’t come near.

She crouched by a jumble of stones, the grayish brush between her and the nearest guards at their fire. She saw no way to get closer. Arn and Arel might not be kept in this tent, even if it was Mori’s, but how could she find out?

She hadn’t been paying any attention at all to what was right in front of her—a small hole between two stones—but now she felt life here, and thoughts, small but intense ones. There was a small animal not two feet away from her, aware of her and worried about what she was and what she wanted so near his hole. Why had she stopped for so long right over his hole? Did she catch and eat his kind? Yes, he could smell that she had eaten meat. He saw now that she had two eyes close together on the front of her head; she couldn’t see far around to the sides, or in back of her: she was a hunting animal, and he was afraid. See how intensely she crouched and waited, her hard eyes glittering.

No, she thought. No, little animal. What are you—a coney rabbit, a chipmunk, a white-footed mouse?

He was himself; he ate roots and grasses and the bark from stems and branches. He didn’t have a name for himself or his kind, but they were warm together in their dry den, though always in danger, in danger. They harmed no one, they had many young in the right seasons, they were always listening and watching, nearly always hungry, but never for blood. Then he thought, Your thoughts confuse me and hurt my head.

I am not here to eat you, but I must use your mind and body for a little while. I’m sorry to force you, but I must: I have that gift and I must use it.

Already Jen was deep in his consciousness, seeing in a ghostly light, half-whiskery feel, the labyrinths of moist and dry tunnels, used and unused, whose turns and openings were the property of his mind. Several led beneath the meadow, turning around or under submerged boulders, meeting with other tunnels and going on. She knew now, by the size of those tunnels he could use, that he must be a coney rabbit, too large for the passages of moles or mice, terrified of the dens of foxes, neutrally aware of the hibernating woodchucks in their long sleep.

There is a tunnel that leads beneath the tent, where the tread of man frightens you; you will go there with a message from me, and if you are given a message in return, you will bring it back to me.

Arel, she thought. Can you hear me through this small, harmless, simple mind? I am below you now, in the ground, but it is Jen, come to try to help you. Tell me what it might help me to know.

Now go, little rabbit, and return to me.

She heard the faintest scurry, and he was gone. While she waited the dampness of the earth came through her clothes at knees and elbows. The guards were changed with much stamping, marching and saluting with weapons, the watchfires heaped with fresh wood. The night was moonless, the air still and cold.

After a long time she heard in the farthest part of her mind the thoughts and feelings of the rabbit, even heard his paws as he crept, frightened, back to the entrance of the hole. He trembled at the faint old odors of carnivores whose trails he had crossed—weasels, stoats and fishers, their scents meaning death. But he had gone and come back.

Jen, she heard now, faintly. Jen, we’re here. We’re tied together and guarded. You can’t come here. Don’t try to come here. Go find Tsuga and Aguma, Jen. Leave this place. Mori knows you escaped, and he’s in a rage. They search for you everywhere. You must get away, get away. Arn sends his love, and so do I. Goodby, brave Jen.

But Jen heard more; she heard what Arel didn’t want her to know—that poor Doro had been flayed alive and pegged upon the hide-drying racks for the crows to eat; that tomorrow night Arel and Arn were to be killed upon the stone altar by the Tree.

Jen never took advice; she acted upon deeper, more hazily complicated information. She knew she couldn’t go into Mori’s tent, but there were unanswered questions she must think about. What were the wolf, the boar and the bear to Mori and his purposes? She would find them and see.

The little rabbit still trembled at the entrance to his hole, so she thought to him, Go back to your warm family now; I hope Ahneeah knows what you have done for me.

Then she crept back into the forest and continued along its edge. Soon she would have to leave it for the open meadow between the tents and fires, so she studied the lay of shadows out there, each tent causing shadows, each fire creating lanes of light.

With all her concentration she tried to hear the wolf, to visualize his yellow eyes, feel the horror of his bonds, wherever he might be. And the bear, hurt by the dead-fall trap and now bound with rope, and the boar whose ugliness could not mask his thoughts—she sent her concern out to them across the camp of the Chigai, wherever they might be.

But she heard nothing from them in reply, only the odd dream-thoughts of a ruffed grouse perched for the night in a nearby spruce, so she left the protection of the brushy edge and followed a shadow line across the meadow, between the looming tents. She saw a patrol of guards enter one tent without hail or warning and make the people come out into the light of torches. Any child near her size they took and held in the light to see the color of its eyes; they were searching for her. At one point she had to cross a band of light, but no one saw her. She moved and stopped, moved and stopped to listen and look the way a robin stops and is suddenly quiet on the ground. Passing one tent she felt a sense of forced immobility and bondage that was so strong her own wrists seemed tied together. Then she knew that something within the tent was bound against the whole of its will. It was the wolf whose mind reached out to her. She crouched against the side of the tent and felt the thoughts of boar and bear, too. This was the place.

In her boot she had the knife Amu had picked out for her in the bowyer’s hogan. She had never used it. Now she took it out of her boot, out of its sheath of folded leather. The rawhide thongs that made its handle had now dried as hard as wood. No light came through the hides of the tent; if there were guards, they would be at the fire around on the other side, near the door flap. Carefully, as quietly as she could, she cut a slit in the hide tent, down then sideways, then back up to make a flap large enough for her to enter.

Inside, the light of the guards’ fire gave a dim glow where it shone through the skins at the front. The trussed animals lay on their sides, breathing thickly through their muzzled mouths and noses. She felt the terrible frustration of their forced immobility, their muscles unable to flex, the unnatural helplessness of wild strength that had been free. Her first instinct, because she felt for them so deeply, was to cut their bonds; but then she felt caution; she must think with them first.

They knew her. The bear’s thoughts came to her:
I smelled you once, in the bog, but I was neither hungry nor angry, so I moved away. Now set me free.

You would set me free,
the wolf thought.
In our cages that was your intention if you could.

The boar thought,
You have eaten my kind, but not in cruelty; now we have a common enemy. Set me free.

Their pain was too deep for thought. She knew that if she cut their bonds, there would be a great alarm. Perhaps they would escape, but she couldn’t run in the night as an animal could. But she could no longer stand their agony. She must act. Swiftly her hands found the thongs of the muzzles, the ropes that bound their feet and legs. Her knife slid smoothly through thong and rope. The bear was loose first; without pausing to shake out his cramped limbs he gave a roar and bounded out to the guards. One scream of terror came before the sounds of thrashing and ripping. Then the boar followed in swift silence. The wolf looked at her once, his yellow eyes seeming a source of light rather than reflectors. She saw his exultation, his wild gladness; then he turned and was gone.