As he started up the steep slope, he stumbled, almost dropped her, and clutched her to his broad chest. “Careful,” he hissed, more to himself than to her. “Careful now. We are almost there.”
With his sandals skidding and clattering on the wet shells, he carried her to the top of the mound and gently lowered her body. The view from up here was gorgeous. Whitecaps glistened down the length of the wide Forks River, and for as far as he could see, lightning slashed the stormy sky.
“You’re home,” he said, and bent to stroke her face. Her skin felt cold and clammy.
Sonon straightened. For a few brief instants, he did not hear the rain or the wind through the branches. His souls were filled with a terrible silence. Each person, before he crossed the bridge to the afterlife, had to discover what he was running from and why. This moment—this exact moment—was the heartbeat of his own search. The terror that had stalked him all his life.
“The crow comes, the crow comes, beat the drum, hide the young, and run, run, run,” he sang as he tried to focus his eyes. A dark fluttering filled his head. The iron-gray night was suddenly broken and shimmering, as though each instant was nothing more than a shattered glimpse of death.
Desperation tingled his veins.
He lifted his face to the storm … . The rain washed her blood from his hands … . The roar of Thunderers drowned his agonized cries.
When he could breathe again, he choked out the words, “One f-final task.”
He grabbed the leather cord of his gorget and lifted his precious conch shell pendant from around his neck. The False Face image carved into the shell stared up at him with hollow eyes. Holding it in both hands, he breathed his soul into it, then placed it upon her chest, right over the protruding shaft of the arrow. As he straightened, the old, tarnished, copper beads that encircled the collar of his cape clicked together.
“When I reach the bridge to the afterlife, remember me,” he whispered.
He watched the cascades of falling leaves that showered the forest while he thought about death: hers and his own. There was a bridge that spanned a black abyss of nothingness, and each soul had to cross it to reach the afterlife. Standing on this side of the bridge were all the animals a man had known in his life. Those he had helped defended him and gave him the time to cross the bridge. Those he had hurt chased him, trying to make him fall into the abyss, where his soul would float in black emptiness for eternity. On the opposite side of the bridge—if a man was going to make it—he saw all the people he’d ever loved, waiting for him. A man who was not going to make it across saw nothing.
Sonon knew, for he had stood upon the bridge many times and seen across the border of death to what lay beyond. That emptiness still lived in his dreams, calling to him in a lover’s voice, luring him to step onto the planks. Someday he would freely walk into those open arms and never return. He longed for that black peace with all his heart.
Cold wind rustled the trees around him, and leaves pirouetted through the air.
He sucked several deep breaths into his lungs and forced his trembling legs down the midden slope toward the trail that led east.
Four
Gonda pulled his elkhide cape more tightly around his muscular shoulders. Sunlight penetrated the forest in bars and streaks of fallow gold, but there was no warmth to it. He was a slender man with a round face and heavy brow. He had seen twenty-six summers pass, but this morning he felt older than the forests. As he knelt to examine a washed-out track in the trail, his short black hair fell forward.
“What are you?” he whispered. “Nothing?”
The scuff mark was frost-rimmed and skimmed with ice. It could have been made by anything—a deer, a man, even a raccoon. He vented a frustrated breath and rose to his feet.
Buttonbush thickets crowded the spaces between the towering sycamores and shorter sassafras trees. Birds perched among the branches, plucking at the few shriveled fruits that clung to the leafless red stalks. A riot of sparrow and wren songs filled the air.
He expelled a breath and propped his fists on his hips.
At dawn, he’d found dim marks at the edges of the flooded trail, as though a man had been dragging a heavy pack through the water and, occasionally, the pack had scooped up mud. But the marks had vanished over one hand of time ago. In desperation, both of them had kept pushing onward up the same trail, hoping to spot more sign, but so far they’d seen nothing certain.
After two days, this was the most promising trail they’d found—if it was a trail—and every instant they delayed, every moment they spent discussing what they should do next, their enemy was getting farther and farther away.