People of the Nightland(14)
A prickle climbed Windwolf’s spine. Kakala! Six times since last summer, he’d almost caged Windwolf’s ragtag group of warriors. Only desperate acts on Windwolf’s part had saved them. But the day was coming, he knew, when without more warriors, Kakala would win. “It’ll be harder to find me if I’m alone than if I’m surrounded by tens of warriors.”
“Blessed Ancestors, what can I say to reach you?” Silt tipped his chin skyward, as though looking to the Spirits for help. Despite the chill wind, sweat glistened on his tanned skin, soaking the ends of hair that stuck to his forehead.
Windwolf exhaled the words, “I’ll send a runner if I need you.”
“Yes. I know you will. If you can. What happens when we learn Nightland warriors plan to attack another band? Do I leave them defenseless to rescue you?”
Windwolf lifted a hand. “There are always places to hide. I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Silt demanded. “Duck into some hole and pray to the Ancestors that when you have to come out to hunt nobody recognizes you? Run for Sky Dog Village where you know you have friends, worried every instant that Nightland spies are going to spot you and you’ll endanger everyone there?”
“Why can’t you let this go?” He met the hot challenge in Silt’s eyes with equanimity, feeling like an observer rather than a participant. It took only moments before Silt’s gaze softened, going from fiery to sick worry. He straightened, walked up the trail to a rise, and stared across the Lake River Valley. Beyond the braided channels weaving through the stony riverbed lay the Lame Bull lands. In another four days he would reach Headswift Village where it stood on its high point off to the east.
The Lame Bull village was a natural fortress. As the Ice Giants retreated northward, they had left massive piles of gravel and tumbled boulders behind. The Lame Bull People lived in rockshelters and hollows created by the boulders. Traders who’d visited there said the place was like a rabbit warren, tunnels twisting under the hill like tree roots, going in every direction. Many reputedly ran deep underground.
Windwolf said, “It will be dark soon. I have to cross the Lake River channels while I still have light.”
He thought of Headswift Village. Living in such a manner was a strange notion. His Sunpath People preferred hide-covered lodges in open meadows, or along rivers. In their lands, ten days’ run to the south, they had oaks, hickory trees, and walnuts. Here, at the edge of the Ice Giants, only pine and spruce seemed to flourish.
Silt said, “I’m fighting a losing battle, aren’t I? You’re not going to let me stay to guard your back.”
They stared at each other a moment, exchanging a silent communication.
Then Silt turned, face somber, and trotted back south, toward his people and a future Windwolf could no longer believe in.
Five
Old Lookingbill, chief of the Lame Bull People, had once been blessed with a tall and robust body. In his old age, the muscle had faded, leaving only large bones and withered skin behind. What little hair he had left had gone silver-white, and his back had developed a slight hunch as the endless seasons wore him down. For this special night he wore a rich beaverhide cape over a beautifully tanned hunting shirt that hung to his knees. His feet were clad in high moccasins, the tops crafted from the neck hide of short-faced bear, tanned with the fur on.
He and his grandson, Silvertip, stood in the crowd that had gathered on one of the lower trails and gazed admiringly at the line of people carrying torches as they wound up the hill. The procession weaved through the boulders like a gleaming snake. On holy days the torches seemed to flare brighter, and the night smelled sweetly of burning spruce sap.
Headswift Village was an anomaly. He knew of no other place like it. In the hilly moraine country south of the Thunder Sea, it rose in a high prominence that gave a stunning vista of the Ice Giants to the north. To the south the braided path of Lake River could be seen, and beyond it, the endless forests of the Sunpath People.
From the time he was a child, he had wandered through the maze of tunnels beneath the village, and wondered at the great rocks. Once he had even tried to make a smaller version of it, piling stones on top of each other and sifting dirt over the whole. The notion had lived with him since those boyhood days that just after the creation, giants had piled these huge rocks in the same fashion, though, as he aged, he’d come to the less-spectacular conclusion that the great pile of stone had been left behind by the retreating Ice Giants. He had seen similar formations melting out of the retreating ice.
For generations his people had lived here, seven days’ journey south of the Nightland camps that fringed the westernmost extent of the Thunder Sea. They had hunted and collected in the surrounding forests, bringing their catch, firewood, and other necessities back. Water was obtained from a spring just below the massive pile of rock.