People of the River(120)

''When you learn that everything you want, everything you crave and believe in, is just sparkflies flitting through the darkness — then you'll find First Woman's Cave. Yes, Bat spends a great deal of time chasing sparkflies . . . and if he would just let himself die, why, he'd find out that he didn't need those glittering flies at all."

I'm dying now, Wanderer," she whispered as her mouth started to quiver.

Whiffs of smoke fluttered in the northern sky like windswept feathers. How many people had died? Was the war still going on? She didn't know how long such things lasted. Didn't the warriors just attack, kill people, and leave?

Lichen tugged the thong around her neck to pull the Stone Wolf out from beneath the green ritual shirt. The Wolf flashed in the sun.

"Are you in there. Spirit?" she called. "I ... I need help. Can you talk to me?"

She received no answer.

The deer in the meadow bolted suddenly, bounding among the rocks that skirted the bluff. Frantically, Lichen's gaze raced over the winding path—and there, far below, she saw five warriors trotting along her backtrail. Occasionally they would stop to make sure of the tracks, then take off again.

Panic burned through Lichen's veins like wildfire.

She grabbed the fire sticks she'd made from chokecherry branches, tucked them in her belt, and ran. Her feet pounded the gritty stone as she ran down along the crumbling edge of the cliff, out of sight of the trail. Are they looking for me? No, no, why would they be looking for a little girl? But maybe they want to kill everyone who lived in Redweed. Maybe they're hunting down the people who escaped.

"You won't leave any tracks across this stone," she panted to herself. "They won't be able to follow you."

But they would find her smoldering fire.

Then they would fan out to search for her. Warriors knew how to hunt for people. She had heard her mother talk about old battles where warriors crawled into every cranny to catch people they didn't like.

She forced her feet to move faster. Rounding a boulder, she pounded along a shadowed ledge where alumroot sprouted in the tracery of cracks. The shaggy stalks tugged at her tattered hem.

Movement ahead! Lichen grabbed onto a rock to stop herself so she could see. Melting against the rock, she hid in its shadows. With each puff of breath that escaped her lips, a glittering wreath of sand flitted before her face.

They speckled the bluff above her like black ants. Fifty, a hundred? More warriors? Coming up from the south?

Lichen whirled to look back toward her breakfast fire. The five men who had been working out her trail were trotting toward it. She could just make out the top of their bobbing heads.

A cry strangled in her throat. "Oh, what should I . . . where ..."

She looked over the ledge. There, eight hands below, was a lip of rock no wider than two hands across. Urgently, she scrambled over the edge and landed safely on the lip. Sunlit nothingness spread below. When she moved, gravel scritched under her sandids before rolling over the brink and tumbling a hundred hands to the jagged, uptilted slabs at the base of the cliff.

A war whoop split the air. Lichen clutched the rock face in desperate fright.

Screams and shouts rang out like the baying of coyotes. Were the two groups of warriors enemies? Had they gotten into a fight? Lichen forced herself to inch along the lip, seeking a better hiding place.

A garbled shriek echoed as a man's body rolled off the bluff top and wheeled through the air before her.

Lichen let out a stunned cry and clawed to maintain her hold on the crumbling limestone. For what seemed an eternity, she fought blind, sickening terror as she teetered on the narrow lip. The world swayed with each jolt of her heart. Her sense of balance had fled with the horror. The rock itself seemed to shudder beneath her feet.

"Bird-Man, Bird-Man . . . Bird-Man," she began, a choking litany filled with tears. "Bird-Man, help me. Help me . . . Bird-Man ..."

While the sounds of battle continued above. Lichen mustered the courage to take another step, and another. She

scratched viciously at the limestone to hook her thumbs in the crevices. Her nails split and bled.

''Help me, Bird-Man! Where are you? You're supposed to be my Spirit Helper!"

Her questing hand hunted wildly for the next hold . . . and sank into a womb of cool air. Lichen gasped. Her eyes went wide with hope. Patting the emptiness, she carefully lowered herself to peer into the cave.

"... You must go to a cave in this world. It will be dark, cold. But fire burns there."

Fear surged in her veins. What was in there?

The screams of the dying still pierced the air above her.

Falling to her knees, she crawled into the cave.



Hailcloud roughly jerked the shell-inlaid war club from the hand of his enemy and tied it to his own belt. The man's body flopped lifelessly, though blood still pulsed around the arrow embedded in his chest. Hailcloud took a deep breath. With a dizzy feeling of triumph, he gazed out at the broken bodies sprawled across the heights. Two enemies still made weak swimming motions while they died. But Hailcloud had lost only one man—young Crayfish. At the age of thirteen, this had been his first battle-walk. Who would tell the boy's mother? Would any of his party be left alive when all this was over?