People of the Sea(14)

Kestrel’s heart almost stopped beating. She spun around.

On top of the hill, Iceplant stood silhouetted against the blazing background of the bonfire. Tannin and Cottontail held his arms apart while Lambkill brutally beat him over the head with a war club. As Kestrel watched, Iceplant’s knees buckled. Lambkill took the knife from his belt and thrust it into Iceplant’s stomach, then sawed upward, into the chest cavity. A small, wretched cry escaped Iceplant’s lips as Tannin and Cottontail let him drop to his knees. The crowd backed away. Dark blood gushed from Iceplant’s wound. As though fighting to stay alive, he braced a hand on the ground and dug his fingers into the mud. He coughed. Red foam bubbled at his lips. With great effort, he lifted his head and



stared out beyond the village toward her. “Run!” he choked out. “Run, Kestrel…”

She thrashed away through the sage, whispering to herself in terror: “Run uphill, uphill.” Wounded animals always run downhill. Lambkill will expect it. He thinks that I’m beaten, that he won’t have any trouble finding me. That’s why he’s not chasing me yet.

She circled the village and forced her exhausted legs up the slope until she could look down on the bonfire from the red ridge west of the village. When she saw Iceplant, Kestrel started to shake so badly that she could barely keep standing. He lay on his back, peaceful now, rain glistening in his dark hair. Firelight coated his wide, dead eyes with a patina of pure gold, turning them luminous. When the wind gusted, the light flitted through the crowd like a homeless ghost. It fluttered over the face of each person who had witnessed the crime.

Lambkill stood talking to Tannin before the lodge of Old Porcupine. He was smiling, and then he laughed. A harsh, deep laugh that came from his belly. Hatred rose in Kestrel! a hatred so violent, so terrifying in its strength, that it blurred the rest of the world. “I’m going to kill you, my husband,” she swore. “Someday I will find you vulnerable

…”



Lightning split the darkness, but the Thunderbeings kept silent as though they, too, feared the dagger of flame that had crept into Kestrel’s soul and begun consuming it alive. In the lightning’s eerie afterglow, the Mammoth Mountains in the west stood silhouetted like huge beasts shocked abruptly into stillness. One peak looked as though it had its trunk up and was beckoning, saying, “This is the way. Come this way …”

Kestrel clutched her belly and gazed back at the village, Iceplant’s body wavered in the windblown shreds of firelight, sometimes there, sometimes not.

Tenderly, she whispered, “I’m going to the sea, Iceplant… as you wanted … to your mother’s people. I pray they take us in.”





Three


White hair fell over Oxbalm’s eyes as a gust of night wind swept the beach, bringing the pungent odor of salt and sand to his nostrils. The fringes on his buckskin jacket flapped. He drew his knees closer to his chest and peered at the old woman beside him. Sumac sat like a stone sentinel, her wrinkled face gleaming with spray, and she watched the beach through eyes even more ancient than his own. He gently patted her knee, and she twined her fingers with his.

Snores and the coughs of children echoed from Otter Clan Village in the fir forest behind them. Everyone else slept. Only Oxbalm and Sumac had been up all night. They had sat together watching the Star People sail their canoes through the dark seas in the Land of the Dead, listening to the night birds, watching the fluorescence of the surf… remembering.

Through the eyes of their souls, they could penetrate the veil of the present and peer into the past. Only there could Oxbalm still see huge herds of mammoths roaming the coast…

He could smell dust. Hear pounding feet. Dust and pounding feet and the voices of mammoths calling. Where the sea breeze parted the haze, trunks lifted, trumpeting in fury. Hunters appeared and disappeared in the dust. Youth pumped in Oxbalm’s veins as he ran, his dart nocked in his atlatl, chasing a straggling calf. With his Spirit Song on his lips, he sprinted forward, unafraid of the bulls that watched him, their tusks gleaming in the brilliant sunlight. Other hunters Sang. They all ran to encircle the herd.

Oxbalm shouted “Cast!” and a hail of darts pierced the



warm summer air. They arced up and fell in a shower of glinting chert points. Whoops of joy mixed with the screams of wounded animals. Oxbalm cast again, and again. Painted hunters wove around him, racing through the scattering herd, shouting, killing enough mammoths to feed their people for the entire winter.

Such a good dream. It swelled within Oxbalm like a blossoming flower, reminding him of the days when he had been one of the greatest of his people’s hunters, of the days when there had been too many mammoths to count. No one had starved back then. There had been no sicknesses that lasted for moons at a time and ran through the villages like a rampaging dire wolf. For too many winters to count, Oxbalm had watched the number of mammoths dwindle, until now only a few lumbering animals with haunted eyes remained. He hadn’t had a mammoth steak in six long cycles, and he yearned for one desperately.