Her daughter’s eyes sought hers, and the girl frowned, as though in answer. The longer Kestrel gazed into those eyes, the brighter they grew, until they were so brilliant and beautiful that it hurt to look at them. Her soul seemed to twist and detach from her body to go flying, up, up—as if it had climbed onto the wings of soaring Thunderbeings.
The baby coughed, and the sound snapped Kestrel from her euphoria.
Trembling, she brought up the edges of her hide dress and tucked them around her daughter’s body, then moved the baby to her breast to nurse. “Twisting Cloud Girl… that will be your name, my daughter. For your eyes.”
“Mothers:.. Mother?”
The Unnamed Boy called forlornly into the black, glittering womb that encased him. But no one answered. . No one.
Not a breath stirred the dark haze, and loneliness ate at his soul like a starving beast.
“Mother? I want to live! Let me live. I can help you!”
The ebony weave of the womb unraveled into strands that swirled and changed their shades, reweaving into stunning patterns, like the face of Brother Rainbow twisted into multiple, interlacing spirals that spun outward into infinity…
Beautiful.
The Boy sucked his thumb as the colorful threads began to sway gently, rocking him back and forth like an invisible hand pushing the side of a cradle board suspended between two trees. He fell into terrible tears.
“Mother? Why can’t you hear me? I’ve been calling and calling to you! I’m not dead, Mother. I’m here. Up here. Alive in the Stars. Let me come down. Let me be with you. Please, Mother. I need to be with you. I won’t be any trouble. I promise. I just want to be close to you.
“Mother!” he shouted. “Let me be close to you!”
The rainbow fires turned into a Song .. faint at first, hard for him to hear, and then the crystalline notes rose like the wails of a thousand mammoths trumpeting in unison. They formed such a magnificent lullaby that it soothed his fears like cool salve on a hot wound.
He sucked his thumb more contentedly—though the music was not like his mother’s soft brown nipple. Not at all. The Rainbow fires could never take” that memory from him. Not ever…
He dreamed about it as he fell asleep, and he whispered
mournfully, “Why can’t you hear me. Mother? .. . I need you. I need you to hear me. I want to live.”
Four
Oxbalm grunted as he stretched to reach the meat that clung to the interior of the mammoth’s rib cage. The entire village had dedicated the morning to skinning the carcass and then to slitting the belly open and hauling out the heavy mass of intestines. The liver had been cut up into slabs and immediately carried away by the children, who giggled and laughed as the red-black blood coated their skin.
The lungs, logged with saltwater, had been hacked away and thrown into the surf for the sea gulls to scream and fight over, and the villagers had moved on to other carcasses. Later, after dark, the crabs would swarm over the lungs as the tide came in. Oxbalm sucked at his lips as he stared at the thick yellow artery that hung limply ‘from the backbone. Someone had already been tired when he’d cut the giant heart out, for the artery had been hacked raggedly.
This old cow had almost no fat around her ribs—she was little more than skin and bones—but Oxbalm’s mouth watered just the same. Tough mammoth tasted better than no mammoth at all. The thick quartzite flake had gone slippery from blood, and the joint fever that plagued his hands made holding the flat tool painful. The villagers’ bloody feet had tracked in sand, but the footing in the coagulated goo on the ribs below remained precarious.
Pulling on a flap of meat with one hand, Oxbalm used his serrated quartzite to strip the flesh from the Heavy bone, trimming ligaments and tendons as he went.
This was the easy work, suitable to an old man, and—he shot a glance from the corner of his eye—to lazy Dreamers who thought themselves superior to the hard work of cutting heavy muscles and using choppers to sever the tendons and ligaments in order to disarticulate the thick legs.
Oxbalm swallowed his disgust and continued to cut the strip of meat loose, sawing along the rib on one side and then the other, exposing a shaft of daylight as he peeled the meat down.
Catchstraw worked silently beside him, his obsidian knife glinting in the light that filtered through the layer of clouds. Tall and skinny, he resembled a big-headed bird. The salty air had turned his gray-streaked black hair into a damp mass. His hooked nose protruded from the middle of his face like a beak. Forty-nine summers old, he looked much older… as though the labor of ruining two marriages and alienating half of his relatives had worn on him.