“Oh, not my granddaughter. Not Mountain Lake. What’s happening, Sunchaser?” Oxbalm pleaded. “What are the mammoths trying to tell us? First they kill themselves, then they kill us. What’s gone wrong with the world? You walk the
path through the maze to the Land of the Dead. You should know why this is happening!”
Cries for help rose all through the village, and people moved through the misty morning calling names, searching. Sunchaser’s throat ached. He clenched his fists and shook them with weary futility.
“I don’t know why!” he shouted, and the village went quiet. As though frozen in time, people stopped to stare at him. “I’ve lost the way through the maze!”
Voices hissed around him, repeating his words.
“.. . lost the way?”
“Sunchaser has lost his way.”
“He can’t get to the Land of the Dead.”
“Oh, Blessed Spirits. What does that mean? Sunchaser isn’t a Dreamer anymore?”
From across the wrecked village, Catchstraw let out a shrill, triumphant cry and stared dumbstruck at Sunchaser-as though he’d heard news too good to believe.
Helper trotted back, his black eyes wide and unblinking. He took Sunchaser’s sleeve in his mouth and whimpered while he tugged him northward.
“No, Helper. I must stay. The council session is tonight. I have to—”
The dog growled and tugged so hard that Sunchaser almost toppled to the sand. “All right. I—I’m coming.”
Helper loped out in the lead, keeping sight of the retreating mammoths as-they traveled through the forest. Sunchaser followed on weak legs.
*<? .
The Boy watched through wide, horrified eyes. He cried, “Why are you tormenting them so, Man? What have they done to deserve this? They are good people! They obey your laws. They follow your ceremonials. They give you every ounce of their souls… and you do this to them?”
No answer came. But the wealth of stars glittered more brilliantly, as though all the souls in the Land of the Dead were listening. The heavens had quieted.
The Boy cursed and shouted, “Are you good, Man? Or are you wicked?” When still no response came, the Boy yelled, “I accuse you of wickedness! You are evil! That’s why you won’t let me live! That’s why you want me to commit myself to that putrid dead body! .. . Why do you not defend yourself, Man? I am waiting for your excuse. Speak to me!”
“Boy, boy …” the Man replied wearily. “Go down to the earth and find a rock to curse. I want you to curse it soundly.”
“But why should I—”
“Just do it.”
So the Boy did. He found a big rock, big and ugly and gray, and he spent three days cursing it up one side and down the other. He cursed the rock, and he whipped it with branches until he grew too tired to continue. Then he flew back up to the black sky and took his place amongst the twinkling Star People. “I have done it, Man,” he said.
“What did Rock say to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all? He didn’t object to your curses?”
“No. It was a rock. Just a dead rock.”
And the Man whispered, “Nothing is dead, Boy. Your arrogance blinds you to the many lives going on around you all the time. That is like most humans. Rock just spent part of his life to teach you a very great lesson.”
“What lesson?”
“If you did not understand Rock’s silence, Boy, you will never understand anyone’s words…. Letting you be born would be a curse upon the world.”
Fifteen
“It’s been only three weeks since Mother Ocean called to Oxbalm and showed him the sign,” Catchstraw said from the eastern end of the council fire. They’d set up the meeting away from the devastated village, in a narrow fissure in the sea cliffs, but they could still see the broken fragments of their lives on the beach. Firelight gilded the dead faces of their loved ones, who lay beneath warm hides at the edge of the trees. Before them, a carpet of crushed bones from lodge frames glittered.
Catchstraw pointed at the ravaged skeletons of the mammoths on the beach, then at each of the huge carcasses left from the morning’s attack. The stiff breeze that blew in off the ocean whipped his leather sleeve until it snapped. “And I ask you, what do you think the sign meant? Sunchaser claimed that he didn’t know. What do you think the Mother was trying to tell us?”
Thirty people huddled beneath hides on the ground in front of him. Some peered at him stoically. A few had adoration in their eyes. Most looked skeptical and bored.
I’ll show you, you old imbeciles. Not even Sunchaser can stand in the way of my Power! He raised his voice to a shout. “Look around you! Our village is gone! Thirteen of our friends and loved ones are dead. Illnesses are butchering our sister villages in the mountains. And when did it all start?”