He may be as powerful as Ice Fire. As powerful as our greatest shaman! The thought brought a bitter sneer to her lips. Unthinkable! Unthinkable that these pitiful remnants of a people could have so powerful a Dreamer.
Seeing Jumping Hare looking in her direction, she quickly bent to the task of stripping the hide from a caribou.
Despicable! She, Moon Water, eldest daughter of the White Tusk Clan's Singer, must process a kill like an old hag! Rage and anger burned. The heat of it fueled her muscles, giving her strength to continue.
Her fingers cramped around the flat biface she used to cut the hide and dismember the carcass, the warm odor of caribou streaming up around her head. She stropped the tool on
her long boot, cleaning the edge of resistant tissue before attacking the carcass again.
And this Dreamer was taking them under the Big Ice? It was insanity. No human could walk under ice!
But he had Dreamed in the caribou. She'd seen that. She'd seen him cure the infant born to that woman Green Water. She'd seen him suck the fluid from its nose and breathe life into the tiny blue fetus who'd been born so early. Powerful, yes; powerful, indeed.
"But not so powerful as Ice Fire," she whispered confidently.
She sank teeth into her lip, feeling her fingers strain as the gray quartzite biface severed the caribou's tissues. With a section of antler beam, she quickly knapped off a new edge, the long flakes driven off by her expert hand. The new edge sharp, she resumed skinning.
"But they can't keep me." From behind her swinging wealth of black hair, she glared hatred at Jumping Hare where he carried thick quarters from the butchering area. "And you'll soon have to forgo your pleasure on my body, bott-fly maggot! Stick to your skinny woman of the People. The daughter of the White Tusk Clan is too good for you!"
Soberly, she reached down, pushing hard on her belly as if to drive his seed out of her. Anxiously, she waited this turning of the moon, knowing her bleeding was overdue.
Soon, soon she would make her break, now that the Long Dark had begun to ebb. Before the People walked under the ice? She continued to chew her lip, her perfect brow furrowed in thought. The stories were that Wolf Dreamer had found huge herds of animals on the other side. If a woman of the Mammoth People were to find this magic hole, could not Ice Fire, with his greater Power, take all the Mammoth Clans through?
"I will wait." She smiled sourly. "Then we'll see how safe your hole in the ice is!"
Chapter 46
"I'm still not sure about this." One Who Cries shook his head, bending to stare into the inky blackness. A frigid breeze blew out of the slit in the grimy cobble-encrusted ice that spread in dirty heaps to either side: an awesome world sundered. Before them, the Big Ice lay in mounds and ribbed masses like piled scales. Snow gleamed softly in contrast to the dirty ice. Faint echoes of the tormented ghosts reached their ears even here.
A trail of rock—the washout from the runoff channel—led into the ice, an undercut pathway winding between walls of forbidding cold.
Muscles—like bands—tightened in One Who Cries' chest. As he swallowed, it seemed to stick in his throat—midway, like a crossed fish bone. Unease prickled the base of his scalp.
"So immense ..." Singing Wolf gasped, arms spread as he looked at the ice rising high against the gray day.
One Who Cries nodded nervously. Gray. The world has turned gray for all* of us. Color is gone. Only desperation remains. Ice and rock ahead of us, around us. Behind comes painful death at the hands of the Others. Is this the way? Truly ? Isn 't there life and joy and happiness anymore ? I don't want to go in there. Not into the darkness with the ghosts.
Wolf Dreamer stood to one side, a brooding look on his face. He wore the tailored hide he'd skinned from Grandfather White Bear. The hem swung slowly in the breath issuing from the yawning crack before them, the long white hairs rippling.
One Who Cries looked back, seeing the stiff set of Dancing Fox's face. Studiously, she and Wolf Dreamer avoided each other. What had happened in Heron's shelter that day? What did it mean for the rest of them? More than the chill wind shivered in One Who Cries' thoughts.
"See how the boulders have been rolled out?" Wolf Dreamer called, leading them up on a pile of rock. "That's
from the summer melt. This whole thing fills with water—a regular river.''
"Why's the ice only here? Why not all the way to the end of the world?" Singing Wolf asked.
"Mountains. They come together here from the east and west, restricting the Big River. The ice forms higher and runs down here to block this one place." Wolf Dreamer pointed as he explained.
Behind, the People came, packs bundled high on their backs, rope made from braided lengths of caribou and mammoth hide—laboriously split—clutched in their hands. The dogs nosed about, sniffing with lowered heads at the dank exhalation.