"Yes ..."
Raven Hunter nodded sympathetically. "And what's left for us?"
"But to cause anything to suffer is—"
"Necessary." His face worked with the effort. "Consider. People make themselves share things. When you kill an animal, lance a mammoth in the gut and follow it for days, you feel its pain, don't you?"
Singing Wolf nodded. "Any hunter feels the pain of the animal he kills."
"That's our only weapon against the Others. Don't you see? Make them imagine themselves as the bloody corpses we leave on the ground. Make them see through our eyes. Make them feel that pain."
"Just as we feel it ourselves?" Singing Wolf considered.
"You're beginning to understand. When you look at an infant, its skull crushed, it twists your soul if you think your own child might look like that, doesn't it? Think what it does to theirs." The black eyes pinned him, the power of his certainty humming in the air.
"Your soul screams in your dreams?"
Raven Hunter's impassioned eyes didn't waver. "Their screams fill my sleep. It's . . . it's torture."
"Then why?" Singing Wolf demanded. "Why do you do it to yourself?"
Raven Hunter's eyes seemed to expand, his very soul exposed and twisting in the light of the low fire. "Because I love the People. I bear this burden, not because I want to be a monster . . . but to save the People. I have nothing more precious to give than myself."
The encompassing eyes seemed to suck him up—not the eyes of a monster, but of a man in hideous misery. Honest, open, Raven Hunter's soul pulsated.
A cold chill shook Singing Wolf. He looked around at the dark camp. Bodies wrapped in hides were only lumps in the crushed tussocks. Before him, the fire lay dead, a few tiny embers gleaming.
Raven Hunter put a hand on Singing Wolf's shoulder, patting softly. "War is hideous. But we must fight." He stood and stepped lightly over sleepers, going to his own robes.
Singing Wolf shook his head, staring off into the darkness.
Just after nightfall three days later, they peered through a series of jagged boulders at an unsuspecting camp of Others. Women roasted fish around a half-dozen low fires, laughing quietly, patting the children who played a game nearby. Men sat in a distant circle, talking in hushed tones, eyes vigilantly
scanning the growing darkness. Rapids on the river glimmered silver in the moonlight.
"Nock your darts," Raven Hunter instructed, and men rushed to comply.
Singing Wolf gripped his atlatl fiercely, one finger roaming the grooves along the shaft. He'd cut a line for each man that died, so that now his weapon undulated like the bones of the spine. Strikes Lightning had died first, a dart catching him in the leg, severing the big artery that ran along the thighbone. Singing Wolf hadn't been able to find it in his heart to weep. A day later, Two Darts was lanced in the gut. He failed slowly, an oozing pus forming in the wound to fever him. Carried by other young men, he babbled and died horribly amid fearful dreams. Moss Stalker, Loon Voice, Blows With Snow, and many others fell. Some perished in the heat of the fray, others later, from infected wounds.
Raven Hunter's stature grew, the young men listening care
fully, bowing to his expanding Power. Singing Wolf felt
haunted—a foreboding eating at him. Where was truth? The
memory of the pain and horror in Raven Hunter's eyes stayed
with him. The logic of the butchery had proved so right. At
one camp, they needed only to appear and the Others ran,
horrified, into the darkness. It worked, the terror of the Peo
ple proved as effective as their darts. '
I should leave! Run home to Laughing Sunshine, Singing Wolf told himself repeatedly. But some horrible fascination kept him there, watching as though his very life depended upon the outcome. He peered at the warriors crouching around him. A hardness lay in the eyes of the People that he'd never seen.
Something is happening to us. What? Life is changing. See the set of the young men's mouths? See the way they look over their shoulders, wary, lean, and dangerous. The women they take, they take by farce. They've grown brutal. Where is the laughter, the old humor we used to share?
"Ready?" Raven Hunter whispered eagerly. Nods went round through the boulders. "Now!"
At his command, men swept around the rocks, screaming viciously, striking down anyone they passed. Singing Wolf ran behind, weaving through the clashing crowd. A woman
scuttled from a lodge to his left. He gasped, recognizing his cousin who'd been abducted so many years ago.
"Blueberry? Blueberry!" he called, and lurched to block her flight.
Wide-eyed with fear, she huddled down before him, trembling as she cuddled her baby protectively. "Don't kill my baby," she pleaded. "He'll make you a good son. Don't—"