The Broken Land(69)

At this point in my life, I realize there was nothing I could have done to save them, but strangely that truth doesn’t alter the guilt. Sleeping deep inside me is the overwhelming sense that I should have tried to save them. Today, standing here, that desperate sensation returns to haunt me. My belly knots. My fists clench. I have to do something. Yet I am delaying marching into the meadow where the huge warrior camp sprawled.

Gusting up from the river, the cold breeze carries a mass of whirling leaves and smells sweetly of dew-soaked earth. I concentrate on the fragrance as I bend to grasp a potsherd, study it, and replace it in the exact location where I found it. Gitchi follows me with his ears pricked, listening to the morning.

Ten paces away, Taya sits on a rock with her knees hugged against her chest. Long black hair falls over the front of her cape, fluttering in the wind. When she catches me looking at her, she sucks in a breath, expels it in a disgusted rush.

I ignore her. Standing here … burns. My blood is aflame. Despite the cold, I’m roasting from the inside out. Gitchi feels it, too. He stays right at my heels, whimpering when he knows I’m on the verge of lashing out.

Like a knife in my heart, Taya calls, “I thought you said we were on an urgent mission to find a dead man. Why aren’t you looking for him?”

My heartbeat begins to slam against my ribs. She’s right. I force myself to turn to the meadow. It’s empty. Most of those men are long dead. Look around. They are not here. They’re not hiding waiting to capture you again.

But my ears ring with the hideous laughter that filled the night twelve summers ago. The celebration songs almost drown out the childish sobbing of the new captives … and Zateri’s cries. Through the stench of burning longhouses, I smell clams boiling and dogs roasting.

Seeping up from inside me, Wrass orders, “Hide in those leaves, Odion. If they find you, swing that club as hard as you can, and don’t stop swinging. No matter what you hear or see, keep swinging. Do you hear me? I’m going to lead them away. I’ll meet you …”

My aching fingers go tight around a war club that rotted to dust long ago. I hear shouts, men calling to each other, chasing us down … .

“They are not here,” I whisper to that terrified little boy who still huddles inside me. “Look. They are not here.”

Taya cups a hand to her mouth and shouts, “When are we going home?”

“But Wrass, I’m scared. I want to go with you! Let me—”

“I told you to hide. Now do it!”

I shake myself. I have to force my cramping fingers to release the imaginary club I hold. My hand stings.

Dreams tormented me last night. I was back here. It was dark and cold, and I was sure Wrass was dying. They’d beaten him badly. He’d tried to protect me from the old woman’s wrath. He shouldn’t have. He …

When I jerked awake, I rose and went down to the river where I hurled rocks at the water until I killed it … or killed the reflection of me that I saw there.

I order my feet to move, to walk. My long cape slurs softly over the old leaves. Even now, upon the very ground where it happened … the black hole in my memory persists. He took me by the hand, dragged me out into the forest …

The rest is gone.

While I struggle to figure out why, I pick up a mud-caked arrow point, wipe it clean, turn it over, and gently put it down.

“What are you doing?” Taya demands to know.

I call, “I’m thinking.”

I’m sure this isn’t how she expected to spend the moons before her joining. She must long to be home putting the finishing touches on our place in the longhouse. Not out in the middle of the wilderness scrambling after winter-starved rodents and dodging war parties. Underlying her impatience and irritating demands, I realize she is on the verge of blind panic, and has been for days. I’m fairly certain she would bolt for home if she thought she could make it alone. I can’t let her. She’ll almost certainly be killed or captured.

There is a flash on the horizon. Gitchi’s gray head turns, and he wags his tail. As Elder Brother Sun rises from his resting place in the branches of the celestial tree, an amber gleam spreads across the old village and hundreds of arrow points glisten. They are everywhere—testaments to the intensity of the long-ago battle that devastated Bog Willow Village.

Taya climbs down off the rock and trudges through the village ruins toward me.

I reach down and grasp a stone tool, an old scraper used to process corn husks, and hold it to my ear. I close my eyes, listening for the voices of people who might have seen what happened to me. The tool is quiet. I replace it in the exact spot in which I found it, and move on. Gitchi smells the stone before following.