The Dawn Country(34)

Wakdanek said, “We can’t go back over the pass. There will be too many warriors. I’m going to lead you along a tributary that curves south; then we’ll follow another trail to return north to the warriors’ camp.”

Koracoo said, “That is acceptable.”

The night had gone quiet again, and bitterly cold. Sindak longed to be on the trail, running, so he could warm up. Down by the campfire, the Dawnland elders sat, their gaunt faces gleaming orange in the light. Warriors prowled around them like young wolves. Frequently their faces shone as they gazed up at Sindak and Towa.

Sindak leaned closer to Towa to say, “I hope Koracoo knows what she’s doing. I think those two are trouble. When it is least convenient, I suspect they’re going to kill each other.”





Fourteen

Grandmother Moon’s face cast an opalescent glitter across the land, silvering the mist that wreathed the dark maples and leafless sycamores. The night was so quiet. It was as though the many voices of the forest had been silenced all at once by some great catastrophe.

Sonon stopped to listen. It wasn’t often that a man stood in such deafening silence that he was truly alone with himself and the enormity of his failures. Eternity seemed to open its eyes.

For a few blessed moments, he bowed his head and let the sensation filter through him.

Then he clutched the boy’s body against his chest and continued picking his way down the frozen bank toward the river.

Ice filled every hollow. The footing was treacherous. He breathed a sigh of relief when he reached the edge of the water, where willows clotted the shallows. Around the stems, he saw fish feeding. Concentric rings expanded each time they broke the surface.

The pithy fragrances of old autumn leaves drifted on the breeze. He sucked them deep into his lungs. His arms had been trembling off and on for two hands of time. The constant struggle of battling the ice to stay on his feet had taken his strength. He didn’t know how much longer he could carry the boy. Soon, he’d be forced to drag him.

But for now, he just held him close.

In a barely audible voice, he sang, “The crow comes, the crow comes, pity the little children, beat the drum.”

As though the old song called her, a soft rhythmic pushing of air stirred the depths behind his eyes, and he knew she was sharing his vision. Staring out through his eyes. As she had since he’d seen six summers. Sometimes, especially at night, the beating of her wings was so frantic, he would rise from his blankets and run as hard as he could until dawn, when she finally went back to sleep.

He gazed down at the boy’s face. His eyelids sunk into his empty eye sockets. His blood-soaked shirt had frozen stiff. In the wash of moonlight, the boy’s oval face resembled a ceremonial mask carved from wood and painted a luminous white.

Sonon let out a shaky breath and plodded on down the shore.

He could not say why it began. Not exactly. He knew only that by the age of six, his sister, Jonodak, had seemed to spend all of her time wandering an unfathomable labyrinth that twisted down forever into her own souls.

He remembered with perfect clarity the day Jonodak suddenly looked up at him, squinted, and snapped, “What are you doing sitting there?” As though Sonon should have known it wasn’t his place and he ought to move.

He and his sister were twins. They’d been inseparable. For the first time in his life, he’d felt like an outsider looking through a thin veil into her world. A visitor from a hazy place where Jonodak had once lived, but no longer did. And he knew at that moment that she had left him behind and traveled beyond to the realm where no one could reach her.

The horror began when they turned eight.

He’d awakened one night to feel a sharp chert blade slicing through his throat. Then, just before dawn, she had picked up a rock and slammed it into his face. It was impossible to set the shattered bones, so the village Spirit elders had just left it alone. Since that night, his nose had bent to the right like one of the False Faces.

A few days later, his sister had attacked three other children in the longhouse. Poor Skaneat. He’d seen barely four summers. Sonon’s parents had been hysterical. They’d called in every Healer in the village and demanded to know what was wrong with her. One old man told them that Jonodak’s afterlife soul had wandered away and gotten hopelessly lost in the forest. He’d said her body was nothing more than a slowly deteriorating husk.

Human souls were things of mystery. One day a person felt fine. The next day, an overheard conversation, or the loss of a beloved friend, turned the world into an alien wasteland where death seemed less strange than simply going on.

Sonon understood, of course, that he was just as mad as Jonodak.