The Dawn Country(4)

I breathe in the icy air and say, “We should try to sleep, Baji. We’re going to need our strength. Tomorrow is going to be a hard day.”

“I’ll try if you will.” She tugs her blanket up around her chin and snuggles against me. The feel of her body against mine sends a warm sense of security through me. In less than sixty heartbeats, she is sound asleep.

But my eyes will not close. I stare up at the dark winter sky. The flickering campfires of the dead look oddly hazy. I realize it’s because even here, across the mountain, smoke from the burned village still streaks the sky. I try not to think of the people who lived there, of the dead and dying, of the shrieking children who were taken captive. The destruction of their village allowed us to escape.

Will the war and suffering ever end?

Behind the lies of safety that I tell myself, I feel the presence of Gannajero watching me across the dark distances.

Her warriors are coming.

I feel their footsteps pounding in my chest.





Three

War Chief Cord’s breath frosted before his face and hung there like a small starlit cloud, ghostlike in the frigid air. He continued struggling up the slope. Above him, through the frost-coated trees, the trail was nothing more than a black gash.

The night had frozen the jagged terrain, turning it into a still and sparkling wasteland so bone-cold that nothing stirred. Even the Forest Spirits and lost souls who usually roamed the trails had fled to their hiding places beneath rocks and in secret holes in the ground. The vast silence was eerie, as though an otherworldly blanket had descended to compensate for the echoed screams, the ululating cries of victory, and the terrified shrieks of the dying that had washed the slopes last night.

Behind him, he heard the rasping moccasins of the handful of his warriors who’d lived through the battle, but he didn’t turn to look. Instead, he focused on the trail ahead. Their lives rested upon making it to the pass that was hidden high above them.

Cord pulled his wolf-fur hood closed beneath his chin. He stood twelve hands tall. Snake tattoos covered his cheeks and ropy arms. He wore his hair shaved on the sides, leaving a black roach in the center and a long braid hanging down his back. He had seen twenty-nine summers pass. His wife had once told him he had the burning eyes of a Spirit-possessed shaman. In the summers after her death, however, he knew he radiated only a glacial cold. As if his souls and this frigid night were perfectly matched.

He carefully studied the dark slash of trail.

How far to the summit? He and his men would only find safety on the other side of the pass. Or would they? All night long they had been pursued by a small group of enemy warriors, survivors of the Bog Willow Village fight. Their leader was cunning, instructing his men to show themselves for fleeting instants to tempt Cord’s warriors to waste arrows. But long before the arrows struck, their targets had vanished into the darkness.

Cord shook his head. His men were growing careless, desperate. They’d lost friends and loved ones in the battle. Each feared he would be next.

Gravel crunched. He turned.

Strung out behind him, his four men climbed with their heads down. Shoulders and hoods glittered with frost crystals. They did not speak, needing every morsel of strength to sustain the climb.

How long since any of them had slept? Each man was exhausted. Cord could see it in the occasional trembling of a leg, or a head suddenly snapping up from where a man had fallen asleep as he walked. As if the horrors of battle were not enough, the great blind forest—brutally cold and unnaturally still—had rousted every shred of arrogance from their souls. Where once they had preened and paraded in their finest quillwork capes and shell jewelry, now they struggled just to place one foot in front of the other.

When his men drew nearer, he motioned for them to keep going. One by one, they stepped past him with barely a glance.

They wore knee-high moccasins, long war shirts, and wolfhide coats with the hair turned in for warmth. Gray-furred hoods encircled their faces. Each time a man exhaled, his breath settled upon his bristly hood, creating a thick rime of frost. Unstrung bows and quivers rode on top of packs stuffed with loot. Belts clattered with hafted chert knives, sharpened deerbone stilettos, stone-headed war clubs, a food pouch, and water bag.

When the last man walked by, Cord lifted his hand to the sky and measured how far the constellations had moved since his last stop: two hand-widths, the distance across his palm twice. Dawn was another six hands of time away.

He fell into line behind Neyaw and continued up the steep rocky trail. The darkness and cold pressed down, as though to smother that last warm spark in his body.

A cry—half howl, half wail—sounded on the trail below them and echoed through the night. Almost inhuman, it sent a shiver down Cord’s spine as he stopped short, staring back down the dark trail.