A Breath of Snow and Ashes (113 page)

“WELL, SO.” Ian took a deep breath. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “Ye ken the child died, aye?”

He spoke with no emotion at all in his voice. It was that dry, controlled tone that seared her heart, and choked her so that she could do no more than nod in reply.

He couldn’t keep it up, though. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but the big, bony hands clenched suddenly on his knees, and instead, he rose abruptly to his feet.

“Aye,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ll—I’ll tell ye the rest, walking.”

And he did, his back resolutely turned, as he led her higher up the mountain, then across a narrow ridge, and down the path of a stream that fell in a series of small, enchanting waterfalls, each encircled with a mist of miniature rainbows.

Works with Her Hands had conceived again. That child was lost just after her belly began to swell with life.

“They say, the Kahnyen’kehaka,” Ian explained, his voice muffled as he shoved his way through a screen of brilliant red creeper, “that for a woman to conceive, her husband’s spirit does battle with hers, and must overcome it. If his spirit isna strong enough”—his voice came clear as he ripped a handful of creeper down, breaking the branch it hung from, and cast it viciously away—“then the child canna take root in the womb.”

After this second loss, the Medicine Society had taken the two of them to a private hut, there to sing and beat drums and to dance in huge painted masks, meant to frighten away whatever evil entities might be hampering Ian’s spirit—or unduly strengthening Emily’s.

“I wanted to laugh, seeing the masks,” Ian said. He didn’t turn round; yellow leaves spangled the shoulders of his buckskin and stuck in his hair. “They call it the Funny-Face Society, too—and for a reason. Didna do it, though.”

“I don’t . . . suppose Em-Emily laughed.” He was going so fast that she was pressed to keep up with him, though her legs were nearly as long as his own.

“No,” he said, and uttered a short, bitter laugh himself. “She didna.”

She had gone into the medicine hut beside him silent and gray, but had come out with a peaceful face, and reached for him in their bed that night with love. For three months, they had made love with tenderness and ardor. For another three, they had made love with a sense of increasing desperation.

“And then she missed her courses again.”

He had at once ceased his attentions, terrified of causing a further mishap. Emily had moved slowly and carefully, no longer going into the fields to work, but staying in the longhouse, working, always working, with her hands. Weaving, grinding, carving, boring beads of shell for wampum, hands moving ceaselessly, to compensate for the waiting stillness of her body.

“Her sister went to the fields. It’s the women who do, ken?” He paused to slash an outreaching brier with his knife, tossing the severed branch out of the way so it wouldn’t snap back and hit Brianna in the face.

“Looking at the Sky brought us food. All the women did, but her most of all. She was a sweet lass, Karònya.”

There was a slight catch in his voice at this, the first in his harsh recitation of facts.

“What happened to her?” Brianna hastened her step a little as they came out onto the top of a grass-covered bank, so that she drew up nearly even with him. He slowed a little, but didn’t turn to look at her—kept his face forward, chin raised as though confronting enemies.

“Taken.” Looking at the Sky had been in the habit of staying later in the fields than the other women, gathering extra corn or squash for her sister and Ian, though she had a child of her own by then. One evening, she did not return to the longhouse, and when the villagers had gone out to search for her, neither she nor the child was anywhere to be found. They had vanished, leaving only one pale moccasin behind, tangled in the squash vines at the edge of a field.

“Abenaki,” Ian said tersely. “We found the sign next day; it was full dark before we began to search in earnest.”

It had been a long night searching, followed by a week of the same—a week of growing fear and emptiness—and Ian had returned to his wife’s hearth at dawn on the seventh day, to learn that she had miscarried once more.

He paused. He was sweating freely from walking so fast, and wiped a sleeve across his chin. Brianna could feel the sweat trickling down her own back, dampening the hunting shirt, but disregarded it. She touched his back, very gently, but said nothing.

He heaved a deep sigh, almost of relief, she thought—perhaps that the dreadful tale was nearly done.

“We tried a bit longer,” he said, back to the matter-of-fact tone. “Emily and I. But the heart had gone out of her. She didna trust me any longer. And . . . Ahkote’ohskennonton was there. He ate at our hearth. And he watched her. She began to look back.”

Ian had been shaping wood for a bow one day, concentrating on the flow of the grain beneath his knife, trying to see those things in the swirls that Emily saw, to hear the voice of the tree, as she had told him. It wasn’t the tree that spoke behind him, though.

“Grandson,” said a dry old voice, lightly ironic.

He dropped the knife, narrowly missing his own foot, and swung round, bow in hand. Tewaktenyonh stood six feet away, one eyebrow lifted in amusement at having sneaked up on him unheard.

“Grandmother,” he said, and nodded in wry acknowledgment of her skill. Ancient she might be, but no one moved more softly. Hence her reputation; the children of the village lived in respectful dread of her, having heard that she could vanish into air, only to rematerialize in some distant spot, right before the guilty eyes of evil-doers.

“Come with me, Wolf’s Brother,” she said, and turned away, not waiting for his response. None was expected.

She was already out of sight by the time he had laid the half-made bow under a bush, taken up his fallen knife, and whistled for Rollo, but he caught her up with no difficulty.

She had led him away from the village, through the forest, to the head of a deer trail. There she had given him a bag of salt and an armlet of wampum and bade him go.

“And you went?” Brianna asked, after a long moment of silence. “Just—like that?”

“Just like that,” he said, and looked at her for the first time since they had left their campsite that morning. His face was gaunt, hollow with memories. Sweat gleamed on his cheekbones, but he was so pale that the dotted lines of his tattoos stood out sharp—perforations, lines along which his face might come apart.

She swallowed a few times before she could speak, but managed a tone much like his own when she did.

“Is it much farther?” she asked. “Where we’re going?”

“No,” he said softly. “We’re nearly there.” And turned to walk again before her.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, they had reached a place where the stream cut deep between its banks, widening into a small gorge. Silver birch and hobblebush grew thick, sprouting from the rocky walls, smooth-skinned roots twisting through the stones like fingers clawing at the earth.

The notion gave Brianna a slight prickle at the neck. The waterfalls were far above them now, and the noise of the water had lessened, the creek talking to itself as it purled over rocks and shushed through mats of cress and duckweed.

She thought the going might be easier above, on the lip of the gorge, but Ian led her down into it without hesitation, and she followed likewise, scrambling over the tumble of boulders and tree roots, hampered by her long gun. Rollo, scorning this clumsy exertion, plunged into the creek, which was several feet deep, and swam, ears clamped back against his head so that he looked like a giant otter.

Ian had recovered his self-possession in the concentration of navigating the rough ground. He paused now and then, reaching back to help her down a particularly tricky fall of rock, or over a tree uprooted in some recent flood—but he didn’t meet her eyes, and the shuttered planes of his face gave nothing away.

Her curiosity had reached fever pitch, but clearly he had done speaking for the moment. It was just past midday, but the light under the birches was a shadowed gold that made everything seem somehow hushed, almost enchanted. She could make no sensible guess as to the purpose of this expedition, in light of what Ian had told her—but the place was one where almost anything seemed possible.

She thought suddenly of her first father—of Frank Randall—and felt a small, remembered warmth at the thought. She would like so much to show him this place.

They had taken holidays often in the Adirondacks; different mountains, different trees—but something of the same hush and mystery in the shadowed glades and rushing water. Her mother had come sometimes, but more often it was just the two of them, hiking far up into the trees, not talking much, but sharing a deep content in the company of the sky.

Suddenly, the sound of the water rose again; there was another fall nearby.

“Just here, coz,” Ian said softly, and beckoned her to follow with a turn of the head.

They stepped out from under the trees and she saw that the gorge dropped suddenly away, the water falling twenty feet or more into a pool below. Ian led her past the head of the falls; she could hear the water rushing past below, but the top of the bank was thick with sedges, and they had to push their way through, tramping down the yellowing stems of goldenrod and dodging the panicked whir of grasshoppers rocketing up underfoot.

“Look,” Ian said, glancing back, and reached to part the screen of laurel in front of her.

“Wow!”

She recognized it immediately. There was no mistaking it, in spite of the fact that much of it was invisible, still buried in the crumbling bank on the far side of the gorge. Some recent flood had raised the level of the creek, undercutting the bank so that a huge block of stone and dirt had fallen away, revealing its buried mystery.

The raked arches of ribs rose huge from the dirt, and she had the impression of a scatter of things half-buried in the rubble at the foot of the bank: enormous things, knobbed and twisted. They might be bones or simply boulders—but it was the tusk that caught her eye, jutting from the bank in a massive curve, intensely familiar, and the more startling for its very familiarity.

“Ye ken it?” Ian asked eagerly, watching her face. “Ye’ve seen something like it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and though the sun was warm on her back, she shivered, gooseflesh pebbling her forearms. Not from fear, but sheer awe at sight of it, and a kind of incredulous joy. “Oh, yes. I have.”

“What?” Ian’s voice was still pitched low, as though the creature might hear them. “What is it?”

“A mammoth,” she said, and found that she was whispering, too. The sun had passed its zenith; already the bottom of the creekbed lay in shadow. Light struck the stained curve of ancient ivory, and threw the vault of the high-crowned skull that held it into sharp relief. The skull was fixed in the soil at a slight angle, the single visible tusk rising high, the eye socket black as mystery.

The shiver came again, and she hunched her shoulders. Easy to feel that it might at any moment wrench itself free of the clay and turn that massive head toward them, empty-eyed, clods of dirt raining from tusks and bony shoulders as it shook itself and began to walk, the ground vibrating as long toes struck and sank in the muddy soil.

“That’s what it’s called—mammoth? Aye, well . . . it
is
verra big.” Ian’s voice dispelled the illusion of incipient movement, and she was able finally to take her eyes off it—though she felt she must glance back, every second or so, to be sure it was still there.

“The Latin name is
Mammuthus,
” she said, clearing her throat. “There’s a complete skeleton in a museum in New York. I’ve seen it often. And I’ve seen pictures of them in books.” She glanced back at the creature in the bank.

“A museum? So it’s not a thing ye’ve got where—when”—he stumbled a bit—“where ye come from? Not alive then, I mean?” He seemed rather disappointed.

She wanted to laugh at the picture of mammoths roaming Boston Common, or wallowing on the bank of the Cambridge River. In fact, she had a moment’s pang of disappointment that they
hadn’t
been there; it would have been so wonderful to see them.

“No,” she said regretfully. “They all died thousands and thousands of years ago. When the ice came.”

“Ice?” Ian was glancing back and forth between her and the mammoth, as though afraid one or the other might do something untoward.

“The Ice Age. The world got colder, and sheets of ice spread down from the north. A lot of animals went extinct—I mean, they couldn’t find food, and all died.”

Ian was pale with excitement.

“Aye. Aye, I’ve heard such stories.”

“You have?” She was surprised at that.

“Aye. But ye say it’s real.” He swung his head to look at the mammoth’s bones once more. “An animal, aye, like a bear or a possum?”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled by his attitude, which seemed to alternate between eagerness and dismay. “Bigger, but yes. What else would it be?”

“Ah,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Well, d’ye see, that’s what I needed ye to tell me, coz. See, the Kahnyen’kehaka—they have stories of . . . things. Animals that are really spirits. And if ever I saw a thing that might
be
a spirit—” He was still looking at the skeleton, as though it might walk out of the earth, and she saw a slight shiver pass through him.