Children of the Dawn (33 page)

If she knew how much I want Kai El…
Gaia pictured the tongue of a lizard shooting out for a sleepy fly.
How easily she could get him
…
with her boldness and her health.

In desperation, Gaia decided to talk to her mother. Should she forget about Kai El? Or try to make him love her?

When dawn lit the hut, Gaia found that her mother hadn’t come home. She didn’t bother to wonder what man Tsilka had shared
the night with.

No one to trust. Her sister would steal Kai El. Her mother had her own complicated life. Kai El’s father Tor was too unhappy
to help anyone. His mother Ashan was dead. The Other Moonkeeper a stranger…

Spirit quest.

The words just came to her mind. It was a custom of the Shahala part of the tribe. She’d been afraid to go on one when she
was small. Maybe a spirit quest could help her now.

No one saw Gaia leave Teahra Village. She carried a water pouch and wore two light skins. She might stay away for a day
and
a night… that’s how much thinking she needed to do.

You wouldn’t!
said a voice that came from inside, and reminded her of her sister’s voice.
Our mother would have the whole village searching before the nightfire is lit.

With the village barely out of sight, Gaia’s courage was already failing. She told herself it wasn’t how long she stayed gone
that was important, but what she learned.

She took the trail that led to the rock picture called She Who Watches—the special place of the lost Moonkeeper. Ashan’s trail
was an uphill slope for a long way—straight up through a series of clefts—then level, but narrow and dangerous, near the top.
It wasn’t the hardest trail to climb, nor the easiest. Maybe Gaia just wanted to test her body. Maybe she was angry at her
body.

There was another reason to take Ashan’s trail: Since no one she knew could help her, Gaia might as well be alone. No one
would bother her up here. People were afraid of the Moonkeeper’s takoma.

She thought of Kai El…
Most people
…

Gaia had been afraid of it herself, until she’d gone there with Kai El. It was a wonderful place. There was a feeling of—she
couldn’t think of a word—of everything as it should be.

Maybe he will be there,
she thought.

Gaia kept a pace to tempt the Breath Ogre.

What Breath Ogre?
her clear chest asked.
Now that there’s no one here to see, I have the strength of a cougar.

“Gaia!”

She looked up to see a dark shape against blue sky—Kai El, waving and calling.

“It’s me!” he shouted, running toward her.

She’d been avoiding him so carefully. Now what? She looked back at the trail, but she couldn’t run. It was too steep. She
waited for him.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“No, I’m glad you did. I was wanting someone to talk to. Give me your water pouch. And your hand.”

Gaia allowed him to help her. But she wanted to get away. What must he think of her? She couldn’t stand it.

When they got to the Moonkeeper’s takoma, she saw that Kai El had slept there. He smoothed the skins on the stone seat, inviting
her to rest.

“I don’t need to rest,” she said. “I was going to see what’s over the top, so—so good-bye.”

“I’ll come with you. If a big animal or something attacks, a man should be there.”

She knew what he meant. If the
Breath Ogre
attacks. Gaia hated people feeling sorry for her, thinking they had to help her.

“I want to be by myself. Give me my water pouch.”

Holding it out, he gripped her wrist as she reached for it—not hurting her, just stopping her. Confused pain filled his eyes.

“Why are you angry, Gaia?”

“I’m not. I just want to be alone.”

“Please,” he begged. “Tell me what I did wrong.”

“Let go.”

Releasing her, he took some pungent gray sprigs from his waist pouch.

“Look, I’ve got sage. If I’d known it could help, I would have had it before.”

For a moment, she softened.
How sweet of him.
Then she wondered.

“How do you know about sage?”

“Tenka told me.”

Devastated, Gaia said, “You told her? I asked you not to. Now everyone will know.”

“Tenka won’t tell anyone. Even if they knew, they’d want to help.”

Gaia shook her head, blinking back tears.

“Now I know how much I can trust you.”

She slung her water pouch over her shoulder, made her way past him, and got on with her spirit quest.

“Well,” Kai El said after Gaia left. “I finally get to talk to her, and I ruin it completely.”

He closed his eyes and pictured his mother’s face.

“I wish I knew if you could hear me,” he said to her spirit. He waited, but nothing happened, so he just kept talking.

“Something happened when I carried her, something much greater than lust. I want to take care of her. I think I love her.
But she won’t even look at me. What did I do wrong? Go too fast? Too slow?”

He hit his palm with his fist. “The more things get in our way, the more I know she must be my mate.”

To make his frustration go away, Kai El made up the conversation he and Gaia
should
have had.

“The Autumn Feast is coming,” he should have said.

“It’s a custom of your people I truly enjoy.”

“It’s a time of great changes.”

Kai El realized the made-up Gaia knew this, but he went on. Even in a pretended conversation, it was hard to keep from saying,
“Oh, Gaia, be my mate.”

“Changes in people’s lives. Little ones taking their spirit names. Men taking their mates.”

“And the feasting,” she would say, “and the dancing.”

He pictured her dancing. His heart sprang a leak. Control flowed away. The made-up Kai El could no longer hold himself back.

“Gaia, I love you. I want to be with you forever.”

Only the wind heard him.

S
URPRISES AWAITED SPIRITS NEW TO THE OTHERWORLD.
The best of these, to Ashan, was the ability to travel great distances in an eyeblink. She could choose from endless places
and times, moving with the speed of lightning, by the power of desire—an invisible collection of energy that was everything
essential she had ever been, without the burden of a human body.

Spirit travel did not always work as Ashan expected. She couldn’t be in two places at the same time. Sometimes she went places
without desiring it. Unasked-for travel seemed random at times, full of purpose at others. Like humans, spirits had to sort
through the meaningless to find meaning.

This time the Spirit of Ashan arrived somewhere without knowing she was coming. She found herself inside a long, narrow shelter.
It was built on a mound instead of in a pit—as Teahra huts were—and was much larger. Twenty or more could sleep without touching
on the swept earth floor. Foggy daylight seeped through a low door opening in the center of a long wall. Piles of skins and
furs leaned against the opposite wall. Cooking fires rimmed with round stones rested near each end.

The roof of lapped cedar splits would keep rain out and warmth in. The walls were made of slabs of cedar so massive that Ashan
wondered how they’d been cut. She couldn’t smell without borrowing the nose of some living creature—and she
was alone in this place—but she imagined the clean scent of all this cedar.

The Spirit of Ashan had never visited a finer living place. Though she didn’t yet know where this was, she considered staying
awhile, to learn about the people who lived here, how trees so large were cut and slabbed—

Two men crawled through the low door. They didn’t look alike, but they shared a blue aura that said they were brothers. Young,
healthy, bursting with mating desire, they spoke a language unlike Shahala or Tlikit. Ashan understood them, as she did everyone
she visited in her new life.

The older one said, “It’s crazy. What’s wrong with the women of our tribe?”

The younger one rolled his eyes… they must have talked about the women of their tribe before.

“If you had seen these two,” he said, “you would understand.”

“These people don’t guard their women?”

“No.”

“And there are two exactly alike?”

“Exactly. Perfect beauties. A man could trade them for ten women.”

“Are you sure you can find them again?”

“If not, we’ll find some ugly ones to trade for beauties.”

The brothers laughed.

Suddenly, the Spirit of Ashan was at her rock in the cliffs above Teahra Village.

She focused on returning to the cedar slab hut and the brothers planning evil. Instead, she found herself watching a dream
that Kai El was having about his forbidden sister.

Ashan would have wept, if spirits could.

She tried desperately to enter his dream and change it, as she had done many times before, but the power of human love was
too great to overcome.

She fled to a mountaintop on the other side of the world, and ran with a red wolf in the dawn-colored snow. The wolf howled
to greet morning. Ashan sang with the wolf, until she forgot what she couldn’t bear to remember.

T
OR GOT WORSE
. E
ATEN BY RAGE, DROWNING IN UNSHED
tears, he danced alone on the edge of madness. He marked each day after Ashan’s death with a firecoal on the hut wall. When
he realized that the number of days in forever didn’t matter, he stopped counting, and time blurred. He separated from the
world, like a caterpillar inside an invisible cocoon. Things looked flat. Sound and taste were blunted. Nothing seemed real.
He could stare at a nearby bush and a mountain behind it, and they both seemed the same distance away, as if they were
painted
on the sky. If he reached for something, he might miss it. Thinking was difficult. The smallest decision loomed gigantic.
At times words made no sense. At times, he felt invisible. Unfortunately he wasn’t. People saw the miserable man, but didn’t
know what to say to him.

Weary of inflicting himself on others, Tor spent days and nights away from Teahra Village. He wandered through mark-less time,
as he had long ago after man-eaters massacred his Shahala tribesmen. But now there was a difference: He could go home. People
would feed him. It was a good thing: No longer a youth at the mountaintop of cunning and strength, Eagle from the Light was
slipping down the slope of old age.

A long way from the Great River one day, Tor hurried along a barren plateau with a strong wind at his back, using the butt
of his spear as a third leg to push himself along. High, dark clouds filled the sky. “Find cover,” the clouds said to all
creatures, “and soon.” Tor didn’t know where he was, so he ran before the wind, hoping to find shelter before the coming storm’s
fury caught him.

Even if I don’t find shelter,
he thought,
rain won’t kill me. Though all this running might.

The clouds had turned day into almost-night when he reached a cleft between plateaus. He scrambled down a rocky decline, and
into a narrow gully carved by runoff from higher ground. Farther down, where the gully widened, he saw the gray-green of a
grove of trees, and ran for it.

Over the treetops, the wind howled. Inside the grove, the air was still, except for Tor’s huffing. He grabbed branches and
propped them against a tree trunk—leaving the side away from the wind open—then covered the frame with his sleeping skin,
tied it down, and settled in to wait for the storm.

His breathing and heartbeat quieted as he looked around. Dull as he’d become, it took a while to realize the importance of
what he had found.

Trees. Not just
any
trees, but
pine
trees.

No—not the majestic grandfathers of Shahala land—tall and proud, with long, limber needles in groups of three. These were
old and twisted, with short, sharp needles grouped in twos. The stunted things were far from his mind’s picture of pine trees,
but by smell and taste, he knew they must be.

Spirit of the tree who gives medicine for many ills, we thank you…
Tor remembered Ashan’s song as she gathered pine in the fragrant forests of their youth. He sighed for that other life.

The only pine found in the new land was far up in the mountains, where the huckleberries grew. Tenka used what she could get
for coughing sickness. There was never enough for sap tea to soothe the pains of old age, or inner bark for warriors to soak
and put on their wounds.

On the side of a tree away from the wind, Tor cut pieces of rough bark with his stone blade, stripped off the thin inner bark,
and replaced the outer bark so the tree could grow a scar around it. He filled his waist pouch with moist strips. His nose
came alive. The inner bark smelled like health.

As wind and clouds had foretold, rain pounded the land for days and nights. Tor’s shelter kept him dry. Runoff cas
caded from higher ground, but missed the pine grove. The trees lived in the only place they could, proving that they were
smart, as well as good medicine.

One morning Tor awoke to see the sun rising into a cloudless sky, and he knew the storm was over.

Sunlight sparkled from an ancient trunk, caught by a rounded glob stuck in the bark: a drop of hardened pitch. He pried it
out, turned it over in his fingers, held it up to the sky. Smooth, clear and golden… like sunshine seen from the bottom of
a pool.

Tor could never resist the magic created by sun and water. It made him think of Kai El. The piece of golden pitch took him
back to Keecha Creek—the waiting; the sound from the Home Cave that terrified him until he realized it was his child’s first
cries. He remembered raising his arms to the sky as men had done since the Misty Time, shouting:

“Spirits of all who love people! Kai El, Sun River, is born! Give this child a better life than mine!”

Tor sighed. So long ago…

Inside the hard glob of pitch, a small beetle slept forever.

Once, Tor would have run to Ashan with the treasure. His curious mate had loved things with a story, and what a story
this
could tell. No one had seen such a beetle. Maybe the creature with shimmering green wings had died out like mammoths and
horses.