Kalik (11 page)

Maka and Tepulka tried the meat, nodded gravely, and grinned at each other. Thrusting poles underneath, because it was falling away from the bones, we lifted off the roasted carcass, lowered it carefully on to a platform of logs covered with watercress. The meat hissed magnificent on the damp cress.

“Look at me!” Chak dipped his fingers in the steam and licked them.

Maka, Tepulka, and I carved quickly. On sharp slivers of wood, the Children took thick slices, chops, and gobbets of hot meat running juice. The catch of the herb came through the smell of roast meat.

“We’re alive!” I said.

Paku nodded. “We beat them!”

We ate, and laughed, and ate, and sang, and ate again, and rested. We dozed around the ruin of the carcass, woke, and dragged ourselves forward for more. Licking fingers. Taking the oiliness off lips and tongues with the sharp cress. I feasted my family.

“If I don’t stop I’ll split up the middle!” said Chak, stuffing down some more.

Stomach round, her red cheeks shining with grease, Kimi crawled and sprawled against me. “Tell us a story?” Hurk leaned on my other side. Jealous, Chak climbed on my lap. I got my back against a log, made room for Tupu. Puli and Tama joined us, eyes large in their sad faces. We were warm in the wash of flames. An occasional hiss of rain on the fire. In the dark, the river roared.

“Tell us the one about the Showman and the Dark Forest?” begged Puli. “Yes!” “Yes!” “The one about the Showman.” Why
would Puli want a story that scared me, the part where I thought the Showman looked like Kalik – or the Carny?

The story finished, the Five Friends safe home in their own place, a voice mumbled drowsy, “One day we’ll find a place like that.”

“What’s wrong with staying here?” murmured somebody.

And Maka said, “I want to get further away. Out of sight of Grave Mountain and Lake Ka. Where we can forget everything.”

“I wonder if Nip’s had her pups?” said Chak.

“We’ll get some dogs where we’re going,” I told him. “And I’m going to teach you how to read.”

“What’s read?” asked Kimi.

“Remember when I drew the Five Friends on the wall of your hut?”

I could feel Kimi nodding.

“The marks I made under their pictures?” She nodded again. “You copied them when I was away up the lake. Making those marks was writing. Knowing what they mean, that’s reading.”

“That’s easy!”

“You’re going to learn to read and write lots more words, thousands.” The Children didn’t know what thousands meant. “All the words we say to each other, you’ll learn to write them down. You’ll learn to write messages to each other.”

“And there won’t be any Kalik?”

“No!”

“No Lutha?”

“No!”

“Just us?”

“Tell us about our place?” asked Tupu, the feverish note in her voice.

“A long way south,” I said, “there’s a warm piece of land between a lake and a river rushing by. With grass for our sheep and goats. And the river has a pool for swimming in summer. There’s a tree with a branch to hang a rope from, so you can swing and let go into the water. There’s a hut with a chimney.
In winter we’ll sit around the fire and tell stories. We’ll spin wool and hair from the Animals and weave it. We’ll trade our cloth for knives and cooking pots.

“We’ll grow gardens. Fruit trees. We’ll catch fish and deer and wild goats. Kitimah and Sheenah’s babies will grow up there. We’ll steal wild pups and tame them….”

I went on until I was talking to myself, the Children asleep, firelight flickering off the grease on their faces and hands.

During the night, the river shifted the barrier of logs, boulders, and sand from the mouth of the tunnel and blocked up its old bed just downstream. The water piled against the new barrier and disappeared through the iron grating, submerging its bars. We stared in silence.

“What about all the rocks and dirt where the roof fell in?” asked Paku.

“I suppose the water will blow it out. Remember I said this tunnel must join the river under Grave Mountain.”

“It would have taken hundreds of years to cut and dig tunnels that big,” said Tepulka. “How do you know they weren’t there all the time?”

“They wouldn’t be so even-shaped. And there’s the gate. And remember the shaft to let in fresh air?”

Paku nodded, but I could see Tepulka found it easier to believe the tunnels were natural.

“The Old People had machines to dig tunnels,” I said.

“What’s a machine?”

“A tool’s a machine. Like a bow or a knife.”

“Did they have knives that cut tunnels?”

“Huge machines with metal teeth like knives that spun and drilled through rock and soil. You’d understand them better than me,” I told Tepulka. “You know how you can make things?

“But machines became a problem. I read books about the time they did so much of the work, people lost interest. Sicknesses swept through, killing them. And then the sun went mad.

“The Shaman said we are an animal that’s very clever at
going forward over difficulties. But that’s one difficulty the Old People didn’t overcome: how to keep going when there aren’t any.”

I could see I hadn’t explained things clearly enough. The Children had seen some of their toppled walls, but they had no idea of the huge numbers of the Old People.

“We don’t need to worry,” said Paku. “Things aren’t going to get too easy for us!”

“Not if we’re going to have to build everything ourselves!” Perhaps Tepulka understood more than I thought.

The excitement of starting our journey that morning! Even Tama and Puli felt it and moved faster. Paku wrapped the leftover meat in watercress and put it inside a deerskin pack. Tepulka rolled the sheepskin and plaited flax ropes to hold it on his shoulders. I depended more and more upon those two older boys, and on Tulu and Maka.

In bright sunlight we crossed the shrunken river, a mud dribble through the great tangle of logs and rocks above. I carried one of our bows. Two arrows through my belt. The broken one in my pack. Paku, a fair shot, carried our second bow, and the other two arrows. Tepulka had our one spear. Paku, Maka, and I had knives. We would look for wood to make more bows. Sticks for arrows. We would spin and braid cord. We needed more spears, too. I could show the Children how to sharpen their ends, harden them in a fire.

Backs to the sun, we headed south. All day we saw tracks and dung, the signs of browsing. There were more of the tracks Maka and I had seen the day before. I looked back. Chak and Kimi were shoving and trying to get in front of Maka and Tulu. Then Hurk, and Tupu with her face flushed with fever. Kitimah and Sheenah talking companionably. Tama and Puli. Tepulka and Paku coming along behind. “If only we had some animals, we’d look like the Travellers,” I said and thought of Nip.

Towards evening, clouds rolled across from the Western Mountains. I showed the Children how to jam long branches
between trees to make a shelter, leaning others against them. More and more. Then a thatch of long grass.

“First layer across the bottom. Tips down so it carries the rain towards the ground. Next layer on top, overlapping the first. Another layer above that. That’s it! Till you get to the top. Then start all over again. A layer across the bottom. One above. That’s the way. Pack it tight.

“When you think you’ve got the thatch thick enough,” I said, “then start all over again from the bottom and double it. That’s right, Puli, overlap it. See how Puli’s doing it? The rain will drip down from the top bit, on to the next bit, all the way to the ground at the back of the shelter.” Puli hung her head. A flush came up her neck, but she was pleased.

“You want the thatch at least this thick.” I showed Paku with my hands. “Lash some branches across to hold it down. Then start everyone collecting firewood.

“Build a fire against the rock,” I said to Maka and Tepulka. “It’ll reflect heat into the shelter. And get twice as much firewood as you think we’ll need. I’m going to have a look at the way ahead.”

Smoke curled up where Maka was taking her turn at pushing the firestick backwards and forwards in its groove. Paku was sending the little ones for more grass.

The country rose to the south-east. The Western Mountains had disappeared. Over a ridge the far side of the valley, cloud poured like a river of snow.

Three sheep sheltered under an outcrop on a small clearing. Two looked like lambs. If only I had Nip! I backed away. No sense scaring them. We needed to catch some alive. Train them to walk with us. To become our Animals.

I headed back. When the smell of smoke came through the first drops of rain, I felt happy!

It rained three days. We hunted, fixed leaks, closed in the ends of the shelter. To keep the cooks dry, Tepulka built a high roof beside the fire.

We all went to the small clearing. Paku saw at once what to do and led Tulu, Maka, and Tepulka around through the trees. The rest of us ran up, shouting, waving. The ewe got away, but the two lambs ran into thick scrub at the top where the others were waiting.

We trussed and slung the lambs in deerskins, carried them back to camp. Tepulka cut up the cured deerskin I had brought, cut it around and around into straps of even width. We made harnesses, and the Children took turns training the half-grown lambs to walk with us. Tama showed more interest than anyone else, and the lambs responded to his quiet way.

When I chipped an arrowhead out of stone, everyone wanted to try. I watched Tepulka, but couldn’t see why it was the stone seemed to chip the right way for him, as if it was wood.

We made bows and arrows. Paku and Tulu got stung robbing a hive, but the arrowheads were lashed and coated with beeswax, and we ate honey. Kimi and Tupu, Chak and Hurk, all carried small spears with fire-hardened points.

Since we couldn’t catch the ewe, Paku shot her. We had her wool, and that off the one we had eaten. I lashed sticks around a stone, this way and that, and showed the Children how to hold the wool under their left arm, how to tease it out between their fingers so the yarn wound on the spindle as it turned and rose and fell.

By the time we moved on, we had several large balls of yarn. Deerskin bags. Ropes of plaited leather. Bows and arrows. Spears.

“Travellers only own what they can carry,” I said.

We led the lambs on ropes at first, and they took some holding. It was easier to leave them to Tama. After the first few days, they followed him! At night he tethered them. “They feel safer near us,” he said in his serious way. My heart leapt at his little smile.

We were throwing up a shelter near a stream where rushes grew, fine thatching. “Ish!” Puli screamed. She was cutting
rushes with my knife. Something huge and black had leapt out of the rushes, woofed at her, and bolted. Worse, Puli had dropped my knife.

I hoped it wasn’t a bear, but found the same tracks Maka and I had seen before. More rounded than a deer’s. Heavier. Thick dung, hot and rank. Black bristles caught on a broken branch, about the height of my knee from the ground. More of them caught in a log rubbed to a polish. I also found my knife.

“I think it’s a pig,” I told Paku who ran with his bow. “Have you ever heard of them? Boars?” I remembered the Boar Man in the Animals’ Dance when I was a child. In the Travellers’ Cave in the Whykatto.

Paku shook his head.

I tried squealing and grunting, but Paku laughed until he cried and shook his head.

Later, with charcoal from the fire, I drew on a cliff what I remembered of the Boar Man. A beast heavier than a dog but lighter than a bear. Stronger in the shoulders. Huge head. White tusks.

“The Boar!” the Children repeated to each other. Other memories came back to me. I drew a sow. Several piglets. “Boar,” I printed under the first drawing. “Sow.” “Piglets.” And I wrote “Pigs” across the top. “Pigs!” I said.

The Children looked at the pictures. They said the words with me. Kimi and Tupu, Chak and Hurk rolled, grunting, laughing, squealing. That night, as I told them their story of the Five Friends, they asked for others about sheep and pigs. About tunnels. About children who ran away, tamed sheep, made arrows, bows, spears. Crossed rivers and hills. And learned to cook mutton and make their own spindles and spin yarn from wool.

That night, after they were asleep, I drew a column of children and sheep walking across a wide land. I took care to draw each child. I wrote their names beside them, so they could see them, first thing next morning, and I wrote “The Travellers” underneath.

We were late starting next day. Everyone had to practise writing their own name, over and over beside their picture. At last we travelled on. Our flock grew to nine. Six little ewes, three rams. I taught the Children to pick the wisps of wool snagged on the scrub, to run their hands over the sheep for loose strands. The spindles rose and fell as we walked.

I showed Tepulka how to make fire with a bow-drill. “That’s a machine,” he said, ‘for making fire.”

“You might have shown us before,” Maka said and pulled a face. “It would have saved us a lot of work.”

“That’s what a machine does,” said Tepulka.

Where a hillside had collapsed, we found good clay and made rough pots. For several days we built huge fires and baked them. A few didn’t break. I remembered the glaze that Taur had shown me, to seal pots so they would hold water. We would make that, too.

I showed the Children how to pack a couple of firepots with embers and moss. We wove nets to carry them. “Now we can have fire whenever we want it,” said Maka. “Without all that work!” Her eyes flashed at me, and I caught my breath at her prettiness. “Ish, tell us a story about a man who wouldn’t show some children the easy way to make fire?”

One day I said, “We’re going to have to stop before the cold weather. We’ll make a winter camp, spin more wool and weave clothes. For ourselves, and for trading.”

“Trading?” asked Paku.

I told him about the Iron People in what Kalik called the Cold Hills. “They’ll trade knives and cooking pots for our woven cloth.”

“I remember Kalik going away with a trading party,” said Paku. “In the early summer.”