People of the Earth (32 page)

 
          
 
He raised a hand to grope her sore breast. She
locked her jaws, body trembling. He tightened his grip, forcing her to gasp.

 
          
 
"Bad storm. Cold."

 
          
 
She strangled a cry in her throat.

 
          
 
"We need to stay warm, you and I. I'm
feeling cold again."

 
          
 
She fought the urge to scream as he raised
himself to pull up the hem of her worn leather dress.

 
          
 
"It will be a long night," he
whispered in her ear. "You and I, we'll need to stay warm a lot."

 
          
 
He laughed in a low, savage voice as his
weight settled. She could feel the chill on her thighs when the buffalo robe
lifted. She turned her head away, eyes tightly shut. She tried to will her body
to relax in the hope that his entry wouldn't hurt so much this time.

 
          
 
She endured. His movement within sickened her;
vomit tickled at the back of her throat. He groaned, muscles tensing, and her
guts knotted against his release.

 
          
 
He went limp, sighing.

 
          
 
He shifted as he reached to pull the robe over
his back where it had slipped off—and in doing so, exposed her hand to the
chilly ground. Her fingers brushed something round and cold that lay on the
gritty sandstone. The fires of hope raced through her veins.

 
          
 
Bad Belly puffed his way to a wind-dusted
point of rocks and looked out over the land that spread below. He stood on a
promontory that jutted up from the north slope of the
Sideways
Mountains
. Gradual inclines rose to the irregular
peaks—all of them deep in a mantle of unbroken white. As he watched, sunlight
broke through the parting tufts of cloud and spotted the snowbound land in
patches of gleaming white bright enough to hurt the eye. Here and there the
rich blue of the sky could be seen in the ragged gaps.

 
          
 
Bad Belly stared back at the long slope and
shook his head. He'd passed four days of misery working his way down the
summits. For two days now, his stomach had growled its hunger. Travel through
the deep snow had sapped his strength, and cold had worked into his very bones.

 
          
 
"And it's all your fault," he
muttered to Trouble. The dog stood beside him happily, sniffing the wind while
he looked over the country, ears pricked. Then he whined and yawned, wagging
his tail.

 
          
 
Bad Belly turned his gaze to the terrain ahead
of him. Immediately to the west, the
Gray
Deer
River
ran through a canyon in the
Sideways
Mountains
. Half-blinded by the blowing snow, he'd
almost fallen off one of those steep cliffs when he'd wandered too close to the
edge.

 
          
 
To the north stretched the rocky bones of the
basin. Out there the Wolf People hunted when they came down from the
Grass
Meadow
Mountains
, rising like sentinels to the east.

 
          
 
A series of dark-red ridges rose where the
river twisted its way through the bottomlands. The spines of rock gleamed where
the steep faces of the sandstone remained defiantly exposed. Beyond a turn of
the river, a pillar of steam lifted from a spot in the buff-capped bluffs a
half-day's walk away.

 
          
 
"The hot-water springs," Bad Belly
whispered. He fingered his chin as he stared. A Power place.

 
          
 
He'd heard plenty of stories about the huge
springs, where water too hot to touch boiled out of the earth. Curious
formations held the water in pools before it ran into the
Gray
Deer
River
. Larkspur liked to tell the story about how
she had gone to the
hot springs
once as a girl and bathed in the waters. While there, she'd received a
vision that told her to return home, that her oldest sister had died through
the actions of a malevolent Spirit. She'd gone back to Round Rock and Sung a
Power Song that drove the bad Spirit away and reclaimed the camp for the clan.

 
          
 
Bad Belly chewed his lower lip, staring at the
billowing steam. As often as he'd heard the story, he'd come to believe that
Larkspur had gone someplace outside this world. Now he stared at that very
place. A sense of wonder possessed him.

 
          
 
A patch of cloud parted and sunlight spilled around
him. He squinted; snow blindness could strike a man at this time of year. When
the sun hit the column of steam, the vapor glowed brightly. He would go down
there and see the
hot springs
before he stumbled into the next calamity awaiting him.

 
          
 
"Well, let's go. Left Hand is probably
most of the way to his people by now." He grimaced at Trouble's happy
face. "You just had to follow that wolf, didn't you? Look at the mess you
got us in."

 
          
 
Trouble looked up, tail wagging.

 
          
 
Bed Belly twisted his face into a sour
expression and looked up at the cloudy sky. "Warm Fire, you don't know
what you got me into when you made me promise. Now I really have problems—as if
I didn't have enough as it was. I'll go down there and get killed by some Sun
People warrior, or something."

 
          
 
He started down the slope toward the silver
ribbon of the
Gray
Deer
River
.

 
          
 
In a world of white, White Ash stumbled
forward aimlessly. Her feet kicked up the fluffy wet flakes as the deep snow
dragged at the leather of her soggy moccasins. The mantle of white hid rocks
and brush. More than once she tripped and fell. Each fall drained more of her
flagging energy and caked her with wet snow that melted to soak her clothing.
She felt faint, detached from the world.

 
          
 
She forced herself on, step after step, a
simple pattern of movement her numb mind could understand. She gave no thought
to her direction, driven only to place as much distance as she could between
herself and that horrible rock overhang.

 
          
 
The red splotches of Three Bulls' blood
crusted on her sleeve and under her fingernails. She'd reveled in the rushing
warmth of his spurting Wood as it soaked her hands. The sound of the sharpened
quartzite cobble smacking time after time into his bones would echo in her
dreams until she died.

 
          
 
"Was that really me?" she asked
herself dully, remembering the fear-charged power of her muscles as she
attacked him. Not until she'd exhausted herself had she finally dropped the
quartzite cobble. Her soul had been seized with terror then; the image of his
wrecked features burned into her memory. She'd never forget his battered body
lying on the crumbling sandstone.

 
          
 
Her foot caught in buried sage and she fell
again, the cold wetness of the snow eating into her face and hands. She
floundered, battling to stand. Then she retrieved each of Three Bulls' darts
from the snow where she'd dropped them.

 
          
 
At least she'd had sense enough to grab up his
pack before she fled. Now she had fire sticks of hard wood, and his
atlatl
and darts. With weapons, and the ability to kindle a
fire, she could survive.

 
          
 
Something whispered in the silence behind her.
White Ash whimpered as she cast a frightened look over her shoulder. The snow
formed strange, haunting shapes, almost like faces, that seemed to swoop forward
on icy wings. She gasped and charged forward. She tripped and fell again. She
could sense a lurking presence watching, waiting, following in her tracks.

 
          
 
Run! Flee! Get away! She scrambled awkwardly
to her feet, her stomach aching from hunger. The muscles of her legs trembled
from fatigue as she shivered and panted, teetering from exhaustion. The world
shimmered and went hazy in her vision. Hazy. Then gray. . . .

 
          
 
White Ash came to lying in the snow. She
couldn't feel her hands or feet. She blinked against the swirling grayness that
spun about her foggy thoughts.

           
 
She staggered up, lost her balance, and fell
heavily. A dark shadow loomed over her.

 
          
 
''No! Leave me alone!'' she raged in terror
and lunged to her feet again, forcing herself to run, the edges of her vision
blurring as she looked back—and saw nothing. The earth spun and went gray again
. . .

 
          
 
The cold bite of snow on her face brought her
back to consciousness once more. How long had she lain there this time? Pushed
too far. Even my body has failed me. Violent shivers shook her and splintered
her vision.

 
          
 
She blinked, staring up at the sky. Sunlight
broke through the clouds in bars. Did the light trick her? An image formed in
the patchy clouds. A man of fire stared down at her, concern on his face.

 
          
 
She got a foot under her, wincing as she
stood. Her vagina burned like a wound. Her breasts chafed angrily on the
leather of her dress. Her battered face had gone wooden from the cold, the
bruises too chilled to sting.

 
          
 
With the
atlatl
shaft, she propped herself up. One step after another, she wobbled forward. Her
tumbling thoughts refused to form. Which way?