Shadows in the Cave (16 page)

“You …”

He raised a hand. “Not yet,” he repeated.

With a canny edge in her voice, she said, “Let’s go see Oghi.”

“No!” he said too loud and too fast. Oghi would give away his owl secret immediately. “I need to leave.”

“You want to make me really mad?”

“Iona, there are other things going on here. I can’t talk about them. I’ve got to go see my great-grandmother.”

Iona studied his face. At last, with the wisdom of generations of women who watched their men act bone-headed, she nodded. “I’ll pack you some food, so you can go out and slay the world’s demons.”

All day Shonan and Yah-Su crouched in the shadows of the cave and listened to Brown Leaf warriors walking up and down the hillsides, searching for the Red Chief who cut a swath through their people.

Shonan supposed he was safe. The enemies were damned unlikely to find this camp. It crouched far back in a corner of the ravine, and on both sides the rock walls were overhanging. Anyone peering down would see that the muddy bottom showed no tracks. Clearly Yah-Su had camped here for years. If the Brown Leaves hadn’t found his camp in all that time, they wouldn’t find it today.

Shonan hated hiding. He wanted to
do
something. He wanted to find Aku. He wanted to fight. He put more fat on his raging belly burn.

At full dark Yah-Su motioned that they should go. They moved out by stealth.

It was impressive, in the Red Chief’s mind, that a man the size and shape of a buffalo could weave through the forest with less noise than Tagu made. The fellow had survived for a reason. By the time the moon came up, they were tucked deep in another cave, this time with few supplies and no water. The next night they traveled until dawn and came to a cave behind a waterfall.

Yah-Su grinned broadly, jumped behind the curtain of water, jumped back out, grinned bigger, and with a hand invited Shonan in. With a couple of deft steps, you could get in without getting wet.

This looked like Yah-Su’s main camp, if he had such a thing. A lovely, liquid light gleamed through the falling water and showed a room that got wider as it deepened. Yah-Su had stacks of rolled hides, all protecting dried meat. The man clearly was a good hunter, and he must have learned to tan hides himself. Against the walls leaned weapons—clubs, spears, spear throwers, all with well-flaked heads nicely lashed to the bodies. He had a pile of knives of flint and obsidian, with handles of everything from wood to a bear jawbone.

Shonan looked around curiously. Because of the water-reflected light, this was a remarkable home.

He realized they could talk—the water would cover the sound. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

Yah-Su smiled sweetly and said something in the Amaso tongue. Shonan resorted to signs—he hated it when people didn’t speak Galayi, as right-thinking people did. “Good place.”

“Thanks.” Tagu came to Shonan, who rubbed his ears.

Awkwardly, he told Yah-Su with signs and gestures what was what. “I want to go back to the Brown Leaf village and kill the shaman.” He spoke aloud the shaman’s name, Maloch.

“No,” signed Yah-Su.

“I’ll do it alone,” signed Shonan. Signing cut speech to the basics.

Now Yah-Su was stumped. After a few minutes he fingered, “
Big
want to?”

“Yes.”

“Maloch is also the Uktena.” He spoke the name of the
dragon. Evidently the two tribes called the monster by the same name.

“Yes.”

“We die.”

Shonan sighed. He would be glad to have the man beast as a war comrade. He fixed Yah-Su with his eyes. “A warrior dies maybe any day. A warrior, okay to die.”

Galayi tradition said that two kinds of the dead were quickly reborn onto the Earth, warriors who were killed in battle and women and children who died in childbirth.

Yah-Su looked at Shonan with huge brown buffalo eyes. “They stop looking for us. Then we go.”

That simple.

They talked. It was damned awkward, in Shonan’s mind, to talk with your fingers. But they were stuck inside, they were safe, they had nothing to do, so they talked.

Shonan told about his war exploits. If he read Yah-Su right, the young beast was fascinated. He was another man of action, he understood. You come to situations that have to be faced. You clear your mind for moments of pure action, without thought, in a way moments of pure beauty. If you kept things simple and true, if your actions were bold and quick, you probably lived. And you felt real. The rest of life wasn’t like that.

Those meanings underlaid Shonan’s tales. He had the impression that Yah-Su understood.

But Shonan didn’t understand Yah-Su, so he asked him, “Why do you live alone?”

“I don’t like to be alone,” said the buffalo man. “I plan to get a dog like Tagu.” He turned the dog over and rubbed his belly.

The beast was evading. When Shonan pressed him, he wouldn’t answer, not really. He fingered a lot of things. He threw out quite a few words to go with them, but the words were in the Amaso language, and Shonan didn’t understand them. Shonan did learn for sure that Yah-Su was from the Amaso village.

Shonan got the picture that Yah-Su had been mocked by other boys when he was an adolescent because he was humpbacked. Yah-Su felt humiliated, probably thought marriage would be impossible for him, and for that reason he could never truly be part of the village, one of the people. So he ran off and started living by himself.

“That was before you got so big?” sighed Shonan.

“Yes.” Yah-Su always seemed polite and considerate in the way he conducted himself. The people who thought he was a beast had the wrong fellow.

“You learned to hunt, make lamps, everything else by yourself?”

“I saw it around the village. And my mother’s brother, sometimes I would go see him at night. He helped me get good at making weapons.”

“You still go there?”

“One of my relatives trades things to me. For meat. But she … she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

There were more details, but that was the story.

Yah-Su wanted to know the particulars of what happened when Shonan and Aku were captured, more than he’d been able to see from the distant shadows. Shonan told him how a creature tricked up to look like his daughter lured them into a trap, how the “daughter” taunted them with whorish talk of what she did with Maloch. She was no daughter, but a false creation of Maloch shaped like Salya. Then the two
of them did an obscene dance and melded themselves into one creature, Maloch.

Then he told how Aku shape-shifted into an owl and escaped.

Shonan asked, “You don’t think we can kill Maloch?”

Yah-Su shrugged the most massive shoulders Shonan had ever seen and shook his shaggy head.

“Then why are you going with me?”

“Maybe you’ll be my friend.”

On the second afternoon Shonan asked Yah-Su if he wanted to leave that night. The buffalo man shook his head no. Shonan thought the man’s reluctance was odd. He knew Yah-Su was not afraid of a fight. Bluntly, he signed, “What is it? What are you afraid of?” He didn’t believe such a warrior had a great fear of being killed.

Yah-Su shrugged.

“Do you like Maloch the Uktena?”

“I hate him.” The buffalo man’s eyes flickered with fire. Then he lowered his head. “He took over the village. He kills the pretty girls.”

Shonan nodded. Yah-Su had watched what happened. He saw the warriors go to neighboring villages and steal girls. He watched as Maloch the Uktena ate their life-fires.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has armor,” Shonan agreed.

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has teeth like knives.” Shonan didn’t think the dragon’s short arms and small claws were a big factor.

“No one can kill the Uktena.”

“He has that diamond eye. If you let it blind you, you’re dead.”

Yah-Su said nothing.

Shonan regarded Yah-Su. In this world everything could be killed—everything died. Death made Earth different from the world above and the Underworld. He liked it that way. Battle, the risk of life, death right in your nostrils—it was exhilarating.

“Let’s wait one more day,” he said.

“I want to practice with your spear throwers.”

Yah-Su nodded.

Yah-Su had a place for his own practice. You could hurl a dart into a mound of dirt twenty paces away or arc a dart to the far end of the meadow a hundred paces away.

The weapon was a kind of spear given the speed of a shooting star. You used a lever with a cup on the end to hold the dart, a slimmer, lighter spear the length of a man. With this thrower, which increased the length of your arm hugely, the dart became the deadliest of weapons.

Shonan knew damn well that a spear-thrower dart would kill any living creature.

Yah-Su had three spear throwers—he was a real warrior—but Shonan didn’t know them. He needed to throw with each one, feel its heft, test its balance, learn which one suited his arm and style. He practiced at twenty paces, not a hundred. He intended to drive the dart head clear through the dragon.

He knew by noon, and chose one. The dart was heavy for his arm, but it was the lightest of the three.

Yah-Su signaled that he would carry the others.

Shonan smiled, clapped the buffalo man on the shoulder, and they walked back to the cave behind the waterfall.

They had three shots. He would need only one.

Shonan was amazed by Yah-Su’s strength and agility. Not only did he have trouble keeping up with his comrade on the way back to the Brown Leaf village, they wore Tagu out. In the dark Shonan couldn’t figure out the route Yah-Su was taking. Like any good fighting man, as he and Aku walked the trail, Shonan had made a clear picture in his mind of the creeks and ridges. But he couldn’t puzzle out where Yah-Su was headed. He shrugged and followed. This was Yah-Su’s territory, and he was its master.

The second night they camped in sand. Since the moon was dropping behind the mountains to the west, Shonan couldn’t see the ocean, but he could hear it and smell it. When he crawled into his blankets, he was comfortable. He liked the soft shush of the sea on the sand.