Shadows in the Cave (3 page)

He looked at the sky. Not enough time before dusk, but he thought it was important to get moving.

When the great congregation was organized, his daughter was standing at the front, between his son and the man she intended to marry.

5

I
n her family hut at the Amaso village, beside the river that curved into the sea, Iona woke when the first hint of light lit the smoke hole. She sat up wildly, feeling like all the hairs would fly off her head and then her head would sail away from her neck. She groped inside for … what? The feeling of being herself? What she found was craziness. In a quarter moon, or perhaps a half, her lover would come to her. Until then, craziness.

She pulled on a doeskin dress, slipped out the door flap, walked up and down the ocean sands, searching for something, but she didn’t know what. The village where she’d lived all her life, the sands stretching to the north, the cliffs rising to the south, the great water blasted with the light of the rising sun—she cared nothing for this familiar world. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the air had been sucked off the planet.

Yes, she knew Aku was on the way. She knew he felt the same passion, bigger than anything she had ever thought people could feel, a force rough and crazy, like the white-frothed waves that racked the sea. She knew that when he came to Amaso, she would give him all they both wanted, they would fulfill the promise. But she felt empty
now
. She wanted something
now
.

She got an idea. She saw her father, Oghi, walking away from the hut they shared—only the two of them lived there. He was headed for the tide pools and soon would come back with his hands full of shells. He was the village seer, and he used shells as tools of divination to get glimpses of the future. She didn’t understand how it worked. Now she ran after him.

Though she called him “father,” he was no more than a dozen winters older than she, and he was the brother of her first father. Two winters ago her mother died giving birth, and last winter her father died of the coughing sickness. Oghi had never married and lived alone in a small hut about a hundred paces from the village. Though he declined to move into the village—the closeness made him uncomfortable—she moved in with him. Neither of them had any other family left.

“Father,” she called, “what are the tides today?”

Oghi meant “sea turtle” in the Amaso language, and her father knew more about the ocean than anyone else in the tribe. In a vision he’d seen himself as an ocean-going turtle. Then he learned to shape-shift into the common turtle with the smooth red-brown back and the fine-tasting green fat. Though he was a monster as a turtle, the weight of two men, as a man Oghi was slight and looked boyish, except for his ancient eyes. His hair, oddly, had been red-brown from birth. He kept track of the weather and everything about the sea for the village.

“The tides will be big,” he said. Sometimes the incoming tide pushed halfway to the village and deepened the separate fingers of the river until no one could walk across them, or the outgoing tide exposed long stretches of sand and rock, and sucked the river almost dry.

“Really big. Flood tide way upriver tonight. Go get some water. We’ll cook these mussels.”

“What about the ebb tide?”

“Biggest one in a moon tomorrow at midday. Bring back plenty of water. You’ll want to stay away from the river in the morning.”

Will I, now?

At dawn she was ready. She shoved the log off the sand into the river, stood in the water naked, and held it back against the current. The outgoing tide shooshed around her thighs. If she didn’t launch on the log, the force would take both dead tree and passenger, ready or not.

She looked at the sun, gathering itself on the eastern horizon far, far out to sea. She felt the river running out to … no one knew where, not even her father. It was against all wisdom, yes, it was. Of all Amaso people she, daughter of Oghi the sea turtle, knew that best. It was what she wanted—to be swept away by an immense force, to be
taken
.

She pushed the log and flopped onto it. The current seized both of them and for a moment snatched her breath away. Once, several years ago, she’d felt loss of control like this. She’d dared some other girls to climb an oak tree that stood on the edge of the high river bank, roots peeping out below. Taunting them, Iona crept further and further out on a thick limb. She was agile as a squirrel and as sure-footed. Her best friend scooted out onto the branch and—

It snapped off. The friend fell the height of two men to the flat ground and hollered like she’d been wounded mortally. Iona fell onto the sloping bank and tumbled head over heels all the way to the river sand. Her friends shrieked in fear. Iona stood up and roared like a bear, beating her chest. Not because she’d survived unhurt, but because of a feeling.
During the moment of the fall—the moment that lasted half a lifetime—she had felt absolutely out of control. She exulted in it.

Now—
Let it come!
—she lost control again. She rushed between the banks and swept out along the tidal flats. Where sweet river met salt ocean, the log spun in the churning sea. She whirled past the last point of land and into infinity. She felt triumphant. Let fate come—she wanted whatever it brought, she wanted an enormous blast of something, she wanted to throw away her daily wisp of a life, she wanted experience, real and strong. She wanted to feel alive
today
.

She saw it now—the ocean was as big as the sky. She wasn’t a bird, she wasn’t a fish. She couldn’t swim in the one, couldn’t breathe in the other. She was going wherever the tide took her, and it was running toward the end of the world, wherever that might be. She was possessed wholly—she lived in immensity. She wanted to feel owned, lips, arms, breasts, legs, crotch, the heart that drove the blood, the blood itself, the place her feelings lived—she wanted to be usurped and melded into this sea, this world, this power.

She stood up on the log, wobbly.

It rolled.

She plunged deep, took two strokes deeper, held herself underwater for a delicious moment, turned, and surged upward to the light. Her head popped into the air. At that moment the log banged her shoulder. She cried out in pain. With her other arm she grabbed a stud sticking out from the log and held on hard. She rotated her sore shoulder in several directions. It sort of worked. She clambered back onto the log and straddled it.

She looked around. Grandmother Sun was well up from her watery bed, bright and strong—a strong woman like Iona.

The girl looked straight up and saw an osprey cruising overhead, hunting. It wanted fish for its belly. It had the swiftness, strength, and skill to get what it wanted.

Iona wanted a belly full of life, and she would take what she wanted.

And she wanted to stay out here all day and play and ride the tide back.

“It doesn’t look like much to me,” said Salya.

She and Aku looked from the top of a low hill across sand flats toward Amaso. The huts were few and shabby and the sands barren. The wide river split into a lot of stringy braids. She wasn’t enticed by the horizon-to-horizon immensity of water to the east. It was just somewhere she would never be able to go. The sun, straight overhead, didn’t make the place look better. She was dispirited, missing Kumu. The six men came back with the food, but, true to his agreement with her father, Kumu would wait in Tusca until he and Salya were married.

Aku said, “It’ll be fine.”

Salya humphed. She was back to wondering why her twin let their father push them to this odd place without protest. Didn’t he love the mountains where they grew up? She liked the foothills full of canopied hardwood trees, too. She was bored by what her father called the coastal plains stretching eastward from the foothills, much too flat, and boasting none of the rich herds of game of the foothills. At least the traveling party had taken a lot of meat in the foothills.

“What do you think fish and crabs taste like?” she said. “I hear they’re too salty.”

“You’ll like them as soon as you’re here living with
Kumu,” Shonan said. They hadn’t heard him walking up. He gave Salya a hug. “And until then you can slow down on the grumping.”

She sort of smiled.

The three walked close to the village, the traveling party trailing. The Amaso gathered. Aku’s eyes searched for Iona.

“We better teach them to build stouter huts,” Shonan said. The homes were just brush huts, spread fingers of flexible limbs bent into the shape of cupped hands, turned upside down and covered with hides.

“They say it’s warmer here,” Shonan said, “never snows. Maybe that’s why the houses are flimsy.”

Aku said, “Or maybe it’s because the good hardwoods are eight or nine days walk back toward the mountains.”

Salya nudged her brother and grinned. She liked talk like that.

They approached the council lodge at the west edge of the village. “I didn’t want to tell you about this,” said Shonan. It was a shabby thing, as though nothing important could happen there.

“I’m glad our weddings will be at the Cheowa village,” said Salya.

Aku still couldn’t spot Iona.

“There aren’t enough people here,” said Salya, “to make a real blessing.”

“I told you I picked these people because they’re weak and will be glad of the safety of becoming Galayis.”

They’d heard it before.

An old man came walking toward them, bearing a pipe. A short, slight, boyish man walked next to him, Oghi the seer.

“Chalu,” said Shonan, “the chief. They don’t even have a war chief.”

When the chief came close, he made the signs for wanting a ceremony.

Aku was proficient in the sign language. “Signal him yes,” Shonan told his son.

Aku did, but his mind was on something else.

“As soon as we get our camp set up,” said Shonan.

Aku signed it.

Chalu turned and made his doddering way to the council lodge.

Oghi signed to Aku, “She’s waiting for you. You see the flat-topped rise over there?” He nodded toward it. “In the dunes right beyond it.”

Aku started running.

“Where are you going?” called Salya.

Aku turned, ran backward, grinned big, waved, turned again, and sprinted toward Iona.

Salya and her father set up their own camp and looked around. They had the same thought, but didn’t share it.
We’re at our new village, but we still don’t have a home
. Salya shrugged. “Hey, we’re used to it.”

Oghi walked up. He and Shonan had a short, quiet conversation off to one side. Salya saw that several digital repetitions were necessary. Then each man nodded and smiled a lot.

People were gathering in the arbor used as a council lodge.

“Go find your brother and this Iona,” said Shonan.

Near the center fire stood Chalu, holding the sacred pipe, on one side of him Oghi and on the other Shonan.

Chalu picked up an ember from the fire with two twigs
and dropped it onto the sacred tobacco. Then he drew the smoke in deeply and offered it to the four directions. Shonan couldn’t understand what he was saying. He watched carefully how Oghi handled the pipe and again couldn’t understand. When his turn came, he performed the ceremony in the Galayi style. He thought,
We’re not going to learn to be them. They’re going to learn to be us
.

Chalu addressed the assembly, and Aku fingered his words to all the people of both groups. Shonan paid enough attention to see that it was a welcome to the visitors. “Except they’re not visitors,” said Chalu. “They will become our relatives, our children, even our fathers and mothers.” Other words followed. Shonan gathered that it was a diplomatic speech.

When Chalu handed him the pipe, Shonan smoked ceremonially and repeated some of what the Amaso chief had said. “This is a great moment,” he said. “Let us no longer call each other Galayi and Amaso. We are one people, and we will be known as the Amaso village of the Galayi tribe.”

It was well done, a good acknowledgement for both groups.

Now Shonan raised his voice. “And I have something special to add.”

Iona stood up beside Aku, who was still translating with his fingers.

“Proudly Oghi the seer and I announce to all the first blood joining between our two peoples. At the Harvest Ceremony in three moons my son Aku”—here Aku pointed to himself with both index fingers—“will be married to Oghi’s daughter, Iona.”

Aku held Iona’s hand high in triumph.

4

S
honan walked observant. The mountains of his native country were a wild country, steep, rugged, heavily wooded. His migrants followed a twisting creek eastward, toward the sea. At will, though, it snaked around to point northwest or southwest, turned by the shapes of the great ridges. The rhododendrons and mountain laurel were thick as fur on the hillsides, blocking vision. Scouts walked ahead and behind. Others flanked themselves to each side and followed trails that led to observation points. Spotting enemies in this country was almost impossible, but Shonan and his soldiers had driven all enemies back to distant borders. He might have felt safe if he did not remember, every day of his life, that his wife was taken from him in an enemy attack in country just like this.

His duty now was to pay attention, but his daughter was making it hard.

“What?!” she said. “What do you expect? You’re making us leave everything we love. Our friends? Most of them we leave at home. Our uncles, aunts, and cousins?” She spread her arms toward the forested mountainsides. “Why don’t I see them? Every place I played as a kid, every place I stooped to get water, every place we gathered onions or seeds—where is it all?”

Shonan walked silently. Aku said, “Lots of our relatives and friends are here with us.” A third of the village, in fact.

“Yes, being tortured. Walk three quarter moons to a place we’ve never seen and don’t give a damn about, and then stay there forever.”

Only Shonan and a score of soldiers had visited Amaso.

“Salya,” said her twin, “you have your lover.”
Unlike me
. “You will have a husband, children, your family.”

Shonan and Kumu glanced at each other, but neither even whispered.

Salya plunged on. Sometimes she was like the drummers at a ceremony—carried away with their own rhythms and then wilder and crazier until dancers fell on the ground laughing, unable to move to such a beat. And the drummers loved it. They banged on until … who knew what made them stop? Who knew what would make Salya stop?

Shonan strode along on one side of her, her clown lover and twin brother on the other side. None of them cared if she banged out her mood. It was half anger and half play, and would wear down. Shonan’s mind was on the country. He couldn’t see far to the rear, high ridges shutting out half the sky. He couldn’t see past the forest to the next region they would reach, the piedmont, the foothills of the mountains. He knew it, though. It was a good country, full of oaks, chestnuts, silver maples, sweet gum and black gum, and lots of game. They would spend a night in a Galayi village in the piedmont, Equani, where three narrow streams joined into one broad river. Everyone had relatives there. It was the last time they would sleep inside for the three quarter moons of their walk.

“When we’re happy where we are, you ask us to start all over in a village of strangers! Why? So you can be important? You want to be a hero like your grandfather?”

Shonan gave her a sharp glance. Smart remarks about the hero Zeya were out of order.

Salya stopped as if she was out of breath, but she always had enough breath to start a fire. She could have gone on about all their neighbors, the babbling and shouting of the children they knew, the roughhousing of the boys, and her girlfriends and their chance to smile slyly and gossip about boys their own age.

Shonan and Aku knew Salya’s barbs well, and in their way they were friendly. She liked to stir the pot. But she didn’t often run the wolf of her anger this long.

“Kumu,” said Shonan, “would you run ahead and speak to Yim and make sure things are all right? Wait for us there.”

It was a gesture accepting Kumu as part of the party. The clown trotted off.

“You done?” said Shonan to Salya, knowing he shouldn’t ask.

Those words pricked her into rambling on. No one listened.

Aku, especially, had other things on his mind. His father had indicated that things would work out with Salya and Kumu.

Aku was silent because his mind was far away. He was the twin who was glad to go to Amaso. Salya thought he wanted to get away from a gang of teenage boys who didn’t like him. They were preoccupied with being manly and muscular, devoted to the ball game and to weapons and learning to fight. They thought Aku was strange because he was built like willow limbs lashed together at the joints, and had about the same strength. Worse, there were the owl feathers in his hair—when people saw owls they thought of death. “You hate this village,” Salya had said yesterday, “but I love it.”

She was wrong about him. He was elated to move to the sea. He dreamed of smells, embraces, and caresses at the eastern village nestled against the great waters. Though he had told no one, his lover waited there.

That night Shonan slipped out of camp and went hunting for fresh meat. On a long trip, carrying parched corn and ground seeds and dried flesh, people longed for fresh meat. Shonan would get a deer—he always did—and then say the prayers for forgiveness that kept the deer people from getting angry. When he brought it back, he would give most of the meat to other families, saving only a few scraps for his own. That was the way of a good leader.

“Poor Father,” Salya said, “does he think he’s fooling us?”

“He’s a good man,” said Kumu.

“The last six years have been hard,” said Aku.

“Hard for him,” said Salya, “and he makes it worse for himself.”

“He’s a good man,” Kumu repeated.

Salya squeezed his hand.

Everyone had seen what Shonan had done since their mother died. He led war parties at every season, even when the snows should have kept every sensible man at home by his fire. He beat all their enemies back from the edges of Galayi territory. He claimed new hunting grounds for the Galayi. He won every battle and lost none. Sometimes, as soon as men of other tribes merely heard the Galayi war cry—
Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! Woh-WHO-O-O-ey! AI-AI-AI-AI!
—they ran for their lives.

Now he was going to be the war leader and surely the most influential man of Amaso, turned into a new Galayi village.
The Amaso people seemed likable enough, though they were touched by the spirit of beggars. They needed Shonan.

Which brought everyone to this day. Salya was playful with her lover and twin, but with her father it was different. Kumu stayed silly. And Aku … He liked walking alongside his father and learning things. He like ambling along with Salya and Kumu, because they were all laughter, as long as Shonan wasn’t close by. But half the time he avoided his father and sister and dreamt his dreams. Shonan was carrying his ambitions, which crackled like lightning. Salya was preoccupied with the man she wanted.

In the half-blue, half-gray of the evening he watched Salya and Kumu shoulder their elk robes and head off into the twilight. Salya glanced back furtively.

Aku studied his father. He’d known all along. “You wanted to build a bridge by giving Salya to the chief’s son,” he said.

“Grandson,” Shonan corrected.

Silence. “He’s good-looking. I thought he was a catch, but …” Shonan looked in the direction of the lovers, who had disappeared.

“I have an idea,” said Aku. He hesitated. “Let me be the bridge. My … She’s the daughter of the seer, Oghi. Her name is Iona. She’s …” He made a point of talking about things other than her smells and caresses, and emphasizing that she was the daughter of the second chief.

When Aku finished, Shonan said, “All right. You want her.”

Aku stopped himself from saying “Wildly” and only said, “Yes.”

“She wants you.”

“Yes.”

“I’m happy for the two of you. Let’s think about it,” said his father. “Meanwhile, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

In the middle of the third night the waters flooded camp. “Put it higher, in the crotch of the tree,” someone yelled. People were trying to protect their dried food. When it got soaked, it was useless. The campground clattered with curses at the river. Clothes were wet, bedding was wet, firewood was wet—the rest of the night would be miserable, and a couple of days would be lost.

Shonan glanced up at the stars and saw that dawn wasn’t far away. A little good luck to take the edge off a lot of bad luck. It happened sometimes. A hard rain would pound the mountains several ridges over, where you couldn’t see the clouds. The river would rise in its narrow canyon, and the few wide camping spots would get flooded.

A hand touched his elbow. Salya. “I’m sorry, Father, it’s my fault.”

True enough. If Salya hadn’t pulled her trick, if they’d started on time, they would be in a fine campground downstream, where the mountains opened into foothills, and the riverbed was wide enough to stand some flooding.

Shonan said to his daughter, “Just help take care of things.”

In the early morning light the men scrounged up enough tinder to get fires started. People stripped out of some clothes—nudity was no issue among the Galayi—and got into others. They ate the mushy corn which had once been parched, because it wouldn’t last anyway. The grass seed they’d ground into flour they threw away. They laid their soggy meat strips
across branches—in a couple of days the meat would dry out fine, unless it rained again.

Spirits were as soggy as the ground, emotions muddy. Salya made tea, and Shonan’s little family gathered around to warm up from inside. Aku stuffed his belly with corn mush. Kumu munched idly, looking distracted, and then addressed Shonan.

“War Chief, let me run back to Tusca and get us food.”

Salya caught her breath. Clearly, she hadn’t been warned.

As he spoke, the early sun caught Kumu’s twisted tooth and he looked silly. But Aku knew this clown was serious. He had watched Kumu play the ball game. He was a natural athlete. More important, he played like a demon of determination.

Shonan looked at the man who wanted to marry his daughter. Kumu had a good idea. The party could walk slowly, underfed, to the Equani village and ask for food. Any Galayi village would help out. But Shonan didn’t want to come into Equani as a beggar. He wanted this journey to be a triumphal march, a procession led by a strong leader to benefit the nation. And Kumu wanted to be the hero of the moment.

“I can be up there tomorrow before the sun sets, back here by the end of the next day.”

That was a stretch—the first half of the journey was uphill, and on the return trip he’d have a load. Still, Kumu might do it. “I will send six other young men along,” said Shonan. “You will lead.”

Kumu resisted smiling.

“But this is a trade.”

Both Salya and Kumu frowned.

“You go home.” That word struck Aku as odd. “Tell
people what happened. They’ll see to it that you get food. Then, when the party returns, six men come back and you stay in Tusca.”

“Father!” snapped Salya.

Shonan held up a placating hand.

“If you will grant me this favor, I will give permission for the two of you to be married at the Harvest Ceremony.”

Salya still looked mad, but Kumu’s eyes lit up. The three great annual ceremonies, the Planting Moon, the Harvest Dance, and Sun-Low Dance, those were the traditional occasions for weddings, with all the Galayi people there to celebrate.

Before Salya could object again, Shonan said, “Aku and I have a surprise for you.”

Aku told his twin sister and Kumu about his lover, Iona, daughter of Oghi, seer of the Amaso people. “When I saw her the first time at the Planting Ceremony,” Aku said, “we …” Salya put her hand on her brother’s and squeezed it.

Shonan said to Salya, “I had intended to give you to the grandson of the chief. But I am willing, instead, to give Aku to Iona, the daughter of the seer.”

Salya covered her face with her hands.

Shonan turned to his son. “But you can’t be like these two, and spend every night together before the ceremony.”

Aku grinned and nodded. He thought,
The afternoons will do fine
.

“Let’s do it like this. We’ll have two marriages, twin brother and twin sister, at the Harvest Ceremony, marrying two good partners, Kumu and Iona.”

Salya peered at Kumu between her fingers.

Taking her gently by the shoulders, Kumu said, “Let’s do this,” he said.

Salya crumpled into his arms, which was daring in front
of her father. “I guess so. I’ll miss you too much. I guess so.” She broke into big sobs.

Kumu held her until she stopped crying.

Shonan said, “You’re my daughter. I want you to be happy.”

Kumu’s eyes hinted of challenge. “War Chief, you mean this truly.”

Shonan smiled broadly. “Yes.”

Kumu lifted Salya’s face to his own. “We’ll join together with all the Galayi people singing for us.”

Her eyes and her voice said, “Yes.”