Breakaway: Clan of the Ice Mountains (31 page)

“Not for sure.”

“I need you to tell me more. Tell me exactly what you dreamed.”

Attu did his best to explain to Rika about the dreams, about the white-haired blue-eyed man, about the need to go through the pass together, alone, before the others. He explained how he believed that what he’d learned in the dream was true, that if they didn’t do this, everyone would die, even though he had not been told how those deaths would occur.

Rika listened.

“Whenever Paven is with us, he takes over,” Attu said. “And right now, I don’t think your father’s too happy with me.”

“True.”

Rika studied the rock-strewn beach in front of them. “He doesn’t even know we’re still alive, we’re bonded.” Rika looked at him then, her face soft.

“I don’t think once we rejoin the clans that Paven will agree to us going by ourselves through the pass first.”

“And you don’t want to have to argue your way into convincing the clans to let us pass through first. But in your dream, you weren’t told why you have to be first, we have to be first,” she corrected herself, “just that we do. And if we don’t, everyone dies.”

Attu glanced at Rika. Her forehead was creased in thought.

“Do you think me needing to come with you could have anything to do with the voice in my dreams?”

“I don’t know. I thought showing mercy to Moolnik on the ice fulfilled your dream. But I thought warning my clan when the ice cracked fulfilled mine at first; still, it has turned out to be so much more.”

“Yes. Tell me more about this pass.”

“In my dreams, the pass isn’t too long, a day’s journey at most.”

Rika nodded. “You know it’s too dangerous to go alone, just the two of us.”

“How could anything be more dangerous than what we’ve already been through? We’ve survived being trapped on an ice chunk, Moolnik’s attacks, and I’ve survived two ice bear attacks. Nothing has been able to kill us yet.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t go,” Rika continued. “I’m just saying it’s dangerous.”

“I know. I feel it in my spirit, too.”

“Then let’s get going. Who knows how far behind us the others are?”

They quickened their pace, loping along the beach, their long strides eating the distance, covering in one afternoon what would have normally taken them an entire day to travel. When the sun was nearing the western horizon and the sea was sparkling in the evening light, they halted, both exhausted.

“I need to find us snow to melt and something to eat,” he said. “Can you set up the shelter?”

Attu dropped his pack on the rocky beach and began readying his hunting equipment. He grabbed the skin pouch with the large mouth for packing snow into it and turned to walk toward the trees.

“Be careful,” Rika said.

Attu turned back. Rika looked so small against the background of the restless unfrozen water and ice chunks glimmering in the late sun. “Keep your knife out.”

“I will.”

Attu approached the dark line of the pines with their whispering limbs. He felt dread seep into his bones. Forcing himself to keep walking into the strangeness of the pine-scented darkness, he soon found himself surrounded by the green spicy trees with their brown needle-like castoffs. They littered the ground, cushioning it like furs on a sleeping platform. He took a few steps into the trees and turned around. Suddenly everything looked the same.

Attu’s breath caught in his throat. He listened for the sound of the water rolling up onto the rock beach. Confident he knew where it was coming from, he turned his back to it, drew a line with his spear butt deep into the brown-needled ground, and put a sideways mark across it to show in which direction he’d come. Satisfied it would work to help him find his way, he walked a few more steps. Turning back, he could no longer see the line. His heart began pounding. He tried tying a signal string onto a tree arm a few feet ahead. Walking a few more feet, he turned. The signal string was designed to show up against snow. With its hide colored string and grey rock, it was now hidden in the swaying branches of the trees he had just passed.

How can I walk in this place without getting lost?

Then he had an idea. Attu touched one of the trees. Fascinated, he felt the life force in the pine as it moved in the wind. It was old, the tree, old and somehow wise, in a way he’d never experienced before. Asking the tree’s spirit for forgiveness, Attu pulled out his bone knife and at shoulder height, cut a few strokes into the rough skin of the tree. Inside, its meat was white, and Attu saw that its blood was almost clear, thick and very sticky as it moved slowly into the wound he’d made. Attu walked a few more steps into the trees and turned back again. The blaze of white was clearly visible against the dark skin of the tree.

Good.

Attu continued to walk into the trees, at a slight angle to the shore, making more cuts in the trees as he went. He was looking for snow. Attu was hungry, but both he and Rika were used to going days without food. Everyone did when the hunting was poor. They’d survive without food for a while, but not without fresh water.

Off to Attu’s left, he heard a sound that grew louder as he walked in that direction. Curious, he followed the sound and came upon an area of thick moss. The trees were even bigger here than near the shoreline. Attu walked across the moss a few steps and looking toward the rocks, he saw water, flowing from uphill, down along sand and rocks and moss.
How could that much water be here? It wasn’t part of the sea...

Attu knelt by the flowing water and touched his finger to it.
Cold.
He wet his finger again and licked it.
Fresh.

Attu had been walking uphill, and this water was flowing downhill, toward the sea. It was cold, like snow when first melted. Attu had seen a few drops of melting snow dripping from the rocks on the last land they’d stayed on, but never more than a tiny amount.
If great areas of snow melted when the air of Nuvikuan-na warmed, then that snow would become water and it would run downhill to the Great Frozen. No, that wasn’t quite right. It would flow to the Great Sea, which is what the Great Frozen was becoming...

Attu quickly filled the snow skin with water, and his own water pouch as well. The snow skin was much heavier filled with water rather than snow, and Attu worried it might split. He’d have to move slowly back to camp. He set it down on the soft moss and turned to adjust his smaller pouch so he could carry both. As he did so, something caught his eye.

A small bundle of fur hopped along the edge of the water. As he watched, it hopped again and stopped. Ridiculously long ears moved first this way, then that. It took two more hops and stopped.
Did all creatures of this place have huge ears?
Attu wondered. Ears like that on the Expanse would freeze in a few moments.

Attu saw an eye on the side of the fur ball’s head, large for its face, and a nose, with whiskers like a nuknuk’s, twitching as it smelled for danger. It was close. If it would just hold still long enough...

Attu shifted his spear into his throwing hand and raised it slowly. The little animal didn’t move. Attu drew his arm back and aimed at the center of its body.

Attu’s spear hurtled through the air. It pierced the animal clean through and pinned it to the ground. Attu ran to the creature. It was still alive, its back legs kicking the ground helplessly, trying to escape the spear. Attu pulled it off the spear point by its ears and twisted its neck quickly to kill it.

“Little furry one, whose name I do not know,” Attu said, his voice solemn, “forgive my ignorance. Thank you for giving your body for us to eat. May your spirit soar wherever your kind desires to be in the Between, and may you be born into another body like this one, when you are ready. See, I have killed you quickly and with mercy. Please tell the rest of your kind, so they won’t be afraid to die at my hand and avoid me when I hunt.”

Attu took the small creature and went back to pick up the water skin. He retraced his steps using the blazes he had made in the trees as he walked. He was almost to the beach, watching the last sunlight fading through the trees as he neared the shoreline, when he saw the fire.

Something large and yellow, like a thousand nuknuk lamps, was burning near the hide shelter. It lit up the shelter and the rocks in a wide circle, as well as Rika, who was hunched down next to the snapping brightness.

“Rika, run!” Attu yelled.

“W
e’ll be walking into the trees, through the mountain pass. I believe it will be like the passes through the hills back on the land we knew, but the hills here are mountains like the ice mountains, only even taller.”

Attu was trying again to explain to Rika what he’d seen in his dream about the pass. He was still embarrassed about dashing madly across the beach and throwing Rika off to the side to protect her from the roaring spirit of flame, only to discover that it was only a fire she herself had made from dead tree bodies.

“Wood,” Rika explained. “Elder Nuanu told me about it.”

“Oh, like in the story of the New Green. I didn’t know,” Attu said. He knew he sounded like a whining child, but he didn’t care. He’d thought Rika had been in danger.

“Because women are keepers of the fire.”

“I know that, but this...”
keeping of the fire meant the small nuknuk lamps,
Attu thought,
not some mighty conflagration that roared, an inferno of heat and light with acrid smoke that rose up like trystas spinning off into the night.

How was I to know it wasn’t attacking Rika? This fire was too powerful a thing for a woman to handle...

But Attu knew he’d better keep that thought to himself. So instead, he sat and glared at the fire as if it were his enemy. It didn’t help that Rika had commented, “Saving me seems to end up with me bruised and scraped and you in a bad mood.”

––––––––

H
e changed the subject and began outlining his plan. They’d leave a cairn of rocks at the pass when they found it, and three strands of hide lacings with time stones tied to a pole, cut to the right lengths and identified with Rika and Attu’s patterns. The clans would see them and know Attu and Rika were alive and that the people needed to wait three days before they attempted to go through the pass. That should give Rika and Attu plenty of time to go through and back, with an extra day for whatever they might encounter along the way.

“You know it’s likely my father will not wait one day, let alone three,” Rika said.

“And we have no idea why we have to go through first, what we do to save everyone. I know, it’s frustrating,” Attu agreed.
And it doesn’t help that I haven’t dreamed since Elder Nuanu spoke in the man’s voice. It makes all of this seem unreal, like we could just go on, find the pass, wait for the clans, and move forward as if I never dreamed at all.

Rika poked at the fire with a tree arm, sending a shower of sparks into the air.

Attu slid farther away from the heat. He knew he was being unreasonable, but he felt uneasy around this fire made from tree skeletons. He didn’t think it right to burn tree bodies. What if the spirits of the trees grew angry with them for doing it? They were surrounded by trees, countless trees...

“When I see the pass in my dreams, it’s just a day’s journey across, not too steep a climb up or out of, and most of it is pine trees, with rocks rising up on both sides. I can’t sense any reason we must be first through it, just the two of us. Still, everything else I’ve seen in my dreams has come true. Why should I doubt them now?”

“Who knows what we might encounter in that pass? We have no idea what kinds of people or animals might live here,” Rika said, motioning with her head towards the forest behind them. “We both know the way of things. Bigger animals eat smaller ones. The tooth fish eats the smaller fish, and the snow otter eats the tooth fish. The ice bear eats the snow otter and the nuknuk. So just think how big an animal must be to eat one of those big-as-a-shelter plant eaters we saw.”

Rika cringed as she spoke and reached out with the tree arm to stir the fire again, raising another shower of sparks. Attu moved away from the fire even further. Rika, however, seemed to draw comfort from the blaze and slid herself closer, increasing the distance between them. Attu didn’t like it.

“And how would you ever kill such a predator if we were alone?” Rika added as she stared at the flames. “It might be the size of a hill, and it would certainly eat us if it eats those animals.”

Rika set the tree arm on the ground beside her, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around herself.

Attu hadn’t stopped to think about the possibility of a monster predator, big enough to kill the shelter-sized creature. No wonder Rika was scared.
How can I protect Rika from some monster like an ice bear only ten times bigger? But we have to go. We have to fulfill the prophecy, or everyone will die. That’s what the white-haired man in the dream said through Rika, and through Elder Nuanu. We can’t back down now.
Attu didn’t know why, but as they spoke of it, it was like some power rose up in him, compelling him to continue. He had to do this.

“It will be all right.” Attu moved over to Rika. She leaned against him, and he folded her in his arms.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

Attu took in a deep breath. “So am I,” Attu whispered into her ear.

Rika drew back from him.

“I’d be a fool not to be scared, wouldn’t I?” Attu challenged.

Rika looked at him, confused.

“I’m tired of all the lying between hunters and their women, Rika. We get scared, too. You must know that? Can’t I be my real self with you? Isn’t that what you want? Or do you want the lies, Rika?” He paused.

Rika continued to watch him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“I just wanted you to know the truth,” Attu finished, his voice now barely above a whisper.

Rika nodded her head.

“Look at all the things that have happened so far, as the prophecy has been fulfilled, piece by piece,” he said. “We’re heading into something awful. I feel it in my spirit, but we must go alone.”