People of the Earth (28 page)

 
          
 
The end of the Spiral. The end of the harmony
of the Dream.

 
          
 
Bad Belly cried out as the glowing wolf began
to change its form. As he watched, the front legs of the fiery beast spread and
grew into wings with long feathers of flame. Gleaming, golden eyes locked with
Bad Belly's. The huge bird hissed and clutched the rock with jet-black talons.
Then the beast leaped for the sky, screaming as shrilly as an angry eagle.

 
          
 
Bad Belly huddled against the rock, battered
by the burning wash of the wings. High in the crimson heavens the Spirit bird
soared—and vanished. A crack of thunder split the sky and shook the ground
before fading into a distant roar.

 
          
 
Bad Belly shrieked and bolted upright in his
robes. As sweat tickled on his hot skin, he stared around at the dark camp. His
good hand knotted the thick leather of his buckskin shirt over his heart. Left
Hand, half crouched in his robes, had a dart
nocked
in his
atlatl
.

 
          
 
"What the—" Left Hand whispered.
"What happened?"

           
 
"Dream." Bad Belly swallowed past
the knot in his fevered throat. "Spirit Dream."

 
          
 
Left Hand peered nervously around at the
night, feet twisted in the wreckage of his bedding. "Spirit Dream? Didn't
you hear it?"

 
          
 
Bad Belly clamped his eyes shut to squeeze the
vision from his soul. Had it been Thunderbird? The Spirit Helper of the Sun
People? Why would such a being come to him? He shivered. "Hear it?"

 
          
 
"The thunder. Like a bolt of lightning
blasted the camp."

 
          
 
Bad Belly opened his eyes and looked fearfully
up into the crystal night sky. Not a cloud anywhere. The memory of huge, fiery
wings throbbed against his soul.

 
          
 
Fear spurred White Ash, fit to burst her
heart, as she raced up the narrow valley. Gentle slopes packed with sagebrush
rose to either side, and a narrow arroyo meandered through the flat bottoms.
Her lungs burned as breath tore at her throat. She blinked tears out of her
eyes. The sobs tried to choke her as she vaulted low sagebrush and crunched the
crusted snow underfoot.

 
          
 
The sun rose higher in the sky, cresting the
rounded ridge to her left. The day would be warm and sunny. As the ground
warmed, it would be harder to hide her trail.

 
          
 
How many had survived? What had happened to
her world? Sage Ghost? Had he been far enough away—or had he been the first to
die, killed to buy silence for the attacking Wolf People?

 
          
 
Wind Runner made it. He was far to the north
by the time the attack came.

 
          
 
A colder fear lay like ice inside her: Old
Falcon had been killed long before the attack. The blow that murdered him had
come early in the night, or the blood wouldn't have frozen that way. Nor would
his flesh have lost its heat.

 
          
 
A ghostly memory formed: Brave Man and Old
Falcon sitting across from each other after the council meeting, the look of
challenge between them. But to kill? And in so brutal a manner?

 
          
 
Brave Man's possessed eyes leered at her as
she relived the moment when he'd tried to rape her. That powerful gleam knew no
right or wrong—she'd seen that in his soul that day.

 
          
 
What mattered that now? She'd witnessed the
destruction of the White Clay. Those final screams would haunt her forever. All
that could be loved and cherished had been obliterated—like tracks in the sand
after a strong wind.

 
          
 
She panted as she forced one foot ahead of the
other, making distance. Panic began to fade into a searing of the soul. She
turned out of the valley and drove her exhausted body up the slope. Her feet
punched through the ice-crusted snow.

 
          
 
Lungs laboring, legs trembling, she wove
through the thick sage and stumbled onto the ridge top. Before her, ridges ran
in every direction as they extended from the foothills of the
Red
Rock
Mountains
. A broad drainage lay between her and the
Sideways
Mountains
.

 
          
 
The peaks of the
Sideways
Mountains
glistened as the sun struck their virgin
snowfields. An impossible barrier. Too steep. In those ice-locked valleys she
would find nothing to eat.

 
          
 
Not only that, there wouldn't be much to eat
anywhere this early in the year. A few sagebrush buttercups had begun to bloom
with the retreat of the snow. They could be eaten after having been boiled
three or four times to wash away the bitterness. Shooting star and biscuit root
would be growing in the next moon. But now?

 
          
 
She dropped to her knees, breathing deeply,
trying to recharge her drained body. The wind teased her tangled hair into a
black web around her head.

 
          
 
She looked back to the west, toward the
unforgiving slopes of the
Red
Rock
Mountains
. Faint puffs of ugly cloud hung around the
high peaks. She shook her head. Snow followed warm days, as if the warm weather
were but a cruel joke—a tease of better times.

 
          
 
She braced herself, got up and started to wind
her way down the far side of the ridge. Drainages like a maze of cracks cut the
rough, rocky landscape. Here the sagebrush grew no higher than her ankle and
looked weathered-indication of a poor soil. Farther away, pale clumps of
greasewood choked the white soil of the floodplains. Winter-tan grasses waved
in the wind, umbels long since shorn of seeds. A land of dry rock and tortured
ridges, it didn't offer much.

 
          
 
She bit her lip, unsure of what to do, of
where to go. Behind her, to the north, the Black Point and Broken Stones pushed
ever southward. And what sort of life could she find there?

 
          
 
Wind Runner, you fool, they'll kill you! What
other outcome could she accept? That one lone youth—barely twenty summers
old—could vanquish the bravest and most cunning of the Black Point's tested
warriors?

 
          
 
To the west, the Sheep Hunters hunted the
Red
Rock
Mountains
, stern warriors who had learned the trails
and ways of the mountains since birth. To the east, across the basin, lay the
Wolf People—and she'd already seen their mercy.

 
          
 
South, beyond the
Sideways
Mountains
, lay her native Earth People. My only hope.

 
          
 
She paused at the top of the next ridge,
hating the fatigue that ate at her muscles. The best way, the only way, would
be to skirt the rugged foothills of the
Sideways
Mountains
, follow the drainages to the east, and
search out a pass that wasn't choked with snow.

 
          
 
Provided I can find enough to eat. Provided I
don 7 freeze. Provided . . . a lot of things.

 
          
 
Her fire sticks, her
atlatl
and darts, her
pack.of
sleeping robes, were
gone—trophies of the Wolf People's last crushing blow to the White Clay. First
thing, she needed to find a stand of
ricegrass
. The
stems, charred, made the finest fire starter. Fortunately, the
Gray
Deer
Basin
was rich in tool stone. Flaking cutting
tools would be simple enough. Once she found the right woods with which to make
fire sticks, she could build fires. The coming days would be difficult, but the
land would provide.

 
          
 
She glared at the east, a burning anger in her
heart. Your time is limited, Wolf People. The Sun People are coming from the
north. Kick them, even a little, and they'll strike back again and again. It's
their Power—their way of war. She shook her head. It's their very strength.

 
          
 
She walked on, each step a desolation of the
soul.

 
          
 
Bad Belly placed his foot carefully and
stopped, head cocked. They were somewhere close. The droppings that lay on the
gray duff under the sagebrush couldn't have been older than last night. He
stood on the eastern side of a long slope. Here the sagebrush grew thick and as
tall as a man's knee. A rolling vista of ridges stretched to the east and the
hazy horizon. The sun slanted, casting shadows over the land. The rugged wall
of the
Sideways
Mountains
loomed to the north. Narrow valleys cut
through the weathered slopes as if a Spirit cat had ravaged the very stone with
its claws.

 
          
 
He fingered the round rock in his hand. Once
he'd used it as an image of the moon when he'd traced its shadows before the
lodge fire; now he hoped it would kill.

 
          
 
With patient skill he studied the blue-green
wealth of sage. He sniffed the fresh air and let the aromas of sage and damp
earth soothe the faint awareness of homesickness. There, from a perfectly
camouflaged body, a single brown eye stared at him. Bad Belly shifted, getting
his balance. Years of practice paid off as he threw the stone. The rock caught
the sage grouse broadside; the wounded bird fluttered and clucked.