Shadows in the Cave (38 page)

Oghi nodded. “Yes.”

The rays of the morning sun shot into the cave—it was a slaughterhouse. The great wave and the tide had slid back to the infinite water-everywhere, leaving no comment but bodies. Shonan, Aku, Oghi, and a phalanx of soldiers walked through the carnage, nauseated. Brown Leaf bodies were mashed and mangled where they’d been flung against the rough rock walls. Skulls were crushed, legs snapped, arms twisted into impossible shapes, rib cages smashed. Most corpses were snake-bitten. The Amaso had to be careful where they stepped, because some snakes still squirmed among the dead bodies.

“I think they all drowned,” said Shonan.

“This cave—this tube,” said Oghi, “was full of water for a long time.”

“The whole damn ocean tried to jam its way in,” said Shonan. “Aku, will you count the bodies?”

But Aku had no heart for it. When they got to the seaward end, Aku told his father, “Fifty-something, I think.”

Shonan nodded. “If we meet any enemies out there,” he said, “run back in here.” He flicked his eyes across their faces and said what didn’t need saying. “Damn well do not go down the little hidey-hole and give it away.” He paused. “If we see the Uktena, turn your back and run like hell. It’s
bright out there.” As an afterthought, he said, “Everyone got his blindfold?”

Everyone but Oghi did. Shonan gave him another one.

The beach told the story of the cave again, except that the Brown Leaves hadn’t drowned—they’d been crushed against the stony cliffs. Maybe a dozen were still half alive. Shonan walked among them, ramming the point of his spear deep into the chest of each one that groaned or stirred or seemed to breathe.

Aku was appalled. He noticed that his father was murmuring something. “What are you saying?”

“The prayer that sends a true warrior to the Darkening Land,” Shonan said.

Aku walked in silence.

“Ending their suffering is a kindness,” said Shonan.

On top of the cliffs, in his coral serpent form, Maloch lay in a crevice between rocks and watched his enemies walk their triumph. Except that they had accomplished nothing—the sea had done everything.

Maloch regretted that his army had stumbled into the storm at the wrong moment. But that would not stand in the way of his real purpose here. He wanted to gobble up the life-fire of the young hero who knew not his own power, Aku, son of Shonan, and while he was at it the life-fire of the father as well. Strong in spirit, both of them. He looked down on his victims with satisfaction. Their ignorance pleased him. The thought of conquering alone, himself against all the Amaso warriors, pleased him even more. He needed no army to conquer his enemies.

As for the Brown Leaf people back in their village? He did not need them. He had the guile and the dominance to
take over any village and make it his own. He smiled to himself. Even Amaso.

Aku, Shonan, Oghi, and their soldiers picked their way to the north end of the beach and gaped across the river at their town. The ocean had turned it to rubble. Their hearts sank.

“You want to go over and inspect it?” Shonan asked Aku.

“Not right now.”

Oghi added gently, “There’s nothing to inspect.”

They studied the landscape, the tidal flats, the river and its bottoms, their fields of corn, the plains beyond. All the way to the foothills in the distance, all was devastation.

Then Oghi voiced it for everyone. “Where’s Maloch?”

They stared at each other.

Suddenly Aku said, “I’ve got to get back to Salya.”

Maloch didn’t see the Amaso leaders turn and head back to the sea cave. He was busy taking a new form. In a cave, who would be suspicious of a bat? Who would worry about a bat? Who would think a bat might be the most terrible of enemies?

He extended his new wing-hands and took pleasure in the feel of the membranes stretching between the bones. He looked around. Though his vision was somewhat dim, he would have an amazing sense of every obstacle he flew near. If he winged his way through a gang of swinging clubs, for instance, his ability to detect flailing stone heads would guide him through untouched. He had a sharp sense of smell and excellent hearing. He could sense the warmth of any living being nearby. Surely a bat was a perfect adaptation to the
darkness of a cave, and all the people therein who intended him harm?

He flew to the hidey-hole. Carefully, he crawled along the roof above the guard, someone he didn’t recognize who’d replaced the chief. Maloch smiled to himself at the memory of the chief’s final throes.

He glanced at the sentry’s face and saw the fool was asleep. But even awake, why would a sentry get excited about a bat? Or, in the half-darkness, even notice a bat?

Still, Maloch didn’t like ineptitude. He decided that, as a favor to Shonan, he would punish this incompetent. He landed delicately on the man’s shirt where it covered his shoulder. Then he bit the neck ever so gently. The man felt nothing, probably would have felt nothing even if he’d been awake. But the teeth injected a terrible poison that Maloch had concocted. In a few days the man would develop a raging thirst, go crazy, and suffocate.

Maloch flew back to the ceiling and crawled through the emergence slit. He was less visible, he thought, when he merely crept along. He looked ahead. The passage showed the soft glow of lamps. He winged his way silently for a few paces, crawled, and winged again. Slowly, he made his way past sodden bedding, scattered belongings, and other chaos wrought by the great wave. Maloch reveled in chaos.

Eventually, the passage opened out into a great room with a high ceiling. This was the spot for Maloch. Up he flew and into a large, dark hole where the wall had crumbled away from the ceiling. Here he could see without being seen, and with a little maneuvering re create himself into dragon form.

He looked around and observed little of interest. The wave had not splashed its way this far into the cave. Women were making tea and breakfast, and everything was orderly. The light from the horn lamps played with the shadows and
lent the room a certain beauty. Beauty made Maloch shudder, but he knew how to destroy it.

He looked for Salya. His plan was to attack her, or seem to, and create an uproar. That would bring her brother and father running. A rush to death. To him Salya was no more than a fly to brush away. This foray was to suck in the life-fires of Aku and Shonan and zoom away, boosted in power.

The difficulty was that he didn’t yet see Salya.
Damned eyesight.

Just then Aku, Shonan, Oghi, and some soldiers walked in. In the hole Maloch quivered with excitement.

Aku strode ahead, leaving the others behind. Some soldiers drifted off toward their families, and others walked into the passage beyond the great hall to their own camps, in a passageway that led to the closest of the uphill exits. Aku slipped through the grove of stone trees, past the guard Fuyl, and into the chamber where his twin lay in endless half-death.

Salya was ever unchanged. Aku felt impatient with himself for even noticing that. Since they found her in the Underworld, she hadn’t altered a whit, nor would she ever, not until he helped her. Kumu sat next to her, holding her hand. Her lover sat with Salya at every opportunity, always touching her, as though to pass his own warmth into her lifeless form. Kumu’s eyes looked hollow and vacant. Aku caught a glimmer, in that look, of how he would feel if Iona lay dead, and their child dead inside her. He blinked at the horror.

Oghi came into the chamber, his sympathetic eyes on the husband and wife to be.

“Maloch!”

Aku took a moment to register the voice, his father’s, and what it meant. He was a step behind Kumu and Fuyl, sprinting through the stone tree trunks and into—

Maloch the Uktena dominated the great hall. He looked half as tall as the chamber and wide as a huge boulder. Women were scattering in all directions, shooing or carrying their children. Aku was glad to see that the men were padding toward Maloch—uncertain and hesitant but on the advance. They wore their blindfolds, but Maloch’s diamond eye sent out only the barest glimmer. The stone lamps offered too little light to feed it.

Maloch’s enormous mouth yawned open for a roar that deafened everyone, and reverberated in the chamber a long time, a weapon that itself stunned most of the warriors.

Fuyl stepped forward and hurled a dart from his spear thrower into the monster’s maw. Maloch turned his head and it glanced off his teeth.

Shaking his spear, Kumu ran behind the monster and toward the tail, as if he was going to climb the beast. The tail flicked. Kumu skidded screaming toward the nearest wall and hit with a thud.

Aku stepped back among the stone trees, made a lightning change into war eagle shape, and flew out shrieking. He winged his way clockwise, to draw the beast’s head away from the side of his heart. The shriek seized Maloch’s attention, and the great head followed Aku.

Fuyl hurled a second dart, and it knocked a fang out of the side of Maloch’s mouth. The dragon snapped out a bark louder than a tree crashing to earth.

Aku flapped behind Maloch. Not all the motion of his feathers was flight—some was terror.

Aku saw his father circle to the side where Maloch wasn’t following Aku with his head. Shonan meant to get at the heart. Kumu was on his feet and circling the opposite way.

Aku screeched and flew straight above the tail and the spine and landed at the base of Maloch’s neck, talons gripping the ridge.

Maloch bent his head hard to reach the war eagle but couldn’t. He flailed at the eagle with one of his short forearms, then the other—he missed both times. He roared hideously. Aku’s nerves and feathers fluttered.

Now the dragon turned the cave into an echo chamber of bellows. Roar crisscrossed roar between the stone walls. Hearts quailed. Minds got confused.

Oghi grabbed someone’s spear and ran to Maloch’s front. He threw it hard at the monster’s neck, but didn’t even puncture the scales. Maloch swept his head the other way, and Oghi tumbled across the floor as if he was falling downhill.

Clinging to the dragon’s back ridge, Aku saw that the turn of Maloch’s head pointed his eyes toward Shonan. The chief charged, his spear aimed at the scale protecting the heart.