The Dawn Country (3 page)

Just seeing her calms my fears. But I miss her long black hair. After the attack that destroyed our village, she cropped it short with a chert knife. Among our people it is a sign of mourning. The short jagged locks fall around her ears as though sculpted. Her gaze is fixed on the darkness just beyond the circle of firelight, as though she hears something, or someone, on the starlit mountain pass above us. We came over that pass two hands of time ago, and are now on the western slope.

I breathe in the icy air and say, “We should try to sleep, Baji. We’re going to need our strength. Tomorrow is going to be a hard day.”

“I’ll try if you will.” She tugs her blanket up around her chin and snuggles against me. The feel of her body against mine sends a warm sense of security through me. In less than sixty heartbeats, she is sound asleep.

But my eyes will not close. I stare up at the dark winter sky. The flickering campfires of the dead look oddly hazy. I realize it’s because even here, across the mountain, smoke from the burned village still streaks the sky. I try not to think of the people who lived there, of the dead and dying, of the shrieking children who were taken captive. The destruction of their village allowed us to escape.

Will the war and suffering ever end?

Behind the lies of safety that I tell myself, I feel the presence of Gannajero watching me across the dark distances.

Her warriors
are
coming.

I feel their footsteps pounding in my chest.

Three

W
ar Chief Cord’s breath frosted before his face and hung there like a small starlit cloud, ghostlike in the frigid air. He continued struggling up the slope. Above him, through the frost-coated trees, the trail was nothing more than a black gash.

The night had frozen the jagged terrain, turning it into a still and sparkling wasteland so bone-cold that nothing stirred. Even the Forest Spirits and lost souls who usually roamed the trails had fled to their hiding places beneath rocks and in secret holes in the ground. The vast silence was eerie, as though an otherworldly blanket had descended to compensate for the echoed screams, the ululating cries of victory, and the terrified shrieks of the dying that had washed the slopes last night.

Behind him, he heard the rasping moccasins of the handful of his warriors who’d lived through the battle, but he didn’t turn to look. Instead, he focused on the trail ahead. Their lives rested upon making it to the pass that was hidden high above them.

Cord pulled his wolf-fur hood closed beneath his chin. He stood twelve hands tall. Snake tattoos covered his cheeks and ropy arms. He wore his hair shaved on the sides, leaving a black roach in the center and a long braid hanging down his back. He had seen twenty-nine summers pass. His wife had once told him he had the burning eyes of a Spirit-possessed shaman. In the summers after her death, however, he knew he radiated only a glacial cold. As if his souls and this frigid night were perfectly matched.

He carefully studied the dark slash of trail.

How far to the summit? He and his men would only find safety on the other side of the pass. Or would they? All night long they had been pursued by a small group of enemy warriors, survivors of the Bog Willow Village fight. Their leader was cunning, instructing his men to show themselves for fleeting instants to tempt Cord’s warriors to waste arrows. But long before the arrows struck, their targets had vanished into the darkness.

Cord shook his head. His men were growing careless, desperate. They’d lost friends and loved ones in the battle. Each feared he would be next.

Gravel crunched. He turned.

Strung out behind him, his four men climbed with their heads down. Shoulders and hoods glittered with frost crystals. They did not speak, needing every morsel of strength to sustain the climb.

How long since any of them had slept? Each man was exhausted. Cord could see it in the occasional trembling of a leg, or a head suddenly snapping up from where a man had fallen asleep as he walked. As if the horrors of battle were not enough, the great blind forest—brutally cold and unnaturally still—had rousted every shred of arrogance from their souls. Where once they had preened and paraded in their finest quillwork capes and shell jewelry, now they struggled just to place one foot in front of the other.

When his men drew nearer, he motioned for them to keep going. One by one, they stepped past him with barely a glance.

They wore knee-high moccasins, long war shirts, and wolfhide coats with the hair turned in for warmth. Gray-furred hoods encircled their faces. Each time a man exhaled, his breath settled upon his bristly hood, creating a thick rime of frost. Unstrung bows and quivers rode on top of packs stuffed with loot. Belts clattered with hafted chert knives, sharpened deerbone stilettos, stone-headed war clubs, a food pouch, and water bag.

When the last man walked by, Cord lifted his hand to the sky and measured how far the constellations had moved since his last stop: two hand-widths, the distance across his palm twice. Dawn was another six hands of time away.

He fell into line behind Neyaw and continued up the steep rocky trail. The darkness and cold pressed down, as though to smother that last warm spark in his body.

A cry—half howl, half wail—sounded on the trail below them and echoed through the night. Almost inhuman, it sent a shiver down Cord’s spine as he stopped short, staring back down the dark trail.

Dzadi—now in the lead—stopped dead in his tracks and lifted his nose to scent the wind. A tall and muscular warrior, his face was dominated by an enormous jaw that protruded outward and down until it almost seemed to rest upon his bearlike chest. Dzadi had seen thirty-four summers, most of them at war. He wore the puckered burn scars that discolored his face and arms like badges of honor. Last summer, Dzadi had been captured by the People of the Landing. Through indomitable will and cunning he’d managed to escape his captivity; the scars would be with him forever as a reminder.

The howling cry came again, piercing the darkness like a knife. Hollow, wolfish, it sliced upward to a final shrill note that seemed to hang in the night and shook a man to his souls.

Cord tilted his head, determined the direction. Directly beneath them, down the mountain, through the maples. Was it the same group of survivors? Or another? Perhaps several had merged.

“Was that a … a wolf?” Young Wado asked, locking his knees to keep his legs from trembling.

Cord’s men shifted, glancing uneasily at each other. No wolf could fill its voice with that desperate, hungry rage. Somewhere inside them, they all knew it.

Dzadi worked his way past the other warriors, touching a shoulder or confidently gripping an arm to steady a man; then he came to stand beside Cord and hoarsely whispered, “They’re still following us.”

“We have to keep moving.”

Cord took the lead again, muscles trembling, struggling toward the distant notch that marked the pass. On the other side they would strike the trail that led west: home to the People of the Flint, and safety.

When they came to a thickly forested section, he told his men, “Be careful. Watch your footing. Every time you trip over a root, it drains you that much more.”

Below, the cries rose and fell, wild with mockery, as though their pursuers knew there was no escape.

Cord lifted his gaze to the rolling mountains. High above him, hidden behind waves of peaks, was the rocky defile known as Elbow Pass. Steep switchbacks zigzagged up the mountainside. Their enemies were driving them toward it like deer into a killing pen. Once they reached the switchbacks—if they reached them—their pursuers would block the trail below. He and his men would be forced to continue climbing upward. There was no other way.

Two hands of time later, they reached the base of the switchbacks and squatted on their haunches in a copse of willows. His men were gasping for breath, and the scent of stale sweat filled the air.

“We haven’t heard them in a while,” Ogwed panted. He’d seen eighteen summers. A handsome youth with an oval face and flat nose, he’d lost three children and his wife in the battle that had destroyed Wild River Village. He turned sad eyes on Cord. “Do you think they gave up?”

Cord untied his water bag from his belt and took a long drink. Every eye was upon him, waiting for his answer. When he’d drunk his fill, he lowered the bag and tied it to his belt again. “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

A grim smile rearranged Dzadi’s scars. “There is only one pass.” He nodded toward the Elbow above. “That’s the route home. They know it as well as we do.”

“But they might think we broke off, tried to skirt the mountain through the rough terrain,” Wado suggested hopefully. The youngest warrior in his party, Wado had only seen sixteen summers. “Maybe they just decided to go home and take care of their dead relatives?”

Cord closed his eyes, desperate for even a moment’s rest. “We hit them hard, Wado. As hard as they hit us. Would you give up?”

Wado hung his head and seemed to be considering; then he whispered a miserable, “No.”

Ogwed glanced around the circle and sheepishly asked, “Can we sleep for a while? We haven’t slept in two days, I—I’m not sure how much longer I can run.”

“Eat something,” Cord instructed. “Food will give you strength.”

Ogwed pulled a strip of elk jerky from his belt pouch and chewed it in silence. The other warriors did the same, jaws working deliberately, trying to get food in their bellies before the last brutal climb.

Cord examined their downcast faces. Two men had their eyes closed, trying to nap while they chewed. Their heads kept bobbing and jerking up. Though no one grumbled, they looked disheartened and soul-dead. Warriors pushed to the brink began to think their Power was broken, that they’d been deserted by the Spirit World. When that happened they would start to disappear, drifting away one by one.

Dzadi murmured, “Being out of arrows doesn’t help our situation. We shouldn’t have wasted them on those wild shots at our pursuers.”

“How many arrows are left between us?”

Dzadi rubbed his huge jaw as his gaze scanned the quivers. “Neyaw has two. That’s it. Maybe if we—”

A long shriek—mournful as a death cry—interrupted him. Dzadi listened to it before he finished. “If we can reach the pass and set up a trap, it might make them pause long enough for us to escape.”

“Perhaps.” Cord’s gaze flitted over the youngest warriors, and Dzadi knew what it meant:
Maybe we can buy enough time for them to escape, but you and I will not.

Dzadi expelled a breath. “I can’t believe this. Over four hundred attacking warriors, from so many different peoples and villages, survived the attack. Why have they fixed on us? There are plenty of other war parties out in the forest trying to make it home.”

Around a mouthful of food, Wado stated the obvious: “It’s easier to slaughter a war party of five than a party of one hundred.”

Cord soberly tightened his fists. He’d already lost too many warriors in the battle—men and women he’d grown up with. People he’d loved and respected. And it looked as though he might lose the ones around him in the next hand of time. He’d been a fool to make this raid. He’d tell that to his elders when he returned—if either was alive. Both matrons had been badly wounded in the attack on Wild River Village, making decisions in haste, probably afraid they were dying.

Cord had argued against joining forces with the other Flint and Mountain People war parties to make this strike, saying they needed to bury their dead and make their way to a new village for protection before they considered any retaliatory action. The matrons had disagreed—and the rest of the village council was dead. He had never disobeyed the matrons, but he wished with all his heart that in this one instance, he had refused.

He got to his feet and looked down the mountain at the dark maples and boulders.

Ogwed said, “War Chief, maybe we should send out a scout? We don’t even know for certain that they’re enemy warriors. They could be part of the alliance. Maybe even some of our own people.”

Wado’s eyes brightened inside his frost-rimmed hood. “That must be it. They’re not after us. They’re just behind us. They’re Flint warriors. We should contact them! Let them know we’re brothers.”

Neyaw snorted in derision. He had a bulbous nose and slits for eyes and wore his long black hair coiled and pinned over his left ear. The style made his hood look lopsided. “You’re a young fool,” he commented, with the authority of a man who’d seen countless battles.

Wado glared, but did not reply. He knew better than to cross Neyaw. For the slightest provocation, Neyaw had been known to crush men’s throats with a blow from his war club, then string their teeth for a necklace.

Exhaustion pulling at his senses, Cord swayed on his feet. For several moments, he had the unearthly feeling that they were already dead—just ghosts wandering through a spectral enemy land, condemned to run forever with no hope of reaching home. The sensation was so powerful that it stunned him. He lifted a hand and rubbed his eyes. “Finish eating. Let’s go.”