The Dawn Country (4 page)

He didn’t wait for them.

The steep switchbacks were filled with ice-coated rocks and gravel that rolled beneath his moccasins. Many times he lost his footing and had to claw at the rocks like a dog to keep going. His men fared no better. Grunts and curses laced the air, accompanied by the sounds of scrambling hands and feet.

When they were two-thirds of the way to the top, Cord stopped and turned. Ogwed and Wado were crawling up the slippery path on their hands and knees. Neyaw had fallen far behind. Dzadi glanced up at Cord, saw that he’d stopped, and heaved a sigh of relief as he clambered up to him.

Cord braced his wobbling legs. “What do you think?” He gestured to the men with his chin.

“Not all of them are going to make it home.”

Cord tilted his head to look up at the pass. In the pewter gleam, the deep V that resembled a bent elbow was filled with the glistening campfires of the dead. He gazed at them longingly. After the pass, for rested men, it wasn’t more than a hard two-day run back to the nearest Flint village, and home.

Home? Where was that now? His village had been burned, the familiar longhouses destroyed. Any homecoming was only going to be filled with grief as he realized how many relatives and old friends were gone.

At the thought, an almost unbearable sadness filled him. His wife and son were long dead, victims of the endless warfare. Two summers ago his daughter had been claimed by his wife’s clan—as was the way of the Flint People, who traced descent through the female. Children were clan property. Little Arum was greatly loved and cared for among the Bear Clan, and, of course, he saw her often. But his life was a husk of what it had been three summers ago.

“Dzadi, listen,” Cord said quietly. “I have nothing to go home to. If we have to sacrifice someone, I—”

“One man can’t do it, old friend. You know that. You and I will stay together.”

“I
can
do it. Not for long, but for long enough that the rest of you can get away.”

Dzadi smiled, and the taut, shiny skin of his burn scars reflected the starlight. “Our people need you. I’m the expendable one, Cord. I’ll stay.”

The walls of black rock that created the switchbacks seemed to be leaning down to listen better, and Cord wondered how many desperate men had stood on this very spot and spoken these very words. How much blood had these rocks absorbed? Cord swore he could hear the land itself laughing at him, laughing with the deep ageless wisdom that comes from watching thousands of puny men toil and die, crushed by the weight of their own fears.

“I’ve seen you fight, Dzadi. I know you’ll kill half of them before it’s over, but—”

Dzadi pointed down the mountain. “There they are.”

Cord swung around. Dark shapes moved through the shadows at the base of the switchbacks. More appeared. Two, three, four, then too many.

Dzadi lowered his arm. Occasionally, fangs flashed and pricked ears swayed against the frost-lit background. Headdresses?

“Wolf Clan warriors,” Dzadi whispered, shaken for the first time. “May the Spirits of the Dead help us.”

Shadows spread out among the tree trunks. Shapes appeared, then vanished, then moved again higher up the trail.

“How many do you count?” Dzadi whispered.

“Maybe twenty. Maybe more.” Cord exhaled a long tense breath.

“They’re persistent. Surely they don’t think we have captives with us?”

“They may.”

After the battle, the women and children captured at Bog Willow had been rounded up and herded into the victorious warriors’ camp. Many were sold to the highest bidder. Cord remembered seeing two Traders who specialized in child slaves—though in the commotion, some of the captive children had escaped. Most were caught and dragged back within a few hundred heartbeats, but it had caused quite a stir for a time, briefly interrupting the feasting, dancing, and general revelry.

Dzadi hissed, “This is not looking good.”

Cord filled his lungs and bellowed, “Come on, you lazy dogs! Hurry it up. Move!
I said, move!
”

His three men staggered and stumbled up the steep trail with agonizing slowness. The human wolves below them darted back and forth around the switchbacks. Cry after cry erupted and echoed through the trees.

Cord’s men betrayed their fear by scrambling up the slope, panting as they ran for their lives.

Four

I
s this what it feels like to die?

Wrass eased to his side on the packs in a birch-bark canoe. The violent pain in his broken skull blurred his vision, leaving him dizzy and nauseated. Vomit continually tickled the bottom of his throat, and his bowels squirmed like shivering eels.

But the blows had been worth it.

Some of the others got away: Odion, Baji, Tutelo. Even Hehaka.

Too bad Zateri had been recaptured. In that, he’d failed. He would have gratefully given up his life to save Zateri. Like him, she had been Gannajero’s captive for too long. Unlike him, she’d been sold to a lot of different men. Perhaps sold was the wrong word. They’d bought her for a hand of time to use in ways that would have earned the men death if their relatives ever learned of it. Gannajero, however, specialized in ensuring that no one ever found out about her children, or what happened to them.

The farther south Wrass’ captors paddled, the thinner the clouds became until they drifted through the night sky like translucent veils of charcoal silk. He watched them pass. Sometimes they looked like feathers slowly falling to earth. Two canoes bore Gannajero, her captive children, accomplices, and packs south from Bog Willow Village. Gannajero’s canoe, where he lay, was in the lead.

He tried to concentrate on the river’s tangy smells. Old leaves had piled along the shores, creating moldering borders that suffused the air with the musty scents of just-past autumn.

The only sounds on this cold night were the soft swishing of oars and the whimpering of the new children who lay beside Zateri in the canoe that followed them.

For a time, he let himself drift on the waves and think of home—which he rarely did, because it hurt too much. Yellowtail Village had been burned to the ground in the attack, but by now the survivors would have found a new place to rebuild and would already have cut hundreds of logs for the palisade. They might even have the palisade finished, and had perhaps begun building longhouses. He remembered Grandmother Sayeno telling the clan elders, two moons before the attack, that if they were smart they would ally themselves with a larger Standing Stone village. That way they could help protect each other. He wondered where the survivors had gone. Bur Oak Village was the closest large Standing Stone village. Perhaps they’d gone there to rebuild Yellowtail. If they …

“We have to find Hehaka.” Gannajero’s sharp voice rose from the bow. “It’s the only way.”

The old woman had been speaking quietly to her deputy Kotin for two hands of time, but as her voice grew more desperate it got louder.

Kotin replied, “But by now Hehaka could be halfway to Standing Stone country. How can one little boy—”

“Don’t tell me what I already know!” she snapped.

Wrass turned in time to see Kotin shrink like a water bladder being wrung dry.

“Yes, all right,” Kotin mumbled, taking a stroke with his paddle.

Wrass cautiously lifted his head, wincing at the pain. Two warriors sat behind him, alternatively paddling and steering them through the frozen night. They wore capes against the cold, skin caps on their heads, and did their best to look in any direction but at Gannajero.

Wrass let his gaze trace the canoe’s sleek gunwale, following it forward to where Gannajero sat in the bow. The old woman wore a new cape made of finely smoked deerhide and decorated with circlets of seashells and flashing twists of copper. She had seen around forty summers. Greasy twists of graying black hair framed her deeply lined face, framing her toothless mouth and that shriveled plum of a nose.

And her eyes … Her eyes were black bottomless pits that seemed to have no pupils. Looking into them was like gazing into a well of hopeless terror that froze a person’s souls. Whatever Gannajero was, nothing remotely human ever seemed to look back.

Kotin leaned over her hunched form like a hunting heron about to spear her with his long nose. He reminded Wrass of the
hagondes—
cannibal Spirits who carried off bad children in a basket. Grandmother Sayeno and her sisters had seen one once. It had been walking near an old longhouse and was clearly visible in the moonlight. The Spirit’s nose had been so long it almost touched the ground. They’d tried to catch the Spirit, but it had let out a hideous scream and vanished into the forest before they …

“That little boy, as you call him,” Gannajero snarled, “is valuable in ways you’ll never understand.”

Hehaka? Valuable? Wrass made a face, only to wince at the pain it caused him.

Three children rode in the canoe just beyond Wrass’ feet: two girls and a boy. The boy had seen perhaps seven or eight summers. The girls were a little older, ten or eleven. All had been captured during the Bog Willow Village battle, and sold to Gannajero. They were Dawnland People. At the sound of the old woman’s voice, the boy curled into a tighter ball and started crying. The two girls continued to sleep fitfully.

“Are you all right?” Wrass asked the boy in the Dawnland tongue. He was good at languages. He had always listened intently when Traders came through, trying to learn as much as he could.

The boy turned to peep at Wrass from beneath a skinny arm. He was half Wrass’ size, with a narrow face and an unkempt mass of chin-length black hair. His blade-thin nose kept quivering and dripping. A ratty cape—made from woven strips of weasel hide—covered his shoulders. “No, I’m c-cold, and my throat hurts.”

Wrass inched forward, lifted his cape, and draped it over the boy like a blanket. The boy slid backward, pressing against Wrass as he cried.

Wrass drew him closer. “Shh. Don’t cry.”

“I can’t stop.”

“Believe me, it doesn’t do any good.” Wrass stroked his arm. “You need to get some sleep. You have to be strong.”

Above the rocky riverbank a shrubby blanket of winged sumacs seemed to roll on forever beneath the dark maple trees that fringed the winter sky. The campfires of the dead gilded the shrubs with an opalescent sheen that made them appear to shimmer as the canoes passed.

The boy whispered, “What’s your name?”

“Wrass. I’m Bear Clan from Yellowtail Village of the Standing Stone People.”

“I’m Toksus of the Otter Clan from Bog Willow Village.”

“Toksus? That’s a good name. How old are you?”

“Eight summers.” The boy suddenly twisted his head to look up at Wrass. “My parents are coming, aren’t they? They must be right behind us by now? Have you seen them?”

Wrass let out a deep breath. When he’d first been captured, the strangling mixture of fear and hope had been unbearable. “Toksus, I’m not going to lie to you. You have a lot of hard days ahead. But I know this for sure: Someone
is
looking for you.”

Toksus stared up with swimming eyes. “And … they’ll find me soon?”

“I’m sure they will.”

“My parents are alive. I saw them! When the Flint warriors rounded up all us children after the battle … as they marched us away … I saw my parents standing in a line with twenty other people. They were being guarded by six warriors.”

Wrass’ headache made it difficult to think, let alone speak coherently and gently. The scene Toksus had described was common enough. The captives would be divided up, given to warriors who had shown merit on the war trail or during the fight. The warrior who ended up with Toksus’ mother could kill her, or keep her for a slave. Were the latter the case, she was already being marched away to the west, hands bound behind her. The only value his father would have would be as a source of body parts to be carried home as trophies. But he couldn’t tell the boy that.

Wrass wet his lips. “Someone is looking for you, Toksus. That means you need to stay alive, or all their efforts to rescue you will be for nothing.”

Toksus wiped his eyes on his sleeve and blinked at Wrass. “Are you just saying that?”

The warriors paddling in the rear chuckled, amused.

Wrass turned his back to the men and softly said, “Among my people, if anyone survives an attack, they always form a search party to try and get their families back. Don’t your Dawnland people do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then if your parents are alive, they’re trying as hard as they can to find you.”

Some of the tension went out of the boy’s shoulders. “But how will they find me, Wrass? If we were traveling on land they might be able to track us. We’re in a canoe, headed downriver toward the lands of the People Who Separated.”

Wrass nodded. “It will be more difficult, but a good warrior would still be able to find us. Is your father a warrior?”

“He—he’s a Trader.”

“That’s even better. He’s protected by the power of Trade.” A stab of pain splintered his thoughts. “He—He can s-safely stop at any village along the shores. A-Ask if people have seen us pass by. The important thing to remember is that he’s not going to give up, Toksus. He’ll keep looking even if he—”