The Dawn Country (6 page)

Cord tried to count the dark shapes of his men coming up the trail. “I only see two.”

“Are you sure?”

Cord searched for a time longer before he said, “We lost one.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not certain yet.”

Twenty heartbeats later, Ogwed trudged up along the trail. Five paces behind him, Wado was keeping himself upright by sliding his back along the rock wall, side-stepping up the switchback with his knees quivering. Both looked like they might drop at any instant.

“I don’t see Neyaw,” Cord said.

Dzadi bowed his head. “I’m not surprised. The fool probably decided to hide somewhere. Sneaked away with his tail between his legs.”

Cord didn’t answer. His gaze fixed on movement. Two switchbacks down the trail, a stone’s toss to the south, stood a cluster of boulders girdled by plum and sumac. A circle of dark forms coalesced around the boulders. Cord watched them close in on the rocks.

A shrill cry, triumphant, almost made Cord jump out of his skin. As it echoed away, bows twanged. A man screamed in pain and fear, the sound buried beneath a din of snarls and yelped war cries. Black forms writhed over the boulders.

If Cord hadn’t known better, he’d think it was a pack of wolves downing a struggling deer.

Ogwed cried, “Is that Neyaw? Neyaw!” He started to turn back, but Dzadi brought him down hard in the middle of the trail.

“Leave it be, boy,” Dzadi said. “He’s gone.”

If it had been daylight, their Dawnland pursuers would have sacrificed Neyaw to their Sun God and eaten his flesh, giving the best parts, the brain and tongue, to their most honored citizens. In the darkness, they were, perhaps, dispensing with the ritual.

Dzadi patted Ogwed’s shoulder, then released him. “Neyaw was a fool. Don’t you make the same mistake. Don’t fall behind.”

The young warrior sat up and stared down the trail. Suppressing tears, Ogwed said, “He didn’t deserve to die that way.”

Wado added, “We are Flint warriors. We should all die in great battles, fighting to protect our people. That’s what warriors do.”

Dzadi exchanged a sad glance with Cord, then raised his eyes to the narrow defile just above them. The black chunks of stone resembled huge stair steps.

“Get up,” Cord ordered. “We have to make the pass while they’re busy with Neyaw.”

“But we need to rest. I can barely walk!” Wado objected.

Dzadi said, “You’d better be able to run, boy.”

As they climbed, the war cries grew louder—enough to throw his warriors into short-lived panics where they almost shoved each other off the blocks in their haste to reach the pass.

When they crested the trail and staggered into the gap, Cord could see the forested hills of Flint country in the distance; unwarranted joy warmed his veins. The trail down the other side of the mountain was a silver slash that cut through a thick sumac-and-hickory forest. Even staggering and half-dead, they could run it in their sleep.

Behind him, Dzadi cursed and stamped his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Cord called.

“We lost another one.”

“What?”

“Wado’s gone.”

Cord leaped down from the high point and searched their back trail with care. Nothing moved. The desolate frozen-hearted wilderness had swallowed all sound, save the ragged breathing of the men beside him.

Ogwed stared up at Cord. “Do you think they got him?”

“He might have run off,” Cord replied gently.

“Or maybe he fainted and they found him. That’s why we didn’t hear a ruckus,” Dzadi said without thinking.

Horror sparkled in Ogwed’s eyes. “You mean they found him, gagged him, and they’re cutting him to pieces and swallowing his flesh while he watches? That’s it, isn’t it?” The youth’s eyes rolled around in his head, darting this way and that as though he was on the verge of bolting into the blackness.

Cord said, “Stop wasting breath. We’re going home.”

He climbed back up and perched on the highest block of stone to survey the country to the west. Lines of tumbled and irregular hills, softened by the winter-gray mat of forest, stretched out before him. There, just beyond those ridges, lay the familiar forests, streams, and fields of home.

Or what was left of them.

Feeling hollow and drained, he started down the other side at a shambling trot. He couldn’t feel his legs, though he knew when his moccasins hit the ground: Each step jolted his body. Dzadi and Ogwed struggled along behind him.

When they rounded a bend, a tiny light flickered. A campfire. Down the western slope of the mountain, perhaps one-half hand of time away. Friend or foe? He’d worry about it later. Right now, they had only one task: to stay on their feet.

Six

G
onda turned when his eleven-summers-old son, Odion, sat up in his moosehide blanket, as though he’d heard something, and tipped his head to listen to the night. The boy was twenty paces away, sitting beside the Flint girl, Baji. They both looked terrified. Odion’s shoulder-length black hair hung around his face in a mass of tangles, and his dark eyes had gone wide. His gaze was riveted on the dense plums and sumacs that created an impenetrable thicket on the northern slope.

Odion tilted his right ear toward the east, then turned to Gonda. Almost breathlessly, he said, “Father? Do you hear that?”

Gonda shook his head. Odion pointed up the mountain toward the pass.

“Are you sure, Son?”

Odion and Baji nodded in unison.

Gonda quietly walked around the fire where the other children and the two Hills People warriors, Sindak and Towa, slept rolled in blankets. His former wife, War Chief Koracoo, stood guard there. She obviously hadn’t heard anything either. She stood with her back to him, vigilantly keeping watch on the trail that led up the mountain. Her red leather cape, painted with a blue buffalo, looked black in the faint light. Her legendary war club, CorpseEye, was propped on her shoulder.

As Gonda approached, she didn’t turn. She knew the sound of his steps better than her own. They had been married for twelve summers—until she’d returned to find their village burned to the ground. Then she’d set what remained of his belongings outside their smoldering longhouse and, according to the ways of the People of the Standing Stone, divorced him. He walked to stand at her shoulder and whispered, “Odion heard something. Did you?”

The tiny lines around her black eyes deepened. After the devastating attack on their own village, Yellowtail Village, they’d both cut their hair short in mourning. Chopped-off black locks framed her beautiful oval face. At the age of twenty-seven, she stood twelve hands tall—very tall for a woman—and had a straight nose with full lips and a wide mouth. “No. Earlier, I thought I heard wolves, perhaps human wolves, near the pass, but …”

They both stood absolutely still and listened. During the attack, several of the Yellowtail Village children had been stolen by the enemy. Last night, they’d rescued their own children—Odion, and their eight-summers-old daughter, Tutelo—plus a Flint girl named Baji and another boy, Hehaka, whose people they did not yet know.

Koracoo’s head tilted to the right. Gonda held his breath. Bitter cold gripped the forest; it had driven the sap out of the trees, freezing them solid and leaving their mighty hearts dreaming of spring. They were too cold even to pop and snap with minor temperature variations.

Yet Gonda heard snapping in the distance. And it was rhythmic.

“Men. Running.”

“Yes,” Koracoo whispered. She spun around to survey the camp. Her gaze lingered on the children. “One of us should remain by the fire while the rest of us hide.”

“I’ll be the bait. Go. Get the others up and packed.”

Koracoo trotted away, rousted everyone from his or her blankets, and ordered them to pack. Hands flew, rolling blankets, stuffing belongings into packs. Then Koracoo sent Sindak and Towa out into the northern sumac thicket with the four children. She lightly trotted to hide in the plum grove to the south of the fire.

A herd of deer thrashed through the plums, startling Gonda into instinctively grabbing for his war club, but they trotted past and disappeared into the forest.

Gonda walked back and crouched before the fire. Reluctantly, he placed his war club to the side, near the tripod where the boiling bag hung, and pretended to be warming his hands before the tiny blaze. Far off, branches cracked as men staggered into brush and trees, then curses erupted, and finally feet stumbled down the mountain trail. Thirty heartbeats later, they arrived.

Gonda subtly gazed at the vague forms that moved at the edges of the firelight. They stood just beyond the weave of leafless plum trees. Gonda calmly added another branch to the flames and mentally noted the location of his war club. He could have it quickly, but not as quickly as they could shoot an arrow through his heart. Sitting clearly visible in the fire’s gleam, he made an easy target.

“Since my heart is still beating,” he softly called, “I assume you’ve decided not to kill me. Why don’t you come in and get warm.” He looked straight out at their dark forms and gestured to the logs pulled up around the little blaze. “You’re welcome to the stew that’s left in the boiling bag.”

A hissed conversation ensued beyond the trees. From the corner of his eye, he saw Koracoo shift, getting ready.

Full into the firelight, his legs shaking, walked a tall man wearing a finely tailored wolfhide coat with the hood pulled up. He had a long pointed nose and cold eyes. Serpents were tattooed on his cheeks, and he had an ugly knife scar across his square jaw. The man moved with a mixture of mistrust and careless desperation. His legs were shaking as though he’d been running flat-out for days. “You’re from the Standing Stone People,” he noted in a deep voice as he took in Gonda’s accent and the distinctive rectangular cut of his buckskin cape. “What are you doing here?”

Again, Gonda gestured to the logs situated at angles around the fire. “Please sit down and call in your friends. I mean you no harm. You look like you can use some rest.”

The man swallowed hard and said, “There’s no time to rest. They’re right behind us. If you value your lives, you’ll collect your belongings and join us.”

Gonda’s head jerked up. He’d said your
lives,
not life. So he knew Gonda was not alone. Had he glimpsed Sindak and Towa? “Who’s behind you?”

“Dawnland warriors.”

“Survivors from the Bog Willow Village attack?”

“Probably.”

Gonda slowly got to his feet. “Who are you?”

“I am Cord, of the Turtle clan of the Flint People, war chief of Wild River Village. Or at least, I was.”

Gonda’s hackles rose. Cord’s men still hadn’t come in. Was Cord the decoy for the pack? Was he supposed to keep Gonda busy while the rest of his men surrounded the camp, cutting off escape? How many were out there? Gonda clenched his uplifted hands to fists. “Why are they chasing you? Were you part of the war party that destroyed Bog Willow Village?”

Cord nodded. “Yes.”

“Why did you attack them?”

Through gritted teeth, Cord answered, “They destroyed my village, Wild River Village, eight days ago, but I don’t have time to explain everything.” He used his chin to gesture to the places in the forest where Sindak, Towa, and Koracoo hid and said, “Since your friends have not killed me, I assume you are all bystanders in this, though I can’t fathom what you’re doing this deep in Dawnland country. Either join us or let us pass. A fight will help neither of us.”

Gonda lowered his hands, and called, “Koracoo? Everyone? Come out.”

“Koracoo?” Cord said, and clutched his war club more tightly. “War Chief Koracoo of Yellowtail Village?”

Koracoo stepped out, eyed him hostilely, and said, “That’s right.”

They faced each other like two stiff-legged dogs about to lunge for the other’s throat. Cord stared hard at CorpseEye, Koracoo’s war club. It was old and made from a dark wood that did not grow in their country. Legend said that CorpseEye had once belonged to Sky Woman herself. Strange images were carved on the shaft: antlered wolves, winged tortoises, and prancing buffalo. A red quartzite cobble was hafted to the top of the club, making it a very deadly weapon—one Koracoo wielded with great expertise. Throughout their territories, CorpseEye was known as a frightening magical weapon, capable of sniffing out enemies even at great distances.

Cord spread his arms in a gesture of surrender and said, “I have never met you in battle, and hope I never have to. I know your reputation for courage.”

“And I know yours, War Chief Cord. I also have dreaded the possibility that we would, someday, meet. Are you headed home?”

“Yes, we—”

Sindak and Towa pushed out of the trees, herding the four children before them, and the expression on Cord’s face swiftly changed. He looked like a man who’d just been condemned to death.

“Blessed gods,” he said. “You have children with you?” His gaze went over the two boys and two girls, as though assessing their ages and how fast they could run. “If you don’t want Dawnland filth feeding them to their dogs, you should come with us.
Now.
” He lifted a hand and called, “Dzadi? Ogwed? Come out.”