Kalik (19 page)

“Who hid them in the holes?”

“Whoever made the gardens. It must have been a few years ago. Maybe they left these here in case they ever came back and needed them.”

“Did they die?”

“Maybe they went too far to ever come back.”

“The red ones,” said Paku, “they’re the ones we used to grow at the Headland.”

“We’ll dig a patch and plant it, just in case those people come back. And we’ll leave some in the store-pits.” I didn’t say it might be useful to us, too, if we had to return.

“Why didn’t the wild pigs eat them?” asked Hurk.

“The pits were too deep. They might eat the ones we plant, of course. But somebody might find them first. And they’ll make the pigs fatter anyway.”

So that was our last job, planting potatoes. While Tepulka split some tote slabs and replaced the wooden covers on all the store-holes. He also put a pointed digging stick in each hole, just in case. Then we said goodbye to Sheenah, sang the Travellers’ song so our voices blended with the creek’s.

Up Wild Dog Creek we went and across the big clearing. Maka laughing at something Tepulka whispered to her. Gobble and Hurry rolling like two round black boulders at Tama’s heels. The sheep following. The goats spreading, Tag and Bar heading and turning them back.

Kitimah beside Hika, murmuring a lullaby to Arak and Perrah already nodding in their basket. Puli beside Bok who carried her loom as well as a heavy load of potatoes. Kimi, Hurk, and Tupu chattering. The other pups tripping them, running up the line to Tama, and bolting back again.

Three more laden donkeys, then Tulu and Paku, spears and bows slung on the last. Each of us carrying a spindle, twirling and winding the yarn from the wool tucked under our arms. I looked back down our column. Travellers!

We climbed to the same height as the bluffs and found a clear terrace that looped southwards. Around spurs, in and out of gullies. Covered by slips here and there, but so level it must be one of the Ways of the Old People. Kitimah had stopped her lullaby as the babies slept. Puli was singing one of her weaving songs, the three little ones chattering still. We had followed the Way some distance before a cold thought struck me.

Tepulka took the lead on his own, Maka the rear. Paku, Tulu, and I turned back. By mid-afternoon, the Way led us north – past where we had joined it – and along the top of the bluffs to a cave overlooking the big clearing.

“Someone’s been watching us all winter!”

Paku knelt. The ashes in the fireplace were warm, flew at his puff. Two sets of footprints left the cave and headed along the Way north. A man’s, with a badly-shaped left foot, probably an injury. I could not remember anyone at the Headland with a foot like that. The other prints were a child’s. Towards evening what looked a dark tower reared ominous upon the Way. Another Triple-Hekkat. One face gazing upwards, one to the south, the third looking north to a silver glint between distant mountains.

At the statue’s base was a chunk of bloody meat. “A meal for Hekkat,” said Tulu. Her voice shook. White-faced, she pointed down. At the Hekkat’s foot, the earth was piled as if the great statue on its plinth of stone was moving south. Splitting, turning back the earth like water. Paku and Tulu were already running when I called them back.

“Look!” I showed them the footprints, the same ones. I pointed at the marks of the broad-headed spear the watchers
had used to dig. The hole where they had stood the spear in the ground.

“What were they doing?” asked Tulu.

“They wanted to make it look as if the Hekkat is hunting us.” I remembered Kalik’s story of the goddess who waded into the lake and turned to stone. I forced a laugh. “Maybe somebody was trying to scare us.”

“Well, it worked,” said Paku. He laughed, weakly at first, and Tulu and I laughed with him. It helped. We knew whoever had made the marks, they were humans. Not a monstrous stone statue come to life.

Down the hillside I flung the sacrificial meat. “So much for superstition!” And I remembered Jak, my old dog, pissing on the feet of of one of the Guardians in the mountain pass. “They’re too far ahead for us to catch, but we’ll scare them!” I said, stamping the earth flat again. “When they come back with Kalik, they’ll wonder what’s happened. Let’s warn the others.”

But Paku grinned, drove in his spear, and turned up the earth at the northern base of the Hekkat. “We’ll scare them instead,” he said. “They won’t like it when they find the Hekkat going the wrong way!”

We turned, still laughing, and trotted till dark.

Outside the cave next morning I looked at the injured left footprint again. In my mind I saw a steel trap and, caught between its jagged teeth, part of a white bear’s left hind foot. I saw the Carny limping on his left foot. The picture changed again, became the nightmare in which that evil face turned into Kalik’s beautiful mask.

“What did you say?” Tulu was staring at me.

“I was just telling myself not to believe in superstition.”

Paku, too, stared at me before he grinned. “It’s easy –” he said, “– I mean, to believe in it.”

“I have to fight it all the time,” I admitted. “If you give in, you let yourself be ruled by fear you invented yourself. Kalik understands that.”

We caught up to the others that evening. The little ones cried at the thought that we had been watched all winter. Maka sat silent.

We travelled on at first light. Tag and Bar now at the back with me. They looked behind and sniffed the air, as I did.

We stopped several times a day for Kitimah to feed the babies. We hunted as we went, gathered what green leaves we could eat, and collected the wisps of wool and hair the Animals left on twigs and thorns. The days went by in the regular rhythm of the Travellers, the Animals grazing as they walked. We could not go any faster.

Where were we going? We’d know when we saw it. By another lake between mountains. Grassy flats. “By a river running by,” I murmured. Good soil lying into the sun. Our first crops. Oats. Potatoes. Stores of winter food. Stacks of hay. Planting the winter wheat.

I saw the planks we would split for walls. Thatched roofs bonneted with snow, smoke rolling low in winter. Shaded by fruit trees in summer. Gardens. Yards with railing fences. Goats and sheep, pigs, donkeys.

I had read how to make paper. We could try reeds and flax. Ink would be easy. I would write down all I could remember of healing, and Tepulka would add to it so Children still unborn would start with our knowledge and discover more. We would write our story, build up our own Library. I would find a cliff and paint our journey, and Puli would tell it through her weaving.

We would send trading parties to the Cold Hills. Perhaps some of Henga’s people would come to live with us. We slowed down when lambs and kids were born, slinging them on the donkeys as they tired. Tupu ran with Kimi and Hurk among the sheep and goats. The first milk went to Kitimah and Tupu. Any left over to Kimi and Hurk. As more kids were born, there was enough for everyone. Tulu remembered making cheese and began to experiment.

The Way wound down off the ridge and ran beside the wild
river. Tama said to me, “They’re following us, aren’t they?”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen you and Paku dropping back with Tag and Bar. Looking. Sniffing. Why don’t we ambush them?”

“Kalik won’t walk into any ambush. We’re looking for a place we can make a stand, Tama, somewhere to defend ourselves.”

A white wall of mountains closed the valley south as if the river ended in the lake Henga’s mother had described to her. Lake Tip she had called it, stretching below the mountains’ feet. But if it lay there, we couldn’t see it yet.

There were several places we thought of stopping, but each had some disadvantage. Tama wanted to fortify a hillock on the floor of the valley. With a hollow in the top, like a huge dimple.

“No water,” I said. “No feed for the Animals. We’d last only a couple of days.”

One morning Paku spotted tiny figures crawling across a shingle fan we had descended two days before. The wind was carrying their scent to the dogs. Paku counted twenty-one warriors. Ahead of them a group of three. They were moving fast, would catch up tomorrow.

“What will we do?” asked Tulu.

“We’ve all got bows, spears, knives. We know how to use them.”

Then Tama came running. “I’ve found a place!” We followed him up a rock-choked slot between bluffs. I thought of Karly Campy’s mistake all those years ago when he led the Travellers into a closed-off gully. But in Tama’s narrow valley the Animals could not be panicked to run through our tents. We would build our cooking fires well away, to be safe. The bluffs right around the valley were sheer, surely too high for our attackers to lower themselves. Nor could they shoot arrows so far with any accuracy. Even if they could see the floor of the valley.

A stream of good water came over the cliffs. A separate spring welled under a boulder. Grass for many days. Firewood. I saw deer tracks, and some wild goats that climbed and stood
craning, and I felt safer. If there were a way up or down these walls, the wild goats would know it, but these were now trapped with us.

We unloaded the Animals, passed their packs up the tumble of boulders in the gully mouth. Tama called his sheep and goats, jumping from rock to rock. The donkeys heaved themselves up, stretching out their necks, leaning forward as we pulled from in front and pushed from behind so their clattering feet gripped on the rock and they toppled forward into safety. The kids and lambs we passed up.

For Gobble and Hurry’s short legs, the climb seemed impossible, but Tama called, and they bolted, tails stiff, squealing, up and over. We laughed as their round black behinds disappeared. The little ones forgot Kalik and explored our retreat. The Animals grazed.

Tepulka thought we could shift the unstable slip of boulders in the entry, make it into a wall. With thick poles, Paku and I levered at what he said was the keystone.

“Run!”

Paku’s feet skipped past my head. Tepulka dragged me up. We ran shouting, laughing. It would have been too late, anyway, if the boulders had fallen our way. As it was, they teetered, rumbled, and slid. We levered a couple and had a wall like a parapet from side to side of the gorge. With everybody helping, we soon built a ledge behind.

“They’ll have to come up one at a time,” said Paku.

“Better than I hoped,” I puffed. “Give us a hand.” We stacked smaller rocks, made slots to shoot through.

There was the flesh of two deer killed the night before, four baskets of dried meat, and several of freshly-picked green leaves and roots. While Tama kept a lookout, Tepulka, Paku, and I went down to the river and netted three baskets of trout. We hung them in the smoke from the campfire under a huge bulge of rock. There we should sleep safe.

In the darkness under the northern wall, the creek backed
up behind the boulder parapet. The top end of the pool finished under a bank of scrub which kept falling away, mixing with the water. Sunless. The smell, the look of fetid swamp reminded me of something. Slime dribbled out over the boulders below our parapet, making attack even more difficult.

Then a deer bounded out of the scrub. The pups yelping behind. The deer leapt on the jelly-like pond. One pup flung itself after. I held Tama back. The deer’s head rose coated with liquid clay, eyes opening, rolling in panic. Its drowning bawl gurgled. The white patch of rump hair tipped and slid under. The pup crying, following it out of sight.

As we stared, another section of dry ground carrying a couple of trees and some scrub detached, subsided, and sank. A wave travelled slow down the swamp’s surface. Half the ledge and parapet was now backed by the sinister ooze.

I worked out a roster: two on guard at the parapet; two waiting just behind, one to support, the other to run and call the rest.

“The moment you feel yourself getting tired,” I said, “call the next person up.”

I was on watch with Tulu in the early hours. Maka and Paku slept wrapped in cloaks on the ground behind us. Through a spyhole I could see the way any attacker had to climb.

The eastern sky was lightening when I glanced back down. Something had changed. I touched Tulu’s arm as she reached to touch mine. Three warriors sliding up, arching their bodies to seem part of the slimy rocks. Clinging, then sliding up again. The first was just beneath us, the second below him, the third heaving himself up. Their hands shifted, finding grips. I nodded to Tulu and we stood together and leaned over.

“Now!” Tulu shot the first. I took the second. They both lay where they fell. The third sprang downhill, but I hit him, and he fell between boulders. The other two died before dawn. Throughout the day, the third man’s voice weakened. It stopped in the afternoon.

“We’re fighting for our lives,” I said.

An occasional arrow clinked upon our parapet. I kept two groups of two children on patrol, looking for any attempt to climb down the steep walls. Kimi and Hurk ran down the second day, crying that a man had fallen.

From what was left of his face, I recognised one of Kalik’s men called Munt. His bow had smashed, his arrows. We took the bowstring, the flights, the arrowheads, and the knife still in his sheath. The bones so broken, his body felt like a loose sack. Tepulka and I swung and pitched it into what we now called The Ooze.

Kalik lost eight warriors in the mouth of the gorge and on the unclimbable walls. He began a siege of terror. Hoots and screams echoed between the cliffs, night and day. The roar of bears. The rumble of avalanches shook our gully all one day. I woke once to the Children’s screams and heard the terrifying pour and thunder of a river in flood.

How did he do it? Kalik understood how to use others’ imaginations. Intuitively, he already knew what images were in our minds. He only had to distort and enlarge them into fears. But how could I explain that to the Children? All they remembered was the Kalik who had killed their families, who had practised evil upon them. I tried hooting back at Kalik’s hoots, screamed when he screamed, and the Children copied me. They screeched and roared louder than any bear. Still, I knew Kalik’s inventiveness and warned them we must be patient.

After several nights of noise, Tepulka woke me to a great silence. Maka had seen something on the high rock wall that bulged and soared above our camp. We looked up the great swell of rock, but nothing moved.

“It might have been a huge bird flying across the moon. But it looked like a man’s shadow thrown upon the wall,” said Maka. “There!”

My skin prickled cold. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. Limping high across the wall of rock, hands weaving, dancing, posturing, enticing, body doubling and straightening, I saw the shadow of the obscene creature who had haunted me in the Land of the White Bear.

I had never told the Children of the Carny. How he had
come like an apparition, dancing tall, then shrinking dwarfed, bending low, repulsive. Singing in his eldritch voice, screeching, chattering, gossiping. His hands fluttering over people, too familiar. Now I told Tepulka and Maka of his oppressive reek like a sunless swamp, how his stench filled the snow-house where we waited for Cheena’s marriage. Of how the Carny gulped greedily at fresh seal liver and blubber, blood and oil over his face, in his hair. How the women hid their children behind themselves, away from his dancing, unclean fingers.

I told them of the Carny’s wispy oily beard, his pursed and horrid lips, his white-lashed eyes that looked painful, raw.

“He had a child chained to his belt. A hood over its head.” I told how he unhooked the chain and made the child dance half-naked. A dance no child should know. How he dressed the Child after the dance, how its weary eyes disappeared under the hood. The snick of the chain.

“His slobbering, dribbling mouth disgusted me, his sore eyes, but his hands were the most repulsive part. They were never still, crawling, leaping and joining, fingers fluttering apart again. He tried to touch me with those hands, so I struck them away. He hated me.”

I told them of how the Clock stopped, how Cheena could not marry, how the gloating Carny vanished with the Child. And how Cheena gave herself to the Droll to save her people.

I told Tepulka and Maka of how Arku and I set the great bear traps in the Metal People’s village. “We caught one and killed it. In another trap we found the torn-off part of the hind left foot of a white bear. Next day, we saw the Carny, limping on his left foot.”

I could hear my own voice, its babble, but had to tell the story. Tepulka and Maka listened as I told them of my dream when I thought the Carny was Kalik. How I dreamt of him as the Showman.

I got control of myself. I mustn’t alarm the others, make them feel helpless, but I had to explain the shadow on the
rock-face. “Kalik knows how to play upon our fears. He uses superstition, just as the Carny did. He understands how to set going the most appalling memories in the minds of his victims.”

“How is it both Maka and I saw that thing on the cliff?” asked Tepulka. “The same figure you were seeing?”

“There is a thing the Shaman told me about,” I said. “A thing he called hypnotism. Mass hypnotism can make us all think we’re seeing and hearing the same thing.”

Tepulka nodded, only half-convinced. And Maka just stared at the wall of rock above where we had seen that evil shadow prance behind the fluttering curtains of its hands.

“I read a book,” I said, “about people who grew up in a cave. The only things they ever saw were shadows thrown on the wall by other people passing before a huge fire. So the people in the cave grew up believing the shadows were the only real things in the world. Kalik’s using that idea to try and convince us what we’re seeing is real. He’s using the pictures in my head. Using them to convince you as well. But he’s only a man like us.”

Back by the campfire, Tepulka and Puli now on watch at the parapet, I told the rest of the Children about the Carny. How Kalik was putting his evil pictures into our minds, using the moon to cast his shadow on the bulge of the cliff.

“We’re safe here, as long as we don’t let him frighten us. We’ll beat Kalik if we wait long enough.”

“Tell us that story about patience,” said Maka. “You know – about the wooden doll.”

I had read it to the Children long ago but remembered it well enough. And I told it now.

“There was once a hunter and his wife far from their people. His wife died, and the man thought he must die of grief. He made a doll out of wood and dressed it in his dead wife’s clothes. He painted the face like hers. He carved the hands like hers. He sat the doll the other side of the fire and talked to it as if he was talking to his real wife. A year went by, and he still missed his real wife, but talking to the wooden doll eased
his heart.

“One night he came back from hunting and found the fire going. The next night, there was a pot of water over the flames. The next night, meat was cooking in the pot.

“The man started finding the hut swept. His tunic mended where a bear had torn it. Firewood heaped beside the door. Water carried up from the stream. One day he came home early and saw a woman going into his hut. The man rushed inside and found the doll had gone. Instead, his wife sat by the fire, cooking his meal.

“‘You missed me so much,’ said the woman, ‘the gods felt sorry and sent me back to look after you. But you must not make love to me until we have rejoined our people. Then it will be safe. Until then, if you even touch me, I will disappear and never come back. You must be patient.’

“As soon as the river froze, they filled their packs with dried meat and set out to find their people. Across the river of ice, they climbed through the mountains. As they came down their other side, it began to snow. On the plain far below, the man and his wife could see smoke from the tents of their tribe. But the snow was too deep to go any further.

“‘We must be patient,’ said the woman. They made a tent from the skins they carried, lit a fire, and slept either side of it. The hunter killed a bear, and they cooked and ate some meat.

“‘We have enough for many days,’ said the woman as she hung the rest to freeze.

“‘I hope the snow melts soon,’ said the man.

“‘Be patient,’ said the woman. ‘Remember the gods’ warning.’

“They ate their meal and made their beds either side of the fire. More snow fell and rose around the tent. Each day the man looked down the mountainside at the smoke rising from the tents far below on the plain.

“‘I wish we could get down there,’ he would say. ‘Amongst our own people. And then we can touch each other and make love.’

“‘We must be patient,’ said his wife.

“When the bear meat was eaten, the man snared a deer. His wife cooked some meat and hung the rest. Outside, the snow began to melt.

“In the morning, they could almost get through the snow. ‘We must be patient,’ said the woman. ‘The snow is still too deep. If we try to get down the mountain now, we will die.’

“Her husband nodded. When the deer was eaten, the man caught a white hare, and they ate that. Early next morning, the man looked outside. Most of the snow had melted. They could get down the mountain! He cried with delight, rushed back inside, and kissed his sleeping wife awake with the good news.

“And he found himself kissing wooden lips. Holding a wooden doll in his arms. A doll dressed in his wife’s clothes.

“The man ran down the mountainside. His people heard the agony in his screams as he fell, picked himself up, and ran again. They tried to quieten him, but he shrieked his story, went mad, and died. Through the snow, they followed his tracks back up the mountainside to his camp. There they found a wooden doll dressed in his wife’s clothes. The lips burned away where it had fallen in the fire. And behind the tent, they found a woman’s footprints disappearing under fresh snow drifting down.”

In the last light of the fire, the Children looked grave. Maka and I went down to the parapet. Puli and Tepulka were glad to be relieved. They rolled themselves in their blankets, and lay down behind us.

High above our heads, the Carny’s shadow danced across the wall again that night. But this time it carried a bundle wrapped in soft deerskin. As the shadow pranced and crouched, it unwrapped the bundle and held out the shadow of a wooden doll. But the doll moved its arms and its feet kicked. A tiny mewling came down the air. Maka screamed and fell. Tepulka was there at once, lifting her, carrying her away. Paku came running to keep watch with me. And the shadows disappeared.