Spirit Walker (12 page)

Torak glanced over his shoulder. "Do they hunt people?"
"Not unless we hunt them."
"And do you?"

Detlan glared at him. "Of course not! The Hunters are sacred to the Sea Mother! Besides," he added, "they always avenge harm done to their own." His heavy face became thoughtful. "There's a story that once, before the Great Wave, a boy from the Cormorant Clan caused the death of a young Hunter. He didn't mean to do it, it was an accident; the Hunter had become tangled in the boy's seal net, and he'd harpooned it before he could see what it was." He shook his head. "The boy was so terrified that he never went out in a skinboat again. All his life--his whole life--he stayed on the shore with the women. But many winters later, when he was an old, old man, he was seized with such a longing to be once more on the Sea that he told his son to take him out in his skinboat." Detlan licked his lips. "The Hunters were waiting for them. They were never seen again."

Torak thought about that. "But--he hadn't meant to
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kill the young one. Was there no way he could have appeased them?"
Again Detlan shook his head, and after that they didn't speak for a long time.
The wind dropped and they entered a fog bank. Bale and Asrif disappeared. Detlan's paddle cut noiselessly through the water.
A barren rock slid by to Torak's right, with a gull perched on top.
"There," said Detlan with a nod. "That's the Rock."
Somewhere in the fog, Asrif sniggered. "Soon that'll be you, Forest boy."

Torak set his teeth, determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing him flinch; but inside, his spirits quailed. The Rock was scarcely bigger than a skinboat, and even at its highest point it was no taller than he was. One big wave would wash him into the Sea. He couldn't imagine surviving on it for a day, let alone a whole moon.

On they went through the fog. Torak felt it settle on his skin, beading his strange new clothes with damp.
Up ahead, something bobbed in the water.
He blinked.
It was gone.
No--there it was again, bobbing up beside him. A head like a dog's: a gray dog with a blunt, whiskered
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muzzle and large, inquisitive black eyes.
Detlan saw it and smiled. "Bale! Asrif!" he called. "The guardian has come to show us the way home!"

The seal rolled over, showing a pale, spotted belly. Then it flipped around, scratched its muzzle with one handlike flipper, shut its nostrils tight, and sank below the surface, where it swam alongside the skinboats.

So that's a seal, thought Torak. He thought it an odd blend of ungainliness and sleek beauty.
The guardian led them well, and the fog cleared as abruptly as it had descended. Suddenly they were out in sunlight again.
"We're home," said Detlan. Laughing, he lifted his paddle high, scattering droplets.
Torak gasped. Before him lay an island like none he'd ever seen.

Three jagged peaks reared straight out of the Sea. There was no Forest. Just mountains and Sea. The mountains were almost sheer, their grim flanks speckled with seabirds and veined with waterfalls that cascaded from patches of ice mantling their shoulders. Only at their feet could Torak see a swathe of green-- and below that, a wide, curving bay with a slash of sand stained pink by the setting sun.

Smoke rose from a cluster of humped gray shelters on the sand. Beside each shelter stood a rack on which
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were laid several skinboats. Torak saw that below them on the beach, two saplings had been planted, and lashed together to form an arch. The saplings were bright scarlet. Uneasily he wondered what they were for.

From across the water came the murmur of voices and the clamor of birds. With a shock he saw that the cliffs were alive with seabirds: thousands of them-- wheeling, crammed onto ledges. The shelters of the Seals, too, seemed precarious and cramped. He couldn't imagine how people could live like this: caught on a narrow strip of land between mountain and Sea.

"The Seal Islands," said Bale, bringing his skinboat alongside Detlan's. There was no mistaking the pride in his voice.
"How many islands are there?" said Torak. He could only see one.

Bale looked at him suspiciously. "This, and two smaller ones to the north. The Cormorant and the Kelp clans live on those, but this--this is the Seals' home. It's the biggest, which is why the whole group takes its name. The biggest and the best."

Of course, thought Torak sourly. Everything the Seals did had to be the best.
But as they drew nearer, he forgot about that. There seemed to be something very wrong with the bay. Its
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waters were deep crimson: too deep to be colored only by the setting sun.
Then he caught a familiar, salty-sweet stink, very strong in the windless air. It couldn't be. . . .
It was.
The Bay of Seals was full of blood.
J
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Chapter EIGHTEEN
The clamor of seagulls dinned in Torak's ears, and the smell of blood caught at his throat.

He saw children paddling in foaming red shallows, and women washing hide in crimson water. Men moved like shadows before a leaping fire, piling huge slabs of meat beside the sapling arch. Limbs, hands, faces: all were stained scarlet, like people in a dream.

"Someone's made a big kill," said Asrif.
"First of the summer," said Bale, "and we missed it." He made it sound as if that were Torak's fault.
Suddenly Torak realized that all this meat came
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from just a single kill. He saw a tail fin longer than a skinboat. What he'd taken for saplings were the jawbones of a whale.

At least--he guessed it was a whale, although it wasn't a Hunter. Instead of teeth, its jaws trailed a long fringe of coarse black hair, which a Seal man was chopping off with a knife. He'd cut off his own hair, too. It lay at his feet in the same pile as the whale's.

 

As Torak waded onto the slippery red pebbles, he saw how happy everyone was. The whole clan was bubbling with celebration. A kill this size would mean food for days to come.

Bale leaped out of his skinboat and told Torak to
stay there.
"Islinn will decide what to do with you after the feast."

Alone on the shingle, Torak was painfully aware of the Seals' stares. Among the Ravens he'd been an outsider, but this was worse. And these people were his bone kin.

 

He watched Bale unstrap his bundles and toss them to a weather-beaten man who'd come down to meet him. From the resemblance between them, Torak guessed they were father and son.

He saw Detlan setting his skinboat on a rack, flanked by a beaming woman and a small girl, clearly his sister, who was jumping up and down, clamoring for 159
his attention. Detlan looked embarassed, but pleased to see her.
Asrif, still in the shallows, was being scolded by a shrewish woman even shorter than he was. "You were supposed to bring back
two
bundles of salmonskin!" she said, jabbing her finger in his chest. "How could you leave one behind?"
"I don't
know,"
mumbled Asrif. "I packed them both, I know I did. And now it's not there."
Bale was speaking to his father and pointing at Torak. Then he ran up the beach to talk to a man by the fire.
Dusk came on, the Seals went to make ready for the feast, and still Torak waited. His cheek hurt. He was ravenous.
He saw now why nobody had bothered to tie him up. There was nowhere to run to: the mountains walled in the bay. At the south end, a waterfall pounded down from

a cliff face. At the north, a track climbed up toward an overhang that jutted over the Sea like an enormous skinboat. Unless the Seals let him go, he'd never get off the

 

a cliff face. At the north, a track climbed up toward an overhang that jutted over the Sea like an enormous skinboat. Unless the Seals let him go, he'd never get off the island. He would be trapped, while in the Forest the clans sickened and died. . . .

The sky turned deep blue. Food smells wafted down to him. He saw cooking-skins hanging from supports of what looked like whale bones, and fair-haired women 160
chatting as they stirred. Unlike the Seal men, their calves rather than their arms bore the wavy blue lines of their clan-tattoos.

Near them, a group of girls giggled as they dug into a steaming mound from which came the rich smell of baked meat. Torak knew this way of cooking from the Ravens, but he'd never seen it done quite like this. A hunk of meat as big as he was had been wrapped in seaweed, then buried in a pit of fire-heated stones, and covered with more seaweed and sand.

The women began sharing the food into bowls. Torak noticed that only they did the cooking, while the men had cut up the carcass. That struck him as bizarre. Didn't Seal girls hunt? He wondered what Renn would say about that.

 

Hungrily he watched the clan gather in a circle around the fire. Still no one came to fetch him.

A murmuring began, like the sighing of the Sea, and the whole clan lifted its arms. A figure stepped from the circle, and Torak recognized the man who'd cut off his hair. Bearing a basket of capelin, the man approached the jawbone arch, and set the offering beneath it. Torak guessed he was thanking the whale for giving its life to the clan. But instead of returning to the feast, the man trudged into the gloom, toward a cave at the foot of the overhang.

When Torak had almost lost hope, Detlan came for
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him, and they went to sit some distance from the fire, with Asrif and Bale.

A girl handed Torak a bowl. It was so heavy that he nearly dropped it, and to his astonishment he saw that it was made of stone. Why in the name of the Forest would anyone make bowls out of stone? How would you carry them when you moved camp?

A disturbing idea came to him. Perhaps the Seals
never
moved camp.
"Eat," said Detlan, tossing him a spoon.

Torak glanced at his bowl. It contained a hunk of dark-pink meat topped by a thick slab of gray fat, and a smaller piece of purplish flesh. Around it swam a sludgy stew that stank of the Sea, half a capelin, and two long, pale things that looked like fingers.

"What's the matter," said Bale, "not good enough? You're lucky we're feeding you at all."
"Haven't you ever eaten shellworms?" said Asrif.
"What's in it?" asked Torak.

"The red meat's whale," said Detlan, "and that's blubber on top." With his knife, he speared his own chunk of purple meat. "Whale heart. Very special. We all get a piece, to take in its strength and courage." He crammed it into his mouth and chewed.

"Bet you don't have anything this good in the Forest," said Asrif.
Torak ignored him and ate. The whale meat was
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stringy, the blubber oily and bland, and the shellworms had no taste at all. But the capelin was good.
"Had you really never seen a seal?" said Detlan.
"Detlan, why waste your time?" said Bale.
But Detlan seemed to have taken Torak's ignorance as a personal affront. "Seals give us
everything"
he said earnestly. "Clothes, shelters, skinboats. Food, harpoons, lamps." He paused, clearly wondering if he'd left anything out.
"What about your parkas?" said Torak, curious despite himself. "That thin hide you can see through. That can't be seal."
"It is," said Asrif. "It's gutskin."
"I told you," said Detlan, "the seals give us everything. We are the people of the seal."
Torak frowned. "But no one's allowed to hunt their clan-creature. So why do you?"
All three of them looked horrified.
"We would
never do
that!" cried Detlan. Angrily he struck the spotted fur on his chest.
"'This
is our clan-creature! This is
ring-seaV.
What we hunt--what we eat--that's
gray
seal!"

Torak had never heard of such a distinction, and it struck him as slippery and false. Something must have shown in his face, because Detlan's brows lowered ominously.

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"Told you it was a waste of time," said Bale, rising to his feet. Then to Torak, "Come on. Time to face the Leader."
Islinn the Seal Clan Leader was old and shrunken. He looked as if the life were being sucked out of him.

His wispy white hair and beard were beaded with tiny blue slate beads, and his ears were pierced with twisted, spearlike shells whose weight had stretched his earlobes to his shoulders.

 

Bale forced Torak to his knees. Then he named the captive to the Seals, and told them how he'd broken the law.

 

At that, many people cried out and ran to lay placating hands on the whale's jawbone. The Leader stroked his beard with a shaky hand, but said nothing. His rheumy eyes moved constantly. Torak wondered if they hid intelligence, or the lack of it.

At last Islinn spoke. "You
say
that you're kin," he murmured in a reedy voice that sounded as if he barely had the strength to force it from his chest.
"My father's mother was a Seal," said Torak.
"What was his name?"
"I can't name him. He died last autumn."
The Leader pondered that, then murmured to the man beside him. The man's face was hidden by drifting
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smoke, but Torak could tell from the thick, sandy hair and the muscled limbs that he was much younger than Islinn. His jerkin and breeches were plain, but his belt was magnificent. Made of braided hide, it was two hands wide, and fringed with the red and yellow beaks of puffins.

Puffins, thought Torak. He must be the Mage.
"Name your father's mother," said the Leader.
Torak did.
The Leader's lipless mouth tightened.
Among the Seals, someone caught their breath.
"I knew the woman," wheezed the Leader. "She mated with a Forest man. I never knew that she'd had a son."

"How do we know that she did?" said the Mage without turning his head. "How do we know that the boy is who he says he is?" He spoke quietly, but all the Seals leaned forward to listen.

 

It was a remarkable voice: smooth flowing and low pitched, but with an undertow of great power, like the Sea. It was a voice that anyone would want to hear. For a moment, Torak almost forgot that it had called him a liar.

The Leader was nodding. "My thoughts too, Tenris."
The smoke shifted, and Torak saw the Mage for the first time--or at least, he saw one side of his face, for
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Tenris was still turned away. He was handsome in a sharp-boned way: with a straight nose, a wide mouth flanked by deep laughter lines, and a dark-gold beard cut close to the strong line of his jaw.

 

Torak sensed that this was the man who wielded the real power among the Seals; the man who would decide his fate. For a moment, he was reminded of Fin-Kedinn. "I am telling the truth," he said. "I am your bone kin."