Tsuga's Children (23 page)

“They look down on me and my kind,” Doro said, “but we know what’s inside. We cut the throats and watch the dying and then we slit the bellies open. We know all about that.”

“But what’s going to happen to us?” Arel asked.

“We get the grease and the bile in our fingernails and blood in our clothes and they say we don’t smell good, so we can’t go into the houses.”

They saw that he was not talking to them, just talking as he talked to the boar, the wolf and the other prisoners. Soon, still complaining about how they treated him, he went away.

Jen watched the boar’s long, hairy face with its yellow tusks and its small red eyes that peered through the black hair. It seemed evil, murderous; but then the red eyes caught hers and there was a recognition that contained no evil or murder. This was the boar who had stopped in the tunnel of juniper and looked so long and quietly up at her before he went on. She hadn’t been able to read his thoughts then, but now, faint yet sure, a deep signal of intelligence came from the red eyes and the sudden stillness of his head.
The small human in the tree, not one who would trap me,
the boar thought, not in words, but that was what his recognition meant.
And now we are both trapped by a common enemy.

A common enemy, Jen thought. She turned to Arel, who was staring at the great wolf in his cage. “Can you hear his thoughts?” she asked Arel.

“He’s the leader of the wolves,” Arel said. “And now he’s been betrayed by the half-wolves. They led him into a trap.”

Then they looked to the bear, who, as if he felt their probing of his mind, stopped moving his head and looked straight at them. He, too, had been free not long before. Now, sorely hurt from the wounds he received in a deadfall trap, he would not eat the food his jailers offered him.
When you are trapped, you fight. You do not eat.

None of the powerful animals was afraid. Each watched and waited for a chance at freedom.

“I wish they could understand us,” Jen said.

Arel said thoughtfully, “I wonder if some of the animals have the forbidden gift, like us.”

It was the wolf leader who replied. They both felt his mind and turned at once to see his yellow eyes regarding them calmly.

It is Ahneeah of the Deer who gives us our gifts, yours and mine.
That is what his mind told them. He knew them to be afraid of his kind, as his kind was of theirs, but in the wild it was a different fear, not the kind that swept away all dignity, and dirtied the air of this prison.

Jen and Arel had a thought in common:
If we could set you free, we would.

I know that,
the deep yellow eyes told them.
We all know that now.

“What are you looking at?” Arn said.

They told him what the wolf had told them.

“Well,” Arn said, “I have Jen’s knife now. All we can do is wait and watch for chances.”

The wolfs wide eyes blinked in assent.

Over near the gate where they had been given over to Doro by the guard, Doro sat in the doorway of his small hut, staring in his round-eyed, vacant way at the pens and cages. Then there was a noise at the gate, a rattling of the bars and a shrill, querulous voice. “Hey, Doro, hey! It’s your old friend come to see you! At least you can open up and say hello!”

Through the bars of the gate they saw something low and brown jiggling and moving from side to side like a spider. Doro got up with a curse and opened the gate. It was old Ganonoot, his brown snaggletooth protruding from his face that was so squashed and creased they could hardly tell his mouth from the other wrinkles. He came scooting in, bent over, leaning on his bow, and sat right down in Doro’s spot. Doro picked him up by the scrufF of his neck and kicked him over to the side.

“That’s my place, you filthy old beggar, so have a little respect for your betters!” Doro said.

Ganonoot ignored the kick. “If you please, Master Doro, Ganonoot is hungry! Hungry! Now, would you have a joint of roast beef, perhaps, with squash pudding and currant jam and a loaf of your excellent round bread for your old friend?”

“Old friend! You miserable wretch, you stringy piece of dried gut! I ought to feed you to the boar—maybe you’d be to his taste!” In spite of his words, Doro was enjoying himself, and soon he had given Ganonoot a piece of bread, which Ganonoot soaked with water from his leather water bottle before tearing off pieces of it and stuffing them into his mouth. Doro watched him eat, his round eyes blinking each time the long tusk tore into the bread. When Ganonoot had eaten all the bread, they talked in quieter voices. Ganonoot was evidently telling Doro a story, because he stood and sat down, gestured with his bow and his hands as Doro laughed or grew serious, wonder in his simple eyes.

When the story was finished, Ganonoot looked around the yard for the first time. “A wolf, a bear and a boar!” he said. “But what’s this, Master Doro, master of the cleaver and bone-saw? Some small children in your cage?”

“Yes, and watch out you don’t go too near. They say a soldier named Gort did and he thought he’d swallowed a porcupine.”

Ganonoot came scooting over to their cage and squatted on his haunches.

“Don’t get too close!” Doro called from his doorway, where he sat, his eyes droopy now in the winter sunlight.

“Ah, now!” Ganonoot said to them in a voice Doro wouldn’t hear. “Arn and Jen and fair Arel, all in a cage!”

“Ganonoot,” Arel said. “What are you doing with the Chigai?”

“Ganonoot, he comes and goes. Nobody cares about old Ganonoot except to give him a kick in the rear and maybe a moldy piece of bread. Ganonoot can go wherever he wants, because nobody cares.” A tear came to his eye.

“Can you get us out of here?” Arn asked him.

“I can tell you a story, that’s what Ganonoot can do. Do you want to hear a story, now? Ganonoot knows all the old stories, the best stories. Sometimes Ganonoot can’t remember when he’s eaten last, or what direction he ought to be going in, but he knows all the old stories, every one!”

“We just want to get away from here,” Arn said. “We don’t know what Mori wants with us …” Arn saw that Ganonoot wasn’t bothering to understand, so he trailed off hopelessly.

“I will tell you more of the story of Ahneeah and the People Who Left the World,” Ganonoot said in his story-telling voice, which was lower and less squeaky and crotchety, as if another person spoke through his lips. “Once upon a time, long ago, when the Tree was young …”

“Please, Ganonoot,” Jen cried. “The Chigai shot Amu and caught me, and then Arn and Arel followed them and tried to cut me loose, but …”

“… a man was made insane by power.”

“Ganonoot!” Jen said. “Please listen!”

“The power of life and death was his, he thought, so he came to believe he owned the world. But he came to have small doubts, and the small doubts made him anxious and cruel. Now, we will call these small doubts children, and there were four …” Ganonoot stopped, seeming per-plexed. He pointed a thin old finger at them and counted. “Didn’t I say four? Yes, yes. But here are only three, and the story must have four, so the tale can’t be told.”

Behind Ganonoot, Doro lay slumped in his doorway, asleep. Suddenly their eyes caught a movement at the gate, and a small figure in brown buckskin quickly climbed the gate and jumped down, then looked around carefully before running toward them. It was Bren. He pressed himself against the bars of the cage and reached in to touch Arel’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face tight, his lips quivering with tension, as if his face were about to break apart.

When they told him that Runa was not hurt, and that Amu, though shot through the lung, was not dead when they left, he put his hands over his face.

Ganonoot counted again. “One, two, three, four; now the story can be told.”

“I’ll find a way to get you out of here,” Bren said. “Tonight Mori and all the Chigai start for the place of the Great Tree. I’ll hide somewhere and when they’ve gone I’ll come and get you out.”

“That is not the way the story goes,” Ganonoot said. “Perhaps you should listen to old Ganonoot’s tale, for many lessons are learned by the ears, and old stories do not always have to repeat themselves.”

“Ganonoot,” Bren said, “we don’t have time for stories now.”

“But your father …” Arel said to Bren.

“Never mind my father now,” Bren said. Anger and sorrow fought in him. “I will not see my friends in a cage. I will not.” He clenched his fists. “I am myself.”

“Yes,” Ganonoot said. “That is in the story.”

Bren said impatiently, “Be quiet, Ganonoot. We must make a plan for tonight.”

“Wait, Bren,” Arel said. “I want to hear more of Gano-noot’s story. The wolf is speaking to me. Can you hear him, Jen?”

“Yes,” Jen said. She felt the chords of a memory that was so old it went back through generations of paws and fangs and kills, moonlight on frigid snow and the fearful respect of wolf for man and man for wolf. The wolf leader had risen to his feet, the hair along his back rippling and erect. He stared at Ganonoot. Then they saw that the boar and the bear regarded Ganonoot with the same intensity.
We remember,
the fierce animals said.
Listen.

Ganonoot’s voice, calm and sad, seemed now the recalling of all the memories of animal and man. All of them listened; even the animals seemed to listen.

“And this man who was driven mad by power had once been a wise hunter and a good man, kind to his fellows, fair in the sharing of what he had, strong in the fields and orchards of his people, wise in council, and loved by children. When he was still sane, Ahneeah came to him in the form of an old woman and said to him, ‘Great trials are coming for the animals and the people, and you will not be the least of their trials.’ ‘Me?’ he said. ‘A trial to my people? But I am a good man. I am respected and even loved. How could I cause trouble for my people?’

“‘You are a man,’ Ahneeah said, ‘and no man may take what you will be offered by your people. I give you a choice: do not take what they will offer you, even though it is offered freely.’ But when trouble came, when a harsh winter, a winter of iron ice came, there was dissension among the people, and they asked him if he would lead them. He did take that gift, and it was the gift of absolute power, and it made him mad. In the name of the people, people were murdered. In the years that followed, always for the good of the people, the land was trampled by ten thousand slaves, and the lowing of death-fear was a pall across the world.”

From the cattle pens that same lowing came back to their ears:
I am helpless, but I don’t want to die.
Other caged animals added their own doleful voices, high and low, to the unending sound of fear.

“In his madness he changed; he was no longer loved, only feared, but at first he was unaware of the change. The people lived then in a large village on the meadow by the shores of the warm lake, below the Great Tree (which was a sapling then). The leader of the people grew afraid of anyone he thought opposed him, so the village was walled within and without. He was afraid of the leaders of the wild animals, so he trapped them and enslaved them.”

From the wolf, bear and boar came the deep resonance of anger.

“Finally he became afraid of his own betrayal of Ah-neeah’s justice toward the animals, so he sacrificed the most handsome children, two by two, on the altar by the Great Tree, thinking that this would pacify the spirits of the cattle, the boar, the bear, the wolves and the other animals he had degraded.

“It was then that the pestilence came, and destroyed nearly all the animals in the world, slave and wild, so that the people began to starve.

“Then a young man called Tsuga gathered some of the people together in the forest and said to them, I know of a way to leave this world where the children cry in hunger, where the animals die for no reason. Come with me to the northern mountains, and we will leave this dying world for another.’

“Then Ahneeah appeared before them in the form of an old woman and said, ‘You may leave the world if you wish, but you may never return, and ever after you and your children and your children’s children will mourn the world you have lost and the justice of Ahneeah that cannot follow you.’

“And that is what happened, except that Tsuga Wanders-too-far did return through the Black Gate, and …”

Here the story was interrupted by a shout that startled them all, including Doro, who jumped up so quickly he banged his head on his doorframe and stumbled to one knee in the dirt. Andaru and several guards ran by him, one kicking him out of the way as they passed.

Andaru took Bren by the arm and pulled him back, shaking him in anger. “Are you my son? Haven’t I told you not to come here? And never to listen to this old fool?”

Bren was silent.

One of the guards had raised an ax over Ganonoot’s head. “No, leave him,” Andaru said. “Get the animals trussed and ready to travel.”

Loops were snaked through the bars of the cages of the boar, bear and wolf. Though they pushed, clawed and bit at the ropes, in time the loops found their marks and after all the roaring and snarling the animals were trussed and helpless on their sides. Once securely tied, they were dragged from their cages onto the dirt, where all three were muzzled, the thongs cruelly tight; but their eyes were open and alert. They were quiet, now, and watchful, dignified by their own silence.

The guards inserted poles between their tied legs, then carried them, hanging upside down, through the gate and down the street toward Mori’s house. This sight brought from the other animals in the pens and cages a long groan of despair.

As soon as the guards weren’t looking, Ganonoot had scuttled off and disappeared.

Later, when Doro brought them their food, his cheek was turning green and blue where the guard had kicked him. His mouth was slanted down on that side and rimmed with dried blood. “Loss some my tees, too,” he mumbled. “Kick my tees ow. I gone seep.”

He left the bread and water with them and disappeared into his hut, but was soon hauled out of there by more guards, who had come for Arn and Arel. “Open up the cage, you scum,” one of the guards said as he dragged Doro across the dirt. “We want that one and that one. The other you can keep.”