Tsuga's Children (26 page)

“Vote?” Mori said, interrupting her. He laughed. “Shall Ishow you some votes?” He nodded to his guards; each man stepped aside to let a half-wolf leap forward and stop, all teeth and slaver, upon the end of a thong. “And here is another,” he said. A huge half-wolf in a studded collar leapt into the circle and sat at Mori’s feet. He was the largest of all the half-wolves. He seemed to grin as he looked around him, yet one brawny shoulder was slightly turned down in deference to his master. “Vote?” Mori said loudly. “Vote? Mori is the only one who votes, and his vote is law!”

Aguma said, “You are not greater than Ahneeah’s justice.”

“There are more powerful gods than your old woman who is never seen, and they have made me strong,” Mori said. “I please them with blood, as I please my people with meat.”

“Ah, Mori,” Tsuga said, coming forward to stand with Aguma. “The gods of murder are simple, and voracious, and fickle; that is why you are afraid.”

Mori laughed again as he looked around at his half-wolves, his guards, his thousand people covering a wide circle of the meadow. He raised the bronze knife again, and his people resumed their sorrowful chant.

Two men in cattle skins and masks then brought two children into the circle, the children dressed in clothes decorated with black and white beaded designs, trimmed in the white fur of the winter weasel. The children’s hands were tied, their faces blank and cold, as if they knew their fate and must in their helplessness accept it. They were placed side by side on their backs upon the stone.

Then came the man holding the young evergreen tree, to place himself between the children and the bronze knife. The chanting grew in intensity, within its sadness a high call of hope, but when the bronze knife descended upon the tree and the green branches fell, one by one, the hope died back into the windy moan of despair.

“Bren!” came a deep voice from among the guards. Two of the guards in the circle were pushed aside, and Andaru, dressed in the cattle skin and armed with bow and broadax, came striding to the stone. “Bren!” He looked from the child on the stone to Mori, his black brows low over his glittering eyes. “You have my son upon the stone!”

Mori looked then at the children for the first time. He stared: again his plans had warped and changed before his eyes, and it was the children who caused it, always the children. He turned to Andaru and stabbed him in the side, then signaled to his half-wolf to kill him. “Your son will have to do,” he said to the fallen Andaru.

Mori’s half-wolf leaped at Andaru’s throat, but Andaru rolled away. The half-wolf skidded on the grass as he turned to try again, snarling and snapping his white teeth. Then he froze still, for a long cry as thin and fine as a steel blade came from above, by the tree. This was neither the snarl nor the fawning howl of a half-wolf, but the clear, free challenge of a wild creature, cold as a winter moon reflected in ice.

At the sound, all the other half-wolves cringed and looked smaller upon their thongs. Mori’s half-wolf didn’t cringe, but turned toward his challenger, grimacing, the hair along his back stiffly erect, shivering as if in a rage to find a throat with his teeth.

Down across the ledges came the wild wolf, slowly and carefully. He was long and gaunt from lack of food; his yellow eyes were directed only upon Mori’s half-wolf. He never turned his head, as if unaware of all the people.

Mori signaled his guards to let the wild wolf through, then took a bow from a guard and nocked an arrow to the string. “We will watch this,” he said.

Mori’s half-wolf, fed on beef, was the heavier one. His jaws, as he yawned in nervous anticipation, seemed wide enough to crush the wild wolfs skull. But the wild leader came steadily forward, his steps precise and firm, even delicate. Only his eyes shone with his fierce purpose.

When they were six feet apart they both leaped forward in attack. The half-wolf screamed in his rage, but the wild leader made no sound but breath and the clack of fangs. They met at an angle, in a blur of gray and black, and when they parted, a puffy cloud of cut gray hair settled to the ground. For a moment they were as still as two stones, then they met again, blood a new color in the blur of their bodies. Mori followed them with a half-drawn arrow, waiting. Many more times they met in a rush of slashing, until the ground beneath them was gray with shaved hair and spotted with blood. The half-wolf lost an eye and his studded collar, the wild leader two of his teeth broken off at the base. But after the last meeting there was stillness and silence, for the half-wolf lay on his back, his throat and scarred belly exposed in surrender and supplication, the wild leader’s fangs around his throat. He had surrendered forever, as is the way of wolves. Though the half-wolf would have killed his enemy if he had won, the wild leader did not choose to close his jaws and kill.

Mori drew his arrow to kill the wild leader, but before he could let it loose, another cry came from above, along with the hiss and twang of a bowstring. “For Amu!” a woman’s voice cried. “For Amu!”

Mori’s bow fell from his hand, his thick left forearm transfixed by Runa’s arrow. Without looking at his arm, he stared up at the ledges. “But she is dead!” he said.

Along the stone platform and above the Cave of Forgetfulness on the ledges a company of archers was assembling. “For Ahneeah and the Tree!” shouted a young man with a weathered face. “Hunters here!”

Others shouted that cry, but Mori’s deep shout was the loudest. “Kill them! Guards of the Chigai! Kill them all! Loose the wolves!”

But now the half-wolves were no longer half-wolves, they were wolves whose leader had surrendered, whose human masters were busy elsewhere. When released, each turned tail and made for the darkness, leaving this human turmoil far behind, as is the way of wolves.

Mori’s guards formed around him, big men with long bows and deadly axes, more of them than there were able men of the hunters. But the light of the fire and the torches was dimming now, and people ran here and there in confusion, screams of fear and panic everywhere. The dim air was full of the hiss of arrows and the clashing of steel. A tall guard leaned his whole length forward and hit the ground like a felled tree.

Arn had been watching the two children upon the stone, and when Mori had taken Runa’s arrow in his arm he saw Bren push Arel off the stone, then roll over to fall on top of her on the grass below. When the guards formed in front of Mori and began to advance upon the ledges, Arn ran down the stones, ducking and jumping. The councillors had joined the fighting, but he had to get to his two friends. A dead guard, two arrows in his chest, lay in front of him. Arn took the large knife from the guard’s belt as he passed. An arrow slit the shoulder of his parka, giving him a sharp sting. Others hummed and hissed overhead, meeting earth or flesh with the same
thuck, thuck.
He ran by the thighs of frantic men as if he ran past trees in a forest, until he found the stone altar and hid behind it with Bren and Arel. With the guard’s knife he cut the thongs at their wrists.

“My father!” Bren said desperately. Arn held him, saying, “Wait, Bren!”

Mori stood on the grass with his broadax in his right hand, his wounded left arm at his side. With the ax he broke the arrow off on both sides of his arm. “Kill those archers!” he screamed to his guards. A guard stood at his side, and to him he said, “Kill the four children! Find them and kill them!” Then he looked back at the thousand people of the Chigai on the meadow. “Forward!” he shouted to them. “Come forward and fight for Mori and the Chigai!”

“Come,” Am said. The guard approached the altar, ax in hand. The three children ran through the screaming and the arrows, over bodies slippery with blood. To the guard they must have looked like a scampering of rabbits as they disappeared into the darkness. But he knew where the other child was tied to a sentry stone, so he went to kill her first.

Jen was tied to the boar stone, thongs around her chest and legs pressing her to the cold stone. The stench of carrion from the decomposing boar’s head fell upon her like a thick pouring of the odor of death. It was upon this stone that the fresh head should have been placed according to the ritual of the Chigai, but there had been no fresh boar’s head, so the old one remained. The people who had stood near her had all moved away now, and she was alone in the dim light, hearing the cries and the clash of battle at the ledges. She tried to get free, but the thongs had been wet, and as they dried they tightened. If she couldn’t get loose somehow, the tightening thongs would compress her chest and kill her. She felt the gradual, inevitable clutch of them until it seemed she would be pressed into the stone itself, and become stone.

The silhouette of the guard grew as he approached her, walking fast and deliberately toward her. He grew taller and taller as he came on, his ax swinging in his hand.

“Help me!” she cried, though she had no hope.

The guard stopped and looked down at her. “I’ll take her head back to Mori,” he said out loud. “That ought to please him.” He raised his ax to make a slanting cut, so as not to dull his edge on the stone, but a low sound came from behind him, a sound of distant thunder, unlike the battle sounds. At first he shrugged it off, but it grew deeper and more rhythmical and closer. It approached him, that deep pounding of the earth. He turned, but it was too late. A great black hump-shouldered thing hit him at the thighs and lifted him up, his ax flying. When he came down, one leg was useless, torn to the bone. He tried for his knife, but the thunder had turned, and the last he saw in the faint light was a gleaming yellow tusk like a saber that entered his side and split him into darkness.

The boar nosed the corpse of the guard, then turned to Jen. Battle thoughts roiled his mind, but then it began to settle, and the signals became fainter. He was a boar; he was wild and did not belong here. His instincts all cried out to him to run. But fading, fading, barely caught by Jen, was an acknowledgement of some service done, the faintest echo of gratitude and payment. Then he turned and ran toward the wilderness, his thunder fading across the meadow.

But the thongs tightened remorselessly, and soon Jen fainted, her head falling forward to her chest.

As soon as the three children knew they had escaped the guard, Bren said, “Jen! She’s tied to the sentry stone with the boar’s head!” They were at the edge of the fighting now. Bren and Arel both had knives they had taken from the dead, the knives almost the size of swords to them. “Come!” Bren said, and they ran back across the meadow, past groups of the people of the Chigai who didn’t seem to know what to do. Some milled about like cattle, others merely sat and moaned. None did anything to stop the children as they ran on.

First they came to the wrong sentry stone, almost missing it in the darkness. Was the boar stone to the right or the left? “No good to stand here,” Bren said. They ran to the right, on a guess, the only thing they could do, and found the boar stone at last. Arn tripped over the dead guard and was lucky not to cut himself on his knife. He went to cut Jen free, but Bren stopped him.

“Wait!” Bren commanded. “You’ll cut her! I’ll do it!” He felt carefully around Jen’s ankles until he found where the thong was away from her flesh, then cut it once. Then it was a matter of unwinding the rest. “I saw them do it with one thong,” Bren said as they unwound it. “It was wet.”

Jen fell into their arms, but they warmed her with Bren’s decorated parka, and held her until she breathed long breaths again and came awake.

The four friends were together once more, but they had little hope that the battle had gone to the hunters. There were too many of the Chigai, and of the big guards with their broadaxes. Over at the ledges the sounds of fighting had died down, although from across the meadow were still the shouts and clashes of battle. Someone had heaped more wood on the council fire, which flamed up again in light that illuminated the Great Tree. They decided to approach the fire, crouching and hiding as best they could, to see what had happened to Bren’s father.

Creeping, and running crouched down in the odd shadows, they approached the place where all the bodies lay. In the fire’s bright light a strange dance of violence was happening. They came close enough, hiding now behind the body of a bulky Chigai guard, to see two big men fighting with axes. Around the men in a circle were five Chigai guards, watching the fight. Andaru held his left hand to his wounded side, while Mori did the same with his wounded left arm. The axes rang and sparked when they met, the two men advancing to swing, turning and staggering back to avoid the deadly edges. They were both tired, both painted with blood that seeped down through the shaggy cattle skins they wore around their waists. Mori smiled and spoke as he motioned his guards back. “You are the only one of your thin people who could give me a fight, and if I want I’ll split you down the center!”

Andaru, his eyes jet-black and intent beneath his black brows, raised his ax in answer. His face was pale from the hurt of his wound, but his big arm rippled along its length as it easily held the heavy ax, waiting for Mori’s next charge.

“Wait,” Mori said. “You are the last, now. All your people are dead or gone. You may still live and be the leader of my guards.”

Andaru held his ax still in the air. “No,” he said. “I must die for what I have done. Come at me!”

Mori smiled again and advanced. In the clash Andaru dropped his ax and went to his knees, looking at his right arm where it was slashed through the muscle to the bone.

“Now,” Mori said, “here is another for my voracious gods!” and raised his ax high over his head.

But Bren was not through. He had found a thick Chigai bow and a spent arrow. He stood, the bow taller than he, trying to pull it. It was much too heavy a pull for him; his arms shook and trembled with the effort. But with one harsh sob he managed to pull it half of a full yard and sent the arrow on a high arc. The children watched its flight as it rose, black against the fire, orange against the blackness, to its full height and its unwavering descent upon the sweat-shining body of Mori, where it sank half its length between his neck and shoulder.