Children of the Dawn Read online

  The wind died suddenly, as if speared. It had been with them for so long that its absence was eerie, a silence broken only by the occasional barks of a coyote. They crested another hill like the rest—except that Ashan saw no hills beyond. The moon-washed grass of the plateau gave way to flat, rock-strewn ground. They walked on, and suddenly they were standing on a cliff—

  —at the edge of the world!

  Ashan dropped her staff and it went clattering down. She swayed, would have fallen, but Tor had his arm around her.

  “Oh Amotkan,” she gasped.

  “The Great River,” Tor whispered. “For so long I’ve wanted you to see this.”

  Bands of moonlight shimmered on black water so wide she couldn’t see any edges, except one far below, where waves lapped the dark shore. Great herds of fish swam against the current, taking no rest even at night… glistening silver specks dipping up and down, breaking the moonlight into splinters that quivered and formed themselves whole again.

  “So many!” she said. “They must be huge to be seen from up here. Are they salmon?”

  “They are, and they fill the river in all seasons.”

  She shook her head in wonder.

  Tor pointed downriver. A tongue of land pushed into the water. Ashan saw the glow of a used-up fire.

  “Teahra,” he said in a voice soft as a dream. “See how the cliffs curve round to protect it?”

  She wondered where the huts were.

  Tor seemed to know what she was thinking. “Someday it will be a great village with many huts. Right now, the people sleep in a cave—see the dark slash? It’s long and low, a good cave, except for the smell, and a nose gets used to that. The wind can’t—”

  A howl ripped his words away.

  The hair on Ashan’s neck stiffened. She’d heard this coyote before. Closer than ever, it seemed to be stalking them. But why? Coyotes didn’t follow people. Known by legend as both trickster and friend, songdogs traveled in families. Why was this one alone?

  Tor went on as if he hadn’t heard it. “Our people will never know hunger again.”

  Another howl, closer yet. Then eager yips.

  Ashan whirled around. She saw nothing but moonlit ground strewn with rocks too small to hide a coyote. The yipping died away, leaving the night air thick with silence, heavy with power.

  Her voice shook. “Why would a coyote stalk us?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That coyote! It’s been following us! It’s right over there!”

  She pointed a shaking finger. The howling started again. It rolled on and on, longer than any coyote ever howled. Noise grew to pain. Ashan covered her ears, but the sound sliced through her hands and pierced her heart like a porcupine quill made of cold stone. A scream rose in her throat. If the beast didn’t stop, Ashan would start howling with it.

  But it stopped. Thank Amotkan!

  The silence roared.

  “You didn’t hear that?”

  “What?”

  She shrieked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Ashan?”

  But she could not answer.

  TWO lights blinked on in the night, a stone’s throw away. Fist-sized, pale green, bright as chunks of sun, the light balls bobbed above the ground, as if thinking—then hurtled, faster than shooting stars—growing huge—coming straight for her face. She saw eyes in the lights—hot, burning eyes—and a black nose, and lips curled back from white, sharp teeth. Coyote Spirit!

  Shoving Tor away, she backed up and plunged into empty air. Falling free, she screamed the trickster’s name.

  “Spilyea!”

  The creature of light slipped under her, a sling to cradle a birthing baby, slowing Ashan to float like a leaf above a storm. A point of rock reached out and caught hold of her robe. She began sliding, tried to grab—

  Ashan knew no more.

  CHAPTER 4

  THIS CAN’T BE REAL! TOR THOUGHT.IMUST BEdreaming!

  A moment ago, Ashan had been here beside him at the edge of Chiawana’s high gorge. Then, terrified by—by what?—she pushed him away—fell—

  Her screams echoed up from the dark canyon.

  “Speeel-yea-a-a!”

  “No!” Tor cried. “No-o-o!”

  Their mingled terror bent the night.

  Sounds from below silenced him: a heavy thud, a clatter of rocks… then nothing but riversound.

  What did she see that sent her backward off a cliff, to her death. No, he would not think that word! Moonkeepers did not die like other people.

  Everyone dies!

  “No!” he shouted at the voice inside. “Moonkeepers go to the spirit world many times before they die for the last time!”

  Tor went after her. Like a six-legged beetle, he scrabbled down the dark, steep canyonside. He saw nothing but a picture in his mind—Ashan—the one he couldn’t live without—though Amotkan knew, he had tried.

  Down, down, with his hands and feet doing the thinking—

  His moccasin nudged something soft—

  Flesh—

  Tor jerked to one side and stepped onto a ledge, mumbling thanks that it had stopped her fall halfway to the bottom. Still—he swallowed, staring up at the clifftop, black against the starry sky—she had fallen a long way, must be a crumpled heap of broken—there was her robe, he’d have to get it—

  He smelled her blood, made himself look.

  Ashan lay in deep shadow on a narrow shelf of rock. Her back was bent over the edge, head and arms hanging, long hair adrift. A puff of wind or a bug landing on her chin would snatch her from the ledge and send her flying again.

  Tor crept out and pulled her to safety. Blood from the back of her head slicked his hand and oozed through his fingers. She was limp. He couldn’t tell, and feared to know, whether she was breathing. He held her to his chest, moaning, “Oh Amotkan, oh Ashan,” because he knew his mate was dead. No. Terribly hurt. Her skin was so cold. He got her robe and bundled her up. She didn’t move.

  Tor prayed for spirits to help him, and they did. Carrying her in his arms with his back to the rugged cliff, feet lashing out blind, stumbling and sliding, he reached the riverbank. She never moved. He laid her on moonlit gravel and smoothed her blood-matted hair. His tears splashed her face. He stroked them away, murmuring, like a song or a prayer:

  “Ashan, my love, after all we’ve been through, you cannot leave me now. I need you. Kai El needs you… your baby, think of him. And the people… with no Moonkeeper, Shahala and Tlikit will fight like black and red ants who live too close. Oh please, Ashan—”

  You ’repleading with something that isn’t there, said a pain-sick voice in his mind. She’s dead. But he refused to believe it, though her eyes were closed, her lips were slack, and she was limp as soaked moss. She’s dead.

  “You’re alive, Ashan. You are.”

  Tor’s voice connected them. His voice would keep his love alive. He wouldn’t stop until…

  “I will never let you go.”

  Surrounded by sleeping little ones, Kai El lay awake, gazing at his favorite star group, Soaring Hawk. He was worried. Amah and Adah had gone somewhere. Amah had thought- spoken: They would be back soon. But the boy was young, only five summers, so it was hard not to worry. Why would they leave in the night? What if they never came back? Kai El, who had grown up without a tribe, loved them more than other little ones loved their parents. Especially his mother. What if—

  He heard screams far away—Amah! He shook the boy next to him, who was older and smarter.

  “Wake up!”

  “I heard!” Elia said. “Let’s go!”

  Wriggling from the pack of sleeping little ones, Kai El and Elia dashed toward the memory of the scream. By the time Kai El realized he should have gotten warriors instead of another boy, it was too late to go back.

  They found the path, and ran along it until the ground plunged away. Kai El dug his toes in. He stood at the edge of the world, shaking his head,
staring down—way down—at what? He squeezed his eyes shut, opened one—but it was still down there—a monster with no end—flat, dark, shiny—

  Kai El gulped. “Blood.”

  Elia chuckled, forgetting the terrible reason they were here.

  “Water. Great River. I live here before.”

  A sorrowful moan rose from below.

  “It’s Adah!”

  “Tor need us!” Elia said, going over the edge.

  As Kai El followed in darkness thick as face paint, fear chewed his guts. He hugged smooth stone with the whole front of himself. Fingers jammed into cracks. Toes dug into unseen crevices. He groped around heaps of boulders, clambered down slides of shale—hard going—full of scrapes, bumps, and stubbed toes. At times the older boy had to catch the younger one as he slid by.

  Hearts pounding, chests burning, with still a long way to go, they stopped to rest on a narrow ledge. As his ragged breathing slowed, Kai El smelled his mother’s blood. She had been here. Where was she now?

  He looked down at the moonlit riverbank and saw them: Amah lying still, Adah weeping over her. Kai El’s hope crumbled, and his bravery. He heard Shahala voices from the cliff-top above. Thank Amotkan, his people were coming. Kai El was only a little boy—shaking, weak, more scared right now than he’d ever been—just a little boy who needed his mother. And she was dead. He knew it because no thoughts came from her.

  His father? Adah’s mind must be ruined, for he babbled over and over, “You are alive.”

  Clearly, Amah was not.

  The Moonkeeper’s screams jerked many Shahala people awake, one of them Tenka, Rising Star, the supposed-to-be Other Moonkeeper.

  She sat straight up and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Oh, Amotkan! If anything happens to Ashan, I’m not ready!

  Tenka could heal, and speak with spirits; knew plants, animals, seasons, rituals, and laws. She knew about magic, but it was not her friend. Either it failed when she needed it, humiliating her—or worse, sometimes she couldn’t stop it. More than once, she’d nearly killed someone she only meant to frighten.

  The people will never follow someone who can’t use magic!

  She covered her ears against Ashan’s screams.

  “Oh,” she moaned. “I’m only thirteen summers—”

  TENKA!

  Dead Raga’s voice inside her head stopped panic. Tenka took deep breaths. Ashan stopped screaming. Shock and fear swept the camp on the barren plain as if it were a kicked-over anthill, as people got up and ran around, shaking others awake.

  Tenka, the Other Moonkeeper, knew she must take control. One of Amotkan’s earliest lessons was that a tribe must have a leader to survive.

  Though she had warmer things, she chose the garb of her position—a dress of fox fur sprigged with falcon feathers—and short moccasins that didn’t need lacing.

  “Warriors! Follow me!” she commanded with a thrust of her staff, as she leaned into the wind and ran off in the direction of the screams.

  The warriors took up their weapons and followed—not because they thought she must be obeyed, but because they were afraid. They’d lost Ashan once before, and the Time of Sorrows had almost destroyed the tribe.

  Tenka stood on the canyon rim gaping at the endless water, the moonlit riverbank… two people… Ashan lying on her back, Tor squatting next to her.

  Fear emptied the girl’s mind of thought. Loneliness emptied her heart of courage.

  The warriors panicked.

  “The Moonkeeper is dead! We are doomed!”

  Tenka bit her lip, then spoke to the fastest runner.

  “Ashan needs all the people. Go get them.”

  Deyon disappeared. The rest of the warriors followed the Other Moonkeeper down the cliff like a hatch of spiderlings.

  At the riverbank, Tenka hurried to Ashan. Quiet as death, she lay face upward to the waning stars; head toward the river, feet toward the sacred mountain, Pahto—the wrong way for healing.

  Tor was squatting by Ashan—head down, rocking back and forth, mumbling.

  Warriors bunched up around them.

  Tenka dropped to her knees. “Ashan!”

  Ashan didn’t move. Afraid of what she’d feel, Tenka touched the Moonkeeper’s cheek; it was warm. She picked up a limp hand, found a weak throb in the wrist.

  “Our Moonkeeper lives.”

  “Thank Amotkan!” a warrior said.

  But barely! Tenka thought. Unconscious; pale; breathing so faint her chest doesn’t move.

  “Get back,” Tenka said. “You’re stealing her air.”

  Tor had not even noticed them.

  “Alive, alive… ” he muttered, like a fool or someone in a trance.

  “What happened, Tor?”

  “Alive—”

  “Tor!”

  Tenka shook him. He swatted her away with no more notice than he’d give a mosquito, and went on with his stiff rocking. She slapped him. He looked at her, brows pinched, the pain of his heart running out his eyes—staring at his own sister as if he should know her, but didn’t; as if he should understand her words, but couldn’t.

  “Tor, she’ll be fine. She journeys in the spirit world as Moonkeepers do.”

  He went back to rocking and mumbling.

  Tenka bit her lip—her big brother—wise, brave—useless as a sixth toe. Useless as Ashan.

  As the sky lightened with morning’s approach, the Other Moonkeeper spoke to the warriors, hiding her sense of abandonment under her best chiefly voice.

  “We must begin the ritual of protection. Find power stones shaped like your love for Ashan.”

  The Shahala warriors turned to go.

  Forty-eight people slept in a cave by the Great River. They called themselves Tlikit, which meant People of the Lake, because there had once been a lake where they used to live—though not in any of their lifetimes.

  A Tlikit woman named Tsilka awoke with screams in her ears… faraway and faint screams, long and awful, like a woman having a hard time dying. Then silence.

  Just a dream, she told herself.

  Others were whispering, getting up, going out of the cave.

  They worry about everything.

  The twins woke up, wanting her breasts.

  “No,” she said. “Back to sleep.” She held them close and tried to sleep herself.

  Tsilka was twenty-one summers, the daughter of Chief Timshin and a forgotten woman who died in birthing. The brother she thought of as Wyecat the Weak was twenty summers, with a different mother, also dead. When their father the chief died not long ago, it had been easy to take the power that should have been Wyecat’s: he’d always been afraid of his sister, for good reasons.

  Tsilka was as much a leader as anyone had ever been, but the Tlikit tribe still did not accept her as a real chief. She was only a woman, after all.

  But smarter than anyone, she thought. Strong and healthy. And good to look at. Once a man named Tor, the father of her babies, had told her so. Even though their love had come to a horrible end, she always remembered that.

  You are good to look at, Tsilka, with a body that—

  “Tsilka! Come out here!” someone said.

  She would rather have stayed in the cave, safe in the dark, holding her little girls. But if she wanted to be chief—

  Tsilka told the twins to stay, and went out.

  The People of the Lake stood on the moon-splashed riverbank, peering into the night, listening. Silence—except for Chiawana’s low-throated murmur—so ever-present that Tsilka barely noticed it. She did notice the lack of wind—that was unusual.

  “It was a woman,” someone said.

  “Too loud,” another said. “It must have been a god.”

  “Ask Timshin’s daughter.”

  They looked at Tsilka.

  “How would I know?” she snapped. Being expected to know everything got tiresome.

  Tsilka heard the screaming again—or did she? No—it was in her head. Its memory beckoned. As daw
n started to argue with night, she set off in the direction Where Day Begins. The Tlikit people followed the one they secretly called Thinks She’s a Man, over boulder heaps and around brush mounds, skulking up the Great River to find whatever had screamed.

  Strangers!

  Tsilka froze like a rabbit in torchlight, one hand over her mouth, the other over her head in a sign that meant, “don’t move, don’t breathe.”

  She and her people were hidden in the leftover shadows of dawn. At least for now.

  Strangers—more than all her fingers and toes—large, fierce-looking men, or maybe they only seemed so because of the many skins they wore. Each held a thick spear as tall as himself. They looked down with worry at a woman laid out on the riverbank. The woman appeared dead.

  A man huddled on the ground by the body; head down, rocking back and forth, as if grief had made him senseless.

  A girl was kneeling over the body. She stood and spoke to the men in a voice of authority. Tsilka thought, She can’t possibly be their leader. But the men listened as if she were.

  The girl’s words made no sense, so Tsilka just watched her talk. She had bushy hair, a long, serious face, a lanky frame. She wore a lush fur dress tufted with feathers. Always thinking up clever words, Tsilka named her Many Feathers.

  Many Feathers finished speaking to her warriors.

  There was something about her words, Tsilka thought.

  The warriors nodded, turned—

  Dawn snatched away the remnants of night, exposing everyone to everyone else.

  Startled, the strangers looked back and forth from one to another, to the Tlikit people hiding in shadows, to Many Feathers. Clattering rocks announced more strangers coming down the cliffside. Men, women, and little ones reached the riverbank, saw the others of their kind standing and staring. Stopped and stared themselves.

  Like two bison herds, head to head, waiting to see who will make the first move, Tsilka thought. But there are so many of them.

  The girl chief held her arms up, as if asking for help from the sky, then spoke to her people. Tsilka knew some of the words, though she couldn’t think how.

  The strangers walked off in different directions, leaving their chief alone with the grief-stricken man and the dead woman.