Date: 1991-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Adventure; Science Fiction
Description: In order to be accepted into a new tribe, Timov and Hamr, two survivors of a doomed people, must hunt the savage ghost dancer, a vicious Neanderthal that has been terrorizing the tribe. By the author of Radix and Wyvern. Reprint.
Publisher: HarperCollins

Hunting the Ghost Dancer

A. A. Attanasio

Hunting the Ghost Dancer

published by Firelords Press

Ignite your imagination!

second edition copyright © 2013 by A. A. Attanasio

ISBN: 9781301072569
http://aaattanasio.com/

Hunting the Ghost Dancer / A.A. Attanasio.

Originally published by HarperCollins 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

CALL NUMBER: PS3551.T74H86

Cover art:

Matthew Attard
http://priteeboy.deviantart.com/
matthew.attard1988@gmail.com

Five feathers for the flight of our senses — three talons for grasping heaven, earth, and the abyss — a gem for each of the six directions — and at the center: the spiral journey home, to the source.

For you —

worthy companion on our woundward journey

Fifty thousand summers ago,
we wandered a world stranger than we remember —

Contents

Prelude

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Part One

Beyond the Shadow Is the Ghost

Blind Side

The Doom of the Blue Shell

Taiga

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Part Two

Slitting the Belly of the Moon Bitch

Ghost Dancing

The Invisibles

Moon Bitch

Hunger Music

Eating Darkness

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Part Three

Masterings of the Beast

For the Dead, Who Live Us

The Door of the Mountain

Lightfall in the Stone

South

Prelude

Sun sparked on the wings of a dragonfly. A lone figure watched the flitting insect disappear in sunny mists of rhododendron and barberry. Squinting against the late afternoon glare, he stared north across the flat terrain at a blue star on the horizon—a distant glacier.

Shadows of several woolly rhinos marred the level distance as they selected resting spots for the night, and a herd of yaks mulled along the rocky bed of a tributary stream that shone like ice in the hard light. Otherwise, the tundra appeared empty. A few flakes of snow, dropping from mare's tail clouds, glittered gold in the sun's slanting rays.

The robust man squatted alone on the spine of a ridge that marked the northern limit of the Great Forest. Behind him, a dark wall of shaggy pine and stout cedars admitted only fibrous sunlight. And when wind backwashed off the dense trees, resined air inspired memories of the thirty-five winters he had sheltered there.

Those were the winters he had counted. At the end of each, as now, when the snow lifted and silver lichen again crept out of the crevices in tree barks, he had cut a notch on his clan belt. His clan had cut seven for him before he had earned the right to mark his own time.

Using a wooden knife, he cut a nick in the leather of the belt just above his left hip. Then he untied the thongs of the elephant-hide belt and removed it from his waist. He sheathed the knife in the furry cuff of his boot so that he could pull the belt taut in both hands and hold it against the western horizon.

With one eye squeezed shut, he matched the notch he had just cut to a cleft in the tree-stubbled landscape, where the sun settled. This custom he remembered from his childhood. Each year at the coming of warm winds and flowers, the old ones held high the belts of all the clan members, one at a time.

Now there were no old ones. No clan.

Winter done, summer already pushing up from the dark earth, the tundra looked beautiful to the wanderer. Fiercely so, for he knew this would be his last warm season before he rejoined the People, who had gone ahead.

An old man now, he moved entirely alone on the pathways of the world. He had done so for eight winters. Like an ancient lonely elk, he wintered in the Forest, proud under the heavy antlers of his memories.

That pride proved hard to bear even in the most clement weather. In the snow and biting ice-winds his absent-minded daydreaming had almost killed him.

Once, he had been a great hunter in his clan, the Spear-Throwers. Too often now he curled up among his remembrances of the People when he should have been hunting, and he had survived only because the spirit powers had pitied him.

He knew he could not rely on the compassion of those benevolent spirits another winter. He had to find others of his kind before the harsh winds came down again from the cold plateaus. One more winter alone and he would fulfill the promise of his given name, Baat, which in grandfather-tongue meant "Hollow Bone."

Baat yearned to share what he had learned in his seasons of solitude, to hear once more the music of his youth, to huddle with others, and talk and laugh again before the journey with no return. And so he had found his way to the edge of the Great Forest earlier than usual to hold his year-notch up to the last sun of winter.

Baat lowered his arms and fastened the belt about his waist.

He purged his mind of sorrow: He would be with his clan soon enough. This was his last opportunity to savor the bounty of life, even if alone.

Looking out over the tundra to the north, the traditional summer path of the People, Baat felt deepening nostalgia for the perfections of summer. How easy to thrive in the days of flowers.

That he might never again wander with the herds, never fish among the boulders with the cranes, or smoke bees from their bracken hives and chew their sweet combs ached in him. Most of all, he would miss walking up to the glacier, staring into its blue depths, hearing its shatter-rock songs, feeling its cold under his feet while the day's styptic heat tightened his skin.

His reminiscence snapped at the sight of thin shadows appearing out of the glare of the glacial stream. Grazing yaks casually lumbered away from these sudden figures.

Baat crouched lower.

The slim shadows resolved to people, not the People, but creatures of another breed: the smallheads, narrow ones whom he often saw in the Forest and on the tundra. Dangerous by day, they traveled always in bands. Cunning hunters, the smallheads hated him and his kind. Their hatred fed on murderous envy, because they could not share the cold fire that came down from the night sky—that cold fire which, with all its strength, voices, and pain, belonged only to the People.

Against the sun's red fire, the smallhead band stood out in sharp relief. Four men and a woman moved slowly along the stream’s stony margins. At first, Baat thought they carried a hunt prize among them.

Looking closer, he observed that the object trussed and hoisted between two of the men was another smallhead. They bore someone injured. On the flat tundra the litter could be dragged, but over the stream rocks the wounded one had to be lifted. With their burden, they would not reach the Forest before nightfall.

At that thought, a sexual flurry troubled Baat. He recognized that as an urgency of the cold fire. Night drew near enough for the cold fire to feel its way to him.

Ul udi was what the cold fire called itself. The name felt hard to speak, even silently. Much of what the ul udi said when their cold fire descended from the night and furred him in chill brightness he had no way to fit to his breath. Yet that hardly mattered, for he carried their cold fire, as all the People did. And in those cool, vivid flames thrived far more than speaking or understanding. The ul udi wanted rapture and blood.

Baat considered moving on, away from the smallheads. Far better for them if he slipped off now, back into the Forest. The erotic flimmer in his muscles protested with hot craving. Even if he left now, he could not go far before nightfall. And once the night came and the cold fire descended, the ul udi would bring him back for the blood of the smallheads.

He crouched, making certain that he had not been spotted. Though it seemed futile, he had to try to get away before night claimed him. If he stayed, there would be violence and more smallheads would come.

Bent over, he edged slowly backward. Once the cool shadows of the Forest closed around him, he turned and loped through the dark tree tunnels.

He knew well in which direction the smallheads' winter camp lay and where they journeyed in spring to set up their summer residence. Those were choice places in the Forest, near clear water springs and salt holes, where the People had once dwelled. The smallheads had driven off the People and made those places their own.

Baat ran hard away from there, into dense thickets, where wild pigs rooted and the Great Bear slept and the smallheads feared to go. When he could, he leaped from one root-arch of the giant trees to another and swung from thick lower limbs. More often, he crawled among bramble and clawed his way through winter-killed curtains of dead ivy and dodder, ignoring the scratches on his face and bare arms. If he could get far enough away from the smallheads, the ul udi would not smell them and would lose interest.

Already too late, he felt the erotic flutter steepen in him. The cold fire had come down from the sky. In the darkness of the Forest, he could see it glowing like moonmist on his limbs.

Soon the voices would begin. Soon he would wonder why he ran, why he let the little claws of the Forest cut him when the smallheads were the ones who should be fleeing. Were they not the ones who had intruded on him and the People? Had he forgotten that they had drawn first blood? They had murdered not only the hunters but the old ones, and the women, and the children. Did he not remember his own children, twisting in his arms with pain from the poisoned water they had drunk?

He stopped running.

His breath chuffed loudly from exertion, yet he could hear his blood thrumming even louder in his ears, his heart knocking hard at the root of his throat, where a cry coiled.

The smallheads are your enemy, a bitter voice spoke. The ul udi stood in him again. They had come down from the sky to live the life of the earth in him.

Baat held his hands up before his face. The space between his fingers webbed brightly with the radiance of the ul udi. The glow pulsed with his breathing.

Kill the smallheads, an ul udi voice said. And in the cold fire that he held in his hands he met again the faces of his children. Their large, bright eyes stared at him through pain, expecting him to help them, as he had always helped. He watched them die again. Their faces closed around their suffering, hot with tears and pain, not comprehending his helplessness. Da! they cried to him. Da—it hurts!

Baat's hands fisted, and the cry twisting about his heart uncoiled to a howl.

Kill the smallheads!

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On the tundra, where the wanderers had stopped in their trek to build a fire against the night, the howl from the distant treeline sounded deathly. Two of the men rose from where they hunkered by the juddering flames, and shook their spears at the Forest.

The two women, one sitting in the litter, the other kneeling at her side, feeding her from a wooden bowl, shared a knowing look of apprehension. The other two men hugged themselves tighter beside the fire, and looked to the woman in the litter for directions.

"Deadwalkers begone!" the larger of the spearmen shouted, and the two began a dance to ward off phantoms.

"Have those fools sit down," the woman in the litter spoke.

"Sit down!" the squatting men yelled.

The dancers stopped. The large one said, "The dead are crying. We must drive them away."

"That is not the cry of the dead, you dolts," the woman in the litter spoke. "That is a ghost dancer."

The spearmen exchanged surprised stares. "You're mistaken, priestess," the big one said. "The Grandfathers have killed all the ghost dancers."

"Not all." The priestess waved away the bowl her attendant still held before her, and signed for her shoulders to be covered. The kneeling woman placed the bowl by the fire, got up, and draped the priestess' white shoulders with a bearskin.

"None of the Thundertree has ever seen a ghost dancer," the smaller of the spearmen said, while the other tentatively shook his spear over the fire. "Maybe you're wrong, priestess. Maybe these are our dead—unhappy that we are bringing you, a Longtooth priestess, to our people."

The priestess shared a mocking expression with her male escorts. "The Thundertree are fools, all of you, fools. You've lived too long in the Forest hiding like squirrels. You've forgotten the Ways of Wandering. That is why there are no great hunters among you. And that is why you need this." She lifted the fertility rock from her lap, where it had to remain to stay potent.

The Thundertree men looked away from it, afraid it would steal their virility and wither them to old age before their time.

The priestess laughed. She lowered the round, smooth stone to her lap and placed her fingers in its cleft. "Only what is in here can save your people. Without the rock of fertility to call great souls into the wombs of the Thundertree, your people will become more foolish with each generation—and soon enough not even the animals will talk with you. Only this rock can save you." She cooed to it as to a child. "And only I can carry the rock. So do as I say. Douse the flames, quickly, and carry me into darkness."

The Thundertree men turned away. "No," the smaller one objected. "In darkness the night beasts will feast on us."

"In the open, the ghost dancer will tear you limb from limb. We must hide. Quickly, do as I say."

"No, priestess," the larger hunter spoke. "For days we've done all that you told us, carrying you as you wished, stopping when you wished, eating what you wished. Now we see the Forest. Now the Thundertree know the ways. You will obey us. Have your Longtooth men gather more kindling and feed the fire."

The Longtooth men rose, spears in hand, and moved threateningly toward the fire. The priestess stopped them with a raised hand. "Fight each other and we will all die out here. The ghost dancer knows we are here. He comes for us!"

The Thundertree men clacked their spears together. "Then we will kill him as our Grandfathers killed the ghost dancers in their time. Feed the fire—and let this ghost dancer dare enter the light of our circle."

The Longtooth men looked urgently to their priestess. She signed for them to stay calm.

"You came to the Longtooth for help," she said to her Thundertree escorts.

"Many among us do not want your help. We will call forth our own great souls."

The priestess tossed her head with exasperation. "Then why have I been troubled to make this long journey? Why must I endure the rigors of winter's end, keeping this rock warm between my legs? If the Thundertree don't need us, why have we come this far?"

The Thundertree men conceded with weary nods. "You are needed," the short one admitted. "The hunt has been difficult for many years. There has been little meat. The women have provided most of our food. We alone are the two great hunters of our people."

"As they have reminded us since they came for us," the priestess smirked to her attendants.

"But"—the larger Thundertree hunter spoke up—"we are now in sight of the Forest. Our Grandfathers watch us from there. We cannot cower in darkness. Let this ghost dancer come for us—if that's what's out there."

"Oh, it is a ghost dancer out there, brave Thundertree hunters. It most certainly is. Look for yourselves." The priestess pointed to where the crest of stars ended abruptly at the bristly horizon of the Forest. In the darkness there, a blue light blinked. "He is still among the trees. Soon, he will break for us."

The female attendant gasped and began whimpering.

"Be still, Shala," the priestess ordered. "It is too late to hide now."

"The crystal will stop him, surely," Shala whispered.

"No. There is no moon tonight. The crystal is too weak."

"What are you speaking of?" the big Thundertree hunter asked.

"Shut up, Big Kell, and prepare to fight for your life," one of the Longtooth men snapped. "You didn't want to hide, so now let us see your courage."

"You've killed ghost dancers before, Teshuk?" Big Kell asked.

Teshuk looked to his partner, and they grinned without humor. "Cort and me killed our share, eh, brother?"

"Not like this," Cort said, grin falling away. "They got to be killed asleep. When they sleep deep. Better to poison 'em, then jump 'em while they're cramped up. Never like this."

"Mudman! Look at that thing."

"Forget asking the Mudman for help, Vran," Teshuk grumbled. "Mudman isn't going to rise up to save your shivering shanks."

"What makes it burn like that?" Big Kell wanted to know.

The Longtooth men shrugged, looked to the priestess. She stared at the Forest with half-lidded eyes and did not appear to have heard them.

She was not really watching the blue light winking brighter and nearer. She thought about what was to come. The ghost dancer would certainly kill the men. But for her and Shala, if they showed submission—no, more than submission, willing desire—they might survive yet. The Thundertree dwelled not far. Two women could travel that distance alone.

Shala knelt beside the priestess and pressed a cold glass blade into the woman's hand. With tear-bright eyes and a sob in her voice, she begged, "Kill me, priestess. Be swift. Do not let the beast get me."

The priestess threw the black-glass knife into the fire and seized Shala by her hair, pulled her face up close. The priestess' stare fixed her with fierce intensity. "For the men there is only death," she whispered to the girl. "For us there is yet hope. You must give yourself to him. You must pretend he is your wished-for lover."

"No!" Shala cried and pulled away.

The priestess jerked her close again. "Do you want to die? Do you prefer the Mudman for your lover? Are we not women? Does not the Mother shine in us? Let Her shine brightly, dear Shala—and we may yet live!"

"Priestess—" Teshuk called. "Look!"

The ghost dancer had come clear of the Forest and crossed the open plain toward them. Unobstructed by trees, he blazed blue, a hot piece of noon-sky running toward them through the night.

"Why does he burn?" Vran asked, transfixed.

"He's not burning," the priestess said, watching intently. "The spirit-fire of the sky has seized him. The cold fire comes down from the sky and carries him. He is but an animal. The spirit-fire makes him something more."

"Make brands!" Cort ordered, and the men began binding dried shrub to thick brush-limbs.

"Yes, make brands," the priestess chortled and lay back to wait.

When each of the four men had a torch in one hand and a spear in the other, they spread out, two to each side of the fire and shouted their battle cries.

The ghost dancer advanced silently. Now they could discern his shape. His legs pumped, arms flailed, as he sped across the uneven terrain. The eerie light of his body illuminated the ground around him, flickering off the tundra grass and bramble bushes.

Clearly, he would exhaust himself by the time he came upon them. The men's shouts echoed defiantly and their torches swung wide, waving the monster closer.

The ghost dancer entered the gully beyond where the travelers had stopped for the night, and disappeared. Only his weird glow rose from the ditch like starlit fog.

The hunters braced for him. "Don't throw!" Teshuk shouted. "Hold your spears. We'll stick him like a pig as he comes at us."

The monster’s head appeared out of the gully—a boulder with a grimacing face bashed out of it, hair short, bristly as a hog's, and streaming blue fire. Giant shoulders followed, burnished like sunshot fronds, hackled with flames. Long glittering arms, a prismatic torso strapped with pelts, naked muscled legs, and fur boots tufting sparks.

The ghastly apparition loomed over them, silent as smoke, and the Thundertree men moaned.

Vran let fly his spear—and the projectile hurtled through the giant's chest and clattered among the rocks of the gully behind him. The men hooted with surprise and confusion.

The ghost dancer lurched toward Cort. He touched flesh, feeling rage and fear, heat and cold competing in Cort's nerves. Cort jabbed with his weapon, and again the spear cut emptiness.

The flames of his torch flapped green as they passed through the blue ghost. Then the wraith swept over Cort, and the Longtooth hunter cried in anguish.

From out of the darkness behind the hunters, Baat slinked closer. While his body of light swirled about Cort, he advanced into the firelight, a rock in each fist.

Shala spied him first and screamed. By then he had moved close enough to hurl a stone and strike Big Kell a crunching blow at the back of his head. Even as Big Kell dropped, Baat flung the second rock, and hit Teshuk on his temple as he turned.

Vran attacked, obsidian knife held low. Baat snatched the wooden bowl by the fire and heaved it at the charging man. The bowl caught Vran full in the face, and he spun and crashed into the fire. Twisting swiftly to his feet with a howl, he stumbled into the ghost dancer who grabbed his head and shoulders and with one mighty twist snapped the man's neck.

The ul udi capered with delight in Baat's mind, a chorus of chittering devil voices. Kill the smallheads!

The stink of blood ignited the cells of his brain, making the inside of his skull a luminous pulp, an interior mirror in which every tremor of the dying smallhead, every swell of fecal stink and soft croon of last breath, reflected again and again. The Dark Traces' appetite for detail swelled, insatiable—and the killing, which had been terrible in its swiftness, went on inside him, repeating itself many times.

Hot with murderous frenzy, Baat faced the last of the men. Cort stood transfixed. Numbing shivers coursed through his muscles, while his head whirled with crazy voices jabbering in a language he did not understand. Every effort he made to move creaked slowly. Vision belled, blurred at the edges, where he eyed the Thundertree men sprawled on the ground in graceless postures. And there, below him, even cunning Teshuk on his back, staring up with lifeless eyes in a blood-rayed face.

Terror swirled through Cort, and the nattering voices flurried louder, so that he thought his ears would burst.

Two spear-lengths away the ghost dancer stood, a head taller and a hand's span wider than the biggest man he had ever seen. He looked much like the other ghost dancers he had come upon after they had been poisoned—ruddy-haired, with long green eyes under bulging brows—an ugliness as if hacked from rock. Only this one was standing, striding closer until only an arm's reach away.

Cort smelled the forest duff on him, spotted dried leaf-mulch in his stiff hair, a crescent-moon scar parting the whiskers on his right jaw. He gazed up into those long, slim eyes, met the fury there, and went cold in all his hollows.

Burn him—burn him! the ul udi cried—and the scarlet pulse in Baat's skull hammered. He tore his attention away from the exploding voices and shouted, "No burning!"

His shout sounded like animal noise to the smallhead, made the man's tiny eyes flare and quivering lips lift from his teeth.

Baat opened his palm before the smallhead's terrified face, and the blue fire lifted up, balled in the air, and vanished.

The inane voices vanished from Cort's head, and his muscles unlocked. Immediately, the Longtooth hunter drew back his spear. Before he could raise it, the ghost dancer grabbed his arm in a grip so ferocious that Cort's arm broke at the elbow. The torch in his other hand fell, and he crashed to his knees, mouth open around a soundless scream. Baat swung his fist hard against the smallhead's ear, and ended his suffering.

Blue fire played briefly over the corpse, moved away, and returned to Baat. The ul udi voices bleated with rapture. The hot smell of blood, the crunch of shattered bone, the sharp apex of pain, and the fluting gasp of last breath reflected endlessly among the interior mirrors of his brain.

He had not killed smallheads in a long time. He had forgotten the sodden joy it gave the ul udi.

They gushed thickly in him, savoring the bloodsmoke and dreaming they had become flesh.

He felt their unslaked appetite: He had killed these smallheads too quickly. They had given him no choice, but the ul udi would have relished more suffering, more bloodsmoke, more death.

Kill the smallheads! Kill the bitches! Kill the sows!

Baat turned toward the female smallheads. One had lifted her robes to show the white of her thighs, pink in the firelight. Her legs spread, exposing a large stone pressed against her genitals. The other cowered behind her, backing off into darkness as he approached.

Kill them! Spill their blood! Let us smell again death heat! Kill the smallhead bitches!

The fleeing one made the death voices wriggle louder in Baat's head. Kill them! Kill the sows!

Studying the other, the one with the rock between her legs, overrode the hungry voices. This started a new strumming going in his head with its own body echoes. She murmured to him and seemed to be smiling in a sickening way. The other backed off deeper into night, frightened, and her fear fed the hateful violence in him.

Baat knelt before the open legs of the priestess, summoned by the new melody of the ul udi. Only the fear of the other smallhead spoiled the strumming in his groin, jangled it with the competing need for bloodsmoke.

Shala watched the giant kneel between the priestess' legs, his large, hideous face gleaming. The blue fire had almost entirely vapored away. The killing had ended. She retreated, heart banging, almost gagging her. Then she spun and sprang into the dark.

The ul udi guided Baat's hands. He did not have to think, not even have to try. With wide-splayed fingers, he lifted the rock of fertility and exposed the priestess' slewed cleft.

She whispered him encouragement, filling him turgid with the ul udi's new melody. He heaved the rock of fertility out of the way, and it flew into the dark with the ul udi's murderous accuracy. When it smashed Shala's skull, he heard nothing, the new melody resounded that loud.

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Kirchi startled awake, a cry widening through her body, too large for her voice. The cry had pushed out silently through her gaping mouth, right through the walls of her chest, and left her wrung and weak. The cry went on, beyond her, out through the cave wall into the night, through the Forest, out to the tundra, where, right now, the beast heaved his engorgement into the priestess—while in darkness Shala lay, brains naked to the starlight.

"Wake up, child," a familiar voice spoke. "It is over. Tell me what you saw."

Kirchi's eyes strained wide, locked in a stare bent on a small tallow flame before a crystal lobe big as her knee. It amplified and scattered the light into enormous shadows on the cave wall.

In the shadows, she still beheld the beast, his broad naked back hunched over the priestess. And all the while those tiny, evil voices in his head singing shrilly in rhythm to the fire's elemental vibrations, as if the fire itself pushed and pulled the beast over the priestess. And with each thrust, her legs jerked straight up and a slurred cry flew from her—

"Wake up, I say!"

A thorn pricked Kirchi's cheek, and her whole body winced and curled on itself like a torched moth.

The old woman who had jabbed her placed a knobby hand on the back of the young woman's neck, feeling through the bright red hair for the pulse behind her jaw.

"There, there," the crone clucked. "You've had a fright. Remember what I've told you about frights. Remember, now. Feel your heart. Feel her drumming in you. Be the drummer. Be her—and slow the drumming. That's good, child. Good. Now sit up."

The hag grabbed Kirchi's coarse hair and pulled back her head till she sat upright.

In the tallow light, her pale skin reflected all the hues of the flame, and her gray eyes spun color like the lump of crystal on the moss-mat before them.

Sensibility returned to her stare. Fright still showed in the small quivers at the corners of her slack mouth. A handsome not a pretty girl, she had a ferocious fox-keen face and lithe, small-breasted body braced by the proud bones of the seeress who had birthed her.

The Mothers of the Longtooth had been happy to let Kirchi go to the witch, for the girl lacked the breadth of hips and fullness of teats to serve them. Yet, with a seeress mother, she belonged to a lineage too hallowed to spend her days digging tubers and mashing acorns.

"Tell me now, Kirchi-girl, what did you see?"

"A ghost dancer," she muttered.

The hag's long, sullen face brightened. "Five moons in front of the scry crystal and you've found your first ghost dancer! Ha-ah! I was a full year staring before I found my first. Who is it?"

Kirchi blinked, trying to remember the names and characteristics the witch had taught her. "I'm not sure."

"Not sure? Child, there are no more than a dozen ghost dancers in our domain. You know all their names and traits. Think. Female?"

"No. A man. Big, with bristly hair like red hackles."

"All the men are big, child, and all, here, have red hair. But most are not tall and some trim their hair in odd ways. Come, now. Is it one-eyed Moruc? Or Toothless Talman? Gray Pindal with the black mole on his nose?"

"He had a scar on his jaw, curved like the sliver moon."

"Baat!" The crone sat back with surprise. "I thought him dead. He must be very old—forty or more summers. Nearly my own age." The witch thumbed her chin reflectively. "It's been almost seven years since I've seen him. That was the year after he lost the last of his tribe. It maddened him of course. I was sure the loneliness had killed him when I stopped scrying him at his ancestral grounds. He's the last of those that lived at this end of the Great Forest. Yes, they were tall ones. The others—Moruc, Talman, Pindal, Cark, all the rogue women—they're short-legged. They wandered in from the east. Baat, alone, belongs here. The Longtooth killed his people."

“Our tribe,” Kirchi spoke absently, not listening. Her fright had dulled, and the weariness of the scrying-brew saturated her.

The witch again pricked the young woman's cheek with her thorn, and Kirchi snapped alert. "Where did you see Baat? What was he doing?"

"On the tundra. In sight of the Forest. He burns blue with kindled spirit."

"Dancing?"

"No. Not dancing."

The crone's face creased with worry. "Not dancing? Then the Dark Traces have him."

"Yes, they have him. They filled him with killing-strength and he has slain four men—two Longtooth men from my father's cult, Teshuk and Cort, and two Thundertree hunters, Big and Little Pell or Gell—I couldn't hear their names so well, the Dark Traces jabber so."

"He killed them with his hands—or with the blue fire?"

"With his hands."

The old woman swung her face toward the black night in the mouth of the cave. "Bless him, Mother of Darkness! He tries to control himself. After all these years. Still trying. No wonder he yet lives."

"There are two women—one a priestess."

"Women!" the witch wailed. "What are women doing on the tundra at night?"

"They journey to the Thundertree. The priestess carries a rock of fertility."

The witch threw up her hands in despair. "Superstitious children! Politics, not wisdom, brought them here. Every priestess knows those rocks are useless. So now the Longtooth women are playing the silly games of their men and trying to influence the primitive Thundertree."

"Only one woman is dead," Kirchi spoke, staring down at her lap, not wanting to look into the crystal or face the shadow wall and begin the trance again. "Shala ran. And Baat broke her head open with the rock of fertility. And now he ruts with the priestess."

"Oh, Mother, Mother!" the witch cried out, and her outburst folded into echoes far into the cave. "Why do You give Your daughters to the beast?" She shook her head, weary with grief. "A moonless night. No crystal could have spared her this indignity. The Dark Traces will not be denied tonight. She is fortunate, at least, to be under Baat. Once he is spent, he will not let the Dark Traces kill her."

Kirchi shut her eyes, wanting to blot out the horrid memory. The crone gripped her behind the neck.

"Don't fall asleep yet, child. You must purge the scrying-brew or you will fly and not return. Go out to the spring. Drink a full gourd at least. Wait for the cat star to set. Then sleep. Tomorrow we must find Baat. The Longtooth men are too wise to demand a ghost dancer's blood for Teshuk and Cort, but the Thundertree will seek vengeance for their dead. They will hunt him now. Blessedly, they are sloppy hunters. Still, we must protect Baat. He has come back to meet his ancestors. He has come back for only one thing. To die in his blood land. We must see he has that dignity."

Kirchi lugged herself to her feet and swayed out of the cave and into the night. Chill air cut through the drowsiness of the trancing brew. A breeze shuffled the branches of the giant firs with a sound like a stream of water, and the femur bones hanging on the skeleton-poles beside the spring clacked.

She followed that noise under an enormous hive of stars until she came to where water sluiced from a fissure in a hillock. Mist soaked fern brambles around the spring, frosty against her bare legs. She knelt and felt for the drinking gourd, found it nestled between two smooth rocks. As she drank, the cold water hurt her teeth. She prayed to the Mother to be free of this, not to have to drink the bitter scrying-brew again and see the horror she had seen tonight.

Never had Kirchi desired to be a seeress, or even an important mother. She would be happy, she knew, as one of the simple mothers in the tribe, foraging with the others, smoking meats, watching her children grow.

She finished drinking and gazed at the crackling stars. Yearning burned harsh as malice after what she had witnessed this night. Her wordless prayer to the Great Mother spun in her, empty of hope. How could she ever get free of the witch? If she fled, the beasts would devour her within a night. If she stayed, in time she would become the witch herself.

Cold tightened her flesh against her bones, and tears wet her cheeks, though she drifted far past sadness. She wept in despair, not only for herself but for the young woman whose brains lay on the tundra nibbled by ants, and for the priestess under the beast, and for the beast himself, his people dead, alone forever now under the smoldering stars, enclosed by night black as venom.

Part One

Beyond the Shadow Is the Ghost

Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that people's food consists entirely of souls.

—Inuit shaman

Blind Side

An arrowhead of white cranes flew north through red air. Duru stood at the cavemouth and watched them wing overhead, carrying her heart joyfully into her ninth spring.

Winter had seemed interminable, moaning outside the honeycomb of caves in the limestone cliffs, numbing the land and the people. Cold winds grayed the sky and peeled the ocean to whitecaps that made fishing impossible. No birds to hunt, no fish to net, no berries to gather. Duru had long ago wearied of eating stale acorn-mash and dried meat from autumn—and pecking the dust in the back of the caves for insects.

Now there would be fresh food again. The sea mirrored blushing clouds, and already fisherfolk sculled onto the bay in dugouts, while their women waded among tidepools.

Not long ago, the last of the great winter storms had thrashed the Forest more fiercely than ever and had driven numerous flocks of birds out of the trees and into niches of the sea cliffs, easily hunted, even by children. Meat abounded yet again. Spring had returned, and the honking of cranes chorused in the fragrant sea-air.

Duru looked about excitedly for someone to share the news of spring's arrival. She waved to one of the fisherfolk far below on the beach, stringing his net between two limbs of driftwood, and he waved back from under wheeling gulls.

To left and right fronting a white escarpment riddled with caves, a ledge-path ran, strewn with small bones the cats had dropped. One of the family's old yellow dogs slept at the juncture where the path bent upward over the scarp to the high fields above the sea cliffs. The animal waited, too tired for the climb yet still eager to partake of the mice and snakes the children brought back from above.

Today, or very soon from today, there would be cress and berries, cattail sprouts and orange mushrooms. She skipped into the cave, singing, "White cranes—white cranes—spring flies overhead!"

Biklo, the family slave, squatted in the moon of morning let down by the roof-hole. He strung together hollow gourds for that morning's hike to collect water. Laconically, he smiled at Duru’s little song, his good eye sad, his blind eye bright as a shell.

He mimicked her song: "White cranes, white cranes, spring is flying overhead—and when they fly back who among us will be dead?"

"Biklo!" Duru frowned at him. "Don't tease."

"Life comes and goes like the cranes, little sister."

Duru clucked at him and ordered him back to work. Long ago, before her birth, Biklo had been captured by Grandfather Scom in combat with the Walnut Hands. Most of the men of the Walnut Hands had fought and died. The family had eaten their brains and stacked their skulls in the sea-cave where the boys became men and the women could not go.

Biklo had submitted without fighting, and Grandfather Scom had spared his life. Every summer, on the longest day, Biklo gathered field flowers and placed them on the bone-hill where Grandfather Scom now lay. And every longday without fail, the slave sang a song to the Mudman to watch over the Grandfather who had given him new life.

Duru loved Biklo for doing this and for his amusing and sometimes scary stories that whiled away long winter nights.

"White cranes—white cranes!" Duru sang, parting the grass curtain that muffled the wind from the cavemouth. The dimly lit cavern rang with her joy.

Mother and her sisters sat toasting nuts and gourd seeds with the Firewatcher, the crone who sat through the night singing breathy songs to the embers. The small children chivvied shells about, playing scuffle.

"Get your basket," Mother said, offering a toasted hazel nut. "We're going soon enough. And find your vest. There's still a chill in the air."

Duru snatched the hazel nut and bounded across the cavern to the ladder that mounted to her sleeping niche in this complex of caves and crawl-holes. Feeling mischievous with excitement, she detoured on her way up the ladder, stopping to poke her head through the moss veil of the chamber where Timov lay with the older women.

Most of the women had already risen and gone to the back vaults to freshen themselves at the stream that rilled through the rock wall there. Timov, the only uninitiated man in the Mothers' cavern, was obliged to sleep with the old women. He would still be there satisfying one or more of them.

"White cranes—white cranes!" Duru sang into the old women's chamber.

"Aw, so what?" Timov griped from the dark.

Duru could just make out his silhouette rising and falling between the stocky legs of Kwyn. Her raspy breathing sawed loudly in the dark with her pleasure. A boot thudded against the wall beside Duru's head, and she pulled away with a laugh.

"Leave Kwyn alone," Duru’s older sister, Aradia, chided her from the chamber above.

Duru hurried up the ladder and parted the curtain of ribbon grass. "White cranes, Aradia! I just saw them."

"Kwyn's bones have been aching all winter," Aradia said. She sat in the dark on her pelts stroking her soft hair with a bristle-brush. She stopped long enough for Duru to crawl into her lap. "Let Timov give her some pleasure. You know he hates doing what he must, so why do you trouble him?"

"Because he hates his work." Duru pouted. "He eats our food, takes the best pelts after the Mothers, and what does he do but complain all the time? When are the men going to take him?"

"When it pleases them."

"But there are boys two years younger already living with the men. Why can't he?"

"He'll be among them soon enough. Does he trouble you that much?"

"He puts thistle-burrs in my bed, steals my food, and never does what I tell him. He even barks at Mother."

"If not this summer then next, the men will take him. If Father were alive they'd have beckoned him by now. He has no one to stand for him."

"What about Father's brothers? They do the Father-rites for you and me."

"For the boys it's different. Father-brothers have their reasons."

"Hamr will do it."

"Hamr is of the Tortoise. Timov belongs to the Panther."

"Tell me again about the two folk." Duru squirmed in her sister's lap, intrigued by these male mysteries.

"You know all this already. Why are you acting like a baby?"

"Please, Aradia. Tell me again."

"Once, long ago," Aradia began, wearily, continuing to brush her hair, "the Tortoise men knew nothing of hunting. They were fisherfolk—and our enemies. They raided the people of the Panther for pelts and hides. We raided them for shells and fish. The women of the two tribes convinced the men to join together and share their skills as one tribe—the tribe of the Blue Shell, named for the Great Tortoise whose shell is made of two halves."

"But the two folk would never have stayed together with only the skills of the men to bind them," Duru recited.

"That's right, little sister. Men compete—women complete."

"And so the Blue Shell has two folk of men—the hunting Panther and the fishing Tortoise—and one tribe of women who bind them." Duru smiled proudly. "That's why when you take Hamr for your own, he will no longer be a Tortoise but a Panther, and then he can sponsor Timov. Hamr is brave."

Aradia sighed. "Too brave, I think, little Duru. Hamr has great dreams—and I'm afraid what happened to Father may befall him."

Father had been pierced in the thigh by a boar’s tusk three summers ago, and the children remembered the long time he had lain dying, growing weaker each day, an echo.

Duru sat up, put her hands on her sister's knees. "You are going to take Hamr for your own, aren't you, Aradia?"

"If he'll have me."

"Why wouldn't he? You're the most beautiful of the Blue Shell women." Aradia pouted at this but did not contradict her. "And besides, Hamr brags about wanting to live as a hunter. He doesn't want to fish. So he'll have to marry some Panther woman. How could he refuse you?"

"You know. We've talked about this before."

"The horse."

"Yes. He wants a horse, like the great men of old. He won't marry until he has one. And if what you say about the white cranes is true, then today is the day he will try."

Duru leaned closer, her heart high in her chest. "Today? This very day, Aradia?"

"That's the sign he's been waiting for."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"And have you spread it around? He doesn't want a crowd watching him. And I don't want you telling Mother. Or anyone. Go up to the fields with them today. I'll join you there later and tell you what happens. Now go and get your basket, and don't forget your vest."

Duru slipped through the plaited ribbon grass and bumped into Timov. "You don't belong up here," she said. "The old women's chamber and no higher, Timov. You know that."

"Shut up, Toad. Mother let me hang my birds from the cope-beam so the mice won't spoil them. I'm getting them now." He nudged past her and made his way over the dark shelf to where several tree limbs had been lashed together and laid across the open space at the back of the cavern. There, visible in the smoky light from the fire below, several pelts hung as well as a raft of birds dangling by their legs, wings open. Timov used a tined pole to hook the raft of birds and lower it to the cavern floor.

"I see hawks," Duru said. "You've killed many."

"Six hawks, three falcons," Timov said proudly. "More than most of my friends, though the others got their share."

"Why so many?"

"Hawks and falcons, they're the only birds whose feathers are useful in the dance."

"But why kill so many? You don't need that many feathers."

"All the boys are doing it this year," Timov answered, nonchalantly. He returned the pole to its notch in the wall and pushed past her. "The seals came ashore too far west this winter."

"Because of the storm," Duru said. "The same one that beat the birds out of the Forest and onto the cliffs. The men should leave the birds alone and hike up the beach for the seals."

Timov twisted his mouth derisively. "What do you know? It's easier to climb the cliffs and stone birds. Everyone's doing it."

"That's not good."

"Why not? The Fathers are glad enough for the feathers—and I see you've been eager enough to eat your share of their meat."

"They're already dead."

"Greedy, greedy."

"I'm not. You're greedy. You kill them just for the feathers."

"Greedy toad."

"Greedy saphead!"

Timov dismissed her with a backhanded wave, clambered down the ladder and picked up his birds. He had taken them down sooner than he had planned. He had not wanted his righteous little sister to know that he had actually been eavesdropping on Aradia. He had heard Hamr's name, and he had wanted to catch what they were saying about him.

He knew Aradia favored Hamr, and that annoyed him. Most boastful, arrogant, and self-centered of the Tortoise men, Hamr thought the Beastmaker had personally chosen him to benefit the Blue Shell—and to become a great man.

All the boys and young men laughed at Hamr behind his back, to think that he or anyone could be a great man in these modern days!

The great men lived long ago, upon the young earth when spirit powers still willingly tried out different shapes. Nowadays, the powers had found their forms and men existed simply as men—and beasts and plants no longer talked or changed shapes. How could anyone think he was a great man in these changeless times?

None, however, not even among the men, would taunt Hamr to his face. Those who did got their mouths smashed and their gonads kicked back up where they came from.

Big, tough—and crazy—he talked out loud to the Beastmaker, as if the sky and all its paraphernalia awaited his next breath. He laughed at the warnings and omens of the old men and fished beyond the smoking breakers when no one else dared. And he shared his catch with anyone who would meet him as he came triumphantly to shore.

When elders laid out the dead for the tears of women and the awe of men, Hamr smiled faintly, as if he knew something about death no one else did. He had smiled like that when the elders laid out Father. That was when Timov began to hate him.

Sooner or later, the swaggerer would fail at something, hurt himself lame or dead, and then the whole tribe would laugh. Timov did not want his sister inviting such certain tragedy into their family. But he could think of no way to stop her. As an uninitiated male, he had no authority in the family.

Timov dropped the raft of birds before Biklo, who had just finished stringing the water-gourds for his daily trek to the spring. "Pluck them and separate the feathers," he ordered. "Give the meat and small feathers to the Mothers but save all the pinions for me."

Biklo nodded and began untying the birds. "The white cranes are flying, Grandson Scom."

"Yeah, yeah." Timov stepped onto the ledge-path. Sunlight crowned the eastern mountains and flimmered below on the sea. He squinted and breathed deeply of the sea and the calm smell of ice from the distant peaks.

Today looked opportune for Hamr to wrestle with a horse. In the last few days, the herd had moved into the meadow above the sea cliffs, following ancient, narrow trails from the south. He had seen them, their flanks shivering with energy, power jetting from their nostrils in silver clouds.

Timov smiled smugly. After today, Aradia would have to find someone new to fill her womb.

)|(

Timov ambled past cave-entrances of several families. He stopped to pet dogs and casually inform friends that he would use this day to get bog-mud for Biklo's aching joints. Such a tedious and messy chore for a slave did not merit companions. And this solitude gave Timov a chance to follow Aradia and Hamr secretly.

At the ledge-trail that mounted to the top of the cliffs, he climbed into a dense pine shrub and startled a flurry of mice. He marveled that they swarmed everywhere this year and shook the branches to watch them scatter pell-mell into rock crevices.

Then he waited.

He gazed at a young girl gathering molted feathers while her mother hung a patch-pelt rug over the ledge and thrashed the dust out of it with a wicker sheaf.

Soon the Mothers' singing lilted above the bird-chatter. A band of women sauntered along the trail, gathering members from each cave-mouth on the rock terrace.

He spotted his mother and aunties and the old women he serviced at night and behind them the youngest children who could walk, with Duru and her girlfriends to mind them.

Aradia did not parade with them, so Timov lingered in the pine bush until the Mothers' band had climbed past and their singing and prating dimmed with distance.

Blue flies rose with the morning thermals and began harrying him, and he moved to swing down from the pine-covert just as Aradia appeared on the path.

In brilliant morning light, she looked as beautiful as the panther that the men of her family worshiped: She had tied her sleek jet hair atop her head in a fan-crest and wrapped a black rabbit skin mantle under her arms, tucked up around her waist with a sash of pink shells, so that the pelt dangled above her knees. Nut-oil glossed her limbs and shoulders, and her lissome muscles shimmered as she mounted uneven notches in the trail to the top of the cliff.

Timov emerged from the pine bush after she scrambled over the cliff-wall and out of sight. At the top, the trail cut through a bluff of yellow grass and opened into knolly fields. To the left, the land sloped west through stands of bare trees to hummocky meadows, the haunt of the red deer, and then onward into brambly groves of hazel shrub and thornapples at the edge of the bog.

Ahead rose hills, replete with skeletal groves of fruit trees, berry swatches, chuckling creeks and icy rills that had galloped a long way down from purple mountains in the north. The Mothers had gone that way to forage the first tender shoots along brooks and rivulets.

But Aradia swerved right. Timov followed her east among leafless scrub oak along the cliff-edge toward the migratory trails—more like ditches—that cut the land into a patchwork of hawthorn and black birch, all still without foliage, wiry and haggard.

On the other side of the migratory ruts a cedar forest began. Massive trees ascended dark green and majestic toward mist-tattered highlands. There the Eyes of the Bear, the Blue Shell's ancient enemy, dwelled.

Wind slicing along the cliff top rattled naked oak branches, and Timov did not have to worry about keeping quiet or even staying very far behind. He virtually walked on Aradia's shadow, ducking back and forth among oaks.

At the first migratory trail, she turned inland, picking her way carefully among leafless blackberry bramble fringing the trail. The ridge climbed toward towering clouds, became a hill of copper grass crowned with spires of poplar.

Crouching among those slender trees, Timov watched Aradia descend the far side of the hill toward a dark hollow in a spidery thicket. Wind-sheened grassland loomed, where horse herds grazed.

Now Timov advanced slowly, since somewhere around here Hamr lurked. He crawled under a soapberry bush and scanned the hollow until he found the man. He was not alone. An older man stood beside him, gesturing at the herd, obviously instructing him.

Timov, noticing the two men intent on the horses and Aradia on Hamr, rolled out from under his cover and boldly pranced downhill into the hollow. He ran in a crouch behind cluttered trees to outflank his sister.

Deftly, he curled up behind a blue willow, naked of leaves yet sufficiently dense to hide him. He had gotten close enough to hear the two men talking.

"Wind'll turn before midmoming," the older man said. Timov recognized him now as Spretnak, Hamr's sponsor among the Tortoise men. Hamr's father had drowned years before, snatched away by a giant wave while harvesting urchins on the slippery rocks. "You can move in closer then."

"You sure?" Hamr looked nervous, which delighted Timov. The man had only three more summers to Timov's fourteen, but his strong cleft chin made him look older. In the fashion of the Tortoise men, he wore no beard, the hairs plucked from his face with tweezing shells. Even so, his mien appeared as manly as any of the full-whiskered Panther men. Timov grinned to see Hamr’s dark eyes blinking anxiously above his small, hawk-bent nose, a tuft of his unbraided hair in his mouth.

"See that shear up there in the ice clouds? The sea wind is rising with the day. Probably rain late this afternoon. But it will certainly turn the wind long before midday. So stay patient. Don't get any closer before then or the herd will close around him."

"Hamr." Aradia had come up behind the talking men.

Hamr took a moment to fix the cloud pattern in his memory, then turned casually to take Aradia under his arm. His relaxed intimacy with her irritated Timov.

"You shouldn't be here, Aradia," he spoke earnestly and brushed his lips against her brow, inhaling the nut-scent in her hair.

"The white cranes arrived this morning," she answered.

Spretnak greeted the young woman with an awkward nod and said to Hamr, "I will start making my way to the other end of the grove. When the wind changes and you are ready, give your call. I will approach the horses from the side, gradually, and they will move away, onto the ancient path. You know what to do then. But remember, if you hear my call, run. The Eyes of the Bear are swift when they fall upon us."

The name of their enemy pricked Timov's attention, and he cast a nervous glance to the distant hills. The Eyes of the Bear ate horses and would rage to find Blue Shell taking from the herd.

Neither Hamr nor Aradia seemed alarmed at that prospect. Before the old man had limped out of sight, they began hugging and cooing at each other.

"Let the horses alone," Aradia said and nibbled on his ear. "Come back with me."

Hamr caressed her neck with his lips and, ignoring her plea, picked her up and sat her on the elbow of a bent tree. "There, at the edge of the herd, you can see my horse. See the one browsing closest to the ditch?"

All the horses looked the same to Timov. Dun-brown with creamy-white bellies, stubby tails, and bristly manes, they grazed placidly. The one Hamr indicated seemed to lift its head more often than the others to sniff for predators.

"Hamr, you'll never get near enough to take one," Aradia said.

"Spretnak and I have been watching them for a long time. We think—"

"Spretnak got lamed when he tried to take a horse."

"He did. He chose the wrong horse."

"And how is yours different, Hamr?"

“Look at him, Aradia.” He smiled, sadly. "He never prances like the others, and he constantly tastes the air. He can't see. I've named him 'Blind Side of Life.'"

Timov noticed that, indeed, the animal's eye-sockets bored inward darker than those of the others. Hamr had found a sightless horse. No wonder he acted so cocky, so confident of accomplishing what none of the other Blue Shell men had done. Blind Side of Life—what kind of name is that for an animal?

"Sightless or not," Aradia said, "you're risking your life with a beast that big. And for what if it can't see?"

"He can smell. Once I tame him, he'll help with the hunt. I'll track the biggest game. I'll bring you ivory and bear claws."

"I want only you, Hamr."

"I want these things for you."

Aradia lost her fingers in the long hair falling over his shoulders. "I'm afraid for you, afraid I won't see you again. The hunt killed my father."

Hamr met her imploring gaze with his fixed expression. "You're beautiful and wise, Aradia. There are others, perhaps better than myself, for you."

Timov nodded with agreement, hoped his sister would not contradict him. She stirred to speak, and Hamr lifted her off the bough and silenced her with a nuzzle. His hands unfastened the shell sash and opened the mantle she had wrapped about herself. It fell to the ground, and they began nibbling at each other.

Timov choked back a groan, then searched about for pebbles. By the time he had gathered a small handful, the lovers lay naked in a nest of grass between two tree roots. Mischievously, he waited until Hamr mounted before pelting him with the sharp rocks.

Hamr slapped his stung buttocks, and jerked about with a ferocious scowl and a shout.

Timov laughed like a jackal, danced briefly before them, wagging an imaginary penis, and darted away. He did not dare to glance back until he had attained the poplar grove atop the hill.

Hamr and Aradia had disappeared deeper into the hollow, and he sat down to catch his breath. For a while, he stared out over shimmering waves of grass at the horses. They seemed small and fragile among the clouds' running shadows.

Soon Hamr's come-cry would spark out of the hollow, the wind would shift, and the hunt would begin.

He rose and ran off to tell the others.

)|(

Spretnak worked his way slowly through the hollow, down one side of the migratory ditch and laboriously up the other slope. He sat now in the shade of a gnarled tree.

His gimpy leg throbbed from the effort, and he ignored the pain. For him, this particular suffering offered a small sacrifice, well worth the coming joy of seeing his son ride a horse into the settlement.

With Hamr for his son, Spretnak knew pride. In the season before Hamr’s birth, Spretnak had been thrown from the horse he had wanted to master and had broken his leg. And though the leg had mended badly, his dream of becoming a great man had not mended at all. He could no longer hunt, fish from the dugouts, or climb the sea rocks for mussels. Instead, he mended nets, studied the mysteries of the Tortoise, and gave his son to a good friend so that the boy might be reared by a whole man. He never told Hamr the truth, and the few other people who knew had died years before. Now his broken dream had found new life and become whole.

From the time Hamr began to talk, Spretnak had instilled in his son the conviction of the boy’s own greatness. He did so quietly, secretly, only to the boy and in such a way that the youth believed this fate had risen from within.

Never telling him the words outright, he let Hamr discover for himself that he had been born great, able to listen deeper, run harder, eat more food and endure more pain. And, to Spretnak's satisfied amazement, the boy grew tall, strong, and certain of his fate, some would say arrogant—and even Spretnak had come to believe he had merely sponsored the boy's mighty destiny.

Spretnak lifted his gaze into the wide morning sky. He noticed in the clouds that the day's heat had turned the wind.

Men are like the clouds, he thought, moved by invisible forces that rise out of the earth and descend from the heights. The clashing of these forces shape men as wind shapes clouds. Great men learn to read the wind and to partake in their own shaping. No one, not even the greatest of men, can choose their way. Acceptance, and with it participation, are the only choices beyond ignorance.

He thought this good. Life existed simply as one found it, beautiful and terrible in its simplicity.

Clattering noises among the briars behind him interrupted his thoughts. He twisted about in a fright, half-expecting to confront the brawny hatchet-faced men who called themselves the Eyes of the Bear.

Instead, he spotted the glossy black wings and red legs of a chough exulting in the briar over its capture of a large mud beetle. Spretnak blew a relieved laugh at this demonstration of what he had been thinking: Life gives no choices to the chough or the beetle, to the Eyes of the Bear or to me.

He nervously scanned the dark treeline that undulated with the hills, observed no movement at all. A deer or drifting wolves would have reassured him that the woods stood empty of his enemy. Now he could not be certain.

Surely, the Eyes of the Bear knew the herd had arrived, since the horses had to trespass their territory to reach this valley. He hoped that the hunters had already taken all the horsemeat they wanted.

Hamr's call warbled from across the hollow. Spretnak pulled himself to his feet, the fright of a moment ago shifting to exhilaration. The time had come to justify a lifetime of resignation. For seventeen years, he had trained his son for this morning. He had taught him everything he had learned from the misery of his own blunder. This day, he would see a Blue Shell man master a horse!

He limped a short way toward the herd. When they noticed him, he stopped. He did not want to frighten them into bunching, the mares and foals inside, the stallions ringing them. He simply wanted to move them on their way. They would have gone in another day or so anyway, once the grass had thinned. Better to cut out the animal they wanted now while it was still hungry so later it could be gentled with food.

From the hill's brow, he waved his arms, and the horses watched him. Like a slow dream, they began to move out, drifting single file into the ditch that thousands of springs and autumns of migration had cut into the land. They moved unhurriedly, nose to tail, occasionally glancing up at him or maybe past him to the deep rows of cedar from where predators might descend.

Spretnak followed the herd, near enough to make sure they did not clamber out of the deeply worn trail and favor themselves with the early and tender shoots of the hollow. The horse he and Hamr had selected, Blind Side of Life, marched in the middle of the herd, with the mares.

The appearance of a sightless horse two summers earlier had been accepted by Spretnak as an answer by the invisible powers to his petition. Every moon since the first sighting, he and Hamr had made sacrifice to the Beastmaker, throwing into the ritual fires bundled grassheads, each with a seahorse at its center.

Hours ago, they had shaped a tiny horse from mud. Hamr had tied a strand of his hair about the mud-steed's neck and had buried the icon on the migratory trail with only the strand sticking out, so that he would have the right to lead the horse away from the ancient path.

Now if only Hamr would remember everything he had been taught. Ahead ranged dunes, where the horses would have to wend. Hamr waited there, remembering but, at last, able only to trust himself.

Spretnak sighed deeply and slowed into the hurt of his walk. Nothing remained for him to do. At best, if all went well, he would be the secret half of a proud story. And he would spend the rest of his life accepting that—or whatever happened.

)|(

Hamr knelt at the crest of a dune alongside the trench where the horses would pass. He could see, above the beach grass, the silver haze of their dust. The haze blurred his view of the bosky hollow with Aradia at its center. Though, of course, she had left when they had parted, gone back the way she had come, he imagined her still there. Their moment together provided a perfection he did not want to let go until after this trial. Her love for him informed the faith he needed to accomplish what before had just been a boast.

He knew the others in the tribe thought him insolent and boastful. No one would say it to his face. He read it well enough in their measuring glances, studying him for his flaws. If he failed now, they would laugh, remembering they had gauged him a fool. And if he survived his failure, he would spend the rest of his life wintering in pain, like Spretnak.

That one man believed in him, only because Spretnak was halt and useless as a man and could no longer believe in himself. The haze rising from the herd carried all the dust of the summers Hamr had sat on the ground with the lame man, watching him draw pictures in the dirt to illustrate his ideas of the hunt, the capture of the horse, and war.

Though flat, the drawings appeared sharp and rich: horses moved, hunters ran, spears flew, and ideas took shape, so that time no longer moved invisible but as a line that turned back on itself and spun round through the seasons. A wheel, Spretnak had called it.

He had made one once from the shell of a tortoise, put a hole in its middle and a stick through the hole and spun it round, like time, always returning to where it had begun, night to day, winter to spring.

But what good did a wheel provide? What use did drawings in the dirt offer?

The makings of a useless man playing games.

If Hamr succeeded, Spretnak could sincerely believe all those games had been more than games. The horse would make it so.

Hamr's reverie snapped as a hooting laugh whooped overhead. He looked up, toward the sea cliffs that loomed to his left on the far side of the defile, where the horses would pass—and he eyed Timov, small as his toenail, staring down at him and pointing. At the boy's side, other figures stepped forward.

Hamr recognized them all but fixed on one, Gobniu, chief of the Blue Shell. The fact that he attended, summoned by a boy, bestowed importance to this event. Gobniu should have been with the dugouts, finding food. Yet he, stout and commanding even at this distance, stood there with the other men, leaning on their fishing spears, watching.

What do they expect to see?

His death or maiming, of course. None of them believed he could take a horse. Why should they believe Hamr the braggart? Gobniu and the others did not like him, for he did not care to spear or net fish with the others. And though he obligingly did both every day that Gobniu called the men to the sea, he did so dreamily. Now they had gathered to witness his dreams shattered.

As the first of the horses came around the bend, the men on the sea cliffs frightened them, and they moved faster than he had expected. Quickly, he reviewed what he had to do. The rocks he had piled atop the dune days earlier remained in place. The fishnet clotted with horse dung lay furled at his knees. His heart beat strong and calm, trusting in the clarity of his plan.

The first mares passed. He continued to lie flat on the dune, downwind and unseen by the horses, and his hand strayed toward the twined hemp tied to the wooden stake holding the rockpile on the crest.

When he spotted Blind Side of Life following the mare ahead of him—the horse's head high to catch the scent of her, eyes sunken, the shape of the skull showing at the sockets—Hamr yanked the rope. The stake flew out, and the rockpile crashed into the trench, nipping the back hooves of the mare that Blind Side followed.

Blind Side reared and stumbled into the rocks. The mares behind bolted up the sides of the ditch and scattered when Hamr slid down the dune-face and cast the fishnet over the horse's head.

The stallion reared again, and Hamr held fast to the net. As Blind Side came down, Hamr rushed forward, pulled himself up by the net onto the animal's back, and clung to its neck with all his strength.

Blind Side of Life bucked, banging his front legs among the fallen rocks. Hamr feared the creature would break its hooves or legs, but the next moment the horse clambered up the side of the ditch and twisted to shake him loose.

A sighted horse would have rushed at full gallop down the beach. Blind Side reared, capered, and bounded. He could hear the cries of the other horses fleeing down the strand, and he sprang toward them.

On the cliff, men howled and shouted encouragement and derision. Timov, agape at Hamr atop the beast, knew he would fall at any instant.

The other horses had galloped out of sight, and their scent thinned away in the sea wind. Blind Side, frightened and confused, continued to thrash until he tired. Each time Hamr tried comforting noises the horse started bucking again.

Drawn by the din of screaming men, the women had hurried back from their foraging and now gazed down from the cliff. Aradia stood among them, and she watched with arms outstretched, as if she could project her strength into him.

She had not expected this. She had made herself believe she would care for him if lamed or remember him if killed. This was unbearable, watching him clasping a frenzied animal fighting him across the beach.

Spretnak hobbled up the side of the ditch, and stood gaping at his son astride the stallion. Emotion welled up in him, at once proud and frightened. He had taken this wild ride before.

Only panic kept Blind Side of Life moving finally. He heard the pounding sea very close now. A wave splashed his fetlocks, and he reared halfheartedly. No pain, just the weird weight of this creature holding him tight, its stink muted by the safe, good smell of the herd's droppings.

The animal paused, breathing hard, now more afraid of the water sloshing around his legs than the weight on his back. He edged back onto the shore, sniffed for the herd and—frightened anew not to find any sign of the others at all—bucked again and again.

Fatigue pulsed in him, and he ambled up the beach.

Hamr, shoulders contracted with pain, hands fused into fists on the fishnet, dared not relax. He tried gentling noises again. The horse did not object.

Blind Side moved away from the pounding surf. As soon as he shuffled among the dunes, Hamr slipped off his back. The horse reared again, and Hamr held to the net still firmly wrapped about the steed's head.

Gently, slowly, he guided the horse among the dunes to the cliff-wall. There, in a recess bounded on three sides by the cliff-face, he let the horse go.

Blind Side wandered about the enclosure. Hamr and Spretnak stood in the depressions between the dunes on the open side and made comforting noises to keep him inside. Spretnak pulled tufts of grass from the bale they had harvested the day before and scattered them in the enclosure while Hamr blocked the open side with bramble and rocks.

For a long while, the horse wandered around, first one way then the other, trying to find the scent of the others. They had always milled nearby. Where had they gone?

Gobniu and the fisherfolk arrived first, hurrying down cliff-trails. The women flew after, trilling and clicking their amazement.

Gobniu clapped his big hand on Hamr's shoulder and looked up into his gleaming face. "Don't think because of this big catch your net-fishing days are over," he joked, and all the men laughed and pressed forward to touch him and rub some of his luck into their own hands and hair.

The clan enfolded Spretnak, too, despite his protests, and the men hoisted them both into the air as the women poured off the cliff-trail, shouting and laughing.

Aradia's face glowed the brightest among them. Hamr swam down from the embrace of the men and took her in his weary arms. To the excited throng, he announced, "This woman has asked me into her family. Now that I have something more than my bare hands to give her, my heart accepts."

The women trilled loudly, and the men cheered. Even Timov, whose displeasure with Hamr had softened during the jubilant rush down the cliff-trail, shrugged his acceptance and whistled with the crowd.

The noise startled Blind Side of Life as he paced the enclosure, crying out for the herd and the freedom they had taken with them.

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Purple spears of crocus pierced the meadow where the Mothers had erected the wedding bower: an arbor of alder limbs jeweled with buds like clusters of jade. They had hung this canopy with yellow plaits of lemon grass and seaweed in scarlet ribbons.

Conch shells gaped pink as mouths at the sides of the bower. A panther-skin wrapped the bride, who otherwise stood naked but for sparks of tiny red blossoms in her untressed black hair.

She lifted her face to gaze upward. From the central ridgepole dangled a round talisman of carved silkwood set with feathers, hawk talons, colorful crystals and, and a snailshell fixed to the middle.

The emblem gathered her mindfulness: Five feathers for the flight of our senses — three talons for grasping heaven, earth, and the abyss — a gem for each of the six directions — and at the center: the spiral journey home, to the source.

The bride had waited alone in this sacred place for the last hour of night, watched over from the bluffs by the Mothers. Mother Mysteries decreed that the women stand apart until the moon fell through her last station and the sun rose into his first.

This year, however, the field mice had proliferated. Swarms of them drifted like cloud-shadows in the moonlight, nibbling at whatever blossoms they could reach. So the Mothers thrashed at them with bundled switches until the last possible moment.

Alone, Aradia thought about her childhood, the playfriends she would leave behind and that lonely night long ago when she bled for the first time and stayed locked inside the cramped reed hut of First Blood.

Hanging within the bower, the Hair of the Mother enclosed her—valerian bines, tannis roots, nettle berries, drake nuts, and strips of resin-beaded bark—whose uses she had been taught beginning that night. She reviewed each carefully, not wanting to slight any of them for fear of losing their potency. She recalled the ills and aches she had seen the medicinal plants heal in her body and in others, and as she did so, she gathered them in the bride's wallet of many pouches given her by the Mothers.

She fingered the acorn shells she implanted as cervical contraceptives, which she had been using faithfully since First Blood, and thought of the boys and men she had favored since her womanhood. There had been others before Hamr, blown off now like seed tufts into the sky.

As a girl, she remembered, she had feared Hamr. He had been a bully, always fighting and taunting the other boys, ignoring the girls. As the two of them had grown, both had come to stand apart from the others—she by her beauty, which the tribe honored, and he by his strength, which the tribe feared.

She had not favored him until recently. He seemed so aloof and strange, talking aloud to himself, braving seastorms when no one else would fish, as if spirits did indeed ride him. He was too strong to be possessed. Many of the women favored him and bragged of his stamina and erotic cunning.

The summer before, when she had finally mustered the courage to call him into the bushes, he had surprised her with his gentleness and humor. They found they could play together, chasing butterflies and diving for starfish. It surprised her to find this boy in a man's body. As she put aside the acorn shells, she remembered the times he had made her laugh, which made him dear to her.

Last came the nuts and bark whose paste she could use to choose the gender of her children. For herself, of course, and for the Mothers, the first would be girls. The Mothers, the oldest of them wise to the needs of the tribe above the desires of the families, had sworn her to birth at least two boys. The man she had chosen had the marks, at least superficially, of a great man, and his boy children would strengthen the hunt.

When the bride's wallet had filled, Aradia sang her beckoning cry. By now the moon neared the horizon, the first full moon after the time of equal day and night that began the season of spring in the sky. Iris light purpled the east, and the Mothers began filing down from the bluffs and assembling around the bower.

Aradia's mother stood behind her daughter, and Duru meticulously plucked fallen blossoms from her sister's panther wrap.

Then came the men, hunters of the Panther cult and the far more numerous fisherfolk of the Tortoise clan. All wore feathers. The seal hunt had been poor this winter, so the fisherfolk as well as the hunters had killed instead many more hawks, owls, and eagles. Now they displayed their trophies in hair-crests, capes, bands around their elbows and knees.

Timov walked at the head of the Panther procession, taking Father's place. He held high a belt of white and red feathers that Father's friends had made for the bride. He presented his offering and took his place beside Duru, who thought he stood too close and gave him an elbow jab. Mother frowned at him for whining, and he glowered at Duru.

The Tortoise men carried gifts: seal furs, narwhale horns, baskets of brilliant shells, coils of edible seaweed, wet pouches of mussels—all the sea's treasures, in gratitude that their son, Hamr, had been chosen worthy of a bride.

Last of the men to arrive, Spretnak, the groom's sponsor hobbled proudly to the threshold of the bower and presented Aradia with a rainbow necklace of the rarest abalone shells and polished discs of sea-amber. And then, he produced from under his tunic an odd object, a small round plate of tortoise shell with a reed lancing the bore hole at its center.

Timov had often seen Spretnak and Hamr playing with that toy, and he leaned closer to hear what the old man said.

Spretnak spun the wheel as he handed it to the bride. "Give this to your husband if he should ever act childish," he said softly, for her alone to hear. "It will remind him of everything good I have taught him."

Duru shoved Timov aside to hear better, and the boy was about to step on her foot when Spretnak lifted a conch shell from the base of the bower.

The old man blew long and deep before stepping back among the Tortoise men.

As the green filaments in the east brightened to red, Hamr came up from the sea. He rode Blind Side of Life, a tall, majestic shadow against the brightening sky. He climbed the long trail that wound through a cleft in the giant sea cliffs and trotted between the eastern knolls to the meadow, where the tribe and his bride waited.

At the sight of him, the drummers in the throng beat a cadence to his advance—a new rhythm in time to the horse's stride, unheard before at any Blue Shell wedding. None among the tribe had ever seen the likes of this, and an excited murmur flashed through the gathering as he approached.

In the month and five days since he had captured his horse, Hamr had lived with the animal, feeding him tender shoots, filling a large basket he had lined in octopus-skin with fresh water twice a day.

For a long while he had not mounted the stallion again but instead laid blankets atop him. Slowly, as the horse had become comfortable in his presence and had begun to anticipate his feedings and the songs Hamr would sing to him, Hamr had increased the weight with rocks wrapped in pelts. Only after Blind Side came to him for his food when he called had Hamr put the rocks aside and hoisted himself onto the steed's back.

Over the last ten days, Hamr had taught Blind Side of Life to take direction from the pressure of his knees. They had wandered miles along the beach.

Spretnak, too, had mounted Blind Side and at last felt animal strength muscling under him. With his will melded to animal power, the elder guided the large creature, clopping along the firm sand, His heart breathed joy, mute with the wonder of his dream made real.

The horse had already worked for the tribe: Hamr had fastened a fishnet across the stallion's chest, strung braided lengths of hemp from the net, attached them to another net dropped into the bay by the dugouts, and with Blind Side's strength, had trawled to shore large caches of fish. In like fashion, they had made new tidepools by moving boulders, a labor that would have been unthinkable by men alone.

His legend assured,Hamr rode proudly to his wedding. The faces, like pale petals in the early light, stared up at him in awe. He noticed all of them and acknowledged none—his attention reserved for the lone figure of his bride, who watched him with a demure joy from under the blossomy bower.

Gobniu the chief did not gawk, though Hamr noticed the hard stare of amazement in his face and the nod of acknowledgment as he rode by. Hamr ignored him as he had the others. He looked down only once, when Spretnak swung into view. Hamr stared him full in the face and received the old man's beneficent smile and salute.

Hamr dismounted at the bower, palmed a sweet-root to Blind Side to keep him still, and joined his bride. The drum-throbbing stopped.

Duru kicked Timov, then deflected his anger by pointing behind him to an antelope pelt folded on a reed mat. The boy hurriedly picked it up and glared at his sister, but she held his stare easily.

The antelope should have been hunted by him, the pelt flensed from the hot animal by his own flint blade. But he had no flint and had never killed anything bigger than a hare. One of Father's friends had presented the pelt and Mother and Duru had tanned and tailored it.

Timov should not even be under the bower, Duru thought. He should be with the children.

And he would have been except that Aradia had insisted he offer the wrap. The older sister expected some of her husband's greatness to pass to her diffident brother and, no doubt, some of Timov's idleness to pass the other way and keep her Hamr close to home.

Hamr removed the seal-fur loinwrap and jerkin and stepped out of the tortoise-leather thongs with their fishskin toppings to stand naked before Aradia.

Gobniu, as head of the Tortoise clan, took the doffed garments, and Timov, as the bride's eldest clansman, offered the groom the antelope-skin.

Hamr wrapped the pelt about his nakedness and fastened it with a bone clasp. At his feet, Duru placed boar-skin sandals, bristles standing straight out from the straps. The horseman stepped into them and into his new life.

The crowd broke into song, and drum flourishes and conch bleats announced the culmination of the wedding ceremony.

Agog with the focused excitement of the gathering, Timov and Duru stepped back. As one, they recognized that their lives would—again—never be the same: Father's going had weakened them all, and now Hamr's coming would give strength to everyone. They clasped hands and moved closer to Mother, to share the tribe's joy for their family.

Blind Side shuffled nervously under the burst of sound, until Spretnak gentled him with a reassuring pat at the neck and another sweet-root. Patiently, the horse hung his head and chewed the root, pausing to lift his long face. The noise had stopped. Warmth touched everything.

Hamr and Aradia embraced, and the sun cast first light over them.

Hamr mounted Blind Side and offered a hand to Aradia. Though informed days before that he planned to carry her off on his horse, she hesitated. Until they wed, the Mothers, ever wary of ill-fortune, had forbidden her to ride, for there was no precedent. Better, they had reasoned, to wait until she had been ritually joined to Hamr and could partake of his power. Alas, now she felt no more powerful, and the beast looked so large and restless, its sightless sockets dark and frightening.

Hamr smiled down at her. His long hair fell past his shoulders, his eyes radiant with first light of their first day as one. She placed her hand in his, and he hoisted her into his strong arms.

He turned her about so she sat facing forward, scared and giddy. Awkwardly, she leaned back on him and straddled the beast, then clutched at its bristly mane.

Blind Side pranced sideways, disturbed by the unfamiliar double weight, and Hamr's hands at his neck calmed him.

Hamr leaned to the side and tugged at the stallion's mane to turn him about. Spretnak handed him a satchel stuffed with food and a water bladder. And then, in a graceful saunter, smelling and feeling his way, Blind Side carried the couple into the rising sun.

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Hamr directed Blind Side of Life through the hummocks past green-dotted hazel brambles and budding thornapple shrubs. They ambled along the tall sedge margin of the bog, where spring already bloomed with churlish red flowers.

On the far side of the swale, they arrived at a fern grove, where butterflies bobbled and bees darted. Here, while Blind Side browsed happily, Hamr and Aradia spent most of the day erecting their own wedding bower, one sturdy enough for them to reside in while the moon waned and then grew full again. Under this roof of lashed beech branches thatched over with eelgrass slick enough to repel the spring rains, they would make their first child.

By day's end, they sat together in their hut on a mat of fern and white moss and shared the wedding food that Spretnak had gathered for them—roe kept damp in fennel grass, dried fish, a leafpouch of honey ants, and smoked seal-meat wrapped in seaweed.

The last bees lugged their amber burdens home, and the sky above the wide sward glowed with the fires that made the world.

"Now that we are married," Hamr said, "I can tell you what I have never told anyone else, not even Spretnak."

Aradia lay with her head in his lap, nibbling on a twist of dried meat, half-listening, watching Blind Side of Life shining gold under the black trees.

"I dream of the Beastmaker, Who is the Great Mother's husband and son," he began, looking at her closely. "He's entered my dreams since I was a boy."

Aradia sat up. "Hush," she said sternly. "It's not good to talk of these things."

"I want to tell you what I've seen."

"No. I don't want to hear any more."

"And why not?"

"These are secret things."

"That is why I must tell you. The Beastmaker has shown himself to me. I've seen his hidden face. He has antlers, like an elk, and eyes like moons filled with blood. His features are human. He has a human mouth, and he has told me secret things that I can tell you."

"I don't want to hear these things, Hamr."

"The Beastmaker says that I am to be a Beastmaster, so I must know these things. And since you are my wife, I can share them with you."

"Don't, Hamr."

"Why are you afraid? We're together now. I won't let any harm come to you. The Beastmaker says we are made from pieces of the sun. That our bones were baked in the sun the way we bake clay in the fire. Our blood, too, was made in the sun, for our blood grows out of our bones. And when we die and our flesh goes to worm-dirt, we do not die. We become like sunlight, something bright and warm that we can feel yet cannot hold."

Aradia stood up. "Hamr, be quiet. If you say any more, I will leave."

"Night is falling."

"I don't care. The Great Mother does not want us to know these secrets or they would not be Her secrets. The Mother gives—and she also takes away. She has given us each other. I fear if we say too much about these things, she may take us away before our time."

"But the Beastmaker tells me—"

"Hamr! I tell you, if you want to be mine, you must never again speak of these things, to me or to anyone. Do you hear?"

Hamr stared hard at her, then nodded. Aradia visibly relaxed and knelt beside him. "Far better, my Hamr," she said, removing the bone clasp from his antelope-skin, "to live the secrets of our lives than to talk of them."

)|(

Red evening climbed the sky, and Hamr kicked at a sponged log, watching worms pearl and shine. Aradia awaited him in their bower, but he was in no hurry to go to her.

The moon would rise late tonight, seven nights after their first night. True to her word, she had not once wanted to hear his prayers, his thoughts, his dreams of the Beastmaker. Eating and rutting passed their nights, foraging and rutting passed their days. Playing, while they foraged and rutted and ate, was all she wanted to do.

Her laughter intoxicated him, made him feel light in his bones, so he was glad to splash with her in the rivulets, to catch crickets, to couple in the mud. And that was all she wanted! Nothing seemed serious to her, except her hopes for their children. That he had tired of hearing about, and they had begun to quarrel, first about the Beastmaker, then about his doting on his horse. Dearly as he regarded her, they disagreed about much.

With a mighty blow to the dead log, Hamr kicked loose wafers of light. Beastmaker! he cried in his heart, not daring to speak that name aloud. Two nights ago, after overhearing him talking to the Beastmaker, Aradia had curled up to sleep and would not let him touch her. The next morning, though, she woke him by slipping a toad into his loinstrap, and laughed as if nothing had happened.

Beastmaker—what now?

Red evening climbed the sky and vanished in violet hues. Frogs spat and creaked while mating. Fireflies blinked among rushes with the cool radiance of courtship. And out of darkness, Aradia called his name. He shrugged and turned to go to her.

What happens now?

From shreds of clouds among the stars, a slur of rain fell, and he felt the Beastmaker's answer rise in him with the odors the earth gives the sky, What did you think?

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"Saphead!"

Timov threw another pebble at Duru. She was supposed to be gathering dead grass for kindling, which she could do anywhere. She insisted on doing it here, on the knoll where he had come to watch the hunt. "Get lost, Toad. You're a girl. You're not supposed to watch. You want to kill him?"

Duru made an ugly face. "You're angry, because you can't hunt. You're still a boy—Saphead."

"Get out of here." He threw several more pebbles, harder, driving his sister into the tall grass at the toe of the knoll. Soon as she dropped out of sight, he peered down the knoll through a stand of green-budded trees to the far end of the bright meadows, where Hamr and some of the Panther men had taken the hunt.

The hunters moved at the shimmery edge of the canebrake, lazy clusters of men slouching on their spears, just visible. They had been waiting there since midday, when Hamr and Blind Side of Life had entered, following a trail beaten down by a large boar.

From his vantage, Timov could see Hamr pacing back and forth through the clacking husks of last season's growth. His head appeared above green furls of young plants.

The boar he stalked moved invisibly among the traps and obstacles of the sedge. Father's friends called out advice from the branches of overlooking trees when they spotted it. Other hunters, returning with fallow deer slung between them and a dozen hares strung on a spear, jeered.

Timov gloated with relief that he was not Hamr, hot with mosquito bites, icy with fear, tensely reading the shadows for sharp tusks and a bristly stare. When Timov became a hunter, he would go with the other men, after hare and deer. Why had Aradia married this reckless showoff?

Each time Timov ran back to the summer camp for a drink and a snack of nutmash or salted fish, he found Aradia cool as a berry, helping the other women skin animals their men had brought in. Not once did she ask how the hunt progressed. He wanted to tell her she should be worried: The hunt had gone on too long, the horse would be tired, the boar enraged. But her gaze kept slipping off his.

Father had died on the hunt—slain by the Boar. Now Hamr would die. Timov felt the certainty of it. This was not a time of boldness but of common sense. Hamr had defied common sense too long. His time was up.

Grimly, Timov watched as Hamr's shadow drifted back and forth through the field. Every now and then, one of Timov's friends, the sons of men who had returned to camp with prey, whistled, wanting to catch the boy’s attention and wag proudly.

Timov ignored them, and wondered what they would think when they saw him smiling at Hamr's funeral.

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The boar crashed through the canes and burst into the field of marshgrass. Hunters who had gathered there—young men recruited by the Bride-Father's friends to help the newcomer—had been chatting wearily about the deer and many hares the other hunters had caught. When the bristling, humpbacked swine, big as three men, charged toward them, they scattered in a panic. Shouting confused orders at each other, they quickly regrouped and lowered their spears to block the giant boar's escape.

Hamr charged out of the canebrake in time to see the boar turn sharply before the jabbing spears and bolt for a gap that the clustered men had left at their flank. He kicked Blind Side to a dash, and the sightless horse lurched forward a few quick strides, enough to reach spear-range. Hamr threw his spear underhand, and it struck the boar's back but lacked the force to pierce vitally.

Hurt and infuriated, the boar turned, tried to shake the spear loose, then heaved itself toward the horse that had dared to hurt it. Hamr stiffened with alarm, and Blind Side, feeling his fear and hearing the enraged squealing, skittered nervously. By scent and sound, he measured the boar's lunging attack and reared as its tusks thrust for his front legs.

Hamr, unprepared for the boar's assault, lost his grip on Blind Side and went flying. The sedge grass softened his fall, and he sat up in time to see the boar bearing down on him, head lowered, tusks glowing with dawnlight. His provision sack had fallen beside him, and he clutched it desperately, a useless gesture yet unable to stop himself. Above the grass, he sighted the heads of the hunters and their spears, too far away to help. Grunting with fury—the impaled spear waving from its back—the boar flashed toward him. The wisp of a scream squeaked in Hamr's throat.

Blind Side trotted into view, reared up, thrashing the air with his front legs, and came down on the angry noise in the grass, striking the boar's skull with his hooves. The beast collapsed with a squeal, and lay unmoving. Blind Side backed away and ambled off as the hunters rushed toward him. Their spears stabbed at the boar, though it was already dead.

Breath gushed into Hamr's lungs, and he got to his feet. He waved the hunters off, looking down at the still boar and the socket of blood above its eye, where Blind Side's hoof had crushed its skull. Its legs stuck straight out from its thick black bulk. Its dark lips revealed sharp teeth set in a permanent snarl, and its tusks gleamed. Its rage still rang in Hamr's ears.

He thumped it hard, and it lay still. The men had begun to apologize for not killing the creature as it came out of the cane-brake. Hamr silenced them with a hard stare. "Truss it," he told them, and pulled his spear from its back.

Blind Side had drifted to the firmer land above the sedge. Hamr called to him, and he reluctantly stepped back onto the softer ground and came, head waving side to side, smelling for more danger. Hamr rewarded him with several sweet-roots from his sack and whispered his gratitude in the horse's ear.

A soft rain fell as Hamr dragged the trussed boar through the tall grass and over the hummocks toward the Blue Shell's summer camp above the sea cliffs. Hamr had tied the rope about his waist.

The dead weight of the beast pulled hard behind him as he clung to Blind Side. In this dead weight, he recognized his own death. He had died back there in the sedge. His soul had squeaked in his throat on its way out. But the Beastmaker had forced his soul back into him and had saved him from the boar by the power of the Horse.

The other hunters had seen it. He heard them muttering among themselves as they walked behind. Blind Side of Life embodied Hamr's soul-animal. They existed as one life in two forms. The Beastmaker had joined their souls, fused them together in the space where Hamr would have died, and made them one.

At the Blue Shell camp, the hunters spoke excitedly to the others about what they had seen. The whole tribe gathered to view the boar. Even the fisherfolk climbed up the cliff-trails from their summer beach camp to behold the fierce creature Hamr had killed with his horse. Such a huge boar would provide meat for each of the families.

The tusks, of course, belonged to Hamr. He promptly gave them to his wife. That caused a stir among the Panther men who had expected him to honor their cult with the trophy. Hamr preferred to secure his marriage than his rightful place in the Panther cult. During their moon together in the fern holt, he and Aradia had often quarreled. The time he had spent with his horse had continually annoyed her.

He had tried to explain that Blind Side of Life had never been separated from him since the fateful day that he had ridden the wildness out of the animal. He wanted her to think of him and the animal as one—a thought that repelled Aradia. She sharply informed him that she had married Hamr and not his horse.

Time and again she made her displeasure apparent by refusing to ride with him. When he had gone ahead and ridden without her, she wandered off alone, and once he spent the better part of a day looking for her, only to find her in a tree near their bower, weeping disconsolately. On their return from the fern holt, Aradia had walked and, not wanting to enrage her, Hamr had walked too, leading Blind Side with a rope around his neck.

Now that the entire tribe had acknowledged the soul-bond of Hamr and his steed, Aradia could no longer object to the attention her husband lavished on his horse. The tusks mollified her somewhat, for with them came a great deal of prestige within the tribe, especially among the Mothers.

The tusks, shaped like the crescents of the New and Old Moons, honored the Mothers, who proudly installed them behind the Throne of the Elder. The blessings of the Great Mother redounded to Aradia. Surely, now her childbearing would be easier and she would birth great souls.

After that, Aradia acted more tolerant of Hamr's doting care of Blind Side of Life. She even took time to help prepare the horse's daily feed, sifting through the sheaves of wild barley and oats for strands of milkweed and thorn-grass. When Hamr went riding, she contented herself to see him go, and she attended to her duties as a Young Mother, for the first signs of pregnancy had already appeared in her.

Her younger sister, Duru, eager to learn the Mother mysteries, shadowed her everywhere. Except when her new brother, Hamr, let her ride with him. Unlike Aradia, she enjoyed riding, feeling the muscular strength under her, smelling the good animal heat. She was always the first to greet Hamr each day when he returned from his time with the men, and he always pleased her by taking her on a slow circuit about the camp.

Timov watched with feigned indifference from behind the hut, where he and the slave Biklo gathered kindling for the night-fire. Timov, amazed that Hamr had not died hunting the boar, began to believe that the hunt consisted of more than common sense. He began resenting the time that Hamr spent with Duru. A girl, she belonged with the Mothers.

Timov, however, needed a sponsor to initiate him among the Panther men. Hamr could not vouch for him until he himself had been initiated, which would not happen until Hamr had crafted the pelt of the boar he had killed into a ceremony-vest. And the more time he spent amusing Duru, the less time for him to work on the vest, which he alone could do.

Hamr understood Timov’s eagerness to leave the women and join the men, yet his time with Duru was important for him. Soon after his father had drowned, his mother had chosen another man among the Tortoise men. He had insisted young Hamr leave his mother's clan and join the men in the dugouts.

Hamr had never liked working together closely to spear and net fish, gossiping and joking the whole time and no one at all interested in his dreams. He had much preferred solitude, lifting rocks for hours on end, trying to pack their strength into his muscles, running all day between dunes and sea, fitting the wind itself to his breath.

If he had to work, he waded through tidepools and shallows collecting mussels and seaweed with the women. Their songs left him to ponder the thoughts Spretnak had taught him. He contemplated how he would become a great man.

His time with Duru reminded him of those earlier days, when the women had given him the chance to think about the Beastmaker and the ways of power. When he rode with her, he felt free of the Panther men's judgments and Timov's expectations.

Every night, no matter how fatigued from accompanying the men on the hunt, Hamr worked on the boar hide. He chewed the margins, where the bristles had been plucked, gnawing the boar-skin to leather. He pierced the softened hide with a bone-awl to stitch feathers and shells to the edge with plant fiber.

Timov helped him in the only way he could, by talking to help pass the time. He recounted how many birds-of-prey he had killed at winter's end and boastfully displayed the feathers. And he observed how, without the birds to eat them, mice and hares abounded, offering many kills for his slingshot. He had achieved skill with the sling, and he shared the meat and related the tales of his rabbit hunts with his friends.

Hamr smiled to himself as he chewed the leather and stitched the white owl's feathers to the boar-skin's edge. Last season, Timov had despised him for a pompous fool. The whole tribe had thought him intimidating. And now he had turned all that around. He crafted his ceremony-vest, his wife proudly growing her first child for him—and Gobniu, the chief, thanked the ancestors that Hamr had married out of the clan. The boys who had feared him and mocked him behind his back now avidly pranced for his attention. Everything had changed for the better in his life. Just as Spretnak had promised, the wheel had turned.

Most gratifying of all, he had turned the wheel of his life himself, by his own dream and his own bravery.

And all this bounty he now enjoyed—sitting by a Panther cult fire, Panther women feeling safe to have him near, Panther men proud to share their strength and wiles with him—all this he enjoyed because his life had once had a hole in it, an emptiness, a lack of greatness into which he could fit an axle that had let him turn his life around.

That axle, Blind Side of Life, had filled his emptiness, had made him whole.

Later, when his jaws and fingers ached from his work on the boar-skin, when the fire dimmed and the old woman fire-watcher wakened to attend the embers through the night, he got up, as he always did, and went out to where Blind Side of Life browsed, tethered to a stake.

Together, in the underworld of darkness beneath the floating river of stars, they comforted each other: Hamr with sweet-roots and a quiet song for the horse, and Blind Side with sleek, shouldering power that the Beastmaker had lifted up from the earth for the man.

The Doom of the Blue Shell

Hamr and Spretnak sat on the slipface of a dune. They gazed into the moonless night, a black snake glittering over the candescent breakers. For a long while, they said nothing and simply shared the pleasure of watching Blind Side of Life facing into the salt wind and blowing sighs from the verge of sleep.

Presently, the old man broke the susurrant silence: "You know this will be the last time I can talk to you about the wheel. The coming moon will see the longest day. And now that you’ve finished your ceremony-vest, the Panther men will make you one of their own."

Hamr agreed with a nod, not sure what to say.

"Your ties to the Tortoise clan end. If they catch us talking about our mysteries, they will think you are divulging their secrets. Men get violent when they think their secrets are betrayed. We part here." Spretnak shook his head remorsefully, muttered, "Secrets. What else makes us important? We're such wretched creatures." His chest rattled with a deep laugh that constricted to a cough. "Only the animals have real secrets, eh?" He nodded toward where Blind Side had turned his back to the wind and drowsed. "How's your animal?"

"He's fine. Caught a burr in his left hind hoof four days ago and hobbled for a day after that. The Mothers made up a nettle mudpack that healed it almost overnight. He's himself again."

"And Aradia? Treating her as well as your horse, are you?"

Hamr's smile flashed in the dark. "Since the boar, she considers Blind Side of Life one of the clan."

"The Panther men are unhappy you gave the tusks to the Mothers. That's why they make you chew leather. You don't need a ceremony-vest. They've initiated boys of fifteen summers with no vest, just a two-point antler. And you've killed Boar."

"I had to give the tusks to Aradia. Blind Side had come between us."

"My gimp leg spared me the blessings of a wife. From younger days, I remember how cunningly they use our need to fulfill their own. Surely, the Mother is Great."

Laughter swept the two men, and Spretnak curled up on himself in a fit of hacking coughs.

"You're not well." Hamr steadied the old man with an arm about his shoulders.

Spretnak answered through a gasp, "Forty-three winters." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I've lived long enough to see you become a Great Man. I'm ready to die."

"A muscle chill. The Mothers will heal you."

"There's no healing at my age, Hamr. Be great while you're young. There's no greatness in growing old."

"Let's go to the fire and warm up."

"You're a Panther man now. You can't sit by a Tortoise fire."

"I'll take you there. You need to warm up."

"No." He laid a firm hand on Hamr's shoulder, felt the muscled strength there and nodded to himself with pride. "There's something more of the wheel I must tell you."

"You can tell me later. First let's warm you up."

"There may not be another chance. If I've done well by you, then listen to me now." He paused, searching for the strength to speak, then began with the cadence of an oft-told tale, "At night, in the spring of every fifth summer, the tortoise climbs out of the sea to lay her eggs..."

Hamr laid the old man back against the dune. The younger man took off his antelope-hide tunic and draped it over Spretnak. Then he lay down beside him and listened to the story he had heard many times before, of the wheel of life, of turning seasons and returning stars, and animals journeying endlessly around the wheel of their migrations.

While Spretnak recounted the mysteries of the wheel, Hamr explored the old man's face. Clouds hooded the stars and the wind uncovered them again, drifting starlight and darkness across the familiar features and highlighting characteristics Hamr had never noticed in brash daylight.

The old man's squared-off temple bone and the mating of nose bridge to the overhang of brow looked suddenly very similar to what he had seen of his own face in rain-pools and the black reflections of volcanic glass. Soundless joy swelled in him at the thought that this man could be his father.

He dismissed the thought with a frowning flinch and gazed up at the spectral sky. He saw only his wish. The man had been as a father to him, not only sponsoring him in the clan and transmitting the mysteries, also wanting more for him than the drudgery of the dugouts and the fishing nets.

Spretnak had remembered the Grandfathers, who had ridden horses. They had reared them from foals captured from the herd. That was no longer possible, not since the Eyes of the Bear had settled close to the Blue Shell. The Eyes of the Bear ate horses. They believed the Blue Shell taking foals stole the food of their children. It had been Spretnak's vision to tame a grown horse.

Hamr returned his attention to the old man and noticed he shivered as he spoke: "Men, too, turn with the wheel, just like and yet different from women, animals, and stars. Women turn from blood to blood to make their children. Animals turn from north to south to make the herds and flocks. And the stars turn through the sky to make the seasons. Men turn, too, though what turns us is invisible. Not blood, not direction or season. The invisible power that turns us is destiny. And because it is invisible, most men ignore destiny, are not even aware they turn with destiny. It turns them old—otherwise it does nothing for them."

"You're shivering, old guy. Come on, let's go get warm." Hamr pulled Spretnak till he sat upright, then wrapped the antelope-skin full about him.

"Listen, Hamr—destiny is never chosen. It can only be recognized, then accepted. You must see that your destiny is to serve the Beastmaker."

"I understand, old man. Let's go."

"Wait." Spretnak put his hands to the sides of Hamr's thick neck. "You must be equal to the silence to meet Him. We all meet Him in death. To meet Him in this life, you must be equal to the silence from which we have come and to which we go. This is the final mystery I have called you here to tell you. Whoever speaks of the Beastmaker speaks lies. Only silence carries His power. Tell no one what He reveals to you. Destiny is invisible. It can never be spoken. It can only be lived." Spretnak coughed violently, shuddered with his eyes squeezed closed. "Now take me to the fire. The damp is in my bones."

Hamr lifted Spretnak to his feet. What the old man had just told him paralleled what Aradia had said the first night of their marriage, when he had tried to share his vision of the Beastmaker.

This insistence on silence troubled Hamr.

He wanted to talk about how the bloodnoise in his ears sometimes spoke to him, how the busy darkness behind his closed lids sometimes made scenery, lavish landscapes of red earth and fat leaves and an oily sky of swirling rainbows—and sometimes out of that mischief behind his lids, he perceived the Beastmaker with His wide antlers and moon-eyes filled with blood and His black elk shanks and hooves holding erect a manbody, a manface, packed with muscle, yet bright, carefree, a deity with a laugh in his heart.

The edict of silence left Hamr with a weight of longing, a frustrated need to boast and to share both the wonder and the fear of his vision. At the edge of the Tortoise camp, where the dogs barked at them, they embraced, and Hamr defeated the urge to ask Spretnak to explain the vision of the Beastmaker.

"You'll be the best of the Panther men," Spretnak said, "so long as you live what you dream."

The old man turned, shuffled toward the wincing campfires, and left Hamr alone in the darkness.

)|(

Though Hamr yearned to boast, he had little time for that. His childhood days had ended when he captured Blind Side of Life. Now he labored too busily for his rightful place in the tribe to make fireside chat about his dreams. Besides hunting with the Panther men, tending his horse, and spending time with his wife and her family, a battle plan needed his attention.

Each year, at the height of the spring mussel-harvest, the Eyes of the Bear raided the Blue Shell, marching down from the cedar forest to meet the Blue Shell men among the dunes. Atop a dune selected for its majesty, the Blue Shell chief left a cache of mussels, pelts, and shells. If the Eyes of the Bear felt satisfied with the offering, they took it and left. If not, they attacked the Blue Shell men on the beach, striving to reach the Tortoise camp where they burned the huts and stole women and children. On the way back to the cedar forest, they did the same to the Panther camp in the fields above the sea cliff.

Seven summers had passed since the Eyes of the Bear had spurned the offering. Then, Hamr's mother and sisters had been among those carried off. Hamr had not yet been made a man, and he had sworn he would never allow the Blue Shell to suffer so grievously again.

At the council held on the first evening of the new moon, the night before the Eyes of the Bear would come down from their forest camp, Gobniu reviewed the offering. The mussel trove glistened bountifully, kept alive in nets left in the tidepools. The seal-fur bundles stacked smaller, since the seals had beached farther north than usual this past winter. Feather-sprays from birds-of-prey that had been taken in place of the seals seemed less impressive than the usual pelt-bundles.

"We must prepare to fight," Gobniu announced.

Murmurs of agreement seethed from the circles of men surrounding the council fire. Not far from the Tortoise camp yet hidden by dunes, the men deliberated where the women could not hear them.

The initiated men composed three circles, the inner one Panther, the outer two Tortoise. On the flanks of the surrounding dunes, the uninitiated men sat, Hamr among them.

Not long ago, he had been a part of the Tortoise circles, and he felt odd, excluded from this important council. He sat farthest from the others, where he could be near his horse, whom he had tethered to driftwood.

Patiently, Hamr listened to the men plan their defense while inwardly he squirmed. When he closed his eyes, he met the luminous face of the Beastmaker. A tender smile opened beneath the terrible moons of his eyes. Little skulls hung around his neck, human skulls clicking against each other with a sound like crickets chirping.

He understood: The dead belonged to the Beastmaker. He opened his eyes and observed the heads of the men bobbing as they schemed to defend themselves. No defense could save them. All their fury went nowhere. And their fear changed nothing. Only a man's destiny opened true, and it could not be seen, touched, or talked about, only lived.

He noticed that among the men, near where once he had sat as an initiated Tortoise man, Spretnak gazed directly at him. Huddled in a woolly hide, pallid face drawn and intent, he nodded once and looked away.

Hamr took the old man's cue and stood up. He spoke loudly enough to be heard above the mutterings in the fire-circle: "There is no defense."

The men fell silent, noted who spoke, then muttered their protests. Gobniu quieted them, addressed Hamr: "Hamr, you are not free to speak. You are here only to witness. Be silent, listen, and learn."

"I will say only this," Hamr spoke again, louder than before. "There is no defense. You know the Eyes of the Bear will attack tomorrow. I say, there is no defense. We must attack them first."

Deploring groans and shouts erupted from the gathering. Gobniu again quieted the men, and stood for a silent moment regarding the defiant youth. "You speak from outside the circle. You speak without experience. Be silent or be removed."

"Not long ago, I sat in the circle. My advice proved worthy then."

Gobniu scowled at him. "Sit, Tortoise man! I will drag you from here myself if you say one more word."

Hamr sat.

A few mocking hoots sounded from the circle, with some snickers from the uninitiated men.

The deliberations continued. Hamr took counsel with himself. He knew destiny moved him to attack the Eyes of the Bear. He planned the best way to do that, mentally preparing himself to die a lone warrior.

The next day, the men arranged the offering atop the most noble of the dunes. Hamr groomed Blind Side of Life.

Timov, who had sat beside him at the council gathering and had laughed into his hand when Gobniu rebuked him, went with Biklo to fill the water-gourds, so as to avoid Hamr. After the gathering, Timov's friends, who had been silent about Hamr since he had become a horseman, jeered: "Are you going to lead the attack with Hamr?" Now he wanted to help somehow, only he feared Hamr would guffaw at him.

From the rill where they scooped water, Timov and Biklo watched the Eyes of the Bear emerge from the shadows of the cedar forest. Forty men moved casually down the slopes and across the migratory gullies toward the beach. They carried spears and axes.

Timov ran far ahead of the aged and half-blind Biklo, shouting to warn the others.

The sentinels on the clifftop had already seen them. Abalone shells flashed the warning to where Gobniu stood with the elders before the offering.

The chief reviewed the stack of pelts and feather-displays and the seaweed-swathed baskets of mussels, then turned and made certain the men he had positioned among the dunes stayed out of sight. A spearhead appeared here and there, and he shouted orders for those men to lower their weapons until the attack began.

As the Eyes of the Bear approached the beach, they began to prance truculently. They jeered at the Blue Shell's uninitiated men, who had gathered on the cliff-trails to watch.

Gobniu and the elders had retreated from the offering dune and stood before the tribe's dugouts, where their weapons waited. None of the Forest tribe directly mocked Gobniu, though as they mounted the dune to claim their prize, they stared with scorn at the chief and his men.

At the crest of the dune, the Forest men picked over the offering. Holding up the few seal-pelts, they kicked the rabbit hides and feather bundles into the sand. Forest men below the dune brandished their weapons with disdainful shouts.

The Blue Shell elders drew together behind Gobniu. "Out to sea with you," the chief ordered. Several of the men responded instantly, and shoved their dugouts into the waves. Those who remained took their fishing spears from their dugouts and lined up firmly at the chief's side. He nodded his approval, prepared to give the signal that would bring forth the men he had hidden among the dunes.

The sight of the fleeing elders and the appearance of fishing spears incensed the Eyes of the Bear. Angry yells from atop the dune began the attack. Screaming battle cries, the Forest men charged down the dune and across the beach toward the dugouts.

Gobniu gave his signal and snatched his fishing spear and battle ax from behind his dugout. The Eyes of the Bear did not falter when the sand hills around them bristled with spears. They had expected this, for this was what had happened seven springs earlier.

The Blue Shell had won renown as great fisherfolk, but the Eyes of the Bear survived as hunters, accustomed to coordinating attacks to take down large prey. While the fisherfolk attacked haphazardly, from every direction, with varying courage and ferocity, the hunters had bunched into battle groups, backs to one another, moving as one.

The fiercest of the Blue Shell engaged the enemy first. They knocked spears with the invaders and hacked with their axes. While each of these vehement warriors engaged one hunter, the other Forest men at his side closed in. They clubbed and speared the courageous Blue Shell, while his companions yelled with dismay from a distance.

Gobniu and the fighting elders, with their dugouts between them and the invaders, shouted for their laggard spearmen to press harder. Some responded, and the Eyes of the Bear cut them down. Most bawled with anger and fear, threw their spears futilely, and backed away.

Timov and the other uninitiated men hurled rocks from the sea cliff, too far to hit anyone. Though the battle had raged for only moments, six Blue Shell lay dead and not one Forest man sustained injury. The rout nearly complete, only Gobniu and the handful of courageous elders stood between the Eyes of the Bear and the shore camp.

Timov looked for Hamr to share his grief: Mother, Aradia, and Duru hid in the field camp above the cliffs, the second objective of the victorious Forest men. Those avid hunters would track them easily. He scanned the cliff-trails and could find no sign of Hamr. The other boys on the cliff with him had clearly not seen him, either. Their faces, wrought with desperation, fixed on the slaughter below, fearfully anticipating the plunder to come.

Hamr had not waited for the attack. He knew the certainty of it. As soon as the Forest men reached the shore, he had led Blind Side of Life away from the steep cliff-trails and down the long path in the cleft of the rock wall, reaching the dunes as the fighting began.

He had seen all this before, as a boy. He had stood, like Timov, with the other boys on the cliff-trails and had watched the slaughter and the plunder. The fisherfolk and the handful of Panther men had behaved then as now: The brave died swiftly, the others screamed, danced, and wept. Soon, the chief and his elders would flee in their dugouts, and the Eyes of the Bear would take women and young children. The huts would burn, and the invaders would make their way laughing up the trails to the Panther camp.

Before that happened, the Eyes of the Bear would have to kill him. Hamr had no doubt he would die now. Forty hunters, men skilled at slaying and eating horses, would make quick work of him and his blind steed. Even so, he too well remembered what he had seen seven springs ago: He knew the leaders by the bearclaws they wore at their shoulders—and he determined to kill at least one of them before his destiny played out.

As Hamr had foreseen, Gobniu, recognizing defeat, heaved his spear uselessly against his attackers and rushed with his dugout into the waves. No one pursued him except his own elders. The few who remained behind jigged briefly, then fell, quickly slain. With a triumphant howl, the Eyes of the Bear lifted their red spears to the sky and marched boisterously down the beach to claim their prizes. From the camp ahead came the shrill wails of the women.

Hamr, mounted on Blind Side of Life, had loaded his slingshot and hoisted his fishing spear. He would not see the women taken. He would return first to the Beastmaker. Goading his steed with his heels, though his insides churned with fear, he went forward to complete his destiny.

The carousing Forest men pulled up short at the sight: a horse mounted by a man! Some stood confused before this bestial fusion of man and horse. Most reeled, simply awed. Well they knew the wildness of Horse, and assumed a great spirit power possessed this man who rode to battle.

The leaders felt only anger that anyone—or anything—would dare block the way to the prizes they had won with blood.

Blind Side had often ridden on this shore, and he recognized the firm sand and the lapping whisper of low tide. The driftwood would lie tangled higher on the beach, and the way ahead opened clear. When Hamr signaled him to go forward, the horse did not hesitate. He liked to run when sure not to trip.

The Eyes of the Bear, astounded and befuddled, scattered before him. Only the leaders stood fast, spears raised, shouting for the others to come back.

Hamr pointed his charge directly at the men with the bear-claws at their shoulders. He slowed Blind Side when within slingshot range, then let fly his rock. The missile arced true, and struck one of the bearded men in his eye, felling him. The others cried out, aghast.

Eager to meet his death—and be done with the fear twisting in him—Hamr urged Blind Side forward again, pressing him to run. The horse lurched forward. Then, hearing the alarmed cries of the Eyes of the Bear, faltered and stopped. Two spears slashed through the space where he would have been. Hamr snatched one of them from where it stood straight up in the sand and trotted the reluctant Blind Side toward his enemy.

The Forest men who had thrown their spears attacked, battle axes whirling over their heads, screaming doom at the man-horse. Hamr returned their cry, lying flat against Blind Side's neck, both spears thrust forward, kicking hard at the ribs of his animal, expecting him to rear at any instant.

Alarmed by Hamr's yelling and kicking, Blind Side abruptly leaped forward. The unexpected rush caught the attackers head on, and impaled one of them on a spear that snapped in half with the impact.

The collision startled Blind Side. He reared, sending the second attacker staggering backward. Hamr clung to his steed with his one free hand and heaved his spear at the easy target below. The spear pierced the hunter's chest and dropped him thrashing into the sand.

Amazed, Hamr hugged Blind Side's neck, and the horse sidestepped nervously until he felt the sea sloshing at his legs.

The Eyes of the Bear, anguished at the swift deaths of their leaders, fled toward the dunes. Now the Blue Shell pursued. Tortoise men speared two more of the Forest men before the others disappeared into the ravines that led back toward the cedars.

Hamr watched, suddenly very far away. He sat tall on his horse and gazed out on the world as though he had never seen it before.

The joy in his people's faces and their jubilant cries arrived new. Dunes dazzled. The sea's dark body gleamed. Grasses bowed shyly beside the bodies of the men who would have killed him—and, experiencing all this, he felt he understood now the ancient stories of men returning from the dead.

With his legs, he hugged Blind Side, until he felt again the immediate strength of his life. All fear had passed and left him pure, possessed of a divine secret. Joy opened with holy simplicity. He lived. He lived, because he knew fear—and had set fear aside for destiny.

The Blue Shell who had chased off the enemy returned jubilantly to the beach. The boys from the cliff-trails arrived too. Their laughter died off at the sight of their own dead.

Gobniu and his elders, humiliated to have fled before the fight was done, wore baleful expressions.

Hamr walked Blind Side to the dugouts and dismounted. Gobniu surveyed the dead, and refused to meet his stare. But the others gazed admiringly at him. Today his legend had become secure. The clan would retell this day for generations. Not yet initiated among the Panther men, he stood apart, already a Great Man.

Timov recognized the pride flushing Hamr, and expected to hear his customary boast. When Hamr spoke, he merely named those who had died. The initiated men shouldered around, touching him, taking some of his power, and the uninitiated men grinned and gaped at him, wanting to look into his eyes and gain his favor. When the women came, they threw onto him and Blind Side red seaweed, emblem of mother’s blood, and sang his name loudly.

Aradia knelt before him to the cheers of the women and the gasps of the men. Women knelt only before the chief, and then only on the most sacred of the men's ritual nights.

Hamr knelt beside her, and the men laughed with relief.

The tribe's reprieve from defeat had been so unexpected and unprecedented that at first no one knew what to do. One of the elders called for the heads of the enemy to propitiate their fallen comrades.

The Blue Shell men hurried to claim the heads of the fallen Forest hunters. This rite the women could not witness. “Blood calls to blood!” a crone shouted, reminding all that menstrual blood invited possession by enemy blood.

Those mothers, wives, and daughters who had lost men in the battle gathered around Hamr and Blind Side, expecting his escort back to the camp to the joyful singing of the others. This prerogative belonged to the chief.

Hamr looked to Gobniu.

The chief met his proud stare unsteadily, and waved him off. "Our dead must be honored. Take the women away." Gobniu lowered his gaze in shamed concession to Hamr's greatness. The chief belonged to the living and never tended the dead. Today, however, the chief had gone to sea, believing the battle lost. He had abandoned the women. They would not forgive him that. He had no choice now but to tend the dead like a common man, or return to the camp and be mocked and rebuked by the women.

As the women marched off with Hamr and his horse, their elated trills rang off the sea cliffs. Gobniu watched after them.

Timov and the others observed his face darkening. When he turned toward them, they hastened to busy themselves with the dead.

"You—" Gobniu's stern voice cracked the air over Timov. "You are of the Great Man's family. You wash our dead. That will give them some honor."

Timov hurried to obey, though fear of the dead rippled through him. The bodies had been stripped, wounds laid bare. Timov's breath tightened at sight of the punctured flesh clotted with gore, and the skulls bashed in, bone-chips and brains frothy with blood.

Gobniu signed for the other men to move aside and left Timov alone to cleanse the wounds and pack them with seaweed.

Even in his glory, Hamr bestowed trouble on Timov. As a braggart fool whom his sister loved, he had made Timov the butt of endless mockery. Then as a horseman, he had favored Duru as much as himself, and retarded his initiation into manhood. And now this, a job that usually all men but the chief shared, spreading the possibility of spirit attack among them. Surely, blood spirits would possess him now, and he whimpered.

Gobniu barked at him to take more care, to accord due respect to each of the corpses.

Hurriedly, the other men gathered driftwood to build death rafts, hoping to avert the chief's wrath. Gobniu ignored them. Hamr he hated and Timov provided as close a target as he could get to Hamr—for now.

)|(

A scream, shrill with evil, pierced the night.

A child had died. The ululating wail of the Mothers announced this tragedy to the tribe. By the wail's length and tone, everyone knew a daughter of the Panther cult failed to thrive. The wail repeated, slicing the night with horror, until the elder women, the guardians of the Great Mother's mysteries, roused from sleep and replied.

Two of the older women of the Tortoise clan set out upon the steep, nightbound trails. Their gourd lanterns winked like fireflies on the cliff ledges a long time before they reached the high camp. Before dawn, their spark-lights flickered back down the trails, bearing news of what they had witnessed to the other Mothers.

The dead girl had fevered the day that the Eyes of the Bear attacked, and she had died two nights later. None of the Panther Mothers' herb infusions or root broths had quelled the fire in her frail body. Hardened lumps had appeared under arms and jaw that did not respond to the leafmash plasters strapped to her.

By the morning after her death, two more children and three adults among the Panther clan had also fallen ill—Duru and Biklo among them.

Timov crouched over the old slave, where he lay under an acacia bush near the kindling pile. He had thought he would still be able to do his chores during his illness. Illness had visited him before and he had worked. Not this time.

His body felt like a winter tree, empty of ambition, rattling in a wind reaching down from the cold heavens.

Timov tried to soothe him with a twig-fire and a wad of gum from the poplar, to dull the pain in his joints. The fire's warmth gave to Biklo no more strength than moonlight, and his jaw ached too sharply to chew the medicinal gum.

When Biklo struggled to rise, to gather the day's kindling and string the water-gourds, Timov laid him back down. The boy sorted the firewood in sight of the slave, so he could correct Timov's blunders, keeping the sweet wood for braising, slow-burning hardwoods for the night fires, various barks with differing scents separated to grace the unique stations of the day.

With palsied fingers, Biklo showed Timov the correct way to string the water-gourds, and Timov's eyes clouded with tears at the slave's eagerness still to serve. While Timov hauled water from the rill, Biklo stopped resisting the snow-wind churning in him. He convulsed violently, shaking new budded leaves from the acacia. When Timov returned, Biklo had died.

None of the women wailed for the slave. Only Timov wept, remembering how often he had relied on the old man's spirited willingness. He wanted to go to the cliff-edge and shout the man's death to the tribe. But Duru lay dying. She needed the water he had hauled.

Had the spirits of the war dead, whom he alone had washed, come back to kill those he loved? Then why not kill him? And why had a girl died whom he did not know that well? Clearly, something evil had come upon them.

In the summer, Timov slept outdoors with the men. When the old women wanted him to pleasure them, they made a place for him in the bushes. He never entered the thatched huts in which the women dwelled during the warm months. Now the women needed him to fulfill Biklo's chores, and one of those required carrying water into the huts.

Soon as he entered the hut where Duru lay, he smelled death, like scorched feathers. He put the water-gourd down, wanting to back out right away. The sight of his sister fixed him. She gleamed like a spring toad, naked body glossed with sweat, shivering though the hut sweltered from a spitting fire.

Mother handed him a wad of poplar bark, and he noticed, with a flicker of alarm, that her hands shivered. With her chin, she pointed to the stone mortar beside the fire. For a moment, Timov could not move. The squalid heat, the child's slick thrashing, the illness already in Mother—

Cyndell, Duru's nurse and Mother's friend, stopped swabbing the sweat from the girl's wrung hair. "Biklo is dead," she said, softly. "We need your help."

The quiet words penetrated him as sharply as the death wail, and he jolted forward and knelt before the mortar. Mechanically, efficiently, Timov arranged the fibrous bark in the mortar, picked up the pestle and mashed the poplar with the strength of his grief.

The amber color of nightfall glowed in the west when the next death wail echoed from the cliffs. Two Panther men had died.

Immediately, the Pantherfolk built a bonfire on the edge of the sea cliff and sacrificed all the pelts, feathers, and shells retrieved from the Eyes of the Bear. Everyone believed that the Eyes of the Bear had cursed them.

The men heaved Biklo's body into the flames, thinking he would explain the offering in the afterworld if he arrived with it. As the fire ate him, he twisted, as he had in dying, and sat up, arms extended, embracing what no one could see.

Before dawn, a Panther woman died, convulsing and vomiting blood. Mother, who had tended Duru without sleep since she fevered the previous day, succumbed to the illness herself.

Soon thereafter, several of the Tortoise clan fevered, among them Gobniu's two wives and his eldest boy-child. For them, the drums throbbed, and, hour by hour, everyone in the tribe knew what they endured.

Bonfires blazed on the beach that night, and the heads of the slain Forest men burned along with all the seal-fur and mussels that the Blue Shell possessed.

Hamr and Aradia built a lean-to behind Mother's hut and helped Timov gather water and kindling, mash the bark and steep the brews. When more of the Mothers fevered, Aradia took over the cooking and Timov and Hamr foraged. Happily, mice and hares abounded and provided meat for the cooking pot.

Cyndell tended both Mother and Duru, and when she nodded with exhaustion, Aradia took her place. The drum throbs from the Tortoise camp matched the pulse of the sick, and by that they knew that the same evil spirits attacked both camps.

More sacrifices had to be made. Hamr burned his boar-skin vest, Timov his feather-cape.

The sacrifices proved futile. Mother died in the night, delirious, not recognizing her children. Aradia wept and worked harder to make Duru drink the bitter root broths.

Timov sat on his heels in Mother's hut, sobbing in big gasps like someone who had run a long way, staring numb-eyed at Mother's torqued body.

The death wail for Mother blended with echoes of other death wails. Many of both clans had fevered and curled up by the fires, shivering as if winter blew through their bodies. Spretnak lay among them and died the first night of his fever.

That same night, the drum throbbing stopped. Gobniu's eldest son had died.

Hamr returned to the Tortoise camp for the burial of his sponsor. Six other bodies waited on the beach to be carried to the sea caves for burial. Hamr draped them two at a time on the back of Blind Side of Life and carried them to the cliffs.

The Tortoise Man himself, the tribe's soul-catcher, lay among those dead, leaving no one to sing sacred songs over the corpses and lure their souls out of their corrupting bodies.

The Tortoise Man's two disciples did their best. Though they had learned all the words, they lacked the power of their teacher. The people knew, numerous ghosts would wander the beaches as souls struggled to free themselves from decaying bodies.

Fire would damage the souls and impair their journey to the afterworld. Soul-catchers deemed cremation suitable only for slaves. And as none of these clan people had died in battle, they did not merit the death raft journey over the sea. The ghosts would have to be left to wander—and that meant they would lure many more to their deaths.

"This is Hamr's fault," Gobniu declared at the emergency council meeting called after the Tortoise Man's death. The council's three circles had been reduced to two by the many deaths, and quite a few among those who attended appeared ill. "He defied the Eyes of the Bear. He has brought evil spirits upon us."

"Killing our enemy would never call evil upon us," one of the Tortoise Man's disciples spoke up.

Gobniu glowered at him. "I did not say that," he quickly replied, making the mental adjustments in his argument to meet this challenge. "It was how he killed our enemy that has drawn this evil to us. The Beastmaker is enraged with us for using one of His beasts to kill our enemy."

"What do you know of the Beastmaker?" Hamr shouted from his place outside the circle.

Angry voices shushed him.

Gobniu smiled grimly to himself. At last, Hamr came to grief, trapped by his own greatness. "The Beastmaker favored you with a horse for the hunt—not for battle. To the Beastmaker all tribes are one. You affronted the Beastmaker by using his animal to kill men. Are not all tribes one to the Beastmaker, Tortoise Man?" Gobniu looked to the disciple who had not challenged him, conferring the coveted title on him with a solicitous nod.

"Men are simply men to the Beastmaker," the new Tortoise Man replied.

"That is why we are being punished," Gobniu continued, conviction compressing his voice to a near whisper, "why so many of our own are dying. Don't you see? So long as this one"— he gouged a thumb toward Hamr—"is among us, our people will die."

Hamr's insides fisted. He had lost Spretnak. Aradia's mother, too. Duru lay fevered. Certainly the Beastmaker, who had inspired his bravery, would not do this to him. He closed his eyes, seeking a sign. Only darkness and anger flexed in him.

"Hamr is a Great Man," one of the Panther men said. "He saved our women and children. They would be slaves now had he not killed the Eyes of the Bear. The Beastmaker would not punish us for saving ourselves."

"Not for saving ourselves, surely," Gobniu conceded, "but for misusing his beast."

"Then what is to be done?" one of the fisherfolk asked.

Gobniu gazed steadfastly into the fire-painted faces. "Hamr and his horse must leave us," he said loudly. "Let him leave the Blue Shell at once and not return."

Fear floated through Hamr, while his face showed only defiance. "I will not return."

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Timov followed Hamr as far as the sedgegrass, where Hamr had killed the boar. The whole way he pleaded with him to stay. "Gobniu's afraid of you," Timov told him.

Hamr rode Blind Side of Life slowly, as if wanting the boy to keep up with him. Actually, the sightless horse could go no faster on this uneven terrain.

"You were born into the Tortoise clan," Timov went on. "You could be chief. That's why he's afraid of you. I saw that the day you killed the Eyes of the Bear. He made me wash the bodies. He was angry. I saw it in his face. As Biklo says, anger is never itself—it always hides in something else, hurt or fear. For Gobniu, it's fear."

"I'm a Panther man now," Hamr said, without looking at Timov. "The Panther men can't be chiefs."

"You could."

Hamr ignored the flattery. Exhausted from several sleepless days, from grief for Spretnak and dying Duru, and the shared grief of his wife for her mother, he just wanted to go back to the fern holt where he had been happy with Aradia. And sleep. When he woke, the world would be new.

"You're running away," Timov said to Hamr's back, trying a new tactic. "You're afraid of Gobniu. You're afraid you're not a Great Man and he'll prove it."

Hamr stopped his horse and cast a weary look over his shoulder. "If I stay, Gobniu will come with his men to kill me and with me, Aradia—and you. Go back to camp and help Aradia. She's alone with Cyndell in that hut trying to save Duru. Help them."

"Duru is going to die," Timov said. "Don't leave us."

Hamr turned and continued on his way. Timov walked after him. Where was the Hamr who ate spiders, who defied the omen-casters and smiled at death? He began again: "Gobniu's afraid of you. You must see that. If you stay, you can sway the men. You're still a Tortoise man. The Panther men haven't initiated you yet. The tribe will follow you. You're the first Great Man in memory."

At the sedgegrass, Timov stopped. To go any farther was dangerous. Boar, Snake, and Panther haunted these tall grasses.

"Don't go," Timov called after Hamr. "Don't leave us."

Hamr hurried Blind Side as fast as he would go through the switching grass with its wild blend of odors. From behind, the sea wind luffed, salty and aromatic. Ahead, the pungent stink of the bog carried the sweet fragrance of blossoms and grassheads.

Mouse scents flourished and hare, as usual. No dangerous beasts, not yet, anyway. Blind Side obeyed Hamr and trotted forward, testing each step just enough to keep balance, his ears and nose constantly running errands for his absent eyes. What strength had grown around that absence.

Once Timov's angry cries dimmed away in the plangent breeze from the bog, Hamr slowed. He was in no hurry. His heart felt too heavy to hurry. He tried to forget his grief by stroking the horse under him.

Hamr remembered the old emptiness in his young life, the absence of a father, the fullness of dreams, which is no fullness at all, and how that emptiness had become the hole at the center of his life, around which his destiny had turned. And that was why he rode now, as no man in memory had ridden. And to what did he ride?

Sleep offered the only answer he could understand. He rode on without thinking, watching the horse, watching the world.

At the fern holt on the far side of the bog, the bower still stood. Vines speckled with tiny white flowers shrouded most of it, and a patch of mushrooms gleamed like bones in the shade at its north side. No animal had taken up residence within. The air there smelled damp and sweet.

After tethering Blind Side to graze among clover, he lay down on the white moss mat inside the bower, and in moments he slumbered.

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Hamr woke deep in the night. The sky across the bog shone faintly red with fever fires from the Blue Shell. Bats squeaked and tumbled in the black air. Huge stars shimmered with insomnia.

The wind carried exhausted smells of the bog and a dangerous scent of cat. Rumbling rhythms from toads told him that the cat prowled far away, and he got up and lumbered to the edge of the bog to empty his bladder.

Blind Side whinnied a greeting, and Hamr went over and stroked his neck. He had hoped that a dream would have come to him while he slept, but he remembered nothing.

The faraway glow of the fires inspired fear. Of what? Not death, not his own, at least. The boar had killed him. And he had died again before the Eyes of the Bear. He knew with chilled certainty, death opened to freedom.

Yet he was afraid. Of what?

Staring at the fire-glow beyond the bog, where the tribe suffered, the outline of his fear came clear, and he stepped back from Blind Side of Life and sat down in the wet grass. He was alone. Forever.

He despaired, with Spretnak dead, no longer there to guide him to greatness, and Aradia gone with the rest of the Blue Shell, who had sent him away—forever. The truth of that frightened him.

At first, his anger had been enough to cover his fear. If the Blue Shell exiled him, so be it: He would live on the fringes of the tribe until they needed him again and called him back. Then Timov's pleading for him to return had been enough for him to believe he might return. Now, alone in the night, the truth bore down on him.

Maybe Timov had been right. He feared Gobniu and had run away. He feared how the chief had made Hamr's greatness seem evil. And so he had run away, here, to figure it out—no, more than figure—to confront the Beastmaker Himself and find out for sure if his destiny attracted evil to the Blue Shell.

He returned to the bower and sat in darkness. He would sit here until sleep or the Beastmaker came for him. He began a chant, a soft dirge for the dead and dying, those he had left behind.

As he chanted, he heard night frogs splash, a snake slide through the debris of last season, and an owl talking nearby and no one talking back.

)|(

Timov returned to find the water low and kindling gone. Without Biklo or Mother and so many ill, too many chores occupied those who could still work. Cyndell wanted water for Duru right away, and Timov grabbed the gourds and hurried out to the rill.

Scooping clear water in the narrow-necked gourds went slowly, and Timov had time to grieve. He missed Mother and Biklo and could not imagine life's routines without them. Yet mostly he felt anger that Hamr had abandoned Aradia and him. Not for a moment did he believe that Hamr had caused the killing illness. He had seen the rage in Gobniu's face, and he knew the truth of Hamr's exile. How could that oaf think otherwise?

With the filled water-gourds strung over his shoulders, Timov paused to pluck sticks of kindling from the edge of the alder grove on his way back to camp. Most of the sizable kindling knocked down by the winter winds had long ago been cleared from the beaten path to the rill, so he detoured through bramble, following a gap the deer had nibbled out in the winter, and found a jumble of tree litter. He stooped to pick up two large branches when he spied through the underbrush the figures of men.

A dozen Tortoise men clung precariously to the goat steps of a narrow cliff-trail. Pebbles snicked into the void from around their handholds and toe-grips.

Timov sensed something wicked. Tortoise men, spears and axes strapped to their backs, would not ascend a dangerous goat path unless they wanted to reach the Panther camp unseen.

He spotted the eagle-fan crest-feathers of the chief. Gobniu, royal red fishing spear at his back, huffed and wheezed as he clambered among the rocks.

Crouching backward through the bramble, Timov retreated to the rill. He dropped the kindling but clutched the water-gourds tightly as he ran along the path to the camp.

Several women chaffing oat grass and one whom he had often pleasured stopped to wail some grief toward him. He ignored them and ran on, looking for men. Most had set out on the day's hunt. Among the huts crouched boys, a few his own age, catching mice. He found only three men, all fevered. He ran up to one, who lay curled on his side in the shade of a hedge.

"The chief and his men are coming. They climb a goat trail by the rill." He had to repeat this while the man rocked out of his doze.

The afflicted hunter blinked into the sunlight. His pale, cracked lips trembled, and he gasped, "Hide ... Aradia."

Timov recognized one of the great spearmen, the best of the hunters, though now he looked aged, emaciated.

Timov stepped back, too shocked at first to comprehend the warning. When he understood, he whirled about and dashed for his hut. Not satisfied with Hamr's exile, Gobniu intended to destroy all that was Hamr's.

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Aradia and Cyndell knelt beside stretched-out Duru, who looked dead, eyes shut, unmoving. "Men are coming!" he cried.

"Hush," Cyndell frowned. "She sleeps. Give me the water."

"No—listen. Gobniu and his men are coining up the goat trails with spears, axes. They're going to kill us."

Cyndell shrieked, and Aradia rose calmly. She brushed past her brother and looked out the door.

"We must hide," Timov said.

"They are here," Aradia answered, quietly. "And we cannot hide Duru."

"They don't want Duru," Cyndell shrilled, hurrying to Aradia and clasping her shoulders from behind, pulling her back from the doorway. "They want you, and the child you bear. Hurry, we must hide."

Mention of her child shot fear through Aradia. She let Cyndell guide her to the back of the hut, where the old yellow dog slept.

"Timov—quickly!" Cyndell beckoned at the thatched wall.

Timov fell to his knees and tore at the withes and dried grass, opening a hole large enough for Aradia to crawl through.

"Hide—hide—wherever you can!" Cyndell urged as Aradia and then Timov squirmed through the torn hole.

Even as she spoke, Gobniu's broad shadow fell through the doorway, and the men behind him hurried to the back of the hut. Cyndell screamed and screamed again as the Tortoise men dragged struggling Aradia past the doorway.

Timov had ducked between the men's legs, and he sprinted among the huts until certain no one pursued. Crouching around a corner, staring past the Mothers and children, who had come to their doorways at Cyndell's screaming, he watched the men tear the rabbit skin wrap from Aradia and stand her up naked in the noon brightness.

Two men went into the hut. One pushed Cyndell into the clearing, the other dragged little Duru by her ankles and stood over her in the dust.

The Mothers began to trill, the high, piercing cry of danger, calling their men back from the hunt.

Gobniu waved, and the Tortoise men unstrapped their axes and rushed at the Mothers, who ducked into their huts and fell silent. The men returned to Aradia's hut. One flint-struck a flame to the roof sheaves.

Aradia hung limply in the arms of her captors. Timov could see her face clearly in the daylight. Frightened—lips trembling, eyes fluttering—she did not struggle or make a sound.

Cyndell clutched at Gobniu's knees, howling and sobbing, until he kicked her aside. Then she spat curses at him, flew to her feet and flung herself at him to rip at his eyes. Two men grabbed her. One smote her over the head with his ax, and she went down like a bundle of kindling, arms and legs twisted, and lay still.

Flames leaped like red mice among the trusses of grass, and a python shape of white smoke coiled straight up into the still sky.

At Gobniu's sign, the Tortoise men pulled Aradia toward the blazing hut. She struggled, kicking up dust and straining against the men, so that it took another man, lifting her from behind, to carry her to the flames.

Timov's heart burst in him, and he could not breathe. The men heaved Aradia into the burning hut and danced back from the heat. When she came flying out, one of them struck her between the eyes with the flat of his ax. She collapsed, and they flung her back through the sheet of fire that veiled the doorway.

The Mothers stood again before their huts, now trilling their slow, dirge wails. The boys had gathered in fidgety groups, their faces blank with fright. The conflagration settled a haze over the camp and with it a terrible, greasy stink of burned flesh.

The hut collapsed, the fire withered, and Gobniu and his men left, taking the most convenient cliff-trail down to the beach.

The Mothers hurried to the charred hut. They uncovered Aradia, a black, steamy bundle among the flattened ashes and wispy sparks. The Mothers picked up Duru, whose mouth gaped, gagging on a silent cry, and they carried her off. Several of the Mothers bent over Cyndell, and soon she wobbled to her feet.

Timov noticed then that the boys had turned from the fire and had gathered around him, sitting staring at him where he crouched in the dust. He met their peculiar stares, their frightened and mockingly relieved expressions—relieved the chief had chosen his sister to propitiate the baneful spirits.

With a defiant cry no louder than a whimper, Timov sprang to his feet and ran at the staring boys. They leaped aside as he flew past. Even as he kicked dust through the length of the camp and into the outlying hedges, they watched after him.

At the far end of his strength, everything flung out of him, he crashed through the blowsy grassheads and flung himself into the dirt.

The smell of the earth, the labor of rotting and rising plants, received him. He sat up, weak, his head full of bright gnats.

He put his head on his knees and waited for the churning nausea to go away. After a while, chill fluted through him, and he trembled upright. The sky unfurled frayed clouds. Larks floated overhead.

A new urgency occurred to him. He had to find Hamr. No matter the bush-snakes or panthers, tusked boars or dog packs, he had to find Hamr and tell him what had happened. Only then would his pain find its home.

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Throughout the night, Hamr searched for the Beastmaker. No sign of Him appeared. He felt abandoned, and that, more than his exile or the death of Spretnak, convinced him that some truth held to Gobniu's accusation. Hamr thought that maybe he had been wrong to ride Blind Side of Life against the Eyes of the Bear. His own sacrifice might have fulfilled his destiny but taking the lives of the Forest men with the power of the Horse had been wicked.

Adept, cunning, and fearless as he had once thought himself, he had blundered, he realized now. He had abused his divine privilege and had misused the Beastmaker's gift. Now nothing availed but to accept the truth of his error and find within himself the strength to propitiate the Beastmaker.

At dawn, Hamr confronted Blind Side of Life. During the night only one sacrifice, apart from death, came clear as meaningful. He would return to the Blue Shell and then redeem the wrongful deaths of the Forest men by delivering to the Eyes of the Bear his horse.

Probably, the Forest people would kill him as well as his horse. If that turned the evil spirits away from the Blue Shell, his death would be great and he would live on in memory as a Great Man.

Resolved to this sacrifice, Hamr stood for a long time before his horse, admiring the creature's beauty. Heavy lids over sightless eyes winked away flies, and he pressed his wet muzzle against Hamr's comforting hands.

How wrong he had been to seek greatness. This horse could have lived among its herd—and the Blue Shell could have been spared so many deaths.

Cold with anger at himself, Hamr mounted his horse and began the slow ride back to the Blue Shell. The willows and oak and hazel bushes looked happy. Leaves jangled with sunlight and burst-open blossoms sparkled with dew. Hornets left amber tracks in the air. Small birds plunged in the wind. Grass billowed like clouds. Everywhere, the world shone with life.

Hamr had no desire to die or to turn his mighty horse over to men who would club him and cut him down to meat. Yet, survival inflicted a worse fate: exile from the Beastmaker, loss of his greatness, and the doom of the Blue Shell. Far better to say farewell to the trees full of agile birds.

A groan snatched Hamr's attention, and he spotted a scrawny figure slogging among the reeds in the bog. He recognized Timov, mud-caked, dazed, arms outstretched, fingers quavering for something to hold. Quickly, he dismounted, grabbed a willow branch and leaned his weight against it so that it fell within the boy's grasp.

Timov had lost himself in the sedgegrass and had spent the night wandering through the bog. Most of the time, he had crept along the shaggy boughs of marsh trees, thinking he wended his way across the bog. When the old moon had come up after midnight, he saw that he had gone the wrong way, toward deeper wallows, where hippopotamus herds lolled like boulders.

"Have you been following me this whole time?" Hamr asked after the boy had struggled to firmer ground and lay hugging the earth.

"No, I went back." He sucked for air, not wanting to announce his news in a hurried breath. When he could speak clearly, he told Hamr all that he had witnessed.

Hamr stood impassively, his face quiet, eyes slimmed as if he had not fathomed what he had been told. Yet the veins at the side of his thick neck pulsed. Soon his eyes seemed to draw closer together as he understood the depths of his error.

The Beastmaker had not abandoned him. He had forsaken his own destiny. He had forgotten what Spretnak had told him—the very last thing the old man had told him. He remembered those words now with clarity that hurt his brain: "Whoever speaks of the Beastmaker, speaks lies. Only silence carries His power."

A look came over Hamr that Timov had never seen before. All the blood drained from the man’'s face, and the holes in the center of his eyes tightened to prick-points. The nostrils of his hawk-bent nose flared and set wide, and his mouth clamped tight as a rock-seam.

He rose stiffly, mounted Blind Side and turned the animal toward the tall grass and the Blue Shell camp.

Timov, wearied from his harrowing night in the bog, followed haltingly. Hamr pulled him up so that he rode behind.

"What will you do?" Timov asked.

Hamr said nothing. The boy persisted for a while, yammering incoherently about the Tortoise men, the fire, and his sister's soundless death. "What are you going to do? They'll kill you when they see you."

Hamr listened. The boy mimicked almost exactly the frightened voice inside him. He said nothing. What was there to say? He knew just two things now for sure. The Beastmaker had not abandoned him and death waited ahead.

When the Panther camp appeared through clumps of hazel shrubs and twisted thornapples, Hamr turned Blind Side of Life away from the huts. They rode through a stand of elm to a more remote rill than the one the people used for water. Here the boys sometimes came to catch frogs. The frogs liked it, because the rill had worn away the land from around tree roots providing many webby places for them to hide. Though not ideal for drawing water, it offered an adequate place to wash the mud from Timov's body.

While Timov cleansed himself, Hamr strode to the top of a knoll and climbed a robust pine that had shot up among the elm. From a bristly branch halfway up the tree, he could see the Panther huts—the charred heap that had been Aradia's house—and beyond the sea cliffs, the Tortoise camp. The people moved about, too small to identify, but he was sure Gobniu waited there. The dugouts sat empty on the beach. No one fished with so many ill and dead to tend and to stow in the caves.

Hamr checked the long, sloping trail that glided down to the beach through the giant cleft in the cliff. No one foraged there. Everyone remained in camp. If he rode Blind Side close to the clumps of shrubbery sprouting from the rock crevices, only the Panther people would see him until he reached the beach. Then, if he slipped the right way among the dunes, he could reach the Tortoise huts without Gobniu ever knowing he approached.

Normally, boys playing among the dunes or girls and Mothers rummaging for cliff plants would see him. Now, they busied themselves dying or comforting the dying. The evil spirits would be his allies.

Confident of his approach, Hamr came down from the pine and returned to his horse. Timov had washed away the bog mud and stood in a slash of sunlight, drying. He shivered involuntarily at the sight of Hamr. The man looked bloodless. Was he frightened, too? No tremor touched his pale face. His nostrils looked frozen in mid-gasp, jaw locked, eyes unseeing, seeing across a span of light to what would happen soon.

Hamr mounted and Timov offered his hand, but Hamr did not take it. He looked down at the boy with his grim stare, then rode off. Timov hurried beside, asking again what he would do. Hamr did not look at him again.

As he turned the horse around the base of the knoll and moved over the sloping sward toward the wide course that dipped into the cleft of the cliff, Timov stopped. He knew that way led to the Tortoise men.

The Panther camp seemed asleep. The surrounding fields and groves stood empty. No children played or shouted. No old women sorted grains under the big trees. No old men sat by the drying racks flensing hides or carving wood.

Timov walked through the camp as in a weird dream. Through doorways, he glimpsed people lying down or crouching. The dogs, too, seemed strange, wandering in and out of the tall grass at the far end of the camp, not chasing the mice that flitted there in swift shadows, just coming and going, as if afraid to approach the huts too closely and yet unwilling to drift out of sight of them.

At the hut where Aradia had been killed, her body had vanished. The Mothers had scattered over the ashes the plaited grass dolls they wove by moonlight and hung on the dead.

Timov did not stare too long. He hurried on, peeking into each hut he passed, until he found Cyndell. She huddled among the old women whom Timov had spent the last three winters pleasuring in the chill of night. Duru sat in her lap, clear-eyed, flesh pink yet no longer glossed with sweat.

"Duru—" He took her hand, small and weak though no longer hot or slick. "The Mothers cured you."

Cyndell, who wore a weary smile, shook her gray head. "No, the Mothers had nothing to do with this. The spirits spared her for their own reasons. Others are still dying. The evil is not through with us. Where have you been, boy?"

He told her about Hamr, and the tired smile fled from her careworn face. Alarm tightened through her, and she looked side to side for the older women to take Duru. "I must stop him. He will kill us all."

Duru rolled from Cyndell's lap, and one of the old woman embraced the girl. Cyndell jolted to her feet and pulled herself through the door.

Timov followed. She waved him back, but he would not be stopped. He read her urgency accurately. Since he had crawled out of the bog, he had recognized the murderous look on Hamr's face. What could Cyndell do? He had no notion of her but that she was one of the Mothers. Her children had all died years before, one in childbirth, others in a tree-breaking storm, and one more at sea. The tribe respected her for her quiet strength and her uncomplaining grief. If anyone from the Panther people could intervene with the Tortoise clan, she might. In such matters of killing—clansman against clansman—what could one Mother do?

Timov bounded ahead of her and picked out the fastest cliff-trail that he surmised a woman her age could manage. With her leaning on his arm, they skidded and hopped down the trail. She proved far stronger and more agile than he had guessed, and they completed their descent as Hamr appeared among the dunes. He had not seen them yet, nor had the Tortoise clan spotted him.

Cyndell brushed away furies of sandflies that clouded up from the salt grass as they hurried through the sand to intercept Hamr. Blind Side had clopped ahead and disappeared among the dunes.

When he reappeared, Hamr had already dismounted and hurried, spear in hand, across the open space toward the huts. The Tortoise women, sitting in the shade of a dune shucking clams, spied him and began their danger trill. Men appeared in doorways, axes in hand.

By then, Hamr had reached the central hut of the chief, outside which stood Gobniu's coup, two large fishing-spears decked with silver seal-fur and garlands of rainbow-shot mussel. He knocked over the spears, kicked sand onto the fur, and crunched the shells under his sandals. Then he bellowed for Gobniu.

The chief charged from his hut, spear lowered. Hamr had hoped for that. He had feared only that Gobniu would have cowered and made the killing less noble. Standing firm on the fallen coup, he invited the chief's attack and turned swiftly only at the last moment.

Gobniu's spear ripped Hamr's antelope-hide vest and snagged. With his own spear, he banged down hard on the chief's weapon, and the two spears clacked to the ground. His hands found Gobniu's thick throat as the chief dug his fingers into Hamr's neck. Hamr, clearly the stronger, brought Gobniu to his knees.

Other Tortoise men scurried toward the struggling men, spears raised. Hamr sensed them and heaved around so that the chief's back faced the spearmen. The men balked, drew their knives. In the same instant, Hamr shoved Gobniu into the sand, drew his own wooden blade, and poised its tip at the chief's throat.

"Hamr—stop!" Cyndell shouted and came running through the salt grass between the dunes. "Do not kill him! If you ever loved your Aradia, do not kill him."

Hamr had wrestled the chief flat on his back, with his arms pinned. In one stroke, Gobniu's lifeblood would spill from him. The Tortoise men danced from side to side, between fear for their chief, and eagerness to lunge at Hamr.

Cyndell pushed her way between the Tortoise men. "Hamr! If you kill him, you will die here—and all the Panther people will die. The Tortoise clan will want their blood. If you ever loved your Aradia, do not do this to her people."

"He'll kill you anyway—won't you? Coward! Killer of your own people!" Hamr's face shivered with fury as he pressed the blade harder against the chief's throat. Gobniu's grimace froze, aware that even too deep a breath would cut him.

"If you kill the chief," a voice spoke from the hut at Hamr's back, "then slaughter must visit the Panther people. The ancestors would expect nothing less."

Hamr recognized the voice of the Tortoise Man, the tribe's new spiritual leader. His word sounded more deadly than the chief's, for he spoke with the authority of all who had gone before.

"If you spare him," the Tortoise Man continued, "you will be spared and the Panther people as well."

"I've come back! Broken my exile!" Hamr gasped past his rage. "For that alone, you will kill me. And all the Panther people as well. You have already slain my Aradia."

"The death of Aradia propitiated the evil spirits," the Tortoise Man claimed.

"Duru is healed," Cyndell confirmed. "Do not forsake her life and that of her people now. Relent, Hamr."

"The evil will pass," the Tortoise Man announced. "In time it will pass entirely away. And so, your exile is lifted. Put aside your knife. Release the chief."

"You will spare the Panther people?" Hamr asked Gobniu.

The chief's eyes swore he would.

"Speak it," Hamr commanded. "Tell everyone. Tell the ancestors. And if you lie, the evil spirits will destroy you and all the people. Speak it!"

"I will spare the Panther people," Gobniu said through his grimace. "None will be killed."

Hamr gazed hard into Gobniu's wrung face, imagined his throat slashed and his hot blood spurting. Then he stood and sheathed his knife, picked up his spear. He nodded to the Tortoise Man, and turned to go.

"But—" Gobniu shouted, up again, his hand at his throat, "the Tortoise people will not have the Panther people among them any longer."

Hamr spun about, face hard. The spearmen at the sides of the chief raised their weapons.

"By morning," the chief said, "all the Panther people are to leave. Any who are found among our dunes, within our groves or our fields will no longer be our people but strangers—and they will be killed."

"You lied!" Hamr shouted.

"The chief has not lied," the Tortoise Man declared. "He has spared the Panther people slaughter. He has spared you and lifted your exile. And now he imposes a new exile, upon the whole of the Panther cult. What he does is just and good in the eyes of the ancestors. Now go. Tell your people to leave."

Timov, who had been watching from the edge of the camp, not daring to enter the space of the Tortoise people, reeled with sudden nausea. Exile for the Mothers and children meant almost certain death in the wilderness. The terrified look on Cyndell's face and the throbbing fury on Hamr's confirmed his fear.

Hamr slouched toward his horse. Instead of mounting, he placed his arm on the steed's neck and walked him between the dunes. Timov wanted to go after him, to query him about what would happen next. Cyndell clucked for him. He followed her up the trail, wanting from her the comfort of something said, even in anger. She only clicked her tongue disconsolately when he tried to question her.

At the top of the trail, Cyndell began her danger trill, modulated with mournful, wailing tones. The Mothers appeared and clustered. The men stood in doorways, the children behind them. Timov had never seen the likes of this, and his insides frosted.

He went with Cyndell to the center of the camp and stood to the side as she related to the Mothers what had transpired. Then the dirgeful trilling began in unison.

Timov turned away, watched Hamr leading Blind Side of Life up from the cleft. Alongside the scarp at the cliff's edge, the horse found a patch of broad-blade grass to his liking and began to nibble at it.

Hamr dropped his hand from his animal's neck and walked on, past Timov, past the wailing Mothers to the charred site of Aradia's hut. He recognized the stone ring, where the daily fire had burned, the slumped shapes of moss matting, where they had slept, and the ashen nest that must have been the drying racks for his wife's plants.

In one corner, not completely burned, was her bride's wallet. He stepped through the ash and kicked it over. The flap opened, and he stared down at the Mother's Hair, the bundles of medicinal herbs that could not bring her back.

Among the crisped plants Hamr noticed a disk of tortoise shell. He bent over and picked it out. He held one of Spretnak's wheels. It still had the stick pushed through the hole in its center.

What was she doing with this? He spun the wheel on its axle and watched the markings of the shell blur. Had Spretnak told her the significance of this device, this master symbol of Hamr's life—or was it simply given as a toy for the children they would have had?

The Panther men gathered behind him, a respectful distance from the ash heap. They made disgruntled noises but did not dare address him directly while he mourned, fearing the spirit of his wife, who certainly still resided in the house and who would not want to be interrupted.

Presently, the presence of the unhappy men became less bearable than his grief. Hamr turned to face them. "Gobniu has exiled the Panther people," he announced.

"Because you returned," one of the men shouted. "Why did you return?"

"Why should we suffer for what you've done?" another asked.

"Gobniu lied to me," Hamr muttered. "He said I brought the evil spirits upon us by using my horse to kill our enemy. I believed him. I was wrong—but I did not see his lie until he killed Aradia. I returned only to slay him."

"Then why does he live? Why are we driven from the Land?"

"If I had killed him, the Tortoise men would kill you."

Angry noises blew among the men as they loudly discussed their options. Some wanted to attack the Tortoise clan immediately, others thought to wait in ambush for them to come, a few suggested the elders go to Gobniu and petition him for mercy, and one wanted Hamr killed and sent down as a peace offering.

The discussion blustered into an argument, and the Mothers stopped their wailing. The eldest among them approached the men, her arms raised, face scowling. The men fell silent at her shout.

"The Blue Shell are doomed—Panther and Tortoise alike," the crone told them. "Have you no sight in your heads? Have you not seen the war tokens that the Eyes of the Bear have nailed to the trees at the edge of the Forest? Have you no hearing in your heads? Have you not heard their drumsongs, noisy with wrath? The evil spirits have not built fires in their blood. Their strong men have not died. Their wise women have not died. Their hearts are not broken with grief, for their children have not died. The fires burn in our blood. Too many of us have died. We are weak—and the Eyes of the Bear know this. They have seen our sacrifice fires. They have heard our funeral songs. They have watched us from the Forest, and soon they will come to destroy us all."

"What can we do?" a man wailed.

"Gobniu has driven us out," the crone said. "We cannot flee. Where would we go? Into the bog to live with the swamp creatures? Into the mountains, to be hunted by the Eyes of the Bear? We have no choice. We must go to the Eyes of the Bear and live with them—as their slaves."

Shouts burst from the gathered men but soon subsided. The women did not protest. The crone spoke for them.

"There is another way," Hamr said to the stricken men. "We can follow the sea past the bog. Eventually, the beach turns north. If we journey far enough north, we will find other Panther people, the ones you remember in your firesongs, in your histories. What do they call themselves?"

"The Thundertree," Timov piped.

The men moaned with disapproval. North, the direction of darkness, source of the cold, and home of the evil wolf spirit, terrorized all. "The journey is too difficult," one explained. "We're too weak from our losses. And, besides, even if we were strong, even if the Eyes of the Bear were not eager to kill us, would we find the Thundertree? The last we heard of them was in the time of the Grandfathers, long ago. What if they have moved on? What if their enemies have destroyed them? We will wander with nowhere to go."

"Is slavery better?"

"As slaves, we will live, our children will live," the crone answered. "North lies the wind of winter and death. Which, then, is better? Life—or death?"

Hamr left the men to debate their future. For him, no other choice opened. After what he had done to the Eyes of the Bear, they would kill him on sight. He pushed past the wrangling men and met their glowering stares without flinching.

The crone spoke truth: Whether he had returned or not, the Blue Shell faced doom. Their enemy would know of their terrible sickness and would eagerly use it to crush them. His return, if anything, had helped them to look up from their grief long enough to realize the danger they confronted. Now, if they wanted, they could go with him or become slaves. They did not have to die.

Blind Side of Life had wandered away from the camp, following the patches of broad-blade grass he favored, and Hamr went after him. The horse whickered a greeting at the familiar scent of him. Hamr sat down on a flat rock nearby and twirled the wheel he still carried, watching the Panther people arguing among themselves.

Overhead, clouds toiled from the sea toward the mountains, and in a short while there would be rain. A crow jeered from the walnut tree.

The smell of approaching rain, the racket of the crow, and the wheel spinning in his hands helped Hamr to sort out his feelings. The anger that had driven him back from the bog had dissipated, replaced by weary futility. He had lost Aradia. The raw path through the blackberry brambles and hazelnut shrubs still led toward the sedgefields, and the fields still led to the bower, where they had made their first child, and the bower still squatted at the edge of the bog.

He had not even seen her dead. His mourning felt all the more empty for that. And in the emptiness, around its own emptiness, the wheel spun, and a jay-crow squawked at the sweet smell of coming rain.

Taiga

Dawn looked frayed the day of the exile. Rain had pattered throughout the night and by morning still hung in gray veils over the mountains to the north. Sunlight filtered through tattered clouds and made the placid sea appear muddy.

On the beach, the Tortoise clan had gathered to witness the dispersal of the Panther people. The Tortoise women stood silently atop the dunes, a few waving. Their men had posted themselves before dawn at the top of the cliff-trails, axes in hand, faces smudged for battle.

The Panther people put up no resistance. Many had died from the fever, many still shivered. In the night, they had gathered up their possessions and with first light had dragged their bundles of hides and carved bone toward the cedar forest—and the Eyes of the Bear.

As soon as they had trudged out of camp, the Tortoise men advanced and set fire to the abandoned huts.

Only Timov, his sister Duru, and their nurse, Cyndell, had elected to journey north with Hamr. Timov felt scared to go into the wilds with only grief-struck Hamr, a girl too weak to walk, and an old woman. Greater torment twisted his heart at the thought of living as Biklo had, ordered about by children and women. Better to follow the Great Man into the wilderness and face death there, bravely.

For Duru, still drained from the fires that had blazed in her blood and the shock of her sister's death, the journey unfolded another fateful change she could not avoid. By custom, when a Mother died, her man passed to her sisters. Hamr now belonged to Duru. And she resolved to stay at his side and endure their journey as she had endured her fever and the horror of Aradia's murder.

Cyndell would have preferred to go to the Eyes of the Bear and serve by the comfort of their fires. But she had known Duru's mother too well to abandon to the wilderness the child she had nursed. She packed her medicinal herbs, what dried meat she had, and her bone needles and scrapers in a satchel of sewn rabbit hides, and she stood with Duru and Timov as they bade farewell to their clan.

Hamr waited impatiently at the cleft in the rock wall. He had thought that more of the Panther men would accompany him to find their totem brothers in the north—the Thundertree. Dejection flared when only Timov came to meet him at the cliff's edge.

The boy meekly announced that Duru claimed Hamr for her own.

Hamr accepted this news impassively. Inwardly, he quailed. How would they defend themselves in the wilds, just he, this boy, and two women?

He had spent the night among the knolls, under locked branches of alders whose broad leaves offered some protection from the rain. With the strength of his anxiety and a flint knife, he had occupied his grief in the wakeful darkness by whittling a pliant sapling to a spear-shaft. He tipped it with a quartz blade given to him by Spretnak years ago, before his first hunt.

After midnight, the glint of distant fires appeared among the cedars on the high hills. The Eyes of the Bear had camped closer to the forest fringe, perhaps anticipating the arrival of their new slaves or preparing for a further raid on the disease-weakened Blue Shell.

Hamr wanted to be on his way long before the Panther people reached their new masters and could tell them of his decision to seek the Thundertree. Maybe the Eyes of the Bear wanted revenge enough to track him. Certainly, he and those with him lived in death’s shadow as long as they moved within sight of the cedar hills.

To help them travel more quickly, Hamr had loaded their satchels onto Blind Side of Life. The horse fretted, because of the smells of pyre smoke, and stamped, eager to be going. The horse had little to carry, mostly the hides that the Panther clan had gifted Cyndell and Duru so that they could make clothes to stay warm in the north.

If the child grew tired, she could ride. Her survival amazed Hamr, and he had not the heart to turn her away to a life of slavery. Who was he to say that the hardships of the journey ahead would outweigh the pain of serving the Eyes of the Bear?

As for her claim on him, he would not strengthen her conviction with his acknowledgment until they had found their way to the Thundertree. If she yet lived and still wanted him, he would serve her to honor her sister. Aradia, his bride, owned him though now she slept with the Mudman. He envied the Mudman and would not release her entirely to him yet. In his mind, he held her as he had last seen her, dark-eyed, lovely face shining with health in the cove of her black hair.

On the walk down the wide sloping path in the cleft of the rock wall, Hamr stared boldly at the Tortoise men on their way to torch the Panther huts. The younger Tortoise men, who thought him a Great Man for taming a horse and killing the Eyes of the Bear, looked away. The older ones, who remembered him for a braggart, leered to see him exiled with children and an old woman to care for.

Among the dunes, the chief, the elders, the Tortoise Man, and their guards, whom he had thwarted the previous day, mocked loudly. The women hooted derisively. If the Beastmaker loved him so, where were the animal guides to lead him to the Thundertree? Surely pigs and deer would offer him their throats along the way! And what a noble entourage for a Great Man! Why did the Panther people not see that the Beastmaker favored him? Why did they prefer to live as slaves to the Eyes of the Bear?

Hamr clutched his spear with one hand and rested his other on the back of Blind Side of Life, where the satchel lay that carried his wheel. Sooner or later, even this would turn around. He refused to panic at his freedom. And, to prove that to himself, he stopped when he reached the firm sand before the sea and looked back.

In sun mist, the giant cliffs shone red. Above them, smoke furled from the burning huts. Women and children standing on the dunes watched him, pouring out a song of hatred directly at him, as if he intruded as an enemy.

Not he, he had to remind himself to ease the pain of their song, not he but his greatness was their enemy. It had always set him apart—had set him to compete and win against their boys—had spurned their girls—had carried him above the ground they trod onto the back of a beast—and had lifted him out of their clan to another life. Of course they would hate him. He had eluded them. He had given himself to greatness.

Without a sound or gesture, Hamr turned away. He patted Blind Side's neck, and his horse resumed his gait. Ahead, the beach curved about the promontory of the cliffs and widened into pebbly flats. Hamr kept his eyes on the morning-light simmering on the wave crests, with occasional glances ahead, into the baffling distances.

)|(

Once the familiar terrain fell behind, the travelers turned inland. Hamr sought the migratory trails: ditches cut into the earth by the herds' seasonal movements.

Blind Side of Life recognized the horse trail, which the travelers identified by droppings hardened there. Blind Side, stimulated by the familiar smell of the herd, trotted north more quickly than the others could keep up. Hamr at first restrained him by riding him. Only after one end of a rope had been looped about the horse's neck and the other around Hamr's waist did Blind Side reluctantly slow down.

Traveling went slow, since they had food only for the first day and spent much time leaving the migratory trail to forage and hunt. The hunting went even slower. Neither Hamr nor Timov could manage to stalk an animal close enough to use the spears, and all attempts to rush deer and antelope toward coverts where the others waited in ambush ended pitifully. Other than rodents and an occasional hare and squirrel, the men caught nothing.

Duru had lost weight yet grown stronger than anyone's prayers had hoped, and she and Cyndell provided most of the food and kept up the daycount. The woods teemed with berries, nuts, edible grasses, and tubers. While Blind Side of Life grazed, tethered to a tree, the women foraged around him and prepared vegetable broths and mashes. When it rained, they knew which slick fronds to weave into makeshift lean-tos. And, with Cyndell's bone-needle kit, they kept their sandals in good repair, using bark and squirrel-hide to protect their soles.

At day's end, after building the night fire, they counted the days on Cyndell's ivory bracelet. A priestess of remote ancestry had carved a meander into ivory, a square spiral whose zigzag pattern outlined the thirteen chambers of the moon.

Each chamber contained twenty-eight days. Six chambers spiraled inward to the seventh at the hot, solar center of the year. And six more spun outward through the darkness of winter. Well into the dark turning now, the calendar warned that sap already seeped inward though the Forest looked robust.

Hamr and Timov snickered at the ritual daycount and the women's compulsive marking of time. For them, time pulsed all around, as weather and the directions. To the west, beyond thistly tussocks, lay the sea, and to the east, dense Forest, where night seemed to lie in perpetual residence.

The ravine country of the migratory trails boxed in the travelers and yet allowed them to move faster and farther north than they could have done either in the marsh or the Forest. At night, the culverts blocked the brisk sea wind that buffeted the great trees and sighed overhead forlorn with the night cries of Forest animals.

Nine nights into their journey, Hamr took out his wheel and spun it in the firelight. The others stared in fascination at the spinning brightness. "What is it?" Timov asked.

"A wheel."

"What's it for?"

"For nothing," Hamr answered. "You see, there's nothing in the middle." He stopped it and removed the stick from the hole at the center. Then he replaced the stick and set the tortoise disk spinning again. "It spins around nothing."

"It spins around the stick," Duru said.

"No," Hamr replied. "An ax-head is joined to a stick, too, and it does not spin. It is fixed by the stick. The wheel has a hole, and it is the emptiness of the hole that lets it turn. It's like our lives."

The others squinted, perplexed faces gleaming in the fireglow.

"At the center of our lives is emptiness," Hamr explained. "Do we remember from where we come?" He parted the antelope-skin he wore as a wrap and revealed his navel. "There's our hole—the emptiness cut from the Mother."

Cyndell put a hand on Hamr's and stopped the spinning wheel. "We should not speak of these things."

Hamr stared at her flatly, while inside, the fog of his grief for Aradia deepened, glowed like a smoke-filled hut. "Why not?"

"These are mysteries for the tribe," Cyndell replied. "We have no tribe."

"We have each other," Hamr said, resolutely. "And someday we will have the Thundertree."

Cyndell nodded. "Then perhaps we can speak of these things. Now, we four are too small, and these thoughts are as big as everything around us. We will be crushed."

Hamr nodded once, remembering Aradia's admonition and tucked the wheel back in his satchel. He had spoken without forethought, simply wanting to fill his own emptiness from the mighty fullness of stars, wind, darkness, and the hulks of trees holding the many secret lives of the Forest.

Duru and Timov groaned with disappointment, and Cyndell hushed them with a song. Her voice, strained with love, faltered briefly with the fear Hamr had evoked in her. Then her bright song lifted through the fire and wavered against the dark, offering warmth of memories and brightness of hope. Soon the children slept.

Hamr sat facing her with a quiet, chill, and sober stare. Duru slumbered with her head in his lap.

Cyndell placed her hand on his and whispered, "The shadows heard you speak of the wheel. I saw them drawing closer in to hear more. I was afraid, Hamr. But my song has pleased them. Now we can sleep."

)|(

Cyndell cowered with fear. Sometimes at night, even her own breathing frightened her. They wandered alone in the wilderness, with only the Great Mother to watch after them—and She, without the enwombing strength of the tribe, could do little but watch. From the faces of Her animals, what did She see but an old woman wandering the wilds with two children and a crazy man?

Hamr had to be crazy. Only a crazy man would drive a blind horse down a beach against men with spears. That he had returned triumphant frightened her even more.

What spirit possessed this man who could ride a horse, who could face down three spearmen, who could speak blithely before the fire about the emptiness at the center of everything?

She knew that the spirit of the Horse did not possess him. That spirit loved the herd, and this man defied his own kind and now wandered alone. Neither had a tree spirit entered him, which would have rooted him to one place. What crazy spirit owned Hamr?

Cyndell could not see what some of the truly old Mothers had seen from years of fire-watching. She could not identify what type of spirit empowered Hamr. What possessed him had had the strength to prevail against the Eyes of the Bear and to challenge the dark spirits of the north.

Now they would continue on, ever deeper into the Mother's unpredictable body, farther from the well-known foraging terrain, which was Her left teat, and ever farther from the warmth of the tribe, which was Her right teat.

Timov recognized Cyndell's fear of Hamr. He joked grimly with Hamr about it when they hunted: "Mama Cyndell would rather rut with a cave bear than look you in the eye."

Hamr shrugged. "At least the Bear has a den. Every Mother wants a home. But for a man, there is only distance."

They walked down the tunnels of the Forest, leading Blind Side of Life. The horse disliked the mushy ground whispering underfoot, the poking and scratching of undergrowth on every side, and especially the smell of rotting leaves overlaying a darker stink of Bear and Cat.

"Do you think we will find the Thundertree?"

"Not if you keep talking instead of looking for their sign."

"What am I looking for?"

Hamr frowned. "You're a Panther man. Don't you know?"

"I'm not sure. When the Panther men took me hunting, I'd see them reading each other's sign in the grass and on the trees, and I'd look, but I didn't see anything."

"Then maybe they'll find us when we trespass in their domain."

"The Tortoise men initiated you. What did you learn to see?"

"I can read the sign that the Tortoise men leave in the tide litter. You know, where the fish are running, what tidepools belong to which family, where the seals will beach with the tide. The Forest tells me nothing."

As if to confirm that, a quail burst from a hackleberry bush an arm's length from Hamr and flapped into the canopy of the Forest. Her alarmed voice clanged back from out of sight, eerie as an unwrapped soul.

"We've got to catch something," Timov whined. "I'm tired of eating berry mash and tuber broth with lion-tooth grass."

Hamr peered up through the branches at the day's heat piling clouds atop each other. "It'll rain tonight. Tomorrow we'll slog through mud. Even catching mice will be hard. I say we get out of here and take one of the elk we saw in the fields above the ravines."

"Elk? That's a dream for the fireside."

"Look at the sky, Timov. The wind has banked. It blows down through the Forest for the first time since we began. If the elk are still grazing on those fields above the ravines, we can get very close by crawling along the nearest gully. They won't see or smell us."

Small lightnings flashed in Timov's eyes as he imagined the approach. "We'll have to leave Blind Side behind. They'll see him in the gully."

"That'll just convince them they're safe. Elk don't think of men when they see Horse."

Timov excitedly agreed, and Hamr arranged some stones and gravel into the shape of an elk and lanced its heart with a straw. After a quick petition to the Beastmaker for sustenance in the wilderness, Hamr and Timov led Blind Side of Life through the feathery grass at the Forest's edge. Their eyes watched the needlework of the wind among the clouds, and expectation buoyed them.

On a sloping field of grass between the dark wall of the Forest and the crooked seams of migratory trails, a herd of elks browsed. They glowed almost red in the heavy sunlight. Wind glinted in the antlers of the big males, and the horns of the bucks appeared blue with velvet.

Nervous joy thrummed in the men as they slid down into the ravine and crept closer, bent over, leading Blind Side by a rope about his neck.

The occasional lowing of the females sounded very close as the hunters edged near enough to smell the musk of the herd. Neither man dared to peek over the edge of the gully. They crawled to the end of the trail, to where rains had dumped the silt of the Forest and grass grew in tufts majestic as headdresses. There they lifted their heads.

The man and the boy gazed at bristly white hair in the clefts of hooves and stiff eyelashes, blue lips rippling, pulling the grass. Giddy muscularity tensed the hunters, seeing their own excitement shining back from each other's faces.

Hamr signed for Timov to stay while he went back along the gully to a vantage where they could attack from two sides. The herd shifted briskly. Hamr thought he had startled them, yet when he peered through the brittle weeds, he saw that the herd had sensed another threatening presence. From the Forest, a pack of hyenas loped.

Back at the clogged end of the gully, the branches of a dead tree jutted from the silt. Hamr tethered Blind Side there, then dashed up the rocky slope, carrying two spears and calling behind to Timov, "Follow me!"

On the field, the elk had bunched, the females and young moving to the center of the encircling males. Hamr rushed the herd, heaving his familiar spear. It wobbled through the air and disappeared in the grass. The herd, aware now of the attacking men, stampeded toward the Forest, scattering the hyenas.

Hamr and Timov dashed after them, Hamr hurling his new spear. It arced cleanly and stabbed into the earth. Its haft waved above the limp grass. When Timov handed him the first spear that he had retrieved, the two sprinted again. Now the herd swerved away from the hyenas, and ran obliquely toward the Forest. One of the young stumbled and fell under leaping panicky hooves.

"Forget the herd," Hamr ordered. "Take the fallen one."

Timov balked at sight of the half dozen hyenas tearing at the small elk. When Hamr charged, he mustered his courage and followed.

The hyenas snapped viciously as the men approached. The beasts crouched, growling and barking, dashing forward and circling back to protect their prey.

Hamr threw his newest spear at the most aggressive of the hyenas. It easily dodged the missile and retreated. Timov, hurling rocks, remained several paces behind Hamr, waving and thrusting his spear while both men shouted.

The hyenas withdrew. Fangs bared in their black faces, they stood glowering only a spear's thrust away. When Hamr stooped to pull away the fawn, two of the beasts lunged.

Timov leaped back, and Hamr swung his spear.

"Get over here and help me!" Hamr yelled.

Timov nudged closer, spear warily thrust out before him.

"Grab its hind legs," Hamr commanded. "I'll hold them off."

Timov obeyed. As he dragged away the animal, Hamr charged and scattered the hyenas. Most of them had already conceded their prey and skulked away. Only three remained, gazing sullenly.

Hamr picked up the new spear and backed off. With the spears tucked under his arm, he bent and lifted the small elk's front legs.

At the edge of the gully, they dropped the heavy animal. Hamr took out his flint knife and cut back the hide before the haunches, so that he could unstring several tendons from the back legs.

Timov stood, spear in hand, standing off the three hyenas that paced angrily in the grass. They drew close enough so he could smell their hot stink, even though the aroma of elk's blood bossed the air.

"Get Blind Side," Hamr said. He punched holes in the flaps of skin at the elk's torn belly and strung the tendons through, tying back the hide to keep the viscera from spilling out.

When Timov brought Blind Side along the gully, Hamr picked up the hind legs, Timov the front, and they slung the animal over the horse's back.

They marched off with their prize, Timov hooting a triumphant song, laughing at the hyenas—foolish night creatures daring to hunt by day and catching a meal for men!

Hamr let him sing, glad for his help. Inside he felt measureless silence. It filled him with the quietude of his awe, which no song could dispel. They had failed today. If not for the hyenas, which usually prowled alone at night, they would bring no meat to the fire. Surely, the Beastmaker provided for his chosen.

Mountains of clouds cast shadows over the land. The hyenas' threatening cries grew long and lonely. And the syrupy smell of blood twisted like mischief in the wet wind.

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Well fed and exhausted from dressing the fawn after a long day's work, Cyndell and Duru curled up together beside the fire while the sun still smoldered among the trees. When they slept and the fire burned vigorously, Timov climbed the knoll and found Hamr gazing into the nomadic fires westward.

"Why did you smile when Father was laid out?"

"I did what?" Hamr asked, distracted by the constellations hardening in the darkness. He pondered his blunders during the hunt today, and caught sight of herd-patterns in the stars.

Timov sat down beside him, emboldened by their success at the hunt. Large emotions moved in his chest: the joy of achievement and the fear of the next hunt seething above the constant sorrow of having lost everything—family, clan, and tribe.

Kinship blazed in the boy for this man he had once feared. Now Hamr alone remained of the male mysteries. Timov stared hard at his bold profile, wondering at the malice he had learned from that face. He found only the carved silhouette of the Tortoise clan, the features set wide apart from generations of facing out to sea. "You always smile whenever the dead are laid out. Why?"

Hamr turned. Shadow filled his rapt gaze. "I will always laugh at death."

"Why?" Awe and fear clashed in Timov, and he had to look away, at the purple ethers in the sky, struggling to keep the largeness of his feelings from breaking into tears. So much had been lost. Did Hamr feel none of this? "Death is terrible."

"To return to the Beastmaker is terrible?" Hamr put a firm hand on Timov's arm and squeezed till it hurt. A smile glinted in the dark. "You've got it backward. Dying is all right. Living is terrible."

Timov flinched. Hamr saw the fear in the boy and let his arm go. He looked back into the dark to calm himself. Timov's questions had reminded him of his grief, and he did not want to feel that anymore. Out here, grief felt as dangerous as the Wolf. The boy had been good today, and Hamr would need him to be good again tomorrow. When he faced Timov, his voice had fallen almost to silence, "Death makes it okay to laugh."

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Duru beamed with pride for Hamr for days after he brought back the elk. Aradia had chosen him, so she knew he would attach excellence to all his deeds. Aradia would not have wanted him otherwise. She had always had the best of what the Blue Shell could offer for her renowned beauty—the best of Mother's love, the choicest cuts of meat at the feasts, the best shells and pelts from her suitors, and, surely, the best of all men for her husband. And now he belonged to Duru, and she shone with pride, no matter that Mother Cyndell feared him and thought him possessed by a crazed spirit.

"You know why I've come, don't you?" Cyndell had told her several times since they had lost their chance to go to the Eyes of the Bear. "Your mother was my friend. Among the Mothers, death does not loosen any bonds. You will be glad for the Mother mysteries I will teach you—if we survive."

Cyndell told her nothing more. They foraged together every day, sought fresh water and edible plants for hours, and the older woman told her nothing new. They reminisced about the Mothers and children they remembered. They sang old songs, repeated many beloved stories, and discussed various ways of preparing available plants.

As they traveled, they found less and less familiar in the land. The farther north they journeyed, the stranger the plants became. The wide-branching trees of the south became rare, replaced by pines, enormous cedars, and goliath evergreens whose cones stood straight up on their branches. Firs.

Cyndell had heard of these green monarchs, these grand, silver-green giants, from an ancient song remembered by the Grandmothers. Those old dames had sung of their Grandmothers, whose Grandmothers had come from a place in the north where pinecones stood tall on the trees and rivers of ice nestled between mountains even at the height of summer. They had called that domain taiga.

Cyndell became yet more frightened of their fate as she reminisced about those childhood songs. The Grandmothers of the Grandmothers had remembered a land of tusked panthers, voracious lions, and ghostly fires in the night sky. No point terrifying Duru and Timov, she reasoned and said nothing.

The children felt proud and hopeful traveling with Hamr. The elk he had scavenged had fed them well for many days, and they had used its hide to replace the sandals worn out in their wandering. Though he had yet to kill any further creature in the hunt, even a hare or a squirrel, he carried their strength.

What would become of them in this unknown land, where the trees stood like spears, where each leaf stood sharp as a needle? Every day, at dawn's first sting of color, Cyndell made an offering to the Great Mother, thanking Her for sparing them from the hungers of the night beasts and begging Her to take them back to Her bosom, to nourish them again from the tribal warmth of her right teat.

Duru helped with the offerings. She moved quickest to find a moss-bellied rock, a pregnant root bole, or a vulval tree cleft that had the correct shape to suggest the Mother's ubiquitous presence. There in precarious light, they fashioned offerings of leaves or chaff-wings to suggest an animal or insect favored by the Mother.

For Duru, this ritual enthused her like play. But Cyndell believed their survival depended on these prayers, that she had to focus her will strongly or death would gain on them. So, the rain-threaded morning when she crouched before the sacral shape of a hollowed stump and a gust of wind broke the acorn doll she had meticulously crafted, she knew her trespass in the wilderness had led to danger.

Hamr and Timov slouched past as she knelt to retrieve the broken acorn puppet. "Get out of the rain, Mama Cyndell," Timov said. "It doesn't look like it's going to clear anytime soon. You'll be damp all day if you get soaked now."

Cyndell knew Timov spoke sense, and she stood up. What would be, she could not change. She looked for Duru. After finding the pelvic-shaped stump, the girl had gone back to the shelter of the hawthorn covert.

Under the wall and overhang of the spiny shrub, she sat plaiting hemp and feeding twigs to a small fire. The remnants of the acorn and berry mash that she had prepared for the men to take on their hunt lay beside her on the sheet of bark, where she had crushed them with a rock.

Under the arbor, the ground stayed dry though the rain pattered brightly among the glossy leaves. Cyndell sat beside Duru. "I've seen signs," she said to the girl.

"Panther signs?"

"No. Mother signs. Bark scratchings, leaf folds. Tiny marks. Nothing a man would notice. I've been seeing them for two days now. Other women have foraged here during this last lunar quarter."

"You've told Hamr?"

"Not yet. I can tell they're not Panther women. They're some other clan—I don't know what totem. But I think they live in the fir forest. Hamr won't want to go there until he finds Panther signs. It's too difficult for his horse."

"Maybe these people can help us find the Panther."

"Hamr will fear that they will make us slaves. A worthy fear. Every tribe wants new hands."

"We should tell him, though."

"First, I had to tell you. We should decide what we need to do before we tell Hamr—or he will decide for us."

"He is leading us, Mother Cyndell. He must decide."

"He is just a man, Duru. He can lead men, if others, like Timov, will follow. We are women. Only we know our needs. We must lead ourselves. You are still a girl, and as you get older you will see that what I am saying is true."

"What are our needs as women?"

"Above all else, the Mother. She sustains the whole world. Look about you. The land is Her body. See how strange Her body has become?"

"We are far from home. This is the taiga. The land of the Grandmothers of the Grandmothers."

"Yes, this is the taiga, but only its beginning. The land gets stranger yet, farther north. See this hawthorn arbor?" Cyndell opened her arms to the enclosure of tangled thorn boughs. "Why did we camp here and not over there, where it is just as dry?" She pointed across a thicket of birch to a dark den of fir trees.

"The plants there are less familiar."

"Exactly. Here, we know these pink blossoms, the mushrooms that grow nearby, and the animals that favor this shrub. There, we know nothing. It is the same with our wandering. With the Mothers—of any tribe—we will recognize the ways. Out here in the taiga, less and less is familiar, more and more we are in jeopardy of eating a deadly plant, disturbing a hungry beast. We need the protection of the Mother. As women we need Her, so that what children we bear will have protection and provision."

Duru laid a small hand on Cyndell's knee, wanting the older women to feel her understanding. "Everything you say is true, Mother Cyndell. For now, I'm too young to bear children. This is a good time for me to follow my husband, wherever he may lead me."

"Why, Duru?" Cyndell felt a burst of anger and restrained herself. "Hamr is not your choice. Why let the dead choose for you?"

The child's face flinched with pain at the memory of Aradia. She had seen her die through the heat of her fever, and the image of her sister in the delirium of the flames always shimmered in her blood, an inch behind her eyes. "Hamr is all I have left of Aradia. He is the best of the men. That's why she chose him. She always had the best."

"Still, he is only a man. Only a man, Duru. You must think of the Mother. He won't."

The rain had faded to soft mist. Duru dropped the rope she had been twisting nervously and stepped out into chill fragrant air. Nimbus clouds streaked scarlet with dawnlight promised more rain. She headed down toward the thicket, to gather mushrooms.

Mother, Aradia, Biklo, all dead—the Mothers she knew, gone. Why should she live as a slave? Why should she live at all? The fever should have killed her, as it had killed the others. Why was she alive and the others gone?

Even now, a moon after those cruel days, the wildness of fever and grief still spun inside her like Hamr's wheel. Far inside her, the chills had departed, tears no longer burned her eyes when she remembered those dear ones she had lost—yet, grief still churned.

With Hamr, everything had become different, new, unlike all that had gone before. Duru did not want to be with the Mothers of any tribe—ever again. She did not want to be reminded of the good way life had once been, and could nevermore be. She loved Hamr, not just for Aradia but because he had led her here to the taiga, to where summer had an unfamiliar shape and where new memories waited to be made.

Even Timov, idle and coddled, had become stronger, more alert and useful than he had ever been in the clan. Duru glimpsed in him the creative power of their suffering.

Mist dewed in her long hair, and her locks garlanded her neck as she bent to pluck white mushrooms from the turf around skinny birch. She put the mushrooms in a woven-grass sack she carried at her hip. When she had enough, she looked up and marveled at this strange land that so disturbed Mother Cyndell.

Indeed, it looked as though it had fallen from the sky: giant boulders scrabbled with vines teetered above ravines, and everywhere on bluffs and hillocks fir trees glowed with inner darkness. Blind Side would be having a hard time picking his way through this jumbled land.

Jays swirled around a blue spruce, then burst through the birch thicket with rowdy screams. Something had frightened them from the berry shrubs, where they had been loitering.

Duru pulled the draw-cord on her foraging sack and backed away, peering among slender trees for what had startled the jays. She hoped to see a civet cat, though she feared to find a panther slinking through the grove. Her skin tightened. Just visible in the shrubs, hyenas appeared. Their blackened visages had already spotted her, and they approached with grinning fangs.

Shouting to frighten them, Duru looked about for a stick, a rock. Her noise made their grins wider.Thick shoulders, powerful striped legs, and leering muzzles pushed into the light.

She counted six of them—and noticed their ribbed gutsacks and the pangs of hunger in their tiny eyes.

With a howl, she swooped and snatched a fallen branch, used both hands to bring it up before her.

The beasts growled shrilly, advancing. They fixed on her, a creature their size, prey that would not thwart their hunger. Carefully they closed in, each waiting for the other to initiate the attack, eager to follow through and get down to the urgent necessity of feeding.

Cyndell, busy filling gourds with rain-water, heard Duru's cries, dropped the gourds, and rushed down the slope toward the thicket. The girl backed into view as Cyndell reached the hawthorn arbor, and the older woman observed her fending off something. On the run, she snatched as big a rock as she could lift in one hand.

The hyenas, assured of their prey's vulnerability, converged swiftly. Duru thrust the branch at them, turned, and ran. The branch slowed the beasts, kept them from a lunging run, and sharpened the rage of their attack. With tails streaming, in full voice, they pursued.

Cyndell paused in her rush when she confronted hyenas shooting out of the thicket. Their enraged barks iced through her. Here came the doom the Mother had foretold. The pack, gaping fangs, gained on the child and would momentarily pounce on her.

Crazed with terror, Cyndell screamed and threw herself forward. The slant of the land flung her faster than her feet could move, and she fell, rolled in a flail of arms and hair, cursing herself for failing the child, then leaped to her feet.

The hyenas fanned out and narrowed in from the sides, to keep Duru from fleeing left or right. As the land rose, her dash slowed, and they followed closer, ready to lunge, two paces behind their prey, black faces frenzied with chase-ferocity. At that moment Cyndell flew screaming down the slope of the bluff.

The rock she threw thudded off one hyena's back and elicited a hurt yelp that briefly slowed the charge of the others. Cyndell seized Duru's arm and hauled her past, then pushed her up the bluff.

"Run! Run! Don't look back! Run!"

The next instant the beasts fell upon Cyndell. One carnivorous jaw clamped her arm and, in a stab of twisting pain, she toppled off balance. Another jaw fastened on her leg.

She went down in a tangle of sharp, gasping hurts. Immediately the others jumped her, sinking their fangs into her face and throat, tearing at the skin of her torso with hind claws.

Her blood sprayed; the steamy feel of it, the sweet smell of it, heightened their voracity. Looped in salty entrails, they burrowed their putrid muzzles under ribs for the glisteny liver and quivering heart.

Screaming her terror, Duru flew up the bluff, past the indifferent boulders where the jays had perched already anticipating what carrion they might pluck. The snarling and snapping from below drove Duru harder than she ever thought she could run. Her breath had left her with her screaming, and she staggered uphill, toward the silver firs, taking in air with wrenching sobs.

Hamr and Timov had heard Duru's first cries from the high ledge, where they had gone in the hope of spearing one of the goats they had seen the day before. Hamr paused only long enough to loosen the rope that tethered his horse, so Blind Side could pull free if a big cat came. Then he and Timov, spears held low for balance, scurried down the broken landscape.

Before they found Duru, they spied from their high vantage Cyndell’s body torn among the frenzied beasts. Timov howled his rage. The hyenas did not bother to look up, though they recognized his voice from the day they had lost their elk to him. He cried from too far away. They would eat well before he came close enough to despoil them again.

Duru had collapsed among pinestraw on the steep grade at the skirt of the Forest. Panting and blind with tears, she clutched at her brother when he lifted her.

Hamr stood over them, a spear in each fist. The silence of awe in his heart that he had experienced when they had taken the elk had turned to horror.

Timov rose, left Duru sitting in the pinestraw and started down the slope.

"Where are you going?" Hamr asked.

Timov looked back, perplexed that Hamr would have to ask. "To drive them off. Kill one if I can."

"Leave them be."

Timov's perplexity narrowed to anger. "That's Mother Cyndell down there. We can't leave her to them."

"Let them have her meat. She's with the Great Mother now, not with them."

"Her meat?" Anger flexed in his voice. "You talk of the body that nursed me and Duru. She should be buried."

"Let the beasts have her," Hamr insisted. "Someday it will be you and me."

"No," Timov spat back. "That's Mama Cyndell." He turned and hastened down the hillside.

Hamr shook his head, and let him go. He felt a weak grip on his calf and looked down at Duru.

"Help him," she said. When he did not move, she added, "I am your wife. A woman of my clan is dead. Bury her."

Hamr sighed and helped Duru to her feet. "You must wait by the fire, where I can see you."

After leaving the girl in the hawthorn covert, Hamr continued down the slope, shouting for Timov to wait. The youth already descended the bluff, throwing rocks at the pack. The beasts moved off reluctantly and circled back, heads low, tails tucked.

"We will bury her where she fell," Hamr said, coming alongside Timov. "You will dig. I will drive off the beasts."

Timov thanked Hamr with a nod, not daring to meet his gaze, knowing the somber indifference he would face there. Shouting, the men advanced on the feeding hyenas. From among weed-stalks and long grass, crows waiting their turn flapped up into the misty rain like black, answering cries.

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When Hamr returned, he gave Cyndell's calendar bracelet to Duru. The girl wept over it while they cleaned up. Then she revived the small fire under the hawthorn trellis.

If she did not make herself do something, she would turn into a rock. She crumbled dried leaves to powder and struck sparks from her fire-pebble, and the enormity of her aloneness crouched over her.

Hamr and Timov sat before the fire, soaked with sweat and rain, while Duru told them about the signs Mother Cyndell said she had identified in the Forest.

"Mother signs. There's a tribe living not far from here."

"Panther?" Timov asked, hopefully.

Duru pouted indifferently. "Someone is in the Forest. I'm sure if we look, we will find them."

Hamr broke a pine bough over his thigh and fed the fire with the resinous wood. "So long as it's not raining, we're safer in the ravines."

"Not safe enough for Mama Cyndell," Timov said harshly, and stoked the kindling.

A sob broke through Duru. When her brother put his arm around her, she said, "She gave herself to save me."

"She's happier now, with the Mother," Timov soothed. "She didn't want to wander like this."

Duru wept quietly, eyes squeezed shut, face glistening in the orange blaze. "It should have been me."

Hamr poked at the fire. What do you tell a child? The truth would be: "It was you—that's why you're suffering. Cyndell feels no more pain." Those words would not quite fit his breath, neither would platitudes about Cyndell returning to the Great Mother, nor the peace of lying with the Mudman. Silence alone offered itself, and that made him angry.

There had to be something with which he could face her tearful anguish. He looked at her. Her child-features squeezed with hurt, and tears flowed freely. Timov, too, wept, leaning against his sister, shoulders jerking.

Hamr's anger softened. He wished he could cry. Long ago, shortly after his father had died, that power had weakened in him. He had put all his will and energy into making himself strong on the outside, to replenish the loss of his father's power—and to fend off the mockery of others, who thought him a fool for wanting greatness. His body had become strong—his will had become strong—and he had lost that deepest strength that comes only from grief.

When he thought of Aradia, the softness in his life, who might have made him strong again in his deepest self, he felt rage at those who had killed her—and he felt emptiness. No tears rose in him.

Yet, certainly, she deserved his tears if anyone did. Spretnak, too, who had taught him to dare for greatness. The relief of tears had never flared in him for those he loved the most. Something darker moved inside when he experienced grief. Somehow he knew: The dead did not need his tears. They soared free. What he felt in himself when he thought of them, what he allowed himself, opened to the hurt of living on.

Once Duru and Timov had calmed, Hamr said in his softest voice, "Cyndell came with us this far. To turn aside now would waste her death. We must go on. We must find the Panther people."

"They may be here," Timov said, "in the Forest."

"Perhaps," Hamr said to the fire, then looked up at the two across from him, "and perhaps not. We dare not gamble with our lives."

"How far will we go?" Duru asked in a thin voice.

"As far north as the herds have gone," Hamr answered. "Surely there we will find the great hunters—and among them, the Panther people."

That afternoon, even though the sky lowered veils of rain, the travelers set out again. Blind Side of Life, happy to follow the herd trail, accepted Duru's weight. She sat easily on the beast, clutching Cyndell's satchel to her chest.

Ahead, where a stream ran beside the trail, softer trees than fir and spruce arched over the ravine and made a green tunnel. When evening fell, they camped in the gully. Timov started the fire, Hamr led Blind Side to the stream bank, where he could graze, and Duru set about foraging nearby as she had with her nurse every evening.

She followed the contour of the land upstream, to where a pond had silted in. Choked with mint grass, poplars, and willows, it had become a meadow. There, she knew she would find the tenderest shoots, purple-tipped tubers that made the best broths, soft-cored reeds whose hearts held sweetness, and chive grass and garlic bulbs that fortified with pungency the meal she gathered.

Her hands expertly parted the turf to find the bulbs she sought, lifted rocks, always toward her so they opened away and would not expose her to snake or scorpion. She plucked delicate blades from among poisonous creepers. She reached into her forage sack for twine and brought out a thin braid of silvery strands, hair Cyndell had plaited from her own head. The girl's wise hands, that long ago stopped needing supervision, forgot what to do.

The meal that night held silence. No songs or stories could fill Cyndell's absence. Each ate without speaking, staring into the fire, and when done, they lay with their backs to each other and slept. The next seven nights continued the same. Then, the land began to change more drastically yet, and evening meals became more animated with strange news of what they had seen.

The ravine country thinned out as the migratory trails opened northward into enormous sweet-smelling grasslands. Ponds and kettle lakes shone in the distance like pearls. To the south and east, the Forest loomed larger than ever with giant green vaults.

Among the brindled shadows, a white elk with immense antlers appeared and watched them. The wind carried new, peculiar smells. Silk tufts of unknown plants flurried by. Stupendous herds shifted in the north like dark clouds, too distant and too dangerous to approach.

At the edge of creeks, the travelers knelt and did not recognize the swift stabs of fish in the kelp or the black toads squatting among rocks smooth and speckled as eggs.

None of them could any longer explain the weather. Rain fell far away, leaning like lavender shadows over the blue firs, and crawled away into the wind, full of animal canniness. Torrents flashed out of a clear sky. Or clouds boiled overhead, releasing showers in steamy sheets that disappeared before reaching the ground.

At night, wolf voices cried from the Forest with supernatural sorrow. And blue and green fire reeled across the stars, a sweep of aquatic ripples. The three travelers fell asleep every night with that radiant smoke in their eyes, trying to figure the unfelt wind blowing through it.

Glaciers appeared in the north. They burned with sunlight under the tremendous sky. Arrows of birds came and went from the ice-fields each day. The sun blazed, but the wind, when it turned from those blue glares, blew cool and delivered, with the witchy fragrance of the grass, the sadder, lonelier smell of winter.

No longer did the wanderers simply encounter food. Hunting had become nearly impossible in the open land, and only one rabbit fell under Timov's slingshot, none under Hamr's spears.

Duru puzzled over wisps of mysterious grasses and nibbled at narrow, bitter roots, afraid to try them in her broths. She watched what Blind Side ate and cooked that. Nowhere could she find the sweet marrow of the canebrakes, the fat tubers from silted meadows, friendly mushrooms, well-known berries. Each day, all three had to forage to gather enough edible plants to make one meal.

At last Hamr admitted the migratory trail served only Blind Side, who enjoyed grazing on the abundant grasses. For them to survive, they would have to leave the trail to forage in the Forest. They led the horse up from the path grooved by his ancestors, and made their way through woeful terrain of scattered boulders and twisted lone-pines.

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Flowers burst wherever sunlight lanced the Forest. Purple mallows glowed in the shadows among clouds of mushrooms, and red and orange gills of fungus ledged tree trunks. Here began the forbidden realm of the travelers' past—the Eyes of the Bear. Here, everything appeared strange to the people who had lived among sea cliffs and grasslands.

Yet, after long wandering in gullies and ravines, the plenitude of the Forest comforted the Blue Shell. The rank, sweet smell of burdock mingled with resinous breezes slipping down dark corridors from the mysterious interior. And every turn of the wind smudged the air with odors of blossoms, water plants, and a tumult of animals.

Duru stared up at the high peaks of trees burning with morning light and felt glad Hamr had led them here. Above the branches, the day opened like a sliced melon.

Another beautiful day, like the other eight glorious days they had enjoyed since entering the Forest. Plenitude smothered the grief of all they had lost The skins of the squirrels Hamr and Timov had killed stood taut on a drying rack fashioned from branches. A dozen skins of tawny fur, ready in another day or so for stitching to garments.

The remnants of last night's stew lay in the firepit, furry with ants. Duru had wanted to dry the meat, and Hamr had laughed at her efforts to do so over the fire.

"We need salt to do it right," he said as though she did not already know.

She shrugged when he dropped her meat skewers into the flames and doused them with broth.

"Let the Forest eat, too—She feeds us well enough."

Duru had shrugged, because she had enough work curing the numerous skins and strings of gut and sharpening wooden knives for that day's certain kill.

The Beastmaker had filled the Forest with many animal powers, nimble teachers of the Hunt. Not only squirrels, the easiest to kill, but dwarf pigs, thick black snakes more like eels for their lack of fangs and poison, and weasels, ferrets, sloths, and porcupines. So much to hunt that hunting had become more like foraging.

Hamr and Timov no longer bothered to rise with first light. They slept on soft leaf litter in root coves until sunlight rayed like spears among the trees. They leisurely nibbled berries Duru had gathered the previous day, while Hamr sat under a tree and plucked hairs from his chin with the clam shells he carried in his satchel.

Timov liked to explore the sunstruck corners of the Forest. He startled mouse deer and tree foxes. And once, he brained a surprised ptarmigan with a shot from his sling. He wore its feathers in his hair.

Now better endowed to ascend toward the Sky World, he climbed tall trees, looking for bee hives. With smoking bundles of leaves prepared by Duru and lifted by twine, he drowsed the bees, then broke open the hives for the amber combs and sweet larvae.

Timov stared out over the spires of the Forest. He marveled at the undulant green vastness and at snow mountains in the far purple of the east.

North, the Forest ended. He could see the seas of grasslands, the drifting herds, and a blue-white curve to the world's icy edge.

West, the land opened to flat, torn terrain and herd trails.

South, the trees ranged forever.

That panorama always left him giddy, even when he found no honey to loot, and he came down into the gloom of the Forest with the wind shining in his eyes and ran among the trees on springy legs, yawping like a bird.

At nightfall, all three sang out the daycount and watched on Cyndell's bracelet their approach to the cold chambers of the moon. They had to find a strong, friendly tribe before winter, and they hoped that their fire-chant would alert others to their intelligence and worthiness.

After the chant, when no answering call came, Hamr told proud adventure tales to bolster the courage of his young companions and keep his mind off their plight. Duru and Timov participated, embellishing the fantasies, until sleep compelled and they drifted into dreams, sometimes without the hurt of remembering where they wandered, or why.

Only Blind Side of Life moped, overtly unhappy in the Forest. He missed the herd scent of the migratory trail and the prairie grass he preferred to the bitter tangled weeds that sprouted from tree-rot in these tight spaces.

The cluttered smells here sometimes confused him, and he always had to be led, for fear of breaking a leg among the numerous roots and fallen branches. While the men hunted, he moved between the trees, nibbling here and there, mostly sulking.

Occasionally, the wind shifted from the north and delivered memories of minty grass and stale yet comforting odors of the herd, which he sorely missed. He lifted his nostrils and turned his body into the wind and stood, head high, like a sighted horse, until the wind slipped away.

The morning of their ninth day in the maze of trees, Blind Side whinnied nervously. A harsh stench of decay spoiled the blossom fragrances. He tried to turn away, and Hamr took him by the rope tied about his neck and led him closer.

Since entering the Forest, he and Timov had been finding bent blades of grass and nicks in the treebark that might have been tribal messages. Perhaps Blind Side sensed other people—or, if nervous about a beast, they should move anyway.

They walked over a small rise and through a thicket of alders before they began to smell what the horse had sensed—the feculence of dead bodies.

Hamr mounted his horse and Timov and Duru fell behind.

The thicket opened to a grove of blue-shadowed fir, where a woman in a plaited grass robe stood with her back to them. Arms raised, she gripped a skull-sized rock in both hands. Before her, hanging by their hair from low limbs of the fir, three human heads dangled. Crows had gouged their eyes, and from their tattered necks hung juts of bone and blackened cords of flesh.

Duru gasped, and Blind Side of Life whinnied and stamped nervously.

The woman started, turned to face them, and they saw her pregnant profile—at least four moons. Long locks of yellow hair fell to her shoulders and twined into the grass of her robe, which parted to expose large breasts circled in red and black paint. She held the rock toward them and backed off. "Away!" she shouted. "Here be tainted ground."

She spoke in words more roughly hewn than the speech they used, yet the wanderers understood her.

Hamr lowered his spear and opened his arms in greeting. "No harm," he promised. "We are Panther people, seeking the Thundertree."

Duru put her hand on his thigh, wanting him to turn around and retreat from the horror. Instead, he walked Blind Side closer, and Duru and Timov followed reluctantly.

Now they could see the entire grove and noticed, under a haze of flies, beheaded corpses slumped under trees, torsos ripped open and limbs mangled by scavengers.

Beside them lay the carcasses of two panthers reduced to heaps of torn fur and exposed bone. In the trees, the birds that had been feasting fretted angrily at these additional intruders.

"Leave here or be cursed!" the pregnant woman yelled as she backed between the firs.

Hamr dismounted to pursue her, and Duru grabbed his arm and pointed to where a small wooden bowl wisped a burnt offering. "She is a priestess," the girl said. "She is burning resins to free the spirits of the dead. Let her go or she will curse you."

Timov took Duru's hand and pulled her behind Blind Side and back into the alder thicket. The priestess had fled, and Hamr hurried forward, to see which way she had run. Blind Side whinnied a warning, and Hamr pulled up short before a brisk rustling in the brush.

Ahead, a barberry shrub parted, and a black stump of a head emerged, ears laid back, green eyes glaring, fangs opened around a sizzling hiss.

Hamr shouted and thrust his spear. The panther jumped from its cover, a living shadow, and moved noiselessly under the trees, circling toward where Timov and Duru cowered.

Blind Side cried out and kicked his front hooves. Hamr dashed to him and quickly pulled him back into the thicket.

Duru clasped Hamr, while Timov, his back toward the horse, held his spear with both hands ready for attack.

The panther vanished. Blind Side's jittery pacing indicated it circled nearby. With Timov watching in the rear, and Duru close to the horse, Hamr led them back the way they had come. Warily, they edged through the Forest until they arrived at a brook, where they paused to orient themselves.

"Who are those dead?" Timov asked.

"You saw the big cats that died with them," Hamr answered. "They must have been Panther men."

"That’s a stalking panther stopped you from chasing the priestess," Duru observed. "Its tail is bobbed."

"Who killed the men?" Timov searched the shadowy chambers of the Forest for movement. "Their enemy must be nearby. They are dead less than a day."

"If it is war," Hamr said, "everyone will think we are enemy—both the Panther people and their foes."

"What do we do?" Timov whined.

"We should make an offering to show we are outsiders," Hamr answered.

"The priestess would be near her people," Duru said. "The Thundertree will know about us soon."

"We're getting out of the woods," Hamr decided, playing his alert stare across the nearby branches, searching for spearmen in the treetops. The bountiful, sunshot woodland menaced them with every wind-blur and bird squawk.

Shadowy streams crisscrossed the Forest, swollen with glacial melt and the thunderstorms of summer, and the noise of their watery tumult charged the air. Previously, the sound had been comforting, reminiscent of the sea. Now Timov's and Duru's ears ached, trying to listen past the rapids for threatening noises.

Hamr watched Blind Side, even though he could not entirely trust the stallion's more acute ears, since the horse did not know the Forest. They followed the brook north, without stopping to pick up the cured squirrel-pelts even though Duru pleaded. By afternoon, they stepped into the brazen light of the open plains.

Blind Side whinnied, delighted, and waded eagerly into the sighing grasses. While he frisked and grazed, the others lay in the open, staring at clouds toppling across the enormous sky.

Yet even with sunlight hot on their faces, fright chilled them. They listened hard and often raised their heads to scan. The darkness of the Forest had soaked into their senses, and as they sat on boulders that rose above the tasseled rye, they heard the lowing of the Great Bear in the wind, the cough of the Panther in the soft clop of Blind Side's hooves, and the dead-leaf slither of the Serpent in the hiss of wind through grass.

"A rival tribe would've taken the heads," Timov said, around the stick of grass he nervously chewed.

"No beast tied their heads to the branch," Hamr responded. He lay on his side atop a lichen-splotched boulder, watching his horse drifting slow as a cloud through the rye. "Had to be a tribe did it."

Duru grunted agreement from behind Hamr's sandal, tugging on a stitch with her teeth. "At least we should've gathered the pelts."

"We were scared," Timov said.

"Careful," Hamr corrected. He accepted his sandal from Duru and put it on.

"At least the priestess honors the dead," Duru said. "They must have some respect for the living, too. Maybe they'll come for us when the priestess tells them we're Panther people."

"Unless," Hamr suggested, "she was the enemy's priestess, catching her adversaries' souls."

"Then why did the Panther stop you from chasing her?" Timov asked.

They fretted the rest of the day. At night, they retreated to the edge of the Forest, to forage and shelter from the soft rains. With Blind Side of Life to warn of beasts, they succumbed to weariness and slept deeply, huddled in the embrace of root ledges, blanketed with leaves and branches.

Usually on this wearying journey, sleep ranged dreamless or illuminated with radiant memories of that day's wandering or the persistent undertow of fleeing perilous shadows among the trees. That night, thrumming with fear of the severed heads, Timov suffered a unique dream.

Thunderheads, racked with lightning, burned in the night. Hot rain fell in sheets. Thunder squashed him, and he lay pressed against a tree, watching the torn rain part around a man, a hideously huge man with a block head and hair like hackles, beard short and stiff as pine needles. Long eyes stared from under a shelf of brow, above flared nostrils and a sinewy mouth. Rain streamed from naked, solid shoulders that in gray light looked hammered from rock. A hard pulse beat in a neck swollen as a puff-adder's.

Sudden strong hands reached for Timov, and the blunt fingers pulled him close enough so he could see a fish-skin scar parting the beard of the giant's right jaw. He met the giant’s velvet breath, musty as new earth, and heard words, gruff as two stones clacking, "Go back!"

Timov lurched awake, those long eyes still visible in a flash of dream-lightning—wolfish, ice-green eyes, nailing him with cold rage. He sat up into whispering rain, noticed pink twigs of dawn among the trees, and hugged himself.

Hamr laughed at Timov's dream. "The ancestors are taunting you."

Duru rubbed her brother's hunched shoulders. She had slept restlessly, too, too frightened to let herself sleep deeply. Every owl hoot and wind-rubbed branch defeated fatigue, and she had lain awake in the watched dark.

"Hamr," she said to his broad back as he urinated against a pine, "all night I felt we were prey."

"That's why Timov needed that dream," Hamr explained through a yawn, tightening the antelope-hide about his waist. He squeezed the back of the boy's neck. "We are prey for whatever can catch us, aren't we? Come. Let's see if we can find a meal without getting eaten."

A short while later on the grasslands, while trying to run down a black snake for a meal, they found the site where the ghost dancer had killed the tribesmen earlier in the spring. Their bones had been scattered by scavengers and glowed white as pieces of cloud in the emerald shadows of tundra rye.

Hamr picked up a skull, smashed at one side like a piece of pottery. He examined the broken cranium, held it out to Timov, who shrank from it.

"It's just bone," Hamr said.

"Human bone, Hamr. They died violently. Their spirits—"

"Put it down!" Duru yelled.

"Spirits can't hurt us anymore than your dream can." Hamr dropped the skull, smiled at the others' diffidence, and waded through the rye. "Better to fear what's living."

In a lush patch he found a few charred twigs the rains had half buried and, nested among them, a black knife. The bone grip, though scorched, remained intact. Its leather bindings had burned away, and the seared handle had opened its white interior like a pod to release the volcanic-glass haft of the knife.

"Duru," Hamr called from where he knelt. "Look at this." He pointed with the blade to a wavy line etched in the handle. "This is a Mother sign, isn't it?"

She recognized the Moon Serpent, who each month molted her two skins, of light and of darkness. Hamr had uncovered a birth knife, used to cut the umbilical. At midnight, it etched the protective circle in the magic ashes around the last tooth of fire, freeing the Sun from the womb of the Earth. Only a birth-knife could wound spirits.

"It is Snake," she whispered. From her satchel, she withdrew a length of chewed tendon. "Will you bind it?"

Hamr fitted the bone halves together over the knife's haft, and wound the string about the grooved throat and butt of the handle. With his teeth, he tightened the bindings, then cut the tendon cleanly at the knots.

He admired this beautiful, mirror-black blade as he buffed it with his antelope-hide. Though far sharper than wood or flint, it was brittle, impractical for the hunt. He handed the knife to Duru. "Use it well."

Duru took the Moon Serpent in both hands, touched the tip to the charred spot in the grass where the fire had stained it. The knife's omen signified the cutting away of their old life and a new life promised.

Giving Hamr a pleased smile, she placed the Moon Serpent in her satchel, carefully sheathed between leaf-packets of dried plants. Someday this knife would gleam before the fire of their home among new people, and she would tell their grandchildren how Grandfather Hamr retrieved the Moon Serpent from the Land of the Dead.

Timov called from a nearby gully. More bones lay there, with a spear hollowed by termites. They studied the spear and noted Thundertree markings.

The wind shifted, and Blind Side nickered. They climbed the scarp of the gully, searched upwind. Duru cried out, pointed into the glare of the rising sun where a shadow moved in the rye, larger than a panther, big as a deer but low, slinking under the grassheads. A moaning cry rose with the wind, reboant as a bull.

Timov clutched his sister, and they backed away along the edge of the gully. Duru flicked nervous looks toward the Forest, wondering if they could make it to the trees before whatever it was attacked.

Hamr lifted his spear and approached the shadow. Blind Side had backed off. With no way to reach his steed. he waved for Timov to back him up.

Timov left Duru behind a rock half her height and loaded his sling. He followed several paces behind Hamr, leaning back, ready for flight.

The moaning darkened to a bellow, and a figure rose from the grass, ox-shouldered, black-furred and big as two men, with a gruesome head and a cankerous craw of fangs. Ghoul eyes glared from a visage of pale, fungoid flesh.

Duru screamed. Timov whipped his slingshot, sending a rock whizzing wildly past Hamr's ear and into the grass. Hamr had ducked, expecting the creature to pounce. His spear left his hand of its own will, and gouged out earth beside the monster. It shambled forward with a mighty roar, and the two hunters ran.

Hooting cries assailed them as they sprinted for Duru, snatching her, each by one arm, and bolting for the Forest. Hamr glanced back once, to see the monster's head fall away and reveal a scowling man in panther-skin sitting atop another man's shoulders.

A third man stood up in the grass and whirled the bull-roarer he had devised from a vine and a thick piece of bark. Then they were off, bounding like pronghorns.

Stupefied at first, Hamr stalked to where the Panther men had duped him, and kicked the crude mask of birch bark, moss and shabby furs. The tribe of the Forest had just tested his courage, and found him wanting. He grabbed his spear, shook it over his head, and shouted furiously at the fleeing men.

Laughter and jeers trickled back on the wind as the men disappeared into the ravines and gullies.

Part Two

SLITTING THE BELLY OF THE MOON BITCH

For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.

—Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

Ghost Dancing

Baat lay on his back, staring through branches of the Forest, watching the sun's light dapple with each breeze. He wanted to sleep, though he dared not during the day, when the smallheads prowled about.

Since the spring, after he had killed that smallhead band on the tundra and violated their sorceress, he had slept fitfully by night, and never by day. Under the sun, the smallhead men stalked the Forest in silent gangs, with poison-tipped spears and knives.

Baat hid from them in the gloomiest enclaves of the Forest, among tangled briars and snake-infested meres, where the smallheads feared to follow. Yet here, too, in these dark hollows, he could not sleep. He blinked up at the sun, listening for the sounds of their narrow bodies slithering through the bramble.

At night, when the ul udi came down from the sky and fitted themselves into his body, Baat could see with their ghostly vision. The Forest shimmered then, and he stared through trees and brush as if peering into the crystal clarity of a glacial lake.

He spied them dotting the terrain, each hunkered under a bush or beside a log, asleep or playing with their small fires, hugging spears, waiting out the night to continue the hunt. At dawn, the ul udi vapored away and left him blunt-sighted as any smallhead.

Even so, Baat would not retreat to the eastern mountains, where he had lived before, free of the smallheads. He chose to remain, no matter his suffering, tied to these meres and briar patches by memories of a time long lost.

He sipped from the bone-spout of his water-bladder and washed the dryness of fear from his mouth. Though a creek ambled nearby, he never drank water from his hands. He collected his drink from pools where he could see fish circling above their shadows.

The smallheads poured their flavorless poisons in streams and still pools and had killed most of the unwary People that way. Even at night, when these puny creatures huddled about their fires, they posed a danger, because they left deep pits in the Forest covered with branches and leaves and set with sharp stakes.

Sometimes they hid boulders in treetops lashed to trip-vines. Once, as a child, he had found a clansman nailed to a tree with an antelope's prong weighted with rocks and slung from a vine.

Those dark memories convinced Baat that the smallheads threatened him more fiercely than the Dark Traces. The ul udi killed with Baat's hands and with fire from the sky, pressing alertness into each moment of their victims' anguish, seeking and experiencing death intimately. The smallheads killed from afar.

To survive their killing wiles these several moons, he moved about rarely and then only at night and with steadfast attentiveness. That had made it impossible for him to follow the north trails to the herds and the icefields of summer. Whenever he showed himself on the grasslands, they came after him.

And now, despite all his precautions, they closed in here in the Forest. Just yesterday, three smallhead hunters had spotted him hiding in the bramble of a river isle and had used their drums to contact others. He had been forced to kill them during the day, without the strength of the Dark Traces.

After that, Baat had run east until exhaustion had dropped him in this dark dell. Nightmares denied him rest, and now he felt sick with weariness and fear. He squinted into the sun, paring his attention to the fierce light above the branches, listening for voices that sometimes came from there, when he exercised no wickedness in his heart.

Distantly, he heard a quiet voice: Why do you stay here, where you are in danger? Nostalgia for these woodlands of your childhood is empty, Hollow Bone. If you die here, the Dark Traces will capture your light and torment you for many generations.

"Bright Ones!" Baat called and immediately regretted his cry. He laid still, ears straining to hear past the hum of his startled blood and the burble of the creek for tiny sounds of encroaching smallheads.

Your days are almost ended, the gentle voice opened again in him. Soon, you can join us here in the sky, and we can listen to the wind of the sun as it sings through the heavens—and in that music, you will hear everything there is to know of peace and rest—and love. Come north, to the cairn of your ancestors, to the door of the mountain that leads to the sky.

North—across the tundra, over the grasslands, where the smallheads could easily track him—did his destiny await him there? From earliest days, long before smallheads arrived, the great ones of his tribe had gone there to die. How he yearned to follow them, to dance among the dolmen altar that the earliest ancestors had built.

There, the Bright Ones had the power to lift his spirit out of the worn animal of his body and carry him to heaven. Yet, this very hope of joining his ancestors trapped him in these haunted woods.

As a child, these had been his groves and dells. He had grown up following the herds in summer and wintering among these great firs. In his twentieth summer, without warning, the smallheads poisoned the streams and killed his parents, his two children and their mother.

Grief-stricken, he left, and for many years lived with another tribe to the east. Now as an old man, he had come back to dance with the ghosts of his youth—at least, so he had thought when he first returned here, seven years ago.

During those years, Baat had visited the sky often: The Bright Ones came to dance in meres and bogs far from the evil eyes of the smallheads. Embraced by their fiery wings, he had soared up from the hungers of the earth, high into the starry void. And there, he had known glorious raptures among the ul udi, while far below his body slept.

Among those raptures, memory blazed: He danced with ghosts of his young family and lived a summer of happiness so sharp and intense he wearied of the anguish he had endured in the years since.

In autumn—scrawny from dreaming when he should have been hunting—he returned serenely to the eastern mountains, to the tribe of People, where his second family flourished, far from the smallheads.

In many ways, life in the mountains had been good to Baat. The children he had fathered there had grown to have children of their own, and they revered him. Even so, he felt incomplete in their quiet realm, for this particular tribe of the People did not have or even want ghost dancers.

In this eastern tribe, the ul udi arrived only in dreams, and by day the People actively suppressed those celestial spirits. At first, Baat had been glad for that. He had wanted to forget, simply by living each of the first twenty years of his life again without ul udi or smallheads.

Only as old age made its claims did Baat yearn to call the cold fire down into his flesh once more. He quested others of his kind. He did find them, childhood chums, who had lingered around the Forest despite the danger of the smallheads.

Sharing their woe, though it fed Baat's hopelessness, made him feel stronger, because he was not alone. Then, he stopped finding them. Only smallheads remained in the Forest where the People had once lived freely.

Most of the summer that Baat skulked about the ancient woods, he believed he would return to the mountains. The season's longest day came and went before he admitted to himself that something more held him here. He had not relived the memories of his first family at all, had not even floated with the ul udi in their heaven. All he had done since arriving was watch for the smallheads.

Come north, to the cairn of your ancestors, to the door of the mountain that leads to the sky.

Baat's instincts wanted to obey the ul udi and go there, where he could dance in the cold fire with all the ghost dancers who had ever lived. At the sky altar, he could make arrangements for his own death, for the time when he would undertake his last trek across the tundra a handful of summers ahead.

With his sons helping him, he would dance around his own corpse. In the north, where heaven came down to earth, holy cairn rocks anchored the sky to the ground. The ul udi walked that land in bodies of light like creatures of flesh. Only there could he leave behind his body like a shucked garment and journey to heaven with the Bright Ones, never to return.

Forlornly, he realized he could not embark north without the smallheads tracking him. They populated the Forest fringe and roved the tundra in fierce bands.

With no one to warn him as he slept in the day, the more vulnerable he would be, not only to smallheads but to ravenous beasts. If even one of his People had remained to travel with him, as the journey north required, perhaps the crossing would be possible.

Several months ago, he had still hoped to find one of his own people to share the journey with him. He had come north early in the season to seek out the old places where the tribe once lived. Perhaps one of the others would have returned here too—though that hope now seemed foolish. The smallheads had overrun the old places. How could he ever have thought that any of the People would return to these woods of death?

One small, desperate chance remained if all else failed. Not far from this shadowy tarn of vipers and humpbacked boars lived an old smallhead woman. Sly-eyed as a marmoset, she had learned from witches before her how to catch ul udi in crystal rocks.

Certain crystals entranced the People, and these smallhead witches knew how to use those spellbound bodies to speak with the ul udi. From the ul udi, witches got their power and learned the secrets of heaven and earth.

Baat decided he would go to the witch and seek her help eluding the smallhead hunters. If she watched over him while he slept so that he survived the pilgrimage to the cairn of his ancestors in the north, she could use him. He would submit to her crystal-induced trances so that she might converse with the ul udi.

Baat sat up from where he lay, vision branded from staring at broken shafts of sunlight. He must be very tired even to consider trusting a smallhead witch. He rubbed his face with his hands, and fatigue darkened in him.

)|(

"We need something more," Hamr said, holding up the two rabbits they had stoned. "The Thundertree are laughing at us. We ran from their mask, and now they are laughing at us. We can't go to them with two rabbits and ask for a place at their fire. We must go back into the Forest and kill something larger."

Timov leaned against a boulder, tightening the straps of his sandal. Duru watched wind ripple across the grass range. Neither of them wanted to look at Hamr.

"Sure, it's going to be scary," Hamr said. "But we can't stay here. The days are getting shorter, the wind sharper. Winter's coming, don't you realize? Winter. We need the Thundertree. So now we've got to show them that they need us."

"The herds will be coming south soon," Timov spoke, plucking at his sandal. "We can take a big animal when it comes down the trails."

Hamr blew a sigh of exasperation, threw the dead rabbits to the ground, and turned away. These children thought as children think, he reminded himself and walked to where his two spears stood in the ground, crossing each other. What did they know of destiny? Their lives pivoted about fear and hunger. They would stay here so long as they perceived no danger. Anger seethed in him at the thought that the Thundertree laughed at them.

He put a hand on the spear tip from his childhood, and the weapon gave him back an instant of strength. With calm regard, he faced his companions again. "All right," he said, quietly, "you can stay here. I will go into the Forest with Blind Side and get our offering. If the Thundertree accept it, I will come for you."

"No," Duru said, looking to her brother. "We must stay together."

Timov passed his sister a weary frown. He wanted to wait and knew she would be going with or without him. "We'll go."

"Not. with that spirit. I need your help, not your reluctance."

"Then stay here," Duru urged. "Winter is coming and with it the herds, as Timov says. Let the Thundertree laugh at us. At least, they know we are not to be feared. In time, we will earn their respect and our place among them."

"Maybe they'll come out to us," Timov offered.

"I'm going," Hamr said and went for his spears.

Duru picked up her satchel and the two rabbits and looked to her brother. Unhappy, he pushed away from the rock he leaned against and pulled his spear from where it stood. She smiled at him and held up the rabbits. "At least we'll eat well tonight."

"Yeah, if we're not eaten first."

Hamr led Blind Side of Life by his rope and did not look back. He knew they were following. Their unwillingness made him feel more responsible for them, and he approached the forest warily.

While pretending to let Blind Side loiter in the bunch grass the animal liked best, Hamr studied the treeline. The Panther men, who had spooked them, presumably to test the newcomers' courage and worthiness for inclusion in their tribe, appeared nowhere. Nor were there any obvious signs of dangerous animals. Yet even so, he advanced slowly and stopped at the fringe, under the awning of the big trees.

They built a fire early, while the sun still dazzled in the branches, and they ate facing away from each other, the better to watch for the Panther men or an enemy. Before night fell, they sang the daycount on the calendar bracelet, doused the fire and lay down with their backs to a tree. Fear spoiled Timov's rest, and Hamr too dozed restlessly, anxious for the day so he could begin the hunt.

Duru, exhausted from her uneasy slumber of the night before, slept deeply and dreamed she woke on her back, her mouth open and filled with nut oil. Her tongue had become a wick. A yellow taper of flame stood on her tongue and illuminated the cope of a forest grotto feathery with ferns. When she could hold her breath no longer, she gasped and swallowed the nut oil and the flame—and her whole body ignited.

Blazing, she twirled and flapped upward like a burning leaf. Quiet as a star, she burned, silver, cool, shining through the darkness of distance, sliding across the night with a river's leisurely flow. All at once, she lifted beyond the trees and beheld them from above: ghostly clouds of tree-heads shimmering with moonlight. Then tundra, lonely and silver in the night, stretched below. Boulders and stray shrubs swung past. Ahead, a tiny figure appeared, a snowflake, a glistening star, a man rushing closer.

The surge of her flow stopped sharply at ground level, an arm's reach away from a giant with a face chipped from a boulder, hair like short quills, and a lichenous beard cut by a scar across his jaw and right cheek.

Above him, the northern lights rippled, a luminous green smoke visible through the transparency of the giant's head and wide-slung shoulders. He is a ghost, she thought. Through his chest, wide as a treetrunk, sleek as the sharks she had seen beached after a storm, she watched two men approaching. She recognized the moon-limned silhouettes of Timov and Hamr.

The hunters hurled their spears, and the weapons flew harmlessly through the ghost. Movement turned her attention toward a graben fenced by shrubs as jagged as antlers. The ghost's twin climbed out of that ditch, only this time he did not appear transparent. Not a ghost!

The giant’s solid form loped smoothly as a wolf behind the hunters. They stood baffled, looking ahead, where their spears had penetrated the wraith.

Duru wanted to rush to them, to warn them of the giant behind them. Before she could move, she spied another figure, a serpent the moonlight had split to legs and arms, creeping up behind the giant, spear poised. As the snakeman neared, she noticed his white hair streaming like fog from a scarred face twisted tightly to the skull.

"I see you there, Yaqut!" the giant shouted to the reptilian man, and the white-haired hunter came running toward him, spear raised, face squeezed into a grimace of rage.

She willed herself closer to Timov, who had turned with Hamr at the sound of the giant's voice. As she approached her brother, he retreated without moving his legs as if falling backward, and she fell after him. Their fall accelerated, then slammed to a stop—and she woke.

Or thought she had—but she could not move. Though her eyes had snapped open, her body lay paralyzed against the tree where she had fallen asleep. She noticed Timov slumbering under a blanket of leaves between tentacles of tree roots. Hamr sat beside him, head leaning back against the trunk, eyes closed, hands in his lap gripping the rope tied to his horse. In the dark, Blind Side rubbed against the trees and looked like river mist moving.

Duru burst with fear and willed herself with all her might to stir. She lay like a dead thing, her terror mounting. Then she twisted herself awake so vehemently that Hamr jumped to his feet, spear swung to block an attack.

Blind Side of Life snorted fretfully, stepped to Hamr for a reassuring pat.

"I'm alive!" Duru said in a gasp.

Hamr blew a sigh of relief. "The ancestors are taunting you, little sister." He stroked Blind Side between the eyes and sat down.

Timov rubbed the sleep from his eyes with one hand and put his arm around the sobbing Duru.

When she could talk, she related what she had seen. Hamr huffed a skeptical laugh and closed his eyes. "A dream, a nightmare," he told her reassuringly.

"It wasn't a dream," she insisted. "I flew, far from my body. I had trouble getting back in."

"Uh-huh."

"I saw it all clearly. There's another hunter around here. The ghost man called him Yaqut."

Timov sat up, alert now. His eyes opened wider with fear. "The ghost man sounds like the giant I dreamed about last night," he said. "There's an evil spirit in these woods."

The three sat in silence, letting that possibility sink in. Then Hamr got up and stoked the fire. "All the more reason to find the Thundertree. We need a home, safe from spirits and beasts. Rest now, the both of you. Tomorrow we'll get our offering."

"Hamr's right," Timov agreed finally. "The spirits taunt us out here. Go to sleep now. A better dream will soothe you."

Duru closed her eyes, met loose stars jiggling there. Her brother fidgeted with his own anxieties. She stared out into the dark woods, wondering what had really happened. By dawn, she had convinced herself of her dream’s reality. As they resumed foraging, she looked about for signs that another hunter lurked nearby. She climbed into a tree with her brother and scanned for smoke in the Forest or a human form on the northern plains and found neither. As the morning wore on, she began to believe that the ancestors indeed toyed with her.

At midday, Timov spotted a roe deer that stood immobile in a thicket of ash trees. The dark berries of its eyes watched to see if they had noticed it. The wanderers backed away and crouched out of sight.

Hamr tethered Blind Side to a sapling, signed for Duru to stay with the horse, and indicated that Timov should crawl with him. Hunched over, they scurried downwind among the trees until the deer's white rump came into sight through a screen of sunstruck foliage. It sipped at a brook, apparently mindless of them.

Hamr crept forward, slow enough not to rustle branches. Timov followed, froze when the deer's head came up. Hamr had to edge forward another pace to throw his spear free of the bush. He waited with aching stillness. The deer's head lowered to sip again, and the hunters nudged forward.

Hamr lifted his spear.

A neigh fluted from Blind Side, and the roe deer perked its head and leaped the brook in one bound. Hamr dashed after it, Timov directly behind him.

They splashed across the brook and barged through a bosk of slender ash on the far side and into a maze of thorn bramble. Thrashing blindly, they pursued the fleeing white rump among wends of bramble, shouting and cursing at the sharp, lashing branches.

Hamr pulled up short, Timov slamming into him. Ahead stood a lanky, sinewy man, narrow as a shadow, with a mask-like face that peered at them from between long shocks of white hair and a stringy beard. This face had long understood pain: The slash of mouth and lump of nose twisted to the left around a raw, jagged splash of purple skin. The left eye slanted almost closed under the purple, while the right eye glared vindictively. At his thonged feet, the roe deer lay twitching, a short lance piercing its throat. The stranger yanked the lance from the deer, and brilliant blood gurgled out.

Timov pulled at Hamr, wanting to run to the clearing, where they could dart and hide. Hamr stopped, turned his spear aside, and raised his left hand in greeting. "I am Hamr of the Blue Shell." He spoke in a bold voice. "This is my companion Timov."

The stranger, content that the two facing him presented no threat, knelt and plugged the deer's wound with a wad of grass and held it there until the animal lay still. Then he looked up with a fierce squint. "Get away from here or I'll kill you."

Timov tugged at Hamr's arm. Hamr, stunned by the hatred in that crooked face, backed off. Anxiously looking over their shoulders, they crossed the brook and returned to Blind Side.

When Timov told Duru what had happened, she said, "That is Yaqut. I know it."

Hamr mounted his horse and scowled at her. "We'll follow the brook and go around him."

Blind Side waded slowly upstream, while Timov and Duru followed, hopping among cobbles, occasionally glancing behind. At the first bend in the stream, the narrow man waited. His short lance held in both hands across his wiry thighs, he blocked their way.

"I warned you to get away from here," he said in a voice thick with menace.

Hamr stopped Blind Side and leaned forward, eyes narrowed. "We are leaving."

"You are going the wrong way. Turn around and take your runts out of here. If I find you anywhere east of this stream, I will cut off your limbs and leave you for the wolves."

Hamr's nostrils flared. "We are going east of here," he said through his teeth. "Get out of our way."

The twisted half of the stranger's mouth bent in a stiff smile. Hamr drove Blind Side of Life forward, spear raised. The gaunt hunter did not move. As soon as Hamr approached close enough to see the veins twisted at the stranger's bony temples, he pulled Blind Side up to strike with his hooves.

In that instant, the spindly man neatly sidestepped close to the horse. With one hand, he grabbed Hamr's knee and shoved, sending the horseman toppling from his steed.

Hamr splashed onto his back, thunking his head on a cobble. Through scattering pinpoints of hot light, he watched the stranger's grimacing face loom over him. Sharp flint pressed hard under his jaw and despair forced a whimper from him.

"Don't kill him, Yaqut!" Duru shouted from the bank.

The stranger held the tip of his lance firmly against Hamr's throat while he looked hard at the girl, then at Timov, who raised his spear tentatively. "Put your spear down, boy. Come over here."

Timov dropped his weapon and swashed into the brook.

"Sit down."

Timov obeyed.

The hunter gazed down at Hamr's anguished face, and his hard grin returned. He looked again at Timov, then Duru, and his grin slipped away. "How do you know my name?"

"I heard it in a dream." Duru held her breath. The sight of this scrawny old man atop big-boned, muscle-shouldered Hamr terrified the girl. "Please, don't kill him."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"We are hunters like you," Timov blurted. "We mean no harm."

"You attacked me."

Hamr struggled briefly, and the point of the flint pressed sharper against his jugular until he lay still.

"You would be dead now but that you know my name. Who are you?"

Yaqut looked to Timov, whose eyes could not hide his horror. "We are the last of the Blue Shell. From the south."

When the boy finished his story, Yaqut pressed his face closer to Hamr's. "With one stroke, your life's blood runs with this stream. No man attacks me and lives. Do you want to live?"

Hamr nodded, and the blade bit him under the jaw.

"Say it," the man insisted.

"I want to live," Hamr muttered.

Yaqut smiled his distorted grin, exposing teeth worn to brown stumps. "Now you owe your life to me. For the sake of these children, I will spare you, Hamr the Arrogant. But if you raise your hand to me again—" His good eye hardened with the promise of death.

Then he stood up, sheathed his knife. "So, you are Panther people." He spat into the water. "I hate Panther people. They are weak and hide in the Forest like squirrels." He put his hands on his hips, playing out the moment, and studied the strays before him. He surprised himself that he had thrown such a large man, had actually dominated him—and he felt even more amazed that he had not killed such a dangerous one when he had the chance.

But the girl had known his name, had heard it in a dream. What manner of child is she? He had heard of seer-children who possessed such powers of knowing from their dreams. He had never met any before. Might she be one? This opportunity must not be squandered.

Four moons, Yaqut had crawled among brambles and slept in trees, stalking the monster that had killed his clansmen, and he had yet to see more of the creature than the thing's day-old droppings.

Maybe these simpletons from the south might flush out his prey. If the girl indeed proved a seeress, then the priestess among the Panther people could very probably use her to track the ghost dancer. He shrewdly looked over the trio, then said, "The Thundertree are not far from here. I will take you to them. They need hunters—and they will be proud to show off their skills to men weaker than they."

Hamr sat up, rubbing his throat, and Yaqut waved him and Timov to the mudbank. "Get out of the water, you dolts." He picked up their spears, walked over to Blind Side and led him to where Hamr and Timov stood dripping on the bank. "You are the saddest horseman I have ever seen," he told Hamr, handing him the rope and his spear. He shook his head with scorn. "And you—" He turned his disdain on Timov. "You with the spear in your hand—why were you just standing there?"

"If...if I'd attacked, you'd have killed Hamr," Timov ventured nervously.

"If you would have bothered to attack, maybe I wouldn't have gotten to him," Yaqut derided. He heaved the spear's haft into Timov's hands so hard the young man almost collapsed. "Your fear will kill you, boy."

Yaqut stepped close enough to Duru to peer down into the small holes of her eyes. "Now, tell me the dream that showed you my name."

Duru stared back frightened yet unflinching. She observed the whipstroke of purpled flesh that seared the man's face and told him her nightmare.

With an amazed laugh, Yaqut blessed himself for his restraint in not killing them. "Aye me—you beheld the ghost dancer. You actually spied him. Few people have seen one and lived, you know. You are lucky he visited you only in a dream."

"Ghost dancer?" Duru repeated.

Yaqut paused to see if she dissembled, caught the sincerity in her open stare, and felt his wonder kindle. These far-traveled strays had not even heard of ghost dancers. "He happens to be your salvation." He waded across the brook and came back with the pack of stitched pelts he had dropped. "He knows my name, and that knowing saved you. He knows my name well, because I am hunting him." He pointed upstream and swept his arm toward the marshy terrain downstream. "I've tracked him from the mountains where this stream began and through the bog where it ends, and I haven't seen him once. The Forest is big, and he knows how to hide. But before winter, I will have his head." From the pack, he lifted a large skull and regarded it smugly. "Here's one I took last year. Behold the size of it."

It was a human skull yet far bigger than any they had seen. The blockbrow, thick above wide apart orbits, edged a long cranium, capped at the back with a knob of bone. The jaw displayed molars broad as thumb knuckles and incisors truly fangs.

"Imagine the flesh this skull wore," Yaqut said. "Imagine the strength that strapped these jaws." He laid the skull down and lifted from his pack a long bone, the radius bone of the arm. It looked like a club. "Can you see the power this bone held in life?"

"He must have been a giant," Timov marveled.

"This was a female." Yaqut put the bone aside. "She belonged to a tribe of giants, whose smallest stands a head taller than our biggest. They are enormous and powerful. Their strength—their real threat—is not size or strength but that they carry fire. Not the earthly fire we spark from flint and rub from wood. They carry the sky fire that spears down from the storm and splits the oak."

Yaqut grinned at the shades of incomprehension in the Blue Shell's faces. "You don't believe me. Yes, how can people carry lightning? Understand—these are not people. They are beasts that do not fit our imagination. And this one whom you have seen in your dream—he is old and cunning, eager to murder and defile and too wily to get caught."

He put the skull and arm bone in the sack, then nodded to Hamr. "Go get the roe deer. And you—" He pointed to Timov. "Make a fire. We will prepare enough meat for the next few days. The ghost dancer already knows we are here. Pointless to hide now."

Duru went with her brother to gather kindling, and Yaqut stopped her. "Have you had other dreams?" he asked, after Timov and Hamr had gone off.

"No, but my brother did. He saw the ghost man in a dream, too."

Yaqut nodded and dismissed her with a backhanded wave. These young ones are more than seer-children. Elation flared in him. Their dreams, so precise and vivid, are not dreams at all. Surely they are seeing this ghost dancer, exactly as the priestess has described him. Surely they are linked with him in the unique way that only blood can bind.

Though they did not realize it—though they had not heard of ghost dancers—he felt certain that one of their ancestors, perhaps not so long ago, had shared kinship with this breed of monster.

)|(

Hamr stood over the dead deer, noticing the precision of the puncture that had killed it. His own neck still ached where the flint had nearly severed his pulse. He rubbed his throat absently while he stared down at the dead animal, considering the expertise required to kill so efficiently.

At first he had seethed inside with the indignity of such a scrawny and aged man besting him. For a while, he had considered betraying his life-debt to the stranger and goring him while he showed them the giant's bones. The Beastmaker had not led him this far simply for him to kill vengefully. Such was not the way of a Great Man. And now that he contemplated what had happened, his humiliation faded. He realized that, in truth, he recognized the work of the Beastmaker.

Hamr examined the clean wound at the exact point of the animal's jugular and remembered how swiftly the deer had been running when Yaqut stabbed it. Here, obviously, they confronted a master hunter and fearless warrior, whose spirit defied his advanced age and small body. Hamr felt no shame for being bested by him. The ferocious degree of the man's burned face only heightened Hamr's regard for him.

Surely, the Beastmaker had sent Yaqut to lead them to the Thundertree, after they had come so close and could go no farther. What further sign did he need of the Beastmaker's presence?

Swans whistled in the sky, confirming this truth. With a silent prayer of gratitude, he bent to tie Blind Side's rope to the deer's hind hooves.

)|(

Yaqut touched the tip of his lance to the space between the deer's eyes, intoned: "The Beastmaker gave us your flesh and your bones to sustain us that our flesh and our bones may fulfill the Ways of Wandering. Great is the Beastmaker."

Hamr shared a look of pleased surprise with Timov and Duru: This strange hunter recognized the Beastmaker. He closed his eyes and thanked the inward darkness for finding them this leader whose bond to the hidden world they could trust.

After the deer had been butchered, marrow devoured, heart and brains seared and divided among them, and the haunches skewered for roasting, Yaqut mixed the blood with brook water in the ghost dancer's skull and passed it around.

How primitive these Blue Shell appeared to him, with their faces and limbs smudged with crude bodypaint, more like greasy ash than pigment. They seemed as likely to dash off senselessly into the woods as to eat the food he offered them.

He decided then to hold them with stories, beginning with his own. That seemed the easiest way to keep them close until he could figure out their usefulness in the hunt. While they sipped and ate and cooked the legs of deer, he told his story.

"I am of the Longtooth. Unlike the Blue Shell and the Thunder-tree, we have not forgotten the Ways of Wandering. We follow the herds across the tundra in summer, and we winter in the taiga, falling back to the Forest only when big storms roar from the north.

"Many summers ago, when I was a boy younger than Timov, a band of ghost dancers attacked my tribe among the rocky fields to the far north. There the glaciers had piled boulders atop each other taller than trees. The great ice had strewn them across the land like shattered mountains. The ghost dancers knew the land better than we, and they trapped us there. By day, many of my people were killed by thrown rocks. At night—" He paused, his crooked lip trembling. "Do you know what happens to ghost dancers at night?"

The Blue Shell shook their heads, staring at the livid ugliness of the skeletal hunter squatting beside the fire, the flesh around his slanted eye hot as an ulcer.

"At night, they carry fire from the sky." Yaqut lowered his head like a bull, paused a moment to control the ancient rage impacted in him. "More! They become that fire. The spirits that rage in the night don the bodies of the ghost dancers and walk the land. Can you grasp what I am saying?"

Timov had stopped turning the spit over the fire, and Hamr reached over and rotated the haunch. "What are these spirits of the night? The Blue Shell have never seen them."

"No one sees them. I tell you, the spirits wear the bodies of the ghost dancers. Otherwise, they cannot be seen, anymore than the deaf can hear sounds, yet the sounds are there." He nodded knowingly. "The Longtooth have a saying, 'Beyond the shadow is the ghost.' The spirits are like ghosts—less than shadows, yet real."

"And these spirits inflame the ghost dancers as barley-sours inflame us?" Hamr queried, fascinated.

"Far worse. Barley-sours inflame us with passions of the blood. But these night spirits inflame the ghost dancers with murderous lust more wild than the yearnings of the blood. They kill simply to kill. And so they killed us in a frenzy that night."

Yaqut closed his good eye with grief, stared sideways at the Blue Shell wanderers through his scar-hooded eye. "I hid when they came down from the rocks. I found a cranny, and I hid. But I saw them. Fire speared from their arms like lightning. Lightning! Can you see that?"

His good eye snapped open, and he looked fiercely at them, daring them to doubt him. "The lightning blasted our hunters into smoking corpses before they could throw their spears. And worse—far worse for some of them—the lightning did not blast but lifted them into the air and burned them slowly, while their suffering howled out like wolves."

Timov and Duru turned their amazement on Hamr who sat unstirred and reached over to turn the spit again. "How is it that the ghost dancers are not burned themselves?" Hamr asked.

Yaqut jutted his lower lip, shook his head. "That I do not know. But each bolt they flung wearied them. I remembered that, and it saved my life years later. On that terrible night, the last night of my childhood, I was ignorant of this fact. There were many ghost dancers, almost a dozen of them, males and females. When some fell back exhausted from throwing lightning, others attacked, and with their bare hands tore off the heads and limbs of the remaining men. And then they danced with the corpses. Mired in blood, they danced." He whispered the last words, stared into the flames, and fell silent.

After a while, he peered up from under his one silver-flared eyebrow joined to a crust of scar where the other had been, and forced a dark, one-sided grin. "You do not believe me. How could you? This is more evil than anything you have known. And there is more to tell. They did not kill all the women—some became sacrifices to the evil spirits' lust. That is right. They did not kill us all. By dawn, when they had departed, a handful of our women remained, and myself and a few other children who had also hidden. We wandered south till we found the other bands of the Longtooth." He stopped, rubbed the pain of remembering from the skull-gleam at his temples. "Ach, you have heard enough. Now tend that meat before it is all ash."

Timov obediently turned the haunch and Hamr fed the fire.

"You said the ghost dancers are wearied by throwing lightning," Hamr spoke, "and that saved your life years later. What did you mean?"

"Just that." Yaqut drained off the last of the blood from the skull. "You see my face, do you not? What do you think did this to me? I have been hunting ghost dancers since I became old enough to know what revenge is. I know all their wiles. And I paid a dear price to learn them." He ran a brown thumbnail along the purpled side of his face. "Ghost dancers not only throw lightning, they throw dreams. They appear to be where they are not. And when you attack them, they are behind you." He passed a ghastly smile to Duru. "Very like your dream, child. That happened to my first hunting party, after we had tracked down one of those bonesuckers by moonlight. We fell on her ghost—and she blasted us from behind, killed the other three and burned me as I was turning. Other men would have fled, half their face on fire, fearing more flames. But I knew she could not throw lightning again right away, so I dared to attack."

Yaqut turned over the leather straps he wore across his chest and revealed a row of thick fangs. "Ghost dancer teeth. One from each kill." He flipped the straps so the teeth were hidden again, then tapped the gut-bindings, where the straps criss-crossed over his chest. He parted the bindings and exposed another fang embedded in the binding. "I wear this one closest to my heart. It is hers. She made me wear my pain outside for all to see. So I keep hers in sight."

Timov mechanically tested the roasting haunch by pressing his thumb against it and gave it another turn. "We saw three dead Panther men yesterday. Their heads were torn off. Was it the ghost dancer who killed them?"

Yaqut hissed through his teeth. "The Thundertree are not real hunters. They are trackers. They follow their cats, who hunt best at night." He clicked a fingernail against the fang over his heart. "She taught me never to hunt them at night. And it is even better not to confront them by day. Those corpses you saw stood against him by day. He killed them with his hands."

Yaqut removed a hide sash from his waist and opened it on the ground. Inside lay a dozen wax leaf packets. He peeled apart several, disclosing yellow powders, amber resins, and gummy black oil. "Poisons," he said, quietly, as if the venoms slept and should not be woken. "I have learned them all. The powders for tainting drinking pools and the resins and oils for tipping spears and knives." He meticulously closed the packets, folded the sash, and tied it about his waist. "The best way to kill bonesuckers is without ever seeing them until they are dead. Even in daylight, they can reach into your spirit and make you see and feel things that are not there."

"Why do you call them bonesuckers?" Duru asked.

"Because if they get you," Yaqut answered, with malevolent amusement, "they will do to your bones what we did to this deer's."

)|(

The end of the twelfth moon arrived, the Pine-Shouldered Moon, the first moon of the cold season, riding lower in the sky than the moons of summer and spring. Each day, the sun rolled farther south.

Already the small changes of autumn had begun: Days shortened. The smell of snow opened in the mouth of the wind. The hard nuts had formed, and the seed-strewn floor of the Forest crunched underfoot.

Watching the watery birches swell with the first chill, hearing the drone of bees lower as they moved their hives into the deeper hollows of trees, anticipating the next moon, the Frost Moon, Baat squirmed. If he was to reach the cairn of his ancestors in the north before winter, he would have to leave the Forest and cross the tundra immediately.

The thought of trekking the grasslands alone stopped his breath. He had done it before, eight times. He knew well the dangers, but he had never dared to cross the thunder of the herds while being hunted by the smallheads. Out there alone, he knew for sure they would find him, and then his headless body would feed the dog packs and the crows, the ants would hollow his bones, and the Dark Traces would trap his body of light in the groaning wind and give him pain forever.

Do not be afraid, a dulcet voice spoke from inside him.

"Bright One!" Baat whispered with surprise. The red disk of the sun, though low among the trees, had not yet set. The ul udi only rarely came to him before dark.

We came soon as we could to tell you: There is a way to go north, to the door of the mountain, the sweet voice said.

Baat stepped through a windfall scattering of tiny brown apples and peered around a stout fir, looking for smallheads among the shallow stream-waters sliding by. Mists welled in the ditches of older rivulets, spilled over among the trees.

The hulking silhouette of a bear lumbered by, smelling him and moving away. Otherwise, the twilit woods held still and empty. He could speak aloud without fear of betraying himself to the smallheads, and he said, softly, "Bright One, the smallheads hunt me everywhere. I must hide."

Winter is coming, Hollow Bone. You must not tarry any longer.

"I've been thinking of going east, Bright One, and wintering in the valleys, where the mountains break the big storms. I could come back here next summer and try again. By then, the smallheads may have forgotten me."

You are too old to wait another season. Winter is harsh. If you die where we cannot help you, you know what will happen: The Dark Traces will take your body of light for their own. You must not wait. The smallheads will not forget. They will be searching for you till the end of your days. You must make the northward journey now, tomorrow—no later.

A goldfinch sparked overhead. Baat clambered into a sprawling hickory and surveyed the surrounding land. The smallheads would be settling in for the night, he understood. He need not be afraid.

Wren-song rode a breath of rain from the northeast, and the bear he had spotted rummaged among leaves looking for mice. "I'm afraid to walk the tundra alone. The smallheads will see and track me down."

No. Travel at night. We will guide you.

"In the day, when I sleep, their stalking animals will track me, and they will pounce on me. You will not be there to warn me."

You will not travel alone. Your companion will watch over you while you sleep. And when your companion sleeps, you will hunt. You will travel together at night.

Baat raised his empty hands to the lavender sky. "Bright One, I have no companion. I am alone."

You are not alone. We have shown you that you are not alone. Do you not remember? Go—and take your companion.

Baat sat on the tree limb, listened to swifts creaking in the higher branches on their way to sleep, and tried to remember. Looking down at his thighs, he watched the afterglow of sunset shining there. The darkling gloom brightened as a blue light came on around his body. The ul udi climbed down the sky toward him.

Out of the sunset blur, the old ones appeared, faceless human shapes, the color of moonlight, standing in a circle around him. He bowed to them. They opened their arms, linked hands, and began to dance, silent as rising mist.

The diaphanous shapes of the old ones danced like flames, like underwater shadows. They closed in. He held his arms out to them, watched cold fire bristling green from the tips of his fingers, sparking blue at his elbows.

A whirling laugh spun him around, and sparkles unfurled from his body, fluttering through the leaves, high into the brown air and clicking among the first stars.

He became the still point of the reeling earth. The old ones spun around him, effervescing to cold light. When he stamped his feet, neon snakes slithered away in all directions. When he clapped his hands, fireworks splashed in front of his face. Electricity veined his limbs, sent thin, hot wires shimmering through his hair and beard. Joy arced from his testicles to his brain. And he convulsed in a stagger-step dance to sizzling, cracking music of pure energy.

All at once, he no longer danced but soared above the woods. The fog under the trees shone through the branches, phosphorous mist fleshing the black veins of creeks, brooks, and streams.

Where are the Bright Ones taking me so swiftly?

To the companion they had promised him, yes, of course. And when, in the next instant, his flight stopped, he stood in night-haze before a horse tied by a rope around its neck to a thick-shouldered man asleep under a craggy butternut tree.

Baat remembered the beardless man and those around him—the white-haired scar-face, Yaqut, who had stalked him all summer, and the young brother and sister.

The Bright Ones had brought him to these children the last two nights, when the ghosts of the old ones had come down from the sky to dance with him. Timov and Duru—he had heard their names, as alien to him as their swarthy looks.

Both times he had been eager to return to the dancing rapture, and he had pulled away quickly, though not without the boy and the girl both sighting him clearly.

That is strange. Except for witches with their crystals, smallheads never before had seen his body of light.

Now Baat looked more closely at these smallheads. They seemed typical, except for the one with the broken face, who was far more sinister than any hunter Baat had seen before. Even in sleep, hostility snarled his mouth. Baat had been careful to keep his distance from this one.

The girl whimpered, already sensing him, somehow fitting him into whatever she was dreaming.

The boy stiffened. An alarmed tremor startled the eyes under his lids, and Baat realized that these two young ones already sensed him.

Dance, a Bright One commanded.

Baat stepped back. He felt the rhythm of his dancing body far back in the woods, and he moved with it. He swayed, gently at first, afraid to lose sight of these smallheads in the bright smoke that streaked around him as he stirred.

He noticed that his movements calmed the children. They lay still as he veered about, and he knew that, as they watched him in their dreaming, they became less frightened to see him dancing than when he simply stared at them.

Of course, he thought to himself. I must look terrifying to these small things.

So he gave himself to the music in the cold fire that fell from the sky. And, as ever, the fire carried him.

Slippery green light swung him in circles, looped him into the air and back. Bodiless, he danced as he never could when anchored to his bones.

Twirling in radiant motion, he rode the rapture of the ul udi, the hawk-rush, falcon-tilting pleasure of the Bright Ones, the meteor-stab, comet-feather, aurora dance of star-whirling night. He danced until he reeled, as with drunkenness, and collapsed.

He woke alone, back in his body, lying face up. He stared through the leaf-rustle at the borealis painting the sky chill green. His breath pumped hard, and his ears rang with cricket-noise.

He sat up, clutching his head. The ghosts of the old ones had gone. Only a faint glimmer shone on his skin, where he had worn the ul udi's cold fire.

What has happened? Why have the Bright Ones made me dance for the smallheads? "Bright Ones—" he moaned.

Hush. Sleep now. Tomorrow you must begin the journey north.

"With those smallheads?"

The Bright One kept silent. An owl's hoot floated through the trees. Crickets trilled. And a lithe rain began. Baat lay back and let the fog ruffle over him as the truth of what he had seen began to come clear.

)|(

At dawn, Duru and Timov sat huddled under the big fir where they had slept, chattering like the loud sparrows hidden in the branches above. "It was the ghost man," Duru asserted.

"It didn't look like a man at all," Timov said. "It was spirits. It looked like the sky's night fire come down with the wind."

"No, Timov," Duru said, with petulant certainty. "I saw him before he started dancing. It was the ghost man."

"What happened?" Hamr asked, stepping out of the bushes.

Timov and Duru looked at each other, and the boy saw that his sister would not speak about it. That frightened him. Maybe this was some bizarre Mother mystery. Stricken, he turned to Hamr: "We had the same dream last night."

Hamr repressed a shiver. The night before, Duru had learned Yaqut's name in a dream, and that had saved his life. What is this long sight she has? A spirit—and is it possessing Timov as well? He turned a narrow eye on the girl.

Under Hamr's gaze, Duru wilted, said quietly, "The ghost man came to me—to us. He stood where you're kneeling now. But he didn't say anything."

"I didn't see any ghost man," Timov asserted. "Just ghost fire, like in the sky at night, whirling like a waterspout."

"Let her finish, Timov."

"The giant was the ghost fire," Duru piped, reclaiming her annoyance at Timov's distortion of her vision. "I saw him standing here, under these trees. When he started to move, to dance, his body melted almost, became liquid flames that swirled round and round. Then he rose into the air and was gone, like that. I couldn't see where he went."

"He went where the rain lives," Yaqut said from the bushes. He stepped out, his hands still tightening the leather straps of his loin-pelt. "That was the ghost dancer. So, both of you saw him again?"

"You did, too?" Duru asked, staring up at him with trepidation.

"No, child. I dream only of what is past. But you—and your brother, too, it seems—have something of the seeress' gift. When we reach the Thundertree, that may prove useful. There is a priestess there from my tribe. She will know how to use your power."

"When will we reach the Thundertree?" Hamr asked. He stood a head taller than Yaqut and looked almost twice as wide, but his voice had a hush of respect when he addressed the wiry man.

"If we leave now, we will arrive before nightfall—before the ghost dancer comes in the flesh."

The Blue Shell quickly gathered their satchels and strung them from their horse's back. In moments, they moved out.

By midday, the travelers had left the flat river-forest. They climbed into a confused and beautiful land of tree-crested ridges overlooking a necklace of lakes.

Blind Side moved falteringly through the undulant terrain, feeling his way cautiously among cobbles and boulders under twisted trees and across traps of glacial sand in the sudden glades.

At the summit of a winding hill, Yaqut paused and pointed down at a somnolent hollow of giant oak and maple beside a kettle lake. From the center of the hollow towered an immense boulder, a glacial erratic, gigantic as a mountain's flank, with trees sprouting from its top like hair. Smoke threaded into the sky from among those trees.

"Thundertree," Yaqut announced.

Hamr shielded his eyes against the westering sun and gauged the distance across the tumbled landscape to the splinter of mountain. "We'll not make it before dark."

Yaqut agreed with a nod, held up a disk of polished abalone, and flashed a sun-signal to the camp. A few moments later, an answering gleam sparked from the top of the massive boulder. "The Panther men and the priestess will meet us in an elm glade midway from here. We will be safe among them."

Timov and Duru smiled at each other. Duru took Hamr's hand. Their long journey nearly over, she breathed deeply and for the first time since their exile began, something akin to a song rose up in her. She began to hum.

Hamr's hand tightened on hers—proud to feel her ease, to know that, at last, his faith in the Beastmaker and in himself had been reward by the joy of those in his care.

They marched down the grassy hill, among hot-colored rhododendron and brilliant green grass, and Timov sang the words to the tune Duru hummed—a song Mother had often sung to calm them when the dark came:

Now that the sun is setting

Panther walks like smoke
sleek as the muscled rain
where the night wind woke.

)|(

In a clearing made from a toppled giant elm, the priestess waited with a band of Panther men. The sun, low among the trees, pierced the glen with shafts of crimson light. The hunters loitered nervously under uplifted roots of the fallen tree, building a fire and making torches from their long spears. Their cats floated like pieces of night at the perimeter of the clearing, restlessly waiting for the command to stalk.

The priestess, with her rock of fertility pressed against her naked, swollen belly, sat on a convenient limb of the prone elm. She stared down at the red and yellow circles painted on her bloated breasts and widening around her puffed-out omphalos, and she muttered to herself, "Yaqut—where are you? It is getting late."

Since the ghost dancer had filled her with his child on the tundra five moons ago, she had resided with the Thundertree. Her clan in the Longtooth had sent her here with the rock of fertility to win the favor of the Panther people, to lure great souls into the wombs of their women. The Longtooth desired the indebtedness of the Thundertree so that they might shelter in the Forest with them when the terrible storms of winter raged.

Power, the priestess said to herself with disgust. She had been sent to earn a privilege among these primitive people, and now, because of the ghost dancer, she had been doomed to bear a child among them.

She had expected to return to the Longtooth, be called to the chief's hut as reward for her troubles, and bear his children. Never could she have guessed a ghost dancer would take her. There had been no ghost dancers in these woods for years.

The priestess knew which berries to eat to abort the child, but then she would have to return to her clan to recover and lose her chance to convey her chief's power to the primitive Thundertree. Instead, she grew larger and lived like a chieftess.

The priestess gnashed her teeth and silently cursed Yaqut's tardiness. His flash-signal had promised strays—ghost-dancer half-breeds. Well, if that were true, she could use them with the crystal to hunt down the ghost dancer who had done this to her.

She wanted that creature's head, not just for her own revenge, though that thrived in her with the weird child growing in her womb—but she also wanted the giant's head to present as a trophy to the Longtooth chief, to assure that she would indeed have other children, noble children.

The witches would hate her for this, for they used the ghost dancers to speak with the spirits, and hated those who killed them. They could have her weird child for their trance-work, so long as they left her alone to live out her life as a chief's woman and a noble Mother.

One of the cats sounded a cry, and a Panther man broke from the group and hurried to the edge of the clearing with a torch. "Someone comes," he called.

The priestess did not bother to rise. These fools had often been wrong. They relied almost entirely on their animals, beasts that growled and snapped at every hare.

With disdain, she regarded the hunters in their mangy pelts, lax limbs sheened with animal fat to ward off biting flies and mosquitoes, beards braided about bits of bone. As soon as she dropped this weird child, she would take the ghost dancer's head and leave these smelly louts behind.

From among the trees, Yaqut appeared leading the two dark-haired youths and the girl she had seen three days before, when she had been sent to free the spirits of the latest Panther men killed by the ghost dancer. The bigger of the youths, a beardless man strapped with muscle, held a rope looped about the neck of a horse that shuffled nervously before the panthers. Only the youth's constant reassurance kept the beast from rearing.

The Thundertree men gasped and muttered at the sight of the regal animal, and their cats walked tight circles, fighting the urge to pounce, looking to their masters for the word to attack.

The priestess rose and lifted the rock of fertility in greeting to Yaqut, the most famous of the Longtooth hunters. She was proud to see him again, though always before, among the wandering camps of her clan, she had feared his marred and deathly stare. No mangled pelts hung from his taut frame, only well-chewed leather and the chamois of the tundra gazelle. Among the shabby Panther people, here in the gloomy and treacherous Forest, he looked divine, like the wrath of her ancestors sent to avenge her.

Yaqut accepted her greeting by touching the rock of fertility with the tip of his short lance. "The young ones have weird blood," he said, soft enough for her ears alone. "They have seen the ghost dancer in their dreams. He told them my name."

The priestess' eyebrows flicked up. "Oh, they will be very useful then. But we must get them up into the Thundertree soon, where the crystal is hidden. I thought you would be here earlier."

"But for that blind horse, which slowed us down."

The branches on the fringes of the clearing rattled in a sudden wind, and then went silent. The panthers pacing before Blind Side of Life cringed. Their bellies pressed the ground, and the horse, which had been wagging his head with fear of the big cats, lifted quivering nostrils, smelling something new.

A throb of thunder lifted everyone's gaze to the purpling sky. Stars glinted in a cloudless twilight.

Yaqut and the priestess exchanged a knowing glance. "Quick," Yaqut ordered, "into the woods. Leave the strays here."

A cold wind blew through the clearing, fluttering the spear-flames and the fire under the crown of roots and making everyone's small hairs bristle.

"It is too late," the priestess gasped. "Look!"

Overhead, against the last red streaks of day, a ball of blue fire swirled. Moans of fright escaped the Panther men, and they bunched, burning spears raised against the celestial fire.

Hamr pulled Duru and Timov closer, wedged them between himself and Blind Side. He looked to Yaqut, but the old hunter had backed against the fallen elm, lance poised, mad face turning its fury to all sides, seeking his prey.

Horrified shouts cut through the knot of Panther men, as they spread out and pointed their flame-tipped spears to one side. There, a fiery being raced among the trees, arms whirling, head shooting sparks and clots of flame.

The hot silhouette flashed closer, and Hamr pulled Blind Side forward to block the approach. A spear in each hand, he leaped to the side of his horse and widened his stance, ready to heave his weapons at the advancing fire-creature.

Timov, face drained of blood, pushed Duru behind the horse, rushing around the steed to join Hamr. His legs quavered at the sight of the blazing apparition rushing closer, flashing among the trees, and he had to use his spear as a staff to keep from tottering.

The Panther men had formed a line facing the burning demon, spears held high. Only Yaqut looked the other way and shouted for them to turn. The fallen elm blocked him. The crouching priestess clutched his legs, and his cries vanished among the fearful shouts of the Panther men screaming for their cats to attack. The panthers crawled on the ground, hissing and raising their claws at the radiant shape hurtling toward them.

Only Duru, peering out from behind Blind Side, glimpsed Yaqut as he broke free of the priestess and clambered atop the log. He pointed his spear the other way. Before she could turn to see what he gestured at, a marshy odor whelmed up. Gruff hands grabbed her. She screamed and was hoisted up.

Blind Side startled and sprang aside, and Duru watched the faces of those nearest her falling away. Hamr and Timov, following her with their eyes, gasped and shouted. And then they were gone, blocked by trees that abruptly converged as she flew into the darkness.

She twisted in the grip of what had seized her and confronted a big horrific face: the cruel visage from her nightmares, the beast-man—whose bone-hooded eyes stared down at her with vast clarity.

The Invisibles

Baat ran hard, with the small girl tucked under his right arm. Though she kicked and flailed, she could do nothing to slow his flight into the Forest. He leaped over fallen trees and splashed across creeks, crouching over the girl to protect her from thorns as he crashed through walls of bramble and vetch.

He had no trouble carrying her light body. But her screaming bothered him. Though the smallheads would not pursue him now that night had fallen, they could hear from her piercing screams the direction he fled. Not wanting them to know he intended to go north, he hurried south, deeper into the Forest. Later, when he had somehow calmed her, he planned to backtrack.

How to calm her? Or even yet, how to calm himself? His raid of the smallheads' camp had drawn the Dark Traces down on him. Aroused by the fear and fury of the smallheads, the ul udi swarmed through him, expecting violence, needing bloodsmoke.

Kill the smallhead runt!

"No!" he barked. "She is my companion."

She is a smallhead! She is the runt of those who killed your children! Spill her blood! Break her bones! Rip out her entrails! Leave her carcass for the smallheads to find! Make the small-heads weep—as you wept!

Baat could not ignore the Dark Traces. They inhabited his flesh. Their voices reverberated in his skull with such insistence that he lost his concentration and ran hard into a tree. He fell on his back, sharp points of light spinning before him.

Duru twisted free, scrambled to her feet, and burst away. She ran through the darkness, pulling herself past trees in her way, squeezing through tangled branches of a hedge, and skidding down the embankment of a brook into utter blackness and a chill of mist.

She wanted to scream, but there was only enough breath in her to run. Groping blindly, she splashed among rocks, found her way to the other side and crawled furiously up the muddy slope.

Behind her, she heard the monster's roar, bellowing like a bear as he crashed through the hedge above the brook and lunged into the descending darkness.

Baat yelled, "Come back! I will not hurt you! I will not let the Dark Traces hurt you!"

To Duru, he sounded like a ferocious beast.

When she reached the top of the bank, she heaved herself forward, grateful for the dim illumination of the auroras surging above the trees. Terror clotted her chest. Her breath pounded so loud she could no longer hear the monster's chase. Yet she felt him gaining on her.

Her foot snagged on a root and sent her sprawling. As she staggered back to her feet, she cast a fearful glance over her shoulder and sighted him, huge against a gap in the leafy branches, spike-haired and swollen-shouldered under the fiery fog of the borealis.

Duru screamed, and Baat lunged for her, snagging her by her arm, and jerked her off her feet as she bucked and kicked.

Smash her head! Rip off her arms! Kill the smallhead runt!

"No!" he shouted at the ul udi. "Go away! Leave me alone!"

Kill her! The smallheads killed your children! Kill her!

"No!"

They're coming for you! Kill her now! Look! The smallhead comes! Kill the runt!

Baat held Duru above his head, to see past her. She thought he intended to dash her to the ground, and her screams doubled. Then she caught what the monster had already noticed: Something moved directly ahead. A shadow broke from the darkness. A human figure approached.

"Duru!" Hamr's voice called.

Baat gaped in amazement. The smallheads never hunted by night. Who is this one? He tucked the girl securely under his arm and squinted. The beardless one, without his horse.

He came through the trees with spear raised, uncertainly aiming the weapon, forward and back, afraid to throw, afraid of hitting the girl.

The Dark Traces' wrath swelled up in Baat from his core as they rallied for the kill, and the air brightened with the cold fire that limned his body.

Hamr fell back a step at the sight of blue flames crawling over the giant, sparkling green from every pore of his body.

Duru had stopped squirming when the fire swept over her. Vision widened, and a chill pervaded and soothed her. With perfect clarity, as though the full moon had broken through the clouds and she were suspended in the air with it, she gazed down at the giant, saw herself under his arm and Hamr standing there, gawking.

Burn the smallhead! Quickly—quickly! His spear is tipped with poison! One cut and you will die! We will eat your soul! We will eat you, Baat! Kill the smallhead!

Hamr edged closer, spear poised.

Baat could feel lightning taking shape, burning, yet he would not throw it. The Dark Traces would not master him: If he killed this one before the girl, she would never be his companion. The Dark Traces would defeat the Bright Ones, who had led him to her.

Burn him! Burn him now—before he strikes!

"No!" Baat yelled and, with an effort, painfully pulled the blue lightning back, deeper into himself.

Hamr's whole body shook. Meeting the ghost dancer's blockbrow stare, he was not sure what he met there—rage, and yet something else. "Let her go!" he shouted back.

Though Baat did not understand what the smallhead yelled, he knew what he meant. He swung the girl around so she dangled in front of him, shielding him from the spear. He looked deeply into the smallhead hunter before him, recognizing the fear in his tight face, and felt a glimmer of wonder at the courage it took for this one to have run through the night Forest to stand here at the brink of his death.

"Let her go," Hamr pleaded, and lowered his spear.

Baat hugged Duru to his chest with one arm. He raised his other arm, palm forward, no killing fire in his hand now. "I will not hurt her," he said. "I will die before I allow hurt to touch her." He backed away, turned, and sprinted into the trees.

"Wait!" Hamr bawled and ran after them. The ghost dancer moved too swiftly, somehow seeing his way in the dark. What had he said? The gruff voice had sounded almost gentle.

Despair mounted in Hamr as he realized the ghost dancer had taken Duru for his own. "Come back, you bonesucker! Damn your blood! Come back! She is my wife!"

Duru heard Hamr's cries dimming away. Fear skirled again in her. What has happened? For a while, she had been stunned, somehow freed of her fright, even of her body. Now, she fit again firmly locked in the grip of the monster. His swamp-stench sickened her, his outbursts of grunting speech filled her with animal dread.

Was he carrying her off to kill her, to shuck her brain and suck on her marrow as Yaqut had warned? She remembered the beheaded bodies she had seen in the Forest, and struggled to break free, but he only tightened his grip until she could barely breathe.

Now Baat fled more cautiously through the woods, ignoring the commands of the ul udi. Since he had pulled back their killing fire, they had somehow become less frantic. His insides cramped around the knot of resistance lodged somewhere near his heart. He did not care. Let the Dark Traces hurt him. Let them rend him inside-out with their anger.

He had not killed to take the girl. The Bright Ones would be pleased. "Oh, but where are you, Bright Ones?"

The Dark Traces answered him.

You belong to us, Baat. You are bones of the earth, flesh risen from mud. You will die for what you have done this night. The smallheads will hunt you down and kill you with their poisons—and we will eat your soul—oh, yes, Baat, we will eat your pain in a darkness where light never comes.

He could not ignore those voices.

Kill the runt! Kill her!

He might endure them until they faded. And they would fade if he could get far enough away from the smallheads. With each creek that he splashed across, with each black wall of undergrowth he shouldered through, with each rocky ridge he mounted and crested, the smallhead hunters fell farther behind.

The dark took him in. The cold fire lit the night flamboyantly—and the lichen on the trees glowed for his eyes, mushrooms gleamed, rocks breathed with the last heat of day. Owl eyes sparked from a high branch, fireflies flickered. Like a piece of ice hung in the sky, the evening star flashed, low among the trees.

Once Baat felt confident that he had traversed a greater distance than any smallhead could track in the dark, he stopped. He stamped the ground to clear off snakes, and lowered the girl to a mound of leaf debris. She twisted off on all fours, and he had to scramble to catch her.

Smash her head!

"No!" he screamed. The girl thought he yelled at her, and hung perfectly still in his grasp. He placed her on the leaf mound again though he could see, even in the dark, the skittish look in her eyes. She would bolt as soon as he stepped back.

Break her legs!

"Good idea," he muttered. He reached up and snagged a fistful of crawling ivy. He wound the vines about her ankles and tied the other end to his wrist. He squatted over her and scrutinized his catch. She appeared older than the girl-child he had fathered and lost—so long ago. In her seventh winter, his child had convulsed to death in his arms, banging her head against his chest.

Kill this runt! Kill her for the young you lost!

"Bright Ones—help me!"

The girl cringed under his loud voice, not hearing words, only gruff animal noise. Tears channeled her cheeks.

He pulled away from her but could not stop looking. Is this truly my companion? Have I evilly deceived myself? This is a child. Of course: If she had been a woman, the Dark Traces would want to wreak their lust on her.

He had wanted to take the boy, but the girl had been easier to grab. And now? She would be hungry, thirsty.

Baat rubbed his face, looked up through the branches at the vaporous fire. What have I done? How can I hope to feed her, to gentle the terror that owns her now that I have ripped her from her own people? He moaned, and she curled up into a ball and shivered with sobs.

Kill her and be done with it. Do it for your dead children.

Hands to his head, Baat rose to his toe-tips and screamed at the sky: "I will not kill! I will not! Not now! Never again! Go away!"

Duru peered through her fingers at the ranting monster. His incomprehensible noise battered her. His hulking shape glowed like the sky above. The gloom had darkened, and a scatter of rain raked the treetops.

The ghost dancer stamped furiously, luminous arms upheld, face wracked with grief, grunting and gnashing, slapping his head. Sparks flew. Then he turned and looked at her again. His huge face sorrowful, angry, tormented, gazed down at her through unfathomable suffering.

)|(

Hamr returned to the clearing, where the Panther men had built a raging bonfire. Timov waited for him beside Blind Side of Life, and rushed over when he came through the trees.

"Did you find her?" he asked frantically, but Hamr strode past him. He ignored the spitting panthers and went directly to where Yaqut squatted before the flames, gnawing at the deer haunch they had cooked the day before.

"Why didn't you come with me?" Hamr asked.

Yaqut looked up, nonchalantly, and placed a thumb against the scalded side of his face. "It is night. The bonesuckers will burn you at night."

"He didn't burn me."

"You found him?"

Hamr threw his spear down in disgust. "Duru broke away. He had just caught her again when I found them. If you'd been there, we could have saved her."

Yaqut cocked his head with surprise. "He saw you, and he didn't burn you?"

"She's alive then?" Timov blurted. "He could have killed her on the spot—but she's alive?"

"The girl," the priestess said, looking up at Hamr. "He spared you for her sake."

"What do you mean?" Hamr's face still showed the exhilaration of his confrontation with the ghost dancer. His eyes now darted from the priestess to the hunters hunched about the fire, angry at their cowardice, angrier yet at his own ignorance.

"She means her dreams." Yaqut nodded wisely. "Yes, that is how she knew my name. She said that the ghost dancer told her in a dream. She and the boy saw him dancing last night. Those were not dreams. Her spirit was already with the bonesucker."

"Aye, she has the spirit of a ghost dancer herself," the priestess added. "He did not kill you for the sake of the girl. She is one of his own."

Timov exchanged alarmed glances with Hamr.

Hamr scowled incredulously. "Are you two crazy? She's no monster. She's a girl from my tribe. There are no ghost dancers in my tribe. We'd never even heard of them until yesterday."

"Look at me." The priestess put her hands to her enlarged belly. "There are no monsters in my tribe, either. Yet I carry one. The ghost dancer raped me at winter's end. Now our bloods are forever mixed."

Timov crept closer. "What does that say about me? You mean—one of my ancestors is a ... a ..."

"Maybe." The priestess smiled ironically. "Remember—we are the intruders. The ghost dancers have lived in these woods, and all these lands, from long before our first ancestors came here. When the Ways of Wandering led the Grandfathers out of the grasslands, the ghost dancers were already ancient in these places. What has happened to me has happened before to other women."

Timov sat down under the weight of all that had been said. "But why? What does he want with her?"

The priestess' haughty face spoke to the fire, "A wife."

"She's a child!" Hamr snapped.

"For now." The priestess sighed. "Almost all the ghost dancers have been killed in the Forest. I was surprised when this one attacked us on the tundra. Clearly, he is alone. He has no tribe, no clan, no one. Now, he has the child."

Hamr squatted beside Yaqut. "You hunt these monsters. Why is this one here?"

Yaqut threw the gnawed haunch-bone to one of the attendant panthers, wiped his fingers on a dried leaf. "It has been eight winters since I killed a bonesucker in these woods. And even then I had been summoned here by clansmen, who had traded with tribes in this region for years and never seen one before. On the tundra and in the mountains to the east, I have led the Longtooth on many a poison foray. But the mountains always seem to hide more than we can kill. Maybe this one drifted down from there. Last winter was harsher than most. Big storms from the south clashed with the cold of the north and many of the red deer died. I have seen packs of wolves and hyenas prowling rib-shrunk through the summer woods. Why should it be different for a bonesucker?"

"I want Duru back," Hamr stated.

Timov nodded, wild-eyed.

Yaqut showed his worn, brown teeth in a smile that was a grimace. "If you can take her, she is yours. I have been stalking this bonesucker all summer, and only saw him for the first time tonight. The Beastmaker made him a sly one."

"Duru will slow him down," Hamr said.

"Maybe not." Yaqut picked at his teeth with a splinter. "He will bind her and carry her like a satchel. Soon, it will be winter. He will disappear into the mountains, and the blizzards will make pursuit impossible. By thaw, he will be long, long gone. I think you should best accept it: You will never see your Duru again."

Timov groaned and hung his head. Why had he tried to safeguard her behind the horse? Her dream had warned them of the ghost dancer's feint. And Yaqut himself had told them the same. Why had he not remembered? He pressed his fists against his eyes: His despair must not wrench uncontrollable sobs from him in front of the staring Thundertree hunters.

"The crystal," the priestess spoke, her eyes brightening. "Maybe the boy can track with the crystal."

"What is that?" Hamr asked impatiently.

"The fire from the sky is a spirit," the priestess said.

"Many spirits," Yaqut corrected.

"Yes," she agreed, "there are many spirits in that strange fire that the ghost dancers wear. They live high in the sky. You can see them there." She gestured to the auroras wavering among the stars beyond the shreds of cloud. "They come down to live in the bodies of the ghost dancers. The witches catch those spirits in special rocks, the clear stone of crystal and amber. I have such a rock. When the moon is full, one can see shapes in it. If the boy has the long sight, he may be able to find the ghost dancer who took his sister."

"The moon's dark," Hamr despaired. "We're a dozen days from full."

"Take my crystal, anyway," the priestess offered. "Come with us to the Thundertree, and I will give it to you."

Hamr shook his head. "That's another day's trail and another after that to come back here. By then the bonesucker's tracks will be cold. And maybe the crystal won't work." He looked to Yaqut. "At dawn, I’m going after him."

Yaqut snorted. "You cannot even hunt a roe deer." He spat his toothpick into the fire. "You have lost the girl. Accept that and make a new life for yourself, here, among your Panther people." With a nod of his grizzled head, he indicated the sullen Thundertree men. They clustered on the far side of the fire, away from the strange priestess, the scar-faced hunter, and the Blue Shell with ghost dancers' blood.

"I'm going," Hamr rasped.

Yaqut peered deep into Hamr's dark eyes, gauged the cold certitude there. Then he turned to the Thundertree men and said across the fire, "Here is a Panther man. He traveled a long way to ally with the Thundertree. Who among you will join him in the hunt?"

The pale-bearded men muttered uneasily and shrank back.

The Longtooth hunter smiled wolfishly. "None of them will face the ghost dancer with you, Hamr. Not one." His smile withered, and he glowered contemptuously at the huddled men. "They hide like squirrels."

"Duru is my clanswoman," Hamr said, as much to the Thundertree as to Yaqut. Somewhere in the huddle were the ones who had frightened and mocked him and Timov in the tall grass, with their mask and bull-roarer. Now they would see, he was a great man after all. Real pain revealed itself in his voice, "I will not abandon her."

Yaqut heard his determination. He acknowledged it by gripping the youth's shoulder. "We will hunt the ghost dancer together. But you must obey me. If you want your Duru back, you must do as I say!"

Hamr nodded.

"I'm coming, too," Timov's small voice piped up.

Hamr gave him a cold stare. "You'll just get in the way. Stay here. Make a place for us among these new people."

"She's my sister—I can't just wait here. I want to help."

"You can help by staying out of the way," Hamr said.

"Maybe my dreams will help," Timov contended.

He was afraid: He had seen the hulking creature snatch his sister, had seen by fire-glow the horrid face hackled with stiff hairs, the bison-humped shoulders and the limbs like tree boughs. He had also witnessed the terror on Duru's face, had heard her shrill screams.

Afraid as he was of the bonesucker, he felt more frightened of doing nothing for his sister, of hearing her cries every time the wind caught in the branches, knowing she lived somewhere out there in the hands of that spirit-possessed beast.

"I won't be in the way," he promised. "I'll do whatever you say! Let me come with you."

Hamr looked to Yaqut. The aged hunter scratched his scar-riven beard. "Your dreams may help," he admitted. "I have had no success tracking this one. Too bad we do not have the crystal in hand."

"What about the witches who make the crystals?" Timov asked, feeling expansive now and useful. "Maybe they can help us."

Yaqut barked a laugh. "They would as soon cut off their thumbs. Witches love their bonesuckers. They will not help us kill one."

"The boy has an idea," the priestess argued. "There is a witch not far from here. Neoll Nant Caw by name. A Longtooth woman. I promised her the weird child, when I drop it. She may want to help if you tell her your purpose is to get the girl back."

"No witches on this hunt." Yaqut shook his head vehemently. "Their magic will baffle us. We have troubles enough with winter on our heels."

The priestess clucked. "You have had all summer to catch your prey, Yaqut, and what can you show? Neoll Nant Caw is east of here, the direction you are heading anyway." She fixed him with a shrewd stare. "If you are afraid, send these two in to ask for help."

Yaqut rose and shivered with disgust. "We will talk no more about it tonight." He walked off into the dark to make his bed.

The priestess turned her proud face to the fire. "He will go to her. I taunt him, but fear has never stopped a man like Yaqut."

)|(

Fear filled Timov, however. He imagined Duru smothering in the huge locked arms of the ghost dancer, her despairing spirit hanging in the black branches, the bonesucker circling back through the tattered fog for him—and he tossed with fright before he slipped into dreamless sleep.

In the chill of dawn he woke, surprised there had been no nightmares. He had slept at the edge of the clearing alongside Hamr. Both of them had  tolerated the fresh stink of Blind Side's manure, wanting to be near the horse in case he warned of another attack. No attack came and no nightmares.

Timov blinked away the grogginess of his deep sleep to observe the Panther men already moving about in the clearing.

Eager to return to the safety of their abode atop their towering rock, the Thundertree men gathered around the stretcher they used to carry the priestess. She had them wait, while she held out the rock of fertility for the Blue Shell to touch.

When Hamr and Timov put their hands on it, she whispered, "Bold hunters—beware. Every hunter of the Old People is himself hunted." Then she lay down in her litter, and the Panther men sent their cats running ahead into the Forest and carried her off.

"She is right, of course," Yaqut told them, climbing down from the tree where he had lain all night between sleep and watchfulness. "Once he knows we are after him, he will come for us. We must stay hidden long as we can."

"But won't the spirits warn him?" Timov asked.

"The witch may help us with that, if you are brave enough to face her. But no magic will avail if we go blundering through the woods. You must learn the ways of traveling like true hunters."

In the first shadowy hours of morning, Yaqut taught Hamr and Timov to move silently through the Forest, walking on root bridges between trees, varying their pace through leaf litter to mime the wind, reading birds' signals for what the feathered sentinels witnessed of other animals, especially Bear, Sloth, and Elk, whose large movements could mask the hunters'.

"The horse we leave behind," Yaqut declared. "It belongs to the grasslands and draws too much attention in the Forest."

They were sitting on a fallen elm before the last embers of their fire, and Hamr had been staring up at the fast clouds, keeping his mind free of distraction so he could absorb all that Yaqut had to teach. He glared at the hunter. "Blind Side of Life stays with me."

Yaqut's mouth opened around a silent laugh, like a skull's. "In the Forest, it is Bright Side of Life, blundering through the shrub. The ghost dancer will hear us a day away. We leave it behind."

"No." Hamr said this without expression, though a vein ticked at his throat. "The horse stays with me." He read the grim intensity of Yaqut's stare. "And if you're thinking of killing it, kill me first."

Hamr had already placed his hand in the satchel at his hip, and Yaqut knew he held a knife. He sighed, disappointed that so much strength had joined to such a childish mind. "I have had my chance to kill you, Hamr the Arrogant," Yaqut said. "I will not kill you now unless you betray me." When Hamr's hand did not come away from inside his satchel, he added, "Keep the horse. But you will ride ahead of us. We will let the ghost dancer see you. The boy and I shadow as I direct. Understood?"

Hamr nodded. He stepped out of Yaqut's striking range before relaxing his grip on the obsidian blade in his satchel.

Timov had watched apprehensively, and shrugged. Now the boy visibly relaxed, and when Yaqut told him to bury the fire site, he stooped to the job eagerly.

"That horse is your death," Yaqut warned Hamr.

Hamr brushed away the insects buzzing around his head and ambled toward where Blind Side stood fetlock-deep in the thick grass of the clearing, grazing contentedly. Hamr's body felt sweaty with fear, and the bump at the back of his head from his fall two days before still itched. Maybe Yaqut was right—yet, he knew the Beastmaker did not want him to leave his horse behind. "Death is certain," he whispered in the animal's ear. "So how a man gives himself to life should be decided as surely."

)|(

Hamr rode Blind Side of Life ready for death, if the Beastmaker wanted that of him. Yet he remained keenly alert. The late-bearing summer trees, laden with nuts and fruit, hung their boughs low in the dells, and the horse chose the more open ways along the knolly ridges of pine and fir.

Up here, Hamr could see the entire broken landscape, from the flat outwash plain of the tundra, through stream-webbed woodlands, to lakes among the lumpy hills, where they journeyed now. Looking down, he occasionally caught a glimpse of Timov among the dense trees. Yaqut roamed nowhere in sight.

The startled cries of crows announced the horse and his rider as Blind Side clopped along. The birds' echoes flapped back and forth above the dark valleys. The crows clamored so persistently that in the afternoon, when a tribal site came into view, Hamr made no effort to hide.

He sat high on Blind Side's back, surveying a gloomy dale below, where stone fences crisscrossed among enormous firs and bunkers of cobbles and boulders. Between steep hillocks, a black pool glittered with swans, and on near slopes of the approach from the ridge, sunlight gleamed off totems of animal and human skulls.

"The glen of the witch," Yaqut announced, appearing behind Hamr out of nowhere.

Blind Side started, and Hamr had to hug his neck.

Timov waved from below. Hunched among a cluster of alders, he pointed through yellow dappled leaves at two men on a hillside above the swans. Kindling piled high in their arms. They gawked at Hamr and his horse. One of them yelled, and from a cobbled bunker, two women emerged.

Yaqut signed for Timov to wait. "Hamr, you go down. Take the boy with you. But mind you—do not eat or drink anything in this place."

"Aren't you coming with us?"

The flesh between Yaqut's eyes flinched. "I hate witches. They love the bonesuckers. You and the boy go. It is your clan’s woman he has taken."

Hamr peered apprehensively at the two women, who had stepped into a clearing among sombrous firs. Sunlight glowed like snow from the head of one and like fire from the other. "Will they help us?'

"That is for you to find out." Yaqut kept the horse between himself and the view of the witches, and backed off into the underbrush. "I will wait up here. Do not tell them about me. Get out before dark if you can. And most important—do not eat or drink anything they give you!"

Hamr nudged Blind Side of Life forward.

"Where's Yaqut?" Timov asked as the horse picked his way down the hill toward him.

"We're going in alone. Stay beside me. We may be leaving fast."

Hamr wanted to carry his two spears like lances but thought that seemed too threatening. He left them crossed in his lap. When they came to the first stone fence, he opened his empty arms in greeting.

The fence, a natural configuration of rocks and boulders, had been shoved into a long line by an ice-sheet long ago. Numerous breaks opened to the fir grove, where the witches waited. Only one appeared large enough for the horse.

As Hamr led Blind Side through it, fierce growling and howling assailed them from among the clustered trees. In the shadows, a pack of wolves crouched.

The white-haired witch pointed her longstaff first at the pack and then at the strangers, and one of the wolves broke from the pack and charged.

Blind Side of Life, already anxious because of the howling of the wolves, panicked at the sound and smell of one hurtling toward him. He jerked his body upright with a startled whinny, and Hamr flew from his back and crashed among the rocks. Timov rushed to him and was brushed aside as the frightened horse clattered past, swerving blindly among the rocks until he found the gap and bolted through it.

The attacking wolf rushed close enough for Timov to see foam threading its fangs as it snarled. He swung his spear up in time to block it, and it bit the haft. The force threw him off his feet. Its ferocious face pressed close. Its claws tore at the hide over his stomach.

A shout shrilled out from the old witch, and the wolf curled away. Tail tucked under, it dashed back to where the others milled among the trees. Timov sat up, slick with sweat and shuddering. "Let's get out of here!"

Hamr ignored the ache in his bruised back and staggered upright. He helped the boy to his feet, saw that he was unhurt. "Did you see that? The witch called off the wolf. Look."

The white-haired woman waved for them to approach.

"Hamr, let's go!"

Hamr picked up his second spear. He wished he had his satchel with the obsidian knife in it. Grateful at least for the wood blade sheathed at his hip, he said, "Go to Blind Side and wait for me there."

Timov watched Hamr walk toward the witches. He wanted to flee but could not. Yaqut observed from afar, and the boy did not want to face that stiff visage alone. He scampered after Hamr. As the witches came more clearly into view, his run slowed. He kept well behind the larger man.

Before the darkness of the firs, the women stood like apparitions risen up in sunlight. Their bodies draped in plaited grass and moss, faces white as moth-wings, they looked ancient.

The old woman, with her lichenous hair and flesh cracked every-which-way as bark, seemed a part of the fir gloom, more tree than hag. The younger one looked keen as a fox. The sun's flame in her tangle of red tresses fell past a throat as long as a water bird's. And something secret and dark smoldered in her gaze.

The two stood like the very reflections of time that the old Mothers were fond of sketching in the warm ash: youth and crone, beauty and age, the cresting fullness and the drained end of life.

Beyond them, the men who had been carrying kindling dropped the wood into a fire-pit between soot-blackened pines, and continued busily arranging the branches for that night's fire. They ignored the strangers.

Only the witches watched them approach. The old one seemed to be staring through them, and the young one's eyes, green and slow, fixed them like a cat's. She flicked a glance at Timov, then steadied her stare on Hamr. A smile shadowed her pale lips.

As the hag's eyes sharpened, the travelers stopped. Hamr leaned both of his spears in the crook of one arm, and raised his hand in salutation. "I am Hamr—this, Timov. We are the last of the Blue Shell and have traveled far. Are you Neoll Nant Caw?"

The crone's taut gaze did not flicker. The young witch looked amused.

"The priestess of the Longtooth sent us here," Hamr went on. "She said you could help us. Our clanswoman—"

"Where is the third?" the aged witch interrupted.

Hamr said nothing, and Timov looked to him, waiting for his reply. "We are alone," Hamr said, finally.

"You lie!" The crone raised her longstaff, and the wolves howled from among the trees. "You will speak truth or not speak at all."

Timov cowered, both hands on his spear, staring toward the fir darkness, where the wolves paced. Hamr leaned forward on his spears, and Timov's chest constricted to see anger throb in his jaw. He reached out to tug at his arm—to urge him away, back to the horse and their journey. Then Hamr spoke and surprised Timov with the composure of his voice, "Old Mother, you mistake me. We have come here, to you, alone. Our companion waits for us in the hills."

The crone nodded, eyes aglare. "Yes, he waits. Who is he?"

"Yaqut," Timov quickly said, before Hamr angered them with an ambiguous answer. "A hunter of the Longtooth, who—"

The old witch cawed like a crow. "Yaqut of the Evil Face! I know that devil. So he is here in the Forest." She cocked a glance at her companion. "How unlike him. Much easier to kill his prey in open grasslands, where he can poison their water and watch them die from afar."

Casually, Hamr glanced past the witches to where the men had finished arranging the kindling and now dragged lugs of nut shrubs from the treeline to the clearing of the unlit fire-pit. They seemed oblivious of him and Timov, and he decided they would pose no obstacle if he chose to use his spears on the witches. He shifted his weight so that he could more easily hoist his weapons.

"Are the Blue Shell a horse clan?" the red-haired witch asked.

"No," Hamr answered, noticing the softness of her voice, unlike the crone's harsh tone. The crone noticed it, too, and stared at the young woman as Hamr explained, "Before sickness destroyed our tribe, we thrived as fisherfolk. Tortoise clan, with a few who worshiped the Panther. We've come north to find the Thundertree, to—"

"Enough banter," the crone groused. "You ride a horse. That has not been seen here before. It drew us out of our burrow. If you'd come on foot, the wolves would have dealt with you as they do all strays—which, I can see now, would have been best."

"Your wolf attacked us," Hamr said.

"Only because you passed our fence bearing weapons," the crone replied. "You still bear weapons. Did Yaqut not tell you? This is witch ground. No men tread here but as our guests or our slaves. And neither bears weapons."

"I think the Evil Face would be just as pleased if the wolves had killed them," the young witch said.

The aged one concurred with a nod. "Yaqut despises strays as much as he hates the Old People. Why has he let you live this long?"

"He would have killed us," Timov answered, "but my sister knew his name from a dream."

The wisps of the old woman's eyebrows lifted, and she looked to the younger one, then turned an owl's stare on Timov. "A dream?"

As Timov told the witches the dreams of the ghost dancer, the women listened, eyes bright with surprise and understanding. When he finished, they regarded him carefully for several long moments.

"Leave your weapons here," the crone said finally, "and come with us."

"Wait," Hamr said. "You sent a wolf against us. You were ready to turn us away, because we don't know your customs. Now you order us to part with our weapons. We have yet to know who you are."

The crone smiled, her mouth pegged with yellow teeth worn almost to the gums. She rested her longstaff against her shoulder and put a gnarled hand on Hamr's spears. "We are witches. And we are more than you will ever know. If you want our help, leave your spears and your knives behind." Her smile thinned away. "The Invisibles are astride you. Given the chance, they would gut us hollow. Leave your weapons."

Hamr saw no alternative. He stabbed his spears into the earth and flicked his knife point-first into the ground. Timov did likewise and dropped his sling and rocks. They followed the witches between two tall staves mounted with the skulls of Bear, Wolf, and humans. Femur bones hanging beneath the skulls clacked in the wind soughing down from the hills.

Past small stacks of cobbles and heaps of gravel arranged in symmetrical patterns, the clearing ended. The bunker from where the women had emerged rose out of the weed-matted hillside like a stone outpost. Dark trees screened its cave-hole entrance.

As they passed, Hamr and Timov peeked in. They glimpsed beyond parted curtains of braided vines to the cavern-depths, where nut-oil lamps glimmered far inside the hillside.

The men, who had gathered kindling and large gourds from the Forest, squatted now beside the fire-pit, mashing acorns with pestle-rocks. Like the witches, they wore garments of plant-fiber: breech-thongs of woven grass, tree-bark sandals. They did not look up as the witches and their guests walked by.

Hamr stooped in mid-stride to look into the eyes of these strong-boned, blond-bearded men, so busy doing woman's work, and met stares blue and empty as the sky. He tapped Timov's shoulder and jerked a thumb at the tranced workers.

Timov nodded, already aware that those men existed not as themselves in this place of danger. He pleaded with a silent look for Hamr to stay close and not challenge the strange women.

Hamr frowned and wished he had questioned Yaqut more thoroughly about the powers of these witches and their weaknesses.

They stopped before a black and highly reflective pool under an overhang of rock banded with red jasper. Swans, perched like butterflies on their mirrored images, glided away.

"Kneel," the crone commanded.

Hamr and Timov knelt on the muddy lip of the pool. Waterbugs skittered across the slick surface.

From within the pleats of her grass robe, the old witch withdrew a clear glass dagger.

Hamr pulled back, ready to rise. The witch put the claw of her hand on his shoulder and steadied him. What she held, he recognized, was not a dagger but a large, oblong crystal with sharp facets.

She pressed it against his brow—between his eyes. It felt warm from her body and pinched but did not cut his flesh. He felt foolish.

The crone removed the crystal and stepped to Timov. He could see from Hamr's derisive frown that he had nothing to fear, yet apprehension stirred in him.

The long crystal touched his brow—and a pang of icy pain pierced his skull. His vision grew black though his eyes stared wide. A scream left his mouth and carried him with it, out of his body, into the sky.

Sunlight scorched his sight. Through the glare, he could see again, and what he beheld set panic leaping where his chest should have been. He soared and, below, he eyed the black pool with its swans and, on the slick bank, Hamr and the witches bending over him.

He lay sprawled on his back, a thick foam oozing from his slack mouth. He cried out and emitted no sound. Yet he heard noise. A massive droning vibrated across the sky. It moaned through him like the groan of the bull-roarer that the Thundertree had used to terrify him days ago.

He was dead. The witch had killed him. His spirit had leaped free of his body, and now he ascended from the appalling sight of himself dead, eyes sightless. He lofted into clouds, and the clouds shredded around him to mist. They burst apart into sudden blue reaching a zenith of indigo.

He looked back, aghast at the abruptness of his departure, unready for the afterlife. He surveyed under him the vastness of the Forest shrunk to nubbly lichen. The land had become a sprawling splotch of mold, veined with silver rivers and streams, pocked with bright lakes beneath cloud plateaus and jagged, radiant peaks of snow. The sight mysteriously soothed his shock, and he surged even higher, no longer afraid.

Mists swarmed in the mountain valleys, and mighty rain clouds churned among the icy summits. Violet cumuli, stabbed with lightning, towered against blue emptiness, casting enormous shadows across the rocky chasms.

Sadness came to him with the realization that soon the rain would fall where his body lay. So quickly, so implacably, his life had ended—and now, he flew upward to the spirit realm.

His whole being hummed with the sky’s deep vibrancy. Yet he could not take his sight away from the earth. He strained to see through shreds of clouds to where the dense forest gave way to chaparral—taiga Cyndell had called it—and he glimpsed, far off, across the taiga, wide, brown plains of tundra. Glaciers glinted on the brink of the planet like stars fallen to earth.

The land began to tilt, to bend. On the distant, bellied horizon, the sea appeared, agate blue shattered by the sun's fierce reflection. The land extended not flat after all but curved, just as the storytellers of the Blue Shell had said: The land arched like the back of a tortoise.

Amazement muted to awe as the bright sky fell away, and Timov hurtled into the cave of night. The sun had shrunk to a small white shell, and hard points of stars nicked the darkness. Underneath him, the earth's giant blue tortoise shell glowed with a silver haze.

The massive droning in the sky now sharpened to voices, frenzied voices sounding closer and louder: A hole! A hole. A hole for an axle!

Needle through the brain!

Chill! Shiver! Spasm!

Iciness penetrated Timov as the fleeting warmth of his life seemed to flee into the vast darkness. He looked to the sun, to feel again its warmth—but the sun was small, perfectly round, and with no heat at all. He quaked with cold.

A hole for an axle! Pierce him!

Pierce the needle through his brain!

Shuck the flesh! Shuck it!

Timov convulsed with cold, wanting to press his hands over his ears to shut out the harsh voices. But he had no hands, no ears. He had no brain to be pierced, no flesh to shuck. Unless—

The cold burned, wrenched him with the deep torment of a storm-twisted pine even as he realized he was not dead, not yet. He was dying! Somehow, his spirit still clung to his body far, far below.

He almost lives! Catch him!

Spasm! Convulse! Die!

Die, Timov! Die! Catch him!

The battering voices intended to kill him. They occupied the cold, twisting hurt tearing him from his body. He had to get away from them. Down—down through the agony, back to the misty dew of the turtle's shell, down to earth and his body.

The evil voices darkened to thunder.

Catch him! thunder boomed.

Laughter roared out. Thunder bellowed like bulls. Darkness glared. And Timov, clenched in spasm, screamed a fractured scream.

)|(

"Catch him!" the old witch yelled. She squatted over Timov's chest, the crystal shaking violently in her hand, as if pushing itself away from the boy's skull.

From out of his mouth, white ooze flowed. The discharge gathered into a reptilian shape beside his face, then slithered through the grass, away from the water's edge. "Catch him, Kirchi!"

The red-haired witch stood aghast beside her elder, staring with unbelieving eyes at the white effluvia snaking through the grass.

"The crystal!" the crone shrieked. "Use your crystal!"

With a trembling hand, Kirchi drew a dagger-length of quartz from under her grass robe and pursued the wriggling coil of vapor. She jumped and stabbed at the earth with the crystal until, when she stood, the milky white rock had become black.

The old witch's crystal pressed against Timov's forehead stopped vibrating, and the crone sat down heavily on his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. A loud gasp shook him, and his staring, sightless eyes relaxed, focused.

"Hamr!" he called out when he found the crone astride him.

Hamr knelt so the boy could see him. "I'm here, Timov. You're all right now. The witches took an evil spirit out of you."

Timov's pale face shivered. "I heard them. I heard the spirits. Voices like bulls. Hamr—I was with them! In the sky."

"Yes," the crone agreed. Her wrinkle-webbed face had flushed with her exertion. "In the sky. That is where they live. And they come down at night and feed on the pain of the dying. Lucky for you we put the crystals on you by day. At night, you would never have come back."

"I thought you said the evil was invisible," Hamr blurted. "I saw it. It looked like a white snake."

"Not a snake, but a piece of the boy's life that the spirit took with it to escape. The Invisibles have no shape."

The witch got off Timov, and Hamr helped him sit up.

"It was horrible," the boy said in a thin voice. "Cold. High up above the Turtle's back, it's horribly cold."

"Gets colder yet when you die and the Dark Traces get you," the witch said knowingly. "Kirchi, show him the evil."

Kirchi snapped alert from where she had been standing, staring at the black crystal. Though the old witch had prepared her with many stories and, in trance, she herself had heard the evil voices, never had she seen one embodied. She held the black rock away from her body, glad to pass it to the old one.

The crone waved it before Hamr. "Listen." She held the rock to his brow, and a chill crawled across his scalp. A whisper sounded deep in his ears, You will die!

Hamr jerked away, and the crone snickered. "What did it tell you?"

"What I already know," he answered gruffly.

The witch showed her yellow tooth-stubs, and winked. "You understand this spirit." She hurled the black rock high into the air, and it splashed into the pool.

"Can it escape?" Timov asked anxiously.

"Water locks it away from the others. In time, the great ice will come again and bury it and the many more I have cast there before it. They will not return to the sky—not for a long, long time. But time means little to them. And there are many others up there, indeed many others."

Timov stood up heavily, as if rising out of water. His hands clasped his body. And he knew gratitude for the warmth of the sun and the lavish algal odors of the pool. Stunned by the events that had carried him to this strange moment, he stood silently with the old woman.

His mind went back: He had truly soared above the Turtle's back and into the void. The spirits had actually spoken with him. Anything might happen now—and yet the world looked the same as before. He watched a swan unfold its wings and walk several paces across the water to a shadier feeding place.

"Now you are free of the Dark Traces," the old witch said. "But they will come for you again."

Timov's stare hardened into fear, and he squinted at the crone. "They will?"

"You have the blood of a ghost dancer in you."

Timov turned away abruptly, remembering what the priestess had told him last night. Though he had dismissed it at the time, he now found the truth of it hard to deny. He felt dizzy with the prospect of the evil spirits returning for him. He looked imploringly at Hamr, who shifted his weight uneasily, met his gaze with a sad shrug.

"What can I do about it?" Timov muttered bitterly. "This has never happened to me before."

The crone put one hand to the side of the boy's face and gazed at him compassionately. "You can be proud. You have a gift. The Invisibles visit us all. You are among the few who can visit them."

"I don't want to! I never wanted to." He grew silent, then added sullenly, "And my sister? What about her?"

"She is like you," the old woman replied. "That is why Baat took her. The spirits recognize her."

The crone stepped back from Timov and looked to Hamr. "You will never hunt down the ghost dancer."

"It's not the ghost dancer I want, old woman," Hamr replied. "Will you help us get Duru back?"

The witch sucked in her lips and considered this. Her tongue flicked, tasting the air like an asp. "Do you have something of hers?"

"I have her satchel."

"Then get it."

Timov and Hamr started toward the horse, where the satchel hung, and the crone hissed at Timov to stop.

"Little man—stay here." She clutched a twisted cord of bine about her neck strung through a chunk of crystal, and lifted the rock from under her robe. "You must stay near the crystal till your spirit sets back into your body—otherwise you will fall out again and die."

Timov nodded. "Go ahead, Hamr. I'll be all right."

Hamr leveled a fierce stare on the hag. He had been watching the red-haired Kirchi covertly and had seen the apprehension in her fox-bright face. She was as fearful of the old witch as they. "If any harm comes to this boy, your wolves will not stop me from spilling your blood," he warned.

The witch met his stare coolly. "You have come to me for help—and now you threaten me? Take the boy and go! Why would I want him?"

"To enslave him as you have those men," Hamr said, inclining his head to where the two workers squatted, mashing acorns.

"You speak with an empty voice," the witch said. "Get the girl's satchel, or take the boy and go."

"Get Duru's things," Timov insisted. "I'm okay now. Just a little groggy."

Hamr had been trying to see the ghost dancer traits in Timov, incredulous that his Aradia's ancestors had been sired by monsters. He wanted to doubt, but he had seen the spirit drawn from the boy's body, had heard its wicked voice in the stone. So what? he defied himself. The Beastmaker had shaped them all from mud, ghost dancers and people alike.

Resolved to the unimportance of this fact, he placed a reassuring hand on Timov's shoulder. He did not care if the boy’s ancestors had been toads, this lad belonged with him as a clansman. After fixing a stern gaze of warning on the crone, he jogged off to where Blind Side of Life waited on a hillock beyond the stone fences.

"How did he come to master a horse?" Kirchi asked, watching him disappear.

Both women looked to Timov. His insides had unclenched in his gladness that the crone had not raised her longstaff to send her wolves after Hamr. Nervously, he began the story of Blind Side, and as he told it, the old woman leaned closer, as if to hear better.

With the striking speed of a serpent, her hand shot out. The crystal chunk in her grasp gently brushed the boy's brow.

Darkness surged over Timov, and he collapsed.

"Quickly now," the old woman commanded, "get him into the burrow. I will rid us of Hamr."

)|(

Lashed to a fir all night, Duru had worked hard to loosen her bindings but to no avail. The ghost dancer had secured her with devilish knots that tightened the more she fought them. At last, she lost sensation in her hands and feet and hung there in the dark, pressed to the tree by the taut vines.

The monster had gone off, either to hunt or to circle back and see that no hunters followed. No ordinary man would dare trespass the darkness of the Forest, she knew—except her Hamr. Over and over, she muttered prayers to the Great Mother to protect him.

Mosquitoes raged in her ear, stinging her exposed flesh where her bodypaint had come off in her struggle with the giant. Owls talked to each other, and the frayed howl of a lone wolf curled on the wind, sharpening the ice-barb in her chest.

Baat squatted in the darkness watching Duru. The harsh voices of the ul udi had worn down his determination to protect her from them. Now only silence occupied him. Even the chill fire from the sky had dulled on his flesh, leaving him dark as any beast of the night.

Slowly, he got up and gathered enough food to offer her a meal—yet, he waited before he returned, listening to her muttered fear, watching her tears fall as she strained against her bonds.

You've done well, Hollow Bone, the gentle voice of a Bright One whispered.

Baat shook his head, incredulous. "How can such a frail and frightened smallhead help me?"

Someone must—and soon, no matter how frail. Have you not noticed the thinning streams? The ice appears in the north already. You must leave at once for the door of the mountain.

"The leaves have only begun to change," Baat said in a hush. "Surely, there is time."

No time. Already you may be too late.

"But what can I do? She is frightened of me. She will never consent to help me."

Loosen her bonds. The blood is cut off in her hands and feet.

Baat rose and moved toward her. At the sight of him, she stiffened and a cry burst from her. He placed before her the skin of nuts and berries that he had collected and opened his arms, showing her that the fire from above had gone. Then he walked around to the back of the fir and loosened the knots.

"Don't be afraid," he said to her soothingly as she knelt and rubbed her wrists and ankles. "I will not hurt you. I need your help for one journey—my last journey. Then you are free of me."

The ghost dancer's voice sounded to Duru like gravel sliding down a rockface. He pushed the pelt of nuts and berries closer, and she recoiled.

"Eat it," he said. "It's for you." He remembered the sound of her name from his first encounter with her in his body of light. It sounded strange to his ear, yet he tried to mouth it: "Doo-roo"—he pointed at her. "Baat," he said, putting his hand to his chest. "Doo-roo," and he pointed at her.

The sound of her name coming from this huge face startled her so that she uttered a small cry and curled up.

Leave her alone now. Secure her gently and leave her alone.

Baat re-tied the girl loosely to a fir and backed off into the trees.

Duru watched after him with speculative eyes. When he had walked out of sight, she tried tugging on her leash and fraying it with her fingernails and teeth. A tightly reeved vine, it resisted her efforts. Frustrated, she curled up tight, her back against the tree, and stared through her tears into the darkness.

)|(

Hamr ran hard across the dell of firs, past the glassy-eyed men mashing acorns, past where his spears and knife stood in the ground, all the while eyeing the wall of Forest where the wolves lurked.

Not a howl lifted from the dark trees, even though the ground near the totem of skulls and clacking bones displayed numerous wolf prints. Chanting under his breath to the Beastmaker for protection, he skirted the totem and penetrated the wall through a smaller gap.

His mind reeled with dread. Spirits haunted Timov and Duru. The spirits of the sky owned them as they owned the ghost dancers—even as they had owned Aradia. He felt lightheaded at the memory of her, and the anxiety in him stilled momentarily. He stood in the dry grass smelling her again. From far away, a drumbeat of thunder rolled.

Blind Side of Life, nuzzling among plush ferns, whinnied happily at the scent of Hamr and ambled toward him.

Hamr's back ached from his earlier fall among the rocks, though he felt no ire toward his steed. "The wolves obey the witch," he said, rubbing Blind Side's brow. "You were right to run."

"Where is Timov?"

Startled, Hamr turned and spotted Yaqut's waxen face watching him from the bushes. "He stays with the witch. She drove an evil spirit out of him, and he's resting. I've come for Duru's satchel so the crone can find her."

Yaqut rose from the bushes with fury. "You dolt! You've lost him!"

Hamr stepped back, expecting the hunter to strike him. "She ... she drove a spirit from him. I saw the thing crawl out of his mouth!"

Yaqut shook his head, his face unreadable. "Where are your weapons?"

"The witch said—"

Yaqut hissed scornfully. "She wants something from you, or you would be dead now. Quickly—make a brand. We are going in."

They searched around in the bush until they found two arm-length branches. At one end of each, they bound dried bracts with twined creepers and resinous strips of pine bark. "These will burn long enough for what we must do," Yaqut said.

Dread, anticipation, and anger at being duped knotted Hamr's stomach. He knew that the brands were meant to keep away the wolves, but he did not understand Yaqut's urgency until they had crossed through the stone fence. Then, from Blind Side's back, he searched and found Timov nowhere in sight.

Yaqut ran ahead of the horse, burning torch in one hand, lance in the other. He retrieved Hamr's and Timov's weapons. "Stay mounted," he warned. "And be ready to make this horse kick for your life."

From the Forest, yapping sounded but no wolves appeared. Ahead, the witch waited, standing before her burrow, still as the black pines beside her. She kept her longstaff tight at her side, the signal for the pack to stay away.

They had never seen a man astride a horse before. She feared her wolves would disregard her signals and approach to investigate this new manner of beast. But her fears proved unfounded. As the horse drew near, the wolves barked with mounting frenzy. None yet defied her commands.

The horseman and Yaqut neared her bunker, and the witch reached in her pouch and took out an oblate rock smoothed to a glossy polish. Many ul udi had been trapped in this gray stone: voracious Invisibles that the Old People called the Dark Traces.

Their excitement when they sensed others of their kind made the stone grow colder. The chill of this stone had alerted Neoll Nant Caw to the Dark One residing in the boy. She held the stone up for the approaching hunters to see.

"This is what you want from me," she called to them. "With this you can track the ghost dancer."

"Where's Timov?" Hamr shouted and poised one of his spears.

Yaqut stopped with his back to a giant fir, and Hamr rode Blind Side to within a spear's thrust of the witch and stared down into her weathered face.

"I have the boy in safe keeping," she answered him and waved the stone.

"No," Hamr said flatly. "You can't have him. Where is he?"

"He is safe," the witch insisted. "He is far safer with me than he would be hunting the ghost dancer."

"What've you done with him?" Hamr pointed a spear at the witch's heart.

"What I have told you is true," the crone said earnestly. "Your companion will succumb again to the Invisibles if he leaves this place. Let him rest with me while you hunt the ghost dancer. When you return to me this tracking stone that will guide you to your prey, you may have your boy back."

"I want Timov now," Hamr demanded.

"Yaqut," the witch called out. "Tell this one who I am."

"It is true—she is a witch with many tricks," Yaqut cautioned Hamr. "Neoll Nant Caw of the Longtooth. Watch what you say to her."

Neoll Nant Caw wagged the smooth stone. "This tracking stone will take you directly to the Old One, who has taken the girl. It is yours in exchange for custody of the boy." The witch stepped closer and nudged the spear-tip aside. "Listen: Truly I cannot lie to you before Yaqut of the Evil Face. If what I tell you is untrue, he will spread that lie among the Longtooth and my own people will become my enemy. Is that not so, Yaqut?"

Yaqut edged forward, stood behind and to the side of Hamr. "The truthfulness of a witch is her strength among the people. She dares not lie to us. But in her truths there may be deception. Old woman, you know I will kill the ghost dancer if I find him, and you are sworn to protect the Old People. Why then do you give us the means to find him?"

"Finding him does not assure that you will kill him," the witch replied with a sly smile. "If you die trying, the boy remains with me. He is better than a ghost dancer, for he is human, yet I have seen him carry the ul udi."

"What are these ul udi?" Hamr asked.

"Evil spirits," Yaqut replied.

"Not all are evil," the witch countered. "Some speak truths we can learn no other way. With the proper training, this boy can learn those truths."

"And if we succeed?" Yaqut asked. "If we kill the ghost dancer, will you return the boy to us?"

"Yes. If you return, you may take the boy back."

"I want to see Timov," Hamr said.

"He rests now."

"I will see him!"

The witch shrugged. "Kirchi! Bring up the boy."

The red-haired witch emerged from the burrow with a groggy Timov. At the sight of Hamr and Yaqut, he shook off his stupor. "I fell asleep," he said meekly, not remembering the witch's pressing the crystal to his head.

Hamr explained the offer Neoll Nant Caw had made. "Will you stay?"

Timov ran quickly to Hamr's side, fully alert. "No! I don't want to stay here. I want to go with you. I want to find Duru."

Hamr sat tall on his mount. "Timov has decided. He comes with us."

"Wait," Yaqut said. "We came for the tracking stone."

"The boy for the stone," Neoll Nant Caw said. "If you take the stone by force, you take my curse with you."

"The boy will be safer here," Yaqut said, hesitating.

"No!" Timov bleated. "I want to come with you."

"We have the witch's promise he will not be harmed," Yaqut reasoned. "When we have Duru, we will come back for him."

"Hamr!" Timov clutched Hamr's leg. "Don't leave me here."

"If he comes," Yaqut said, "we go without the tracking stone. We may never find Duru."

Hamr stared up at the fleet clouds and considered impaling the witch and taking the stone. Yaqut read his intent and said, "The stone is no good to us if it is cursed."

Hamr closed his eyes, looking for the Beastmaker. Black clouds drifted in a white sky behind his lids. He had to decide. The witch wanted only to keep the boy in custody—and Duru endured far more danger. He looked down at Timov and handed him his knife and his spear. "I will return," he promised.

A reluctant Timov took his weapons.

Neoll Nant Caw nodded sagely, and handed the polished stone to Yaqut. "Turn, Evil Face, and feel the chill in the stone."

Yaqut walked a tight circle. Indeed, the stone frosted in his grip when he faced southeast. "How do I know that this is the ghost dancer we want?"

"This is Frost Moon," Neoll Nant Caw replied. "Whatever Old People came through here this season have long since retreated south. Baat is the Old One you want. He alone lingers in the Forest. Find him—and may he break your necks!"

"Harm this boy and I will break yours." Hamr spoke through his teeth, though within his heart the words felt empty.

Timov moved back as Hamr turned Blind Side around. His eyes stung with tears. He blinked them back and felt them drain into the hollow of his chest.

"I will be back!" Hamr swore again and clacked his spear against Timov's.

He remembered the boy in the Blue Shell days, when Timov and his friends would laugh at him behind his back. Now only sadness circled between them. Like Aradia and then Duru, Timov had become a loss that mocked his greatness, the greatness that had become an emptiness when he lost Aradia and with her his tribe.

Hamr swore to himself that he would return for Timov. With the Beastmaker's blessing, he would reward the boy by initiating him himself. As a man, Timov could make his own destiny even without a tribe. That decided, Hamr joined Yaqut. They walked across the dell in the opposite direction from which they had come, toward where the icy feel of the stone led them. They did not look back.

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Neoll Nant Caw took away Timov's weapons and put him to work at once. She had him sit with the dreamy-eyed men and sort wads of grass into piles of weaving fibers of varying kinds. Timov resigned himself to the tedious work, afraid to anger the witch. The men beside him breathed not a word nor gave him even a single glance to indicate that they acknowledged his presence.

The young witch had a less fierce mien than the crone, and when she passed by to oversee, he summoned the courage to ask her, "Who are these men?"

"They're Longtooth hunters," Kirchi whispered, "who broke the tabu of the Mothers and are here as punishment."

"Why don't they see me?"

Kirchi pointed to an inflamed sting-mark under the ear of one of the men, and Timov noticed that the other also bore that wound. "Neoll Nant Caw pricked them with a trance-thorn, and now they see only their work. Hush now and do what she says or she'll prick you."

Kirchi drifted away, and Timov bent more earnestly to his task, though the light dimmed. He flicked a glance to the sky, at clouds the color of rocks tumbling out of the east. Here came the storm he had seen building over the mountains during his death-flight. Static thrummed in the air.

Timov worked without lifting his head until the light had darkened. Then, he peered up as if at the overcast and looked about for the witches. With them nowhere in sight, he believed that if he bolted now and ran hard he could easily outdistance the old woman.

The storm would certainly slow Hamr and Yaqut, and he could probably find them before nightfall. His spear leaned against a larch beside the barrow, and he decided not to backtrack for it. The others would understand. And with that decision, he leaped to his feet and dashed around the heap of wood beside the fire-pit and across the dale.

The wet wind in his face pressed against him and slowed his flight. The run across the hilly vale seemed far longer now. Sharp yelps cut along the grain of the wind. Among the trees to his left, slinky shadows glided. He peeled to the right, though that sent him toward the stone fences.

Shouts flapped with the wind from behind, and he threw a look over his shoulder. The two Longtooth men plodded after him. Their gait lumbered like that of lame men. Timov felt confident he could elude him.

The yelping broke into howls, and the wolf pack shot out of the woods toward him. He pumped his legs harder than he could run, and tumbled to the ground.

As Timov jumped to his feet, the first of the wolves fell upon him. It clasped his loin-pelt in its jaws and spun him about. He bent over, held his arms to his torso and his hands across his face. The beasts swarmed around him, yawping and growling.

Hands grabbed Timov's shoulders and pulled him away from the snarling wolves. He looked up into the flat gazes of the Longtooth hunters. The wolves' cacophony had diminished. They loped back to the Forest, and the tranced men dragged Timov back to the encampment.

Neoll Nant Caw waited outside her bunker. Her face squinted with anger. "You broke your promise," she snarled, and her hand lifted.

Timov cringed and, from the unexpected side, the witch struck him with the flat of her hand. A sharp pain jabbed him in his neck, and he staggered backward.

"Now you will do no more running," the crone cackled and turned away.

Nausea mounted in Timov. He reeled into the arms of the tranced men. As they lowered him to the ground, strength bled from his legs. Emptiness hollowed his bones, and he sat dumbfounded before the stack of wadded grasses. Fear knocked at his heart for several minutes, then dulled away.

"I am becoming as they are," he said to himself. Moments later, even that thought had become too ponderous to hold in his mind. His hands moved automatically, unraveling the tangled grasses, sorting threads by feel alone.

Rain pattered through the trees. Hands touched him, pulled him upright. The sky had turned green. Against it, Kirchi stood, her features softened with wry sorrow.

"You shouldn't have run," she said. "You should have waited for me. You can't get away without me." She led him out of the rain, into the burrow. Moss curtains parted, and the blue fragrance of burned pine resin greeted him. He sat where the other men already sat husking pine seeds. His hands fumbled with the cones, shook loose the white pellets.

Kirchi's hot whisper sounded behind him, the sweet spice of her breath close enough for him alone to hear: "Evil Face and your friend are not coming back for you. The stone the witch gave them has wicked spirits in it—spirits that will attract the beasts. We must escape on our own."

Neoll Nant Caw's voice called from deeper in the burrow, and Kirchi scurried off. Alone with the others, Timov worked steadily, mindlessly. His blood sucked in his ears. Had the red-haired witch truly spoken to him? He listened hard for his own memory and heard only thunder cutting rain into its endless parts.

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At the center of a subterranean chamber with root-woven walls, Neoll Nant Caw sat in a circle of blue fire. A gopher-tunnel and several mouseholes overhead vented the smoke. Even so, the place still reeked with acrid fumes from burning tar-oil.

Kirchi feared this chamber, for here the witch made her drink bitter dreaming-potions. Many a night she had sat on the packed earth at the center of that circle, watching slim blue flames twist inside the witch's crystals. With the help of the dreaming potions, she had seen deep inside those rocks, seen the moon-bright Forest under the mountains, watched her clan wander the grasslands with the herds.

And once, she had witnessed a ghost dancer possessed by the Dark Traces. That had happened early in the spring, when Baat defiled the Longtooth's priestess and slaughtered her escorts. Even now, eight moons later, she still touched that nightmare whenever she entered this chamber.

"The boy works?" the witch asked.

Kirchi nodded, glad to see that none of the crystals lay unsheathed. "He should be watched. He might easily doze off."

"You watch him then. And steep him a brew of this." The crone held out a rolled leaf packed with root-tip pinchings. "It will give him strength to work. Study what I have mixed here. I will ask you later to make some of your own."

Kirchi stepped closer to the ring of fire. Though the flames flickered low, no more than skinny blue worms glowing in the dirt, she dreaded the circle. Inside waited the trance, the way out of her body and into misting gulfs, where the Forest and even the mountains existed as no more than ghosts. She snatched the leafroll and backed away.

"When he is finished with the pine seeds, have him shave some tinder." Neoll Nant Caw shooed Kirchi off with a hiss, and a frown crossed her face as the young woman disappeared.

Four years they had worked together and still the child feared her. Perhaps the old woman had been too strict, made Kirchi imbibe too many dreaming brews. With so much to learn and so little time left, how else could she have trained this neophyte?

The crone despaired at what her life had come to. Since the day in her twelfth summer when a witch had touched a crystal to her forehead and she had heard a Bright One singing, Neoll Nant Caw had wanted to be a witch.

The Bright One had been singing about trees, lanterns of water that shone with the light of the sun. After hearing that song, nothing about the craft frightened her, not leaving her clan, not drinking the sour brews or losing herself in trances. She had yearned only for the Bright Ones and to learn everything from them.

In those days, it had seemed that from the ul udi everything could be learned. They knew not only how trees ate sunlight but also how sunlight in the grass became the life of the herds.

The men, who wanted simply to kill the Old People and were afraid of the dire spirits they called down from the sky, did not care that sunlight had become grass and then beasts. They wanted only to know where the herds grazed beyond the horizon. So long as the witches could tell them that, they left the women alone with their ghost dancers and crystals to learn how sunlight broke into rainbows.

That was long ago when many more of the Old People lived. In those times, a dozen witches lived together in the Forest, working with three or more ghost dancers at a time. The ul udi taught them how to store celestial energy in crystal rocks and how to use those stones to speak with them and learn what they knew.

The crone huffed a sigh at all that had been known and now lost. During her lifetime, most of the Old People had disappeared from the Forest, and without them to call down the ul udi, the craft had withered. The tribes, busy with the hunt and the Ways of Wandering, thought it foolish to sit around sipping dreaming potions and gazing into crystals, so few women chose the craft. Now merely a handful of stray ghost dancers like Baat remained, three or four aging witches, and these few crystals that had not yet been broken.

Neoll Nant Caw lifted the moss-plaited cover from a small heap before her and revealed a cluster of quartz chunks. Blue light from the burning circle scattered in bright grains and glassy shadows as she picked up one of the rocks.

She searched its rough facets for a way in, found a radiant seam and gazed into its hot glare. After a lifetime of trancework, she no longer needed dreaming potions to use the crystals. One deep breath opened her to the energy in the rock.

With dazzled eyes, the crone stared into invisible kingdoms, and saw. Bare trees against a gray sky wreathed a vision of herself bundled in fur, walking among shifting paths of snow. She bowed before the wind, protecting something from the gusty cold. The wind lifted the fur from the crook of her arm, exposing the squinty face of a newborn—and the shock of seeing its small body broke the trance.

With a trembling hand, Neoll Nant Caw lowered the crystal and shut her eyes, trying to reason through what she had glimpsed. She had intended to seek knowledge from the ul udi about the boy and had not expected to see herself carrying an infant. The ul udi in these stones did not deceive. What else could it mean but that, sometime in the icy months ahead, such a one would come into her care?

The crone touched her cool fingertips to her eyelids and let her flesh hang heavy on her bones. She was far too old to rear a child. Her own children, three girls, she had given to the families of their fathers so as not to distract herself from the craft. Whose child could this be, come to trouble her last days?

The possibility grew in her that this might foresee the young wanderer's child, begat on Kirchi. The witch had come to the crystals to ask about Timov. The boy could attract ul udi like a ghost dancer. A rare being, he should be bred to preserve his skill.

Neoll Nant Caw muttered a prayer of thanks to the Great Mother, wanting this to be true. If Kirchi mated with Timov in the spring, after they had tested his usefulness and proven him worthy, then her vision would be fulfilled the following winter. She could not hope to survive much longer than that. Yet that would be enough, for then there would be others to continue the craft.

The witch picked up the stone and squinted at it again. The trance did not work as deeply. Fatigued, she witnessed only the usual fretwork of energies, the frozen lightning of the ul udi in the stone.

You are made of light, the soft voice spoke to her. Everything is made of light. Each grain of sand is a world of light squeezed to a mote.

Neoll Nant Caw had heard this story many times, and she put the rock down. Later, when she had rested, she would enter the crystal again and try to scry the future. The Great Mother had delivered to her a young man who could carry the ul udi. For the first time in seven years, she would once more have the chance to speak directly with the spirits and to make more crystals.

Vital as the stories in her crystals had been for her, she knew them too well, and her heart hummed with excitement that soon she would hear new stories and learn more about the invisibles.

Moon Bitch

Dawnlight lit the mists of the Forest to golden vapors, and Duru peered through them, looking for the ghost dancer. She had woken in the dark to find herself alone, yet still leashed to the fir. Nuts and berries that the monster had gathered still lay within grasp on a pelt of silver mink. At first, she ignored the food and waited nervously for the giant to return. As the Forest grew brighter, her hunger increased.

Duru had never seen mink before, and she let her fingers crawl over her bed of pine needles to the bright hairs of the pelt. The fur felt softer than she had guessed, and the many subtle colors in the pelage impressed her. She wondered what manner of creature wore this skin, as her fingers walked among the hazelnuts and mulberries.

The fur reminded her of the weasel pelts that the Mothers used for trimming mantles in the wet season. She remembered her own mother had once lined a tunic with weasel for her and she had worn it several winters before she outgrew it.

Sadly, lost in memory, she carried a mulberry to her lips and mashed it between her tongue and palate, sifting the tiny seeds with her teeth. The berry's sweet ripeness exploded in her mouth and reminded her she had not eaten all day. She helped herself to several more of the purple drupes.

Then she sampled the nuts and noticed that they, too, had reached perfect maturity. Their husks peeled away easily. She found two rocks under the duff of fallen needles and used them to smash open the hard shells, exposing meats dark yellow and oily. She began eating avidly.

Baat watched with satisfaction from a covert of dense undergrowth. With the rising sun, the voices of the ul udi had entirely vanished, leaving him weary and clear-headed. He felt proud that he had not succumbed to the murderous insistence of the Dark Traces, prouder yet that he had offered her food she found appetizing.

He observed her nimble way of shucking the nuts with her fingers and cracking them with rocks, sparing her molars. Apparently, the mouths of the smallheads were not as useful as those of the People, so they had to find ways to employ hands for simple things he and his kin would do with their teeth.

Intrigued, Baat studied the way his captive broke off the cap of each nut to expose the hard shell and then how she braced several nuts together on one rock and bashed them with the other. Among the People, only children with immature teeth did this, and for a brief moment Baat imagined her as his own daughter.

Strings of sunlight dangled through the branches, and several touched the girl, lighting the crow-black of her hair, the tawny hue of her flesh. All the smallheads Baat had seen before had hair red as his own or paler. Their eyes pooled the blue light of heaven, whence came the clearest light.

This one's eyes seemed like chips of night, and her look puzzled him, as though she gazed with the mirror-depths of a still, dark pond. Looking at her, he experienced a tinge of fear. After all, wasn't she something more than a smallhead? She had seen him in his body of light, which no other smallhead had done—except her brother.

Who are these exotic smallheads? If he had the strength, he would dance with the ul udi this next night and ask the Bright Ones to tell him. To do that, he would have to sleep now in daylight. Certainly, the smallhead hunters were already tracking him, especially the beardless one, who had dared trespass the night Forest to pursue him. And the beardless one had allied with Yaqut. Evil Face had stalked him all summer in these woods and denied him his flight to the cairn of the ancestors in the north.

Baat rubbed the ache of fatigue around his eyes and tried to think clearly. If he fled now with the girl, he would be too tired at night to call down the cold fire of the sky. Then he would have to spend another day in ignorance, unsure of this girl’s identity and what he should do next.

Besides, another run through the woods would only heighten the unwilling girl's fear. Perhaps if he stayed here for the day, she might come to see that he meant her no harm. Then travel would go easier, and she could help him. The Bright Ones intended that.

His decision felt just, even though it played into the vulnerability of his exhaustion. He sighed—a frustrated sigh. Let the smallheads come. Let them find me if they can.

During his run last night, he had been careful to leave few tracks behind, loping much of the way through the swift course of streams and on boulder paths of extinct riverways. Finding him would not be easy.

Before he could let the weariness in his muscles claim him, Baat had to show himself to the girl. He stood up and stepped slowly through the shrubs. For a while, he just stood there and let the smallhead see him in the misty morning light, eyes lowered so he would not have to meet her dark stare.

Duru started back at the sight of the giant and hugged the fir. In daylight, he appeared even more gruesome than he had in the smudged boreal glow of night.

His garish red hair stood up like bristles from his large head, stubbled along the broad curve of his pike-thrust jaw. A crescent scar scored his right cheek. Flame-flared tufts twisted above down-sloped green eyes that, to her great relief, did not stare at her but looked away, inviting her to study him.

She had seen enough of his brutish features, the lump of his nose, the cruel slash of his mouth. She rested her gaze on the broad stoop of his bare shoulders, glinting with red hairs.

Unlike the hunters of her tribe, the giant did not wear fur but deer hide, like Yaqut. Where Yaqut secured his buckskin in straps across his waist and sinewy limbs, the ghost dancer had wrapped a complete skin about his body, tying the leg-strips off at his shoulder and hip. And, like the Tortoise people, like Hamr before he wed, he used no bodypaint.

The giant advanced, and a mossy odor came with him. He knelt before her, hands open before him, huge against his wall of a chest. "Baat," he groaned. Then he lay down nearby, facing away from her, the long hackles of his ruddy hair streaked like a mane down the muscled curve of his back. In moments, his breath soughed with the rhythm of sleep.

Duru's fingers flitted among the nutshells she had cracked until she found the shards she wanted. While she ate, the idea had leaped in her that the sharp hazel shells could cut her leash, and she had been about to test her idea when the giant appeared. Now that he had fallen asleep, she immediately set to picking at the reeved twine that bound her.

The shell shards proved too dull to slice the vine, but sharp enough to separate the fibers, which she could cut tediously between the two rocks she had used as a nutcracker.

Morning mists burned away. Jays swirled among the trees. The wind turned and delivered the red leaf of a nearby maple and a shadowy hint of rain. Overhead, a woodpecker tapped persistently, and Duru used its noise to mask the sound of the gnashing rocks as she crushed the last fibers of the twisted vine between them.

The vine snapped. Duru sat still, waiting to see if the ghost dancer had heard. His breath flowed deeply, and she crept away crabwise from his hulk. Once she had crawled past another fir, she leaped to her feet, running as silently as she could.

Where to run? Duru had no idea in which direction the giant had carried her during the night. She moved west, following a ridge-back above a snaky stream whose water swirled to foam among black rocks. Jay screams alerted the whole Forest to her flight. Finally, she slid and skidded her way down the embankment to the stream and the riffle of water that seemed to mute the noise of her downstream run.

She clambered over beech trees felled by erosion. When the stream pooled to a mire of kelp-like grasses and bearded hemlocks, where sunlight layered but did not reach, she climbed out.

She crossed the stream along the peak of a cluttered beaver dam, teetering on shaggy logs. Halfway across, she paused as the beaver, huge as a bear, slithered out of the black water and shambled ashore. It paid her no heed, and she hurried over the crook-backed dam and into a fern grove.

Burly oaks stood among rocks above the bracken. Their interlocked branches looked sun-chinked and dark as the legendary roof-trees that held up the sky.

Duru decided to wade through the fern holt to the giant oaks. She hoped to find edible mushrooms in the damp dark there. As she crossed through the sedge, a stupendous shadow rose from the field.

A bear reared from the reed bank and the hackleberries on which it had been feeding. Its bellow made Duru's teeth clack. She scampered away, and the bear lumbered through the bushes after her.

She headed for the oaks. Struggling up the steep rise, the bear loping after her, she heard a whooping cry. The ghost dancer stood on the far shore of the stream.

Baat called again, "Doo-roo!" He waved her toward him. Knowing that bears ran faster uphill, he tried to signal her toward the stream.

Duru understood. And though she had been fleeing the ghost dancer, hope and desperation burst together in her at the sight of him. She turned sharply and dashed down the hill.

The bear yowled and banked after her. She slogged through rush grass, where the bear's pursuit slackened, slowed by mud. When she heaved herself into the stream, the beast shambled two lengths behind, groaning with the effort to catch its prey. It splashed in after her.

Baat stood on the bank and threw rocks at the pursuing bear until it dove. "Doo-roo!" he cried once more, and signed for her to hurry. He knew she could not outswim a bear. A rock in each fist, he sloshed in, and stood waist deep, shouting her on.

The beast's air bubbles frothed just behind the girl's splashing legs. She scrambled upright in the water, a terrified look on her face, then sank again out of sight.

Baat ducked under but could discern nothing in the turgid stream. He bobbed upright. The surface churned, and Duru reappeared, gasping. Beside her, streaming water, the bear rose, fangs bared.

Baat hurled his two rocks and struck the beast's snout squarely. It dove again, hoving into view farther away, retreating to the distant bank.

Duru twisted onto her back and stroked to shore. Blood ribboned behind her. Baat lifted her from the water and carried her through the canes to the mossy slope. Her right sandal was gone, and her calf had been split open like a gutted fish.

Swiftly, Baat unstrapped his clan belt and lashed it around her wounded leg. She clutched at his arm. Gritting her teeth, she gnashed back the pain.

"Doo-roo," he said, softly to allay her fear, and put a broad hand to the side of her face. He took the leather sheath of his flint knife and placed it between her teeth. Then he set to work splitting canes to extract the soft punk, which he mixed with the bast from a nearby poplar.

Removing his clan belt from Duru's leg, he plastered the gash with the mucilage. He wrapped the calf securely using long strands of sedge grass, then gave the girl a chunk of the poplar bast to gnaw.

Duru struggled with unconsciousness. When Baat lifted her, she put her arms around his thick neck, glad for his strength, for his lonely smell of sodden earth, and for the pain that hooked her precariously to life.

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"Wake up," Kirchi whispered in Timov's ear. She had come to collect the large pile of pine seeds he had shucked. The two other workers had already cleared away the empty cones and gone to their own burrow for the night.

Timov watched from far inside his head as Kirchi used a slice of smoothed bark to scoop the white seeds into a basket. The rhythms of the pine-husking continued to tremble in him, and he heard the young witch's voice weave in and out of the sizzling rain: "Wake up, Timov. Evil Face and your friend are lost. We must save ourselves." And the noise of the rain carried her words into the hissing blood in his ears.

Kirchi leaned close and gave Timov the juniper bough that Neoll Nant Caw wanted shaved for tinder. As she fitted it and the flint scraper to his dull hands, she said in chant-voice: "Timov, your body is equal to the sunlight. A star baked your bones. Your blood is red with dust from the center of that star. So are my bones, my blood. So is everything on the Earth, everything made from fire and ash. Wake up and look around you at all that's come from inside a star!"

Kirchi began Timov's new work rhythms by moving his hands through the actions of scraping off the bough's bark and shaving strips of green-white pith. Once the rhythm asserted itself and he began doing the work without her guidance, she picked up the basket of pine seeds and left her charm to do its work.

Everything made from fire and ash ... your body has come from inside a star. The words disappeared into the seethe of his pulse and blood echoing in his ears, circling through its thick night.

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Thunderheads brooded over the Forest. Violet billows piled high into the ether, blotting out the afternoon sun and casting everything below into eerie, luminous darkness. Lightning streaked, and birds fluting in the treetops went silent, waiting for the thunder.

Yaqut had found shelter beneath the overhang of a terrace strewn with juniper. The stream that had cut the rock shelves meandered below. It chortled loudly as it foamed among rocks fallen from above.

Overhead, caverns gaped from the hollow faces of the worn-away land. Their refuge belonged to Bear and Lion. Yaqut built a lean-to among dwarf trees clinging to the stone ledge, and Hamr gathered dried grass and branches of deadwood to spark a fire.

Thunder pealed, and Blind Side of Life shuffled nervously and tossed his head. He smelled the lightning on the wet wind and neighed with concern. Hamr stoked the fire to a blaze and watched Yaqut pace with the tracking stone in his hand, absorbed in feeling the direction of his prey.

"I'm taking Blind Side to a patch of milk grass I saw on our way up here," Hamr said. "It'll calm him."

Yaqut grunted, staring at the stone in his hand as though he could see the ghost dancer in it. "Hard rain is coming. Look out for washes or you will be riding the river."

Hamr untethered his horse and led him back along the shelf the way they had come. Soon as they got out of sight, he mounted and drove his sightless horse harder. They had a long way to go, and the rain already closed upon them. Pellets of water smacked among the rocks and fluttered the leaves of the claw-rooted junipers.

By the time sheets of rain swept through the Forest, Hamr and Blind Side had found their way off the terrace and into the big trees. Lightning crashed on all sides. Blind Side jumped with each boom, forcing Hamr to ride hunched over, clutching his mount's neck.

Darkness fell swiftly, and Hamr guided Blind Side to a pig-walk he had noticed earlier in the day. The rutted path stretched through wooded hollows and puzzled among knolls, eventually leading back to the vicinity of the witches' dell.

Crouched over his shivering animal, dripping rain and plastered with wind-cast leaves, Hamr kept Blind Side in the muddy rut until he heard the femur bones of the witches’ skull totems clacking in the storm.

A sprawling oak beside the farthest fence of the dell provided some protection for Blind Side. Hamr tethered him there before crawling through a break among the piled rocks. He ran crouched over, though the night of driving rain ranged black, illumined only by glaring fits of lightning. In each hand, he carried a spear. His footfalls sucked at the mud.

At the first bunker of moss-matted boulders, he crawled on top, listened hard and heard nothing. When he poked his head in, he smelled the human musk of sleep, barely discerning the reclining shapes of the two tranced workers. The drumming rain masked his movements, and he backed off into the night and resumed his search.

Woodsmoke tainted with an acrid whiff of incense guided Hamr through the dark to the next mound of grass-seamed rocks. Here vaporous light leaked from a vent hole, and rain glittered around it.

Hamr listened, heard scraping. Pressing his face to the narrow space between the rocks, he spied hands using a chipped rock to peel strips of green spunk from a thick branch. The hands belonged to Timov.

Hamr crept around to the front of the burrow, stood, and took a deep breath to steady himself. Then he charged through the moss curtain.

The interior glowed amber with burning nut-oil cupped in root burls perched in crannies of the burrow. A twig-fire crackled in a small hearth, where curls of green spunk wisped aromatically.

Timov sat alone beside the hearth, working with the same tranceful rhythm of the Longtooth slaves. Seeing him thus, Hamr's heart constricted, and he knelt before the boy. "Timov!" he whispered sharply.

The youth looked up groggily and stared with glassy eyes a long moment before his mouth worked. "Hamr." His hands did not stop moving. His face remained slack. "Is it you?"

Before Hamr could reply, the bone-beaded grass curtain at the back of the burrow parted, admitting the red-haired witch. Her green eyes widened—and Hamr advanced upon her. With the spear tips crossed under her throat, he guided her away from the curtain and pressed her against the damp wall. "Scream and you die."

Kirchi gasped, shook her head.

"Where is the crone?"

"You came for the boy?" Kirchi gaped, astonished.

Hamr pressed harder, making the witch gag. "Where is she?"

With startled eyes, she looked to the grass curtain. "Inside—with her crystals."

"What has she done to Timov?"

"Trance-thorn—she pricked him."

"Take me to the witch. She will undo it or I will kill her."

"No! It will wear off. Quick, we must get away from here before she hears us. Take me with you, and I will help you."

Hamr's scowl darkened. "You? You're a witch."

"Not by choice. Please, we must hurry."

"You're lying! You'll call the witch and her wolves down on us."

Kirchi's face pleaded, her glance darting to the bone-beaded curtain. "She'll be out here soon. Please, I tell you, you can't stand against her power. Take me with you. I swear, I can help you."

"How?"

"The tracking stone—it uses the Dark Traces. It will draw the Stabbing Cat and the Lion down on you before you ever get near the ghost dancer. I have a better tracking stone."

"Where?"

She looked to the hearth, and Hamr stepped back but kept his spears trained on her. With another nervous glance at the grass curtain, she ran to the fire and dislodged the central stone behind the flames. A web of light sparkled from a cache of crystals. Kirchi withdrew a dagger-shaped jewel similar to the one that had drawn the evil spirit from Timov.

Hamr leaned one of his spears against his shoulder and took the crystal. He turned with it—and felt a palpable chill come and go as he changed direction. He tucked the tracking stone in his loin-pelt, and pulled Timov to his feet.

"Take me with you," Kirchi begged. As Hamr shoved Timov into the rain, she clutched at him. "If you don't, she will surely kill me for giving you the stone."

Trying to gauge her truthfulness, Hamr stared hard at her. She had given him the tracking stone. That might have been a ploy to save her life. Yet, if he left her behind, she could immediately alert the witch. He seized her arm, pulling her after him into the night.

"Wait," she whispered and lifted a bag of woven rush-grass from its niche beside the entrance. "My medicine bag—"

Outside, the rain thrashed. Hamr braced Timov with an arm around his shoulders, leading him toward the stone fences.

Kirchi blocked the way. She waved them in a different direction, hurrying through the pummeling rain. They darted passed the flooded fire-pit and toward the black pool, where the evil spirit had been driven from Timov. In flashes of storm-fire, the pool glowed.

Kirchi led them on. Hamr hesitated only long enough to look back once: Silhouetted in flashes of thunderbolts, the two tranced Longtooth men ran across the field where he had headed until diverted by the young witch. He moved hurriedly after her. Timov shuffled under his arm.

The witch led them past the pool and up a rocky rise sluicing with runoff. The slope leveled to a copse of young fir bunched close enough to thin the downpour. A stab of lightning ignited numerous yellow sparks among the trees—the eyes of wolves.

Hamr raised the two spears in his right hand to use as a club. Kirchi faced him, arms spread. "Do not threaten them. They know me."

She whispered to the eye-glints as she had often heard Neoll Nant Caw whisper. Her insides iced, wondering if they would indeed recognize her. She reached into her medicine-bag and clutched the moonstones there, whispering the song-chant that soothed beasts. "Yes, they will let us pass now."

Hamr walked backward, one hand on Timov's shoulder. He did not take his eyes off the humped shadows as Kirchi guided them through the thicket. The wolves did not stir, and soon disappeared in the darkness.

A flare of lightning revealed the stone fences at the edge of the dell. Hamr whistled, and the white shadow of his horse stepped from behind the distant oak.

With the spears he pointed to Blind Side and with his other hand made Timov look. The boy's numbed face stared for what seemed a long while before his slack lips offered a tiny grin.

Hamr cast a triumphant smile at Kirchi, who wiped the wet-strung hair from her face, casting a nervous glance back toward the burrow of the witch. She followed the hunters into the slick night.

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Heavy rain flooded the rut that Hamr had followed to the dell, and he guided Blind Side of Life to higher ground. The stream that led back to Yaqut's camp roared invisibly in the darkness, and Hamr followed its sound. With the drumming rain, the horse weary from walking all day and into the night, and Timov trudging heavily as one asleep, laboring under the witch's poison, the trek went slowly.

Hamr wanted to stop under the trees and wait for dawn, but Kirchi insisted they keep moving. "Neoll Nant Caw already knows we've stolen her good tracking stone," she said urgently. "She'll be after us. The rain may protect us from her wolves, but only if we keep moving."

Following ridgebacks through the drumming rain above the stream, Hamr picked his way carefully. One misplaced step would send them plummeting into the engorged stream to be swept through the darkness and bashed among rocks. With his spears, he probed ahead, testing the footing on rocky ground and finding passages through stubborn hedges.

When fire flickered in the distance—Yaqut's campfire— Blind Side would go no farther. Hamr had Kirchi and Timov wait with the horse, and he hastened ahead. The spark of light brightened into a blaze far larger than the campfire Hamr had built. Yaqut had stoked it into a bonfire. As Hamr darted among the trees, he understood why. The roars of beasts resounded above the tumult of the surging stream.

Hamr stopped, squinted into the wet wind. Then a bramble of lightning lit up the terrace where Yaqut had camped, and Hamr identified Yaqut standing before the bonfire waving a torch.

On the ledge above, slinky shadows of Stabbing Cats paced back and forth. Big as lions, they displayed incisors long as knives. Hamr had heard tales of these beasts, ferocious hunters of the Hippopotamus and the Rhinoceros, from the elders, but he had never seen them before.

Using his spears to brace himself, Hamr descended to the rushing stream to avoid the big cats. The soaked earth constantly slipped away from under him, and he slid through the darkness. Bramble and rocks slashed him as he went by. One of his spears snagged on a protruding root. The other fell from his grip into the churning torrent below as he used both hands to hang on. His feet kicked, found purchase among exposed roots, and he stood and inched his way upward.

Now the frenzied roars of the Stabbing Cats battered the air louder than the thunder. Heaving himself onto a rock shelf, Hamr recognized that he had crawled to a terrace level with Yaqut and could see the hunter silhouetted against the smoking flames of his big fire.

Wind drove the rain under the overhang, wetting the burning wood and scattering swells of smoke. Yaqut slashed with his torch overhead to keep the Stabbing Cats from pouncing onto his ledge while he dragged more dry wood out from the crevices against the rock wall. Soon the wind and the rain would defeat him, and the Stabbing Cats would close in.

"Yaqut!" Hamr yelled, and the wind snatched his cry. He pulled himself up with his spear and ran toward the fire, keeping close to the rock wall so the cats would not spot him. When he reached the dwarf trees in the shimmering glow of the fire, he shouted again, "Yaqut! Throw away the tracking stone!"

Yaqut glared at Hamr. His waxen face looked blurred with the strain of defending himself. He waved Hamr closer.

"Throw the stone away!" Hamr shouted, afraid to move nearer. Beyond the dwarf trees, he would step into range of the Stabbing Cats, where they could easily leap on him. Their roars rose in volume, infuriated by the storm. "The witch deceived us! The stone is calling the cats to you!"

Yaqut plucked at his waist-strap and held up the stone. "How do you know?" he cried.

"I went back—for Timov! The young witch told me! Throw it away!"

With an angry shout, Yaqut spun around and sent the stone flying into the blackness above the flooded stream. Immediately, the roaring of the Stabbing Cats died away. The lashing rain and the spitting fire drove them off.

Hamr climbed over to Yaqut and took his torch. "You were right about the crone. She would've killed us to save the ghost dancer."

Yaqut spat out a curse. "Why did you not tell me you were going back?"

"You'd have tried to stop me." He turned and scurried away, Yaqut pelting him with bitter imprecations. When he returned with Blind Side, Timov, and the red-haired witch in his trail, Yaqut still fumed.

"Have you lost your mind, man? Why did you bring her?" He turned his twisted eye on Kirchi and blocked her way to the fire. "She is a witch!"

"She helped me." Hamr showed the long crystal. "This one won't draw the beasts down on us."

Yaqut eyed the crystal suspiciously, refusing to touch it. "It may not draw beasts, but it will draw Neoll Nant Caw."

Hamr looked to Kirchi. She nodded. "She will know where her crystal is."

"And she will come after it, be sure." Yaqut waved the tracking stone away. "Beasts we can fight with fire. The witch—she is death itself to us."

"You'd have died tonight, Yaqut." Hamr tucked the crystal away.

"Maybe." Yaqut eyed Timov, where he stood beside Blind Side, staring blankly. "What happened to him?"

"Trance-thorn," Kirchi replied. "He will come around in time. But he needs to be warmed and fed."

Yaqut stood aside, let the witch and the boy approach the fire. As Hamr stepped past, he took his arm. "You abandoned me."

"I came back, for Timov and for you."

"We do not need Timov." The good side of Yaqut's face looked sour. "And we do not need Neoll Nant Caw stalking us."

Hamr said nothing. He took Blind Side's rope and walked stiffly to the fire.

Kirchi sat Timov close to the flames and blotted his soaked hair and damp flesh with warm ash.

Hamr led the horse to the far side of the fire, near the wall, where they would not slip down the dark slope. Then he squatted beside the witch, and the chill that had penetrated him made him shiver. He bowed his head, throwing his long hair forward, and squeezed the rain from it.

"I remember you from the Longtooth," Yaqut said to the witch. He squatted with a puff of exhaustion. "Your mother is a seeress. Why have you left Neoll Nant Caw?"

"I never wanted to be with her." She stopped wringing the water from her hair and regarded the hunter with a steady but respectful gaze. "My teats are too small for the Mothers, so they gave me to Neoll Nant Caw. I hate being with her. I swear by the Mothers, I hate her ways."

"What do you hate?"

"The trances. The potions are bitter. They make me sick. I do not like leaving my body, seeing afar."

"Have you ever seen a ghost dancer?"

"In trance only."

"Never in person?"

"No. There aren't many left around here. Neoll Nant Caw hasn't seen one herself in seven years."

Yaqut's stare made the witch look away. He kept staring. "Where are you going? The Longtooth will not have you back."

"I ... I don't know where I'm going. Just away."

"You think you can get away from Neoll Nant Caw?"

"I was with her four years. I remember everything she taught me." She patted her woven-grass sack, strung to her waist. "I have my medicines and my charms. Maybe I'll go south, find a tribe that needs me."

Yaqut frowned. "You will go nowhere till we kill the ghost dancer. If Neoll Nant Caw comes for us, you will stop her—or you will die trying."

Hamr glared from under his hair at Yaqut. "Save your bluster and threats for the bonesucker, Yaqut. You'd be torn apart by those Stabbing Cats if not for her."

Yaqut snorted. "Maybe that would be better than letting the old witch get us."

"What will the crone do? Send her wolves? We've got fire."

"Fire will not stop her. You have stolen her crystal." Yaqut reached over and took Kirchi's chin in his bony fingers. "You want to tell him what she can do?"

Kirchi stared at his deformed face with undisguised revulsion.

Yaqut released her and threw another branch on the fire. "Tomorrow we split up," he announced. "Can the boy travel?"

Kirchi shrugged doubtfully. "He'll be very tired the next few days."

"So long as he can walk. You—Hamr," he ordered. "You take the witch and the crystal north, out of the Forest. I do not want Neoll Nant Caw stalking me. The boy and I will go east to the bluffs of the Big River. We will move north this side of the river, and you come south. When we meet—if we meet—we will be closer to the ghost dancer. If I do not find you among the bluffs, I will take the boy to the Longtooth. He will live as a slave, yet he will have his life. By then, the bonesucker will be too far south to hunt."

"You're more afraid of her than of the ghost dancer," Hamr realized slowly. "If she's that dangerous, then Timov is safer with you. I will go north with the witch as you say." He added in a show of bravura: "I went back for Timov. Now, if I must, I'll stand off Neoll Nant Caw."

Yaqut sneered, shook his head dolefully.

Hamr flinched, chanted silently to the Beastmaker: Help me out of this trouble. He had left Timov with the crone and now the boy had been locked in a spell. If he expected the Beastmaker to help, he had to confront the witch without exposing the boy to any further danger from her. He had to agree to Yaqut's plan and face the witch on his own. What is her magic? "She must be very powerful," he ventured.

Yaqut gazed into the fire, the scarred half of his face rigid as ice. "You will find out how powerful soon enough."

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Duru watched the flames of Baat's fire seizing twists of its dried wood as the Rain Master sent wet fingers of wind through the thicket to taunt the blaze. Baat adjusted the tinder to catch the gusts and burn brighter.

Earlier, when the thunderheads swelled, he had carried Duru here, high above the stream where the Bear had clawed her leg. Under an outcrop of granite and behind a thicket of young birch, the Rain Master could not touch them.

Duru lay on a bed of pine needles and feathery sumac. He had propped her head on a rock padded with moss, so she could watch the storm raging over the Forest. Baat crouched beside her, offering her sips of rainwater he had caught in a burl of willow bark. The willow resins would ease her pain.

She experienced little pain now. The poplar plaster and the willow tinctures had soothed the wound. And she had slept. She woke deep in the night to find Baat mashing pine nuts. She ate those and the hackleberries he had gathered outside their shelter. Staggered lightning slashed over the Forest and lifted the turtle-backed hills briefly out of darkness.

Now rested, her hunger appeased and the hurt in her leg dulled, Duru scrutinized the giant who cared for her. His marsh scent filled the enclosure with the fetid exhalation of stirred mud, the undersoils of Turtle and Frog competing with the pine smoke of the fire. She did not find the reek offensive anymore: It had the pungency of a slow kelpy river and brought to mind cattails and cress.

Nor did his appearance strike her as frightful now that she knew he did not intend to break her bones for her marrow. Large as he loomed, his thick body moved lightly upon his bones, and even in this tight space, he turned and rose as graceful as smoke. His harsh face, carved sharply around steep cheekbones, seemed far more dolorous than dangerous. Those long, slanting eyes shone green with phosphors of sorrow.

"Baat," she said.

He startled when she spoke his name and stared at her curiously. When she said nothing further, he offered her more water.

She shook her head and began to talk, words spilling out of her in a gush of relief: "Why did you take me from my people? I thought you were going to kill me. When I ran away from you, you came after me—if not to eat me, then why? And why did you save me from the Bear?"

Baat understood not a word. The cadence of her speech, gentle though swift, conveyed that she no longer feared him, and he allowed a smile to lift the heavy muscles of his face.

A spasm of lightning illuminated for a moment the large world beyond the thicket. Baat glanced at the writhing energy and thought of the ul udi. While the girl had slept, he had tried to reach them, to converse again with the Bright Ones. The storm had interfered. He had heard nothing but his own confusion. What to do now?

He held up his left hand and willed some of the cold fire into it. The hand lit up with blue voltage: A wavery sheath of fire arced between his fingers.

Duru gasped, pulled back.

"No—don't be afraid," Baat said. He understood now that his voice reached her as so much gruff noise. He could not explain that this energy healed. Instead, with his right hand, he steadied her hurt leg and touched the wound with the blue energy.

Duru tightened to cry out. But she knew no pain. The lightning in the ghost dancer's hand crackled over the bindings of her damaged leg. It pulsed coolly through her flesh. When he took his hands away, her leg hummed with strength.

Baat laughed at Duru's amazement, and she smiled, at first tentatively, then more broadly as the good feeling suffused her torn leg. Timov and Hamr will never believe this, she thought—and her joy dimmed. Where are they in this storm?

Surely they believed she was in danger—or dead. Taking a twig from the fire, she drew two stick figures in the dirt, one of them astride a crude likeness of a horse. The ghost dancer watched, then turned away. The flesh he could heal, but for her fear and her sorrow there was little he could do.

In the fargone days of his childhood, Baat remembered the old ones gathering the clan together during storms and singing. The ul udi could not come down through the tempest, so the People would send songs up to them. He hummed a tune he recalled from that time, a lullaby he had once sung to his own children. The stabbing hurt of those memories startled to life with that song and astonished him. His voice trailed off, leaving him bewildered.

Duru picked up on the music with a different song, a rain chant of the Panther people:

Let the lightning flash—

Riding into darkness—

And the thunder crash—

Riding into darkness—

I will not be afraid

Riding into darkness—

In the world the rain made

Riding into darkness—

Baat smiled again. The girl smiled back. Outside, the Rain Master's lightning raged in surges, while behind the thicket, under the granite outcrop, the ghost dancer and the girl hummed storm music together with the thunder.

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As the horizons exploded with lightning, Hamr and Timov crouched near the battered fire. Blind Side stood behind them, his large body shivering with fear.

Yaqut fed the fire with juniper branches and glanced about for the young witch. She had gone into the bushes some while back and had not returned. He motioned for Hamr to seek her out.

Hamr patted Timov reassuringly. The boy's gaze had locked on the jumping flames, and he seemed oblivious to all else. "Kirchi!" Hamr called, rising and stooping into the rain. Maybe she had fled, which would not be bad: one less to protect and feed.

Kirchi had not run away. On her way back to the campfire, lightning stabbed overhead so close that the air crackled and sent her sprawling. When she looked up, the after-glare of the bolt still lingered in the sky like mist. Out of that misty patch, translucent and shimmery, Neoll Nant Caw's spectral image flew toward her.

"You betrayed me," the crone cried, her haggard face vindictive with rage. "Four years I fed and sheltered you. I taught you the wise ways. You cannot run away now."

Kirchi clutched her medicine-bag, felt the jangle of moonstones within. The power in those stones could dispel this wraith. She had seen Neoll Nant Caw use crystals to drive off spectral ul udi—but she had never actually done it herself. "Go away," Kirchi warned.

Neoll Nant Caw's image swelled closer, her furious face a dense thicket of creases. "Come back now, Kirchi—or you will die with the others."

"Get away from me," Kirchi whimpered and curled up tighter. "You know I never wanted your food or your shelter. I never wanted to be a witch."

"You are a witch," the wraith spoke like soft thunder. "You can never be otherwise. Come back."

"No. I'm not a witch. I'm not—and I'm not coming back."

The wraith narrowed in. Her clawed hands glittered with punishing barbs.

Kirchi clutched the charged moonstones in her bag and called the power into her. To her surprise, the power came. A rich, amazing, flamboyance of strength sluiced through her.

Neoll Nant Caw sneered. "You would not dare! I taught you everything!"

With all the vehemence of her fright, Kirchi flung the energy at the wraith. Lightning clapped, and the crone shrieked and disappeared.

In the glare, Hamr's figure moved, silhouetted. "Are you all right?" He helped her to her feet. He felt the fear loosening her muscles and took her weight, thinking she had been startled by the lightning.

Kirchi trembled in Hamr's grasp. She had driven off Neoll Nant Caw! She had actually dared—and had been strong enough to do it. She had defended herself with her own powers—and as a witch. For a brief moment, pride dazzled her against a black sky of fear.

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Dawn broke in long rays of scarlet whose light blurred everything. Timov stared empty-eyed into slashes of red clouds, while Hamr leaned close, trying to stare past the glaze to the boy inside. "You sure this'll wear off?"

"It will take several days," Kirchi answered again. She stood at the edge of the rimrock, staring in the direction of Neoll Nant Caw's camp. Her insides still felt the fright of last night's confrontation.

She had told no one what had happened, for there was nothing they could do. The storm had protected them from the full brunt of the old witch's power. But how much longer before she came again for them? The moon was growing, and the crone would surely use that strength against them.

Yaqut kicked through the embers of the bonfire, stamping out the hot ashes that remained. Though they had camped on a rock shelf with nothing nearby to burn, he did this out of ritual habit, not ever wanting the fire to follow him.

After the tremendous bolts of lightning during the night, he had expected dawn to reveal several forest blazes. Joy touched him to see that the only flames in the Forest spread with the sun's rays fanning through fog and mist.

"Don't leave me," Timov begged in a wilted voice.

Hamr looked to Yaqut. "Let me take him with me."

Yaqut shook his fierce face. "He goes with me. You have the tracking crystal. When the boy's head clears, I will have his dreams." He lifted Timov under his shoulders and stood him up. "The bonesucker escaped me all summer. With the boy, I have a last chance to track him. Is that right, Timov? You are going to find your sister for me?"

Timov blinked, worked his mouth, but no sound emerged.

Yaqut sucked a slow breath through his teeth, and nodded. "He will do it. A few days of walking will clear his head." He faced Hamr, noting the concern in the big youth's face. He liked this oaf and wished the lad were as bright as he was brave. "You did right to go back for him. No matter what I said last night. Now you must contend with the witch." The flesh between his eyes twitched at that thought. "The boy will be safer with me. If you survive the journey to the Big River, you will see him again. I will watch over him, be sure."

Hamr placed Cyndell's ivory calendar bracelet in Timov's hand. "I'll be back for you."

Timov's mouth worked again, and from far away, he said: "I know." He looked down at the bracelet and his gaze lost itself in the swerves of its carvings.

Hamr turned for Kirchi and found her with Blind Side, grooming him with a pine-needle branch.

Yaqut, too, watched her, and he said out of the twisted side of his mouth, "Be wary of her. I want the bonesucker. You want Duru. What does she want? Mind that."

Taking Timov by the elbow, Yaqut led him away from the stamped-out fire, down the slope toward the stream.

Hamr looked after them until they disappeared in the sun-shot mists. He felt Kirchi watching him and wondered if she had deceived him and remained loyal to the old witch. Silently he asked the Beastmaker for a sign.

"You were brave to come back for him," Kirchi said from beside the horse. "Braver yet to take me with you. Most men would have been afraid to trust a witch. But then most men wouldn't have trespassed witch ground."

Hamr scanned the terraced slopes above them. "We better go before the Stabbing Cats return. They'll want the horse." He observed her sandals of plaited grass, already well frayed from last night's trek. "You'll need new footwear. Soon as we get away from these ledges, we'll cut some hide and fit you." He patted the pelts across Blind Side's back.

Kirchi smiled gratefully. She would be glad to get out of the grass robe. She wanted to leave behind every witch-thing she had. After last night's visitation from Neoll Nant Caw, she dared not abandon what protection she had. "I better not wear animal skin for a while," Kirchi said, and when she caught Hamr's puzzled expression, added, "I'm still a witch—until we get away from Neoll Nant Caw. I may have to talk with the animals. They won't talk if I'm wearing their skins."

"Talk to animals?"

"They could help us." She realized he did not understand. During the storm last night and again at first light, she had heard him praying to the Beastmaker, and she had expected him to be receptive to her talking with animals. For now, though, he was more concerned about the Stabbing Cats and eager to get away from the ledges, where the big cats could pounce on them. But she knew the cats had left before dawn, when the rain stopped, moving up the slopes and west.

Blind Side of Life had heard them. When everyone else had been sleeping, he had been listening with his deep ears, each moving independently, separating the noises of the stream and the wash of the rain from the stirring of animals. Each ear, filled with delicate hairs, could catch sounds no person could hear.

At first, she had felt sorry that the horse had no eyes, but once she talked with him and realized how clearly he heard, how fully and deeply he listened to everything, envy displaced her pity.

The paths that the rain had washed into the rocky slopes led down to the stream, glutted now with boulders, uprooted trees, and the carcasses of animals drowned by floods. At a bend where debris had silted a gravel bar, they forded a stream to put water between them and Neoll Nant Caw. On the other side, they stopped to gather some purple whortleberries for their pouches.

"What do you want?" Hamr asked her bluntly at last. "You don't want to hunt the ghost dancer. And Yaqut says you can't go back to your tribe. You said you want to go south, find another tribe. Why don't you go?"

Kirchi regarded him curiously. "You'd let me go?"

Hamr shrugged. "You're a witch—how could I stop you?"

"I thought you'd try. Yaqut said I had to help until the ghost dancer is taken."

"Yaqut's not here. You can go."

Kirchi smiled, a white-toothed grin that softened the sharp angles of her face. "Maybe I will."

A warm feeling suffused Hamr's breast. He had hoped to get rid of her, despite Yaqut's command. At the least, he had expected her to be a nuisance. Yet now he felt inspired by the way she played the brightness of her eyes over him—green eyes.

She struck him as the strangest woman he had ever seen, with her orange hair and fox-slanted eyes. She lacked the ampleness men wanted in a woman, which Aradia had carried so well. She appeared boyish, yet her expression held strength and directness, the look of someone used to facing challenge, who knew more than she would say, like an Old Mother. He liked her looking at him with esteem, making him feel he could be a great man.

She had returned to gathering berries.

"Maybe?" he asked.

"Now that I can go," she said, without looking at him, "maybe I will stay."

"Why? The Frost Moon is growing. Now's the time to go south."

"I don't really want to go south. Strays are killed by other tribes or made slaves. Let me stay with you. You took me from Neoll Nant Caw when I'd thought I'd never get away. Let me help you."

Hamr doubted she could help him, yet he felt pleased with the way she regarded him. He shrugged. "Which way do we go?"

Kirchi smiled with relief, then quickly marked the sun and pointed a way through the shrubs. "If we hurry, we can get out of the hills before dark. Tomorrow we'll reach the taiga." She took Blind Side's rope and guided him.

Glad that Kirchi knew her way, Hamr concentrated on looking for food. Among tangles of alders, willows, and dwarf birch, small mammals flitted, and Hamr whipped rocks at them with his sling and missed each time.

Kirchi giggled with amusement. Then she knelt in the deep moss hummocks beside a creek, snatched a rainbow fish from the purling water with one hand and tossed the trout to an amazed Hamr. They ate the roe as they walked and wrapped the fish in river kelp to keep it fresh for that night.

A shifting cloud of mosquitoes followed along the hill slopes. They swarmed louder in the depressions, until Kirchi found a milty pod of milkweed. She mixed the latex with bile from the trout's gut and dabbed it on their faces and limbs.

Hamr recognized the repellent as a variant of the fish paste the Blue Shell used. Hers smelled less vile and worked as well. He admired her competence and her unhurrying way of doing things.

When she paused by a swollen stream, Hamr waited patiently, thinking she would snatch another fish. Then the waters separated and a large shadow lifted itself upright—a giant beaver, taller than a man. It bobbed back into the stream, with only its big-toothed head, thick as a stump, breaking the surface.

Kirchi held the moonstones in her medicine-bag tight to her chest. She let their energy stream through her and into the Beaver. In that way, the witch power in the stone soothed the creature and opened its mind to her.

How quiet that mind felt, still as a snag pool. Kirchi shared the black water with the creature, watching mosquitoes dimple the surface. Pike poised like knives. Bolts of dragonflies flicked under basswood trees. And a black-haired girl in tattered hide hurried beside collapsed earth banks.

"Beaver has seen the girl," Kirchi said in a sleepy voice. She viewed Duru's small body crossing Beaver's wicker dam and disappearing among the pale blades on the shore. Then Bear reared out of the slick grass, and Kirchi nearly lost her vision. She watched the girl flee, saw her swim the stream, toward the far side where Baat stood throwing stones at the Bear.

Kirchi pulled back, and Beaver slipped into the amber water and vanished. "Duru was near here yesterday," she said quietly, her voice sounding loud even in a whisper. "I think she surprised Bear."

Hamr, who had watched her communion with Beaver with an open mouth, snapped alert. "Bear would kill her."

"Baat was there too. I think he saved her. I think she's all right."

"You think—" Hamr looked with exasperation at the ripples in the stream, where Beaver had floated only a moment before. "What did Beaver tell you?"

Kirchi shrugged. "That's all. I'll ask other animals as we go. Maybe we'll learn more."

Hamr followed the witch lightly, alertly. He felt suspicious and nervous. Had she really spoken with Beaver? How? He watched her carefully as they moved, but no other animals came to her.

Late that afternoon, at the end of their arduous walk through the hills, Blind Side of Life strolled off to nibble the last green shoots in the russet grass. Kirchi cleaned the trout while Hamr used a big rock to fell spruce poles for a lean-to. He asked her, "Can that crone really come after us this far away?"

"Oh, yes." They had chosen a sandy bench above a creek that drained the hills behind and opened into the grassy flat ahead. Low, broad rays of sunlight spread through the trees, brightening autumnal colors: scarlet maples, yellow birches, silvery willows.

"What is her power?" Hamr asked. He dragged the spruce poles from where he had felled them. "Is it the power to talk with animals, the way you did with Beaver?"

Kirchi laid the fish she had flayed with a sharp rock into the creek water. She held up her hand to stop Hamr's feet, cleared the damp leaves from under the fir, which he trampled, and revealed a crop of mushrooms.

"Will she send the wolves after us?" Hamr asked.

"No. They guard the witch ground." She selected two handfuls of mushrooms and returned to the creek to wash them and continue scaling the trout. "Neoll Nant Caw's power is the moon. As the moon waxes, the witch's power grows."

"What kind of power?"

"The next few nights, she'll send wraiths."

"Spirits?"

"More like animal ghosts. I can't describe them. You'll see."

"After that?"

"The Moon Bitch. When the moon is strong enough, Neoll Nant Caw will come to us as the Moon Bitch."

"As a dog then?"

"Yes, a wolf-wraith—but it's her, her spirit. We'll be on the tundra by then. We'll see her coming."

"What can this Moon Bitch do to us?"

"Tear us apart if we give her the chance."

Hamr looked skeptical. "A ghost? The fire-songs say ghosts are mist. They drive people mad but they don't tear them apart."

"This is not a ghost. It's a power, a moon power. Neoll Nant Caw has trapped ul udi in her crystals. They've taught her how to shape the fire from the sky."

"Ul udi," Hamr tried the name. "Like the spirit you drove out of Timov."

"Yes. Now how about a fire for us? Or do you like your fish raw?"

While they ate, the sun set, and the needle of the Frost Moon gleamed in the lavender dusk. Kirchi asked about the Blue Shell, and Hamr told her about his life on the sea cliffs, the wave that swept away his father and gave him his ambition to be a great man, how he captured Blind Side and won Aradia, and what he had learned of the gap between fate and destiny—before the destruction of the Blue Shell changed everything.

From Duru's satchel, Hamr removed the tortoise wheel and spun it for Kirchi on a stem of cane. She listened intently to what he had to say about Spretnak's idea that life is a wheel and destiny the emptiness at its center. She questioned him about his destiny, and he talked about his visions of the Beastmaker, with His antlered head, man's body, and eyes like moons of blood.

"When did you see Him last?" she asked.

"Aradia watched the last time I saw the Beastmaker. I rode Blind Side on the beach, the same beach I used to run on till I dropped from exhaustion and beheld Him in the blood light pounding behind my eyes. Only that last time with Blind Side, it was the horse that got tired, and when he stopped, I lay on his back and heard his breath rushing. And in the sound, I heard Him, the Beastmaker, calling my name. With my eyes closed, He was there. He never said anything more than my name. That was enough. I knew He was pleased that I loved the Horse that He had sent me. I knew He wanted me for His own. And that's what makes a man great, isn't it? To belong to what is greater."

Kirchi had lifted her head while he talked and stared past him, a peculiar look on her face. "There's one," she said.

He turned. The last light of day lay across the sky above the bluffs like green marrow. At the edge of the creek, where mists flowed among cane and woodbine, yellow eyes blazed. Hamr started, then squinted to identify what animal had come to speak with the witch. No animal moved there—only eyes, floating bodiless, brighter than stars.

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The day after the stormy night, Baat carried Duru north. She rode lightly on his shoulders, and though the gash in her leg throbbed dully, she ignored the pain. She felt no concern for herself anymore, only for Timov and Hamr. She knew they feared for her. This she tried to tell Baat when he stopped on a hillside above a flooded stream.

Baat had no idea what the girl tried to say. At first, he thought she anguished over her wound. He unwrapped it, while she chattered and gestured. The gash had become lividly swollen and would hurt more now and in the coming hours than any time since the bear claw ripped her flesh. Happily, the healing had already done much to restore the torn tissue. The pain would end soon.

Baat had chosen this site to stop, because the plants he needed for a new dressing flourished here. As he set to work gathering them, he watched the black islands in the flooded stream and the pale sandbars for smallheads. The heavy rain would slow them today, but they would be out, stalking him. The muddy ground and the added weight of the girl would make tracking him that much easier.

Day travel imposed the most danger, and he had hoped to move only by night. Tonight, he knew, he would dance with the ul udi, dance to win their wisdom for the girl. She would have to meet them for her to understand the journey. There would be no traveling this night. He hoped to make up for that by day.

Duru lay on her stomach, her gashed leg propped on a log, exposed to the styptic rays of the sun. The flawless blue of the sky seemed strange after last night's fury. Rusty stalks of burdock ranged the hillside. Their feathery bolls rose perfectly still in the windless air. Bumblebees and wasps surged among the marigolds. Their drones alone sounded in the hollow above the flooded woods.

When Baat returned, he gave her a wedge of poplar bast to gnaw while he dressed her wound. He talked to her as he worked, pausing frequently to listen, to smell the still air, and scan the brightly mottled terrain. Awe, sadness, and fear mingled in his voice, low and guttural as a river in its rocky bed.

"The herds are moving south now," he told her, though he knew she did not understand. "Soon you will see woolly rhinos darkening the plains, immense as evening. And the mastodons, their giant thunder shaking not just the earth but the clouds in the sky. First, we must get out of these dangerous woods. The smallheads are everywhere with their poisons. They are so silent and deceptive. The shadows are their allies."

Duru sat on Baat's thick shoulders, and he carried her up the hill and down the other side into a confusion of dales and knolls. This complex land gathered the runoff from the far mountains into narrow lakes and a scrawl of streams and rills. In the basins, only tree crowns and the tops of giant boulders showed above the sunny mist. The ridges, threaded by waterfalls, mazed northward to where the giant icesheets had flattened the land and tall grasses shimmered like fur.

Along the way, Baat stopped often to watch for smallheads and to gather food. Traveling went slow—Baat figured that at their careful pace, they would need ten days to reach the tundra, at least that long, because he had chosen a way that far skirted the Thundertree, where Yaqut lurked. The abundant land provided much to eat and unless the smallheads found them, they would not suffer.

By evening, when they made camp beside a kettle lake under a long moon, they lay exhausted, Baat from walking, Duru from pain. Beside the windbreak of a boulder, Baat meticulously prepared Duru's bed of dried leaves with lit cattail punks on either side to fend mosquitoes and, because the air hung damp with the mist of last night's rain, a blanket of cane feathers.

He studied the bed with satisfaction. Such beds he once had made for his own children. He decided that soon he must fashion a spear and begin collecting pelts for the cold nights to come. Then, he gingerly changed the dressing on the girl's hurt leg, while the red salmon he had netted with a vine basket at a creek earlier in the day steamed under hot rocks.

Duru's eyes had glistened with tears all day as she thought of Timov and Hamr without her, fearing for her, perhaps thinking her dead. Baat, believing she wept from the pain of her wound, had offered her more poplar and willow bark. Angrily, she brushed the medicinal woods aside. "I want to go back to my people," she said again as she had been telling the giant all day. "Don't you understand? I belong with them. I can't stay with you."

Baat frowned with sorrow, comprehending her pain though not her words. A child, she belonged with her people. If the Bright Ones had not chosen her for him he would never have thought she could help him. Let the Bright Ones explain themselves. He held up both of his big hands and showed her the blue glow between his fingers. That silenced her, and she lay back in her bed, eyes wide.

"Don't be afraid," he said softly, his large face gruesome in the gloaming. He pointed to the sky and gestured downward to himself. So long as she was not afraid, the Dark Traces would ignore her, and he could call on the Bright Ones to come down and dance with him. Still, Duru recalled her dreams of the ghost dancer, and wonder and fear quavered together in her.

Baat gestured for her to lie still. He stretched tall, reaching for the night sky, where stars flecked brightly in the ghostly green mane of the borealis.

The air chilled—and a weird, clear light appeared around the giant's body. He turned his back to her, and his body-light intensified its blueness. Sparks flickered at his fingers and the tips of his ears. And when he came full around, his face had transfigured. The skin seemed to float like a hot haze on the pulsing glow of his skull. His eyes shone brittle as ice shattering sunlight.

Duru gasped. A black wind rattled the trees and pressed the campfire down to crimson embers. Luminous darkness opened around Baat, like the giant wings of a crow. In that black shine, figures stirred—faceless human shapes glittering like mica.

The wind lifted, and the old ones stood around Baat, their arms open at their sides, linking hands. They paced a circle around him, and he turned with them, obeying some unheard music, head bowed, arms winged. Blue fire crawled over his body, flurrying off him and spinning upward into the purple edge of night.

Slowly but with gathering speed, the ghost shapes narrowed closer, and sparks capered hotter and higher into the sky. Baat blurred among the encroaching specters, a vortex of blue flames. The old ones swirled around him, compressed to windy streaks of smoke.

Abruptly, Baat stopped turning, and the smoky light spinning about him entered the cave of his chest. He stood before Duru dream-like, weighted with radiance, a meshing of starfire shaping around him. He reached out, his fingertips like pieces of the moon.

Without thought, Duru raised her hand to meet his. When they touched, silence deepened. She could hear her heart's enormous footsteps. Beyond that, a far sound drew nearer: a voice like a glitter of rain, calling her out of herself, into the lighted depths of the night.

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Neoll Nant Caw watched Baat dance until his blur sharpened to a star. Then she looked away, to keep from falling into the radiance. Beside her, the flame of an oil-lamp rose pale as a new tooth. With wet fingers, she snuffed it and immersed herself in darkness.

Reassured that the child Duru lived, the witch let the night penetrate her. She became a numb lump, a rock. All her heat seethed out and floated above her, leaving her dense with cold. The cold sank deeper, till all her heat disappeared, given to the thermal swirlings trapped in the burrow. The mist of heat glowed infrared, churning and boiling into fiery clouds.

Shaped by her rage, gangrenous odd shapes appeared out of the roiling air: slithery body organs blotched with tufts of electric fire, ulcerous sparks, and arcs of tiny lightning. The mutilated forms breathed with the heat of her being. They milled around her—tattered entrails, flopped off claws, snarling dogfaces in blue jellies.

She assembled the Moon Bitch, as she had before, building a fiery body of wrath to defend the ghost dancer. He was a source of the tribes' knowledge and represented all that she had loved in life. To defend him, she would use everything in her power. Already the Moon Bitch had devoured all the witch's memories, all her hungers, her very will, and even her wobbly bones. Each night, she grew stronger: Her parts healed their defects and shone brighter. Her grim purpose burned keener.

She would kill the hunters of the ghost dancer. She would kill the thieves who stole the tracking crystal. Above all, she would kill the traitor, Kirchi, who would use the wise ways to kill Baat.

The Moon Bitch dreamed herself more real. Far away, Neoll Nant Caw watched, sitting under the skyhole of her burrow, a rock, patient and sure, as the starlight scratched at her cold surface.

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The stars looked sharp, even through the gusty auroras. Hamr scanned the dark crests of the hills looking for movement, but only the whirr of bats disturbed the night. The yellow eyes that had stared from the creek had vanished hours ago. The mist still crawled there, lit up by the sky's glow.

Kirchi had said the eyes belonged to the wraith of Neoll Nant Caw come to spy on them. Now the young witch lay curled beside the spent fire, snoring gently. Blind Side, too, snoozed calmly, twitching an ear occasionally against the whine of mosquitoes.

Hamr could not sleep. Knowing that Neoll Nant Caw had the power to pursue them stoked his alertness. Talking with Kirchi had stirred him more deeply than the sight of the wraith. She was the first woman who had wanted to hear what he had to say about the Beastmaker. And the peculiar thought occurred to him that perhaps the Beastmaker had led him to her. Without him, she would have remained a captive of the crone—and without her, he would have been alone, perhaps forever, in his secret knowledge.

Before she had fallen asleep, long after the demon eyes had blurred away, Kirchi had said to him: "Everything you've seen of the Beastmaker is true. I've seen so myself, at the ripped edge of sleep. That's where witches live, entranced by their potions, watching the dream that's living us. You see, that is why we need slaves. Most of each day, we are only half in this world, half woman, half dream. And knowing that the dream is far more real than the woman frightens me. Men and women—we are born and we die. But the dream goes on. It is the dream that makes us go on. For you, the dream is the Beastmaker, the Being made from animal jaw and human flesh. Is not that what is dreaming you, the beast becoming a man?"

"And you?" Hamr had asked. "What's dreaming you?"

"What dreams all women—the Mother. She births us and eats us. We are always in Her belly. We drop from our mothers and we fall into the earth. We're always with Her. She dreams me. That's why I can't be a witch. I'm just an ordinary woman. I want to be a Mother, a simple mother, not a witch."

"What dreams the witches?"

"The Word."

At that, Hamr had blinked like a rabbit. "What word?"

Kirchi had smiled at his befuddlement, not mockingly, but with understanding. "Sounds strange, I know. Before there were people or animals, before there was this huge, wild earth, or even the stars, sun and moon, there was the Word. Perhaps Thought is a better way to say It. But Thought sounds so quiet—and what happened was not quiet. What happened made everything that is. It began the dreaming. And the dreaming began the living—and the dying."

"The witch told you all this?"

"No. She just showed me the potions. Everything I've told you, I saw for myself, the same way you saw the Beastmaker. He's real. He's more real than we are, because He's closer to the Word."

Hamr now looked at Kirchi, asleep on her side, eyelids fluttering. She was pretty in a strange way, and he thanked the Beastmaker for guiding him to her. For a long time, he had not thought much about the Beastmaker, not since the hyenas killed Cyndell and he had begun to doubt himself.

A silent, ironic laugh twisted around his heart. He let it linger, to keep back the weeping that welled there: The Thundertree that he and the others had come so far to find, and that Cyndell had died for them to reach, these Forest-dwellers lived as cowards. They would not welcome strays with ghost dancers for ancestors!

The strange pain of that thought lay heavy in him, and he reclined beside Kirchi, holding his spear hard to his side. He would get Duru back and Timov, too. Kirchi would help. She already had, by returning him to the Beastmaker, whose eyes like moons watched him relax into sleep.

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Each day, as the sun dove behind the trees and the sky shone like water, the clouds like strands of red kelp, Baat danced. Blue fire dazzled out of his flesh and wove itself over his turning body, his swampy odor thinning away, replaced by the smell of thunder. And when the moon-tips of his fingers touched Duru, she felt herself fly out of her body and rise above the seaweed clouds and the swarming auroras to the stars.

When she woke, she remembered nothing. At dawn, she would find herself in a different place in the Forest, Baat asleep among the shrubs or under a blown-over beech tree. She had slept deeply and woken refreshed. Her hair and pelts smelled like the air before a big storm.

By day, there had food and water to gather. In the abundant Forest, this took little time, even with her injured leg. She hobbled through the lavish undergrowth with a sturdy spruce pole for a crutch, and she plucked berries and wedges of fungus from tree trunks.

The rest of the morning, she ground the seeds and nuts she found on the ground, fashioned nets from creepers, and gathered the kindling at hand. In the afternoon, she cast her net into a bend of the nearest creek and used Baat's flint knife to scale and gut the fish she caught.

While Duru worked, she idly wondered what was becoming of her. Since the first night that she had witnessed Baat's dance, her apprehensions had almost entirely vanished. She thought about her brother and Hamr, though she no longer worried about them or about rejoining them.

That in itself inspired a detached concern. Yet, even more curious, an understanding had come upon her entirely on its own that she should stay near Baat, gather food, listen for large animals and for others like her: the ones hunting him.

Pondering these changes, smelling the lightning in her hair, Duru began to recall snippets of her nights. A huge listening stillness occupied that space in her memory, where before there would have been dreams.

In that vast hush, swift images came and went of her hanging in the night among tremors of blue and green auroras. Looking down, she beheld herself slung over Baat's shoulders and he blazing with spectral fire, a living torch hurrying through the darkness.

Gradually, over several days of deep listening, Duru remembered the voices in the trembling glare. Far away echoes rippled closer.

Finally, on the turfy bank of a brook, waiting for her net to pull tight with that night's meal, the heard-before voices returned. Pliant with gentleness, they spoke in mellifluous chorus: Baat needs your help, young Duru. He is on a journey to visit us, at the door of the mountain, in the north. There, we walk the land fleshed in fire. We would walk with Baat. But he cannot reach us unless someone guards him by day from beast and man. Help him, Duru. Go with him across the tundra to the icefields. Watch over him while he sleeps.

The voices disappeared, and their commands reached deep into Duru, to the deadness at the core of her being, where Mother, Aradia, and Cyndell had gone. These are spirit voices, from the other world, from where life comes and goes!

They spoke with the authority of those she loved. Later, the Bright Ones told her that her thoughts and feelings consisted of electrical fields that they could shape the way she molded wet sand. She still believed that the Bright Ones were the guardian spirits she had first heard about from the Mothers.

That first time the ul udi spoke with her, Duru deeply accepted their commands. And that gave her joy, for until then she had simply been lost. Now, she found herself on a journey to the north, an ally of spirits.

Only Hamr and Timov had to be informed, and since Timov had already shared one dream with her of the ghost dancer, she felt sure the spirits would find a way to tell him.

That evening while they ate, Duru tried to talk with the ghost dancer. She signed herself asleep, eyes closed, head resting on the back of her hand, and indicated with her other hand her ear, listening. She pointed to the sky, then tapped her head. "I understand now," she said. "I heard the spirit that watches over you."

"Ul udi," Baat said. He raised a finger to the sky and then to the violet shine already beginning to suffuse his skin.

"Is that the name of the spirits? Ul udi?"

Baat nodded, then placed both hands over his heart and opened his palms to her with a bow of his head.

"You're thanking me," she grasped. She put her small hands in his. "I thank you. You led me to the guardian spirits. Baat, they spoke to me today! I heard their voices. They're so gentle. They told me about your journey. I want to help you."

Baat's huge face bobbed, smiling, and he gently squeezed the girl's hands. The Bright Ones had found him his companion, this unlikely child, this daughter of the smallheads! Holding her hands, he looked up at the last light of day burning on the tips of the trees, and the fear that had harried him all season lifted away into the violet chill.

He released her hands and lay down beside the fire. The smallheads would not kill him. The Dark Traces would not take his spirit. He closed his eyes, released a long sigh and, at last, slept deeply.

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The next four days, Hamr and Kirchi trekked through mossy spruce terrain under high ridges of aspen and birch. The dense, shaggy land made travel arduous and slow, and Blind Side of Life followed unhappily, even though Kirchi favored him with honey-bubbled roots only she knew how to find.

At night, the hot disembodied eyes of the wraith returned. They gazed from the shadows of the moon-lustered fog. Each night, the moon grew brighter and higher in the sky, and the yellow eyes glittered sharper. A bestial shape began to take form around the burning stare. Something like the matted face of a hog appeared, with upcurved, evil tusks and gnashing fangs.

Blind Side noticed the wraith first, whinnying shrilly into the dusk where nothing was. Then, out of the smoldering remains of the wrecked sun, it shaped itself—serpent stare, hog snout, wolf fangs, and a squat torso muscled with the scaly integuments of an alligator.

Hamr shouted his battle cry and heaved his spear through the lizard frills of the beast’s throat. Its eyes flared before it floated off with the night mist, unwounded.

"No weapon can pierce it," Kirchi told him grimly. "The most we can hope to do is hold it off. Before each sunset, I will build a circle."

Kirchi doubted she could actually stop Neoll Nant Caw, yet she showed Hamr her moonstones and warding powders as though they were powerful weapons. She had learned to use them to keep the ul udi from penetrating her trances and possessing her. But she had never tried or had reason to hold off a wraith before.

"What about this?" Hamr asked, taking out the tracking stone. During their trek, he had used the stone to feel the direction of the ghost dancer and had always found that the stone chilled to the east, each day a little farther north. The bonesucker was not retreating to the mountains after all but heading for the tundra. And if Yaqut and Timov had not been deflected from their easterly course, they would intersect with the ghost dancer any day now.

"It's true, the stone is good for more than tracking," Kirchi said. "It's a scry crystal, too. In trance, one could use it to see afar. But it's not a weapon, not against the Moon Bitch." She pointed to Duru's satchel, which Hamr carried at his hip. "There's a knife in there that could kill a wraith. I saw it when you showed me Spretnak's wheel."

Hamr took out the obsidian blade he had found on the tundra and given to Duru. He had not used it, because its glass edge easily chipped. "This is a flensing knife."

"No. It's more. Look at the haft." Kirchi took the knife in her freckled fingers and touched the viper-curves carved in the bone. "This is a Moon Serpent knife. It's a ritual implement. Only a priestess would have this."

And with those words came the memory of the one trance where she had seen a ghost dancer—Baat on the tundra at night, attacking the priestess and her escort. She remembered the priestess taking this knife from her attendant and throwing it in the fire.

Her fingers feeling suddenly brittle, she returned the knife. "The Moon Serpent can cut the Moon Bitch. And my moonstones can block her. We have our weapons, Hamr."

The moonstones, four chunks of pearly feldspar, had been polished to a glossy sheen that made them look as if they held trapped light. At sundown, Kirchi talked to them and rubbed them with her bright hair, waking their power. Then she used each one to etch a quarter arc in the ground, encircling their sleeping space. "The smaller the circle, the stronger its protection," she said when Hamr complained that Blind Side was not included.

Kirchi admired Hamr's solicitous care of his horse, and each night, after she groomed the animal, she sprinkled him with warding powders, the gem-dust of old crystals.

Hamr was grateful for that and also for the way she gentled Blind Side after the wraith came and went. This horse held the outside shape of his soul, and her care for the creature justified his showing his affection for her.

After Aradia died, Hamr had thought he would always live as though she lived in this world with him. Now, this witch had begun to earn his caring—and his desire.

While they traveled along the leaf-clogged creeks or struggled over boggy ground, he often found himself noticing how she took time to find footing for the horse, or the way she pulled aside bramble without hurrying or cursing when she snagged herself. Simple things, like reading the land, spotting the tiniest pawprints of mice and voles—that led to caches of winter grouse eggs hidden for the spring—impressed him. Despite all his losses and the great uncertainties ahead, he felt happy with her.

Hamr continued to remind himself that Kirchi was not as beautiful as Aradia. Each day, he believed himself less. The day the Forest finally ended and the wide grasslands opened before them, his and Kirchi's joy had become so strong they could no longer hide their passion.

While Blind Side of Life romped through clouds of grass scents, Hamr and Kirchi clasped each other, tumbling to the ground. With swift fingers, Hamr caressed the girl. Her breath tightened to a moan, and the hollows of her body swelled with pleasure. In a hot glut of desire, she tore the antelope-hide from his body and pressed her hands against him, his nakedness feeding her heat.

Hamr peeled off her wrap, and his long hair tented over them, hiding them from the bright day as they stared at each other, amazed and shining. Kirchi mewed softly as she received him, her eyes rolled up and closed, and her legs hugged him as they rocked and plunged.

Afraid to shut his eyes, afraid to see the ghost of his wife, Hamr watched her move under him. He wanted only this skinny, pale-eyed witch, he insisted to himself, only this moment and the flash of rapture he had won for them by losing everything. So he stared at her luminous face until their passion exploded and banished all his grief.

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Afterward, Kirchi asked him to grow a beard. With snippets of grass and daubs of mud, she pasted haygold whiskers down the line of his jaw and over his chin and upper lip. He cleared away the brown algae of a rain-pool and laughed at the sight of himself.

That night, inside the magic circle, he used his clam shells to tweeze away only the hair of his cheeks and neck. Lying naked together in the fireglow, the lovers dropped resin chips on the embers to drive off the biting insects and rubbed the smudged ash on Hamr's stubble, darkening his beard.

When Blind Side of Life whinnied nervously, Hamr and Kirchi untangled themselves from their lovemaking. The moon tilted like a cup, high in the blue depth of night. Out over the tundra, in the western darkness, another moon had begun to rise—a swell of ghostly light. Blind Side whined as it rose higher, though he caught no scent or sound.

Hamr quickly donned his antelope loin-wrap and deerskin sandals. He crouched beside the fire, spear in hand. The moonshape took form as a huge beast loping toward them with a howl of wintry wind.

Hamr's hackles bristled. He had never heard the wraith before, nor seen it moving. Its huge head slung forward, fanged mouth brushing the ground. He looked to Kirchi, who had wrapped herself in her grass robe and fumbled with her bag for the warding powder.

With a lean-legged stride, the Moon Bitch hurtled itself at them. Its bat-fanged face glared, and as it neared, Hamr noticed that its wrinkly eyes indeed glowered like the crone's.

When Hamr rose to meet it, Kirchi grabbed his leg. "Don't leave the circle!"

The storm-whistle of the Moon Bitch cracked the air. Ripped seams of green fire fell like a net over the area of the magic circle. Fangs drooling, the beast pounced.

Hamr and Kirchi cowered as the monster crashed into the invisible barrier, bounced off, and lay in a stunned crouch. The moonstones at the four points of the circle pulsed crimson.

Howling, the Moon Bitch slashed her talons across the nearest power point, trying to dislodge the stone. Lightning met her at the edge of the circle, and her claws came away curled with pain.

Her head low, the Moon Bitch glared at the lovers, hissing so loudly that Hamr and Kirchi cried out as one and hid their faces.

Sudden silence made them look up. A slavering grin distorted the Bitch's muzzle. With new purpose, she strode to where the Blind Side of Life strained at his tether. The horse bucked and neighed in terror.

"No!" Hamr yelled, and leaped to his feet.

Kirchi threw her arms around him, and he staggered backward.

The Moon Bitch leaped upon Blind Side's back. Her powerful hind talons ripped the stallion's flanks. Her fangs stabbed at his throat while he bucked and kicked wildly. Blood shot out in black jets at his flanks.

Hamr threw off Kirchi's hold and leaped out of the circle. His spear held high, his war cry rattled in his throat.

Immediately, the Moon Bitch abandoned the horse. Hamr heaved his spear. The weapon sailed harmless through the apparition, and stabbed the tree where Blind Side tugged his tether.

The wraith smashed Hamr to the ground. Her powerful jaws pierced his chest, and blood sprayed over his face, surged up his nostrils and down his throat with the bitterness of death.

Hamr's hands fell away from the scaly body of the Moon Bitch and seized the Moon Serpent at his hip. The fangs knifed deeper into him, and he heard his ribs crack. With a last flare of strength, he gripped the black-glass dagger in both hands and drove it up hard into the Moon Bitch's belly.

She roared with pain, and her hind legs frenzied, tearing open Hamr's abdomen and kicking his bowels out behind her.

Hamr pulled down with all that remained of his life, slitting the belly of the Moon Bitch. She reared, her mad visage twisted, and a cascade of live blood and sticky tangles of hot matter spilled out over him. With the last gasp of breath in him, Hamr wept aloud, for the bloody knots of tissue flowing from the Bitch's underbelly thrashed alive!

Red-fleshed, raw foetal monsters slithered over him. Glossy, big as rats, their lidless yolk eyes stared mindlessly as they whirled squealing on furious claws into the pitch darkness.

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Neoll Nant Caw jarred awake in her burrow and found herself flat on her back. Every muscle throbbed with pain. Her face twitched and flinched with her effort to sit up, but all her energy had been depleted. Her body lay inert as a clod, her strength dead with the Moon Bitch. She tried to wail and could not. Where are my slaves?

A muffled cry squeaked from her gaping mouth, and the darkness ate it.

A shaft of moonlight alone illuminated the gopher tunnel of her subterranean chamber. The blue tar-oil fire had burned out. The crystals she had used to build the Moon Bitch sprawled around her in the dark, lightless, thrumming with pain only she could hear.

"Those lunks," she cursed her two slaves. They would look for her at dawn and find her like this, battered flat to the ground—and not dead. She felt as though she withered, dying. Pain quilted her muscles to her bones. Air barely seeped into her lungs. But she would not die. She would not let herself. She would lie here in moon-glossed dark sucking air through her mangled mouth, waiting for her lunks to find her—waiting for strength to return and with it vigor and the keen malice of the invisibles.

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Neoll Nant Caw's slaves found her at dawn sprawled unconscious on the floor of her burrow.

One slave plunged off into the woods, toward the Longtooth to get help. The other propped the witch's head on a reed pallet, then jerked back from her with a grunt of alarm.

On the mat beside her, a tangled mass of gelatinous flesh throbbed and pulsed blue. It broke apart into a panic of tiny pieces. Each piece metamorphosed into a rabid bitch, a miniature beast shattering into smaller explosions of snapping jaws. In a moment, the break-away blue jellies dispersed and disappeared, tarring the air with a black stench.

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The spiraling song of a thrush called Hamr back to life. He woke with a cry. His eyes snapped open and flinched before the sun's glare. Kirchi's shadow blocked out the radiance, and her lean face moved closer.

"I'm alive," he said, voice raspy. His hands passed over his chest and stomach—astonished to find himself whole. A giddy tremor shook him, and he would have laughed with joy but Kirchi laid her fingers over his lips. They smelled like grass, and he kissed them. "I dreamed—"

"That was no dream," she said glumly.

"The Moon Bitch..." he mumbled and sat bolt upright, pushing Kirchi aside. He spied Blind Side of Life nearby, grazing in his own shadow, not a mark on him. "I thought—I was killed?"

You are killed, Kirchi knew, but could not say. "You fought the Moon Bitch. You slit her belly open. She wounded you—and Blind Side. You worse. Your body lives."

"How long was I out?"

"The night and the morning. It's almost midday now."

Hamr looked down at himself, astounded. "The pain was so real."

Kirchi nodded. She had not been sure he would wake at all. Throughout the night and the morning, after the Moon Bitch's wraith had withered to fog, she had sat over him, listening to his breathing. She had seen everything. She knew his body of light had sustained a mortal wound. No one could survive that. And though he sat up awake, she knew the shadow of death had settled darkly upon him.

"The pain—" he repeated. "It was so real. Did you see?" He stared at her with large, astonished eyes, remembering but not believing.

"Oh, yes," she said, and pressed her cheek to his. "I saw."

Hunger Music

In the firelight, Yaqut's countenance looked like a burst blood blister. Timov did not like to face him while they ate or dressed the skins of animals the hunter had killed during the day.

Even after the dismal effects of the trance-thorn wore off, Timov continued to shuffle along behind, head lowered, not meeting Yaqut's harsh gaze when addressed, and keeping his eyes on the fire when they sat together at night.

Yaqut made hunting seem effortless, and the few times Timov looked at him directly occured when the hunter whipped his sling or hurled his lance. Rarely did he throw in vain. He displayed deft skill at slaying animals, skinning and gutting them swiftly, almost casually.

Impatient with Timov's awkwardness, he punished the boy's many missed shots by making him chew hide to leather and stretch and stitch pelts caught by the older hunter. He showed kindness only once, when he replaced Timov's hand-thrown rocks with a sling trimmed from a marten's belly—only afterward to snap at him for his incompetence with it.

Once, when the shot from Timov's sling struck an otter a glancing blow and laid it out squirming on a rock in midstream, Yaqut sent him to retrieve it. Timov waded through the cold rushing water and found the otter staring at him, brown eyes bewildered and hurt. The boy reached for his knife.

"Put that away," Yaqut called. "I want this pelt whole, and I will do the cutting. Strike it but do not crush the skull. I will not have bone-splinters in my tongue when we eat the brain. Knock him out with a blow across the nose—then grab him, break his neck. And hurry. We have a long way yet to go."

Timov picked up a blunt rock. The otter, still too stunned to move, watched him. He had killed many small animals with his sling and his knife, and he wished now that he could simply sever the animal's heart strings and be done. He struck the otter between the eyes, and the creature abruptly stiffened.

Quickly, Timov knelt and seized the unconscious otter's forepaws and pulled it under his arm. He could feel the small heart beating against his side. Any instant, the animal could revive. He grasped its muzzle firmly and twisted its head as far as he could. He felt the neckbone crack, and blood spurt from the nostrils. The small, furred body shivered and went still.

A great loneliness soaked Timov as he sloshed back across the stream to give the limp body to Yaqut. The Forest seemed immense in its perpetual darkness. Jammed with lives eating lives, he experienced himself as just another small life in the gloom. He felt sure he would never see his sister or Hamr again.

At night, with the fire leaping under the skinned body of the otter, Yaqut confirmed his fears, "The moon is filling out." He lifted his blurred face toward where the moon hung like a silver ax above the trees. "The witch is growing stronger. She will surely kill Hamr and the fool girl who ran away with him."

Timov stared hard into the tatters of flame that sputtered with each drip of the otter's fat, not wanting to see the malice in the hunter's crooked features.

"He was a dolt to go back for you," Yaqut continued. "A brave, arrogant dolt. If he had stayed with me, we would have held off those Stabbing Cats. The Beastmaker favored us. Soon enough we would have figured out that the witch had duped us with the tracking stone. We could have hunted down the ghost dancer on our own. But now—" His scarred face gleamed in the firelight like a painted mask. "He has brought Neoll Nant Caw down upon himself. He will die. You will never see him again. Look at me, boy."

Timov looked up and wished the trance poison still turned in him, diverting his fear.

Yaqut's ruined face nodded with satisfaction. "Hamr is dead. You are mine now. And you had better do just as I say, or I will skin you like this otter."

Timov had no appetite for the cooked meat. He ate it, because Yaqut ordered him to. And when done, he stripped the bones off the remaining flesh as Yaqut commanded, braided the flesh with vine, and hung it from a branch over the fire, out of reach of ants and scavengers, to dry for the next day's hike. Then he banked the fire, crawled between two forked roots, and covered himself with leaves. Yaqut climbed into the tree above him and disappeared in darkness.

Alone, Timov found the hard, round shape of Cyndell's bracelet in his sling-pouch. By feel, he followed the carved meander, chanting the daycount silently. They had journeyed deep into the Frost Moon, close to the meander's turn, where the First Snows begin. Before then he should be with Hamr again, and they would be closer to finding Duru—if she yet lived.

On the nights that the trance-thorn had possessed him, he had fallen asleep swiftly and had slept dreamlessly. This night he lay awake, worried about his sister and afraid for himself. Then, in the midst of his fretting, he spotted the otter he had killed standing among blue cloverheads. His sleek body exuded a silver outline, and he smelled of honey. The look in his stare did not appear animal but human and crazy.

Timov knew he dreamt and tried to force himself awake. The dream colors sharpened, and a frightful sound began—the thunder-like drone that he had last heard when the witch had flung him out of his body, far into the sky. A sense of impending calamity deepened in him.

With a ripping sound, the otter's dream skin tore away from its dream body. The ragged pelt winged into the storm-green distance, leaving behind the crimson, raw-muscled body with its silvery tendons and small cage of teeth.

Life eats life, an unseen voice said, and the human eyes in the otter's skull blinked. The humming thunder darkened and seemed to echo from inside his bones.

Before Timov's eyes, the skinned otter decomposed: Strings of muscle and dangling fruits of viscera greened, fluttered, dissolved to blistery jellies. The skeleton broke apart, shattered to bone-chips. While storm-smoke closed in blackly, the melted flesh became plasma, and the bone-chips, stars. And all at once, Timov hung in the incandescent night under the auroras.

You will die! a cruel voice said. And when you die, we will eat you—like this!

Pain jolted through Timov, many tiny, needle-fine teeth stabbing into his flesh. He cried out, and his noise vanished in a loud static humming from inside him. The pain rose toward a convulsion, and fear suffused him as he struggled to wrench himself out of his nightmare.

You will wake, the evil voice said. But when you die, you will never wake, and we will eat you like this—forever.

Fear became consuming fire—so suddenly that he actually felt his skin blacken and curl away. He screamed in terror. His cry bled into a long moan, dissolving into the lion roar of the storm-wind.

Look at the stars, a quiet voice counseled.

Timov responded mindlessly to the benign command and stared through his pain at hard points of light in the darkness. Pain lessened, the thunder-drone softened. Look at the stars, and the Dark Traces will lose their grip on you, the gentle voice said.

The stars shifted, became glinting reflections in the eye-facets of a giant fly. Its buzzing cut loudly through space. You will die—and we will eat you! the stark voice said again, and the stabbing agony in him sharpened.

There is no giant fly, the gentle voice insisted. The sky is the void that holds the stars. See the stars.

Timov did—and the pain eased, the buzzing dulled. He concentrated on the stars, noticing their watery colors, their fiery barbs. The pain vanished entirely. And the loud drone condensed to the muffled drumbeat of his own heart.

The Dark Traces enter you when you are afraid, the calm voice said. Yaqut opens you to them. But you needn't be afraid. Put your attention outside your fear, outside your pain, and you will find us. We are the happy dreams of animals. We live in the sky—and we live in you.

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This night, after eating, when the fire had shrunk to embers, Baat danced with abandon. Blue flames whipped from his whirling arms, scribbling the dark spaces with glittering tracks, comet tails, and meteor streaks. He approached Duru, and this time, when his luminous fingers touched her, she tried to stay awake, to hold on to her memory of the frail voices—the ul udi—and soared into the tangles of auroral radiance with her eyes open.

The whisper-light of stars slipped through her. In the boreal glow, she watched the moon watching her as she pivoted in emptiness, and looked back the way she had come. There she slept, draped over Baat's shoulders like a dwarf deer, her hair bouncing as he bounded north through the woods.

Duru stared ahead of him, across the canopy of the trees, the herded hills, and the webwork of streams shining silver in the moonlight. Mirror lakes glared. Fog breathed in the teeming darkness. And beyond the confusion of the many-faceted land, tundra opened, almost blue in the lunar haze. Somewhere out there, Timov and Hamr wander.

At that thought, Duru felt herself swooping and watched treetops skim by. She plummeted into the darkness of the Forest. Timov had curled up there, buried in leaves, only his face visible, a soft moon in the shadows. Above him, eye-level with Duru, Yaqut lay on a bough, a patchwork of pelts warding off the Frost Moon's chill. His marred face looked as pocked as a gourd. His hair gleamed white as root-ends.

Duru dipped closer to her brother and observed small stars bobbing in the air above him. When she touched one of the stars, she entered his dream: A silver otter hung upside down from a branch, staring into a bloody puddle at a reflection of Timov. He floated in the sky.

She gazed up beyond the hung otter and espied him there, limbs outstretched limply as if he were floating on his back in a clear pool. She rose toward him and called his name.

"Look at the stars," he said in his dream. "Look—or the Dark Traces will get you."

"Timov—it's me, Duru."

He looked at her, and a baffled shadow darkened his eyes. "Duru?"

"Yes—I'm with the ghost dancer—and the ul udi, the spirits that visit him from the sky. They carried me here, to see you. Are you all right?"

Timov's whole body trembled, and in his dream he reached for her. He touched emptiness. He shrank away. "Are you a ghost?"

"No, I'm alive. I'm okay. The ghost dancer is not hurting me. He needs my help. We're on a journey." Concern came into her dream face. "Timov, where is Hamr?"

Timov reached for her again, and his agitated effort pulled him farther away. "Duru—come back!"

Duru willed herself closer. An inexorable force drew her down, back to the blood puddle and the silver otter's dead stare. The next moment, she lifted free of Timov's dream entirely. Caught in a celestial undertow, she flew back into the night sky.

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Timov wrenched himself awake. Through a gap in the branches, the lemur-face of the moon gazed down. Somewhere inside him, he felt the dream continuing. This is not a dream, he realized. With eyes closed, he could still feel his sister's presence, further away now and moving rapidly—to his left, to the south. His flesh jarred on his bones as he felt her flight end. She had returned to the ghost dancer.

"What is it?" a gruff voice broke over him.

Timov flinched, thinking he heard the Dark Traces returning to torment him. When he opened his eyes, he saw Yaqut lowering himself from the branch above, soundless as a snake.

"The dreams have begun again, haven't they?" Yaqut's face gleamed in the moonlight, almost jovial. "What did you see?"

Timov told him and felt uneasy at the glint of cunning that edged the other's stare. "She's helping the ghost dancer," the boy said. "She's not in danger."

"You believe that—after what the ul udi did to you?" The old hunter sneered. "The Invisibles can put any words they want into your sister's mouth. For all we know, she may not even be alive anymore." He gazed in the direction Timov indicated his dream-sister had flown. "Sleep now, if you can. At first light, we are going to follow your dream."

Yaqut climbed back into the tree and squatted on the bough above Timov, contemplating killing the boy now. The ul udi were in him—and that was reason enough to kill him. Both the priestess and the witch had recognized that bonesucker blood flowed in him. That truth also stayed Yaqut from plunging his poison-tipped lance into the youth: The spirits in Timov know how to find the ghost dancer.

At the first smudged signs of dawn, Yaqut roused Timov, and they moved quickly south through loamy woods—more quickly than they had ever tramped before. The hunter made no pause for food, though they crossed the tracks of Fox and Marten and spotted Red Deer prodding a pine sapling, sharpening his antlers. Yaqut even broke his own rules of silence, rushing through leafdrifts, snapping tinder underfoot, startling coveys of Partridge.

At midday, Yaqut stopped on a turf-bank, where the land divided before a fault that humped fir-strewn knolls to one side and on the other dropped into an oak grove of sunken glacial rocks. He looked to Timov. "Which way?"

Timov shrugged.

"Look inside," Yaqut said sharply.

Timov squinted, bewildered.

With the haft of his lance, Yaqut rapped the back of Timov's knees and toppled him. He bent close enough for the fallen boy to smell his sour breath, "Close your eyes. Think of your sister. Remember her carefully—and you will feel where she is. She is still now. The bonesucker runs at night. Feel for Duru. And when you find her, point."

Timov closed his eyes, astonished by Yaqut's confidence that he had the power to find Duru. Only darkness greeted him. Even so, he did as Yaqut had told him and thought of Duru, remembered her baby-round forehead, the dimple in her left cheek, her swollen upper lip that was Mother's, and her large eyes that had always narrowed so drastically when she called him Saphead. Then, quivering shadows separated from the darkness behind his closed lids and began to glint with the bruised blood of a sunset.

"We have to catch him asleep," Yaqut mused. "Then the killing will be easy."

Timov grunted for silence. Tawny hues gathering in the dark behind his eyelids fitted themselves to his memory of Duru. She appeared in him, as she had been last night. Only now she did not move. She stood still somewhere to his left.

He turned his head that way, toward the image of Duru leaning on a spruce pole under a slope of ferns. He raised his hand toward her, and Yaqut pulled him upright.

"Come," Yaqut crowed. "We must find them before dark."

Timov almost swooned under the heavy burden of his trance. As his head cleared, he began to realize that if his sister's visitation of last night had not been a deception, he had betrayed her.

Yaqut did not wait for him. Unsteadily, the boy veered up the hillside. The moon hung overhead, milky in the day sky and followed them across the morning.

When the hunter found his prey's droppings, he knelt. "Less than a day," he judged and scowled at the bloated sun in the treetops. He stabbed his lance into the leaf-matted stool. "We are close. We need a few more hours. That is all."

A strange, divided relief flooded Timov's chest at the sight of the reddening sun. Strange, because he too wanted to reach the ghost dancer—to retrieve Duru. And yet, he feared what Yaqut would do when they found their prey. What did Duru mean?—that she is helping the ghost dancer? What can a child do for a giant?

That had to have been one of the ul udi's deceptions. A tremor prickled his flesh at the memory of what the evil spirits had done to him, and his anxiety mounted with the approach of night.

"We will track until darkness," Yaqut decided. He picked around the area with his lance until he found the ghost dancer's prints.

Timov followed reluctantly, stopping only briefly to fit his foot to the giant's. It spread nearly twice his size.

"Isn't it dangerous to get too close now—at nightfall?" he asked.

"Quiet." Yaqut turned. His scar-hooded eye looked over his shoulder. "If your noise betrays me, boy, I will kill you."

The giant's spoor led the hunters over a ledge of maple, whose crimson leaves mimed sunset, and down toward a dank fen. Timov recognized the slope of ferns where he had visualized his sister. They closed in. But the mushy terrain slowed them, and the sun's last rays fanned overhead while they pressed on, still knee-deep in the bog.

On the ridge across the fen, a blue light flared among the trees, and Yaqut cursed. "We have lost him now. The Invisibles will warn him about us. He will stay ahead of us. And he will try and lose us in the streams."

They climbed onto a hummock and struggled to flint-strike a fire with the few dry twigs they could find among the soggy sponge-wood. Over on the crest of the ridge, the spectral glow winked back and forth among the trees as the giant danced. Timov stared in wonder, until Yaqut barked, "Help with this fire or the mosquitoes will eat all our sleep tonight."

With dry duff that Yaqut carried in his satchel, they started a twig-fire and used those flames to dry a small dead branch snapped from a scraggly larch. Once that limb ignited, they fed the fire damp chunks of wood. By then, the ghost dancer's eerie blue light had begun to move off quickly along the ridge.

"He's going north," Timov observed. "Hamr will meet him on his way toward us."

Yaqut spoke with crisp certainty, "Hamr is dead." He peered at the lad, who gaped at the ridge, watching the ghost fire spin away. Again, he considered killing the boy at once and leaving his body in the fen as an offering to the Beastmaker for His help with the hunt.

"Why is he running north?" Timov asked. "Why doesn't he run south or east into the mountains, where he can find shelter from winter?"

"He knows we are watching," Yaqut surmised and reached for his lance. "He thinks he can baffle us. Later, he will break east."

"But he was moving north last night, when Duru visited me and he didn't know I was watching." Timov looked at Yaqut, his dark eyes bird-bright. "He's heading for the tundra. He'll run right into Hamr."

Yaqut's good eye half-lidded. His hand moved away from his lance and reached instead for his satchel. He broke out the last shreds of otter meat and a handful of acorns and hazelnuts he had collected along the way. Perhaps the boy is right. Yaqut looked at the meager food supply, then offered the child half. "Tomorrow we will take food and more pelts. We are going north." He leaned nearer, placing the food in Timov's hands and staring with stony command into his eyes. "Watch your dreams. Tell me everything you see."

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The sheldrake soared ahead of the flock. Hamr stopped Blind Side of Life and followed the arrowheads of ducks with his gaze.

Since the attack of the Moon Bitch, the air had felt heavier, the chill never quite relenting even at noon, when sunlight slanted amber across the tundra. The shadow of winter, Hamr wanted to believe. Or death. Kirchi's avid care, her eagerness to please him—even pretending to ignore the menace in the air—assured him she thought him doomed, already killed by Neoll Nant Caw.

Hamr watched the lines of birds waver into the turquoise light of the southern sky. For a while, he stared at distant dark firs, feeling as strong in his body as any of those somber trees and as pure in his mind as the deep sky. Then, he turned his horse the other way, toward the clump of wiry shrub, where Kirchi had already set camp for the night.

Though Kirchi had not wanted to think of herself as a witch, the Moon Bitch had forced her to use what she had learned. Every night since then, she had placed her moonstones on the ground, each of them touching, forming a small circle. In the tiny opening they made, she gathered moonlight into smoke. The smoke quivered as radiantly as auroras.

"Sky-fire," Kirchi called it the first night she showed Hamr. "Lightning caught in the air." She chattered on about tapping the ghost dancer's power, the way a tree could be tapped for syrup. Hamr paid little attention to how this magic worked. He simply wanted to see.

Each night, Kirchi and Hamr searched for Baat and Duru in the moonstones' plasma window. The tracking stone indicated they traveled southeast, in the Forest. Kirchi never found them with her magic. Most nights, they viewed only windy trees and animals drifting among silver paths of moonlight. She knew her incompetence with the plasma window thwarted her, yet she kept trying. The view lasted only as long as the moon shone, and it rose later each night.

One night, as Hamr drowsed—dreaming of an upside-down tree hung in the sky, its naked roots tangled with stars—Kirchi woke him. "Look! I've found Timov!"

Visible in the smoky light, Yaqut and Timov crouched in the watery glow of the moon, both asleep, the hunter in the crotch of a furry marsh tree, the boy among its thick roots, Cyndell's white bracelet in his hand.

The vulnerability of Timov, asleep where any panther could pounce on him, frightened Hamr and inspired anger at Yaqut for separating them. He sat back from the misty peekhole and faced the darkness to the south.

"The Moon Bitch is dead," he muttered. "We've gone enough nights without seeing any trace of her. Tomorrow we go back for Timov."

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Baat gazed down below, on the meanders of all the brooks and creeks he had crossed to reach this crest of gooseberry bushes and twisted conifers. The People had names for the larger streams and for the big rocks, the giant slabs and immense tree-spired boulders the water sluiced around or disappeared under. He deliberately kept those names at a dim distance. Whom would I speak them to?

Northward, the land fell to flat stretches of nuthatch groves and firs grown huge in the loam that silted down from these high rocks. Through weird-shaped trees, he peeked at tawny depths of autumn, blowsy clumps of fire colors among blue pinnacles of evergreen. One more night's march would cross that flat fringe of the Forest, and then the taiga's stunted pines, the wolfsbane brushlands, and the viper grass would lead them at last to the tundra.

Baat looked down at Duru, standing in the seam of the rock sheets that had mated to form this crest. She leaned on her crutch and plucked gooseberries dangling from overhead, occasionally glancing up at him—probably wondering why he lingered awake.

The morning sun, high in the spiky trees, glinted brilliantly in the dew that beaded everything. Soon enough that dew would be frost. Maybe even tonight (though, seeing the clear atmosphere to the north and puffs of warm clouds flocking from the south, he doubted that). Soon, anyway, the frost would set.

In the night, as he had run through cold vapors of fog, he had felt the girl's body chill, and he had lifted her from his shoulders and carried her against his chest, even though that slowed him down. Today, he had decided not to sleep but to get the hides they would need to face the frigid nights ahead.

Baat signed for Duru to wait for him, then picked his way nimbly along the rock spine to a vantage that looked down on a narrow gorge. It promised good hunting, choked with scree and thornapple whose glossy, lobed rose-madder leaves were favored by Red Deer. A dozen of the deer grazed in the ravine as Baat silently crawled across the ridge to a cairn of sharp rocks.

The cairn, a tall heap of stones piled here by the People, served for killing animals that entered the gorge. In the years since hunters stacked these rocks, no one had come to use it until now. Baat rejoiced to find that the trigger stone at the base of the pile still had a sturdy vine-rope attached to it. He gave it a mighty tug, and the stack of rocks tumbled down the steep slope.

Most of the deer bounded agilely to safety. Three of them stumbled among the scree and fell under Baat's avalanche. He drew his knife and swiftly scrambled down the incline to where the deer lay stunned among the thornapples. In moments, three big deer carcasses lay before him.

A jubilant cry came from above. Baat looked up to see Duru clapping her hands over her head. She crawled down into the gorge, favoring her good leg, and together they skinned the beasts and disjointed several haunches.

Duru jubilated at the bounty the Great Mother had given them. She felt another joy that they two had come together—this great being and she, laughing together, empty of regard for tomorrow. If only the Great Mother would unite her with Hamr and Timov, all would truly be well.

That strove for more than she dared ask. Mother had taught her never to pray for kindness to happen, only for strength of purpose. In the simplicity of her joy, she believed that getting the ghost dancer north, where he could commune with the Bright Ones, would be enough. She laughed away her doubts and fears, and Baat laughed with her.

After cutting free the hearts and livers, breaking off the antlers, smashing the skulls for the sweet and tender brains, they left the rest for scavenger birds and animals. At the place where the cairn had stood, Baat situated the antlers for the Old Ones, who had thought to make the cairn in the first place. No need to pile the rocks again. And no time. Already the sun peaked.

Baat built a large fire on the ridge. He knew the smoke would alert the trackers, but the meat had to be cooked, the hides seasoned. After eating his fill of brains and liver, he left Duru to tend the fire, and walked the ridge. Scanning the convoluted land of the south and opposite that—the expansive plains where the mountain-high ice had once rested—he searched for danger.

He had planned a vigil of watchfulness, hoping to locate his trackers. What he looked for he found almost immediately: They had approached closer than he had imagined. Down a wrinkled granite incline, flashing in and out of pine shadows, a human spark scrabbled—Duru's brother. Yaqut would be nearby, though nowhere to be seen.

Facing the other way, Baat spotted another dot of motion among the yews of the taiga. Squinting, he distinguished that distant point of color for a lone horse. The beardless one. He traveled with someone, a youth, maybe a woman—too far for him to tell.

The trackers had locked him in—unless he tried to skirt them. That would use up precious time, and increase the likelihood that the first winter storm would catch them on the tundra. No—I must face them.

Baat looked south again, watching Timov’s tiny jig of movement zig-zagging among clumps of pine. He shifted his gaze and let the broken landscape float before him, searching for Yaqut.

In a cluster of cedar, deer glittered like red stars, and on a far hillside he recognized the slouching motions of Bear. Jays swirled above folded and twisted hills, and flicks of dragon-flies, too. His attentive mind opened clear and cold as any of the rock pools glinting below in noonlight—and then he discerned him, a tiny blur among the tortured trees on a high ledge above where Timov ambled. He disappeared into the juniper shadows and did not reappear.

A shiver shook Baat. He did not want to face Yaqut. Throughout the summer, the Dark Traces had taunted him with nightmare images of that ruined face. Facing the other way, looking down into the Forest, he found clusters of granite monoliths that the ice of long ago had bunched and stacked. The People knew that place for its caves and for the lions that dwelled in them.

An evil idea offered itself. He sweated, feeling as damp in his bones as though the Dark Traces themselves had suggested the idea to him. The ul udi slept now, far up in the blue. The idea belonged solely to him. To fulfill its evil, he would need the help of the Dark Traces. Though not sure they would obey him, if he chose he could talk to them. They would not answer him now. They slept, but in their sleeping they would hear him. Maybe, when they woke tonight, if the evil of his prayer pleased them, they would heed him.

As a young man, the elders had taught him how to pray to the Dark Traces. Only rarely—and not in many years—had he availed himself of that grim knowledge, and he wondered if he still could.

With eyes fixed on the distant stacks of granite rubble, he began to hum the hunger music that the old ones had first wept for him. The sound he made voiced a gasp—soft, a beast in pain with too little life left to cry out, calling crows to take his eyes, strangling on his own breath. To hear it would not be to call it music but suffering, suffering that held music to Raven and Hyena, and to the Dark Traces, who relished evil.

Now that Baat had bid for the ul udi's attention, he hoped to impress on them his prayer: Be lion's flesh—and the hunger that lives in that flesh.

He lifted his gaze slightly and fixed on the moving motes of the horseman and his companion.

Be lion's flesh that stalks the horse. Be lion's hunger that devours the horse. Rage with the hunger of the lion. Come down through me and be lion's flesh and lion's hunger. Come down through me.

Duru found Baat squatting on the chine of the ridge, eyes half-closed, arms hanging limply between his legs. His breath came out of him in muttering and faltering, and he did not respond when she called his name. How can he sleep in so uncomfortable a position?

Since last night, when the blue blaze of his touch had sent her flying out of her body, alert for the first time, she had been afraid for him. Her flight had taken her to Timov, and she had clearly seen the fear in her brother.

Hamr and Blind Side had been nowhere near Timov, yet Yaqut appeared there—and now Duru feared that the Longtooth hunter stalked nearby. Tonight, if Baat danced and touched her with his celestial fire, she would concentrate harder, and try to see exactly where Timov and Yaqut moved.

While waiting for Baat, Duru had fashioned a poppet from a pinecone. It had grass stem limbs and acorn caps for breasts—the kind of image that she and Cyndell used to offer the Great Mother. She had made no offerings since—each day of survival had been its own deep, thankful offering—but now she wanted to leave a sign for Timov that she was all right. After crafting the poppet, she had propped it beside the fire and come looking for Baat.

She called his name several more times, but he did not stir. She reached out. At her touch, he sagged forward, so heavily she feared he would fall over the precipice, and she seized his arm. He rolled backward and lay blinking at the amber sun.

Baat roused slowly, then flashed into alertness when he sensed the girl beside him. Quickly, he looked north and south and detected no sign of the trackers. Afraid that if she glimpsed them she would not go on with him, grimacing against the cramps in his legs, he stood and they limped back to the fire.

The skins that had been stretched on birch poles to dry close to the flames remained damp. There would be no time to finish curing them today. The moon hung like a half-blown ball of dandelion seed in the blue sky, and clouds cluttering up the horizon in the west already shone orange. Duru lashed the cooked deer haunches together with strips of tendon, and Baat unstrung the hides and rolled them up.

Satisfied that her leg had healed strong enough to walk on until she needed sleep, Duru leaned on her staff and shambled after Baat. He carried the pelts across his shoulders and later, when Duru grew sleepy, he would roll her up in them. By then, night would have descended. With chill darkness, the ul udi would bring their living fire—and their deepening hungers.

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Yaqut and Timov found the ghost dancer's fire-site on the spine of the ridge early in the morning, before the sun cleared the treetops. During the night, they had camped on a hillside so nearby that, until dawn, they had listened to scavengers fighting over and devouring the deer carcasses Baat had left in the gorge. The fierce noises had kept Timov from sleeping deeply, and he had experienced no further dreams of the ul udi or Duru.

Yaqut held up a pinecone braided with grass, and Timov snatched it from his hand. "That's Duru's!" He turned it around, recognizing his sister's handiwork. And he noted how the arms of the poppet crooked at the elbows, touching the acorn-cap breasts, to signify child or caring. "She's all right!" A smile flickered, lingered, over his smudged and scratched face. "My dream was true! She's helping the ghost dancer. Somehow, she's caring for him."

"Bah!" Yaqut knocked the poppet from Timov's grip, and smashed it into the ashes with the blunt end of his spear.

When Timov sprang forward, to strike the hunter, Yaqut did not flinch, and the boy shrank back. "You do not know the devilish powers of the bonesucker or the Invisibles. Do not believe what you see. That is how we lost your sister in the first place."

Timov stared angrily after Yaqut as the bony man turned away and strode across the crest of the ridge, looking for signs of the ghost dancer's new camp. Timov knew that with a running push he could send the old man careening down the rockface into the green tapers of fir below. That would redeem the humiliations the boy had suffered with Yaqut—the menial work of chewing hides for Yaqut's winter garments, eating gristle while Yaqut took his fill of the best meats and left the rest in the ashes for the Beastmaker, and, worst of all, running ahead through the woods alerting Bear and every other beast, just to disguise Yaqut's secret moves in the shadows.

One shove now, and the Beastmaker could share his beloved hunter with the Mudman.

"Timov—look!"

Timov stepped behind Yaqut and stared along the extended length of his lance, expecting to see the plume of the ghost dancer's new camp. Instead, what he eyed brought a joyful cry from him. Tiny figures moved among the trees, specks of pollen glinting in the violet morning haze—barely recognizable as Hamr, Kirchi, and Blind Side of Life.

Not waiting for Yaqut's order, Timov scurried ahead along the ridge's downward slope, using his spear to keep his haste from tumbling him among the rocks. Yaqut let him run ahead and watched the surrounding tree-shagged hills carefully, feeling for the threat he knew lurked there.

Down in the sapphire mist, Blind Side of Life moved warily, and Hamr did not hurry him. The tracking stone felt very cold in his grasp when he pointed it toward the fog-hung hills.

Kirchi, too, held tight to Hamr's arm. The land had become rough since they had turned south at the bend in the Big River. Among the numerous clumps of boulders and half-buried rock slabs, large animals could appear from anywhere.

With her moonstones held close to her mouth, Kirchi had already talked Wolf and Panther into leaving them alone. Both times, Hamr had infuriated the beasts by trying to drive them off with thrown rocks. He had been amazed that Kirchi's soft mutterings had made the snarling creatures back away. "What do you say to them?"

"That there's easier prey in the Forest."

After the attack of the Moon Bitch, Hamr had become disposed to believe anything Kirchi told him. Neoll Nant Caw had not appeared again since that evil night, but as the moon grew, so did Kirchi's fear.

"You wounded her terribly," she told Hamr that first day after the confrontation, when he started at every colorful tree and dew-baubled bush. "Those half-formed monsters you spilled from her are all her rages—monstrous angers that have been growing in her a long time. She's furious that the Old People are dying out, and that the men of our tribe, of all the tribes, are devoting more of themselves to politics than to the Mother. She sees ahead, far, far ahead. The Invisibles give her that power to see what will happen to our furthest children, high in the tree of generations. And what she sees maddens her."

"And so now we are the target of that fury," Hamr said. "To what end is all her knowledge if she uses it to do us evil?"

Kirchi sighed. "She will not let us escape. She rests now, rebuilding the strength of the Moon Bitch. At the full of the moon, she will attack again. I'm sure of it."

Blind Side of Life balked and would go no farther. "Get your moonstones out," Hamr said, surveying the airy open woods. He fixed on black granite platforms inset among the trees. "There are beasts ahead."

A small group of antelope emerging from the maple grove, where they had spent the night, walked sedately onto the pale grass. A growl vibrated loudly from the rocks, and the antelope bounded away, disappearing into a beech thicket. Blind Side of Life trembled and backed away.

"What was that?" Hamr asked. His heart pounded with the nearness of the roar. "Panther?"

"No, the cry was too deep. Lion."

"I've never seen a Lion. Can you talk to it?"

Kirchi already had her moonstones out, cupped in both hands, and began chanting to them in a persuasive voice. Another resonant roar shook the air, and Blind Side whinnied with fear and pulled away. His hind quarters hit Kirchi, and she dropped her stones.

As she stooped to retrieve them, she froze. Hamr too staggered backward and reached blindly for her. His gaze locked on a massive silhouette rising from the mist around the granite outcropping.

A red-furred lioness, her black mouth hanging open with the breadth and weight of her fangs, slumped closer. Now other huge silhouettes appeared. Three more lionesses, muscle-shouldered, heads slung forward, prowled out of the shadows, followed by a male the size of a horse, mane a blaze of black.

Blind Side reared up in a panic, and Hamr, holding his rope, jerked backward. Kirchi fumbled with her moonstones and could already tell something was wickedly different. The brutes lumbered forward steadily, haze steaming off their rippled backs, eyes tight as embers.

"Get behind me," Hamr whispered. He gripped Blind Side's rope fiercely in both hands, not even bothering to go for the spear lashed to the horse's back. He judged the distance to the nearest heap of boulders: a hard, desperate run.

The lioness roared again, battering the air with the mightiness of her signal. Blind Side bucked, eager to flee, and Hamr took advantage of his fright to lead him in a dash toward the granite blocks. "Hurry!" he called after Kirchi as she lagged, trying to make her moonstones work.

The pride shot forward, roaring together, and in an instant, they lunged upon their prey. A lioness sprang on Blind Side's back.

In a writhing panic, the horse threw off the giant creature. Hamr and Kirchi fell back, and Hamr swiftly leaped for his steed, grabbed his spear and pulled it free. The lioness had pounced atop Blind Side again. And, with a helpless cry, the horse fell.

Yaqut and Timov had climbed down to the grassy verges, and halted at the sight of the lions. When the horse went down, Yaqut seized Timov's elbow. "Up into the rocks! Quickly! Before they spot us."

Timov stood transfixed. Blind Side of Life went down, legs kicking, entrails tugged free in the black mouths of the lions.

"Quickly!" Yaqut hissed in his ear and scampered toward the birchwood that led to higher ground.

One of the lionesses—which the others had shouldered away from the kill—sighted Timov and loped toward him.

Timov darted across the clearing, away from Yaqut and toward the rockpile, where Blind Side had been headed. Glancing behind, he saw the big cat gather itself for a run and knew he had no chance of making the rocks. Thrashing through a brace of skinny hemlock pines, he bolted for a yew whose roots had pulled from the ground at one side and tilted against a rocky hillock.

Breathless with terror, Timov clawed his way up the trunk, heard the lioness scratching after him. The dense branches slowed him down and also stopped the giant feline. After a desperate surge, he hung among the top boughs gasping with relief.

Below, he made out Hamr and Kirchi dashing for the rocks. He heard tearing sounds and frenzied growls. Ahead, the wall of rocks lifted its jagged affliction. They vaulted the first low stones and drove their sandals hard into footholds choked with nettles. Hamr threw his spear onto a higher shelf, and helped Kirchi pull herself up the skewed steps.

From atop the ponderous rocks, sucking deep breaths as Timov watched, they looked back. The lioness huddled over Blind Side, stiff legs sticking out from among their jammed shoulders. They had no time for anguish. The enormous male had followed them. With furious agility, it wended its way up toward them.

The lion, too big to rush vertically up the jutting rocks, swerved among staggered shelves, and they had a long second to marvel at its muscled forelegs, thick paws, and fierce open jaws beneath eyes blind as fire. Then they hugged the rocks and climbed. Hamr cast his spear up to the next ledge, hoisted himself to it, and reached back for Kirchi.

Timov, who had followed their retreat, discovered no hope: The rocks bunched to a tumblestone pinnacle inaccessible from where they stood. In moments, the predator would reach them.

Swiftly, Timov edged out to the creaking limit of the bough where he perched and leaped onto the rock-strewn hillock alongside. Stones spun away under him, and he plugged his feet into the earth and dragged himself upward.

At the nape of the hill, he teetered one bound away from a rock ledge that overhung the lion and his prey. Before he leaped for the ledge, he removed the sling that Yaqut had made for him from the underbelly of a marten and grasped two sharp rocks.

With a violent growl—that almost toppled Timov from the edge—the lion found a shorter route among the granite blocks and scampered onto the ledge where Hamr and Kirchi cowered.

Hamr swung his spear and thrust. The creature pulled back, coiling to lunge. Teeth set, Hamr braced his spear against the wall, and made himself small.

Before the lion could leap, a rock struck its brow. Its roar bruised hearing.

Hamr glanced back at Kirchi, caught her despair, and realized she had not thrown the rock.

Above, in the trees of an overhanging ledge, Timov whirled his sling, and let fly another stone. Again, this one cracked against the crouching lion's head.

Bellowing raw pain and anger, the lion pounced, claws splayed.

Hamr pressed back against Kirchi and, with alacrity and deftness inspired by terror, drove his spear hard into the beast's eye.

The lion thundered rage for a black instant as it rose in fury. Then, front paws grasping the spear, it sagged to its belly before spinning off the ledge in a shower of rubble.

Timov whooped from above, and Hamr gazed numbly down at the scope of the disaster, the price of his own safety—staring beyond the dead lion to where the pride continued to devour Blind Side of Life.

Timov shouted again from above. When Kirchi turned her attention to him, she noticed that he leaned against a pliant juniper so that its branches hung down to the rockpile: They could climb to the hillock. Gently, she tried to make Hamr understand, and he brushed off her grip, transfixed by the horror of the feeding lions.

Emotionless, almost as if dreaming, Hamr drew his knife and leaped down the staggered rocks to where the dead lion lay. Slashing at it with vengeful strength, he worked down from the tail and the back legs, peeling the skin from the hot, pliant muscles. While he worked, he chanted to the Beastmaker in almost incoherent gasps: "Blind Side of Life is dead. My animal is dead—my soul is fed to the Lion. Now the Lion feeds me."

Before he could slit the belly of the beast—and reclaim his soul by eating its heart—he had to skin the creature whole. He fulfilled the way the great men of old when they wanted to take an animal's power with them. The Beastmaker would expect him to do no less for Blind Side of Life.

Tears hampered Hamr's vision, and before he made the delicate cuts at the front toes and the head, he had to wipe his eyes, leaving bloody streaks on his cheeks. Since Neoll Nant Caw's attack he had begun carrying the Moon Serpent. The obsidian blade could cut tissue as his wooden blade, now lost with his satchel, never could.

The nose and lips came free. Hamr stood and stretched the wet skin of the face above his head and shouted down at the two lionesses that still lingered over the broken body of Blind Side.

They ignored him and continued to pull the meat from the horse's underside and tear at what remained of his haunch. Half-hidden among the twiggy growth of birches, a pack of hyenas waited, where crows gathered. Hamr knelt again and cut the mastoid tendons, severing the lower jaw. Then, he set to work lopping the paws before he cut open the belly for the heart and liver.

Finally, the heavy lion-skin pulled around him, teeth, claws, heart and liver wrapped inside, and his spear in one hand, Hamr slowly made his way up the stack of rocks.

Watching in mournful silence, Kirchi and Timov pushed down a juniper branch with their weight, and he passed his spear and the lion-skin to them. He pulled himself up to the rock ledge, and looked back.

Jubilation and grief mixed convulsively in Hamr. Throughout the walk across the stony back of the hill, he moved hunched over and shuddering, like a poisoned man. The riotous clash of emotions felt like sexual contact that peaked but could not release.

The animal soul that had saved him from the Boar, that had brought death to his tribe's ancient enemies, that had led them north to this land of the auroras, had departed now—and in place of the strong, melancholy, and loyal horse, a dead Lion's skin hung heavily on his back, gummy with drying blood. Where the Horse had been life to me, and alive, the Lion's soul is death.

Though he implored all through the night, Hamr did not see the Beastmaker in the darkness that clamped tightly to the tearless grief behind his eyes—yet he knew the Maker dwelled there as the darkness itself, black as every beginning and every end.

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Baat lay shivering in a ditch beneath heavy pines. Water had once run through here before a rockslide clogged the flow upstream and left only egg-smooth rocks in the grooved earth, where the ghost dancer had curled up to sleep. Duru watched him anxiously. Always before, he had slept silently. Since yesterday, when she had found him squatting on the ridge-rock, entranced in his own muttering, he had not been as before. During their night run, the light around his body had glowed dully and red, the deep, dark red of drying blood.

No voices had come to Duru when she had slept wrapped in the deer hide carried in Baat's arms and no flight outside herself. She had slept deeply and woken to find Baat here in the ditch, shivering.

After covering him with the deerskins, she had built a small fire upwind of him, though she well knew that would signal the others. If he is dying, what does it matter if the others find us? Let them come. She thought that maybe, if they knew his need, they would help.

From inside his sleep, Baat heard Duru's concern. The hunger music he had used to reach the ul udi had worked: The Dark Traces had used him to house themselves at daybreak, instead of returning to the sky and going forth from him, as he had directed, into the lions. When Timov and Hamr had killed the lion that the Dark Traces rode, the ul udi had suffered the death of the beast, and they had made Baat suffer with them.

Knives of pain had stabbed Baat, had flayed the skin from his muscles as he writhed in the ditch. From without, it had appeared as though he shivered, while within, he had thrashed and howled with the agony of being skinned alive. The Dark Traces had exulted, feeding off his suffering. Now, gorged, they slept, waiting for night to return them to wakefulness.

Baat floated in the afterpain. This wearied anguish almost became bliss now that the torture had ended. Partaking of the ul udi's telepathy, he could feel all the small lives around him: mice avid with hunger after the chilly night, red fleas torpidly fat with the blood of the mice, ready for their winter sleep, and a hawk circling above, searching for mice and seeing smaller birds flitting on fog paths among the trees in their endless tumult of feeding.

And there sat Duru under a pine, where the small birds rested from flight, chattering about the hawk they had glimpsed in another corner of morning. She listened not to them. She feared for him.

He could feel her fearful caring, and that calmed the hurt in his big body. He had found his companion. The Bright Ones had truly led him to the one who would watch over him. Tonight, when the Dark Traces wake inside me, will I be able to protect her from their evil?

A memory returned to Baat with the pulsing of a fever, a memory of the Dark Traces and their usefulness to the People. He beheld himself again as a child during the summer wanderings. He had been confused then by the hurried pace across the tundra, the wild wailings of the women, the sudden absences of some of the best hunters, their bodies not laid out with their spears, not blanketed in flowers as men who had died on the hunt. They had simply gone.

Looking back, Baat realized that had been the terrible summer when the People had fled before the smallheads, and not escaped. He understood now that the People had been falling back from the smallheads since before his grandfathers’ childhoods.

Always before, there had been room on the tundra to hide. This mournful summer, the smallheads had encroached to the last possible border: to the door of the mountain, the sacred burial site of the People.

Back then, Baat had been too young to understand. He remembered being carried among the giant stones of the icefield and the People shouting with anger and pain. And he remembered the hunger music that the old ones sang.

That had been the first time he had heard it—the numb voices of the singers chanting to Crow and Hyena with the languor of the dying, inviting the Dark Traces down into their flesh.

From high on the tall rocks, held firmly in his mother's arms, he watched as the men, possessed with the Dark Traces, lured the smallheads among the boulders and hurled stones at them. His mother did not hide his eyes or turn him away when the killing began. She let him see the men leap among the wounded smallheads, rip limbs from their bodies, smash skulls to bloody bonemeal. She let him see the Dark Traces do their frenzied killing, for she knew that someday he would have to sing the hunger music himself.

His mother had not foreseen that he would have to sing it alone, without the others to call down the Bright Ones when the killing ended. He, alone, would have to carry the Dark Traces tonight and, at the same time, protect the child Duru from their bloodlust.

And if he and Duru did survive the madness that would rise out of him tonight, what lay ahead?—the journey north to the door of the mountain, to the ancient cairn of the old ones, the journey that walked straight into winter. He could hear the birds talking about winter coming, when insects hid and seeds became less plentiful. Soon, the birds promised, soon they would find their own way south.

The immense sadness of approaching cold rode on the wind, and he could feel its disconsolate energy in his bones: bones too old now to survive another winter. The wind blew through him as through the stark trees, carrying darkness in which stars and snow hid, carrying a whole new season and its secrets.

Eating Darkness

In the poor glow of the waning moon, Neoll Nant Caw sat on the ground outside her burrow. Three other witches circled her, raven-beings, all silent and preternaturally alert, pacing swiftly back and forth. Each held a chunk of crystal. The facet-seams shone violet as they passed before her.

Neoll Nant Caw stared flatly at the running witches and the cold energies in their hands. The death of the Moon Bitch had nearly been her own death. Too weak to participate in the building of another wraith beast, she relied on these women. They had come from their lairs in the Forest to help preserve a ghost dancer from hunters—or, if they failed, to bury the crone in her burrow and take her crystals for their own.

The old witch, proud that the others had come so eagerly for these rocks, waited passively for death. Her real life dwelled in those crystals, mixed with the power of the ul udi. Many of the stones, several generations old, carried light from the first witches, the outcasts and strays of the Forest's early tribes.

She had long feared that when she died the ignorant might discard her crystals among the wild rocks, and she gladdened to see they would be taken up in able hands.

A thermal mist, red-black in color, made a shadow between Neoll Nant Caw and the circling witches. A smear of face appeared in the dark mist: an eye-glisten, fang tremor, saliva thread of ravening strength.

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"When I left you with Neoll Nant Caw," Hamr said to Timov, "I promised the Beastmaker I would initiate you myself when I came back."

They sat by a rain-pool in sight of the feeding pride. At their feet, the lion-skin soaked in mud and leaf-mash. Hamr, still grimed with the Lion's blood, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, red hands tangled in his hair. Tired, yet smiling, he stared with eyes bright with jubilation, not tears.

Glad he had come back for the boy. Glad even to sacrifice Blind Side to the Beast-maker, he thanked his guardian power for sparing Kirchi and Timov. They lived, to hear the roars and masticating of the ravenous beasts. They lived, as he did, because they had struggled together.

"This skin is yours," Hamr declared. "It is the sign from the Beastmaker I knew would come when you were ready."

Timov squinted at Hamr, baffled that he was not mourning his animal, yet pleased to receive praise. "You killed the Lion."

"No, Timov. You've earned your initiation. When the skin is dressed, I'll present you to the Beastmaker myself." He reached over and put his hands on Timov's shoulders. "Young brother, the Blue Shell will not be separated again."

Timov nodded, his heart suddenly big in his chest, squeezing against his ribs. "We will get Duru back," he asserted and felt his clansman's grip tighten with certainty. "We will be a tribe."

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At midmorning, the lionesses decided they wanted no more of the horse and sauntered back to their caves among the rocks. A few cubs lingered but when the hyena pack began closing in, they scurried off.

Hamr, who had spent the time stretching his lion-skin on a rack of pine boughs and scraping the inside clean with an edged rock, stood up, took his spear, and walked out of the thicket into the clearing. Timov and Kirchi followed.

"Where are you going?" Yaqut yelled from his place under a crook-backed pine. "Hyenas will jump you."

No one had spoken to Yaqut since they found him waiting in the thicket, watching the lionesses devour Blind Side of Life. Feeling their withdrawal from him, he had wanted to explain: Not cowardice had stayed him but willingness to die for either a horse or another man. He lived his devotion: hunting the ghost dancer. The Beastmaker did not want him vainly sacrificing himself. No one had asked; so, he had sat in silence while Hamr dressed his lion-skin.

To show his respect for what Hamr had done, Yaqut had collected oak leaves and soaked them in a nearby rain-pool. After he boiled away the water with hot rocks, the tannin-rich sludge that remained served well for toughening the skin and keeping it from rotting.

Hamr had used it, but with not a word of thanks. The boy and the witch, too, had offered Yaqut only skulking glances—as though he should be ashamed for saving himself for the one hunt that mattered.

Now, Yaqut squatted under his pine and watched the others driving off the hyenas with shouts and thrown rocks. What do they want? To bury the dead beast? To weep and chant over its red bones? Let them. The ghost dancer is nearby. In a day, two at the most, I will find him, and then they will need all the courage that has been tempered in them this day.

Hamr desired no lamentation for his horse. The Beastmaker had given him the animal and now had taken it away. So be this, Hamr thought to himself. Rather, he wanted his and Duru's satchels and the pelts that Blind Side of Life had carried since they left the Blue Shell.

Kirchi followed, looking for her moonstones.

Timov alone stood over the torn carcass of the horse and wept. Alone in the woods with Yaqut, he had missed Blind Side's big, snorting presence and now would never know again the companionship of Horse. His grief for the animal made his chest heavy with melancholy music.

"Cut it out," Hamr called coldly over his shoulder. "Blind Side's returned to the Beastmaker—and he's weeping for us. We're the ones got left behind."

Timov wiped away his tears, saw the back of his hand come away with the Lion's blood, and smiled. Blind Side is dead, but he has also been changed, made into the Lion's skin. Now any tribe will proudly make a place for us!

Except, he realized, the Thundertree, who knew he had ghost dancer ancestors.

Looking back at Yaqut, where he hunched under the dark green shade of the pine, Timov remembered the poppet Duru had left for him on the ridge. He told Hamr about it and Yaqut smashing it.

"Maybe Yaqut's right," Hamr said. "It's possible Duru's possessed. The poppet could have been left to make you think she's all right and caring for the bonesucker when, more likely, she's his slave. The spirits—these ul udi—are more powerful than anyone from our tribe could ever have known." He found his satchels and most of the pelts unmolested and pulled them free of the dead horse. As he scanned the ground for Kirchi's moonstones, he related the attack of the Moon Bitch.

Timov listened in dismay. "What if she comes back?"

"She will," Kirchi said. "Very likely, soon. She'll know we're together again, and will want to stop us from going after the ghost dancer. We must find the moonstones. They're the one thing that might stop her attack."

Timov joined the search, pausing only to throw rocks at the hungry hyenas. Soon, they had found all four stones. One had been fractured. Kirchi fingered the spalled moonstone nervously. "There will be no circle to protect us now."

"But three are intact," Timov noted hopefully.

"Three are not enough." Kirchi's eyes despaired. "Neoll Nant Caw will know it instantly. Tonight she will attack."

"What can we do?" Timov whined.

Kirchi shook her head. "Nothing." Then, she looked at the two men with a desperate new hope. "Unless we simply give up the hunt."

Hamr glared disapprovingly. "I don't care about the ghost dancer, but I won't abandon Duru."

"What if the poppet she left is not a ruse?" Kirchi pressed. "What if she wants to be with the ghost dancer?"

Hamr frowned with disbelief. "Why would she want that?"

"To care for him, as her poppet said," the witch answered. "Baat's among the last of his tribe. And he's old. All summer, Yaqut and the Thundertree have stalked him. Why hasn't he fled? Why has he stayed in these woods? Because this Forest is his ancestral home. This must be the reason."

"Perhaps he's come home to die?" Timov wondered.

"Yes, yes," Kirchi said. "Of course. He's dying!"

"Then why hide?" Hamr asked. "He should let the hunters finish it for him."

Yaqut, who had been watching them confer, walked over. "What are you three gibbering about? Let the hyenas eat in peace and let us move on with the hunt."

Kirchi held up the broken moonstone and explained about the Moon Bitch.

Yaqut scowled at Hamr. "You stole the damn crystal. You face down the Moon Bitch!"

Coldly disregarding Yaqut, Hamr turned to Kirchi. "I want to find Duru. If she's helping the ghost dancer, I want to hear that from her."

"If she is helping the ghost dancer," Timov said, "maybe we shouldn't be hunting him."

"Helping the bonesucker?" Yaqut hissed with anger. "You damn fools—the poppet is a ruse. The ul udi squat in Duru right now. She's their poppet."

Facing Yaqut, his stare flat, Hamr looked at the sinewy old man. He reached out, took the straps that crossed the hunter's narrow chest and roughly reversed them to show the rows of teeth stitched there. "This is all you want, old man. More teeth. Another dead bonesucker."

Without warning, Yaqut swung his short lance up hard between Hamr's legs.

Hamr moved faster, blocked the blow with a downward swat, and with one hand grabbed the straps and lifted Yaqut off his feet. His other hand seized the hunter's lance and twisted the weapon free. He threw Yaqut to the ground and pressed the length of the lance across the man's throat.

"We're not hunting the ghost dancer anymore," Hamr said and forced a gagged cry from the mutilated face. "We're going to find Duru. You can either come with us—or you can die here."

He rose and held the short lance over the felled hunter.

"Kill him!" Timov said in a hot whisper. "If you don't, he'll kill you!"

Yaqut sat up, and returned Hamr's steady stare. "We will find Duru," he said flatly.

"Swear it by the Beastmaker," Hamr said. "Swear you will harm none of us."

"No, Hamr," Timov warned. "He's too dangerous!"

Hamr ignored Timov. He did not want to kill Yaqut. The hunter's skills might save their lives if evil spirits had possessed Duru and the ghost dancer indeed proved their enemy. And with winter approaching and no tribe to shelter them, he needed the old hunter.

Yaqut sensed this, and relief pervaded him. "I was wrong to strike at you, Hamr," he muttered. "I swear by the Beastmaker, whose vision path we call life, that I will do you and the others no harm." But the bonesucker, he thought, I'm going to kill him. My life is his death.

Hamr threw the lance into the ground beside Yaqut. "So be it. Let's leave this hateful place. If we must face the Moon Bitch again, let's not do it here."

Without the horse, the satchels and pelts had to be carried among them, in four packs. The lion skin also burdened Hamr. He rolled it up still damp and half-cured.

Following the cold in the tracking stone, the hunters and the witch climbed into the hills of big pines. By nightfall, they had come to the ditch of a withered creek. The crystal pointed south along the stony streambed, colder than ever to the touch. Not far ahead, perhaps around the next bend, the ghost dancer lurked—close, yet too far to pursue in the gloom.

The sun hung briefly among the trees, and the hazy air became milky as fog lapped the hillsides. On a fragrant carpet of marjoram, among sprinkles of blue asters and red buttons of amanita, Yaqut built a fire.

While Hamr stretched his lion-skin, Kirchi and Timov prepared the berries and nuts they had gathered during their trek, and skinned Yaqut's fox.

Wolves howled far away, owls hooted, insects chirped from the sour grass. Wrapped in warm pelts before the fire, the wanderers ate in silence. The gibbous moon shone through the trees in hazy shafts and lit the knee-deep shallows of the fog.

And then, the night noises stopped. Iridescent silence suffused the woods. Fog spilled out of the creek bed and rose like a dustdevil. Hamr stood up. In his hand, he held his spear, the Moon Serpent lashed to its tip.

Wild, white-rimmed eyes snapped open in the rising fog. Timov squealed weakly and instantly regretted it. He crouched behind the fire, commanding himself to be brave. Yaqut rolled backward into darkness. Kirchi stood behind Hamr and snatched two flaming brands from the fire.

The Moon Bitch emerged from the haze with a bull-heavy roar, and the fire fluttered green, then charred black. Kirchi threw the burning brands at the apparition. They flared emerald through its empty shape and out again, and landed in the creek bed.

With a show of sharp fangs, the Moon Bitch lunged. Hamr stabbed at her with his glass-tipped spear, and the Bitch batted it aside, heaving him to the ground. Kirchi fell back under the baleful gaze of the monster. The Moon Bitch's horrid mouth grinned like a lizard's.

Timov, who had pressed himself flat to the earth beside the fire and peeked out from under his arms, watched the abomination rise above Kirchi, claws splayed to wipe out the life of the witch who had betrayed her. Instinctively he leaped at the red-haired witch, meaning to tackle her and sweep her out of the path of the slashing claws. As he struck her and she fell, the talons ripped through his flesh and stabbed into his heart.

Hamr had grabbed his spear, and he hurled it into the wraith's eye—the glaring, vindictive eye of Neoll Nant Caw. Pain stabbed through the wraith and echoed across the Forest in a thousand screams. Collapsing under her own cries, the Moon Bitch's massive body withered to a puddled mess of luminous syrups.

Amidst the shrinking slime, Hamr's spear stood straight up, its glass tip poised above the ground. When it collapsed, the glowing steam shriveled to a splat of fire and, at its center, the crone's glaring eye.

Hamr snatched the spear before it hit the ground and drove its tip into the eye. A green flash clouted the darkness, and a greasy smell whooshed upward and dangled in the breeze, until the wind forked and carried that vileness away.

)|(

Neoll Nant Caw shrieked and heaved backward to the ground under a blast of cold air. Windfall leaves gushed through the tunnels of the Forest and flooded into the clearing. In a gale of leaf litter, the cry of the Moon Bitch resounded across the clearing.

The three witches, who had mounted the power for the wraith, dropped their crystals and ducked into the burrow. When the scream died away, they peeked out and espied the crone's hand and part of her leg, where she lay buried in brown mulch.

"Is she alive?"

"I feel her. Her light is weak, yet she lives."

"Don't touch her. Get the crystals."

"My ears ache."

"My every bone aches. Had we grasped the crystals a moment longer, we'd have died with the Moon Bitch for sure."

"We must get the crystals away before we move her. She could yet fall into the sky."

Neoll Nant Caw heard the witches' voices tightly bundled, bobbing in a sea of silence. Their words and the world around her seemed a mirage—the leaves piled on her face, the hard earth under her, all transparent, part of the emptiness. She floated at the brink of her body, a lazy ghost, knowing that the void before her plummeted into death.

The old woman might have plunged headlong into that peaceful silence, except that she had collided with another soul. As the Moon Bitch, she had tried to slay Kirchi for betraying her and instead had caught Timov in her claws.

His body of light hung above her now, a twitching star at the purple cope of the sky. If she let herself fade into silence, he would fall into emptiness with her. He carried blood too valuable to lose;.The ul udi could come down to earth through him and make new crystals. Even now, the Bright Ones communicated with him. Far away, she could hear their eerie music coursing through the blue air and could see the youth's star trembling to its rhythms.

Over the years Neoll Nant Caw had learned enough from the ul udi of the lightning in her own flesh to pull back from the void. She concentrated on the voices of her sister witches, ignored the lightness expanding in her bones.

"One of us should go get her slaves. They will tend to her."

"Leave her be. She must bind her light first. Come away and bring the crystals."

"What about Baat? She gathered us here to save him from the hunters."

"Forget him, sisters. He's old. He'll die soon anyway."

"And the wanderers from the south—the girl and the boy who carry ul udi?"

"So Sister Caw says. But she, too, is old and may have seen what she wanted to see at the end of a long, bitter life. People can't carry ul udi. Only the Old People could do that and they are almost gone."

"Then we should take the crystals to our dells and use them for teaching the people instead of attacking our own hunters."

"Yes, Sister Caw is old. We must prepare for her loss."

Neoll Nant Caw drew her attention away from the witches. Death did not yet own her. She focused on the mirage itself: the heat shivers of pain in her muscles, the comforting grip of the earth under her, and the bisque of decayed leaves filling her sinuses with their odor. This dream held her life in place.

)|(

Kirchi placed her three undamaged moonstones on Timov's chest so that they touched and formed a triangle. Their power coursed weakly without the fourth, and she had to lean close to find the mica-glints of energy that formed images.

"What do you see?" Hamr pressed close behind her.

Sapphire gleams gathered briefly to an image of Timov in a void. He had been knocked out of his body and had fallen into the purple luminosity of the auroral sea above their heads. Firepoints flickered around him, and then he vanished.

"The ul udi have him," she said.

"Then he's dead." Yaqut spoke matter-of-factly from where he crouched beside a tree, searching the darkness for wraiths.

Kirchi held her breath and steadied her gaze. She pushed her will into the plasma-field of the peephole, trying to see deeper into the sky, to where the Bright Ones had taken him. The window opened too small.

Her attention fell back to earth, and she glimpsed ragged firs and crooked shadows of the Forest. A young girl appeared, sitting at the edge of a trench, her eyes and hair as dark as Timov's and Hamr's.

"Duru!" Hamr shouted, and the image faded.

Kirchi hastily arranged the stones and breathed on them again, to no avail.

"That was Duru!" Hamr said in amazement and bent closer over Timov's body to stare at the moonstones. The vision had vanished. In its absence Hamr felt his need: If he lost Timov and Duru, nothing of his past would remain. A moan escaped him.

"Timov's not dead," Kirchi whispered, peering into Timov's tranced eyes.

"Then where is he?" Yaqut asked, gruffly. "He's not sleeping." Kirchi ignored him and looked at Hamr. "Timov has fallen into the sky."

)|(

The sun set among mountainous purple clouds, and wind bursts carrying the smell of rain whooshed through the trees. On a sheet of birch bark, Duru collected chestnuts she had baked among embers and set them steaming at the edge of the ditch, where Baat lay. She hoped their toothsome smell would ease him awake, but he did not move. His large body lay curled on itself.

"Baat," Duru called in a voice heavy with concern. Is he ill? Is he dying? Anxiety prickled through her as she tried to figure out what to do: Stoke the fire, heat rocks, drop them in a hollowed burl filled with water, saxifrage, and lupine seeds. That is what Cyndell or Mother would have done—make a medicinal broth. But will that help a ghost dancer? Surely it will, she decided, for he had known how to heal her gashed leg. Their medicines are the same.

She had no hollowed root burl, and finding herbs in the thin moonlight would not be easy. She called again, "Baat. It's night. You've slept all day."

Baat heard her, but he was afraid to move. His mind squirmed, maggoty with the Dark Traces he had called with his hunger music. The lion's death had defeated their evil intent, and now they writhed inside him, wanting carnal satisfaction, demanding the bloodlust he had promised.

Rage with the hunger of the lion, the Dark Traces echoed his prayer. Come down through me. Be lion's flesh. Be lion's hunger.

If he lay perfectly still long enough, they would grow bored and go away. He had invited them with his hunger music. He had called them into himself. They shared one flesh now, until they chose to leave. The People possessed means of driving them off. Alone, he was helpless.

"Baat," Duru called again and lowered herself into the ditch. As she neared, the amethyst light encasing him streaked red, and she hesitated.

"Are you all right?" she whispered. "Can I help you?" She remembered seeing oak galls not far away and thought she could find them again in the dark. With the saxifrage and lupine seeds, they would make a strong medicine. Before making the broth, she must know if it would help him.

Timidly, Duru extended her hand and touched the glassy glow around Baat. It felt hot, like glue, like blood, and she snatched her hand back. The red glow came with her and began to burn her fingers.

A voice out of the glow opened in her head: You will die!

Duru eked a small cry. At the sound of her fear, maniacal laughter exploded around her. She scurried to climb out of the ditch. In her haste, she grasped a dead branch that looked like a root in the dark, and it gave way. She fell backward and landed on Baat.

The giant reared up, powerful teeth bared around a ferocious roar.

Duru leaped away. Her fright propelled her swiftly up the slope of the ditch, and she sprawled over the brink, the ghost dancer's glowing hand clawing the space behind her. Her foot landed on the chestnuts she had placed at the edge and sent her flying back into the ditch.

Baat watched from inside his horror as the Dark Traces powered his body with the Lion's hunger. Every effort he made to stop himself rebounded with the mocking singsong, Come down through me! Be lion's hunger!

Duru rolled to her back and beheld Baat burning! Red clots of fire crawled off his enraged face and spun out into the dark. She wriggled backward, felt a rock under her hand, and heaved it.

With a quick swipe, he deflected the missile. Bellowing, he lurched toward her, flames spluttering around him like blood spray,

Sobbing with fright, Duru shielded herself with her arms—and perceived blue fire gleaming from her hands.

The ghost dancer's eyes noticed it too. Baat recognized the power of the Bright Ones streaming through the young smallhead. He called the serene energy into himself to counter the fury of the Dark Traces.

His face still fixed with rage, he stopped. Slowly, his expression dulled. He sat down. Jaw slack, eyes drowsy, massive arms resting limp at his sides, he hunkered in a shrinking aura of red light.

Duru put her hands on his. And the blue radiance condensed to a shining window in his chest.

In the azure glow, shadows materialized into a close-up image of gravel. The field of stones shimmered with movement. Duru discerned that the gravel units consisted of people, a large crowd milling on the tundra, seen from above.

They flowed in one direction, then turned in unison to stream the other way—dancing. The crowd danced, and as she looked closer, she discovered that they teemed as a throng of red-haired people like Baat.

Music poured out from bone flutes, drums, and clappers, and the People moved in a frenzy, bobbing to the rhythm.

Duru moved with them, caught up in the urgent power of the dance. When the crowd shifted to the left, the music jangled out of tune, and the dancers gyrated faster, afraid and angry. Moving to the right, the music brightened, and fear and wrath changed to twirling rapture.

The People danced the ul udi down to Earth. The Bright Ones and the Dark Traces merged into the passion of the dancers. A flinty smell charged the sweaty air and lofted with the heat of the packed bodies.

In the blue fire, Duru rose with their heat and met the cold of space above the churning People. The music dulled away. And another tuneful energy took up, eerie with longing and beauty, synchronized with the beat of the dancers but trembling with silences and long, strange notes.

Fear gripped Duru as she experienced the alien presence of the ul udi. She moved back to the dancers, down from the cold and into the heat of the People.

The crowd had dispersed, scattered like pollen across the hushed brightness of the sky. She drifted alone under the blue heavens, listening down all the length of the wind for the music of the People.

With a jolt, Duru realized she was not alone. She shared presence with Baat, listening in his memory for the music of his tribe—music he would never hear again. All at once, the death of his people meshed with Duru's own great losses, and she partook of his suffering. Far away and getting closer, she heard the whimpers of his children as they died, heard Baat's answering cries, and her own sobs for Mother, Aradia, and Cyndell.

The pain lifted the edges of the trance, and she sat again in the night before Baat's thick body. His chest still glowed with the radiance that the Bright Ones had sent through her to calm him.

In the blue fire, Duru glimpsed the webby fire of the auroras and the vaulting gleam of stars. Cold curled around her again, and she trembled at the sound of that wind beating her upward, full of wailing voices.

The sun appeared, a wingspread of orange fire perched on the blue edge of the Tortoise shell. She floated into its enfolding bright silence, and joyful warmth suffused her. Out of the solar glare, a shadow swelled and became Timov floating in watery distance. Gempoints of light glinted around him.

Duru called out, and instantly found herself back in her body, staring into the misty shine in the hollow of Baat's chest. Timov vanished, and the blue luminosity darkened to violet night. Drowsiness attacked her, and Duru struggled to stay alert.

She leaned backward and looked away from the ghost dancer, until the chill wind rattling down through the treetops refreshed her, and she could focus her eyes.

A slender figure had congealed out of the shimmerings of moonlight—an old woman with ragged lengths of hair. The wraith of Neoll Nant Caw drifted closer, her face bright as milk, the crinkles of her age like veins in marble.

The last, violet gleam of the Bright Ones' energy blinked out, and the ghost dancer sagged in sleep. Now the pressures of the darkness at last overwhelmed Duru, and she swooned to the ground.

Her last sight held the crone shredding to vapors, leaving only her head floating briefly in the darkness. Flame lit her face. Her mouth gaped wide, rayed with needle-fine teeth.

)|(

Hamr labored over Timov until dawn showed among the trees. He sat on the boy's chest, the way he had for those who had drowned, pushing wind out of his lungs and then breathing it back into him.

For a while, Timov survived, sucking shallowly at the air. Then, he stopped breathing, and by first light it could be seen that, though not a mark scathed his body from the Moon Bitch's attack, he lay dead.

Yaqut, who had crept back into the camp after the battle, took a pinch from his poison pouch and burned a puff of acrid smoke under Timov's nose.

Timov did not flinch. His cold face glowed blue in the dawnlight.

Kirchi pressed her moonstones to his temples and shouted, and could not startle his eyeballs into movement. Her fingertips came away chilled.

With a flat rock, Hamr dug a hole in the carpet of marjoram. He cut at the sweet decay under it, hacked at roots and tugged free rocks, all with locked-jaw strength and a fierce frown, as if attacking the Mudman himself. When he laid Timov in the hole, he did so gently.

Kirchi gathered asters and placed their humid blue heads on his chest, so their fragrance would please him in the afterlife.

Yaqut took the sling he had cut for Timov, fitted a stone to its strap, and wrapped the throwing strings about the boy's icy hand.

Then, Hamr chanted greetings to the Mudman and acknowledgment to the Beastmaker, and midway a silent sob supplanted his voice, and Yaqut finished for him.

Hamr waved the others aside after they had thrown their handfuls of dirt, and he covered Timov with the earth. He tamped it solidly, and tucked the minty carpet of marjoram back into place so the animals would not dig him up.

Done, he sat on the grave and felt all the sorrows of his shared journey with Timov fill him to the rims of his eyes. The grief would go no further.

Life is too hard to be softened by tears.

)|(

Timov woke up and faced the black turtleshell of the world drifting under him. He recognized it there only because the auroras outlined its shape against the star-hung darkness: Bluegreen veils shimmered over the carapace of the Great Turtle, outlining a black circle to the north, where its head must be. East and west, the ghostly lights condensed to fiery green fringes at the edge of the Turtle's shell.

He floated downward in the night, returning to where he had begun. Since the Moon Bitch's attack, he had been drifting in a wondrous trance, full of voices and visions. When he closed his eyes, he viewed the sun blazing among thousands of suns, a majestic whirlwind in a maelstrom of fire.

That trance already dissolved like a dream. He soared toward the azure apex of the earth, gliding over the day-side of the planet. Sight opened for him wide as the dawn. He surveyed land far below, clouds and color patches of autumn. There, life carried on as he remembered: Herds and flocks threaded south. Weather tugged its freights from the sparkling sea to the aloof mountains. And lives invisible in their tininess thrived in valleys and forests.

He gazed back to where he had been—to the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Plasma rolled like fog in the black of space, veiling a disarray of stars. Up there, he had dreamed something wonderful, about all of creation. Though he had already forgotten almost everything, he grasped tightly what remained: Our bones baked in the stars, so they would be strong enough to lift us from the mud and yet delicate enough to hold the light of the mind.

He feared to go back down, sensing that everything he had discovered here would shrink to a kind of puny wonder, reduced by the necessities of eating and killing to sleeping and forgetting. Somewhere below, Duru, Hamr, and Kirchi lived—and the ghost dancer. Yaqut, too, wandered there—all the predators weaning the herds of their sick and aged. So many lives wandering the Earth, regal with alertness, destitute with hunger. How many lifted their faces to the sky? How often had he looked up himself and wondered about the stars and ruffling auroras, only a moment later to turn his attention to some fiercesome growl among the trees or a wisp of meat crisping over fire?

Far away, the thunderous fugues of the solar wind boomed against the sky. Inside that perpetual music, other music resounded—voices sang, beckoning him into the spirit stillness of the dark.

He descended. The magical voices, calling with the beauty of sadness, thinned to a rapt memory. The nameless stars disappeared, leaving behind only the luminaries and the constellations. Then they, too, vanished behind the blue abundance of the sky. He passed through clouds, the color-patches of autumn, and crashed headlong into the Forest.

Pain sank its venoms into him once again. Earth clogged his nostrils, and he groped blind. His eyes flew open and immediately stung shut. Mud gagged him, and in a panic he struggled to catch his breath, to move. The earth held him down, pressing him hard to her cold bosom.

With a huge effort, Timov tore his hand free of the packed ground, ripped at the matted grasses smothering him, and wrenched himself upright in his grave.

)|(

The ceremonies ended. Eager to close in on the ghost dancer, Yaqut led the way along the dry creek bed until the tracking stone in Hamr's hand pointed them east. The land sank to blueberry-laden woods whose trees looked like wild dancers waving red rags. The clear sky above swerved with birds. Ahead, over the mountains, weather clouded and rain feathered the wind.

Under a haze of midges, Yaqut knelt, read tracks in the soft earth, and hurried on. They no longer needed the tracking stone. Hamr held it anyway. His heart trotted faster with their quickening pace, afraid the ghost dancer might double back before the old hunter could read the land.

He recognized the absurdity of that thought yet could not dismiss it after losing so much so quickly—Blind Side and Timov gone to the Mudman in one day. The wet wind seemed to slap at his heart. The sky cried for him, and he feared what the world in its grief might do.

The tracks vanished among groundsel and bracken. While Yaqut scrutinized the earth and Hamr swayed back and forth with the tracking stone, feeling the chill of its direction, Kirchi looked around. This place held the broken end of summer. The land looked cluttered with harebells and red mushrooms. Tangles of ivy swarmed over fallen trees. And brittle leaves drifted among bush ferns. Beside a creek no wider than her wrist, a falcon's nest had fallen, scattering animal bones, tiny fish-skulls, shells, bleached twigs and haywire, bright as pieces of the moon.

She hoped they would find the ghost dancer today. She prayed that he would drop the girl and flee from them into the mountains. But she knew that he would not. He had come back to die. She had grown certain of that. He needed Duru to accomplish it.

During the summer, when Neoll Nant Caw had made her drink the trance brew every day and sit peering into the crystals for the whereabouts of Baat—hoping to find him before the hunters did—the crone had told her, "The Old People cross the tundra when they are ready to die. Baat wants to do the same. That is why he has come back. We must find him and help him."

They had never found him. Unless he allowed the Dark Traces to use his body, the scry crystals, which only tracked the evil ul udi, could not see him. All summer, he had hidden in the Forest and not called down the Dark Traces.

Kirchi had been glad not to have to look at him again. She remembered watching him in the spring, when the Dark Traces last used him, seeing how swiftly he had killed the Longtooth and Thundertree men before pumping his lust into the priestess.

An upright shadow moved among twisted bilberry shrubs, and Kirchi shuddered. A cry escaped her. Hamr and Yaqut, spears ready, pressed past her, then fell back. Out of the shrubs, scabrous with mud and peeling leaves, Timov lurched.

Hamr dropped his spear and slashed the tracking stone into a knife.

"Pierce his heart!" Yaqut yelled. "That is a deadwalker's only weakness—the heart!"

"Hamr!" Timov shouted.

Hamr lunged forward, pressed the crystal dagger to Timov's chest.

"Hamr! I'm alive!"

Hamr stared into Timov's face, recognized the fearfulness of life in his wide eyes, and lowered the crystal. "I buried you, Timov."

Kirchi put a hand to Timov's slimed neck and felt the blood-beat. "He was tranced," she said with awe. "By the Power of the Mother, he lives. The Moon Bitch did not kill him after all."

"See if he bleeds," Yaqut yelled.

Hamr shot him a dark look. "How'd you get out?" he asked Timov.

The boy shook his head. "I don't remember. I was choking, couldn't breathe. I got out."

"Build a fire," Kirchi ordered. "We should warm and feed him."

"No," Yaqut insisted. "The ghost dancer is too near, and there is not time left in the day. At night, we become his prey."

"We're building a fire," Hamr declared and held the gaze of Yaqut's bent face until the hunter turned. "Where are you going?"

Yaqut said nothing, stalked off, and disappeared among the shrubs. Hamr sang a thankful song to the Beastmaker while he sparked a fire in the fallen falcon's nest and piled on dead branches. Timov's return provided the Beastmaker's sign that they would indeed create their tribe and that Duru would soon join them.

Kirchi had won his heart with her caring wisdom and would always have a place at his side, but Duru, as Aradia's sister and the last female of the Blue Shell, owned his soul. She was truly his wife, and when she grew to womanhood, they would have children and begin a new clan.

In the warm flush from the crackling wood, Timov discarded his antelope-hide and rubbed himself with warm ash. Water from the rill and wads of wet grass and moss cleansed the ash-softened mud. Kirchi gave him soapwort from her plant pouch, and he sudsed his hair, crouched, and let the creek wash over his scalp.

When their elation over Timov's miraculous return from the dead had subsided to happy contentment, Timov told the story of his journey into the sky.

Hamr listened as he awled holes in the Lion's skin with his knife and threaded thongs to secure the hide to the boy's body. So glad the youth had survived, Hamr happily let him prattle on.

He even felt honored to give him the Lion pelt and speak his praise to the Beastmaker. He cut the skin with the black-glass knife. And he trimmed the hide so that the front paws would cross over Timov's chest and the mane collar his neck and block the wind at his back.

Kirchi's hands worked absently, cracking nuts with a rock. Timov, his face clean and shining, told her raptly, "Everything you said is true. I met the ul udi. The Bright Ones. It's just as you say, Kirchi. Our bodies are equal to the sunlight."

Hamr looked up from his cutting with a quizzical frown.

Kirchi squeezed Timov's hand, reassuring him. "That's the chant I gave you after Neoll Nant Caw pricked you with her dreaming thorn."

"It's true. I was light. My body had become light."

"Your body was buried," Hamr said through his teeth, using them to tighten a knot.

Timov chewed his lower lip, trying to remember. His journey to the sky now seemed no more than a dream, most of which he had forgotten. The wonder remained, a secret feeling no words could hold.

He recalled only a few of the astounding things the Bright Ones had actually told him. Your body is equal to the sunlight. A star baked your bones. He remembered Kirchi whispering that into his ear, while he sat in the witch's burrow, enslaved by the dreaming thorn.

He also remembered floating above the world's curve, the luminous blue crescent fleeced with clouds. And the ul udi had told him the same things. Only up there, they spoke with music—and the music had made him see the truth of what they said.

"Our bones were baked in stars," Timov asserted. "The ul udi showed me." Distantly, he recalled staring up at huge stars above the blue haze of the world, and he had felt as though the stars emptied their light into him—that the star-gleam had sown bright ideas inside him, as part of him, as though he had always known that the earth was round, not a tortoise-shell after all, but an egg with an eggshell crust of granite, albumen of melted rock, and a yolk core of the hardest rock of all: He could not bring forth its name now. But he had known then, floating up there under the seething starlight.

Kirchi put both of her hands on his, said excitedly, "I know something of what you saw. In trance, I've seen as much. That's why I gave you the chant. It's what the witch gave me. It's a place to start with the ul udi, a way of remembering their music."

Timov's face shone. "That's what they are. Music."

"They are light," Kirchi corrected. "We hear them as music."

"What're you two talking about?" Hamr asked, not diverting his attention from his work.

"We're made of lightning," Timov said, squinting to remember. "All of us—Horse, Lion, Bear, the People, Falcon, and Trout—even the trees and the rocks. All lightning."

Hamr had been humoring Timov. Now, he looked up slowly, the thought occurring to him that something more had happened to the boy than simply being knocked out. "Flesh and blood don't look like lightning to me," he said and watched his companion closely to see if his near-death experience had addled him.

"The lightning is inside. It's what makes the tiniest pieces of our flesh and blood and bones stick together."

"Lightning?"

"Yes. It's incredible. But it's no weirder than the Beastmaker, who cuts our bones down from antlers and squeezes our blood from rocks."

Hamr sat up straighter. "The Beastmaker is greater than lightning," he replied testily and motioned for Timov to stand. Trying not to show his mounting irritation over the boy's talk, he placed the bulky mane on Timov's shoulders and pulled the tail between his legs, tucking up the rest of the large pelt to form a breech-wrap. He cinched the tail around the waist. "Lightning might hold the Lion together, but the Beastmaker put the lightning in the Lion."

"I've heard Neoll Nant Caw talk about lightning," Kirchi interrupted softly. "There's an ocean of lightning in the sky, and that's where the ul udi live."

Timov nodded, packing the nuts he chewed into his cheek so he could keep talking. "It's true. Even our thoughts are lightning. And many of those thoughts come down from the sky and into our heads, where we think them."

"Nonsense!" Hamr said, slapping his chest. "We think in our hearts."

"That's what we imagine," Timov insisted, "but, really, we think in our heads, in our brains."

"That's crazy," Hamr derided. "The heart moves. And it moves with our thoughts, faster when our thoughts are excited, slower when we're bored. It's obvious. The brains are head marrow, they fill the hollows of the head bones. That's all. And I know for a fact there's no feeling there. When they drilled a hole into Gobniu's father's head, to let the head pain out, I was there. I saw the Tortoise Man stabbing his living brain with a sharp fishbone. The old man didn't feel a thing."

Kirchi laced the waist-thongs on Timov's lion-leather wrap, stood back and nodded with satisfaction. "You won't be cold this winter."

"If we see the winter," Timov remarked and sat down with Hamr. The memory of his journey to the sky continued to dim away, but one truth had come clear to him that he could not forget: The ul udi existed in reality—as real as the Beastmaker—and he had to make Hamr understand that. "If we keep after the ghost dancer, we may all die. His brain is shaped differently than ours. Somehow it can hold the lightning of the ul udi in ways we can't. Not just their thoughts, but their strength. When the Dark Traces enter him, they run his body."

"I don't understand any of this ... whatever you're talking about. Even if it is so, then all the more reason to go after him." Hamr clenched his fists resolutely. "If the Dark Traces are in him, what will they do to your sister?"

Timov pondered this for a moment. "She didn't seem afraid. You know, I think she's even happy with the ghost dancer. Maybe it's a trance-thorn. Maybe he's protecting her from the Dark Traces. Maybe we shouldn't try to get her back right away. We could follow from a distance for a while, see if I can reach her in dreams again."

"Timov is right," Kirchi chimed in. "We've seen for ourselves, what Neoll Nant Caw says is true: Baat is old, ready to die. He's the last of his tribe, and he needs Duru to watch over him."

"So he simply kidnaps her from us? No, he's nothing like us. We don't dare trust him." Hamr scratched at his new whiskers and shook his head at Timov. "You could be as wrong about his protecting Duru as you are about us thinking with our brains. Neoll Nant Caw attacked us." He cocked a glance at Kirchi. "The Moon Bitch would have killed you if Timov hadn't taken her blow. You can't trust the witch." He returned his stern attention to Timov. "And we can't trust the sky spirits, either—not with all their befuddling trances and visions of lightning in our bodies. Can't you see? They're trying to distract us. They obey the witch and the ghost dancers, because that's how they get their blood sacrifices. If we listen to them, they'll control us. I say we track down the ghost dancer and get Duru back, find out from her what she wants: us or the bonesucker."

"The ul udi are powerful, Hamr," Kirchi said. Timov was alive, the Moon Bitch was dead, and Kirchi wanted Hamr to take her away from these woods before the Dark Traces could use Baat again to do their violence. "I saw how they can inflame Baat—and how terrible his slaughtering can be."

"Let me try to reach Duru in trance again," Timov offered.

"I'm telling you, we can't trust what happens in a trance," Hamr contended. "What if that bonesucker's raping her but these evil spirits are sending you visions of her happiness? She's your sister. And she came with us because she thinks she's my wife. I have to know she's all right—not dream about it."

The sound of a twig cracking among the nettles interrupted them. Out of the purple light, Yaqut emerged and crouched beside the fire. The mottled shine of his scars glinted with sweat. While they had been talking, he had sat on a tree limb listening to the wind. His voice sounded low with fear of what he had heard. "He's coming for us."

Timov perked up his head like a rabbit. "You saw him?"

"Listen. It's too quiet. He's coming."

Hamr held up the tracking stone, felt its scalding cold. He jumped up and swung around, and the cold level deepened in every direction.

Kirchi read the alarm in his stare and whispered, "He's here."

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Duru woke from the witch's trance and found herself once more lashed to a tree. Baat squatted in the morning steam staring at her with a heavy expression. She looked for the crone she had seen last night, and the tatters of dawn mist showed only emptiness among the crooked trees.

"Why am I tied?" she asked, sitting up with the rope of creepers in her hand.

Baat stared silently, his pale eyes watchful, alert, hard as stars. The simple caring she had seen there before had gone, the dumbstruck look gone, replaced by an unflinching stare. Cold touched her spine.

"I saw the ul udi, Baat," she said, trying to evoke some emotion in his stony face. "I heard their music. And I saw the People dancing—thousands dancing."

Baat stood up, and Duru's piping voice, even with its few recognizable syllables, fell mute. He no longer stared at her. He peered up into his head. His eyeballs rolled up under the rock of his brow.

Fear grew in Duru. She pressed her back against the tree and pulled her knees to her chest. The demons still occupied him, the Dark Traces who had tried to kill her last night. The Bright Ones had not repelled them.

When Baat's eyes swung back into place, they glinted with tears. They showed no warmth. Shining with the tears of someone who had gazed into the wind, they locked on her. He pushed a rock closer with his toe, and she observed that it had been smashed to an edge. He was giving her a tool to cut herself loose from the tree. As she reached for it, he turned away and loped into the morning's rags of mist.

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The spicy scent of a river rose with the haze, thinning to the sweet char of dead leaves and a twang of deer musk. No evil woodsmoke odors tainted the day. The smallheads had slowed in their pursuit. Yet, they moved nearby. Even if he had not yet closed upon them near enough to smell their fire, he knew they sensed him. The Dark Traces told him so.

After his hunger music had called the ul udi into his body—after they had gone from him into the Lion to kill his enemies—they had sunk their menace deeper into him. He could not shrug them off. Last night, they had tried to kill the girl. The Bright Ones had stopped them but could not drive them off.

When he had woken in a sprawl with the girl asleep on his chest, the Dark Traces had woken with him. He had been afraid they would make him kill her. The Bright Ones' influence had muted the killing madness in him, and he had had enough clarity to twine a leash from creepers and tie Duru to a tree. Then he had chipped an edge in a small rock so she could eventually cut herself free after he had gone, because he did not expect to return.

A grandmotherly fragrance crossed Baat's path, and he paused. Some gnarly hawk-nut tree dangled its aromatic burrs, its boughs coiled like giant serpents. He husked several of the yellow nuts, popped the juicy meats into his mouth, and rubbed the oily insides of the burrs against his beard, perfuming himself with the odor of autumn.

This had been a favorite pastime of the People. The nuts yielded lamp oil, too, whose incense had flavored all his childhood winters. Smelling this again, he remembered the People and how every day had its own ritual, every rock and all its pocks their names. How much he had forgotten.

Shame weakened his knees, and he sagged under the hawk-nut tree and leaned his brow against his knees. What anger would spit from the old ones if they could meet him in the flesh and see how he had abused the hunger music.

Every dark calling had to be countered by a bright calling. How could he have forgotten that? He had thought only of killing his enemies. If the Lion had succeeded, he would have left the Dark Traces there and gone on his way free of them and the smallheads. The Lion's death had turned the ul udi back on him, and now he had no one to perform the bright calling that could free him. At night, the Dark Traces would wake in his body and use him. Eventually, they would kill him, and his soul would become the plaything for their horrors.

Baat wrenched his head back, and his mouth opened around an inaudible cry. The door of the mountain awaited farther than he could walk in a dozen days. He knew he could never reach there on his own. And the girl was doomed if she went with him. Why not just die here?

The sweet smell of the hawk-nuts cloyed him with their memories of a painfully lost time. He jumped to his feet and barged, heedless, through the tortuous undergrowth.

If the Dark Traces raged in him, he would not let them have the girl. He would turn their fury instead on the smallheads. They had driven him to use the hunger music. They had deprived him of his People, his deathward journey to the north, and now his very soul. He would find those smallheads. He would hunt down his hunters, and he would make them eat darkness.

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Yaqut sneered. The bonesucker coming for them no doubt thought he could surprise them, not realizing they had the tracking stone. Or maybe realizing it: The ul udi had supernatural knowing. Either way, he closed on them. He was already here, somewhere in the violet light of dusk. The long waiting had ended.

The poison Yaqut had boiled from lethal toadstools—the black syrup condensed to deadly tar that he had offered to the Beastmaker and had cursed with the names of all the Longtooth clanspeople slain by bonesuckers—that toxin gleamed on his lance-tip. It needed only one cut to kill, one doorway into the blood. For that, Yaqut prayed to the Beastmaker as he peered into gathering darkness.

At Yaqut's command, the fire had been left burning and the four of them had separated into the night shadows. The ghost dancer would have to come for them one at a time. The witch and the boy were useless, Yaqut knew, and he had sent them to the more open corners of the clearing, with instructions to cry out if they spied the bonesucker. Yaqut was not sure they would. But he could see them, though they thought they lay hidden. If the bonesucker took out either of them first, he would have a clear shot with his lance.

Hamr knelt in a holt of tall ferns. He watched Kirchi across the clearing, crouching alongside a fallen tree, arms hugging her knees to her chest. Timov stood in a thicket of switches that had sprouted from where the tree had fallen. His sling hung from his hand, though Hamr knew he could not use it. The crowded saplings would not permit him to swing it. Hamr kept his gaze close to those two. The bonesucker would not steal anyone else from him.

Timov hefted the stone in his sling, to show Hamr he was armed and ready to fight. He would stand by his clansman even though his dreamy memory of the ul udi inspired awe in him for the ghost dancer. To give himself more room, he edged over sideways, toward Kirchi, and stopped, catching his breath. Blue fire glimmered in the chest-high bracken beside Hamr, flashed abruptly closer, and then bounded through the ferns.

Hamr caught it too, and immediately turned the other way, remembering how the ghost dancer had deceived them when he kidnapped Duru.

"He's behind you!" Yaqut shouted. "There—by the ferns! It's not a ghost!"

Hamr was still looking away when the ghost dancer reared out of the bracken beside him, flames spinning from his body, swirling around him in the dark. With blazing hands, he seized Hamr's head and wrenched hard. A sharp crackle sounded, and Hamr's arms jolted stiff, then went limp.

Baat snatched Hamr's spear and leaped over his slumped body. He ran right through the fire, scattering sparkling ashes in a blustery cloud and kicking chunks of flaming wood into the air.

The sight of Hamr so abruptly fallen under the fiery attack of the ghost dancer shocked Timov, and he stood numb, motionless, until the giant burst through the fire. With a mad scream, Timov leaped into the clearing, whipped his sling and let fly. The rock whizzed over Baat's shoulder. The ghost dancer stopped and raised Hamr's spear.

The opportunity Yaqut craved had come, and he bounded out of the darkness, lance held high. Before he could throw, Baat spotted him, and twisted about with such vehemence that spits of blue fire jarred off in pinwheels. His spear hurtled at Yaqut, and thocked into the maple beside the hunter.

Yaqut's scalded face split into a malicious grin. His lance had sagged before the hurtling missile, and he raised it again. Baat hopped sideways, abruptly hit a knobby beech tree, where Yaqut aimed to impale him. As the hunter flung his weight into his throw, the ghost dancer reached behind and pulled with all his might, ripping up the misshapen tree by its roots from the soggy ground.

Yaqut had let his lance fly before he realized the giant had toppled the big tree toward him. With a startled cry, he danced backward. The falling beech groaned out of the earth and collapsed atop the hunter. Yaqut's lance had glanced off the falling trunk and swerved, gashing Baat's left arm below the shoulder.

A gush of silver fire sprayed like spitting voltage from Baat's wound, and he yelped from the sting of poison. His blue fire flushed bloody red, and the Dark Traces bawled in him, Burn them! Burn the smallheads! You are poisoned! You are dying! Burn them!

Baat swooped up a burning stick from the fire and pressed it to his cut, inhaling the stench of seared flesh.

You are dead, Baat! Kill the smallheads! Burn them!

Lightning seared his arms, crackled in asp-tongues from his fingertips. "No!" he yelled. He pulled the fire back into himself and felt it retreating behind his eyes in a spasm of pain. Yaqut and the beardless one were dead. The hunt for him had ended. No longer would he let the Dark Traces use him, no matter the suffering. He reeled across the clearing, scarlet fluorescence billowing behind.

Yaqut's spear had dropped beside Kirchi. Her eyes had locked on where Hamr had fallen, and she had not seen it. Her blurred gaze fell on it as the giant turned away. Numbly, her hands closed on the weapon. Her eyes followed the glowing hulk of the ghost dancer, rapidly listing away from her, and she raised the lance.

As Kirchi threw, Timov collided with her, and the short spear fell short of the giant. Looking over his shoulder, Baat glimpsed Timov hugging a weeping woman. Pain closing in, Baat shambled off.

"You gawk of a milkless mother!" Yaqut cursed from where he lay under the beech. The branches had broken the massive force of the tree, and he scowled, unhurt, from under the thick boughs. He had kept silent, knowing the Dark Traces would have killed him if he had shown any sign of life. Now, with a grimace of rage on his warped face, he pulled himself out from under the tree. He leaped to his feet and threw himself at Timov. "Why did you save him?" He grabbed the boy's lion-skin and shook him violently. "He killed Hamr!"

Timov wrenched free, and stared into Yaqut's broken face with defiant tears. Words balked in him, could not get past the crammed hurt in his throat. Hamr is dead—

Any explanation required more than his grief would let him voice. He glowered at Yaqut, his lips trembling.

With a frustrated cry, the hunter slammed his fist against the boy's ear, felling him to the ground.

Kirchi shouted angrily at Yaqut, and knelt over Timov.

"Don't yell at me, witch! He should taste my poison for what he has done. You could have killed him! Here and now, we could be done with that bonesucker!"

Kirchi shot a harsh glance up at Yaqut. Then, her eyes went wide. Above the hunter, the canopy of the Forest blazed. Sparks from the campfire that Baat had kicked into the air had ignited among the autumnal leaves. All at once, sheets of flame dropped from the treetops. The fire spread quickly, shriveling the underbrush in its wake.

Yaqut picked up his lance and ran to where Hamr's body lay. Reaching under the dead man, he plucked the tracking stone from beneath his pelt, and dashed away.

Behind him, Kirchi helped Timov to his feet. Together, moving too quickly to talk or even reason, they carried as many of the pelts and satchels as they could gather and fled into the night under a wall of fire.

Part Three

Masterings of the Beast

I create evil: I the Lord...

—Isaiah 45:7

For the Dead, Who Live Us

Shooting stars glinted like needles in the north. Baat watched them briefly while he examined his pain, assessing how badly he had been hurt.

You will die!

The wound felt numb. Poison! His left arm tingled, as if going to sleep. Surely, if the toxin reached his heart, he would die. His heartbeat pulsed irregularly. Is this panic—or death?

Staring at the precise lines of the shooting stars, Baat confirmed that he suffered no blurred vision. The cold fire of the ul udi steamed red from his flesh, as it did when the Dark Traces swarmed over a dying body and took the soul within for their own.

You are already dead, Hollow Bone! We are eating you!

Baat's heart bucked loudly in his chest. To calm it, he reminded himself that the hunger music had invited the Dark Traces into his body: The poison and the killing had simply excited them. He decided his wound was not mortal.

Die, Hollow Bone! Curl up and die!

Baat shouted at the night, "Dark Traces, I will never obey you again!" Defiantly, he began to run. If the poison had soaked deep enough to kill him, this would mercifully hurry his death; if not, the exertion would cleanse his blood. "You hurt me—you do not have me."

Baat ran back through the woods he had crossed before dusk. He found his way in the night by moonglow and the red light misting off his body. Silver hollows gleamed among the trees, where the lunar fire penetrated the treetops. "I did not burn the smallheads," he huffed as he ran, feeling a sudden chill stagger him. "I killed them with my hands. You did not use me."

You killed only one.

"Yaqut and the beardless one are dead. I killed them. Not you."

Yaqut lives. He will take your head after his poison drops you.

Baat pressed his run harder, though he had lost feeling entirely in his arm and could not seem to draw his breath deeply enough. "Yaqut is dead."

No, Hollow Bone—your spear missed. His did not.

"But the tree—I dropped the tree on him."

The smallhead is too narrow to crush with a tree. He is no bison to be blindly smashed. You misjudged—twice, Hollow Bone. And now he will have your head for a trophy.

Ahead, the hawk-nut tree jounced into view. The numerous feathery burrs hazed in the moonlight, like the vision of atoms he had once shared with the Bright Ones. Or like an island of stars, a galaxy he had seen once on a journey to the upper air.

No more flights to heaven for you, Baat. Your body will become mud, your atoms scatter among the roots. Die, Hollow Bone!

The air would not reach all the way into Baat's lungs. The poison slowed his circulatory system, famishing his blood. Now, vision did blur, and the moonshot tree ahead wobbled, doubled, spun before him. His good arm swam. His legs shimmied, and he went down on his knees, straining upward.

Chill! Shiver! Spasm!

The air felt molten in Baat's gasping throat. The beat of his heart throbbed wildly, and dizziness seemed to tilt his whole body. He dug the fingers of his hand into the ground, holding onto consciousness. Overhead, birds veered against the wind, away from the flaming shimmer in the west.

"Fire," he muttered to himself. "Autumn burn." He knew he should get up and move on. The webwork of creeks farther east, where he had left Duru, would stop this burn. He pushed with his legs and inched his back up the trunk. Sickening weakness dropped him again.

From the cavern of twisted conifers, Duru watched. She feared to approach, seeing the bloodfire wisping off him, not sure if he would recognize her, or try to kill her. Swirls of red energy flared around him, fluttering like butterflies.

She absently picked at the remnant of vine still tied about her waist. Magpies and jays flashed through the murky air, and Duru turned to see what they fled. The glow she eyed in the west startled her. She stared at the brightening a long moment, baffled, thinking the auroras had fluttered to earth or that somehow the sun had climbed down, backward—before she realized what she saw.

A group of elk galloped across a clearing and into the dark, escaping the fire. Far off, she watched Baat trying to rise and then sink back to the ground. Wingbeats of flame danced around his head.

Spasm! Convulse! Die!

Baat tried to breathe deeply, to draw strength into his limbs, to stand and escape the approaching fire. The taunting curses of the Dark Traces punished him for his awkward efforts.

He screamed, "Leave me be!"

His anguished cry jolted Duru to act. She had danced with the People. She had stood alone with Baat inside his mind and had felt his losses—so like her own, the sorrow no different. With a cry, she ran through the dusty moonlight between the tall trees. "You're hurt," she whispered, kneeling beside him. "How? What happened?"

Her words came to him as a breeze, delicate as pollen with its promise of life. "Doo-roo."

Duru pointed to the convulsion of flames just visible above the trees. "We must get away." She looked around for a fallen bough that could brace the giant, and found nothing suitable. "Use this." She placed her crutch in his good hand. "I don't need it anymore. It's short for you, but, well, come on. I'll help you."

Kill the smallhead bitch!

Baat swung the spruce pole up.

Do it! Brain the bitch!

He hooked the curved end of the pole to a lower branch of the hawk-nut tree and pulled himself upright.

Duru helped support his hurt side, and the crimson haze on the ghost dancer's skin filmed over her. Dim, baleful voices pulsed in her: You will die!

Duru trembled and looked up fearfully at the giant. The gash in his upper arm crawled with bloodfire sparks. The energies whirling in the air exploded slowly into clouds, that looked like fanged beast faces.

The girl shuddered and pulled away. The look in the ghost dancer's large face appeared hurt, not threatening. She fought her fright, ignored the small, cruel noises from the rat faces flapping in the flames.

"Doo-roo." Baat grimaced through his pain. His long eyes opened wider as he gazed down at her. Where she held his numb arm, the red shine of his flesh gleamed blue.

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From a hillcrest nave of high-arched oaks, Yaqut sat upwind of the burning forest and looked down on the flight of flames. A web-work of creeks to the west and south had already contained the fire there, and to the east, the Big River gleamed like red snake-skins as the conflagration approached. A few more hours of frenzied fire destruction remained. By dawn the blaze would have retreated into ash.

Yaqut envied Hamr. The Beastmaker blessed only the rarest hunter with such a pyre. Truly, he thought bitterly, Hamr is a Great Man—a horsemaster, witch-lover, lion-slayer.

Staring down into the fiery portal to the afterworld, Yaqut remembered when he had first thrown the oaf from his horse and nearly killed him, not knowing that the beardless, inept hunter walked the earth beloved of the Beastmaker.

He frowned, recalling the anger that had knifed into him inwardly two days before, when Hamr held him on the ground and made him swear not to harm the witch or the boy—with the boy, all along, urging Hamr to kill him.

Ashes now, Yaqut thought. There would be no need to avenge his pride on Hamr. Beloved as he is of the Beastmaker, the horseman was no hunter of ghost dancers. And as for the boy—

Yaqut looked over his shoulder into the darkness under the oaks, where Timov and Kirchi huddled, sobbing for Hamr. Yaqut had the tracking stone now. It chilled perceptibly when pointed northeast, and at dawn he would follow its icy guidance and finish the bonesucker.

The witch would come with him. Neoll Nant Caw would want her vengeance for the ghost dancer's death. Far better that the sacrifice be Kirchi than myself. He would turn the young witch and the stone over to the hag once he had Baat's head. Meanwhile, she would warm him well on the chill nights to come.

As for the boy… Yaqut had sworn on the Beastmaker not to harm him—and that vow had died with Hamr. I will leave Timov to find his own way in the Forest. Before the moon is full, the boy will be bear scat.

That decided, Yaqut rose and strode through the fireshadows to the witch, jerked her to her feet. "Tonight, you sleep under me."

Timov rose, as Yaqut knew he would. The old hunter placed the tip of his lance under the crossed lion-claws at the boy's chest. "Hamr is dead. My vow to him chars with his bones. Leave us alone, boy. When morning comes, if you are still here, I will kill you."

Timov flinched.

Kirchi pushed away from Yaqut, her face slick with tears. "I won't have you, Yaqut."

"Flee, and I will kill you too." The bad eye in the mangled face peered calmly. "You are coming with me, to get the ghost dancer's head."

The wet shimmer in Kirchi's eyes dimmed with alarm, and she looked to Timov. He stood small in the bulkiness of the lion's pelt, and she knew there would be no salvation from him. When she faced Yaqut again, her gaze held steady. "He comes with us."

Yaqut traced the line of Timov's jaw with the tip of his lance, saw in the boy's blood-smoked eyes the fright that had broken through his grief. The old man lifted the boy's chin disdainfully. "No."

"If you want any pleasure from me, he comes."

Anger flared out of Timov's fear. "Kirchi—no. He'll kill me anyway. I'll leave tonight."

"Where will you go?" the witch asked.

"There is only one place for him," Yaqut sneered. "The belly of the Beast."

Kirchi stepped closer to Yaqut. "I want him to stay with us. After you take the ghost dancer's head, I want you to let us go."

"You know your wants, witch."

"Timov has the inner sight. I promise if he comes with us, he will help find his sister—and the ghost dancer."

Yaqut squinted at Timov, hating the boy not only for wanting Yaqut dead but for the shiver now in his bottom lip, the nervous skitteriness of his dark stare, and the bonesucker blood with its fevered voices whispering in his veins. He wanted to stick him now, be done with him, and discipline this witch with terror. The flame-shadows moving in and out among the oaks goaded him to do it. But the witch's promise held him in check. She is a witch. He knew he should kill her quickly.

"All right, the boy comes with us," Yaqut decided. "He may prove useful tending our camp."

Timov groaned. He knew the vengeful hunter would eventually kill him and Kirchi.

"You swear you will free us when the hunt is over?" Kirchi asked.

Yaqut nodded assurance—a mean joy knotting and unknotting in his belly—knowing that indeed he would free them, Timov to his death and the witch to Neoll Nant Caw. "But first, you must satisfy my wants."

"I will," Kirchi assured. "But not now. Tonight I mourn Hamr." She turned away and returned with Timov to where they had sat before.

Yaqut let them go. He went back to watching the fire, taking the twitchings of his little revenge plot with him.

Timov felt cold in his lion-skin despite the waves of heat reaching them from the holocaust below. He wanted to ask Kirchi to run away, tonight—though he knew the hopelessness of that ambition: Yaqut would track them down before the sun crested the treetops.

The boy took only one glance at the witch squatting in the dark under the trees, her face pressed to her knees, her masses of red hair bright even in darkness. Then, he looked away, not wanting to see her grief.

Hamr is dead, Timov told himself. Just the other night, Timov was the one who had died. He had dropped his body and flown into the sky. Now, the fires of the auroras had come down to earth. They blazed below, reducing trees and shrubs and Hamr to ash, reducing them to the tiniest parts that once—and only once—had been put together in seed and in womb to build those lives.

From the ash, he knew, more lives will be built—but never again Hamr. Never again Blind Side of Life. Or Cyndell. Or Aradia, Mother, Biklo, Father. None of the dead returned to ash will rise again.

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Kirchi sobbed herself toward sleep. She cried for the man the Great Mother had sent to save her. What remains for him now? What prayer can I give? That the Mudman honor Hamr? That Hamr's spirit watch over us and maybe even call Yaqut to join him? The fear in those chants mocked the great man. Tears are all I can truly offer in prayer.

Ash from the burning Forest fluttered like moths through the red shadows. Those are the souls of all the animals burned in the blaze with Hamr, accompanying him to the western kingdom. The smoke visible there, among the trees, is the tide of the afterworld, the waves of shadow risen for the dead hero of the Tortoise clan. When that tide departs, I will go with it.

Only slavery and death awaited her in this world. Many deep woods separated her from her tribe, the Longtooth—Yaqut's tribe—where her seeress mother, counselor of chiefs and hunters, would immediately return her to Neoll Nant Caw. She had broken too many laws ever to go back to the witch. Death alone seemed plausible.

The roaring warmth of the blaze soothed those chill thoughts as sleep closed in. Hamr's body heat had journeyed into the world and returned to comfort her. He wanted her to live, to struggle, as he had, to carry greatness with the same strength that he had carried death.

)|(

The Forest blaze ran through dells and low hills to the west, looking molten to Baat from his high bluff. Long ago, this scarp had been carved by the Big River, and since then the meander of the river had silted to a meadow, which at the moment seethed, a smoky vat of moonlit fog. The fire ran farther on, burning to the very edge of the water, lighting the bend scarlet.

Baat kept his gaze on the distant flames. They quieted the gibbering voices of the Dark Traces. On the hurried passage away from the danger, the fear of the wind shifting and bringing smothering smoke to them had excited the ul udi, and their jubilant voices had melted into each other and become frantic yammering. But the wind had not turned. The fire retreated, the spices of its burn sifting down to them out of the hazy moonlight. Even so, the Dark Traces continued to harangue him.

Yaqut's poison did not help. The venom had put his left arm into paralysis and hollowed out his chest to a breathless cavern. The rush through the Forest and uphill had only spun the toxin faster through his body. He felt its chill coursing through the length of him, blooming like a canker on his heart. He did not want to be afraid—for then the Dark Traces' ravening din would become unbearable—but the needle-stabs in his heart told him death approached.

Duru knew. She had smeared the gash with the same healing tar that he had used to cure her leg wound. She had diligently built a fire and heated rocks, immersing them in his wooden bowl until the river water there boiled and the sprinkling of herbs and grasses became a brew. He had tried to drop several red toadstools into the hot potion, knowing the amanita would kill him faster than Yaqut's poison, but she had caught him and thrown the toadstools out—as if she thought he could yet live. But she knew. She heard how shallow his breath had become, and she could see the cold fire on his flesh giving up its strength.

"Drink," Duru ordered and held the burl cup to Baat's lips. He sipped, and the liquid drooled from his slack lips into his hackled beard.

"Don't bother anymore with me, Doo-roo. I am dead. But I'm not afraid to be dead. Go back to your brother. I did not let the Dark Traces kill him. And I regret now—oh, I regret very deeply now that I let them use me to kill the beardless one. I had thought only of killing Yaqut, but the Dark Traces filled me with murdering strength and I killed your clansman. When you learn that, you will be happy I am dead."

Duru did not understand the ghost dancer's words. She wiped the spilled brew from his beard with a wad of dried grass and laid her hand on his forehead. He felt cool as stone. Where she touched him, the crimson light around his body patched blue. She took his hurt hand, lifted it in both of hers so that he could see the shine brightening to blue in her grasp. "Baat—what does this mean?"

The blue fluorescence gleamed in Baat's drowsy eyes, and he stared. Could it be? he thought. The flutter of hope in him inspired the Dark Traces to a shattering blat of screaming. He closed his eyes, trying to retrieve the mental space he needed to grasp fully this perception.

Duru thought Baat had fainted. When his eyes opened again, a sharper intent fit his face.

"Doo-roo." He pointed to the sky and then to her and offered his hand again.

Realization dazzled the girl. "You want me to bring down the Bright Ones?"

Baat saw from her expression that she grasped his meaning. And though she would not comprehend him, he said anyway, to convince himself and to defy the tormenting voices battering the inside of his skull; "Doo-roo—you can purge me of the Dark Traces. You can bring the Bright Ones down through you. Fulfill the bright calling. Just hold my hand. There's enough of the People in you to do it. Go on—take my hand and let the Bright Ones come down through you."

Baat's fingers flexed for her grasp. When she took his hand in both of hers, the Dark Traces in him yowled. Their voices merged into one massive roar. Stab-pain hit him in his heart, and his head jolted back, eyes squeezed shut.

Duru almost let his hand go, thinking she hurt him. His fingers clamped on hers. Then his eyes popped open, glaring with the intensity of his effort to stay alert against the battering voices only he could hear. His teeth clacked. "Doo-roo!" He raised her hands up, high enough to lift her to her toe-tips.

Looking upward, at the silver brow of the moon, Duru searched for the ul udi. They did not hover there. They had already arrived inside her, dimly calling. A patient voice spoke from far within: Duru—be still. Be quiet as the oak that the lightning seeks out.

Baat watched the azure light on Duru's hands climbing her arms, and he closed his eyes, knowing he had to hold out only a while longer. Already, their panic had splintered the Dark Traces' bellowing into distinct voices clashing between his ears: You are already dead, Hollow Bone! Yaqut's poison eats your blood! Convulse and die!

The voices gathered to a scream that faded abruptly to silence.

Baat eased his eyes open a slit, glimpsed Duru standing rigid, face lifted to heaven, eyes rolled white. Astral fire sheathed her small body. He sat taller. His left arm remained numb, and the needles of pain in his heart had sharpened. But the terrible noise had vanished.

He listened deeper, for the Bright Ones, and heard their whispery voices talking to the girl: The Dark Traces are gone for now. But they watch. They wait. Baat is dying. Yaqut's poison has hurried his death closer yet. There is little time, perhaps too little for him to reach the door of the mountain, where his ancestors wait. He is listening. Baat, you were wrong to use the hunger music.

"I know that now."

"Baat!" the girl's small voice broke in. "I understand you!"

"Yes—I hear you as well!" he cried into the darkness of his closed lids. "The Bright Ones have joined our minds."

"I'm afraid for you, Baat," Duru began. She seemed to be standing on the bluff among moon-ghosts, kelpy shapes that drifted between her and Baat. Baat himself looked like a ghost, more shadow than shape. "Sometimes I think you're dying."

"I am dying, young Duru. You heard the Bright Ones. I'm old—and Yaqut's poison has made me older yet. In a short while, this body will drop from me. This summer I had thought to journey to the door of the mountain for a vision, but I know now that if ever I get there, I will arrive to die."

"That's why you took me from my clansmen, to help you find the right place for you to die, isn't it?"

So now she knew that truth. "Among the People, those who have opened themselves to the ul udi, the ghost dancers, must go north at the end of their lives, to the door of the mountain, where the Bright Ones come to earth. If I die there, Duru, I will be taken by the Bright Ones. Otherwise, my soul belongs to the Dark Traces, who will torment me for time beyond reckoning."

"I will help you."

"You have helped me." Baat's shadow-shape leaned closer in her vision, and she discerned sad gentleness in his heavy features. "I must tell you a thing. Hamr is dead." Baat's ghostly shape became solid and larger, and his voice came out small: "I killed him."

Anguish washed through Duru, and she felt as if she lifted away from herself. She flew above the wind to find Hamr.

"You will not find him," Baat said. "His body is ash now."

"And Timov?"

"Your brother lives. I did not harm him. But Hamr is far from his old life now. I am sorry. Deeply sorry. My fear used me."

Duru looked at the giant's hand held firmly in her small grip. The strange light of the ul udi joined them. Fervent emotion churned in her. She looked away to the great blaze of the moon-cast Forest.

Hamr's death linked inside with all her other losses. Tears that had been burning in her since the fever took Mother burned hotter. She turned and pressed her face against Baat's hand. Grief and tears flowed through her, a current as strong as a river.

Baat had expected her to rage at him, and when she did not, his remorse deepened. He had wanted to end the hunt, not hurt this child.

The Dark Traces chortled from far away and just behind his eyes, distant and close—haunting, yet not owning him anymore. Duru's bright calling had broken the spell of the hunger music.

With this strong child to guide him, he would find his way past the Dark Traces entirely—away from the irreversible sorrows of this world. The Bright Ones had given her that power.

Duru cried until her grief settled into cold new thoughts. Hamr is dead. I am no longer a wife, no longer a clanswoman. Whatever the Great Mother wants of me is right here with this ghost dancer.

Baat might just as soon have killed her as Hamr. He embodied all the evil and all the good in the world. If she left him here, she would only find him again in the first beast that came for her, as well as in whatever rock or club would defend her. She could not flee the Dark Traces or survive them without the Bright Ones. Her destiny clearly belonged here with this dangerous friend.

At least, she could heal his pain and darkness. The blue fire shining from her showed her that. He needed her. Now that Hamr belonged to the Mudman, that need had become her whole life.

She stared up at the night. As the tears cleared from her eyes, mists of starlight brightened, teemed, condensed to the Milky Way and huge cobalt glints of individual stars.

)|(

The fire in the valleys had burned to a smolder. Smoke, phosphorescent with moonlight, churned in the hill-hollows and wafted in chalky smudges over the ridges.

Out of a furl of wood-smoke, Timov emerged. His thin body looked smaller in the bulky lion-skin. He had wandered away from Kirchi and he hoped from Yaqut, too—to be alone with his grief.

He thought he had come away to pray to the Beastmaker for Hamr. But as he ambled among the skinny, stunted trees on the stony shoulders of the river bluff, he realized that Hamr did not need anyone to speak for him to the Beastmaker.

Timov knew then that he had come to speak for himself. "I am the last man of the Blue Shell," he began, and his chant to the Beastmaker faltered. No need to say any more. There was no clan to hear him, no mysteries to be revealed. If he were going to be initiated at all, he would have to initiate himself.

With his hands gripping the claws of the lion-skin, Timov called all of his grief back into himself. He withdrew all his mumblings to the Beastmaker and to Hamr's spirit. If they could help him, they would have to help him as himself, he grasped coldly. He moved through the world alone, the last of the men.

Yaqut would certainly kill him. The hunter no longer needed him to find the ghost dancer. He had the tracking stone. To live—to make his self-initiation mean life and not death—Timov knew he had to make himself a man. No one else could. Make myself what kind of man? I do not have the strength of Hamr or the murderous cunning of Yaqut. How can I make myself into something more than a helpless and frightened boy?

"I am a man," Timov said to the night. "I am no longer a boy. I have put aside my childish fears. I will be brave. I will not disgrace the Blue Shell. If I am to be the last of our blood—I will be among the first in courage. Hamr showed me the way. I will walk that way to my death."

Timov felt foolish. He felt like the brine-flowers he used to see in the tidepools, their blind faces waiting for sustenance. He could say anything he wanted—yet, still the fear persisted: The doomful solitude did not go away.

He waited for some new power to come to him. But it would not come. He knew that. He had seen the curve of the world. He still vaguely remembered the beautiful music and icy pain of the ul udi. Indeed, the world extended into ranges far stranger than he could ever grasp. Even so, he felt sure, no new power would come to him that was not already in his hands.

)|(

Yaqut pretended to sleep, propped in the crotch of a stout oak. He watched Timov get up and slip into the moonlight. He thought the lad intended to flee and felt glad of that. Kirchi lay under the neighboring yew, collapsed in her grief. She was the one Yaqut wanted.

Not a beautiful woman, not as clansmen judged beauty, she filled too skinny a frame—yet Yaqut liked her vulpine stare, green as lit ice, and the way her cheekbones flared. A witch, she stoked the heat of his desire. What a brutish joy he would know with her, for she would resist, certainly—just as the bonesucker had resisted the prick of Yaqut's poison.

Let her resist. He wanted a good flesh-packed fight. He wanted the mixed delight of matching his cleaving ache, swollen from summer-long denial, with a biting, scratching truculence—enough pain to turn his desire into gleeful plunder.

Yaqut gritted out a curse between set teeth when he saw Timov return. The boy had merely gone off to empty his bowels. Should I kill him now? Or let him tag along until an accident finds him? Sleep claimed him as he pondered this, and when he woke, the first rays of sun riddled red through the smoke from the burned woods.

Charred spines of trees stood above brimming fog. Magpies shouted their loss from surviving trees and hedges on the bluffs. Yaqut, after throwing to the ground his blanket of pelts and standing tall in the oak, stretched the sleep-cramps from his muscles. He took the tracking stone from his hip-pouch and pointed it east. The crystal chill faded as he aimed it north. He watched Timov and Kirchi relieve themselves in the bushes, then crept down from his night perch and emptied his bladder over the shackled roots.

East, torn veils of fog revealed foliage, red, yellow, and patches of lingering green. There would be food. Deer, startled by last night's blaze, stumbled among the hedges, and one would be enough for several days.

First, he would claim his prize and get rid of the weakness Kirchi stirred in him. He sauntered to where the witch bent, gathering her pelts, lashing them with twine for the day's trek. When he stuck his lance in the ground and put his hands on her hips, she straightened as if stabbed.

"Here or in the bushes?" Yaqut asked. He caught Timov's alarmed stare, flicked his eyes to the side, telling the boy to go somewhere else.

Timov stood, staring dumbly, as if trying to remember something.

"I'm mourning Hamr," Kirchi said, not even looking over her shoulder.

"You mourned him last night." Yaqut kept his hands on her hips, stepped close enough to smell the leaf-mulch scent of her matted red hair. "Time now to worship the life that remains. Let us go sing the Beastmaker's praises in the bushes."

"No, leave me be."

"We all need more time. But we only get what we have." Yaqut thrilled to feel the tension in her stomach muscles as she readied to twist about or flee. There would be a fight. He looked to the boy with a harsh stare, warning him off. If he had to speak to him, he swore he would do him real injury. "Fight me if you want," he whispered into her bright hair. "I will take you anyway."

For a stretched moment, they stood still. A blackbird screeched like a cat. Sunlight ripped through creaking mists, and the rolling air carried thunder from the Big River. Then, Kirchi jumped forward, seized a club-sized bough from beside the burned-out campfire.

"Stay away from me," she said, with a threatening wave of the club.

Yaqut grabbed his lance, showed his brown teeth in a dread smile. With a swift twirl of his lance, he struck the club from Kirchi's hand and sent it winging away. She staggered backward, and he lunged for her, grabbed her right arm, slipped his lance between her legs and with one push flopped her onto her back.

Timov leaned forward to jump, and Yaqut stopped him with a murderous shout. "Watch if you want—but touch me and you die."

Kirchi struggled ferociously, clawing for Yaqut's good eye. He blocked her arm with a bruising blow from the shaft of his lance, and pressed himself down between her legs, taking her awkward kicks gratefully. His scar-riven cheek took the force of her head-butts, one hand pressing his lance against her chest and arms. With the other, he freed his turgid manhood from his loin-strap and groped for her cleft.

Timov swayed indecisively. If he attacked, he would die. He knew it. If he did not do something, he would want to die. What would Hamr do?

No. He could never be Hamr. He had to do what he could do.

But what? He looked for a weapon, found nothing fatal. It had to be fatal—there would be only one blow.

Fear pounded in him as blood whipped deeper into his body—hiding from the fight to come. He had spotted the pouch at Yaqut's hip. The tracking stone sat in there.

He started forward, stopped. What am I going to do?

He pitted his whole body against fear, determined to do something. Timing alone would judge him now. He waited, watched with his heart soughing, as Kirchi bucked and fought and Yaqut rode her, trying to fit himself to her.

The moment opened: Kirchi's rise met Yaqut's thrust, and Timov leaped into the moment of the hunter's abandon. He snatched the hip pouch, squeezed it open, and tore free the crystal.

Yaqut spun about with a curse of surprise and rage.

By then, Timov had rolled away. He sprang to his feet, the tracking stone shaking in his hand.

As Yaqut rose, his member dangling through his loin-strap, he thrust his lance forward. Fury distorted his torn face. "You are dead, boy!"

Timov knelt before an impacted rock. He smashed the crystal against it, again and again, until it shattered.

An involuntary cry drove through Yaqut, and, automatically, he cocked back his lance.

"Kill me and you'll never find the bonesucker." Timov stood up, streaming with sweat. To speak, he had to rock loose the muscles strapping his jaw: "You know I'm your only hope, Yaqut. Kill me and all you'll ever see of Baat are his droppings."

Kirchi lifted herself to her knees in amazement. The boy had mastered Yaqut. She could see the hunter's murdering lust subside, then disintegrate into embittered resignation. His lance-arm wilted. His cunning face hung forward in enraged submission.

Yaqut stalked toward Timov, menacingly.

Timov held his ground. The hunter stepped so close his blistered visage blocked out everything else. Timov noticed blood tatters in the whites of his eyes, the roots of gray hair at the bony edges of his head.

Yaqut fixed him with a murderous glare. "Find the ghost dancer. That is all that keeps you alive."

Timov's gaze wanted to slither away, yet he held it fast on the blue irises in Yaqut's eyes. Fear, needless now, he had found his strength, a strength stronger than Hamr's had been, and he had to use it—now. "You're not going to touch Kirchi anymore."

A laugh so toneless it touched silence fell from Yaqut's slack mouth. Crazy willfulness rose in him—to gut this whelp and strangle him with his own bowels. The ghost dancers' teeth tied across the hunter's chest harried him at the thought.

His family's blood, soaked into these fangs, cried out to him. For them alone, he would tolerate this show of arrogance. He would not kill the boy, yet. He would let him live for the dead, who lived in himself and, for now, in the boy. He grinned like a skull. "You think you are man enough for the witch?"

"Just don't touch her again, ever." Timov held Yaqut's dire stare another moment, then strode past him to help Kirchi gather the pelts.

"Thank you," Kirchi said with a soundless breath.

Timov managed a tremulous smile. He helped to fit the bound pelts to Kirchi's back. Then, he picked up the satchels, and they left camp, following Yaqut east into the fire and smoke of a new day.

)|(

At the first painted light of dawn, Baat stood up to try his new strength. He wore the stitched pelts he had slept beneath thrown over his shoulders against the dew-cold. His left arm felt weak, yet tingled with feeling. The gash where Yaqut's poison had entered him itched and ached.

He walked around the scrubby yew, where Duru lay curled in sleep. Only her black hair appeared under the deerskin.

His legs swayed with the plunging motion of his knees, yet managed to keep him upright and moving. The painful needlework stitching in his heart had departed, and he could breathe deeply again.

Baat paused to gaze at the leakage of green light in the east. He scanned north and, finally, west into the scorch and smoke of last night's wild fire. Thanks to Duru the Dark Traces had fled. Yet, he knew what they would be shouting as he stared over the black spikes of the burned Forest: Yaqut moves relentlessly toward me with more of his poison. There is no escaping him.

North, the deep lanes of the Forest led to the Big River. He could hear the sliding water above the early racket of birds. Through the slipping wall of smoke and fog, the abrupt end of the Forest came in and out of view. Unless Yaqut or other smallheads caught them, they would reach the grasslands today.

Deep gratitude moved through him like a slow river for this child, who had forgiven him for killing her clansman. With her, he would see the north again.

An oceanic breeze lofted the river scent along the bluffs, carrying with it the daring smell of the open plains: minty keen heather, purple and humming with bees. A thousand memories and their griefs littered Baat's heart in that drafty moment.

He remembered his first summers on the tundra with the People—the solemn rituals and festive songs, the carousing and the careful hunting, and at night the men and women huddled in their circles, and the cold fires of the sky blazing among them. All gone—yet ever-living in his dreams.

This could have been his last sweet summer on the tundra, but sweetness soured when the Dark Traces used him to kill the Longtooth and rape their priestess.

No matter now. Summer had gone. Ahead, the short days labored under the long nights, naked to the sky and the hard stars. Sunlight, already frail, would only grow weaker.

Baat looked at the girl curled around her sleep and worried about what would become of her. Again, he knew what the Dark Traces would say: She will die. Everything living dies.

What would the Bright Ones say? They had led him to her. They had selected her for his companion. They would not abandon her in the north after he had left this world.

An echo of the Dark Traces' laughter mocked him for this thought, for even thinking he would survive today, let alone the trek across the tundra. He sighed and let his helplessness take over.

Duru sat up and peeked blearily into the lingering dusk.

Baat watched her apprehensively, afraid of her grief.

She took his hand and smiled at him.

After she refreshed herself at a creek, they faced west, where Hamr had died and where his soul had gone, and Duru sang a lamentation she had learned from Mother.

Behind her, Baat chanted. Even though he knew she could not understand him, Hamr's spirit could, and to him, Baat sang:

Now you are dead.

Now you are the secret part in us

We meet in the darkness.

You are the song of our wounds.

Baat wandered silently through the woods, Duru on his shoulders. They foraged as they traveled. By mid-morning, they reached the Big River, and there they found stream mussels and kelp to eat.

Duru's leg gash had healed well enough for her to limp without her crutch, and they ate as they walked.

The land smoothed, and the Forest grew dense to the crumbly banks of the river. At noon, they reached a bend where the colorful trees fell back before a stony plain spiked here and there with conifers. Shallows wobbled with sunlight, trickling westward toward grasslands, while the deep waters of the Big River swerved east in a stately arc that descended from the mountains.

Staring at the ghostly patterns of snow on the distant purple range, Duru wondered if she would ever see her Hamr again, or any of the dead. Baat read the dreaminess in her stare correctly, and spoke again his chant for the dead.

They waded west, leaving the Forest behind, and entered the wide-open flatlands that stretched north to the glaciers. Now that they moved in the open, exposed, Baat sought out the deeply rutted migratory paths and ravines carved by spring flood waters rushing to the Big River.

Ahead, a herd of woolly rhinos nibbled the green shoots of the shallows. Baat knew that this red-shag herd moved north, to winter at the spur of the icesheets. They used their horns to probe under the snow for lichen. In a few days, they would pass their less hardy black-furred cousins trundling south. The dark-haired ones preferred the shelter of the Forest when the gale winds blew.

Baat carried Duru through a ravine that led upwind of the beasts. Along the way, they gathered a sheaf of hassock grass and bearded oat. Baat used a rock to crush the stems and paste their skin, hair, and pelts with the aromatic pith. He braided the oats to crowns for their heads and laced bracelets on their arms.

Bedecked in the fragrant mash, Baat and Duru rose from the ravine and let the wind waft their scents into the herd. Duru, frightened of the giant creatures, lingered behind the ghost dancer as he ambled gradually closer. He stopped frequently to sit and pick at the stones, finding grubs and sweet shoots and breathing the deep musk of rhino. A few of the behemoths raised their heads. With their tiny eyes, they watched the intruders, then lowered their lips again to their feeding.

"They're too big to kill," Duru whispered.

Baat smiled, not comprehending, and offered her a snail.

Slowly, Baat and Duru insinuated their way into the herd, disturbing not even the birds perched on the humped backs. Baat showed the girl how to hold out bunches of the oat mash for the rhinos to eat. At first, she feared extending her hand to the big animals, but after she watched them accept the grass docilely, she imitated Baat. Soon, the rhinos had eaten all their mash, and Baat demonstrated a way of digging in the mud of the shallows for the tubers and root mats the animals favored.

The wind changed, freighted with the mentholated scents of the north. The herd began lumbering away from the shallows. Baat hoisted Duru onto the back of a still-feeding rhino. The beast twitched a conch-ear but otherwise did not seem to notice. Baat signed for the girl to hold fast to the thick fur. Then, he laid a pelt over her and lashed it under with twine.

Baat climbed onto the back of an adjacent rhino and pulled a deerhide over himself. He waved to Duru as the animals began moving, following the others in the herd, tramping north. The earth rumbled and juddered, and Duru hung on with all her fierce strength until the powerful rhythms of the beast became familiar, and she relaxed.

She smiled, waved at Baat, and hugged the animal under her. The sun-rippled shallows fell away and lithe grass wavered on all sides. Birds whizzed overhead, the sky shook, and Duru laughed, riding the back of thunder.

The Door of the Mountain

The wind poured out of the north, blue with the smell of ice. At night, the full moon gazed through auroras over the woolly rhinos drowsing in small groups. Horned heads bent, the herd lowed with dark, seismic music.

Baat's glowing body interested the herd less than did the whiskers of autumnal grass among the cobbles. Their faces of living rock only occasionally looked toward his radiant dance.

Duru stared in wonder at Baat from inside the big reindeer skin she had pulled about herself. Out here, with no trees to block the view, she could see the spiraling trail of stardust glittering down the sky to the ghost dancer's body. In the distances on every side, similar funnels of sparks glinted, and Duru thought those must be other dancers.

Baat carried the cold fire to her. Shivering energy washed through Duru. Seraph-like forms waded out of the moon-glare, weightless, faceless frost-bodies. Almost human, they moved in breezy rags of light rayed with darkness.

The ul udi had come down to guide Baat on his night journey. Though the rhinos had provided a clever way of escaping the Forest, their migration would not lead to where Baat must go. From here, Baat needed to carry Duru at night, and by day Duru would watch over the ghost dancer and prepare food.

"What about the others?" Duru asked, pointing to the numerous blue filaments along the horizon.

There are no others, a Bright One said. Those are decoys we have lowered to distract hunters.

"Then the tracking stone—"

Your brother destroyed it.

Duru looked to Baat, astonished.

"He's brave," Baat said, and in the glassy light of the ul udi, Duru understood him. "Yaqut would kill him if he knew."

Yaqut knows. But he has not killed him, yet. Timov has made himself useful to the Longtooth hunter. He is tracking you with his own inner sight.

Duru clutched Baat's hand. "Timov has spoken with the Bright Ones. I saw him. He won't lead Yaqut to you."

Baat smiled at her with sad understanding. "Yaqut can read spoor well enough to know if your brother deceives him. That is why the Bright Ones have let down other ropes of fire in places where we are not. Without them, Yaqut wouldn't need a tracker."

We must help Timov, the ul udi acknowledged. The Dark Traces are in him, too. When Yaqut no longer needs him, the hunter will kill him. And if he dies now, the Dark Traces will own him.

"Bright Ones, what will you do?" Duru asked beseechingly.

He has made himself useful to Yaqut. There is nothing more we can do. The Dark Traces are powerful. You must move quickly. Hurry to the door of the mountain.

Baat lifted Duru and followed the ul udi through the docile herd and into the amethyst night. After the violent motion of the rhino, the motion of the ghost dancer's loping seemed gentle: rocking like a dugout on a placid sea.

And though Duru tried hard to stay awake and listen to the ul udi, she heard only a little before falling asleep: The bodies of light never die. They are as timeless as the light that they are. When the body of flesh dies, its light is released. It belongs again to the freedom of the universe and to the mysteries of its own nature.

The low voices of the ul udi lulled Baat, too, and he strode across the rocky, uneven terrain in a purposeful trance. He had heard stories of the body of light many times before. All the stories had interested him once—how the stars blazed as suns, how everything had once cooked in the stars and been gathered into giant rocks that whirled about even more gigantic suns, and how the suns gathered in enormous whirlpools and the whirlpools linked in long chains across the sky: all of creation held together by lightning.

The stories no longer interested Baat. He did not want to know any more. He wanted to experience for himself the celestial depths as a body of light and to feel the truth of those stories.

As one of the People, his birthright guaranteed him a place among the ul udi of the upper air. There, he would join all the other People who had carried the cold fire while on earth. Soon, he would unite with the other ghost dancers who had made this journey north to where the ul udi could walk with the animals.

Daylight streaks appeared as a soft rivulet of clouds in the east. While its gray waters pearled brighter, Baat sought out a grassy swatch beside a narrow lake. Under the thrust of a red sandstone boulder, he lay down and let exhaustion claim him.

Duru woke as he put her down in the yellow grass. She watched the moon set, a breath of mist in the cold blue.

Among green sedges of the lakeshore, Duru found sweet tubers that, even uncooked, tasted lovely. There could be no fires. So, she prepared the tubers by mashing them and mixing in insects and lizard meat she spent the day collecting.

Twice, beasts wandered out of the stony ranges, big-shouldered hyenas and wolves with long limbs. A few thrown rocks sufficed to drive them off, and she did not have to rouse Baat.

From the top of the sandstone boulder, Duru searched for Yaqut. The herd of woolly rhinos they had ridden yesterday dotted the southeast. In the west, bison rivered in long dark streams. White mountains shone in the north as splinters of ice. And, overhead, wedges of geese flew south.

The short day charred to night swiftly. Baat rubbed sleep from his face and dismissed his dreams—more nightmares of the smallheads slinking through tall grass, faces smudged with bone-ash of his dead clan. He ate the tuber-mash gratefully. Before he finished, the shine seeped from out of the darkness and glossed the air around him.

"How far is there to go?" Duru asked, when the dancing ultraviolet lace of the ul udi appeared around them.

"We'll reach the Serpent Glacier before the new moon," he said.

"Can you walk that long?" Duru asked, concerned. "The days are too short to rest."

Baat smiled vacantly. "I have only to make this journey once." His grateful eyes looked down at her. "The ul udi will lead you back south. There, seek out the witch Neoll Nant Caw. She will find you a home among one of the northern tribes."

"And my brother?"

"Him, as well."

If either of us survives, she meant to add, though there was no need.

Baat nodded and said no more.

The ul udi began their hypnotic stories. They spoke of the body of light's destiny, the illusion of time, unreal as the eerie perception of the sun and moon rising when in fact the world rolled in space as an egg, spinning in emptiness, whirling about the sun—and the body of light shone in reality as a broken piece of another dimension, deeper than depth, shorter than any height, thinner than width, and free of time. She did not listen.

In Duru's mind, the image of her brother rose. As sleep immobilized her body in the arms of the ghost dancer, her soul climbed into the sky to meet him.

Baat felt her go and felt a pang of nostalgia for the caring that carried her. Years had passed since he had cared for anyone. The larger awareness of the ul udi engulfed his longing.

You are not alone. The People are with you.

"They are with you, in the sky," Baat responded. He watched his footing carefully. Duru had withdrawn from her body, and if he dropped her now, she could easily die.

The People are in your bones, in the marrow that makes your blood. Have you forgotten the stories of the shells that make the body?

"Tell me again."

Smaller than you can see are shells, round and flat like the carapace of crabs. They link together to make your flesh, your bones. In each shell is a piece of your life—and each piece contains all the lives that have lived before you, every grandparent, every distant animal ancestor of your oldest grandparent.

"This is just a story."

It is a true story.

"It is a story, nonetheless. I am alone."

Listen, Hollow Bone: Each piece of life in each of the many, tiny shells of your flesh is an antenna.

"As on insects."

Yes, you remember this story. Like the antennas on an insect that hear vibrations and feel changes, so the antennas in the shells of your body feel the light and the changes in the light. That is how we can be with you. We are bodies of light far above in the upper air—yet, the antennas in the tiny pieces of life in the shells of your body feel us, feel the changes that are our voices and our thoughts.

"Why do the smallheads not feel you?"

Their antennas are not tuned to us. They hear only themselves.

"Then, I'm not alone. The smallheads are alone."

Yes. The smallheads are alone with themselves. And when they grieve, they grieve alone.

"I like the stories of the People better. I like the one that says each star is someone who has lived before, and when we die we appear in the sky."

That is only a story. The stars are suns, far away.

"I know it is only a story. I know it is not true. And that is why I like it."

)|(

Timov sat thinking of his survival. Absentmindedly, he spun the disk of tortoise shell around a thin reed and watched the markings blur. When Hamr had first shown him the wheel, a lifetime ago, among the Blue Shell, he had marveled at Hamr's words that the sun and the moon, too, turned round as the wheel. Now, looking at the sun bloat red in the west while the moon lifted gigantically orange in the east, he knew they held roundness.

"Hamr talked to me about the wheel," Kirchi said, as if she could read his mind. "He told me about Spretnak. He told me that destiny is the emptiness at the center of our lives, around which our lives turn."

"Yeah, Hamr loved that old man."

They sat among a cluster of low boulders on the tundra, the Forest a line of indistinct purple to the south. The land lay flat on all sides, clearly revealing the synchrony of the sun's setting as the full moon rose.

Experiencing this balanced moment, Timov, Kirchi, and Yaqut, who sat apart, could hear each in their own memories the chants their clans sang to greet the sun's pale companion.

Yaqut hummed a moon-song he remembered and stared out over the fire at the dark flecks of a distant herd. He recognized the woolly rhino, the red shag giants who moved against the southern migrations of the other animals. Baat has surely used them to mask his flight from the Forest. Right now, he camps somewhere on the far side of that herd. Small flickers like heat lightning nibbled at the darkness in the north. Those will be the ul udi, coming down to comfort their monster.

With his inmost marrow, Yaqut felt the certainty of finding the bonesucker out here on the flatlands. Yaqut had his home in the north. Its barrenness felt familiar to him. Here, he had learned the Ways of Wandering from his elders. Here, he had stalked and poisoned most of the tall bonesuckers. And here, among the rocks to the north, he had lost his parents. Their spilled blood chilled the air more sharply for him than the north wind.

The ghosts of his tribal past would guide him to food and water, Yaqut knew. To find Baat, he needed Timov's inner sight. Glad now that the boy had smashed the tracking stone, he watched the moon lift like a grand skull.

He remembered too well the unnatural ferocity of the Moon Bitch, and he felt grateful not to have the witch's crystal in his possession. The way that evil creature moved in eerie ripple-starts like a watery reflection, yet flashed fangs and talons of keen reality and bellowed like a pride of lions terrified.

Yaqut also appreciated that Timov had taken the young witch from him. His lust to dominate the woman had almost bested him. How corruptible is the flesh, he thought, looking down at the blackening wood the hungry flames fed upon.

For his hunt of this most wily of ghost dancers to succeed, Yaqut understood he could not squander his power in sexual indulgence. The tight confrontation with the bonesucker, the death of Hamr, and the burning Forest had shaken his resolve, he realized now, and he had almost betrayed his purpose by lusting for the young witch.

With a sidelong glance, Yaqut watched Kirchi and Timov playing with the tortoise wheel, smiling at each other. Let them amuse themselves, he decided. That would better enable him to focus on the hunt. Later, after the demands of the dead had been met, there would be time for the corruptible needs of the flesh.

Kirchi could feel Yaqut staring at her. She shifted slightly, so she would not have to see anything of his broken face. Her stomach tightened to think how close he had come to taking her.

With gratitude, she smiled at Timov, who reminisced aloud about Hamr's heroic deeds among the Blue Shell. In the broken moonlight, his dark eyes and hair seemed black as night itself, and his youthful face floated apparition-like. The hollows of his cheeks and the breadth of his jaw hinted at the man he would be—if he survived.

Against the purple turbulence of sunset, the ruff of his lion-skin fanning out in the steady breeze, Timov had looked almost as masterful as her Hamr had. Even though his resourceful courage and cleverness had saved her from Yaqut, he was not Hamr, not the one she had prayed to the Great Mother to save her from Neoll Nant Caw. Hamr had done that. Hamr had slain the Lion and the Moon Bitch. Hamr alone had embodied the male-beauty she had wanted.

Timov caught the sadness moving through Kirchi, and he put the wheel aside and brushed his knuckles against her cheek. So that she would not have to face Yaqut, he went to the fire and helped himself to pieces of the rabbit he had stoned earlier and that Yaqut had skinned and cooked. He expected some comment—perhaps a challenge—from the old hunter. Yaqut simply stared at him with an unreadable expression on his raw face.

Kirchi and Timov ate in silence. The huge, crystal-bright sky lifted dream-shapes out of the landscape: Boulders shimmered like bearskin huts, shadow animals sneaked through ditch-grass, and bats swerved against the eternities of the sky.

A shadow had edged closer. It ripped free of the darkness, billowed as a cloud of grassheads, then dissolved into a human form.

"Duru," Timov whispered, almost afraid to breathe lest the apparition shatter.

Kirchi shrank into herself at the sight of the young girl. Duru’s black hair and onyx eyes glinted with moonfire, her small, round face waiting as if to say something. As she moved to speak, her image scattered like seed tufts in the wind. Only moonlight slanted where she had been.

The next day, after following Timov's cold-fire sense of his sister northwest over grass-stubbled land rutted with numerous trails, they sighted bison moving south. Though the herd milled a horizon away, the wind churned with the mulchy, drumming presence of them.

"Longtooth," Yaqut declared and pointed his short lance into the dust shadows behind the herd. Squinting patiently, Timov and Kirchi spotted them: dots of movement, hunters following the herd.

"How do you know they're Longtooth?" Timov asked.

"They follow the Bison south. They are on their way to join other bands at Salamander Flats for the Frost Moon rites. I had hoped to be there with them, were it not for the trouble you have given me." Yaqut shook his head with regret.

Now, inspired by the sight of his clansmen, Yaqut pressed their trek almost to a run.

Kirchi faltered, then disappeared into a ditch rife with rock-ivy and the tall grass that had flourished where the herds could not reach. When Timov went back for her, he found her peeling the thick moss from the rocks at the soggy bottom of the depression.

"I'm bleeding," she declared.

Timov started down through the profusion of nettles and ivy.

"It's moon-bleeding," she added, and he stopped as though she had uttered a curse. "Let me attend to myself and I'll be with you."

Timov retreated hastily. When he told Yaqut, the hunter touched his genitals and waved his lance to ward off whatever blood magic might have smirched Timov. "I am going ahead. If you are wise, you will come with me."

During the moon-flow, among the Blue Shell, Timov had to leave Mother's cave and sleep in the cold, damp root cavern with the slave Biklo. Otherwise, he would have been subject to the spirits that bled women to sate the blood-thirst of the Great Mother.

"I used to believe that, too," Kirchi said later, when they were gathering kindling for that night's fire. "That's what the Mothers say, but the witches say different."

The witches had spoken with the ul udi, Timov knew.

"And the ul udi taught me that this is nothing to be afraid of. My womb is cleansing itself, preparing to receive the next egg that I may grow into a child."

"No spirits?" Timov nodded. "No evil blood magic?"

"No moon-flow, either," Kirchi smiled. "I've been eating wonder-of-the-night berries to skip my flow this month. I just pretended to bleed, because I knew it would get us away from Yaqut for a while. I'm afraid of him, Timov. I know he wants to kill us."

"You're a witch," Timov said. "Isn't there something you can do, some magic—"

"I'm not like Neoll Nant Caw. I can't shapeshift. And I've only begun to learn about poisons. I'm sure Yaqut knows more."

"Then, we'll just have to wait."

"For what? He's too cunning to deceive, too strong to fight. What can we wait for?"

Timov watched the way the fox-fine angles of her face absorbed her concern into a concentrated alertness. She never seemed to brood or frown, only to be more watchful, as if fear were something that existed only outside herself. When she talked about being afraid, she meant she perceived real danger.

Timov studied this with fascination, for it was so different from the continual dread that filled his body. For him, dread persisted—unshakable and vivid. The Blue Shell's Panther men had not sponsored him when boys two years younger had already been fully initiated. No one had wanted the contagion of his fear.

And, for this reason, he had disliked Hamr before he had captured his horse and had become a great man. Hamr had laughed at fear – whereas, fear so wholly belonged to Timov that he had felt Hamr had been laughing at him.

Remembering Hamr, recalling all that he had accomplished, all that had been lost, left Timov numb. He caught a few voles, which Yaqut cooked with the insects and grassheads Kirchi gathered when scavenging firewood, and they ate without talking. In the middle of their meal, the moonlight over the grass swirled, like flames on oil, and Duru appeared again. She floated closer.

Timov looked up startled and started to speak. Kirchi stopped him, reached into her satchel and extracted one of her moonstones. She placed the pearly stone on the far side of the fire. The wraith fluttered above it like a wavering thread of incense.

"Timov—" Duru's voice squeaked in the air, tiny as a bat's. "Follow if you must. But beware, brother. The Dark Traces are inside you. If you die now, they will torment you."

"Duru, where are you? Are you alive?"

A blur of some object flew past Timov's face, and a lance struck the moonstone, sent it skipping into the dark. Duru's image wisped away.

Yaqut jumped into the firelight and retrieved his weapon. "I warned you about the witch," he said gruffly. "There will be no conjuring of ghosts on my hunt."

Timov began to rise, a protest starting in him, and Yaqut touched the tip of his lance to the crook of the boy's collarbones and forced him down.

The hunter backed away and strode into the moonlit darkness.

)|(

At night, the far rim of the earth glowed as though the world burned. Banners of celestial flames unraveled green and yellow in the sky overhead, and their shreds fluttered on the horizon. Baat moved gingerly among unseen potholes, grass-hidden fissures, and the malice of sharp rocks.

Twice in one night, his feet slipped from under him and he stumbled. Both times, he took the force of the fail on his back and lay gazing up through tears of pain and frustration at the lopsided moon, the sleeping girl cushioned against his chest.

Duru used Baat's cold fire to go into a flying trance so that she could visit her brother. She accepted the great danger that she might be disturbed while out of her body. Her soul could be flung into the upper air, prey to the Dark Traces, who could keep her from coming back until her flesh died.

Baat tried to talk with the girl about this. When the Bright Ones appeared at night, shining around them like formless man-sized snowflakes, the ghost dancer and Duru could understand each other. Duru agreed not to fly out of her body, just to rest. Yet, even when she did not try, her concern for her brother carried her out of herself.

Baat could protect her from losing her body only by keeping the cold fire away from himself, so that Duru could not use it anymore. At nightfall, when the violent shine seeped from his skin, he raised his arms over his head and drew all the power into his hands. The energy burned in his grasp, hot as though he had thrust his fingers into the throbbing heart of a wood fire. Then, with a burst of pain, lightning twisted off his hands and writhed upward into the spectral night.

Drained of his power, Baat carried Duru asleep in his arms through the night. At sunrise, he sought out kettle lakes and glacial streams. In that thick undergrowth, he located water and food. Then, he slept, and Duru watched over him and prepared their one meal of the day.

Each day, the land became stranger to Duru. Spires of rock slanted out of the ground among silver ponds and water-filled sinkholes. The ground itself grew pebbly, strewn with smoothly worn gravel.

Gradually, the rubble thickened, until frost-shattered rocks covered the earth. At one site, stones clustered in perfect interlacing circles as far as she could see. She believed them to be spirit rings.

Baat knew from the ul udi that these magic rings emerged from the freezing and thawing of the silty ground, which churned the thick soil like slow boiling water, arranging the rocks in the precise patterns of the circling heat.

Overhead, arrows of birds streamed south, stopping at the numerous lakes along the way. They filled the chill opal air with their calling.

Baat, seeing the ice peaks drawing nearer each day, broke his prohibition against fire, and they cooked duck and geese. Standing on a shelf of stacked boulders, staring north across mirror lakes bright with the reflections of the snow range, they spotted the blue vault of the Serpent Glacier.

Baat had dark memories of the People stoning smallheads here. He also had the joy of remembering his initiation in this sacred place, thirty-five summers ago.

Here, the old ones had brought him and several other children to witness the Last Rites. Only then could they attend the ghost dancing. The whole summer long, during the journey north, the young boy Baat had been plump with pride, for not all the People could call down the cold fire.

Many, like his parents and his brothers and sisters, feared the ul udi and wanted nothing to do with them. From his first awareness, he had yearned to hold the cold fire. He wanted to be empowered by the ul udi and to know the mysteries the old ones whispered among themselves.

Under the webs of stars, with the cold fire returned to the night, Baat remembered back to his boy-days and his green heart, glowing with wonder.

In his sixth summer, Baat had secretly followed the old ones when they left the camp with the older boys. The boys, who had trekked to the Serpent Glacier the summer before, were to be made men, and Baat had crept after them, to witness the mystery for himself.

Glistening with spiced nut-oil the mothers rubbed over their young, he had been forced to crawl on hands and knees through the thorn scrub below the wind so the others would not smell him. The thorns had cut his back and pulled out tufts of his hair, yet he had pushed on. He would see for himself the living fire the adults spoke of in hushed awe when they thought the children were not listening.

Baat had lain on his belly under clawing bramble after he reached the high ground where the men conducted ceremonies. Always before, he had been forced to peer through the wicker of his mother's hut when the ghost dancers came up here at night to worship, and he had seen little more than fireshadows against the dark sky wavering in rhythm to the drum-songs. But that night, while elder sister in the wicker hut thought the bundled straw beneath the buffalo skin his slumbering body, he lay in darkness outside the ritual grounds and witnessed the living fire.

Sunshine climbed down the night sky. Baat hid the fear in him and lay still, trembling inside, as heat lightning stood atop the high rocks above the men. He beheld the fright in the faces of the older boys and observed the old ones looking up at the fire-tipped boulders with eyes as still as ice.

Then, he no longer knew what he perceived. The fire, shapeless as brook-water, splashed over the gathered men. Radiance clung to them, went blue all over the skin of their bodies, and sparked green in their long hair, green and slithery as eels.

And the men did not cry out but lifted their flaming faces to the black night and began to dance. Some beat drums tied to their hips, others beat their chests and thighs and sent sparks gusting.

The older boys knelt before the burning, dancing men. The skin of the boys' bodies began to light up. The fire crawled green through their hair, flared white-gold in their eyes and filled their open, astonished mouths like fog. And soon, they stood, sheathed in flame and dancing.

One of the boys shrieked with red rage, lurched about, and ripped off the ear of the boy next to him. Blood spat like venom. The fathers grabbed the wild boy and struck him between the eyes; and the fire flashed—like sunlight in a tree-crown—and went out of him, leaving him dark and slumped in the arms of the dancers. The cold fire continued to whirlpool above him.

The Dark Traces had tried to take that boy, Baat would learn later. At the time, he did not know what he had seen. Another man took the torn ear and slapped it against the wounded boy's head where it stuck. The fire burned brighter there a moment, white-hot along the rip, and the boy became whole again.

The child Baat trembled with terror. He crawled backward through the bramble. And his last glimpse of that ritual revealed the violent boy's fire spinning back into him, lifting him into the dance—red with ghostly fire and with eyes like giant snowflakes.

Later, when Baat joined the men, he asked many questions, so many that they called him Hollow Bone, good for noise and little else. "Who are the ul udi?" he inquired many times before receiving an answer.

"They are the fiery ones who live in the sky. They come down to us at night and wear our bodies as we wear the pelts of Elk and Bison. Hollow Bone, you must not think of the ul udi until you are a man. You must concentrate now on learning the hunt."

Baat’s memories fell away. He stood goat-footed on a boulder before the dawn. In the years since, he had learned the hunt. He had also learned grief. He did not want to remember any more of that. Days without the cold fire in him, without the silent, penetrating music of the ul udi to entrance him, had allowed memories to congeal, and his body felt heavy with the weight of his past.

Ahead, between purple mountains, the glacier shone under the last sliver of moon. As the sky brightened, blue lights came on within the ice. Clouds boiled over the snowcaps, and Baat woke Duru.

Together, they wandered among mighty boulders of scree. With jaw set, Baat reviewed the glyphs the ghost dancers of former times had etched on the rock walls.

Duru recognized the silver dazzle of an ul udi drifting among the weathered slabs, bright even in a slash of daylight. When the tall rocks opened to a pebbled clearing, a dozen of the Bright Ones came into view. They ruffled in the dense sunshine, translucent as jellyfish.

"The upper air comes to earth here," Baat announced, and she understood him. "The Bright Ones will guide us now."

"Welcome, Hollow Bone," a small voice said, and one of the Bright Ones dissolved to a swarm of golden insects, flashing octagonal sparks. "You have been away a long time. Welcome to the door of the mountain.

The husks of golden light flitted ahead, across the clearing and through a crevice between joined granite monoliths. Baat and Duru followed over the ice-polished stones to the granite wall.

Using fractures for toeholds, they climbed into the dark cleft, and the lights of the ul udi directed them through the blackness. A blue star gleamed at the end of the corridor and they could see that it opened to a sun-blinding mountain of ice boulders—the face of the glacier.

Baat and Duru, breaths smoking, trailed the sparkles of the ul udi into a crevasse. Walled in by ice, the air quivered aqua.

Baat held the girl's hand firmly to keep her from slipping into the gaping cracks in the tunnel floor. Duru hugged herself against the cold.

In the jellied blue light of the frozen wall, faces gazed back—the corpse-stares of a dozen ghost dancers. They lay frozen in the ice, jumbled together where they had dropped their bodies to climb into the sky.

)|(

The wind, blind and invisible, carried winter. The clear, furiously bright sky promised another clement day, yet the geese flew south in clouds. The horses, too, sensed the deepening meaning of the wind and moved, not pausing, to browse among the green wetlands between the finger lakes.

Yaqut lay flat on a rusty boulder. He espied men among the horse herds, riding atop their beasts. Storm Riders, he realized, a rival tribe of the Longtooth. Anger flashed through him. He hoped that Timov and the witch stayed out of sight. Though, of course, they would think of Hamr when they spotted the horsemen, and they might even leap and shout.

The last of the horsemen trotted into the migratory ravines and out of sight. Yaqut sat up, thought of doubling back to warn the boy, but his weariness cancelled that intention.

In the days since they had entered the tundra, he had begun to feel his age. Little as he liked the deceptions of the Forest, at least among the trees he enjoyed ample shelter and rest. Out here, exposure stole a man's power.

He tightened the pelts he had strung to the leather straps girding his wiry body and squinted into the glare from the snow-crags and reflecting lakes. If he lost the boy, he could not track the bonesucker on his own. This close to the icefields, too many glacial erratics and boulder mazes abounded in which the ghost dancer could hide.

Instead of going back for Timov, Yaqut used what strength he had to approach a band of antelope drinking at one of the waterholes. After he had lanced his antelope and skinned it, Yaqut carried the choice parts to the top of a clutter of boulders.

There the hyenas, who had watched him from the far shore of the narrow lake, would have difficulty pilfering while he gathered tinder. As he stacked rocks atop the meat to fend off the birds circling overhead, he surveyed a long way out over the stony land, and his heart beat faster. He recognized the labyrinth of tilted boulders into which the ghost dancer had fled.

Surprise and hard-edged grief sat Yaqut down heavily. He locked his gaze on the rough terrain to the northwest. All his life, he had followed the Ways of Wandering across the tundra, but he had not come here—not since his child days, when the bonesuckers had ambushed his clan among those tumbled stones. Yaqut's breath ended in a sob. When Timov and Kirchi found him later in the day, he still sat there, rigid with impacted grief and anger.

From the time of the full moon, they had lingered behind the old hunter. They saw him only when he sought them out to confirm, by Timov's inner sight, what he already instinctively knew.

Days alone together, Timov had come to know the witch better. She had ever wanted only simplicity and the blessings and comforts of the tribe. She had not wanted to be a witch any more than he had wanted to be a wanderer. Where he lived perpetually scared, thrumming with dread, she endured inviolable isolation, a solitude that had begun in her childhood.

Her seeress mother had set her apart from the other children by insisting her daughter be treated with the deference due the divine. Her isolation deepened after she matured into a rangy, thin-hipped woman—of no interest to the men or the Mothers. In her desolation, she had prayed to the Great Mother for help—and was given to Neoll Nant Caw. She thought her prayers had been mocked until Hamr came for her. And now with his death, her desolation had become harder to bear than ever.

Timov felt her forlornness as keenly, and when he noticed the horsemen riding south he stood up in amazement and hope leaped in him that they had arrived as an answer to Kirchi's prayers.

When he jumped and waved, Kirchi tackled him. "They're Storm Riders," she cautioned. "Enemies of my people. They'll make a game of our deaths."

The two lay still against each other as the horse-thunder dimmed in the distance. The comfort of their embrace surprised both of them. Is he the one the Great Mother has sent for me? Kirchi wondered, looking with amazement into the deep black of Timov's eyes.

Timov stared back, all the wished-for joy of his life rising into his heart. And he thought suddenly, this strange woman with the apricot hair might be his destiny. Yaqut's threat had joined their lives. They lived as one with only their gentleness to counter a harsh fate.

Kirchi pressed her lips to Timov's, smiling. "The Great Mother has thrown us together."

Timov sat up, his insides throbbing, face pale. "Will we stay together?"

Kirchi's smile slid away, sadly. "I don't know."

"Do you want to stay with me?"

"Oh, yes." Kirchi hugged him, breathed deeply the fern-scent of his hair. "If we can escape Yaqut—if we can find your sister—"

Timov held her tightly, the fear of her departure clogging his breathing. He would not lose her as he had lost everything else. Yaqut could kill him, but Timov would not lose her to the Mudman.

After the Storm Riders passed, Kirchi and Timov hurried north, afraid their previous night's camp would be found and the horsemen would circle back for them. They discovered the butchered remains of an antelope and Yaqut sitting among buzzing flies. He looked at them with a blank stare, then shooed off the insects with a bloody hand and ordered them to build a fire.

"We saw Storm Riders," Kirchi said. "They'll spot our smoke and come back for us."

"They are not coming back," Yaqut mumbled. "Smell the wind."

The wind had the familiar heathery scent of the tundra, and the boy and the witch glanced at each other, not comprehending.

"Look at the geese," Yaqut added, wearily rising to his feet. He pointed to the flocks that peppered the blue distance. "They are not lighting on the lakes. The small fish and the insects they savor are still there."

"A storm is coming," Kirchi realized. "How soon?"

"Soon."

"There are no squall clouds anywhere," Timov said, wheeling around the open horizon.

Yaqut ignored him. He pointed northwest toward black mountains and their gleaming ice peaks. "The hunt ends there, less than a day's walk from here."

"How do you know?" Timov asked.

"Get the firewood," Yaqut said. "We need to eat well. Tomorrow, we walk hard."

Lightfall in the Stone

Baat knelt before the dead ghost dancers, listening for their voices. With the Bright Ones sparkling in the chill air, he had thought to hear again the songs of the People. Only silence touched him. He shrugged and stood up.

On his journeys here as a child, he had been too young for the significance of this chamber, and he had not been shown the tumbled figures in the ice. By the time he had become old enough to participate in the rituals, the clan had thinned so greatly that only ghost dancers came here, to die or to help their companions die.

Slots in the rock wall behind them admitted daylight, and by that radiance Duru examined the blurred faces of the corpses—thickbrowed men and women with worn-down chins, broad cheeks, and astonished hair standing out in red spikes. The people looked like Baat, and seeing them Duru realized sadly that she viewed his fate—to shuck off his body like a husk.

Baat read the consternation on her face and said gently, "These are just hides. After the Bright Ones took their souls into the upper air, the People carried these bodies atop the glacier, to a sacred hole deep in the mountains and dropped them in. I saw that myself as a child. A stream under the glacier must have carried some of them here."

He placed his fingertips against ice. The strength he projected into the wall did not come back, and by that he knew no souls had been trapped in there. "Even though their faces have not lost their features after all these years, they're just garments, Duru. Nothing more."

Duru reached up and put her fingers to Baat's lips, feeling the guttural sounds that he made yet comprehending him in her own language. Each time she had experienced this, she felt a frightful wonder, more so here in the death chamber of Baat's clan. And she grasped that this would be very nearly the last time she could talk with him and his powerful spirits.

Baat touched a thick finger to her forehead. "It's here that you hear me. This is where the soft lightnings of the ul udi touch us."

"I will miss you, Hollow Bone." Duru's eyes filled with tears.

Baat nodded affectionately at this child, who, with her dust-gray face and mud-stiffened furs looked like a playful rock given life. "I could never have come even this far without you."

"What's going to happen now, Baat?"

Anxiety for this child's well-being tightened the ghost dancer's stomach. He looked away, at the snowy daylight shining at the far end of the tunnel. Whatever good he could do for her would be done there. "Come. We must find the cairn."

Duru glanced again at the tumbled bodies in the solid freeze and followed Baat into the corridor of rock. At the far end, a blue light gleamed. It became the mountainous face of the glacier as they approached, a blue-white cliff crumbling into chunks and sheared wedges big as crags. Before it, the silt-black ground, strewn with smaller rocks, lay perfectly flat. Ul udi glinted before the blue wall, a sprinkling of stardust in the sunny air.

Not as many Bright Ones appeared as Baat had hoped. During his childhood, he had squinted against their glare. That had been at night and earlier in the year, when the wise spirits waxed strongest. This late in the season of life, the air glowed darkly in the long rays of dim heat.

Baat pointed to a heap of orange stones at the foot of the glacier, many of the rocks half-buried in ice. Above it, several ul udi glinted in the air, tiny as stars. "The altar of the Last Rite," he said with hushed breath.

Duru cocked her head, looking for some semblance of structure in the rocks.

"The ice has toppled it since I saw it last," he said and stepped out from the escarpment.

"Will it still work?"

Baat nodded. "The power is in the rocks, not in their arrangement. The power called iron."

"What's that?"

"Another of the ul udi's stories." Baat's hackles rose as he neared the fallen altar, and he signed for Duru to stop. The sky came down to earth here. He could feel the luminous music of the Bright Ones growing with power in him the closer he got. Another step and he would plunge into trance.

He stopped and regarded the rusty rocks poking out from under pearly mounds of packed ice. Gloom of nostalgia claimed him, and he discerned again the original structure: a dolmen slab of red iron braced by black granite monoliths, a doorway to the sky through which generations of ghost dancers had passed.

These orange stones constituted the shattered pieces of the slab. The vertical river still flowed through them. He felt its splendor lifting the small hairs at the back of his neck, ready to hoist his spirit into the heavens.

Build a fire.

The Bright One's voice had come from far away. They sounded weakly here in daylight—which meant that at nightfall the Dark Traces would thrive.

He had to clear away some of the ice so that he could lay his entire body down inside the vertical river. He looked back toward the colossal boulders the glacier had shoved ahead of itself, searching the lichen-splotched scree for wood.

Thorn shrubs peeked from among the shale, and mats of recumbent juniper flourished on the pebbly ground where the tall rocks blocked the wind. With Duru's help, he culled the thick brush for dead branches and used stripped thorn-vine to tie up a large bundle of faggots.

At the edge of the glacier, among the ferrous rocks, Baat fed a big fire with bales of the dried tundra shrub. He dragged scraggly hassocks from under shelves of rock, where the wind had wedged them, and threw them onto the flames. The fire watched the ice weep and shadows of orange stones appear in the bleary depths.

"Now what will happen?" Duru asked apprehensively.

"While the fire does its work, I will speak with the ul udi. They'll show me where Yaqut is and your brother."

"Let me see."

"No. You must watch for danger around us. We dare not rely on the ul udi to alert us. This is their weak season."

Duru obediently sat in the buffeting warmth of the fire and observed Baat observing the stony shadows darken in the ice. He sat on a flat rock, eyes narrowed as if about to fall asleep. He slid into trance.

As before on their journey when Baat was unconscious, Duru selected a high point to watch for enemies. This time, she chose a tall rock at the spur of the glacier. From there, she could see across the flat moraine to the door of the mountain they had come through. The enormous boulders crowded there defeated any attempt to view the tundra beyond them, and she sat staring at the lichen blotches on the wind-torn rocks.

The frigid air smelled empty of life as it flowed from the north over the glacier and tumbled into the dense thorn and shards of granite. Rising and falling with the wind, the sound of rivers echoed, a murmur of torrents from inside the glacier. Every now and then, she heard deep groaning of invisibly shifting ice.

Though no sounds or scents of trouble intruded, Duru reminded herself that Yaqut stalked somewhere nearby, among the rock crannies, drawing closer each moment. Timov accompanied him—if yet he lived. That he, too, might be dead she tried not to think about.

Still, the cold immensity of her aloneness closed in. Soon the ul udi would take Baat away, and if Timov were dead, then no one, truly no one, remained who knew her.

Duru looked back at the ghost dancer, saw him with his head hung forward, shoulders slumped, and silver sparks glinting around him. He dwelled with his spirits now, receiving their last instructions. And regarding that, the strangeness of the whole last season gripped her: She wondered if all this continued as a dream, a confused spirit journey such as the Mothers recounted in their fire-songs.

Maybe she was still in a fever back among the Blue Shell. Maybe when the spirits took Baat away, she would wake and find Mother and Cyndell laughing together, Aradia full with Hamr's child, Hamr in the vest he had taken from the Boar to avenge Father's death, and her brother lazing among the old women.

A cold wind blew over Duru. She relinquished her hope with a forlorn sigh and stared at the glaring snow peaks until her eyes hurt with the conviction of her wakefulness. Sparkles wisped in the indigo sky.

She thought these ul udi until they flurried around her. Snow slanted through sunlight, and Duru turned a slow, amazed circle on her tall perch, searching for clouds. The sky shone overhead like a deep pool.

)|(

In the cold eye of the wind, Baat floated. An updraft of magnetic current tugged at him, and he held back. If he soared now, he risked being out of his body when Yaqut came. Death then would give him to the Dark Traces.

Their murderous yearning surrounded him in the cold: Kill Yaqut. He will stab the eyes from Duru for helping you. He will leave her blind and bleeding for the wolves. Kill him first.

"Where is he?"

Baat noticed his body and the crackling fire swerve off, and he rose above the snake-length of the glacier. Broad desert, sere and vast, stretched away toward tumbled layers of mountain ranges and silver horizons. Beyond the ice ramparts from where the glacier descended, storm clouds churned, coming closer.

Never before had Baat flown free of his body into a day sky, and he marveled at the vistas. The cold reminded him of his vulnerability to the Dark Traces, and he focused his attention on the terrain near the door of the mountain.

Immediately, he spotted his hunters. They had drawn closer than he had feared. Already, the tiny figures of their distant bodies flitted among the towers of rock that the glacier had shoved ahead of itself. That maze of boulders alone separated Yaqut from Duru and his recumbent body.

You must kill Yaqut. Wickedness veered with the wind from all directions.

)|(

Evil faces watched Yaqut from the soft-edged shadows of the boulders. Necrotic shapes of half-rotted bodies wavered in and out of view like the crinkled air above a just-dead campfire. Those are the ghosts of the bonesuckers I have slain, come back to distract and baffle me. Since spotting the glacier, he had sensed them nearby. Now he could see them if he looked.

Yaqut tried not to look. He carried no fear of the dead. They could not harm him. He knew they had come close only because the demon land of the north held little sun-power. As soon as the killing ended, their split-chestnut-shell eyes would disappear, their jaws without lips and their faces like slugs' underbellies vanish.

For now, Yaqut ignored the dead bonesuckers lurking in the shadows and concentrated on following Baat without showing himself. Timov and Kirchi trailed far enough behind not to expose him, yet near enough for him to look back and get direction from the boy.

They clattered noisily over the rubble-stones, within range for him to turn and quickly slay them the moment he located the bonesucker. Otherwise, they would surely try to kill him. Yaqut noticed that Timov kept a stone in his sling now. The hunter did not fear him. The weather threatened to be far more deadly.

Flurries had begun earlier out of an empty sky and quickly thickened to heavy snowfall. Footing had become tricky: The slicked surfaces among cobbles and serried boulders, as well as his blurred vision, increased the chances of his twisting an ankle or toppling into a bone-breaking crevasse in the torn ground.

Also, he needed to stay out of sight, so that the bonesucker would not see him coming and jump him from behind. That tactic had slain his family among these very monoliths. Yaqut kept his back to the giant rocks whenever he could and carefully peered through the snowfall for signs of attack from above.

Fortunately, the air hung still. Without wind, the cold proved bearable and the snow settled evenly, without deceptive drifts. That could change at any time, however, and Yaqut moved purposefully, eager to stick the bonesucker with his poisoned lance and be done with the hunt.

Worry leads to hurry, a familiar voice spoke the ancient Longtooth adage.

Yaqut immediately crouched low and hugged his lance. At first, he thought Timov had spoken, the voice had sounded so clear. The voice did not belong to the boy. Yaqut looked about frantically.

Watching from the violet darkness of an overhanging rock stood the lean figures of his clansmen, who had been killed here in his childhood. A peculiar silver shine engulfed them, blurred their features yet left enough familiarity for him to recognize his mother and older brothers, his uncles and their wives—and there stood his father, who had spoken.

Who hurries, the hunt buries, his father completed the old adage.

"Father—I've come to avenge you."

Wet with radiance, Yaqut's dead clan nodded encouragement and faded into the dazzle of snow. In their places, dead bonesuckers appeared, putrid eyes staring, flesh-shorn jaws working with hate.

Yaqut looked away.

We are with you, son, his father's voice whispered from the back of his head.

Yaqut averted his glance from the dark crannies, reluctant to face again the family he had lost. His whole life had been given to avenging their deaths. Yet, he could not face them—not now.

From the deathly day that he had crouched in one of these crevices and watched the bonesuckers stone his family, he had suffered terrible recollections. He had heard their skulls crack, seen their bodies topple and the ghost dancers leaping down and braining them dead—then monstrously tearing the limbs from them and beating them with their own severed legs. Grief had stormed in him. Everywhere he went, he met rage. The rage had grown as he grew, not knowing where to settle except to rampage back into himself.

Yaqut's rage had knotted into a fierce will. It had made him a superb hunter, of beasts and of bonesuckers. Its invisible flames ate his heart and burned his face. No lightning had scarred his face—that, he well knew, was his own rage burning itself back into him.

Now, he could not face the specters of his family. His rage would not allow it, and he feared that when they looked at him closely they would not recognize him for what his rage had made him.

Son, you are my flesh in the world, his father's voice said. Go and kill the bonesucker. Stab him with your poison. His head shall be your trophy.

Yaqut peered to where he had heard the voice and saw not his father but a gray flutter of the air that blackened under his gaze to a mulch-face of hanging fangs.

"Who are you?" Yaqut yelled.

We are the dead.

"No! Not my dead." Yaqut jumped up and jabbed his lance at the grisly shadow. It shriveled to a dark blob, darkened again to a rooty body with a face like a dried leaf and tiny, needlefine teeth.

We are your allies, Yaqut. We know your grief and your rage, and we are here to complete them.

"You are the Dark Traces!" He stabbed the apparition again, making it curl into a brown tremor. "Ul udi!"

Yes. We have come down from the night, down into the boreal day, to help you.

"Get away from me."

You need our help, Yaqut.

"You dare wear the likeness of my family and say you want to help? Get away from me." He turned and ducked into the shadow of a ledge-stone. This is truly an evil place. He clutched his genitals and then touched that hand to his forehead, imparting enough life-force to his senses to keep the Dark Traces away.

Briefly, he considered falling back to the young witch and availing himself of her moonstones' protection. He had kept her alive to guard him from the evil spirits he knew haunted these northern ranges.

He closed in on his prey and did not want to reveal himself to the bonesucker, who could be watching from any of these pinnacles. He muttered a prayer for the Beastmaker's protection and hurried on.

You need us, Yaqut, the Dark Traces persisted.

Yaqut rushed away, to search through the snowfall, hoping to spot the bonesucker farther on. He picked his way over humped rocks toward the icefield ahead. The gray emanation fluttered in the space beside him. The darkening rot-face appeared among the snow's flakes, a black leaf cankered with eyes and a weeping sore for a mouth.

"Get away!"

Hold out your hand, Yaqut, the Dark One spoke in an oceanic rumble. Hold out your hand, and we will enter you.

"Away!" Yaqut spun about to flee and faced a tattered corpse. A dead woman reached to embrace him with arms like brown stalks and a body hacked out of shaggy peat. Her face, hardened and black as a beetle's shell, grimaced at him with the features of his mother. He staggered back, and moaned.

When we enter you, his mother said, you will have the secret knowledge you seek. You will know where Baat hides. Neither will he hide nor will he surprise you.

Yaqut's heart beat like a club. "Mother! Do you want this of me?"

Oh, yes, Yaqut. I want this of you.

Why resist? His mother belonged among the dead. His whole clan had been murdered before his eyes, and the Dark Traces would lead him to the murderer. He glanced back at Timov and Kirchi, caught them huddled together in the falling snow, watching him nervously. Let them see my rage—let them see how much more death means to me than life.

He held out his left hand. "Come into me, Dark Traces. Come into me and let me be the weapon that will kill the ghost dancer."

Black lightning wove about Yaqut's extended hand, and a hiss seared the snowy silence. He dropped to his knees under a spasm of spine-jolting pain. A scream clogged in his throat and came out a strangled cry.

Frozen in the posture of his agony, left arm up, mouth wrenched open, Yaqut opened into joy, free of hurt. The ghosts evaporated. Snow spun emptily in the windless air. No whisperings or haunting sounds troubled him.

He rose, astonished, and unfathomable strength pointed him northeast. The Dark Traces lived in him now—but did they deceive him? He dared not kill the boy and the witch until he knew. Among the bison-shaped rocks, he moved slowly, cautiously, securing each step before committing himself to the next.

"You saw that?" Timov whispered, clutching Kirchi's arm.

"The Dark Traces have him," the witch acknowledged. "We should flee now."

"Duru—"

Kirchi nodded. "I know. We've come this far. We must try to save her. But Yaqut is no longer just a man."

"I thought only the Old People could carry the ul udi?"

"This far north, the sky power comes to the earth. I've heard it said that the Invisibles sometimes even ride animals up here."

"Can you drive the Dark Traces out with your moonstones?"

Kirchi stared harshly at him. "You saw the black fire. It would enter me. No, we should run while we can."

Timov looked desperately through the plummeting snowflakes. "Maybe I can find Duru first. We can go our own way."

"No. If we lose sight of Yaqut, we'll be looking over our shoulders all the time. And he'll come for us, too. We have no choice, Timov."

Timov peered hard at Kirchi. For a moment, she glimpsed his fear as he recognized the inevitable. Then his jaw set, and he nodded. "You're right. We have to kill Yaqut. We have to strike first."

Yaqut had disappeared around a black shoulder of rock. Kirchi took Timov's hand, and they advanced, staying as much in the open as they could among the boulders jammed close together.

The hunter's snowprints climbed a gravel slope. Timov let go of Kirchi's hand and led the way. He shifted the satchel from his back to his side so that he could whip his sling more effectively. Is Yaqut waiting for us at the crest of the slope? Is his lance poised to strike?

From the lip of the gravel rise, Timov spotted Yaqut ahead, slinking along the base of a towering slab. When the hunter reached a place where he had to choose which way to go, he no longer peeked back to Timov for direction but moved unerringly among the maze of paths.

Timov felt the accuracy of Yaqut's choices in his own body. Days of reaching inwardly for Duru had given him a sense of where she moved: She pulsed like music in him at the very limit of his hearing. And now Yaqut heard her, too.

"He doesn't need me anymore," he said as Kirchi came up alongside. "The Dark Traces are guiding him right to the ghost dancer."

They hurried to keep him in sight as he rounded another bend in the labyrinth. Again, Timov sidled into the opening first, sling ready. Yaqut already had traipsed far ahead.

"Why doesn't he attack us?"

"The Dark Traces want the ghost dancer, not us." Kirchi huffed. As she spoke, an idea became clear. She reached into her satchel and took out a moonstone. "Timov, wait."

Timov looked back impatiently. He wanted to keep Yaqut in sight.

"We saw the Dark Traces enter him," Kirchi went on. "They're leading him. Why not have the Bright Ones guide us?" She held up the moonstone. "Take it. See if you can feel them."

Timov took the moonstone, felt nothing, and tried to hand it back. "We're losing him," he complained.

Kirchi took his hand and closed his fingers on the stone. "We saw the Dark Traces," she said. "The Bright Ones must be here too. You can feel them if you try. Then we won't have to keep him in sight. Try."

Timov closed his eyes. Fear moved sinuously through him, touching his thoughts toward Yaqut, toward Duru, who paced in danger somewhere nearby. At the thought of Duru, the musical signature of her direction sounded louder in him.

Kirchi noted how the frown relaxed on Timov's face. She knew he carried the strength in the stone. She had felt that strength before, in trances induced by dreaming potions. From them, she had learned how to call the Bright Ones by repeating the thoughts they had given her in previous trances. "Your bones were baked in stars," she whispered.

We are all children of the stars, a gentle voice opened in Timov's mind.

"I hear them!"

"Calm down and listen," Kirchi coaxed.

Timov listened and heard only tatters of wistful music. Then, a new sense of direction took over in him, and his body turned. The stone dulled in his grip, and the music vanished. He opened his eyes and distinguished a path disappearing in the snowsmoke. "They want us to go this way. But I feel Duru this other way, where Yaqut has gone."

Kirchi took the moonstone and put it back in her satchel, then ran in the new direction. Gravel under the snow crackled beneath her swift feet.

Timov followed, and when they came to a mound of stacked rocks, he helped her climb. Only this direction remained, and they clambered silently, afraid they had chosen wrong.

Near the top, an overhang forced them to duck into a cramped shaft. The sun and snow penetrated in thin white rays. In semi-darkness, Kirchi slipped, scraped her way abruptly down into a wedged pit. She lay there dazed until Timov lowered his sling and pulled her out.

Cold air braced them, and they gazed up into swirling snow. Pocks in the granite wall provided hand- and footholds, and Timov and Kirchi climbed up into the opening and ascended the flue.

They emerged onto a stone-hobbled ledge in sight of the glacier. Below, a basin of rocks smooth as eggs sagged under the gray sky and, below that, flat moraine. At the far end, on the spur of the glacier, a feather of black smoke rose from a small fire.

Kirchi pointed into the crevasse they had climbed out of. Down there, wending his way among the stand of rocks, Yaqut looked tiny. The Dark Traces guided him through the maze, while the Bright Ones had shown them how to climb out. If they hastened, they could descend to the basin and reach the moraine before he did.

Lowering themselves from one ledge to the next, Timov and Kirchi dropped quickly down the face of the rockpile. At the bottom, Timov paused to select a round rock for his sling.

"Is that really Baat and Duru?" Kirchi asked, squinting through the snow at the strand of smoke rising from the glacier.

When Timov did not respond, she looked behind and found that he had wandered to the edge of the basin and hunkered down to peer into the crevasse. "I can't find Yaqut," he said. "He must have seen us climbing down."

Kirchi stepped to his side and gazed into the wide chasm of cluttered boulders. Nothing moved in the sifting snowfall.

"He saw us," Timov breathed. "He saw us—and now he's coming after us."

Kirchi tugged at his elbow. "Let's face him on the flat ground, in the open."

Trembling with fear, Timov met Kirchi's composed glance. "You're not scared?" he asked.

"I am scared." She took his hand and led him down the bank of clattering stones. "But the Bright Ones are here." She pointed toward the blue gorges of ice between the black mountains. "Baat has found the altar where the Bright Ones come to earth. We won't have to face Yaqut alone."

Timov let Kirchi guide him down the rock-slope, while his eyes searched for Yaqut. A witch, she could believe the spirits would help her. What else could she hope for? But he was a man, and he had learned by becoming a man that the spirits sometimes helped and sometimes killed. Hamr had shown him that.

To survive Yaqut and the Dark Traces, only the slingshot would save them. He gripped the rock in his sling. Hard and still, it, too, had been baked in a star, if what he remembered of the ul udi's music sang true.

Light had fallen from the sky to become stone. And now it sat in his hand, listening for death.

)|(

Duru climbed down from her perch to warm herself by the fire. She had seen nothing living anywhere on the snowy moraine, and she had decided that she could just as well watch for Yaqut from beside Baat. She sat alongside his upright, slumbering form and warmed her hands in the glow from burning juniper branches.

A large facet of ice had melted, draining through the gravel and gathering in shallow depressions nearby. Muddy pools like long dark fingers reached away from the fire, silvering at the edges where they had begun to freeze.

The orange stones exposed by the fire seemed special only in their complexion. No carvings graced them, and no ritual objects seemed apparent.

Duru touched the nearest stone. It felt lifeless under her hand. Neither energy nor music hummed in it. She looked about for the ul udi. They supposedly came down from the sky to these rocks. In the teeming snowfall, she did spy glints of star-sharp light.

Memories of her first nights with Baat brought back vivid images of his blue aura blowing off his giant frame in hot billows. She remembered her vision of Baat's people dancing in teeming throngs to the ul udi's music, jammed together like hiving bees. She recalled his solitary dance—whipping cold fire around him like a cape: the blaze blurred to ghosts, to the spectral figures of his ancestors. That had awed her, had made her feel she shared in the presence of something holy. Where are those ghosts now?

They are lost in the day-glare, she reminded herself. The power that had called them back remained.

She put her hand on the fur leggings Baat had cut from deerskins and felt for the gash Bear had inflicted. Her fingers slipped through the seam of the leggings and stroked the smooth scar on her calf. The wound had entirely healed. Baat's blue fire had done that.

Why does he not use that power to heal himself? Why does he choose to die now? He had never said to her he had to die. Maybe, she thought hopefully, he will use the ul udi's strength in these rocks to make himself stronger. Then, he will take me south with Timov, and we will live together among other ghost dancers.

But there are no other ghost dancers, Duru remembered. Not like Baat. The ul udi have said he is among the last. Yaqut and men like Yaqut killed the others.

Sitting taller, alert with anxiety, she scanned the far wall of enormous rocks for Yaqut's approach. She detected nothing baleful in the settling snow. The invisible threat bled into the landscape and transformed the sharp rock wall into ominous claws of granite. Its shadowy seams and corridors became staring skull-holes.

Duru looked to Baat, whose chin pressed to his chest. His eyelids twitched. For the first time, she noticed his age. Until this moment, he had simply been Baat the Ghost Dancer, long-boned and thick-browed, the only one of his kind. Now she noted the squares of wrinkles on his cheek-ridges, where the skin had weathered to leather. She observed gray strands in his spiky hair, silver glints in the pink stubble along his jaw. Yes, he is old. The flesh hung loosely under his whiskery beard, and his shoulders, though broad, stooped with weariness.

She reached out to touch him gently on his knee, and compassion saturated her for this old man who, like her, had lost his tribe. The spirits of the sky alone remained of clan and continuity. Though little enough to live for, the spirits, she realized after her own journeys out of her body, offered presence worth dying for.

When Baat had danced the blue down from the sky at night and she had flown among the dancing ghosts of the People, she had heard the ul udi's music. The wailful, eerie beauty of their songs drifted out of memory, comforting as an imperishable blessing.

Baat's eyes opened. For an instant, the momentum of his flight outside his body continued in him, and dizziness made him squint and grab his knees. The Bright Ones had carried him into the windless sky and shown him the spoke of clouds freighting the snow.

Blinking, he stared up at the overcast and realized he had been out of his body for some while. That thought made him anxious. On his flight, he had viewed Yaqut nearby, across the moraine, in the maze of glacial erratics that comprised the door of the mountain.

Duru put a hand on Baat's arm. "What did the Bright Ones show you?"

Baat rubbed alertness into his face and regarded the child. Concern for her troubled him, muting the inmost music of the ul udi. Their drifting thoughts went on inside him, and he received their meaning: Come away. Come with us into the sky, into the music of the stellar winds, the immaterial winds of nonbeing, pure light, timelost light, free of flesh and the strangeness of flesh, free of the hungers and the pain. Come away.

When Duru caught the abstract look on his face, she got up and took the burl cup out of their satchel. Baat watched her walk over to the glacier and chip ice into the cup. He could not leave her here to die. He had let himself believe throughout the journey that the ul udi had selected her to guide him and that they would watch after her when he had departed. He no longer believed that.

Duru placed the cup beside the fire to melt the chipped ice. "You're afraid for me, I can tell. What did you see?"

Baat noticed that the fire had cleared enough ice for him to lie down among the sacred rocks. An idea came to him that required a lie. "I saw Yaqut. He is very close and will be here soon. But I did not see your brother."

Duru's face flinched. "Is he dead?"

"I did not see him." Baat experienced a moment of regret that he had deceived her. Such a child, this Duru, ignorant of her own powers. Like the smallheads who had reared her, she thought herself locked inside her own mind. She did not know that if she tried, she could touch the ul udi. They would show her that Timov waited nearby, just as they had revealed to Timov her location.

"What will happen now?" she asked anxiously.

Baat held up his hand, showing her the mauve glow between the spread fingers. "The power is in our hands. Yours, too. Look."

Duru opened her hands and saw nothing. Then, without her knowledge, Baat began drawing sky power through her, and her hands effused a blue shine. Her face brightened with recognition: This energy had healed Baat, had lifted her out of her body and had sent her flying through the night to visit Timov.

At Duru's thought of her brother, Baat's hand closed around hers and his lustrous eyes forced her attention. He did not want her to use this power to leave her body—not yet.

"Duru, the power is in your hands. If you want, you can come with me."

Duru blinked, bewildered.

"Your spirit can come with mine. I will take you with me when the ul udi carry me into the sky." He squeezed her hands gently. "Will you come?"

"To heaven?"

"To where the ul udi dwell."

"Will Mother and Aradia be there?"

Baat smiled sadly. She is just a girl. And that perception barbed him with memories of his own children. "No, Duru. The dead you know are not there. But there are many you don't know who know you, who live in your blood now. They are the People, your ancestors. They will welcome you."

Terror startled her as she grasped what Baat intended. He wanted her to die now, here on the glacier's rubble.

Baat acknowledged her fear and released her hands. "I would never hurt you. I want to save you from Yaqut. If he kills me—and he most likely will—he will hurt you. Then, he will kill you. And you will just be dead. I want you to live, free of pain, in a nimbus of joy vast as all creation."

Duru dropped her gaze, not wanting to see his lips moving differently than what she heard. "Joy?"

"Yes, more joy than you could ever know in this fierce world. That is what light is when we leave our bodies and rise to the music of the Bright Ones—inconceivable joy floating on the wind of the stars, drifting among islands of suns."

"But what about Timov? Can we find his spirit and take him with us?"

Baat stared over his shoulder for Yaqut. Through the roil of big flakes, he saw nothing at the door of the mountain. "Only you can come with me," he said softly, unhappy with his lie yet determined to get her away from Yaqut. Not just a smallhead girl, she could carry the cold fire. Why should she be left to Yaqut—or, even if she gets past him, why should I abandon her to a life of begetting and suffering? Never again will she have this chance to live as pure light, to go out into the immensities of life beyond the frenzy of animal cravings and wretchedness.

He listened for the Bright Ones, for their assurance that he acted with clarity, asking her to abandon this wasteland. They kept the silence they had begun when he reached the altar. They conserved their power to free his body of light. The life of one small girl is theirs to witness, not control.

"I don't want to be left alone here," Duru spoke, her voice reedy and small. The thud of her heart in her ears made her voice sound distant. "I'll go with you."

Baat searched out her eyes and held her gaze. "Come, then. Our journey has just begun."

Duru glanced nervously at the orange rocks. They looked glossy with snowmelt, like bones still wet from their meat. "How will we go?"

From the satchel, Baat removed a leaf-pouch and opened it, revealing a cluster of white berries, dried to silvery pebbles. "Night-wort berries. Four of these for you, the rest for me, and our bodies will let us go."

Duru took the four berries from the pouch and placed them in the palm of her hand to study them more closely. They looked pearly as teeth. "Will it hurt?"

"No. The Bright Ones will carry us away from all pain."

Duru closed her fist around the berries and nodded at Baat. She felt glad for this. Once she had gotten past the fear, this hope of becoming light—like the moon, the stars, like the sun—this story-song hope appealed to her. Everyone she loved in this world had joined the dead. Why not travel with Baat and the bright spirits? Why not give my body to the Mudman and my soul to the sky?

She gazed down at the earth in prayer to the Great Mother and lifted the berries to her lips. Baat stopped her. He gazed past her, staring through the floating snow at the door of the mountain. Figures had emerged from the rock wall. In a moment, she would have noticed them herself. She dropped the berries and stood.

The distant figures resolved to a red-haired woman and a man in a bulky pelt. The man moved awkwardly under the huge ruff, which hung the length of his back. Duru fixed him with tight scrutiny before she recognized the gait of her brother.

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The Dark Traces circled Yaqut like strange dogs—whispering evil thoughts: The worms and grubs of this land ate the blood of your parents.

He ignored them and put all his alertness into his waiting. The Dark Traces lurked there, too, inside his physical senses, watching the world with the glare of the Owl.

From a crevice in the rock wall, Yaqut stared through the snowfall at the fire across the moraine. The bonesucker came into sight. Yaqut could see him standing with the girl he had kidnapped.

The hunter did not move. Before he stepped from the shadows of the rock wall, he wanted all his enemies in front of him and none at his back. He waited, hand curled around his lance, pulsing with killing intent, until he sighted Timov and Kirchi walk out onto the flat terrain.

Timov had spotted his sister and shot both arms up in greeting. At the same moment, Kirchi witnessed Yaqut slink out of a crawl-hole between the boulders.

He came swiftly toward them—lance uplifted in his right hand. His left gripped a large skull through the eyeholes, using the cranium as a shield.

Kirchi shouted in alarm. Encumbered by the lion-skin, Timov lurched around. Fright flushed him with power, and he whipped his sling till it sang. He released his shot right at Yaqut's broken face, and the stone hurtled with lethal accuracy.

Yaqut blocked his face with his sheathed hand, and the skull took the impact. With a report that echoed from the rock wall to the glacier, the cranium splintered, and Yaqut rocked backward.

Timov fumbled with another shot, fitting it to the sling as Yaqut bore down on him again. No time to whip the stone, he gripped it instead and hurled it at his attacker. Yaqut swept the missile aside with his lance arm, and Timov lunged.

To keep him from lowering his lance to thrust, Kirchi pelted Yaqut with stones. Her shots struck, stingingly accurate, and he dropped to a crouch as Timov swept over him.

Wielding a large rock in his left hand, Timov swung to brain him, and the hunter uncurled swiftly. One instant, the old man's head bowed before Timov's raised weapon and the next he stood upright, his lance blocking the boy's blow.

Their eyes met. Timov had no chance to recoil from the murderous blue stare. Pain arrived from where the lance hit his left wrist just as the shaft slammed hard against the side of his head.

Timov's long hair splashed outward and his eyeballs rolled white. Limbs jerking, he collapsed and lay unmoving under the dark mane of the Lion.

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Duru shrieked. "Timov!"

Baat stepped backward, closer to the sacred rocks and their vertical river of power. He felt the trembling updraft gusting at his back as the Bright Ones called: Come away.

Eat the night-wort berries. Cross over into the light.

Hurry. Leave the smallheads to their own furies. Return to the peace of your ancestors.

Quickly. Eat the berries. Come away from the Beast.

"The Beast," Baat whispered, violence coiling tighter in him. "Of course, it has come to the Beast. Will I feed this child to the Beast—as I fed it my own children?"

You are thinking as the Dark Traces think, Hollow Bone.

Baat cast the poison berries into the fire and strode away from the altar rocks, fists clenched. Blind, roaring anger filled him. He knew his rage had no root in the Dark Traces. Their punishing voices did not rise from the hot surge of force in him—yet, their strength filled him.

He seethed for all that he had lost to the smallheads. The Bright Ones sensed that—sensed, too, the reservoir of black energy behind Yaqut.

Come back! The Dark Traces are drawing you away. They want to kill you outside the updraft, where we cannot help you.

"It's not the Dark Traces," Baat spoke defiantly, breaking into a lope. "This is the will of my blood."

Duru seized a club of burning juniper and ran across the moraine after Baat.

Stay here child, an alarmed voice spoke. He has gone to the Beast.

Duru disregarded the spirit warnings. She ran hard, determined to spend all her strength attacking Yaqut. Already, though, the ghost dancer had moved too far away to reach. In moments, Yaqut would slay him. "Baat!" she cried in despair.

Baat stopped running and lifted his hands over his head. He did not know that he could strike Yaqut at this range. A colder part of him willed him to wait, to sacrifice the smallhead youth to Yaqut for a sure kill. Anger choked him. He would not have Duru suffer the death of her brother if he could stop it.

Transparencies of sky-fire flashed between his arms, and pain ripped him. With a blast, the air around Baat jagged with lightning, and a piece of the sun seemed to arc across the snow-hung moraine as he flung fire.

Yaqut had pulled his lance back to stab Timov as Kirchi dashed toward him. She clutched a moonstone in each hand. She had thought to drive the Dark Traces out of Yaqut. The moonstones burned her fingers. She threw them into the air, and they tracked like shooting stars.

Baat's lightning struck the flung stones with a peal of searing heat, hurling Kirchi to the ground, eyes blind, hair singed.

Yaqut dropped his arms from his face, surprised to find himself unharmed. He noticed the witch sprawled unconscious before him. Seared by the heat of the blast, her face flushed red. The Dark Traces had diverted the bolt from him to the moonstones.

Stick the bitch!

Yaqut stepped over Kirchi and ran toward the ghost dancer, who had dropped to his knees. The hunter would not listen to distracting voices now, nor waste his poison. He had only one purpose. Kill the bonesucker.

Baat grimaced with the pain of his miss. He pressed his brow to the stony ground. Futility immobilized him. As Duru rushed to his side, he waved her away. No power remained for another try. He barely had the strength to stay on his knees.

"Go—“ He brushed her aside. “He wants only me. When I'm gone, beg for his mercy. Do this for me."

Duru did not understand his thick words without the Bright Ones to translate. She looked for them, and they appeared nowhere in the ravelling snow.

Baat gestured toward Yaqut sprinting toward them, and Duru dropped the juniper bough beside Baat and hastily began gathering rocks.

Baat stopped her and waved for her to flee. He struggled to his feet, pushed her off when she came close. Tottering dizzily, he scanned the ground for a suitable rock. When he bent to lift a large, flat rock for a shield, he nearly toppled.

"Die!" Yaqut yelled.

The smallhead's screech made Baat flinch behind the rock he clasped in both hands.

Yaqut did not throw his lance. He stopped and stared at the bonesucker. Wrath chilled him as he caught his breath. Looking upon the monster that had defied him so long, he stood surprised by its age. The thing appeared older than he had assumed, its large face and splotchy beard haggard.

It could easily have been among the monsters that had killed his family.

Gut the bonesucker!

Baat heard the echoing voices of the Dark Traces squeaking around Yaqut. And he squinted with malice at the smallhead.

Yaqut's half-face smiled. The twisted side of his mouth grimaced with delight. "You hate me, do you not? I want you to die hating me. I want you to die knowing that I killed you. I, Yaqut." He thrumped the haft of his lance against his chest and pointed it at Duru. "Before I give your eyes to the crows, bonesucker, I will prop your head on my lance so that you can watch me take my pleasure with your women—the witch and the girl."

No more talk! Kill the animal!

Baat did not comprehend the smallhead's words. He did recognize the noise of the Dark Traces and Yaqut's lewd stare at Duru.

"Yes, yes," Yaqut said when Baat lurched in front of the girl to protect her. "She will suffer. Her anguish is the song she will sing for your ghost."

Baat shambled forward and dropped to one knee, with the weight of the stone in his hands.

Duru moved closer, and Baat shouted, "Stand back!" The girl hopped backward, startled by the venom seething in Baat's voice. She snatched up a rock and threw it at Yaqut. He ducked, and the rock clattered behind him.

"Hate me, bonesucker." Yaqut gasped a laugh. "Hate me for killing you. Hate me for killing the witch and little Duru—for, surely I am going to kill them both."

In mid-breath, the hunter flung his lance.

With a mighty heave, Baat lifted the flat rock to protect his heart, and the flint blade smashed against it. The force dropped him to his side, where he floundered. He stretched feebly to reach the lance. It had fallen too far away.

Spry as a spider, Yaqut pounced. Duru tried to block him, and he flung her aside and slashed at the ghost dancer with his knife. The sharp flint tipped with poison scored Baat's upper arm. Yelping a victory cry, Yaqut snatched up his lance and bounded out of reach.

Baat cried out. He rocked upright, a clod of earth in his hand. He smashed the earth against his wound and glowered at the evil smallhead.

The tip of his lance shattered, Yaqut cast it far out of reach. Then, one pace closer to his prey, he sucked a sharp breath through his teeth. "Feel my poison biting your heart. Feel it rotting your insides. Die. Chill, spasm, and die!"

Duru recognized that sinister voice from a nightmare. "The Dark Traces are inside you, Yaqut!" she called out.

The grizzled head bobbed and grinned. "I gave myself to them—and they gave you to me."

"They will kill you!" Duru knelt beside Baat. He would not look at her. He listened inwardly, past the pain congealing in his wound and the poison already lacing his heart with ice. He listened to the unbodied vastness within, from where the Bright Ones spoke when they came.

Yaqut sneered. "He is the one the spirits want. The bonesucker is the one they will hurt forever."

"You, too, Yaqut," Duru spat. "The evil spirits are in you now!"

Yaqut frowned impatiently. Eager to take this head and be on his way before the wind came and drifted the snow, he chanted, "Die. Spasm and die!"

Baat meshed his teeth and sucked hard at the air. His lungs tightened, and pain redoubled with his effort.

Hopping from foot to foot, stabbing the air, too wary to step any closer and deal the death blow yet too excited to walk away, Yaqut shouted with glee. He ranted with spiteful merriment, "I see the shadow in your face, bonesucker! I see death widening the holes of your eyes! Your tongue is too numb to curse me now. Every breath stabs like my lance. I am stabbing you again and again! With every breath you suck, I am killing you. Spasm and die!"

Yaqut leaped forward. "More poison, bonesucker!" He slashed again with his knife, cutting Baat across the backs of his hands. "Die!"

Baat swung out his huge arms to protect himself. Too weak from throwing fire and from the poison, he slumped to the ground.

As Yaqut spun away, chortling, Duru swung at him with the juniper bough. The bough snapped across Yaqut's legs. He lost his footing, scrabbled hard on the flying gravel for a moment, then misstepped and snagged his foot in a crevice. Jerking himself sideways, he tripped and sprawled before Duru.

She struck him fiercely behind the head with the broken bough until he reared up furiously. He grabbed her throat and would have torn out her windpipe but for the amazement on her beautiful childish face.

He glanced down at where she gazed so intently and spotted blood in the crook of his elbow. Fright pierced his heart, as he comprehended: He had stabbed himself in the arm with his poison-tipped knife.

He spat a curse at the knife, still fisted in his right hand. He sheathed it quickly, not taking his eyes from the puncture wound. The blade had gouged into the crease of his elbow. Already, he could feel the poison moving upstream, up the blood-ways of his arm.

Wildly he tore off the pelts covering his torso, and snapped free the chest-strap studded with the teeth of the bonesuckers he had killed. Weeping sweat, he wrapped the strap about his upper arm and, with his teeth holding one end in a panic, jerked it tight.

Baat regarded him coldly. Duru backed away to the ghost dancer and crouched beside him. Together, they watched Yaqut tighten the tourniquet frantically around his arm. Too late. Muscle after muscle froze in deadly rictus.

Yaqut whimpered. The unmarked side of his face trembled with his effort to save himself, the ruined side locked in terror.

He looked to Baat with despair. Black deepened in his eyes, and his mouth widened around a scream that never came.

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Baat watched him until the poison in his own body blurred his vision. The sky darkened, chill deepened. He squinted for clarity, discerned Duru gaping at him in alarm, and tried to smile—to show her he had no fear now that she was safe from the Beast.

Her small hands urged him to rise. He felt frozen fast to the gravel. The altar stones seemed far away in the swirling snow.

Duru shouted angrily at him, then turned away and gazed across the moraine to where her brother lay beside the witch. Baat, too, wondered if they lived, or if Duru stood completely alone out here on the tundra in the snow.

For her sake, he had to get up and eat enough pain to reach the Bright Ones. Only their strength could avail her now.

Poison constricted his heart with thorns. His effort to rise pierced him cruelly, and he sat back down and rested his sick head in his hands.

Duru spoke close to his ear, her small hands on his arm, coaxing him to rise. Her meaningless words carried the softness he had loved in his children and he had come to love in her.

Meshing his teeth against the hurt, he wrenched upright. Pain-weeping and dizzy, he staggered two steps and almost fell down before Duru braced him. He listed to one side, afraid of falling on her, and she clung to him, gummy with his blood.

At the heap of orange rocks, the fire had died, clearing a wide enough space to hold Baat's full length. He toppled onto the altar shards and rolled to his back. The vertical river of energy sluiced through him, carrying away his pain and leaving him glistening with strength. He sat upright—and found that he squatted atop his body.

Duru had stepped back when Baat fell, and she stood at the edge of the updraft. Her hair stood out from her head. "Baat—I see your spirit!"

Baat smiled and lifted his hands. The gashes of his wounds glowed silver as lightning. From above, the voice of thunder spoke his name, and he gazed up through a vortex of shining power and blinked into sun-blinding joy.

"Baat!" Duru called. "You are fading!"

Baat's wraith looked back at her, eyes straining. In the dark of the world, she grew hard to see. Beside her, in the world of light invisible to her, Timov and Kirchi stood.

"Don't be afraid, Duru," he said. His body of light brightened as he spoke. "Your brother will wake soon. And the witch. Go south with them, quickly as you can."

Duru understood and stepped closer, against the buffeting force of the spirits. Her black hair swam in the air and sparkled with blue motes of static. "I want to go with you!"

Baat shook his head benignly. "Go south. The others need you. Go south and live."

"The others do not need me," she pleaded. "You need me. Only you have ever needed me."

"I still need you, to lead the others back. I do not want them to die for me."

Her shadow bled into night, and he distinguished only Timov and Kirchi on either side of her darkness, guiding her backward. "Will you help me do that?"

His head lolled, too heavy now to move, and he swallowed with difficulty.

Come away, Hollow Bone.

The call of the Bright Ones came to him as seraphic music he remembered from childhood. He began to slip, to float into radiance that had its own shapes.

"You're fading," Duru cried weakly. "Baat—I ... I can't bear to lose you too."

Baat whispered to the darkness. "Do not be afraid for me, little Duru. Everything passes. As my people have passed on, so will yours someday. And the Old Ways will pass and pass again, till nothing of this earth will remember us. Yet nothing living is destroyed. We all go on. We all go on as light. Remember that."

"Baat!" Duru reached for his hand. Already it had grown cold, and when she called out his name it reverberated in the emptiness above the ghost dancer's body. She breathed desperately on his fingers to keep them warm. "Baat—I need you!"

Baat wanted to answer, to tell the child to let him go. Nothing to fear threated, even in the world of shadows. The light continued indestructible, immortal. The inconceivable truth of that widened in him with the upsurge of the ul udi's music, and he soared toward the brilliance of the sun.

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The world's edge gleamed blue against the night. Baat rose effortlessly as an air bubble from the sea's bottom. He sensed himself expanding, his body of light becoming more diffuse. Far off, he observed little Duru weeping over his body.

Ravenous cold penetrated him, and by that he knew he trespassed the savage domain of the Dark Traces.

Bonesucker!

Dazzles of freezing energy stymied Baat's ascent, and fear crisped in him again and with it the pain of his wounds as he recognized Yaqut's voice.

Ghost dancer! Help me!

"Yaqut? Where are you?"

I'm here! Right here before you. Can you not see me?

Baat searched. Against the azure glare from the Earth, he barely discerned a sullen green spark. "Yaqut?"

Your light, ghost dancer! Touch me with your light! Hurry! I am falling apart from the cold. Help me!

The emerald spark zipped closer, and a gust of blizzard force shook Baat. In the freezing energy that cut through him came evil voices: Now you are ours! And we are going to bake you in our cold—cut you with our knives—and eat you, eat you, eat you!

Yaqut's scream shattered.

Baat reeled away, and the icy pain went with him and the voices, booming like drums.

You grew out of the dirt. Light touched you, and you rose from the mud. But you turned your back on the Light and rejoiced in your shadow.

Bone-needle pain stabbed and ripped, again and again. Baat and Yaqut screamed as one. Cold clamped tighter, sharpening and expanding their anguish.

Baat looked for the stars, found them cringing in the darkness. One of them shone brighter, and he rose toward it, leaving suffering behind. The grotesque voices of the Dark Traces dimmed too. Yet, Baat still heard Yaqut bleating: They are eating me! The stars are eating me!

Baat gazed back at the Earth. He marked the auburn crusts of land, sapphire sea, and long fleeces of cloud, all turning, slowly, majestically, beneath him. He perceived no sign of Yaqut's green mote or the tortuous realm of the Dark Traces.

He must stay below, a gentle voice spoke. He belongs to our dark brethren. Remember, they are ul udi, as we are, and so, too, do they occupy a place in this world. While we thrive on the solar wind, they listen to the grinding of the continents and the immense electrical storms in the mantle of the planet.

The Bright One's soft voice layered into echoes, and sleepiness spun through Baat. Behind him, the blue shine of the Earth shrank away, tightened to the dimensions of a distant star. Darkness tunneled ahead to where all the stars clumped. They fused to one lucid star, a dewdrop shining in quivering darkness.

Peacefulness amazed Baat. He flew serenely toward the most radiant light he had ever seen. And something like homesickness healed in him, comforted by dim figures appearing out of the tranquil glare, the frail shadows of those he loved.

Empty of all grief, calm as the dark silence that held the stars, Baat flew into the light at the end of the world.

South

The vertical river disappeared, and Duru's hair fell limply to her shoulders. Dull heaviness pressed down around her, and she staggered back from where Baat's corpse lay, not wanting to see the ghost dancer this way.

From the glacier, an etheric wind flowed and set snowfall roiling. Duru darted across the moraine to where Timov lay, and crouched over him.

With her warm breath in his face, he came around groggily. He still dreamed of floating in the sky, staring down at the blue turtleshell of the planet. Then, he remembered Yaqut's murderous stare, his last image before the blow that knocked him unconscious. Timov sat bolt upright, and Duru clasped herself to him.

When the stiffening wind finally unlocked them, they found Kirchi sitting up, blinking with astonishment. Timov's head ached from Yaqut's blow. Otherwise, he moved neck and limbs unharmed. He wanted to see Baat.

Kirchi, too, felt sound enough to walk with him to the altar stones. Duru followed reluctantly. Baat's last instruction still rang loud in her ears: Go south, quickly.

They weaved drunkenly around Yaqut's stiff corpse and hurried away from it, against the mounting wind.

Baat laid on his back in a sprawl, snow already half-covering him.

Timov regarded the face intently for some time, then reached under his lion-skin and took out Cyndell's calendar bracelet. "From the last of the Blue Shell," he said softly and placed it in the giant's hand.

"To the last of the Old People," Kirchi murmured.

A green spark whirled among the snowflakes, and the three huddled together before the fallen ghost dancer. In the distance, a lunatic voice squeaked: Treehouses fall—dungpiles rise. You will die!

The three shared startled glances and bolted from the broken altar. They did not look back or glance again at Yaqut's corpse. They ran for the door of the mountain. Tumbling through a rock crevice, they clung to each other, exhausted. And the wind cried about them.

When the gust quieted, they crawled out and clambered over granite blocks and stacks of shale. By the time they reached the far side of the rock wall, the western sky had cleared. There, the gaseous sphere of the sun bleared crimson among citadels of boulders.

Timov, Kirchi, and Duru stood irresolute before the snow-blotched expanse of the tundra. No inner sight gleamed with direction, and no Bright Ones shimmered, speaking out of the wind to guide them, as Baat had promised.

Timov considered—he knew they wanted to go southeast. What was the best way through the jumble of erratic boulders and snow-drifted trenches torn into the earth by the herds?

Duru frowned, trying to recall the land she had watched while Baat had slept. To her relief, the images came. "I remember the way Baat traveled here," she announced.

So, Kirchi and Timov followed Duru south, as she followed her memory backward.

Everything she had seen on her way to the door of the mountain had been changed by snow, altered in dress as if for mourning. They picked their way slowly, in stunned silence.

They had seen Baat's body of light, had heard the lovely vaporous music of the ul udi. Yet, already, each felt subtly changed, muffled in their senses like the landscape, as though what had happened that day had occurred long ago and to someone else.

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The snow began again that first night. The travelers huddled among the rocks. They found enough brambles to burn through the long cold darkness.

Mice and voles zipped through grass-jammed crevices and provided an ample meal. With the obsidian knife from Duru's satchel, Timov cut the oversize lion-skin to make leggings and headgear for the women and himself.

The next day, few promontories offered landmarks. Duru guided them by the sun's shadow in the overcast.

Storm Riders appeared from behind a boulder and came crashing toward them through the snow. Their horses huffed jets of snowy breath, laboring under riders, pelts, poles, and the butchered haunches of caribou. None of the three attempted to hide. Two days in the bone-penetrating cold had readied them for slavery to the Storm Riders.

When the horsemen drew closer, they stopped. Perhaps finding three people alone on the snowy tundra presented a baleful omen. Or perhaps the fierce serenity with which the wanderers faced the horsemen seemed unfamiliar and eerie. The Storm Riders approached only to stare, then threw down a haunch of caribou and rode off.

The caribou meat lasted several days. Each night, they found shelter among rocks piled high by older icesheets. They thawed the meat over twig fires and flares of dried grass. Blizzard winds bellowed through the crevices, and they slept clutching each other for warmth. At dawn, they had to burrow through the snow to get out.

The day their meat ran out, they found the Storm Riders again. The horsemen, seven of them, sat mounted on steeds that had knelt into the gale winds and frozen. Crusty with snow, they had become one with the earth.

Timov dislodged two more haunches of meat and dragged them through the snow as the storm grew worse. Swirling snow blinded them by day. Night closed in with no shelter in sight. The force of the wind had sharpened, and numbness became burning pain.

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The sky opened, enormous and blue. Neoll Nant Caw gazed into empty space from a snowy glade in the Forest. Her mind loomed empty as those cloudless reaches. The death of the Moon Bitch had taken all her power, and she had spent an entire moon period staring blankly from a cold place inside her skull.

The witches she had called to help build the Moon Bitch had all fled back to their tribes before the snow. They had taken her crystals with them. In homage, they had left her three days' food and firewood and commended her to the care of the Great Mother. In the spring, they would return to honor her bones.

Neoll Nant Caw had wandered from her burrow days ago, tired of waiting for death. She had walked into the woods to give herself to the Beast and had surprised herself by living among the rotting leafdrifts for days without food.

She walked through dark hollows and briar groves, where the Beast lurked. Bear already slept, and Lion and Panther had gone to the herd trails. She lived for days with only sleep and sips of stream water.

Now she stood, wispy from hunger and distracted. She stared at the shining sky above white spires of the Forest.

A cry startled her. At first, she recognized a hyena. The Beast had found her at last. When the cry came again, she knew it for an infant’s distress. The unlikeliness of that helpless sound so far from the nearest tribe lured her back into the Forest.

She followed the child's wailing among the trees, past twig-snags that showered her bedraggled head with clumps of snow and through a frosted thicket. In a clearing trampled by footprints to slush, she found the baby.

Naked, smudged black from ashes of the fire where he had been placed, he lay beside his mother. The snow glowed crimson with her blood loss. She lay on her side under a gore-stained pelt. Mouth slack, hapless eyes open, she stared lifelessly.

Neoll Nant Caw gasped at the sight of her. She recognized even in death the haughty countenance of the Longtooth priestess. Without thinking, the witch charged into the clearing and swooped up the child.

The ash felt warm. She removed the pelt covering the dead priestess and swaddled the baby, while casting around a harsh-eyed search for those who had abandoned them here.

The witch spied pug marks in the snow, smelled the musk of Cat. Shadows flitted beyond the icy hedges. "Thundertree!" she cried out, and her voice croaked. "You are cowards!"

Shadows slunk away. Neoll Nant Caw turned to all sides, searching for beasts that might have smelled the blood and heard crying.

Wind shed a glitter of snow-motes from high trees but otherwise, nothing moved. The witch held the infant close in her trembling arms and stared into its screaming face—the ghost dancer's issue.

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In the black belly of the night, without fire or shelter, Duru, Timov and Kirchi slept. When they woke at dawn, they found the snow melted around them in a large circle. Their breaths smoked, yet the land felt warm, a mire of sunken stones and dew-glinting bramble. Beyond the perimeter of the thaw, snow blanketed the land to the horizons under a saturated blue sky.

Ul udi, they all knew, though no one said it. No one had spoken since they had found the frozen Storm Riders. Duru got up and walked to the edge of the thaw-ring. She took two steps into the knee-deep snow and stopped.

"We've been here before," she said, her voice too thick to be understood. She turned to the others, with astonishment. "Hamr found the black knife here."

Timov and Kirchi looked around at the smothered landscape, bewildered, amazed to be in the world at all.

Climbing to the top of a nearby slope, Duru cried out, "The Forest!"

The others scrabbled after. When they reached her side, they gazed south at a horizon glistening with the veils and shrouds of the Forest.

Timov shouted out loud, laughing, and waded through the snow with Duru. Only Kirchi paused, fitting the muted terrain to her memory of the trance-time, moons ago, when she had witnessed evil here.

"Duru," she called. "The Moon Serpent."

Duru understood and drew the black-glass knife from her satchel. She had not seen it used since Timov had cut down his lion-skin to share with them. She regarded it soberly.

It had not really been a knife at all but an emblem. Of what? Of all that had been cut away? Of all that cut?—Time's fang? It belongs here, she realized. It belongs here, where the journey to the land of the dead crosses its own tracks.

She held it up for the others to see. Their ice-burned faces nodded consent, and she placed the knife in the snow.

Timov looked south to the treeline, where their fates awaited. From his tattered bag, he removed the tortoise shell and spun it on its reed axle. The hunt had completed its circle. Yet the sky continued to turn—or the world turned under it if the Invisibles were to be believed.

Either way, new journeys had already begun. He held the spinning wheel over his head. And the bearded trees watched, secretive and wise under the blue blast of heaven.

)|(

Squinting into the ice-light, Neoll Nant Caw stared north across the flat terrain. A herd of woolly mammoths milled around in the rocky bed of a frozen stream. They probed with their tusks and trunks for lichen under the snow.

Slowly, they began to move away, and the crone watched them until the baby beneath her mantle squirmed. He flexed awake yet did not cry out. A grin relaxed the witch's squint. Yesterday, she had gone to the Beast to die. Today, she moved through the world, a mother.

Without milk or tribe, Neoll Nant Caw could give the child only fire for warmth and maple sap to quiet his hunger. A dream had led her to this spot. She had seen Baat dancing on the spine of this ridge, at the edge of the Great Forest and the tundra, and she had come to show him his son.

Now, she found herself squinting against the snow-glare again, wishing her eyes were not so old. The mammoths had lumbered off, and three figures moved slowly along the stony margins of the stream—a man, a woman, and a girl.

In a moment, the witch recognized them. She stared harder, gaping until certain that hope had not tricked her. A gasp of laughter shook her bent frame, and the baby startled, and wailed.

The crone smiled down at the child and opened her mantle so he could see the cold world.

"Cry, little one. Cry to the wind, and your song will be heard." She lifted the screaming infant to her shoulder and carried him up the rock crest, to where the wanderers below would see her and surely hear him.

In a burst of lucidity, the witch understood that Baat's ghost had danced on this ridge for these wanderers. Her time was done. The Great Mother had sent the baby, the dream, and the wanderers to grant her last acts power.

With exhilaration, she recognized that she would give the child to them, to the young strangers from the south and to wayward Kirchi. Timov, who had soared with ul udi in the celestial sphere, could parent the ghost dancer's boy—and Kirchi would have her chance as a simple mother, at last.

Another laugh coughed its way through her: The pattern of her life had come clear so abruptly that now death seemed welcome. She would die. Yet, her work with the Invisibles would have life. The child of spirits—Baat's last companion—Duru would take her place. Enough time remained to show her how to make and use the crystals—time and hope for the future, for capturing more fire from the sky and setting it ablaze in the minds of the people: time yet to light up the whole, wide, motherly world.

Neoll Nant Caw lifted the infant above her head and held him with her quavery strength. She wanted the wanderers below to see how tiny and powerful the future really was. And she wanted the child to see.

"Look, little one," she called to the wailing baby. "Look below at those young people! They are our family—these few who have found their way to us through every grief."

*  *  *

A. A. Attanasio

Thank you for reading my Paleolithic fantasy, Hunting the Ghost Dancer.

The botanical and zoological details of Europe fifty thousand years ago required extensive research. That groundwork astonished me with Paleolithic facts about giant sloths, cave lions and migratory herds of woolly rhinoceros.

My story also dramatizes the electromagnetic intimacy of the Neanderthal with entities of cold fire, who dwell in the ionosphere. That entailed no research, of course, only imagination. Yet, in this reverie, we fall back into an intuition as old as humankind, about the relationship of the soul and the sky—and where the reality of our being begins and ends.

Storytelling blends facts and fancies and creates a kind of prayer to our common soul. The grace it prays for opens us to wonder—to the dream journey of unmaking and remaking the self. I feel so privileged to share my stories with you. I hope we will meet again in my other ebooks, which I have closely revised from their original print editions.

aaa@lava.net

http://aaattanasio.com/

eBooks Available from A. A. Attanasio

(newly revised by the author)

Killing with the Edge of the Moon

Mama’s boy Chester Hubert drums up the courage to ask a witch’s granddaughter to the school dance – and finds himself hurtling through a modern, demonic fairy tale.

Quiet, elfin Flannery is not like other kids. She has caught the attention of the faerie, beautiful evil creatures from a mysterious Otherworld. They seduce their victims at midnight raves, then feed them to a dragon. For sport, they hunt souls with a black dog of prodigious evil. And they have taken Flannery for one of their own.

Thrust together in the Otherworld’s dark enchantment, Flannery and Chester discover they know each other better than they know their own hearts ... but can they sort things out before the black dog finds them?

And what was that about a dragon?

http://goo.gl/p4mEzc

The audiobook edition of Killing with the Edge of the Moon narrated by Destiny Landon and Lee James available at Audible.com.

http://goo.gl/VWhHKz

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Wyvern

A bold escapade with a young soul-catcher from Borneo kidnapped by pirates in 1609.

Headhunters, sorcerers, pirates and Indian princes thrive in this adventurous, poetic tale of a young outcast in Borneo. Born in 1609, son of a native woman and a Dutch sea captain he never knew, Jaki Gefjon grows up in the jungle as a sorcerer's apprentice. Later kidnapped by pirates, he befriends his captor, Trevor Pym, notorious for his dreaded man-of-war, Wyvern. The scientific marvels on the European privateer become the young soul-catcher’s passion—until he falls for Lucinda, the headstrong daughter of Pym's sworn enemy. Propelled by intrigue, pirates' battles, curses and visions, this seafaring saga takes Lucinda and Jaki from the South Seas to India—and to a bold, unforeseen destiny in the New World.

http://goo.gl/QZBxHo

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Hunting the Ghost Dancer

50,000 years ago, three young friends band together for a perilous journey to find a new home after plague devastates their coastal tribe. Accompanied by a blind horse and armed with meager weapons and their own elusive courage, Hamr, Timov and Duru defy savage odds to survive in the strange and brutal realm of Ice Age Europe. This incredible quest takes them through primeval forests stalked by cave lions and across vast glacial moraines of thundering woolly rhinoceros—to the Thundertree clan. These forest people accept Duru, the girl, for her magical powers. But the two young men must prove themselves worthy by hunting down a giant Neanderthal—the last of his line—who has been terrorizing the tribe.

World Fantasy nominee.

http://goo.gl/nNwOIy

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Servant of Birds

Set in the 1190s during the rule of England's Richard the Lion Heart, this historical romance explores the raw experience of love: romantic, sexual and spiritual. The dramatic action moves from Wales to a tumultuous Europe unsettled by the Crusades to intensely colorful Palestine and back. Arrogant Guy Lanfranc assumes control of the family castle by sending his hated mother, the old baroness Ailena Valaise, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Wily Ailena vows revenge and finds the means in the person of Rachel Tibbon, a Jewish girl who survived the butchery of her family and other Jews after Crusader losses. Ailena's plot to regain the castle built by her father propels Rachel into a perilous adventure of vengeance, faith – and true love set against impossible odds.

http://goo.gl/6Wpr2h

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The Conjure Book

Life is lonely for 13-year-old Jane Riggs in the historical New England village that is her new home — until she discovers a four-hundred-year-old book of spells that really works. Guided by the ghost of the witch who wrote the conjure book, Jane embarks on a terrifying but glorious quest for magical power. Her ambition is to contact her mother, dead these ten years and remembered only in photographs. For such a great prize, Jane is willing to risk much among the weird creatures she conjures out of the spirit world. But she will need more than courage when her magic follows her to school. After an evil spirit-fox steals her classmate's soul, life suddenly gets very complicated. Coming of age among dark, elemental powers while not missing a day of seventh grade is not easy. And the answers Jane needs for growing up don't seem to be in the conjure book.

http://goo.gl/IDjQKW

The audiobook edition of The Conjure Book narrated by Laura Rubin available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/P9kga1

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Brave Tails:

The Moon’s Prophecy

Summoned by a vengeful sorcerer snake, an army of malevolent boars has invaded the peaceful haven of Riversplash Mountain. Only a few humble friends from the swamp dare to believe they can prevent the invaders from ravaging their fertile mountain. Farmer mouse Thrym, wise hedgehog Muspul, a father-and-son team of shrews, and the beautiful mouse maiden Olweena dangerously assume the masked identities of the Brave Tails. Those legendary, sword-wielding heroes of yore originally rid their land of predators. But these small defenders will need more than masks and swords to stop this brutal onslaught – and the magic they seek is even more dangerous than the boars!

http://goo.gl/N04DE3

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The Radix Tetrad

The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual adaptation of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as "colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes."

Radix

A saga of a young man's odyssey of self-discovery on an eerily alien Earth thirteen centuries in the future.

Rich in detail and filled with beings brought to life with intense energy, this strange and beautiful world reveals its secrets as Sumner Kagan changes from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like powers. In the process, we accompany Sumner on an epic and transcendent journey.

Nebula Award Nominee

The audiobook edition of Radix narrated by Sergei Burbank available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/ojf3qX

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In Other Worlds

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer, a sweet, slightly defeated bar manager, spontaneously transforms into energy and finds himself transported to the farthest extreme of the universe, 130 billion years in the future. Turned loose in time's last world, the strangest of all – the Werld – Carl discovers a domain of indescribably beautiful islands floating in a sky contoured by gravity lanes. These skyles are inhabited by the Foke, nomadic humans, who struggle for survival against the zōtl, a spidery intelligence that eats the pain of sentient beings. Among the Foke, Carl meets and wins the lovely Evoë, and their life together offers a blissful future in this kingdom that knows no aging or disease – until Evoë is captured by the zōtl. In order to save her life, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the world he has come back to is not the one he left...

The audiobook edition of In Other Worlds narrated by David Gilmore available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/Ds6CPw

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Arc of the Dream

An alien from a higher dimension has fallen to Earth, trapped within a continuum too small to contain it. In its quest for freedom, this hyperspatial being touches a handful of lives: Filling a frail Asian man with unimaginable energy. Freeing a middle-aged American from the chains of time. Wrenching a lonely French girl out of the depths of madness. Opening a bitter young Hawaiian punk to hope and love. Together, they join in a visionary quest to save the Earth from destruction.

"A kaleidoscopic adventure, a potent piece of storytelling pulsing with menace, yet thoughtfully and gracefully rendered." -- Roger Zelazny

"Arc of the Dream melds physics and metaphysics, adventure and speculation, intellectual entertainment and deeply felt emotion ... A step forward for a major writer." -- Norman Spinrad

"A lovely book, full of poetry and wonder." -- New York Daily News

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The Last Legends of Earth

Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zōtl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.

The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet, humans choose sides, as humans will, participating in the titanic struggle between Rimstalker and zōtl in ways strange and momentous.

Set in the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror, which is no more and no less than an enormous cosmic machine, The Last Legends of Earth is a love story, a gripping saga of struggle against alien control, and an examination of the machinery of creation and destruction.

Above all, it is world-building of the highest and grandest order, on a scale rarely seen in science fiction since the great works of Olaf Stapledon.

“A wondrously complex novel.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Few novels have ever had a broader scope.”—The Denver Post

“A wonderfully realized, richly-detailed and cohesive novel.” —People

The Last Legends of Earth is a magnificent, visionary epic of the far future.

The audiobook edition of The Last Legends of Earth narrated by David Gilmore available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/akxddK

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The Perilous Order of Camelot

Across this four book series, young King Arthur grows up with the help of Merlin in a world of supernatural powers set against him.

The Dragon and the Unicorn

A dragon’s dreamsong, a hunt for the unicorn’s horn, and the ceaseless wars of angels and demons begin this bold retelling of the Arthurian cycle. Here is magic. And dark romance. Here is Merlin’s most dangerous sorcery: the supernatural love story of Uther Pendragon and Ygrane queen of the Celts.

Old as the Big Bang, the demon Lailoken assumes human form in Roman Britain as Celts battle Saxons for mastery. The druid-queen he serves calls him Myrddin and sends him to find her true love—to fulfill for her people an ancient prophecy at the frontier of life and death.

Led by a unicorn and hunted by a dragon huge as the planet, Myrddin becomes Merlinus on his quest for the queen’s mate among her remorseless enemies, the Romans.

And finally as Merlin, he matches wits with gods and elves to unite Celtic queen and Roman warlord and weave the destiny of the most famous king.

http://goo.gl/1aoqTq

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The Eagle and the Sword

The story of young Arthor on his journey to Camelot. When Merlin discovers that Arthor's only joy is killing, he vows to turn the youth around with a magical sword.

Merlinus has fostered the future king of Britain with Kyner, a Celtic chieftain. Protected by obscurity from the jealous hatred of the sorceress Morgeu, Arthor grows to manhood; however, he becomes a twisted creature, loving violence and hating himself. What kind of king will he be? A chance journey leading to woodland encounters shapes his character and settles his destiny.

Arthor's story is a single thread in an immense, complex web of gods, demons, angels, a sorceress, a unicorn, a carpenter with a wish, a dragon, Saxons, an impoverished Aquitanian lady with a secret weapon, battle-hardened Celtic chieftains and treacherous Roman nobles, knights, warring religions—and fairies.

http://goo.gl/zMwP3t

The audiobook edition of The Eagle and the Sword narrated by Thomas B. Hackett available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/q0mNjs

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The Wolf and the Crown

Adolescent King Arthur's first year on the throne portrayed in chapters composed as 'flash fiction:' short, swift, emotionally percussive episodes, which reflect the intensity of the boy king's struggle to consolidate power against brigands and invading pagan tribes.

Though he possesses the legendary sword Excalibur, the boy-king "Arthor" discovers that he must earn the respect of the warring lords of Britain before he can truly claim his place as their leader.

Gods old and new, ghosts, witches, demons, angels, vampires, dwarves, a monkey, elves, stolen and misplaced souls, the hell that is our present day, the fabulous World Tree, Yggdrasil, that is the magnetic field surrounding the Earth, the hollow hills above the dragon at the heart of the planet, heroic adventure, and selfless sacrifice, weave a tapestry of magic and enchanted historical realism.

http://goo.gl/m4ZtL2

The audiobook edition of The Wolf and the Crown narrated by Erin Jones available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/AfO6gW

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The Serpent and the Grail

The narrator is Rna, a clan woman 90,000-years-old. She is eldest of the Nine Queens of Avalon. The place is Roman Britain, A.D. 491 on an alternate Earth, where Camelot is a monumental quantum gate to other worlds—

The boy-king Arthor has beaten back the berserker wolf warriors of the Saxon god, uniting his island kingdom—but at a terrible cost. The Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper and the magical shield of Britain, has been stolen.

Without the Grail's protection, Britain lies parched and barren, a demon-haunted landscape. To find the Grail, Arthor's mother, Ygrane, must strike a dark bargain with Bright Night, elf-prince of the "pale people," in the hollow hills.

Merlin alone can show the way. But it is Arthor who must confront the Serpent, sword in hand, to fulfill the ancient blood rite of kings—and transform himself to King Arthur.

http://goo.gl/Yg1aPs

The audiobook edition of The Serpent and the Grail narrated by Bushra Laskar available at Audible.com
http://goo.gl/JRRXcz

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The Dominions of Irth

Three epic fantasy novels explore Irth, a realm of wizards, witch queens, and magical amulets threatened by black magic from a mysterious world—Earth.

The Dark Shore

Here is an epic fantasy from the dawn of Creation, from the first worlds, the Bright Worlds. Among them is Irth. And upon Irth, in a realm of wizards, witch queens, and magic, destiny casts shadows into the Gulf and onto the Dark Shore, a universe of blacker magic and deeper mysteries — the greatest of which is Earth.

Irth is a world where magic rules — magic that radiates from the Abiding Star. The nobility, possessors of most of this mystic energy, dwell in floating cities that drift above their realms, plotting against each other for dominion.

The nobility cast off the Edge into the abyss beyond the reach of the Abiding Star those who fail in their attempts to hold or usurp power. There, the outcasts fall into the cold world of the Dark Shore — onto Earth — whence no one has ever returned.

Until now.

Hu’dre Vra, formerly an abject scavenger who found a magical sword but failed to use it wisely, plummeted into the abyss, only to return from the Dark Shore with an awesome new power: black magic. At the head of an army of cacodemons impervious to Irth’s enchantments, Hu’dre Vra the Dark Lord wreaks a terrible vengeance upon the world that exiled him.

But there is resistance to the Dark Lord’s rule of terror. The mysterious, inventive thief Ripcat and his crafty partner Dogbrick form an uneasy and dangerous alliance with the brave young noblewoman Jyoti and her small band of comrades, among whom is her family’s ancient sorcerer, Caval. Together, they all must pit their courage, their wits and their lives against the brutal minions of the Dark Shore.

http://goo.gl/rQlCu7

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The Shadow Eater

A gnome wanders among strange worlds of immeasurable beauty and terror on a quest for magic to restore the health of a goddess. If he fails, all creation will dissolve. And so he must dare anything to succeed, even trespass a realm of terrible darkness, pain and dread sorcery — Earth.

The Lady of the Garden, one of the godlike Nameless Ones, has used her magic to dream into existence the worlds of the Bright Shore. But now her unborn child lies motionless in her womb. An intruder from the Dark Shore, the malevolent shadow of her dream, threatens the life of her unborn. If she cannot locate and expel this shadow thing, she will waken the child's stern father, and he will dissolve the dream — and the Bright Shore will vanish.

In order to save the Lady of the Garden's baby, an old gnome travels through the many worlds in search of the creature of darkness whose presence threatens the dream of creation.

http://goo.gl/NONtHg

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Octoberland

A Manhattan coven, Octoberland, weaves ancient black magic to preserve the life of its 7,000-year-old leader, Nox. The sorcerer staves off death by leaching years from his followers’ blood. But Nox’s reckless search for eternal youth has opened the gate to—Irth. From this alien world of wizards, witch queens, and blacker magic yet, goblins invade Earth!

Darkness lurks at the heart of a city on Irth rebuilt from ashes — as a weak-minded ruler and his renegade witch wife hoard technological trinkets from the Dark Shore … from Earth.

Automatic weapons challenge talismanic magic and the amulet power of Charm. Evil threatens two worlds — Irth and Earth — in the stunning climax of The Dominions of Irth.

“One of the most inventive imaginary world settings.” —Orlando Sentinel
http://goo.gl/zljoEr

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Demons Hide Their Faces

(Seven Seriously Strange Stories.)

Featuring seven captivating, terrifying, and poetic short stories giving form to a universe both wonderful and terrifying: Visit an alternate America discovered and settled by imperial Chinese — Sleuth with a hardboiled detective in ‘30s Honolulu — Tour hell with an accidental demon hunter — Meet the Designers of our universe — Investigate the inner life of a vampire yoga instructor — Discover branch universes of evil beauty — and watch an Artificial Intelligence confront the ghosts of our blood.

http://goo.gl/FWUxOp

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