Beyond the corrals, torches ringed a longhouse. This hall served the entire tribe as home, storage, and stable. Even Spits-last, their sorcerer, lived cheek by jowl with them, never knowing solitude.
Flakes of snow spun past. Although the wind had cut harshly on the plateau above, the shadow of winter burned more intensely within the valley’s heart. The shock of the temperature change made her shudder. She paused once to catch her breath. Alain put an arm around her shoulders to warm her. His expression was grave.
“This country knows me,” he said in his stumbling way, “and I know this country. In this country was born fifth son of the fifth litter, who became a strong hand.” He shook his head, puzzling out the words. “His hand is strong. Hei! I cannot speak the name. There were children of rock here, but I see them not now. Many children of rock lived here when I saw it. They do not live here now.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“Quick!” The Akka guide beckoned impatiently. “Walking One of Water people dead is, or not dead is. To her you must speak.”
People came out of the long hall to stare at them. A boy doused torches as weak daylight rose. It was too cloudy for her to mark the position of the sun’s rise against the distant cliffs and ridges. Beyond the hall she saw other structures, pit houses or burial mounds, dug into the ground. She had only visited Spits-last once, in his homeland, and it had been snowing then, too, drowned in winter’s darkness.
They stepped into the long hall to be greeted by a powerful reek. The long, low space was lit by three hearth fires and so smoky that the air seemed alive with particles. She smelled cattle and sheep, penned farther down. The taint of rotting crab apples hung in the air, a sweet tinge above the thick perfume of human bodies pressed together. Alain spoke a few words to his dogs, and they sat down, unmolested, on either side of the door. Their Akka guide made a path for them through the people by using her spear’s butt to poke and prod everyone aside, but Adica and Alain were not as lucky as the dogs: hands reached forward to pinch her bare skin or fondle the strings of her skirt, until she pulled out of the grasp of one only to find another waiting to handle her. They breathed into her face, gabbled in their hard tongue, and poked and prodded her with their fingers as though to assure themselves that she was a living being.
Beside the second hearth fire, on a pallet, lay Falling-down side by side with a dead woman half-covered with pine needles. His eyes were closed. For an instant Adica thought he, too, was dead. She knelt beside him and touched his hand, and he opened his eyes at once. He had the hazel eyes common to his tribe, rheumy with age but still sharply intelligent.
“Adica!” he said with pleasure in his brittle voice. She helped him up to a sitting position. “I sent the Walking One of Tanioinin’s people twelve days ago to fetch you. Alas that the loom brought you here so slow. My cousin is dead now. She died at sunset.”
“What happened?”
Alain crouched beside the woman and, without any thought of death’s dangers and taboos, brushed aside pine needles and placed a hand around the curve of her throat, listening.
Falling-down watched him with bemusement. “Can this be the man the Holy One brought to be your husband? Where did he come from not to fear death?”
“He was walking the path to the Other Side. I don’t know where he came from before that.”
Alain sat back on his heels. The people who had crowded up behind him to stare skittered back, as if afraid that he, having touched that which was dead, would infect them. He did not appear to notice them as he looked at Adica.
“Her soul no longer lives in her body.”
“So you see,” said Adica to Falling-down. “He knows when a spirit still walks in the land of the living. Why are you here, Falling-down? Why did you leave your tribe? Such a long journey is difficult for you. And it is so dangerous now to walk the looms, if the Cursed Ones stalk us.”
He lifted a hand for silence. A child brought him a wooden cup filled to the brim with mead. He sipped at it before reciting his tale. The Akka Walking One translated his words to her people, who crowded around to listen.
“The ships of the Cursed Ones landed on the coast of our land. Scouts of our cousins the Reed people saw them. They sent a Running Youth to alert us. Then another Running Youth came. The ships put to land near the nesting ground of guivres. The guivres rose and feasted on them.”
Voices murmured in satisfaction at this gruesome and well-deserved fate. The Akka woman spoke sharply, and the people quieted, not without a lot of pinching and protests, so that Falling-down could go on.