“Again,” Dog murmured.
Mal stood ready, a spear in his hand, two more at his feet, and then his shoulders slumped. He relaxed his grip and let the spear fall to the ground.
“I cannot do this, Dog,” he sighed.
“You must.” Dog bent down and picked up the spear. “Take it.”
“No.”
“Mal. Please!”
“No.”
“Take it!”
“I cannot!” Mal shouted. He yanked the spear away from Dog with his left hand, spun, and hurled it into the woods.
Dog’s mouth dropped as the weapon soared high, vanishing in the forest.
Mal stood panting, his eyes hot. Dog started to laugh. Mal frowned. “What is it? What?”
“Did you see how far that went?” Dog exulted. “Mal, we have been using the wrong hand!” Dog began running to get the spear, taking leaping steps. “You nearly hit the sky, Mal! You just need to use your other hand!”
Mal watched his brother cavort. Now that he considered it, he realized that he tended to do everything with his woman’s side hand, especially if no one was watching. Perhaps having a twisted leg on that side gave him more strength in his left arm to compensate.
“You are going to be a spearman! A spearman!” Dog was calling from the woods.
* * *
Lyra found the two boys later that afternoon, lying in the grasses and laughing and talking about nothing. She carried with her several pieces of cooked meat impaled upon a stick, as well as a pouch full of eggs that Calli had allowed to simmer in hot water all morning.
She was a pretty girl with a shy smile, just a few months younger than Mal. She liked to take small stems and chain them together and weave them into her braids, an exotic new style that some of the older girls had started to emulate. Dog and Mal scrambled to their feet at her approach.
“I brought you some food,” she greeted. “Calli said you were out here practicing hunting, but I see that instead you are lying around doing nothing.”
Dog laughed, but Mal’s grin was tempered by a sense of injustice. “We were practicing,” he objected.
“When on the hunt, then, do you lie in the grass and wait for a winter mammoth to step over you so you can spear it from below?” Lyra asked.
“That is exactly how we do it,” Dog affirmed.
“Well then. Please eat. Clearly all I thought I knew about hunting has been wrong,” she said agreeably.
They sat cross-legged on the ground. Lyra offered the stick first to Dog, then to Mal. Both young men noticed she had fashioned a vine around her wrist, something they had never seen.
“Thank you very much, Lyra,” Dog said formally.
“When you crack the eggs, you may find the centers are still warm,” she advised.
Mal looked impatient for his brother to share their news. “We have been trying a new technique for throwing the spear,” he told Lyra.
Dog nodded, but did not elaborate on Mal’s statement.
“It is going very well,” Mal continued forcefully.
Dog was assessing Lyra. She met his gaze and he flushed.
Boys were named men when they were in their fourteenth summer but females were deemed adults when the women decided the girls were capable of bearing children—though how they knew that was a mystery to the men. “So Lyra, this coming summer or the next you will be taken into the Kindred as an adult. What will be your craft?” Dog asked.
“We are assuming I will be a spearman,” Mal interrupted almost desperately.
“I am hoping to apprentice to Renne. I like making rope,” Lyra answered with a soft smile.
“Because you are very good at cooking,” Dog told her, smiling through a mouthful of meat.
“Let me show you,” Mal exclaimed, bounding to his feet. When he threw the spear, it went nearly thirty paces before striking a tree. It did not stick, but fell to the ground. Still, a triumph. Mal turned back to his brother and Lyra, and they clapped.
Lyra had known Mal her whole life, and could not remember a time when he appeared so happy.
* * *
Two days later, the Kindred left for their summer quarters. The departure was so different than the migration made at the start of winter—they were excited, looking forward to a bountiful season, better food, and gloriously warm days spent in a far more beautiful place.
Dog, as a spearman, did not need to help his mother anymore, but he still came to take the travois from her, a respite Calli was grateful for. Coco did her best but had weakened in the past few years and simply was not up to the task, and Mal—Mal always tried, but for him, just keeping up with the Kindred was challenge enough.
“Thank you, Dog,” Calli said as her tall older son unburdened her. “Just for a while, and then I am happy to take it back.”
Dog grinned and nodded. He was always grinning—he made everything seem as if it were fun. He was so tall and was finally filling out a little. Calli looked often at his arms, wondering if they might someday fill out like Hardy’s, but mostly he was lean, tall and lean.
They walked side by side in contented silence, and then Calli gave her son an appraising glance. “So, Dog, the women on the council have been talking openly about who you should marry. As your mother, they naturally are eager for my opinion.”
As she spoke, Calli’s eyes involuntarily found Albi, who struggled along as far away from Calli as could be managed, leaning on her walking stick more than ever. Things were so much better with Bellu as council mother. The women talked uncensored, they aired differences, they achieved consensus. How it must gall Albi to see everyone so much happier!
“Well, I do not know about marriage,” Dog replied.
Calli searched his face. “Are you afraid what has happened between your father and me will happen to you?” she asked softly.
Dog cocked his head, considering. “No, I do not believe so. My father has turned against all of us because of his mother. My own mother only cares about me.”
They smiled at each other. Calli reached out and touched his arm.
“Also,” he continued slowly, “the one girl I would be interested in is not yet eligible. She has yet to be declared a woman—perhaps this summer.”
Calli’s jaw dropped. “What? Who? Who?” she demanded. She began mentally listing the girls she thought might make sense, but then stopped—it was obvious. “Lyra?”
“Shh,” Dog replied, his face turning red.
Calli smiled. What a wonderful choice. She decided she would speak to Council Mother Bellu about it soon, as well as Lyra’s mother, Sidee, and make it known among the council, so that when the time came, Dog might have the woman he desired. It was not the same as allowing a couple to determine for themselves, but it was so much better than when Albi decided everything.
“I think you are probably right. It may not be much longer before Lyra will be eligible to marry. I would like to be a grandmother.”
Dog laughed at her radiant expression.
“What? Why do you laugh?” she demanded, shoving his shoulder lightly, but she was laughing, too.
* * *
The water in the river was frigid this time of year, though the ice had recently melted and moved out. Silex shivered at the thought of bathing in it, but he liked the feel of his skin when it was freshly washed.
He was fond of a place upriver where a series of low sandbars trapped the stream in pellucid pools. He made sure he let people know he was going there in case he was needed, but he headed there alone, wanting time to think. His sons Cragg and Tok thought bathing was torture and were happy not to be invited. The sun was warm and high in the sky—he would lie on the rocks and bask until dry.
Just as he was reaching his favorite spot, Silex started in surprise. Someone was already there. Instinctively, he ducked behind some foliage.
It was a woman, standing naked in water up to her ankles. She was reaching down and cupping water with her hands and ladling it on herself. Her back was to him, her ski
n smooth and buttocks taut.
Silex took in shallow breaths, his mouth dry. He should turn away, he knew, but he found himself frozen in place, enraptured. His pulse pounded as he watched the trickles flow down her body, dripping from her breasts. He knew who she was.
Denix.
The intense feelings now startled alive within him had been dormant since Fia died: the longing and the lust, the pull. This was not just mild attraction, this was an instant hunger that wracked him, consumed him, compelled him. When she turned her head, it was as if she had known all along he was there, had known he was watching. She met his eyes, her eyebrows raised.
Silex bolted, turning and fleeing as if being chased. The run helped, redirecting his blood flow, the uneven ground demanding his attention and diverting it away from the image of Denix standing naked in the water. But when he made it back to the Wolfen gathering site, she was all he could think about.
He was married. This is not good, he admonished himself sternly. Not good at all.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Blanc Tribe considered the Kindred to be a harbinger—when the migrating tribe arrived, it meant it would soon be summer, when fishing would be so much better.
The Kindred had fresh meat, and the Blanc Tribe immediately set out to put on a feast, the women mingling easily while the men withdrew to examine each other’s weapons. The children were soon a running melee, brown-eyed and pale-eyed mixing without tension.
Not all children played. Those about to be accepted as adults: Vinco, Mal, Markus—were uneasy, eyeing the teen members of the other tribe, not sure what to say or do.
For Mal, being somewhat apart from everyone gave him an interesting perspective on the mingling of the tribes. He watched as the Blanc Tribe traded items of questionable value, such as the shiny shells they somehow pulled from their lake, for choice cuts of meat. They even brought out the bearskin that Urs had given them years ago and successfully traded it back—it had been fur for fish and now it was fur for meat, as if the fish had been directly traded for meat, in an exchange spread out over several years.
Several women from the Blanc Tribe swarmed Bellu, who had recently given birth to a little girl. They passed the child, bundled in fur, from hand to hand, cooing over the pretty little thing, who seemed to have the same eyes as her mother.
“She cries most nights. I never sleep,” Bellu told them. They nodded sympathetically. “And she is sick all the time.”
Not long after the Kindred’s arrival, a light-eyed man found Calli. As was true of all the people in his tribe, he had shells throughout his hair. “May I ask of you if you are the mother of the one with the leg that is twisted so badly?” the man inquired.
It took Calli a moment to shake off her reaction—in the Kindred, no man would walk right up to a woman and speak without a proper introduction. “Mal, he is my son,” Calli affirmed, deciding to ignore the man’s faux pas.
“Mal. Of course. I remember when I first saw him. He is always playing, as if his leg were not so horribly deformed.”
Calli crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Yes?” she prodded, more coldly.
A girl a year or two younger than Mal peeked out from behind the man. “I must introduce you. This is my daughter. Ema.”
Ema looked up at Calli with tentative light eyes. Calli smiled politely at the girl, somewhat mystified. What was going on?
“Show her, Ema,” the man urged impatiently.
Reluctantly, Ema stepped completely out of her father’s shadow. A less sensitive woman might have gasped—Ema’s arm on her woman’s side ended above the elbow in a mass of scar tissue.
“Her hand was pinned beneath a great rock,” the man explained. “We could not move it. The only way to save her was to use an ax.” He swallowed, nodding at Calli’s horrified expression. “First we tied a cord around her arm and wound it tight with a stick until her flesh was blue. And then we chopped just below the cord, separating the joint as cleanly as we could. I had hoped she would pass out, but she was conscious during the whole thing, my Ema,” the man continued, his voice roughening. “Then, we packed the wound with mud and spiderwebs, and left the rope in place for several days. Her skin grew hot and she spoke in a strange language—we think she was talking to the spirits in the lake, who were trying to decide whether to take her. But the wound healed. Now she is healthy. And what a strong heart! So much pain, and still, she lives.”
Calli could not imagine what that must have been like for the girl. She regarded Ema with sympathy and admiration. A strong heart, indeed. It reminded her of her son Mal, always living his life as if he were not afflicted with a deformity.
“But now,” the man whispered, leaning forward, “no one from my tribe will marry her. Who would, with that arm? It is hideous.”
Ema was listening, her expression bland. Calli felt her anger stir that he would speak so bluntly and unkindly in front of his daughter.
“But your son. Perhaps he will have the same problem? You see? Ema is thirteen years old. Next time you come, on your way to your winter quarters, perhaps we can have a wedding.”
Calli looked at Ema, who gazed back solemnly. “Do you know my son, Ema?” Calli asked softly. The man seemed surprised at the question, but Ema nodded, smiling a little. “Does he seem like the sort of boy … the sort of man you would like as a husband?”
“Yes,” Ema replied. “Yes, he does.”
“And where would they live? With the Kindred? Or here, eating fish?” Calli wanted to know.
The man shrugged. “Perhaps he is happy here, perhaps he is happy with the Kindred. My wife is dead, so there is no woman to pine for grandchildren. I would be satisfied to see my daughter when the Kindred comes through to trade meat, and perhaps one winter or two they stay here if they wish.”
Calli could see it, and it made her smile. A wife for Mal. She thought of the Blanc Tribe and their accepting ways, always welcoming, and of the bruises Mal tried to hide from his mother—bruises administered on a regular basis by his “friends.” She knew Albi’s influence among the women had all but evaporated, but she saw the older woman sometimes sitting and talking to Grat and some of the other boys, as if she were a kindly aunt. Calli suspected Albi was giving the boys malevolent ideas.
Calli pictured stopping here twice a year to see her son and his family. Her happy son and his happy family. “Yes,” she found herself saying. “This is a wonderful idea.”
Year Nineteen
When the man was in the den with the wolf puppy, they would play games together. Often they simply wrestled, but there were other games, such as when he made recognizable noises and gestured with his hands, over and over, until she reacted with a behavior that he praised and rewarded with a succulent morsel from the pouch he kept out of her reach. Sometimes she was to sit down. Sometimes she was to wait for him while he left, not moving from the spot where he put her until he returned. Her favorite, though, was when he called to her and she ran to him. She loved these games, and she loved the man.
“Before I can take you out of this cave, I have to know you will come to me when asked, or remain where I tell you, to keep you out of danger. I do not want to lose you.”
One day he put something on her neck. The smell was familiar—he had something with the same scent looped around his waist. When he stood and her neck was yanked, though, she did not understand and rebelled, twisting and pulling, choking, getting frantic.
The man threw his arms around her and she calmed.
“I think this will work. With the rope on your neck, you will not be able to run off. Please. We will walk around the cave. You only need to become accustomed to it.”
After some time, the wolf understood. It was another game. Tight, the cord choked her, but if she followed next to the man’s heels, the rope dragged on the cave floor and he gave her meat. Not a fun game, but they did it over and over again.
That night, the man brought in something very strange—it was somehow the mother-wolf, with her
scent and soft fur, but the pup’s mother herself was not there. The pup smelled it up and down and whimpered, more out of bafflement than fear.
Later, though, the man lay on the mother fur and the wolf pup drowsily put her head on his chest, feeling content. The presence of the mother-smell gave her comfort.
“Tomorrow,” the man said, the vibrations in his chest filling the young pup’s ears, “we will go outside. I will carry my spear. I hope I can protect you.”
Year Eighteen
The Kindred stayed with the Blanc Tribe for two days. Calli found Mal in an isolated group of Kindred adolescents, and called to him to help her. When she had her son aside, Calli pointed to a group of girls who were fussing with a tangle of ropes called a “net.” Many of the women of the Blanc seemed to spend a lot of their time building or repairing the things, which were somehow used in catching fish.
“See that girl there? Her name is Ema. The one with the arm?” Calli asked.
Mal stared. “What happened to her arm?” he gasped, looking repulsed.
“What happened to your leg?” his mother responded sharply.
Mal looked up at her, shocked.
“How do you feel when people react with such dread to your leg?” Calli asked more gently. “Think how she must feel when people are unkind to her because of her arm.”
Mal took this in and, to his credit, seemed to understand.
“Her father asked that you help her and a few of the other girls do something. I want you to go with them.”
“Her father?” Mal repeated dumbly.
“Mal. Just go with them. The girl’s name is Ema, and she is two summers younger than you, I think. Maybe just one. The Blanc use years instead of summers, so it is always a little difficult to calculate.”
“Yes, Mother,” Mal replied.
“And while you are out with Ema, ask about her. Find out about her. Notice how pretty she is.”
“How pretty she is,” Mal echoed without comprehension.