“What?” demanded Solfrank, a male two years her elder, almost ready for the rites of adulthood, which would compel him to depart the packstead and wander the upper Ponath in search of a pack that would take him in. His chances were excellent. Degnan males took with them envied education and skills.
Marika did not like Solfrank. The dislike was mutual. It extended back years, to a time when the male had thought his age advantage more than overbalanced his sexual handicap. He had bullied; Marika had refused to yield; young teeth had been bared; the older pup had been forced to submit. Solfrank never would forgive her the humiliation. The grudge was well-known. It was a stain he would bear with him in his search for a new pack.
“Dam sends me with two score and ten arrowheads ready for the shaft.” Marika bared teeth slightly. A hint of mockery, a hint of I-dare-you. “Granddam wants the needles Borget promised.”
Marika reflected that Kublin liked Solfrank. When he was not tagging after her, he trotted around after Gerrien’s whelp—and brought back all the corrupt ideas Solfrank whispered in his ear. At least Zamberlin knew him for what he was and viewed him with due contempt.
Solfrank bared his teeth, pleasured by further evidence that those who dwelt in Skiljan’s loghouse were mad. “I’ll tell Dam.”
In minutes Marika clutched a bundle of ready arrows. Gerrien herself brought a small piece of fine skin in which she had wrapped several bone needles. “These were Borget’s. Tell Skiljan we will want them back.”
Not the iron needles. The iron were too precious. But… Marika did not understand till she was outside again.
Gerrien did not expect Zertan to live much longer. These few needles, which had belonged to her sometime friend—and as often in council, enemy—might pleasure her in her failing days. Though she did not like her granddam, a tear formed in the corner of Marika’s eye. It froze quickly and stung, and she brushed at it irritably with a heavily gloved paw.
She was just three steps from home when she heard the cry on the wind, faint and far and almost indiscernible. She had not heard such a cry before, but she knew it instantly. That was the cry of a meth in sudden pain.
Degnan huntresses were out, as they were every day when times were hard. Males were out seeking deadwood. There might be trouble. She hurried inside and did not wait to be recognized before she started babbling. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave,” she concluded, shuddering. She was afraid of Machen Cave.
Skiljan exchanged looks with her lieutenants. “Up the ladder now, pup,” she said. “Up the ladder.”
“But Dam…” Marika wilted before a fierce look. She scurried up the ladder. The other pups greeted her with questions. She ignored them, huddled with Kublin. “It came from the direction of Machen Cave.”
“That’s miles away,” Kublin reminded.
“I know.” Maybe she had imagined the cry. Dreamed it. “But it came from that direction. That’s all I said. I didn’t claim it came from the cave.”
Kublin shivered. He said nothing more. Neither did Marika.
They were very afraid of Machen Cave, those pups. They believed they had been given reason.
III
It had been high summer, a time when danger was all of one’s own making. Pups were allowed free run of forest and hill, that they might come to know their pack’s territory. Their work and play were all shaped to teach skills adults would need to survive to raise their own pups.
Marika almost always ran with her littermates, especially Kublin. Zamberlin seldom did anything not required of him.
Kublin, though, hadn’t Marika’s stamina, strength, or nerve. She sometimes became impatient with him. In her crueler moments she would hide and force him to find his own way. He did so whining, complaining, sullenly, and slow, but he always managed. He was capable enough at his own pace.
North and east of the packstead stood Stapen Rock, a bizarre basalt upthrust the early Wise designated as spiritually and ritually significant. At Stapen Rock the Wise communed with the spirits of the forest and made offerings meant to assure good hunting, rich mast crops, fat and juicy berries, and a plentitude of chote. Chote being a knee-high plant edible in leaf, fruit, and fat, sweet, tuberous root. The root would store indefinitely in a dark, cool, dry place.
Stapen Rock was the chief of five such natural shrines recalling old Degnan animistic traditions. Others were dedicated to the spirits of air and water, fire and the underworld. The All itself, supercessor of the old way, was sanctified within the loghouses themselves.
Machen Cave, gateway to the world below, centered the shadowed side of life. Pohsit, sagan in Skiljan’s loghouse, and her like visited Machen Cave regularly, propitiating shadows and the dead, refreshing spells which bound the gateway against those.
The Degnan were not superstitious by the standards of the Ponath, but in the case of shadows no offering was spared to avert baleful influences. The spells sealing the cave were always numerous and fresh.
Marika played a game with herself and Kublin, one that stretched their courage. It required them to approach the fane nearer than fear would permit. Timid, Kublin remained ever close to her when they ran the woods. If, perforce, he went with her.
Marika had been playing that game for three summers. In the summer before the great winter, though, it ceased being pup play.
As always, Kublin was reluctant. At a respectful distance he began, “Marika, I’m tired. Can we go home now?”
“It’s just the middle of the afternoon, Kublin. Are you an infant that needs a nap?” Then distraction. “Oh. Look.”
She had spotted a patch of chote, thick among old leaves on a ravine bank facing northward. Chote grew best where it received little direct sunlight. It was an ephemeral plant, springing up, flowering, fruiting, and wilting all within thirty days. A patch this lush could not have gone unnoticed. In fact, it would have been there for years. But she would report it. Pups were expected to report discoveries. If nothing else, such reports revealed how well they knew their territory.
She forgot the cave. She searched for those plants with two double-paw-sized leaves instead of one. The female chote fruited on a short stem growing from the crotch where the leaf stems joined. “Here’s one. Not ripe. This one’s not ripe either.”
Kublin found the first ripe fruit, a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch ovoid a pale greenish yellow beginning to show spots of brown. “Here.” He held it up.
Marika found another a moment later. She bit a hole, sucked tangy, acid juice, then split the shell of the fruit. She removed the seeds, which she buried immediately. There was little meat to chote fruit, and that with an unpalatable bitterness near the skin. She scraped the better part carefully with a small stone knife. The long meth jaw and carnivore teeth made getting the meat with the mouth impossible.
Kublin seemed determined to devour every fruit in the patch. Marika concluded he was stalling. “Come on.”
She wished Zamberlin had come. Kublin was less balky then. But Zamberlin was running with friends this year, and those friends had no use for Kublin, who could not maintain their pace.
They were growing apart. Marika did not like that, though she knew there was no avoiding it. In a few years they would assume adult roles. Then Zambi and Kub would be gone entirely….
Poor Kublin. And a mind was of no value in a male.
Across a trickle of a creek, up a slope, across a small meadow, down the wooded slope bordering a larger creek, and downstream a third of a mile. There the creek skirted the hip of a substantial hill, the first of those that rose to become the Zhotak. Marika settled on her haunches a hundred feet from the stream and thirty above its level. She stared at the shadow among brush and rocks opposite that marked the mouth of the cave. Kublin settled beside her, breathing rapidly though she had not set a hard pace.
There were times when even she was impatient with his lack of stamina.
Sunlight slanted down through the leaves, illuminating blossoms of white, yellow, and pale red. W
inged things flitted from branch to branch through the dapple of sunlight and shadow, seeming to flicker in and out of existence. Some light fell near the cave mouth, but did nothing to illuminate its interior.
Marika never had approached closer than the near bank of the creek. From there, or where she squatted now, she could discern nothing but the glob of darkness. Even the propitiary altar was invisible.
It was said that meth of the south mocked their more primitive cousins for appeasing spirits that would ignore them in any case. Even among the Degnan there were those who took only the All seriously. But even they attended ceremonies. Just in case. Ponath meth seldom took chances.
Marika had heard that the nomad packs of the Zhotak practiced animistic rites which postulated dark and light spirits, gods and devils, in everything. Even rocks.
Kublin had his breath. Marika rose. Sliding, she descended to the creek. Kublin followed tautly. He was frightened, but he did not protest, not even when she leapt the stream. He followed. For once he seemed determined to outgut her.
Something stirred within Marika as she stared upslope. From where she stood the sole evidence of the cave’s presence was a trickle of mossy water on slick stone, coming from above. In some seasons a stream poured out of the cave.
She searched within herself, trying to identify that feeling. She could not. It was almost as if she had eaten something that left her slightly irritable, as though there was a buzzing in her nerves. She did not connect it with the cavern. Never before had she felt anything but fear when nearby. She glanced at Kublin. He now seemed more restless than frightened. “Well?”
Kublin bared his teeth. The expression was meant to be challenging. “Want me to go first?”
Marika took a couple of steps, looked upslope again. Nothing to see. Brush still masked the cave.
Three more steps.
“Marika.”
She glanced back. Kublin looked disturbed, but not in the usual way. “What?”
“There’s something in there.”
Marika waited for an explanation. She did not mock. Sometimes he could tell things that he could not see. As could she…. He quivered. She looked inside for what she felt. But she could not find it.
She did feel a presence. It had nothing to do with the cave. “Sit down,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“Because I want to get lower, so I can look through the brush. Somebody is watching. I don’t want them to know we know they’re there.”
He did as she asked. He trusted her. She watched over him.
“It’s Pohsit,” Marika said, now recalling a repeated unconscious sense of being observed. The feeling had left her more wary than she realized. “She’s following us again.”
Kublin’s immediate response was that of any pup. “We can outrun her. She’s so old.”
“Then she’d know we’d seen her.” Marika sat there awhile, trying to reason out why the sagan followed them. It had to be cruel work for one as old as she. Nothing rational came to mind. “Let’s just pretend she isn’t there. Come on.”
They had taken four steps when Kublin snagged her paw. “There is something in there, Marika.”
Again Marika tried to feel it. This sense she had, which had betrayed Pohsit to her, was not reliable. Or perhaps it depended too much upon expectation. She expected a large animal, a direct physical danger. She sensed nothing of the sort. “I don’t feel anything.”
Kublin made a soft sound of exasperation. Usually it was the other way around, Marika trying to explain something sensed while he remained blind to it.
Why did Pohsit follow them around? She did not even like them. She was always saying bad things to Dam. Once again Marika tried to see the old meth with that unreliable sense for which she had no name.
Alien thoughts flooded her mind. She gasped, reeled, closed them out. “Kublin!”
Her littermate was staring toward the mouth of the cave, jaw restless. “What?”
“I just…” She was not sure what she had done. She had no referents. Nothing like it had happened before. “I think I just heard Pohsit thinking.”
“You what?”
“I heard what she was thinking. About us—about me. She’s scared of me. She thinks I’m a witch of some kind.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was thinking about Pohsit. Wondering why she’s always following us. I reached out like I can sometimes, and all of a sudden I heard her thinking. I was inside her head, Kublin. Or she was inside mine. I’m scared.”
Kublin did not seem afraid, which amazed Marika. He asked, “What was she thinking?”
“I told you. She’s sure I’m some kind of witch. A devil or something. She was thinking about having tried to get the Wise to… to…” That entered her conscious mind for the first time.
Pohsit was so frightened that she wanted Marika slain or expelled from the packstead. “Kublin, she wants to kill me. She’s looking for evidence that will convince Dam and the Wise.” Especially the Wise. They could overrule Skiljan if they were sufficiently determined.
Kublin was an odd one. Faced with a concrete problem, a solid danger, he could clear his mind of fright and turn his intellect upon the problem. Only when the peril was nebulous did he collapse. But Marika would not accept his solution to what already began to seem an unlikely peril.
Kublin said, “We’ll get her up on Stapen Rock and push her off.”
Just like that, he proposed murder. A serious proposal. Kublin did not joke.
Kublin—and Zamberlin—shared Marika’s risk. And needed do nothing but be her littermates to be indicted with her if Pohsit found some fanciful charge she could peddle around the packstead. They shared the guilty blood. And they were male, of no especial value.
In his ultimate powerlessness, Kublin was ready to overreact to the danger.
For a moment Marika was just a little frightened of him. He meant it, and it meant no more to him than the squashing of an irritating insect, though Pohsit had been part of their lives all their lives. As sagan she had taught them their rituals. She was closer, in some ways, than their dam.
“Forget it,” Marika said. By now she was almost convinced that she had imagined the contact. “We came to see the cave.”
They were closer than ever they had dared, and for the first time Kublin had the lead. Marika pushed past him, asserting her primacy. She wondered what Pohsit thought now. Pups were warned repeatedly about Machen Cave. She moved a few more steps uphill.
Now she saw the cave mouth, black as the void between the stars when the moons were all down. Two steps more and she dropped to her haunches, sniffed the cold air that drifted out of the darkness. It had both an earthy and slightly carrion tang. Kublin squatted beside her. She said, “I don’t see any altar. It just looks like a cave.”
There was little evidence anyone ever came there.
Kublin mused, “There is something in there, Marika. Not like any animal.” He closed his eyes and concentrated.
Marika closed hers, wondering about Pohsit.
Again that in-smash of anger, of near insane determination to see Marika punished for a crime the pup could not comprehend. Fear followed the thoughts, which were so repugnant Marika’s stomach turned. She reeled away and her sensing consciousness whipped past her, into the shadows within Machen Cave.
She screamed.
Kublin clapped a paw over her mouth. “Marika! Stop! What’s the matter, Marika?”
She could not get the words out. There was something there. Something big and dark and hungry in a way she could not comprehend at all. Something not of flesh. Something that could only be called spirit or ghost.
Kublin seemed comfortable with it. No. He was frightened, but not out of control.
She recalled Pohsit across the creek, nursing inexplicable hatreds and hopes. She controlled herself. “Kublin, we have to get away from here. Before that notices us.”
But Kublin paid no attention. He moved forward, his
step dreamlike.
Had Pohsit not been watching, and malevolent, Marika might have panicked. But the concrete danger on the far bank kept her in firm control. She seized Kublin’s arm, turned him. He did not struggle. But neither did he cooperate. Not till she led him to the creekside, where the glaze left his eyes. For a moment he was baffled as to where he was and what he was doing there.
Marika explained. She concluded, “We have to go away as though nothing happened.” That was critical. Pohsit was looking for something exactly like what had happened.
Once Kublin regained his bearings, he managed well enough. They behaved like daring pups loose in the woods the rest of the day. But Marika did not stop worrying the edges of the hundred questions Machen Cave had raised.
What was that thing in there? What had it done to Kublin?
He, too, was thoughtful.
That was the real beginning. But till much later Marika believed it started in the heart of that terrible winter, when she caught the scream of the meth on the breast of the cold north wind.
CHAPTER TWO
I
Having questioned Marika till she was sure her scream was not one of her daydreams, Skiljan circulated through the loghouses and organized a scouting party, two huntresses from each. After Marika again told what she had heard, they left the packstead. Marika climbed the watchtower and watched them pass through the narrows around the stockade, through the gate, then lope across the snowy fields, into the fangs of the wind.
She could not admit it, even to herself, but she was frightened. The day was failing. The sky had clouded up. More snow seemed in the offing. If the huntresses were gone long, they might get caught in the blizzard. After dark, in a snowfall, even the most skilled huntress could lose her way.
She did not stay in the tower long. A hint of what the weather held in store came as a few ice pellets smacked her face. She retreated to the loghouse.
She was frightened and worried. That scream preyed upon her.
Worry tainted the rank air inside, too. The males prowled nervously in their territory. The old females bent to their work with iron determination. Even Zertan got a grip on herself and tended to her sewing. The younger females paced, snarling when they got in one another’s way. The pups retreated to the loft and the physical and emotional safety it represented.