Tsuga's Children Read online

  In the morning Bren and Arel woke them shortly after dawn. “The net men say the shandeh have stopped running,” Bren said, “so we can do what we want today.” He said nothing about what had happened the night before.

  “And tomorrow we go to the council fire,” Arel said.

  For breakfast they had cornbread and honey, and tea brewed from a dark ground powder like the powder Arn carried in his pack. After breakfast Fannu came in, tall and lanky for his age, and Dona, dressed in her bead-decorated parka trimmed with the fur of fox, rabbit and squirrel.

  “Dona doesn’t want to, but we’ve decided to show you how to play our game with the ball,” Fannu said. “You have to run. Do you like to run?”

  “Arn runs pretty well,” Bren said.

  “You’ll get your clothes all dirty,” Dona said. But when they went out on the meadow to the place where they played the game, Dona put her parka carefully to the side on the grass and played with them.

  The ball was sewn leather, as big as an acorn squash, stuffed with leather scraps. At each end of the grassy space a bent hoop made of a thin sapling had been placed in the ground, forming an arch about five feet high. The object was to kick the ball through the other team’s hoop. Fannu and Bren chose sides and agreed that Bren’s team would be Dona and Arel, and Fannu’s, Jen and Arn. The ground was still frozen from the night’s frost, and the sun was rising at a flat angle that just brought it over the southeastern mountains.

  Fannu was very good; he could run and turn while still playing the ball between his flickering feet. He passed it over to Jen, who kicked it by accident to Arel, who kicked it to Dona, who kicked it ahead of her as she ran until Bren could get into position by Fannu’s hoop. She passed it to him and he quickly kicked it through for a point. Arel, who looked sickly and pale, could still run as well as anyone.

  The hard ground and frosty grass passed beneath their feet as they played. Jen and Am were beginning to understand the game, and how to keep the ball rolling as they ran. Fannu made the next point, after a pass from Arn. They were all breathing hard in the cold air, their breaths white plumes, their feet dashing and dancing through the worn grass, their voices calling happily yet seriously across the meadow.

  When the score was three for Fannu’s team and two for Bren’s, Arn got the ball near Bren’s hoop and dribbled it forward to give it its final kick. Bren was between him and the hoop, and he was about to sidestep Bren when suddenly the sky whirled above him and he was on the ground, numb, unable to breathe. Bren had run right over him and taken the ball. At first all Arn could do was try to get his wind back, to make air come into his lungs. His chest was paralyzed by the blow he had taken; he couldn’t understand the hardness, the violence of Bren’s action. It was as if Bren wanted to hurt him very badly, as if Bren really hated him. He lay there in the icy dust struggling for breath.

  Jen and Arel stood over him. “Are you all right?” Jen asked. “Arn! Are you all right?”

  He couldn’t get enough breath to speak, but as the moments passed he began to get more air. He was perplexed. Anger flirted around the edge of his feelings, and also a sadness that hinted at tears. But he didn’t cry. Finally he could breathe again, and got to his feet. Fannu, Bren and Dona were playing out the point near the opposite hoop. When Bren made the point they came back.

  “Did you mean to hurt him?” Jen said to Bren, anger in her voice.

  “That’s part of the game,” Fannu said. “If there’s only you between the hoop and the player with the ball, you can hit him as hard as you want to.”

  “Bren wanted to hurt him, then,” Jen said. “Did you, Bren?”

  “Can he take it?” was all Bren said.

  “I can take it,” Arn said. He looked at Bren, feeling cold and calm now. Bren’s look was as cool as his own.

  They played the game for a while longer, but the exhilaration they had felt was gone. The coolness between Arn and Bren remained, as though everyone couldn’t help thinking about it.

  As they walked back toward the hogans, Fannu told Arn and Jen that they would make good players, and that they had done very well at a game they had never played before. Both Jen and Arn were pleased by this, and by Arel’s and Dona’s saying the same thing. In spite of the small cloud caused by Bren’s silence—he walked ahead of them, not speaking—they were so pleased, Jen felt herself blushing. Arn thought, This was just a game. Why should it have pleased him so much? He was still sore in places. That was real, and the game was real, as real as anything he had ever done.

  That day they took a long hike through the western woods—Bren, Arel, Fannu and Dona, Arn and Jen. Their lunches in their packs or pockets, they walked westward toward a knob of stone from which they would get a view of most of the valley. They walked through the quiet green woods on an easy trail of moss and evergreen needles, dead winter ferns and the leaves of the summer before. After a mile or two they came to the rising slopes of the lookout knob, then climbed around and around the knob itself, always going upward, until they came out into the sunlight and the wind upon the rounded stone, with the valley spread out below them. To the east was the meadow, where the hogans were just little dark or green squares. The hot lake was to the north of the meadow, its rainbow shores dimmed by the distance. Nearer, the tops of the forest trees pushed up below them, a green depth that changed and became more solid in the distance. Far away in every direction rose the sharp mountain walls of the valley.

  They found comfortable places in the sun and got out their lunches of smoked boar ham slices, cucumber pickles, bread and dried apples. Bren had brought a skin bag of water in his pack, and the brook water was clear and good.

  Arel saw that Jen was looking to the far north, where she and Arn had entered the valley. “Tsuga will be back tomorrow, for the council fire,” she said. “Maybe you can ask him how to get home again.”

  “Can you talk to him?” Jen asked. “Who is Tsuga? What’s he like?”

  “He’s older than the mountains,” Fannu said. “At least that’s what they told us when we were little.”

  “Bren’s talked to him,” Arel said. “What do you think, Bren?”

  Bren was quiet and sad, unsmiling. He glanced at Arel and away, as if he were not going to answer. Then he said in a low voice, “My father says he is only a man. He’s old and maybe he does know a lot, but he’s just a man.”

  “He’s the oldest of all,” Dona said. “They say he remembers when he could raise his arm higher than the top of the Great Tree.”

  “He smiled at me once,” Arel said. “He looked right at me and smiled.”

  Bren was watching Jen, his eyes more alive than they had been all day, as if he were looking out of his head rather than at some dark problem within it. Then he said, “Are you homesick, Jen?”

  Jen knew how hard it must be for Bren to say anything like that, so she knew she had been looking very sad. She had been thinking of the way through the mountain, then the frozen forest, then the small cabin; and then she remembered a time that seemed so long ago, when she and her mother were making butter in the churn and her mother sang the butter song in her clear and happy voice:

  Out of night comes daylight,

  Out of thin comes thick.

  Oka knows how butter grows,

  So turn the paddles quick.

  Jen turned her face away from Bren’s dark eyes. “But I like it here, too,” she said.

  Arel said, “If you can’t find your way back, we’d like you to stay here with us.”

  Fannu said, “Arn can play on my side anytime he wants.”

  Dona came over and sat on the other side of Jen, and the six children were quiet in the warm sun. They knew they were only children and could not decide things beyond their powers, but they could by their closeness make real for a while their separate world.

  13. The Council Fire

  The next morning all the people—men, women, children and babies—made ready to travel to the Great Tree, where the council fire wo
uld be held. After the council fire they would camp by the warm lake and return to the winter camp the day after. Aguma herself had predicted that the next day would be clear, though it would be cold on the evening of the fire. Each family distributed food, arrows and necessary gear among its members, and each person would have a sleeping skin to roll up in on the cold ground, the fur inside.

  Bren’s father had left early that morning, alone, so Bren went with Amu and Runa, Arn, Jen and Arel. Fannu and Dona went with Aguma’s party. It was a long walk across meadow, around swamps and through the woods, and they stopped only once, toward late afternoon, to rest and eat. Bren, who had been silent all the way, took his food and sat apart from them, his unstrung bow across his lap, his back against a spruce.

  Arel looked at him worriedly and spoke in a low voice to Jen and Arn. “Bren is upset because he couldn’t go with Andaru. It doesn’t seem right to him.”

  “But everybody seems worried,” Jen said. “I can feel it.”

  “So can I,” Arel said. Her pale, delicate face was sad. “I heard my mother and father talking last night when we were all supposed to be asleep. It’s the Chigai. The people don’t know what to think about them and their ways, because it is said that the Chigai are never hungry, and the people don’t want to be hungry.”

  Soon they rose and continued their journey to the Great Tree. Arn carried his unstrung bow in his left hand, his quiver tied to his pack, in which he carried both his and Jen’s food. Jen carried her sleeping-skin rolled and tied across her shoulders. It was a long walk, but finally they came to the meadow and climbed up the slope to the ledges and the tree. The sun had set behind the western mountains and a half-moon had risen in the southeast. Far above, a few thin coins of clouds still caught the light of the sun and lent a golden light to the valley. The Great Tree rose above the ledges, branch above branch, the sturdy trunk finally disappearing into green. At its base, behind the stone platform, was the black archway of the Cave of Forgetfulness.

  The people gathered at the ledges, taking their places on the winter-brown grass around a large pile of branches that would be the council fire. On the stone platform in front of the archway, Aguma and several older people sat waiting for darkness and the lighting of the fire. Bren and Arel, with Fannu and Dona, took Jen and Arn to the front, where all the children sat. The grass was soft, the earth still warm from the departed sun, and all the people waited, speaking to each other in low voices.

  Fannu and Dona had heard rumors that the council would be an important one. They were to have visitors from a settlement on the eastern edge of the valley, where some of their own people had visited in the fall. There were rumors of discontent with Tsuga’s teachings. Some people had left early that morning, as had Andaru, and actually visited the camp of the Chigai on the eastern edge of the meadow. It was said that the Chigai had wolves as servants, or as slaves, though that was hard to believe.

  “Is Tsuga up there?” Arn asked. They could just make out the outlines of the people on the stone platform.

  “He’s there,” Arel said. “He sits on Aguma’s left. You’ll see him when the fire is lighted.”

  Bren, who had been silent, spoke to Jen and Arn. “But you had a ‘cow,’” he said. “Was that your servant? And the ‘ox’ and the ‘pig’ and the goats? Was that wrong?”

  “They served us, I guess,” Arn said. “But they weren’t wild animals. Without us to protect them and feed them in the winter, they would have died.”

  “Then how could they be animals?” Fannu wondered. “Tsuga says the animals live in the world, but we live in our clothes and hogans.”

  “And we have fire,” Arel said.

  As the light died the people grew silent and tense, and the children felt it. When Jen shivered, Arel reached for her hand and took it in hers.

  A dim figure rose from among the people on the right and came to the base of the pile of wood. A few flickers from flint and steel, then a small red flame from within the pile, showed that the fire-lighter was Amu, Arel’s father. He stood silently in his buckskin clothes as the fire grew and began to crackle as it climbed within the black branches, turning the inner ones gold and red. Then Amu returned to his place. The crackling turned to a roar as the fire rose through its fuel. The ledges, the faces of the elders, and above them the high green branches of the Great Tree were lighted as if by daylight for a while until the fire fell back within itself to feed quietly on the larger wood. Faces, hot from the fire’s first surge, cooled in the new embering silence.

  Jen and Arn had been watching the person sitting on Aguma’s left. They saw an ancient, wrinkled face below pure-white hair. The face was thin; the skin over the sharp cheekbones shone red. Now that person rose to his feet, and he was tall and wide-shouldered, like their father, though thin with age. His collarbones stood out at the neck of his deerskin tunic, angular and shiny. His black eyes were sunken, yet they reflected the firelight like shiny black stones.

  “Let the council begin,” he said. His voice was sad and old, penetrating yet dry as a dying wind. “I am Tsuga Wanders-too-far, and what I know I will tell you.” He sat down again, waiting with an expressionless face.

  From the left, out of the darkness, came a man in a deer mask with great antlers. Jen was afraid, and squeezed Arel’s hand.

  “It’s all right,” Arel whispered in her ear. “It’s just the beginning of the council. Now they’ll choose who’s to make the gift to the stag.”

  On the platform, Aguma rose to her feet. She held a loaf of bread in her hands. When she spoke she almost sang the words in a deep voice. “Arel and Bren have been chosen.”

  Jen looked at Arel, who was nothing but proud and excited at having been chosen. Bren was proud, too, though he tried not to show it. They both got up and went to the old woman, who broke the loaf in two and handed half to each. Arel and Bren turned and went solemnly to the man in the deer mask, who nodded his great antlers as he received the bread. Then Arel and Bren turned and came back to take their places before the fire.

  Jen wanted to ask Arel about this ceremony, which was almost like the one they had at home on Christmas Eve, but so much unlike the horrors she and Am had witnessed here before.

  Tsuga rose to his feet again. He stood leaning on his long, unstrung bow as if he were very tired. The people were silent, waiting for him to speak.

  “I am old enough to call you my children,” Tsuga began.

  “Too old!” someone shouted from the darkness beyond the firelight. There were gasps of dismay from the people, who turned their heads to search for whoever had spoken so rudely.

  Aguma stood up heavily and spoke in her deep voice: “Who speaks to the council? Come into the light; only liars shout from the dark.”

  “Come forward! Come forward!” the people said.

  Soon a flustered though angry young man made his way to the council fire. He wore a long knife and carried an unstrung bow, his buckskin tunic decorated at neck and cuffs with wolf fur. “All right!” he said. “Here I am!”

  “What do you want to say to the council, Lado?” the old woman said.

  “The people of the eastern foothills have meat, while we nearly starved last winter!”

  “We were hungry, but we did not starve,” Tsuga said.

  “But they had all the meat they wanted!”

  Tsuga sighed before he spoke again. “Yes, I know. And you would also have us keep these strange wolves, these creatures who kill their own kind …”

  “The Chigai have shaggy cattle they can kill whenever they are hungry!”

  “Prisoners,” Tsuga said.

  Some of the people groaned at that word, in horror of it, but at the back, in the darkness, a different sound arose. It was a harsh murmur of defiance against Tsuga and the councillors. Someone shouted, “That’s what you say, but the Chigai increase!”

  “They increase in numbers,” Tsuga said. “But why do they need numbers? Does it make their councillors feel more important?”
/>   “They are more important!” Lado said.

  “I cannot stop you from emulating them,” Tsuga said. “Knowledge is all I can give you. I have lived a long time and I will tell you what I know.”

  “You’re a doddering old fool!” came a shout from the dark. “You and your tree! Can we eat wood in the iron month?”

  Another of the councillors, a man of middle age who wore a cape of white mountain-goat fur, stood up and motioned for silence.

  “I, too, have visited the Chigai,” he said, “and I am of mixed mind. I was taught to cultivate the earth and to hunt. But the hunting is harder than it was in my youth. We, too, grow in numbers; to have meat that is always available, and even the half-wolves to help us hunt… how can that be bad?”

  Cheers came from many of the people. Those sitting around the children spoke excitedly to themselves.

  “We must take a vote!” the young man shouted. “Let the Chigai show us how to fill our bellies!”

  Another man came from the darkness to stand next to the young man. He was much more sure of himself, and when he spoke his voice was steady and his hands made reasonable gestures.

  “I, too, have studied the Chigai and their ways,” he said. “They are numerous and wonderfully large and strong. They keep their cattle in wide fields and in long covered pens made of wood. The cattle are fed on grass and grain; they are protected, and multiply. Only a certain few of the people do the killing; the others never have to soil their hands with blood and fat, but partake of the meat and are never hungry. Others have taught the half-wolves to protect the herds and also to hunt down boar, bear and deer. The people are warm and fat in the coldest winters.”

  Amid the resulting shouts and cheers, Tsuga stood, his arm in the air, asking to be heard. From his belt he took a small green branch and held it out before him. Finally the people grew silent, watching.