A strong gust of wind battered the rock cairn, lancing through the frozen black rock. Ice Fire huddled in his double-layered caribou-hide parkas, arms crossed where he squatted in the protection of the rock pile.
Despite the wind-spawned ground blizzard that obscured the land in a white haze, he could see up through the wispy tendrils of snow, clearing his mind, letting his eyes catalog the myriad of stars. Snow rustled over the rock, sifting down around his long-booted feet in a fine powder.
Ice Fire, Most Respected Elder of the Mammoth People, ran his tongue over the remains of his teeth. The new gap was unfamiliar where the first upper left molar had fallen out. Only the right side of his mouth could still chew. He traced the ridges on the backs of his upper incisors and watched the stars.
“So many years,” he whispered to the sky, “I’ve been alone. Why have you taken all I ever loved? Great Mystery above, what do you want from me?”
Only the ceaseless wind whistled and hissed. He listened, hoping for a voice, for a vision to form from the blowing snow rippling out of the endless plains, blotting out this terrible year.
He shuffled, an angle of rock cutting into his back as he looked to the north. The drawing unease still nagged at him. How long ago? Almost two tens of fingers since he’d first traveled there, following the call. Now it had begun again, only calling him south this time, leaving him sleepless, like this night. A subtle tugging, it worried the fringes of his thoughts, driving him to leave the warm mammoth-hide lodges of the White Tusk Clan to climb the heights and sit, and watch, and wonder while he waited.
The Enemy lay there. The Enemy whose land they now hunted. The Enemy who never fought—but abandoned their possessions and fled ever south. He sniffed. Where did a warrior find honor in such as them? How would the White Tusk Clan ever gain the distinction of cherishing and protecting the Sacred White Hide, his tribe’s power totem, while war raged among the other clans in the far west?
“We must force these cowards to fight us.”
Ice Fire rubbed an ice-encrusted mitten across his nose, leaning his head back to look up at the snow-misted stars. The Hide was the most valued sacred object of the Mammoth People. It had been taken long ago: the skin of a white mammoth calf, carefully tanned. The history of the clans, the symbolism of the directions, and the ways of earth and air and water and light had been delicately drawn around the Hide’s symbolic heart area. The picture had been drawn with blood ritually poured from the heart of a freshly killed mammoth. Without the Hide, the people would starve; Mammoth would no longer hear them. They would die, blown away like so much down from a snow goose’s breast.
Weary, Ice Fire let himself relax, warm in his robes, comfortable but for the cramp in his aging knees and the rock gouging his back.
As always on lonely nights such as this, the memory of the woman on the beach returned to haunt him. Such a beauty.
He’d been so sure she’d called him to that lonely place—part of the vision, of the Dream of pain left by the death of his wife. Perhaps she had. In the vision, she’d given herself to him, led him to love her, to lose himself in the embrace of her soul. Then the Watcher had interfered, changed it all. The vision had been jerked away—leaving him to stare in horror at what he’d done. Power had been misused. Future and past sundered. What might have been good had changed into something terrible. The Watcher had been there, her presence as tangible as hunger or thirst … or pain.
He’d run then, appalled at what he’d done to the woman he’d sought to love. In vain, he’d climbed the high places, seeking the Great Mystery’s explanation, calling angrily into the night to confront the Watcher—all to no end.
“I am only your tool!” he hissed to the sky. “Why have you used me so, Great Mystery above? What am I to you, when I would only be a man? Why have you cursed me? Left me childless when all I wanted were sons?”
He closed his eyes, shaking his head. The wind lulled him, the snow settling in the crevices of his parka, lining the breath-frosted fur of his hood.
The pull of the new land strengthened, and in his exhaustion, he allowed himself to be drawn, southward, ever southward. Like smoke from a green dung fire, he drifted over the land, seeing, feeling, hearing the spirit and soul breathed up from the rock, dirt, and tundra steppe below. For a time he exalted in a total freedom, a light airy joy of broken bonds and unrestricted bliss.
Then a young man stood before him, blocking him. He rose from the rocky hills, feet braced, dressed in the manner of the Enemy, wearing a White Bear’s hide, glowing eyes of a Dreamer.
“Move, man!” Ice Fire ordered. “You’re in the way of the White Tusk Clan. In the way of my people.”
“What do you seek?”
“What I was destined to find. The way for my people. The sons I would have borne.”
The young man cocked his head. “You already have sons. Your destiny awaits—if you’ll take it. Your sons are your destiny. Which will you choose? Light or Dark?” He lifted his hand.
The vision of a beautiful woman molded in the clouds, her hair blowing in the wind.
The tall youth spoke. “She is Light. Choose her and you and yours will pass this way.” He lifted his hand, blowing across his open palm, and from it sprang a rainbow, arching across the sky, dimming even the colorful bands of Light that the Great Mystery played over the northern heavens. The young man pointed to a dark cloud. “Choose Darkness, and you will all die.”
“I said, move! We’ll crush you beneath us, despite your magic,” Ice Fire gasped to hide his fear. “We won’t tolerate this Dreaming, this magic of your kind. The Great Mystery will see to that. Our darts are stronger than your Dreams—your Watchers. Don’t play with us, man of the Enemy. We’ll break your people like a dry willow twig.”
The young man smiled. “Is that what you seek? To destroy? That is your choice?”
“No,” Ice Fire rasped, a desperate tingle of fright winding up his spine. “I seek my sons, the destiny of my people, possession of the Sacred Hide.”
“And what would you give?” The youth’s eyes twirled like lights in his head.
Ice Fire swallowed. “I … anything.”
“Give me your son? I will pay you back in kind. A son for a son. A victory for defeat. Life for death.”
“But I—”
“Do you agree? Will you trade what is yours for what is mine?”
Confused, Ice Fire opened his mouth. Involuntarily, he mumbled, “I would … if it—”
“Then it shall be.” And the young man turned, shimmering, dropping to all fours, arms and legs multiplying until he’d become a red spider. Turning, the beast raced up the rainbow, slowing near the top. There, it turned, spreading its legs, spinning the colors of the rainbow across the heavens until they wove themselves into a web connecting the dewdrops of stars.
Ice Fire jerked awake, squinting into the darkness, windblown snow still streaming by in endless wreaths. He winced,
legs numb from sitting so long. Gasping, he stood, feeling the sting of blood revitalizing his numbed limbs.
As he looked up at the snow-glazed stars, he found the shape of the spider there, hanging, waiting, watching.
“Then it shall be,” he whispered, still seeing the vision. A pain settled under his heart. “A son for a son?” The old lines of misery resettled around his mouth. “I have no son to begin with. Great Mystery? Am I your toy again? To be thrown about like a fish-bone doll? Have you no other man to soak in sorrow?”
Limping from the blood tingles in his leg, Ice Fire climbed out of the cairn, hobbling slowly down the hill to the conical mammoth-hide shelters dotting the plain below.
Far to the south, Runs In Light blinked frosty lashes, wondering at the strange elder of the Others, the man he’d talked so blithely to in his Dream.
Where had his words come from? What did it mean? He wouldn’t speak so to an elder. A frown etched his brow. And this business of peoples … and sons?
He shuffled in the blackness, hearing his parka scuff on snow, startled for a moment until he remembered where he was … the Dream Hunt. Curiously, he reached out, feeling the reassuring touch of Wolf’s hide.
So many Dreams. Frightened, he stared into the darkness. “I’ll go south with you, Wolf. But, man of the Others, who are you? Why did you seek me? How can I, Runs In Light, trade you a son?”