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I could smell the smoke before I could see it. A thick, bitter smell that coated my nose and tongue. I wondered, perhaps, if they had decided to try smoking an auroch.
But then I saw the smoke, a cloud of grey and black hanging in the air. The world around me grew hazy with every step.
I broke into a run.
The basket hanging from my shoulder bounced against my side, but I didn’t care if I lost some mushrooms and herbs. My heart pounded an anxious drumbeat, though I told myself it was just a hearth fire burning a little wild. A few logs of green wood mistakenly tossed in.
Down the embarkment to the river, and then along the shore, I ran until I could see our settlement.
The smoke was thick, heavy; a billowing bank that made me cough. I could see flames flickering along one of the huts, another already reduced to smoldering cinders. The worn paths, all the workspaces, were deserted.
An urgent chill filled me as I dropped my things and tried to throw dirt on the fire – it took long enough to prepare the skins and put together a frame, we had to save what we could.
I gave a shout, my throat burning. “Some help over here! Anyone!”
Silence. Absolute silence.
I stopped throwing dirt and looked around.
Something was wrong.
My gut twisted. “Ama?” I called out nervously, “Aita? Eider?”
Giving up on the burning hut, I hurried over to my family’s home, the ground slick mud. “Ama! Aita! Please!”
The hut had collapsed, the wood frame snapped. The arch of great tusks, the last remains of the behemoths my ancestors had once fought, had buckled inwards, destroying the entrance. I screamed for my parents, for my sister, as I dragged pieces aside to get in.
I could just crawl in on my hands and knees, my fingers digging in the gaps under the frame and skins. There were still the fur blankets, and the stores of nuts and other foodstuffs. One of the baskets had overturned, spilling out the beads my mother had been making for a new hair strand.
My fingers brushed something familiar and smooth, and I shoved the structure aside, freeing it and filling the air with ash. The piece of antler was still brightly polished from many touches, the carving still clear.
My stomach twisted, throat growing closed. My father’s atlatl. Passed from his father, and his father before him; no matter what happened, he never would have willingly left without this. It was a tie to ancestors, to family, to ourselves. It was carved with the same stag from which our clan took its name.
The atlatl dug into my hand as I crawled out, my stomach churning like it was going to come out of my mouth. My breath shuddered as I drew it in. What had happened? What . . .?
I staggered to my feet. It must’ve been sudden, they must be planning to return, they had to have left a message – I stumbled through the settlement, past more collapsed huts and spills of smoldering embers.
The ground was a sticky, muddy mess, as if it had rained, even though the sky had been bright and clear since morning. All the tracks were muddled and smeared. I passed by the clan idol, standing tall and lonely, and froze.
Sticking out from under a pile of timber and skins, was a hand.
I raced over, but the hand was cold. And tiny. I swallowed and breathed once, twice; then, because there was no one else, uncovered the body.
The little girl’s stare was empty, her eyes wide. I laid her out the best I could and tried to close her eyes. She’d been unlucky, hit wrong by something falling on her.
But why had she been left here, long enough for her to grow stiff?
Leaving the little girl for now, I continued to search the settlement. It was possible someone else had also been unlucky, and that maybe they were hanging onto life.
I found two more bodies; one an elderly man behind a pile of firewood, the larger logs having crushed his leg, and another around my parent’s ages, side all bloody. I couldn’t tell what had caused the wound.
Aside from them, I couldn’t find anyone. It was as if the entire clan had just vanished.
That wasn’t possible, it wasn’t –
My eyes landed on something in the mud.
Hoofprints. A trail of hoofprints in the mud, leading to the river.
For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The wild horses would never come this close to people. They avoided all traces of people, that’s why they were hard to hunt –
The Zaldi.
It felt like the ground fell out from under me.
The Zaldi, the demon horses. We told stories of how they were sweeping in from the east, how if they reached our lands they would grab people and drag them beneath the water, drowning them and carrying their corpses to the world of demons. They were vicious, deadly.
And they’d been here.
The hoofprints, the slick mud on a sunny day, how everyone was just somehow gone – the Zaldi had raced through the settlement and dragged them off to another world.
The back of my throat burned, everything around me growing blurry. I gasped thickly for air, scrubbing at my eyes. They were gone. My family. My friends. They were all gone. And they weren’t coming back.
The thought of never seeing them again crushed at my chest. The Zaldi had them, they couldn’t even spend the afterlife in peace –
Shuddering breaths filled the air as I buried the tears. Pale dots appeared on the back of dirty hands and I clamped my jaw down. I pushed myself up from the sticky mud, hands trembling.
Falling apart now only meant joining in an unhappy afterlife. More importantly, I couldn’t leave my entire clan trapped in the demon world as they were. Everyone knew that if you destroyed the demon responsible, you could free the human soul.
Something cold took root in me. It was the Zaldi who had done this, and the Zaldi who would pay the price to set my people free. I would make sure each and every one of them paid a life for a life.
My hands and feet itched, restlessness settling into my limbs. No, not yet; first I had things to do.
The House of the Dead still stood, the beams just as fresh-wood as when we’d erected it mere weeks ago. Inside was shaded and cool, the ground already softened in preparation. It was easy to use the adze and dig three new graves.
Dragging the bodies over was unpleasant, but I couldn’t leave them like this, to doom their souls to wander unhappily. I did my best place them in the correct positions and orientations.
There wasn’t time to do everything, so I grabbed some of the votive figures that dwelled under the idol and set them inside the graves. I murmured words of not-quite-remember prayers. They had always seemed so easy to remember and conjure up before, when everyone else was speaking them too.
I couldn’t do much more for them, aside from looping the bead strands I took off their bodies around the neck of the clan idol. Maybe it wasn’t right, to encourage their souls to linger in this area, but I didn’t know what else to do. Where do you guide free souls to, when their people are gone? I hoped the ancestors would treat them kindly.
It was more than I could bear, to stay in the settlement. After the fires had burned themselves out, and the last few structures given way, and the air cleared, it had left everything feeling open and exposed and lonely.
I found a good basket I could wear on my back, and got a couple stone hand axes and scrapers, a bone knife, and a bow drill. A fire pot I tied from my waist, embers inside heating the case. With luck, I wouldn’t need to use the bow drill for a while yet.
I also took a good bow and as many arrows as I could find. I bound dozens and dozens of replacement arrowheads and small blade pieces into a skin pouch; I didn’t need to lose them through a gap in the basket.
I filled a waterskin from the river, just in case, and salvaged what pouches I could of nuts and berries and some spring tubers. The less I needed to hunt, to butcher and thus attract a predator, the better.
Staring at my family’s atlatl in my hands, I thought about bringing a spear or two with me. They were strong weapons, but large and unsubtle. I could be quicker and stealthier with just my bow. But I wasn’t leaving the atlatl behind. I tied it to my belt.
After salvaging a fur coat and a pair of hide boots – even these seemed singed and discoloured – I told myself that was it. I had what I needed, or at least everything I could reasonably carry.
Inside me, the ache in my heart as I glanced back at my ruined home – even the fields had been trampled, and I wondered where our herds had fled – was overshadowed by cold anger, an arrow of ice aimed at the Zaldi. I would not let the souls of my family, my friends, my clan, remained trapped and tormented in the world of demons.
I set the sight of my lost life behind me, and began to walk down the shore of the river, following the faint impressions of hoofprints.
-
I WASN’T THE SORT OF girl who spent her whole life in the settlement, cooking, sewing clothes, and weaving baskets. If I had to stay home, I was better at driving aurochs and mouflon to grazing land. When given a choice, I’d always preferred hunting and trapping and foraging, which made me very much my father’s daughter, though I’d never really done any of that alone for any length of time.
Going as far as I could and back on foot in a single day was one thing, but even going to one of our hunting camps was normally a three- or four-person trip. No one ever went far alone. There were too many things that could go wrong alone.
But I was all alone.
Even if I knew where to find another clan, which I didn’t, what then? Asking strangers to accompany me as I avenged my people seemed wrong. They might not even believe what I said. Worse, they could try to make me stay with them, and put it all behind me. The very thought made my insides fragment painfully.
Still, it wasn’t easy to do this alone.
I kept to the river at first. Hoofprints traced its shore. An abundance of plants I could eat grew along its shores, and water wasn’t a problem. Fish shimmered beneath the surface, and I realized my decision to not bring only a spear was a poor one. The river drew small game, like rabbits, at least.
The trail of hoofprints faded away quickly, but I stayed with the river. Zaldi were demons of water and dwelt in lakes. Sooner or later, the river would lead to a lake, I thought.
The trick, then, would be to lure the Zaldi to the surface. Diving for them was foolish; I couldn’t kill them underwater, and if I dove too deep, I wouldn’t even make it to the world of demons, for the serpents who dwelt between our worlds were sure to kill me.
The sun and moon danced in the sky, always just out of each other’s reach. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got to a lake, but in the end, it didn’t matter, for the river grew flatter and wider until a marsh spread before me. A marsh was no place for the Zaldi, for it was too shallow, and teamed with fish and plants and herbs.
Realizing there was a marsh just a few days walk from where we’d settled for the summer would have been a blessing, but now it just left me feeling hollow.
It was too early in the season for many bugs to be out, so I slept that night, fireless, on the shores of the marsh. The stars made a familiar blanket above me. The Great Bear, the Cub, and the Hunter watched the world at night, faithful guardians of my slumber.
Ainara . . . Ainara . . .! My mother’s voice whispered with the conspiratorial mirth of a prank pulled just before dawn, rousing me from sleep. I opened my eyes.
The wind whispered on, in the grass and over the water’s surface. Just the wind. No voices. No mists. No ghosts.
Something hot burned in my throat, but I shoved it down and scrubbed sleep from my eyes. There was nothing here except me, some fish, and some rodents. Even the birds weren’t up yet.
I ate a cold breakfast and thought on what to do next. The marsh was unlikely to turn into a lake, and I wasn’t about to turn around to try following the river in the other direction. I could see the light green smudge of a forest on the horizon, sending a thrum through my nerves.
A forest would be plentiful in food, but going alone was risky. If the forest was large and I went in too far, I might wander to the world of the dead, never to return; or worse, I could draw the ire of the wolves who guard the doorways. It was certain death, to brave unknown forests alone.
For the morning, I skirted the edge of the marsh, until the looming woods gave way to rolling hills and grassy meadows full of just-colouring sedges and lumpy tussock grasses. When the wind blew, the stalks rippled like the surface of water.
It was empty, exposed, and beautiful.
It was also where we’d often find wild horses.
I didn’t know where the Zaldi lingered, when they weren’t in their lakes, but alongside their natural counterparts seemed like a good enough guess.
With my basket full of everything I could scrounge from the marsh, I started off across the grassland. The sky was a bright grey, the sun’s arc nearly invisible. I tried to remember how many days it had been, but my mind was a haze, and the sky was too washed out to tell.
In the grassland, every direction looked alike. I picked a few stalks as I went, running them through my fingers to drop green grains into a bag. Added to some water, and it’d make a decent porridge. My elder sister, Eider, had always been good at mixing grains and herbs to come up with something tasty. I’d never quite mastered the art.
I wasn’t ever going to taste her food again.
A few grains blew away on the wind. I watched them twirl and dance and scatter beyond sight. Never to be seen again.
There was a lot I’d never see again.
There was something crushing me, a dull ache, a pressure in my chest. Sometimes it was weak enough I could barely notice it. Other times it’d be like this, and I felt like I would be squeezed out of existence.
I wondered, if I let it, would it squeeze and crush until nothing remained of me, and my soul was set free to find my family and clan?
I shook my head to clear it, the wind throwing some of my hair braids into my face, ticklish streaks of brown and ochre, colours that fit this landscape of swaying grasses. I tucked them back, my bead strands clacking. The sound of them was grounding, a reminder of family, of who I was, of what it meant to be one of the Bizkor Oiloa.
The last of the Bizkor Oiloa.
If I let myself be crushed into nothingness by this feeling, then I was dooming everyone, myself included, to become wild, vengeful spirits, instead of peaceful ancestors. To become that, forever, was far worse than merely dying.
At least until I’d dealt with the Zaldi, I’d have to keep that crushing feeling at bay. I drew in a clean breath of air, felt the sharp wind on my cheeks. I couldn’t keep thinking like this. I had a task to do.
Looking across the grassland with renewed purpose, I realized I’d made a fatal error. Aside from the smudge of green forest in the distance, everything looked the same, and I had forgotten to mark my path as I went. Where I’d come from and where I was going were the same.
I groaned and sat down. “Well,” I said into the wind. “I guess I just wait for nightfall. At least you taught me to read the stars. . . . I hope you’re listening, aita.”
I didn’t hear my father’s voice whisper back to me, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
For a long while I just sat there, waiting for the hidden sun to set, and the moon to clear the sky and show the stars. It seemed to be taking a long time, far longer than it normally did. I chewed on a couple picked-to-soon berries and a mushroom. I saw birds wing in the sky and debated about risking the arrows to try and bring them down.
The ground vibrated, a faint tremor rippling along the grit. I shifted to a crouch, alert, scanning the swaying grasses. If a herd of red deer was cutting across the grassland, I could maybe take the chance of breaking one off and shooting it. They were small, so not much would go to waste, and smoking it would last me a fair while.
There was movement in the distance, a dark shadow moving across the landscape. The movement was fast. Too fast.
Horses.
I sprang to my feet, the weight of my gear creaking down onto my shoulders once more, and set out at a jog towards them. The horses moved quickly, in short bursts of impossible speed. I kept them just in sight as the day grew long and my shadow began to darken and stretch to the side.
The longer I ran, the closer the horses grew. I could see some details now. They weren’t the Zaldi, just horses. I could tell by how short they were, how thick their legs were, the fluffs of manes and fur around their hooves.
I kept after them as the world around me darkened and the ground dipped down and up and down again.
In the moonlight, the horses stopped. Steam curled off their bodies as they gathered close to one another, snorting, and seemed to settle down. My eyelids were drooping; they were ordinary horses, not Zaldi, and if they left it was sure to wake me, so I dropped to the ground right there and fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, a whinny was ripping through the blue of pre-dawn, yanking me awake as the horses stamped about. I squinted into the blue, as an angry whinny echoed from the distance and hoofbeats pounded.
Shadows appeared in the gloom, familiar yet strange, throwing the horses into a panic.
The Zaldi charged into the dawn.