Zadayi Red (20 page)

“I wonder if you’re forgetting that you were born to be extraordinary.”

He looked at her and she held up her webbed fingers to show what she was talking about.

He closed his eyes again.

“Tsola and I believe you were born to be the one who gets another Eagle’s Cape for the people.”

“Mom,” he said in disgust.

“I know about prophecy,” she answered. “Ninyu knows. Tsola knows.”

Dahzi sat up. “Mom, I’m only thinking about one thing, getting a name and getting Jemel. After I marry her, my future
might be . . . besides Jemel, I don’t know, some fairy tale. But Jemel and I love each other.”

He threw himself down and turned his back to her.

Sunoya thought about it. She mourned about it. She talked with Su-Li about it. On the second evening she did what she had to do. She walked gently to Jemel’s family’s house and slipped by the girl and her group of suitors quietly. If Dahzi shot her a look of alarm, her back was to it. She ducked into the open door and greeted Jemel’s parents. Invited, she sat. She asked for the pipe and sent puffs of smoke to the sky.
This smoke my breath, this smoke my prayers.

She took confidence from Su-Li on her shoulder. Then she spoke the words that had to be spoken.

The next morning at first light, before Jemel could slip out again to meet Dahzi, her father and brothers marched her out of the village.

After he waited half the morning by the water path, Dahzi came home. His eyes were heat lightning flickering. “Where is Jemel?”

Sunoya heard a tone her son had never used to her before. She sighed a little sadness, like a sip of death.

“Her father and brothers have taken her to live with relatives.”

Now Dahzi’s voice was a lash. “Where?”

“The Cusa village.” She watched him absorb the news. “You know it doesn’t matter where. She’ll be well guarded.”

He gave a curdled cry. “Why-y-y?!”

“Because you are too young, both of you. You especially. You can’t support a wife and children, not yet. In a few years you’ll be a good hunter, or a good medicine man, and you can have a family. Not yet.”

“Damn it, I—”

“Dahzi!” She cut him off sharply. “Be glad her father and
brothers simply left. They wanted to give you a beating. First I tried to talk them out of it, then I had to use a threat.”

Everyone knew medicine people could make good on their threats.

He let out a roar.

“Get a vision. Earn a name. Become a man. Make a life for yourself.”

He bellowed and stomped out.

D
ahzi woke up to the shush of the river and the lilac twilight. He didn’t know where he’d been all day. Stomping and rampaging until he exhausted himself. Cursing Jemel’s family. Cursing his mother and his fate. He hoped he hadn’t cursed the spirits, but he couldn’t remember.

Now he had a reality to face. He didn’t want to go back to his house, the place where he grew up, but hunger and cold drove him there.

He didn’t speak to anyone. He ate, went to bed, and ate again without even the words “thank you.” He didn’t sleep that night. Instead he tossed and turned, fretted, steamed, stewed, and somehow around the edges of his fury thought things over. He wanted to do something so dramatic that the whole world would give him Jemel.

That morning he watched for his chance, rolled up his pallet of robes and tied them, and picked up his spear. He hadn’t yet made himself a war club.

He strolled casually out of the village and headed up the river. He had made up his mind. He was going to kill Inaj.

Kill his grandfather! Kill the man who led a war against the Socos, Dahzi’s people, for nearly two decades. Kill the man who killed his father.

Yes, slaying another Galayi was
the
forbidden crime. But Inaj did it. Maybe Dahzi inherited the desire to kill.

His mother said being born with webbed fingers controlled his destiny. Maybe having the blood of a killer in his veins controlled it.

And it will make me a hero.

The trouble was, he didn’t see how to get close enough. This was the planting season. Inaj was probably at home—the governor of a village had to stay home most of the time. Dahzi couldn’t even think of marching straight into the Tusca village and killing its chief.

On the other hand, Inaj might be out leading a raid, maybe against one of the tribes that lived along the ocean to the east. Again, maybe the raid was against the Socos. He’d stolen women right out of the fields before, just to mock the villagers.

The truth was, Dahzi didn’t know where Inaj was. But he knew where he would be in half a moon. Then the entire Tusca village would migrate west over a couple of ranges of mountains and turn north to the headwaters of the Soco River and over the divide to the Cheowa village. For the Planting Moon Ceremony. So Dahzi knew where his chance would come.

He walked in a foul mood for a day and a half and came in late afternoon to where the trail from the Tusca village met the river. He looked lingeringly at the big waterfall which had saved his life, and his mother’s life. Twenty winters ago, when Sunoya managed a difficult ford of the river, Inaj and his men jumped in right behind her. As they were crossing, the frozen waterfall collapsed into the river and swamped them.

Dahzi took the trail along the right bank of the river and angled up alongside the waterfall. It was beautiful now, full of sprays where it splashed against rocks and spumed away downward, catching glints of sunlight here and there. It almost improved his mood.

Above the waterfall the mountain got steep and the trail was slow going. Dahzi walked up high above the falls, back down to them, and up again. He stood and peered ahead to
the ridge, down to the falls, and around the woods. He imagined the ambush, one bloody fantasy after another. In the end he thought this might be the place.

He walked to the ridge and then angled up the brushy slope. He’d seen shadows in an outcropping of limestone that meant a cave. That would keep the spring showers off and would provide shelter while he waited. He needed to check the lay of the land thoroughly. He needed to spot hiding places. And he had to practice with his spear—he would get only one try.

He knew it was wicked. But maybe he was born to it. He knew the odds were long. He didn’t care. Heroism and Jemel beckoned. Wickedness? Death? Without Jemel there was no life.

Dahzi made snares from the loose bark of vines and caught a rabbit on the first day. The second day he went hungry except for some tea. On the third morning he waited quietly near the river at first light and watched the deer come to water. When a buck stepped close, he let fly with his spear and hit it right behind the shoulder blade. In a flash he jumped on it and cut its throat with his blade.

He stood over it with strange feelings. Jubilation, because he had done it—this was his first deer. Elation, because now he had food, enough to last him until the Tuscas arrived. Regret, because he had killed.

He reminded himself that no animal died before its time. Deer resurrected themselves from their spilled blood. He knew that. He sang the prayer that would appease the king of the deer.

Then he set to dressing out his kill and carrying the meat up to the cave.

That night, when he was roasting the liver, he suddenly became aware that someone was sitting on the boulder behind him.

Dahzi’s heart jumped in his chest.

“Never mind me,” the fellow said. He talked fast, like he was jittery. His accent was Tusca, which didn’t ease Dahzi’s mind.

“How did you get here?”

“Back in there, yes, back in there.” He pointed into the recesses of the cave, and Dahzi saw that a skinny man might slip through. He wondered how big the cave was.

The stranger worked his lips, making little sounds that weren’t quite words, and then were. “I sleeps here a lot.”

Dahzi moved so that the firelight shone on the man. A slight figure, unkempt, badly dressed, and filthy, grinning with an odd enthusiasm and bouncing up and down on his haunches. Sometimes Galayi went crazy and lived alone in the woods. Maybe the fellow was one of these.

Dahzi extended the rest of the liver to the man on the tip of his blade. “Want something to eat?”

“Don’t get much meat.”

The man reached out with a mangled hand. The four fingers were glued together, the skin melted, maybe by a burn. The thumb opposed them like the claw of a crab.

The fellow held the meat with his claw, inspected it from all angles, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth.

A crazy hermit
, thought Dahzi. “What’s your name?”

“You call me Paya.” It meant “crab.” He seemed to be warming up to the idea of a little conversation.

“But what’s your name?”

“People used to call me Linita. ’Cept I’m not nobody’s puppy anymore, and don’t hardly see many people. Don’t tell a soul you saw me, not a soul. Or where you saw me, especially not where.” He tossed out words like a quick-tapped drum.

Dahzi thought fast. “I’m Crooked Eagle.” Dahzi felt guilty about this lie, which was a claim that he’d had a vision of an eagle. Still, he couldn’t tell his real name. This was a lie with style, and surely the Crab Man didn’t matter. Dahzi had liked
seeing the eagle nest and the feathers, and hoped he’d really see an eagle on his next vision quest. Foolishness, he knew.

He noticed that the Crab Man carried a skin bag full of something flung over one shoulder. “What’s in the bag?”

Paya’s eyes jumped from side to side in panic for a moment and then turned canny.

“Mushrooms,” he said. “Want some?”

“Yeah.” This felt weird to Dahzi, but it pleased him, and he liked mushrooms. He liked the childlike Paya.

The Crab Man stuck out a handful. Dahzi slid them onto his stick and wound a strip of deer fat between them. The odd fellow took a stick and did the same.

Too soon the mushrooms were gone. Dahzi eyed the bag. He could see Paya had a lot more of something in there, but he said nothing.

“I go to the villages, I trade mushrooms,” said the Crab Man. As he spoke, he bounced up and down in his squat. He started making some tea.

This claim couldn’t be true. At least no one came to the Soco village trading mushrooms—they were too common to pay for. Dahzi looked the Crab Man over carefully.

“I trade ’em to the shamans for their medicine,” the fellow said.

A bigger lie. Dahzi knew well what shamans used, and they didn’t use mushrooms.

Dahzi decided to test the child-man. “You know Mena?” That was the Medicine Chief of the Tuscas who replaced Sunoya.

The Crab Man shook his head. “Don’t go to that village. Can’t stand Inaj.” He dipped himself some tea but didn’t offer Dahzi any.

From the way he said it, Dahzi thought he was terrified of the Red Chief.

“Why?”

“Not to talk about. He done me bad, enough to say. Now I stay clear of him, way clear.”

It struck Dahzi that the Crab Man must know this piece of country very well. Maybe he’d help set up the ambush.

Paya piped up happily. “You can sleep here to night if you want.”

Dahzi had been sleeping here, and thought he could do whatever he pleased, but said okay.

Eventually they curled up on opposite sides of the fire.

In the morning Paya was gone. Dahzi built a fire and roasted some deer meat. Today he’d also start drying it.

Suddenly he heard odd noises from the depths of the cave. Like footsteps, but scraping. And along with it, panting.

He stuck his head through the narrow opening at the back of the cave. For a moment he saw nothing in the gloom, and then Paya’s face appeared, grinning. In a moment the rest of the Crab Man popped up.