Zadayi Red (23 page)

M
aybe Dahzi slept for days, except that in the Emerald Cavern there were no days and no nights. From time to time he sipped some broth. When Tsola got him to eat soup with a little meat, she began to talk to him.

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Ummm.” He could barely bring his mind to focus on what was around him.

She fed him some more soup. “You were about to be killed.”

The snakes, he remembered. The snake around his neck, the snake in his face. “Yes.” He was surprised at the faintness of his own voice.

“Not only your body killed, your spirit killed.”

“Ummm?”

“Perhaps we’d better wait to talk.”

She fed him in silence, and he dozed off.

When he felt strong enough to sit up and stay up, he looked around. A fire. Meat spitted over it. The ordinary tools of living. The walls of a cave. The face of a beautiful old woman looking into his face. Lying next to her, a black panther.

She put her hand gently on the panther’s head. “Don’t be afraid of Klandagi. He’s on our side.”

Dahzi began to form a dim realization. “Where am I?”

“In the Emerald Cavern.”

He nodded. That meant something to him, the great shrine of the Galayi people, so this must be . . .

“Let’s start over. I am Tsola, the Seer.”

Dahzi nodded. “And Wounded Healer,” he murmured. It was coming back.

“Yes. And this is my son Klandagi. Today he’s presenting himself in his panther form.”

Dahzi knew. Sunoya had told him, others had told him. But it was a jolt to see.

“How did I get here? I was lost.”

“You did a very foolish thing, went to a very dangerous place, and I had to bring you back.”

Dahzi tried to sort that out and failed. “Did something dumb.”

“Yes. You made tea from
u-tsa-le-ta
and drank it. You knew better. Ninyu and your mother taught you better.”

“Wasn’t clear, felt confused.”

“You’re not a child anymore. It’s time you get some clarity and act like you have it.”

“I, uh . . .”

“Here’s how we start. How did you get into the cavern, and how did you find the
u-tsa-le-ta?
”

He realized he needed to tell the whole truth. He started all the way back with how he sought a vision and failed. Then he told how he fell in love with Jemel and was denied her, how he ran away from the village. As he went along, the story got less jumbled.

“I had a crazy idea of what I was going to do. I was going to kill the murderer of my mother and father, the man who has brought twenty winters of misery to the people. My grandfather, Inaj.”

He looked into Tsola’s eyes, wondering, and saw that she was waiting. He let the spasm of rage pass.

“I thought if I did that, Jemel’s family would let me marry her. They’d have to. I would have been a great hero.”

Klandagi snorted with contempt.

Tsola spoke softly but firmly. “You would have been a great fool. Instead of saving the people, you would have pitched them to greater misery.”

“I wanted to be a hero.”

“You speak like a boy. It’s time to act like a man.”

“I’m not a man yet. I don’t have a vision, I don’t have a name.”

“Yes, well, by madness and luck you’ve ended up where you can get both. And become a hero.”

She saw the light animate his eyes for a moment, then give way to fatigue. “Get some sleep. Then we’ll talk more. A lot more.”

While Dahzi slept, Tsola and Klandagi discussed the problem. They needed a great mission accomplished, and had only a boy to do it.

“I have to prepare him and I have to motivate him.”

Klandagi said, “If we don’t launch him now, we probably won’t see him again.”

Tsola pulled at her chin. “He has to choose the mission. We can’t force him into it, or trick him.”

“His mind is on the girl, not on saving the people.”

“He has powers he doesn’t know about.”

“No way for him to know.” Klandagi said. “Also, he’s thinking with his
do-wa,
and he’s going to keep thinking with it.”

“I sense something more there. He really loves her. Maybe she really loves him.”

She sounded touched by the idea. Man-woman love, to most Galayi, was a piece of bad luck. But Tsola had always been intrigued by the idea.

Klandagi jumped up and started to pace. He forced himself
to stop and looked across at his mother by the fire. He made himself go back, lie down, and speak. “Here’s one thing I’ve learned as a panther—human beings overthink things. When you’re an animal, you know inside yourself what has to be done and you just do it, right now. Leap on that deer. Get away from that buffalo. Kill that mother coyote and get the pups. You act. You might be fine, you might get hurt, you might die, but you act.”

Tsola regarded him thoughtfully. “In this case that would mean?”

“Light a fire in the boy and send him out. Now.”

“What if he fails?”

“Then he was never the medicine bearer. But I believe he is—look at his left hand again. He’ll find a way.”

Tsola nodded. “All right.”

“How many days have I been in here?” said Dahzi.

“We don’t pay attention to days and nights in the Cavern,” Tsola said.

“Is the Planting Moon Ceremony going on now?”

“We have more important things to think about.”

He was getting strong. She’d taken him on a good walk in the Cavern yesterday. Klandagi kept saying it was time.

“Here’s what happened to you. You had a big piece of good luck and bad luck. You wandered into the Emerald Cavern, without knowing it. Paya found you—he goes everywhere here, everywhere but one. Like a fool, whether he meant to or not, he showed you the lichen. As far as I know, this is the only place it grows.

“You recognized it—you’d seen Ninyu and your mother with it. You made the tea and drank it, and you didn’t just have dreams. Ninyu gave you the apprentice’s version of what happens. You traveled to the Land beyond the Sky Arch.”

Disbelief flushed into his face. “The Land beyond the Sky Arch doesn’t look like that.”

“Actually,” said Tsola, “it doesn’t look like anything. Its form is spirit, not flesh. But we’re human beings, and when we visit there we see it as physical. That’s the way our minds are.”

“Until I got there, I pictured it as the most beautiful place in the universe.”

“It’s whatever is in your mind is at the time. You were scared, so the Land was scary.”

She watched Dahzi turn that over in his head.

“You are afraid of snakes, so you were attacked by snakes. What you saw tells us nothing about the Land beyond the Arch and everything about you.”

Now he shook his head. He didn’t think so.

“You need to remember this. You have remarkable powers. You were born with them. If an ordinary person drank that tea, someone who isn’t a shaman, he would have awful dreams and wake up with a bad fever. You took the journey—only a few of us can. I brought you back.”

Dahzi made a face, but she could tell that being special pleased him.

“What do you mean,” he said, “you brought me back?”

“When I saw you were in trouble, I drummed myself across the border between this world and that one. I do it often, to consult with the Immortals. I grabbed you and brought us both back.”

“That was the scariest thing of all.”

“And it left you depleted, exhausted,” said Tsola. “That won’t happen when you learn to come and go properly.”

“I . . .” He made a strange face. He didn’t like this conversation.

“Why don’t I let you be alone for a while? Go for a walk
if you want to. If you get lost, I can find you anywhere in the Cavern.”

When he got back, he was excited. “I found the river.”

Klandagi gave Tsola a look that meant,
He doesn’t know what’s waiting for him there.

Tsola gave him food and tea. “Dahzi, we have to talk seriously. You have a mission, a big mission, something that has to be done for the people.”

Dahzi waited. Her guess was that he was half excited and half stubborn.

“Your job is to get a new Cape of Feathers for the people.”

There, it was in the open. All her attention was on the boy’s eyes. What was in them? Excitement? Anger?

“What are you thinking?”

“When I was born, Inaj killed my father.”

“Exactly. The tragedy of our time.”

“Especially for me. His crime controls my life.”

“Go on.”

“For twenty winters, because of what he did and kept doing, a guard followed me everywhere I went. Now, because of his crime, you want me to set out on some huge mission.”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t anyone care what I want?”

Tsola looked at Klandagi. Holding his eyes, she took time to think this through. Finally she said, “This is not because of your grandfather. He’s just the instrument. This is what you were born for.” She picked up his left hand and stroked the webbing gently.

“I don’t believe my hand is my fate.”

“You can embrace the call, or you can resist it.”

“I embrace Jemel and resist other people’s ideas for my life.”

“Damn it, boy,” said Klandagi in his gravel voice. “Don’t you understand? You can have everything. Do something great
for your people. Be a hero. Be admired. Have the woman you love. Be a leader.”

Dahzi set his face.

“Here’s the main thing,” said Tsola. “If you embrace your calling, it can be good. Grand. If you resist it, the calling will hound you.”

Dahzi’s face set itself harder.

“We can talk about it later,” she said. “Time to sleep.”

But when Tsola and Klandagi woke up, Dahzi was gone.

D
ahzi waited in the shadow of a big boulder just above the entrance to the Cavern, watching the house and the Pool of Healing. The Pool, fed by a spring below the mouth of the Cavern, had three or four visitors. An old woman was showing them how to use the healing waters. If Dahzi remembered right, the helpers were Tsola’s daughters. Tsola lived in the Cavern, her son guarded it and her, and her daughters ministered to people who came for help.

Dahzi had been taught the patience of a hunter, and he used it now. He crouched in his shadow and didn’t stir. He got hungry and thirsty, but he stayed perfectly still.
I myself am a shadow.

Visitors—they were a good sign for Dahzi. Galayi people came to the Pool mostly when they were at the Cheowa village for the Planting Moon Ceremony, just an hour’s walk away. If the ceremony was going on, or about to start, his mother would be there. His mind added,
Inaj will be there
, but he tried not to pay attention.

He waited for full darkness, all the time listening for footpads
from inside the Cavern. He didn’t want to get caught, especially by a panther.

When everyone was gone or in the family’s house, Dahzi slipped down to the pond, lay flat on his belly, and drank deep. He was ferociously thirsty, and he could use some healing.

Then he made his way down the mountain to the village. He did it the hard way, in the underbrush. Klandagi might be watching the trail.

By midnight he could peer down on the houses and council lodge. No dancing—the ceremony hadn’t started. But the Soco village might have arrived already. He circled the Cheowa houses, found a log, eased it into the river, and floated gently downstream.

Yes, there were the brush huts of his village, at their usual camping place.

He shivered until first light. Then he padded quietly among the huts until he found Sunoya’s. He scratched the door flap and said, “Mother.”

She peered out, then leapt out and embraced him. Su-Li jumped off her shoulder and lit on the hut. He didn’t care for gestures of affection.

“Mother, I need to sleep.”

She pointed to her own blankets.

He wrapped up.
Warm and safe.

When Dahzi woke up, his mother had tea and corn mush ready for him. He ate and drank greedily. He kept giving her sneaky looks, wondering when she’d ask where he’d been. She didn’t ask, which was a relief.