Children of the Plains

Chapter 3

Nianki awoke in stifling darkness. Memory of the previous day’s terror returned. After slaying the last of the beasts stalking her, she’d crawled to the foot of the boulder and burrowed into the loose sand of the dry creek bed. Handful by handful she’d hollowed out a hiding place, and while the red moon still blazed like an ember in the sky, she crawled into her makeshift cave and slept like a dead person. The overhanging bulk of the boulder had warmed her during the night, but it must be daylight now — the sun-baked stone made the hole unbearable. Breaking through the thin wall of gravel and sand she’d erected to hide the opening, Nianki crawled into fresh air.

The gully was empty. The bodies of the beasts she’d slain were gone. Nianki tried to stand, but her wounds flamed with pain. Bracing herself against the boulder, she forced herself erect. This last movement drew her mouth open in a silent howl, but she did not allow herself to give voice to her torment. Even if the killer pack was no longer around, there were plenty of other scavengers who would find the injured Nianki a tasty morsel.

She found a length of dried vine to use as a crutch. It was as thick as her wrist and curled along its entire length, but it was stout. With its help she limped down the creek bed. A fallen tree blocked the way a few paces on. Nianki dragged herself over the obstruction and moved on, leaning heavily on her stick.

She knew her family was dead. If Oto were alive, he would have found her by now, and if he wasn’t, none of the others could be. Kinar, Amero, and Menni were not strong enough or swift enough to escape the deadly gray marauders.

So be it.

With each agonizing step, Nianki swore a private oath to Chisa, the great spirit of nature, that none of those creatures would be spared from her wrath — not male, female, or pup.

She would slay them all without mercy, until there were no more left to kill. It was an ugly, black vow, but it filled her with purpose and kept her moving forward.

Flies followed her, drawn by the smell of her wounds. Her tongue ached for water. The gully slanted down at a shallow angle, so she kept to the dry ravine in hopes of finding water.

Near midday the smell of water teased her nostrils. Nianki quickened her step, dragging her mangled leg through the loose gravel. Ahead, the gully was closed by a hedge of ferns and dense creeping vines. Now, she could hear the water as well. She tore through the greenery with stiff, bloody fingers and found a spring bubbling out of a split boulder. It collected in a moss-rimmed pool a hand’s reach below. Nianki wept at the sight of it.

She lowered herself on her belly beside the pool. Cupping her hands, she raised them brimming to her parched lips. Her first swallow tasted like blood, but she bolted it down nonetheless. Two more handfuls followed, the fourth she threw on her face. The clear pool grew murky. Exhausted, she let her face rest against the soft moss.

Kinar had tried to teach her which leaves and roots were soothing to wounds. Nianki had always been too impatient to heed her mother’s words. Only clumsy hunters allowed themselves to get wounded, she had thought. In fifteen years she’d suffered nothing worse than a few cuts and scratches. Now she worked her memory hard, trying to pry out the information Kinar had labored to impart.

Sumac soothes, larchit heals. The phrase surfaced in her fevered mind. Sumac was a woody shrub with pointed, shiny leaves, four leaves per stem. Larchit, also called soft-tongue, grew in dry places. Its leaves were like dark green, fleshy fingers. When cut, the leaves exuded a clear sap.

Nianki opened her eyes. Kinar’s words, Kinar’s voice, resounded in her head as clear as sunlight.

Silver algae from a fast-flowing stream is good for burns, she’d said. The meat of acorns, dried and ground to dust, will stop bleeding.

“Mother — ”

Be still, Nianki, and listen. This is slippery gum, and this is koti weed.

Nianki pushed herself up on her hands, half-expecting to see Kinar standing over her, but she was alone by the pool.

Gingerly, she peeled off her dirty, blood-soaked buckskins and slowly bathed her wounds. Those on her leg and neck were the most severe. She dipped a scrap of hide in the water and squeezed out the excess, using the soft nap of the buckskin to scrub away the dried blood and encrusted dirt. It was agonizing. Nianki banished the urge to weep by concentrating on her task.

She shivered. It was natural enough, sitting there half-naked, washing in cold spring water, but the strange heat in her face told her this was more than a normal chill. She’d seen bull elks survive a panther’s mauling, only to succumb a few days later to wound fever. Oto’s own father died after being gored by a wild pig, though his wounds had not seemed severe.

Nianki knew there were herbs for fever, but she found it increasingly hard to remember what they were. Sumac and larchit were fixed in her mind like trail signs. Lose them, and she would be lost indeed.

When her cuts and bites were clean, she dressed in her damp skins. Though it was another hot day, Nianki trembled as she threaded the lacing of her kilt and tunic. She put a smooth pebble from the pool in her mouth. Sucking on it would slake her thirst. Leaning heavily on her vine staff, she climbed out of the gully and surveyed her surroundings.

Their scattered, frantic flight from the pack had taken Nianki’s family far off their usual track. She could see the eastern mountains clearly enough, but the peaks presented an unfamiliar pattern. To the north and south lay trackless plain, as far as the eye could behold and well beyond. Back to the west lay several days’ worth of grassland, and after that, the great forest.

Huge clouds filled the sky north and west, the flat undersides growing darker and darker as more clouds piled up. Having no desire to limp through the rain, she decided to head south, away from the coming storm.

More than dislike of rain turned her feet south. Kinar came from there. Her people followed herds of wild oxen as they grazed northward in winter and south in summer. They lived in bands of twelve or more, often unrelated by blood. If anyone would be disposed to tolerate a lone hunter like Nianki, it would be the ox herders.

With her back to it, Nianki felt the storm coming before she heard the first thunderclap. The air was oppressive, and the dry heat of a typical late spring day was replaced by sullen humidity. Limping along with her arms full of sumac and larchit leaves, she took shelter under an aged cedar. After wedging herself into a crevice in the split trunk, she began to treat her wounds. Sumac had to be pulped before it was applied, so as the storm overtook her she methodically chewed sumac leaves, pressing the resulting spicy-smelling paste to her tom flesh. Chewing also kept her teeth from chattering. Fever burned deep within her breast. It was a cold fire, like Soli, the white moon.

When her neck was covered in sumac paste, Nianki broke a larchit stem and smeared the clear sap on her leg wound. It stung, but not as badly as washing it had.

In the distance, she saw the rain begin as a wall of mist sweeping across the savanna. Lightning crackled in the clouds, sometimes breaking out and striking the parched earth. Deer and birds fled before the storm. The sight of so much game made Nianki’s empty stomach growl. She chewed more sumac, which was oily and pungent; it dampened her desire for food.

The sighing wind rose to a drone as the storm came closer. Whirlwinds of dust danced by, chased by an army of errant leaves. Nianki flinched as a bolt of blue-white lightning stabbed the ground a few hundred paces away. Dry grass flashed into fire, only to be doused by the ensuing downpour.

The rain finally reached her, and she huddled deeper into the cleft of the tree. Rain raked over her, the cold droplets feeling like a lash of thorns. Nianki threw her good arm across her face to shield it from the driving spray. As she peered over her own elbow at the storm, she heard the drumming of massed hooves above the gusting wind. A herd of elk was stampeding. Her hunting instincts aroused, Nianki pushed herself up for a better view.

Elk were accustomed to thunderstorms — thunder alone wasn’t enough to send them trampling over the plain. Something else must have frightened them.

She saw no smoke. No grass fire could survive in the downpour anyway. Nianki braced herself against the tree and stared through the rain at the oncoming herd.

There! Topping a slight rise, a huge, winged shape came swooping after the terrified elk. Nianki gaped in wonder. Tapered, leathery wings rose in a high arc, the tips almost touching, and swept down again to brush the storm-tossed grass. The monster had a thick, streamlined body and a serpentine neck and tail. Its scaly hide had a shiny reddish-gold cast.

All she could think of was her father’s tales about “stormbirds,” huge flying creatures who lived in the sky and brought violent tempests in their wake. Nianki never imagined a monster like this could actually exist, much less fly with such speed and precision.

So rapt was her attention on the stormbird that she forgot the elk herd was bearing down on her. All of a sudden, a wall of brown bodies, antlers, and churning hooves came over the low hill just two hundred paces away — aiming straight at Nianki. There was no way she could outrun them, so she ducked behind the old cedar and fervently hoped the herd would split around this slight obstacle.

The stormbird opened is massive jaws, revealing fangs as long as Nianki’s forearm. Its snake-like eyes rolled back in its head.

A bolt of lightning erupted from its throat.

Stones and dirt flew, and the blast flung Nianki to the ground. She rolled over, expecting at any moment to be trampled by elk or seared by lightning. The ground heaved and shuddered for some moments, gradually settling down. Nianki raised her head.

The herd had split around the cedar tree and was rushing madly for the horizon. Charred carcasses littered the plain, and a smoking rent in the earth thirty paces long lay within spitting distance of Nianki’s tree.

Shaken, she hauled herself to her feet as the stormbird swept overhead. The air from its beating wings washed cold over her.

The monstrous snake-head darted down and snatched up one burned elk after another. It gulped the carcasses down amid a loud snapping of bones. Flapping its wings hard, the stormbird circled and gained height. Rain streamed down Nianki’s face as she watched it climb.

The monster glided in a wide half-circle, and for the first time noticed Nianki. Eyes the size of sunflowers peered down at her. She thought it would strike her with its lightning, but the monster held its turn and flapped away after the quickly disappearing herd. It looked back once, dropping its long neck in order to peer under its own wing.

Soaked to the skin and shivering, Nianki stood there long after the monster had vanished. The past few days had been a revelation. She who thought she knew so much about nature, about the world of the plains, had suffered two rude shocks. First, the pack of misshapen predators that had killed her family — now this! Had the world turned inside out? Were there spirits and monsters behind every tree, beyond every hill?

The smell of burned meat penetrated her reverie. She wandered among the charred remains of eight large animals, a head here, a haunch there. Hungry as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to take any of the stormbird’s leavings. She’d heard of people who burned their meat with fire, but the idea disgusted her. Meat should be eaten fresh or dried, not burned. Only scavengers ate charred food.

Yet, Nianki’s stomach writhed with hunger, sending shooting pains through her gut. Weak and injured as she was, she couldn’t hunt her own game. She needed food to regain her strength — and there was food all around her, though blackened and smelling of fire. Swallowing hard, she slid to her knees beside a still smoking haunch.

Life’s a struggle, Oto always said. If you knock down an anthill every morning, the ants will build it back by evening. The ants had no choice, if they wanted to live, and neither did Nianki. She wrenched off the elk’s leg, hoping the flesh closer to bone might be less burned.

No luck. The lightning had blackened the poor beast right through to the marrow. Nianki sighed and chewed in silence as the rain continued to drench her and the dark, empty savanna.

She wandered south. Her fever got worse, and she lost track of the passage of time as she slept more by day and walked by night. Perhaps four days after seeing the stormbird — she couldn’t remember exactly how long it had been — Nianki found the cold remains of a hunter’s camp. They ate well, these hunters. She found the bones of a slaughtered pig, a pile of wild grape stems, and a broken birch-bark box that once held salmon jerky. She licked the grease from the bark box and gnawed the cast-off pig bones. It was her first food since the burned elk.

Barks and thin howls announced the arrival of a pack of wild dogs. Nianki feared the dogs more than she would a bear or big cat. Bigger predators were wary of humans and their cunning ways, but dogs were stupid and fearless.

She rooted in the debris left behind by the other hunters, thinking to find the boar’s leg bone or some other suitable club. She had better luck than she dared hope.

Tossed in the grass with the offal was a stone-headed spear. The shaft was broken midway, but the careless owner had thrown it away, flint head and all. Nianki held up the shortened spear and examined it by the failing light. The milky gray flint was finely knapped and quite sharp.

Just holding a spear, even a broken one, filled Nianki with new strength. When the dog pack’s scouts yelped close by, she howled back at them, daring them to attack. There followed only the sound of crickets, singing in the twilight. When she next heard the dogs they were farther away. For the first time in many days, Nianki smiled.

Moving on, she found a swampy water hole. With her new spear she gigged a few fat frogs, then dug some tender cane shoots out of the malodorous black mud. She crouched on a stone by the water hole, washing the shoots and gnawing on them.

The food and her weapon gave her new confidence. She walked all night, and just before dawn she smelled smoke. A thin smudge rose from a pine copse ahead.

Hunters in these parts often slept with a slow fire going, feeding it with resinous green pine. The resulting smoke kept mosquitoes away and usually warned off prowling scavengers.

Still limping on her mangled leg, Nianki crept up on the strangers’ camp. She saw two man-sized lumps on the ground, a smoldering heap of pine boughs between them. A hide bag hung from a tree branch, out of reach of badgers and rats. On the other side of the camp a tripod of sticks stood with a bark box balanced carefully on top. Soundlessly, Nianki entered the camp and sat down on the upwind side of the fire.

One of the men, a tall fellow with bare brown shoulders, rolled over on his back. He began to snore loudly. His companion stirred.

“Shh!” the sleepy man hissed, throwing a convenient pine cone at his snoring friend. It landed nowhere near him.

The snorer rasped on. The one who’d thrown the pine cone gave a disgusted sigh and rolled to his feet. He had a cape wrapped around himself — soft elk hide studded with a crow-feather collar — and he hitched this up around his shoulders. He shuffled toward his friend, unaware of Nianki.

“Pakito, turn over!” he said fiercely. The snoring man remained heedless. His snores were so loud Nianki thought he’d scare away all the game within a day’s walk.

“Pakito! You worthless pile of ox dung!” The caped man aimed a kick at the snorer’s hip. No gentle nudge, it rolled the clueless offender over on his face.

“Ow!” he yelped, sitting up and blowing brown pine needles out of his mouth. “Pa’alu! Did you kick me?”

“I did! You were snoring again.”

“Is that any way to treat your brother?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t use an axe.”

Nianki let out a brief, sharp laugh. Both men started and stared, noticing her for the first time.

“If I were a panther,” she said, “you’d both be feeding my kits by now.”

“Who are you?” demanded Pa’alu, the caped one. Nianki ignored the question. Pakito, taller by a head than his brother and broader in the chest, tucked his feet under him and faced Nianki. He had a round face and dark brown eyes.

“You look like you’ve been fighting a panther,” he observed pleasantly. “Since you’re here, you must have won.”

Pa’alu was staring at the short spear in her hand. “Your weapon — may I see it?” he asked. She held it out for his inspection, but did not relinquish it. Pa’alu’s eyes widened and he said, “Pakito! You said you lost your spear when the boar’s mate ran off with it. How did this — this scarred one get it?”

“My name’s Nianki. I found this a night’s walk from here.”

Pa’alu rounded on his brother. “You threw away your spear!”

“It was broken,” the big man said sullenly.

“It has a good head of gray mountain flint! The shaft could have been replaced!”

Pakito gave an exaggerated shrug, saying nothing. Nianki decided the strapping fellow was actually the younger of the two, no more than seventeen or eighteen seasons old. Pa’alu seemed a few years older.

“It was a bad luck spear anyway,” Pakito finally said. “It never hit anything.”

With a shake of her head at such thinking, Nianki reversed her grip and hurled the shortened weapon at Pakito’s feet. It struck at his toes. He yelped and fell over backward. Pa’alu snatched up his own spear and held it high, ready to impale Nianki. She sat quietly, hugging her knees.

Pakito got up, visibly shaken, but exclaimed triumphantly, “You see! He missed me, as close as he was!”

Pa’alu snorted, but his eyes never left Nianki.

She slowly stood, saying, “I’m a she, giant. And you have a cut between the first two toes of your right foot.”

Pakito lifted his foot, grabbed it in both hands and spread his toes apart. A crimson bead oozed from the tiny cut.

“I’m bleeding!” Pakito sat down heavily and blew on his toes. His brown eyes looked accusingly at Nianki.

Pa’alu grinned. “You have a plainsman’s eye,” he said approvingly. “Where’d you learn to throw a spear like that?”

“From my father. He is — was — a great hunter.”

Pa’alu yanked the spear from the ground and handed it back to Nianki. “Keep it. It doesn’t seem to bring bad luck to you.” He eyed her many injuries. “Or perhaps bad luck is finished with you already.”

Nianki sat down cross-legged, laying the short spear across her lap. Pa’alu offered her a hollow gourd with a long thong tied around its neck. She shook it, heard sloshing, and sniffed the open neck. Water.

She drank deeply, gulping rapidly to prevent any spillage. When she was done she handed the empty gourd back to Pa’alu.

“A handy thing,” she said.

“I made it,” he replied. “Haven’t you seen a water-gourd before?”

“I’m not from these parts.”

Little by little Nianki relaxed. Pakito was good-natured and devoted to his brother. Pa’alu was a bit harder to fathom. He had the quick reflexes and keen eyes of a hunter, but he also seemed clever in the way her brother Amero had been — always making things and thinking of new ways to do things. Cleverness like that made her uncomfortable.

They shared their breakfast with her — raisins, salmon jerky, and soft white mush Pakito called “cheese.” It smelled spoiled to Nianki, and she declined to eat it.

“What happened to you?” Pa’alu asked. “Who attacked you?”

“Animals. A hunting pack. Never seen their like before.”

“Wolves?” mumbled Pakito through a mouthful of raisins.

“No.” With painful economy, she described the beasts who had destroyed her family. “I alone survived,” she said. She bit off a piece of jerky and chewed in silence.

“What will you do now?” said Pa’alu.

She shrugged. “I’ll live the best I can.”

“You can come with us,” Pakito said, looking to his brother for confirmation.

Pa’alu’s expression was unreadable. “You are welcome,” was all he said.

Nianki stood up. “I will go where the wind takes me.” She lifted her head, watching the clouds stream to the southern horizon. “Alone.”

Pakito was crestfallen, but Pa’alu nodded solemnly. He placed a few pieces of salmon in a bark box, tossed in some raisins, and handed it to Nianki, saying, “May the spirits of the sky and plain favor you.”

“They haven’t yet,” she replied.

The brothers departed westward, laden with their food and implements. Nianki couldn’t understand why two hunters would burden themselves in such a way. Why carry so much food when it was all around, waiting to be picked or caught? Still, she couldn’t fault the brothers’ generosity. On the strength of their food and water she felt reborn.

That evening she reached a broad river and found it teeming with birds — ducks, geese, cranes, herons. Raiding a few nests, she added four eggs to her provisions. Afterward, she bathed her wounds by swimming out to midstream and floating on her back for a while, letting the current carry her downstream. Curious minnows followed her, nibbling at her fingers and toes. It was an odd, teasing sensation that she half enjoyed, half ignored until it called up memories of the stormbird gobbling down whole elk. Everything in the world fed on something else. The mouse ate the grub, the fox ate the mouse, the vulture ate the fox — humans ate nearly everything and were eaten by still larger predators. Even the mighty elk were just morsels for the stormbird.

And who ate him? What did the stormbird, he who breathed lightning and flew on the crest of a tempest — what did he fear?

Her eyes closed. She lay, bobbing gently, until an errant wave sent water into her nose and she jerked upright, coughing and spitting. The minnows vanished into the depths.

The broad red orb of the sun was setting, so she swam to the south shore. The other side of the river was a cacophony of birds quacking and trumpeting as they came to roost for the night.

Nianki climbed a sandy hill overlooking the river and bedded down for the night, her back against a sturdy vallenwood tree. It was just a sapling by vallenwood standards, yet still bigger around than she could reach. She laid Pakito’s broken spear against her chest and slept deeply. Only once did a noise in the night alarm her — a panther prowling nearby let out a scream. The high, almost-human sound brought Nianki rolling to her feet, spear ready. When next it screamed, the panther was farther away, so Nianki resumed her place under the tree and slept undisturbed.