Gear, W Michael - Novel 05 Read Online Free Page B

her
husband's frozen body into the narrow crevice. Her son, so much smaller, had
been laid in the packrat-tracked dust at his feet. She'd sung the prayers then,
calling on Tarn Apo, "Our Father," the Creator, then upon Wolf, who
had helped to fashion the world after the Creation. She'd pleaded that they
would receive and cherish her loved ones, and that they would show them the
trail to the Milky Way, the Backbone of the World, and hence to the Land of the
Dead.
                   Such prayers had to be sung to ensure that her
loved ones would not lose their way on the journey across the sky. Should they
do so, they might return to Tarn Sogobia, "Our Mother," the earth.
Mugwa, ghosts who lost their way, no matter what their nature in life, harassed
the living by appearing as whirlwinds and shooting sickness into people.
                   She raised her eyes to the bitter sky, masked
by sullen gray clouds. Snow blew down upon her, but she sang the mourning song
again, fingers knotting in the thick leather of her mittens. The dead could
find their way through clouds, couldn't they? Storms don't matter, she
reassured herself.
                   Willow closed her eyes against the sting of the
wind. Enough trouble was loose on the land.
                   They stared at her from the hollows of her
memory: her husband's face, so strong and serious, trusting her to cure him;
her little son, his round face sunken, his black eyes bright with fever.
                   I failed you . .. both of you. Traitorous
muscles sent shivers through her. She opened her eyes as the wind battered her
robe, and studied the patterns of rock where she'd walled their corpses in. Her
soul's eye could see into the darkness where they lay. Her husband's face had
looked unnaturally pale, a juniper-bark mat covering his eyes and a leather
band around his mouth. To meet the gaze of the dead was to summon one's own
death at best, and to court possession by evil at worst. Terrible things could
issue from a dead man's mouth: corruption, disease, or soul loss.
                   The injustice of it goaded her, and for a
moment she glared upward into the stormy sky, angered that Tarn Apo could have
created a world where such a loving and kind man as her husband could become so
threatening after death.
                   It's not him. He's gone. His souls are
searching the way to the afterlife and its rewards. She turned her attention
back to the rocked-up crevice; snow had begun to settle in the niches and
hollows. They had planned so many things together. His eyes had sparkled as he
played with their son. She had imagined them together, snug in warm winter
lodges, walking arm in arm through green high-country meadows in summer,
slicing hot meat from his kill on a frosty fall morning.
                   Together, they would have watched their son
take his first step. Hand in hand, they would have seen him earn his boyhood
name. She would have smiled to herself as her husband taught the boy the
intricacies of stoneworking, arrow making, and the rituals all hunters must
know. And later, she would have marveled at her boy's first kill, that critical
step toward manhood.
                   Gone now, all of it.
                   There, behind that stack of wedged rock, lay
the empty death of dreams.
                   I didn 't have the puha to save them. I
couldn’t send my soul into the Land of the Dead to bring them back. But then,
such things were omaihen, forbidden to a woman. Only the greatest of puhagan,
the most powerful of medicine men, had that kind of puha. Such power was never
granted to a woman.
                   She lowered herself, back braced against the
cold stone, and stared off across the valley. White wraiths of snow danced like
capering ghosts, twirled by the wind as they settled onto the rounded junipers
and the rangy limber pine dotting