Khell, seventeen Summers before
Maia ran over ice, its sharp coldness digging into her feet. Her doal-hide moccasins, made for scampering around the summer camp, were wearing thin. Her furs no longer felt warm; she had been too long without shelter or a fire. Her stomach writhed with hunger like the windblown clouds above.
The clouds were gray, almost black, threatening a storm. The storms rolled off the water over the endless ice plain all summer. If hunger didn't kill her, the storm could, with its piercing cold winds and sharp flakes of ice-snow. The ice was dense under her feet, but a mountain range rose ahead. If she could reach it, she could burrow into the soft snow on its flanks and live. If she did not collapse from exhaustion first.
She ran over ice, images flashing through her mind. Dhuciri, reaching toward Grandmother with long pale fingers. The camp in disarray, the people in a long line before the dark birds. Dust like ash covering every surface. Everything and everyone she had ever known, gone. She was really, truly alone, on the vast sheet of ice.
Alone, but alive. The wind blew to her back, from the water, not the mountains. A summer storm. A winter storm would have killed her. She ran on.
The way grew steep, and snow began to collapse under her feet just as the first flakes of ice fell from the sky. She had reached the mountains. She stared out at the plain for a moment, gasping for air. The snow looked dirty to her, like the dust of her tribe had been swept up by the wind and carried here to haunt her. She turned and scraped at the snow with raw, cold hands. She burrowed far below the surface, escaping the storm.
In her constricting snow cave, she pulled out the pouch and felt its contents. Ten finger bones lay huddled together within the soft leather. Some were rough, others smooth. They were different lengths, some long and skinny, some short and stout. She considered trying to eat one, and decided against it. Grandmother had trusted her with them. They were sacred. Hungry as she was, she could not eat them.
Instead, she dug further into the snow. Her hands were bleeding and cracked, but she found bare rock within a few feet, supporting tiny patches of frozen lichen. She knew they would not keep her alive, but they eased the cramping in her belly when she chewed them up and choked them down.
The storm passed. Maia stood on the ice again, blinking in the blinding sun, staring at the mountains, wondering if it would be better to scale them or keep to the plain. She needed meat desperately.
What had Grandmother said about the mountains? The summer storms blew in from the Stormbirth Waters, and in the summer, the far side of the mountains sheltered great flocks of gwenwing and wild doal and even inland boareal. If she could cross the mountains, she might find something there she could kill and eat. She set her feet on the slopes and tried to stomp out stairs. The snow was too soft, and she floundered. She could not keep above the snow pack, and she was too weak and hungry to swim though it. She had no choice but to continue on the plain, walking beneath the mountain ridge. Perhaps she could find a low pass or another tribe’s trail.
It was difficult to walk. Her moccasins, made for scampering around camp, not long treks, were worn through. Her feet were swollen and black, and she could not feel her toes. The sun pierced her with its brilliance. The mountains never changed, no matter how long she walked. The sun set and she walked on through the dark. It was too cold to stop moving. She walked under twinkling stars until black turned to grey and grey turned to blue and blue turned to all-encompassing white.
Maia’s gait grew slower and slower. Her feet and legs grew so tired that they could no longer hold her up and she fell to her hands and knees and crawled over the ice. Then her knees and arms gave out and she collapsed on the ice and died.
Death brought blackness and an eternal stillness. The stillness was broken by strange noises, a shuffling and scraping like hides over ice. Blackness faded and she saw the long, slobbery snout of a giant boareal snuffling toward her. Its razor-tusks flashed inches from her face. She was not afraid, because she was dead. They were spirit boareal, coming to take her home.
The tusks passed by her, and a human face looked into hers. She was flung across the boareal’s huge, bristly back, covered in warm furs, rubbed with snow, taken into tent-like traveling egla, fed hot broth and warmed by a fire.
“I am Hakua of the Liathua Khell,” said a smiling young face. “What is your name?”
“I was Maia, of the Nuambe Khell. Now I have no tribe.”
“But Maia means Lost One,” Hakua said. “You are no longer lost. You are welcome to live among us, if you like.”
Then a large man pulled Hakua out of the egla, away from Maia. “Don't speak with the prisoner, Hakua. She will save one of us from the Dhuciri tithing, but you must not grow attached.”