CHAPTER Thirty:

JOURNEY

 

            The snomads had to cross the desolate snowfields in order to go east and catch the sea at the height of winter. Tyree planned a two day rest in the snowfields before going onto the frozen surface. Some grumbled that there was nothing to hunt or gather in the snowfields, that Tyree’s choice was a poor place to make camp. Tyree didn’t listen. He went alone three views from the main body and made a solitary camp. He called out to the Ghost Warriors who had figured so significantly in his life. Tyree’s calls across the bleak, lifeless snowfields sounded like a prayer. He could only wait two days. He could not risk losing any time against the thaw’s unalterable schedule. In the waning light of the second day, his prayer was answered. Jasika materialized out of the whiteness alone and ambled his pallid horse into Tyree’s camp. This time, it was Tyree who served soup. Tyree told of the victory over the Logalla, and of his expedition to escape the age of ice. It appeared the Ghost Warrior somehow already knew all of this.

            “Come with us,” Tyree suggested.

            “The snow is our home,” Jasika smiled, finishing the warming soup and washing his bowl in the snow. “Our legends say that we will be the last alive upon it. You know how we feel about destiny.”

            Jasika made a whistling sound, that was more like the call of the wind. Over a distant drift, came two dozen black Logalla pack horses, their leaders held taut by Ghost Warriors who at the last instant, materialized.

            “For your journey,” Jasika said, as the new arrivals strung the twenty-four heavily laden pack horses together so that one rider could lead them like a single file caravan. “There is food in the snowfields,” Jasika added, “if one knows where to look.”

            Jasika patted Tyree firmly on one shoulder, as the Kodiak always did in bidding farewell to a friend. Then he mounted his white steed, which was not a snow pony, and rode slowly away, vanishing into the whiteness with the rest of his band, all of them just as much a mystery as ever.

            Tyree’s return to camp from the barren snowfields with twenty-four pack horses loaded with extra supplies further enshrined him in snomad lore.

            The expedition reached the great sea three days later. Shuyah and Tyree’s timing was perfect. Winter was at its bitter apex. The sea was flat, frozen solid. The way was unobstructed by mountains and deep drifts as the way north always was. The sleds would move easily, and the snow ponies could run like the wind. But they had to keep the pace down so the livestock could keep their footing. There was ice as far as a Kodiak could see. They went out onto it, and thus began a trek that made the bravest weep. Hundreds died against the cold. They ran out of food in the second month. The occasional seal was of little value to the throng. They began depleting their livestock. First the goats, then the sheep, then the caribou, then the breeding stock of each. In desperation, they ate some of their precious horses. Still they forged on. The only animals left in any number were the snow ponies of the Kodiak. They would not be eaten at any cost.

            As more horses died or were eaten, more and more snomads were set afoot. They labored, then slowed, and then the expedition to Jallalla ground to a stop on the empty ice. As their despair overwhelmed them, there came a distant cracking, and a thunderous crash, but it was only heard by Kodiak ears. Tyree conferred with Konka and Drinda. The three crouched on the ice out of ear shot of the clans.

            “The thaw is upon us from the south,” Tyree said, knowing all the other Kodiak already knew this. “Eight or ten views away.”

            “We have less than a month to reach Jallalla,” Drinda said, “or the thaw will take us. The ice will fall beneath us. The sea shall have us. But—it will make little difference. By then, we will have all starved to death.”

            “On the brighter side of it,” Konka smiled, “if the thaw approaches, it brings with it the sea.”

            “I have had the same thought,” Tyree said. “The sea to the south would be plentiful with seal and fish.”

            “Then let’s meet the thaw,” Konka suggested. “Just a small party. Say a hundred. Enough to bring back food for all. I love to fish!”

            “But to reach the sea, you must stand upon the next area the thaw will take!” Drinda blanched.

            “I am timing them. When the next one drops, we go, knowing how much time we have to get back,” Tyree said.

            “It is imprecise,” Drinda said. “You can’t trust the thaw to follow your schedule!”

            “It’ll be all right, Drinda,” Konka comforted. “Still, I want you to stay here—with our children.”

            Then Konka and Tyree stood, turned, and hurried to gather those Kodiak warriors most suited for the mission. They left Drinda crouched in despair there upon the ice.

            Neither Kodiak nor Tranca were much in the way of fishermen. Usually their fishing began and ended with cutting a hole in the ice. But Tyree knew of a clan that had joined his band the day before they struck out across the sea. It’s members were nomadic, too, but roamed the southeastern edges of the wilderness where it met the sea. They therefore had the occasion to use boats, and had learned how to turn their walrus skin huts into serviceable fishing vessels. They were called the Wirwiry, and they knew the thaw better than any. They were a peaceful clan, and lived in an area that the other clans avoided. They had nothing others wanted, so they were left alone.

            There were only five hundred in the clan, but Tyree was certain a hundred expert fishermen could be found among them. Kobbeesh, chief of the Wirwiry, was stunned when the great leader, Tyree, asked entrance for himself and his lieutenant into Kobbeesh’s humble hut. Kobbeesh nervously offered the seats upon the floor available in every snomad’s home. Kobbeesh’s wife brought tea of a light coastal variety and two bowls of horse meat stew, the last food the Kobbeesh family had. Konka gobbled up his stew, but Tyree handed his bowl to their host’s smallest child.

            “We plan to take an expedition south toward the thaw,” Tyree explained, looking the old man in the eye. “Meet the sea, and there take fish and seal to save us all.”

            The nervous Kobbeesh wringed his gaunt but calloused hands. “It is very dangerous,” the little fisherman said, and then regretted saying it, for he knew these great leaders were already aware of the risk. “But I serve my clan, and my clan is now your clan, Tyree of the Kodiak.”

            “I’m no longer Kodiak,” Tyree said, clapping a hand on the fisherman’s bony shoulder. “We are all snomads, now. Be prepared to ride when we hear the next collapse.”

            “But I’m afraid we’ve—eaten all our horses,” the old man fretted.

            “We have horses,” the two Kodiak said together.

            The old man looked into Tyree’s eyes. The Kodiak was determined to go. To not go meant to die in a few days, so of course he was going to go. Were not the Kodiak the only ones in all the world who might save them all? Were they not wise enough to ask the best fishermen in all the world to show them how?

            “We should go before the next collapse,” the wizened fisherman said as firmly as he could. “Get a jump on the thaw. Get close. Be ready to fish as soon as the next expanse of ice breaks away.”

            “We go before the next collapse,” Tyree nodded, seeing the logic instantly. “It will give us more time.”

            That night, Tyree and Shuyah slept, little daughter, Golana, between them, Tyree closest to the door, as always. Ten-year-old Valaar had his own bed in a corner. All three warriors had swords on the floor beside them. Tyree suddenly felt a presence. He leapt to his feet, sword-in-hand, to find the witch woman, Koleefus. She’d managed to enter, cross the floor and stand a sword’s length from him. Never had anyone, friend or enemy, been able to get within ten pony lengths of Tyree’s hut without awakening him. Yet here was this old Tranca woman, beads and trinkets on her caribou robes now jangling in Kodiak ears that should have heard them some time ago. The two spoke softly so as not to wake the others.

            “You move well in the night,” Tyree whispered.

            “Ways taught to me,” she shrugged. She gestured to the rattling walls of the hut. “The wind hid my arrival.”

            “If I didn’t know differently, I’d say you were Kodiak,” he teased, placing his sword back on the floor.

            “No, I am fully of the clan of the Tranca,” she said, “but someone I knew, long ago, taught me the ways of the Kodiak. How to walk with the wind, blend in the snowfall.”

            She moved to his meager fire and sat down cross-legged, which these days was a painful prospect for her.

            “Tomorrow, you leave on a mission without an enemy but the cold and the needs of your clan,” she began. “I come tonight, for even I cannot predict the outcome.”

            Tyree sat cross-legged to face her and, as she spoke, he stoked the fire with small pieces of precious wood.

            “In my youth, I knew a Kodiak. He was a young warrior; I was the ambitious daughter of a high ranking Tranca commander. We met and fell in love outside the knowledge of our clans. Our love was illicit. Against the laws of both clans. We spent many thaws meeting secretly at the place where my Kodiak and I first met. I had ridden far from my clan’s camp, alone. So had he. It was a warm thaw day. We were both in the mood to explore. He discovered me swimming in a crystalline pool beneath a waterfall on a mountain of which only the eagles know.”

            “Grandfather!” Tyree gasped.

            “He was eighteen, I was fourteen. He taught me the ways of the Kodiak. I told him all he asked about the Tranca. We saw how different, and yet how the same we were. We dreamed of a day when our two clans would be one. We were most happy—for awhile. Then our meetings became more dangerous. Friction between the Tranca and the Kodiak had been growing over a vast grazing area to the west. Security was increased. All out war was very much on the wind, and your grandfather—well, he was in the line.”

            Tyree knew what she meant. Members of his family were always in the line to be Kodiak military commander.

            “We met one last time at our eagle mountain lake,” she went on. “We agreed it was not meant to be. We returned to our clans. He married another. My father was killed in the battles that followed. Over these many thaws, I became the witch woman of the Tranca, often using the Kodiak magic taught to me by your grandfather during those few, sweet winters. I never loved again.”

            “You knew him as a novice? Before he married?”

            “Yes. We were so much in love. And the danger, it only seemed to enhance the attraction. Too soon, it became our love’s end. I tell you this for a purpose, Tyree of the Kodiak. I have many stories to tell about your grandfather. Of our youth together. Stories that could not until now be told. Stories no one knows but I.”

            “Tell me these stories!” Tyree said excitedly.

            “Not tonight. Tonight, you need to sleep and awake refreshed,” she said rising shakily, but finding Tyree up and at her elbow before she’d risen but one inch.

            “But Koleefus—!” he pleaded.

            “No. When you return. The stories of your grandfather yet unheard will give you reason to stay alive. Reason to return successful, and to keep us all alive.”

            He helped her to the door, though he was sure she could have just vanished at will, like she did on the trail the first day he’d met the old witch woman. She handed him a stick of incense that was somehow already glowing and filling the hut with a pleasant soothing smell.

            “Breathe of this. It will help you sleep,” she said.

            When Tyree opened the hut’s flap for her, the wind hurried by biting at them as it went. The wind across the plains was their ally, but here, across the flat sea of ice, the wind had become unfriendly. Koleefus went out into the cold, back to her own hut where orphaned children slept. Tyree poked the burning incense into the wall near his bed, and he lay back down. How could he sleep knowing Koleefus had stories to tell? Yet within a few heartbeats, sleep came to him, the incense wafting its magic one more time before going out.

 

                        *                       *                       *          

 

            The Wirwiry packed their huts onto their sleds, and harnessed and mounted able snow ponies borrowed from the Kodiak. These snow ponies were outfitted with the bridles and saddles the Wirwiry were used to. The Wirwiry horses wouldn’t be needing them any longer. The Kodiak whispered into the ears of these snow ponies, asking them to accept the indignity. The Wirwiry were important to all.

            With Tyree and Konka among the twenty Kodiak selected to protect the fishing party, the unsightly band struck out south toward the thaw. Each rider towed several pack ponies. The Wirwiry were upbeat, happy to be again on a hunt. The Kodiak were uneasy. The wind here brought them little information. The Kodiak periodically held a hand up to read the wind. They raised their noses, and opened their ears. Here, across the empty ice, the wind told them nothing.

            Tyree didn’t tell the rest of the clan his plan until they were ready to depart, so that there was little time for the others to think too much about it.

            “They desert us,” Virella said to the conjurer and Garl as they and several Logalla warriors watched Tyree’s expedition slowly move beyond the horizon of ice.

            “No, Tyree has left his wife and children with us,” the conjurer assured. “He will be back, or he will be killed.”

            “Both of those options could come to pass,” she noted.

            The Logalla warriors’ thoughts were not of murder at this time. They were big men, and they were starving. They wondered from where their next meal would come, and how they would seize upon it. Virella knew from where her next meal might come. Virella and her son would do all that was necessary to survive—as they did in the camp of the starving Logalla war widows after their army’s defeat. Now they were starving once again. It was a horrible prospect to most, but not so much to Virella and her son.

            Tyree’s fishing expedition had crossed five views of barren ice when the old fisherman, Kobbeesh, riding a tired old snow pony, held up his hand. Riding at the old man’s side, Tyree held up his hand, and they all came to a stop.

            “Close enough,” Kobbeesh muttered as the sun began to set through the haze in the west. “We camp here.”

            Tyree’s Kodiak ears could hear the distant thrashing of the sea unseen. All the Kodiak stood and listened. Only they could hear the sounds of seabirds feeding, the unmistakable barking of seals. Then it faded, as night came.

            They put up their huts against the cold. Within each Wirwiry hut a kayak was being stitched together. Each Wirwiry hut had two extra walrus skin sections that, with a few hundred stitches, and precut wooden ribs and keel, became an excellent kayak. The Wirwiry had developed a fishing line of thin yet strong quality. It could only be made from the intestine of the great snow shark. Lodge poles became excellent fishing poles. They had turned their metal working not to weapons, but toward developing fine hooks and sinkers and harpoons. They were expert at making lures, artificial silvery fishes and colorful imitation creatures, with which the Wirwiry had fooled the fish forever. Tyree and Konka went from hut to hut to encourage the Wirwiry, but the two big Kodiak just seemed to get in the way of the little fishermen, so Tyree and Konka went to their own hut for the night.

            In the ten Kodiak huts, the warriors of the plains sat in twos, sullenly contemplating their imminent deaths upon the ice. They were veterans of many winters in the frozen north, yet the cold here was the worst they’d ever known. Tyree and Konka shared a hut. Their fire was pitiful. They had to preserve their wood supply in order to smoke the fish they hoped to catch.

            “Let’s go back to the Wirwiry huts,” Konka shivered. “It seemed nice and cozy in there.”

            “No, we just get in their way,” Tyree said. “And their huts. They are made better than our Kodiak huts. Ours are fine against the wind, but cold this fierce—!” He thought about it a long moment. “We must learn from them. Make all the huts this way. Cold is the way of the future.” Then Tyree’s teeth started chattering and he decided to shut up. He was surprised to hear Konka begin one of his deep, guttural laughs—the one that was always laced with sarcasm.

            “You are a wonder, Tyree of the Kodiak. You speak as if there is going to be a future. A future of any kind for us.”

            Konka reached into his pouch and took out a box wrapped in lamb’s skin and tied firmly with rawhide strips.

            “Shuyah gave this to me,” Konka rasped, his breath making great white puffs even within a Kodiak hut that stood infallible against the wind. “She said for me to give it to you when the time was the worst. This seems to be it.”

            Tyree unwrapped the package. What could she have sent that would make any difference now? It was a small goatskin cask of gruda.

            “The woman may be a queen, but she knows what her man needs,” Tyree grinned. Then he popped the leather stopper and took a long drink.

            “She knows what her man’s friend needs, too!” Konka laughed, reaching for the gruda.

            “Careful, Konka,” Tyree teased, pulling the cask slightly away. “You know this gruda of the Tranca could only be made in the warmth of Verdanta. Only made if the maker was not moving, so the juice can sit in the sun and become something different. I know how you hate the idea of staying in one place. Surely a drink that must not move for several months to reach usefulness would be of no interest to you.”

            “I’ve acquired a taste for it,” Konka said.

            Konka grabbed the cask and he and Tyree exchanged stimulating drinks. They wordlessly let the gruda warm them. Then Konka said, “So, you’re not Kodiak, anymore?”

            Tyree looked at him quizzically, so Konka continued.

            “You told the old man you were no longer Kodiak.”

            “Politics, my friend,” Tyree grinned. “The people need to be united. Clan loyalty is fine, but it leads to conflict. Always has. Besides, you and I know who we are, don’t we Konka?” Tyree said with a yawn, then he lay back, falling asleep, as he listened to Konka suck out the last dregs from the tiny cask.

            A sealskin boot crunched in the snow. It awoke Tyree instantly. Sealskin. He knew the boot was that of a Wirwiry. Tyree crawled past snoring Konka, and went out on the ice. He saw Kobbeesh looking south into the night toward the unseen sea. Tyree went to the old fisherman’s side. They both stood quietly and looked at the night. The sun came up in the east and they could suddenly see to the horizon. So cold, so white, so flat, a bleak horizon that—curved! Yes, it curves! The flatness of the ice makes it possible to see. We must stand on a great ball, Tyree concluded to himself!

            “We have, since time began, looked toward the thaw in this way,” the old man finally said.

            “We are fortunate to have you with us,” Tyree replied.

            “Have you not asked yourself why a clan would choose to live before the thaw? To embrace the icy sea?”

            “To avoid conflict with the warring clans of the plains,” Tyree shrugged. “I know of other clans who avoid conflict by living in harsh domain,” he added, thinking of the Ghost Warriors living in the barren snowfields.

            “That is not our reason. We have always believed that there was a paradise beyond the sea,” the old fisherman said. “Though we could not reach it, we chose to live as close to it as possible.”

            “Jallalla,” Tyree said with understanding, his belief reinforced that they were all, when time began, one clan.

            “We call it the Land of the Sun, but it is what we all seek. We are joined by purpose, Tyree, to find paradise.”

            “I’d settle for a nice, fat seal,” Tyree quipped.

            Then, as if the wind were not amused, the earth shuddered and something sucked all the air forward toward the sea. It was space being vacated by the next collapse. It created a massive vacuum that the wind obeyed. All could hear the fall of a great portion of the ice shelf. By the time it crashed into the sea, all had come out of their huts, both Kodiak and Wirwiry. It was five views away, so none could actually see the collapse. There was a long silence as the horrifying rumble echoed across the frozen ocean. Then, the Kodiak began to hear the sounds of seabirds and seals returning. The Wirwiry had no ear for the wind, and could not hear the seals and seabirds. But they knew they were there. Tyree looked over the group. Each had its own ways. The Wirwiry were not warriors, nor great trackers, nor ruthless killers of things other than fish. But they surpassed the Kodiak in other ways. Tyree wondered how that mattered, now.

            “We go,” was all the old fisherman said.

 

LOOK FOR CHAPTER 31:  “SHOOSHINKA”

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