CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE:

Stragglers

           

            Tyree thought about taking The Scar’s head back to the Tranca clan, then of Shuyah’s displeasure at his doing so. His need for revenge had been satisfied. Now, he was one of the leaders of a new world. It would be a world of peace, one needing leaders with compassion and the people’s interests at heart. Bringing The Scar’s head to the Tranca clan would be—uncivilized. But the Kodiak clan! They would have appreciated it. Golanka would have found it fitting.

            There was no time to take Boozagloo’s head, anyway. A colossal black bear and her two cubs raced through the clearing bawling and bringing Tyree out of his reflections. The crackling forest fire was eating its way around the outer edges of the clearing. The armor on Tyree’s back was blistering hot and his cloak was smoking. With urgent leg pressures, Tyree put his snow pony into a gallop. As they crossed the clearing Tyree grabbed the reins of The Scar’s horse and led it away behind him. Tyree had always found use for a Logalla horse. As overlord, The Scar would have had the best of the Logalla horses, and he had little use for it now. As Tyree rode past the dead Boozagloo the fire flared, turning the night into a day of orange. Tyree could see his dead enemy lying in the snow. His eyes were open. One was white.

            The fire was bearing down on Tyree. Both horses were tired from the duel. Deer and forest birds shot past them easily in their flight through the forest. Wolves and bears raced by, all heading for the safety of the ice shelf beyond the forest. On the ice shelf, there was nothing to burn. But the lone Kodiak would never make it. Too much forest lie ahead. Too tired were both his mounts. As his tired snow pony galloped gamely, Tyree leapt onto the Logalla horse. They rode on, wheezing, stumbling. The fire was at their backs. They were alone. All the forest creatures still alive had outdistanced them. The flames licked at Tyree’s flowing main of hair. Singed, it was now trailing smoke. Suddenly, the wind stopped. The fire roared its disapproval, and seemed to stand upright, reaching skyward to the last remnants of oxygen above the wilderness. Then, slowly at first, the wind reversed itself for a second time and blew the flames back over ground they’d already visited. Tyree and his mounts escaped.

            The twisted forest blazed for two days. Then, when the wind had decided the snomads had been punished enough, it blew in a huge snow storm and snuffed the fires out. The fires were devastating to all, for a great portion of the twisted forest was consumed. Many would freeze to death over the winters ahead, for wood would be more scarce than ever. Still, worse fates awaited the snomads.

            The first winter after the eruptions and forest fires was the harshest ever. The Logalla widows and their children, nearly all sixty thousand of them, would not live through this first sunless winter. With no men to hunt for them, no horses with which to migrate, they would die there amid the smoldering remains of the twisted forest—there under pollution filled skies that didn’t permit the warmth of the sun.

            The wind now brought the bitterest storms, a life even the hearty and gifted Kodiak could not survive. Each thaw was more devastating, too, the first one swallowing the crater that was once Verdanta. Still, more died from the cold than from the thaw. It was on the first thaw migration after the death of Verdanta that the Kodiak discovered another great loss. The volcano fields where they’d mined and forged their brave iron had erupted, too. The vein of special metal that they used to make all Kodiak weapons and armor was no longer theirs.

            Each winter became more severe. Many Tranca died, even some Kodiak. Those upon the snow were dying, yet there was no war. In the third winter after Verdanta’s destruction, the Kodiak and Tranca clans banded together as if to share each other’s warmth. They became, as they might have been when time began, one clan. Tyree and Shuyah reached out to the smaller clans and offered to let them join their clan.

            “Just more mouths to feed!” grumbled Konka.

            “More hands to help,” Tyree countered.

            The orphans of Verdanta were an important part of the Tranca/Kodiak family. They were living symbols for the clan to never forget. Tyree made the eldest son of Thrabok commander of the orphan brigade. He told the orphans to aspire to greatness in the tradition of their dead mothers and fathers. They trained with zeal to one day become Tranca warriors. It was good training and it groomed them for the day. It served other purposes: it kept the orphans’ minds off of the crushing winters, and off of—other things.

            Tyree’s son, Valaar, had naturally taken to the small unit theory of the Kodiak. He and Konka and Drinda’s two children trained constantly to become warriors like their parents. The twins were full-blooded Kodiak and extremely adept at reading the wind. Sometimes the twins could communicate across the snow when there was no wind at all. This would one day be prince Valaar’s unit, its deeds a story for another time. Valaar was well aware that he stood in the line and would one day be called upon to lead his clan. Such responsibility demanded utmost training and unswerving dedication. Of course, Valaar had just turned eight and the twins under the age of five, so warrior days were far in the future.

            Winter returned more bitter than before. The snomads made for the north to escape the thaw that in three months would take the land. Shuyah was pregnant again. That spring, she gave birth to a girl. They named her Golana, after Tyree’s revered dead uncle, Golanka.

            Tyree and Shuyah decided that the clan needed a new name, one that reflected the co-mingling of Tranca, Kodiak, and many of the small outer clans into this band of forty thousand that would make their stand upon the snow. Tyree and Shuyah decided to call them the name of legend. The name many clans believed the first clan was called: Snomads.

            Even some Logalla stragglers joined Tyree’s band. Four hundred were warriors, three hundred were women and children, all ragged survivors. Like all the other clans joining Tyree’s, the Logalla placed their black bear skin huts together in one location. It was as if several clans had set up their camps at night, in a fog, and when morning came and the fog lifted, they found themselves in one big camp with several very distinct neighborhoods. The Logalla policed their area like a fortress, knowing that the Kodiak could overwhelm them at their whim.

            The Logalla conjurer was among these desperate remains of a defeated people. The conjurer didn’t know Tyree knew him. Tyree would forever keep that knowledge his own. The conjurer didn’t know Tyree had watched him administer his evil Logalla elixir to some of their captives, that Tyree had tasted of it himself.

            Tyree had three choices: turn the Logalla stragglers away, kill them all, or let them join the clan. Konka, of course, wanted to kill them. Tyree decided to let Koleefus befriend the Logalla conjurer. Let her ply him as only Koleefus could, use the unsuspecting sorcerer as a means of information. The Logalla warriors were brave and smart and deadly. They might be of use to the clan in the uncertain future they all faced. Besides, execution was no longer Tyree’s way, gaining advantages was.

            The Logalla woman who saw the last overlord murder his predecessor was also among the stragglers. Her name was Virella, and none but the Logalla recognized her for anything other than a refugee. Virella’s son, Viyak, was fathered by Shidyak, the overlord murdered by The Scar. Virella was one of Shidyak’s consorts. An overlord’s blood ran in young Viyak’s veins, so his mother and the conjurer plotted to make Viyak the leader of not just the remains of the Logalla clan, but of all the snomads. The conspirators had a contingent of four hundred Logalla warriors to back them up. The Logalla warriors were led by a proud war commander named Garl. Garl was determined to make certain that the Logalla survived, so he and his men swore loyalty to the son of Shidyak.

            There were many reasons for the superstitious Logalla to fear Virella and her young son. They had survived the harsh winters that killed all but a handful of the sixty thousand widows and children of the defeated Logalla. Destiny approved them. But the whispers were that to survive, there in the shattered remains of the twisted forest, Virella and her son had turned to the one thing that repulsed even the Logalla—cannibalism.

            It was the fifth winter since the destruction of Verdanta. The smoke of the forest fires had added to the volcanic ash from Verdanta and, combined, these events forever changed the wilderness. Dark skies persisted through the thaw and the sun seldom warmed the clans. The snomads didn’t know it, but the eruption of the volcanoes under Verdanta and the brave iron fields were not the only ones to burst forth from stresses deep within the earth. Far away, in temperate zones of which no snomad could possibly conceive, huge clouds of ash and smoke filled the troposphere. It damaged the ozone layer, and brought about what to planet earth was just another in her eternal string of ice ages. Tyree and Shuyah formulated a plan to survive.

            Tyree took his eagle, Wingswift, to the mountains where he and his grandfather had found the wounded bird many thaws before. Every winter, Tyree had released the bird back to its brothers and sisters. Now, Wingswift had several grandchildren that he could soar with playfully in the lofty, craggy cliffs of old age. Tyree swam in the crystal pool beneath the towering falls that fell from the mountains of which only the eagles knew. He fed Wingswift one last time, then left the bird with its brethren for good.

            The Kodiak Council of Elders was still functioning, and the Tranca still lived under rule of the royal family, which now somehow included a Kodiak. Tyree and Shuyah were permitted to bring issues to the council, and the council could still vote to decide what was best for the Kodiak. Tyree and Shuyah’s arguments were always convincing, so they usually held sway. But this freezing, bitter day, the issue they brought was a momentous one. Tyree and Shuyah nodded in deference, then sat respectfully before them, cross-legged on the caribou skin floor, all surrounding a hot little fire built on stones.

            “What do you bring before the council?” the elected spokesman for the council asked.

            “It is the end for us all if we again go north,” Tyree began, “and we’ll be consumed by the thaw if we stay here. Instead of returning north, as we have since time began, we plan to make a rush to the east. East, to meet the sun.”

            “But only the great sea lies east of the thaw,” one of the two female members of the council noted.

            “We believe that we can cross the great sea once it freezes,” Tyree smiled. “Perhaps find Jallalla.”

            “This would require a belief in other lands. Lands beyond the sea,” a male Kodiak elder said. “Fantasies!”

            Shuyah suddenly stood, a disrespectful action, but one that thoroughly captured the council’s attention. She moved to the flap of the large hut.

            “Jallalla is a belief we all share. But this—” she pulled open the hut’s flap and let the snow and icy wind blow in, “—this is death!”

            The icy blast of wind smothered and nearly extinguished the council’s little fire. Tyree hid the amusement he felt at his wife’s use of theatrics, and instead looked gravely at the council as Shuyah returned to sit at his side.

            “Each winter, we have less and less firewood,” Tyree said. “Each thaw, there is less and less tundra bush and thaw grass for the livestock. Our hunts produce less and less game.”

            “In my youth, an expedition tried to cross the frozen sea to the new land,” another elder nervously said. “Their voices were never heard again upon the snow.”

            “Perhaps they found paradise,” Tyree said, smiling that hang dog smile that usually got him his way.

            “Our plan is to give all the snomads the opportunity to join us on this migration. Those who wish to stay and move north are welcome to do so,” Shuyah explained.

            “There you have it, my honorable elders of the Kodiak. Our plans for the clan’s survival,” Tyree said with finality, standing up to end the meeting. “On winter’s coldest day we shall strike east. Attempt to cross the frozen sea before the thaw arrives.”

            Tyree reached out a hand and helped his wife to her feet, again. Again they nodded with respect and left the hut.

            The Council of Elders voted three to two against the plan. Tyree and Shuyah did it anyway.

            Most of the elders of all the clans were unconvinced that Tyree and Shuyah’s daring plan had merit. To cross the frozen sea was far more distant and uncertain than a mere migration north. It was a gamble against unknown odds. Most of the elders stayed behind, and with them the three members of the Kodiak Council that voted against the plan. Many of the younger families stayed, too, unwilling to risk their children on such an epic trek. Twelve thousand Tranca, five thousand Kodiak, several small clans and, surprisingly, almost all of the Logalla stragglers went. A new life in a new land was very appealing to the Logalla. Tyree and Shuyah led the throng, over twenty thousand of them, and forty thousand livestock, on the most monumental migration ever attempted by snomads.

 

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