SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 1: Night Watch (part 2 of 2)

Tull's heart pounded, and he looked away as she began to strip off her summer tunic. He wondered if she knew that he was in the tree. How could she not know? he wondered. We always have a guard.

Fava gasped as she splashed into the pond. The water felt deliciously cool against her skin. Distilling honey was hot, sticky work, and Fava relished the thought of feeling clean again, clean like the night sky that caressed the moon's cheek.

Fava dunked her head beneath the water's surface to soak the honey smoke out of her hair. She rolled her head from side to side, letting the current ripple like fingers through her tresses. Fingers, she thought. Would that they were Tull's fingers instead of the river's.

He watches, up there in his tree, she thought. She pushed off against the rocks and silt of the pond's bottom and took in a breath before she stretched out to float on her back under Thor's blue-green light.

Fava shared her smile with the moon. Let him watch, she whispered to Thor. If Tull watched, perhaps he would see that she was a woman grown, a woman who offered potho ha-chima, the love that opens like a rosebud, instead of the simpler friendship of a childhood playmate.

For Fava was a girl no longer. Her goals and desires had evolved from the toys and games of a child into the larger world of kin, village and hearth. Like all Pwi women, she would take a mate once and forever, joining her spirit with his the way bark is bound to pith.

The water lapping against the shore offered a soft chuckle in response to Fava's thoughts, so she splashed.

What if Tull didn't want her? What if his heart yearned after some human woman, just as hers yearned after him? Tull's father was human, so perhaps Tull aspired to a human life, a human wife. The thought unsettled Fava, so she dove beneath the surface again to wash the thought loose.

Surely, Tull could see that a strong Pwi woman like herself was better than the wilting flower of a human girl he'd chased after as a boy. Well, if he couldn't, Fava would do her best to make him see.

She rose to the surface and stole a glance at Tull's guard post over her bare shoulder.

Tull dared a glimpse toward the pond. He could see little. Fava's pale flesh shone softly in the blue moonlight, and she swam with the grace of an otter. "Fava," he whispered, "what are you doing?"

"Bathing," she said. Fava was a sweet girl who seemed mystified by the world and always spoke with a strangely intense inflection, as if trying to convey how odd everything was.

Tull's face burned with embarrassment.

"Mmmmm," she sighed, splashing water. "I've been boiling honey for three days. My clothes are sticky, and they smell like leatherwood. Tell," she said, speaking Tull's name as well as her Neanderthal lips would allow, Even my skin smells fondly of honey."

Tull blushed and looked away. Fava teased him from time to time, yet it seemed like a game. Tull was not sure if she really wanted to catch him. For Neanderthals, all objects, all people, all places held kwea, the emotional weight of past associations. Tull felt drawn to Fava, but she'd always been like a little sister to him. The kwea he felt for her was friendly, the kwea built up from good times spent together.

He could not think of her as anything but the little girl she had been, someone to protect. But lately, the kwea was changing. She teased him often, and he felt a craving for her-the desire to treat her as a lover.

Yet he didn't dare make such a move, afraid it would spoil their long friendship.

Besides, why would she want me, a halfbreed? Tull wondered. Not many women would want a half-human, half-Neanderthal for a husband. Fava could surely do better. No, she is just trying to embarrass me.

Tull breathed slowly and forced himself to watch the grasslands, but he could not concentrate on them with Fava swimming in the pool, the sinuous waves rippling away from her like silver ribbons untwining from her legs. She kept at it for half an hour, then climbed out to dry herself in the warm night air, shaking out her long, red hair with her fingers.

Tull struggled to keep his eyes averted. Several small dinosaurs had gathered in the valley to scavenge the carcass of the tyrannosaur Ayuvah had killed earlier in the day. Perhaps that was what had so many of the smaller dinosaurs, kavas, as the Pwi called them, on edge. The smell of a tyrannosaur, mingled with blood and offal, was sure to cause some alarm.

Once Fava had dressed, she entered the fortress, shinnied up the tree, and stood on the gnarled old branch beside Tull, one hand resting on the trunk of the tree.

She was tall for a Neanderthal, yet Tull looked down on her, for like many halfbreeds, he was taller than most Neanderthals, and broader of chest than any human.

"Tull, will you comb my hair?" she asked, standing precariously.

"I'm on guard," he said.

"Everyone else is asleep!" Fava insisted.

Tull took the ivory comb she proffered. She turned her back and leaned against his thigh while he brushed her long, wet hair.

"I'm eager to get back home," Tull said as he combed.

"Why?" Fava asked. "I thought you were happy to come on this trip. You said you were bored with picking fruit and hauling hay."

"I fear," Tull answered, and he told her about Ayuvah seeing a lantern.

"It would be a shame if the slavers come here," she said. "Tsavathar'shi." This place, too beautiful. She stood gazing out at the moonlight over plains. It was still an hour before dawn, and a quetzalcoatlus with a fifty-foot wingspan soared overhead, hunting for carrion. As Tull and Fava watched, it began to circle the dead tyrannosaur down in the valley.

Tull finished combing Fava's hair, then tied it into a ponytail and patted her shoulder.

"Did I get the honey off?" she asked matter-of-factly, playing the part of a little sister again.

Tull leaned in. Her hair smelled of mountain spring water. "I think so, Friend."

Fava turned and looked up at him smiling. Tull could not read her expression: Anger, desire, mockery?

"Friend?" she said, "are you sure that is all I am?" She leaned her head back.

Tull breathed the sweet scent of her neck. Her clothes still held the fruity, flowery scent of leatherwood honey, and somehow it made him dizzy.

Tull felt unsure how to answer, for if he told her the truth, she might go down and bathe again.

Suddenly he stopped worrying about it: on the hill far away, he saw a torch swinging in the darkness. Tull pulled out his telescope, gaze riveted on the honey tree: Two miles across the plain, Denni was swinging the brazier.

For a moment, Tull noticed nothing else, then he spotted men dressed in black boiling out of the brush. Denni was trying to drive them off with the brazier. Swords flashed in the moonlight.

"What's happening?" Fava asked.

"Slavers!" Tull said. "Pirates from Bashevgo, I think-at least they are dressed in black. Denni is holding them back."

"How many?" Fava asked. Tull heard fear and bewilderment in her little-girl voice.

He counted. "Ten or twelve that I can see."

"Denni can't fight so many. He is swinging the brazier to warn us!" Fava said. She grabbed the war horn from Tull's neck, pulling it so hard that the leather string broke.

"No," Tull said, "you'll warn the slavers that we're here."

Fava put the horn to her lips and blew, letting the deep bellow add to the mating cries of the blue-crested hadrosaurs on the plain below.

Tull watched through the glass as slavers turned as one toward the sounding war horn.

Fava's little-girl voice turned hard. "Now Denni and Tchar know we are coming. And the pirates know they have a fight on their hands!"