SPIRIT WALKER

Ch 21: The Quicksilver Man (part 2 of 2)

Tchupa looked at Tull, raised his eyebrows in shock. "But perhaps someday the child will have to steal in order to stay alive. And if he must steal, he must learn to steal well!"

Tull looked Tchupa in the eye and saw that the Okanjara was truly a stranger, a man whose mind he did not want to comprehend, for it was said among the Pwi that "To understand another, you must become like him." Tull had never lived in Craal, could not imagine a man beating his child for not stealing well.

The stories he'd heard of Thrall warriors working for slavers, of Thralls who ate human flesh, who thought it a sign of strength to endure unendurable pain—all of them could be true with a man as duplicitous as Tchupa.

A realization struck. Tull felt a bond with Tchupa, a sense of brotherhood. You can love a man, and yet hate what he does.

"I see," Tull said. His head was spinning. He felt that he needed to leave, to have time to think about Tchupa, and perhaps advise him as a friend. But for now, it was too late, and his mind moved too slowly. He yawned as if tired, stretched. "In the morning, we will talk more, my friend."

The small taste that he'd taken from the Okanjara's drugs must have made him dizzy, for he staggered a bit as he ambled back to his own camp.

That night when Thor set behind the hills and the cries of jackals filled the camp as the dogs began to sneak in to nibble table scraps beside the fires, Tull still lay thinking. He could not sleep. The Okanjaras' drugs gave him strange dreams and brought back painful memories, and the nightmares seemed too real.

He kept seeing flashes of Tchupa in his mind, Tchupa riding upon the back of a horned dragon in the night, beneath Thor's green moon.

He heard a sudden shout. "Hukm! Hukm are upon us!"

Tull and Wisteria were lying in the giant barrel, and thus were somewhat protected. He untangled himself from Wisteria's arms and whispered urgently, "Wait here. I'll go I see what's happening!"

But as he pulled off his bearskin covers, he looked out, and in the dying embers of the fires he could make out dozens of mastodons, black shadows with great curved tusks. The white of the polished tusks reflected the light of campfires. The mastodons had circled the camp.

Giants squatted atop the mastodons, and as Tull watched, the great hairy men silently urged their mounts in among the people.

The traders had naturally set up several camps—one made mostly of Pwi, another to the east for humans, and a third just to the north for the Okanjara, and so Tull was watching the mastodon men enter his own camp, a wall of flesh surrounding it. His own people began to cry out and flee.

Everywhere the Pwi shouted, "Run, run!" "The Hukm are here!" "This way!" "No, here!" They were rushing about in fear—turning first one way, and then the next.

In the darkness Tull heard sickening thuds as Hukm war clubs smashed into bodies.

Thus the Pwi die, some small part of him thought. Ever it was so. Neanderthals were tougher than humans in so many ways, so much stronger, but kwea could kill—with fears and loves that could not be mastered.

Tull spotted Phylomon beside a fire, the light playing on the back of his blue skin, desperately waving his fingers in Hukm finger language.

A great hairy Hukm, a lord with many silver bracelets, steered his mammoth close, peered down at Phylomon, and answered calmly, with slow waves of his fingers.

"Hold! Hold!" Phylomon began shouting to the Pwi, trying to keep them from running to their deaths.

Phylomon pointed toward the Okanjara camp, and the Hukm lord pointed in that direction, urging his warriors toward the new camp.