Tumna

Tumna looked out over the Valley of Salt and saw his village smoking in a great ruin. His spear clattered to the ground and he leapt down the mountainside with the abandon of a goat, heedless of slicing tree branches and prickling tufts of pine. At a sheer stone overlook, only three tree-heights above the valley, he collapsed to his knees. He was sucking air through his bared teeth, his long hair tangled in dirty brown dreadlocks, his eyes glimmering with pain.

Below him law the windswept plain of the valley, a place of dirt and rocks and sparse bushes so infertile his camp planned to move to another valley the following day. Everything was packed. He scanned the village remains for signs of life. There were burned tents with charred animal skins flapping in the cold breezes, their wooden frames collapsed and comingling with drifts of white ash and shriveled black corpses, pale flesh still clinging to some of them. Red flesh peeked from beneath the bloated black cust encasing human-like figures. One lay facedown on the ground, one soot-black arm stretched forward, grasping, reaching. Blood and fat and oil dampened the ground. 

“Eeka!”

Tumna let the scream lurch up his spine and launch from his throat until all sound was swallowed in the grief howl that no one would hear, echoing back to him from the silent gray mountains. 

He sat there for a long time, conscious of nothing out the wind lifting his hair, scouring the valley below for loose debris it could carry with it. His one thought was that he wished to be one with the wind. Knowing nothing, feeling nothing, simply one with the flow, carried somewhere far away. He struggled up to his feet. Wiped his nose. After a few minutes of standing in the wind, he began the long trek downward. The dusk was a rosy gleam in the Western sky, the sun a fiery copper stain. As he slid down the loose rock faces, he did not care whether he caused an avalanche. He slid to the bottom of the biggest slope and took the forest trail that wound through mountain pines. As he thumped through the forest, the sun slid lower and for a brief moment the ridges burned a deep copper and then everything faded to grayness and sun bled its life into the remorseless clouds. 

It was nightfall when Tumna reached the camp. The only light came from the adamantine stars glittering in the firmament like so many faces. The sky was a great wash of liquid blue. He stepped into the camp. The pulsating embers hissed at his feet, and he thought that as long as the embers held life he could still feel the life of those who had died, and be certain their souls had not departed from this place. A tear rolled down his cheek. He passed piles that had been huts. Piles that had been human. White ash swirled in eddies around his feet before streaming off into the night. He was transported to his childhood days at the coast, when the foamy yellow tidewrack would tremble in the sea breezes after the long retreat of the tide, leaving a space of damp sand in which one was free to walk between what was and what is. Tumna picked up a stick, the top of which was wrapped in oilskin cloth. He stuck it into a pile of glowing embers and the torch caught fire, a warm light spreading out from him. Tumna looked around for anyone he might have missed. Not a whimper, not a cry in the cold, dark light. 

Tumna carried the fire with him up the mountain. He sought shelter from the wind, which was driving down the valley in long, invisible traverses. He did not look back at his village until he was halfway up the mountain and by then it was a single ember in a sea of dark. He dug the torch into the ground of a clearing high up on the mountain and went to work digging a bigger hole beneath a large limestone rock that jutted at an angle from the bracken, as if placed there by a god to shield him from the wind. Tumna’s tongue became tacky with dirt and he felt sweat break out on his brow as he softened the dirt with a sharp stick and dug it out with his hands. It was a welcome distraction. He dug for two hours in the wind until he had made a hole large enough to sleep in. Once he lay in the hole he used his arms to slough the turned-up dirt back over himself, adding a layer of pine needles and fern fronds. Lying there, he heard his heart beating. Heard the whisk and whisper of the wind and felt it dry the sweat on his brow. Soon he fell into a fitful sleep, the torchlight burning down to a faint orange stain.

The next morning, Tumna opened his eyes to see the sun filtering through the pines, their wheel-spoke branches dividing the light into yellow beams. He spat and used his strong arms as a base from which to thrust and twist his way out of the clotted dirt. He stood in the morning light and dusted himself off. He remembered the hunt, the camp below, the ember glowing in the sea of dark. He wanted to give them a good burial but he knew he had to leave. He needed water. He could only swallow with difficulty and when he relieved himself the urine came out a dark yellow. He finished watering the dirt and turned his face toward the valley. He looked at the black smear of the camp. He closed his eyes.

Through the mountain forest, the trees grew up in arrowlike pillars of rough pine bark. The earth was hard and cold under his feet. He walked long miles in the cool morning and as the sun rose he realized he was walking down a long ridge. He needed water. At a rock escarpment he surveyed the land ahead. To the south, where the ridge ended, lay another stretch of valley, brown and stark, studded with bushes. Mountains rose up in shadowy heaps on the other side. To his left, where the sun was approaching noon-height, lay one of the Valley of Bones. His group had passed it on the way to their valley. There an entire people had been wiped out, ensepulchred under tons of hardened lava rock and calcified ash from an eruption long ago. What little remained of the city lay scattered in a grid of sun-bleached ruins that stretched for miles before terminating at the base of a distant ash-gray mountain, the top blown off by the eruption. Beyond the mountain and flowing into the woods he spotted a glimmer of water. So Tumna switched his torch for a staff–a broken branch–and descended the mountain on its northeastern face, where the rocky hills magnified the faintest ground and the trees and bushes grew up perilously on little shelves of soil. 

He sang a song his tribe was accustomed to singing on long journeys. It was a travel song passed down by the first ancestors. It involved several harmonies but he managed to sing it by himself in a soft, wavering voice, and it brought some comfort to him. By noon he had reached the barren moorlands that sloped down to the flat valley. The sky opened itself to the day and the dawn retreated. Clouds brought acres of shadow sliding over the valley, before the sunlight poured in like water, exposing the dun-brown earth and ferns and wildgrasses in their muted oilpaint hues. Tumna kept humming the little tune to himself. His mind wandered to the previous day’s hunt and the view from the overlook. He spat and put the thought out of his mind.

When he reached the forest adjacent to the Valley of Bones he walked straight on, keeping to the forest edge, his stick tapping the dry earth with each step. A cry sounded. Tumna snapped his head toward the Valley. The cry of a woman, not far away, he was sure of it. His pace quickened and he ducked into the forest. He did not want to be detected by whomever it was who was crying out or whomever was torturing them until he could get within a reasonable distance. He ran through the forest, hopping over gullies and gaining momentum in the swales, dodging around trees and scanning the forest for a possible weapon. Another cry sounded in the same feminine pitch. He followed the cries until finally they became fainter the longer he ran. He backtracked and listened at the edge of the forest, hands on his knees, panting, eyes wide and alert. He saw no one, but another cry split the morning stillness like a knife through flesh. He asked the gods for protection and slipped the shale knife from his leather belt. He stepped outside the coverage of the forest and scanned the city for signs of life, dreadlocks swinging this way and that. The cry sounded again, louder this time. A she-being. He was sure of it. The gods had not left him alone. 

He ran across the intervening hills until he slid behind the first ruin in his path, throwing up a cloud of dust. A flying arrow droned in his ear and without thinking he dove into the ancient side street as wood splintered nearby. He peered over the foundation of a building, which made a little parapet of stone, and his foot brushed up against a metal pole, rusted to a dull orange. He saw a head poke above another crumbling wall and an arrow sliced through the air above his head. He waited for the third arrow to whistle by, then bolted down the street, metal rod in hand, setting his sights on the pale ribs of a building not fifty yards away, where he had last seen the archer. He ran from cover to cover, taking most of his weight on his thighs as the arrows knifed through the air and met hard stone with a snap or a clatter. At ten yards’ distance he saw the bowman notch another arrow and went flat to the ground with such ferocity rock-grit embedded itself in his cheek. The arrow passed overhead in a sucking airfoil and a light breeze ruffled the hair of his scalp, the wooden shaft snapping against a crumbling stone wall behind him. He raised himself with a grunt of rage and ran toward the man with the metal rod held slantwise in both hands. The man was pulling another arrow from his deerskin quiver and about to notch it–the crude igneous arrowhead glittering darkly–and Tumna could see his face was grimy and wrapped in rags, rotting teeth bared and claggy with meat from his last meal. Before he could raise his bow Tumna had cleared the distance and swung the rod and knocked the bow from his hand. The man clutched his hand, crying out in pain, and the next blow came crashing sideways into his face. The man fell to the ground, gagging, coughing, unable to speak out of the gristly mouth. He had teeth in his hand and he sat there looking at them uncomprehending. Tumna swung the rod back for the killing strike but his balance failed him and he fell down exhausted. He had not eaten in a day. 

“Reek-Ah!” The woman finally showed herself. She had brilliant fire-orange hair and eyes like ice on a clear day–blue and intense. “Flek mo rak!” She collapsed to the ground, sobbing, and held the man’s battered face in her hands. Her whole body was shaking. She turned to Tumna with shining eyes and cursed him, howling her grief. Tumna stared dumbfounded at the woman, thinking he had saved her from death, but here she was decrying the violence. His violence. She opened her mouth to yell something else but instead her body seized and she let out a sharp cry and clutched her swollen belly. Her swollen belly. She was pregnant. Tumna saw their little hideout with fresh eyes now. There was a deerskin laid over a frame of wood lashed together with homemade twine and propped up against the crumbling remains of a wall. There were wooden bowls. Clean leaves laid out. A pestle and mortar carved from the gray, moonlike rock of the dormant fire-mountain. Tumna dropped the rod and a quiet wail started somewhere in the back of his throat. The man with the caved-in jaw spat a tooth onto the ground, bright red blood stippling his chin, clear hatred in his eyes. 

But Tumna was already gone. He was running away, running away from what he had done.