He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh, pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.
When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark of his boots.
Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one expect from the Empty Lakes People?
It was Loses His Way.
Loses His Way was a warchief and one of the most renowned warriors of the Empty Lakes People. He had given the Icefalcon the scar that decorated the hollow of his left flank in a horse raid during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths. He'd been a minor chief then, and the Icefalcon had encountered him twice more, once in a battle over summer hunting and once at a Moot.
If the Icefalcon hadn't left the Talking Stars People, they'd probably have fought again at another Moot.
He was a big man, some ten years older than the Icefalcon, with massive shoulders and tawny mustaches braided down past his chin; the finger bones of a dozen foes were plaited into his hair.
He moved painfully now, and the Icefalcon saw the red blister of burned flesh through the black hole that had been the back of his tunic.
When he saw the bodies had been disturbed, he looked around quickly, short-sword coming to his hand.
Conscious of the possibility of sound carrying, the Icefalcon whistled twice in the voice of the tanager, a bird native to the oakwoods along the Ten Muddy Rivers, where the Empty Lakes People had originally dwelled, though it was never seen in the high plains.
Loses His Way turned his head and the Icefalcon stepped from cover, crossed swiftly to the pile of bodies at the foot of the cottonwood tree. "I am an enemy to the people who did this," he said, as soon as he was close enough that their voices would not be heard. "I am alone."
Loses His Way raised his head, grief and shock darkening gentianblue eyes. "Icefalcon." He spoke the name as it was spoken among the Empty Lakes People, K'shnia. He was like a man stunned by a blow, barely taking in the presence of one who was his enemy and the enemy of his people.
"The air was full of creatures that tore at us," he said, and turned back to the dead. "When we rode away, the horses threw us and ran back. Our dogs attacked us and savaged one another."
He touched the torn-out throat of a big gray dog, as if stroking the hair of a beloved child. "There was a Wise One, a shaman, among them."
"The shaman is called Bektis," said the Icefalcon, framing the words carefully, haltingly, in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People, which he had not had call to speak for years. "An evil man, who has carried away the son of one who was good to me."
Loses His Way seemed scarcely to hear. His thick scarred stubby fingers passed across noses, lips, brows. "Tethtagyn," he said, framing the name in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People; Wolfbone it meant. "Shilhren... Giarathis..." Under long, curling red brows his eyes filled with grief.
"Twin Daughter," he whispered, and touched the face of a warrior whose hair was as red-gold as his.
"Twin Daughter."
Gently lifting the thick ropes of her hair-three braids, as was the fashion of his people-Loses His Way took from around the young woman's neck a square spirit-pouch, decorated with porcupine quills and patterns in ocher and black.
Worn under the clothing and out of sight, spirit-pouches were almost the only article decorated by any of the peoples of the Real World. With his knife he cut off some of Twin Daughter's hair and put it into the pouch. Then he sliced the palm of her left hand, and with his thumb daubed the congealing blood in the open center of the pouch's worked design.
This he did for all the others in turn, saying their names as he did so: Wolfbone, Blue Jay, Shouts In Anger, Raspberry Thicket Girl.
The Empty Lakes People, the Icefalcon remembered, did not revere their Ancestors, but rather the ki of various rocks and trees in the country of the Ten Muddy Rivers. It was to them that these spiritpouches must be dedicated and returned.
The Icefalcon privately regarded such customs as unnecessary and a little dangerous. Dead was dead, and any member of the Talking Stars People would have been able to find his or her way home without the assistance of a spirit-pouch. But he saw, in the big warrior's face, the need to do these things for his own peace of mind.
One of the things that the Stars had told the Ancestors of his people was that every people had their custom, and though all other people were wrong, it was not polite and frequently not safe to say so. At least Loses His Way didn't feel it necessary to take fingers the way the Twisted Hills People did.
"You took all the food?" he asked then, and the Icefalcon nodded. "Then let's go away. I thought you departed from the Real World for good," he added, as he and the Icefalcon followed the cliff wall northwest, seeking an inconspicuous place to regain the prairie above.
"I departed," said the Icefalcon. "Though I fail to see how my comings and goings are the affair of the Empty Lakes People."
"Blue Child is now the warchief of the Talking Stars People," said Loses His Way. "Even before the coming of the Eaters in the Night this was reason enough for concern among those of us who hunt the same mammoth and pasture our horses in the same ravines. Now that the mammoth move south, and white filth grows in the ravines of the homelands-now that the ice in the North rolls south to cover valleys that once belonged to the Empty Lakes People-it is a matter for concern that she rules your people instead of you."
The cliff was lower toward the northwest, and the Icefalcon recalled how squirreltail grass grew thicker in that direction, amid stands of juniper brush that masked the cliff's rim from the direction of Bison Hill.
Under cover of these junipers the two men scrambled up and glided through the thickets to higher ground.
At the cliff's top a dark shaggy shape rustled up to them out of the grass, a yellow-eyed war-dog, burned like Loses His Way over his shoulders and back, like Loses His Way mourning his losses and his pain in silence.
He licked the warchief's hand and wriggled with grateful joy to have his ears rubbed-sniffed the Icefalcon suspiciously but followed in silence. The Icefalcon raised up on his knees to put his head above the clusters of leaves but saw no sign of travelers as far as he could look west along the road.
They were evidently staying put for the day.
"For one thing, the Empty Lakes People never owned a thumbbreadth of the land in the North," he pointed out. "The starlight wrote our names on forest and stone from the Haunted Mountain across to the Night River Country, and ours it remains, Ice or no Ice, forever. Will these take you and your brother here back to your people?"
He nodded to the dog and held out to Loses His Way two tubes of pemmican and one of the several sacks of pine nuts. "I hunt this Wise One and his warriors, and in the North I am told the white filth grows thick. There is no hunting in it. I need all I can carry."
The brilliant eyes narrowed. "You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko."
"Gsi Kethko?'' The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning-glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect) language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.
"The Wise One," Loses His Way amplified.
"He was a member of Plum's family," remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he should be interested. "A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don't think he was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek out the Antlered Spider?"