Read Shadows in the Cave for Free Online

crying.
    Shonan said, “You’re my daughter. I want you to be happy.”
    Kumu’s eyes hinted of challenge. “War Chief, you mean this truly.”
    Shonan smiled broadly. “Yes.”
    Kumu lifted Salya’s face to his own. “We’ll join together with all the Galayi people singing for us.”
    Her eyes and her voice said, “Yes.”

 

    5
     
    In her family hut at the Amaso village, beside the river that curved into the sea, Iona woke when the first hint of light lit the smoke hole. She sat up wildly, feeling like all the hairs would fly off her head and then her head would sail away from her neck. She groped inside for … what? The feeling of being herself? What she found was craziness. In a quarter moon, or perhaps a half, her lover would come to her. Until then, craziness.
    She pulled on a doeskin dress, slipped out the door flap, walked up and down the ocean sands, searching for something, but she didn’t know what. The village where she’d lived all her life, the sands stretching to the north, the cliffs rising to the south, the great water blasted with the light of the rising sun—she cared nothing for this familiar world. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the air had been sucked off the planet.
    Yes, she knew Aku was on the way. She knew he felt the same passion, bigger than anything she had ever thought people could feel, a force rough and crazy, like the white-frothed waves that racked the sea. She knew that when he came to Amaso, she would give him all they both wanted, they would fulfill the promise. But she felt empty now . She wanted something now .
    She got an idea. She saw her father, Oghi, walking away from the hut they shared—only the two of them lived there. He was headed for the tide pools and soon would come back with his hands full of shells. He was the village seer, and he used shells as tools of divination to get glimpses of the future. She didn’t understand how it worked. Now she ran after him.
    Though she called him “father,” he was no more than a dozen winters older than she, and he was the brother of her first father. Two winters ago her mother died giving birth, and last winter her father died of the coughing sickness. Oghi had never married and lived alone in a small hut about a hundred paces from the village. Though he declined to move into the village—the closeness made him uncomfortable—she moved in with him. Neither of them had any other family left.
    “Father,” she called, “what are the tides today?”
    Oghi meant “sea turtle” in the Amaso language, and her father knew more about the ocean than anyone else in the tribe. In a vision he’d seen himself as an ocean-going turtle. Then he learned to shape-shift into the common turtle with the smooth red-brown back and the fine-tasting green fat. Though he was a monster as a turtle, the weight of two men, as a man Oghi was slight and looked boyish, except for his ancient eyes. His hair, oddly, had been red-brown from birth. He kept track of the weather and everything about the sea for the village.
    “The tides will be big,” he said. Sometimes the incoming tide pushed halfway to the village and deepened the separate fingers of the river until no one could walk across them, or the outgoing tide exposed long stretches of sand and rock, and sucked the river almost dry.
    “Really big. Flood tide way upriver tonight. Go get some water. We’ll cook these mussels.”
    “What about the ebb tide?”
    “Biggest one in a moon tomorrow at midday. Bring back plenty of water. You’ll want to stay away from the river in the morning.”
    Will I, now?

    At dawn she was ready. She shoved the log off the sand into the river, stood in the water naked, and held it back against the current. The outgoing tide shooshed around her thighs. If she didn’t launch on the log, the force would take both dead tree and passenger, ready or not.
    She looked at the sun, gathering itself on the eastern horizon far, far out to sea. She felt