Read Spirit Walker for Free Online Page B

blind cave spider that spends its entire life in a single web that both defines his world and binds him to it.
    Mayor Goodman’s hounds barked from their pens. Outside the mayor’s front door, in a small iron cage, sat the mayor’s pet Dryad. She was a small girl with silver hair and skin as white as aspen bark, mottled with horizontal black and gray blotches. Her natural coloring blended with her native aspen forest. She was a strange, wild creature who never spoke. Three young boys were standing outside the cage, poking at the captive girl within. One of them was Little Chaa, Ayuvah’s younger brother.
    “Get away from there!” Ayuvah shouted. He ran and grabbed his brother and shook him by the shoulders. “Touch a Dryad, and she will destroy you!” he said.
    Little Chaa laughed. “I could beat her up,” he said, and he ran off to the woods with the other boys.
    “And she can steal your soul,” Ayuvah shouted, shaking his head at the ignorant youth.
    The men reached the redwood bridge over Smilodon River, and the sun shone on both banks. Like the gravitational wind, the steely-gray water was just beginning to hiss out to sea as the tides turned. Within hours the river level would drop thirty feet.
    Now that the fresh water was running, several Pwi women were finishing their washing on the rocks, while naked toddlers played at the river’s edge. The riverbank was choked with wild raspberry bushes, and clothing was draped over every bush. Blackberry vines crowded in upon the wash women, and they had tied a brown-and-white goat to a tree so it could eat the bushes down. There on the Pwi side of the river, lopsided Neanderthal huts made of driftwood and crooked boards, with weathered hides for doors, sprung up in mockery of the fine houses in the human settlement.
    Ayuvah asked, “Friend, I saw you frown when Scandal gave us those papers. You are disturbed. What do the words on the paper mean?”
    Tull held out his receipt for their day’s labor. “Scandal says he paid us for drudge work. He said we are drudges.” Being halfbreed, Tull could speak the human word, but his accent was nasal, and he pronounced the word as drege .
    “What does that word mean?” Ayuvah asked.
    “It means we are the lowest of the low,” Tull answered. “We are like cattle.”
    Tull flexed his hands, massive hands with strong fingers and knobby joints—the kind of hands made for throwing spears or ripping the hides from animals or digging in the earth. Though he was only half Pwi, Tull’s thumbs were tilted so that if he laid his hand on the table, his thumb and fingers would all lie flat. Because of this, he could not easily hold objects between his thumb and forefinger—could not touch his little finger at all. Like the Pwi, this lent him a degree of clumsiness unknown among the small, clever-handed humans.
    Tull felt inside him. The Spirit Walker was still there. Tull wanted to speak privately to Ayuvah, to say something he was hesitant to speak in front of others.
    The Spirit Walker knows it all now, anyway, he thought.
    “Remember last year, when I took a job as apprentice to Debon, studying medicine?”
    “ Shez ,” Ayuvah said. Yes.
    “I studied his books for months, and when Tchema cut her leg, Debon wanted me to sew it. But when Tchema saw that I was going to sew her leg, she said, ‘No! I want a human’s clever hands! I’d rather be mauled by a dire wolf than let you do it!’”
    “You would have done your best,” Ayuvah said.
    Tull laughed derisively. “My best is not good enough. Debon talked to me later, and what he said was right. No woman would want me sticking these big hands up her if I have to turn a baby. He was hoping it would work, that I would be accepted among my own people, among the Pwi. But I had to remind him that I am Tcho-Pwi , no-people.” The kwea of the memory was sharp and painful.
    Ayuvah watched Tull’s face. “The paper means nothing. Paper is only good for starting fires.” He