Death Chants by Craig Strete

Author:Craig Strete
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-11-04T20:53:16+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

And ancient rat, unseen, crouched in the birth bed robes, hiss­ing in anger and unslaked hunger. His eyes saw the beginning of the feast yet to come, a small baby with many days yet to grow before it would come dancing into the rat's ruined pueblo at last.

Later that day, the old woman closed her eyes for the last time and the people burned the lodge around her, to chase the spirit of death away.

Shadow father stood and watched the burning. He held Yasheya in his arms.

In his way, he had loved the old woman very much.

He was a thunder and lightning man, a shadow being of great dark power, but his heart was as soft as fawn skin. The death of the woman made the human world empty for him.

He no longer had a home there.

In the middle of their human night, at a time when his physical being was strongest, the shadow man left the village, vanishing into the night with baby Yasheya in his arms.

He went high into the mountains beside the sea and there he raised Yasheya far from the others of his kind.

The shadow man loved his son so much that he wished to keep him by his side in the nonhuman world. In that place, he would fashion a great shaped, spirit being of his half-human son.

So the shadow man hoped it would be.

But first it was necessary for the little one to be fed. Without a mother, the baby would soon sicken and die.

He took Yasheya to a special place high in the mountains.

He placed the tiny baby on a rocky ledge and then went even higher into the mountains, to the heart of his great power, thunder and lightning.

He became a shadow again and asked the lightning to find a mother for Yasheya.

And the lightning went journeying across the sky and touched the heart of a wolf.

It touched the sadness in the heart of a mother wolf, for her newborn cubs were winter-dead and her den was empty.

The lightning came back to the old man, burning the sky with a sad story, and the old shadow man sought out the young she-wolf.

Softly, in the language of her kind, the shadow being called her.

The wolf shook with the sound of distant thunder and came slowly, fearfully, out of her den. Her fur was blue-gray and soft as summer sky. Her eyes were quick and golden and full of the longings she felt for her dead pups.

The wolf began running down the mountain, in a thunder-quickened dance, down toward the innocent, storm-eyed Yasheya, lying naked on a rocky ledge in the sun.

The wolf did not know what called her, but it was something that pulled the mother strings of her heart and she had to obey. She came upon the baby suddenly.

She growled, hackles rising at the smell of human in the air. That familiar, hated enemy smell. And she would have darted forward, to attack, to kill and rend with her strong teeth, but the dance inside her was so strange a dance that she could not move.

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