I sat on the ground, wrapped in my cloak, and stared after them. I looked up to see Jodoli watching me. “I’m not a ghost!” I shouted at him. “I’m not a shadow.”
I heard a sound I had come to dread. Heavy wings flapping. Orandula alit first in a treetop and then hopped down heavily, branch to branch, until he perched on one well out of my reach, but clearly visible to me. He settled his feathers, preened his wing pinions, and then asked me sociably, “How are you doing?”
“Oh, just wonderfully,” I snarled at him. “You took my death. But my people won’t believe I’m alive. Jodoli has used his magic to ban me from the camp and to keep me from contacting the People. The only clothing I have is a cloak and some shoes that are too big for me. I’ve no food, no tools, no weapons. Is this the life you gave back to me?”
He cocked his head at me and the wattles around his beak jiggled horribly. “I didn’t give you a life, man. I took your death. And even that didn’t go quite as I had planned.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m surprised that you need to ask. Obviously, you’re dead here. You show all the signs of it; no one can see you, can’t cross a line of salt—I thought you would have understood that by now.”
“But I have a body! I get hungry, I eat, I can move things! So how can I be dead?”
“Well, you’re not. Not completely. As I told you, things didn’t go exactly as I expected them to. It often happens when gods squabble over something. Neither one wins completely.”
I pulled my cloak more closely around myself. Despite the growing warmth of the spring day, I felt a chill. “Gods fought over me?”
He began diligently preening his other wing. “Part of you remained dead in this world. Part of you didn’t. I feel a bit sheepish about that. I like things to balance, you know. And right now you are still a bit out of balance. I feel responsible. I want to correct that.”
I didn’t want him to “correct” me any more than he had. Doggedly, I tried my question another way. “Is Lisana, is Tree Woman, a goddess? Did she fight for me?”
He tucked his bill into his breast and considered me. I wondered if he would answer. But finally he said, “Hardly a goddess. She fought for you, of course. And I suppose that in some ways she is connected to Forest, and Forest might as well be a god with all the power Forest has. But, no, Lisana is not a goddess.”
He shook his feathers again and opened his wings.
“Then who—?” I began, but he interrupted.
“I, however, am a god and therefore feel no obligation to answer a mortal’s questions. I will be considering how best to balance what remains unbalanced. I like to leave things tidy. Hence my affinity for carrion birds, don’t you know?”
He jumped off the branch and plummeted toward the ground. His wide wings beat frantically, and with a lurch, the falling glide turned into flight.
“Wait!” I shouted after him. “I still don’t understand! What is to become of me?”
Three raucous caws were my only response. He banked sharply to avoid a thicket, saw an opening in the canopy, and suddenly beat his wings harder, climbing toward it. An instant later, he had vanished.
I stood up slowly. For a short time I stood staring at the kin-clan’s encampment. There, people were going about their lives. I could see Olikea sewing something. She lifted it up, shook it out, and held it toward Likari. I recognized the fabric. It was from one of my robes. Evidently she was remaking it into something Likari could wear. The boy was already running naked in the spring sunshine, playing some sort of jumping game with the other children of the kin-clan. I hoped she would make it large, so he didn’t outgrow it before winter returned and he could use it.
I wanted to offer some sort of farewell. I thought about that for a time, and then turned away silently and walked into the forest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
DEAD MAN’S QUEST
I thought I walked aimlessly. I crossed a stream and drank there, but it did little for my hunger. There were probably fish in the stream, and I thought of trying to tickle a few. But I would have had to eat them raw; I was not yet that hungry. It was too early in the year for berries, but I found a few greens I recognized growing there and picked and ate them. I recalled that once Soldier’s Boy had eaten vast quantities of the water-grass that grew along the bank. I sampled it. Even the youngest, most tender shoots seemed unbearably bitter. Another food that belonged only to the Speck Great Ones.
I left the stream and walked on, staying in the shade under the trees. The touch of sunlight on my thin skin was still uncomfortable and when I touched my hand lightly to the top of my skull I found it was still sore there. The skin was thicker over my muscles and bones today than it had been yesterday. It was not as gruesome to look at myself as it had been. So, I was healing rapidly, but not in the miraculously quick way in which the magic had healed me. It seemed obvious to me that I had a physical body, and it moved, so I could not be dead. Yet, if I was alive, who was I? What was I?