Product Description
Dark forces are at work within the realms of earth and sky, and a savage new dance of life and death is about to begin....the internationally acclaimed saga of the First Americans continues in this long-awaited novel from bestseller William Sarabande.
As the Ice Age draws to a close, the men and women living on the northeast coast of the North American continent struggle to adapt to their rapidly changing environment. Ancient cultures clash as warriors battle for vital hunting territories. When a mammoth is seen in a forest, the shaman, who is also brother to the headman, conjures wondrous and terrifying visions for his imperiled band as he goads them to hunt a beast that may be the last of its kind. Although an ancient legend promises death for the People on the day that the last mammoth dies, the shaman counters with a legendary promise of his own--that those who dare hunt, kill, and consume the flesh of the mammoth will be made invincible in battle. The hunt is successful but the headman is killed--and the shaman comes to power and takes possession of his brother's woman and daughter. Although he has no suspicion of his uncle's treachery, the eldest son of the former headman must live with the fear of the charging mammoth that caused him to feign injury rather than risk his own life to save his father's. Now, as the last mammoth walks the land, a young warrior who has lost nearly everything to his enemies must learn new ways, or die in a world where men, women, and even children dare not be less than heroes.
As the Ice Age draws to a close, the men and women living on the northeast coast of the North American continent struggle to adapt to their rapidly changing environment. Ancient cultures clash as warriors battle for vital hunting territories. When a mammoth is seen in a forest, the shaman, who is also brother to the headman, conjures wondrous and terrifying visions for his imperiled band as he goads them to hunt a beast that may be the last of its kind. Although an ancient legend promises death for the People on the day that the last mammoth dies, the shaman counters with a legendary promise of his own--that those who dare hunt, kill, and consume the flesh of the mammoth will be made invincible in battle. The hunt is successful but the headman is killed--and the shaman comes to power and takes possession of his brother's woman and daughter. Although he has no suspicion of his uncle's treachery, the eldest son of the former headman must live with the fear of the charging mammoth that caused him to feign injury rather than risk his own life to save his father's. Now, as the last mammoth walks the land, a young warrior who has lost nearly everything to his enemies must learn new ways, or die in a world where men, women, and even children dare not be less than heroes.
Ingram
"The First Americans" saga continues with the Ice Age coming to a close. While the members of a coastal North American tribe struggle to adapt to their changing environment, ancient cultures clash, warriors battle, and the sighting of a mammoth is an omen of great importance. The shaman conjures strange visions for his band as he goads them to hunt the beast. Dark forces are at work, and a dangerous new dance is about to begin.
About the Author
Joan Hamilton Cline is the real name of William Sarabande, author of the internationally bestselling First Americans series. She was born in Hollywood, California, and started writing when she was seventeen. First published in 1979, Joan has been writing as William Sarabande for eleven years. She lives with her husband in Fawnskin, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The young one crouched within the trees. She was frightened. Her heart was beating fast. Much too fast. Casting a worried glance upward at gathering storm clouds, she chastised herself for venturing so far downstream. If only she had allowed the lengthening shadows to urge her home instead of inspiring her to check the last snare in her trapline! If only she had hurried back across the snow to the safety of Old One's den when she had first caught the stink of Strangers upon the wind! Now it was too late.
They were coming!
She could see them now. They were just emerging from the dark depths of the evergreen forest on the far side of the creek. Distance raised a thin shimmer of mist that obscured her vision. She growled, recognized mist for the trickster it was, and kept her gaze fixed and steady. In the cold vastness of this northern land, discerning eyes could easily pierce the substance of illusion and force reality into stark definition. And even in the fading light of this late winter day, the young one's eyes were as discerning as the eyes of the black wolves from whose loins Old One claimed the ancestors of their kind had sprung.
Another growl formed at the back of her throat. She was no wolf. But this was her hunting ground! And now, as she deftly strangled the winter-lean hare she had just withdrawn from her snare, she watched the Strangers driving their dogs and sled toward her across open snow. Her eyes narrowed. She counted four males, two females, a double hand-count of dogs. They were headed for the creek. Her creek. Never before had their kind ventured so deeply into her hunting grounds. Never! The wind brought her their strong, smoky stink. She snarled. They reeked of danger.
And they were coming closer, fast.
Her heartbeat quickened. If they kept to their present course they would soon be upon her. She looked around, worriedly eyed the surrounding copse of slender, bare-branched young birches, and knew that the trees offered no hope of continued concealment. She must run before she was seen!
Fighting panic, she hurriedly slip-noosed the warm, limp body of the hare to a hunting thong already laden with a cottontail and two larger hares. The combined weight of the uneviscerated animals was considerable; nevertheless, the young one slung all four carcasses over her bearskin-clad shoulder with little effort. She had not yet attained the full power that would be hers in maturity, but she was nearly fully grown and as strong as she was resolute. She would not abandon her kills to the carrion eaters of the forest. She would not dishonor her prey. She was of the Old Tribe! That which she had snared and strangled she would eat. Tonight she and Old One would feast. Later, when their bellies were full and the coals in the fire pit were sleeping beneath a blanket of insulating ash, they would take the skulls and bones of the hares and rabbit into the night. They would venture to the center of the sacred spruce grove. They would place the skulls and bones in a circle on the snow. They would hunker together inside the circle, wave their willow wands, raise their long pale faces to the darkness, and sing the ancient song of their kind, summoning the kami with their howls.
She held her breath, trembling as she thought of how it would be--of how it must be. When she and Old One had finished their song and gone back to the lodge, the spirits would come. For newly fleshed bones and skulls the kami always came. And in the thin chill of dawn, when she and Old One returned to the clearing, the bones and skulls would have vanished. By the grace of the kami, the hares and rabbit would be alive again, running and leaping along the slender hunting trails that their long-eared, high-flanked kind made through the winter forest, offering themselves as prey while the rabbit drummed upon the earth with its great feet and the hares danced the wondrous winter dance of their kind, asking to be stalked again, slain again, devoured again, and reborn again in the never-ending Circle of Life Ending and Life Beginning.
She exhaled. Her heart was still beating far too fast. Her mouth had gone dry. If there was to be a feast, if there was to be a singing in the forest, if life was to be renewed and endless winter brought to an end through the dance, she must make it back to the lodge with her prey.
The Strangers had reached the creek. Two of them were lagging behind, but the rest of the pack was continuing on, driving their dogs and sled fast across the ice.
The young one gripped the shaft of her bear-bone lance so tightly that the palms of her fur-wrapped hands ached from the pressure. Restraining a gasp of fright, she turned and darted toward a nearby snowbank. Clambering to the top, she slid down the lee side of the drift, scooted on all fours into the cover of a thick snaggle of deadwood, and sprawled flat on her belly.
The Strangers were still coming!
She lay motionless. The shock waves generated by their movement across the snowpack rippled beneath her. Hard. Pounding. Threatening. Closing her eyes tight, she uttered an involuntary sob of fright as she buried her face in the soft fur of her folded arms. Her mind flamed with a terrifying recollection of Old One's oft-spoken warning:
"Look not you upon the Strangers lest the power of your gaze they feel. Let them or their dogs set eyes upon you never. Never! If ever see or scent you them passing through our forest, conceal yourself within wind and trees and go your way unseen, leaving no track by which you may be followed. The Strangers are Enemy! Outside of the sacred circle do they stand. There is not one among their many tribes who will suffer our kind to live!"
A shiver went up the young one's broad, powerful back; the short, coarse hairs at the base of her spine prickled as her senses quickened with a loathing born of generations of enmity and alienation.
The Strangers were almost upon her!
The hackles rose on her skin. She heard a sharp crack of sound followed by the pained yelp of a dog, then felt the Strangers cresting the outer slope of the snowbank. They were passing directly above her now, moving fast along the narrow, elongated top of the drift, heading toward the deep woods that lay beyond. She listened to the runners of the sled sliding, bouncing, and slicing deep into hard-packed snow made nearly gelatinous by several consecutive days of clear skies and the frail, all-too-fleeting warmth of a pale winter's-end sun. She heard the creak of wood, the stress of thong, the strained suck and pull of human breathing, heaving, slobbering panting of dogs.
Never before had she been so close to Strangers. Their presence was overwhelming; it reeked of power and arrogance. Their scent was revolting. And yet, impelled by a curiosity innate to her kind, the young one could not resist peering up at the beasts of Old One's warnings. Just one quick look was all she desired, to see if they were truly as ugly as Old One said. Surely one look could not matter, could not . . .
The lead dog felt her gaze. It rolled an eye downward. It saw her.
Trapped in a lake of shadow within a maze of tangled deadfall, the young one's muscular body tensed and resonated with a virulent loathing so overwhelming that she was momentarily transported beyond fear, beyond reason. Her upper lip quivered upward to display her canines as, growling deep in her throat, she warned the dog out of fixed and narrowed eyes.
Look away, foul and unnatural thing, for if to my enemies you betray me, I will find a way to gut you before I die!
Startled and intimidated by the unspoken communication, the dog yarfed, bucked sideways in its harness, spurted urine, yet kept on its way, inspired not only by the young one's warning but by the crack of a well-oiled thong whip.
The young one shut her eyes so tightly that her entire face hurt. The Strangers hurried on without so much as a sideward glance, and images of them remained burned beneath her lids as she lay trembling in a descending explosion of ice particles kicked up out of the snow by runners of the passing sled.
Big dogs. Heavy-jawed. Slavering. Wolf-eared. Tails curling over blanketed flanks, exposed anal hair stained from endless defecations. Hideous! Foul!
Strangers. All in caribou skins. All on snow walkers. All hooded. All stinking! She knew their gender, not only by the cut of their garments but by their scent. One female, big, lagging slightly behind the males, bent double beneath the weight of an enormous pack. Three males: one trotting close to one side of the sled, another on the opposite side, and the master of the sled loping behind, cracking his whip, his hood blown back, his hip-length black hair flying loose and wild in the wind, his profile strong, smooth, devoid of fur, broad-mouthed, high-nosed as an eagle, with the black barred lines of a shrike running upward toward his temple from the corner of a long, angular eye.
The young one caught her breath. The master of the sled owned the face of a raptor. A predator's face. And he was not ugly. He was the most singularly beautiful creature she had ever seen. She shivered, not in fear of him but in awe of his beauty, and in stunned recognition, for she was also a predator, a stalker of prey, an eater of flesh, a gnawer of bone, a sucker of marrow and blood taken hot from her kills. And her face was broad-mouthed and high-nosed and--so unlike Old One's--devoid of fur.
We are of a kind, this Stranger and I!
The realization burst into her consciousness. Sun-bright, fire-hot, it was as appalling as it was enthralling--until she recalled Old One's warning that Strangers were like mist: tricksters, dangerous and deceptive and often deadly in their endless and unpredictable transformations. Yet now, with their scent lingering in her nostrils, the young one found herself wondering if her own scent was not also redolent of den smoke and if, were she ever to find cause to journey many days beyond Old One's refuge, she would not also take o...
The young one crouched within the trees. She was frightened. Her heart was beating fast. Much too fast. Casting a worried glance upward at gathering storm clouds, she chastised herself for venturing so far downstream. If only she had allowed the lengthening shadows to urge her home instead of inspiring her to check the last snare in her trapline! If only she had hurried back across the snow to the safety of Old One's den when she had first caught the stink of Strangers upon the wind! Now it was too late.
They were coming!
She could see them now. They were just emerging from the dark depths of the evergreen forest on the far side of the creek. Distance raised a thin shimmer of mist that obscured her vision. She growled, recognized mist for the trickster it was, and kept her gaze fixed and steady. In the cold vastness of this northern land, discerning eyes could easily pierce the substance of illusion and force reality into stark definition. And even in the fading light of this late winter day, the young one's eyes were as discerning as the eyes of the black wolves from whose loins Old One claimed the ancestors of their kind had sprung.
Another growl formed at the back of her throat. She was no wolf. But this was her hunting ground! And now, as she deftly strangled the winter-lean hare she had just withdrawn from her snare, she watched the Strangers driving their dogs and sled toward her across open snow. Her eyes narrowed. She counted four males, two females, a double hand-count of dogs. They were headed for the creek. Her creek. Never before had their kind ventured so deeply into her hunting grounds. Never! The wind brought her their strong, smoky stink. She snarled. They reeked of danger.
And they were coming closer, fast.
Her heartbeat quickened. If they kept to their present course they would soon be upon her. She looked around, worriedly eyed the surrounding copse of slender, bare-branched young birches, and knew that the trees offered no hope of continued concealment. She must run before she was seen!
Fighting panic, she hurriedly slip-noosed the warm, limp body of the hare to a hunting thong already laden with a cottontail and two larger hares. The combined weight of the uneviscerated animals was considerable; nevertheless, the young one slung all four carcasses over her bearskin-clad shoulder with little effort. She had not yet attained the full power that would be hers in maturity, but she was nearly fully grown and as strong as she was resolute. She would not abandon her kills to the carrion eaters of the forest. She would not dishonor her prey. She was of the Old Tribe! That which she had snared and strangled she would eat. Tonight she and Old One would feast. Later, when their bellies were full and the coals in the fire pit were sleeping beneath a blanket of insulating ash, they would take the skulls and bones of the hares and rabbit into the night. They would venture to the center of the sacred spruce grove. They would place the skulls and bones in a circle on the snow. They would hunker together inside the circle, wave their willow wands, raise their long pale faces to the darkness, and sing the ancient song of their kind, summoning the kami with their howls.
She held her breath, trembling as she thought of how it would be--of how it must be. When she and Old One had finished their song and gone back to the lodge, the spirits would come. For newly fleshed bones and skulls the kami always came. And in the thin chill of dawn, when she and Old One returned to the clearing, the bones and skulls would have vanished. By the grace of the kami, the hares and rabbit would be alive again, running and leaping along the slender hunting trails that their long-eared, high-flanked kind made through the winter forest, offering themselves as prey while the rabbit drummed upon the earth with its great feet and the hares danced the wondrous winter dance of their kind, asking to be stalked again, slain again, devoured again, and reborn again in the never-ending Circle of Life Ending and Life Beginning.
She exhaled. Her heart was still beating far too fast. Her mouth had gone dry. If there was to be a feast, if there was to be a singing in the forest, if life was to be renewed and endless winter brought to an end through the dance, she must make it back to the lodge with her prey.
The Strangers had reached the creek. Two of them were lagging behind, but the rest of the pack was continuing on, driving their dogs and sled fast across the ice.
The young one gripped the shaft of her bear-bone lance so tightly that the palms of her fur-wrapped hands ached from the pressure. Restraining a gasp of fright, she turned and darted toward a nearby snowbank. Clambering to the top, she slid down the lee side of the drift, scooted on all fours into the cover of a thick snaggle of deadwood, and sprawled flat on her belly.
The Strangers were still coming!
She lay motionless. The shock waves generated by their movement across the snowpack rippled beneath her. Hard. Pounding. Threatening. Closing her eyes tight, she uttered an involuntary sob of fright as she buried her face in the soft fur of her folded arms. Her mind flamed with a terrifying recollection of Old One's oft-spoken warning:
"Look not you upon the Strangers lest the power of your gaze they feel. Let them or their dogs set eyes upon you never. Never! If ever see or scent you them passing through our forest, conceal yourself within wind and trees and go your way unseen, leaving no track by which you may be followed. The Strangers are Enemy! Outside of the sacred circle do they stand. There is not one among their many tribes who will suffer our kind to live!"
A shiver went up the young one's broad, powerful back; the short, coarse hairs at the base of her spine prickled as her senses quickened with a loathing born of generations of enmity and alienation.
The Strangers were almost upon her!
The hackles rose on her skin. She heard a sharp crack of sound followed by the pained yelp of a dog, then felt the Strangers cresting the outer slope of the snowbank. They were passing directly above her now, moving fast along the narrow, elongated top of the drift, heading toward the deep woods that lay beyond. She listened to the runners of the sled sliding, bouncing, and slicing deep into hard-packed snow made nearly gelatinous by several consecutive days of clear skies and the frail, all-too-fleeting warmth of a pale winter's-end sun. She heard the creak of wood, the stress of thong, the strained suck and pull of human breathing, heaving, slobbering panting of dogs.
Never before had she been so close to Strangers. Their presence was overwhelming; it reeked of power and arrogance. Their scent was revolting. And yet, impelled by a curiosity innate to her kind, the young one could not resist peering up at the beasts of Old One's warnings. Just one quick look was all she desired, to see if they were truly as ugly as Old One said. Surely one look could not matter, could not . . .
The lead dog felt her gaze. It rolled an eye downward. It saw her.
Trapped in a lake of shadow within a maze of tangled deadfall, the young one's muscular body tensed and resonated with a virulent loathing so overwhelming that she was momentarily transported beyond fear, beyond reason. Her upper lip quivered upward to display her canines as, growling deep in her throat, she warned the dog out of fixed and narrowed eyes.
Look away, foul and unnatural thing, for if to my enemies you betray me, I will find a way to gut you before I die!
Startled and intimidated by the unspoken communication, the dog yarfed, bucked sideways in its harness, spurted urine, yet kept on its way, inspired not only by the young one's warning but by the crack of a well-oiled thong whip.
The young one shut her eyes so tightly that her entire face hurt. The Strangers hurried on without so much as a sideward glance, and images of them remained burned beneath her lids as she lay trembling in a descending explosion of ice particles kicked up out of the snow by runners of the passing sled.
Big dogs. Heavy-jawed. Slavering. Wolf-eared. Tails curling over blanketed flanks, exposed anal hair stained from endless defecations. Hideous! Foul!
Strangers. All in caribou skins. All on snow walkers. All hooded. All stinking! She knew their gender, not only by the cut of their garments but by their scent. One female, big, lagging slightly behind the males, bent double beneath the weight of an enormous pack. Three males: one trotting close to one side of the sled, another on the opposite side, and the master of the sled loping behind, cracking his whip, his hood blown back, his hip-length black hair flying loose and wild in the wind, his profile strong, smooth, devoid of fur, broad-mouthed, high-nosed as an eagle, with the black barred lines of a shrike running upward toward his temple from the corner of a long, angular eye.
The young one caught her breath. The master of the sled owned the face of a raptor. A predator's face. And he was not ugly. He was the most singularly beautiful creature she had ever seen. She shivered, not in fear of him but in awe of his beauty, and in stunned recognition, for she was also a predator, a stalker of prey, an eater of flesh, a gnawer of bone, a sucker of marrow and blood taken hot from her kills. And her face was broad-mouthed and high-nosed and--so unlike Old One's--devoid of fur.
We are of a kind, this Stranger and I!
The realization burst into her consciousness. Sun-bright, fire-hot, it was as appalling as it was enthralling--until she recalled Old One's warning that Strangers were like mist: tricksters, dangerous and deceptive and often deadly in their endless and unpredictable transformations. Yet now, with their scent lingering in her nostrils, the young one found herself wondering if her own scent was not also redolent of den smoke and if, were she ever to find cause to journey many days beyond Old One's refuge, she would not also take o...
