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ISBN-10 1-59201-042-3
ISBN-13 978-1-59201-042-4
Books Unbound E-Publishing Co.
http://www.booksunbound.com
Publication February 2006
Cover Art by Frank Berger
The World Between Earth and Sky
L. E. Erickson
Copyright 2004
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and occurrences
are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental and not the goal of the author or Books Unbound.
Chapter One
On that day, Brother Vulture's shadow crossed the path in front of Caliia Windgatherer. She shivered and glanced up at the sky, but the bird's shadow had only fallen in front of her, not touched her, and a day like this was too bright for fear. She dismissed the portent--the shadow and the shiver were gone as quickly as they had come, and she thought no more of them.
Caliia's shadow remained, though, rippling over knee-high rows of corn and sunflowers and creepers of beans and squash as her bare feet padded along the path winding through the field in front of Zhocata's gates. The air was still, but so warm that it felt as though the sun itself flowed through her loosed hair and danced the hem of her cotton dress around her legs. The odors of earth and sweat and green growing things filled her senses.
Singing sparkled in the air, lit by bursts of laughter from the people working in the fields. The women and the older girls, their dresses like bright flowers in the new green, pulled what weeds weren't choked by the vines. Younger children, clad in cotton shifts, frightened away birds.
Lean, short-haired dogs chased the children and any rodents unlucky enough to be caught in the fields of the Zhocata e'Azhono. The dogs didn't seem to be chasing many squirrels or rabbits this day, though, Caliia noticed, and the birds seemed fewer and less vocal, too. Brother Vulture had frightened them, perhaps.
Others of the People moved in and out of the trees ringing the field, gathering herbs or as Caliia had been doing, hunting the first of the season's heartberries. A few men stood around the edges of the field, wearing small axes on their belts or bows and quivers on their backs, prepared to deal with marauding bears or cats--unlikely, but possible. With their deerskin breeches and bare, tanned torsos, the watchers all but disappeared into the shadows at the edge of the forest. Only the brilliant colors of their cotton headbands shone out.
Keven, her grandfather's apprentice, was cultivating the tobacco patch. Caliia studied him as well as she could without turning her head to look directly at him. He'd inquired about Caliia to her parents, and her parents seemed to approve.
Caliia thought she approved, too--Keven spoke little, even to Caliia, but he was kind and hard-working and he smelled good. What would it be like, to be married? Apprehension and curiosity tingled along Caliia's spine.
As Caliia watched, Keven paused in his work and looked up, seeming to scan the forest's edge. Caliia was again struck by the hush layered just beneath the Azhono voices. A sense of having missed something she ought to have heard tickled at the back of her neck.
But Keven went back to work with his hoe, and Caliia set aside her twinge of concern. The forest watched over the Azhono. Were there real cause for worry, the Spirits would speak.
"Caliia! Caliia!"
The voice was like sunshine. Caliia spotted Roaan hopping through the field to her right.
The girl bounded through corn and sunflowers that were waist-high on her, moving in a fashion similar to that of the black and white dog that leaped along beside her. Her dark hair glinted with red in the sunlight, and spots of pink blossomed on her dirt-smudged cheeks. The basket she carried nearly upended with every jump. Her cotton shift, vibrant yellow, bunched above her knees.
Caliia stopped and waved. Roaan and the dog burst from the field onto the path. While the dog circled Caliia, sniffing a greeting, Roaan stumbled to a stop in front of Caliia. Her dark brown eyes were as wide as her grin.
"Caliia! I made something! For you!"
Caliia crouched, putting herself at eye level with Roaan. She shifted the basket of heartberries she carried into one arm and extended her hand, palm up, to the sniffing dog.
"You did? For me?"
The dog sniffed Caliia's fingertips, its nose tickling her skin, then ran off to chase after the children who were chasing the birds. Its short bark punctuated their musical laughter. The sense of something wrong tugged briefly at Caliia again, but Roaan was tugging too, at Caliia's dress.
"For you!" Roaan said. "I made a present for your birth's day!"
Caliia smiled. Her birth's day. Sixteen turnings of the seasons. And the Passage, at the next new moon. After, she could begin to follow in earnest the path of Storyteller. Already Starling had taught her his song--Caliia was eager to learn what the other Spirits would teach.
"How wonderful!" Caliia said to Roaan. She had no trouble finding enthusiasm for her voice--the six-year-old's giddiness was contagious. "What is it?"
Roaan dropped her basket onto the path. It contained a handful of boneset and vetch leaves, with two or three leaves from the heartberry plant mixed in. Of heartberries, there was no sign, but their tart odor lingered. Caliia noticed that Roaan's fingers and one corner of her mouth were stained red. The sight brought a smile to Caliia's lips, but it also, oddly, brought a chill and a surge of nausea.
What is wrong with you today? Caliia resolved to relate her symptoms to her grandfather. He would know if she was taking ill, and how to treat her if she were.
Roaan's basket also contained Caliia's gift, which Roaan lifted with great ceremony and held up for Caliia to inspect--strands of new ivy, braided together to form a necklace. Woven in with the leaves were purple and yellow violet blossoms. Roaan peered through the circle of ivy and watched Caliia's face expectantly.
"I made it," she said.
Caliia smiled. "It's beautiful! May I wear it now? Please?"
Roaan grinned and nodded. Caliia bowed her head forward and the girl slipped the necklace over her head. Caliia carefully settled the chain of ivy and violets over the front of her dress.
"Thank you, Roaan--I feel so pretty now!"
Roaan laughed and clapped her hands together.
"But you are pretty! Do you really like it?"
Caliia set her basket down on the path and hugged Roaan, who wrapped her arms around Caliia's neck and hugged back hard enough to nearly tumble them both over. Caliia laughed and kissed Roaan's hair, breathing in the girl's warm, earthy scent.
"Yes. I love it," she said into Roaan's ear. Caliia released Roaan and sat back.
"Roaan!" Hezpriit Featherspirit's voice was distant, coming from within the trees that stood sentinel around the field, but there was no mistaking its tone. At hearing her elder sister calling, Roaan's mouth puckered into a worried o.
"I'm supposed to be picking leaves," she said. "I got some already. See?"
Caliia smiled. "I see." She plucked a heartberry leaf from amongst the boneset and vetch. "What are these ones for?"
Roaan giggled. "I picked some berries, too," she said. "But I ate them already." She eyed Caliia's basket with undisguised longing.
Caliia picked up the basket, which had a scattering of the ruby berries in the bottom of it. It was early in their season, and they hadn't come into abundance yet.
"I picked them for Faazho Pathwalker," Caliia said. "But I think he won't mind sharing a few with you."
Roaan pursed her lips, then sighed. "No, thank you. I had some already, and Oldfather Faazho needs them more than me."
Caliia leaned forward and kissed Roaan's forehead. "A generous and kind heart is a treasure always," she said, repeating words she'd heard from her grandfather. "I'm proud of you, Roaan."
Roaan beamed.
"Roaan!"
Roaan's mouth puckered again.
"You'd better go." Caliia tousled Roaan's hair, and the girl leaped back through the field in the direction of her sister's voice. Caliia watched Roaan go, strangely tempted for a moment to call her back.
But there was no reason to. Caliia picked up the basket of heartberries and continued along the path through the field.
Where the fields ended and the forest began again, so too began Zhocata's walls. Hundreds of saplings, grown and formed in the days when the Grove still dwelt in the World Between Earth and Sky, their slender boles fitted perfectly against each other, ringed the city--save for the hill at its back. There, the height and angle and loose rock of the Wailing Man's back protected the city as thoroughly as any wall. The wall ended on either side of the hill and butted up against it so that the hill formed the back arc of the circle.
The branches of the wall's saplings remained, although leafless from the sacrifice they'd made in order to remain with the Azhono and protect them. They curved and wound and interwove, vining together in a pattern that wasn't quite a pattern. As Caliia passed through the open gate she ran her hand over the wood, as touched as always by the ineffable sense of bittersweet beauty that resonated from the guardian trees.
Just inside the gate, another group of women and men worked--tanning and sewing, fletching and sharpening axes, cooking the midday meal in large pots hanging over the firepit. The pungent odor of venison stew surrounded Caliia as the cool of the shaded city enveloped her.
She lifted her hand in greeting to her parents, sitting beside each other near the path. Her father, whose slender form seemed entirely focused on the new arrowhead he was lashing onto a feathered shaft, merely nodded his dark head, flashed a smile, and went back to his work. Her mother, working beside him at her loom, waved Caliia over.
Caliia's mother rose in a single, graceful motion, and Caliia felt a twinge of envy. She might share Liaara Windgatherer's tawny hair and wide hazel eyes, but she doubted she could ever match the entirety of beauty that her mother was, even if she, too, became Storyteller someday. Her stomach tensed as she thought of how hard she'd have to work to even approach her mother's perfection.
"You're going to the mourning room?" her mother asked.
Caliia nodded and lifted the sparsely-filled basket of berries. Their tart-sweet odor drifted up. "For his journey."
Her mother smiled. "A good thing. Here then, take this to Faazho as well." She bent and reached into the basket beside her loom.
"You finished it?" Caliia's father asked, without looking up from his work.
"Yes, Birwan." Her mother removed a tiny carved figure, straightened, and held it out to Caliia. "After the Stories last night, I saw what it should be."
It was a deer. Caliia took it and turned it in her hands, admiring how the grain of the wood resembled so closely the fur of a real animal, how it stood with one front foot lifted and its head tilted just so and its nostrils widened as though it truly tested the air and prepared for flight. She ran a fingertip along the warm, smooth surface of its back, half-expecting its tail to flip in alarm.
I will never be able to do this.
"It's just right," she said.
Her mother nodded. There was no trace of pride in the gesture, just satisfaction that the totem was as it should be. Caliia held no such modesty--pride in her mother swelled in her chest.
Someday. I pray that someday I will see so clearly.
Caliia gave her mother a quick hug and her father's hair a tousle. He chuckled, but still didn't look away from his task. Caliia put the deer into the basket with the berries and continued along the path and through the city, toward the hill at its back.
Zhocata appeared to have grown from the forest, or perhaps with it. The houses were round, with frames made of saplings and covered with sheets of bark. The only openings were the smokeholes at the center, where the saplings were lashed together, and the doorways, covered by braided mats. They were scattered amongst the trees as though they'd grown there--in some places living trees provided part of a hut's support. Caliia moved between them, through a rain of dappled sunlight from the canopy of leaves overhead and the cooler, damper air trapped beneath, until she reached the gathering ground.
A second circle within the circle of Zhocata's walls, the ash and birch that formed the perimeter of the gathering ground were live trees, each standing enough apart from the others to allow its fellows room to flourish unhampered. The path through the village ended at an archway formed by two of the ash. Caliia passed through and into the gathering ground, relishing the feel of the soft, cool grass beneath her feet as much as she did its vivid green scattered with delicate white bluets and tiny yellow creamcups.
The tree leaves whispered, and Caliia paused, listening. For a moment there seemed an urgency to their rustling, but no. It could only be their delight at the coming night. Like Caliia, they eagerly anticipated the time when Grandmother Moon would paint the trees silver and the people would gather to sing their farewell to Faazho Pathwalker.
On the opposite side of the gathering ground was another arch. Caliia lingered a second longer, wriggling her toes in the mud-cool grass, then passed through the second arch and onto the rocky trail leading to the burial caves. The rough stairway wound up the hillside and ended at the black mouth of the caves.
The slope was gentle at first, then grew steeper. Caliia climbed, singing in a soft voice the words of the journey wish as she went. It was a simple song, the first she'd learned, and she relished the ease with which it flowed through her.
When Caliia reached the ledge outside the cave entrance, she paused and looked back, out over Zhocata and the forest that held her. It rolled out beneath Caliia like the ripples of a pebble in a pond of shimmering, living green.
A flicker of iridescent light to her right, and a half-heard whisper of wings. Caliia looked, but saw nothing. Her earlier nausea returned briefly, and she remembered her intention to ask her grandfather about it.
As soon as there's a moment for it.
There should have been a breeze here, above the trees, but the air remained still. The beads of sweat on Caliia's forehead and the back of her neck chilled anyway. She shivered, turned away from Zhocata with that lingering sense of foolish dread still stirring in her stomach, and entered the caves--and shivered again from the clammy coolness within.
The burial caves were just that: a maze of caves, tunneled into the limestone of the Wailing Man, which held the remains of Caliia's ancestors safe in their rocky embrace, and which gave the hill its name, when Brother Whirlwind blew through the caves. Caliia came here often, with her grandfather, and had learned enough of the caves to know her way to the most recently-used chambers and to the other entrance, the one on the far side of the hill, though she had yet to see all of the caves. She doubted anyone ever had. But this first cavern was Caliia's destination for now--the mourning room.
Faazho Pathwalker was there, on the bier in the center of the circular room. His arms were folded across his chest and covered by his burial blanket--black, with a quilled depiction of a bridge over a stream flanked by a setting and a rising sun. Around him were all the things he would need for his journey--a blanket, a kettle, his axe, a pouch of corn meal. A string of bright-colored wooden beads was arranged beside him, too. His youngest granddaughter had made it for him.
Her grandfather shuffled and stepped in a slow circuit around Faazho, chanting so softly that Caliia could not have made out the words if she hadn't already known them. A red sun was centered on the black shawl draped around his narrow shoulders. Moving in a carefully erect manner, he completed the circuit. As he came to greet her, his somber, black-painted face split into a warm smile. The smile widened when he saw the basket, pressing paint into the creases around his mouth.
"A generous and kind heart is a treasure always," he said.
Caliia couldn't suppress a smile. Her grandfather noted her expression, and his eyes narrowed.
"Little heart--does your grandfather's wisdom amuse you?" He might have tried, but he couldn't hide from Caliia the minute quirk at the corner of his mouth.
"Oh, never!" She laughed and shook her head. "As it is, old one, I shared that same piece of your wisdom with Roaan this very day."
Her grandfather touched the chain of ivy and violets around Caliia's neck, then patted her cheek. "It is a lovely piece of work," he said. Caliia caught his wrinkled hand with hers and squeezed it gently.
"So, too, was Roaan's decision to refuse Faazho's offer to share his heartberries. She thought he would need them more than she."
Her grandfather chuckled and shook his shaggy, salt-and-pepper head. "Your memory is sharp. You were no older than Roaan when you reached the same conclusion."
"With your guidance," Caliia said.
"But within your own heart. You learn well. It pleases me to know you teach well, too." He reached onto the ledge beside the cave entrance and retrieved a small birchbark box. "You will join me, then, in preparing Faazho for his departure?"
Caliia, glowing from her grandfather's words of approval, smiled. "It would honor me. And Mother has sent his totem, too." She held up the carved deer for her grandfather to inspect. He nodded.
"It is as it should be. My daughter sees with a true vision." He dipped his fingers into the birchbark box and smeared the mixture of crumbled black clay and sunflower oil onto Caliia's forehead. "The journey of the dead is half ours," he intoned.
"We help them find vision in this life, so they may see the next," Caliia chanted in reply. Her grandfather dipped his fingers again and smeared the black paint down the right side of Caliia's nose and across her cheekbone.
"The journey of the dead is half ours," he sang.
"We give them shelter in their passing, so they may rest for their journey."
Caliia's grandfather smeared paint over the other side of her face.
"The journey of the dead is half ours."
"We wish them farewells with sad hearts, so they may greet us with happy hearts at our journey's end."
A terrible howling swept in through the cave entrance, as though the Raven-Crier herself stood just outside and mourned for the soul she had lost.
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This is a sample chapter from
The World Between Earth and Sky
by
L.E. Erickson
We at
Books Unbound E-Publishing Co.
www.booksunbound.com
hope you will enjoy the entire book!
Author's Biography
Lori E. Erickson grew up in a farming community in central Illinois. An avid reader and storyteller (verbal or written, with an audience or without) as a child, she still initially studied accounting and earned a bachelor's degree in that field. Five years ago, she turned her attention to seriously pursuing the writing career she'd previously dabbled in. Her short stories, which have been published in several venues, reflect her lifelong enjoyment of fantasy fiction and her love of family.
After a brief stint in South Carolina, she now resides in central Indiana with her husband and their two sons and is a full-time homeschooling mother and writer. She enjoys reading and writing children's literature as well as grown-up stuff, listening to music (especially country), and hovering near the weather radio during tornado season. (OK, she doesn't necessarily enjoy that last one, but she does an awful lot of it.) Her bibliography can be found at http://www.l_e_erickson.tripod.com.
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