Children of the Dawn Read Online Free PDF

he muttered, like a fool or someone in a trance.
    “What happened, Tor?”
    “Alive—”
    “Tor!”
    Tenka shook him. He swatted her away with no more notice than he’d give a mosquito, and went on with his stiff rocking. She
     slapped him. He looked at her, brows pinched, the pain of his heart running out his eyes—staring at his own sisteras if he should know her, but didn’t; as if he should understand her words, but couldn’t.
    “Tor, she’ll be fine. She journeys in the spirit world as Moonkeepers do.”
    He went back to rocking and mumbling.
    Tenka bit her lip—her big brother—wise, brave—useless as a sixth toe. Useless as Ashan.
    As the sky lightened with morning’s approach, the Other Moonkeeper spoke to the warriors, hiding her sense of abandonment
     under her best chiefly voice.
    “We must begin the ritual of protection. Find power stones shaped like your love for Ashan.”
    The Shahala warriors turned to go.
    Forty-eight people slept in a cave by the Great River. They called themselves Tlikit, which meant People of the Lake, because
     there had once been a lake where they used to live—though not in any of their lifetimes.
    A Tlikit woman named Tsilka awoke with screams in her ears… faraway and faint screams, long and awful, like a woman having
     a hard time dying. Then silence.
    Just a dream,
she told herself.
    Others were whispering, getting up, going out of the cave.
    They worry about everything.
    The twins woke up, wanting her breasts.
    “No,” she said. “Back to sleep.” She held them close and tried to sleep herself.
    Tsilka was twenty-one summers, the daughter of Chief Timshin and a forgotten woman who died in birthing. The brother she thought
     of as Wyecat the Weak was twenty summers, with a different mother, also dead. When their father the chief died not long ago,
     it had been easy to take the power that should have been Wyecat’s: he’d always been afraid of his sister, for good reasons.
    Tsilka was as much a leader as anyone had ever been, but the Tlikit tribe still did not accept her as a
real
chief. She was only a woman, after all.
    But smarter than anyone,
she thought.
Strong and healthy. And good to look at.
Once a man named Tor, the father ofher babies, had told her so. Even though their love had come to a horrible end, she always remembered that.
    You are good to look at, Tsilka, with a body that
—
    “Tsilka! Come out here!” someone said.
    She would rather have stayed in the cave, safe in the dark, holding her little girls. But if she wanted to be chief—
    Tsilka told the twins to stay, and went out.
    The People of the Lake stood on the moon-splashed riverbank, peering into the night, listening. Silence—except for Chiawana’s
     low-throated murmur—so ever-present that Tsilka barely noticed it. She did notice the lack of wind—that was unusual.
    “It was a woman,” someone said.
    “Too loud,” another said. “It must have been a god.”
    “Ask Timshin’s daughter.”
    They looked at Tsilka.
    “How would I know?” she snapped. Being expected to know everything got tiresome.
    Tsilka heard the screaming again—or did she? No—it was in her head. Its memory beckoned. As dawn started to argue with night,
     she set off in the direction Where Day Begins. The Tlikit people followed the one they secretly called Thinks She’s a Man,
     over boulder heaps and around brush mounds, skulking up the Great River to find whatever had screamed.
    Strangers!
    Tsilka froze like a rabbit in torchlight, one hand over her mouth, the other over her head in a sign that meant, “don’t move,
     don’t breathe.”
    She and her people were hidden in the leftover shadows of dawn. At least for now.
    Strangers—more than all her fingers and toes—large, fierce-looking men, or maybe they only seemed so because of the many skins
     they wore. Each held a thick spear as tall as himself. They looked down with worry at a woman laid out on the riverbank. The
     woman appeared