Shadows in the Cave Read Online Free PDF

chest. Not because she’d survived unhurt, but because of a feeling.During the moment of the fall—the moment that lasted half a lifetime—she had felt absolutely out of control. She exulted in it.
    Now— Let it come! —she lost control again. She rushed between the banks and swept out along the tidal flats. Where sweet river met salt ocean, the log spun in the churning sea. She whirled past the last point of land and into infinity. She felt triumphant. Let fate come—she wanted whatever it brought, she wanted an enormous blast of something, she wanted to throw away her daily wisp of a life, she wanted experience, real and strong. She wanted to feel alive today .
    She saw it now—the ocean was as big as the sky. She wasn’t a bird, she wasn’t a fish. She couldn’t swim in the one, couldn’t breathe in the other. She was going wherever the tide took her, and it was running toward the end of the world, wherever that might be. She was possessed wholly—she lived in immensity. She wanted to feel owned, lips, arms, breasts, legs, crotch, the heart that drove the blood, the blood itself, the place her feelings lived—she wanted to be usurped and melded into this sea, this world, this power.
    She stood up on the log, wobbly.
    It rolled.
    She plunged deep, took two strokes deeper, held herself underwater for a delicious moment, turned, and surged upward to the light. Her head popped into the air. At that moment the log banged her shoulder. She cried out in pain. With her other arm she grabbed a stud sticking out from the log and held on hard. She rotated her sore shoulder in several directions. It sort of worked. She clambered back onto the log and straddled it.
    She looked around. Grandmother Sun was well up from her watery bed, bright and strong—a strong woman like Iona.
    The girl looked straight up and saw an osprey cruising overhead, hunting. It wanted fish for its belly. It had the swiftness, strength, and skill to get what it wanted.
    Iona wanted a belly full of life, and she would take what she wanted.
    And she wanted to stay out here all day and play and ride the tide back.
    “It doesn’t look like much to me,” said Salya.
    She and Aku looked from the top of a low hill across sand flats toward Amaso. The huts were few and shabby and the sands barren. The wide river split into a lot of stringy braids. She wasn’t enticed by the horizon-to-horizon immensity of water to the east. It was just somewhere she would never be able to go. The sun, straight overhead, didn’t make the place look better. She was dispirited, missing Kumu. The six men came back with the food, but, true to his agreement with her father, Kumu would wait in Tusca until he and Salya were married.
    Aku said, “It’ll be fine.”
    Salya humphed. She was back to wondering why her twin let their father push them to this odd place without protest. Didn’t he love the mountains where they grew up? She liked the foothills full of canopied hardwood trees, too. She was bored by what her father called the coastal plains stretching eastward from the foothills, much too flat, and boasting none of the rich herds of game of the foothills. At least the traveling party had taken a lot of meat in the foothills.
    “What do you think fish and crabs taste like?” she said. “I hear they’re too salty.”
    “You’ll like them as soon as you’re here living withKumu,” Shonan said. They hadn’t heard him walking up. He gave Salya a hug. “And until then you can slow down on the grumping.”
    She sort of smiled.
    The three walked close to the village, the traveling party trailing. The Amaso gathered. Aku’s eyes searched for Iona.
    “We better teach them to build stouter huts,” Shonan said. The homes were just brush huts, spread fingers of flexible limbs bent into the shape of cupped hands, turned upside down and covered with hides.
    “They say it’s warmer here,” Shonan said, “never snows. Maybe that’s why the houses are flimsy.”
    Aku