Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series Read Free

out.”
    “Ayaah,” one man said, “better him than me.” The fellow glanced at Tull, as if wondering if Tull might be forced to take a turn in the shafts.
    The men spoke no more about what was going on, but Tull understood. The Creators had sent their gray birds to attack. The image flashed through his mind of the little humans he had seen in Craal, the eel-like creatures attaching to their hosts at the base of the neck so that they could bore into the brain stem, take control.
    Once the eel attached, the two could not be separated. Tull pitied any poor Pwi used that way.
    He could not sleep. The memory of how those eels slithering silently over the ground kept him awake. For hours Tull breathed the stale air, superbly alert, until cooler air broke into the hold.
    Only then did he let himself sleep. Tull dreamed that he was hunting with Ayuvah, Chaa’s dead son, deep in the redwoods where wild raspberry bushes grew leaves as large as plates and the vine maple grew tall and thin.
    Tull and Ayuvah ran, carrying their spears, and Tull’s stomach growled.
    The moss and brush before them was pitted and scarred—a giant mastodon had left its prints in the ground, and had gouged the moss with his tusks as they dragged the earth. Tull could hear it ahead in the forest, crashing through trees, snapping branches.
    “I fear the beast will not let us catch it, and I am hungry,” Ayuvah said, and the young Neanderthal stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow with his forearm.
    “I’m hungry, too,” Tull said.
    “Perhaps the beast will not give itself because we have not asked it,” Ayuvah said. “We are not hunting as men of the Pwi should.”
    Tull stopped, and he suddenly felt guilty. It was a lesson Ayuvah had tried to teach him long ago, to ask the spirit of the animal to give itself before the hunt.
    Ayuvah pointed forward to the shadows of the forest, and Tull saw a great shaggy brown back, like a small hill, moving ahead. “Perhaps we should not bother asking for this one,” Ayuvah said. “It is more than we could eat anyway.”
    Is it greed that makes me hunt this beast? Tull wondered. His belly cramped in on itself.
    Ayuvah studied Tull. “What do you hunger for?”
    Tull peered into the distance as the mastodon crashed through the forest shadows.
    His stomach tightened. But instead of mammoth, he thought of Bashevgo with its army of Blade Kin. He thought of gray birds sent by the Creators, dropping from above, with their worms of destruction. He imagined Eridani warships streaking through the night, and he wanted to end it.
    “I hunger for peace,” Tull said.
    Ayuvah nodded. “Then ask the spirit of the world for peace.”
    “How?”
    Ayuvah pointed at the rich humus with his spear.
    “Take off your clothes, lie naked on your belly, and beg the world for peace. Then listen to what it tells you.”
    In his dream Tull stripped and sprawled on the ground, naked, redwood needles pricking his bare skin, and he talked long to the earth, until the shadows of night fell, and he begged the earth to fill his belly with peace.
    Very faintly, like the thundering of a waterfall that is miles away, the ground trembled as if in answer.
    ***

Chapter 3: Forebodings
    Fava nudged her mammoth’s small ears with both toes, urging it down through the mountains in the moonlight.
    They had left the firs early in the evening and traveled now through straggling ponderosa pine, nothing like the lofty redwoods of the south. The mountains had eroded to large rolling hills. Snow lay on the ground two feet deep, and traveling would have been all but impossible if not for the mammoths, which trundled quickly, crazed with “ice fever,” the fear that came on mammoths when forced north during the snowy season.
    Ahead of her in the moonlight, Hukm warriors armed with twelve-foot war clubs loped over the hills, a blur of white fur on white snow.
    Everything, the wide open sky, the lack of sea air, the army of Hukm—none of it had the