tents and your possessions, and walk toward the sunrise.”
And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini.
The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more. The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly: they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth, and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini.
They crossed the land-bridge.
Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. Now the sky was dark, and Kalanu had not returned, but the night sky was alive with lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green and violet and red. Atsula and her people had seen the northern lights before, but they were still frightened by them, and this was a display like they had never seen before.
Kalanu returned to them, as the lights in the sky formed and flowed.
“Sometimes,” she said to Atsula, “I feel that I could simply spread my arms and fall into the sky.”
“That is because you are a scout,” said Atsula, the priestess. “When you die, you shall fall into the sky and become a star, to guide us as you guide us in life.”
“There are cliffs of ice to the east, high cliffs,” said Kalanu, her raven-black hair worn long, as a man would wear it. “We can climb them, but it will take many days.”
“You shall lead us safely,” said Atsula. “I shall die at the foot of the cliff, and that shall be the sacrifice that takes you into the new lands.”
To the west of them, back in the lands from which they had come, where the sun had set hours before, there was a flash of sickly yellow light, brighter than lightning, brighter than daylight: a burst of pure brilliance that forced the folk on the land bridge to cover their eyes and spit and exclaim. Children began to wail.
“That is the doom that Nunyunnini warned us of,” said Gugwei the old. “Surely he is a wise god and a mighty one.”
“He is the best of all gods,” said Kalanu. “In our new land we shall raise him up on high, and we shall polish his tusks and skull with fish oil and animal fat, and we shall tell our children, and our children’s children, and our seventh children’s children, that Nunyunnini is the mightiest of all gods, and shall never be forgotten.”
“Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return…”
And there is no telling how long she might have continued in this blasphemy, had it not been interrupted in a manner that brooked no argument.
The roar that erupted from the west was so loud that ears bled, that they could hear nothing for some time, temporarily blinded and deafened but alive, knowing that they were luckier than the tribes to the west of them.
“It is good,” said Atsula, but she could not hear the words inside her head.
Atsula died at the foot of the cliffs when the spring sun was at its zenith. She did not live to see the New World, and the tribe walked into those lands with no holy woman.
They scaled the cliffs, and they went south and west, until they found a valley with fresh water, and rivers that teemed with silver fish, and deer that had never seen man before, and were so tame it was necessary to spit and to apologize to their spirits before killing them.
Dalani gave birth to three boys, and some said that Kalanu had performed the final magic and could do the man-thing with her bride; while others said that old Gugwei was not too old to keep a young bride company when her husband was away; and certainly once Gugwei died, Dalani had no more children.
And the ice times came and the ice times went, and the people spread out across the land, and formed new tribes and chose new totems for themselves: ravens and foxes and ground sloths and great cats and buffalo, each a taboo beast that marked a tribe’s identity, each beast a god.
The mammoths of the new lands were bigger, and slower, and more foolish than the mammoths of the Siberian plains, and the pungh mushrooms,