by Kate Elliott
Yet she wished she could set foot on the earth and just walk through the market, taking her time, taking in smells and sounds. She wept a little, to see such riches, although the judges assured her with the greatest embarrassment that if only the gods favored them, then in a few years the terrible poverty of today’s fledgling market would be replaced by a decent selection as in the days before, and folk would have cacao beans and folded cloth with which to trade properly.
How could they not recognize how life flourished here, even if it seemed poor to them. There were so many people. There were so many children!
It was hard to concentrate, and doubly so when a parade of mask warriors chivvied a mixed herd of sheep and goats into view.
This was too much! She got to her knees, rocking the litter so that her bearers staggered. As the blood knives cried complaint, she swung down, let fall, and walked over to examine the beasts, who bawled and ba’aahed from the shelter of a makeshift corral over against the arcade leading to the street of live animals. Many folk gathered to stare, and especially she noted among them the wasted bodies and thin faces of those who had survived exile, yet they were only a few compared to their brethren who had come out of the shadows.
White Feather accompanied her, to protect her from the nattering of the blood knives, and a pair of judges came up quickly to ascertain what manner of trading was to go on.
It was Cat Mask, after all, who was leader of the group. He had a fresh scar on his left thigh but looked otherwise entirely pleased with himself.
“We have been tracking beyond the White Road,” he explained to the market judges, “and brought these here, our prizes, to the market.”
“For sacrifice!” cried the blood knives.
“Two of them,” said Feather Cloak. “Let two suffice, two males. The rest must be sold for breeding stock.”
Oh, they did not like to hear it, and some of the folk gathered to stare murmured in favor of the blood knives, while others murmured in favor of her decree.
“If we do not maintain the balance,” said the blood knives, “then He-Who-Burns will darken.”
“Clouds cover the sun in the north,” said Cat Mask. “But He-Who-Burns shines on us here in our own country. It is the fault of the human sorcerers. Everyone knows that they are the ones who wove the spell. Now it has rebounded against them.”
“You babble like a Pale Dog,” cried the blood knives. “How long will our good fortune, if that is what you call it, last, if we do not restore order. How soon will He-Who-Burns turn his bright face away from us in anger and despair?”
“Two is enough, until there is plenty,” said Feather Cloak, but they muttered and scowled to hear her speak. They were fighting her now for no other reason than to test her authority; she did not know how to counter them.
“See what else we brought,” said Cat Mask, dismissing this as he might the whine of a mosquito. Like all the young adults who had grown up in exile, he had never seen or conversed with one of the blood knives. “See, what we have brought from the lands beyond!” He and his mask warriors preened, being proud of themselves. “This herd is not the only one we captured.”
There came in a line, dressed in wooden slave collars, a bundle of children: four infants, eight of toddling age, seven very young, and one older girl of nine or ten years of age who looked glassy-eyed with shock, staring only straight ahead. They looked nothing like the Bright One, having a different complexion and broader features and black hair more like to that of the Ashioi than Liathano’s mass of fire-gold hair. They were not handsome children, not like those of her kind, but they were very young and there were so many in that one group. After so long in exile, she was still astonished by the sight of children.
“Brought you no captives?” asked the blood knives. “No warriors taken in honorable combat?”
Cat Mask shrugged. “The adults we killed were not warriors. It was too much trouble to bring them, so we killed them.” He looked at his companions, and they shared winks and nods. “And we were very hungry, so we ate them.”
Everyone laughed, since it was disgusting to think of eating a stranger, and one with sour flesh, at that.
“We thought it worthwhile to bring these children. A bundle plus two.”
“I only count a bundle,” said the eldest of the blood knives.
“Oh, that’s right,” remarked Cat Mask, scratching his chin. “When we came through High-Hill we met with Lizard Mask’s sister, who has settled there. She just lost her little son to the coughing sickness, so she took a pair of little boys thinking that, if she raised them, she might forget her grief over the other one.”
“Very well,” said the blood knives. “A bundle will be enough. But you who raid into the lands beyond the White Road must bring us strong captives as tribute for the gods.”
“If we can find any!” said Cat Mask with another laugh. “They looked pretty scrawny and weak. We had to fatten these little ones up on goat’s milk.”
“It is their blood we need,” said the blood knives, “not their flesh.”
They stepped forward to take the children, but before they could lay hands on them White Feather pushed past them and scooped up one of the toddlers.
“I claim this one for mine, to raise as my own!”
Her voice was loud, and her tone harsh, and the child hiccuped and sniveled into the growing silence as the blood knives opened and closed their hands and folk pressed forward to see what was going on.
Before three breaths had passed, a man with the delicate frame of an exile stepped out of the crowd and pulled an infant out of the arms of one of the mask warriors. “And I claim this one, to replace the child my wife could never have.”
“And I!” said a woman, coming forward to put her hands on one of the little walking ones. “For I lost my child and my husband when the Pale Dogs raided our settlement, just before the shadows fell over us. I want this child to raise.”
In her wake, other people in the market shoved forward—women and men both—and claimed children until only the oldest girl remained with her vacant stare and her terrified expression.
The blood knives raged, but they were few, and the crowd was many, and the folk who had a grip on the children looked very determined.
“These are the children of dogs! They are not our kind,” the blood knives protested.
“How will they know anything different,” asked White Feather boldly, “if they are raised among us?”
“It goes against our laws.”
“It does not!” she retorted. “In the days before, some among humankind walked together with our people and painted the clan marks on their bodies. In this way, they became part of the clans, and their blood and our blood mixed.”
“Yes! Yes!” cried the blood knives triumphantly. “And that turned the balance. You see what came of it!”
White Feather was burning with anger now. She was as bright as the sun. “I will not listen to you!” she said in a voice that carried like sunlight over the market square, where all commerce had come to a stop. “I listened once, when the last of you still ruled us in exile. What fools we were!”
“You were fools to allow your blood knives to die without training up those who could succeed them.”
“You know nothing, you who walked in the shadows while we struggled, while the land died around us! Hu-ah! Hu-ah! Let my words be pleasing to She-Who-Creates, who sustains us!”
Now she could not be interrupted.
“In those days as the land died and we died, the blood knives still ruled. Many had already died because there was not enough to eat. But in those days, when I was a child, there was a great sickness and most of the remaining people died. Dogs feasted on corpses, for there were none to prepare them for the death rites. Vultures grew fat on lean flesh. Bones lay everywhere. And still we died. After this, we abandoned the cities. The few of us who still lived scattered to the villages. There we lived as the fields withered and the birds laid fewer and fewer eggs
. The lakes dried up, there were no more fish, and the rivers leaked away until they ran no more than a trickle of water. And still we died.
“At last the remaining blood knives decreed that in order to restore the balance and placate the angry gods we must offer to the gods the thing we valued most. I was young then, a young woman newly married. I had just given birth to my first child, a daughter.
“The blood knives took her from me and sacrificed her. They said I was young, I would have another, and that the blood of this one would save us.
“But my womb was parched. Like the land, it was dying. I had no other child. They sacrificed the only one I bore, and the sacrifice was for nothing. The land died because it was uprooted from Earth through the magic of the human dogs. This reason, and no other. We died, and we had no more children. Don’t you see? The blood knives were wrong. And in the end they died, too.”
She balanced the first child on her thin hip and grasped the wrist of the older girl as well, drawing her close. “I will take these two girls to replace the one I lost. They are mine, now. I claim them, according to the law, as is my right. I will not let the blood knives sacrifice any child of mine. Not again.”
The blood knives turned to Feather Cloak, who had set her feet on the dusty earth of the marketplace.
They said, “There must be a sacrifice.”
“Two goats from that herd,” she said, “and captives of war, strong warriors. But not these children.”
The eldest leaned close, his breath sharp with the smell of pepper, and he whispered, “You will regret this.”
2
AT the Heart-of-the-World, peace seemed to reign. In all the wide land that lay south of the great pyramid, called the Mountain of the World’s Beginning, the Lost Ones had come home and made themselves busy in a hundred ways: building, sweeping, gossiping, mating, planting, fishing, hunting, trading, digging, bathing, carving, plaiting, weaving, grinding, sewing, minding the children, and all the rest besides.
But in the council chamber of the exiles, two brothers argued, while Feather Cloak and half a bundle of trusted councillors watched.
“How can you have managed so quickly, in no more than half a year,” Zuangua was saying, “to make the priests so angry?”
“You were always first to complain of the power hoarded by the sky counters,” said Eldest Uncle with a crooked smile.
“Yes, but I did so where they couldn’t hear me! Yet the Feather Cloak must go to the marketplace, and you do not even counsel her in the proper way to observe the authority held by the priests. Now their knives are raised against you! They make no secret of it.”
“Have you come here only to scold us?” asked Eldest Uncle.
Feather Cloak sighed. The journey back from the city on the lake had wearied her mostly because she could see what was coming. She had hoped for a respite, but hard on her heels had come Zuangua carrying a mantle-load of arrogant anger. She had refused to speak to him until Eldest Uncle could be fetched from the watchtower on the border where he made his home. Now, she listened as he shook his head impatiently at his twin brother’s words.
“I came here to warn you! I speak up for you exiles as much as I am able, because of what binds us, my heart and your heart, but those of us who survived in the shadows have many complaints!”
“Complaints!” cried White Feather.
The others—Green Skirt, Skull Earrings, and seven others, all of them from those who had endured exile together—echoed her outrage.
“How can you have complaints?” asked Eldest Uncle in a milder tone, seeming half amused and half exasperated.
Zuangua held up a fist, showing its back to his aged brother.
“One.” He lifted the little finger. “How have so many died? So many! We who walked beyond the White Road to fight the Pale Dogs and protect our homeland were less than a quarter of the people. Coming home, we discover we outnumber you twentyfold! How have so many died? How has the land fallen empty in a span that is no more than your life?”
“A very few among us saw great-grandchildren born,” said Eldest Uncle with the patience of the old. “That is a long time.”
He was not angry, although the accusation was insulting. Even Feather Cloak, normally the most placid of souls, found herself flushed, cheeks hot. She tucked her infant more tightly against her. Those who had returned from the shadows could not possibly understand how precious each child had become. Green Skirt held the other baby with the fond attention of a besotted aunt, although the two women were not related by blood ties. White Feather had her own children to care for; the toddler was sleeping in a sling tied around the older woman’s torso, and the girl was crouched by the wall, arms hugging her knees, eyes closed, rocking slightly on her feet.
“How long?” asked Zuangua. “How many years?”
“We could not count the round of years accurately. We had no sun and no stars by which to measure the calendar.”
Zuangua had brought with him a pair of followers, a tough-looking woman wearing a fox mask and an older man with a merchant’s sash slung around his torso. Fox Mask stood with arms crossed and feet braced aggressively. The merchant sat cross-legged and with a cold stare examined Feather Cloak’s council members as though he would have liked to spit on each one.
“Very well,” he said grudgingly. “It may be impossible to determine.”
“So have we told the sky counters,” murmured Eldest Uncle. “Many times over. But it appears they do not believe us.”
“So it does. That brings us to my second point.” Zuangua raised the next finger beside the little. “What of the priests? No land can survive without order, for we see that it did not. Yet how can it be that every one of the blood knives died?”
None of the elders replied, and most looked at the ground. White Feather’s baby stirred, made restless by the tension, and the infant Green Skirt was holding gave a single, flustered cry before the old woman shushed her gently.
This was a subject no one had ever spoken of, even during exile.
“I wait,” said Zuangua.
Eldest Uncle rubbed his chin. He did not look at the others. “When the famine came, during the first generation, and we died in great numbers, the blood knives offered us no solution, only problems. And when the great sickness came, still they refused to change. They could not count the measure of the sky in that place, but all they spoke of was the way things used to be done. We worship the gods still, and properly, giving of our own blood in tribute, but those who used the power of the blood knife to keep themselves raised high above others are all gone. It is true. They are all gone.”
The merchant coughed, for something in Eldest Uncle’s tone made everyone uncomfortable.
Zuangua frowned. “It is difficult for me to know which of those words I like least, and which I dislike most.” He still held up his hand, and now he raised the middle finger to stand beside little and next. “Three. Two of the twenty clans have vanished from among the exiles.”
“And ten of the remaining clans number less than five bundles in their lineage. Yes. We know how many we lost.”
“How can this be?” The merchant slapped his own chest three times. “I am born into Rabbit Clan. Here in the land I find no house to welcome me!”
“There are others of the Rabbit Clan among those who survived in the shadows,” said Eldest Uncle, “or so I am told.”
“How could you let the clans die?” the man roared.
Eldest Uncle smiled sadly. “How can you know how it felt to watch the people die of hunger and thirst as the land failed? To smell the stench of the sickness that afflicted us? To watch fathers sing the death rites over their only child, and then fall themselves as their strength failed? What do you know of bones left to bleach on the hillside? Hu-ah! What could you have done better than what we did!”
Age gave a man power. Eldest Uncle, as well, was known as a sorcerer. He was a seeker after the grains of truth hidden in the mantle thrown over the universe which mo
st folk call the world, for what most folk call the world is really only the things we can touch and smell and taste and hear and see.
“My apologies,” said the merchant. He set hands on knees and inclined his head, just a pinch, toward the old man. “You must see how it appears to us, to wander in the shadows for so long, watching the Pale Dogs swarm over the Earth we love. To return at last to find our homeland …” He wiped away a tear, and this show of emotion seemed so unforced and genuine that Feather Cloak found her throat choked and her own eyes filling. “It is a land of bones.”
“So it became,” said Eldest Uncle. “So many died. We struggled to stay alive.”
“I am not finished.” Zuangua raised his forefinger, and showed the back of his hand to his brother, to all of them, open now except for the folded thumb. “Four. In the days I remember, the Feathered Cloak rose from the high lineages marked out by the gods from the heirs of Obsidian Snake, who led us over the seas.”
For the first time, he looked at Feather Cloak directly. His regard distracted Feather Cloak for a moment, as it always did. His features were attractive, his bronzed complexion a handsome shade. He wore his long black hair unbound so its glossy fall would dazzle women’s eyes. Yet one might admire in this same fashion Cat Mask and other warriors she had known all her life. There was this difference: Zuangua had the look of a well-made sword already whetted in battle. Compared to him, the others had no shine and no edge.
His smile was a challenge. She lifted a brow in response, refusing to be baited, not by his challenge and not by his sexuality. Still, it did her no harm to let him see she found him handsome. Some men, receiving women’s regard, puffed up until their vanity made them foolish. It would be interesting to see if Zuangua would succumb to that fault.
“He believes me unworthy of the Eagle Seat,” she said without dropping her gaze, yet the words were directed not at Zuangua but to Eldest Uncle and her faithful councillors.