“Morning Star? Husband?”
Nothing.
I pinch his shoulder.
No response.
Placing a hand to his sweat-damp breastbone, I feel the slow beat of his heart. His breath purls on my cheek when I lean close.
“That is a gift from High Minko White Water Moccasin and the Sky Hand.” As if he could hear given the state he’s in. But I promised Hanging Moss.
I roll off him, toss my hair back over my shoulder, and slowly catch my breath. I shiver as sweat dries on my flushed skin. I wonder if I will ever be the same again? And what sort of creature that was that took possession of my souls and body? That beast couldn’t have been me, could it?
I am oddly weak as I climb to my feet and fish for my skirt. Carefully I dress, pick up the little nectar bottle, and then help myself to some of the more exotic items and stuff them into a sack. Lastly I take a fine buffalo-wool blanket and wrap it about my shoulders.
As I am ready to leave, I glance back at the Morning Star. I am not surprised to see the particularly large humming moth that hovers over his senseless mouth. The long proboscis is sucking desperately at the sweet trace of nectar on his lips.
Thirty-one
The sun beat down in warm yellow rays as Night Shadow Star reached out and parted the corn. At her feet, tangled vines of squash—heavy with fruit—wound across the ground. In amongst them bean plants flourished, pods heavy amid the green leaves.
Pushing the last of the cornstalks to the side, she stepped out into the yard and glanced over at her Spirit plant garden where datura flourished. The beautiful large white flowers contrasted brilliantly with the triangular-shaped dark green leaves. Behind it a stand of rattlesnake master plants gave way to nightshade. Off to the right her thick crop of tobacco had a lighter green color, the leaves wide, tall, and curled on the edges.
Have to water again, she thought, glancing up at the remarkable blue sky. Color. So much color. She loved the contrasts of garden and sky, her red soil, and the variegated greens of the vast forest that surrounded her little farmstead.
She turned and followed the path to her house—a snug trench-wall structure with a fresh new thatch roof. The walls were white-plastered and painted with spirals of yellow, purple, violet, crimson, and black. Even as she watched they seemed to glow, shift, expand, and contract. It hit her: The spirals were pulsing with life. As if in affirmation they began to shimmer and dance along the walls of the house.
For long moments she stood entranced, reached out with a hand until she almost touched the vibrant curls of light.
The bubbling laughter of children interrupted her enchantment as two little girls and a boy burst into the yard. Screams of delight broke from their lips as they chased each other in some sort of game of tag. The little boy, a chubby and brown-skinned imp with a thatch of black shaggy hair, was being ganged up on by his sisters. He dodged and darted, trying to keep from being “tagged” by his bigger sister. Just a glance at his face and she knew he was Fire Cat’s son, just as the two little girls had her features.
Our children.
She placed a hand to her breast, smiling as the children ran and cavorted. Their laughter soothed her, brought a sense of peace and fulfillment to her anxious souls.
They’re beautiful. We made them.
Which was what life was all about, wasn’t it? Not the complications and endless conflicts of politics. Not the continual strife inherent to Power and its ceaseless struggle for balance. Not light against dark, wisdom against chaos, or white in conflict with red.
For one glimmering moment she understood that life was about perfect farms, laughing children, and that sense of fulfillment. Of being part of the continuum. Establishing one’s place in the endless procession of being born, finding a mate, bearing young, and watching them grow as she herself aged. Just as her ancestors had done before, and her children and their children, and so on, would do.
“They’re happy today, aren’t they?” Fire Cat asked, coming up behind her.
She turned, greeting him with a smile. “It’s a good day, husband.”
His eyes were twinkling, the Red Wing tattoos on his cheeks radiant in the golden sunlight. She thought the lines of his face to be perfect, the humor in his smile, enchanting.
He bent to the side, lowering the turkey he carried to the ground. “Hunting was good today,” he added, with a nod to the dead bird. “The children can use some of that boundless energy plucking it.”
“Don’t let them ruin the feathers,” she told him. “I can split them to weave a new cloak in case winter ever comes.”
“Of course.” He stepped close, draping a strong arm over her shoulder and pulling her against him. She sighed, perfectly content with the warmth and love that seemed to leach from his firm muscle and bone into hers.
“Nuts are falling,” he told her. “It will be a very good crop this year. Might have to dig another storage pit just to hold it all.”
A colorful flock of buntings mixed with cardinals as they descended on the garden, apparently in search of insects. Odd to see so many, let alone flocking together.
“I couldn’t be happier,” she told him softly. The spirals continued to pulse and throb, the children to play, and Fire Cat folded her into a warm hug.
Just as her souls began to Sing with joy, the sky went black.
The air turned cold. Frigid.
She shivered, suddenly alone in the dark.
“What happened?” she cried out.
Around her, she could now feel the current as it moved slowly past, lifting her hair and floating it in streamers behind her. She stood in a narrow passage, the limestone on both sides dark and covered with roots. Her feet rested on soft mud, and filaments of moss flowed with the water.
Fear rose with the rapid pounding of her heart. She knew this place: the Underworld.
“Something’s changed,” Piasa told her as he appeared in a soft blue glow.
Night Shadow Star knotted her fists, tensing her shoulders. “I was so happy.”
“An illusion. Another vision you spun for yourself.” The fearsome Underwater Panther raised one of his yellow eagle’s feet, raking the darkness with midnight talons. “This is the reality. What you have to look forward to. Your city, your palace, it’s going to end now.”
“Why?”
Piasa lifted his whiskered jowls into a snarl that exposed his curving canines, the pink cat’s tongue curling. “He’s been brought here. Into my realm. That stupid girl! Humans, you are all a plague. Of all the creatures of Creation, you are the only ones that insist on mucking around in Spirit Powers you don’t understand. Do the bison? Do the deer? No. But give a human a vial of datura nectar, and she’s creating havoc.”
“I don’t understand.”
Piasa spread his wings. “Of course you don’t. You’ve been using the Tortoise Bundle to Dream houses and gardens and children and a loving man, while a confused girl has been manipulated into precipitating disaster.”
“Talk straight!”
“The Chikosi girl fed datura nectar to the Morning Star. Which drew Sacred Moth to drink his Spirit out of that wretched human body. And now Morning Star’s been carried to the Underworld. Trapped here. In the darkness. Where he doesn’t belong.”
“The Morning Star has been eaten by a moth?” she asked, stifling a laugh.
In a lightning flash, Piasa grasped her in his taloned, crushing feet; the cougar’s face thrust against hers. His breath—stinking of death and corruption—bathed her face. Deep in the yellow eyes, his black pupils were hot, sucking her souls into their searing depth.
“He has to be freed.” Piasa’s voice cut through her like obsidian. “He is Sky World. His Power, here, is an infection. You’ve seen a wound fester? Burn hot and red in the flesh? Watched the pus swell and weep as it eats away at tissue? That’s what will happen, woman: rot, and smell, and stink, and corruption, all sending its poison among the dead, sickening the Tree of Life, weakening Old-Woma
n-Who-Never-Dies.”
He pushed her back, sent her staggering.
“That’s what that little fool has done with her jar of datura nectar.”
“You said a moth ate his Spirit?”
Piasa hissed, back arching, wings flared into bars of light as his rattlesnake tail whipped back and forth. “Sacred or not, a moth is still a moth. Just because Sacred Moth is filled with Power doesn’t mean it has a brain in its head. It does what it does. Follows its nature. It is drawn to nectar, to drink. It can no more deny that instinct than can those moths that fly into flames.”
“And a girl caused this?” Night Shadow Star asked weakly. Had she ever seen the Spirit Beast this enraged?
“The Albaamaha are a clever people, an old people, and Hanging Moss knew just how to bend an inexperienced and starry-eyed girl to his will.” Piasa’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “He and Wet Clay Woman thought she’d be a way to strike at High Minko White Water Moccasin. Instead the Sky Hand sent her here, married her to a more important target.”
“Why? Why would anyone do this?”
“So that the Sky Hand would get the blame for killing the Morning Star.”
“Didn’t the Morning Star know? Couldn’t he see?”
“Of course,” Piasa said simply. “Spirit Beings enjoy dancing with danger every bit as much as humans.”
“So … how are you going to get the Morning Star back to the Sky World?”
“Me?” he asked, eyes narrowing with deadly intent.
“No!” she said, backing away. “I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about…”
* * *
Night Shadow Star blinked awake in her bed. Dark as her room was, it had to be the middle of the night. Her heart hammered against her breastbone; Piasa’s foul breath still hung in her nostrils.
From across the room, the Tortoise Bundle was whispering, the voices issuing from it too low to understand.
She threw back her covers, feeling an electric tension in the air, as though lightning were about to strike. The blankets crackled, and her hair was floating from static. Every nerve in her body quivered.
She saw the dark shape in her doorway. A person, crouched.
“Fire Cat, is that you?”
Instead of Fire Cat’s, a soft voice said, “Dream the big beasts to the stars, away. Their corpses bleach on dusty clay.” A pause. “Change the land the People tread. Find a new way … or we’ll all be dead.”
“Sun Wing?”
Fire Cat’s familiar shape appeared in the doorway behind Sun Wing’s crouching form—a shadow against shadow, but she knew the way he moved.
“Lady?”
Night Shadow Star spun as her stomach tickled and went tight. Stumbling to her chamber pot, she barely had time to pull her hair back before she threw up.
As the spasms ceased, she felt Fire Cat’s arms around her, asking, “Are you all right?”
“No. It’s the Morning Star. We’re in trouble. Bad trouble.”
Thirty-two
The old weaver woman sat on a box just inside her front door and fingered the long whelk-shell columella that Seven Skull Shield had given her. On the looms to one side of the cramped and dark room hung half-finished weavings. Nothing fancy—just utilitarian everyday kinds of cloth, the sort that could be sewn into hunting shirts, working skirts, or capes.
Seven Skull Shield got a twisted sense of amusement out of the fact that the old woman despised him and Farts—and didn’t particularly care for or trust Flat Stone Pipe either, believing as she did that dwarves were inherently dangerous concentrators of Spirit Power. Why else would they be so little?
But as bitter, sour, and unpleasant as the old woman might be, she’d nevertheless compromised all of her principles in return for a couple of skeins of buffalo-wool yarn and that long white columella Traded up from the gulf. One of the last of Seven Skull Shield’s stock, to the old woman it represented a small fortune. And in return for it and the yarn, she’d allowed them access to the tight confines of her house—though she’d howled when Seven Skull Shield used a rock to hammer a short section of firewood through her clay-plastered wall to make a hole. Down at bench level, he’d driven another hole through the wattle-and-daub for Flat Stone Pipe to look out. Both allowed an excellent view of Wooden Doll’s yard and ramada.
Now all that remained was to wait. A not-so-pleasant task given that the old woman’s bedding smelled like it hadn’t been washed in years, the room was cramped and dark, and in the limited time they’d been there, Farts had begun scratching as if an army of fleas had crept out from the cracked and battered ceramics and filthy fabrics stored under the bed.
The old woman just kept staring at them, eyes half-slitted as she murmured what sounded like curses under her breath. The entire time she kept running the columella through her wrinkled fingers. In an endless cycle, a wicked smile would fade into a frown before another eerie smile would take its place and the cycle repeated. Her wispy white hair seemed to float around her almost-bald head as the breeze drifted through the door behind her.
A faint stirring of the air wafted through the house and carried another whiff of the old woman’s bedding to Seven Skull Shield’s nose. He made a face.
So did Flat Stone Pipe who muttered, “I will remember this day. It’s going to be right up at the top of my list of memories to forget.” He leaned forward to peer out of the hole. “Still nothing but that litter and the bearers. How long do you think this will take?”
“Until Winder comes,” Seven Skull Shield told him. “But he will come.”
Flat Stone Pipe flopped around on the dirty blankets to sit with his back to the wall. “What makes you think he’ll come here instead of sending a messenger to the Keeper’s? That’s the obvious place to deliver a message. And he could hire anyone at the canoe landing to carry it.”
“This is Winder, little man.” Seven Skull Shield reached down with a toe to scratch Farts where he lay just under the sleeping bench. The big dog uttered a squeaking yawn and tilted his head so that Seven Skull Shield’s toe could find that itchy place just behind the right ear.
“As if that explains it all?” the dwarf asked.
“It does if you know Winder. He and I should have been dead a dozen times over. Some of the boys who ran with us were smarter, faster, or stronger. We made it, and they didn’t.” He shrugged. “Sure, some of it was just luck. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They went one way and got caught. We went the other and got away. But part of it was that Winder always thought past the obvious. Why take the first hiding place when the third or fourth—though taking more effort to find—would allow you sleep all night without keeping an eye open?”
“I see.”
“So you have to think like Winder. Sending a message straight to the Keeper’s might somehow be traced back to the source. So who would know how to get in touch with me without triggering any excitement? Who would know how to deliver a message to my ears alone? Someone discreet. Trustworthy. And out of the loop and not to be suspected.”
“Wooden Doll.”
“Precisely. And not only that, sending the message through her is like a slap. It will be his way to say, ‘Here. You chose her over me way back then. How did that work out for you?’”
Flat Stone Pipe stared up at him, eyes curious. “How did it?”
Seven Skull Shield craned his head around and stared through the hole at Wooden Doll’s yard. The old male slave who had replaced Newe sat hunched before the door to dissuade interruptions to the proceedings inside. The porters waiting by the litter had surrendered to playing dice. And inside, behind that door, some strange man was … Well, never mind.
“Winder never understood,” Seven Skull Shield admitted. “Maybe I didn’t either. We were more than brothers. Bonded between souls. Each for the other. More than friends and boon companions. He expected me to go back south with him because that was our dream. We were going to make the impossible come true. We’d seen it, little man. Glimpse
d the opportunity in potential Trade between the growing colonies and the older Nations. We obtained a big shallow draft vessel, rounded up the men to paddle it, and filled it with Cahokian wares for the Trade.”
Seven Skull Shield smiled wistfully. “And then I stumbled upon Wooden Doll, this marvel of a woman married to a man who hadn’t a clue of what a miracle he had in his bed.
“Did you know that you can fall into someone, like falling into a hole? That’s what happened with Wooden Doll and me. We fell into each other and didn’t come out for a couple of moons when we finally hit rock bottom.”
“What went wrong?” Flat Stone Pipe asked.
“We were so busy being enchanted with each other that we forgot that I’m me and she’s herself. Turned out that we were the sort of people that were the most compatible when we were passionately bedding each other rather than contemplatively living with each other. She put it best: I thrive on the uncertainty of the challenge, whereas she is satisfied to enjoy the spoils of success.”
“I wish she’d chosen better neighbors,” Flat Stone Pipe muttered as another breath of breeze blew the bed’s stink up from below.
By the fire, the old woman hissed to herself and continued to finger the columella.
“I could pay her back,” Seven Skull Shield said thoughtfully. “I could sing one of my songs.”
“And I could pour the old woman’s chamber pot over your head,” Flat Stone Pipe shot back. “I’ve heard you sing. It’s almost as wretched as that yowling you make when you fight. Either sound so appalling your old friend Winder—no doubt of man of tastes and refinement—would flee like a forest hare from a stew pot.”
“You don’t have a clue do you?”
“About what?”
“The sort of remarkable talent necessary to compose songs that touch the heart and get to the very meat of human existence in a hostile world. That I am so blessed by such ability is a true gift from Power. I have seen blooded warriors swoon, their squadron leaders moved to tears by my eloquence.”
“I’ve seen them swoon and cry, too. They were tied in the squares and being tortured. Which, when you think about it, is about what your singing amounts to.”
Moon Hunt Page 25