Regret and sorrow. That’s all that Two Sticks and I have in common. My little fire pops, mere sticks atop a bed of coals. After the light has fled and darkness drapes the land, I shall sneak out on my nightly foray for firewood and water.
Beyond that I don’t need anything. Enough food remains in the storage jars to keep me fed for at least a half moon. Firewood will remain a problem, however. With as many people as are living in the area, anything burnable gets picked up. The few twigs and sticks I’ve scrounged are old pieces of driftwood. Do I dare try to Trade for firewood? Will someone recognize the tattoo on my hand?
I raise that selfsame hand, staring at it as if it were an apparition, something foreign, an appendage belonging to a stranger.
Hard to believe this is the same hand that poured the Morning Star’s deadly drink. The hand that tied the water sack over Two Sticks’ head, and then untied that same bag a couple of hands of time later to expose his dead and staring face.
One thing, however, that I’ve noticed since suffocating him is that I’m no longer fading away. I seem to have reached a state of equilibrium. I am stuck at this halfway point. Anything that would make me more solid—like eating to satiety—causes me to throw up. Just the thought of certain kinds of food or tastes, or smells, set me off. Other things, odd things, I now crave. It is almost routine in the morning. I wake feeling nauseous. Once I throw up, however, things are better.
On the bed, Two Sticks gurgles in agreement, and his anus expels another burst of gas. I make a face as it fills the air.
What am I going to do with him? I figure I can roll his corpse out of the bed and onto the floor, but what then? I can’t carry him. I just don’t have the strength. And if I drag him away in the night, how do I hide the marks he’ll leave in the dirt? Even a five-year-old will be able to follow the trail from wherever I leave his corpse back to the house door.
It is a terrible dilemma. I have the perfect place to hide for the next moon, but for the knowledge that I will not be able to stand the stench as he continues to decompose.
What kind of justice is that?
I poke the coals with the last of my sticks and shake my head.
I thought I would have a sense of accomplishment after killing Two Sticks. Instead I seem to have fallen into a pit of eternal paralysis. My souls are in limbo, just hanging, stuck in place as if covered with pitch and unable to move. I am not sure that the things I remember from my past, of growing up in Split Sky City, of my mother or father, ever happened. Did I just imagine running off to the Albaamaha? Was the initiation in the Sacred Moth Society just a dream? Was I really captured and hauled off here to marry the Morning Star?
I giggle, pressing fingers to my lips to stifle the sound. That’s a head-struck fantasy! A fantastical creation spun by the souls of a clanless, friendless girl who lives with a corpse. That couldn’t have been me.
And I certainly couldn’t have murdered the living god!
Assuming anyone had done such a thing, it would have been a young woman of courage and determination. Not some empty husk of a girl like me. Not a plaything. And oh yes, I was indeed a plaything.
Two Sticks taught me that if he taught me nothing else.
A worthless girl. That’s what I am.
A girl? Wasn’t I once a woman? Married?
Or was the Women’s House and my celebration of passage just another delusion like so many of the fantasies that spin between my souls?
I absently reach down and press a hand to my abdomen. No, no blood. Not even so much as a cramp. And if my memories are correct, the right number of days have passed since my last bloody flux.
Women bleed. Girls don’t.
I glance again at Two Sticks and say, “You were raping a girl, you beast. All the more reason I’m glad I killed you.”
Which makes me wonder: Will I ever be a woman again?
For long moments I just sit, satisfied to breathe, to feel the warmth from the fire.
Wait. Did I hear something?
Yes, there’s sniffing at the door. I know that sound: a dog.
“Go away, beast. Do it before I step out and bash you for the stewpot.”
The sniffing stops, and I don’t hear the beast anymore.
I am about to rise when the door opens, lifted wide.
I am stunned, having heard nothing but the dog—no sound of footsteps. Fear bursts in my breast like an over-pressured pot.
I stare up in horror at the dark shadow of a muscular man. For a moment I can only gape, frozen. And then I recognize him: the lecherous and lascivious thief from the Keeper’s palace.
A whimper builds in my throat, and dies of its own futility. I feel myself going hollow again. The fading that I stemmed when I killed Two Sticks has resumed. I am … finished.
“You,” I whisper in defeat.
“Me,” he replies in his limited Muskogean.
I feel the last hope drain away, head slumping, vision blurring with defeat.
“You kill?” Seven Skull Shield asks, pointing to Two Sticks’ corpse.
I nod. What’s left but the truth? In Trade pidgin, augmenting it with sign language, I say, “He was going to Trade me to strange men. Many of them. ‘Have a rare pot? Stick your shaft into this woman who murdered the Morning Star.’ I just…”
What’s the point? The more I talk, the more I admit, the more of myself is gone forever.
Seven Skull Shield walks over, peers down at Two Sticks’ body. The gut is starting to swell; the eyes are dried out and death-gray; the mouth is slack. “How kill?”
I toss him the small ceramic jar, signing, “Last of nectar. Made his souls travel far enough I could, how you say, stop his wind.”
Even as I finish, I laugh at the absurdity, the sound of it bitter and biting with disgust. It had been such a small and fragile hope. Dead now. Gone with so many of the things that had once made me me.
Then, with a sigh, I lie back on the fabrics where I’ve been sleeping. I know what he wants, what was in his eyes back when he first saw me. He is, after all, just another man. I pull up my skirt and spread my legs wide.
Seven Skull Shield cocks his head as he studies not my exposed genitals, but my expression. I have sucked in my lips and am chewing them against the coming pain.
Why is he dragging this out? Get it over with!
Stepping over, he reaches out a hand, saying, “Here. Let me help you up.”
For a moment, the words don’t make sense. “You not take?”
“Not like this?”
“But you…” I frown, then nod in defeat as it all comes clear. “Trade me to other men later. I understand.”
“Snot and spit, no.” He rubs the back of his neck. His expression screws into something unpleasant. “Sometimes men can really be vile, can’t we? Come on, girl. On your feet.”
I let him pull me up, almost staggering from fear and worry. His dog is lapping what’s left of my supper gruel from the brownware jar beside the fire.
“Where you take?” I ask, wondering if I should make a break for the door, or if the accursed dog will drag me down.
“To somewhere safe.” He rubs his chin. And there’s enough light to see that he’s thoughtful. “I’ve got to figure this out. To do that, I need the whole story. And I’ve got to have someone who knows Muskogee.”
“What of him?” I point to Two Sticks’ body.
“If I read the signs right, girl, and from what you’ve just told me, he’s a weasel. Sometimes the best thing for a pus-sucking maggot like that is just to be left to rot, don’t you think?”
I dare not allow so much as a tremble of the lips—nothing that might give him an advantage.
“You got anything here you want?” he asks. “Pack it up. I think it’s dark enough I can get you to a safe place.”
“Yes, yes,” I say woodenly. I have figured it out. He doesn’t want to be serviced on the ground just below a dead man’s feet. “Find better place. I understand.”
He gives Two
Sticks a disgusted look. “If he’s abused you to the point you can’t understand there’s more to coupling than rape, I’d only want him alive for just long enough that I could kill him all over again.”
Then he spits on the corpse, following it with, “Take that, maggot.” To me he says, “I meant it. Get your things. We’re leaving.”
It takes me only a couple of heartbeats to shove anything of value into my pack. As I follow him out into the night I know this isn’t going to have a happy ending, but I am too exhausted to care.
Sixty-two
Things were slowly, painfully starting to make sense to Wooden Doll. Which, when it came to Seven Skull Shield, wasn’t all that unusual. It just took time to figure out how the big thief’s actions actually related to any kind of common sense.
Like they did that night.
Wooden Doll sat on the edge of her bed and studied the attractive young woman—barely more than a girl—who crouched by her fire. Across from her, Seven Skull Shield perched with half of his butt on her large wooden storage box, his arms crossed, expression pensive.
Skull had arrived not long after her last client had left. Wooden Doll had first felt irritation—wanting nothing more than a full night’s sleep. It had brewed into anger when he led the lithesome young woman into her house, followed by that loathsome dog.
What was the matter with him? Bringing a ripe young thing like the Sky Hand girl—all right, she might be a woman, but just barely—into her house?
The flare of sudden jealousy had surprised her. Of course she knew he bedded other women. The man had a reputation for charming women into his bed—or, more often, into the woman’s own. But he’d never dared to bring one here. Let alone one so young.
And then had come the stunning realization that this creature with lackluster eyes and broken posture was Whispering Dawn. The living god’s wife. The woman all of Cahokia was hunting over the Morning Star’s attempted poisoning.
Wooden Doll sighed deeply, shaking her head. “It figures, Skull, that only you could get yourself into a mess like this. My advice? Hand her over to the Keeper immediately. Before you end up hanging in a square for the few days it would take the crowd to slice you into strips and burn what’s left to a charred crisp.”
He arched a scarred eyebrow and flexed the muscles in his crossed arms. “Oh, come on. She’s not an assassin.”
“What? You just told me she murdered Two Sticks!”
“So?” he shot back. “He was abusing her. Told the poor girl if she didn’t bed him, let him Trade her services to other men as ‘the Morning Star’s assassin,’ he’d turn her over to the Four Winds.”
She glanced again at the girl who hugged her knees, staring aimlessly at the matting. She did look pathetic.
“Why did you bring her here?”
“To find out the truth.” He shrugged. “You speak Muskogee. Ask her to tell it from the beginning. The Sky Hand, the Albaamaha, why she came here. She looks so hopeless I’ll bet she tells it straight.”
Wooden Doll raised her hands in surrender. So much for a good night’s restful sleep, huh? And she was competent in Muskogee. As she was in most of the major languages. It made her clients more comfortable and at ease, which meant she could Trade her services for more.
To the young woman she said, “How old are you?”
Whispering Dawn jerked at the sound of her own language. “Just seventeen, Lady.”
“Seven Skull Shield wants to hear your story. Would you do that? Tell it like it happened? From the very beginning?”
Whispering Dawn nodded, a self-mocking smile on her lips, and began, “I ran away with Straight Corn. He was forbidden, an Albaamaha. But I loved him.…”
She spoke slowly, telling the story, her gaze locked on an interminable distance. Idly she began to finger her long black hair, twisting it around and around her fingers.
As the young woman spoke, Wooden Doll translated for Skull. He remained still, head down, lips pursed as Whispering Dawn told of her journey upriver, and of her arrival at Cahokia.
When she came to the part about putting the nectar in the Morning Star’s drink, Wooden Doll asked incredulously, “Didn’t you think it would kill him?”
Whispering Dawn glanced up, slightly surprised. “Hanging Moss told me it wouldn’t. That he’s the living god. That it would only send him on a Spirit journey.”
“And you believed that?”
She nodded, eyes guileless as she met Wooden Doll’s stare. “Hanging Moss wouldn’t lie. He was my husband’s uncle.”
“They used you,” Wooden Doll told her.
“But Hanging Moss didn’t lie! Seven Skull Shield told me the Morning Star lives. That I didn’t kill him.”
“Word is that it was close, girl,” Wooden Doll told her. “Very, very close. Enough so that a lot of people had the scare of their lives, and the city was barely spared civil war. Your dear Albaamaha uncle meant for you to kill him. And he meant for your father, the high minko, to get the blame.”
Whispering Dawn shook her head doggedly. “Hanging Moss is a good man. He wouldn’t have done this to me. Even if he had, Straight Corn wouldn’t have let him. He loves me.”
But the tone behind her words indicated that she was doing everything in her ability to believe it.
“They played you. Used you as a tool.”
Whispering Dawn continued to doggedly shake her head, a stubborn frown marring her forehead.
After Wooden Doll had explained to Skull, he said, “That’s what I thought.”
“Well, gaming piece or not, her life isn’t worth dog drool on a mat, which, if you’ll take a look, is exactly what that mongrel of yours is doing on my prize floor mat.” The beast had fixed its blue and brown eyes on her stewpot, nose quivering in expectation.
“Farts! Stop that!” Skull shifted just enough to fish in his belt pouch and toss the brindle beast a chunk of bread. “Never known a dog with such an appetite.”
“You joke. All dogs are just loose hair pasted around a walking appetite. What are you going to do about the girl? She poisoned the Morning Star. Now she’s sitting at my fire.”
“She’s barely more than a child. They used her.”
“Neither you nor I was ever that gullible, Skull. Not even when we were younger than she is. It’s not my fault that she had the stupidity to believe what other people told her.”
“Come on, Wooden Doll. We were privileged in the way we grew up. We were lucky. We had to live by our wits with death and disaster around every corner. She didn’t. She was deprived. Locked away in a palace, a spoiled high chief’s daughter. She never got the chance to learn anything worthwhile.”
“Pity her? For having life spoon-fed to her?”
“Yes.”
“Pus and blood, Skull, there’s times you make me crazy.” She looked down at the girl, who watched them with wide and uncertain eyes. “What’s your ultimate goal here? You going to ransom her? Trade her off for some advantage? Or did you think to adopt her like you did that foul-bred dog and keep her as a bed warmer?”
Skull gave her a disgusted look. “I’ll admit that she’s nice to look at, dream about, and maybe if she ever … But no. She’s been beat up enough by men. And after what Two Sticks did to her? I just don’t think being young and naïve should always be a death penalty.”
“You and your warped sense of justice.”
He grinned impishly. “That’s why Power smiles on me.” The grin faded. “I want you to keep her for a couple of days.”
“And do what with her?”
“Let her watch the door. Like Newe used to do. And do something with that tattoo on the back of her hand. It almost screams ‘I’m a wanted murderess, and I’m stupid.’”
“Me?” she cried. “Keep her here?”
Skull arched a sad eyebrow. “I have to go pay an old debt, and it’s going to cost me dearly. Wound me down to the depths of my souls. But it’s got to be done.”
At his expression, she guessed,
“Winder?”
He nodded. “I need to get something out of your storage. If I’m not back by tomorrow, it’s because you’ll finally be proven right, and I’ve met a bad end. When they tie me in the square, pay someone to stick a wad of water hemlock in my mouth will you? I don’t want to hang around and suffer.”
He turned, walking to the door. His brindle dog with its weird blue and brown eyes rose to follow, tail swishing. Then the man let himself out into the night.
“What’s he doing?” Whispering Dawn asked in Muskogee.
“Going to say good-bye to a friend. That or get himself killed.”
“And if he comes back? I am to service him?”
Wooden Doll lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Why would you ask that?”
“It was in his eyes from the first moment he saw me.”
Wooden Doll read the young woman’s despair and self-loathing. For being so young, life had treated this one hard. “Girl, there are men who appreciate and enjoy women for who and what they are, and then there are other men, those who dominate women for what they can use or take. Skull is the first kind: He likes women. Enjoys their company in all of its ways and forms. He’s by no means a perfect man, or unflawed, but he has never forced a woman to do anything she didn’t want to.”
Wooden Doll read the young woman’s disbelief before adding, “My suspicion is that you’ve never had that much to do with that kind of man. You’ve just been trapped with the other kind, the users, exploiters, and takers.”
“How do you know so much about men?”
Wooden Doll smiled wearily. “That’s how I make my living, girl. By knowing them, and what they want, and what they’ll Trade to get it. When it comes to Skull? I know him, because—with the exception of his detestable need for excitement and challenge—I’m just like him.” A pause. “So, let’s see what we can do to remake that tattoo.”
Sixty-three
Winder had been hurt before, but nothing had ever been as painful or taxing as his first night in the square. It hadn’t been bad for the first finger of time as the sun set and the Evening Star Town plaza had darkened. The trick had been to shift his weight from one foot to the other, tied as they were in the lower corners of the square.
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