“Did you keep count? How many have died—”
“I never keep count. Why would I? They were worthless human beings. But hundreds, at least. Probably thousands, though I can’t say for certain.”
The man’s eyes glowed with reverence, or maybe he was simply awed by the numbers. It swelled Leather Hand’s chest with pride … but it also made him uneasy. Who was this man?
“Astounding,” the man said, and bowed his head to blink at the black pot canted at an angle on the thick coyote hides. He gestured to it. “I’m surprised you haven’t opened the pot.”
While Leather Hand turned the precious serpent fetish in his hand, he could feel his breath-heart soul writhing where it was locked in the stone. He glanced at the soul pot. “I can’t open it. I tried.”
The man nodded, then asked, “Would you like me to open it for you?”
Leather Hand placed the fetish on the hides at his side and lifted the pot, but he hesitated to hand it to the man. “Can you?”
“Oh yes.”
Leather Hand gave it to him and watched as the nameless man, using only the slightest effort, twisted off the lid and placed the pot on the soft coyote hide right in front of Leather Hand.
Frowning, he peered down into the depths of the empty pot. The black interior was shiny. Unnaturally shiny. Then he looked around the chamber. None of the thlatsinas responded. They didn’t even seem to be awake. And the soul pots on the shelves didn’t so much as whisper.
“There’s nothing in it.”
“True.”
Rage filled Leather Hand. “But her soul was supposed to be locked inside!”
“It was a good ruse, wasn’t it?” the man said with a smile. “But she did give me a message for you. She wanted you to know that all the old debts will be paid tonight. Including the debt she owes you for locking her in the bear cage.”
Fear was building just below Leather Hand’s pounding heart. All the stories he’d heard over the summers … He should have known instantly who this man was. It surprised him that he had not. But here he was face-to-face with a legend.
“You’re Maicoh, aren’t you? The real Maicoh?”
The old man smiled and respectfully tipped his head to the man standing outside Leather Hand’s door. “His brother. My parents, Cornsilk and Poor Singer, named me Snowbird.”
Leather Hand’s gaze strayed to the man in the moonlight. He stood unmoving out there, his corpse-like face shining. Like a coiled rattlesnake in the grass, he seemed to be waiting for some signal.
“Get out! Get out!” Leather Hand screamed hoarsely. “Leave me alone! Guards! Where are my guards? Stinger!”
Rather than lunging forward to kill Leather Hand, as he’d expected, Snowbird rose, bowed with great deference, and backed to the doorway, where he stepped outside to speak softly with Maicoh. Two black silhouettes standing tall against the silver-dusted sky. At any instant, Leather Hand expected Maicoh to enter his chamber with a shining obsidian blade in his hand.
He heard Snowbird say, “Are they away?”
“Yes, I saw them running up the north road.”
“They know where to meet us?”
“They do.”
Both men walked out of Leather Hand’s line of sight.
He waited. How long? It felt endless.
They did not return.
Gods! Leather Hand could not believe it. He was still alive! What trickery was this? Sucking in a shuddering breath, he struggled to slow his thundering heart. Why would the great witch hunter have worked so hard to get close enough to Leather Hand to kill him, and then just walk away?
Impossible.
Unless … Maybe that was not Maicoh at all? Just another ruse …
As he calmed himself, he blinked around the chamber, and his gaze returned to the empty soul pot.
In the tumult, it had rolled to its side and the interior faced him like a round black circle. The shape was perfectly outlined by the meager red glow of the firebowl behind it. He reached out and picked it up.
“Think you’ve had the last laugh, old witch?” he growled into the bowl. “Just wait until I track down your adopted daughter. That little girl you brought with you from Cahokia. What was her name?” Leather Hand mulled it over in his mind. “Disappeared right after I had you killed. When I became Blessed Sun she was no longer important, but now … Ah yes. Her name was Orenda. I remem—”
Sandals again.
Then the dark cloying fragrance of datura blossoms blew through the chamber, but that was not unusual. The trumpet-like flowers bloomed long into the autumn. What was odd were the shadows clinging to the rim of the pot. Like oil droplets in water, the black clots combined, slid around, and separated at will. What could cause that? Perhaps clouds drifting through the moonlight …
Fabric whispered across the floor like the trailing hem of a woman’s dress. He swung around to search for the source. Nothing. Nothing there.
But when he returned his gaze to the soul pot, a hot tingle lanced his heart.
“What is that?”
In the black depths of the Wellpot, a tiny red dagger floated. Just like the thing he’d seen rising from the Black Ogre’s throat!
Drawing back his arm, he heaved the pot at the wall, hoping to shatter the cursed artifact. The pot struck the middle of the Black Ogres and seemed to stick there, as though the Ogre had caught it in his free hand. The pot remained there, suspended for several heartbeats, before it fell, thumped onto the floor, and rolled in a curious spiral. When it halted its circling, the round black hole faced Leather Hand again.
The odd clots reappeared and transformed into pure black stair steps. Far down the throat of what appeared to be a tunnel, he saw her approaching, climbing up with her red dress swaying around her long legs.
When she fully materialized outside the pot, Leather Hand felt true terror for the first time in over thirty summers. He gaped at her. He’d only known her as a shriveled old woman, but the tall, slender beauty before him was young. Long black hair draped her shoulders like a silken mantle.
“You were in the pot,” he rasped. “It wasn’t empty!”
A thin smile touched her lips. “No, I wasn’t. I was sitting around the campfires of the dead with Badgertail.” She turned and placed a hand over the heart of the Black Ogre that had caught the pot, as though to thank the beast. “It’s spring in the Land of the Dead. I hated to leave. The wild plum trees are in full blossom, and Badgertail was in the middle of a funny story that made me laugh.”
Leather Hand was afraid to move. Though he had convinced people that he was the greatest witch ever to have lived, he knew it wasn’t true. She was. As a boy, he’d heard hundreds of stories about her. When she was a little girl in Talon Town, she was forever locked in her own soul, talking to Spirits no one else could see. Despite the fact that her mother, Yarrow, had been the Keeper of the Tortoise Bundle, it had never spoken to her. No, only that bizarre little girl had heard the Bundle’s voice. The secrets they had whispered together …
As Nightshade lowered her hand, her smile faded, and she continued her slow journey around the chamber, past the wall covered with the footprints of the dead. When she stopped before the magnificent image of Cold Bringing Woman, reverence washed over Nightshade’s ethereal face. “The Blessed Ancestors tell me your reign begins tonight and will last for more than three hundred sun cycles. Terrible sun cycles where people will starve, plagues will run wild, and vast expanses of Mother Earth will become vacant wastelands. They say it’s necessary to cleanse the world of evil.” She gazed up into the beast’s red eyes and tenderly said, “Long live Cold Bringing Woman.”
Nightshade stood like that for several heartbeats before silently walking to kneel before the pile of belongings on the floor. Leather Hand watched her sort through them—something he had planned to do in the morning. She seemed to float above the floor and, at times, he could see campfires through her body. It occurred to him that maybe she was only half here. Or she might not
be here at all, but just another of the fantastic figments that stalked him.
“I heard that after you were stolen away to live among the Mound Builders in Cahokia, you became a legendary priestess. Is it true? Heard everyone there was terrified of you.”
She moved a belt pouch and reached for a pack. As she dragged it over, she replied, “Not everyone.”
Leather Hand watched her, curious. What was she searching for? “Will you remove your curse?”
She had her back to him, feeling inside the pack. “I remember the bear cage. Do you?”
Leather Hand chuckled. “Oh yes. It was very amusing. People came from everywhere to pitch feces at you. You were so covered with it no one could even recognize you. People said they’d never smelled anything as bad in their lives.”
Almost too low to hear, she said, “Then that dark, dark room. And the lance thrust through my middle, pinning me to the floor. Took a long time for me to die.”
“Of course I remember. I still go down there to laugh at your bones. Don’t you know that? I thought the soul that remained in your bones would have told you.” Drawing in a breath, he watched for a time before he repeated, “Will you remove your curse? Or shall I hunt down your adopted daughter?”
She didn’t even react to the question, as though she hadn’t heard him.
Methodically, she pulled tiny pairs of moccasins from the pack and clutched them to her heart as though she’d known the children whose feet had once pattered around the house in those moccasins.
“Answer me, Mountain Witch!”
Rising, she carried the moccasins to the shelves of soul pots, where she gently placed one pair beneath the feet of each of the strange clay dolls, as though the dolls were wearing them.
“Your breath-heart soul, Blessed Sun, has another destiny,” she replied at last. “Long into the future, it will be dug from the earth by another. I pray he listens to his elders and buries it in a deep dark hole.”
“That’s unacceptable! I must travel to the afterlife to be with my ancestors when I die! I don’t wish to be locked in a serpent fetish—”
“After all you’ve done, all the people who’ve suffered at your hands, how can you demand anything from the gods?”
She lifted her fingers and left them hovering for a moment over the tiniest soul pot. “Are you ready, Zihna?” she whispered and listened to a voice Leather Hand could not hear. “Oh, don’t be scared. Your mother and sisters will be with you.”
Grasping the tiny pot, Nightshade cracked it open like an egg. A dart of foxfire, threadlike and silver, leapt from the broken pot into the doll standing beside it, and the doll glowed suddenly, casting a halo of golden light upon the wall at its back.
Leather Hand whispered, “They are houses for the dead?”
Nightshade refused to answer.
Instead, she silently broke open the other three pots to set the souls free to fly into the dolls. The halos of light that swelled around them fluttered with eerie brilliance. The last doll on the right blazed brighter than all the others.
Nightshade lightly touched it. “Moon Mother is bright tonight. You’ll have no trouble leading your daughters to the Star Road. People who love you are waiting for you.”
One by one, the dolls, shod in their oversized moccasins, leaped from the shelf and melted into nothingness. They just vanished in the air as though they’d never been.
Leather Hand’s heart thundered. “Let me follow them! I’m ready to go. I must—”
“The Blessed Flute Player says no, and your ancestors say no. They believe you will pollute the Land of the Dead with your arrogance.”
While Leather Hand roared and futilely shook his fists in the air, Nightshade walked down the line of soul pots to Leather Hand’s favorite pot, the black one with white zigzags of lightning, and pulled it from the shelf.
As she stroked it she said, “Forgive me, Spots. Dear friend, I did not know the suffering my last request would cause you.”
Lifting the pot high into the air, she hurled it to the floor, where it shattered. Sherds bounced and careened across the chamber, twirling in midair as though alive and dancing to joyous music Leather Hand could not hear. A ball of light coalesced from the fragments, hung weightless in the air for an instant, as though communing with Nightshade, then leisurely floated out into the moonlight and shot heavenward.
He waited breathlessly to see what Nightshade would do next, but she just stood there, staring at him with narrowed eyes.
For what seemed an eternity, silence held the world in its palm, then Leather Hand’s heart fluttered. He grabbed for his chest. As he fell forward, he tried to break his fall with his hands, but couldn’t and collapsed onto his side. All around him, throughout his chamber, the campfires of the dead blazed, and he saw shadowy figures walking around them.
“Let me go with you!”
Nightshade turned away and gracefully walked back into the Land of the Dead, where she sat upon the ground beside the muscular tattooed warrior who was still telling stories to his smiling ancestors. Blossom-laden trees swayed in the firelit background, sending wind-twirled petals to fall around them.
For one shining moment, Leather Hand thought the clarity of the vision might be an invitation to join them, and he struggled to sit up …
Then the campfires faded, and his chamber spread around him like a dark icy tomb.
Maicoh and Snowbird, who’d been standing outside his chamber, entered, and Snowbird went straight to the coyote hides to pick up the serpent fetish.
Maicoh collected the other belongings. As he tied the old leather bag with the faded blue wolf painted on the front to his belt, he said, “I’ll get the Wellpot.”
“No,” Snowbird sighed in a tired voice. “Her holy crusade is over. She can truly rest now. And, soon, so can we all. Leave it.”
Snowbird walked to the rack of soul pots still resting in lines on their shelves. When he stood before them, faint breathless cries seeped from the pots. “Shh. It’s all right.”
One by one, the old man gently broke open each of Leather Hand’s precious soul pots. The imprisoned dead flashed, then leaped from the sherds like blazing flames and shot across the chamber out into the night. Leather Hand could see them flying away, streaking through the dark sky toward the Star Road.
He was … having trouble … couldn’t seem to get air …
When his heart slammed his ribs one monstrous time and stopped, he foolishly kept waiting for it to start beating again. Instead, he felt the blood in his veins stop flowing. What an odd sensation. He was instantly cold, very cold. How was it possible that his eyes continued to see and his ears to hear?
“Why don’t we just leave the evil fetish?” Maicoh said.
Snowbird turned the tiny black serpent so that it reflected the moonlight with a pewter radiance. “Because I must hand-carry it to another who lives far to the north. She will be the new Keeper.”
After a short pause: “All right. Your choice.”
“No, Ravenfire,” Snowbird softly replied. “Those are my instructions.”
Ravenfire? Ravenfire!
As his vision faded, Leather Hand saw his son-in-law, the man he’d kept imprisoned for thirteen long summers, leave his chamber with his brother and walk away across the moonlit rooftop to the ladder that led down to the plaza. They stopped for only a moment to look out at the majesty of Flowing Waters Town, before they climbed down and disappeared into the silvered darkness beyond.
Fifty-four
Blue Dove
I tiptoe around my father’s body, wondering if he’s truly dead. Looks dead. His toothless mouth gapes and his eyes are wide open; he seems to be staring at the hundreds of potsherds that cover the floor like a thick layer of multicolored autumn leaves.
“Father?”
Nothing.
Bending over him, I squint at his slack face. “Father, are you dead?”
Not a muscle twitches.
I kick him in the ribs, and it hurts my
foot. He’s rigid as a frozen board.
“Well…”
Elation washes through me. As I enjoy the sensation, I look around the chamber that will soon be mine.
The black pot—Nightshade’s Wellpot—rests along the far wall. Looks like he hurled it against the Black Ogres, for the pot rests at their feet. Odd that it did not break. In the pale pink light of dawn streaming through the doorway, the interior shines with a rosy hue.
Cub and Stinger stand outside, speaking with Weevil and Wasp Moth. Not one of the men has been brave enough to step into this bewitched chamber.
Only me.
And even I must admit there is a ghostly breathless aura here that stirs terror in my souls. Part of it is the shattered soul pots.
I turn and walk to the door, step outside, and announce, “You were right, Cub. He’s definitely dead.”
Father Sun is still below the horizon, but the drifting clouds are radiant. The terraced levels of Flowing Waters Town cast blocky shadows across the plaza below where the White Moccasins huddle together, speaking in low speculative voices. A few other people have risen and move about town in unnatural silence. News of the Blessed Sun’s possible demise is already flying from chamber to chamber. Soon crowds will gather, and I will have to answer a thousand boring questions.
Cub’s eyes tighten. “You rule now, Blessed daughter. At least until you marry. What are your commands?”
Marry? A ridiculous thought.
“What killed my father? Do you know?”
Cub shrugs. “Personally, I think his heart simply gave out.”
“You do not believe it was witchery?”
“No.” He shakes his head.
I turn. “High War Chief Stinger? What is your assessment?”
As Stinger’s scars move with his thoughts, they resemble shiny white worms writhing in some death dance. “I agree with the Sunwatcher. He was an old man. He lived a very long life.”
Wasp Moth and Weevil both stand with their shoulders hunched, as though fearing I will ask them their opinions. If they disagree with the High War Chief, their severed heads are likely to become kickballs in some game of chance.
People of the Canyons Page 29