“People have told me that before. Didn’t believe it then, don’t now.”
“That, or you have a death wish.”
“Not particularly.”
“I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. For my part in bringing you to this.”
“Do you know the most terrible day of my life?”
“When Red Wing Town fell.”
“No.”
She raised her head, looking at him with that intensity he could feel more than see in the darkness.
“It was the day you married that Itza lord. Nothing—not the death of my children, the loss of Red Wing Town, or even the fear I felt in the darkness in that cave when the terrors of the Underworld hovered around me—was so terrible. But for the thief…” He shook his head, laughed in a vain attempt to make light of it.
“It was my duty to my clan.”
“I know.”
“We beat him, though, didn’t we?”
“We did.”
“Together,” she said thoughtfully.
“Together.”
“You know how much I would give to leave all of this behind?”
“I do.”
“I was cursed. It began the moment I was born. It’s because of who I have to be. Maybe, if we can kill my brother, it will be enough of a balance, a sacrifice to Power, that you and I can make a new life.”
“Maybe.”
She placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, yawned, and climbed to her feet. Looking out into the darkness off to one side, she said, “Yes, Lord. I am thinking about it. Wondering what price I would have to pay, and if it would hurt more than living this way.”
“What is the beast saying?”
“Just meddling,” she told him as she walked off into the night. “Like he usually does.”
Meddling in what? But he knew from her tone of voice she’d never tell him.
It didn’t usually help matters when he tried to understand what went on between his lady and the Spirit monster who owned her.
Tossing a stick out into the dark water, he stood, clawed at the mosquitoes so they’d be as out of sorts as he was, and turned his steps toward camp. There, he knew he’d spend the night aching to hold her. Satisfied to know that she slept but an arm’s length away, and that he would be there if she needed him.
A Tedious Predictability
One would think that warriors, of all people, would have an oaklike grain of fortitude within their flinty hides. After all, they march out, blood in their hearts, death in their eyes, as they form up behind their shields to face the arrows and war clubs of the enemy. These are the wielders of pain and death. Not the sort to give in to night terrors or show the slightest squeamish side of their natures.
The Joara Clan House, hardly to my surprise, was vacated within moments of my arrival. Seriously, I just entered the place, picked a sleeping bench in the back, and had Fire Light’s runners place my box and basket. The other five occupants whispered, “Lightning Shell!” back and forth a few times as they hastily threw their things together and rushed for the door. One—apparently bunked next to me—didn’t even bother to pick up his blankets. He just hurried out. Made warding signs with his fingers the entire time. Must have had a guilty conscience.
I spent that first night pleasantly alone, listening to the warriors singing over at the Men’s House a couple of structures to the east. They were involved in some kind of ritual. Along with the drumming and flute music one had a particularly fine baritone voice.
I found it irritating, therefore, that the following night, the Men’s House was dark. That it remained that way thereafter. I asked Fire Light about it, and he told me that though there was no threat in the country thereabout, the war leader had taken his squadron for a “patrol of the mountains,” whatever that meant.
Which brings me back to Fire Light.
He only shows up after dark. On this, the fifth night, he comes in the company of a large-boned and rather scurrilous-looking fellow with a sack of something over his shoulder. At the door, he calls a cautious, “Soul Flier? Hello?”
Indeed. Soul Flier? At first, I’m puzzled and amused, but when I think about it, does he really want to stand at the door and call, “Hello? Witch? Are you there?”
Not that I think of myself as a witch. I’ve always considered witches to be those narrow self-serving individuals who are bent on creating havoc, seeking to fulfill only their personal lust for aggrandizement, authority, and personal gain.
I don’t need aggrandizement. I already know I am born to a higher calling: that of remaking the world.
For the sake of the moment, I slip my shell mask over my face. The mask is made from a large half of a whelk shell. Triangular in shape, it has eye holes, an incised nose, and a round hole for a mouth. It hangs on my head by means of a thong over the top and another around the sides. Wearing it gives my face a ghostly, pale look, and I have carved the zigzag symbols of lightning under the eyes and down the cheeks. It almost resembles the scar patterns.
I toss another couple of branches onto the fire and take a position behind it. Only when I have my cloak hanging just so with the flames casting dancing light over my body do I say, “Enter!”
Fire Light comes first, and behind him, nervous to the bones, comes the burly fellow. Maybe a Trader, but certainly not a warrior. He has the kind of crude face that could be fashioned out of a stump. The forehead sort of slopes into the cheeks—a broad face, with almost no setback for the eyes. His nose is a flat and wide thing like a rolled-on triangle, nostrils are two round holes. Jaw and chin made to match.
His eyes flick back and forth, going everywhere but in my direction. He stoops and lays a large thick-weave burlap sack on the floor. As soon as he does, he touches the top of his forehead and he’s gone. Big feet thumping on the matting as he rushes out the door and into the night.
On the floor, the bag is shifting and squirming, muffled whimpers and cries coming from within.
“Two,” Fire Light announces. “As you asked.”
He pauses, looks slightly sick. “It wouldn’t do to have them talking. I mean, you know, shouting for help. Calling for their parents. That sort of thing.”
I can tell that my mask, my silence, is really eating into him. Like when he was a boy, Fire Light can be read the way a recorder can read a string of beads.
In a detached voice, I say, “I don’t think that will be a problem.”
“Good.” He claps his hands together. “Now, I’ve taken your word that you can get me back to Cahokia. If it turned out … Well, you know. It wouldn’t make me happy. Especially after going to such lengths. Taking the kind of risks involved in … Well, you know.” He gestures toward the squirming sack on the floor.
What sounds like weeping can be heard through the coarsely woven cloth.
I ignore his words, stepping over for my little-girl’s-skull cup. Retrieving it, I bend down by the fire and dip it into the pot that contains steaming sassafras tea. This I offer to Fire Light. “Drink?”
He is staring wide-eyed at the cup, cut halfway through the eye sockets as it is. The dull ivory color of the bone looks almost ruddy in the firelight.
“No, thank you, Soul Flier.”
“I am not a soul flier. That’s for the likes of those who can send their souls into the Underworld, or up into the Sky World in search of the Spirits. Me, I have only ridden the lightning.”
I reach up and touch the zigzagging lines on the cheek of my mask. “It left me marked, you see. Imbued with its Power. It speaks to me. Tells me things from around the world.
“For example—and the reason behind why I needed your help procuring the little darlings in that sack—someone is coming to Cofitachequi. Someone Powerful, filled with Underworld Spirit. She is coming for me. Thinks she’s going to destroy me, pull my corpse down into the Underworld where Piasa can rip me limb from limb, tear my stomach open and devour my intestines like a robin sucks a worm from damp soil.”
Fire Ligh
t swallows hard. “I see.”
“No, you don’t. I hope to keep her from making it this far.”
“Her?”
“What makes you think that only males are gifted with Power?”
“I, uh…”
“When you take your report back to Sharp Path, tell the orata that I am in the process of doing everything in my Power to keep this woman from arriving here. I have no desire to fight this out in Joara, especially if I can destroy her on the way.”
This is all a lie, of course. I would love nothing better than to get Night Shadow Star here, alone, and defenseless. She and I have unfinished business from those last moments in the canoe. I feel my penis harden at the mere thought of her.
“How can you do that, Soul … er, Lord?”
I gesture to the sack that is bunching, shifting, and twisting on the floor. “There are ways of striking across distance, just as there are ways of seeing. Power, however, needs to be fed. Life is filled with Spirit, and that energy can be harnessed to a purpose. I can’t conjure something from nothing.”
I pause, knowing full well how to torment my dear cousin. “Understand. If I lose this, you have a long and happy life to look forward to right here in Cofitachequi. It’s not that bad of a place. I’ve traveled most of it. In the event I fail, you should consider it not an exile, but a remarkable opportunity that…” I tilt my head curiously. “What? I see that expression on your face.”
He struggles, futilely, to hide his horror. “Let’s just see that you win then, Lord.”
“Help me, and I will accompany you back to Cahokia. Personally take you with me. You will walk at my side as we ascend the Grand Staircase to the Morning Star’s palace.”
He is about as keen to share my company as he would be to clutch a full-grown water moccasin to his breast. But he hides it well, even plastering a cheery smile onto his face. It doesn’t go all the way to his eyes.
“Anything I can do to help, please call on me.”
I incline my head. “We sit right on the Trade route from the sea to the head of the Wide Fast, the Tenasee, and the whole of the world.”
“Yes.”
“If you should happen to stumble across some Traders? You know, the kind who really don’t spend their nights agonizing over the Power of Trade? You might send them to me. I would be willing to make them rich, drowning-in-copper-shell-and-property rich. But they have to be the right kind of men. Um, not the sort you would invite into your palace, but the kind who still know the river. Maybe the sort who are traveling to this part of the world because they can’t stay back in theirs. You see what I mean?”
Fire Light chews on his lips for a moment, a churning behind his eyes. “I think I do, Lord.”
“Last offer of a drink.” I extend the cup his way again.
“No, thank you, Lord. Um, I should be going. Thank you again.”
And with that he turns, doing his best to pretend he isn’t hurrying for the door.
After he leaves, I lift my shell mask, take a drink of sassafras tea and let the taste, sweetened with honeysuckle nectar, run over my tongue. What a remarkably refreshing drink. And it always puts me into a good mood.
Then, lowering my mask again, I step over, drag the bag back past the fire, and untie the knot.
The fabric falls away from two little girls, maybe four and five, their hair mussed. They look like sisters. Their eyes are huge, dark pupils overwhelming the brown irises. Both are gagged with knots of cloth, and the cords eat deeply into their round cheeks.
At the sight of me, they try to scream into their gags. It sounds like rabbits being crushed under a too-large boulder.
I pull the older of the two up onto her feet, bound as they are at the ankles. The knot that holds her skirt up surrenders to my first tug and the slip of home-woven fabric falls away to leave her naked and terrified. Her squealing into the gag is almost comical.
“Well, dear one. You need not fear. I have yet to meet a people who don’t believe that everyone who has a name also has a soul. And everyone knows the soul continues after death. So, whatever happens tonight, it’s not like you will cease to be.”
With that said, I reach for my knife.
The muffled squealing gets louder and louder.
Thirty-five
“Time to go now.” Piasa’s voice came as a whisper. Night Shadow Star could feel the Spirit Beast’s breath against her ear as she jerked her eyes awake to the night.
It took her a moment to realize where she was: the Traders’ camp. An abandoned village called Maygrass Town.
A cool breeze blew the last of the clouds from the moon’s face as she sat up, peered out from under the cover of the hides draped on the pole frame overhead.
She took a deep breath, hearing the crickets and insects on the warm night. The perfume of spring flowers carried on the somnolent breeze, mixed as it was with the scents of water, mud, and freshly leafed-out vegetation.
She glanced at where Fire Cat lay sound asleep in his blankets, fought the impulse to reach out and reassure herself by touching him.
The fire popped in the hearth, the faintest red glow around the bottom of the boiling pot that rested at the edge of the coals to stay warm.
“You must leave now!”
Piasa flickered at the edge of her vision, but when she turned her head, he’d already vanished into the shadows.
“Got to go now,” an ethereal voice insisted from air around her. “They are coming.”
She reached out with a foot and shoved Fire Cat. “We have to go.”
In an instant he was awake, reaching for his weapons. “Trouble?”
“A warning from the Spirits. Piasa is most insistent.”
“Thought you and he weren’t on the best of terms these days.”
“We’re not.”
But she didn’t dare tell him the thoughts that had possessed her as they’d traveled farther and farther from Cahokia and all that its environs had meant to her. She’d keep the torture of her temptation to herself. No sense in adding to the burdens he’d already assumed on her account.
The Spirit Beast knew that she balanced on the fine edge of betrayal. Even as she thought it, she could hear her Spirit master’s hiss of displeasure.
“What do you know of sacrifice, Lord?” she muttered to the dark as she stood and began rolling her blanket.
“What are we doing?” Fire Cat asked, crawling out of his bedding.
“We’re leaving. Wake the others.”
“It’s not even midnight,” Fire Cat protested as he glanced up at the position of the stars in the moonlit sky. “You want to take your chances on the river? In the dark? You know the dangers, floats of driftwood, half-sunken logs.”
“Piasa will warn us if there’s trouble,” she lied, hoping the malicious beast would accede to her wish since she was giving in to his.
“The Traders are not going to like it.”
“It’s been five days, Fire Cat. We’re rested, you’ve killed two deer, we’ve caught fish, Half Root’s been diving for freshwater clams, it is time we got back to our duty.”
“Right.” He promptly began rolling his bedding and taking down their shelter.
The others complained, even after Fire Cat threatened them. With grumbles, much stumbling about in the darkness, and no little confusion as things were remembered at the last moment, Red Reed was ultimately shoved into the current. Taking paddles, they got under way. White Mat was in his usual position in the bow, paddling shoulder to shoulder with Shedding Bird.
“It’s too dark. Hard to see the thread of the current,” Half Root groused.
“If Piasa woke Night Shadow Star out of a sound sleep,” Fire Cat told them, “it was for a reason.”
“You put a lot of faith in the lady’s visions,” Made Man muttered.
“When you’ve lived in the shadow of Power for as long as I have, seen the things I have seen, you’ll understand,” he answered.
“I think we do,” Half Root said
from the stern. “Downright spooky the way she gets when she hears the voices. Sees all those flashes of light and flickers of movement that we don’t.”
“Half the time we’re in awe,” Mixed Shell said softly. “The rest of the time we’re more than a little scared. Like when she gets that vacant look, sways, her hands in her lap and all filled with visions.”
“We mean no offense, Lady,” Half Root added quickly.
As Night Shadow Star paddled, she said, “It’s no blessing to be half in the Spirit World. I would Trade my Power to live your lives in an instant. You could have it all, the palaces, the wealth, the prestige and servants, the knowledge that you have been chosen because of your birth to be the tool of Underworld Power. In return I could simply be myself, unmolested by voices, free of everyone else’s expectations. No one would be hunting me to make me marry a man I didn’t want. I wouldn’t have to cross half the known world to kill a brother who’s as twisted and evil as any man alive.”
“Thanks, Lady,” Half Root replied. “I think we’ll just stay happy being ourselves.”
“That’s the smart bargain,” Fire Cat told them. “Get us to your town at the Mussel Shallows, and you’ll be the stuff of legends for the rest of your lives. Think of the stories you’ll be able to tell of the time you took Lady Night Shadow Star of Cahokia on the epic journey to her confrontation with Walking Smoke.”
“Assuming we don’t get capsized by a sunken log first because we can’t see the slick it makes on the surface,” White Mat replied.
Night Shadow Star chuckled softly. “I don’t think Piasa will let that happen.” Not yet anyway. “He wants me in Cofitachequi. He’s not going to let anything interfere with that. Until I’m face to face with my brother, you can be assured that this journey has Power on its side.”
“Hope you’re right, Lady,” Mixed Shell told her.
They had progressed down the channel of the Sand River, could see the open water of the Tenasee at the confluence. And there, on the sliver of beach exposed by the falling water, lay five canoes. Three fires had burned low. The dark forms of men sleeping in blankets could be discerned on the pale sand.
Star Path--People of Cahokia Page 22