Star Path--People of Cahokia

by W. Michael Gear

  Arriving at the Great Plaza, he’d been delighted to note that the warriors who spent their days watching Night Shadow Star’s palace were gone. Where they’d usually stood, a boy—maybe in his early teens—now sat, butt just shy of the sloping side of Morning Star’s great mound. The kid was playing in the dirt, drawing figures with his fingertip and glancing periodically up at the Piasa and Horned Serpent guardian posts where they frowned down on the avenue.

  Never one to take things for granted, Seven Skull Shield studied all sides, found no one suspicious, and with relief, pounded up the steps.

  He gave the perfunctory salute to Piasa and Horned Serpent and snapped a “No, you don’t” as Farts started to hoist his leg on Horned Serpent’s post.

  He dropped his basket of rags on the veranda and strode in the door, calling, “The wandering thief has returned! Was I missed?”

  “I had a boil on my neck once,” Green Stick called from the back of the room where he used a thumbnail to peel the tough outer skin off a small wild onion, the first of which had started to show up in the plaza markets. “I missed you about as much as I missed that boil after Rides-the-Lightning lanced and drained it. I used to spend my nights saying, ‘I sure wish I had that boil back.’ And I did it in the same voice as I say, ‘I sure wish that shiftless thief would come back.’”

  “Do you know the difference between you and dog shit?” Seven Skull Shield asked. “No? It’s the dog.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Think it through, Green Stick. Where are the rest?”

  “Winter Leaf and Clay Stick are gone for water and firewood. I was just—”

  “Seven Skull Shield!” Willow Blossom cried as she appeared in the doorway leading back to Night Shadow Star’s personal quarters. She tossed a folded blanket onto the Red Wing’s bed and came at a run, throwing her arms around Seven Skull Shield, clamping her body tightly to his.

  “That’s what I call a welcome,” he greeted, lifting her off her feet and whirling her around. “I have so missed you. Figured it was worth the risk.” He cast an eye at the stewpot, adding, “Farts, get away from that.”

  The big dog dropped on his butt, scratching at a persistent flea, mournful eyes on Seven Skull Shield. It might have been the ultimate betrayal.

  Seven Skull Shield set Willow Blossom down, taking the moment to savor the happiness in her eyes, and yes, it was back, that sparkling joy that said she was delighted to see him. The smile was on her full lips, a radiant excitement in her expression and in the way she held him.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he told her. “Through the day and filling my dreams at night, you are always there. I want you to come away with me.”

  “Away? From here?”

  “It won’t be much. Not at first. I’ve been talking with Flat Stone Pipe. There is a farmstead out west of Evening Star Town. It’s got a good house on it, water in a creek just down the slope. Nice soil for a garden. Peaceful. I Traded a beautiful redstone eagle effigy pipe for the place. I tell you, it will be perfect. No one will think to look for me there, and in a couple of moons they will have forgotten all about me.”

  “A farmstead?” The dullness only flickered behind her eyes for a heartbeat, and then she broke out in laughter, the sparkle back. “Of course! Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”

  She broke free of his arms, turned, and told Green Stick, “You promised.”

  “Promised what?” Seven Skull Shield asked.

  “He promised me that the next time you showed up, he, Winter Leaf, and Clay String would leave. Give us a couple of hands of time alone.”

  Green Stick tossed the last of the onions into the stewpot, scooped up the skins, and consigned them to the fire. “Of course, he’d show up at the most inconvenient moment. It’s not like I didn’t have ten tens of things to do today. Or like Winter Leaf and Clay String won’t be back with their wood and water anytime soon.”

  “So, go watch a stickball game,” Seven Skull Shield told the man with a wave of the hand. “Wasn’t it you complaining that you never had the time to watch a game all the way through? That Duck Clan team from over east is playing a Snapping Turtle team from down at Horned Serpent Town this afternoon. I heard talk of it all the way from River Mounds. People are wagering a fortune.”

  Clapping his hands to free them of clinging onion, Green Stick gave a mighty sigh. “Very well. Guess we know what you two are doing while we’re out and about. You going to be gone for that farmstead by the time we get back?”

  “Might,” Willow Blossom called gaily. “Can’t wait to see it. But it depends on how distracted we get in the meantime. Might wait until morning to leave.”

  “Enthusiasm is nice, and the vigor of youth is wonderful, but don’t break the bed strapping,” Green Stick muttered as he grabbed up his cloak and headed for the door.

  A feral excitement had filled Willow Blossom’s eyes as she stared up at Seven Skull Shield. Her quick fingers slipped past his breechcloth, grabbing his shaft. He sucked a breath as she squeezed.

  “Why don’t you pull those ugly clothes off. Make the bed ready. Me, I’m going to check that he’s really gone.” She turned, almost skipping out the door to the top of the stairs between the guardian posts.

  Seven Skull Shield watched her wave, make a sign with her hand. Must have been some curious good-bye to Green Stick.

  He had slipped out of his cloak, shirt, and breechcloth by the time she had returned to set the door so that it blocked the view from outside.

  Farts had flopped on his side by the fire, filled his lungs, and vented one of those canine sighs of resignation.

  Willow Blossom slithered out of her skirt as she crossed the matting and pulled the pins to let her silky black hair cascade down her back. She struck a pose, let him enjoy the perfect symmetry of her body, and then leaped on top of him where he had reclined in her bed.

  Maybe Green Stick was right to worry. Willow Blossom’s exuberance did strain the bed straps, but they held. Though it had to be a close-run thing.

  He’d barely caught his wind when she managed to tease his shaft to attention again. This time he slowed her, savored the sensations of her body against his. Yes, he could spend the rest of his life enjoying this woman. She had him …

  The only warning was Farts’ growl. Seven Skull Shield was barely aware when the dog stood as Willow Blossom tightened around him. Squealed with delight.

  He glanced over as the door was thrust wide.

  Warriors, in a stream, burst through the door, charging across the floor.

  Seven Skull Shield tried to throw Willow Blossom to the side, but she clung to him, arms and legs wrapped desperately around his body.

  A hollow-sounding blow was accompanied by a yelp, and Farts streaked for the door, three warriors hot after him, swinging war clubs the whole way.

  Seven Skull Shield bellowed his rage, still trapped by Willow Blossom’s clinging body. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t fling her off. Might hurt her. And the poor woman was just terrified.

  Stuck as he was, Seven Skull Shield watched the ring of warriors close around the bed. Never, ever had he felt so trapped, helpless, or frustrated.

  “All right,” the big warrior with the stone-headed club said. “You can let loose of him now.”

  Willow Blossom scrambled away, slipping between the warriors to collect her skirt and cloak. “I’ve kept my part of the bargain. Now it’s time for the Keeper to keep his.” She tossed her head to throw her tousled hair back.

  Seven Skull Shield gaped, staring at her where she stood behind the warriors. “You what?”

  “Oh, come on. A farmstead? After everything I’ve done to get this far?”

  At her words, he leaped. Might have had a chance, but the straps gave way under the strain. His legs and butt crashed down between the bedframe and the wall.

  They were on him like flies on fresh dung. He howled, flailing, but his struggles were cut short by a clipping blow to the head that left him s
tunned, his ears ringing, and his vision blurred with little stars of light dancing before them.

  His last memory was of Willow Blossom saying, “Bet he’ll never forget his last moments with me.”

  Forty-seven

  Winder proved as good as his word, employing a Muskogean team of five brothers from Mussel Midden village. The small Muskogean band—mostly Albaamaha intermarried with some Koasati—had built their village on a terrace at the head of Mussel Shallows. In a remarkably light-hulled canoe loaded with Night Shadow Star and Fire Cat’s possessions and Trade they made their way past the shallows at the mouth of the Elk River and on into the “pond.”

  The exiled Cahokian Trader hadn’t lied when he talked about his expertise on the river. From Night Shadow Star’s perspective—city-bound as her life had been—Winder came across as having been everywhere. At night, seated at the cook fire, he told wondrous stories of Yellow Star Mounds in the distant west, of the lower Father Water, and the nations who lived there. He claimed to have been on the Gulf, to have Traded down the peninsula, to have traveled the Mother Water to its headwaters and Traded with the Haudenosaunee.

  While Night Shadow Star might not have been to those places, she was familiar with those distant locales. Not only had she been present as Traders and embassies described them in the Council House, but she was passingly familiar with the maps and records, the latter woven into shell-beaded mats. It all sounded just the way she’d always heard. Odd, but now that she’d been on the rivers, a part of her was jealous. She envied Winder the depth and breadth of his travels.

  “Imagine going to all those places,” she’d told Fire Cat that night after they made love. “Think of the sights, the people, the places.”

  “Changes the way you’ve always thought of the world, doesn’t it?”

  While her nights might have been filled with dreams of faraway peoples and nations, Night Shadow Star’s days were consumed with paddling, her thoughts invaded by the soft whispers of voices in the air around her. Flickers of light, fleeting glimpses of movement at the corner of her eye, fragments of images tried to distract her from the river and the chore of driving the canoe upriver.

  If there was any solace, it was that after a hasty supper cooked by the Albaamaha men, she could wrap herself around Fire Cat’s warm body beneath their robes. Each time they joined it was with a gentle desperation, as if they understood that time was not on their side. That each mating of their bodies made up for the lost past and served as hope against a fragile and uncertain future.

  The thought This is too good to last kept whispering in the silence between Night Shadow Star’s souls.

  They knew each other now. Had learned each other’s secrets. Fire Cat proved to be a most remarkable lover, had discovered how to use his shaft just so, delay his emission until he could coax her loins into a series of tingling explosions.

  “Are you a perfect man?” she asked, her arms wrapped around him as mosquitoes hummed above their bed. The little beasts were put off by a mixture of puccoon root, sassafras root extract, and well-smoked blanket.

  “No. Just lucky,” he told her.

  After a pause, he asked, “What do you think of Winder?”

  “He’s a curiosity. A blend of competence, craftiness, and honor. I don’t—for so much as a heartbeat—doubt that he’s playing his own game. That somehow he knows more than he lets on. It’s in the way he looks at me.”

  “I know how he looks at you. And then at me. The man is envious every time we retreat to the blankets. That Yuchi wife of his back in Big Cane Town? She was a beauty, but the moment he fixed on you … Let’s just say my first impulse was to club him in the head.”

  “Like Seven Skull Shield?”

  “He and Winder, they’re two of the same kind.”

  “Winder and the thief grew up together. You can see it, the similarity, I mean. Makes you wonder, did Seven Skull Shield learn his peculiar code of honor from Winder, or was it the other way around?”

  “You haven’t mentioned that you know the thief.”

  “I don’t know what Winder knows. Were I to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I left Seven Skull Shield in charge of my palace during my absence,’ Winder might get that startled look, and say, ‘Ah, good to finally make your acquaintance, Lady Night Shadow Star.’”

  “You think he suspects?”

  “I don’t know. Nor do the Spirits tell me anything. But something is coming, Fire Cat. It’s in the air, in the feel of the river. Even the land seems to be holding its breath. We know that Blood Talon hasn’t given up, and every day we travel we’re closer to Walking Smoke. I can feel his growing menace. He knows we’re coming.”

  “How?”

  “He has his own allies in the Spirit World. It was the Thunderbirds, after all, who snatched him away from Piasa that day in the Father Water. Just as Piasa uses me for his purposes, the Thunderbirds are using my brother.”

  “But he’s evil.”

  “It’s not about good and evil. It’s about balance. The white and the red. Order and chaos, wisdom and creativity, peace and war, harmony and confusion. He serves a purpose on the Sky World’s side as I do for the Power of the Underworld.”

  Fire Cat remained silent, his arms warm around her. The night sounds of the river, humming mosquitoes, a thousand croaking frogs, water lapping at the shore below them, a whippoorwill, some night bird, and the wind in the leaves of the great chestnut beneath which they slept, all whispered their unease.

  “What?” She could tell he was disturbed.

  “Balance? If only you survive, Piasa comes out ahead, doesn’t he? You kill Walking Smoke, that’s an imbalance.”

  “So, you think we’re both supposed to die?”

  “I’ve been worried. Like you said, it’s the symmetry of it all. Walking Smoke came to Cahokia, and almost to the instant, you sent your souls to the Underworld to be eaten by Piasa. Walking Smoke’s threat immediately had a counterweight.”

  She snuggled her head under his chin, understanding the harsh logic of it. Terrified by the implications.

  “If all I have is this time on the river, I want to live it with you. I will cherish each moment, each meeting of our eyes, every last smile and the warmth of your body.”

  “We’re a long way from the end of the journey, my lady. And when we get to Cofitachequi, nothing is certain. Whatever it takes, I will be there to keep you safe. Perhaps to serve as your instrument. I will see that you prevail. I promise you that on my honor.”

  She smiled, a flutter of relief in her breast mixing with a hint of dread. What if he did manage to save her at the last instant? What if he gave his life in place of hers? Could she live with that knowledge?

  Better to curl up and die.

  She expected to hear Piasa’s laughter come spiraling out of the insect-laden air. Instead, lightning flickered in the distant east. And then again, and again. Strobes of white light in the night. As the far-off clouds flashed and blinked, it was as if the Thunderbirds had taken their place at the gaming blanket and were casting dice on the outcome.

  The Storm

  As lightning flashes and bangs in the night, I sit naked before my fire. With a hickory baton, I beat on the small pot drum. Match the resonant thumping to the rhythm of my heart.

  Another crash of thunder shakes the very walls, rattles the thatch overhead.

  Lowering my drum, I walk to the door, throw it open, and stare out at the night, torn as it is with lightning that flickers and Dances among the high-packed clouds that obscure the sky.

  The air hangs heavy, the scent of rain filling my nostrils.

  An instant later a wicked flash of lightning contorts its way across the sky. Bent and twisted. As though in eternal agony. The quick double flicker burns itself into my eyes, sears a path across my brain, and snakes its way through my souls.

  Stunned, I collapse onto the beaten ground before the Clan House veranda. Even as I sprawl there, nerveless and limp, the rain slashes down.

  B
linded by the fierce black-on-white afterimage, I stare sightlessly up into the unleashed torrent. Feel the huge cold drops as they smash into my face.

  In that moment, I see: Night Shadow Star is looking up into the night. I could be an owl, circling silently overhead as I stare down into her eyes. She is standing by the river; a canoe is grounded on the beach. A low fire burns, two men, cross-legged, sit on either side of it. They are talking as men do in companionship.

  But it is Night Shadow Star who draws every bit of my attention. She remains as beautiful as ever. Her face unforgettable if I should live a thousand years. Only now her hair is down in a Trader’s braid. A simple cloak hangs from her shoulders; an unadorned fabric skirt is tied at her hip.

  I turn my head from the rain, letting it drain from where it has pooled in my eyes. Then I struggle to my feet, raise my arms. Again, lightning curls just over my head. White, hot, it burns through my eyes and lights my insides. Makes my bones shine white, glows through my guts. My liver turns that same shade of pale as a stone in the heart of a bonfire.

  I am the lightning. Frozen for that one actinic moment, cast through the Sky World, discharged from the Thunder Being’s taloned foot. I sear the world, stretch my burning essence through the heavens, displacing eagles. In that moment, the whole of the earth cowers beneath me.

  “The storm. Call the storm.”

  The words thunder down around me as the glow fades from my flesh.

  Fixing my entire soul on Night Shadow Star and the river, I pull my knife from my belt, extend my arms to the tempest, and slice down the insides of both my arms, crying, “Brother Lightning! Go! Find Night Shadow Star! Unleash your Power. Drown her! Wash her down into the river. And when her Lord Piasa rises to save her, blast them both!

  “Strike her! Wound her! Hurt her where her heart lies! Take from her what she loves more than life! Show her your Power and sicken her souls. Blind her so that she doesn’t see me. Deafen her so that she hears not my approach! Send her to me, stumbling and alone, without her protector!