People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past) (29 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past)
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Salamander swallowed hard. He never felt safe when they made these deposits. His Dreams, always uncertain to start with, were labored after he and the Serpent processed a body. That he involved himself in such doings irritated his wives to no end—perhaps explaining his willingness to help the Serpent with his grisly chores.
“Come, my friend.” The Serpent turned and led the way back into the forest. “We have finished this portion of our duty. All that remains is to help Clay Fat fire the house tonight. I shall have Bobcat do most of the Singing. I think he is ready for that.”
They walked in silence as they retraced their tracks. Breaking into the open again, the sight of the Bird’s Head to the north and the children playing on Dying Sun Mound to the south reassured Salamander.
“Mud Stalker came to see me last night,” the Serpent said offhandedly. “Knowing that Bobcat had been called to Ground Cherry Camp to attend a broken leg, he asked me to find another to help with the Elder’s body.”
Salamander shot him a glance. “He did?”
“It appears that some do not approve of your interest in acquiring the arts necessary to handle the dead.”
“That is not their concern.” Salamander swung the basket back and forth, slinging the loose gore from its stained bottom.
“You are not happy in your marriage,” the Serpent stated.
“You have divined this on your own, have you?”
“Do not mock me. You have been married now for almost three
moons. And a Speaker for your clan for nearly as long. I can feel Power and trouble gathering around you.”
“Mud Stalker is disappointed with me. I haven’t always voted the way he would like. And Mother, I don’t understand. She mostly just stands there, eyes lost on the distance. I have caught her talking to Cloud Heron’s ghost when no one’s around.”
The Serpent sighed. “What about your Dreams?”
Salamander ground his teeth, then admitted, “They come sometimes. Many Colored Crow has come to me since the night of my initiation. Sometimes I fly with Masked Owl. He tells me things.”
“Such as?”
“He tells me to watch out for certain people. He gives me glimpses of faraway lands. Sometimes he warns me of things.”
“What things?”
Salamander shook his head. “I’m sorry, Elder. They are between Masked Owl and me.”
Carefully, the Serpent said, “You are aware that Mud Stalker and your wives are plotting?”
“Oh, yes. Though why they insisted that I marry is beyond me. And why, for the sake of Snakes, did they appoint me to the Council? I just sit there. I’m an embarrassment. Look at me! But for the political necessity, I wouldn’t be made a man yet. Who ever heard of a boy like me sitting in the Council?”
The Serpent slowed as he reached the deep borrow pit. With care he stepped over the edge. The slope was steep, but a narrow trail had been worn through the thick green grass and into the brown earth. A misstep meant a nasty tumble through the weeds and grass and into the stagnant water below. Salamander started as a snake slithered rapidly away. He could see the plants moving as the reptile wound along the slope. Wood snake? Or water moccasin?
At the bottom, the Serpent crouched on a thin strip of beach and splashed his hands into the water. Cleansing had to be done on the western side of Sun Town, every bit of blood, liquid, and tissue washed away. The borrow pit pond was the perfect place for these ablutions. With great care, the Serpent washed his hands, taking time to pick the dried blood from under his fingernails. “Bide your time, Salamander. You are meant to be a joke. It is the revenge Mud Stalker has planned for your mother and clan.”
“It humiliates me,” Salamander agreed as he stepped to one side and perched on the steep slope. He bent forward and dunked the basket into the water, seeing minnows, tadpoles, and insects swimming away. He sloshed it back and forth before hauling it out, ripping
a handful of grass free and scrubbing the insides to remove the stains.
“And what does a salamander do when a raccoon is snorting and sniffing around a fallen log? Does he run out immediately in search of insects?”
“Of course not.”
“There is a lesson in that.” The Serpent rubbed at a blood spot on his forearm and looked up pointedly. “Do you know what it is?”
“I didn’t want to be a member of the Council.” Salamander tipped the basket to dump the red-stained water out. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“Sometimes the best people are those who didn’t ask for the responsibility.”
“Sometimes they aren’t.”
“Power chose you, Salamander. At each important event, it has settled around you like a blanket. Just as it did atop the Bird’s Head and at your initiation.” He paused, looking down at his hands again, inspecting them to make sure they were clean. “I won’t be around to help you much longer.”
“What are you talking about?” Salamander bent down and began washing his hands.
“I’m talking about the future. What is to come. You are so young, my friend. That is your strength and your weakness.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Listen to me!” the old man demanded. “Something is coming, something I cannot see over the horizon of time. I am an old man, and I will probably not live to see this thing happen. My friends are dying. Graywood Snake was younger than me. Elder Back Scratch is ailing and will die soon—leaving that witless Sweet Root as Clan Elder. Cane Frog will be lucky to survive another winter. Who can tell how many moons I have left? This, however, I know: Learn from your Spirit Helpers. Learn from the world. Do not seek fame, or revenge, or any other petty gratification. Do you hear me, Salamander?
Be who you are!
That is why Power chose you.”
“Be who I am?” He glanced at the old man in puzzlement.
“Exactly. And be it smartly. You are caught between Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow because they saw something in your souls. Dreams are crossing here. Different paths to the future. Like those crossed lines I carved into your chest, you are the place between the North and the South, the East and the West. You lie between Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow. A battle is being waged, and you are the key.”
“What battle? What are they fighting over?”
The Serpent shook his head slowly. “It is an old thing between them. They are brothers, you see. Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow. They take other forms at times, sometimes wolves, ravens, eagles, lions, bears, but one is always light, the other dark. Forever separate, forever bound, but never in agreement. They pull the world back and forth between them.”
“And I am supposed to bring an end to this?”
“No. You are just supposed to help one side win for the time being.”
“But how can I be part of this? I don’t even have a Spirit Helper to advise me. Not even Salamander.”
The Serpent made a face. “Are you
that
dull-witted?”
“How do you mean?”
“Many Colored Crow sits atop the Men’s House during your initiation. Masked Owl takes you flying in your Dreams. Boy, just
what
do you think a Spirit Helper does, anyway?”
Salamander blinked, a cold shiver running down his back despite the dripping heat.
No wonder he laughed when I asked if Salamander would consider being my Spirit Helper.
“That’s right,” the Serpent told him fondly. “Just be yourself, Salamander. That will save you. So long as you do not lose yourself, do not become like the others. If you forget who you are, become like them, you are going to be crushed like a caterpillar in a lizard’s jaws.”
E
vening had settled on Sun Town the way it did in the days after the solstice—with great rapidity. Water Petal sat to one side of the ramada, her back propped against one of the support poles. Her infant, a son, suckled noisily at her left breast. As it worked the brown nipple, the baby’s little fingers kept grasping and flexing, as if he didn’t have enough to occupy him in the busy pursuit of filling his belly.
A low fire smoldered under the ramada’s northern edge, that location receiving slightly more protection from the intermittent summer rains. Wing Heart tended it by adding another branch from the pile Salamander had brought in from the forest.
Lost in thought, Salamander studied the circular wicker framework of the new house that rose immediately to the west. Still unroofed, the walls looked like a huge round basket sticking out of the ground. Poles had been dug into the earth and saplings woven between them to harden as they dried. This in turn would eventually be smeared and plastered with clay and allowed to cure before brush was piled against the walls and set on fire to harden it. Only then would the pole rafters be put in place for the roof. Saplings, again, would be woven across them to provide a lattice to which shocks of grass thatch could be attached.
Salamander turned, studying the preoccupied look on his mother’s face.
What is wrong with her?
Was this the woman he had
known, and so often feared? Where once a cutting sharpness lay behind those dark eyes, now only emptiness remained.
Wing Heart had decided to rebuild on the location of Uncle Cloud Heron’s house rather than her old one. Though she’d never said, Salamander suspected that she couldn’t bear to build where she had burned her son’s bones. It didn’t make sense, but then, where Wing Heart was concerned a great many things didn’t make sense anymore.
“Moccasin Leaf is continuing to spread her poison,” Water Petal announced. “She is spreading the story among the lineages that Salamander, with the advantage of two wives, is unable to plant a child in either one.”
“White Bird has only been married for three moons,” Wing Heart answered absently.
Both Salamander and Water Petal flinched at the use of her dead son’s name. Oblivious, she continued, “I’d been married for six before Black Lightning planted White Bird in my belly. And, if memory serves, Pine Drop’s mother, Sweet Root, took nearly a year to catch.” Wing Heart turned and settled herself at her loom. A half-finished kirtle hung there, the center decoration consisting of a bird woven out of the whitest hemp thread she could find. Her fingers rose like thin brown spiders to the warp and began plucking the threads.
Water Petal turned her attention to Salamander. “You are lying with them, aren’t you?”
“Of course.” Great joy that it was. He looked out at the night with a bitter feeling in his breast. In addition to the worry over his mother’s frequent lapses and odd snatches of conversation with dead people, his nights with his wives bore down on him like rough sandstone on soft wood. The memory of Spring Cypress pulled at his souls like a tightening cord. He could feel his heart hammering, the blood running hot in his veins. Snakes, he had wanted her with a desire that had burned him. Why wasn’t it that way with Pine Drop and Night Rain? Both women had bodies every bit as well shaped as Spring Cypress’s.
“Salamander?” Water Petal’s voice dropped. “How often do you mount your wives?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “When they tell me to.” The admission felt like drawing a rose stem through an open wound.
“Snakes!” Water Petal cried, startling the baby, who spat out her nipple and gave a lusty bawl. She maneuvered his mouth back into
place and resettled his fabric-wrapped body into a more comfortable position. “I suppose each time they
let
you exercise your rights as a husband, it is a week just before or just after they’ve been in the Women’s House?”
He nodded, wishing they could talk about something else.
“Salamander,” Water Petal’s voice dropped, her eyes taking Wing Heart’s measure as she asked, “is it fun? Do you enjoy coupling with them? Or have they turned it into work, a thing that must be endured?”
“Endured.” He ground his teeth, taking his own suspicious glance at his mother. “It wasn’t as if our marriage was something any of us looked forward to.”
“Salamander, there is talk that you may not have heard. Moccasin Leaf overheard it in the Women’s House. It seems that …” She winced as if her teeth hurt.
“That Pine Drop is bedding that Frog Clan man, Three Stomachs.” He finished for her. “How did he get that name, anyway?”
“From the way he eats. What would fill three men barely lasts him until his next meal. But that’s not the point. Is it true?”
He nodded. “I have seen them. One of the advantages to being invisible is that it’s easy to pass unnoticed. They plan meetings any chance they get.” He paused. “At least she enjoys coupling with him.”
“Rot her crotch away,” Water Petal hissed. “You know what she’s doing by putting you off, don’t you?”
“Yes, Cousin. She is avoiding having my child. Though why she would mate with Three Stomachs is beyond me. None of his children have lived. His wife, that Rattlesnake Clan woman, has borne him five stillborns.”
“Of course,” Water Petal noted, putting the pieces together. “If she does have a child by him, and it’s stillborn, it reflects on you.” She shook her head. “Do they hate us that much?”
“More, I’d say.” Salamander reached out, fingering the polished wood in the ramada’s support pole. “But do not concern yourself.”
“Indeed?” Acid, like cactus juice, laced Water Petal’s voice. “Do not concern myself about the woman who seeks to insult my cousin, not to mention the Speaker of my clan?”
“It is not time yet,” Salamander told her. “She isn’t conceiving any child by Three Stomachs.”
“Snakes and Lightning, Salamander! It’s his seed he’s planting inside her slippery tube!”
“Please lower your voice.” Salamander shot her a hard look. “Not everyone in Sun Town need be part of this discussion.”
“And
how
do you
know
that his seed is not already growing in your wife’s womb?”
“I have my ways.” He watched his mother as he spoke, but Wing Heart seemed oblivious, a slight smile on her lips as she worked the loom. This world might have been but a shadow of the world she saw. “You must trust me, Cousin. She will not conceive, and she suffers as a result of her roaming.”
For the first time, Water Petal’s expression softened. “That makes me feel just a little better, Cousin. It gladdens my souls to hear that you are carving at least a little revenge off her slim body. Would you mind telling me how you’re accomplishing this feat?”
“It is not revenge, Cousin. And, no, I will not tell you how I deal with her infidelity.” He noticed a young man hurrying along the embankment toward their ridge. A slim fellow, Salamander couldn’t place him in the gloom. Then he recognized that loose run: Little Needle. “Cousin, you must trust me about this.”
“Thank the Sky Beings, I hope this is something that you’re learning from the Serpent? People talk about that, too, you know. Many wonder what to think of you. It’s not like you will step into his shoes when he dies. He has made it clear that Bobcat will. As to why you help him with the death rituals, well, it seems depressing to me.”
“He needs me.”
“So do other people, Salamander! Your mother, the Clan Elder, could use a little help on the house she’s building. But for Yellow Spider, it’s a wonder we’ve even raised the walls!”
He stood, stepping out from the ramada as Little Needle came jogging up, his breath rising and falling.
“Salamander?” the boy called.
“Greetings, Little Needle. What brings you at a run? Not more gossip about my wives, I hope.” He glanced back, unable to read Water Petal’s expression.
“No.” Little Needle managed between puffing breaths. “But I’m glad you have heard these things about them. Especially Pine Drop. Did you know that she’s been—”
“Yes, yes, go on.” He clamped a hand on the boy’s greased arm and dragged him into the shadows of the ramada. “What brings you here?”
“Jaguar Hide!” the boy cried. “You wouldn’t believe it! I talked to my cousin, Bluefin, who was fishing in the south. He has a set of gill nets placed where the channels are draining out of the swamp. He went to check them, and who should be waiting but Jaguar Hide!
Bluefin thought he was dead! But then Jaguar Hide asked him his clan. And when he told him Owl Clan, Jaguar Hide asked him to carry a message to Elder Wing Heart.”
“What message?” Water Petal stood and stepped forward. Salamander didn’t need to see her quick glance at Wing Heart.
“Cousin,” Wing Heart interrupted, surprising them all, “Speaker Cloud Heron and I will hear what Jaguar Hide says.” She turned her head in the darkness, though how she could still work the loom baffled Salamander. “Tell me, Little Needle.”
“Jaguar Hide wants to come here!” Little Needle had stopped bouncing from foot to foot, puzzled at the mention of the dead Speaker. “He wants to meet with you, declare a truce between our peoples. He wishes to know if you will speak in the Council and grant him safe passage to come and see you?”
Wing Heart had stopped weaving, her form a dark shadow in the gathering night. For a long moment she remained frozen, then said in her old familiar voice, “Yes, Little Needle. I will speak for him. Send word: Owl Clan guarantees his safety. Let him come and tell the Speaker and me what is on his mind.”
“Don’t do this, Elder.” Water Petal turned to stare at Wing Heart’s dark shape. “Whatever he is after, it is no good. And we have never been weaker.”
“We are
Owl Clan
!” Wing Heart snapped. “No one challenges our authority. Let him come!”
Water Petal’s sagging posture betrayed her defeat. No matter what, Wing Heart remained the Elder. Her word was final.
Salamander turned back to his friend. “Go. Tell Bluefin that the Elder will see Jaguar Hide. I take it that he has a way of getting the message to the Swamp Panthers without ending up skewered on a pole in their village?”
“He does. Jaguar Hide gave him instructions on how it was to be done.”
“Then you had best get a good night’s sleep,” Salamander told him. “It will be a long trip through the channels tomorrow.”
“Yes, Speaker.” Little Needle turned, trotting away into the darkness to find his mother’s house on the third ridge.
“What does Jaguar Hide want?” Water Petal repeated to herself.
“He will bring trouble,” Wing Heart said from her loom. “I have no doubt of that. Don’t worry, Cousin, it is nothing that the Cloud Heron and I can’t handle.”
Salamander could feel Water Petal’s unease as she studied the Elder. White Bird, Cloud Heron, they cropped up in Wing Heart’s conversation as if they had never died. Maybe this was just what his
mother needed to bring back her old confident self. Was she still canny enough to deal with the terrible Swamp Panther warrior?
Masked Owl, why haven’t you warned me about this in my Dreams?
P
ine Drop followed a deep-forest trail through the gathering dusk; a heavy fabric sack hung over her shoulder and weighted her down with freshly picked bladderwort. The plant was her excuse to walk a half day’s journey to the south and had taken her but a finger of time to collect. The rest of it she had spent satiating herself on Three Stomach’s male member. In the beginning she had hesitated taking him as a lover. The man simply had no brain to go along with that magnificent body of his. The reason for his prodigious appetite was directly related to the fact that he had a lot of body to feed. Three Stomachs was big, muscular, hardy, and endowed with an incredible vitality. His male part was built like the rest of him: huge. The sight of his hardened organ had frightened her the first time, but to her delight, he was skilled enough to prepare her womanhood to accept it without discomfort.
She winced, placing a hand to her abdomen. While she would have liked to blame the cramps on Three Stomachs and the oversize root he slipped into her, the painful irritation had started earlier that week. And Night Rain, too, complained about it. The malady didn’t affect her seriously, but was annoying, peaking about midway through her moon.

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