People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) (36 page)

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

BOOK: People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past)
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He held it up in the light. The blade had been chipped from a single piece of stone and was as long as his forearm. Firelight gleamed in the riffled surface. The handle had been crafted from a section of human arm bone, and was engraved with intertwined rattlesnakes, their
sides spotted with circles that represented doorways into the Underworlds. She suddenly realized that the dark stains in the binding were from long-dried blood.
Smoke Shield ran a finger down the deadly length of stone. “It’s only made for one thing: the ritual execution of prisoners. A blade this long is too brittle to be used for anything else. I have been keeping it handy.” He smiled into her eyes. “I think I’ll use it on your husband.”
She had seen such a thing before. Biloxi had used the White Arrow ceremonial sword on the day he was made high minko. He had killed a Biloxi that he had allegedly taken captive on a raid. From that act, he had received his name.
“I think I’ll slice off his penis and balls first.” His measuring eyes were on hers. “Would you like them when I’m done? You know, a sort of memento of the times he lay with you?”
To keep from screaming, she bit down on her tongue. “You can give me whatever you wish.”
“Is this hard for you?”
“He was my husband. What do you think?” The trembling started in her gut, a sickness that grew and expanded.
“Then perhaps I’ll make you come with me. Knowing him as you do, you can tell me what his weaknesses are.”
Blessed gods, what do I say?
A scattered thought landed, and she said, “If you order me to, I will.” She struggled to keep her breathing normal. “Actually, it will help him to endure. Seeing me, he’ll want more than ever to prove his bravery.”
She could sense the disappointment behind Smoke Shield’s eyes. “What about your brother?”
She gave him a dead stare. “He will die poorly. There is nothing I can do to change that. I will weep, and my heart will break; but he is who he is.”
“And you?”
“I have recently discovered that I, too, am who I am.
Isn’t that true of all of us, War Chief? You will be what your souls make of you?”
“You sound like my wife.” He carefully slipped the sword back into its sheath and replaced it beneath the bed.
“Is that good or bad?” she asked as he picked up his bowl and scooped the last of his meal from the bottom.
“Bad,” he mumbled though a mouthful of food.
“Then I will say no more.”
“The last thing I need to think of tonight are my darling wives.” He threw the empty bowl across the room. The wood split when it hit the wall.
He narrowed an eye, belched, and took a drink of water. She set her plate down when he gestured to her. She stood, stepping around the food bowls, and lowered herself to her knees where he indicated.
What is happening behind those half-lidded eyes? What twisted thoughts are lodged there?
His hand settled lightly on her arm. She flinched, then said, “I’m sorry. This will be difficult for me, but I will do my best.”
He traced a finger down from her shoulder to the tip of her breast. He was watching the leaping pulse in her neck.
The corner of his lip quivered as he grasped the neckline of her dress with both hands. Muscles bulged as he strained against the fabric. It gave with a loud rip, pearls pattering off like raindrops. Then he was on his feet, lifting her, spilling her out of the ruined dress. She flopped on the floor, naked and frightened.
She lay panting, staring up. Her wits had scattered like quail before a hunter. His smile victorious, he reached down and untied his apron, letting it fall away. Unable to help herself, she fixed on his penis, watching it rise and stiffen.
Submit!
Heron Wing’s voice seemed to call from the very air.
This is it.
Taking a deep breath, Morning Dew lay
back, spreading her legs among the overturned dishes. Warm food slipped beneath her skin. She fixed her eyes on the soot-stained ceiling, fully aware that he had dropped to his knees between her legs. His hands stroked down the length of her thighs. The shudder that ran through her body was involuntary, and she tried to breathe deeply.
Think! What do you do next?
“I’m sorry, War Chief. I’ll be dry.”
“Oh, I’ll fix that,” he told her hoarsely.
She stiffened when his finger speared into her, probing.
It’s only my body. He’s doing nothing that Screaming Falcon has not done before.
She pulled her head to the side and concentrated on one of the knots in the logs overhead, centering the eye of her souls on it as he settled his weight onto her. He drove himself into her as though trying to hammer her hips through the floor.
The knot. All that exists is the knot.
She imagined the branch that had once grown from that dark eye, willed her souls into it the way an
Alikchi Hopaii
sent his souls through portals into other worlds. The branch was firm, the leaves it sprouted green, full with life and sap.
She was still lost in the knot when he gasped, moaned, and went limp. From under his stifling weight, she stared vacantly upward, wondering if laughter still lived anywhere on earth.
 
 
T
wo Petals sat backward in Old White’s canoe, her stumbling thoughts spinning like a whirwind. The river flowed around her, buoying her weight, spilling over her fingers when she reached over the side. Even the chilly breeze slipped effortlessly around her, as though in reluctant avoidance.
Why do I feel so desperate?
Something terrible was coming. The Watcher loomed somewhere over the horizon. She could feel him, looking in her direction. A great black void was opening, lost somewhere in the days upriver.
The time Two Petals had spent in seclusion during her moon had been refreshing. For those precious moments she had sat in the dim interior of the abandoned house, bothered only by the voices and the disembodied Spirits that came to visit. The visions from her Dance with Sister Datura played between her souls in glowing images of light and color. The voices that whispered in the air around her were calm. And best of all, the world was no longer moving. Not like now. Not like on the river.
Movement made her ill. Her senses would swim, and she could feel herself becoming one with the current. Water was alive. It always sought to move. In growing desperation, she had tried to feel it, sense it, the way she would an animal. But no matter how she extended her senses, she couldn’t seem to reach the spirit of the water. When she called out to it from the canoe, she would catch Old White’s curious gaze on her as he paddled laboriously upstream. That he seemed to accept her eccentricities didn’t lessen the effect his evaluative stare had on her wobbling peace of mind.
At times she would feel the Watcher. She wasn’t sure who he was, only that he was aware of her. Sometimes, in the twilight, she’d catch a glimpse of his crystalline eyes. From the shadows, they’d stare at her, glittering and transparent. When they did, she could sense his curiosity and concern.
“Where are you?” she asked more than once, but the phantom image remained mute.
She had first seen him while Dancing with Sister Datura. From a whirlwind, she had looked down upon his wrapped face. He had glanced up in surprise, gazing at her through the cloth that covered his quartz eyes. Uttering a cry in a strange language, he had clutched at a
shell gorget on his chest and held it up. She’d seen the design, three spinning triangles in the center surrounded by concentric circles, and a lobed margin that reminded her of flower petals.
She’d felt the force of his Power before it masked him from her gaze. Where he had been, only a curtain of black haze remained. It made no sense, but many things in the vision remained incomprehensible.
Memories out of time slipped between her souls. She had seen incomprehensible fragments of people, events, and heard scattered statements uttered by unknown mouths. The faces of the people, the places they inhabited, were all strange, foreign to her. She had seen herself as if from above. Watched her body undulating on Trader’s, heard her soft intake of breath as her loins burst with pleasure. She had seen the Seeker staring thoughtfully into a campfire burned low in the night. A circle of warriors seemed to appear magically from the forest, their weapons held at the ready. And then she would feel the terror. Fear would wash over her, drowning her in an ocean of disembodied souls. Then had come a blackness, a gap in events. A place she could not see—like a huge hole in the vision she had shared with Sister Datura. The rest had been like daydreams, all disjointed and thrown together.
Finally it would all come to an end. Distant murky water, a great Horned Serpent, and the dark-souled man awaited her just over the horizon of future-past. The terrible dark-souled man’s gleaming eyes stared at her from the future. They would Dance, surrounded by the shining scales of the great serpent. Around and around they’d go, and then down into the eerie light of another world.
She need only wait until the image became real.
I am backward in time.
She had lived those things sometime in the future before her souls had been sent back, to see it all again. The sense of doing it all in reverse disoriented her, as if events had been turned upside down. It left her consumed with confusion.
Gods, if I could just keep it all in order! But control was beyond her abilities.
Traveling upriver, however, was moving backward, going counter to the flow. Doing so helped her to structure her thoughts. Things were calmer when she went backward. The sense of rushing toward inevitability lessened.
She clamped her eyes shut. If only the world wouldn’t move. She desperately wished she could stop the clouds in the sky, stop the movement of the sun. If the wind would freeze in place, if fire wouldn’t flicker, she could finally find herself.
What had been so normal when she was a child now left her senses reeling. Worst of all were people. They moved faster, like a juddering swirl of partially seen images. When they did, her confusion was complete. It took all of her willpower to keep from slapping both hands to her ears, pinching her eyes shut, and shouting, “Stop!” at the top of her lungs.
She had tried that when the disembodied voices came in a flurry. But to no avail. With real people, she could at least mute the sounds. The Spirit voices, however, seemed to come from inside her head. Sometimes they told her the most ridiculous things, like Trader and Old White were conspiring against her. That they would drug her food, or that one of them was urinating in her water bowl.
She couldn’t believe the voices. Sister Datura had shown her none of those things. When she watched Trader and Old White, it was to observe no nefarious actions on their part. Instead, they simply seemed to accept with mild amusement when, with no proof, she lifted her water jar, took it out, and poured it on the ground. Once she had heard Old White say matter-of-factly, “She’s a Contrary.”
As much as she missed home, and her family, she wouldn’t Trade being back there for her time on the river, as confusing as it was. Here she could listen to the voices,
dump her water bowl, refuse food the Spirits told her had been poisoned, and fight to keep the world at bay without hearing anger in people’s voices or seeing the fear in their eyes.
Now she sat, facing backward, watching the river rush away from her. She was going backward, trees creeping into the corner of her vision, slowly moving away from her. And today, with a south wind, the few fluffy clouds, too, were acting correctly.
“You are the only constant,”
one of the voices told her.
“It is you who is in place. The rest of the world is moving around you.”
Stopped in time, she thought. But what anchored her? What terrible thing pinned her in place so that she was rooted while the earth, sky, and water flowed steadily past? Sister Datura hadn’t told her the how of it, only the why.
“Be who you are,”
Sister Datura whispered from her memories.
“The rest shall come to you.”
The fear that came from that knowledge was lessened only because she had seen and lived through it in her Vision. Time was alive. She had entered it, lived within it. Then that morning when she had awakened in Silver Loon’s temple, she had somehow slipped outside of its breath and being.
“Not everyone has received a gift like this,”
one of the voices in her head said.
“But I don’t want it!”
She realized that Old White had heard. He cocked his head, as if waiting for more.
She looked away, fixing instead on the packs between them.
After a while, Old White asked, “We’re coming up on the first rapids. There’s a Kaskinampo town there. Anything I should know about it?”
The coming sights and sounds played through her. People haggling, Trader offering packs of prime beaver. She could sense the growing confusion, the smoky air
of the Kaskinampo town, and a thousand questions buzzing around her like an angry swarm of churning insects.

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