The People of the Black Sun (22 page)

The man said, “You bitch in heat! I'll club you like a fish.” He kept glancing at a red-painted war club a few paces away, lying canted against a rolled blanket.

As Baji closed in, the man lunged for the club, grabbed it, and rolled away.

Baji dove for him. Her ax chopped into the spine at the base of his neck, and he went limp. Lying broken on the ground, his eyes were still upon hers, blinking feverishly. His fingers twitched and jerked. His lungs desperately sucked and expelled air. She tossed the ax aside and got her hands around his throat, grunting as she fought to strangle him.

Dzadi, Ogwed, and the others edged out of the trees to watch.

When she felt the enemy warriors's heart stop, when his frantic lungs no longer pulled at his throat, she staggered to her feet and stared down into his dead eyes. The fire had gone out. How quickly the night cooled! Darkness seeped close around her. She looked past Dzadi's blank face to a narrow starlit trail that weaved through the trees. In the distance, at the end of the trail, a bridge spanned a dark glistening river. Flint country lay on the other side. She knew it, could feel home in her bones, calling to her.

How would Cord take it when he heard that she had avenged him?

Baji walked out of the clearing, her friends following behind, and passed on into Wild River Village in search of a warm longhouse. The familar crowd filled the plaza. Women used mallets to pound corn in hollowed-out logs. Old men slept in the sunshine beneath the porches, with dogs curled at their sides. Children played stick-and-ball games along the palisade wall. None seemed to notice that Baji and a remnant of her war party had returned home. Not that it mattered. The day was warm and fragrant with the scent of dogwood blossoms. They would gather around the plaza bonfire with the other warriors who stood eating heaping bowls of freshly roasted grouse and talking of the latest news. And what was that in their hands? Cornmeal biscuits dripping with bumblebee honey! As she led her party closer, Baji saw twenty or more grouse, skewered on poles, being cooked over the flames, sizzling with fat.

“Baji?” Dzadi called happily. “How will we ever eat so much?”

She turned, smiling, but …

“Baji?”

Not Dzadi.

She suffered a moment of disorientation. Couldn't figure out …

“Baji, I need you to wake up.”

Dekanawida's deep voice. A hand rested lightly on her shoulder.

She opened her eyes. “Gods, I'm sorry. I must have fallen to sleep.”

She sat up and braced her hands on the log on either side of her hips. Her long black hair fell forward over her cape.

“I didn't want to wake you, but I need you to lie on your left side so I can get to your head wound. I must care for it tonight, before the Evil Spirits smell the blood and fly to nest in your flesh.”

A wooden bowl clacked as he set it on the log, and she noticed in surprise that a small fire burned not two paces away. The bowl, filled with warm water and a piece of soaked hide, steamed.

She nodded tiredly. “Thank you. I'm just so tired.”

Dekanawida's thick brows drew down over his slender nose. His jagged locks of short hair sleeked down around his wide mouth and blunt chin. In a tender voice, he instructed, “If you'll stretch out on your left side on the log, I'll try to work. I don't want any of the water to drip down and soak your cape. You need to stay dry and warm tonight. When I'm done, I'll wrap you in my blanket.”

Baji's wounded arm shook as she braced it to ease down onto her left side, so that Dekanawida could clean the swollen lump behind her right ear.

In a stern voice, he said, “I'm heating willow bark tea for you. When I've finished cleaning, I want you to drink it. It will help with the headache.”

“If I'm awake.”

She thought he nodded. She wasn't sure.

Dekanawida squeezed out the soaked hide and started washing the lump. The warm water hurt. But his touch was a balm upon her soul. He had large hands, strong, and they worked with practiced skill. As a deputy war chief, he'd tended many wounds in his time. Tonight though, his face was aspen-bark white, his eyes blazing like polished brown chert.

“Close your eyes and try to rest,” he ordered.

Hundreds of summers from now, while she slumbered in an old tree, the sound of his deep voice would fill her lonely dreams.

The firelight threw faint multiple shadows across his concerned face.

Gitchi's ears suddenly pricked, and he turned to stare out at the white cedars. Baji glimpsed something. The hem of a wind-blown black cape, flapping wildly, like a trick of moonlight in the saplings, for the forest around her was absolutely still.

A faint smile came to her lips.

He's standing guard. I don't have to.

 

Eighteen

For the moment, Yi ignored the dusty messenger who stood, breathing hard, on the opposite side of the fire. A shaft of afternoon sunlight streamed down through the smokehole, landing like a golden scarf across his dirty trail-weary face. Yi continued pacing the floor of the longhouse, thinking.

Yi's chamber in the Wolf Clan longhouse in Atotarho Village sat at the far end, eight hundred hands away from the former High Matron's chamber. Tila was gone, her chamber empty, but Yi still felt the weight of her presence, as if Tila's Spirit had refused to travel to the afterlife, and remained in the longhouse. Her afterlife soul had not been Requickened yet, and it was a terrible spiritual loss for the clan. It weakened all of them. Almost everyone had assumed that when Zateri returned from the battle, she would receive her grandmother's soul.

Yi looked down the length of the house, her gaze passing over the many chambers and people sitting around their fires. Women nearby weaved baskets from willow staves. Children played with cornhusk toys. Yi missed Tila desperately. Especially now when the clan needed her guidance so desperately.

So much had happened in the past half-moon, she was having trouble making sense of things.

First, High Matron Tila had died, then had come the shocking news, delivered by one of Atotarho's messengers, that Tila had named Kelek, Matron of the Bear Clan, to replace her. One did not question the Chief without good cause, but they'd all known Tila for more than forty summers. It was simply impossible. Then, yesterday morning, news had come that Coldspring Village, their sister village, had been completely abandoned. The villagers had fled in a hurry, carrying only food and blankets with them. The rest of their possessions remained in place, as if awaiting their owners' return. Scouts had seen the Coldspring villagers running up the Canassatego Village trail. Later, Atotarho Village had been flooded with returning warriors, charging through the gates, proclaiming that they'd lost the battle against the Standing Stone nation after the prophet, Sky Messenger, had called a gigantic storm that swept their forces from the field of battle. There had also been wild rumors of betrayal and civil war. Finally,
finally,
this morning, more warriors had flooded in, fresh from burning Coldspring Village to the ground. Along with them, a messenger arrived from Atotarho verifying the rumor that Zateri, Kwahseti, and Gwinodje had betrayed the Hills nation and fought on the side of the Standing Stone People. Despite their treachery, Atotarho reported that he had won the battle, and devastated the Standing Stone nation. He'd said they were but a pitiful remnant of what they had once been, and informed the Ruling Council that he would remain in Standing Stone country for perhaps one more moon, by the end of which, he said, he would have completely destroyed the Standing Stone nation.

Atotarho's report had humiliated the Wolf Clan. Matrons from all three of its ohwachiras had betrayed the nation! Where just a few days ago, the Wolf Clan had been the most numerous and powerful clan among the People of the Hills, the news had thrown them down to the lowest level of society. People had actually spat upon Yi and Inawa when they'd gone to grovel before High Matron Kelek, begging forgiveness, and promising to do anything necessary to prove their clan's loyalty to the Hills nation.

And now this …

Yi stopped pacing and looked at the messenger. He'd run hard to get to her. His elkhide cape bore a thick coating of grime and dust, as did his black hair and round face. He looked to have seen perhaps seventeen summers.

“What is your name, warrior?”

“Skanawati, great Matron.”

“Of Riverbank Village, I assume?”

“I am. Matron Kwahseti sent me to you.”

Two little boys raced by, laughing, and ducked through the door curtain out into the cold afternoon air.

The messenger shifted, clearly wishing to be on his way. His gaze appeared fixed on the beautiful False Face masks that decorated the rear wall of Yi's chamber. They did not have bent noses, as other masks did, rather they had extremely long noses and fanged mouths. Her masks had been handed down from grandmother to grandmother for more than three centuries. The legends of her ohwachira said they came from the great cities of the ancient moundbuilders, from a distant ancestor named Lichen. Sometimes late at night, she heard them whispering to one another.

“Well, Skanawati, your message has left me with many questions. Please, sit. Let us talk for a time.”

The man nodded respectfully, and knelt on the mat on the opposite side of the fire. As he did so, a slave girl rushed to dunk a teacup, made from the skull of a Flint warrior, into the boiling bag that hung on the tripod near the fire, and brought it to him.

“You must be hungry and thirsty. I'll have food brought.” Yi waved to the girl, who ran to fetch a basket of bread. She set it beside the warrior and dutifully backed away.

“Thank you for your kindness.” Skanawati finished the tea in four gulps, looking like he cherished every swallow. Then he shoved two corncakes, filled with walnuts, into his mouth and seemed to swallow them whole. When he'd finished, he wiped his hands on his leggings, heaved a sigh, and looked up at Yi.

The afternoon gleam that streamed down from the smokehole lanced the thick blue wood smoke. As he lifted a hand to wipe his mouth, the sunlit smoke curled around it. He looked nervous, perhaps even afraid. As well, he should.

It had only been through her good graces that he had not been murdered when he'd appeared at the gates demanding to speak with her. After all, he came from a village that had just betrayed their nation.

Yi ran a hand through her graying black hair. She had seen forty-eight summers pass, but she'd never witnessed a winter like this. The wrinkles that cut around her mouth and across her forehead deepened when she glared at him.

“I need to know every detail of the battle.”

“I'll be happy to answer any question you have, Matron.”

Yi considered her words, before asking, “At some point matrons Zateri, Kwahseti, and Gwinodje decided to fight against Chief Atotarho. Was it after they'd received news of the former High Matron's journey to the afterlife?”

He nodded. “Yes. In the middle of the battle, Atotarho dispatched a messenger to Matron Zateri asking her to move her forces into position around Bur Oak and Yellowtail villages to prepare to attack. At the same time, he informed her that her grandmother was walking the Path of Souls, and told her the former High Matron had named Kelek to succeed her.”

Zateri must have known it couldn't be true. Like every other matron in the Wolf Clan, she would have suspected foul play on Atotarho's part.

“Were matrons Kwahseti and Gwinodje present when the news came?”

“Yes, Matron.” He nodded and respectfully bowed his head.

Yi resumed her pacing. Gods, how would she have felt if she'd just learned that her entire clan, thousands of people, had been stripped of their rightful place in the nation? A place their mothers, grandmothers, and great-great-great grandmothers had struggled for generations to achieve? The sacrifices their clan had made for the good of the People of the Hills were legendary. She would have been outraged. As, of course, she
had
been. But she'd been sitting here at home in her warm longhouse, not out on a battlefield watching her kin shed their blood for a nation that had betrayed them.

If it were true that the Wolf Clan's rightful place in the nation had been stolen through treachery while its warriors were dying on the field of battle … clan members would demand that the Law of Retribution be fulfilled.

“Have Zateri, Kwahseti, and Gwinodje set themselves on the path of retribution?”

“I have no knowledge of any official statement to that effect, Matron. However, our former High Matron told Matron Zateri's daughter, Kahn-Tineta, that she planned to appoint Zateri to succeed her. So…”

When he hesitated, she ordered, “So … what?”

“Well, there is talk that Atotarho knew this and had our former High Matron murdered before she could appoint Zateri. Rumors say that Kelek and the Bear Clan were accomplices. If it proves to be true, we have the right to retribution.”