People of the Morning Star (30 page)

“No. Nothing … well, outside of the ordinary grumblings, envy, and resentment.”

“What if I told you the assassin was Cut String?”

Columella slowly narrowed her right eye into a knowing squint. “You’re saying that one of my cousins tried to kill the Morning Star?” She paused, meeting glare for glare. “And I only hear of it now?”

“We purposefully kept the information quiet, hoping that the silence would lure anyone involved to betray themselves.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Columella growled. “Ah, now I see yet another reason why you are here. And, no! Don’t even ask. Cut String never confided his plans to either me or the High Chief. Had he, we would have dealt with it quietly. As your presence here indicates, we don’t need
that
kind of trouble.”

Columella let herself fume appropriately, then added, “It makes a certain kind of sense that it would be Cut String. The man’s uncle … let’s say he’s vulnerable to ‘persuasion’ since he has an unhealthy attraction.” She waved it away. “If Cut String shows up we’ll—”

“He’s been taken care of.”

Columella nodded. “Then we’ll immediately have the unlamented Cut String’s uncle, Pond Water, rounded up and dealt with. We’ve let him go for too long as it is.”

Blue Heron’s gaze hardened. “No. We want the uncle delivered to us. Alive. We’d like to hear the story from his own lips.”

“You’ll have him as soon as my people can run him down.” Columella slowly shook her head. “The Morning Star? You and the
tonka’tzi
? Whoever is doing this is playing with fire, Clan Keeper.”

Blue Heron nodded soberly. “They’re so anxious to burn the Morning Star’s temple down, that it looks to me like they’re willing to burn it from the outside in. Even if it means they’ll be trapped and consumed in the process.”

Columella frowned.
I’m missing too many of the pieces. Who else is moving against Morning Star’s House?
Aloud she said, “If they succeed?”

“Cahokia will tear itself apart. Riots, chaos, old clan feuds burning out of control, the immigrants turning on their neighbors.”

Columella nodded sagaciously. “In these dangerous times, Clan Keeper, I will be more than willing to send you any information that comes to my ears.”

Blue Heron watched her through predatory eyes. “I would expect no less of you, Matron. Please give my regards to the High Chief. Let him know how sorry I was to miss him. You don’t happen to know his whereabouts, do you?”

Columella shrugged her ignorance, saying, “Had we been notified in advance of your arrival, we both could have welcomed you appropriately, and you could have had our combined counsel.”

“I suppose.” Blue Heron cocked her head, one eye glinting. “But we wouldn’t have had such a spontaneous conversation had we been burdened by all that formality.” A pause. “Now, if you will excuse me, I must be getting back.”

Only after the Clan Keeper had been ceremoniously carried from the room did Columella once again wave her attendants out, demanding they leave her in peace.

She waited until the last of them had filed out the main door and pulled it closed.

In the silence, she asked, “Well?”

She felt as well as heard the wooden door being opened in the dais beneath her seat. The dwarf, Flat Stone Pipe, crawled out from the hollow, made a face, and stretched his small body. His skin had taken on the impression of the matting upon which he’d been lying. His hair had been mussed by the cramped ceiling of the small hole.

He rubbed his back in irritation as he said, “I am taken as much by surprise as you are, Matron.
Two
assassins striking the
tonka’tzi
’s House at the same time? And we haven’t heard of them? Both following so closely on the botched attempt on the Morning Star?”

“But who?” she wondered. “We’ve ears in High Chief War Duck’s palace, in Green Chunkey’s House down in Horned Serpent Town, as well as every other House. Something would have warned us.” She paused. “What about Cut String’s uncle?”

“Old Pond Water is ignorant. A simple tool that we knew would fall into Blue Heron’s hands. I’ll send Red Thigh to help Blue Heron’s people with the interrogation. Since Red Thigh knows nothing about the plot, he’ll be as horrified as anyone, and just as eager to expose the plotters. Blue Heron’s people will be satisfied with his zeal on the way to ultimately discovering a dead end.”

“But who organized the assassination of the
tonka’tzi
?”

Flat Stone Pipe gave a shrug of his small shoulders. “Since we don’t know, Matron, perhaps we should pay attention to Blue Heron’s warning: you and the High Chief could be next.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Matron, anyone capable of murdering the
tonka’tzi
and nicking the Clan Keeper’s throat without tipping his hand to either her or me is someone we most assuredly do not want to underestimate.”

Twenty-four

Seven Skull Shield propped his elbows on his knees as he watched the chunkey game. The bark sun hat on his head not only shaded his face, but he’d used a charcoal-laced grease to darken his features. Up close it didn’t do much good. Anyone who knew him would recognize him. From a distance, however, it granted him a degree of obscurity. Just why he’d thought a disguise was a good idea, he wasn’t sure. Something, some itch of nervousness, had urged him to take the precaution.

If a person were looking for information, River Mounds City was the place to get it. And if anyone knew anything, it would be the man perched on the platform beside him. He was called Crazy Frog. In whatever family he’d been born to, he’d probably been known by some common name like Corn Boy, or Brown Stem, or Jumping Rabbit; but that had been so long ago even Crazy Frog probably had forgotten. Assuming he even still remembered which clan he’d really been born into. With so many tens of thousands of people living in Cahokia, like Seven Skull Shield, Crazy Frog switched clans the way most people changed shirts. In the new Cahokia, for those willing to employ the ruse, one’s clan affiliation depended upon necessity, circumstance, and potential opportunity.

Crazy Frog was a common-looking man of perhaps forty, medium of frame, average of features. His nose was neither too wide nor too thin; his face was shaped about like everyone else’s. If he had any distinguishing characteristic, it might have been his tattoos: they’d been reworked sometime in the past to create a design that was completely unrecognizable. When he laughed, most of his teeth were missing—not uncommon in Cahokia, for a man of his age. The Healers said tooth loss was higher among the poor who ate a higher percentage of corn. But what choice did they have?

Crazy Frog had his finger in just about everything that was happening in River Mounds City, but his passion was chunkey. To better watch the games Crazy Frog had built himself a portable platform that his men carried around to the various matches. Elevated as he was above the heads of the crowd, he could see every moment of a match. After watching a player’s first few casts, Crazy Frog could evaluate his chances of winning with uncanny accuracy. Calling down bets to his runners, he’d maintain his own markers on a flat piece of engraved red cedar by means of a complicated pattern of beads.

Seven Skull Shield now perched beside his old friend on the raised pole platform with its plank floor. The wobbling framework didn’t inspire confidence. Nevertheless, Crazy Frog had been using the thing for years, and it hadn’t collapsed yet.

The matches were being played on the River City Mounds grand plaza, dominated as it was by High Chief War Duck’s mound-top palace. River City Mounds formed a semicircle instead of a square or diamond. Here topography dictated form. The high ground atop the levee formed by the river and its confluence with Cahokia Creek had been packed with mounds and buildings. The curving community ended in a cluster that included the large River House palace with its high roof, towering red cedar pole, and guardian effigies. The temple and charnel mounds were close beside it. The site overlooked the bustling canoe landing as well as the marshy bottoms of Cahokia Creek to the west. Across the river Evening Star City stood atop its smugly dry bluff.

Cahokia thrived on chunkey. In the grand plaza beneath the Morning Star’s mound, chunkey was played as a ritualized reenactment of the hero’s battle against the giants in the Beginning Times. Among the dirt farmers and immigrants it was played as a form of prayer, the outcome of the games being interpreted as an expression of divine will. At River City Mounds, however, the game had grown into something else: a true sport upon which piles of Trade were wagered. Most of the better players who made their living playing chunkey had adopted striking names likes “Rolls His Head,” “The Lightning Lance,” and “Skull Pinner.” They wore flashy costumes of brilliantly dyed feathers and literally jangled as they walked, so bedecked were they in shell and copper jewelry.

They were in the right place. As the gateway to Cahokia, not only did most of the Trade land at the River Mounds, but so, too, did the emissaries, foreign chiefs, and warriors with their wealth. Many arrived with reputations as chunkey players among their own people, and at River City they had their first chance to prove their skill against the best in the world.

While Cahokia’s prestige and influence had drawn foreign chunkey players and their wealth, it had also created something absolutely unique: a city of strangers.

Among strangers the old rules of behavior no longer applied. Never before had such opportunities for greed, wealth, and nefarious indulgence existed. A man no longer had disapproving kin looking over his shoulder; he could act reprehensibly and disappear into the crowds without fear of censure. In a town of two or three thousand, if a thief took another person’s possessions, someone was bound to know. Any immoral behavior was immediately reported by rival clans.

In contrast, a sack full of corn stolen in River Mounds could be Traded a day later in the Horned Serpent community with impunity. A distinctive shell necklace lifted from an Earth Clan chief in Evening Star City could be Traded for a copper effigy in the eastern uplands without fear of discovery.

It wasn’t even a difficult undertaking. Newcomers who had lived all their lives in communities where everyone knew and trusted everyone else, couldn’t conceive that the smiling local who greeted them at the canoe landing didn’t have the same scruples they had. Even after half their Trade had disappeared, many of the simpletons approached the local high chief with the absolute conviction that somehow a misunderstanding had occurred, and surely the missing goods would be returned as soon as the absconding party was made aware of the mistake. For many of those, even after it was explained to them, the concept of blatant theft remained utterly unfathomable. How could anyone behave in such a soulless manner? And especially in the Morning Star’s Cahokia?

In the city, with its teeming throngs, a man’s ambition was only limited by his lack of imagination or cunning. Crazy Frog was full of both.

On the chunkey court a dazzlingly bedecked player crouched slightly, his polished red-granite stone in his right hand, waxed wooden lance in his left. The breeze batted playfully at the bright blue feathers sticking out of his headdress. He’d painted his face white, with two large black forked-eye designs. Giant copper ear spools gleamed in the sunlight, and his muscular body tensed.

“Badger Cape will make the point if he doesn’t release too high,” Crazy Frog noted. “If he’d ever get that right, just letting the stone kiss the ground instead of dropping it, he’d be a master.”

“He looks the part. He must win enough to afford the copper and paint.” Seven Skull Shield propped his chin, having never developed Crazy Frog’s eye for evaluating a player.

“The important word is ‘enough.’ What he needs to do is win ‘more.’”

Badger Cape stepped off on his left foot, taking four paces before his arm went back. His body bowed, chest dropping as he bowled the stone down the court in one fluid motion. The stone left his hand at least two finger-widths above the smooth clay.

“Too high,” Crazy Frog said. “Did you see that bounce?”

“I did.”

Badger Cape straightened and shifted his lance to his right hand in one poetic movement, ran four more paces and whipped his arm back. He cast, using his body as a spring to fling the lance forward. Then, muscles knotting in his strong legs, he slowed to a stop just shy of the penalty line. All eyes followed Badger Cape’s spinning lance as it arced against the hazy sky. The red stone was slowing, curving to the right as the lance dropped toward it. At the last moment the stone’s curve increased, carrying it away from the lance’s path. The lance impacted the clay a heartbeat before the stone flopped onto its side a good body length to the right.

A groan went up from the crowd.

“It always veers like that when he lets it bounce,” Crazy Frog muttered, bending down to his plank and moving one of the colored beads.

The next player was dressed in yellow and black, his face painted in diagonal lines. He wore his hair in a bun, to the front of which was tied a stuffed oriole, its wings spread wide. Tattoos of interlinked diamonds ran down his bare arms and legs.