People of the Morning Star (64 page)

He pointed to the sides of his imaginary circle. “Your pieces will go here. And I will fill out the rest of the curving sides with High Dance, Columella, and their delightful children.”

“And who’s at the top,” she asked, fascinated despite herself.

“Ah.” He rubbed his hands and grinned, the expression changing his painted cat-face. “That I save for Night Shadow Star. You know how at the top of the sheath, just below the bone, a woman feels the most wondrous sensations? That I’ve saved specifically for Night Shadow Star.” His eyes sharpened. “She’s the erotic one, you know.”

Across from her, Columella called, “You think this will work? Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies will strike you down! What you’re doing? Sacrificing your sisters and relatives? This is
perversion
! Evil. A twisting of Power that will end in disaster for the
whole world
!”

He raised a hand as two of the Tula took steps toward Columella. He barked an order in Caddo. The two Tula nodded, collected ropes from Lace’s litter, and closing on Columella, muscled her into submission and began tying off her arms and legs.

High Dance just sagged in his bonds, cringing. The children whimpered and huddled in on themselves.

“Cousin,” Walking Smoke told Columella, “I’m doing nothing that the laws of Power prohibit.
Hunga Ahuito
wouldn’t have created the world, divided it into the three realms, or allowed souls to travel between if he hadn’t anticipated,
expected
exactly this outcome. It’s a fulfillment, don’t you see?” He almost giggled. “I’m setting the world free.”

“Your souls are going to be destroyed.” Sun Wing struggled to find something, some bit of reason. She cried, “You won’t know that you’ve succeeded, brother. Piasa will devour your souls! You’ll cease to be in an instant.”

A sadness filled his eyes as he walked over and studied her. “Do you think it’s easy to be me? It’s not. Chunkey Boy was the chosen one, the one born correctly. I’m the Wild One, Thrown Away Boy, the discarded child. At first I didn’t realize it, little sister. I played my part, just like in the Beginning Times. I had to fit in. I had to live up to the responsibility. We all did. Me, my brother, and dear Night Shadow Star. Even when the voices first started whispering to me, I knew—but I didn’t yet understand.”

“Understand what? You had everything!”

“No matter what I did, what kind of trouble I talked the other two into committing.” He laughed mockingly. “Nothing was ever
wrong,
little sister. I learned that you can rape, and kill, and steal, and defame. And
no one cares
!”

“I care,” she whispered, clinging to fraying hope.

“I think that’s a lie.” He leaned forward, pressing his painted cougar-face close to hers. “What will you do? How will you make the pain go away? How will you keep them from mocking me behind my back? And what Chunkey Boy—or Morning Star, as he called himself—and Night Shadow Star did together? I
saw
them! How do you fix that?
I loved her!
”

He rocked back on his heels, stood, and began pacing in circles, his hands flexing and twitching in unison. “If it was good enough
for him
it had to be good enough
for me
! And Night Shadow Star! Oh yes, good enough
for her, too
!”

His smile was a delicate and fleeting thing. “The question remains … Were those screams of joy that burst from her lungs? Was that passion I wrung from her? Was she struggling in a fit of exploding delight?” He glanced at Sun Wing, as if desperate for the answer.

When she just blinked in confusion, he chuckled, voice lowering. “Or was she just disgusted? Ecstasy? Or disgust? She’d just lain with a God! Wasn’t Thrown Away Boy good enough?”

His entire body seemed to vibrate, his eyes pressed closed, and he bellowed, “And for that they bundled me away
and banished
me?”

At the violence in his voice, she cringed back, horrified to realize that she could no longer feel her arms, and her legs had gone numb and senseless.

For long moments he stood like a wooden carving, muscles knotted, back arched, his head tilted up to expose his corded neck.

Some of the Tula had dropped to their knees, expressions of worship on their beaming faces.

“But I didn’t do anything to you,” Sun Wing whimpered, the hot rush of tears filling her eyes.

“Oh, yes, you did,” he gritted. “You’re one of them. You would betray me as quickly as you betrayed your beloved Morning Star and the
Tonka’tzi.
All I had to do was dangle a promise, and you leaped for it.”

Her voice squeaked as she whimpered, “I’d never betray you.”

Walking Smoke grunted his disbelief and called to one of the Tula. The man promptly jumped up, retrieved the long ritual knife and reverently handed it to Walking Smoke.

She squirmed against the ropes as her brother knelt before her and touched the knife’s sharp point to the bottom of her foot. Her heart hammering against her chest, she gulped a frantic breath. Her foot had no feeling. She couldn’t even pull her numb leg back.

Walking Smoke’s cat face smiled into hers. “Rejoice, little sister. It’s your turn.”

Returning to the pot of black drink, he filled his large cup, lifted it to his lips, and gulp after gulp drained it. Again a Tula provided him with rattlesnake master.

She threw her head back and screamed as the Tula undid the ropes that fastened her to the bench.

Her thoughts shattered and fragmented, her muscles electric with fear. Whimpers broke from her throat; her bladder let go as they picked her up as easily as a snared rabbit and bore her to the center of the room.

Walking Smoke bent double as he threw up; the hot cassina tea shot from his mouth to spatter on the gore-coated matting.

A wailing squeal broke from Sun Wing’s throat as one of the Tula approached with the corrugated cooking pot, its sides stained with dried blood.

Her eyes fixed on the knife he held, on the missing chip broken from the edge just back from the tip. A piece the size of the fragment Aunt Blue Heron had retrieved from a murdered woman’s ruined pelvis.

Sun Wing felt something tear asunder in her souls, a ripping that gave way to a washing wave of black terror. She filled her lungs and screamed.…

Sixty

The muscles in Night Shadow Star’s legs trembled as she climbed the steep bluff path from the canoe landing on the Father Water’s western shore. Her breath came in gasps; a hunger-knot had tied itself in her empty stomach.

Perhaps she’d spent too much time traveling in the Spirit World. She shouldn’t be this winded, feel this weakness, after only running for half the night.

She stopped to catch her breath, remembering old times when she, Chunkey Boy, and Walking Smoke had sprinted full-bore up this same steep bluff.

Below her, the mighty river glistened silver in the predawn light; the Cahokian floodplain beyond was but a smoke-hazed darkness accented by the gleaming curls of oxbow lakes. In the distant east, the horizon lay like a rumpled black line below the graying sky.

Thunder rumbled in the west. On the wind she could smell rain through the smoky scent of Evening Star town.

Filling her too-tense lungs, she heard Piasa’s whispered urgings, saw a flicker of his movement in the corner of her eye.

“Yes, yes, I’m going.”

She placed her right moccasin on the trail and forced her hot muscles to bear her onward and upward.

She’d broken a sweat by the time she climbed through the trail gap and onto the clay-capped terrace. The Four Winds guardian posts, each portraying
Hunga Ahuito,
rose on either side, mere shadows against the dark and rolling clouds scudding in from the southwest. Again she heard the rumble of thunder rolling across the land.

Piasa’s Spirit presence followed her as she forced her tired legs into a trot. Clan houses lay to either side, their members subject to Evening Star House’s governance. She caught the sickly stench of the charnel houses where they stood beside low, conical burial mounds.

To the side of one such mound, a knot of people stood around a crematory pit. The contents had burned down to a glowing bed of coals that consumed the last of the bones. For the mourners, the ritual had been an all-night affair, the final farewell for the soul of their relative. These had been dirt farmers, probably come from the west where cremation was considered a way of releasing the life-soul from the bones; the thought being that rising smoke would carry the newly freed soul to the Sky World and the ancestors.

The mourners barely noticed, her black-clad shape little more than a passing shadow in the predawn.

Granaries and warehouses rose to either side of the broad path. She touched her chin out of respect as she passed Evening Star town’s version of the Four Winds women’s house. Into its seclusion Matron Columella and her female kin would retreat every twenty-eight days to pass their bleeding in seclusion.

And when will mine come again?
She’d passed two moons now without cramps or menstrual discharges. And unless some Spirit had taken her senseless body during one of her soul-flying trips, she couldn’t be pregnant. No man had lain with her since her husband had led his army north nearly a year ago.

She passed between the partially completed addition to the Four Winds charnel house mound on her left and the large conical burial mound to her right. Apprehension rising, she trotted into the central plaza. Trampled grass whispered beneath her feet. She touched her forehead in respect as she passed the World Tree pole. The mighty red cedar had been felled in a distant forest, carried here by hundreds of sweating laborers. The great log had been carved and finally erected in the center of the plaza. Its sides were covered in detailed reliefs that depicted stories from the Beginning Times.

She crossed the chunkey court and approached the Evening Star House palace, little more than a dark, hatchet-roofed silhouette that rose against the stormy skies.

Three men rose from the bottom of the ramp stairs. She could see a couple of litters off to the side, and recognized Sun Wing’s ornately carved one. Her porters and a figure that was probably Feather Wand were sleeping in blankets beside it. The rest of the slumbering figures, she assumed, were messengers from the various Earth clans and assorted agents, all waiting to see High Dance.

“Who comes?” the first man asked, obviously the speaker as he raised a hand palm out to stop her and brandished some sort of staff of office.

“I bring a message for High Chief High Dance of the Evening Star House.”

“The High Chief and the Matron are involved in personal ceremonies and will not receive visitors for another day.”

“I am sent by Lady Night Shadow Star with a personal communication for the High Chief and the Matron.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You will not let me pass?” She could feel the tension rising in her gut. Her stomach began to churn, a sick burning sensation.

“I would take your message in.”

She shrugged, a slow smile of inevitability on her lips. “Then I’ll have to wait.”

Like a cold wave rolling within, the anxiety washed away, her pounding heart settled, and a crystalline certainty hardened between her souls.

She clearly remembered her question to Piasa:
“Walking Smoke’s going to kill me, isn’t he?”
And the Water Panther’s response.

Those chosen by Power were accursed.

Dispassionately she turned to the warrior on the right, a tall muscular man with a war club in his hand. “How about you?” she asked. “Are you up for an entertaining time under the blankets? A diversion while I wait?”

“He doesn’t speak our tongue, woman.”

“I don’t care if he can speak. Is his shaft serviceable? And if it is, what language would he praise me in?”

The man’s voice filled with disgust. “He speaks Caddo, woman. But neither he, nor his companion, is free to ‘entertain’ themselves with a woman.”

So the guards were Tula. She flipped her arm dismissively. “Thank the Spirits I’ve got fingers then, eh? I’ll wait over to the side, maybe entertain myself with my bow.”

“You do that,” the man said coldly. “Or else you could return whence you came and tell Lady Night Shadow Star that if she were to come herself, I have orders to escort her immediately into the presence of the Evening Star House chief.”

A cold breeze of certainty shivered her souls. He was inside, waiting for her.

She touched her chin with an insolent flick of the fingers and stepped back. The speaker chattered away in Caddo, eliciting laughter from the two Tula, one of whom pointed at his crotch and said something boastful.

Night Shadow Star slipped her bow from her shoulder, used her hip to string it, and withdrew an arrow.

The first Tula had just seated himself on the lowest step when her arrow drove through his breastbone with a snap. As the warrior stiffened and half rose, she was nocking her second shaft. The angle wasn’t good, and her shot pierced the second Tula’s left bicep before it thunked hollowly into his chest. From the amount of shaft remaining, it had stopped just short of his heart.