People of the Silence (11 page)

“It’s not my fault,” Cornsilk replied. She threw all of her weight into grinding the meal, crushing it to fine flour. “I think he’s just hungry.”

“Ravens move in flocks. This one comes to you alone. That’s not natural.” Leafhopper gave Cornsilk a sidelong glance. “He hasn’t talked to you, has he?”

“What!”
Cornsilk slammed her handstone down into the meal. Pink flour puffed up and swirled in the breeze. Ravens only spoke to Ant people who were witches. She stared disbelievingly at Leafhopper. “Of course not!”

Leafhopper lifted a shoulder and short black hair fluttered over her fat cheeks. “I was only asking.”

“I am
not
a witch, Leafhopper. You know I’m not!”

Leafhopper pounded the kernels until they cracked and fragmented, then rocked her handstone over them and pounded some more. Eager to change the subject, Leafhopper tipped her head to the gray-haired women weaving baskets. “Brave Boy told me a story about old Pocket Gopher today.”

Pocket Gopher sat next to Clover, her dress—gray and white in diamond patterns—clinging to her skinny frame. She had a perfect triangular face with a long beak of a nose and deeply set black eyes. Pocket Gopher had never borne a child, but made up for it by disciplining everybody else’s. When Cornsilk had seen six summers, Pocket Gopher caught her hiding out in the bean field, eating the tender new shoots. The old woman had grabbed a dead cactus limb and beaten Cornsilk over the head all the way home. She
scared
Cornsilk—and every other child in the village.

“Brave Boy has seen only five summers. What could he know?”

Leafhopper whispered, “He said one of the young warriors standing guard saw her out in the burial ground at midnight on the full moon.”

Cornsilk’s handstone halted in mid-downward swing. “Doing what?”

“The warrior didn’t say, but I’m sure the old hag is a witch. She’s so mean to people, she must be. Do you remember what happened to Sand Melon?”

Cornsilk wet her lips nervously. “Yes.”

Sand Melon had miscarried in her sixth moon, and when the birthing women came to care for her, they’d found corpse powder sprinkled all over Sand Melon’s house. Sand Melon had accused Pocket Gopher, screaming that the old woman had been the last person in her house before Sand Melon had returned home. But no evidence could be found.

Still, people watched Pocket Gopher closely now, and if she had been seen in the burial grounds … Blessed thlatsinas! Perhaps she
was
a witch.

“I don’t believe it,” Cornsilk said. “People accuse me of being a witch, and I’m not.”

“I know that.”

Cornsilk pushed the flour to the side of the grinding slab and scooped more coarse meal onto the fine-grained slab. “It’s just the weather. People are worried.” She pounded the meal.

“The weather and the raiding,” Leafhopper corrected.

“They go together. Each summer without rain makes things worse. More and more witches are being accused and killed. And I…” She tilted her head at the blasphemy. “I’m not sure they are to blame.”

Leafhopper sat back on her heels and wiped her meal-covered hands on her dress hem while she gazed at Cornsilk. “Then who is?”

“I don’t know! Maybe … maybe the First People at Talon Town. We send them corn and pots and everything else we make. All that, and they’re supposed to talk to the gods so it will rain. They’re the ones who always start the wars. Not only that…” Cornsilk leaned forward to whisper, “I heard that Chief Crow Beard keeps corpse powder in his chamber to use against his enemies! Maybe he’s the witch!”

Leafhopper set the black-and-white bowl at the bottom of her grinding slab and pulled the coarse red meal into it. She had clamped her lower lip between her teeth, thinking.

Cornsilk kept grinding.

There were two kinds of “people” in the world: First People and Made People. The First People were descendants of those who had bravely climbed through the four underworlds, led by a blue-black wolf, and emerged from the darkness into this fifth world of light. All First People lived in Straight Path Canyon. The four clans of the Straight Path nation were, on the other hand, Made People. The Creator had “made” them from animals to provide company for the First People after their emergence. The Bear Clan, the Buffalo Clan, the Coyote Clan, and Cornsilk’s own people, the Ant Clan, had been the creatures their names implied. Through the miracle of the Creator’s divine breath, they had changed into humans. But the First People saw them as inferiors because they had once been animals, while the First People had always been humans.

Outsiders, like the Mogollon, the Hohokam, and the northern Tower Builders, were not people at all. Despite their human bodies, the Straight Path people knew they had the souls of beasts. Why, the Mogollon’s own legends said they had once lived as fiery wolves in Father Sun’s heart and been cast out because they started chewing up his body. As they ran through the heavens toward earth, their blazing wolf bodies had transformed into human shapes. To this day the Straight Path people called them Fire Dogs, for their souls remained predators, watching, waiting for the right time to kill.

The Fire Dogs could not be trusted. They didn’t think like humans.

Cornsilk wondered how the elders of the Made People clans got along at Talon Town. Each clan sent their greatest leader to live among the First People, to help and advise them on the ways of the world. The Made People had, after all, lived here much longer than the First People. But Cornsilk had heard that the First People routinely treated their clan leaders little better than Fire Dog slaves.

Sternlight, the legendary Sunwatcher, had the worst reputation. The Straight Path nation had been suffering from drought for sixteen summers, and where once the clans had looked to Sternlight for guidance, now they openly accused him of witchcraft.

Power flowed through everything in the world, from the smallest dandelion seed floating across the desert to the grandest of the Comet People. Priests and shamans called upon Power to help their peoples, to bring health, assure good crops, and influence the rains to fall. Witches used it to benefit themselves.

Two summers ago, a Trader had whispered that he had stumbled into one of Sternlight’s private chambers at Talon Town by accident. He said he’d seen piles of exquisite blankets, fine pots filled with chunks of turquoise, jet, malachite, and coral, and baskets of priceless macaw and parrot feathers. He’d also claimed he’d seen a line of human skulls mounted on the wall.

Cornsilk suppressed a shiver.

Good people never accumulated wealth. They shared what they had with their families. Only witches amassed such “things” for their own pleasures.

Leafhopper shifted her squat body to lean over and murmur, “Do you think the First People would starve without us?”

Cornsilk cocked a brow. “Thinking of subtle ways to kill the witches?”

“Shh!” Leafhopper said. She glanced over her shoulder, and her bean-sack dress pulled tight across her flat chest. “No, I was just—”

“Yes, they’d starve. We provide them with almost all of their corn, beans, squash, and dried meat.”

Made People hosted every major ceremonial at Talon Town, hauling in massive quantities of food to feed the attendants, and pay the priests, Dancers, and Singers who used their spiritual powers to call upon the gods. When the ritual cycle ended, the Made People stored the excess food at Talon Town. First People grew little of their own food; they survived on those reserves.

No one minded, not if the First People’s voices reached the gods and rain made the crops flourish—but that had not happened in many cycles. The gods seemed to have abandoned the First People.

But they still ate the Made People’s food.

“So,” Leafhopper said, “if we just stopped bringing them food they would die?”

“Or go away. There aren’t very many of them left anyway. It wouldn’t take much.”

First People only married other First People, and many of their children didn’t live past the first two summers. As a result, their numbers had dwindled dramatically. The Blessed Night Sun, Matron of Talon Town, and her husband, the Blessed Sun, had two living children—all the others had died. The Sunwatcher, Sternlight, had never married, and many of the other First People at Talon Town had vanished mysteriously. In the other thirteen towns in Straight Path canyon, perhaps another three hundred First People lived.

“But if they all die”—Leafhopper glanced uneasily at Cornsilk—“how will we ever find our ways to the afterlife?”

“We’ll just follow the north road to the
sipapu
and travel into the underworlds. We’ll get there.”

Because the First People had come up through the underworlds, they, and they alone, knew the correct path to the Land of the Ancestors. Legends said that unimaginable dangers, traps and snares, and bizarre half-human creatures, waited to leap upon the unwary soul. Fortunately, the First People knew each trap and hiding place. And, for a price, they would share their secret knowledge.

“Maybe we’d better not starve them,” Leafhopper said. “I wish to see my parents again. Besides, I think it might take a lot of Power to starve them. And, as you said, Crow Beard keeps corpse powder in his chamber. I don’t think we want to be witched as punishment.”

Cornsilk smacked a new handful of meal. Pink flour wafted up around her face. “A really evil witch could beat him.”

“Maybe.” A smile came to Leafhopper’s round face. She shoved up her red headband with a finger, leaving a streak of red meal across her forehead. “Wouldn’t
that
be interesting to watch? Witches hurling curses and drowning each other with corpse powder. I’d give a Green Mesa pot to witness that.”

Cornsilk absently glanced eastward, toward the Green Mesa clans. “You don’t own a Green Mesa pot.”

“Nobody does.”

“Some of the First People do. They get them in exchange for those little turquoise figurines that guide souls down to the Land of the Ancestors.”

“Great,” Leafhopper said. “I’ll have to steal a figurine to get a pot so I can pay to see witches kill each other.”

Cornsilk smiled, grabbed the black-and-white bowl of coarsely ground meal and got to her feet. “I’m going to go heat this up.”

“I’m coming with you!” Leafhopper jumped to her feet and stared wide-eyed at Cornsilk. “After all this talk of witches, I’m not going to sit here by myself. What if there’s a witch watching from the bushes? He might shoot a witch pill into my mouth and kill me.”

Cornsilk frowned out at the red hills, where birds chirped and membranous insect wings glittered in the sunlight. A nighthawk sailed over a line of up-tilted sandstone slabs and disappeared into a stand of prickly pear cactus.

“I don’t see anybody out there,” Cornsilk said, and started across the plaza … briskly.
Just in case.

Leafhopper trotted at her side, craning her neck to examine anything that moved beyond the walls of Lanceleaf Village.

Five

When the sun sank below the distant mesa, glowing red spikes shot over the horizon, lancing the hearts of drifting Cloud People, turning them into blazing beasts as they lazily roamed the skyworlds. Southward, the tallest peak of Morning Star Mountain gleamed crimson. Shadows cloaked the rolling hills around the sacred mountain. As the light dwindled, birds found perches on the cactuses and scraggly limbs of brush, their feathers fluffed against the cold.

Buckthorn pulled his red-and-black blanket up over his chest. He had camped on a hillside in a fragrant grove of junipers. The branches twisted above him and created a spiky nest at his back. Faint traces of blue smoke from his supper fire had been trapped by the thick needles; they spun and curled as they poked for a way out.

In the spaces between the limbs, Buckthorn could see the early risers among the Evening People.

He yawned. He had run, off and on, all day, and weariness weighted his tall skinny body. As slumber came, his thoughts flitted like moth wings in torchlight. Where did his path lie? What did the Spirits wish of him?

He had traveled to the First Underworld and received a vision from the ancestor Spirits who lived there. A strange vision of his father. He’d been young, with jet-black hair and broad shoulders. He had worn a pure white buckskin shirt and a magnificent turquoise pendant. When the man had first spoken to Buckthorn, he had instantly recognized that voice—because it sounded so much like his own, deep, soft, with a wistful tinge.

A cold breath of wind shivered the juniper grove. Buckthorn tugged his blanket up to his chin. Fanned by the breeze, the gray charcoal in his firepit became a living bed of red winking eyes. He watched them, and yawned again.

If only he had understood what his father had been trying to tell him.

“There is danger ahead, my son. You must have the heart of a cloud in order to walk upon the wind.”

“The heart of a cloud…” Buckthorn whispered. Deep blue puffs of cloud sailed overhead, their edges shining with starlight. Wind stirred the juniper branches. The gnarled trees creaked and moaned in complaint. “But what does that mean?”

His weary soul seemed to rise at the urging of Wind Baby and coasted on the current like corn pollen on a summer zephyr. His father’s soft voice slipped into his Dream with the lightness of a bobcat’s footfalls.…

“Come this way, son. Come this way.”

Buckthorn seemed to float, breathing hard, and stared into the black eyes of the young man who had guided him through the First Underworld. The man bent over Buckthorn, smiling, his handsome face, with the straight nose and large dark eyes, glowing reddish in the glare of the wind-blown coals. He wore the same white buckskin shirt and magnificent turquoise pendant. His loose long hair flipped around his broad shoulders in the gusts. His white moccasins reached his knees and seemed to blend with his long shirt. Blue, red, and black beads chevroned the tops of his moccasins.

“I am happy to see you, Father.” Buckthorn rubbed sleep from his eyes. Stargleam sheathed the junipers, and he spotted an owl soaring through the darkness overhead, its wings flashing as it circled.