The People of the Black Sun (2 page)
Read The People of the Black Sun Online
Authors: W. Michael Gear
Keep in mind, human beings are storytellers. Our cultures are founded upon stories, interpreted through them, and survive because of them. Destroying a civilization doesn't require warfare or plague or starvation. Cultural midnight is always only a generation away. History has demonstrated many times that causing the death of a culture is a relatively easy process: First, destroy a people's written records. Second, destroy their language. When there's no one left who can recite the stories of the people, and no documents to tell the young about them, assimilation into the dominant culture is virtually inevitable. Why? Because when a people's words are lost, they must re-story their world from the traditions of alien nations.
Imagine, for a moment, what it must have been like for Henan Scrogg and Solon Skye, the last two people in the twentieth century able to read the original wampum of the Code of Handsome Lake, knotted by the Prophet himself in the early 1800s (Johansen and Mann, 2000, p. 328). Now imagine what it would be like today to lose the last two people who could read the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Certainly Faithkeepers would keep both documents alive as long as possible through oral history, but the truth is that oral traditions are mutable. They change with the failing memories of the elders struggling to preserve themâespecially if the young no longer care about such “fables.”
The People of the Longhouse, the Haudenosaunee, managed to save some of the most critical wampum belts. They can be seen today in excellent repositories like the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, New York (
www.iroquoismuseum.org
), which was established by the state of New York in 1891.
We encourage you to take a trip to see these fragile beautiful pieces of American history. Each is a story worth seeing.
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Contents
Map of Iroquoia: The Lands of the People of the Longhouse
Map of the Lands of the People of the Dawnland
Tor and Forge Titles by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
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Ensegaha'aâ¦
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One
As Sonon strode through the evening forest, his black cape parted the sea of frigid air, leaving ice crystals swirling behind him. Every twig on the maples and giant sycamores was sheathed in white. Far out in the trees, owls watched him with their feathers fluffed out for warmth, their eyes shining.
Deep cold was a quiet monster. It slithered into clothing, stiffened leather, and afflicted bones with agony. Its unnaturally silent voice made ears crave even the slightest sound. The sheer vastness of the frozen land pressed down upon him tonight.
What is my offering? What can I give him to help him?
When he crested the hill and gazed out across the valley where hundreds of campfires glittered, he took a few moments to contemplate the next few days. He suspected they would be some of the most difficult of his existence.
He inhaled a deep breath, and started down the hill toward the warriors who had waged the battle. Frozen flowers hid amid the shriveled leaves on the sides of the trail, dead, folded in upon themselves.
As he neared Yellowtail Village, smoke flowed upward from the charred longhouses and obliterated the glittering Path of Souls that painted a white swath across the night sky. His People, the People of the Hills, believed that each person had two souls. One remained with the bones forever. The other, the afterlife soul, stayed on earth for ten days. Then, if it were lucky enough to be properly prepared, it followed the Path of Souls to a long bridge that spanned a dark abyss. On this side of the bridge were all the animals a person had ever known in his life. The animals who had loved him helped him across. Those that he had mistreated chased him, trying to force him to fall off the bridge into eternal darkness. If his animal helpers were strong enough and he made it to the other side, he would be greeted by his ancestors in the Land of the Dead.
Some people, however, had trouble finding the Path of Souls. Especially those who died violently.
His eyes narrowed. On the battlefield below, dead bodies lay contorting as they froze. There must be thousands of glistening soul lights, lost souls, out there bobbing and swaying in confusion, searching for loved ones to take care of them. If Sonon closed his eyes, he could hear their spectral cries rising.
He folded his arms beneath his cape, trying to stay warm while he continued thinking.
Yes, maybe â¦
Perhaps the single greatest truth of life was that the dead were not dead. Their shadows lived. They wandered the forests, slept in crackling fires and ancient sycamores, they huddled in grass that wept and stones that whimpered. They were the painted prayersticks that Great Grandmother Earth used to dance life in and out of this world. If humans could only learn to watch shadows pass like a mountain did, they would understand that death was just a whisper.
“Is that my offering?”
War songs lilted through the sparkling air, mixing eerily with the sobs and moans coming from the destroyed villages.
“Yes,” he said softly, deciding. “A glimpse from inside the mountain.”
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Two
As Grandmother Moon edged above the rocky valley rim, her gleam flecked the bare tips of the trees, and the cold night took on a blazing opalescence.
Where she stood on the catwalk of Bur Oak Village, Matron Jigonsaseh spread her feet and tucked short gray-streaked black hair behind her ear. An unusually tall woman, she had seen thirty-nine summers pass. She had large black eyes, a small nose, and full lips. Her belted cape, woven from twisted strips of foxhide, hung to her knees. The only weapon she carried was her war club, CorpseEye, shoved into her belt. Only a few days ago, she had been called War Chief Koracoo. When she had accepted the position of village matron, she had undergone the Requickening ritual. Her dead mother's soul had been raised up and placed in her body, along with her name: Jigonsaseh. Koracoo hadn't grown accustomed to either the position or the name yet. When people called her Matron Jigonsaseh, she often didn't realize for an instant that they were speaking to her.
She gazed out across the battlefield. The bulk of her army had been destroyed in that gently rolling part of the bowl-shaped valley to the west, just beyond Reed Marsh. In the silvered gleam, she could see the dead. Bodies froze at different rates. Those still warm created black spots upon the frosty grass. Thousands of black spots. How many? She tried to estimate. Perhaps four thousand out there, and another eight or nine hundred in the meadow to the east of the villages?
She braced her forearms on the palisade, and squinted.
Evening carried the pungent scents of smoldering longhouses and old blood.
She concentrated on the war songs that filled the winter night. She longed to be out there in the camps with the men and women who'd waged the battle today. She missed that companionship ⦠and the solace of friends who understood what the fight had cost her.
She bowed her head for a long moment, staring at the tangle of bodies encircling the palisade, enemy warriors who'd tried to assail the walls and failed. Here and there, the ladders they'd thrust against the forty-hand-tall palisade lay like disorganized lattices, the rungs frosted and shining.
All night long, her souls had kept repeating the battle, forcing her to live through it over and over â¦
six thousand enemy warriors flow swiftly, steadily, across the rolling valley swathed in mist, their clan flags fluttering. They come on like waves, dying all the while, flooding forward to engage my two thousand archers stationed in the maples ⦠volleys of arrows piercing the fog, rising above it, and arcing down in iridescent streams â¦
Only a warrior could understand the unspeakable beauty. The battle had writhed and roared, shimmered with a thousand crystal eyes. Magnificent. Terrifying beyond words.
As though to remind her of her duties, sobs of grief and the delirious cries of the wounded rang out in the plaza below. One man in the Wolf Clan longhouse kept coughing wetly, gasping. Lung wound. She had tended many such wounds. If he and his family were very lucky, it would be over soon.
She licked her chapped lips and tasted bitterness. A fine deep-gray powder of ash continued to rise from the smoldering walls. She had ash in her hair and eyes, ash in her throat. For the rest of her life, she would remember the gritty flavor that pervaded this cold night ⦠and the miracle that had ended the attack â¦
my son lifts his hands and a monstrous storm swells above the eastern horizon and crashes down upon the battlefield in shrieking, whirling blackness ⦠warriors scatter like brittle old leaves.
She laced her fingers and squeezed them together in a stranglehold, desperate to keep her emotions at bay. When the next few days had passed, and she'd done the things that needed to be done, then she would grant herself time to make sense of it.
She still had things to do.
I must go see Cord.
She owed the Chief of the People of the Flint more than she could ever thank him for. Without his help today, the Standing Stone nation would have been wiped from the face of Great Grandmother Earth. Cord's help, and the support of the three Hills People villages that had turned on Chief Atotarho and fought on her side, had made the difference between life and stark oblivion. She had already gone to the Hills matrons and chiefs. She'd left Cord for the last because seeing him was the most difficult.
⦠on the river twelve summers ago ⦠staring at me with such longing ⦠the black roach of hair bristling down the middle of his skull shining with new-fallen snow ⦠his deep voice like velvet ⦠“If things were different ⦠if our nations were not at war⦔
She studied her village, Yellowtail Village, thirty paces away. It was the smaller sister village of Bur Oak Village. Numerous charred holes gaped in the three concentric rings of palisades that encircled the village. All three longhouses had sustained damage. Roofs had burned through, flaming bark walls had toppled to the ground in smoking heaps. For the night, her villagers had torn down the intact bark walls that separated their interior chambers and tried to fill the gaps in the exterior longhouse walls. Firelight streamed around the mismatched squares. The central plaza bonfire blazed, flickering over the dark shapes of dozens of people who tended the dead, laid out in rows. Oddly, the feet were all even, the toes pointing upward like short stubby posts. It would have been foolish to waste the warm space inside the crowded houses on them. Their afterlife souls were not in their bodies, but roaming around the village in the form of glistening soul lights, eating the dregs in the cooking pots, trying to speak with their loved ones. Jigonsaseh's own daughter, Tutelo, would be there tending the bodies, probably working through the night, despite the fact that her own husband had been killed yesterday afternoon, and grief must have swallowed her world.