People of the Morning Star (11 page)

“What the…? You! Stop! Who are you? What are doing in my house?”

Seven Skull Shield grinned, touched his forehead in a gesture of respect, and ran for all he was worth.

The man hesitated just long enough to pick up a piece of club-length firewood. “I’ll get you, you foul worm!”

Seven Skull Shield had more than passing familiarity with this part of Horned Serpent town. He charged between the close-packed dwellings, zigging and zagging, hammering through freshly planted gardens and corn plots. People screamed, jumping to their feet, shaking fists, and generally getting in poor Fivefish’s way as he pounded along in pursuit, waving his chunk of firewood.

Seven Skull Shield’s muscular legs were warming. Now, this was life! First he’d lifted the statuettes, and while wandering through the …

The statuettes!

Five of them, remarkably rendered by one of the best stone-workers in River Mounds City. Carved from black siltstone, they’d been the center piece on the altar in First Woman’s temple atop its high mound just off the Horned Serpent town plaza. The depiction of Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies showed her seated, holding the infant Morning Star to her breast, a necklace around her throat, and her hair done up in a bun at the top of her head.

Traded to pilgrims at the canoe landing, or to Traders headed up or down river, they were worth a small fortune.

“And I just
left
them?” he cried incredulously between breaths. Pus and blood. Spring Flower had been distracting, but not
that
distracting.

He shot headlong through someone’s ramada, leaping an old woman with a loom. At her scream, the dog at her feet leaped after him, growling and snapping.

Seven Skull Shield barely skipped away from the mongrel’s snapping jaws, reached out, and toppled a latrine screen into the beast’s path.

“Come back here!” Fivefish’s bellow carried on the air.

In a glimpse over his shoulder, Seven Skull Shield saw the old woman throw her loom at Fivefish. Dodging it, he stumbled, slammed into the ramada post, and spun around. The whole wobbly structure collapsed with a clatter. The dog, ripping its way through the cattail matting, fixed on the reeling Fivefish, leaped, and sank its fangs in his thigh.

The last Seven Skull Shield saw, the old woman was swimming her way through the thatch of her ramada roof, Fivefish was wailing on the now shrieking dog with his firewood, and bellowing in pain and rage.

Charging through a gap between houses, Seven Skull Shield bulled headlong into a latrine screen, and remembering the dog, tore its flimsy poles out of the ground. Stopping just long enough, he grabbed a long wooden pestle for milling corn and propped it at an angle across the narrow gap between the houses.

At the side of a granary, he stopped, pulled the screen up to mask his position, and fought to fill his starved lungs.

Fivefish, running for all he was worth, rounded the corner, tripped over the pestle, and flipped face-first into the open latrine pit.

At the man’s howl of rage, Seven Skull Shield slipped out of sight. Having caught his breath from everything but chuckling, he circled back toward Fivefish’s house.

When he rounded the corner of her house, Spring Flower was pacing anxiously, her hands twisting in knots. She kept staring off in the direction Seven Skull Shield had fled, her face a panicked stew of anxiety.

Totally distracted, she didn’t see him slip into her small dwelling. Crossing the clay floor, Seven Skull Shield found his fabric sack right where he’d left it. Undisturbed, it still held the five statuettes.

She started as he stepped out of her door, a hand flying to her mouth. “It’s you?”

“Told you you’d see me again.” With a tilt of the head, he indicated the interior. “Want to enjoy another quick romp? Those tricks I was telling you—”

“You have to
go
! Now! I mean … where’s Fivefish?”

“Yes, yes, I’m leaving even as I speak.” Seven Skull Shield gave her a confidential wink. “Oh, and Fivefish? Last I saw he’d stopped to use the latrine.”

Six

Red Warrior Tenkiller, the
tonka’tzi,
or Great Sky, was responsible for the administration of Cahokia’s business. He attended to his duties in the Council House on the Great Mound’s palisaded southern terrace. No one—from foreign delegations to kinsmen from other lineages—could help but be impressed. Not only was the walled terrace a healthy climb from the plaza below, but as they entered through the gates, the immense height of Morning Star’s palace rose still farther into the sky before them.

Every day
Tonka’tzi
Red Warrior was carried from his residence on the western side of the plaza. His ceremonial litter was borne up the ramp and through the gates. The Council House had been constructed on the western side of the enclosed terrace, and contiguous ramadas allowed him to conduct Cahokia’s business outside when weather permitted.

This morning, as spring rain threatened, Red Warrior sat in his litter chair upon its raised dais at the rear of the Council House. He had dressed regally, wearing a brilliant red apron festooned with Four Winds Clan designs rendered in bits of mica, polished copper beads, and elaborate quill work. Eagle feather splays seemed to blossom behind each shoulder, and his face was painted in patterns of red and black.

To his right, in a smaller litter sat his sister Matron Wind. She wore a blue skirt, her chest covered by no less than twelve strings of gleaming white beads. Her gray-white hair had been carefully fixed in a beehive-shaped bun at the back of her head and pinned with copper. Though in her midfifties, her wits remained sharp, and fortune had left enough of her front teeth that she didn’t suffer the speech impediments of the toothless.

Behind Red Warrior’s dais, a rank of four recorders—their pots of beads and skeins of string before them—listened intently as the reports came in. Picking from their various sizes, shapes, and colors of beads, they strung them in patterns to document the proceedings. A line of aides waited along the left wall, including Dead Bird, the Morning Star’s liaison to the
tonka-tzi.

Two of Red Warrior Tenkiller’s daughters, Lady Lace and Sun Wing, rested on litters. Lace’s place was to their left and Lady Sun Wing on the right. The
tonka’tzi
’s wives had given him many children, but the most important were the ones his first wife, White Pot—a distant cousin from the Horned Serpent House—had borne him. His oldest son by that marriage had been Chunkey Boy, then the exiled Walking Smoke. After that she’d produced daughters beginning with Night Shadow Star, then Lace, and finally Sun Wing.

Cahokia’s administration had barely kept up with its growth, and governance had evolved into a complex web of responsibilities. Most of its huge districts had been delegated to the different Houses, which managed a network of Earth People clans who in turn oversaw most of the immigrant areas. A few districts in Cahokia were governed by autonomous, but subordinate clans of the Earth People. Of these, Matron Corn Seed and the Deer Clan had become most prominent. The Bear, Snapping Turtle, Hawk, and Fish Clans respectively had been delegated ever more responsibility for governing the flood of “dirt farmer” immigrants who’d poured into Cahokia’s outlying areas—especially atop the eastern bluffs.

Council Houses and temples had been built in each community. The Earth Clan sub-chief in charge there reported to his clan’s district Council House, the districts to the clan lineage in a center such as Evening Star City. The lineage chief in turn reported to her House, and the House to the
tonka’tzi.
The system was ponderous, often clumsy, but given Cahokia’s immense sprawl, nothing else had been found effective.

In addition to his domestic duties the
tonka’tzi
received the delegations and emissaries from the far-flung colonies Cahokia had established along the major rivers. Rolls of tanned buckskin maps recorded the location of each colony, and the associated beaded belts, blankets, and bead strings recorded the particulars.

Also within the
tonka’tzi
’s purvey were the diplomatic embassies from other nations including the Caddo in the southeast, Natchez, Tunica, and Mus’Kokee in the south, and the polyglot of nations that dotted the lower lengths of the Mississippi. Fortunately he could delegate many of these to the priests, since their interests were mostly religious.

He glanced at his daughters seated to either side and dressed in finery second only to his and the Matron Wind’s. The Lady Lace, Night Shadow Star’s younger sister, seemed to have the knack. Though she sat uncomfortably due to her pregnant belly, she paid close attention and had started to make constructive comments.

Red Warrior Tenkiller wasn’t sure about Sun Wing. His youngest daughter had survived but sixteen summers; she seemed more taken with her new-found status than the needs of empire. Having just been made a woman at the equinox celebration, she’d been married to Hickory Lance, a young noble in the Horned Serpent House leadership. Since then her dreamy thoughts were obsessed either by her husband’s penis and the novel delights she could conjure from it, or the flaunting of her so recently invested authority.

He cast a sidelong glance at Sun Wing, catching his daughter in the act of preening as she studied herself in a slab of mica she carried for the purpose.

“You’re a lady in the Morning Star House,” the
tonka’tzi
growled. “Be one.”

Matron Wind noticed the object of his irritation and lit into the young woman, saying, “Stop acting like a piece of artwork, niece. Pay attention.”

In another time and place the pouting look Sun Wing shot Matron Wind would have earned a slap followed by a tongue lashing. Lace, having caught the entire exchange, couldn’t hide a mocking smile.

Matron Wind ground her teeth and fought to keep from fuming. Red Warrior could only agree. With Night Shadow Star lost in whatever world she’d plummeted to, one of these two would eventually inherit the mantle of clan matron.

Blessed Creator, for the Morning Star’s sake, endow the Matron with long life.
He gave Lace’s child-swollen abdomen a speculative glance.
And let that child be both a male, and a survivor!

The latest in the long line of individuals seeking audience was a Fox Clan man who’d arrived at River Mound City the night before. He’d appeared, looking exhausted, and bearing a pack full of map-hides as well as a beaded message belt. The map-hides had been carefully drawn of Reed Bottoms town, a colony of about six hundred persons that had been established last year at the bend of the Tenasee River far to the southeast.

Red Warrior returned his attention to one of the map-hides, studying the layout of the temple, the Council House, granaries, and the surrounding palisades that had been built at Reed Bottom town. While he did, the messenger fingered the beaded-shell belt he’d brought. Eyes half closed, he translated the pattern of the beads into words.

“We have twenty-three families planting fields this year,” he said. “Of the one hundred and fifty-three warriors, only seven have been killed in fighting with the local tribes. Depredations have declined since War Chief Kicks Them burned three of their villages this winter and enslaved the head men and their families. A total of sixty were placed in the squares and tortured.”

“And have there been conversions?” Matron Wind asked.

“Yes, High Matron. Most of the women and children captured as slaves are now taking part in the rituals.”

She motioned with her finger, and one of the recorders stepped forward to take the beaded belt, squinting at the different-sized and colored beads. He nodded, then repaired to his place behind her, rolling it up.

“Anything else,
Tonka’tzi?”

“No.” He smiled at the messenger, and added, “I shall convey this report straight to the Morning Star.”

Matron Wind added, “Please express our thanks to your chief and his clansmen.” She gestured again, and one of the attendants stepped forward with a smoothly polished chunkey stone. Bowing, the attendant offered it to the messenger. The Fox Clan man received it, hands almost shaking, and promptly bowed his forehead to the matting in obeisance.

Matron Wind explained, “That is a token of the Morning Star’s affection and appreciation for the hard work and deprivation your people are experiencing. It is a gift to your chief and clan, to be passed down from generation to generation.” She gave him just enough time to absorb the enormity of the gift, then added, “May the Sky Beings protect you on your journey home.”

Still shaking, the young man crawled backward, the chunkey stone pressed to his chest. Rising to his feet, he managed a wide-eyed, awe-filled last glance and hurried out past the guards.

Red Warrior handed the map to the recorder. “At least he didn’t come weeping and asking for more warriors.”

“The Tenasee isn’t as dangerous as it was ten winters ago,” the Matron replied. “The colony at Reed Bottom covers a strategic section of river. It’s the eastern colonies that worry me. The ones beyond the great mountains. We’ve heard nothing for two years.”