People of the Morning Star (31 page)

“Sun Bird can’t lose now.” Crazy Frog rubbed his chin. “Should have bet a second pot of shell beads on this game.”

“All because Badger Cape bounced his stone?”

“Losing by that much on his first cast?” Crazy Frog gestured futility. “When he starts well, he ends well. Now he thinks Power isn’t with him on this game. It would be a miracle if he recovered, and Badger Cape isn’t in the habit of making miracles.”

Seven Skull Shield watched Sun Bird start his run with a little hop. On the fourth pace he bent, whipped his arm back, and smoothly bowled a white marble stone down the court. Straightening, he sprinted forward, switched his lance, and launched it in a perfect overhand throw. He came to a stop, bouncing on his toes as he watched the lance speed after the fleet stone.

“Good cast,” Crazy Frog admitted as he moved his counter bead even before seeing the lance impact no more than two hand’s distance from the stone as it slowed and toppled onto its side.

“I’m curious about something,” Seven Skull Shield said softly. “When I get curious, I think about who might have the answers to my questions.”

“Is that why you gave me that nicely polished whelk shell and asked to sit with me?”

“You’re a remarkably bright man, old friend. And not just about the ins and outs of chunkey. I need information.”

Badger Cape and Sun Bird went to retrieve their gaming pieces and the judge raised an ornate stick at the side of the chunkey court to mark Sun Bird’s point.

The crowd along the court was busy calling encouragement to their favorite player, or haggling over bets.

Crazy Frog gave him a sidelong glance. “A big shell like that earns you not only my wisdom on chunkey and a seat on my platform, but more than just a little information. What is it this time? You need an introduction to some unlucky young woman?”

“What do you mean, ‘unlucky’?”

Crazy Frog shrugged, his nondescript face expressionless. “If I were a pretty young woman, and I woke up to find you in my bed, I’d feel unlucky.”

“Good thing you’re not a young woman. And if I were
ever
to wake up and find
you
sharing my bed? I’d slice my own throat open before I’d live with the memory.”

Crazy Frog laughed and slapped his knee.

Seven Skull Shield concentrated on his friend’s expression as he added, “That would take a special knife, of course. Something ceremonial, perhaps made of translucent brown chert and chipped out by a master flint-knapper. You heard of any such knives being Traded around?”

Crazy Frog’s eyes narrowed as he thought. “Nope. But I could put the word out. What do you need it for?”

“Maybe I’m worried about waking up with you in my bed?”

“Not a chance. And you didn’t bribe me with that shell just to get a line on an expensive ceremonial knife.”

Seven Skull Shield watched Badger Cape take his position, all of his concentration on the course. Spectators shouted advice and support from the sidelines. The player sprinted forward with a passion, tucked, and bowled his stone. Shifting the lance was smoothly done, and he cast before pulling to a stop just shy of the penalty line.

“He’s throwing long,” Crazy Frog muttered, moving his counter.

Seven Skull Shield watched the lance impact a good six hands beyond where the stone stopped. “I don’t think I want you watching when I play.”

“You’re not too bad. With practice and someone who knows the game to tell you what you’re doing wrong, you’d be pretty good.”

“But not great?”

“Not to the point that I’d play the Morning Star for my head if I were you.”

“He usually grants the loser his head back.”

“You assume he’ll be in a good mood when he plays you.”

“What do you hear about the Morning Star? Myself, I’ve heard that some parties aren’t very pleased with him these days.”

Crazy Frog watched Sun Bird take his position, study the court, and then charge forward to bowl his stone and cast his lance. He moved another bead in Sun Bird’s favor even before the lance had made it midway through its flight. “Being ‘displeased’ with the Morning Star and clapping one’s jaws about it doesn’t sound like the best path to a long and happy life.”

“Apparently someone has done just that. Anything you might have heard that actually proves worthwhile might earn you considerably more than a whelk shell or two.”

Crazy Frog gave him a careful inspection from the corner of his eye. “Tell me that you’re not thinking about challenging the Morning Star. I always thought you were smarter than to desire a slow death in a square. And, if that’s where you’re headed, I want nothing to do with you.”

“Me? Challenge the Morning Star? Not in this or any other lifetime.”

“So far you’re not making much sense, old friend.” He arched an eyebrow. “Say, this doesn’t have anything to do with that rumor that the Four Winds Clan Keeper ran you down in old Meander’s shell-carving workshop? I figured it was some exaggerated story.” He chuckled. “Did she really call that third leg of yours a tow rope?”

“It was just a misunderstanding about some Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies statuettes.”

“Oh, yeah, and I heard they broke every finger in Black Swallow’s hands for stealing them.”

Seven Skull Shield made a face. “We’re getting away from the point. Tell me something: Do you like the way things are? Enjoying wealth, fine food, gambling on chunkey, living like a high chief, running your own little squadron of hired men?”

Crazy Frog’s eyes were flat and emotionless. “What do you think?”

“I think you want everything to stay just as it is. I think you really like living the way you do. Me, myself? I want things to stay as they are. I think Cahokia’s perfectly fine just as it is.” He paused. “Someone doesn’t share our way of thinking.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I need to find out.” Seven Skull Shield met Crazy Frog’s intent stare. “Not much goes on around the River Mounds or down on the canoe landing that you don’t hear about. And if you
had
heard something, you might not have realized just how much of a threat it might be to your continued and future enjoyment of chunkey.”

“What’s this all about?” For the first time, Crazy Frog was no longer paying attention to chunkey. His flat brown eyes were now fixed on Seven Skull Shield.

“Someone is trying to overthrow the Morning Star and destroy the Four Winds Clan. You and I might not think that was our problem, and that the elite can rotted-well take care of themselves. Then if we think a little further we realize that if the plotters succeed in assassinating the Morning Star and brewing a civil war…?”

“I won’t be watching much chunkey.” Crazy Frog’s expression tightened the slightest bit. He didn’t even notice when Badger Cape took his position, bowled, and cast. “The
tonka’tzi
?”

“The Four Winds Clan has managed, so far, to keep the pot from boiling over. Your people are in a position to hear things. If anyone mentions the
tonka’tzi
’s throat being slit with a big ceremonial knife? That, I’d want to know about immediately. And if you could nab the source of the rumors? You might end up having a chunkey match held in your honor.”

After thinking for a while, Crazy Frog said, “I’ll put my people on it. How do I contact you?”

“Send someone you can trust to the Four Winds Clan Keeper’s palace. Have them”—he watched Sun Bird take his position—“deliver a chunkey stone. A red one if it’s critical and needs immediate attention, white if you just think it’s important.”

“The Clan Keeper’s?” For the first time Crazy Frog’s face reflected astonishment. “So, that’s really true?”

He gave Crazy Frog a narrow-eyed squint. “Which is why you’re going to keep this in the strictest confidence, my friend. I’ve watched the old woman work, and believe me when I say your life will be both longer, and more profitable, with her as an ally.”

“And to think,” Crazy Frog mused, “I always thought you were something of a buffoon when you weren’t playing slick to seduce some woman.”

“I like being a buffoon. People who don’t take me seriously don’t watch their wealth or their wives. It’s just that I have trouble keeping up appearances when people are dying right and left, and assassins are sneaking in at night.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to rethink my opinion of you …
Tow Rope!
”

Twenty-five

The stench was overwhelming, worse even than the charnel houses where bodies were allowed to rot before the bones were picked clean. The difference, Blue Heron thought, was that in charnel houses the entrails were removed first and respectfully disposed of. Here they lay in smelly, fly-and-maggot-crawling piles where they’d been tossed into corners on the blood-soaked floor.

She batted at the buzzing flies and slowly cataloged the dim farmhouse’s interior. Body parts from five dismembered corpses were laid out in a large circle that arced from wall to wall. The pieces of a man, woman, two girls, and a small boy had been laid out artistically; the woman’s torso at the top, nearest the door, the man’s back by the benches. All were naked and had symbols painted in red, black, yellow, and blue. The throats were neatly severed under the angle of the jaw. So precise was the cut on each victim, and so wide the wound, that she could look down onto blood-caked vocal cords in their severed voice boxes.

Each torso had been opened from sternum to pubis. Their hearts and livers had been removed and placed in a smaller ring on the lip of the fire pit; the charred organs, having cooked through and desiccated, were easily identifiable. The intestines, however, had just been dropped and kicked to the corners. Each of the empty gut cavities now held a brownware pot filled with ash.

Blue Heron suffered a shiver, as if each person’s body-soul—the one that remained in a person’s bones at the time of death—was screaming at her through those now-gaping throats.

But it was to the corpse lying in the middle of the clay floor by the fire pit that her eyes kept returning. There—in a pool of coagulated blood and crawling with flies—sprawled the remains of a young woman. Her breasts had been cruelly hacked from her rib cage; packets of fly larvae rimmed her dried, gray, and shrunken eyes. Crisscrosses had been incised so deeply in her forehead they cut into the bone. The fleshy part of her nose along with her cheeks and mouth had been cut away from ear to ear to expose blood-caked teeth and her jaw bone. The tendons inside her thighs had been severed and her legs inhumanly spread wide. Long slices had been taken down the inside of her thighs. The wreckage that had been made of her pubis and mutilated vulva sent a shiver through Blue Heron’s bones.

Instinctively Blue Heron made a warding sign against the haunting souls of the outraged dead. She jumped, unsure if the tickle on her skin came from grasping Spirit fingers, or scores of fly feet.

“I’m here to help you,” she implored the dead, and forced her heart to beat normally as she shielded her lips to keep from sucking any of the vile flies into her mouth or lungs.

Once more she glanced back and forth between the victims. The ones laid out in pieces in the circle had been carefully sacrificed, each cut made with precision and for an apparent purpose. She could almost think they’d been treated with reverence. The woman on the floor, however, had been hacked at, the viciousness of the attack readily apparent.

Why the difference? What had the young woman done to incite his anger?

She sucked a breath, two flies racketing around her mouth. Her gag reflex spasmed as she spit the little beasts out.

Come on, concentrate.

She glanced again at the interior walls. Intricate images had been painted carefully, first in blue, yellow, black, and red. Then the artist apparently went back and savagely splashed bloody designs over them, as if to deface the bright images.

“Keeper?” Five Fists asked from where he stood just inside the door.

She turned, glancing at him from the corner of her eye as she batted away the buzzing flies. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But something … There’s a similarity here. As if…”

He pointed. “The blood on the wall, like with the
tonka’tzi
?”

She glanced at the smears and crisscrosses on the plaster. The colorful images beneath had once been butterflies, cocoons, tadpoles, frogs, mudpuppies and salamanders, seeds, and corn stalks. All images of transformation.

“No snakes,” she murmured.

“What do you want done with this place?” he asked softly. “The crowd outside is waiting, as are High Chief Right Hand and the Matron Corn Seed. People are worried, Keeper. The talk of witchcraft is spreading.”

She sighed, making another warding by twining her fingers together then flinging them apart to disperse both evil and the angry ghosts of the dead. “Burn it.”

She turned as Five Fists stepped out the door, admitting a shaft of light that illuminated the woman’s wounded crotch. Something glinted in the mutilated flesh. Blue Heron slashed impotently at the column of flies that rose as she crouched, careful to keep light on the gleam.

She reached out, grasping a thin bit of cold stone between her thumb and forefinger. The sliver had been jammed into the midline where the two bones joined above the sheath; it had apparently stuck in the cartilage before being snapped off. Patiently she worked the fragment loose, holding it up in the slanting light.