People of the Morning Star (38 page)

The night after the ritual that resurrected Morning Star’s body into Chunkey Boy had been completed, and the god had retired to his palace to rest, Night Shadow Star had presented herself at the Four Winds Clan’s Women’s House to undergo her transition from girl to womanhood. Through the four-day period, she’d been quiet, self-absorbed, as if possessed of a Spirit not her own.

Looking at her now, Blue Heron wondered what, if anything, had changed to cause that first menstruation. Her niece had been peculiar, withdrawn, and distracted, as if her souls entertained more than just themselves within that lithe and healthy young body.

It’s a miracle any of us can still function as human beings.

“Niece,” she said aloud, “why did you risk offending the Morning Star and take it upon yourself to cut down the Red Wing? You ordered me to find that miscreant, Seven Skull Shield. What specifically did Piasa tell you?”

Night Shadow Star’s eyes seemed to enlarge, and she smiled slightly as she gave her aunt a careful inspection. “Piasa doesn’t confide in me. I am only his tool.”

“You’re the
tonka’tzi
’s daughter! Perhaps even the future Matron of the Four Winds Clan.”

“And Piasa is the undisputed lord of the Underworld.”

Blue Heron glared into Night Shadow Star’s eerie eyes, reading the insistence there. In a low voice she said, “I wonder how First Woman takes such statements? Discovering that Piasa is the ‘undisputed lord’ of her realm must be disconcerting.”

Night Shadow Star tilted her head as she laughed. “Who do you think carries First Woman’s orders about the Underworld and enforces her will? They are entwined. Part of the same creative and destructive Power. First Woman sits in her cave at the bottom of the world, dreaming her dreams. And through them flow Piasa, the Horned Serpent, the Tie Snakes, fish, and turtles. The life-souls of the dead bow and offer their respect as they seek the ancestors who have preceded them. And through it all, Power beats like a great heart, all subject to First Woman’s will.”

“You speak like a priest,” Blue Heron muttered.

“Only because you ask questions for which there are no answers.” Night Shadow Star cocked her head suggestively. “When I was Dancing in the Underworld, Piasa seized my souls, crushed them out of my body … and swallowed them.”

“Like Bird Man is said to have done to the great priestess Lichen?”

Night Shadow Star shrugged. “Only Lichen herself could have answered that. I am Piasa’s creature.”

“If that’s the case, he’s not taking very good care of you. You’d think Piasa would have given you some warning before that attack last night.”

“I felt a sudden chill. Nothing more.” She raised a hand. “Aunt, you have to understand. We’re at the center of a struggle for more than just our lives. This is a battle over Power and its uses. The resurrection of the Morning Star came as a shock to the foundations of our world. Cahokia, by the miracle of its existence, has changed everything. The tremors continue to shake the Underworld. Unease breathes its way through the Sky World, unsettling Thunder Beasts, upsetting Grandfather Sun’s path through the sky, and Moon Woman’s soft glow.”

Blue Heron was peripherally aware of Fire Cat’s expression, tightening like an overstretched mask. Her own skepticism had to have slipped past her control, because Night Shadow Star’s eyes flashed anger. Her fiery gaze intensified as she thrust her face into Blue Heron’s. For a moment, the Clan Keeper felt herself grow dizzy as she peered into the endless depths of those pool-like eyes. As if seeing into a shadowed eternity.

As Night Shadow Star spoke, the words echoed off Blue Heron’s souls. “When the Four Winds Clan called the Morning Star’s Spirit out of the Sky World, we upset the balance. Human beings should not have been capable of concentrating that kind of Power. We stunned the Spirit Worlds, both above and below. Since the miracle, Cahokia has become like a great whirlpool, sucking people and Power from all corners of the earth. And it’s spewing it right back out, spitting colonies in every direction. We’ve imposed a new order … and with it a new chaos.”

A shiver worked down Blue Heron’s spine as she realized Night Shadow Star’s eyes were changing, yellowing around the edges, as if a mirage shimmered there. Voice cracking, heart pounding, she asked, “What’s changed? It’s been over sixty summers since Petaga and his clan leaders were sacrificed to reincarnate the god.”

The voice that answered wasn’t Night Shadow Star’s but a deeper, almost hollow, echo. “What if someone didn’t want to stop at just recalling the Morning Star?”

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“Think, Clan Keeper.” The hollow voice seemed to vibrate her very bones. “Four Winds Clan created the ritual, manipulated the Power, and recalled the Morning Star. In the aftermath, you rebuilt Cahokia, drew people from every direction. They came, carrying their own Power bundles and sacred objects. Never before has so much Power been concentrated in one place. Cahokia literally breathes, the air throbs, the earth and water swell and pulse.”

For an instant Blue Heron would have sworn she was staring into a great panther’s predatory eyes.

The beast lifted its lips in a snarl as it said, “But what if you’d captured the very lightning, and its Power was in your fingers? What could you touch without bursting it asunder? What would you caress without scorching its surface to blackness?”

“We’re not talking about lightning,” Blue Heron rasped.

“No. We’re talking about breaching the boundaries between the three worlds. Flood, pestilence, fire, and war, as the Spirit Beings clash and destroy each other. Death … so much…” Night Shadow Star’s odd eyes rolled back in her head, her body weaving.

Fire Cat leaped forward, catching Night Shadow Star’s body as she fainted dead away.

Thirty-two

Tapping one of the arrows on his left palm, Seven Skull Shield made his way down the busy path—more of a transportation artery actually—that wound through the dense cluster of houses, temples, workshops, storehouses, and ramadas that made up the thriving strip of River City Mounds where it dominated the river’s eastern bank.

The long walk from the Clan Keeper’s had been sobering, and he’d looked at Cahokia with new eyes. He’d always viewed the problem from the other side: How do you stay hidden in Cahokia?

Now, the converse surprised him: How do you find someone who is hiding in Cahokia?

Having left just after his breakfast, and before the dawn had fully broken, he’d been walking through solid city where the mound-studded avenue skirted the southern bank of Marsh Elder Lake. It had taken five hands of time just to reach the main congestion of River Mounds City where the four or five arrow makers maintained their workshops. In the process, he’d been in the constant company of people. An endless stream of on-comers had been headed toward the Great Plaza, most with packs of food, blankets, colorful textiles, bundles of firewood, pack frames heavy with pottery, teams of men carrying bundles of peeled poles. He’d encountered people literally obscured with bales of thatch, occasional nobles atop their shouldered litters, men with haunches of venison or braces of turkeys, young men with loads of dried fish, or whatever the mind could conjure. Sometimes he had to duck to the side as teams of sweating, panting men, stumbled along under the weight of immense logs bound from some major construction. Other times it was to allow for the passage of loads of stone borne inland on litters by muscular two-man teams.

Once again the incredible and ravenous immensity of Cahokia, and the amount of food, material, and fuel it demanded left him amazed. The fact that the city could actually function, that it could meet the needs of tens of thousands, reeked of an impossible miracle.

He just made it to the first workshop when a conch horn sounded, and people scampered out of the way as a squadron of warriors appeared. Duck Clan designs decorated their aprons and shields. They came trotting down the center of the thoroughfare, equipment clattering, feet beating out a rhythmic cadence in the damp sandy swale that served for a road. Their Squadron First was a scarred and burly man, whose entire hide had fallen victim to the copper tattoo needles in his clan’s men’s house.

In the wake of their passage Seven Skull Shield watched men, women, children, and the occasional dog emerge from gaps between buildings, doorways, and wherever they could step aside. Then he slipped into the arrow maker’s.

The workshop was little more than a peaked, thatch roof held up by eight heavy support posts. Mat walls draped a third of the way down from the roof and were tied off on the upright posts. Around the walls, large bundles of green shafts rested on wooden racks to season. Ignorant as he was of the craft, Seven Skull Shield could identify at least six different woods as well as lengths of cane. Another bench was covered with differently sized sandstone abraders and shaft straighteners. Boxes of different assorted bone, antler, stone, and wooden points rested below the work benches. Loosely woven burlap sacks of feathers hung along the far wall ready for cutting and fletching. Coils of buffalo, deer, and elk sinew as well as spools of thin cordage filled additional pots.

While none of the eleven men working at the benches so much as raised their heads, the old man in the back rose to his feet, calling, “Welcome. May the blessings of the Morning Star be upon you.”

“Greetings, yourself, elder,” Seven Skull Shield replied, touching his chin respectfully. “I’ve an arrow for you to look at.”

The old man limped his way to the front, taking the arrow from Seven Skull Shield’s hands. Stepping into better light, he held the shaft at arms’ length, narrowed his eyes into a thoughtful squint, and rolled the shaft in his fingers.

“I can make you as many like this as you need.”

“Is it yours?”

“Hmm? Oh, no. One of the others. I’d say Gray Mouse’s family given the double-knotted sinew hafting on the point. The stone point was made down south by Wild Eye. He ships baskets of them up here. The shaft’s hickory, from a third season sapling. Green-cut but well seasoned.”

“Gray Mouse? His workshop is around here?”

“Just up from the main canoe landing. Only arrow maker north of the River House palace, just at the edge of the storage houses above the landing.”

“Thank you, elder.” Seven Skull Shield reached into his belt pouch and produced a clam shell in payment. “May the Morning Star bless you with health and old age.”

“I need no Trade for identifying an arrow,” the old man told him. “But thank you.”

“Gray Mouse,” Seven Skull Shield mused as he worked his way through the maze of buildings until he could see the top of High Chief War Duck’s palace and its towering World Tree pole. In River Mounds, everything was oriented from that one soaring landmark.

Three fingers of time later, after wandering through a confusion of structures, he found the arrow maker’s. Apparently they liked the same kind of architecture: open-sided, thatch-roofed, with mat walls, and the interior filled with benches. Here, too, men were bent over their work, some peeling shafts, others sanding, one carefully notching a tip, yet another winding sinew around a freshly fitted, chipped-stone point.

“Gray Mouse?” Seven Skull Shield asked, only to have a smiling, toothless, white-haired man rise from where he carefully spun a completed arrow in his ancient hands.

Walking over, Gray Mouse gave his shaft another spin, saying, “Bless you, this fine day, warrior.” His gaping smile exposed pink and toothless gums; his brown, deeply wrinkled face rearranged itself into a serene mask. “Got to spin them when they’re done. If there’s a flaw, I can feel it.”

“Did you make this one, elder?” He handed Gray Mouse the shaft.

Gray Mouse laid his arrow down, took the shaft and raised it to a hand’s length from his nose as he inspected the point, shaft, and fletching. Then he spun it. “It’s been shot,” he muttered. “Probably hit the ground at an angle. Lucky you didn’t snap the point off.”

“You can tell that? That it’s been shot?”

“It’s in the balance.” The old man grinned and winked conspiratorially. “Been doing this awhile. That’s why I’m the best there is. Yes, that one was shot. But don’t shy away from using it again. It’ll fly truer than most men can shoot.”

“And you made it?”

“Oh, yes. And not so long ago. Probably one of that lot that we Traded out of here a couple of days ago. Hickory shaft, third season. Green-cut. I know that wood. Traded it up from the Tenasee River. Seasoned it myself. That’s why we don’t have walls here. Wood changes with the temperature, and whether the air’s wet or dry.” He spun the arrow again on his fingers, asking, “You make your own arrows?”

“No.”

“Ah, good. You can’t make them as well as we can. Most warriors and hunters, they think they got to breathe their own Spirit Power into the arrow. Put part of themselves in the work. Here, we’ve got even more of the right Power. Comes from what we know.”

“Do you know who Traded for that arrow that was shot only once?”

“Young man. Noble born, if you ask me. Not a veteran warrior, didn’t have the way about him. But the two warriors with him? They were blooded, I’ll tell you. Tula, if you ask me.”