People of the Morning Star (62 page)

Her other arm was lifted, and she could see where tight ropes had purpled her skin, the imprint of the fibers visible. Next they removed the ropes from her completely numb legs. As two of the men worked their arms under her back, however, spears of pain shot through her; she screamed as they lifted.

They carried her through a palace of some sort, but the walls—bathed in flickering yellow light—had the oddest decorations: crimson snakes, tadpoles, frogs, caterpillars and butterflies, mudpuppies and salamanders, oddly proportioned Spirit beings, all painted on the plaster in rusty red-brown tones.

Her back spasmed again as the four men who held her stopped and turned her. In the process, she screamed again as they bent her backward and her head dangled. She could just see her long black hair where it trailed across intricately woven matting. The first tingles of agony began to be felt in her arms and legs. Her baby squirmed in her womb, as if it too were now afraid.

From her upside-down vantage point, she could see a line of children seated on the benches along one wall. And there was Chief High Dance and Matron Columella. Glancing to the other side she was surprised to see Sun Wing, naked, her body painted and tied securely to one of the wall benches. Her younger sister’s hair was down, a cloth gag in her mouth. Even as Lace watched, Sun Wing was tugging at the ropes binding her. A desperate fear glittered behind her eyes.

“Hello, Sister,” a soft voice cooed, and she fixed her upside-down gaze on the young man who approached.

“Help me,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’m Lace. Lady Lace, of the Morning Star House. Call them. Call the Morning Star … he’ll…”

He smiled warmly, his face so familiar, yet odd. His naked body had been painted in the sacred colors, red, white, black, blue, and yellow. His face was painted like a panther’s ropy muscles slid under smooth skin as he cocked his head and studied her. Burning brown eyes stared into hers, and he smiled slightly.

Pus and blood! Walking Smoke!

Horrible memories came flooding back. Heavy Cane had screamed against the gag in his mouth as Walking Smoke had cut him apart. Of all the terrifying images, she remembered her husband’s throat, the sinews bulging, veins popped from the taught, muscle-tight skin. His eyes had strained as though trying to burst from his head while sweat beaded and ran from his forehead.

Walking Smoke just kept cutting, laughing in delight as he did, and now he has me!

“Morning Star’s not coming, Sister. He doesn’t even know where you are. More’s the pity. Imagine the gift if I could offer
him
to the Underworld.”

“Gift?” she rasped, trying to swallow. Her thoughts were reeling, half dazed by the pain spearing through her body. Memories of what Walking Smoke had done to her husband, the brutal torture, kept whirling through her souls like a foul wind.

One of the other warriors was approaching with a large corrugated cooking pot. Pushing her hair out of the way, he positioned the pot just so on the matting below her head.

“Please, Walking Smoke,” she whispered hoarsely. “You’re hurting me.”

“It will stop soon,” he told her with a smile. “I’ll fix it, I promise.”

She glanced to the side again, at the children who stared at her with horrified eyes. High Dance looked sick, and Matron Columella gaped in disbelief.

“My baby, Walking Smoke. You’ve got to help me keep him safe.” She turned her gaze back to his, trying to remember something that pain and fear kept hiding. Each time her thoughts reached for it, the revelation jetted away like a trout from a grasping swimmer.

“Your baby is among my greatest concerns,” he told her seriously. “I can’t tell you how important the first heir to Morning Star House is to me. To everyone in the Spirit World.”

Her heart was hammering, the tingling pain in her arms and legs almost unbearable. Thirsty as she was, tears silvered her vision. “Please, Brother. Put me down. It hurts! I’m afraid!”

“Pus and blood!” she heard Lady Columella cry. “
She’s your sister!”

Walking Smoke had turned toward her and pointed. “Be quiet, camp bitch! Or your boys will be next.”

Lace screamed as the men holding her shifted her position, raising her hips, arching her back further. Yellow lances of pain burned up and down her spine, her head now dangled, blood pulsing in her brain with each panicked beat of her heart.

She could feel her child as it kicked frantically inside her.

“Help me.” She tried to swallow. Almost choked on fear. “Help me,” she whispered. “I don’t understand.”

Walking Smoke was singing now, some kind of ritual song.

She shivered, fighting the pain, as someone began bathing her cold skin with a damp cloth. Even upside down as she was, she caught glimpses of men with palettes as they began painting designs on her skin. She felt their fingers tracing patterns on her breasts, and the extended girth of her belly.

“Please, Brother.
Please.
What are you
doing
?” Her voice caught in her throat. They were painting her arms and legs now. Breathing had grown so difficult due to the angle at which she was held.

This is some terrible game he’s playing.

Her last memory of Heavy Cane banished that hope as a lie.

Her stomach knotted, heaved, and spewed burning fluid into her throat and mouth. She coughed, blowing the bile into the back of her nose.

A hoarse scream was torn from her throat.

Walking Smoke’s eerie song sent terror through her trembling bones.

“Are you ready, Sister?” The words seemed to come from across a huge distance.

“Please,” she whispered weakly. “Stop it.”

Half-blinded, choking and coughing, she felt her hips lifted even higher. Craning her neck, she glanced past her hanging breasts, painted now in red spirals, and saw Walking Smoke looming over her. His eyes were slitted as if in rapturous delight, his arms out. She fixed on his blue-painted penis now fully erect and just above her; a tension filled his voice.

“No!” she tried to cry, but coughed on the bile.

She saw one of the warriors offer him a long, chipped-stone blade. It’s glassy surface rippled in the firelight.

“
Let me down!
”

Sheer panic burned through her in waves.

Twisting her head, her eyes fixed on the blade as Walking Smoke bent down. Then she looked into his gleaming and excited eyes.

“Got to do this just right, Sister. The timing has to be perfect.”

She tried to jerk, to kick away. Her weak limbs hardly moving.

Hard hands grabbed her hair, yanked her head down and back. Someone was holding the corrugated pot so that she stared down into its dark depths.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Walking Smoke crouch, the song rising on his lips. Her heart was hammering, blood pulsing in her head. She felt the sharp blade as it was placed against her stretched throat.

He waited until she’d screamed her lungs empty.

The sting surprised her as it burned through her neck from front to back.

She had the momentary glimpse of her head being pulled back even farther, felt the rush of air into her lungs despite her closed mouth. Heard her blood as it splashed into the jar. She could see the man now who tugged on her hair.

The last horrifying sensation was of a stinging line of fire as her belly was sliced open from breast bone to pubis. But that, too, vanished in an encompassing darkness.…

Chrysalis

Pure blood, Powerful blood.

This is the blood of my family. The life force of the Four Winds Clan, taken in the most beautiful and pure way. I have drawn it from my sister, and even better, from the unborn son who would have one day become
tonka’tzi.
Or, should the Morning Star have worn out Chunkey Boy’s body, the son whose souls would have been sacrificed to resurrect the living god yet again.

Such is the Power and purity of the blood I have offered to the four corners of the Earth that I don’t need to break my concentration to look at the places where my Tula have torn the matting up and dug sacrificial pits into the mound top. I can still see the dark holes through the eye of my souls, see the blood I poured pooling in the bottoms. Like a well pot in the very soul of the earth, I looked down and saw my reflection in that still surface. The same image Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies was seeing as she looked up from the other side: me, staring down into her world with reverence and respect. Meeting her, eye-to-eye, and assuring her that I, Walking Smoke, alone of all men was worthy of the great task that I am attempting.

The voices tell me that Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies knows I have no choice, that when I call her servant forth, the Water Panther will have a worthy host for his dark and violent souls.

In return I have offered her the noblest blood in the world.

I open my eyes to a slit and glance sidelong at Sun Wing. She sits tied to a bench post in such a way as to restrict the circulation in her legs and arms. Her face is tear-streaked, eyes swollen and panicked. The gag in her mouth distorts her lips. She understands the incredible honor I’m bestowing on her. I realize that the immensity of it has momentarily overwhelmed her.

“Lace was but the first offering, First Woman. Just as you begin to revel in it, I will offer yet more. And when you think there can be no greater sacrifice, I shall double it!”

For the moment, I am but a caterpillar, tempting Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies. Through Lace’s offering she knows my heart. Knows that I will offer her my entire family, the very might of Cahokia, in return for Piasa’s souls.

I am shaken and awed. Is there no end to my love?

The voices whisper no.

For what greater sacrifice can a man make in the name of love than to offer up his family in the attempt to change the world?

I cannot take too much time, or gloat. I must focus as I dismember Lace’s body. Each cut has to be made just so. Both with her and the infant. The Underworld is watching and judging the perfection of my performance.

Unlike my last fumbling attempt in the farmstead, I cannot make a mistake.

With a glorious sense of rapture flowing through me, I fill my lungs and begin to sing!

From a caterpillar, I shall now become a chrysalis.

Fifty-eight

Columella’s stomach churned, and she dared not close her eyes lest it all replay behind her eyelids. Instead, she hunched forward, arms clenched over her now empty and growling stomach.

“It’s a dream. A twisted fantasy. I’m going to wake up soon, and it will be morning. None of this will have actually happened.” If she repeated it over and over, insisted with enough passion, believed hard enough …

She needed only to cast her gaze to the right where Lace’s corpse lay to disabuse herself of any such fantasy.

My children…?

Just down the bench from her, the heirs of Evening Star House—product of her own womb—huddled against the wall, feet up, curled against one another for reassurance. She could hear their weeping, feel their terror. Her heart ran cold. This day’s terror would scar them.

Assuming they survived. Assuming they didn’t end up like Lace, their throats slit, their blood offered to the Powers of the Underworld.

Across from her the once-proud Sun Wing stared through fear-dazed eyes into a distance of nothing. Her shoulders periodically shook as she wept. Her young body had been painted in the transformation symbols before she’d been tied to the bench post. From the angle of her binding, the circulation had to be cut off. How cunning of Walking Smoke. His victims couldn’t struggle effectively with their limbs gone numb and useless.

In an attempt to stem her failing courage, Columella let her eyes play over the walls of her once-beautiful palace. But everywhere she looked
his
presence and malignant Power was manifest. Every surface was covered by the hideous drawings. The brilliant crimson of fresh blood had darkened, browned, and was now edging into red-black.