Lightning Shell--A People of Cahokia Novel, page 18
“Have to tell you, you made the best-looking Trader’s pack I’ve ever seen. But it was a whole lot better than having one of the Catawba see you. I’ve seen angry people before, but those Catawba reminded me of a kicked anthill. They were swarming up and down both sides of the river. I think caution dictates that you stay hidden under that tarp for another day or two at least.”
“You probably think it’s easy to imitate a pile of Trade goods. My back was about to break.”
“Would you rather be fighting a long retreat all the way to the Fast Wide?” He rolled a strand of her hair between his fingers. “Walking Smoke drove them into a frenzy by killing and cutting up that Trader, Six Toes, and eating his heart. Not telling what kind of witchcraft he practiced. And then you and your Cahokians show up.”
“I tried to tell them we were Traders. They shot first.”
“All they saw was more accursed Cahokians. And things went from bad to worse.”
“We need to tell anyone we meet who is headed upriver that they are hostile.” She shifted, the long bloody wound in her cheek black in the night. “Speaking of hostile. What is Blood Talon doing in your canoe? Last I heard, he wanted you dead and me safely returned to Spotted Wrist’s bed. What happened when you turned his canoe over?”
“I drowned all his men,” Fire Cat told her softly. “Almost drowned myself, but I made it to that island we’d just passed. I was headed upriver when I found him. He’d been taken by locals who’d lost kin when a tree toppled onto a house in a storm. They’d tied him to their version of a square and were going to cut him apart as a sacrifice to their ancestors.”
“So you saved him?” she asked incredulously.
“Call it a moment of madness.”
“Ah, that’s what all those healing scars are about. They tortured him.” She paused. “You trust him?”
“As much as I can trust any man. But yes. The man who came out the other side of that trial is very different from the one I tried to drown that day.”
“What about Winder?” she asked.
“In the end, I don’t know. Never forget that he is in this for whatever he can get out of it. For the time being, he thinks being in the service of Night Shadow Star of the Morning Star House will bring him fortune.” He paused. “But you traveled with him. You know him better than I.”
“He’s right. Serving me will bring him fortune. And yes, he’s as much a scoundrel as Seven Skull Shield, but without that odd streak of honor deep down in his bones.” She smiled, which made her wince from the stinging cut. “And he’s every bit as much of a lecherous dog.”
“Do I need to…”
“Shhh.” She placed fingers to his lips. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. Besides, you can’t blame a man for being a man.”
He chuckled at that. “Gods, I have missed you. I came so close back at Joara. When we finally catch up to that pus-dripping Field Snake, it will be a close-run thing to see if I can get to him before Winder does.”
“Field Snake?” she mused. “Young man in his late teens? Had a smile as slippery as pond scum? Claimed to have saved Walking Smoke from a Cahokian war party?”
“You know him?”
She shifted in his arms, her eyes like dark holes in her night-pale face. “I beat his head in with a rock.”
“What?”
“Hammered it into a flattened pulp of blood, bones, and brains. He thought he might warm his shaft in my sheath. It was necessary to disabuse my warriors of entertaining any such fantasies. Fed Field Snake’s corpse to Piasa as an offering. Maybe that’s why he let you catch up and appear at just the right moment.” A pause. “Fed each of those warriors to Piasa. Made of Wood and Summer Ice? Both were good men. Bluefish, perhaps not so, but in the end, he saved us.”
Fire Cat drew a deep breath. “And what now, Lady?”
“We chase down Walking Smoke. I still have a duty and a promise to keep. After that, my husband, you and I can be free.”
“Husband?”
“Is that not what you wish?”
In the dim flicker of the firelight, he saw the lines of doubt deepen in her forehead, and told her, “With all my heart. But until this entire mess is brought to a conclusion I can only—”
“While we were separated I had a lot of time to think,” she interrupted. “Even if we are forced to return to Cahokia, I will marry no other man. Not on the matron’s order or even the Morning Star’s. You are my husband. From here on, that cannot be denied. Nor will I allow it to be.”
Her words kindled a warmth in his breast. “It would be my honor, Lady.”
“Then you must call me wife.”
“Not sure I can do that.”
She gave off a soft sigh of annoyance. “Well, Red Wing, you’ve always been more than a little thickheaded. I will just have to show you what it means to be a husband. Make sure you understand your new duties.”
And so saying, she reached down under the blankets until her questing fingers encircled his shaft. With a gentle insistence, she pulled him along as she rolled onto her back.
“Who says I’m thickheaded?” he whispered into her unwounded ear. “Wife.”
Thirty
Never had Spotted Wrist felt so impotent or enraged. Not even the night when that foul thief, Seven Skull Shield, was stolen out from under him. He mused on that as his litter was carried down the Avenue of the Sun toward Morning Star’s high temple mound. The day was hot, brassy, and sweltering. He wished he had a sunshade for his litter, but somehow it had been left behind in the morning rush to get on the road.
On top of it all, the pus-rotted gods alone knew what he’d been summoned to discuss. Anything having to do with Morning Star was dyspeptic. No doubt the living god wanted another update on that gods-accursed Koroa copper or some such. Just, please, by Piasa’s balls, don’t let it be about the pus-dripping canoes.
As the days had passed, a quarter moon stretched into a half. And now they were past that. In all that time his warriors had only managed to recover a pitiful fraction of the canoes he had been responsible for. A fact for which he was still being assailed. Seemed like complaints were coming from every quarter. The Traders he could ignore. Especially the foreign ones. What could they do? But the ones from the Earth Clans? That got a bit more tricky.
The whole situation was intolerable.
In response to the endless heckling, he traveled with an armed escort of twenty warriors, Squadron First Cut Weasel at their head. It might have been a nuisance, but while surrounded by an armed box of warriors, the closest his hounding creditors could get was mere shouting distance as they bellowed, “Where is my gods-rotted canoe, Keeper? You owe me! You owe my clan.” Or some such.
The worst was that the various Traders and Earth Clans claimants had taken to camping out at Serpent Woman Town, pressing their claims to his nephew, High Chief Wolverine. When they couldn’t get to him, they’d plague his niece, Matron Slender Fox. And—married to Cut Weasel as she was—that always got back to Spotted Wrist.
Both the high chief and matron had made it clear to the owners of the missing boats that North Star House was not liable for the loss of the canoes. That, they insisted, was the Keeper’s responsibility. When it came to communicating their displeasure concerning the situation, they didn’t mince words.
All of which fed a constant and increasing anger and frustration, which necessitated the never-ending redeployment of his scattered squadrons ever farther downriver. But the farther they got, the fewer canoes they recovered. So, how did a rank-and-file warrior tell a lost canoe from a passing Trader’s? Sure, if they found one empty and lodged against the shore, but they couldn’t seize every thrice-blasted canoe they encountered on the river.
“How in a piss-pot did that many canoes just disappear?” he groused as his litter was carried past Night Shadow Star’s palace. The building looked grand atop its grassy earthen pyramid where it overlooked the Great Plaza. He gave the tall palace a slit-eyed scowl. In the front, at the top of the stairs, Piasa and Horned Serpent might have been glaring balefully down at him alone.
His troubles had started with Night Shadow Star and her refusal to marry him. Until that moment, he had been triumphant. Everything had been falling into place.
Pus and spit! He should have been living in that most opulent of palaces instead of the almost invisible dwelling he’d built atop Lady Lace’s vacant mound. Didn’t matter that he’d had a layer of earth laid atop the charred surface where Lace’s palace had stood. The tall and imposing trench-wall building he’d had constructed seemed to carry a taint. One he’d barely begun to understand when, somehow, the thief had been rescued from the bear cage he’d been locked in.
Only to vanish.
Completely.
As if he’d never been.
“Headed downriver if he has a brain in his head.” Spotted Wrist suffered the first hints of that acid-in-the-gut feeling that promised only to get worse.
He need but look up the avenue running north along the base of the Morning Star’s Great Mound to see Lady Blue Heron’s mound just past the society houses. Atop its flat summit, he could make out the charred posts. Left untouched for so many moons now. Tonka’tzi Wind, for whatever reason, had ordered it left as it was. To his surprise, Clan Matron Rising Flame had not objected.
What did that mean? Didn’t matter that he’d heard rumors. That Blue Heron was seen here, or spotted there, or that she’d been dressed as this, or sometimes disguised as that. When he sent his warriors searching, they found nothing.
And they’d done their duty, watching the Four Winds Clan House, the Tonka’tzi’s palace, the stairway to the Council House, and even Evening Star’s palace.
Fact was, Blue Heron would have been noticed. After Wind, she was the highest-ranked noble in the Morning Star’s direct lineage. Like Wind, she’d been born to privilege. The woman had her standards when it came to the environs in which she’d allow herself to live. Yet not a single sighting of her had panned out.
She’s dead. No other explanation.
But why, then, did he have that uneasy sensation of something out of place as Cut Weasel bellowed, “Make way! Make way for the Clan Keeper, the Hero of the North!”
From his high position on his litter, Spotted Wrist watched the milling crowd before the Morning Star’s mound slowly part. Here, at the foot of the Great Mound, the knot of pilgrims, porters, petitioners, and servants to foreign embassies blocked the entire Avenue of the Sun, and it was only midday. Traders, craftspeople, and travelers trying to pass were forced out into the Great Plaza, but only as far as Morning Star’s chunkey courts, where—with Morning Star’s warriors on guard—they had to press into a moving mass lest they blunder onto the groomed sand where two Earth Clans nobles now played, followed by their audiences and those who were betting on the sidelines.
“Make way!” Cut Weasel thundered.
Spotted Wrist’s warriors were reaching out past their shields, using war clubs to move the less motivated of the gawkers, hawkers, and porters who crowded just back from the stacked litters awaiting those who were already involved in business either on the Council Terrace level or up at Morning Star’s palace.
“Hey!” someone screamed after being on the receiving end of a club. “I’m a chief in the Deer Clan, I’ll have your hind end skinned, warrior.”
“Tell that to the Keeper,” the warrior replied. “Now move your chapped butt.”
Spotted Wrist bit off a smile, let his warriors clear a space at the foot of the stairs. Then they carefully lowered his litter.
“Oh, yeah?” the Deer Clan chief declared in a loud voice. “Where’s the missing canoes your great Keeper took and let get stolen? How’s the Hero of the North expect to run Cahokia if he can’t even get a squadron across the river?”
From all sides, a cackle of laughter rolled through the crowd, accompanied by whistles and jeers.
Stunned by the insolence, all Spotted Wrist could do was stare in murderous hatred; his heart began to thud in his chest. In a dazed sort of way, he blinked, taking in the faces on all sides. These were riffraff. Mere commoners. Earth Clans folk, and even dirt farmers, and they dared to laugh at him?
“After that man!” Cut Weasel ordered, his face contorting as he pointed with his staff of office. “Get him! Bring him to the Keeper!”
The Deer Clan chief—a man in his early forties—artfully sidestepped, dodged, and slipped away in the now riotous crowd.
Someone started shouting, “Canoes! Canoes! Canoes! They’re all missing, but whose?”
“Canoes! Canoes! Canoes!” The crowd took up the chant. “They’re all missing, but whose?”
The two warriors who’d charged off into the crowd, having lost the Deer Clan chief, slowly worked their way back, glowering and red-faced as they shoved their way through the throng.
“Come on,” Cut Weasel said as he stepped back and gave Spotted Wrist a hand up.
Climbing to his feet, Spotted Wrist heard someone yell, “Got a special on canoes this quarter moon. A dozen for a copper plate. Fresh from the attack against Evening Star Town. Only one previous owner!”
Another thunderous roar of laughter went up from the mob.
At the foot of the stairs, Spotted Wrist—a violent rage burning free in his breast—said, “Squadron First?”
“Keeper?”
“Turn the warriors loose. I want those vermin beaten to within a hair’s breadth of dead.”
“Keeper?” Cut Weasel, face pale, his tattoos twitching in time to his nervous lips, raised a cautionary hand. “There’s but twenty of us. Maybe a couple hundred in that crowd. We’d have to kill some of them, Keeper. Maybe a lot of them before we could disperse them. Earth Clans chiefs? Might be some foreign lords in the mix. You really want that kind of complication?”
Spotted Wrist made himself climb. One foot ahead of the other. Under his feet the squared-log steps were polished so fine the grain looked like it had been waxed. “No. Not that those vile human rodents don’t deserve it, but … but…”
“It would make more problems than it would solve,” Cut Weasel finished for him.
Not exactly the words he’d had in mind, but he’d go with them.
At the top—one on either side of the gaping Council Terrace Gates—the two Morning Star House warriors stood their posts. Resplendent in their shiny wood-and-leather uniforms, feather splays on their shoulders and waxed hardwood shields catching the sunlight, they bowed, touching their foreheads in respect.
Spotted Wrist caught the barely smothered smiles, the carefully averted eyes.
Stalking through the gates, he kept his eyes ahead as he crossed the Council House Plaza, was again saluted by the guards at the bottom of the steps. But this time, ignorant of what had transpired below, they were a model of decorum.
Spotted Wrist pounded his way up the long stairway, used the climb to burn the adrenaline surging in his veins.
Blood and spit, he was about to be face-to-face with Morning Star. Rising Flame would be there along with who-knew-what others.
He made himself stop, take a deep breath, and look out over the city. To the east, he could see the clutter of temples, dwellings, and society mounds lining the Avenue of the Sun. Farmsteads crowded every inch of arable land, their fields green. Interspersed among them were the various ponds, the curving lakes left by old meanders, and the borrow pits, all sparkling and blue under the afternoon sun. Beyond these lay the bluffs, complete with the ramped cut where the Avenue of the Sun climbed up the steep incline to the uplands beyond. There the sprawling city continued. The whole of the uplands was a polyglot of dirt farmers, their temples, rude chunkey courts, world tree poles, and plazas surrounded by crowded farmsteads with their fields of corn, beans, and squash, bobbing sunflowers, and stands of goosefoot, maygrass, and berry bushes. And in the center of each, a palace, charnel house, and temple where one of the Earth Clans maintained a chief and a matron, a priest, and enough kin to act as a sort of governance for the dirt farmers.
And that was just to the east.
Look to the south, across the Great Plaza to the raised causeway and the Avenue of the Moon, or west toward River City Mounds, or north across the Cahokia Creek bottoms to the old oxbow lakes, the associated mounds, and finally Serpent Woman Town in the distant north, and he’d see the same thing.
This is what I have to gain. But to claim it, I must keep my anger under control.
He passed through the high palisade gate into the small plaza. In the center stood the mighty World Tree Pole, with its relief carvings depicting Morning Star’s history in the Beginning Times. Lightning strikes had traced patterns down the sculpted length, adding to the tall pole’s Power.
A group of nobles—most of them high chiefs from various Earth Clans, their matrons, along with a smattering of lesser Four Winds nobility and their servants—waited before Morning Star’s soaring palace or walked along the bastioned walls. At Spotted Wrist’s arrival, they seemed to pause, taking a moment before either bowing or touching their foreheads.
Was it just him, or did he detect an unusual reserve in their gazes? Did he see ridicule, suspicion, or unease reflected in their pursed lips, in the narrowing of their eyes?
Ignore it. You’re the Keeper.
He kept his head high, Cut Weasel—in his armor—striding along just behind his right shoulder.
At the great double doors with their carvings depicting Morning Star borne aloft by eagle wings, Spotted Wrist took the salute of two of Morning Star’s guards and waited while they opened the heavy portals.
Inside, Spotted Wrist paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom.
The great central fire had been allowed to burn low, no doubt in compensation for the heat of the day. The place was already warm enough to make him wish he’d worn a lighter cape—and that was after having been out in the blazing sun.
He strode forward across the intricately woven floor mat, glancing from side to side and taking in the ornately carved wall beds, the hanging textiles, carvings, and statuary.
