The Contrary—the woman once known as Two Petals—walked through the quiet night. Her moccasin-clad feet scuffed the plaza’s trampled surface, the sound of leather on clay like the whisper of distant ghosts. Her straight body moved purposefully, rounded hips swaying. Black flowing hair swung even with her buttocks, and she clutched a beaverhide blanket closely about her shoulders. With each exhalation, she watched her breath fog and rise toward the black, star-encrusted sky. Overhead, the constellations seemed to shimmer and wink against the winter night.
Around her, the great Yuchi capital known as Rainbow City slumbered. Even now the size of the city, with its tall, building-topped mounds, thousands of homes, temples, society houses, and granaries, amazed her. The city’s sleeping soul surrounded her like the low hum of insect wings. She could feel the immensity of it: all those thousands of souls breathing, mired in Dreams, their passions muted by sleep.
This was the western capital of the Yuchi—called the Tsoyaha in their own language. The city had been built on a high bluff overlooking the Tenasee River. The location had been chosen not only because it was well above the worst of the great river’s periodic floods, but it was strategically placed just below the river’s bend. Sheer heights on the east and north provided a natural defense, while the western and southern approaches were protected by a tall palisade bolstered by archers’ platforms every twenty paces. Rainbow City controlled passage up and down the Tenasee—the trade route carrying goods between the southeastern and northern river systems.
Though Two Petals had walked in the ghostly ruins of Cahokia and climbed its great mound, Rainbow City left her feeling humbled. Cahokia was a place of dried bones; Rainbow City flexed warm nerve and healthy muscle. It lived, thrived, and bristled with energy.
High temples, palaces, and society houses perched atop square earthen mounds capped by colored clays sacred to the Yuchi. The buildings reminded Two Petals of brooding guardians overlooking the empty plaza. The image was strengthened by steeply pitched thatch roofs that jutted arrogantly toward the heavens. Beyond them lay a packed maze of circular houses, their thickly plastered walls and roofs a uniquely Yuchi architectural form. The dark dwellings hunched in the night, as though weighted by the countless sleeping souls they sheltered.
The Contrary needed but close her eyes in order to sense the occupants. She experienced their Dreams the way an anchored rock knew the river’s current. The weight of their loves, hatreds, lusts, hungers, triumphs, and fears flowed around her. Were she to surrender her control, all of those demanding souls would filter past her skin, slip through her ears, nostrils, and mouth. Like permeable soil her body and souls would absorb them. Then, in the manner of a saturated earthen dam, she would slowly give way, carried off in bits, pieces, and streamers by the flood.
“But I am not earth.” No, I am a great stone. I stand resolute, lapped only by the waves of their Dreams. Feel them, washing up against me, seeking a grasp, only to drain away before the next. Two Petals clasped her arms around her chest, hugging herself for reassurance.
She had come from a small Oneota village in the north, rescued from a charge of witchcraft by Old White. He was the legendary Seeker: the man who had traveled to the four corners of the world. Old White had chosen her to accompany him on this quest to the south. She’d heard of the great cities—places like Red Wing Town—and even seen the abandoned sprawl that had been Cahokia. Nothing had prepared her for this concentration of humanity. On the night of her arrival, the mass of Rainbow City’s humanity had overwhelmed her. The impact had left her comatose, deafened, and paralyzed. Now, by dint of will alone, she barely kept panic at bay.
“You must learn to deal with what you have become,” Two Petals told herself. “Trouble is coming.”
She sighed, sensing the perpetual isolation of a person touched by Power. Forget the Dreams of others; her own were frightening enough. Not so many moons past, while in Cahokia, she had been carried away on Sister Datura’s arms—borne off to the Spirit World. The visions she had had of the future remained just behind her eyes, as clear as when she’d first seen them. Were she to beckon, they would come flowing forward. She would again see the terrible black-souled chief, his hand trembling as it reached out to caress her naked skin. Or know the guilt-stricken eyes of a woman whose bloody hands dripped red spatters onto hard ground while she trembled beneath the twists of fate. In other scenes an angry war chief led a thousand warriors through a deadly and silent forest. And finally, swirling water washed over a great scaled hide that shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow.
She fixed on that final image, staring into the serpent’s great crystalline eye, as though looking through time and worlds into another reality. As she did, a faint Song began to fill her souls with a tremolo that echoed from her very bones. The melody rose and fell, lifting her spirits like a leaf on the breeze. Two Petals could feel herself rising, spinning, carried aloft on the vibrant notes. She began to Dance across the hard-packed plaza, arms undulating to the beat, souls swaying in time to her skipping feet. The Song played within her.
“Soon,” she promised, her body spinning in time to the melody.
As quickly as it had come, the Song faded, leaving her to stand alone and motionless in Rainbow City’s great plaza—but one more of the many shadows that mingled in the night. In that instant she felt utterly destitute.
“You are never truly alone,” a familiar voice remarked. Over the years, she had grown used to the voices that spoke in her head. Sometimes they told convincingly of things she knew were untrue. Other times, they offered a startling insight into the confused reality around her.
This voice, though, she knew. Two Petals turned, seeing the eerie outline of Deer Man. He stood off to the side, watching her through large liquid-brown eyes. In the beginning, it had bothered her that only she could see him. That Deer Man could be so apparent to her, but not to Trader or Old White, had perplexed her. In the end, she simply accepted Deer Man’s presence as a manifestation of her Contrary Power. Half-man, half-deer, he had a human face; deer antlers and ears sprouted from his head, and the sleek hair that covered his body could have graced a buck’s winter hide.
Frowning, she studied him, wondering how he managed to balance on those slender deer legs that ended in delicately hoofed feet, or why he never left tracks in the soft dust or silty mud. Why the oddity of it continued to puzzle her was elusive. He was after all a Spirit Being. She often had seen him standing on water, waves washing through his feet, and other times with his nether regions passing through some object like a pestle and mortar, cane wall, or fallen log. As with so many of the voices that spoke to her, or the Spirits, ghosts, and other oddities she saw, she had wondered if Deer Man were real.
“Real?” Deer Man asked, hearing her thoughts. “Are any of them real? Old White? Trader? The Kala Hi’ki?” He paused. “Are you real, Contrary?”
She tightened her arms around her, feeling the warm beaverhide cape, aware of the soft swell of her breasts, of the skin, muscle, and ribs beneath. The rise and fall of her chest with each breath she took reassured her.
“I am. At least for this moment.” She frowned. “Can’t say for sure about tomorrow . . . or yesterday. Sometimes the world slips and shifts around me. It just up and moves, and I lose track of what’s what. Who’s whom. Things become muddled and rushed. Then, when it all stops, I’m not sure where I am, or how I got there.”
“Come. Let me show you something.” Deer Man turned, walking off toward the south.
Two Petals followed, head cocked as she watched his hoofed feet. Though Deer Man took long steps, his hooves never seemed to make actual contact with the earth; and though he moved at her speed, his feet seemed to be making faster progress than he was.
“How do you do that?”
“The same way every other creature does,” he answered. “It is no different than the way you move backward in time.”
Two Petals didn’t answer. So many things were riddles. That the world ran backward around her was just one more.
“Still bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“That you’re Contrary. That you can never be normal like Trader, Old White, or anyone else.”
She nodded. “A part of me, way deep down inside, still wants to be like normal people. But it is growing smaller and smaller. Soon, as we get closer to the end, it will shrink away completely. All that will be left is the Contrary. Two Petals will have been like a raindrop in the sunlight.”
“The Kala Hi’ki has helped. I can see it in you: a strength that you didn’t know you possessed.”
She remembered the night when she, Trader, and Old White had first landed at Rainbow City. She had been frightened, overwhelmed by the images of a future that soon would be her past. The flood of souls around her had washed over and through her, drowning and suffocating. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but Trader had told her later that she’d cried out and fallen over. He said that she’d turned as stiff as wood, her muscles and joints locked and immovable. He’d carried her to the Kala Hi’ki’s temple like some sort of oddly shaped log. All she remembered was a thick blackness until she’d awakened in the Kala Hi’ki’s room. The terror of it was still too close.
Power had brought her here. Well, Power and the Kala Hi’ki’s not-too-friendly and well-armed warriors. During her long trip southward from her native Oneota lands, she’d caught glimpses of the Kala Hi’ki. Even as far away as Cahokia, she had seen him in her visions: a terrible man covered with burn scars, his nose slashed away to leave two gaping nostrils. He wore a cloth wrapped over the empty sockets of his eyes, and his maimed hand had reached out for her.
“He brought you here to destroy you,” Deer Man reminded.
“Instead he Healed me.”
“You were a mystery to him. Trader was merely a temptation. And Old White? Ah, in the end he would have been the Kala Hi’ki’s destruction. Mystery, temptation, destruction. Such a curious combination Power weaves.”
“Old White is dangerous?”
“The Seeker is the most dangerous man alive. Not even the Kala Hi’ki fully understands the Seeker’s obsession . . . or the dark secret he carries hidden between his souls.”
“Where are you taking me?” Two Petals asked as they passed the base of the Warrior Moiety’s large temple. The structure had been built atop a square mound, the high building having a commanding view of the plaza. Protruding from the thatch roof’s peak were carvings of Falcon, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and Snapping Turtle, their dark eyes glaring down at her as though the very Spirit beasts themselves watched her.
“We’re going there.” Deer Man pointed past several houses to a large, square-sided structure that rose above a low mound. The walls beneath the overhanging thatch roof had been plastered black at the bottom with a red band just below the eaves. The Spirit poles standing outside the west-facing doorway had been carved into the shape of vultures.
At that moment a shift in the night breeze carried the pungent odor of decay. “It’s a charnel house.”
“Oh, yes.” Deer Man inclined his antlered head, the pointed tines gleaming in the night. “Come, let me show you something.”
Two Petals glanced warily around at the darkened houses, corn cribs, and ramadas as she followed Deer Man to the entrance. Nothing stirred, the silence oddly discomforting.
Deer Man ducked into the low doorway, his wide antlers passing through the thick-plastered wall as if it were smoke.
Two Petals placed her hand on the unforgiving plaster, feeling its dense resistance. She shook her head, ducked past the door hanging, and emerged into a large room. Benches lined each wall, and raised platforms had been placed in rows throughout the center of the room. Most of these supported corpses in varying states of decomposition. The intense odor hung at the back of her nose and cloyed in her throat. She couldn’t help but make a face.
“Why do you wince?” Deer Man asked. “You are a Contrary. The smell of death is just the odor of life turned backward.”
“I . . . I’m just not used to it.” She stepped forward, staring down at the closest of the bodies. This one had been a young man. His flesh sagged loosely on the bones, dry eyes recessed into the orbits of his skull. White teeth were bared behind hardened lips frozen in a rictus. Each of the man’s ribs pressed out through the skin. His belly was a hollow, and the bones of the young man’s hips seemed to jut up uncomfortably. His penis looked like a dried tuber, testicles like stones in the stretched scrotum. Flesh sagged on his thin thighs, the knees like knotted roots.
“He was young,” Deer Man told her. “They called him ‘Chigger.’ Said he was a bit of a nuisance. He didn’t pay attention to the curious black mold that was growing on old acorns. Anyone with sense would have thrown them out.”
Two Petals stared down at the wasted corpse. “Where are his souls?” She looked around, curious now as she cataloged the various bodies supine on the pole racks. Some were swollen with gas, others barely more than skeletons.
“That’s what I brought you here to see. The souls are all around you, waiting. If you clear yourself of the noise made by the living, you will be able to recognize them.”
She gestured to the bodies. “What will the Yuchi do with them?”
“When the time is right, the High Priest will slice what little flesh remains from the bones. He will pick away the loose tendons, strip off the scalp and any clinging tissue. Once the bones are cleaned, they will be Blessed, tied together, and given to the family for final burial in one of their mounds. Or maybe laid to rest in a place where the souls of the dead will remain close by and can help protect the living from the dangers in the Spirit world.”
She tried to quiet her revulsion. As she did, she could make out the faintest yellow-orange objects, like dim lights glowing along the walls. Others hovered near the ceiling.
“Yes, you begin to see. Those are the souls of the dead.”
“Why did you bring me here? I am not of these people. Why would my souls wish to lurk about watching my body rot? Who would I want to protect?”
“Exactly.” Deer Man smiled. “I wanted you to see how your body would end up should you fail to fulfill your Visions.”
“You mean if I don’t find my husband?”
Deer Man smiled. “He will find you when the time is right. It is, however, your decision whether to go to him, or not. People fear him for a reason, and it will take an extraordinary woman to go willingly into his lair. I wanted you to understand what would happen if you gave in to fear, temptation, or desire. You dare not love, Contrary. You can only surrender yourself to the future.”
She reached down, placing a finger on the sunken flesh inside the bowl of Chigger’s hip. It gave, soft but leathery. When she withdrew her finger, the depression remained. She wondered what his souls thought of her poking him like that. Looking up, she saw two of the glowing lights drop, as though in concern. “Oh, I understand just fine, Deer Man.”
“I just have to take the most terrible man alive into my bed. And keep him from discovering what is happening right beneath his nose.”
And if I fail, we will all die, and end up in a charnel house just like this one.
From Rainbow City, one could paddle up the Tenasee until it made its great eastern bend. By ascending one of the several tributaries that drained from the south, travelers could canoe their way up to the headwaters, then portage across the densely forested hills to the Origins of the Black Warrior River. Tumbling through the hills, the Black Warrior flowed south until it reached the fall line. There, after the last rapids, the river settled into a broad floodplain. The broken, forested uplands gave way to rolling country. The current grew lazy as the Black Warrior pursued its sinuous path toward the gulf. Back swamps, thick with bald cypress and tupelo, were dotted with canebrakes; and yellow lotus, cattails, and duckweed thrived. Hanging moss draped from low branches. Higher ground—on the terraces below the hills—with sandy, better-drained soils had long been home to the Albaamaha People.
It was said that the Albaamaha had come from deep in the earth, following the roots of the great World Tree to reach the earth’s surface. There, half the people emerged from one side of the root to become the Albaamaha, the other half—separated from their brethren—called themselves the Koasati.
From the time of the emergence, the Albaamaha had farmed the Black Warrior terraces. In the dark forests of the surrounding uplands they hunted deer, wild turkey, and other forest game. The woodlands—rich in hickory, oak, and persimmons—had provided bountiful nut harvests from which the Albaamaha rendered food and oil. From the swamps they had taken roots, cane, waterfowl, and other game. The river provided fish, freshwater mussels, and clams. Up and down the river, the Albaamaha had built their bent-pole houses, thatched them with shocks of local grasses, and warred and squabbled among themselves for generations.
Then the Sky Hand had come—a Mos’kogean People from the great Father Water to the west. The Sky Hand had made their way down the Black Warrior River, following an advance of warriors. At a high bluff that dominated a bend in the river, they made their new home. Immediately they began the construction of Split Sky City. Many Albaamaha welcomed the Sky Hand, brokering alliances with the newcomers as a means of settling age-old vendettas against surrounding villages. Cunning, and skilled in political manipulations, the Sky Hand pitted one Albaamaha village against another. Too late, the Albaamaha realized that their new benefactors had come not to share the land, but to rule it. Some Albaamaha resisted. The poorly organized farmers and hunters were no match for trained and disciplined Sky Hand warriors. Within a generation, any Albaamaha resistance had been crushed, and the Sky Hand moved quickly to take advantage of Albaamaha labor in the construction of their great new city overlooking the Black Warrior River. Within twenty years land had been cleared, surveyed, earthworks erected, and the first palaces and temples built.
Nor did they stop there, but expanded up and down the river, building new settlements and installing chiefs to oversee the Albaamaha lands. The Albaamaha had nowhere to go. To the west lay the intimidating Chahta, another invading Mos’kogee nation. To the south, the Pensacola brooked no intrusion into their territory. Though cousins, the Koasati resisted the temptation to accept refugees, worried enough about holding their own lands. In the east, the Ockmulgee and Talapoosie peoples were just as dangerous as the Sky Hand. Going north into the Yuchi lands was unthinkable. The Yuchi had raided the Albaamaha for generations, taking spoils, scalps, and slaves.
Resigned but resentful, the Albaamaha had no choice but to accept their new overlords. The Sky Hand, for their part, provided protection from raids, enforced peace between the Albaamaha villages, and ensured order and security. In return the Albaamaha were required to expand their farms—the majority of the produce to be delivered as tribute to the high minko, or supreme ruler, of the Sky Hand. All the backbreaking work—building, logging, carrying, and earth moving—was done by Albaamaha labor.
The greatest accomplishment of Albaamaha sweat and tears was the construction of Split Sky City, a complex of high palaces, Council Houses, and Temples built atop large earthen mounds and laid out according to moiety and clan, each in its place. Hickory Moiety and its clans lay to the east, Old Camp Moiety to the west. A great central plaza was dominated by the tchkofa, or Council House. The entire city was surrounded on three sides by a defensive wall of pitch-pine logs, four times the height of a man. On the north, where Split Sky City overlooked the river, the slopes below the bluff were cut sheer to prohibit any kind of organized assault. Gangs of Albaamaha had logged the surrounding countryside, clearing forests for fields and delivering wood, cane, and thatch to teams who constructed Split Sky City’s edifices.
Once built, a city consumes like a voracious beast. A steady stream of Albaamaha bore food, water, firewood, clay, stone, thatch, and wood into the city. Each fall, at harvest, lines of Albaamaha carried basket after basket of corn, beans, squash, sunflower seeds, lotus root, goosefoot, and forest nuts to the elevated granaries. So, too, came fish, clams, wildfowl, and meat. Any surplus such as tanned hides, matting, cordage, shells, feathers, or other things the Sky Hand might fancy were brought to Sky Hand City to be traded for brightly dyed fabrics, ceremonial ceramics, talismans, or special services such as Healing or divination that the Sky Hand had mastered.
The Sky Hand specialized in higher pursuits such as sculpting, ceramics, the arts of religion and Healing, politics, games, and most of all, war. Among all the peoples in the Southeast, Sky Hand warriors were the most highly trained, disciplined, and deadly. Neighboring peoples, even the irascible Yuchi, quickly came to the conclusion that maintaining peaceful relations with the Sky Hand tended to be the sanest course of action. At least most of the time. Power, after all, had to be kept in balance. Insults of any kind required immediate and violent response. Failure to do so affected the Spiritual health of the people. Any sign of weakness invited exploitation by the chaotic forces of the red Power.
The notion of Power preoccupied the Mos’kogee peoples. While Creation was separated into the Sky World, Earth, and Underworld, the Power that flowed through it consisted of the white Power of order, peace, serenity, contemplation, happiness, and security. Its equal and opposite was red: the Power of chaos, war, creativity, procreation, lust, ambition, and desire. While the great Priests—called Hopaye by the Sky Hand—taught that all Power had to be kept in balance, many utilized a specific Power for their own ends.
One such man was the Sky Hand war chief. His full name was Smoke Shield Mankiller, of the Chief Clan of the Hickory Moiety. As the high minko’s nephew, War Chief Smoke Shield was next in line to assume the high minko’s position. Smoke Shield needed two things: The first was for his uncle, High Minko Flying Hawk, to die, or step aside. That it would happen was but a matter of time. Second, but of even greater importance, Smoke Shield needed confirmation by the Sky Hand Council. That was key. The high minko might rule, but only with the assent of the Council. This was made up of the clan chiefs from both the Hickory and Old Camp moieties.
Nothing a man did was accomplished without the Blessing of Power, let alone being confirmed as high minko. Smoke Shield had long ago made his bargain with the red Power. In return for his devotion, it had granted him each and every one of his desires.
Smoke Shield had little use for the prattling teachings of the Hopaye. The current one was a Panther Clan man called Pale Cat. Dedicated to tranquility, order, and reason, Pale Cat served the white Power. He and Smoke Shield had despised each other since they were boys. Things had grown worse in the years since Smoke Shield had married Heron Wing, Pale Cat’s sister. Smoke Shield had used red Power to win the woman. Lies and manipulation had allowed him to prevail over his long-gone brother, Green Snake, but in the end, Smoke Shield emerged victorious, having caused his brother’s exile, claimed the woman Green Snake loved, and secured succession to the high minko’s panther-hide chair. Smoke Shield had an ugly scar that marred his head as proof that Power never gave its gifts freely.
As he considered that, Smoke Shield fingered the deep scar, remembering the blow his brother had given him. But for it, he would have been a handsome man. Then again, why did a man need beauty when he was muscular, and quick of mind and body? Smoke Shield was in the process of living through his twenty-sixth winter. Despite the ugly scar, his face was tattooed with a Chief Clan bar across his cheeks. Forked-eye designs had been tattooed around each eye—the one on the left a little distorted by his long-healed wound. This day he wore his hair in a tight bun at the back of his head. Three little white arrows, the highest honor bestowed upon a warrior, had been stuck through his hair. A single warrior’s forelock hung down over his forehead and was decorated with three gleaming white beads. He wore an eagle-feather cape over his bare shoulders, and a white warrior’s apron had been tied at his waist, its long tail hanging suggestively down between his knees.
Smoke Shield stood at the northeastern margin of Split Sky City’s great plaza. Just to his left the high minko’s mound rose up in a flat-topped pyramid of earth to support the mighty palace where he and Uncle Flying Hawk held sway. Off to his right, and slightly behind him, the tishu minko, a man called Seven Dead, chief of the Raccoon Clan, had his palace. The plaza itself was flat, dominated by the stickball grounds that ran east to west just behind the red-and-white-striped Tree of Life—a pole that represented the great tree at the Spiritual center of their world. To either side of that were clay chunkey courts where stone disks were rolled before men attempted to spear them with lances.
Despite the throngs of passing people, busy with their lives, Smoke Shield’s attention was fixed on the line of wooden squares that stood empty along the plaza margin. He stood before one in particular. Made of hickory logs, the uprights set deeply into the earth, it was one of five. The square was composed of two uprights with crosspieces lashed across the top and bottom. It left a man-sized frame that would support a human body. Captives were tied inside the open square—wrists to each of the upper corners, ankles to the lower—so that their naked, spread-eagled bodies could be beaten, burned, mutilated, and otherwise abused.
On either side, Smoke Shield could see the other empty squares. Not so long ago, men had hung from them. He frowned, thinking of the captive who had died within the empty frame before him. His name had been Screaming Falcon. He’d once been the White Arrow Chahta’s most promising young war chief.
Until I plucked him right out of his house, along with his high minko and the Chahta Priests, and took him prisoner. Smoke Shield had also burned White Arrow Town to the ground and stolen its matron: Screaming Falcon’s young wife Morning Dew. Morning Dew had become the matron the instant Smoke Shield killed her mother during the raid. Her brother, Biloxi Mankiller—who had also hung from one of the squares—had been the Chahta high minko. In a stroke, Smoke Shield had decapitated the White Arrow leadership, and dealt the Chahta a stinging blow.
He smiled as he remembered the glorious procession his warriors had made as they arrived at Split Sky City, marching their captives up from the canoe landing, past the Old Camp Moiety Mounds, and around the sacred tchkofa, the Council House where the Sky Hand Mos’kogee deliberated and conducted their governmental business. Yes, that had been a glorious day.
And it would only be the beginning!
He reached out, fingering the wood, remembering Screaming Falcon’s misery and horror as he had hung, right here, in this very wooden square. The young man’s face had looked lopsided from his broken and swollen jaw, and his flesh had been mottled, blistered, brown, and cracked from where split-cane torches had been pressed against his skin.
“I should have paid better attention to you,” Smoke Shield whispered to the empty wood. “Instead I was too preoccupied with your wife.”
Pus and rot, what a disappointment. He’d planned the whole White Arrow Town raid around stealing Morning Dew. Once she’d looked at him with the same disdain she’d have given a worm in a fruit. After he’d taken her from Screaming Falcon, burned her town, captured her high minko brother, and wrought every other indignity upon her, she’d just surrendered herself to him without a fight.
What was the point of trying to break a woman who was already compliant?
“I expected more of you, Morning Dew.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, across the corner of the plaza to where his first wife’s house stood. These days Heron Wing owned Morning Dew. The thought of it rankled. Not so much the loss of his slave, but the way of it.
He turned back, peering closely at the heavy wood square, seeing the dark patterns where blood had stained the wood.
Everything changed that night.
He remembered the fog: thick and clinging, so dense a man could hardly see his hand before his face. All of his irritation had been focused on Morning Dew, on the way she lay under him, as unresponsive to his thrusting manhood as a soggy cloth. And while he was wetting his shaft in Morning Dew, someone was out here in the foggy night, sneaking past the guard to drive a stone sword into Screaming Falcon’s heart and then sever his genitals from his body.
“War Chief, I wanted to cut them off myself, just for the pleasure of watching your wife’s horrified expression as I handed them to her.” Perhaps that would have spurred some sort of violent reaction out of her. But someone had beaten him to it.
Who? That single act of murder had robbed the Sky Hand Mos’kogee of revenge on their victims. No claim had been made by any of the subservient Albaamaha. Not so much as a rumor floated among the Traders. What kind of miscreant would commit such a desperate act and then not utilize it as a means of belittling the Sky Hand?
Smoke Shield ran his finger over the deep pucker of his scar.
It had to be the Albaamaha. They still chafed under the humiliation of serving their Mos’kogee masters. He already knew they had tried to betray the White Arrow Town raid to the Chahta. They had to be behind the captives’ murders. Anyone else would have bragged about it. Such a triumph would be shouted up and down the trails.
In an effort to discover the culprits, Smoke Shield had taken Councilor Red Awl and his wife, Lotus Root, captive. In a rude shelter, up above Clay Bank Crossing, he and the warrior Fast Legs had tortured the Albaamo mikko, and learned nothing.
Then it had all gone wrong. Red Awl and Lotus Root had escaped. He and Fast Legs had found the mikko later, dead of his wounds; but the woman . . . gods, where was she?
He reached out and placed his hand on the wood, feeling the polish of years. So many bodies had been tied here. “Screaming Falcon?” he asked softly. “Who killed you?”
If he could only figure that out, he could retaliate. It had to be the Albaamaha! They’d been stewing with revolt for years. He’d caught the Albaamo traitor, Crabapple, who had been sent to warn White Arrow Town. The man had confessed—implicating an old Albaamo named Paunch as the conspirator. So could the mysterious and missing Paunch be behind the ultimate outrage of killing the captives?
“Where are you, Paunch? Wherever it is, I will find you eventually.”
He narrowed an eye, letting his finger chip some of the caked blood from the square. When he found Paunch, the man would talk. Perhaps he even had something to do with Smoke Shield’s Hickory Moiety losing the winter solstice stickball game. He had bet everything on that game—and lost it all. His wealth, clothing, shell, and copper . . . even Morning Dew.
He shot a narrow glance back at his wife’s house across the plaza. How had she known to bet against him? In collusion with the Albaamaha? No, that was ridiculous. Heron Wing was much too influential in Panther Clan politics. She’d just bet against him because she knew it would irritate him. Gods, why had he ever married that woman?
“Forget it,” he told himself. “Taking her as a wife was your first great triumph. Your attention now must be on breaking the Albaamaha.”
He took a deep breath, turning from the empty square. He would have his revenge. And somewhere, up in the north, his most trusted warrior, Fast Legs, was even now running the missing Lotus Root to ground. Fast Legs would already have disposed of Red Awl’s body. When the woman was dead—and the stolen weapons she’d taken from Smoke Shield returned—then and only then would Smoke Shield begin to wreak havoc on the Albaamaha.
Fast Legs, what is taking you so long?