Though it was well past midnight, neither Pitch nor Dzoo could sleep. Snow gusted out of the darkness in glittering white veils to soak Pitch’s cape and the tangles of hair that crept out beyond his conical hat. They had left Antler Spoon’s village immediately, trudged through the snow for four hands of time, and finally made camp in this grove of alders near Black Rock Creek. Water trickled beneath a thin crust of ice two body lengths away, sweet and melodic.
Pitch smoothed his fingers over his wet teacup and studied Dzoo. She sat across the smoking fire from him, eyes focused on their back trail as though she expected to see a war party at any instant.
An exotically beautiful woman, she drew a man’s eye. Pitch couldn’t say why exactly, but he caught himself staring at the curved hollow of her cheek, at the full red swell of her lips. A man might flounder in those large dark eyes. Her brow, high and smooth, balanced her upturned nose, pointed chin, and delicate jaw. But her long hair was her crown. In bright sun, it was a deep red with golden highlights, but in the firelight tonight, it glinted like polished red cedar. Though Dzoo had seen two tens and nine summers, she had never borne children; her body was still perfect, her breasts, small waist, and long legs the stuff of male fantasy.
Pitch smiled at that, aware that he liked to fantasize about her. Dzoo was a perpetual enigma, more a creature of other worlds than
this one. He could see it in the way she walked, almost floating above the soil, each step placed with a feline grace. An unsettling energy flowed through her, around her, and into her. Something she could project through a look or a touch. In her presence, no one was complacent. Being close to her reminded Pitch of sitting on a peak during a lightning storm. He could feel his skin prickling and his hair starting to stand on end.
“I am not lightning,” she whispered as she remained motionless.
Pitch swallowed hard, wondering where that had come from. “Did you hear my thoughts?”
She just gave him the vaguest of smiles. The silence of the night began to press down around them.
“Who do you think this ‘Coyote’ is?” Pitch smoothed his hand over his wooden cup. As the snowflakes struck the warm surface, they melted and ran down to pool around his fingers.
Dzoo’s eyes fixed on some point out in the snow and held, motionless. She might not have heard.
Pitch took a long drink of his tea, then tugged his cape more tightly about his shoulders. “Do you think he’s one of the Raven People?”
Dzoo shook her head. It was a bare movement, as if, over the decades, she had grown weary of extravagant gestures. “He’s of the North Wind People.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He has their long, narrow head and pale skin.”
Pitch’s cup froze midway to his mouth. Like him, the Raven People had broad, flat faces on round skulls, but the North Wind People were characteristically long-headed, with sloping foreheads and thin faces. “Are you telling me that you … you saw him?”
Dzoo turned her gaze on Pitch, and a tingle went through him. Looking into her large black eyes was like gazing into the eyes of a Spirit Raven. He could almost feel his soul begin to drift.
“I’m almost certain he lives in Fire Village,” she said. “Or at least he was born there. He is broad of shoulder and has a curious scent, like the moss that grows at the base of the lava cliff above Fire Village.”
Her hand lifted to the pendant she wore, and she gently smoothed her fingers over the red spear point. “He wears one of these.”
Pitch stared at the pendant. The fluted points were magnificent, as long as his palm, and so finely flaked they had a vitreous glitter. They were called fluted points because the very last thing the maker did was to “flute” the base: that is drive a wide, thin flake of stone down the long axis of the point. Only North Wind People were allowed to
possess them. The points were part of their Power as a people. They claimed their ancestors had made them from the blood of long-dead monsters. It was considered a grave offense to even be found trying to copy them.
“Then,” Pitch said, “Cimmis probably sent him after you.”
“There is more to Coyote than even Cimmis understands.” Her smile was cold and crystalline. “Oh no, Pitch, he is more dangerous than a desperate chief, or his soul-sick Council. He has touched blackness. It lingers on his soul, taints the very air with his every breath.”
That sent a shiver down Pitch’s back. Chief Cimmis and the Council of Four Old Women was scary enough. The Four Old Women had felt no pity, suffered no mercy in their decisions to punish those who defied them. Reprisals had been immediate. All along the coast Raven villages lay in charred ruins, and refugees filled the trails, fleeing their wrath.
And Coyote was more dangerous than that?
Her lips parted slightly as she studied him. “He and I will meet in the end. One of us will possess the other. I wonder who will be the stronger? He … or I?”
“Dzoo, you don’t have to deal with him alone. There are a great many of us—”
She raised her hand, fingers a golden brown in the firelight. “Listen to me. Power is shifting, Pitch. People are being swept up in the passion and madness of the gods. Our souls hang in the balance.”
“How? I don’t understand.”
“The future,” she whispered as she fixed on the night beyond their camp. “We will decide that in the coming weeks. The Raven and North Wind Peoples will begin their Dance together, shuffling … step by step … .”
An owl hooted out in the forest. Pitch tipped his head, letting the water drip off to the side as he studied Dzoo. “How will the Dance end?”
For a long time she seemed oblivious; when she finally spoke, she said, “In the end, we all make love with Death. We wrap ourselves in the most intimate of embraces. As we thrust ourselves inside Death, so does Death thrust into us.” She paused, eyes alight, lips parted as if on the verge of ecstasy. “And then the release comes, tingling through us like a burning delight.”
“I’ve never heard Death described that way before.”
She glanced at him as if she hadn’t quite understood him. “Pardon?”
“Death,” he added, “as a lover.”
Her only reply was a sad smile.
Pitch tossed another branch onto the flames and watched the sparks twirl upward through the dark filigree of alder branches. Snow frosted the tops of the limbs, but the bottoms remained as black as night, creating a stunning interplay of light and dark set against a background of scudding starlit clouds.
“Broken Sun must have been waiting for me to leave the cave,” Dzoo said.
“That’s when he took Sweet Grass?”
“Yes. He Traded her for these.” She reached inside her cape, took a small leather bag from her belt pouch, and tossed it across the fire to him.
He hefted the bag, finding it heavy and decorated with beautifully painted red paw prints.
“Open it.”
Pitch set his teacup aside, and poured the contents out.
Two tens or more obsidian fetishes glittered on his palm, and his skin began to crawl. Magnificent things: coiled serpents, bears, howling wolves, eagles with spread wings, and several images he couldn’t discern in the dim light. The longer he looked at them, the more he felt it. Strange Power filled the fetishes, as though the master flint knapper had breathed part of his Spirit into the objects.
But there was something else—a voice, frail, childlike, but there. Pitch held them for as long as he could, studying them; then he shoved the fetishes back in the bag and set it on one of the hearth stones.
“Hallowed Spirits.” He shivered. “Who made these, Dzoo?”
A cold smile touched her lips. “He’s Powerful, isn’t he?”
Pitch wiped his hands on his cape, but he could still feel the man’s presence, a fetid prickle, like hungry maggots crawling around his bones. “Who is he?”
“Coyote, I assume, but I’m not certain.”
Pitch washed his hands in the freshly fallen snow. “Where did you find them?”
“Broken Sun offered them to me.”
In a heartbeat he saw the entire thing on the fabric of his soul. Broken Sun must have known the instant Dzoo found him that she had seen everything.
“Where did he get them?”
“That was the bargain. Coyote gave them to Broken Sun in exchange for me.”
Pitch flinched. “Dzoo? What did you do with … I mean, Antler Spoon searched …” He made a face. “The warriors backtracked you through the snow. They found blood, but no body. No other tracks but yours.”
The wind shifted, and snow plummeted out of the sky, creating a thick white veil between them. The fire sizzled and popped.
Dzoo answered, “He would not have been welcome at the Underwater House. I just spared his ancestors the trouble of telling him so.”
He squeezed his eyes closed. If a person’s body was not properly cared for, the soul became a homeless ghost, wandering the earth forever, trying in vain to speak with people, watching loved ones die. Most homeless ghosts went mad and took out their vengeance on the very people they loved most.
“What he did was wrong, Dzoo, very wrong, but he thought he was saving his village. I wish you had—”
“A man who will sell a sick woman’s life for a handful of trinkets is capable of anything. I couldn’t let him go.”
It sounded like something Pearl Oyster would have said: Who will he sell next? Hmm? You? Me? His own daughter?
Pitch asked, “What does Coyote want with you?”
“Possession.”
“Possession? Of what?”
“My body. One of us will devour the other. We will embrace each other, and one of us will suck the other dry.” Dzoo stood, and her black buffalo cape billowed in the gale. “Why don’t you try to sleep? I’ll take the first watch.”
Pitch finished his fir needle tea and placed the cup beside the tripod. “I think you should sleep first. In two days, you are supposed to lead the Moon Ceremonial at War Gods Village. You will need …”
Dzoo turned suddenly, eyes searching the storm.
He followed her gaze to the trees five tens of paces away. “What is it?”
The reflection of the firelit snow wavered over Dzoo’s beautiful face. She said nothing, staring in knowing silence.
An elusive wink of light flashed in the alders.
Pitch grabbed the fetish bag, stuffed it into his pack, and gathered his things.
“Back away. Slowly,” Dzoo said. “When you’re two tens of paces up the trail, turn and run. I’ll be right behind you.”
“But it might just be a messenger from Antler Spoon, or Rain Bear. Perhaps we should—”
She turned. “Go. Now!”