The Awakening of Sleep

The grassy rise, backed by pine, hemlock, bald cypress, and sweet gum, overlooks water. I sit, my attention on the swamp and backwater where it lurks just this side of the river. I come here to marvel. This land is different. Even from the swampy lower reaches of the Father Water where I traveled after my first exile from Cahokia. It has a different feel, a different Power.

My butt is perched on a fallen and rotting log surrounded by palmetto and supplejack vines; I am aware of the insects that swarm around me. My skin is rubbed to a deep-red sheen with puccoon root and sassafras extract to keep the mosquitoes and biting flies away. Diaphanous wings glitter in the sunlight as dragonflies dart and weave in search of prey.

At my feet, past the bulrushes and swamp grass, the water stretches—green with patches of duckweed, dotted here and there by yellow lotus. It is still, and dark, and murky. Frogs are singing, fish dimple the smooth surface. Towering bald cypress, tupelo, overcup oak, and swamp laurel cast shadows pierced by shafts of sunlight.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and inhale not only the perfume of vegetation, water, and damp earth, but the Spirit that pulses here. The swamp, I learned long ago, bursts with life devouring itself like no other place. Think of the Tie Snake that has swallowed its tail and continues to consume itself. Even as it digests itself, it grows longer.

In all the lands that I have ever traveled, this is the richest.

I can’t tell you how I got to Cofitachequi. One minute I was in the depths of the Father Water, cold, water gurgling around my ears as I raged, clamped my fingers around my sister’s throat, and sought to choke the life out of her.

The next I was here. Surrounded by fire, heat, and cracking bolts of lightning.

As to choking my sister to death?

That is the true measure of love.

One can’t destroy what one does not truly love.

And I love my sister more than any woman alive.

My need to strangle her that day was as great as my need to thrust my bursting shaft into her warm sheath. Were I able, I would have driven it all the way through her, right into her heart. The explosion of my seed would have burst like golden light through her entire body. It would have shone from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. It would have glowed, lantern-like, from her fingers and toes and twinkled in the feathery tips of her ears.

You see, she ruined it all. And I was so close! I had the doorway to the Underworld creaking on its hinges. A flick of the blade, a few body parts to complete the vulva that would have opened Mother Earth’s sheath, and Piasa would have been born into our world.

Would have found me. Waiting. My body the perfect host for his primeval Spirit.

But Night Shadow Star tricked me, lured me away from that last stroke of the knife that would have severed Sun Wing’s throat.

Lured me all the way to the river with the promise of her body and the rapture it would have provided.

And somehow I woke up here. Different. Changed. With half of my face scarred from a terrible burn. I don’t remember how it got burned, or the pain, or the time it would have taken to heal and scar. I just appeared in that burning charnel house wearing the shell mask to hide my hideous face.

From the depths of the Father Water and my hands locked on my sister’s throat to here. In what seemed a single moment.

As I stare at the swamp I try to understand. I was choking Night Shadow Star in spring. I appeared in Cofitachequi in fall.

What happened to the time in between?

Why do I remember none of it, but I can recall every moment of my youth? I know I am Red Warrior Mankiller’s second son. That my older brother, Chunkey Boy, became home to Morning Star’s Spirit. That I am Thrown Away Boy, the Wild One, a force of chaos.

I remember using a beautifully flaked long chert knife to cut my sleeping father’s throat. To sacrifice my sister, Lace, and to cut the fetus from her womb.

Looking down at my hands, I remember the hot blood shooting across them. That red was so much more Powerful than the color of the puccoon root now staining them.

In the distance, I hear the first rumbling of thunder. Through the trees I can just see the high billowing white towers of thunderhead.

It will build, carried by the prevailing winds, to unleash its fury over Cofitachequi where the town stands on its river’s north bank.

The barest of movement in the duckweed catches my attention. I see the eyes, the slit pupils, and an arm’s length in front of them, the two rounded nostrils. He’s a clever fellow, hidden like he is. Alligator is a prized feast among the Muskogee hereabouts. I’ve come to savor it myself. Something about an ultimate predator’s flesh being another ultimate predator’s finest meal.

And I am the ultimate predator.

It is my birthright.

The first gust of wind comes rolling out from under the thunderhead. It rushes through the leaves overhead, shishing through the branches.

Lightning streaks out in multiple contorted and bent fingers, the white light jumping through the swamp.

I hear a name in the wind-blown leaves, it seems to be exhaled: “Joara.”

I cock my head. I hear the voices periodically. Disembodied. Speaking out of the air around me. When I look, there is no one there.

“She is coming, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” the storm wind answers, using the trees to give itself voice.

“Then I shall go to Joara to await her arrival.”

I look down again, flex my fingers, and remember their feel as I clamped them around my sister’s throat.