Forty-seven

Winder proved as good as his word, employing a Muskogean team of five brothers from Mussel Midden village. The small Muskogean band—mostly Albaamaha intermarried with some Koasati—had built their village on a terrace at the head of Mussel Shallows. In a remarkably light-hulled canoe loaded with Night Shadow Star and Fire Cat’s possessions and Trade they made their way past the shallows at the mouth of the Elk River and on into the “pond.”

The exiled Cahokian Trader hadn’t lied when he talked about his expertise on the river. From Night Shadow Star’s perspective—city-bound as her life had been—Winder came across as having been everywhere. At night, seated at the cook fire, he told wondrous stories of Yellow Star Mounds in the distant west, of the lower Father Water, and the nations who lived there. He claimed to have been on the Gulf, to have Traded down the peninsula, to have traveled the Mother Water to its headwaters and Traded with the Haudenosaunee.

While Night Shadow Star might not have been to those places, she was familiar with those distant locales. Not only had she been present as Traders and embassies described them in the Council House, but she was passingly familiar with the maps and records, the latter woven into shell-beaded mats. It all sounded just the way she’d always heard. Odd, but now that she’d been on the rivers, a part of her was jealous. She envied Winder the depth and breadth of his travels.

“Imagine going to all those places,” she’d told Fire Cat that night after they made love. “Think of the sights, the people, the places.”

“Changes the way you’ve always thought of the world, doesn’t it?”

While her nights might have been filled with dreams of faraway peoples and nations, Night Shadow Star’s days were consumed with paddling, her thoughts invaded by the soft whispers of voices in the air around her. Flickers of light, fleeting glimpses of movement at the corner of her eye, fragments of images tried to distract her from the river and the chore of driving the canoe upriver.

If there was any solace, it was that after a hasty supper cooked by the Albaamaha men, she could wrap herself around Fire Cat’s warm body beneath their robes. Each time they joined it was with a gentle desperation, as if they understood that time was not on their side. That each mating of their bodies made up for the lost past and served as hope against a fragile and uncertain future.

The thought This is too good to last kept whispering in the silence between Night Shadow Star’s souls.

They knew each other now. Had learned each other’s secrets. Fire Cat proved to be a most remarkable lover, had discovered how to use his shaft just so, delay his emission until he could coax her loins into a series of tingling explosions.

“Are you a perfect man?” she asked, her arms wrapped around him as mosquitoes hummed above their bed. The little beasts were put off by a mixture of puccoon root, sassafras root extract, and well-smoked blanket.

“No. Just lucky,” he told her.

After a pause, he asked, “What do you think of Winder?”

“He’s a curiosity. A blend of competence, craftiness, and honor. I don’t—for so much as a heartbeat—doubt that he’s playing his own game. That somehow he knows more than he lets on. It’s in the way he looks at me.”

“I know how he looks at you. And then at me. The man is envious every time we retreat to the blankets. That Yuchi wife of his back in Big Cane Town? She was a beauty, but the moment he fixed on you … Let’s just say my first impulse was to club him in the head.”

“Like Seven Skull Shield?”

“He and Winder, they’re two of the same kind.”

“Winder and the thief grew up together. You can see it, the similarity, I mean. Makes you wonder, did Seven Skull Shield learn his peculiar code of honor from Winder, or was it the other way around?”

“You haven’t mentioned that you know the thief.”

“I don’t know what Winder knows. Were I to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I left Seven Skull Shield in charge of my palace during my absence,’ Winder might get that startled look, and say, ‘Ah, good to finally make your acquaintance, Lady Night Shadow Star.’”

“You think he suspects?”

“I don’t know. Nor do the Spirits tell me anything. But something is coming, Fire Cat. It’s in the air, in the feel of the river. Even the land seems to be holding its breath. We know that Blood Talon hasn’t given up, and every day we travel we’re closer to Walking Smoke. I can feel his growing menace. He knows we’re coming.”

“How?”

“He has his own allies in the Spirit World. It was the Thunderbirds, after all, who snatched him away from Piasa that day in the Father Water. Just as Piasa uses me for his purposes, the Thunderbirds are using my brother.”

“But he’s evil.”

“It’s not about good and evil. It’s about balance. The white and the red. Order and chaos, wisdom and creativity, peace and war, harmony and confusion. He serves a purpose on the Sky World’s side as I do for the Power of the Underworld.”

Fire Cat remained silent, his arms warm around her. The night sounds of the river, humming mosquitoes, a thousand croaking frogs, water lapping at the shore below them, a whippoorwill, some night bird, and the wind in the leaves of the great chestnut beneath which they slept, all whispered their unease.

“What?” She could tell he was disturbed.

“Balance? If only you survive, Piasa comes out ahead, doesn’t he? You kill Walking Smoke, that’s an imbalance.”

“So, you think we’re both supposed to die?”

“I’ve been worried. Like you said, it’s the symmetry of it all. Walking Smoke came to Cahokia, and almost to the instant, you sent your souls to the Underworld to be eaten by Piasa. Walking Smoke’s threat immediately had a counterweight.”

She snuggled her head under his chin, understanding the harsh logic of it. Terrified by the implications.

“If all I have is this time on the river, I want to live it with you. I will cherish each moment, each meeting of our eyes, every last smile and the warmth of your body.”

“We’re a long way from the end of the journey, my lady. And when we get to Cofitachequi, nothing is certain. Whatever it takes, I will be there to keep you safe. Perhaps to serve as your instrument. I will see that you prevail. I promise you that on my honor.”

She smiled, a flutter of relief in her breast mixing with a hint of dread. What if he did manage to save her at the last instant? What if he gave his life in place of hers? Could she live with that knowledge?

Better to curl up and die.

She expected to hear Piasa’s laughter come spiraling out of the insect-laden air. Instead, lightning flickered in the distant east. And then again, and again. Strobes of white light in the night. As the far-off clouds flashed and blinked, it was as if the Thunderbirds had taken their place at the gaming blanket and were casting dice on the outcome.