Sixty-nine

So this is what it meant to be a warrior. For the first time in his life, Blood Talon thought he finally understood. Since he was a boy, he had trained to learn the arts of war, the skills of battle, of tactics. He had survived the physical privations, wounds, and exigencies of life on battle walks, endured the endless training and the trials of soul-sapping boredom.

Now, for the first time in his life, he traveled with a true warrior. A man dedicated to a cause. Not just a unit, a leader, or a mission. Here was a warrior who had committed himself fully, without hesitation, to another human being.

Never in Blood Talon’s life had he doubted he could match up to the challenge. He had been tested often enough in the past, pushed himself to be the best.

In all those instances he had known down in his core that he measured up. Now, glancing across the canoe, for the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure.

Had it just been a physical challenge, a matter of endurance or will, he wouldn’t have worried. But Fire Cat, from the beginning, had proven to be so much more. At times Blood Talon couldn’t help but wonder if the man wasn’t bigger than life.

Not only had Fire Cat rescued him from the torments of the locals who’d tied him in that accursed X, but he’d tended him. Never hinted that it wasn’t more than just his duty to a fellow human being. Never used it to put Blood Talon in his place.

And then, back at Canyon Town, Blood Talon had been awed when Fire Cat innocently walked over to the chunkey court and began practicing.

“We need Trade,” the Red Wing had said reasonably. “I can see only one way to get it that won’t get us hanged in squares as thieves.”

For two days, Blood Talon had watched Fire Cat play chunkey. The first day, Fire Cat won some and lost just as many. This was how the hero of Cahokia played chunkey? The mediocre games were always close. Won or lost by a point or two. And word passed. Additional players appeared, wanting to try their hand against the Trader. And again, Fire Cat won and lost, sometimes in circumstances that stretched Blood Talon’s belief. The man had to be losing on purpose.

That night he had asked, “What were you thinking? That last cast was outside the bounds! A child could have won that match. I could have won that match.”

“Of course you could,” Fire Cat told him with a wink. “The goal isn’t to win the match, it’s to win us a canoe full of Trade.”

“Well, I saw you lose half a canoe full of Trade on that last match. So, are you really the man who beat that Natchez and took his head to save the city?”

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Fire Cat had mused before he rolled over to go to sleep.

The next morning, the crowd had grown. Yet more players brought their Trade and wagered it against the Red Wing Trader from up north.

And finally, in the late afternoon, Fire Cat had amassed enough wealth, learned his opponents, and in a final great match, played an epic game of chunkey, winning by two.

“I figured you could have won by ten,” Blood Talon muttered. “And then you gave back fully half of what you won! We could have left here with two canoes full of Trade!”

“Think it through, warrior,” Fire Cat had told him. “The people here think well of us. Those I beat in the game don’t feel that they’ve been taken, tricked, or abused. We were given a marvelous feast afterward. And the canoe we Traded for, along with enough to hire six men to paddle it, is more than compensated for.”

And the next day they had left at dawn, traveling mercilessly upriver.

Fire Cat was a driven man, never harsh but always firm, never angry but brooking no excuse, willing to drive himself even harder than he drove the men who worked for him.

And proceed they did. Past Hiawasee Island, ever northeast, up the broad valley of the Tenasee, to the fork of the Wide Fast, the main river that traveled east through the mountains to the divide that would take them to Cofitachequi.

Despite the time they’d lost on the lower river, they were gaining. As they passed the various Yuchi, Hiawasee, and Muskogean villages, they learned that Night Shadow Star and Winder were now only four days ahead of them.

That night they camped at the mouth of the canyon, in a mixed-ethnic village called The Flats for its level terrace above the river’s flood stage. Here Fire Cat dismissed his paddlers and Traded his canoe to four strapping young men in return for their, and their pack dogs’, services in making the trek along the riverside trails through the high mountains. Word was that there would be no canoe travel for days as the river carved its way through challenging terrain in a series of rapids, rough water, and cascades.

“From this point forward,” Fire Cat told Blood Talon, “we’re Traders. I’m even dickering for a staff, complete with white feathers.”

“Traders? We’re Cahokians, warriors. No, even more, you were a war chief, I was a squadron first. I can no more be a Trader than I can be a fish.”

Fire Cat, firelight reflecting in his face, asked, “Have you learned so little, Blood Talon? If Power wanted you to remain a squadron first, would it have taken your warriors, lost you your weapons, and cast you alone on the river?”

He frowned, lines etching deeply into his forehead. “Do you find it so easy, Red Wing? Giving up who and what you are? Or are you so lost and without a heart and strong souls that you no longer know?”

Fire Cat had smiled wearily. “Just the opposite, Squadron First. I know who I am in ways I could never have comprehended back in Red Wing Town. It is you who is stumbling, blindly clinging to the man you used to be. Terrified to find out just who you really are.”

Blood Talon’s first response was anger, but somehow he stifled that. “What makes you think you know all this?”

“Because to fully find yourself, you must first completely lose yourself.” The man arched an eyebrow in question. “The tricky part is, not everyone can survive the transition. Sometimes, Squadron First, the souls inside are just too fragile or too frightened to take the chance. If that’s the case, you are condemned to fail. If you do fail, you will never completely recover but will be a half person, forever incomplete, for the rest of your life.”

“You seem to know a lot for a slave.” He hated the bitterness of his retort the moment he said it.

“How do you think I learned it in the first place? Now, get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’re Traders.”

As he rolled into his blanket beneath the ramada where they were staying, the thought kept echoing through Blood Talon’s head: What if I don’t know how to be a Trader?

Which wasn’t nearly as frightening as the notion that he might ultimately be one of those fragile ones. The ones who broke and spent the rest of their lives incomplete.