Eighteen

Tsilu

Turning one shoulder into the storm, I brace my feet against the gusting rain that’s hammering my head. It runs in streams down my face, and squishes inside my moccasins. I’m soaked, tired, and miserable. My feet keep slipping in the mud.

About thirty paces ahead, a maze of collapsed walls creates a jagged black outline against the cliff.

“That’s it?” I shout against the wind. “GoingBuck Village? That’s where we’re going to make camp?”

Crane walks ahead of me with the wind snapping his cape about him.

He half-turns to say, “Yes. I’ve sought shelter in these ruins before. Isn’t far now. Just follow me.”

Crane plows through the rain ahead of me, but I stop to wait for Kwinsi.

When Kwinsi walks up he says, “Everything all right?”

“Guess so.”

“Want to run off into the night with me?”

I realize he isn’t joking. “Why? Are you all right?”

Kwinsi uses a hand to wipe rain from his eyes. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be all right again.”

Of course not. He’s just found his village destroyed and his family missing, probably part of a mound of burned bodies. Kwinsi isn’t the type to want revenge, but he is the type to mourn the loss until he himself perishes from grief.

“Sorry, Kwinsi,” I say and gently touch his arm. “Wish I could help you.”

“I imagine it’s actually worse for you. My family is dead. No one can hurt them now. But you know your grandfather is alive and being held prisoner by the people who destroyed our village.” He pauses. “Sure you don’t want to run away with me? We can go hide in a hole for the rest of our lives.”

“Maybe later tonight. I’ll wake you—”

“You won’t have to wake me.” He tips his chin toward Crane, who is meandering through the dark, rain-lashed ruins ahead. “I’m going to spend the night with one eye open and fixed on our friend.”

“Me, too.”

When I start walking again, Kwinsi dutifully falls in line behind me.

We find Crane waiting for us in the abandoned village. Standing there amid the dripping ruins, his cape flapping around him, he resembles an evil wraith. The black oval inside his hood might be a bottomless abyss, a doorway to oblivion.

I pick my way around the fallen mud bricks of toppled walls until I discover the path Crane followed through the ruins.

“Thought I’d lost you,” he calls, clasping his hood tight beneath his chin with a skeletal hand.

“No.”

“Another twenty steps and you’ll be warm. I promise.” He leads us to a narrow tunnel that slopes downward, as though diving into the belly of the earth. He has to duck his head to enter. “There’s a dry chamber at the bottom. Many summers ago it was a subterranean storage room.”

When I enter the tunnel, I see that thousands of feet have worn the stone floor into a long hollow runnel. Damp with rain, it’s slippery and treacherous. I have to keep one hand braced on the wall to steady my feet as I follow him down into the darkness twenty hands below.

“Careful, Kwinsi. This is slick.”

“I see that.”

The deeper I go, the more dread I feel. Horror seems to ooze from the smoke-stained bricks and hovers around me like the stench of carrion on a hot day.

“Feel it?” Kwinsi asks softly from behind me.

“Yes. What is it?”

His loud breathing competes with the roar of the flooded river out beyond the ruins. “Something terrible happened in this room. The walls have not forgotten.”

At the bottom of the runnel, a red gleam flares, and I see Crane blowing upon the pot of coals he collected from our last fire. Then, suddenly, a torch blazes, and the room comes alive with dancing flame shadows.

When I step into the old storage room, I find Crane crouching on the floor, putting the lid back on the pot of coals. A stack of juniper-bark torches rests against the wall to my right. Travelers must replace the torches they use as a courtesy to the next traveler. “There. The torch will help warm the room. Come and sit down.”

The juniper poles that create the ceiling look old and rotted. Strips of bark hang down like ancient rags. About thirty hand-lengths long and twenty wide, the mud-brick walls smell of mildew and mold.

“At least it’s dry down here.” Crane carries the torch to a wall holder—a ceramic tube attached to the wall—and tucks it inside, then goes to sit down against the rear wall.

“It’s a relief to be out of the icy wind,” I say.

“Certainly is. Are you hungry?” Crane pulls his bag of jerky from his pack, opens the laces, and holds it out to me.

“Thank you, elder.” Taking a stick, I walk over and slump down against the wall.

Crane lowers the jerky bag to his lap and studies Kwinsi, who remains standing in the middle of the chamber, watching the fluttering torchlight as though afraid it’s more than it seems.

“When was this village burned?” Kwinsi asks.

“Don’t know the exact date. Fourteen or fifteen summers ago.” Crane sinks back against the wall, getting more comfortable. “The villagers were very ill. I heard that Leather Hand sent in a huge war party to surround the sick village, kill everyone, and burn it to the ground. They didn’t have a chance.”

The smoke from the smoldering torch is being sucked straight up the corridor and out into the night air. Only a few gray tendrils float over my head. There must be a ventilator shaft somewhere. Ah … over there. There’s a square hole in the floor that draws air in from outside to create the draft that pushes smoke up the corridor.

“Come and sit down, Grandson.” Crane holds the jerky bag out again. “Have some jerky.”

Kwinsi pads across the floor, pulls his pack off his shoulder, and reaches for a stick.

As Kwinsi backs away, Crane softly asks, “Can you hear them?”

“Hear what?”

“The voices.”

Kwinsi retreats to sit cross-legged beside me. “I don’t hear anything, but I feel … sorrow.”

“You may not hear them tonight, but you do hear the voices of the dead on occasion, don’t you?” Crane studies Kwinsi as he would a curious bird.

“Sometimes, yes. Not often. Usually ghosts are too busy to bother with me.” He flips his hand toward me. “They speak with Tsilu all the time, though. She is truly connected to the Land of the Dead.”

Crane’s hand shakes slightly as he pulls out a stick of buffalo jerky for himself. “I’m sure she is. Can you hear them tonight, Granddaughter?”

I listen. Though I feel the horror oozing from between the bricks, permeating the air, I do not hear voices. “No, elder. The Spirits here do not speak to me.”

“Ah, well…” Crane takes a bite of jerky, chews and swallows, then says, “Perhaps I hear them because I am an old friend. I’ve come here often over the long summers.”

“What are they saying?” I glance around at the dark crevices between the bricks.

“They’re just talking to each other tonight, but sometimes they tell me about how they died.”

“About the attack on GoingBuck Village?”

“Yes. The women and children ran here to hide when the warriors came.” He stares hollowly at the torch on the wall, as though seeing the attack playing out in the wavering flames. “They heard everything, the war cries, people running, the screams of the dying. As the village above burned, walls toppled, sealing them in here. They couldn’t escape.”

My heart sinks. I lower my jerky to my lap. “Did their families find them?”

“No.” Crane shakes his head. “By the time the women and children in here perished, their families had been dead for days. There was no one to Sing their souls to the Land of the Dead, so they took refuge in the cracks and crevices. At first it was unbearable. But now this is their home.”

Kwinsi’s small nose wiggles, scenting the air. The fragrance of rain-soaked earth has blended with the musty odors of mold and mildew, giving the room the distinctive odor of ancient destruction.

“But someone found their bodies at some time. They are no longer here.”

Crane nods. “I found them, Tsilu. I carried them outside and gave them the best burials I could, but I did not know their clan songs or rituals, so I could not Sing them to their ancestors. The most I could do was care for the souls left in their bones. Their breath-heart souls were beyond my help. Perhaps, if I’d been a better shaman, or a better person, they would have trusted me enough to tell me their songs and rituals.”

“You did the best you could,” I say. “I’m sure they know that.”

As his gaze moves around the room, the flickering torchlight seems more intense, more alive. “They do.”

His oddly blank face reminds me of a story Grandfather told me many summers ago, a story about the Undead. I’d been having nightmares about ghosts sneaking beneath my hides, and Grandfather told me I had nothing to fear from the souls of the dead; it was the Undead I had to worry about. The Undead were human husks who appeared to be alive, walking among us, but were hollow inside, and therefore capable of terrible acts of madness. Grandfather said the Undead were the only nightmares I should fear, because they seemed to be human, but were not.

As I chew my jerky, I glance sidelong at Crane, wondering if he is one of the Undead.

“Are you sure Tocho camped here last night?” Kwinsi asks.

Crane nods. “They would have reached here about dark, though they may not have stayed in this room. They could have made camp in one of the rockshelters along the cliff face outside.”

Kwinsi straightens and the quartz crystals he wears around his neck catch the torchlight like droplets of honey. “Then they’re not that far ahead of us. We may see them tomorrow.”

“I think we will,” Crane says. “There’s a place where this narrow trail crosses the main road into the Straight Path nation. It runs straight as an arrow—”

“Into the jaws of the monster,” I say. “The three of us are going to be walking into a land filled with hundreds of warriors who will either kill us on sight or take us as slaves.”

“Probably the latter,” Crane agrees. “I’ve heard the Blessed Sun has been sending raiding parties all the way to the southern Fire Dogs to capture slaves and herd them home to Flowing Waters Town.”

“So taking us as slaves would be a lot more convenient,” Kwinsi notes. “And less costly.”

“A very practical assessment, I’m afraid.”

I look around the storage room, hoping to see some sign of Grandfather. If he stayed here last night, wouldn’t he have left something, a bead or a mark on the walls, to tell me he’d been here? Surely he knows that Kwinsi and I are coming after him to rescue him. Tears blur my eyes. I miss him so much, it’s like a knife constantly twisting in my belly.

Crane leans back against the wall. “Personally, I’d prefer death to being a slave in Flowing Waters Town.”

“I would, too,” I say.

Kwinsi nods. “Even if only half the stories told by Traders are true, they leave me trembling in my moccasins. Old HornTooth told a story last time he passed through OwlClaw Village. I doubt it’s true, but—”

“The one about the captured war chief?” I ask.

“Yes. You remember, too.”

“Who could forget that story? I still have nightmares about it.”

Crane looks back and forth between us. “Must be a good story. I don’t think I’ve heard it.”

Still chewing a mouthful of jerky, Kwinsi says, “Well, according to HornTooth, a few summers back the Blessed Sun captured an enemy war party. He had the men brought to the central plaza to be questioned, but he didn’t ask them a single question. Instead, he ordered that the enemy war chief’s hands be shoved into a blazing fire and held there until they’d cooked through. Afterward, he told his priests to hack off the man’s arms at the elbows, then he chewed the cooked flesh from the fingers while the dying war chief watched him. Over several days, he did the same thing to every member of the war party, except for the last man, whom he turned loose to tell the tale.”

Crane does not comment for a time, then says, “Cannibalism is a tool of terror that Leather Hand has employed since he was a young war chief, and now wields with great expertise. I’ve seen him do things I wish I had not. Those memories will never leave me.”

Grandfather’s elderly face smiles at me from behind my eyes, and a sob rises in my throat. Leather Hand wouldn’t do that to Grandfather, would he? Maybe the Blessed Sun’s warriors were already torturing …

Kwinsi leans sideways to press his shoulder against mine. “Don’t worry. He’s all right. If he weren’t, I’d know it.”

I blink back tears. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.” He reaches down for the ceramic canteen on his belt and pulls out the wooden stopper. “That jerky was dry. Want some water?”

“Yes, I’m thirsty.”

Kwinsi lifts his canteen and looks apologetic. “I forgot. I drank it. I need to fill my canteen from the river. Want to come with me?”

“Yes, I can fill mine at the same time. Elder, may I fill your canteen as well?”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

Crane hands me his canteen, and I follow Kwinsi up the damp tunnel and out into the rain.

We are both quiet as we walk to the muddy river.

When Kwinsi crouches at the edge of the water and starts to fill his canteen, I glance back at the ruins. The surrounding walls are hidden below the low hills. Only the tallest wall is visible from here, poised like a dark fang ready to rip out the stormy belly of Brother Sky.

“Hand me the other canteens so I can fill them, Tsilu?”

As I hand them over and watch him dip them into the rushing river, I say, “I’ve been wondering about something.”

“What?”

“How did the Blessed Sun’s daughter know that Grandfather had Nightshade’s soul pot?”

Kwinsi hesitates for a long time. “I shouldn’t think he told her.”

“Well, of course he didn’t tell her. She must have found out from someone else. Who?”

Water gurgles as it flows into the canteen he holds beneath the surface of the river. When he pulls it out and shoves the wooden stopper back in the top, he says, “Do you think Tocho told Ahote?”

“Grandfather didn’t even tell me it was Nightshade’s soul. He would not have told Ahote. Besides, I don’t recall him ever loaning Ahote the pot, or even showing it to him.”

As Kwinsi dips the next canteen into the river, he says, “Tocho told me he’d never loaned it to anyone before me. He was trying to help me understand the path of the sacred clown.”

“He cared about you.”

“I know.”

Kwinsi stoppers the last canteen and places it on the bank beside the other two, then he stands up and frowns out at the river. The trees that grow along the channel are half beneath water.

For several heartbeats, I am conscious of every sound. The roar of the river, the patter of raindrops, the distant yipping of coyotes.

“Then, so far as we know,” Kwinsi says, “only three people knew it was Nightshade’s soul pot. Tocho, me, and Crane.”

I spin around suddenly. I have an eerie feeling that someone is watching us. As though eyes drift somewhere overhead, looking down upon us. A cold sensation filters through me. “Yes.”

“Crane sat beside the Blessed Sun’s daughter at the council meeting. Anyone could tell they were together, so Crane must have been the one who told her Grandfather had the pot. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“But why would he do that?”

Kwinsi props his hands on his hips. “That’s the first question we need to answer. The second question is: Why is he here with us, rather than with her?”

“Think we should go ask him?”

“Scary proposition.” Kwinsi reaches down, picks up his canteen, and ties it to his belt. “But I guess if he kills us, we won’t have to worry about watching our hands roast before our eyes.”

I collect the other two canteens. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

As we walk side-by-side back up the trail and into the midst of the toppled walls, I hear mice scurry through the fallen bricks. Occasionally, I glimpse tiny eyes flash.

At the mouth of the tunnel to the storage room, Kwinsi whispers, “Stay behind me, Tsilu. I’m not much good in a fight, but at least I’m bigger than you.”

He leads the way down into the torchlit storage chamber, where Crane sits in exactly the same place we left him. The only difference is that he has spread out his blanket and encircled it with tiny pairs of moccasins. Children’s moccasins. A pair rests at each cardinal direction. When we enter, Crane’s unblinking black eyes focus on us as though nothing else exists in the entire world.

It’s a sobering, breathless moment, where I have the uncomfortable feeling that he heard every word we said down by the river.

Carrying the canteens across the floor, I hand Crane’s back to him, then back away to stand slightly behind Kwinsi. “The river is muddy, elder. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. Thank you for filling it for me.”

Nervously, Kwinsi wets his lips before he says, “Elder, we’re a little confused, and are hoping you can help us to understand some things.”

The faintest trace of a smile touches Crane’s face. “Let me think. What could possibly be troubling you?” He removes the stopper from his canteen and takes a long drink, then lowers it to his lap. “You saw me with the Blessed Sun’s daughter at the council meeting, so you’ve convinced yourselves that I told her Tocho had the pot. In essence, you think I betrayed my dearest friend in the world.”

Kwinsi blurts, “How did you know we—”

“You’re the only possibility, elder,” I interrupt.

“Am I?” Crane lets out a breath. “Then, in your estimation, why am I leading you on this journey?”

“Maybe you want the pot back.”

“Believe me, that is the last thing I want. And, by the way, it’s the last thing Nightshade wants.”

“Nightshade?” Kwinsi walks over and stands in the doorway. “How do you know what a long-dead priestess wants?”

“Do you really believe you are the only person she’s ever spoken to?”

Crane gets to his feet, walks wide around me, and goes over to pick up Kwinsi’s pack. “She’s speaking right now. Don’t you hear her? She’s calling to you.”

Kwinsi cries, “I don’t have it. I’m telling the truth!”

It might be my imagination, but as the tension in the room ratchets up, I do hear faint high-pitched voices drifting through the darkness. Whether they come from something in Kwinsi’s pack or the Spirits in the walls, I can’t be certain, but …

“Kwinsi, please open your pack,” I say. “If the pot is in there, I need to see it.”

A peculiar smell invades the torchlit chamber. The coppery tang of blood. Where is it coming from?

Suddenly, the shadows in the room spin and coalesce. Has to be a trick of the fluttering torchlight, but they appear to twine up around Crane’s emaciated body like dark arms tightening around a man beloved.

A few shadows snake across the cold floor toward me, coming close. Terrifyingly close. Longing to touch me.

Crane whispers, “Shh. It’s all right. They mean well. You know they do.”

As he walks across the room with his black cape flaring behind him, the murky arms melt to simple flame shadows and dissolve into the torchlit air. The room goes profoundly quiet.

Crane hands the pack back to Kwinsi and says, “I believe you, Grandson. Of course you’re telling the truth. You don’t have it.”