Firelight flickered in yellow phantoms on the inside of the house walls and cast a shadow outline of Speaker Cloud Heron’s dead body. It gave the wattle and daub a golden sheen, accenting the cracks that had appeared in fine tracery through the fire-hardened clay. Overhead, the ceiling was a latticework of soot-stained cane poles and bundles of thatch. Net bags hung from the larger poles, the contents bathed by the rising smoke. Such was the gift of fire. Not only did it heat, light, cook, and purify, but its smoke preserved, kept roots, dried fish, nuts, and thinly sliced meat from molding in the damp climate of Sun Town.
The dead Speaker lay on the raised bench built against the wall. Poles set in the ground supported the framework that was in turn lashed together to support a split-cane bed. A thick layer of hanging moss rested atop the cane, and a tanned buffalo hide atop the moss. All in all, it made for a comfortable and dry bed just high enough off the floor to stay warm in the winter but low enough that in summer the haze of smoke kept the hordes of humming mosquitoes at bay and allowed the sleeper some peace in his repose.
Not that Cloud Heron, Speaker of the Owl Clan, would ever need to worry about mosquitoes again.
Wing Heart bit her lip as she studied her brother’s body in the firelight. That he had lasted this long was a miracle. Now, after months of watching his muscular body waste into this frail husk of a man, her strained emotions only allowed her a soul-weary sigh. It
was over. For that, and for her son’s return, she could be grateful.
“How is he?” Water Petal asked as she ducked through the low doorway. Her thick black hair was parted in the middle, indicating her marital status, and hung straight to her collarbones. She wore a brightly striped fabric shawl over her shoulders, its ends fringed. Her kirtle had been tied around her waist with a silky hemp cord, its girth relaxed now that her pregnancy was apparent.
Wing Heart added another piece of hickory to the crackling fire. “The Speaker is dead.”
Water Petal exhaled slowly, eyes raised involuntarily, as if she could see his Life Soul floating up in the smoky rafters. “He was a great leader, a man who never flinched in his duty.”
“Even in death,” Wing Heart whispered. “He waited until my son returned before surrendering his souls. When will we see another like him?”
“When your son assumes the mantle of Speaker,” Water Petal said firmly, eyes glittering with resolve. “Who in the other lineages could compare? Name anyone else in the clan—and surely not Half Thorn, no matter what Moccasin Leaf might say about him.”
Wing Heart stared absently at her dead brother’s face. The flesh had shrunk around it as though sucked down across the skull by the withering souls inside. His empty eyes lay deep in the hollow pits of his skull, the lips drawn back to expose peglike teeth. Sallow skin outlined the bones of his shoulders and chest. This man whom she had shared so much of her life with, whom she had loved with all of her heart … by the Sky Beings, how could Cloud Heron have faded into this wreck of bone and loosely stretched skin?
“Do you wish to be alone, Elder?” Water Petal asked. “To speak with his souls while they are still near?”
Wing Heart vented a weary sigh. “He has heard everything I have to say to him, Cousin. Over and over and over again until I’m sure he’s weary of it.” As I am weary of saying it.
Snakes take it, had she grown so caustic and cynical? She could imagine Cloud Heron in another time, giving her that measuring stare. His brow had risen to a half cock, questioning her as only he could.
Her throat tightened at the sudden welling emptiness inside.
“Elder?”
“I’d rather have cut off my leg,” Wing Heart whispered, barely aware of the tear that burned its way past her tightly clamped eyelids and traced down her cheek.
“I understand, Elder.”
“No. You don’t, Cousin.” She knotted her fists in her lap. “For
ten and two winters now, my brother and I led the Council. For three tens and nine winters we have lived the same life, breathed each other’s air, shared each other’s thoughts, and bound our souls together. He was me. I was him. We were one. Like no two people I have ever known.”
“That was what made you great.”
Wing Heart nodded, hating the grief that rose as relentlessly as the spring floods; brutal and inevitable, she could feel it pooling around her lungs and heart, lapping at her ribs.
“How shall I continue?” she asked of the air. “Brother, what can I do? How can I do it? Without you, it seems …” Empty. So very empty.
“Your son is ready to step in at your side.” Water Petal sounded so sure of herself.
“My son is not my brother.” Her fists knotted, crumpling her white kirtle with its pattern of knots. “But he will do.” She bit back the urge to sob. “As I have trained him to.”
“Elder?” Hesitation was in Water Petal’s voice. “Would you like me to care for the Speaker? He must be cleaned, his clothes burned. The corpse must be prepared for the pyre.”
“Not yet.”
“As you wish, Elder.”
Wing Heart ground the heels of her palms into her eyes, twisting them as if to scrub her traitorous tears from her head. I thought I had myself under control. I have been so calm, so prepared, and now that he’s truly gone, I am broken like an old doll. Why didn’t I know this was coming? Why didn’t I understand I would hurt so badly? Why didn’t you tell me, Brother?
“Would you like me to make the ritual announcement, Elder?” Water Petal’s voice remained so eerily reasonable.
“No, Cousin. Thank you. That is my job.”
A long silence passed as Wing Heart sat in numb misery, flashes of memory tormenting her with images of Cloud Heron, of the times they had shared triumph and pain. How did one pack a lifetime of memories, as if into a clay pot, and just tuck them away?
Brother, after a turning of seasons of watching you die, why is it now beginning to hurt?
“Elder, someone should at least let White Bird know that his uncle is dead. He should know before the others. It will give him time to prepare.”
“Yes.” Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow I will be able to think again. She waited hesitantly, struggling to hear Cloud Heron’s response to that, but the clinging silence of grief washed about her.
“And Mud Puppy?” Water Petal asked as she rose and crouched in the doorway.
“What about him?” Wing Heart asked, slightly off guard at the change of subject.
“Should I tell him?” A pause. “He’s up on the Bird’s Head. The Serpent left him up there at dark.”
Wing Heart shook her head, trying to clear the dampness from her eyes. She blinked in the firelight, gaze drawn inexorably to Cloud Heron’s death-strained rictus. “No. Forget him. He’s a worthless half-wit. It’s the future, Water Petal. That’s what I have to deal with. The future.”
“This is not a good idea,” Cooter said from the darkness in the front of the canoe. He stroked his paddle in the rhythmic cadence they had adopted.
Anhinga glared where she sat in the back behind the others. She hadn’t anticipated the night being this dark. They canoed northward in an inky blackness that was truly unsettling. On occasion someone hissed as unseen moss flicked across his face or over his head.
“You would think you had never been out at night,” Anhinga managed through clenched jaws. Truth to tell, she was a little unnerved herself. Was it lunacy and madness to strike out like this with her young companions, to sneak north through the swamps in darkness?
“But for the wind, we’d be lost,” Spider Fire reminded. Overhead the south wind continued to roar and twist its way through the backswamp forest. With that at their backs they couldn’t get lost. And it helped to keep the humming hordes of mosquitoes down. They had greased their bodies, but the bloodthirsty insects still swarmed.
“I don’t worry about getting lost,” Mist Finger muttered. “I do worry about smacking headlong into a tree, capsizing, and drowning out here in the darkness.”
“Not me,” Right Talon declared uneasily. “It’s the stuff we keep sliding under. I don’t know when it’s hanging moss or when it’s a water moccasin dropping down to bite me in the face.”
“Thanks,” Slit Nose grumbled from his place in front of Anhinga. “That’s just what I needed to hear! Panther’s blood, I’d just about let myself forget about the snakes, and then you let your lips flap.”
“Some brave warriors,” Anhinga cried. “Should we turn around and go back? Is that what you want? My brother’s ghost is wandering about, unavenged because my uncle will do nothing!”
“Out here, in the darkness, where spirits can drift in with the mist and kill us, I’m not inclined to argue,” Cooter replied from his position up front. She could barely see his shoulders moving, or did she just imagine them as he stroked with his pointed paddle?
“He was your friend,” she reminded hotly. “You were there. You saw it.”
“I did,” Cooter said. “It was all I could do to escape. There was only the two of us against ten of them, their bodies slick with grease. We caught them levering our sandstone from the side of the hill. When Bowfin shouted at them they turned … didn’t even hesitate, and cast darts at us. Luck must have guided the hand of the first, for his dart sailed true. I still don’t know how Bowfin could have missed seeing it. He should have been able to dodge out of the way.”
“But he didn’t,” Anhinga told them. “I was there when he died. No one should die like that, their guts stinking with foreign rot while their blood runs brown in their veins and fever robs them of their wits.”
“I was lucky enough to run.” Cooter’s vigorous paddling mirrored the anger in his voice. “It was stupid of us to make ourselves known. It would have been better if we’d just sneaked away, called for more warriors.”
“That’s wrong!” Anhinga felt the anger stir in her breast. “It’s our land! It’s our stone! They have no right in our country, treating it as if it were theirs!”
They paddled in silence for a while, accompanied by the sounds of the swamp, splashing fish, the lonely call of the nightjar and the chirring of insects. Overhead the wind continued to slash at the spring green trees, rustling the leaves and creaking the branches.
Spider Fire finally said, “You’re right, it’s our territory, given to us by the Creator, but they have been raiding our land since the beginning of time. I will help you end this once and for all.”
“Will you?” Mist Finger asked wryly.
She had been glad when Mist Finger volunteered to accompany her. For the past several moons she had been alternately delighted and annoyed by the way he kept creeping into her thoughts. At odd times of the day, she’d remember his smile, or the way the muscles rippled in his back. The sparkle in his eyes seemed to have fixed itself between her souls.
“Branch!” Cooter sang out. “Duck, everyone.”
The canoe rocked as they bent their heads low to drift under a
low-hanging branch. Anhinga felt trailing bits of spiderweb dust her face, crackling and tearing as the canoe’s momentum carried them past. She reached up and wiped it away, hoping the angry spider wasn’t trapped in her hair. The thought of those eight milling legs tangling in her black locks made her scalp tingle.
Slit Nose broke the silence. “That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Anhinga’s right. It’s got to stop sometime. It might just as well be now.”
Mist Finger laughed, the sound musical in the windblown night. “You don’t think it’s been tried? How many of our ancestors, no matter what the clan, have died fighting with the Sun People? How many stories can you recall? You know, the ones about great-uncle so-and-so, or cousin what’s-his-name who was killed in a raid on the Sun People, or who, like Bowfin, was skewered by a dart, or smacked in the head with a war club. Is there any clan, any lineage that you can name that doesn’t have a story? In all that time, all those generations going back to the Creation, don’t you think that others have tried to teach them a lesson?”
“Does this have a point?” Spider Fire asked.
“Of course,” Mist Finger answered easily. “The point is that nothing is going to change. Our war is eternal. No one is going to win.”
“Then why are you here?” Anhinga asked, anger festering at the bottom of her throat.
“I’m here for you.” Mist Finger’s voice carried an unsettling undercurrent. “As are the rest of us. Bowfin was our friend and your kinsman. We would indeed see his ghost given a little peace.”
“But you don’t think this is going to do any good?” Anhinga tried to stifle her irritation.
“In the long run, no.” Mist Finger sounded so sure of himself.
“But you came anyway?”
“Of course.” Where did that reasonable tone come from? He might have been discussing the relative merit of fishnets rather than a raid against the Sun People. “Like my companions, Anhinga, I am here for you. As I said.”
For me? “I don’t understand.”
“Then I shall lay it out for you like a string of beads.” Humor laced Mist Finger’s voice. “Though I doubt my friends will admit to it out loud. We are here to prove ourselves to you. Oh, to be sure, we wouldn’t mind killing a couple of Sun People in the process. Bowfin was a good friend. We share your anger over his death. But, most of all, when this is over, each of us wants you to think well of us, to admire our courage and skill.”
Her thoughts stumbled. “What are you talking about? Prove yourselves?”
“Shut up, Mist Finger,” Spider Fire growled unhappily.
His admonition brought another laugh from Mist Finger, who added, “Anhinga? Are you not planning on marrying soon? And when you do, which of your suitors would you choose? Some simpleminded fisherman who worried more over the set of his gill nets, or one of the five dashing young warriors in this canoe?”
“Be quiet, Mist Finger,” Slit Nose muttered.
Anhinga started, considering his words, ever more unsettled by them. “Why are you telling me this?”
Mist Finger calmly replied, “So that my companions here know that they have no chance.”
Chuckles and guffaws broke out from the others while Anhinga felt her face redden. Snakes take him, he’d embarrassed her, and in the middle of this most important strike against the Sun People.
“Well,” she told him hotly, “if and when I marry, it won’t be to you, Mist Finger! And for now, it would do all of you good to think about what we’re doing. This isn’t about courting. It’s about revenge.”
“Nice work, Mist Finger.” Right Talon couldn’t keep the gloating out of his voice. “That’s one person less the rest of us have to worry about.”
The canoe rocked as someone in the darkness ahead of her slapped a paddle on the water, spraying the front of the boat where Mist Finger sat. Laughter followed.
“Stop that!” Anhinga ordered. “You want to know who I’ll marry? Very well, I’ll marry the man who kills the most Sun People.” There, that ought to set them straight.
“Is that a promise?” Slit Nose asked.
“It is. My uncle might be willing to remain at the Panther’s Bones and talk about revenge,” she told him. “I intend on doing something about it. If I do nothing else in my life, I will see to it that the Sun People finally pay for the wrongs they have committed against us. On that, I give my promise. By the life of my souls, and before Panther Above, I swear I will harm them as they have never been harmed before.”
“No matter what?” Right Talon asked.
“No matter what,” she insisted hotly. “So there. If you’ve come to impress me, do it by killing Sun People.”
Out in the blackness of the swamp, the hollow hoot of the great horned owl sent a shiver down her soul. It was as if the death bird heard, and had taken her vow.