White Bird stepped back, an arm raised to protect himself from the violent heat radiating from his uncle’s house. There, just within the doorway, he could see his uncle’s bones laid in a careful bundle on the rick of hickory and maple wood. In the midst of the bonfire the skull charred and blackened, grease sizzling as the rounded bone split, steamed, and oozed. The long bones had been tied in a tight bundle that now spilled down into the crackling logs. One by one they popped as the marrow began to boil inside.
White Bird backed up another step to where his mother stood, arms at her sides, a grim expression on her drawn face. He flinched at the heat, amazed that she could stand it, and struggled with the desire to step back even farther to where the crowd had gathered on the other side of the borrow ditch.
“Farewell, Brother,” she said in a voice mostly drowned by the fire’s roar. Clay began to flake off the walls as the cane-and-pole substructure began to burn. A wreath of black rose in a pillar, bearing the smoke of a dead life to the Sky World. Mother Sun sank below the horizon beyond the Bird’s Head, the sky uncharacteristically blue and cloudless.
White Bird might have been able to stand it, but the dull smarting on his chest where the Serpent had tattooed the red pattern of dots became unbearable. The design marked him as a blooded warrior and a leader worthy of respect. He unwillingly took his mother’s hand and half dragged her back.
The look she shot him was nearly as frightening as the searing heat. Grief lay behind her eyes, grief so powerful it sucked at his souls. And then, as if he truly saw her for the first time, he cataloged her face: Threads of white streaked her hair where she’d pulled it back and pinned it into a severe bun. Deep wrinkles hatched her hollow cheeks, and her mouth had thinned. When had her angular nose gone to extra flesh? He had never noticed that the smooth skin of her forehead had hardened and lined. Her throat, once so fine, now wattled and bagged like an elderly man’s scrotum.
She’s so old! He stood stunned, trying to fathom what it all meant. The popping of his uncle’s bones, his mother’s old age, the pain of his new tattoos. As of that morning the world might have been dislocated, shifted somehow as it floated on the endless seas. From this day onward nothing would ever be the same. His life might have ended and begun anew.
Even the mysterious nighttime escape of his captive seemed somehow of lesser import—though he’d vowed to find the culprit who had sawed her ropes in two. Protestations aside, he was sure it had something to do with Snapping Turtle Clan, and perhaps Eats Wood and his preoccupation with sticking his penis into anything female.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he leaned close to his mother’s ear.
For several heartbeats she stared blankly at the fire, then his words seemed to penetrate. She swallowed hard, the loose flesh at her throat working. “Yes. Part of me is in there with him. I am burning, White Bird. My souls are becoming ashes.”
“He was a great Speaker for our clan,” White Bird replied as he turned his attention back to the flame-engulfed structure. “I am honored to bear his legacy.”
“Honored enough to take the responsibilities of the clan over your own desires?”
“Of course.” He pointed at the blackened bones now half-hidden in an inky veil of smoke. “He taught me that. My first duty is to my clan.”
“Even if it means giving up your own desires for the good of all? Surrendering the needs of your lineage for those of the whole?” Her voice sounded far away, oddly brittle.
“Yes.” Must they have this conversation now?
“What would you give up to be Speaker?”
At the serious tone in her voice, he studied her from the corner of his eye, aware that they were surrounded by a huge throng of the people. Tens of tens of tens had come to watch the cleansing of
Speaker Cloud Heron’s house, belongings, and remains. For the moment, he and his mother were the center of all attention.
“Whatever I have to,” he said in a low voice.
“Spring Cypress?”
The question shocked him. “Why? I love her. She loves me. We want to be together. Why do you think I—”
“For the clan.” Her low voice had all the flexibility of a stone bowl. “Or did you mislead me?”
“No, I …”
“The clan places its demands above those of its Speaker.”
“Yes, but I don’t understand what that has to do with my marrying Spring Cypress. Rattlesnake Clan has been our ally for so many years that—”
“Things change, boy. Clay Fat has his own plans for Spring Cypress ... but that is not your concern. Tell me now, would you marry Spring Cypress, or be Speaker of the Owl Clan? I must know. Time is short, and if you are not interested in serving, I must quickly find another.”
He tried to keep from gaping, aware that the Wolf Traders were standing across the borrow ditch with Yellow Spider, several arm’s lengths to his left. They kept glancing back and forth between the fire and White Bird. He could see them talking in low tones, trying to understand what they were seeing.
“Mother, I went north—”
“You are talking to your Clan Elder. Whatever your mother wishes is not germane to this conversation. How do you answer your Clan Elder? Will you be Speaker?”
“I would, yes, but to—”
“Even if it means giving up your own desires for those of your clan? Yes, or no?”
“I’ve planned on marrying Spring Cypress since I was a boy! We’ve always understood that she and I—”
Her implacable gaze had fixed on the burning house as the thatched roof slumped, sagged, and collapsed. Smoke, sparks, and glowing ash whirled about within the still-standing walls to rise in a curling vortex. Inside the open doorway the inferno obscured the splintered and scalloped bones on the pyre.
“Yes,” he muttered, feeling a hollow anger begin to strangle his grief. “As you have known all along.”
“No matter the cost?”
“No matter the cost.” His heart might have been stone when he added, “Even if it means I cannot have Spring Cypress.” How odd? At that moment he could barely remember what Lark’s face looked
like. Had he left her so long ago? It seemed like a lifetime.
His mother nodded, reaching out to retake his hand and turning him to face the crowd. Raising his hand high over his head, she cried, “People of the Sun, Speaker Cloud Heron is dead. His remains have been cleansed. His Dream Soul will reside with us here forever. As required by our laws, his house and his belongings, the remains of his body, are being cleansed before your eyes. It is in this moment that I, as Elder of the Owl Clan, do raise this young man’s hand. Greet White Bird, nephew of Cloud Heron, son of Wing Heart, fathered by Black Lightning of the Eagle Clan. As Clan Elder I place this young man before you for your inspection.”
White Bird battled the wheeling sense of confusion, conquered it, and stood tall and straight before them. He wondered what they were seeing. A muscular young man, his chest a painful mass of fresh scabs. A man too young for such a responsibility. This was madness. A Speaker needed to be older, tempered and wise as his uncle had been.
“Hurrah for White Bird!” The shout carried over the crowd. To his surprise, the caller was none other than Mud Stalker.
While he was still reeling from the sight, Spring Cypress caught his attention by bouncing on charged legs. Her whole face beamed with joy and excitement as she clapped her hands for him.
Beside her, Clay Fat’s subdued gaze had fixed on the young girl, his look anything but reassured.
What is going on here? White Bird wondered, face neutral against the tight agony in his mutilated chest. Not all of it came from the wounds left by his tattooing, as his mother continued to thrust his hand up toward the deep purple sky. The cheering of the crowd before him did little to ameliorate the heat burning into his back.
From the corner of his eye he noticed Mud Puppy, standing off to one side, his slight form illuminated by the ghastly yellow firelight. A haunted look, one of terror, reflected from his large brown eyes. He was shaking his head, and even across the distance, White Bird could read his lips. They were repeating, “Don’t do it!” over and over.
Anhinga let the canoe drift, carried forward by its own momentum. She banked the pointed paddle across the gunwales as the craft curved slightly to the left—a flaw in its shaping during construction. Paddling it, she had constantly had to correct for that peculiarity.
Now, however, she was so exhausted that she didn’t have enough energy to feel frustrated.
Around her the swamp pulsed with life: the humming of insects; the piping song of the birds rising and falling in scattered melodies; fish sloshing as they broke the surface for skimming bugs. Heat lay on the water, burned down through gaps in the trees by the relentless sun. Sweat beaded on her aching body.
For a long moment she stared at nothing, blind to the brown water with its bits of yellow-stained foam. Dark sticks from a forgotten forest floor bobbed gently, and the flotsam of bark and leaves lay in dappled shadows. The trees, so rich and green in the light might have been shades cast by another world. She did not see or feel the patches of triangular hanging moss that draped the branches and traced over her skin as she floated past. The dark shape of a water moccasin gliding away from her course didn’t register in her stunned mind.
Again and again she relived the nightmare images. All she could see was that last instant when Mist Finger collapsed under the battering of the Sun warrior’s stone-headed war club. Heartbeats later that scene faded into fragments of images as she watched her friends being torn apart before the Men’s House. The vibrant red of bloody flesh, the odd gray of the intestines, the dark brown of the livers as they were cut loose from under the protective arch of human rib cages, painted her souls.
One instance in particular stood out. She flinched as she watched a blood-streaked warrior toss Cooter’s shining liver high. It had risen, flopping loosely, to hang at midpoint and then dive steeply. At impact it had literally exploded into a paste, bits and pieces spattering hither and yon. Who would have thought a man’s liver was so delicate?
She stared, sightless to this world, hearing the humming of the mosquitoes and flies as they hovered about her. Even the sweat trickling down her face seemed so far away, intruding from a different world than her own.
Blinking her dry eyes she glanced down and took inventory of herself. They had stripped her naked, of course. Clothing left wounded souls with a final if ever so small place of refuge. They had denied her even that. Blister-covered welts itched and oozed where they had used burning sticks to elicit her screams. A black bruise marked her left breast, where the one called Eats Wood had viciously pinched her nipple. Despite the bath she had taken at first light, she felt dirty, filth-smeared in a way that no amount of scrubbing could ever cleanse. If she reached up, she could feel the swollen
lump that stuck out of the left side of her head. That was where the flat of White Bird’s stone ax had brought her down. Broken and scabbed skin overlay deeper bruises on her wrists and legs where they had bound her.
In defiance she flexed her feet against the gouged wood on the canoe bottom, thankful that White Bird hadn’t had the time to cut the tendons in her heels. Despite her other wounds, she could still walk, still run, instead of hobbling like an old woman on loosehinged ankles.
Those were the wounds to her body. Try as she might, she could not even catch a glimpse of the wounds to her souls.
As she had paddled through the morning, dream images had flashed in her head: she and Mist Finger in love; their marriage; their first child—his smile as he stared up from moss bedding. She had imagined Mist Finger, grinning at the sight of her as he walked up to their house at the Panther’s Bones. Gone, vanished like the morning mist that gave way to a burning midday sun.
Other memories of her and the dead sifted through her disjointed thoughts. She had grown up with them. Like the vines surrounding a tree, she had woven bits and pieces of their lives into her own. Cooter had brought her the first fish he had ever caught. How old had he been? Five summers?
She remembered the accident when Slit Nose had been running full tilt across Water Lily Camp, and fallen to slice his nose open on a discarded stone flake. The scar had never fully healed—and now never would. Until she died she would remember the way one of the Sun People propped his severed head onto the flames of that crackling bonfire. How it had sizzled as his face was blackened and burned, the scarred nose curling into ash while the eyeballs popped like overinflated bladders.
Spider Fire had always been a wit and a tease. Sharp of tongue, a bit irreverent, his puns had often left her incapacitated with laughter. Not more than two winters past, she had held him as he mourned his big brother’s untimely death. In a freakish accident, a wind-lashed tree had fallen on him. It was to her that Spider Fire had come for comfort. Then, yesterday, she had seen his muscles carved away and fed to camp dogs until only the blood-streaked bones remained.
Right Talon had been the sober one, the youth of whom no one had expected great things. Instead, he had been carried away by dreams that would never come true. One day he was going to be a great Trader, the next he would become a most holy Serpent. Later that same afternoon he had been sure that a warrior’s fame lay ahead
of him. Dreams. All Dreams. They had died, locked away behind his sightless eyes, unable to escape past the tongue protruding from his gaping mouth. She could see his disbelieving face, wet and witless as a Sun warrior urinated on it.
The bumping of the canoe jarred her back to the present. She blinked at the swelling knot of pain that grief placed under her tongue. No tears remained to leak past her raw eyes. The canoe had fetched up alongside the trunk of a sweetgum tree. Patterns of green mottled the gray bark where wrist-thick vines twisted their way up into the canopy. A lizard skittered upward, disturbed by her arrival.
Where am I going? How am I ever going to live? The answers eluded her. When she glanced down, no less than a dozen mosquitoes dotted her arms. Their abdomens were dark and swollen, their back legs lifted as they drank deeply of her blood.
She would have to face the families of the dead. How did she explain what had happened to them? How did she put the terror she had observed into words?
One by one she watched the mosquitoes rise and fly off, their blood-swollen bodies heavy on the hot, still air. As they went others landed on airy feet, probing with their spiky snouts until they tapped her veins. Let them. She no longer needed her blood.
She no longer needed anything.