“You’d better start believing, my friend. As things become more desperate, this is going to get much worse. The only thing they have is hope.”
Towa called, “Hiyawento! I’ll cover Sky Messenger’s back. Go!”
They started walking through a writhing sea of reaching hands.
“Stop! Let me touch him. I must touch him!”
“Move! Please, I have to get close…”
“I just need to speak with the human False Face for a moment … get out of my way!”
“Let me through! I must tell him something. He must hear this! Stop pushing me!”
“Gods!” Hiyawento shoved a man away. The panicked insanity of the crowd would smother them if they didn’t get out of the village.
Towa yelled, “Hiyawento! Use your war club if you have to!”
He pulled his club from beneath his belt, and waved it over his head. “Move, or I’ll start crushing skulls! The Prophet must leave!”
“No, don’t take him … belongs to all of us, doesn’t he … Let him go! He’s tired, he needs to stay here for the … We’ll kill you if you try to take him!”
People, many of them weeping, stumbled over each other trying to move as Hiyawento bulled through the mass of humanity, clearing a path to the gates. When he neared the plaza bonfire and saw Tagohsah still standing there, Hiyawento shouted, “Tagohsah! Meet us outside!”
“Why? What do you want?” The man’s voice was shrill, frightened. He kept looking around at the eddying crowd as though he knew he’d be crushed long before he made it to the gates.
“If you’re not out there in one-quarter hand of time, I’m coming back in to find you!” Hiyawento glared at the ugly little Flint Trader, then turned back to forcing his way through the grasping sea of hands.
Forty-two
“Gitchi?” Baji whispered and cocked her ear to the forest. “What’s that sound? Do you hear it?”
The wolf, who lay curled in the grass at her side, blinked up at her, as though he sensed nothing wrong, or perhaps he didn’t hear the strange wistful cry that had begun to seep across the land the instant Elder Brother Sun passed below the horizon. Riding the wind like a falcon, it rose and fell, sometimes seeming very close, other times vastly far away.
The cold quiet forest stood perfectly still. She listened. A fox over the next ridge? No, she didn’t think so. Tremulous, descending in pitch like an eerie wail of longing, it seemed not to be of this earth.
Baji hesitated, listening for a time longer, then she tiptoed into the forest. Nightfall had drained the colors from the land, leaving it slate gray. Downy woodpeckers peeked at her from holes in the trees, their feathers fluffed out for warmth.
She stopped. The woods had gone peaceful. A screech owl sailed through the trees barely six hands over her head, so silent it might have been a shadow rather than a living creature hunting the pine-scented evening.
Baji watched it alight in a red pine twenty paces away. Small, no longer than her hand, he lacked the usual rusty ear tufts. Probably a young owl. When he turned to study her, his eyes glowed with a silvered brilliance.
The call came again, stronger, trying to pull her deeper into the growing darkness.
Baji placed her hand on her belted war club and took another step. The arrows in her quiver uttered a faint rattle, like a rattlesnake’s warning.
Gitchi’s paws crunched behind her. He whimpered, urging her to go back to the trail, to return to a place where Dekanawida could find her, but the call was too powerful. It continued to pull her into the falling darkness where towering trees turned black, and frost grew like quartz crystals on rocks and deadfall. The astonishing fragrance of wet bark melted into her body. Her nostrils quivered. Just the movement of breath in her lungs filled her with such gladness she might have become one of the sailing Cloud People.
“Wolves?” she whispered. “Maybe that cry is a pack of wolves in the distance?”
The cry turned into long drawn-out wailing. The chorus seemed to resonate in Baji’s chest, wild and free, and she strained so hard to hear it that her throat ached. As though untold generations of ancestors Sang to her of a primeval time before fire and roof, of a time before Elder Brother Sun existed, her souls thrilled to the melody. In her heart, she was running with them, hunting the cold and dark in the frost dance of constant winter.
Barely audible, she murmured, “I don’t think it’s wolves, Gitchi.”
He nosed her hand.
“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
But it wasn’t, and she knew it. Something was happening to her.