People of the Black Sun(122)
Confused, he said, “Hmm?”
“The fork in what your people call the Path of Souls, and mine call the Road of Light.”
He nuzzled his chin against her long hair. “What about it?”
“Do you believe there’s a bridge at the fork? A bridge where all the animals you’ve ever known wait for you? The animals who loved you protect you and help you across, while the animals you’ve hurt chase you, trying to force you to fall off the bridge in the eternal darkness below.”
She felt him smile. “I believe.”
Baji’s gaze returned to Gitchi. He was still staring at her with that worried expression, something akin to grief, in his yellow eyes. She reached out to stroke the white hair beside his left eye.
“Do you think the animals call to you?”
Dekanawida’s arms tightened around her. “You mean just before you die?”
“Or after.”
Where his wrist rested just below her heart, she felt his pulse speed up, thumping against her ribs. After ten heartbeats, he firmly said, “First, I’ve never heard any of our storytellers say that. Second, everyone saw you today. Everyone. Third, why did you ask? Do you hear something?”
Baji grasped his arm and pulled it more tightly around her. “No, but a holy man told me that once. I was just wondering if you’d ever heard of such a thing?”
“No, and I really wish you’d stop thinking about death.”
“Me?” she said in a teasing voice. “You’re the one who keeps Dreaming the end of the world. How can you expect me to think of anything else?”
Offhandedly, he replied, “Well, there is that,” and tenderly kissed her hair. Then his lips moved down to her throat, warm and inviting.
Baji rolled to her back to look up into his eyes and found so much love shining in those brown depths that her heart ached. She smoothed her fingers down his side and slipped them beneath his cape and shirt to touch his bare skin. “My head is much better, you know.”
He reached around to feel her head wound, frowned a moment, then said, “Yes. It is.”
They laughed together.
As Grandmother Moon rose above the dark hills, the ghostly pewter landscape took on an opalescent sheen that painted every swell and hollow with an edge of silver fire.
Baji looked up into his face, haloed by short black hair, and her gaze slipped across his slender nose and blunt chin, coming to rest at the lines that cut deeply around his eyes. He had seen only twenty-three summers, but so many had been difficult. Her hand lifted to massage his left shoulder, broken by a war club when he’d seen eleven summers. It still hurt him on cold winter nights.
He whispered, “Baji, don’t think about those days,” and rolled over to kiss her.
As his lips grew more passionate, she yielded completely to him, letting herself drown in the tingling warmth of his hands gliding over her breasts, trailing down her waist to her thighs, lifting her war shirt and whispering like ermine fur across her bare skin. One moment of perfect happiness …
As if a fever had been lifted from her, she wept.
His whisper sounded loud in the buried stillness of the moonlit night. “Are you all right?”
“Happy.” She wrapped her arms around his back and pulled him hard against her, holding him desperately. “I want this to last forever.”
He kissed her and said against her lips, “I’ll do my best.”
Their touching drifted with the silence of river mist into love. As Grandmother Moon rose higher in the sky, her light brightened and streamed through the forest. Baji never closed her eyes. She watched his leisurely movements repeat in vast amorphous shadows on the rock wall to her right. Gitchi kept wagging his bushy tail, and Baji kept smiling at him. All the way to the enchanted lavender dawn, she ached with joy.
Forty-eight
Kwahseti stood beside Gwinodje on the catwalk of Canassatego Village, overlooking the main trail below. Six hundred men and women with bows aimed, manned the catwalk around them. Another four hundred lined the trail that led to the village, standing in neat rows. Their nocked bows glimmered in the newborn sunlight that filtered across the valley. In the distance, two clan matrons, one from the Wolf Clan and one from the Bear Clan, walked at the head of a procession of approximately two hundred warriors—enough to protect the matrons, but not enough to threaten Canassatego Village. No show of force. Interesting.
A messenger had arrived late last night informing them that the Hills nation would be sending a delegation to negotiate with the New Hills nation. They’d spent most of the night discussing what they would say. Gwinodje wore a plain doeskin cape with no decorations, as did Kwahseti. If they were forced to become a separate nation, they would immediately change their cape designs, and wanted to foster no wrong ideas about their loyalty in the minds of the delegation from Atotarho Village.