“Of course I can, I’m a Trader. I can talk people into anything.” He slapped Hiyawento’s shoulder. “I’ll meet you there.”
Hiyawento sprinted back to Disu.
If the Faces of the Forest were on Sky Messenger’s side, how could everything have gone so wrong?
Fifty-three
When sunlight finally crept across the meadow, Negano was standing beside Atotarho and Nesi, but his eyes had fixed upon Chief Wenisa, waiting to see the big man’s reaction when he finally noticed how few warriors Atotarho possessed. Wenisa’s army remained in the same position, surrounding the camp on three sides, but many warriors had squatted down or gathered into small groups to talk. Their strange Mountain People accents lilted through the warm smoky air.
Chief Wenisa’s voice trailed away suddenly and his jaw slackened as his gaze swept the meadow. After a time, he bent down to whisper something to his War Chief, Powink. Powink subtly nodded. A tall, skinny man, Powink, had a long sallow face that gave him a perpetually sad expression. Like Wenisa, his clothing was little more than a thin leather sieve. So many tears and rips shredded his knee-length war shirt that from a distance a man might mistake them for black paintings.
Nesi whispered, “They know.”
“Apparently,” Negano softly replied.
For the first time, Negano could see that Wenisa had one extraordinary eye. It was dark as coal and filled with a strange wolflike clarity. The cruelty of a predator that feels neither regret nor shame in the act of killing, for it is simply life. His shaggy eyebrows tilted upward and had wild gray hairs curling from their midst.
Negano shifted his weight, trying not to appear uneasy. He’d ordered his three hundred seventy-six warriors to align on the western edge of camp, just out of bowshot of Bur Oak Village, and out of bowshot of most of Wenisa’s army. In the open space between the armies, rotting corpses sprawled. Bones, kicked and scattered about in yesterday’s attack, lay in tangles, held together by fragments of shirts and pants. Barely fleshed skulls studded the battlefield like half-sunken rocks. Each wore a shrunken rictus that resembled a gleeful smile, as though the souls that remained with the bodies knew they would have company by nightfall. All day yesterday, as his warriors had run back and forth across the meadow, the skulls had rolled and tumbled. At one point, there’d been so many bouncing in the air that the battlefield had resembled a macabre ball game.
Atotarho’s gaze slid to Wenisa and his wrinkled mouth tightened. Gray hair hung over his sunken leathery face, flipping in the light breeze. The rattlesnakes braided into the locks flashed when he repositioned his walking stick to support his crooked body. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Atotarho turned and gave Negano a hateful look, as though it were his fault that so many had deserted in the night.
Negano took the hint. “If you don’t mind, Chief, I think I’ll walk among our warriors to judge their moods.”
“Do so.”
Atotarho returned to discussing the strategic situation with Nesi, his former war chief of many summers ago. As Negano started to walk away, Nesi gave him an apologetic look.
Negano needed to speak with Nesi alone … but the opportunity had not yet arisen, and he had to face the fact that it may not.
Negano weaved silently between the tangled corpses, his empty hands clasped behind his back, threatening no one. He wandered, nodded to warriors, and soaked in the fragments of conversations he heard. These were tired men and women, disheartened more than ever. As he’d ordered, they stood with their backs to the Standing Stone nation, and their lowered bows aimed vaguely in the direction of the huge Mountain army facing them across the meadow. Each studied Negano as he passed, ready even now, even after everything he’d done to them, to follow him into the Land of the Dead if that’s where he led them. Loyalty lasted too long. It cost too much. Though he thanked the Spirits that warriors had that failing.
Negano slowly made his way to the southern end of the line, and stopped beside a muscular woman warrior named Ohonsta. She had a reputation for humor, but this morning her smooth triangular face showed nothing; it was empty, inscrutable. Her red-rimmed eyes stared at him as though gazing out across some vast unfamiliar country, which he knew came from utter exhaustion. “It won’t be long now. Pass the word down the line that my first order is going to sound like madness, but they must not hesitate to follow it.”
Ohonsta blinked. She seemed to be trying to imagine what that order might be. She said, “You’re going to order us to slice our own throats? Everybody is ready to do that anyway. It will make perfect sense.”