Nesi’s gaze slid to Chief Atotarho. The old man hunched over his walking stick, gripping the head with knobby parchment-like hands. His crooked body quaked with repressed violence. Muscle spasms twitched across his wrinkled face with such ferocity that Nesi thought he might be about to collapse in convulsions. Negano’s move had left the Chief with five personal guards in the midst of a swarm of deadly Mountain warriors.
Nesi met the gazes of Atotarho’s other guards. Terrified and stunned, they looked like they didn’t know what to do. Each one who silently glanced down at his weapons belt, or shifted his shoulder to indicate his slung bow, received a subtle shake of Nesi’s head. Gods, that was the last thing …
A wild-eyed youth came careening across the battlefield, leaping corpses in a heedless charge to reach Chief Wenisa. Shoulder-length black hair flew around his face. “Chief! Chief! I saw her first!”
Nesi studied the youth of perhaps fifteen summers. He had misshapen eyes, and spoke like a simpleton. Tears streamed down his bucktoothed face to stain the front of his ragged deerhide shirt. His eyes glistened as though he’d seen Sky Woman herself descending from the clouds.
Wenisa sneered, as though the youth was a well-known imbecile. “Get him away from me.”
As two of Wenisa’s personal guards grabbed the young warrior, he shouted, “She’s coming! She’s coming! Listen to me. I saw her in the forest. I was the first one!”
“Shut the fool up!” Wenisa shouted.
One of the guards clamped a hand over the warrior’s mouth and dragged him off.
Someone must have called retreat. Mountain warriors fell back from the village, out of bowshot, and a curious sound—like eels coiling in mud—moved across the battlefield. It started slowly. As a mass, warriors turned to the north, then came bursts of low questions erupted.
Nesi followed their gazes.
Where trees disturbed the path of Hadui, a lilting symphony of whistles and shrieks answered back: the music of the windswept forest.
Only slowly did he become aware of her. She appeared standing in the deepest forest shadows. A tall figure, broad-shouldered for a woman, wearing a simple doehide war shirt. Long black hair whipped around her beautiful face. Strangely eerie, the locks resembled black serpents striking at the air.
“Blessed Faces of the Forest,” someone whispered.
As she started walking down the slope and across the meadow, her skin had an alabaster radiance. A huge wolf strode close at her side. Where they stepped butterflies flitted from the warm grass and danced around them. The woman carried no bow or quiver, but her weapons belt glistened with light, the bone stilettos casting slender iridescent flashes.
Nesi shook his head, jimmied the images, the odd shadows. Her movements were so graceful she seemed to be floating, not tethered to the ground. It had to be a trick of light, that or he was dead and didn’t know it. Perhaps he’d stepped out of his body into the world of the corpses that surrounded him.
Wenisa shifted to stare at her through his one good eye. “Who is that?”
One of his guards replied, “I … I think that’s War Chief Baji from the People of the Flint. We fought against her two moons ago. She led the defense of Wild River Village.”
No one loosed an arrow at her or the wolf. Her sudden appearance—or perhaps her beauty—had stilled every fighter on the field of battle.
She walked straight to the unconscious Standing Stone Prophet and spread her feet as though ready to fight the world to defend him. Her expression was granite hard, her dark eyes brilliant with challenge. When the wolf lay down on the ground and began licking the Prophet’s swollen cheek, murmurs passed through the guards. The animal whimpered softly.
As though the woman could have cared less that she was surrounded by enemies, she knelt beside the Prophet.
“It’s me,” she softly said, then she sat down in the dry grass and gently drew his wounded head into her lap.
Fifty-seven
Baji smoothed the tear-soaked black hair from Dekanawida’s cheeks. His purpled misshapen face was almost unrecognizable. His left eye had swollen closed, and his right eye was filled with milky fluid. Dried blood covered his shirt.
“Dekanawida?”
No answer.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, bringing the storm closer. Trees battered one another, and everything loose on the battlefield tumbled across the ground as though hurled by gigantic fists. Broken arrows and torn quivers cartwheeled by her.
“Dekanawida? Can you hear me?”
He roused slightly, then seemed to sink back into the oblivion that had swallowed him.
She stroked his short black hair. “I’m here. I’m right here beside you.”