She bowed her head for a long moment, staring at the tangle of bodies encircling the palisade, enemy warriors who’d tried to assail the walls and failed. Here and there, the ladders they’d thrust against the forty-hand-tall palisade lay like disorganized lattices, the rungs frosted and shining.
All night long, her souls had kept repeating the battle, forcing her to live through it over and over … six thousand enemy warriors flow swiftly, steadily, across the rolling valley swathed in mist, their clan flags fluttering. They come on like waves, dying all the while, flooding forward to engage my two thousand archers stationed in the maples … volleys of arrows piercing the fog, rising above it, and arcing down in iridescent streams …
Only a warrior could understand the unspeakable beauty. The battle had writhed and roared, shimmered with a thousand crystal eyes. Magnificent. Terrifying beyond words.
As though to remind her of her duties, sobs of grief and the delirious cries of the wounded rang out in the plaza below. One man in the Wolf Clan longhouse kept coughing wetly, gasping. Lung wound. She had tended many such wounds. If he and his family were very lucky, it would be over soon.
She licked her chapped lips and tasted bitterness. A fine deep-gray powder of ash continued to rise from the smoldering walls. She had ash in her hair and eyes, ash in her throat. For the rest of her life, she would remember the gritty flavor that pervaded this cold night … and the miracle that had ended the attack … my son lifts his hands and a monstrous storm swells above the eastern horizon and crashes down upon the battlefield in shrieking, whirling blackness … warriors scatter like brittle old leaves.
She laced her fingers and squeezed them together in a stranglehold, desperate to keep her emotions at bay. When the next few days had passed, and she’d done the things that needed to be done, then she would grant herself time to make sense of it.
She still had things to do. I must go see Cord. She owed the Chief of the People of the Flint more than she could ever thank him for. Without his help today, the Standing Stone nation would have been wiped from the face of Great Grandmother Earth. Cord’s help, and the support of the three Hills People villages that had turned on Chief Atotarho and fought on her side, had made the difference between life and stark oblivion. She had already gone to the Hills matrons and chiefs. She’d left Cord for the last because seeing him was the most difficult.
… on the river twelve summers ago … staring at me with such longing … the black roach of hair bristling down the middle of his skull shining with new-fallen snow … his deep voice like velvet … “If things were different … if our nations were not at war…”
She studied her village, Yellowtail Village, thirty paces away. It was the smaller sister village of Bur Oak Village. Numerous charred holes gaped in the three concentric rings of palisades that encircled the village. All three longhouses had sustained damage. Roofs had burned through, flaming bark walls had toppled to the ground in smoking heaps. For the night, her villagers had torn down the intact bark walls that separated their interior chambers and tried to fill the gaps in the exterior longhouse walls. Firelight streamed around the mismatched squares. The central plaza bonfire blazed, flickering over the dark shapes of dozens of people who tended the dead, laid out in rows. Oddly, the feet were all even, the toes pointing upward like short stubby posts. It would have been foolish to waste the warm space inside the crowded houses on them. Their afterlife souls were not in their bodies, but roaming around the village in the form of glistening soul lights, eating the dregs in the cooking pots, trying to speak with their loved ones. Jigonsaseh’s own daughter, Tutelo, would be there tending the bodies, probably working through the night, despite the fact that her own husband had been killed yesterday afternoon, and grief must have swallowed her world.
Jigonsaseh let out a slow breath. As it condensed in the icy air, Wind Woman gently swirled it into firelit spirals. Tomorrow, the bodies would be prepared. The strongest souls would be Requickened in living bodies, their confusion and agony ended. They would live again. Then, ten days from now, the main burial feast would be held. When completed, the souls that had not been Requickened could be on their way to the Path of Souls in the sky, and the bridge that led to the Land of the Dead beyond.
I must see Chief Cord.
She shoved away from the palisade and headed for the closest ladder, where she climbed down, and tiredly walked toward the wooden plank gates.
The guard, short and burly, swung them open. “Matron Jigonsaseh, you should not be out alone. Shall I assign you guards?”