People of the Black Sun(28)

Baji tossed her bow aside and jerked her war club from her belt. Spinning low, she slammed the fool’s feet out from under him, rose and crushed the second man’s chest, and lunged for the third. As she swung for his head, she saw Cord stumble to his feet with his war club in his hand and wade into the onslaught. His distinctive Turtle Clan war cry rang out. Grunts and cries rent the blood-scented air.

As if he were here, fighting at her side, as he had so many times, she heard Dekanawida shout, Baji, get down!

And at the far corner of her vision … to her left … she saw a flash. Just a small glint, but like a rock thrown into a pond, it seemed to leave a wake in the cold air. Baji just had time to leap.…





Nine

Blighted as though by perpetual wind, the moonlit slope bristled with tormented shapes: pines with branches on only one side, the twisted trunks of leafless sycamores, rocks scoured as smooth as polished agate. Some of the boulders stood half-again as tall as War Chief Negano, and he was a tall man, lean and muscular, with long black hair. His plain undecorated buckskin cape flapped around his legs as he hiked up the trail through the icy wind.

Across the narrow valley, hundreds of campfires glistened. He could hear the laughter of his warriors, and the hum of conversations. They made a strange contrast to the deep bass notes of the battlefield, where low groans and sobs lilted like perverse music. They had used their clubs to silence the Flint wounded. These cries came from his own people.

Negano had just visited the field where his wounded had been carried. The grasping hands, the pleading voices of men and women who just wanted to be carried home to die so that their families could Requicken their souls in new bodies and they could live again—all of it had made him ill.

When dry leaves crunched behind Negano, he spun around with his war club lifted … but all he saw were the glowing white faces in the valley below. Moonlit visages of the Flint warriors they’d slaughtered that afternoon. The valley bottom had been the heart of the ambush, the killing pen. Hundreds sprawled there, a feast for the wolves whose shining eyes winked up and down the valley.

Negano sucked in a breath and let it out slowly.

He should have been ecstatic. His ambush had been perfect! Brilliantly planned and executed.

But on nights like this, he swore he was being tracked by enemy ghosts. He lowered his club, silently berated himself, and turned back to the trail, heading up to where Chief Atotarho camped just below the crest of the hill. Five men, the Chief’s personal guards, stood behind the old man.

As he walked, Negano continued to hear footsteps, soft, carefully placed. It took an act of will not to whirl around again.

The Flint People were fighters. It did not surprise him that death would not stop them. Negano’s cape was spattered with their gore. In the distance, to the west, he could see the bodies of those who’d made it out of the killing pen and desperately tried to flee. They’d scrambled up the wind-combed hills like terrified rabbits. Few had escaped. Negano had commanded two thousand warriors to Baji’s five hundred. The enemy hadn’t had a chance.

A twig snapped behind him. Negano instinctively spun on his toes to face his attacker … only to see nothing.

Laughter erupted from the Chief’s personal guards, and Negano clamped his jaw. Were they laughing at him, or at some joke that had been told?

“You’re being a fool,” he growled at himself. “Stop it.”

At the age of thirty-two summers, Negano had lived with death, and the dead, for so long they rarely left him, waking or sleeping. Somehow, though, tonight was worse than usual. He could feel vast solitudes pressing down upon his lungs, squeezing the air out, and he felt certain Sodowegowah was standing right there, backed by an army of ghosts, all staring him in the face.

Negano cursed himself and marched straight toward where his chief sat on a rock, clutching a long stick in his hand. Atotarho’s hunched back looked like a misshapen pack hidden beneath his clothing. When the old man heard him coming, he looked up. The black pits of his eyes, staring out of a cadaverous face, made Negano’s belly muscles go tight. They were alive with malice.

Negano called, “It is I, my Chief. Do not be alarmed.”

The circlets of human skull that decorated Atotarho’s black cape flashed as he prodded his fire with the stick, sending tornadoes of sparks swirling into the cold night air.

He didn’t appear to be in good humor. Negano inhaled to prepare himself. He knew perhaps better than anyone, for Negano had been the head of the old man’s personal guards until last night. Negano had never had designs on the position of War Chief … too much responsibility, too little reward … but here he was. No choice now but to try and make the best of things.