People of the Black Sun(50)
He wanted to believe. For her sake.
Unbidden, a face flashed and vanished behind his eyes.
Hopocan.
He tried to block the images, but like all true horrors, they paid no attention to individual wants and needs.
She, too, had been a great warrior woman. In his sixteenth summer, Sonon and Hopocan had been trotting down the war trail, side-by-side, smiling at each other, when the attack came. An arrow pierced Hopocan’s back. He’d carried her home and covered her with soft elkhides from which she never again rose. At first, she’d grown ashen and corpselike. Then her real suffering began. The evil Spirits of gangrene edged from her wound and slithered into her body. Puss leaked from her mouth and enormous worms lived in her flesh. Her muscles decayed, hanging together only by transparent sinews. Had her affliction come from a natural source, she would blessedly have died one moon earlier. But the malignant living creature had been sent by the Ancestors. Sonon had rocked her in his arms until it was over.
He lifted his eyes to the Cloud People. Grandmother Moon’s light slivered their edges as they traveled south, trailing the veil of snow beneath them. Hopocan was up there somewhere, sitting before the campfires of the dead, laughing and telling stories. He prayed she had forgotten him. The possibility that she might be waiting for him was too great a burden to bear.
After her death he had spent many torturous moons trying to make sense of it, and had come to believe that her staggering sufferings were, in reality, a glimpse granted by the Ancestors of a greater truth: The “Law of Retribution” extended far beyond the world of the living. It coiled in the heart of existence itself—and existence demanded that someone pay the price of war. Hopocan had not been called; he had.
He turned to look back at the trail.
The white slash weaved through the forest, glistening as it filled up with snow, obliterating Baji’s tracks. He couldn’t let her get too far ahead.
When he fell into a steady, distance-eating trot, he whispered, “Yes, Baji, I did.”
Sixteen
War Chief Hiyawento stood tall and straight, his nocked bow gripped in his hands, watching his warriors appear and disappear, moving through the stark trees, searching the forest for either intruders or survivors of the Riverbank Village battle. The stench of carrion was everywhere. Drawn by it, wolves had come in the night, prowling for the food inevitably left in the wake of war parties. Occasionally, a man shouted at the animals, and warning growls and barks erupted in response.
Wind Woman flapped his short hair around his eagle face as he turned to examine the smoldering palisades that sent black smoke trailing across the blue midmorning sky. The village sat on the highest terrace of the Sundrop River, a small rushing stream that babbled over rocks as it cut its way across the tree-covered hills. Inside the village, Zateri, Kwahseti, and Gwinodje wandered through the destroyed longhouses. Their ominous voices carried.
The story was clear. The villagers had received Kwahseti’s message to leave as soon as possible, but a small contingent of warriors had remained behind. If he’d been at Coldspring Village when such a message came, he would have done the same thing. Get most of the people out, but leave warriors—all volunteers—to guard the walls for as long as possible, delaying the enemy, giving their fleeing relatives more time to reach the safety of Canassatego Village. As best he could tell, thirty warriors had remained. Men and women who knew it was a death sentence, but stayed anyway.
War Chief Thona wandered the ruins with his jaw clamped, a handful of trusted deputies at his side. When Thona pointed, deputies bent to collect the bones of the fallen. Most were blackened. Those warriors had died in the fires, still at their posts on the walls. Others, the survivors, had been chopped apart. Their bones bore the unmistakable evidence of cannibalism. The long bones of the legs and arms had been split open with war clubs to get to the roasted marrow inside. Several showed “pot polish,” the sheen associated with having been stirred in a ceramic pot for a long time.
Hiyawento’s pulse beat a dull rhythm in his ears. Did Coldspring Village look like this? Or worse? Had any of the villagers managed to escape? Or had they been attacked before they could leave? His souls spun hideous images.
Curses rang out in the forest. A man shouted. A woman tried to calm him down. Dread tingled the winter-scented air. Every person feared this place and the lost souls who roamed the shadows. They were all anxious to be away, to get to Canassatego Village to find out which of their relatives had survived.
Hiyawento looked inside the destroyed village again. Sky Messenger had told Hiyawento once, just a few days ago, that he could see them … the lost souls. They appeared as small yellowish lights bobbing across battlefields or through the husks of destroyed villages. Sometimes, he heard them weeping, confused because their relatives wouldn’t talk to them, not understanding they were dead.