Sindak took a deep breath and nodded his understanding. “You think I will be the one to hesitate?”
“Just tell me why you volunteered to do this.”
Sindak looked back at the warriors on the palisade and his eyes glistened, as though he were straining against his better judgment. Standing silhouetted against the firelight, the warriors made perfect targets. Except for Joondoh’s group, most were vigilantly watching Bur Oak Village, the marsh, and scanning the surrounding hills. “May I ask you a question, Gonda?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think that you and I are here by chance?”
“Chance? What do you mean?”
“I mean that I think you and I are meant to be here. From that fateful instant twelve summers ago when Towa and I were ordered to help you and Koracoo find the missing children right up to this conversation, I don’t think any of it has been chance. Do you believe in Sky Messenger’s Dream?”
“If I didn’t I wouldn’t be out here with my testicles so frozen they’ve knotted up against the bottom of my throat.”
Firelight reflecting from the marsh danced over Sindak’s lean soot-coated face and seemed alive in his eyes. “Is there anything else you want to know?”
“No.”
Gonda looked back at Papon and Wampa. They were almost invisible in the eddying mist. Both stood watching and waiting, undoubtedly wondering what was taking so long.
“When we get inside the palisade, I’ll go right and you go left. The crumbling remains of refugee shelters fill the space between the palisades. It’s a trash heap of charred bark, old cloth, torn baskets, and rush matting. Finding quiet footing is going to be the challenge.”
“I understand.”
Veering around the chokecherries, Gonda got down on his belly, and slid ashore. Sindak was right behind him. They slithered around the patches of snow that dotted the dark leafbed, and headed straight for the southwestern palisade wall of Yellowtail Village. Beneath where War Chief Joondoh and his friends stood, a black gaping hole had been burned through the palisade logs—a vulnerability in the defenses, which probably explained War Chief Joondoh’s presence above it.
Heart pounding, Gonda moved with the stealth of a hunting serpent. He still half-expected Sindak to warn his friends and betray their mission.
Wampa and Papon must have managed their tasks in utter silence for the sentries in the marsh had called no alarm.
When they reached the blackened hole, Gonda flattened himself against the wall as he quietly slipped his pack from his shoulders and pushed it through the gap, before he crawled through. A few heartbeats later, Sindak pushed through, glanced at Gonda, then looked up. Through the slats in the catwalk above them, they could see the men moving, hear them talking.
“Ready?” Sindak asked, lips to Gonda’s ears.
Gonda gave Sindak a firm nod and bent to his business. His fingers were shaking—from cold and fear—as he untied the laces. Carefully he removed the pots of walnut oil mixed with pitch, the bag of wood shavings, and pots of hot coals gathered from the fires of the Bur Oak longhouses.
He leaned close to Sindak, busy with his own pack, and whispered. “I think we have around six hundred heartbeats before Deru starts letting fly.”
“Which means we have to hurry.”
“I’ll count to five hundred and meet you back here.”
“Good luck!”
Gonda watched Sindak disappear among the shadows and pulled the wooden stopper from his own oil pot. Silently, he moved along beneath the catwalk, tiptoeing through ankle-deep ash, slabs of burned bark, and useless chunks of basketry.
Glancing up, he saw two men standing above him. He edged forward, moving ten paces farther down the wall to a twisted wad of half-burned reed matting.
Gonda dribbled oil on the mat, then shook out a small amount of hot coals in the middle. It would take a little while to catch, but not long. He had to move quickly. The warriors on the catwalks continued talking, laughing, completely unaware of his presence.
When he’d gone halfway around the curve in the wall, one of the warriors on the catwalk suddenly stopped talking in midsentence and leaned over. “Who’s there?”
Motionless in the shadows, Gonda thought his heart was going to batter its way through his breastbone.
The man illuminated in the firelight above was a square-jawed man with long hair streaming over his shoulders.
In the midst of thick shadows, Gonda’s black-clothed body should blend with the background, but mist glistened in the firelight. If it eddied around him, creating unusual swirls …
“What did you see?” the man’s friend asked.
“I don’t know. Something moved down there.”