Pale Snake made himself relax, aware of how hard he had gripped the paddle, his fingers white and bloodless as if he were trying to strangle the wood.
“Sorcerers don’t always recognize sorcery. One illness followed another among my wife’s people. By the time I returned home, nearly three moons had passed. My wife had miscarried during the first, and for two moons, he had soothed her, wooed her, and perhaps given her one of his charms.
“One of his Spirit Helpers warned him of my coming, and he was gone before my arrival. I should have recognized the dreamy look in her eyes, the distance I felt when we lay under the robes. Naturally, I attributed it to her losing the child and the uncertainty that comes of such things. She said he’d been there for only a short time.”
“Are you sure he did this?” Star Shell asked. “Are we really talking about the same man that I traveled with for so long?”
“I presume so. Short, about so high, fleshy nose, copper ear spools, carried a little bag with a wolf’s head in which he kept poisons, aphrodisiacs, and charms?”
“That part sounds like him.”
“If you weren’t one of his women, the rest would, too.”
“I wasn’t one of his women.”
He looked at her. “I left again within two moons for, of all places, Starsky. I accompanied my mother’s father and the Elders there to discuss an access for mining sacred chert, and also to settle a boundary dispute. Tall Man arrived on my doorstep the day I left. Within a span of days, he was in my wife’s bed, and this time, without the benefit of charms.” “Why?” Star Shell demanded. “Why would she bed your father? Didn’t you tell her what sort of man he was?”
Pale Snake’s paddle dangled over the water, and he rubbed a hand over his curiously hot face. “I’d told her not to let him in. That I didn’t want him in my hoase. We fought. She didn’t believe me. Maybe that’s why he had so little trouble parting her legs. He’d left by the time I’d returned, and I thought we could live the way we had before the baby. I didn’t know that she was laughing at me the whole time.”
“Maybe she wasn’t laughing. Maybe you just think <hat. A way of salving your guilt for murdering her.”
“Oh, I wish it were that easy, Star Shell.” He stared up at the sky, watching clouds rolling in from the west. “She was probably easy for him. After all, he was the Magician, revered, Powerful, and influential. He was everything her people had taught her was admirable. You yourself know how charming he could be. Me, I was young, serious, and he knew me. From my toes to the depths of my soul, he knew me. He could tell her things—things about what I would say—and then twist them, you see?
“I left again, this time to accompany the Elders to a marriage at Six Flutes. Within a day of my leaving, he was back in my wife’s bed. That time when I returned, I could feel the difference.
She didn’t care to have me share her bed. Said she was feeling unwell, and in fact, she was. Every morning she was ill.
Are you beginning to understand? It was winter. I’d been gone almost three moons with the delegation to Six Flutes.”
Star Shell turned, her face pained. “Oh, no.”
Pale Snake ran his fingers down the wood of the paddle, over a knot that had resisted smoothing. “He claimed that he’d never had a woman he didn’t plant a child in. That was part of what drove him. It took me a moon, stupid bumpkin that I am, before the realization came to me.”
“I’m sorry, Pale Snake.” Star Shell shook her head. “Why didn’t you just cast her out? Send her back to her clan?”
“Because of what she said to me. Because she laughed at me, at my manhood. She had to goad me, tell me that she would bear her child and that my father would raise it. That it would be everything that a failure like me wasn’t. He filled her, she said … while lying with me was like coupling with water.”
He worked his hand on the wood. “And something in my soul went black and evil, and when I came back to myself, she lay dead on the floor.”
The canoe was drifting, turning slowly in the mild current.
Silver Water blinked. When he looked at her, it was like staring into a bottomless pool.
He shook himself, casting out the demons. “So there, Star Shell, you have it. The horrible, wretched secret of the man you’re traveling with. Now you know why I ran, and why I went as far as I did. The only thing you don’t know is why I let you come with me … and to be completely honest, that baffles me, too.”
She watched him with a crystalline fragility, as if on the verge of tears, and lifted a gentle hand toward him, then dropped it and turned away, placing her paddle in the water to turn the canoe back to the channel.