People of the Lakes(39)
“The whole temple was burned to the ground. The four old men were scorched as they dragged Green Spider from the flames. Green Spider sat up, eyes wide, but saw no one, heard no one. He is reported to have shouted, ‘ are so beautiful!
Yes … yes … I’m coming. Fly … fly to the Spiral … ‘ And then he fell over dead.”
“What does that mean?” Round Seed wondered. She had placed a hand over her mouth, her frightened eyes fixed on a point over the door.
Grandmother cleared her throat in the familiar growl she used to bring people back to their senses. “How do I know? I told you, this is just what Four Yellow Feathers said.”
A stirring of unease sucked at Otter’s soul like dark water around a snag.
Five
The evening fire crackled and spit, sending dancing sparks upward into the darkening sky. Pearl sat silently on the weathered gray trunk of a cottonwood. The river had borne the fallen giant down the winding channel, scrubbing the bark away with the same brutal efficiency that had snapped off the tree’s branches and limbs. The wiles of current and fate had grounded the giant here, on the crest of a long sand spit that curled out into the murky brown river from the downstream end of a wooded island.
Pearl pulled her blanket tight about her as she gazed across the fire toward the distant eastern bank. In the fading twilight, the river had gone black, roiling and twining in the darkness.
Freedom lay there, beyond that surging rush.
She could see the high prows of the canoes in the flickering orange light of the fire; the boats were pulled up on the beach like four weird teeth rising from the damp mud. Water slapped at their sterns, the sound mixing with the bell-like splash of waves on the shore. Beyond the clotted blackness of the eastern uplands, a red wolf sent an eerie call through the trees, only to be mocked by the plaintive hoo boo hoooo of a great horned owl.
Pearl leaned closer to the popping fire to gather more of its warmth. The smell of hickory and sweet gum mixed as the breeze changed and blew warm smoke around her. She leaned back and tilted her head to one side to avoid the worst of the fumes. The blackness of the night weighed on her.
“You all right?” Grizzly Tooth asked in thickly accented Trader talk as he approached and settled on his haunches. He braced his muscular arms loosely on his knees, his fingers dangling.
Pearl nodded, glancing at him from the corner of her eye.
Grizzly Tooth couldn’t have been more than twenty summers, yet he claimed to have killed ten enemies in battle and to have traveled to a barren land in the far west where he killed a great silver bear.
He looked the part of a warrior, his keen eyes gleaming alertly in a broad-boned face, his nose flat. No trace of humor betrayed itself in his firm mouth. He wore a deerhide shirt that reached to mid-thigh. The leather had been decorated with teeth, most of them human incisors, but there were fangs from bobcat, badger, and fox as well. Large copper ear spools had stretched his earlobes and glinted in the light. He had pulled his long black hair into a bun above his forehead and pinned it with a stiletto crafted from a deer’s ulna. The grizzly-bear teeth—from which he drew his name—alternated with long brown claws on his necklace.
From what she’d learned, Grizzly Tooth and her promised husband, Wolf of the Dead, had undergone some sort of ceremony that made them brothers where nature had failed.
She glanced around, hating the dull ache in her soul. The rest of Grizzly Tooth’s companions, young, strong, and muscular, either squatted or stood before the other fires, roasting fish, ducks, and a heron they had killed during the day. They laughed, sharing jokes in their guttural language. Periodically, they glanced at her, their black eyes speculative in the firelight.
The Khota were an attractive people, lithe, tall, with broad faces and thin, hooked noses. They covered themselves with ornaments of copper, mica, and shell. For dress, they tended toward tailored hides or coarsely woven textiles that seemed more like matting than the finely woven fabrics Pearl was used to. During cold weather, they draped blankets or fur cloaks over their shoulders. Many used long thongs to lace hide or cloth to their bare legs, twining the laces in a net weave.
Each of the young men carried an atlatl strung to his belt.
Thus armed, the Khota were a most formidable party as they moved upriver. Pearl wondered about that. Why did they need forty able-bodied warriors, bristling with darts, to travel the river? Other Traders made the trip by themselves, or at most, in parties of less than ten, depending on the size of the canoes they had to muscle upstream.
Who did the Khota fear? And why? She’d never paid much attention to stories about far-distant peoples. The uneasy thought had settled within her that it might be a serious deficiency in her education.