People of the Lakes(41)
From the moment Green Spider had returned from the Dead, he’d been someone, something, different. The sober-eyed, quiet young man Black Skull had known—and moderately detested— had been replaced by this curiously possessed caricature of that other Green Spider. What had happened to him while he’d been dead? What—or who—had he become?
Black Skull’s muscles locked for the briefest of instants as he remembered the horrified face of his mother, her glazed eyes glaring wide at him from the edge of death. Wet, hot blood had leaked down her face in web-like tracery.
He tossed his head the way he would to fling water from his face and hair … Or blood … blood like hers … tracing across the numbing skin. Snails left tracks like that blood … tracks, the pathways of death … and murder.
He drove the memory away violently, like scattering a covey of quail. The fool had brought all this on—he and his insane babbling.
Black Skull gazed around uneasily, peering into the silent maze of dark tree trunks, hearing the crystal sounds of water and ice. Power seemed” to hover in the air around them like an invisible haze—as it had from that fateful moment on the solstice when lightning speared from the sullen sky to destroy the temple.
His mother’s memory rarely intruded into Black Skull’s dreams, let alone his waking hours. And now she’d returned to haunt him. The raving maniac in the bow had something to do with that. Supposedly, he’d been in the Land of the Dead.
Talked to her perhaps?
I ought to crack the idiot’s head open.
Black Skull unleashed all the strength in his muscular body, driving the paddle deep into the still water as he battered the canoe through another patch of ice. Imagine, dragging the Clan Elders, the most important people in the world, out into danger like this. It was all insanity! ť
Behind him, the second canoe, powered by the great warrior, Three Eagles, followed. It carried the other two Clan Elders.
They sat like wooden stumps, wrapped in thick blankets woven of feather and cord.
I warned them not to do this thing. They didn’t listen to me.
Dedication to duty had its failings. If anything happened to the Clan Elders, it would be Black Skull’s fault. Yet this demented idiot with the sense of a raving jay had placed them all at risk.
Black Skull cast a suspicious glance at Green Spider. The fool’s vacant brown eyes rolled around in their sockets as if they were unhooked. He looked unkempt, his triangular face pale. That couldn’t be Power.
Black Skull remembered everything that had happened, and he used the memory to cover any trace of his mother—used it the way the clan used a new layer of earth to cover the bones of the Dead in a burial mound.
Just before the lightning struck, Black Skull had been walking toward the temple. He’d felt the hair on his head begin to prickle, and his nerves had crackled like rubbed fox fur.
The bolt had flashed brightly across the cloud-wrapped winter sky, cracking the bones of the world with its thunder. Frying white light -had split eerily, touching the flat-topped mound with one fork and splintering the roof of the temple with the other.
For one incredulous moment, Black Skull had stood as firmly rooted as one of the old oaks. Then he’d run as he’d never run before.
As he’d charged up, Black Skull had found the Clan Elders dragging Green Spider from the roaring nightmare. The look in their eyes would haunt him forever: sheer glassy-eyed terror.
\with his callused hands, Black Skull had beaten the flames from the disoriented old men, shaking them one by one to return them to this world, demanding to know if they were all right.
Somewhere in the horror of the moment, one of the Elders had bent down over Green Spider wailing, “He’s dead!”
An ominous silence had settled over the City of the Dead, to be broken only by the popping and snapping of the flames.
The rest of that day had passed like a dream. Scattered images still swirled in Black Skull’s memory: worried people running . in all directions; frantic pleas from cowering individuals with tear-streaked faces; others, mute, who stared up toward the heavens; a little girl lost in the panic, crying past the knotted fist she’d stuffed into her mouth as she ran through the forest of legs, searching for her mother; the wretched expression on Green Spider’s dead face as they carried him to the Blood Clan charnel house.
People began to slip away, many leaving their belongings on the ground as if tainted by the horrible event. More followed, until by nightfall, the City of the Dead had been all but abandoned.
The Clan Elders remained, silent, their gazes fixed on Visions that lay outside this world. In spite of the remonstrations of friends, Healers, and concerned relatives, they’d barely responded, choosing to stay in the charnel hut with Green Spider’s corpse.