People of the Longhouse(18)
We all turn to look at her. The attention seems to unnerve Chipmunk. She curls onto her side again and turns her back to us. She’s shaking all over.
As I am. My legs feel like boiled grass stems. I sink to the ground and put my arm around my little sister. She hugs me tightly.
“It’s all right, Odion,” Tutelo whispers. “Mother and Father are coming. They’re coming.”
Seven
The northern sentry cried, “Two people on the northeastern trail!” Sindak climbed to a higher branch in the maple tree where he stood guard over the western trails. Glorious swaths of orange, red, and yellow leaves dappled the mountains. He scanned the winding stretches of trail he could see—even in the soft lavender gleam of dusk they seemed to glow. But he saw no travelers. Not that it mattered. He would know who they were soon enough.
He sighed and leaned against the massive tree trunk. A tall, muscular young man, he had seen nineteen summers. His beaked nose protruded far beyond his deeply sunken brown eyes. Shoulder-length black hair blew around his lean face. Few women found him attractive, which was one of the reasons his wife, Puksu, had recently divorced him. There were other reasons of course, not the least being that she despised him. He had committed two crimes in her eyes: He hadn’t yet gained acclaim as a warrior, and they’d been married for two summers without a child. Gratefully, he no longer had to listen to her endless complaining.
His gaze drifted back to the broad plaza of Atotarho Village. Arranged in a rough oval around the plaza were four longhouses, four smaller clan houses, and a prisoners’ house. The magnificent longhouses—the biggest ever built in the history of their people—were constructed of pole frames and covered with elm bark. The Wolf Clan longhouse was amazing; it stretched over eight hundred hand-lengths long and forty wide. The others were shorter, two or three hundred hands long, but still stunning, especially when viewed from Sindak’s height. The arched roofs were almost level with his position, soaring over fifty hands high. Each clan was headed by a matron, and each longhouse was inhabited by the male and female descendants of one woman—around whom many legends revolved—and her maternal female descendants. When a man married, he moved to his wife’s longhouse.
Since the People of the Hills traced descent through the females, a child belonged to his mother’s clan and owed obedience to its clan elders. Women also owned the fields and houses. That’s why women decided when to go to war. Everything at risk belonged to them. Men owned little more than their own clothing and weapons. It meant that men had fewer responsibilities, which freed them to fight, hunt …
A shouted curse rang out.
Sindak squinted at the council meeting where over five hundred people had gathered. The village matrons sat in a broad circle around the chief, discussing what should be done next. Chief Atotarho had just returned from a Trading voyage where his party had been attacked. During the fighting, his ten-summers-old daughter had been taken prisoner. War Chief Nesi had tried to track the enemy warriors, but had lost their trail in the rain. Atotarho had been hoping to trade freshwater pearls for food—but had failed.
Everyone was hungry.
The matrons said that the past one hundred summers had been unusually cold and dry. Sindak knew only that the corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers rarely matured. He gazed down at the six women pounding corn in the plaza. They used a hollowed-out log as a mortar, threw in handfuls of dried corn, then beat it to a fine powder with a heavy wooden pestle, about twelve hands long. The rhythmic thunk-thunk echoed. A short distance away two women stood roasting the corn that would be ground in the mortars. They roasted whole ears over an open trench filled with glowing coals. Y-shaped sticks stood at either end of the trench; then ears were hung from a pole placed in the crotches of the sticks and roasted until completely parched, whereupon the women shelled the kernels into a bark barrel and stored it until needed in the mortars. This time of year, there should be two hundred women pounding and roasting corn—not six.
The harvest had been very poor. Meager harvests made people hunt harder, but after so many summers, the animals were mostly hunted out. The simple truth was that they were all growing desperate. Winter was almost upon them, and they had little food to stave off the cold. When people couldn’t feed their children, they had to take what they needed from nearby villages. Stealing had become a way of life. When it failed, warfare broke out. Battles had been raging, off and on, for more than one hundred summers, but it had gotten particularly violent in the past twenty summers. That’s why a forty-hand-tall palisade of upright logs enclosed the village.