People of the Longhouse(9)

Gonda glanced at his former wife, Koracoo. She stood five paces behind him, examining something on the forest floor. He kept praying she would look up and meet his gaze, perhaps smile at him, anything to keep him going. She did not.

They had been married for twelve summers—until two days ago when she’d set his belongings outside the charred husk of their longhouse and told him to go home to his own clan.

He stepped off the trail and continued his search through the trees.

Blessed gods, couldn’t she see that his own guilt was strangling him? Even if they found their children alive and well, he would never forgive himself. The images of burning longhouses and dead friends would remain open wounds on his souls for as long as he lived.

Gonda stopped, seeing a curious shape just beneath the overhanging branches of a bush. He bent over, frowned at it, and called, “Koracoo? You’d better come look at this.”

She lifted her head. At twenty-seven summers, Koracoo was unusually tall for a woman, twelve hands. She’d chopped her black hair short in mourning. It created a jagged frame for her beautiful face. Since the destruction of their village, her large dark eyes maintained an almost perpetually somber expression. Over her knee-length war shirt, she wore a red cape. In the middle of the cape, the blue painting of a buffalo defiantly stared out. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve been a warrior for thirteen summers, Koracoo. Don’t you think I know how to recognize a man’s track?”

As Koracoo walked toward him, sunlight gilded the copper inlay in her war club, giving it an edge of flame. It had a name, that club: CorpseEye. His own nameless club was made of fire-hardened oak. Hers was a wood no one had ever seen before, dark, dense, and old. Legend said that CorpseEye had once belonged to Sky Woman herself. Strange images were carved on the shaft: antlered wolves, winged tortoises, and prancing buffalo. A red quartzite cobble was tied to the top of the club, making it a very deadly weapon—one Koracoo wielded with great expertise. She constantly polished CorpseEye with walnut oil, as her father had done, and his father before him, and his before him, back into the obscure mists of time.

Koracoo stopped beside him. “Show me.”

Gonda held the brush aside for her.

As she knelt to scrutinize the frost-rimmed track, the lines around her eyes deepened.

He watched her. More than anything, he longed to touch her, to lie in her arms and talk about his mistakes until he could bear them. He was the father of her children. Between them was the unbreakable bond of two people who had seen their children stolen away to a fate neither of them dared imagine. Only in her arms would he ever find comfort.

But as the days passed, it seemed less and less likely. On the rare occasions when she looked at him now, it was with the eyes of a cold, impatient stranger.

Koracoo said, “He wore finely woven cornhusk sandals. A wealthy man. A man of status.”

“Yes. Let’s go. We’re wasting precious time.”

“I need to study this a little longer.” She kept her eyes on the sandal print.

Gonda grumbled under his breath. Every tendon in his body was stretched taut, telling him to leave, to keep searching. But she was war chief, and he was deputy. She made the decisions.

He scowled at the track. The herringbone pattern of the sandal weave was distinctive, woven by the Hills People. There were five kinds of People south of Skanodario Lake: Flint People, the People of the Landing, People of the Mountain, People of the Hills, and their own tribe of Standing Stone People. The People of the Hills had the most warriors and the largest villages. They were—despite what the Standing Stone People wished to believe—the greatest power in the land.

Koracoo said, “He was a Hills warrior.”

“Yes. Probably a big, heavy man, because his feet sank deeply into the mud.”

Her eyes narrowed in thought before she replied, “Or he was carrying a heavy load.”

“Maybe.”

Koracoo stood, and her gaze moved to the shell midden partially visible through the tangle of tree trunks. The mound glittered with frost. Canassatego Village, a Hills People village, had used the same trash site for ten summers; it was huge, covered with freshwater mussel shells, broken pottery, ashes from their fires, and other refuse.

“His toes pointed toward the midden,” Koracoo observed.

“Yes. So?”

“Let’s see if he came here alone, or met someone. You go left of the trail. I’ll go right.” When she turned to look at him to make sure he understood, his heartbeat stilled. Her eyes were as black and translucent as obsidian, and cut just as keenly. “I’ll meet you at the midden.” Koracoo stepped away.