People of the Mist(26)
Sun Conch paused uncertainly. She turned the problem before her, considering different sides, possibilities she’d never thought of before. Faces flitted through her thoughts. She rejected all but one. The only man alive who truly terrified her. “Who would listen to us?” she repeated absently. “No one, perhaps. But I think I know someone they will listen to.”
“Who?”
She waved his questions away. “We need to sit down and talk. I must know every detail of last night. Do you understand me? Everything! The expressions on people’s faces, things that were said. Even if you do not think something important, I want to hear about it. High Fox, if we are to save your life, I must be able to describe your trip to and from Flat Pearl Village as if I had been there with you. I know you are weary. So am I. Are you able to do this?”
He looked at her in silence for a long time, then sat down on the moonlit sand, and through a tired exhalation said, “Tell me where to start.”
“From the moment you left the palisade with your father. What happened after that?”
High Fox scooped up a handful of damp sand, and began molding it into different shapes. “Father went a little mad. I’ve never seen him as red-faced and emotional as he was that day. He slammed his war club into every tree we passed, cursed me and my mother, promised to ‘take care of me’ when his responsibilities to the Weroansqua were over. I swear, Sun Conch, I feared to show him my back.
“When we arrived at Flat Pearl, our people split up and Father ordered me to walk at his heels in silence. I was not even allowed to speak to people I knew. Then, at the dance that night… blessed gods …” He dropped the ball of sand and gripped handfuls of his unkempt hair. “Red Knot was so beautiful. She kept looking at me, you know, looking at me in that special alluring way, and I wondered if Copper Thunder saw, and what he might be thinking. No man misunderstands that look, especially when it’s directed at another man. I thought I would explode, Sun Conch. Danger pressed in on me from all sides. My father, Hunting Hawk, Copper Thunder. Even Flat Willow stared at me with a sort of amused hatred in his eyes. I felt like a man in his first battle, desperate, afraid.”
He flung the ball of sand out into the water, and grimaced at the silver rings that bobbed outward from the splash. “Then Red Knot started dancing in front of me. Dancing for me alone …”
Sun Conch sat cross-legged, her feathered cape tucked beneath her, and watched the arrival of morning. The stars had faded to pale awl pricks of light, and the heavens gleamed like wet slate. She exhaled a frosty breath. The night had been cold and damp. A rim of ice crusted the shore.
High Fox lay to her left, wrapped in his blanket. His handsome face shone with the dawn. He had finished his story less than two hands of time ago, and fallen into an exhausted sleep.
As Sun Conch studied him, she twisted the softly tanned hide of her red deer hide dress into tiny peaks, then smoothed them away. He had not told her the whole truth, and she knew him well enough to be certain of it. She did not know why, but she trusted him. If he had kept some things to himself, then he must have reasons, good ones. Still, the gaps in his story left her uneasy. She kept trying to fill them in with her own imagination, which did no good at all.
Quietly, she rose to her feet, and headed down the shore toward the line of canoes. She always thought better when she was walking. Off in the distance, a huge flock of geese honked as they flew in irregular chevrons across the pink sky. Water lapped softly at the sand four hands away, and gulls rode the waves in the distance. Their feathers flashed silver whenever a wave rolled beneath them.
She shivered as she walked, for more reason than the morning air and High Fox’s secrets. No one had come looking for her during the night, and in the corners of her soul she could hear her aunt’s gruff voice saying, “Leave her be. A night alone in the dark and freezing cold will do our little Sun Conch some good. Perhaps it will remind her of the importance of her relatives.” She’d heard Aunt Threadleaf say such things about other wayward girls, and Sun Conch could imagine her mother’s torn expression.
She kicked at a piece of driftwood.
Usually the shore bustled with people, fishing, hunting birds, collecting wood. Today there was no one. She felt oddly as if time had frozen. As if only she and High Fox still lived, and breathed. Tracks lined the shore. She identified a deer, several birds, and a raccoon, but saw none of them. Her moccasins pressed into the icy mud of a world gone still and silent.
When she reached the canoes, she could make out folded fishing nets, and paddles. Here and there lay shell fishhooks, and harpoons. Her uncle Sawtooth’s slim dugout nestled in the middle of the group of canoes. White zigzags of lightning decorated its hull. It would be the easiest for her to control. She had ridden in it many times before, and knew its quirks. It tended to pull to the right