People of the Moon(17)
The young man frowned. “Holy Derelict, as always, your words make no sense.” “Quite the … contrary. They make … all the sense … in the world.”
Poor Singer stared at the old man.
After several heartbeats, the old man opened his eyes and said, “The wolf … give it to Matron Night Sun. She will … need it … soon.”
“Yes, Dune.”
“Take it … now.”
Poor Singer gently removed the talisman from around the old man’s neck, cupping the warm stone and leather thong in his hand.
Silence.
For long moments he looked into the old man’s eyes as the brilliance faded into a dusky haze, and then to milky gray.
“You always did mock me, didn’t you old friend?” Poor Singer reached out and gently closed the old man’s sightless eyes before he placed his hand over the smiling mouth. Like a soft caress the Holy Derelict’s breath-heart Soul slipped from the body into the smoky night air.
For a long time, Poor Singer sat, just listening to the crackling of the fire as it consumed the pitch-filled piñon wood.
Five
With his back bowed by the weight of the heavy elk quarter, Bad Cast had to crane his neck to look up at the sky. Though Father Sun still cast a faint yellow light through the high heavens, evening shadows deepened into blue and purple in the canyon bottom. In the First Moon Valley ahead of them, smoke from a hundred fires added to the effect and muted ridge lines, patches of conifer, and the rounded slopes. It blurred the hard-edged outcrops of sandstone and shale. Behind them, centered in the valley, he could see one of the naked peaks where Cold Bringing Woman Danced. It blazed in orange glory.
They followed the worn path that paralleled the River of Stones. It was at this point that the valley opened; the high pinnacles of First Moon Mountain jutted against the southeastern sky while the length of Juniper Ridge could be seen extending southward on their right. They passed the first cornfields, those belonging to a Black Shale clansman.
The land around First Moon Valley was densely inhabited. Some people lived in farmsteads, while others occupied one of the ten villages, each with at least two great kivas for the moiety celebrations. While some dwellings were still ancestral-style pit houses that sheltered single families, many were multiroom, multistory masonry buildings that housed clans, lineages, or extended families.
No matter where a person lived, First Moon Mountain dominated the valley. Its Power filled the very air.
Bad Cast glanced up at it as he led his party down the worn trail at the head of the valley. He called a stop at the upper crossing of the River of Stones. There they laid their piles of still-cold meat onto the grass before bending and sucking up great gulps of water.
Drinking until his belly swelled, Bad Cast settled back on his haunches and wiped a hand across his wet mouth. Water trickled down his chin.
One by one his companions copied his position, each thankful for the chance to rest. Sweat had tracked patterns through the grime on their bodies. Blood splotched their clothing where it had leaked from the meat, and flies still made a nuisance of themselves as they swarmed around their feast.
Bad Cast stretched his tired limbs. Every muscle quivered, and his joints—especially the ankles, knees, and hips—ached. His shoulders were raw where the pack straps had eaten into his skin.
He took a quick look at his companions, seeing fatigue reflected in their expressions. Ripple, however, looked the worst. Something brooding and terrible lay behind his eyes.
What did he really see up there?
Bad Cast leaned forward, cupped water, and splashed it into his hot face. Settling back, he considered the ramifications of Ripple’s vision. Whatever it had been, it boded no good for the rest of them.
Before them the floodplain was filled with cornfields. These were fed by short ditches, giving way to other, smaller, dryland plots higher on the terraces. Here and there, as the slopes rose, small wattle-and-daub structures made rounded bumps on the land. These were field houses: huts built of wooden lattice, plastered with clay-rich mud, and fired to a hard finish. People kept tools there, used them for the short-term storage of harvested food, for shelter from a passing storm, and sometimes even slept inside when they needed to guard their fields.
Clan villages sat higher on the slopes. Clusters of single and multiple dwellings could be seen as fires twinkled and thin plumes of smoke rose into the evening sky.
Bad Cast let his gaze linger on the jagged spires, and the gap between them—could feel the Power of the place.
His uncle’s words returned to him. On that long-ago evening he had just stepped from his boyhood initiation in the kiva and looked up at the familiar peak. Uncle had said, “There are places, boy, passages where the Below Worlds emerge into this one. First Moon Mountain is such a place. Do you know why?”