People of the Moon(230)

“I think by tomorrow morning, I will be proud to call you Blessed Sun,” Turquoise Fox said knowingly.

Yes, I will be Blessed Sun, and may the Blue God show mercy on the Made People, for I shall not.

He was at war with the Made People. Terror was his weapon. He and his men could walk among them, and they would never know. His fingers smoothed the egg-hatched serpent that Webworm had given him.

Something stirred in his heart, as if tightening and coiling.





Sixty-three



Sister Moon’s first rays consisted of a pinprick of white light softening the gap between the great stone pillars of First Moon Mountain, then brightening as she peeked through. The shaft of pale white light grew brighter as she cast her glow on the ruin of Pinnacle Great House.

When her round disc filled the space between the pillars, cold luminescence shone off the standing walls, turned the blackened timbers into gray, and cast inky shadows across the skeletonized rooms.

Did she see the corpse of Dreams the same way he did? Spots couldn’t help but wonder. He stood at the lip of the collapsed Blue Dragonfly kiva, watching Sister Moon rise between the pillars.

So, you are home.

But where was he?

He stared down into the kiva’s midnight depths. Only silence and blackness remained. This place was as empty as his heart, as the hopes of his world.

He and Cactus Flower had detoured here against the advice of Bad Cast, Wrapped Wrist, and the rest of their heavily armed party. But he’d wanted to see this place one last time. He needed to know, and most of all, to mourn.

This plaza should have been crowded with Priests in costumes, masks, and feathers, offering their prayers to the rising moon. Pahos, drums, and flute music should have been lifting in the still night. Fires should have been blazing, bathing the great house with their own warmth and light. Children should have been laughing, the smell of boiling corn, squash, and beans heavy on the air. Meat should have been roasting in pits, women tending them to ensure the mouthwatering feast was cooked to perfection.

He sniffed, catching only the tart scent of the conifers on the slope below.

In the days after the attack, the First Moon People had removed much of the roof fall, carted the bodies to the edge of the slope, and laid them just below the cliff. There they remained, each with a basket-load of dirt dumped atop it. Other corpses, those of the dead Red Shirts, had been pitched to tangle in the black timber: hideous, flaking caricatures of people, intertwined, with hollows for eyes, noses, and mouths. The snows would come and cover them, and over the years duff and dust would drift down and softly entomb the remains. Charred flesh did not rot, so they would Dance there, frozen in motion.

He turned, staring out at the valley. His people had thought to reclaim this place, rebuild it in their own image. They hadn’t lasted a week before the food was gone. Fights broke out, and by the hundreds they had fled, scattering to the north, south, east, and west in search of a place where they could scratch out enough to feed them through the winter.

But where would they go? The deep frost had ruined the entire harvest across a drought-stricken land. Only Yellowgirl’s iron control of Flowing Waters Town had kept the place from being sacked.

Across the land was chaos. He had passed Cricket and Seed’s farmstead on the River of Souls and found the swollen bodies of a man, a woman, but only three of the children among the burned and looted ruins. He had heard that half the great houses had been attacked, stripped, and set aflame. Terror stalked the land. Traders had been attacked. Bodies lay unburied along the trails where entire parties of individuals had starved to death in search of food. The rumored valley toward which Yellow Petal and her party had fled for sanctuary was nothing more than a fantasy.

Even wilder stories circulated that Night Sun had been seized by angry Made People who blamed her for the drought. Other rumors said that Ironwood had watched as she was stoically tortured to death. Still other accounts had them alive, traveling in the south with Poor Singer and rallying Fire Dogs to invade the Straight Path Nation to install Cornsilk as Matron. It didn’t seem to matter that hundreds had witnessed Ironwood borne to his grave in Dusk House. What was it about people that to believe the impossible seemed more important than to know the truth?

Darker rumors were whispered from lip to lip. Two days after Desert Willow’s mysterious disappearance from the bear cage, Creeper had been found dead in his bed, his head missing. In dark places it was whispered that Leather Hand had fathered a child in Desert Willow, and that Night Sun’s own grandson, Ravenfire, had eaten Night Sun’s flesh. By some reports, the white-moccasin-clad cannibals were building secret kivas where they ate wombs freshly cut from murdered maidens and Danced to the honor of the Blue God.