People of the Moon(24)
Webworm stared at him, bits of corn cake stuck to his chin. “What?”
“After the events triggered by Crow Beard’s death, after Jay Bird’s raid, the stories of the prophecy—”
“Gods, yes, that accursed Fire Dog prophecy! The rotted fools think that one of theirs is going to destroy the Straight Path Nation.” He balled a fist, jaw hard. “You know how I feel about that, being half Mogollon myself. Some of the ignorant fools even say that I am the fulfillment of that accursed prophecy. Well, we’ve made a prophecy of our own: The Straight Path Nation will be reborn! Here, at Flowing Waters Town upon the Spirit River. We shall build a bigger, better Straight Path Nation. We have consecrated this ground. It isn’t the end, War Chief, it’s the new beginning.”
“Blessed Sun, I do not disagree with you. I only report what the barbarians are saying.”
Webworm relented, waving his anger away. “Yes, yes, and the Made People clans? What do your spies tell you is being whispered in their kivas? Surely they don’t have any sympathy for this wrongheaded notion?”
Wind Leaf nerved himself. “For the most part … no. There are elements, however, for whom such an idea has a certain attraction. I’ve had reports that some …” He broke off at the wild-eyed look in Webworm’s face.
“You will crush any such notion, War Chief. And you will do it by whatever means necessary!”
Wind Leaf straightened. All it would take would be a spark. Just one tiny little spark, and their whole world could go up in flames.
Seven
His name was Bulrush—after the green plants that grew in springs and seeps. He belonged to the Coyote Clan of the Made People. A thick-witted fellow from Clay Cup Village on the Green Mesas, he had never been attractive to women. People said he was stupid as well as ugly. Perhaps it was because his broad face, bland features, and slow mind just didn’t captivate the female imagination. Or maybe it was because his family—dryland farmers by trade—never amassed either wealth or prestige.
Bulrush had been attending the summer solstice ceremonies at Far View Town when he first saw Gourd Pendant. He’d thought her comely. She’d been a thin sliver of a young woman with small breasts, a shy smile, and large brown eyes. Most of all, he’d wondered at her lustrous dark hair. From the first moment he glimpsed it—freshly washed with yucca soap—it had seemed to capture the sun in its blue-black length.
When he had mentioned Gourd Pendant to his mother, she had immediately approached the girl’s uncle, Sage. He and the girl were of the Dust People, subsistence farmers who’d traveled in for the festivities. They actually lived in the flats just south of Thunderbird Mountain a day and a half’s journey to the west-southwest. Sage had taken one look at Bulrush’s full frame, sized up the thick muscles in his arms, and nodded.
To Bulrush’s amazement, he was joined to the raven-haired, large-eyed beauty that very night. When morning broke the following day he and his new family were already headed down the steep southwestern trail that descended the mesa side. Two days later he walked into their shabby little farmstead.
It was poor country, windswept and subject to blowing dust. It baked in the summer, and his teeth chattered through most of the winter. Water—perpetually scarce—was rationed by the cupful. But Gourd Pendant’s people said it was blessed. From their pit house rooftops they could see World Tree Mountain where it jutted up from the Underworlds, its lines of lava roots running across the flats. Southwest of that lay the Bearclaw Mountains, from which the Dust People’s ancestors had come bearing their tchamahias: highly prized triangular stones used expressly for channeling water from canals into ditches that fed the corn and bean fields. More than tools, tchamahias were emblems of ownership, each stone tied to a given piece of land and the right to operate the ditches that irrigated it.
Bulrush had looked askance at his new home—so different from the cool verdant heights of Green Mesa. The place, called Saltbush Farmstead, consisted of two pit houses, a couple of ratty ramadas, and several masonry granaries standing in an open and dusty plaza.
“It is Blessed,” his new uncle-in-law, Sage, told him as he pointed at the southern tip of Thunderbird Mountain. A rocky pillar of stone jutted up from the timbered slopes. “Thunderbird alights there to rest and look south at World Tree Mountain. From his perch, he can see the place where our ancestors entered this world.”
Bulrush hadn’t believed it. But for the fascination of his new wife, he would have loved nothing better than to have slipped away in the night and sprinted like an antelope for the fastness of Green Mesa where it beckoned on the eastern horizon.