“We are under a great strain.” Leather Hand looked from face to face, reading their acknowledgment. “And all it would take would be one small crack, one little weakness.” He pressed harder, feeling the smooth surface of the clay pot under his hands.
“Like the Dust People killing one of our Priests,” Turquoise Fox said.
The pot collapsed with a loud pop—pieces of it flying out to pepper the watching warriors. They flinched, some jerking back.
Leather Hand let the shards that remained fall from his hands into his lap. “That’s all it would take. Just like that … our world will be gone. We are all that stands between it and destruction.”
Turquoise Fox stared from man to man. “Do you understand now how important this pursuit is?”
They nodded, eyes narrowing with resolve.
“Good.” Turquoise Fox shot a measuring glance at Leather Hand. “We may all be driven to extraordinary measures in this most dangerous of times.”
Leather Hand nodded. He does have something in mind. Something so terrible he doesn’t even want the men to think about it yet.
Fourteen
Ripple crouched in the corner of the dark room, hugged his knees to his chest, and tried to keep any warmth trapped against his skin. His trembling body was a mixture of numbness and pain.
They had stripped him naked and brought him to this room three floors down in the north wing of Pinnacle Great House. They had withdrawn the ladder that led down into tall, narrow rectangle of a room. When they left, the lamplight had been cut off as they placed something over the hole. Alone in pitch blackness, he had explored by feel, encountering what felt like old dried feces in one corner. In another, his fingers came across what seemed to be fragments of turkey bone. Beyond that there was nothing but the gritty surface of plaster. Jamming his thumbnail into it, he had pried out bits to encounter stone.
A long time later the guard—a man called Horned Lizard—had appeared bearing a torch. He had looked down into Ripple’s high narrow room, lowered the ladder, and climbed down in the company of a Buffalo Clan man. The latter was a burly fellow with a face reminiscent of a toad. He carried a curious-looking war club with a small stone head hafted to a whip-thin willow handle.
“Your friends seem to have vanished,” Horned Lizard had told him. “Like water under a desert sun, they’ve dried up and blown away.”
“My … my sisters?”
“Perhaps they’re with them.” Horned Lizard smiled down. “You know what that makes the Matron and her war chief?”
Ripple glanced up. “No.”
“Mad.”
Then the toad-faced man struck. Blow after blow rained down while Horned Lizard held a pitch-and-tallow lamp high. As he cowered under the blows, Ripple had taken note of his room. The plaster was scratched here and there, ripped by frantic fingers. Several small piles of dried feces lay in the corner. In the flickering light, he thought the stains on the floor might be dried blood.
When it was over, Horned Lizard called out, the ladder dropped, and the two men climbed out. A desperate Ripple watched as the ladder was hauled up into the room above. The light faded with the sound of steps.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. How had this happened? In the hands of the First People, there would be no future, no testing by the Mountain Witch. Like his parents before him, he would die here.
Cold Bringing Woman? Did you lie to me?
The gritty masonry wall felt rough as Fir Brush ran her finger along it with one hand. Her other arm was around Slipped Bark’s thin shoulders. In the hazy night she could see the fires winking at Pinnacle Great House high on the mountain above them. On this night the dry late-summer air was heavy with dust and smoke. Bats flitted through the darkness, their chittering calls barely audible as they whispered their secrets to the Star People.
Ripple was up there somewhere. The distance to Pinnacle Great House seemed insurmountable to Fir Brush. At least here, atop the Dog’s Tooth, she and Slipped Bark were safe. It just didn’t seem fair.
A man laughed as he stepped from one of the rooms in the two-story clan house that dominated the triangular peak. In the firelight the rounded walls of the two great kivas shimmered like beaten copper. The warm air carried the scent of cooking beans, piñon smoke, and tobacco mixed with kinnikinnick as someone smoked a stone pipe in the shadows.
“What do you think is happening to him?” Slipped Bark asked in a reedy voice.
“Nothing good.”
“Do you … do you think he’s still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“He lives,” a rattly voice said from the darkness before a pipe bowl glowed fiercely. A soft exhalation preceded the perfumed scent of the tobacco mixture. Then a scuffling of cloth accompanied a grunt as a dark form rose to its feet and stepped toward them. “At least, he lives if Cold Bringing Woman really did come to him.”