Finally he said, “Hard to believe, isn’t it, that this is the source of the First People’s strength.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This water. From here it runs down the canyon, out among the mesas and into the desert. Follow this stream and it will take you right into the heart of the First People’s world. This water feeds their cornfields. From it the bean and squash plants drink.” He reached out, cupping the clear fluid and letting it trickle through his fingers. “This is the blood of their life.”
“What would you do? Shut it off?”
“If I could.”
Spots frowned out at the sun-silvered current. His brow was lined, eyes troubled. “Wrapped Wrist, what’s happened to us? In no more days than I can count on my fingers, our world has turned upside down. We were just ourselves—hunters and friends—until we answered Ripple’s signal on the mountain. Now look at us: fleeing like packrats from coyotes, scurrying away into the high country, looking for a witch.”
Wrapped Wrist nodded, clamping his tired fist to watch the muscles in his arm bulge. “I just hope we can find her. Somehow, I don’t think the Mountain Witch is easy to locate. The Blessed Sun has sent several war parties up into those mountains to chase her and the Outcasts down.”
Spots looked eastward, past the bubbling hot springs across the channel to the tall granite peaks that rose above the valley head, fit to pierce the very sky. “None of them so much as reported a sighting. And each party went home missing warriors.”
“If you ask me, that’s Ironwood’s doing. He was the greatest war chief the First People ever had. People say that if he had remained as war chief, none of this would have happened.”
“I’ll face a war chief over a witch any day,” Spots avowed. “A war club is quick and sure, but people say the Mountain Witch can draw your souls out through your nostrils, slowly, so that your body wastes and fills with pus.”
“Stop it. Why would she want to do that to us?”
Spots shrugged. “What do I know of witches?”
Wrapped Wrist squinted at the water, listening to its crystal music as it flowed past. The wind made a soft sound in the grass. “I just wonder why Ripple insisted that he be taken to the Mountain Witch. Why does a lowly hunter think the Mountain Witch will even speak to him?”
Both Spots and Wrapped Wrist jumped like spooked rabbits when a gruff voice behind them said, “We wonder the same thing.”
Scrambling up, Spots clawed at Wrapped Wrist for balance. The two of them splashed about in the shallows, steadying each other as they gaped at the gray-haired apparition behind them.
The man stood behind Ripple’s litter, muscular, scarred, with a grizzled and weather-beaten brown face. And what a face it was: stern, with a dominating nose and slanting brows. His left eye was hidden under a patch made from a tuft-eared squirrel hide; the right was probing, smoldering like hot obsidian. A terrible scar ran jagged across his cheek. The war club in his hands fit the man: old, use-polished; the dark stains around the sinew that bound the stone head to the chokecherry handle had the appearance of long-dried blood.
“Who … who are you?” Wrapped Wrist was the first to find his voice. It finally registered that the man wore a beautifully tanned deerhide hunting shirt, tall hunting moccasins made of mountain sheephide, and a silver foxhide cape that was thrown back over his wide shoulders in favor of the warm summer day.
“What if I told you I was an assassin sent by the Blessed Sun to kill nosey Moon People who wander too close to the hot springs?”
Wrapped Wrist edged in front of Spots. If this turned ugly, it was he who stood the best chance of taking the fearsome stranger. The man was old, he tried to tell himself, no doubt slow of reaction. Surely the years had robbed those sinewy arms and sapped the strength that those thick legs belied.
But when he looked into that single fierce eye, quailing fear sucked at the bottom of his heart.
“We’re just traveling through,” Spots sputtered. “Taking … taking our sick friend for a Healing.”
“Yes,” Wrapped Wrist agreed. “That’s right. We want no trouble with the Blessed Sun.” And then it struck him. “Wait. We don’t know you. How is it that you speak our language?”
The grim warrior—and yes, he was a warrior, it was in the set of his shoulders, the way he held the war club—uttered phrases in several languages before he finished in their own. “A cunning warrior knows the tongues of many peoples. In my later years, I’ve been making a study of it.” He slapped the war club meaningfully on his hard palm. “Now, why are you seeking the Mountain Witch?”