Desert Willow—heedless of the effect of her words on Creeper—smiled slightly. “Well, we’ve always said they were no better than animals.”
“They ate them?” old Creeper repeated in a mystified tone.
“They ate them,” Webworm replied flatly. His face still reflected stunned disbelief.
A bubble of laughter rose in Desert Willow’s throat. “They ate them!” She slapped a hand to her shapely thigh and laughed out loud. “They ate them!”
The Matron’s peals of laughter rolled around the great building like a wave.
Twenty-four
High atop the Green Mesa, Leather Hand sat in the cool recesses of a yucca-mat-covered ramada and sipped at a mug of mint tea. Around him, the inhabitants of Far View Town had turned lazy, taking their ease from the strong midday heat. Most of his warriors had disappeared into the shade of the high-walled buildings or the scattered pit houses to enjoy their well-earned rights to the slave women. The rest of the population was doing its best to avoid them.
There is a price to greatness.
Warm as it was up at this high mountain elevation, Leather Hand pitied the people in the distant lowlands where the heat must be brutal. He sighed, leaning back in a hammock made of tightly knotted cord, his tea perched on the rippled muscles of his belly. A feeling of great satisfaction had grown in place of the indecision he’d felt after the punitive raids on the Dust People.
I have changed things. My men are different. I am different.
By the gods, word had traveled fast. It had been apparent when they came trooping up the mountain, passing the Green Mesa villages on the way to Far View Town. People had watched them pass with frightened eyes, whispering among themselves. No one had dared to so much as call a greeting.
It wasn’t just the people; he could see it the eyes of his men. They walked, talked, even seemed to breathe with a sense of otherness, as if by eating the flesh of men, they had become sharper, passing like blades among ordinary folk.
It is well that the Blessed Sun’s special warriors are set apart. No one will dare to incite our wrath now.
Here, from the Blessed Sun’s holding high atop the Green Mesas, he could look down over the large multistory buildings and towers that composed Far View. Given the town’s importance, each of the major First People clans had their own house: Red Lacewings’ was built on the solar line, while the Blue Dragonfly Clan had built along the line of the lunar maximum. The Made People clans had constructed towns of their own. In addition to those, he could see the pimples of pit houses rising here and there in the spaces between the corn and bean fields. The two observation and signal towers stuck up like stubby thumbs above the patchwork of terraced fields. Little squares of single-room granaries stood beside paths and the sinuous ditches that watered the fields. It was a thriving community, not as large as Tall Piñon with its three thousand souls, but large enough to boast nearly half that.
Far View was more than a sprawling center for Trade and ceremony; it was the Blessed Sun’s giant stamp of authority over the Green Mesa villages. From here, his prestige and control radiated out over the mesa-top towns and farmsteads. The Matrons who served here felt the stirring of each breath taken by the Made People who called this high broken land home. From this large complex of buildings, they sent out their Priests and warriors to enforce the commands and pull the strings that administered the countless settlements.
The lifeblood of Far View, however, could be found a stone’s throw up the slope from his ramada: a large stone-and-clay-lined reservoir. It was fed by winter snows, spring or summer rains, any weather that dropped enough precipitation to cause runoff. The caprock above had been cunningly engineered to divert water into ditches. These in turn emptied into a large canal that flowed through a clever silt trap and into the reservoir. At first light slaves descended the stone steps to fill tall water jars that they carried down to the towns or perhaps to the gardens when the rains were too widely separated. There, in the cool evening, men gathered to splash water on their faces and gossip about the day’s events. For the children it was a focal point for play, an opulent wet miracle to amaze a desert people.
Far View had come by its name honestly; its location was strategically perfect. From his hammock, Leather Hand could look south across the settlement, down the sloping mesa, across the broken River of Souls Valley to distant Smoking Mirror Butte where it hulked below the southern horizon. He could see the Bear Claw Mountain uplift, World Tree, and even the distant hump of mesa where Center Place stood above Straight Path Canyon. There, baked by the midday sun, the Blessed Sun’s sentries kept watch on the northern reaches.