People of the Moon(90)

As a chill night wind ruffled his hair, Water Bow stood on the long balcony of Pinnacle Great House and stared up at the midnight sky. The balcony itself was a clay-covered platform built upon poles laid across thick beams. Not only did it provide shade on summer afternoons, but the view was spectacular. A person could almost feel like an eagle as he looked out across the valley to the distant high peaks in the north. To the east he could sight through the gap between the two pillars of stone.

That gap marked the place where Sister Moon had emerged into this world. An electric thrill tickled his nerves. Soon he would see her pass through it, a reenactment of her first birth into the sky. He could feel the holy nature of it, sense the Power of a daughter seeking to return to her roots.

Like us she entered this world, passing from the Fourth World through a womb of stone and squeezing out into a virgin night sky.

He imagined how she felt, tricked, alone, rising into the sky of a new and strange world. What a trauma birth was.

One from which we cannot escape until death. Does she feel as lost as we ordinary humans do? Does she age slowly but eternally with each trek she makes across the sky?

While he watched, the tip of the half-moon peeked out from behind the slim right-hand column of stone. Enraptured at the sight, he smiled. For long moments he stood in silence marking the slanting path Sister Moon took into the sky.

Once again, you are almost home. How desperate she must be to forever search for the way back, eternally doomed to remain here, trapped in the Fifth World sky.

Had Spider Woman sealed that doorway forever? Was the reality that Sister Moon, Father Sun, the gods and Spirits, even the First People themselves were all trapped?

Is there a way home for any of us?

“What do you think?” Matron Larkspur asked. She crouched in the low doorway behind him. In the moon glow he could see that she wore endless loops of tiny shell beads that left her neck and chest covered with the wealth. A form-fitting black cotton dress decorated by four-pointed white stars was pinned over her right shoulder, leaving her left bare.

“With her next phase, Sister Moon will have finally come home.” He took a deep breath of the cool night air. “It is time. Send word to the Blessed Sunwatcher. Blue Racer will want to know. So, too, will the Blessed Sun.”

“Then we must prepare. They will be coming here by the next time Sister Moon’s face is full.”

“Let us hope that all goes well with their journey.”

“Is there word on the escaped slave girl and the false Prophet?” Water Bow asked.

Larkspur snorted. “I think Burning Smoke knows better than to trust a slave, no matter how well his shaft fits her sheath. What is it about men that they lose their senses around a woman?”

Do I dare mention the warrior you kept in your rooms that night? Actually he was smarter than that. If she wanted to maintain the charade that she kept herself only for her distant husband, that was fine with him. He did ask, “What has been done to recapture him?”

She was glaring angrily at the moon. “In an effort to redeem their war chief, Burning Smoke’s warriors are searching every household, kiva, and storeroom in the valley.”

“That will produce nothing, but will add to the Moon People’s anger.”

“Precisely.” She rolled her shoulders, as if to loosen them. “Fortunately, I don’t even think he’s still in the valley. So I’ve offered a jar of turquoise beads to whichever of my informants can deliver his head to me should Ripple ever return. Where Burning Smoke’s clumsy warriors fail, greed will finally prevail.”





Nothing had substance. Ripple walked through an endless gray mist. Stamping his heel, he encountered nothing solid. When he hugged himself, his arms pressed a Dreamlike quality, as though he were there, and wasn’t. He couldn’t actually feel himself, even if he could look down and see his body. Raising his left hand, he wiggled the fingers, and pawed his hunting shirt aside. His penis hung as it always had, the wrinkled skin whole and healthy. His tongue slipped over the bumpy cusps atop strong teeth.

“I’m whole again!”

A fierce joy rose in his chest. Whole again. As if the pain and misery had never happened. The fear that had left his souls whimpering and paralyzed was only a memory. Relief, like a surging wave, buoyed his spirits.

He leapt, jumping high, trying to remember why he had been sad, why he had been so worried. Leap by leap, he sailed through the gray mist, his weight never crashing down, but sinking softly.

“Quite a sensation, isn’t it?” a voice asked.

Ripple stopped short, spinning, wondering how he could have missed the great black raven. The midnight bird perched on a snag of wood that vanished into the ether. It watched him with a piercing, but very human eye.