One
The acclaimed high chief of the Deer Clan, Right Hand, fingered his prominent and scarred chin as he looked westward across the sprawl of Cahokia. The Whisperer was coming. Right Hand had received word but two days past.
Plotting the murder of a living god is a dangerous business. We have no way of knowing how Power will react.
The thought sent a flutter of unease through him.
According to the latest of the Whisperer’s messengers, the time to act had arrived. All Right Hand needed was the “token,” the weapon with which to strike. If the Whisperer’s messenger was correct, it would be delivered today or tomorrow at the latest.
Looking down at his mangled right hand, he wondered how the Whisperer had known. Memories of that day, the screams, the pain, returned as fresh as if it were yesterday. Chunkey Boy’s brother Walking Smoke and a couple of Four Winds warriors had held him down as Chunkey Boy used Right Hand’s own chunkey stone to crush the bones in his hand and fingers.
Chunkey Boy’s vicious expression remained so clearly imprinted: his lips bared, his eyes slitted with rage. His arm rose and fell, hammering the stone down. Each impact made a wet smacking and snapping as blood spattered and bone crushed.
You took so much away from me that day, Chunkey Boy. But you couldn’t take my birthright. And now I shall repay you with long smoldering rage.
Below his bluff-top vantage, the great city of Cahokia stretched across the floodplain in a confused pattern. Clusters of dwellings concentrated around mound-top temples and palaces, only to give way to interspersed fields before merging with the next batch of closely packed houses around their lofty temples and palaces. At night—as if thousands of stars had fallen to earth—even the distant Evening Star bluffs on the other side of the river were pinpricked with tiny dots of firelight.
Right Hand wore a high chief’s white apron decorated with the image of two heavily antlered deer, their front legs raised. The bucks faced each other on either side of a pole decorated with severed human heads.
The high chief’s broad shoulders narrowed to a slender waist, his body that of a longtime athlete. He wore his gray-streaked hair pulled back in a severe bun and held in place by two flaring copper pins. Though his right hand appeared mutilated, it functioned well enough to clutch a tall staff wrapped with strips of raccoon fur; Raccoon, Spirit messenger of the dead, had special meaning for Right Hand. Several of the characteristic ringed-tails dangled from the top.
So much humanity, he thought, wondering if the entire world’s population had crowded together here. His tattooed face mimicked a raccoon’s black eyes, lines down the cheeks like laid-back whiskers. For the moment it reflected extreme distaste.
As he expressed his displeasure, his sister—an older woman, and the Deer Clan Matron—stepped up beside him. “You worry about Power?” she asked. “You shouldn’t. Since the Beginning Times, the Spirit creatures who dominate the Underworld have always fought in opposition to the Powers of the sky. Morning Star’s soul was called down during the daytime, making him not only a creature of the sky, but of light as well.”
She absently fingered the finely woven blue skirt that clung to her hips. A bright-pink spoonbill-feathered cape graced her shoulders. Her hair had been pulled back in a matron’s bun, and polished shell columellas—imported from the distant gulf to the south—hung from her ears. The skin of her shoulders, back, and chest bore tattoos rendered in an intricate and endless knot of intertwined Tie Snakes—a tribute that marked her as a devotee of First Woman.
First Woman, the Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies, the ruler of the Underworld, lived in her cave down below the World Tree’s deepest roots. There she dreamed the patterns and Powers of the Underworld. Her realm was portrayed by the color red, indicative of fertility, creativity, war, and chaos. She had dominion over the waters and plants. The Spirit creatures of the Underworld including the Water Panther known as Piasa; the flying snake called Horned Serpent; Snapping Turtle, fish, and frogs answered to First Woman. So, too, did the Tie Snakes who guarded springs, lurked in the depths of the rivers, and invoked the rains; even though doing so infuriated the Thunderbirds, who unleashed lightning bolts in their constant battle with the Powers of the Underworld.
Right Hand narrowed his eyes as he studied the distant high mound. In a husky voice he said, “It is said in the old stories that at the Creation, First Being, Hunga Ahuito, took the form of a mottled, two-headed eagle. Capable of seeing in all directions at once with its four eyes, and being male and female, it orchestrated all things, ruling even the sun, rainbows, and thunderers. Now Morning Star claims he rules the sky.”