“But I didn’t do anything to you,” Sun Wing whimpered, the hot rush of tears filling her eyes.
“Oh, yes, you did,” he gritted. “You’re one of them. You would betray me as quickly as you betrayed your beloved Morning Star and the Tonka’tzi. All I had to do was dangle a promise, and you leaped for it.”
Her voice squeaked as she whimpered, “I’d never betray you.”
Walking Smoke grunted his disbelief and called to one of the Tula. The man promptly jumped up, retrieved the long ritual knife and reverently handed it to Walking Smoke.
She squirmed against the ropes as her brother knelt before her and touched the knife’s sharp point to the bottom of her foot. Her heart hammering against her chest, she gulped a frantic breath. Her foot had no feeling. She couldn’t even pull her numb leg back.
Walking Smoke’s cat face smiled into hers. “Rejoice, little sister. It’s your turn.”
Returning to the pot of black drink, he filled his large cup, lifted it to his lips, and gulp after gulp drained it. Again a Tula provided him with rattlesnake master.
She threw her head back and screamed as the Tula undid the ropes that fastened her to the bench.
Her thoughts shattered and fragmented, her muscles electric with fear. Whimpers broke from her throat; her bladder let go as they picked her up as easily as a snared rabbit and bore her to the center of the room.
Walking Smoke bent double as he threw up; the hot cassina tea shot from his mouth to spatter on the gore-coated matting.
A wailing squeal broke from Sun Wing’s throat as one of the Tula approached with the corrugated cooking pot, its sides stained with dried blood.
Her eyes fixed on the knife he held, on the missing chip broken from the edge just back from the tip. A piece the size of the fragment Aunt Blue Heron had retrieved from a murdered woman’s ruined pelvis.
Sun Wing felt something tear asunder in her souls, a ripping that gave way to a washing wave of black terror. She filled her lungs and screamed.…
Sixty
The muscles in Night Shadow Star’s legs trembled as she climbed the steep bluff path from the canoe landing on the Father Water’s western shore. Her breath came in gasps; a hunger-knot had tied itself in her empty stomach.
Perhaps she’d spent too much time traveling in the Spirit World. She shouldn’t be this winded, feel this weakness, after only running for half the night.
She stopped to catch her breath, remembering old times when she, Chunkey Boy, and Walking Smoke had sprinted full-bore up this same steep bluff.
Below her, the mighty river glistened silver in the predawn light; the Cahokian floodplain beyond was but a smoke-hazed darkness accented by the gleaming curls of oxbow lakes. In the distant east, the horizon lay like a rumpled black line below the graying sky.
Thunder rumbled in the west. On the wind she could smell rain through the smoky scent of Evening Star town.
Filling her too-tense lungs, she heard Piasa’s whispered urgings, saw a flicker of his movement in the corner of her eye.
“Yes, yes, I’m going.”
She placed her right moccasin on the trail and forced her hot muscles to bear her onward and upward.
She’d broken a sweat by the time she climbed through the trail gap and onto the clay-capped terrace. The Four Winds guardian posts, each portraying Hunga Ahuito, rose on either side, mere shadows against the dark and rolling clouds scudding in from the southwest. Again she heard the rumble of thunder rolling across the land.
Piasa’s Spirit presence followed her as she forced her tired legs into a trot. Clan houses lay to either side, their members subject to Evening Star House’s governance. She caught the sickly stench of the charnel houses where they stood beside low, conical burial mounds.
To the side of one such mound, a knot of people stood around a crematory pit. The contents had burned down to a glowing bed of coals that consumed the last of the bones. For the mourners, the ritual had been an all-night affair, the final farewell for the soul of their relative. These had been dirt farmers, probably come from the west where cremation was considered a way of releasing the life-soul from the bones; the thought being that rising smoke would carry the newly freed soul to the Sky World and the ancestors.
The mourners barely noticed, her black-clad shape little more than a passing shadow in the predawn.
Granaries and warehouses rose to either side of the broad path. She touched her chin out of respect as she passed Evening Star town’s version of the Four Winds women’s house. Into its seclusion Matron Columella and her female kin would retreat every twenty-eight days to pass their bleeding in seclusion.
And when will mine come again? She’d passed two moons now without cramps or menstrual discharges. And unless some Spirit had taken her senseless body during one of her soul-flying trips, she couldn’t be pregnant. No man had lain with her since her husband had led his army north nearly a year ago.