People of the Morning Star(18)

The suspicious husband was faced away, hands on hips as he glared at his wife. It wasn’t going to get any better. Seven Skull Shield slipped out the door and made a hard right for the side of the house.

Spring Flower’s eyes flew wide and fixed on Seven Skull Shield the moment he emerged. Her mouth popped open, and she stiffened. Which meant that Fivefish immediately twisted his head around to see what she was staring at.

“What the…? You! Stop! Who are you? What are doing in my house?”

Seven Skull Shield grinned, touched his forehead in a gesture of respect, and ran for all he was worth.

The man hesitated just long enough to pick up a piece of club-length firewood. “I’ll get you, you foul worm!”

Seven Skull Shield had more than passing familiarity with this part of Horned Serpent town. He charged between the close-packed dwellings, zigging and zagging, hammering through freshly planted gardens and corn plots. People screamed, jumping to their feet, shaking fists, and generally getting in poor Fivefish’s way as he pounded along in pursuit, waving his chunk of firewood.

Seven Skull Shield’s muscular legs were warming. Now, this was life! First he’d lifted the statuettes, and while wandering through the …

The statuettes!

Five of them, remarkably rendered by one of the best stone-workers in River Mounds City. Carved from black siltstone, they’d been the center piece on the altar in First Woman’s temple atop its high mound just off the Horned Serpent town plaza. The depiction of Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies showed her seated, holding the infant Morning Star to her breast, a necklace around her throat, and her hair done up in a bun at the top of her head.

Traded to pilgrims at the canoe landing, or to Traders headed up or down river, they were worth a small fortune.

“And I just left them?” he cried incredulously between breaths. Pus and blood. Spring Flower had been distracting, but not that distracting.

He shot headlong through someone’s ramada, leaping an old woman with a loom. At her scream, the dog at her feet leaped after him, growling and snapping.

Seven Skull Shield barely skipped away from the mongrel’s snapping jaws, reached out, and toppled a latrine screen into the beast’s path.

“Come back here!” Fivefish’s bellow carried on the air.

In a glimpse over his shoulder, Seven Skull Shield saw the old woman throw her loom at Fivefish. Dodging it, he stumbled, slammed into the ramada post, and spun around. The whole wobbly structure collapsed with a clatter. The dog, ripping its way through the cattail matting, fixed on the reeling Fivefish, leaped, and sank its fangs in his thigh.

The last Seven Skull Shield saw, the old woman was swimming her way through the thatch of her ramada roof, Fivefish was wailing on the now shrieking dog with his firewood, and bellowing in pain and rage.

Charging through a gap between houses, Seven Skull Shield bulled headlong into a latrine screen, and remembering the dog, tore its flimsy poles out of the ground. Stopping just long enough, he grabbed a long wooden pestle for milling corn and propped it at an angle across the narrow gap between the houses.

At the side of a granary, he stopped, pulled the screen up to mask his position, and fought to fill his starved lungs.

Fivefish, running for all he was worth, rounded the corner, tripped over the pestle, and flipped face-first into the open latrine pit.

At the man’s howl of rage, Seven Skull Shield slipped out of sight. Having caught his breath from everything but chuckling, he circled back toward Fivefish’s house.

When he rounded the corner of her house, Spring Flower was pacing anxiously, her hands twisting in knots. She kept staring off in the direction Seven Skull Shield had fled, her face a panicked stew of anxiety.

Totally distracted, she didn’t see him slip into her small dwelling. Crossing the clay floor, Seven Skull Shield found his fabric sack right where he’d left it. Undisturbed, it still held the five statuettes.

She started as he stepped out of her door, a hand flying to her mouth. “It’s you?”

“Told you you’d see me again.” With a tilt of the head, he indicated the interior. “Want to enjoy another quick romp? Those tricks I was telling you—”

“You have to go! Now! I mean … where’s Fivefish?”

“Yes, yes, I’m leaving even as I speak.” Seven Skull Shield gave her a confidential wink. “Oh, and Fivefish? Last I saw he’d stopped to use the latrine.”





Six

Red Warrior Tenkiller, the tonka’tzi, or Great Sky, was responsible for the administration of Cahokia’s business. He attended to his duties in the Council House on the Great Mound’s palisaded southern terrace. No one—from foreign delegations to kinsmen from other lineages—could help but be impressed. Not only was the walled terrace a healthy climb from the plaza below, but as they entered through the gates, the immense height of Morning Star’s palace rose still farther into the sky before them.