People of the Morning Star(19)

Every day Tonka’tzi Red Warrior was carried from his residence on the western side of the plaza. His ceremonial litter was borne up the ramp and through the gates. The Council House had been constructed on the western side of the enclosed terrace, and contiguous ramadas allowed him to conduct Cahokia’s business outside when weather permitted.

This morning, as spring rain threatened, Red Warrior sat in his litter chair upon its raised dais at the rear of the Council House. He had dressed regally, wearing a brilliant red apron festooned with Four Winds Clan designs rendered in bits of mica, polished copper beads, and elaborate quill work. Eagle feather splays seemed to blossom behind each shoulder, and his face was painted in patterns of red and black.

To his right, in a smaller litter sat his sister Matron Wind. She wore a blue skirt, her chest covered by no less than twelve strings of gleaming white beads. Her gray-white hair had been carefully fixed in a beehive-shaped bun at the back of her head and pinned with copper. Though in her midfifties, her wits remained sharp, and fortune had left enough of her front teeth that she didn’t suffer the speech impediments of the toothless.

Behind Red Warrior’s dais, a rank of four recorders—their pots of beads and skeins of string before them—listened intently as the reports came in. Picking from their various sizes, shapes, and colors of beads, they strung them in patterns to document the proceedings. A line of aides waited along the left wall, including Dead Bird, the Morning Star’s liaison to the tonka-tzi.

Two of Red Warrior Tenkiller’s daughters, Lady Lace and Sun Wing, rested on litters. Lace’s place was to their left and Lady Sun Wing on the right. The tonka’tzi’s wives had given him many children, but the most important were the ones his first wife, White Pot—a distant cousin from the Horned Serpent House—had borne him. His oldest son by that marriage had been Chunkey Boy, then the exiled Walking Smoke. After that she’d produced daughters beginning with Night Shadow Star, then Lace, and finally Sun Wing.

Cahokia’s administration had barely kept up with its growth, and governance had evolved into a complex web of responsibilities. Most of its huge districts had been delegated to the different Houses, which managed a network of Earth People clans who in turn oversaw most of the immigrant areas. A few districts in Cahokia were governed by autonomous, but subordinate clans of the Earth People. Of these, Matron Corn Seed and the Deer Clan had become most prominent. The Bear, Snapping Turtle, Hawk, and Fish Clans respectively had been delegated ever more responsibility for governing the flood of “dirt farmer” immigrants who’d poured into Cahokia’s outlying areas—especially atop the eastern bluffs.

Council Houses and temples had been built in each community. The Earth Clan sub-chief in charge there reported to his clan’s district Council House, the districts to the clan lineage in a center such as Evening Star City. The lineage chief in turn reported to her House, and the House to the tonka’tzi. The system was ponderous, often clumsy, but given Cahokia’s immense sprawl, nothing else had been found effective.

In addition to his domestic duties the tonka’tzi received the delegations and emissaries from the far-flung colonies Cahokia had established along the major rivers. Rolls of tanned buckskin maps recorded the location of each colony, and the associated beaded belts, blankets, and bead strings recorded the particulars.

Also within the tonka’tzi’s purvey were the diplomatic embassies from other nations including the Caddo in the southeast, Natchez, Tunica, and Mus’Kokee in the south, and the polyglot of nations that dotted the lower lengths of the Mississippi. Fortunately he could delegate many of these to the priests, since their interests were mostly religious.

He glanced at his daughters seated to either side and dressed in finery second only to his and the Matron Wind’s. The Lady Lace, Night Shadow Star’s younger sister, seemed to have the knack. Though she sat uncomfortably due to her pregnant belly, she paid close attention and had started to make constructive comments.

Red Warrior Tenkiller wasn’t sure about Sun Wing. His youngest daughter had survived but sixteen summers; she seemed more taken with her new-found status than the needs of empire. Having just been made a woman at the equinox celebration, she’d been married to Hickory Lance, a young noble in the Horned Serpent House leadership. Since then her dreamy thoughts were obsessed either by her husband’s penis and the novel delights she could conjure from it, or the flaunting of her so recently invested authority.

He cast a sidelong glance at Sun Wing, catching his daughter in the act of preening as she studied herself in a slab of mica she carried for the purpose.