People of the Morning Star(3)
“You can get this assassin of yours into the palace?”
“If the Whisperer’s messengers have told us the truth.” She nodded absently, eyes half squinted as she stared at the Morning Star’s distant palace. “Having made a careful study of the palace, I have just the place for Cut String to hide. He’s already been given the instructions.”
The high chief drew a deep breath. “The Whisperer is ready. We need but to receive the token, and we are free to strike. Once we kill the Morning Star, the Whisperer will slowly but surely pluck Blue Heron’s web in a way that draws her into his reach.”
“Be careful, brother. If this should go awry…” She laid a cautious hand on his shoulder.
“The believers would unleash a blood bath as they sought to snuff out even the faintest whiff of heresy.” His smile bent the long scar on his chin. “The Whisperer is right. Everything must be traced back to the Four Winds Clan.”
“If we do this thing—succeed in killing the Morning Star—we must act quickly. The Houses of the Four Winds Clan must be incited to turn on one another. If the dirt-farmers and immigrants panic and riot, chaos will be unleashed. Our world will consume itself. What will remain will be soot, ashes, rotting corpses, and ruin.”
He nodded grimly. “Our duty is to ensure it never gets that far. But then, the Four Winds Clan has shown us all how to be gods. And … well, what’s a little risk compared to those benefits?”
“Nothing that can’t be bought by a little blood and suffering,” she whispered. “Like the Whisperer, I just want the Four Winds Clan destroyed.”
“Then, perhaps, we can resurrect the life-soul of Petaga, place it in a young man’s body. Reunify the Earth Clans and place the worship of First Woman where it belongs. We can restore the heritage of the great priestess Lichen and the legendary Nightshade.”
She pointed to a tall man who emerged from between the houses that crowded behind the base of the small, conical burial mound on which they stood. The runner bore a red-fabric-wrapped bundle in his arms. He slowed, chest rising and falling from his long journey. He looked around cautiously, and nodded as the high chief waved. Then he started up the grass-sided mound.
Reaching the top, he dropped to one knee, head down, asking in a thick and guttural accent, “For which hand?”
“The right,” the high chief replied, glancing down at his maimed hand.
The runner, a foreign barbarian, fit-looking and in his mid-twenties, touched his chin in a sign of respect. Oddly, his face bore no tattoos to identify his nation or clan. Reverently, he offered up the red-cloth bundle. No sooner did the high chief lay hold of it than the man rose, spun, and trotted back down the mound. Within a matter of heartbeats, he’d disappeared back into the maze of houses.
“What man gains adulthood without tattoos?” Right Hand wondered. “Unless he’s a slave.”
“No slave has eyes that arrogant and proud. He was all warrior, that one.” She gestured at the bundle. “That’s it?”
Cradling the wrapping, his raccoon staff in the crook of his right arm, the high chief unwound the red cloth just enough to expose the tip of a long stone blade. Sunlight glistened in parallel rows of rippling flake scars. A master had carefully chipped the slim blade from a beautiful translucent brown chert; the edge sharp enough to split a hair.
“The Whisperer is as good as his word. Now all we have to do is get this to your assassin, Matron.” He paused watching the light play on the deadly blade. “And hope it drinks deeply of the Morning Star’s blood.”
Two
But for the intrusion of a single dark knot, the inboard-side of the canoe’s sanded and waxed hull exhibited straight and uniform wood grain. The reddish color, combined with the wood’s faint pungent perfume, told Fire Cat Twelvekiller that the big war canoe had been hewn from a huge bald cypress—one felled far to the south. The workmanship was exquisite, the walls of the hull thin and light, its beam wide enough that parallel ranks of warriors manned the paddles.
That lovingly polished wood had become the boundary of War Chief Fire Cat’s universe. Life, hope, Power—everything he’d ever dreamed of or aspired to—all had collapsed into what little space lay between his blurry vision and the wood’s absolute reality.
A boundary beyond which he dared not contemplate.
He could have raised his head, looked beyond the gunwales to the broad river—its cool green surface swirling, welling, and sucking. Beyond the living water he would have seen the western bank as it ghosted past in a tree-lined glory of cottonwoods, elms, and willows.