“Done,” she whispered as if disappointed. Then she turned, saying, “Cut them down.” She pointed at Fire Cat. “Take this one to my palace and attend to him.”
She indicated the other squares. “Five Fists you will bear the Red Wing women to the Morning Star’s palace. The Morning Star will give you instructions there.”
“Yes, Lady.”
The words didn’t make sense in Fire Cat’s reeling and confused thoughts. He struggled to lift his head. First Woman should just reach out and rip his souls away. He should die there in the square, leaving nothing but his senseless corpse for the Cahokians to savage.
Instead, the Spirit of First Woman stepped back and warriors closed in.
He was piteously crying, “No … no…” as they severed the thongs holding him to the square. This time they didn’t catch him. He toppled face-first into the slippery clay. The impact blasted lights through his vision.
He had vague images of other warriors cutting his mother and sisters down. Limp as sacks, they were carried off to the east toward the great palace-topped mound that jutted into the very sky.
In a gray haze he felt himself being carried, and before him, like a forbidden dream, First Woman walked with the sultry stride of a seductress.
His last thought was, How can a Spirit be that beautiful?
* * *
A steaming cup of rich yaupon tea—“black drink” imported from the south—warmed Blue Heron’s chilled hands. Matron Wind and her daughter Sun Wing cradled their own cups. At the Morning Star’s orders they’d remained at the palace, and been completely surprised when the Red Wing women had been carried in and dropped on the floor at the rear of the room.
Blue Heron sipped the thick, bitter brew, and glanced sidelong at the miserable women. They huddled, naked, exhausted, and shivering on the floor in the rear. Their filthy bodies jarred with the room’s perfect splendor.
There sits the last despicable remnants of the Red Wing lineage of the Moon Clan.
Which begged the question: Why were they still alive?
Matron Red Wing and her two daughters, exposed, bruised, and broken were all that remained of old Cahokia. Remnants of the terrible religious wars that had ended with the sacrifice of Petaga to achieve the first resurrection of Morning Star.
In those first years Cahokia had begun its remarkable transition. As authority shifted, old clans had been replaced with new. Governance of the various villages that were being devoured by greater Cahokia had been awarded to different lineages among the victorious Four Winds Clan and the “Houses” had been established. As people from all over the known world flocked to Cahokia to live in the shadow of the reborn god, Cahokia itself had been leveled, resurveyed, and rebuilt as an earthly representation of the cosmos. A new magnificent city rose where once the chiefs Keran, Gizis, Tharon, and Petaga had walked. The detailed planning, surveying, leveling and grading, remodeling and construction, already had taken an entire generation, and still the earthworks continued to rise. Logs by the thousands were floated down the Father Water and its upper tributaries from forests far upstream as the expanding need outstripped the logging of the uplands.
And into those freshly cleared uplands—as well as any vacant ground in the broad floodplain—hordes of pilgrims and immigrants had congregated. Every plot of tillable soil was now under cultivation. Villages of foreign “dirt farmers” had sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.
And the people, speaking tens of different languages, bowed their backs to work for the greater good of the living god. Families contributed their corn, their labor, and their meager wealth for the glory of the Morning Star. In ritual reenactment, they played chunkey in the god’s honor, mimicking his fine rolling stones with shoddy replicas made of fired clay.
But not all had accepted the resurrected Morning Star. Some, like the Red Wings, defeated in war, had fled rather than submit. And year by year, the dissident towns had been brought to heel. Either they had been brutally conquered and the leadership executed, or they’d slowly been converted to the truth of the Morning Star’s human existence.
For some, the stunning reality of Cahokia itself had been sufficient. How, after all, could the Cahokian miracle be based on a falsehood?
A few, like Red Wing town, far from the majesty and might, had managed to resist. Preaching heresy, they’d tried to spread their poison. Red Wing town had been the most successful. Not only had the town flourished, but they’d constantly goaded the wild forest tribes to raid the frontiers as Cahokia established colonies farther up the Father Water and its eastern tributaries.
Three times the Red Wings had defeated Cahokian armies. Then, as the Morning Star had predicted, the sacred fourth attempt had succeeded. Spotted Wrist had done by guile and stealth that which could not be accomplished by brute force.