Where they stood atop the growing charnel mound, Columella could just make out the lumpy texture of distant forest to the west. Between that far tree line and the main Evening Star complex’s twenty-five mounds, palaces, and temples, lay a sea of houses. They’d begun as tens of independent small villages that had grown into one another to create chaos. Each “center” boasted a cluster of Council Houses, temples with their tall poles, and granaries. Around them what had been farmsteads were surrounded by a patchwork confusion of garden plots.
We should have planned better. But who could have foreseen the constant and massive influx of entire peoples?
The air carried the redolent scent of a thousand fires as morning breakfasts were cooked, charcoal was burned, and potters fired their ceramics.
Evening Star City’s great plaza stretched immediately to the north, with Columella’s pitch-roofed palace atop its steep-sided earthen pyramid at the south end. To the east, just below the bluff, she could see the river’s wide expanse, its silt-laden waters catching sparkles of sunlight. Men bent their backs, driving pointed paddles into the water as they propelled an endless procession of canoes back and forth. From her vantage point, the east-bank landing thronged with activity, the distant shore littered by the parallel ranks of beached canoes. Even as she watched a raft of logs was being towed to shore just up from River Mounds City. Floated down from somewhere in the north by enterprising Traders, the logs would be muscled up on the bank. Then one by one or as a group they’d be dickered for. Cahokia was constantly in need of timber for construction, carving, firewood, roofing, house walls, and a hundred other needs.
Behind the landing, River Mound City’s tall buildings jutted from their palisade-topped mounds. Surrounding them were the Council Houses, warehouses, and the cluttered sprawl of the city’s great port. A smoky morning haze hid the normally visible heights of distant Cahokia where Morning Star’s palace jutted from the broad floodplain.
“Mounds are not just piles of dirt, old friend,” she told Flat Stone Pipe. “They are a re-creation of the world itself, Mother Earth reaching toward Father Sky. Each serves as a portal and a platform, a means of transporting between all three worlds. A gateway, if you will.”
Flat Stone Pipe nodded, his attention fixed on the disappearing layer of white sand as another of the long line of laborers dumped his basket of black clay beside its predecessor. Immediately a swarm of women began stamping the clay flat with their feet. Behind them the men followed with their logs to tamp the clay into a compact layer.
He said, “Clay to seal, sand to drain. And from my practiced eye, the thickness of the layers is perfect.”
“Why did you call us here?” High Dance asked. He’d never really cared for either the dwarf or the influence the little man had with Columella. And she hesitated to elicit her brother’s certain reaction by a reminder that Flat Stone Pipe had sired her firstborn son, Panther Call. The only thing she shared with that vile Blue Heron was a long list of husbands. For whatever reason, she always ended up with the dwarf in her bed.
“Power stirs,” the little man told them, his tiny hand shading his eyes as he looked off toward mist-hidden Cahokia. “The Ancestors were shooting streaks of fire across the night sky like flaming arrows in a battle. And this morning at dawn, an owl flew out of the rising sun.”
“Underworld Power aligned with the Sky World,” High Dance mused.
Columella pursed her lips, her attention, too, turning toward Cahokia. “Word is that Red Wing town fell without a fight. Morning Star has the last of the Red Wing Clan’s ruling lineage hanging in squares. The others, I’ve heard, were killed in the town plaza and the remains dismembered and thrown into the river as an offering to the Underworld.”
Flat Stone Pipe chuckled at some inner thought. “Old news, Matron. I’ve learned that as of this morning the squares are empty. My source tells me the Red Wing heretics were cut down alive and carried off. But to what fate, no one is saying.”
“Did you get that from Blue Heron?” High Dance tried to ask casually.
Flat Stone Pipe humored the stumbling attempt. “The Clan Keeper allows little to slip unless it serves a deeper purpose. I heard it from a passing Trader.”
That’s a pus-dripping lie. But she knew from long experience that Flat Stone Pipe considered it a matter of honor to offer a suitable lie rather than the truth any time he found himself in High Dance’s presence.
Flat Stone Pipe, like Mother Spider herself, had a web of informants throughout Cahokia and its vassal towns. Nor did it bother Columella to substantially fund his activities. Since she had, the numbers of her relatives “honored” by the opportunity to found a distant colony had subsided to a trickle—and those were the ones she was only too glad to be rid of. The moment one of her kinsmen began to figure both prominently and unfavorably in Four Winds Clan politics, Columella was now able, for the most part, to maneuver the offender back into the tonka’tzi’s good graces.