High Dance almost toppled into the ooze as he tried to extricate his foot. The mud sucked the deerhide moccasin off his foot.
Cursing, he finally managed to reach down and pull it from the gooey mess.
“If they knew who I really was…” He smiled wickedly as he beat his moccasin on the packed clay surface, glaring at the people who passed on their business. Then, seeing no more large loads headed his way, he hurried as fast as he could on the irregular rounded surface.
“If this was my territory, this thing would be fifteen hands wide, and paved with gravel,” he growled as he raced to make the higher ground before two men bearing a litter filled with peeled saplings could block his way.
High Dance managed a smile as the men nodded at him. From their dress and manner, they must have been Illini. Each, however, had a crude image of the Morning Star sketched on the front of his sweat-stained work shirt.
High Dance kicked at the mud still clinging to his moccasin and followed the entrenched path. It ran off to the northwest between a cluster of cane-roofed houses with their gardens, ramadas, and storage pits. He could just see the temple roof on the far side of the houses where it overlooked Marsh Elder Lake to the south.
To his relief, none of the women tending their little plots of corn, beans, sunflowers, goosefoot, and squash gave him so much as a second look. Instead they kept on with their weeding, corn milling, and weaving. Around the houses, little naked children ran, screamed, and played, often accompanied by hollow-ribbed, tick-infested dogs with slashing tails.
Cutting off from the main path, High Dance made a face as he passed wide of an overflowing latrine and stepped carefully around piles of excrement and broken pottery. High Dance fought the urge to hold his nose and waved away columns of flies. Like so much of Cahokia, the houses were packed close here because the soil was marginal. Clay didn’t grow good corn. Unproductive ground generally ended up crowded with immigrant housing.
He nodded uncomfortably as a young woman stepped out from one of the latrines and resettled her skirt. Given a good wash and a combing she would have been attractive. At his hawkish glance she lowered her large dark eyes and hurried around to the front of her house where an infant was screaming.
Wearing an expression of distaste he hurried toward the temple atop its low mound. Four tall men, obviously warriors, stood in an arc before the building. Each held a war club and nodded at him as he approached.
Tough men, he decided, trying to place their thick-boned and wedge-shaped features in comparison with any of the peoples he was familiar with. They had a curiously foreign look to them, and he was surprised to note that none exhibited the characteristic facial tattoos that proclaimed a man’s people and clan.
He almost gasped in relief as the breeze blowing in from the lake carried fresh air to his abused nostrils. He climbed the five steps to the mound top and walked to the temple door. There a bone-rack of an old man sat, eyes white and sightless, his mouth gaping in a toothless smile. He seemed heedless of the flies crawling over his wrinkled skin. A weathered and cracked wooden bowl was clutched in his filthy hands—empty of even the slightest offering from passersby.
Stepping into the dark interior, High Dance found the floor to be packed clay. Daylight cast slivers of light where cracks in the walls hadn’t been repaired. A central hearth looked cold, the ash having blown out over the floor in a black shadow.
In the rear, perched on a scaffold made of old cedar branches, sat a wood-and-straw statue of Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies. She crouched on a split-cane mat, the top of her face painted white, the bottom black. Her eyes were charcoal dots, and her mouth was a half-open gape in the round head. A squash vine had been wrapped around one shoulder, and the burden basket on her back contained ears of corn, most of the kernels chewed away by mice.
“They come here to share the miracle of the Morning Star,” a voice stated from the left. “But their hearts forever belong to First Woman.”
“It’s only natural.” High Dance glanced at the man who stepped out of the shadows. “The Morning Star can dazzle them with the ritual displays, with stickball games, colorful chunkey tournaments, and all the elaborate pageants and feasting. They see him, so grand and mighty, a living god among them. But in the end, everything depends on the harvest. Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies exhales her fertility into the seeds, goads the Tie Snakes to call the rains, and balances the powers of the Underworld with those of the earth and sky. From her cave deep in the earth she encourages the Tree of Life to flourish.”
The man grunted. “They find no conflict in that. The dirt people admire and fawn over Corn Woman’s resurrected son in its frail human body at the same time they worship and implore his Spirit Being grandmother to save them. How … typical.”