Twenty-four
Seven Skull Shield propped his elbows on his knees as he watched the chunkey game. The bark sun hat on his head not only shaded his face, but he’d used a charcoal-laced grease to darken his features. Up close it didn’t do much good. Anyone who knew him would recognize him. From a distance, however, it granted him a degree of obscurity. Just why he’d thought a disguise was a good idea, he wasn’t sure. Something, some itch of nervousness, had urged him to take the precaution.
If a person were looking for information, River Mounds City was the place to get it. And if anyone knew anything, it would be the man perched on the platform beside him. He was called Crazy Frog. In whatever family he’d been born to, he’d probably been known by some common name like Corn Boy, or Brown Stem, or Jumping Rabbit; but that had been so long ago even Crazy Frog probably had forgotten. Assuming he even still remembered which clan he’d really been born into. With so many tens of thousands of people living in Cahokia, like Seven Skull Shield, Crazy Frog switched clans the way most people changed shirts. In the new Cahokia, for those willing to employ the ruse, one’s clan affiliation depended upon necessity, circumstance, and potential opportunity.
Crazy Frog was a common-looking man of perhaps forty, medium of frame, average of features. His nose was neither too wide nor too thin; his face was shaped about like everyone else’s. If he had any distinguishing characteristic, it might have been his tattoos: they’d been reworked sometime in the past to create a design that was completely unrecognizable. When he laughed, most of his teeth were missing—not uncommon in Cahokia, for a man of his age. The Healers said tooth loss was higher among the poor who ate a higher percentage of corn. But what choice did they have?
Crazy Frog had his finger in just about everything that was happening in River Mounds City, but his passion was chunkey. To better watch the games Crazy Frog had built himself a portable platform that his men carried around to the various matches. Elevated as he was above the heads of the crowd, he could see every moment of a match. After watching a player’s first few casts, Crazy Frog could evaluate his chances of winning with uncanny accuracy. Calling down bets to his runners, he’d maintain his own markers on a flat piece of engraved red cedar by means of a complicated pattern of beads.
Seven Skull Shield now perched beside his old friend on the raised pole platform with its plank floor. The wobbling framework didn’t inspire confidence. Nevertheless, Crazy Frog had been using the thing for years, and it hadn’t collapsed yet.
The matches were being played on the River City Mounds grand plaza, dominated as it was by High Chief War Duck’s mound-top palace. River City Mounds formed a semicircle instead of a square or diamond. Here topography dictated form. The high ground atop the levee formed by the river and its confluence with Cahokia Creek had been packed with mounds and buildings. The curving community ended in a cluster that included the large River House palace with its high roof, towering red cedar pole, and guardian effigies. The temple and charnel mounds were close beside it. The site overlooked the bustling canoe landing as well as the marshy bottoms of Cahokia Creek to the west. Across the river Evening Star City stood atop its smugly dry bluff.
Cahokia thrived on chunkey. In the grand plaza beneath the Morning Star’s mound, chunkey was played as a ritualized reenactment of the hero’s battle against the giants in the Beginning Times. Among the dirt farmers and immigrants it was played as a form of prayer, the outcome of the games being interpreted as an expression of divine will. At River City Mounds, however, the game had grown into something else: a true sport upon which piles of Trade were wagered. Most of the better players who made their living playing chunkey had adopted striking names likes “Rolls His Head,” “The Lightning Lance,” and “Skull Pinner.” They wore flashy costumes of brilliantly dyed feathers and literally jangled as they walked, so bedecked were they in shell and copper jewelry.
They were in the right place. As the gateway to Cahokia, not only did most of the Trade land at the River Mounds, but so, too, did the emissaries, foreign chiefs, and warriors with their wealth. Many arrived with reputations as chunkey players among their own people, and at River City they had their first chance to prove their skill against the best in the world.
While Cahokia’s prestige and influence had drawn foreign chunkey players and their wealth, it had also created something absolutely unique: a city of strangers.
Among strangers the old rules of behavior no longer applied. Never before had such opportunities for greed, wealth, and nefarious indulgence existed. A man no longer had disapproving kin looking over his shoulder; he could act reprehensibly and disappear into the crowds without fear of censure. In a town of two or three thousand, if a thief took another person’s possessions, someone was bound to know. Any immoral behavior was immediately reported by rival clans.