Making a cut sign for patience, Blue Heron added, “You all listen to me!” She watched the translators as they repeated her words. “Inside are drawings indicating that the witch changed shape and flew away. I want this house and the corpses inside burned immediately. You will bring wood, pile it around the house, and keep a roaring fire burning atop it for four days. Do you understand?”
The crowd nodded as did Corn Seed and Right Hand.
“Then you will scoop up the dirt for a stone’s throw in every direction around the ashes and cover the remains,” she told them. “When you have folded the evil in upon itself, you will bring ashes from the sacred fire in your temples, and cover the mound with a purified ash layer. Only then will you bring in white clay to seal the entire mound. After that, no one shall live within an arrow’s flight of this place.”
People were nodding, eyes wide as they glanced between her and the horrible farmstead.
“Be about it!” Blue Heron ordered, clapping her hands as she spoke.
She watched the people turn away, muttering among themselves and shaking their heads. To Corn Seed she asked, “Who found this, Matron?”
“One of the neighbors. He hadn’t seen the family around for a couple of days and got curious.”
Blue Heron studied Corn Seed as she talked. “Was there any talk about witchcraft? Tensions in the community? Anything that would have led you to believe that something like this could happen?”
Corn Seed spread her arms helplessly. “What could we know, Clan Keeper? These people, this whole community, they’re dirt farmers from somewhere a moon’s travel off to the east. They’re barbarians. Ignorant farmers come to share the glory of Cahokia. This could be some silly ritual of theirs for all we know. Or a personal vendetta. Keeper, we have people packed together here who have been at war with each other since the Beginning Times. Mostly we relocate traditional enemies as far from each other as we can. Half of my time is spent keeping the peace. Honestly, if it weren’t for their belief that chunkey can settle just about every dispute, we’d have a constant war up here.”
“Yes, I know.” Blue Heron rubbed her tired face. Not a hand of time after her return from Evening Star town she’d been called here by a frantic messenger from Corn Seed. All she wanted to do was climb back into her litter and sleep while her porters carried her back to her palace.
Instead she turned, looking out from the bluff to the endless city that filled the floodplain. The curls and swirls of meander lakes and marshes contrasted to the patterns of dense settlement. The higher the ground, the more buildings packed it—refuge against the periodic floods that overwhelmed the bottomland every couple of decades.
“What happened to those people in there,” Right Hand interrupted her thoughts, “that wasn’t just witchcraft, Keeper. That was something else.”
“Your dirt farmers don’t need to know that.” She cocked her head to study the Deer Clan chief. “It almost reminded me of an attempt to recall a soul from the Underworld, the way the corpses were laid out in a circle. But what was done to the young woman in there? The slashing and hacking and mutilation? That’s not part of any ritual I’m familiar with, but I’ll ask around. Perhaps Rides-the-Lightning has heard of this.”
“Don’t forget the blood on the walls,” Five Fists reminded.
Blue Heron nodded her agreement. “The first drawings, butterflies from cocoons, frogs from tadpoles, salamanders from mudpuppies, all speak of transformation.”
“And all were ruined with spattered and smeared blood,” Right Hand reminded.
“Almost as if a soul recall were being purposefully profaned.” Her brow furrowed, cold fear running through her. “But what sort of insane fool would offend Power this way? This is like slapping the Morning Star across the mouth, throwing feces into the very face of the sun, and pissing on the Powers of the Underworld, all in one!”
Right Hand nodded, lips thinning above the scar that ran down his knobby chin. “It would unleash the winds. No one would be safe.”
She gave him a wistful smile. “How right you are, old friend. But hopefully whoever did this is already dead, struck down by Power for blasphemy and pollution. If we’re lucky, it will be considered an isolated act of witchcraft and buried under a mound. Your people up here will be owl-eyed for the next moon or so. Let me know if you need anything. I can have a Four Winds squadron up here within a couple of hands’ time to help you keep order.”
“Thank you, Clan Keeper.” Corn Seed touched her forehead again, her expression pinched, as if she were biting her tongue.