People of the Owl(123)

Pine Drop was nodding absently. “Perhaps.” A pause. “What could he see in her?”

Night Rain stood and walked to the large ceramic pot that held the mixture of cattail down and hanging moss. At just the mention of sharing a bed with Saw Back, her flow increased.

When she returned, Pine Drop was still looking confused.

“Sister, who cares what he sees in her?”

Pine Drop airily replied, “I just wonder, that’s all.”





Thirty

Anhinga stepped out of the canoe and planted her feet firmly on Sun Town’s muddy landing. Above her on the high bluff she could see the hated Men’s House. The old Serpent stepped out of the canoe behind her, helped by Salamander. He was studying her, eyes prying at her souls, perhaps sensing the danger she brought to his people.

Anhinga walked warily behind her husband. Husband? The word still startled her. Of course she had known she was coming here to marry the man she was going to kill. Knowing and anticipating, seeing how it would be in the soul’s eye, was one thing. In that vision she was smiling as she stepped into White Bird’s arms, every essence of her being fixed on his painful death. He had been a tough and cunning warrior. A hero worthy of Anhinga’s wrath.

Now, six days after she had first laid eyes on him, she walked behind a skinny boy possessed of pain-haunted eyes. His hair was mussed, and she could see most every bone in his body. He walked with an ungainly amble, his souls off somewhere distant, lost in Dreams.

Where, Anhinga, is the glory in murdering this simple boy? He has neither craft nor cunning, and shows all the wariness of a rotten stump.

Patience. She would wait. Besides, the ordeal of having undergone that flat-faced Serpent’s “cleansing” made the souls cry out for someone to kill. Miserable though she had been, she was Anhinga, niece of Jaguar Hide. The last thing she would allow these foolish Sun People to see was any hint of weakness.

The old Serpent watched her, his brown eyes like keen shining stones behind those folds of sagging skin. He might have been a fish eagle perched on a low branch, trying to peer below the surface of her skin for a glimpse of her souls. She had given him nothing, bearing the sweats, purges, chants, and smokings as if they were but a pleasant relaxation. By Panther Above, she would kill someone for that!

She fought a grim smile as she remembered the last time she had staggered down this very slope; the darkness had been complete, her body and souls filled with pain and horror. This boy had been with her then, too. Where she had left this place broken, shattered with grief, an escaped slave in the night, she came back in triumph as the wife of a Clan Speaker, walking head upright toward the small knot of people who had come to watch.

Salamander called greetings to some, nodding to others as they passed. One by one, Anhinga met their eyes, seeing one or two faces she thought familiar. And, yes, there was that one! The pus-sucking chigger who had twisted her nipple. She willed her face into a barksolid mask, avoiding his narrowing eyes. Did he recognize her? Cleaned as she was, dressed in a finery of feathers and finely woven cloth?

Then they were atop the bluff and turning northward. She had seen this place through pain-blurred eyes, but now, from a different perspective, it took her breath. How huge! The immensity of Sun Town hadn’t registered when, as a captive, she lay blinking against a headache, bound and trussed, watching her friends being butchered. Now she saw the incredible height of the huge Bird’s Head to the west, the span of the house-topped ridges that arched around her like the jaws of an immense monster. The entire place was open, mantled in green.

And the sky! She looked up in awe. She came from a forest people. She had never seen so much of the sky! Mother Sun beamed down on her, hot and bright. The sensation stunned her, left her feeling exposed, alone, and vulnerable. Never before had she been less than a stone’s throw from trees. Even at the Panther’s Bones, when she stood on the high Sun Mound, it was but an island among the trees.

Unnerved for the first time, she swallowed hard.

“It is something, yes?” the old Serpent asked from where he followed her.

“I hadn’t realized. The size of it!”

“The world crosses here,” Salamander said, turning his thoughtful eyes to hers and smiling shyly. One by one he pointed out the clan grounds. “And this building”—he stabbed a finger at the rectangular building that topped a mound overlooking Morning Lake—“is the Women’s House. Where you will have to go when your moon comes full.” Uncomfortable, he asked, “Uh, is that anytime soon?”

“Perhaps,” she replied offhandedly, her attention on the place. That would be unbearable, sitting in there for four days surrounded by hostile strangers, avoiding their prying questions, enduring their presence. “I might just go to the forest, if you don’t mind.”