“Then I will be most disappointed, Mud Puppy.” Masked Owl cocked his head. “I do not know if you can do the things I’m asking. Others have failed me in the past. I cannot resist your free will.”
Mud Puppy’s soul twisted like old fabric as he said, “I will do my best.”
“Do you promise on your souls?”
“I do.”
“Then, come, let us fly.” Masked Owl leaped from the mound top, spiraling in the air. Looking back, he called, “Raise your arms and jump!”
Mud Puppy, his heart trembling in fear, raised his arms and spread his fingers, willing to try, even if Masked Owl laughed when his flailing arms dropped him back to Earth.
It was to his surprise, then, that he rose, carried by the powerful beat of his arms. He flew! His arms flattened into strong wings that silently caressed the night air. He could see the land, as though in muted daylight, colors oddly drained into a bluish gray cast.
Among the clouds he soared and spiraled. Lightning flashed silently around him, flickering from the spotted feathers on his broad wings. Thunder Beings darted and hid among the clouds, showing their faces, only to vanish again, the memory of their grins left behind in the patterns of cloud and wind.
The sound of the birds brought Hazel Fire awake. He blinked, yawned, and sat up, his elkhide robe falling from his shoulders. Fatigue still hung in his muscles, the night’s rest hardly a payment on the debt he owed his body for the constant days of ceaseless paddling. But they had made it! He was here, just outside the legendary Sun Town. A place that Traders spoke of with awe-hushed voices. He and his friends were going to see this storied place with their own eyes, the first of their kind to do so. It was the stuff of legends.
The canoes were drawn up on the muddy shore just below his feet. He could see their bundled contents; everything glistened silver with beads of dew. A drop spattered on his head, and he looked up at the overhanging branches of the sweetgum tree. The star-shaped leaves hung listlessly in the still air.
Droplets, like little diamonds, shimmered on his elkhide as he laid it aside and stood. The effect was magical. A low mist lay over the silver-gray water. It drifted past the trees, curled around the sleeping bodies of his companions, and seemed to slither around the patches of hanging moss that clung to the branches. A fish jumped in the lake, rings widening in lazy circles.
Hazel Fire walked down to the water and relieved himself. For the moment he was limited to looking across the opaque surface of the lake that separated him from the mythical Sun People’s town. What little he could see of it was perched atop a gray cliff that rose to the height of four men above the distant shore. Several buildings—tall things with thatched roofs—looked ghostly in the silvered mist. One perched on a mound to the north. Another stood atop a mound to the south, just above where the bluff sloped to a canoe landing. Barely visible, the mist shrouded it again with a closing wall of white. Had it really been there?
Memories came back of their arrival last night, of the procession of torches that had wound down to the canoe landing. Tens of ten at least, so many they had cast a warm yellow light over the landing the likes of which Hazel Fire had never seen. The clamor of the voices had been fit to shake the waters and raise the dead. In that magical moment, the torchlit column of people, like a serpent of light spilling onto the shore, had been dazzling in its spectacle. White Bird and Yellow Spider had called back and forth with the horde for what seemed an eternity, and Hazel Fire had suddenly wished he’d taken more time to learn this odd language. It sounded like turkeys squawking to him. Something impossible to wrap the human tongue around.
“Where are we? Is this real?” Snow Water had asked in awe from his canoe.
“I’ve never seen so many people,” Jackdaw had replied warily.
“Those are only a few of the tens of tens of tens who live in Sun Town,” Yellow Spider had assured them from his bobbing canoe.
“Are we going to land?” Gray Fox had asked. “My legs feel like wood.”
“For the moment,” White Bird had replied, “we will make camp there, on that island. We call it the Turtle’s Back. Being surrounded as it is by Morning Lake, it is protected as well as protection from evil spirits and hostile ghosts.” He had pointed, and the torchlight had been such that Hazel Fire had seen the black hump of earth like some monster lurking in the calm water.
“Who would have thought?” Hazel Fire wondered aloud to himself as he replayed the events of the night before. Until he died the sight of all those cane torches burning in the night would be lodged in his head.