He looked up at the night sky, so incredibly clear on this moonless equinox night. The stars wove patterns of white across the blackness. Bird Man’s trail looked like fog running from north to south.
“Are you watching, old friend?” Salamander stared up into the darkness. “My wife’s baby was born healthy. I am here, as you told me to be. I remember what you instructed me to do.”
He reached down and grasped the little figurine around the head with one hand and the body with the other. Twisting, he snapped the neck cleanly. Then, laying the pieces in the hole, he covered them with the dark earth. “Thank you, Elder. I ask your souls to look over us, to watch out for this little infant girl who has joined our lives. Anhinga has enemies here who would harm her and her child. Guard us from all manner of evil.”
He picked up his stiletto and stood in the darkened ring of the Serpent’s burnt house. His old friend’s flat face smiled at him from the firelit warmth of his memories. Did he feel that warm soul drifting around him now?
Bobcat’s cleansing on the Turtle’s Back was almost complete. He would come here with the full moon and begin construction of a new Serpent’s house on the foundation of the old one. It had always been thus, one Serpent after another living on this spot on the third ridge in the center of Owl Clan’s territory.
In that instant he could feel Power washing around him. Unseen eyes peered at him out of the darkness. Just how many of those little figurines were lying buried around here? How many of the Dead pressed around him, stroking his skin with their fingers? The thought of it brought a shiver to his cool flesh, and he turned his steps for home.
A couple of dogs barked at him, but no one would be out this late at night. He walked alone, accompanied only by the Dream Souls of the Dead.
He ducked into his doorway and crossed to Anhinga’s bed before lifting the buffalo hide and slipping next to his wife’s warm body.
“What was that?” Anhinga asked, catching him by surprise.
“What was what?”
She shifted, and he could feel her eyes with the same intensity that he had those of the ghosts. “That thing you dug up from under my bed?”
He took a deep breath. “I thought you were asleep.”
“The infant was sucking. I watched you dig something out from under the bed.”
“A charm,” he told her. “Something the Serpent gave me before he died to ensure that your pregnancy was healthy. Now that you and the little girl are all right, I had to care for it properly.”
“That is all it was?”
He could hear suspicion in her voice and slipped his cold arm around her, careful not to disturb the infant sleeping between them. “It was enough. You and the baby are fine.”
“Are you witching me?”
“Why would I be witching you?”
“To make me like you.”
He laughed. “Too bad I didn’t think of that earlier. I might have tried it. Instead, you have only me, as I am, with no witching.”
She shifted again, snuggling the infant into the hollow of her hips. “Why did you follow me to the island that day, Salamander? What am I to you? Why did you care if I was safe? Is it just the sandstone?”
“You are my wife.”
“Is it that easy for you, Salamander? No questions about what truly lies in my souls?”
“I know who you are.” He smiled sadly in the darkness. “And I know that in the end, you will do what you must.”
She lay silent in the darkness, and after a moment, he heard soft sobbing.
Forty-eight
Pine Drop climbed the long slope, stopping on occasion to catch her breath. She was tired of pregnancy. Tired of the discomfort, of having to rise every so often in the night to waddle out and urinate. The shifting of her daughter—for she assumed Salamander had been right about that—disrupted what little sleep she managed.
Above her the Bird’s Head loomed out of the graying dawn. The last of the stars were fading. A warm misty breeze blew up from the south, carrying with it the scent of greening grass, the perfume of dogwood, redbud, elder, and locust blossoms.
Spring had warmed the land, stirring the life that had lain dormant in memory of Mother Sun’s flight to the south. As she climbed she could hear the high piping of one of the last flocks of blue herons heading northward on the gulf wind.
The grass, thick and lush, fed by the winter rains, curled around her feet when she wandered off the path. A vole rustled away from her passage.
When she looked up, she could see the ramada, and there, on the palmetto-thatched poles of the cane roof, she made out the solitary shape of an owl. In the twilight, it watched her, huge, the largest barred owl she had ever seen. Black eyes studied her from within the twin circles of the facial disks.