“Next time,” Pine Drop mumbled, “you can deliver your own child.”
Night Rain used hanging moss to wipe up the last of the blood from the matting that lay between Pine Drop’s legs. She pressed it into a bundle, and before Anhinga could draw breath to stop her, tossed the moss into the smoldering fire. Flames licked around it before climbing through the moss. The wet blood and tissue steamed and hissed as it burned. The air filled with a pungent odor.
“I would have burned it outside,” Anhinga said, scrunching her nose.
“I didn’t think of that,” Night Rain replied sheepishly.
Anhinga finished her cleaning before dropping to her knees beside Pine Drop. The newborn hung on Pine Drop’s right breast. The woman’s tired arms cradled the infant. Anhinga watched from half-lowered eyes as the tiny mouth worked the nipple.
She thought it curious that Salamander had arrived bearing a fiber-tempered bowl and offered to carry the afterbirth out beyond the clan grounds for burial. Shifting, she noticed the turned earth under Pine Drop’s bed, as if something had been recently dug from there. A slow smile crossed her lips.
“Snakes,” Pine Drop whispered. “I could sleep for a solid moon.”
Anhinga sighed, throwing her head back and feeling her dark hair falling down her back. Panther’s blood, she was tired. “I, too, am ready to fall over. If you need me, you’ll find me at Salamander’s. Sleeping.”
“I can call on kin,” Night Rain told her. “Thank you, Anhinga. We didn’t think it would take so long.”
“Mine did,” she replied as she reached for her daughter. Wrapping the fabric to protect the baby’s face from mosquitoes, she took a last look around, nodded, and ducked out into the night.
The faintest of breezes played with the heavy night air. She could feel the promise of summer’s coming warmth. A cloudless sky was painted with stars, while a sliver of moon hung just above the eastern horizon. A whippoorwill called plaintively from beyond the house-topped ridges. Crickets and frogs added their voices to the night. Woodsmoke hung in the air, mixing with the cloying odor of rotting trash and the tang of human waste.
She tucked her daughter close to her shoulder and walked down the ridge before turning north along the edge of the bluff. The ridges here, she was told, had been built atop an old gully. One the Sun People had filled before plotting out the Snapping Turtle Clan ground.
Below her the tree-filled bottom land south of the lake lay in dark shadow. She could smell cooler air, the pungent scent of the swamp carrying to her position.
She passed the edge of the ridges and glanced uneasily at the dark houses. The last one belonged to Mud Stalker. She stopped, staring at it.
A wicker door blocked the entrance. She cocked her head, stretching down with her free hand to reach into her pouch. Her fingers caressed the stone-tipped knife that lay there. Salamander had sharpened it, using an antler tip to pressure flake an edge keen enough to slice hair.
It would be so easy. She need only slip that doorway aside, step in, and one quick slash would leave his throat severed from side to side. Before he could fully call his souls to wakefulness, he would be choking on his bubbling blood, tasting it as it rushed up in his mouth and nostrils.
She snorted to herself and hurried on. Pus and blood, what was happening to her? Uncle hadn’t been right, had he? She wasn’t beginning to see these people as her own?
Disgusted with herself, she strode purposefully on her way, passing the head of the narrow ditch that drained Snapping Turtle Clan when she stopped short. Her path had taken her to the plaza where the Men’s House stood on its double-humped mound.
She stared at the structure, its thatched roof inky against the sky. The carvings atop the ridgepole guarded the building—black silhouettes against the night.
She swallowed hard, taking careful steps to the pole where she had been tied. Reaching down, she touched the grass-covered earth. The dirt was cool, damp on her fingertips.
She tucked her chin, smelling her baby daughter’s delicate scent as it rose from the cradleboard. How many things had changed since she had been bound and helpless here?
In the eye of her soul, she relived that terrible day. Remembered how they had cut Cooter’s liver out of his body. How they had laughed as they bent down to defecate into Mist Finger’s empty eye sockets. Once again the camp dogs slung silver drool as they snapped up bits of raw flesh cut from her friends. She could see the stripped rib cage, all that was left of who? Slit Nose? Spider Fire?
So much hatred. So much death.
What brought me here?
A fist tightened around her heart. Was that the price she had paid by waiting for so long? That her memories would begin to weaken, that the pain of that day, the humiliation to their spirits and memories, would begin to fade?