His entire body tingled, partly from fear, partly from the ordeal he had endured in the sweat lodge purifying himself for the coming night’s trial. The endless hands of time he had spent alternately roasting and dripping sweat in rivers, versus those few moments when Cousin Water Petal tipped a pot of cool water over his head, had left him feeling oddly weak, though rejuvenated.
“I don’t know what your mother’s after, boy,” Water Petal had told him ominously. “She’s been over to the island”—she referred to the Turtle’s Back—“talking to the Serpent. Something you did set her off. What was it this time? Did you leave a worm in her water cup? Or did she catch you with your butt up in the air, peeking under leaves when you should have been doing chores?”
“It was my cricket,” he had started to explain, but Water Petal had silenced him by pouring another bowl of chilly water over his head. She had just passed two tens of winters, and should have given birth to three or four children by this time; her abdomen now bulged with her first. Those sharp black eyes of hers intimated that she would rather be anywhere than helping Mud Puppy with his ritual cleansing. A sentiment he shared. But when the Clan Elder ordered, people obeyed, especially those in the lineage.
Despite a deep-seated fear in his belly, he and the Serpent finished the long climb. The Bird’s Head, a huge mound of earth, dominated and guarded the western edge of Sun Town. It rose as if to scrape the sky. So high, so huge was it that from the peak Mud Puppy could see the entire world. He could look down on the tops of trees. People looked like mites as they inched along below him.
The old man wheezed, one hand to his chest as the wind whipped his filmy white hair. A faint flush had darkened the wrinkled mass of his platter-flat face; but thoughtful eyes hid deep behind the folds of his skin. His gaze drilled through Mud Puppy like a perforator on a stick.
Mud Puppy fought to still his sudden fear, shamed by the loose gurgle in his bowels. A desire grew in his souls to turn around and run down that long slope on charged legs. Anything to get away from this inspired and terrible place.
His heart began to pound as they topped the highest point. The world spread out before him to the west. The vista made his bare feet curl, toes biting into the crumbly clay soil. They were so high here that when he looked upward he half expected to see the clouds rubbing against the Sky dome. The feeling gave him the giddy sense of seeing the world as a bird must, everything below him, so far below. He might have been Masked Owl himself.
“In the beginning”—the Serpent raised his hand, pointing at the tree-covered western horizon—“at the Creation, the Sky was cracked off from the Earth. That is a most important event. Do you know why the Great Mystery did that?”
Mud Puppy swallowed hard. Would the Serpent give him that same disgusted look that Mother did? He shook his head in a hesitant no.
“Take a moment and consider,” the Serpent told him mildly.
Mud Puppy tried to avoid those hard black eyes. He let his gaze wander, his mind half-locked with the terror of his situation. He had never stood at the top of the Bird’s Head. The enormity of the high mound staggered him. How had his people ever managed to build such a mass of earth, basket by basket, one turning of the seasons after another? Could such a miracle really be of human manufacture? Had hands really built this monument to the gods? It had to be the highest point in the world—though the Traders said that other mountains, far to the northwest, were higher.
Along the western base of the great mound he could see the narrow pond that filled the mighty trench his people had dug into the ground. It glinted silver, like a gleaming worm stretched across the greensward. It was said that monsters lurked under that deep water. Had his people unwittingly opened a door to the Underworld in their effort to erect this huge mountain of earth?
“That’s not where the answer lies,” the Serpent murmured, as if reading his thoughts.
Mud Puppy reached down to pull nervously at the frayed flap of his breechcloth. It was the clay. The thought just popped into his head. His people needed the sticky gray clay. No mound of earth the size of the Bird’s Head could be raised out of the rich brown silt that covered the ridge. The deeply buried clay was necessary to give the huge earthwork stability. Without it, the silt would soften and flow in the rains, slumping and sagging, until the Bird’s Head sank right back into the ground from which it came.
The picture formed in his head: a digging stick being driven down into the hard gray clay and leaving a scar, just one of a number of similar scars in the side of the excavation pit. Like jagged alligator teeth had gnawed the soil away.