Anhinga let the canoe drift, carried forward by its own momentum. She banked the pointed paddle across the gunwales as the craft curved slightly to the left—a flaw in its shaping during construction. Paddling it, she had constantly had to correct for that peculiarity. Now, however, she was so exhausted that she didn’t have enough energy to feel frustrated.
Around her the swamp pulsed with life: the humming of insects; the piping song of the birds rising and falling in scattered melodies; fish sloshing as they broke the surface for skimming bugs. Heat lay on the water, burned down through gaps in the trees by the relentless sun. Sweat beaded on her aching body.
For a long moment she stared at nothing, blind to the brown water with its bits of yellow-stained foam. Dark sticks from a forgotten forest floor bobbed gently, and the flotsam of bark and leaves lay in dappled shadows. The trees, so rich and green in the light might have been shades cast by another world. She did not see or feel the patches of triangular hanging moss that draped the branches and traced over her skin as she floated past. The dark shape of a water moccasin gliding away from her course didn’t register in her stunned mind.
Again and again she relived the nightmare images. All she could see was that last instant when Mist Finger collapsed under the battering of the Sun warrior’s stone-headed war club. Heartbeats later that scene faded into fragments of images as she watched her friends being torn apart before the Men’s House. The vibrant red of bloody flesh, the odd gray of the intestines, the dark brown of the livers as they were cut loose from under the protective arch of human rib cages, painted her souls.
One instance in particular stood out. She flinched as she watched a blood-streaked warrior toss Cooter’s shining liver high. It had risen, flopping loosely, to hang at midpoint and then dive steeply. At impact it had literally exploded into a paste, bits and pieces spattering hither and yon. Who would have thought a man’s liver was so delicate?
She stared, sightless to this world, hearing the humming of the mosquitoes and flies as they hovered about her. Even the sweat trickling down her face seemed so far away, intruding from a different world than her own.
Blinking her dry eyes she glanced down and took inventory of herself. They had stripped her naked, of course. Clothing left wounded souls with a final if ever so small place of refuge. They had denied her even that. Blister-covered welts itched and oozed where they had used burning sticks to elicit her screams. A black bruise marked her left breast, where the one called Eats Wood had viciously pinched her nipple. Despite the bath she had taken at first light, she felt dirty, filth-smeared in a way that no amount of scrubbing could ever cleanse. If she reached up, she could feel the swollen lump that stuck out of the left side of her head. That was where the flat of White Bird’s stone ax had brought her down. Broken and scabbed skin overlay deeper bruises on her wrists and legs where they had bound her.
In defiance she flexed her feet against the gouged wood on the canoe bottom, thankful that White Bird hadn’t had the time to cut the tendons in her heels. Despite her other wounds, she could still walk, still run, instead of hobbling like an old woman on loosehinged ankles.
Those were the wounds to her body. Try as she might, she could not even catch a glimpse of the wounds to her souls.
As she had paddled through the morning, dream images had flashed in her head: she and Mist Finger in love; their marriage; their first child—his smile as he stared up from moss bedding. She had imagined Mist Finger, grinning at the sight of her as he walked up to their house at the Panther’s Bones. Gone, vanished like the morning mist that gave way to a burning midday sun.
Other memories of her and the dead sifted through her disjointed thoughts. She had grown up with them. Like the vines surrounding a tree, she had woven bits and pieces of their lives into her own. Cooter had brought her the first fish he had ever caught. How old had he been? Five summers?
She remembered the accident when Slit Nose had been running full tilt across Water Lily Camp, and fallen to slice his nose open on a discarded stone flake. The scar had never fully healed—and now never would. Until she died she would remember the way one of the Sun People propped his severed head onto the flames of that crackling bonfire. How it had sizzled as his face was blackened and burned, the scarred nose curling into ash while the eyeballs popped like overinflated bladders.
Spider Fire had always been a wit and a tease. Sharp of tongue, a bit irreverent, his puns had often left her incapacitated with laughter. Not more than two winters past, she had held him as he mourned his big brother’s untimely death. In a freakish accident, a wind-lashed tree had fallen on him. It was to her that Spider Fire had come for comfort. Then, yesterday, she had seen his muscles carved away and fed to camp dogs until only the blood-streaked bones remained.