“What are you talking about?” Salamander bent down and began washing his hands.
“I’m talking about the future. What is to come. You are so young, my friend. That is your strength and your weakness.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Listen to me!” the old man demanded. “Something is coming, something I cannot see over the horizon of time. I am an old man, and I will probably not live to see this thing happen. My friends are dying. Graywood Snake was younger than me. Elder Back Scratch is ailing and will die soon—leaving that witless Sweet Root as Clan Elder. Cane Frog will be lucky to survive another winter. Who can tell how many moons I have left? This, however, I know: Learn from your Spirit Helpers. Learn from the world. Do not seek fame, or revenge, or any other petty gratification. Do you hear me, Salamander? Be who you are! That is why Power chose you.”
“Be who I am?” He glanced at the old man in puzzlement.
“Exactly. And be it smartly. You are caught between Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow because they saw something in your souls. Dreams are crossing here. Different paths to the future. Like those crossed lines I carved into your chest, you are the place between the North and the South, the East and the West. You lie between Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow. A battle is being waged, and you are the key.”
“What battle? What are they fighting over?”
The Serpent shook his head slowly. “It is an old thing between them. They are brothers, you see. Masked Owl and Many Colored Crow. They take other forms at times, sometimes wolves, ravens, eagles, lions, bears, but one is always light, the other dark. Forever separate, forever bound, but never in agreement. They pull the world back and forth between them.”
“And I am supposed to bring an end to this?”
“No. You are just supposed to help one side win for the time being.”
“But how can I be part of this? I don’t even have a Spirit Helper to advise me. Not even Salamander.”
The Serpent made a face. “Are you that dull-witted?”
“How do you mean?”
“Many Colored Crow sits atop the Men’s House during your initiation. Masked Owl takes you flying in your Dreams. Boy, just what do you think a Spirit Helper does, anyway?”
Salamander blinked, a cold shiver running down his back despite the dripping heat. No wonder he laughed when I asked if Salamander would consider being my Spirit Helper.
“That’s right,” the Serpent told him fondly. “Just be yourself, Salamander. That will save you. So long as you do not lose yourself, do not become like the others. If you forget who you are, become like them, you are going to be crushed like a caterpillar in a lizard’s jaws.”
Twenty-three
Evening had settled on Sun Town the way it did in the days after the solstice—with great rapidity. Water Petal sat to one side of the ramada, her back propped against one of the support poles. Her infant, a son, suckled noisily at her left breast. As it worked the brown nipple, the baby’s little fingers kept grasping and flexing, as if he didn’t have enough to occupy him in the busy pursuit of filling his belly.
A low fire smoldered under the ramada’s northern edge, that location receiving slightly more protection from the intermittent summer rains. Wing Heart tended it by adding another branch from the pile Salamander had brought in from the forest.
Lost in thought, Salamander studied the circular wicker framework of the new house that rose immediately to the west. Still unroofed, the walls looked like a huge round basket sticking out of the ground. Poles had been dug into the earth and saplings woven between them to harden as they dried. This in turn would eventually be smeared and plastered with clay and allowed to cure before brush was piled against the walls and set on fire to harden it. Only then would the pole rafters be put in place for the roof. Saplings, again, would be woven across them to provide a lattice to which shocks of grass thatch could be attached.
Salamander turned, studying the preoccupied look on his mother’s face. What is wrong with her? Was this the woman he had known, and so often feared? Where once a cutting sharpness lay behind those dark eyes, now only emptiness remained.
Wing Heart had decided to rebuild on the location of Uncle Cloud Heron’s house rather than her old one. Though she’d never said, Salamander suspected that she couldn’t bear to build where she had burned her son’s bones. It didn’t make sense, but then, where Wing Heart was concerned a great many things didn’t make sense anymore.
“Moccasin Leaf is continuing to spread her poison,” Water Petal announced. “She is spreading the story among the lineages that Salamander, with the advantage of two wives, is unable to plant a child in either one.”