People of the Raven(189)

He hesitated for a moment, just staring into her eyes. “Yes, Matron, I will Join with you.”





Great chief?” Dogrib said. “You had better come see this.”

Rain Bear left the Council Lodge where he, Evening Star, Talon, and Kaska had been talking.

“What is it?”

“Dzoo.” Dogrib shot him a grim glance. “She just appeared headed this way down the trail.”

“Is she all right?”

“She looks fine. She’s leading a party bearing someone on a stretcher.”

“Thank Gutginsa she’s safe.” They’d been worried. Dzoo’s blessing would be critical if they were going to maintain the fragile peace. “Do you think she found Ecan?”

“I can’t say, my chief. No one has found him yet.”

As Rain Bear followed Dogrib through the gate he could see her. In the clear morning light, Dzoo walked at the head of a small party of former slaves. They carried a litter, upon which a person lay.

The way Dzoo moved was magical, almost as if she floated above the ground. Her body dipped and swayed as she sang a melody that was at once haunting and joyous.

Above her, a column of crows wheeled and cawed, as if drawn by the bizarre sight.

Rain Bear and Dogrib stepped out to meet her, and both men shivered as Dzoo’s voice rose to a high pitch and ended in laughter.

“Dzoo?” Rain Bear asked. “Are you all right? We’ve had warriors searching for you.”

When her large eyes fixed on his, he felt the world sway, and reached out to brace himself on Dogrib’s shoulder.

“I thank you for your concern, Great Chief. I have been Dancing with Coyote. It has taken a while to teach him to fly.”

“Coyote? Fly?” He glanced at the litter, noticing for the first time that the bearers looked scared half out of their wits.

At a gesture from Dzoo, the litter clattered to the ground—and no sooner were the bearers free of the poles than they broke and ran like quail from a weasel.

Rain Bear stepped forward, frowning, trying to make sense of what he saw. The gruesome thing indeed looked like a huge bloody bird.

“Wings,” Dzoo whispered as Rain Bear puzzled over the flaps of skin that hung down from the spread arms. “Skinned wings.”

The organs had been removed from inside the torso, leaving a blood-caked hollow, the spine visible where the ribs curled up. The eyes were gone; the face had been carefully sliced away from the underlying bone. But the thing that drew the eye was the erect penis that stuck up from the crimson-caked pubis. A stick had been inserted to extend it far beyond human dimensions.

A dizzying sense of Power whirled through the air, and Rain Bear stepped back, wincing. Dzoo caught him and kept him from falling. Dogrib was making a sucking sound, as if he couldn’t quite fill his lungs with air.

“It’s all right, Chief Rain Bear. He can’t hurt you.” She smiled as she held up a blood-streaked obsidian fetish. It had been carefully chipped into the shape of a coyote’s head. “I’ve placed Coyote’s soul in here. It’s obsidian, so sharp and brittle. All I have to do is snap it in two, or crush it under a rock, and his soul is gone forever.” Her smile was predatory. “And he knows it.”

Dogrib had turned away, a green color rising in his face.

She pulled the familiar coyote-tracked bag from the belt at her waist and dropped the fetish inside.

Rain Bear would have sworn he heard a faint, high-pitched scream.





Night

“After everything we’d done together, everything we’d been through, she cast me aside like a cracked cup. I can’t believe it. I loved her with all my soul.” I force a difficult breath into my lungs.

They have been waiting for me to die. But I continue to fool them. For three moons I’ve been devouring myself from the inside out, until now I feel like a drum; all beating heart, but no insides.

“She had to make a choice: you or the survival of two peoples.You know that. Just as you know that she made the right choice.”

“Perhaps, but I have been betrayed. I feel completely empty.”

The old Soul Keeper’s voice is gruff: “It is emptiness that makes a vessel useful. What would a bowl or cup be without its hollow interior?”

“Well, then, my wife has turned me into something very useful—I have become a yawning black abyss.” Anger tinges the words. My love has turned into a huge burning ache. More than anything, I wish I could have betrayed her in kind. A great many women would have flocked to me, worshipped me.

“Very soon now you must decide whether that abyss will be eternally filled with anger and resentment or love and peace. Which will it be?”