People of the Raven(30)

Dzoo shook her head. It was a bare movement, as if, over the decades, she had grown weary of extravagant gestures. “He’s of the North Wind People.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He has their long, narrow head and pale skin.”

Pitch’s cup froze midway to his mouth. Like him, the Raven People had broad, flat faces on round skulls, but the North Wind People were characteristically long-headed, with sloping foreheads and thin faces. “Are you telling me that you … you saw him?”

Dzoo turned her gaze on Pitch, and a tingle went through him. Looking into her large black eyes was like gazing into the eyes of a Spirit Raven. He could almost feel his soul begin to drift.

“I’m almost certain he lives in Fire Village,” she said. “Or at least he was born there. He is broad of shoulder and has a curious scent, like the moss that grows at the base of the lava cliff above Fire Village.”

Her hand lifted to the pendant she wore, and she gently smoothed her fingers over the red spear point. “He wears one of these.”

Pitch stared at the pendant. The fluted points were magnificent, as long as his palm, and so finely flaked they had a vitreous glitter. They were called fluted points because the very last thing the maker did was to “flute” the base: that is drive a wide, thin flake of stone down the long axis of the point. Only North Wind People were allowed to possess them. The points were part of their Power as a people. They claimed their ancestors had made them from the blood of long-dead monsters. It was considered a grave offense to even be found trying to copy them.

“Then,” Pitch said, “Cimmis probably sent him after you.”

“There is more to Coyote than even Cimmis understands.” Her smile was cold and crystalline. “Oh no, Pitch, he is more dangerous than a desperate chief, or his soul-sick Council. He has touched blackness. It lingers on his soul, taints the very air with his every breath.”

That sent a shiver down Pitch’s back. Chief Cimmis and the Council of Four Old Women was scary enough. The Four Old Women had felt no pity, suffered no mercy in their decisions to punish those who defied them. Reprisals had been immediate. All along the coast Raven villages lay in charred ruins, and refugees filled the trails, fleeing their wrath.

And Coyote was more dangerous than that?

Her lips parted slightly as she studied him. “He and I will meet in the end. One of us will possess the other. I wonder who will be the stronger? He … or I?”

“Dzoo, you don’t have to deal with him alone. There are a great many of us—”

She raised her hand, fingers a golden brown in the firelight. “Listen to me. Power is shifting, Pitch. People are being swept up in the passion and madness of the gods. Our souls hang in the balance.”

“How? I don’t understand.”

“The future,” she whispered as she fixed on the night beyond their camp. “We will decide that in the coming weeks. The Raven and North Wind Peoples will begin their Dance together, shuffling … step by step … .”

An owl hooted out in the forest. Pitch tipped his head, letting the water drip off to the side as he studied Dzoo. “How will the Dance end?”

For a long time she seemed oblivious; when she finally spoke, she said, “In the end, we all make love with Death. We wrap ourselves in the most intimate of embraces. As we thrust ourselves inside Death, so does Death thrust into us.” She paused, eyes alight, lips parted as if on the verge of ecstasy. “And then the release comes, tingling through us like a burning delight.”

“I’ve never heard Death described that way before.”

She glanced at him as if she hadn’t quite understood him. “Pardon?”

“Death,” he added, “as a lover.”

Her only reply was a sad smile.

Pitch tossed another branch onto the flames and watched the sparks twirl upward through the dark filigree of alder branches. Snow frosted the tops of the limbs, but the bottoms remained as black as night, creating a stunning interplay of light and dark set against a background of scudding starlit clouds.

“Broken Sun must have been waiting for me to leave the cave,” Dzoo said.

“That’s when he took Sweet Grass?”

“Yes. He Traded her for these.” She reached inside her cape, took a small leather bag from her belt pouch, and tossed it across the fire to him.

He hefted the bag, finding it heavy and decorated with beautifully painted red paw prints.

“Open it.”

Pitch set his teacup aside, and poured the contents out.

Two tens or more obsidian fetishes glittered on his palm, and his skin began to crawl. Magnificent things: coiled serpents, bears, howling wolves, eagles with spread wings, and several images he couldn’t discern in the dim light. The longer he looked at them, the more he felt it. Strange Power filled the fetishes, as though the master flint knapper had breathed part of his Spirit into the objects.