Stones were heated in a crackling fire to white-hot, and a slit was made in a man’s belly from the chest to the groin. With smoking sticks, the stones were plucked from the coals and dropped through the slit into the living intestines. The screams twined with the sizzling. All in all, it was a most gruesome way to die, smelling your guts as they cooked inside you.
Red Dog pondered that as he walked. The world was slipping sideways like a boulder on a mountain. How long before it slid and tumbled into the abyss Rides-the-Wind had mentioned?
He approached Wind Scorpion’s lodge, low and menacing, like something crouched in the darkness.
Red Dog hadn’t liked the man from the moment they’d met four summers ago. Wind Scorpion came from the east, from out in the sagebrush country beyond the mountains. It was said he’d lived with the Striped Dart People, but he had obviously once lived here, among the North Wind, and even in Fire Village itself.
Whenever Wind Scorpion looked at Red Dog, it made the hairs on his neck stand up. Something about the man, including his very smell, gave Red Dog the ghost-shivers.
Flickers of light could be seen around the door hanging as Red Dog called, “Wind Scorpion? Chief Cimmis calls you.”
Nothing. Only the sound of scurrying from inside the lodge, and a worried gasp, as though someone had been caught unawares.
Under normal circumstances, Red Dog would have waited, curious to see what happened, but tired as he was, he bent and ripped the hanging aside to see a naked slave girl jerk a red wig from her head. Her skin was painted white, dabbed with clay. She had a lithesome body, perfectly formed. She stared at him in horror, the firelight playing on her strained face.
“What are you doing?” Red Dog demanded. “Why are you here?”
She swallowed hard, crossing her arms over her breasts, shrinking down to hide her nudity. “I—I am Wind Scorpion’s slave, warrior. He—he was called away. I thought … thought you were—”
“Where is he?”
She was trembling now. “A runner came. A man. I didn’t hear what was said. Wind Scorpion just smiled, as if in triumph, and packed his things.” She was almost babbling. “He left just like that, and said nothing to me about when he’d be back. It’s been almost two days now.”
Red Dog scowled, stuck his head into the lodge, and peered around. To his amazement, images of white-skinned women with flowing red hair had been drawn on the walls. Each had oversized breasts and exaggerated hips around swollen vulvas.
Red Dog made a face and asked, “And you have no idea where he went?”
“No, warrior.” She was wringing the red wig with one hand as she stared at him.
“Well, if he comes back, tell him the great chief wants to see him now!”
Red Dog ducked back into the sanity of the darkness and sighed as he turned and started wearily back for Cimmis’s lodge. Now he had more bad news to deliver.
He had seen a man’s guts boiled, could still smell the stench of it. As he approached Cimmis’s lodge, his belly began to crawl inside him.
Gods, what could he do to save himself from this madness? Or was salvation already beyond his ability?
Three
The stars were nowhere in Starwatcher Ecan’s thoughts as he lay slumped on the weeping woman. She was really just a girl. If she was lucky, she’d seen ten and three winters. For all he knew, he might have been the first man to ever take her.
What was it about a weeping woman that made coupling so much more satisfying? Her sobbing body trembled beneath him. Was it that in that moment he had no doubts about himself? And, as Song Maker knew, he had overcome so many doubts. He and Kenada. Dead Kenada. Murdered Kenada.
In the flickers of firelight her eyes glinted, vacant, as if her soul had fled at the hot rushing of his seed inside her. Waves of her long black hair lay tumbled about the woven-bark matting upon which they lay.
How could a woman sob without leaking tears?
The same way I do, when I think of Kenada. He hadn’t shed a tear at the news. A cold emptiness had yawned inside him, like a falling of water into a black lava tube. He hadn’t known that such a small thing as a man’s body could hold such a bottomless pit.
He reached out and wound his fingers around the girl’s silky black hair and remembered the smile on Kenada’s lips. He’d been two summers younger, never the leader, but always a willing accomplice. To know that he had been brutally ripped from Ecan’s life was like suddenly living with only half of his soul.
Ecan shifted, rising to stare down at the girl. Her round face shone with a copper tint in the firelight, the vacant eyes like glistening obsidian. No movement stirred her lips. But for the sucking sobs that shook her, she might have been as dead as Kenada.