Hailcloud stepped around the dying and the dead to join Basswood. The elderly warrior's dark, leathery face wore a film of tan dust spattered with flecks of blood. The lead Cahokia warrior had taken five arrows and still fought his way into cruel combat with Basswood before he died.
Breathing raggedly, Basswood wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. "These are no green boys. Badgertail brought his best. He must have left the inexperienced to guard the palisades."
"That's his way. Always prudent, calculating." Hailcloud lifted his chin to the west. "These men came up the trail that leads down to Pumpkin Creek."
"Yes. Are you thinking there may be more warriors there?"
"Perhaps," Hailcloud answered. A pang of dread went through him.
He narrowed his eyes and examined the copse of flowering dogwood almost hidden amidst slabs of stone. Last night, after witnessing the devastation of the village, they had seen a tiny glimmer of fire there—a warrior's fire, built low, smokeless, shielded on all sides by rocks. A bare glint of light had betrayed the man. Hailcloud had been waiting this morning to see if anyone moved in that rocky fortress. When the five enemy warriors had emerged, Hailcloud's war party had crept like weasels to meet them.
"How many? Can you guess?" Basswood asked.
"I don't know." Hailcloud frowned.
"What's wrong?"
"Well, we counted . . . what? Six war parties circling around the northern end of the bluff?"
"Yes, six. One for each of the major villages."
"Why would Badgertail waste warriors on Redweed? There's nothing of consequence here. A few old men and some women and children. What threat could they pose?"
Behind Hailcloud, laughter rose as men and women combed the dead enemies, boasting, stealing anything of value they could find.
"You think it's some sort of distraction? A ploy to draw us away from . . . what?"
"I'm not sure."
Hailcloud's gut squirmed. Northward, black dots were moving across the land, blurred by the heat waves that rose from the warming rock. Walking in single file, they resembled a shaggy string of buffalo plodding over the grass, swinging their heads in unison. But it couldn't be; the buffalo had been gone from this countryside for hundreds of cycles.
More likely they were refugees fleeing the war-torn land. But there were so many!
"Do you see them?" Basswood whispered softly.
"Yes."
"Blessed Ancestors. Will there be anyone left in the chiefdom when this is over?"
Fragments whirled through Hailcloud's memory. He heard Aloda saying, "My people have already begun preparing to break up into their clan groups and leave Spiral Mounds if we can't grow enough corn this summer ..." Jumbled images flashed through his mind, coming close and fading away. He lived again the attack on River Mounds, watched his warriors cut down one by one and left bleeding on the dry grass, knelt before Jenos' decapitated body—^and wept.
He answered Basswood, "Anything is better than what we've been living through."
"I won't argue with that," Basswood said. "And if the numbers decrease, there'll be more land for our people to farm."
Hailcloud's eyes drifted back to the flowering dogwood where they had seen the light last night. A feathery tickle like a thousand butterfly feelers moving in his chest made him stand straighter. "Do you think he's down there, Basswood?"
"Badgertail? Could be. There's only one way to find out."
Twenty-eight
Elmrose knelt by Green Ash's head and fanned her with a woven bulrush fan. His sister lay naked in the middle of the floor on a red-and-yellow blanket splotched with her blood. Green Ash's lips pinched against the agonizing moans that crept up her throat. In the last two hands of time, she had started thrashing weakly, rolling to her left side, then to her right, frantically muttering, "What are they? Huge. Look at them! They're everywhere. They've come to take my baby ... in exchange . . . exchange ..."
During the night. Green Ash had simply knotted her fists in Primrose's brown hem and bitten back her groans, but now her nails tore at the fabric.
Primrose writhed inside. How could Green Ash bear it? He would have rather died than witness such suffering. Slivers of late afternoon light penetrated the edges of the lowered window-hanging and streaked his sister's tormented face with bars of gold.
"It's all right," he soothed. "Just keep pushing. The baby will come . . . he's coming ..."
Primrose had kept up an inane monologue for half the night, because when he stopped. Green Ash would cry, "Please! Talk to me!"
A birthing woman sat on each side of Green Ash, and a third crouched at her feet. In the dim light, their traceries of wrinkles appeared etched into their dark, leathery folds of skin.