People of the River(33)

Nightshade let her head fall forward. She said simply, "She always wrestles me for my life."

"Is there something I can do?"

"No. It's between her and me—an old Dance. We know each other's steps too well."

"Would it help if you lay down?"

Nightshade gazed speculatively into that squat face with its too-large eyes, wondering why he would offer. This was the man who had kidnapped her from her home, dragged her to this foreign land, and offered her up to the malignant arms of the Sun Chief, Tharon's father—Gizis. "Yes," she answered.

Badgertail put a hand behind her shoulders to help ease her down into the bottom of the canoe, where she could nestle against the hull. Blood speckled his leather boots in dark brown splotches. Her soul cried out. Sister Datura murmured: "If s probably Jenos' blood, or Goldenrod's, or . . ."

Badgertail rose. The canoe swayed. "We're almost home."

"Cahokia has never been my home, Badgertail. You know that better than anyone."

He stood quietly before turning and going back to the bow.

"Why didn't you go home. Nightshade? When Tharon first threw you out of Cahokia, why didn't you return to Talon Town? You re such a coward."

"I was a child," she mouthed the words. She had desperately wanted to go home, but at the age of fourteen, she had been too afraid to make the long journey by herself— a decision she had never stopped regretting. Talon Town's sun-reddened cliffs still danced in her Dreams, ethereal, beckoning.

Nightshade slitted her eyes. Ahead, the yellow rays of sunset slanted down, striking the Temple Mound, which rose in the distance like an improbable mountain. It had taken three hundred cycles and fifteen million baskets of dirt to erect that stunning monument to Mother Earth—and now she had abandoned them.

"Yes, of course," Datura hissed. "First Woman refuses to speak to Mother Earth or Father Sun if it will benefit Tharon. It's something he's done. You have to find out what. That's why First Woman has locked the entry to the Land of the Ancestors and barred it with a wall of darkness. You know what Mudhead said. Somebody has to find out and make it right."

She nodded, whispering, "I know."

When Nightshade had slanmied up against that midnight wall, she had screamed for help, sending out a call to every Powerful Dreamer in hearing range, but only silence had met her pleas. Hadn't anyone heard? She'd wallowed there, banging her spiritual fists and crying out for an eternity— until Brother Mudhead had come to tell her that she must return to the world of men to meet Badgertail and go back into Tharon's cage. She had begged him to let her see Bulrush for just a moment before she accepted her fate, but Brother Mudhead had told her that First Woman had slipped into her cave and refused to open the Underworld to any human.

Tharon. Nightshade tried to smother her dread. He had beaten her repeatedly when they were children, for no reason other than that he was bored with his protected life. Once he had blacked both of her eyes and hit her in the head so hard that her soul had separated from her body for two whole days.

Her hatred for Tharon had fermented over the cycles into a roiling brew of scorn and malice.

The canoe veered left to skirt a flotilla of slow-moving rafts heaped with poles that had been cut from the upland ridges two days away from Cahokia. With every cycle, people had to roam farther away to find wood. Saplings still sprouted along the riverbanks, but they rarely grew for more than two moons before being cut down for building or for cooking.

As they rounded the final bend, the river assaulted her with the pungent scents of fish and new plants. Turtles lumbered down the muddy shores to splash into the water. Reeds had resurrected at the edge of the water, shooting green tendrils up through the tawny bones of last cycle's dead plants.

Ghostly fear clutched at Nightshade. She shook herself, not understanding, until a pitiful whimper struggled up from a long-hidden compartment in her soul.

'Wo ..." she begged through gritted teeth. "No, my Sister, not this."

But the memories gripped her in leaden fists, dragging her back to a time twenty cycles before, when warriors had surrounded her on another trip. The images flashed haltingly at first; then they began to flow—and the scene returned with horrifying power: the mad flight from Talon Town; being handed from one warrior to the next; being carried for half the night, then forced to run until she thought her heart would burst. She lived again the desperate battles waged as they crossed the Land of the Swamp People, skulking through slimy water that came up to her chin, the snakes, the biting bugs, the blazing fires that certainly belonged to enemies, the screams of wounded warriors carrying through the hot, muggy nights—the wrenching loneliness.