As Petaga listened, he found himself increasingly astonished. The acrid smell of smoke had yet to vanish from Spiral Mounds, and Aloda could speak in this way? As if he wanted the brutal system that had destroyed his own village and killed over half of his people to continue?
"Uncle," he interrupted, "Badgertail killed your own brother to feed Tharon's need for blood. What are we talking about?"
Aloda stared at him unblinking. ''You, my dear nephew, are talking about revenge. / am talking about survival."
Petaga leaned down with fire in his eyes. "I won't stand witness to the murder of any more of my people. Uncle. I'm fighting. Will you join us or not?"
"I can't."
Petaga straightened with a slow deliberateness. "That is your decision?"
"It is."
Petaga tramped toward the doorway, his anger rising to near hatred. Memories of his father's murder replayed in his soul. And until death stole over his exhausted body, he would remember the look in his mother's eyes as she knelt at Jenos' log-lined crypt and Hailcloud walked up from behind, the supple black cord to strangle her in his powerful hands.
Petaga motioned for Hailcloud to leave before him, then grabbed the door frame and turned for one final time. "This day will bring you woe. Uncle."
He went out into the bright noon sunlight, but as he left the mound, he heard Aloda shout: "Maybe I should just disband my village now? Eh, Petaga? It will happen in the end anyway!"
Mother Earth baked in a blinding heat wave. Sunlight lanced through a layer of clouds and fell in stifling sheets of gold across the com and squash fields belonging to the Blue Blanket Clan. Those first fragile green leaves, ripe with so much promise, were wilting before Green Ash's eyes. The water level in the creek had gone so low that the irrigation ditches had dried up. Already people had begun carrying baskets from the creek with which to water the crops. Two lines of women moved with the efficiency of ants, one going to the creek, empty baskets propped on top of heads, one returning from the creek to pour the contents of brimming baskets into the long, ridged rows.
"Oh, First Woman," Green Ash whispered, hoping that Primrose, who labored on the next row, could not hear. "What are you thinking? We can't survive without rain."
She propped her chert-headed hoe on the ground and stretched her aching back. Her unborn child had grown very large now. Often the back pain kept her awake all night. She had fashioned new skirts, short and loose-fitting, to ease the discomfort during the long workdays. The sunny yellow color made by boiling the fabric with lichen brightened her soul, but nothing helped the pain very much. Her naked breasts hurt, shining full and coppery beneath the glare of the sun. This was her first child, so she knew little of what felt normal and what did not. Women with large families told her not to worry, that every baby nearly broke its mother's back just before birthing.
She wiped her sweating forehead. Insects buzzed in glittering clouds above the cornfield; their spiraling columns curled upward into the sky as far as she could see. Mosquitoes, flies, and gnats had been tormenting her since before dawn.
Wearily, Green Ash bent over her task again, using the hoe to thin the com plants. Last week they had been able to perform the same labor with mussel-shell hoes—but not anymore. There had been no rain. The rich soil had transformed itself into mudstone before their eyes. They needed stone for stone. Each swipe of her hoe made a crackling sound, sharp, as ominous as clods of dirt being shoveled into a grave.
Checkerberry worked twenty hands away, slamming her hoe into the hard soil with a vengeance. Her elderly back seemed to have hunched more in the past week. Her gray hair slicked down over her head, accentuating her bulbous nose and undershot, toothless jaw. Since Nightshade's arrival, Checkerberry had been unnaturally quiet, as though waiting for the end of the world.
Over the western bluff, a thunderhead built up; clouds piled atop each other in gigantic opalescent tufts. "Look, Aunt," Green Ash called joyfully and lifted her arm. Primrose glanced up. "Perhaps it will rain after all." She laughed gaily, hoping to pull Checkerberry from her gloom.
The old woman bashed her hoe down with all of the force she could muster. The earth groaned beneath the blade. "No," she said tersely, "it won't."
Primrose's boyish face tensed before he cast Green Ash a comforting look and went back to work, his blue-and-tan dress straining over his shoulders.
Disheartened, Green Ash peered at the clouds, praying Thunderbird would prove Checkerberry wrong. Sucking in a breath, she attacked the weeds again.
Twelve
As dawn seeped beneath the window-hanging of Tharon's room, a gray veil fell over the Tortoise Bundle, which sat on the platform beside his bed. He had placed it there the night before, curious whether the bundle would affect his Dreams. It hadn't. The spirals around the edge had faded so much that he could barely see them, but the eye in the center of the red hand had focused on Tharon, as though alive and studying him.