People of the Sea(73)
“What’s happening?” Buffalo Bird demanded. “Just grab onto that next—”
Kestrel pulled the ulna from her pack, braced her feet and spun around. His mouth gaped when he saw the stiletto in her hand. He choked out “No!” as she threw all of her weight into driving the uma into his chest. She felt the weapon go deep. Blood spattered his buckskin shirt and soaked her hands.
Buffalo Bird let out a cry of shock and grabbed for her as he fell backward. They rolled down the slope entwined like lovers, while dust puffed out around them. In the back of her frantic mind, Kestrel wondered why Cloud Girl hadn’t erupted in shrieks. She kept waiting… waiting for the brothers to hear the ruckus and come running. They toppled over brush and rocks before they landed hard against a tree trunk. Buffalo Bird caught a handful of Kestrel’s long hair and tried to drag her off of him, but she wrapped her legs around his and slammed her fist into the end of the ulna, driving the sharp point deeper. He gasped and half sat up to stare into Kestrel’s face. Blood bubbled on his lips.
Slowly, he sank to the grass, then went limp. Kestrel rolled to the side. She put a bloody hand over her mouth and sobbed silently. On the hill, Buffalo Bird’s brothers had stopped laughing. Confused voices rose. One of the men left the fire and went to the edge of the hilltop to peer down. Against the golden aura of the blaze, he looked huge.
Kestrel jerked the dan quiver from beneath Buffalo Bird, but the shafts were splintered. One of the finger laces on the atlatl was still wrapped around Buffalo Bird’s fingers. Kestrel tore the lace away before she stumbled to her feet and ran for Cloud Girl. When she grabbed for the rabbit-fur sack, Cloud Girl mewed softly, as though asking if Kestrel
were all right. “I’m fine, my daughter. Hold on. We have to run, fast!”
She raced around the base of the hill, holding the baby in a death grip in her arms.
She couldn’t risk following the trails anymore. She would have to chance the midst of the dark forests. Twigs cracked beneath her moccasins as she jumped a fallen log and dashed for the black heart of the trees. No moonlight penetrated there.
Behind her, someone shouted. Then a roar of angry voices split the night. She could hear men running.
The dream… the same dream… always the same.
It was a place that no one went to. No one but himself. Because only he still cared about that murdered baby.
The willows and reeds grew thick along the banks of the Goosefoot Marsh. A low terrace of sandstone, no higher than a man’s head, encircled the water. Cycles of wind and rain had scoured out dozens of shallow rock shelters, and in the bottom of the shelter at the northern end of the marsh, his baby brother lay beneath a pile of earth and stone. That grave drew him like a starved animal to the scent of blood.
Sunshine warmed Lambkill’s face as he braced a hand against the cool stone and followed the narrow path around the marsh. Three hands below, wasps crawled over the shore, flapping their translucent wings while they gathered mud for their nests. Hundreds of the small round structures hung by slender strands of mud from the roofs of the shelters. This place, with its soft sounds, eased his tormented soul. The murmurs of great white pelicans and ducks came from the reeds. Every so often, a line of pelicans beat their wings in unison to drive fish into the shallows, where they could be plucked from the water. Farther out, green-headed mallards flipped their tails up to fish for minnows.
As the trail curved around a dense patch of cattails, Lambkill saw the grave. He stopped and took a deep breath of the fragrant air. Mint veined the cracks in the shallow overhang, and a thicket of ferns fringed the front, creating a sight of extraordinary beauty. A big green bullfrog sat at the edge of the ferns, its throat puffing out in time to its croaking.
“I’m back, little brother. Have you been lonely?”
Lambkill had piled up the stones that marked the grave. Since that day, twenty years before, moss had sheathed them. He approached reverently, Singing a soft Song to the little Spirit that lived beneath the rocks. His people believed that the souls of dead babies would be reborn in the bodies of the next children to grace the family. Lambkill’s father, Blue Warrior, had fathered no more sons. Lambkill had the duty to give that tiny dead boy a body to be. reborn into. “Don’t worry, little brother. I am to marry. Soon you will be with me again.”
Lambkill stroked the mossy rocks and remembered.
His parents had fought. Lambkill had run into the lodge and found his father, bent over his little brother’s bed, strangling the baby.
Something had happened to Lambkill on that day. At the sight of the tiny blue boy, something in his soul had broken clean in two, like a dry suck beneath a heavy hoof. He’d screamed and jerked the baby from his father’s hands and carried it out into the sunshine, rocking it back and forth in his arms. He … “Lambkill?”