People of the Silence

One

Sun Cycle of the Buffalo, Moon of Falling Snow

Sternlight’s moccasins went silent behind her.

Young Fawn turned and saw him drop to his knees in the middle of the trail, his white ritual shirt aglow with starlight. Huge sandstone boulders surrounded him. Many sun cycles ago they had broken free from the towering canyon wall and tumbled into the valley to stand like monstrous guardians along the Turning-Back-the-Sun trail. Kneeling in their midst, Sternlight looked pitifully small. Long black hair fluttered around him as he rocked back and forth, his face in his hands, his necklace of copper bells jingling. His cries resembled a lost child’s.

“No,” he kept whimpering. “No, please…”

He had stopped twice in the past hand of time. At first, he had pounded his fists on the ground. Now he wept inconsolably.

Young Fawn knew little about the trials of priests, but even she could tell he was weary beyond exhaustion. He had been praying for sixteen days, eating only cactus buttons, and begging the ancestor Spirits to help him. Now, it seemed, the ghosts would not leave him alone.

Young Fawn leaned against a rock and folded her arms on her pregnant belly. Golden owl eyes sparkled in every hollow of the dark sandstone cliff, watching, wondering. To the south, fires gleamed. Fourteen large towns and over two hundred smaller villages lined the canyon walls. The priests would be rising, readying themselves for morning prayers on this critical day of the sun cycle. The fires cast a wavering yellow gleam over the massive sandstone bluff on the opposite side of the canyon. It looked dark and brooding this early, but when Father Sun rose, the sandstone would turn so golden it would appear molten.

Young Fawn sighed. The tang of sage scented the wind, but the fragrance did little to soothe her fears. Sternlight spoke softly to someone, and apparently received an answer he did not wish to hear.

“But why must I do it?” he wept. He lifted his head and looked to his right. As he shook his head, his long black hair flashed silver. “Why me?”

At the age of twenty-seven, Sternlight had been Talon Town’s Sunwatcher for nine winters, and his reputation had grown with each one. Chiefs as far away as three moons’ walk relied upon his advice. Young Fawn had seen their messengers arrive, packs filled with extraordinary gifts. Over the cycles, stories about Sternlight’s wealth had become legend. It was said that twenty rooms at Talon Town brimmed with his fortune—and some dared to whisper that only witchery paid so well.

Young Fawn nervously smoothed her palms over her turkey-feather cape. The brown-and-white feathers glistened in the light. Witches—her own people called them sleep-makers—had great Power. By jumping through a hoop of twisted yucca fibers, they could change themselves into animals, and they used rawhide shields to fly about, spying on people. The most terrifying sleep-makers raided burials to gather putrefying corpse flesh, which they dried and ground into a fine powder. Once the soul had left the body, only corruption and wickedness remained. Corpse powder concentrated that evil, and when sprinkled on someone, could cause death or madness.

Young Fawn had been captured in a raid ten summers ago, but she remembered the sleep-makers among her own people, the Mogollon, who lived far to the south. The Straight Path people called them Fire Dogs, for the Mogollon believed that they had originally come to earth in the form of wolves made from gouts of Father Sun’s fire. The Mogollon and the Straight Path people raided each other constantly, taking slaves, stealing food. Her father, Jay Bird, was the greatest and most powerful Mogollon chief. Sleep-makers had continually tried to kill him.

… And the earth had quaked each time, as if the ancestor spirits who lived in the underworlds were enraged by the foolishness of the witches.

Young Fawn reached up to touch the small bags of sacred cornmeal she wore around her throat. On occasion, when she missed her family, she thought about those sleep-makers and wondered if their Power had grown over the long summers. Was her father still alive? The earth continued to quake, more often of late, and she took each tremor as a great omen that he had survived yet another attempt on his life.

The Straight Path people, however, took the recent rash of quakes to mean that their ancestors were growing more and more angry with the greed and malice that filled the hearts of their descendants.

Young Fawn glanced at Sternlight. Could he be a sleep-maker? She had to admit that strange things did happen around him. His older sisters had vanished before they’d turned fifteen summers, and no traces had ever been found. Though rumors persisted that they had been taken slave by the Mogollon, Sternlight’s cousin, the great warrior, Webworm, had suggested a dire possibility. Sleep-makers lived very long lives—at the expense of their families. When a sleep-maker grew ill, or wanted to extend his life, he used a spindle to extract his relative’s heart and put it in his own chest.