People of the Silence(20)
“It’s not my fault,” Cornsilk replied. She threw all of her weight into grinding the meal, crushing it to fine flour. “I think he’s just hungry.”
“Ravens move in flocks. This one comes to you alone. That’s not natural.” Leafhopper gave Cornsilk a sidelong glance. “He hasn’t talked to you, has he?”
“What!” Cornsilk slammed her handstone down into the meal. Pink flour puffed up and swirled in the breeze. Ravens only spoke to Ant people who were witches. She stared disbelievingly at Leafhopper. “Of course not!”
Leafhopper lifted a shoulder and short black hair fluttered over her fat cheeks. “I was only asking.”
“I am not a witch, Leafhopper. You know I’m not!”
Leafhopper pounded the kernels until they cracked and fragmented, then rocked her handstone over them and pounded some more. Eager to change the subject, Leafhopper tipped her head to the gray-haired women weaving baskets. “Brave Boy told me a story about old Pocket Gopher today.”
Pocket Gopher sat next to Clover, her dress—gray and white in diamond patterns—clinging to her skinny frame. She had a perfect triangular face with a long beak of a nose and deeply set black eyes. Pocket Gopher had never borne a child, but made up for it by disciplining everybody else’s. When Cornsilk had seen six summers, Pocket Gopher caught her hiding out in the bean field, eating the tender new shoots. The old woman had grabbed a dead cactus limb and beaten Cornsilk over the head all the way home. She scared Cornsilk—and every other child in the village.
“Brave Boy has seen only five summers. What could he know?”
Leafhopper whispered, “He said one of the young warriors standing guard saw her out in the burial ground at midnight on the full moon.”
Cornsilk’s handstone halted in mid-downward swing. “Doing what?”
“The warrior didn’t say, but I’m sure the old hag is a witch. She’s so mean to people, she must be. Do you remember what happened to Sand Melon?”
Cornsilk wet her lips nervously. “Yes.”
Sand Melon had miscarried in her sixth moon, and when the birthing women came to care for her, they’d found corpse powder sprinkled all over Sand Melon’s house. Sand Melon had accused Pocket Gopher, screaming that the old woman had been the last person in her house before Sand Melon had returned home. But no evidence could be found.
Still, people watched Pocket Gopher closely now, and if she had been seen in the burial grounds … Blessed thlatsinas! Perhaps she was a witch.
“I don’t believe it,” Cornsilk said. “People accuse me of being a witch, and I’m not.”
“I know that.”
Cornsilk pushed the flour to the side of the grinding slab and scooped more coarse meal onto the fine-grained slab. “It’s just the weather. People are worried.” She pounded the meal.
“The weather and the raiding,” Leafhopper corrected.
“They go together. Each summer without rain makes things worse. More and more witches are being accused and killed. And I…” She tilted her head at the blasphemy. “I’m not sure they are to blame.”
Leafhopper sat back on her heels and wiped her meal-covered hands on her dress hem while she gazed at Cornsilk. “Then who is?”
“I don’t know! Maybe … maybe the First People at Talon Town. We send them corn and pots and everything else we make. All that, and they’re supposed to talk to the gods so it will rain. They’re the ones who always start the wars. Not only that…” Cornsilk leaned forward to whisper, “I heard that Chief Crow Beard keeps corpse powder in his chamber to use against his enemies! Maybe he’s the witch!”
Leafhopper set the black-and-white bowl at the bottom of her grinding slab and pulled the coarse red meal into it. She had clamped her lower lip between her teeth, thinking.
Cornsilk kept grinding.
There were two kinds of “people” in the world: First People and Made People. The First People were descendants of those who had bravely climbed through the four underworlds, led by a blue-black wolf, and emerged from the darkness into this fifth world of light. All First People lived in Straight Path Canyon. The four clans of the Straight Path nation were, on the other hand, Made People. The Creator had “made” them from animals to provide company for the First People after their emergence. The Bear Clan, the Buffalo Clan, the Coyote Clan, and Cornsilk’s own people, the Ant Clan, had been the creatures their names implied. Through the miracle of the Creator’s divine breath, they had changed into humans. But the First People saw them as inferiors because they had once been animals, while the First People had always been humans.