People of the Thunder(6)

As he considered that, Smoke Shield fingered the deep scar, remembering the blow his brother had given him. But for it, he would have been a handsome man. Then again, why did a man need beauty when he was muscular, and quick of mind and body? Smoke Shield was in the process of living through his twenty-sixth winter. Despite the ugly scar, his face was tattooed with a Chief Clan bar across his cheeks. Forked-eye designs had been tattooed around each eye—the one on the left a little distorted by his long-healed wound. This day he wore his hair in a tight bun at the back of his head. Three little white arrows, the highest honor bestowed upon a warrior, had been stuck through his hair. A single warrior’s forelock hung down over his forehead and was decorated with three gleaming white beads. He wore an eagle-feather cape over his bare shoulders, and a white warrior’s apron had been tied at his waist, its long tail hanging suggestively down between his knees.

Smoke Shield stood at the northeastern margin of Split Sky City’s great plaza. Just to his left the high minko’s mound rose up in a flat-topped pyramid of earth to support the mighty palace where he and Uncle Flying Hawk held sway. Off to his right, and slightly behind him, the tishu minko, a man called Seven Dead, chief of the Raccoon Clan, had his palace. The plaza itself was flat, dominated by the stickball grounds that ran east to west just behind the red-and-white-striped Tree of Life—a pole that represented the great tree at the Spiritual center of their world. To either side of that were clay chunkey courts where stone disks were rolled before men attempted to spear them with lances.

Despite the throngs of passing people, busy with their lives, Smoke Shield’s attention was fixed on the line of wooden squares that stood empty along the plaza margin. He stood before one in particular. Made of hickory logs, the uprights set deeply into the earth, it was one of five. The square was composed of two uprights with crosspieces lashed across the top and bottom. It left a man-sized frame that would support a human body. Captives were tied inside the open square—wrists to each of the upper corners, ankles to the lower—so that their naked, spread-eagled bodies could be beaten, burned, mutilated, and otherwise abused.

On either side, Smoke Shield could see the other empty squares. Not so long ago, men had hung from them. He frowned, thinking of the captive who had died within the empty frame before him. His name had been Screaming Falcon. He’d once been the White Arrow Chahta’s most promising young war chief.

Until I plucked him right out of his house, along with his high minko and the Chahta Priests, and took him prisoner. Smoke Shield had also burned White Arrow Town to the ground and stolen its matron: Screaming Falcon’s young wife Morning Dew. Morning Dew had become the matron the instant Smoke Shield killed her mother during the raid. Her brother, Biloxi Mankiller—who had also hung from one of the squares—had been the Chahta high minko. In a stroke, Smoke Shield had decapitated the White Arrow leadership, and dealt the Chahta a stinging blow.

He smiled as he remembered the glorious procession his warriors had made as they arrived at Split Sky City, marching their captives up from the canoe landing, past the Old Camp Moiety Mounds, and around the sacred tchkofa, the Council House where the Sky Hand Mos’kogee deliberated and conducted their governmental business. Yes, that had been a glorious day.

And it would only be the beginning!

He reached out, fingering the wood, remembering Screaming Falcon’s misery and horror as he had hung, right here, in this very wooden square. The young man’s face had looked lopsided from his broken and swollen jaw, and his flesh had been mottled, blistered, brown, and cracked from where split-cane torches had been pressed against his skin.

“I should have paid better attention to you,” Smoke Shield whispered to the empty wood. “Instead I was too preoccupied with your wife.”

Pus and rot, what a disappointment. He’d planned the whole White Arrow Town raid around stealing Morning Dew. Once she’d looked at him with the same disdain she’d have given a worm in a fruit. After he’d taken her from Screaming Falcon, burned her town, captured her high minko brother, and wrought every other indignity upon her, she’d just surrendered herself to him without a fight.

What was the point of trying to break a woman who was already compliant?

“I expected more of you, Morning Dew.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, across the corner of the plaza to where his first wife’s house stood. These days Heron Wing owned Morning Dew. The thought of it rankled. Not so much the loss of his slave, but the way of it.

He turned back, peering closely at the heavy wood square, seeing the dark patterns where blood had stained the wood.