People of the Weeping Eye(114)

“Not everyone has received a gift like this,” one of the voices in her head said.

“But I don’t want it!”

She realized that Old White had heard. He cocked his head, as if waiting for more.

She looked away, fixing instead on the packs between them.

After a while, Old White asked, “We’re coming up on the first rapids. There’s a Kaskinampo town there. Anything I should know about it?”

The coming sights and sounds played through her. People haggling, Trader offering packs of prime beaver. She could sense the growing confusion, the smoky air of the Kaskinampo town, and a thousand questions buzzing around her like an angry swarm of churning insects.

“It will be terrible,” she said of the swelling panic within. “No laughter. None at all.”

“We were thinking about hiring a couple of canoes. Remember how the Inoca towed us upstream?”

“Yes, slow us down immeasurably,” she replied, dreading the idea of the world moving even faster around her.

She sighed, bending over to trace her fingertips through the water. The feel of it passing added to her sense of unease. “I still don’t know how it does that.”

“Because it is running away from you. Trying to get as far away as possible before you reach Split Sky City.”

She closed her eyes, seeking the Spirit of the river, only to feel it shift ever so slightly, just beyond her ability to touch it. Why did it elude her so? What did the river have to fear from her? She wouldn’t even be near its waters when they reached Split Sky City.

“Can you hear me?” she called into the depths. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Maybe you’re not asking the right question,” Old White said from his seat in the rear. “Myself, I’ve never talked to rivers. But then, perhaps I wasn’t smart enough to know that I should.”

“It has such a short Spirit,” Two Petals told him. “All compressed, bursting to be longer.” In the end, her time with this river would be so brief. Shorter now that Yuchi paddlers would speed up the entire world. Did they know that by dint of their muscles, they were moving the entire earth? If she told them, would the knowledge sap their energy?

She said, “The only time a man can move the entire world is when he isn’t aware that he is doing so.”

Old White nodded, his expression turning pensive.

She glanced past him, seeing Trader in his birch-bark canoe following in their wake. The rising and falling of his paddle was regular as a heartbeat. With each stroke, it captured a bit of sunlight on the blade, and sank it into the river. She could see sunlight sparkling on the water, and wondered if that, too, was reflected from beneath the surface, from the thousands of paddles over the years that had stirred captured bits of light into the water.

She studied Trader over the distance and remembered the image of their naked bodies locked together.

Not yet. But the time will come. He has much to teach me.

Trader was still far back in time, consumed by his worries and guilt. She had seen his interest in her. He was a man, after all. But the wariness behind his eyes had built a wall between them. She knew how it would slowly come unraveled, to fall with one last surprise.

Oh, I know you well, Trader. She both anticipated and dreaded the moment their paths would finally intersect. In her souls’ eye she saw two rocks, flying through the air, clacking loudly, and then glancing off in different directions to land in the hands of their throwers.

From his perspective, however, he was but moments from the initial throw, just beginning his whistling path through the air. Like a stone, he had no idea what he would hit, or where he would finally fall to earth, or the shape he would be in when he landed. Seeing from the last to the first, Two Petals could pity him.

“Yes, we’ll see terrible times,” she said.

“Good,” Old White answered, thinking she was still speaking of the Kaskinampo.





Twenty-two

Old White glanced back at Trader as they nosed into the canoe landing below the rapids. A child had already spotted them, and ran toward the nestled houses calling a warning. The settlement had been built on a low terrace just above flood stage. People emerged from dwellings, or looked up from the cook fires, mortars, and other tasks they were occupied with. Others stepped out of a fortification behind the village.

Trader seemed only slightly nervous, obviously having at least a little faith in Old White’s sleight to protect his copper. During the days when Two Petals had passed her moon, they had laboriously chipped away most of the stone, hammered nodules flat, and beaten the metal into a thick square sheet. For the time being it was wrapped in a durable cloth bag with heavily stitched shoulder straps.