Generations of native Albaamaha had denuded most of the immediate forest, using the wood for fires, buildings, and other constructions. In an effort to both control and protect this far-flung settlement, Hawk’s predecessor, High Minko Fire Sky, had sent additional warriors and Albaamaha to construct fortifications, add another level to the mound, and maintain local control. The outposts’s existence had always been tenuous.
Alligator Town lay two long days’ travel downriver from Split Sky City. The location was vulnerable to raiders coming upriver, and from those traveling cross-country through the forests. Mostly the latter consisted of White Arrow warriors from the Horned Serpent River. Only on occasion did the Pensacola from Bottle Town downriver, or Koasati—relatives of the Albaamaha, who lived several days’ journey to the east—dare to strike into Sky Hand territory. They had come to appreciate the consequences of doing so.
As his litter crested the terrace edge, Flying Hawk was greeted by charred devastation. They passed part of the palisade that had fallen outward. Fire had scored portions of the wall that still remained standing. Within, only a few skeletal house walls remained, their sides blackened, roofs incinerated. Corpses, dead dogs, broken basketry, smashed pots, and overturned racks littered the ground. Here and there, broken arrows, scattered shields, abandoned war clubs, and other detritus of war could be seen.
The Alligator Town chief—a member of Flying Hawk’s Chief Clan—had constructed his Chief’s House atop a low mound, little more than waist high. Charred wall timbers, like diseased black bones, were sticking up from the smoking ash. The three-legged stool—from whence the chief had ruled his charges—still stood in the gray ash of the fallen roof. Smoke curled from the check-patterned char.
In the village proper, corn cribs—once cylindrical cane-walled structures set on high poles—were nothing but smoking wreckage. Blackened corncobs were all that remained of the near-record harvest. Even the plaza center pole, the symbolic unification of the worlds, had been burned, though the alternating stripes of red and white could still be seen at the top.
“They were very thorough,” Flying Hawk noted dryly as he was borne into the center of the small plaza. The scattered corpses caught his eye. Partially clad in rumpled and torn fabric, most had been scalped; the round domes of their skulls were now black with dried blood. Others were missing hands or forearms. One sprawled body lacked a head; fragments of the spine protruded from the hacked stump of his neck.
From behind the ash-coated wreckage of houses, solitary people began to converge. They might have been wraiths, visions of lost souls seeking the Westward path toward the afterlife. All were smudged with soot, making them colorless and gray. Their faces betrayed shock and dazed disbelief. Some approached with children clutching at their legs. Terror lived behind their eyes.
“What happened here?” Flying Hawk demanded.
One warrior, a haggard-looking young man, stepped forward. His face was streaked with blackened blood, and his left arm hung limp, as if broken. With his right he pointed toward the portion of collapsed palisade. “They came in there. Just after dark they began digging out the soft dirt. They worked silently, their efforts covered by the rain that fell that night. It looks like they used ropes to pull the posts outward until the very weight of it pulled the binding vines apart and it fell. Our people were awakened by the thump. They were among us before we knew what was happening.”
“What of my chief here?” The man’s name was Stuffed Weasel. In accordance with the appellation, he’d been a short-tempered and perhaps unjust man, but he’d been effective: the sort who balanced determination with pragmatism. Flying Hawk had thought the man perfect for so delicate a job as binding his southern border to Split Sky City. From the look of the corpses lying about, none belonged to Stuffed Weasel.
“They took him, High Minko,” one of the Albaamaha cried in poorly pronounced Mos’kogee. “He was wounded. They tied him and the others together and marched them out.” The man pointed toward the forested hills to the west.
“It’s been four days,” Smoke Shield noted. His eyes were narrowed to slits, as though seeing past the hills to the sinuous Horned Serpent Valley beyond. There, to the west-northwest, lay White Arrow Town, fortified on its terrace overlooking the river.
At this very moment Stuffed Weasel was no doubt hanging spread-eagled from a wooden square where the White Arrow people would heap insult and abuse upon him. Beyond the humiliation, Flying Hawk could well imagine what awaited Stuffed Weasel and the rest of the captives. His tormentors would revel in the torture they inflicted, delighted in the notion that their Power was greater than Split Sky City’s. They would sear the man’s flesh, amputate his fingers, genitals, and ears. Bit by bit they would slice Stuffed Weasel’s skin so that his blood leaked away drop by drop.