“After all,” Two Petals said pointedly, “you weren’t born to it.”
Old White started, fixing his keen gaze on Trader. “Really?”
Trader tried to wave it away. “My past is dead.”
Two Petals laughed, her eyes almost glowing as she studied Trader. “Just like the present. Dead and rotten. Bones. The future is turned to bones.”
“No matter who you’ve killed,” Old White said softly, “that piece of copper will buy you forgiveness.”
Trader swallowed hard, remembering the sounds and smells of his home.
“No, you don’t want to go back,” Two Petals told him. “Not Trader. He’s happy traveling alone, with no name, and no place to call home.”
“Stop it!” he cried, leaping to his feet. He stood at the edge of the stretched hide, watching the rainwater drip onto the wreckage of the collapsed walls. The surrounding trees were wet and dark against the cloudy sky. Rain had stained the exposed rocks on the bluff to the east. His breath puffed coldly in the chill air.
Two Petals’ voice, though low, sent a shiver through his guts. “She never thinks of you. You are gone from her memory. The wistful smiles she has in the quiet moments are for someone else.”
Trader didn’t look back; he stumbled over the fallen wall, walking fast as he passed through the desolate houses. The knot in his throat threatened to choke him. In his panic, even the copper was forgotten.
Fifteen
The smell of wood smoke told Amber Bead he was on the right path as he followed a trail down from the Albaamaha cornfields. Walking through the countryside always irritated him. On the trek, he passed field after field, each worked by a family. Even now, with the corn, beans, and squash harvested and packed to granaries inside the city walls, the extent of his people’s labor was manifest. The stripped cornstalks rattled in the breeze, brown leaves waffling in the wind. Below the dead stalks, rows of bean plants lay hard and withered. The squash vines that laced between the mounded soil beneath the cornstalks had been picked clean of all but the most immature of fruits. Those pitiful remnants had shriveled, blackened, and waited for the spring.
Throughout the long summer months his people spent from daylight to dark tending these fields, sweating in the blazing sun. They broke their backs hoeing, planting, and, when the rains failed, carrying water up from the river. When the rains did come, they spent their time pulling weeds, picking worms and bugs from the plants, and pollinating the squash blossoms. In late summer, they even worked through the night, chasing away raccoons, crows, and other pests.
Then when fall came, they harvested the ears of corn, picked the beans, and snapped squash from the prickly stems. But for a couple of baskets—and what they harvested from their own gardens, cared for between working the fields—it was packed on their backs to Split Sky City. Pack after pack, on aching legs, with pains shooting up their spines, they hobbled into the city. There, they climbed ladders to the high granaries, and dumped their packs. Only to go back for more until the entire yield of the land was locked away, property of one of the Chikosi clans.
Down between his souls, the resentment festered.
This was their land, the one they inherited after emerging from the World Tree’s roots. Here, the Ancestors of their Ancestors had walked. Then had come the Chikosi, and they’d taken it all.
Now, for the first time, Amber Bead had a glimmer of hope. If the Chikosi were shocked, shaken down to their souls, their grip would begin to slip. If they could be lured away, into wars with the Chahta, and perhaps weakened, the Yuchi in the north, the Ockmulgee to the east, and the Pensacola down south would be tempted to strike.
The secret is to keep the enemies of the Chikosi informed of their weakness. Bleed away enough of their strength, and we can either drive them out, or crush them ourselves.
The coming months would tell. Not since Makes War had lost both his life and the war medicine to the Yuchi had the Chikosi suffered such a stunning blow as that inflicted by the Chahta on Alligator Town. It had shaken the Council to rashness. Only the desperate would have dispatched a party of thirty warriors to attack a congregation of Chahta at White Arrow Town. He could only pray that the defeat of Smoke Shield’s party, and the loss of the war medicine, would rattle the Chikosi down to their bones.
Amber Bead had no love for Smoke Shield. The man couldn’t keep his hands off women. How many Albaamaha daughters, sisters, and wives had fallen prey to the man’s rutting lust? While the rumors said he occasionally dallied with a Chikosi man’s wife, he was free to do as he pleased with an Albaamaha woman. Of course there would be nasty consequences if he was caught with a married Sky Hand woman, but no Albaamaha female could deny him. And if she did, Smoke Shield would take what he wanted anyway. If the family protested, they would be given a trinket, a string of beads, or a bit of pottery in compensation.