She remained in her hole, listening to the roaring of the fires, while the morning light strengthened. The shouts were distant now, coming from beyond the palisade gate. For a brief time, there was silence. Smoke rolled past in waves, borne by the morning breeze; ash, like bits of polluted snow, settled from the sky. A finger of wind flicked ash into a whirlwind, dancing it around. Then it went over to tease the little girl’s hair before it skipped away.
How could the Chikosi have done this? Every trail and waterway was crawling with travelers headed home from the marriage. Someone should have seen a war party of this size. But what better time—assuming you could avoid detection? White Arrow Town was reeling from four days of festivities, Dances, feasts, and games. Everyone was exhausted. With so many people everywhere, they’d believed themselves safe. The thought of an attack wouldn’t have crossed her mind.
A roof crashed as it fell into a gutted house and shot a vomit of sparks into the choking sky.
Moments later, a conch horn sounded from behind. Its mellow note rose on the dirty morning, hanging, somehow mocking. Almost instantly the warriors reappeared, passing like gray ghosts through the smoke haze. They glanced this way and that, bows at the ready, arrows nocked. And then, like mythical beasts, they were gone.
Only silence, the billowing smoke and ash, and the little dead girl’s body remained. How long did Old Woman Fox hide there? When it was over, she could only judge time by the sun: a brown orb piercing the smoke, no more than a hand’s height above the horizon.
Old Woman Fox climbed out when two men appeared, White Arrow warriors, advancing with drawn bows.
“Here!” she called, coughing from the ache in her throat. “Don’t shoot.”
“Matron?” one of the men called. “Are there others?”
“Just me.”
“Go to the gate. It’s safe there.”
She hurried past, coughing against the smoke-tickle in her lungs. Here and there a house had avoided the flames. Corpses and the dying lay scattered amidst the trash that had been left from the feasting in Screaming Falcon’s honor. No one had had time to clean up. The granaries were roaring infernos. Twice the burning granaries made her backtrack. She had to walk wide, shielding herself from the searing heat with her hand.
As she made her way through the bodies—many of them crudely scalped—it began to dawn on her: mostly children, women, and the elderly. The ones who couldn’t run fast. With few exceptions, they had been shot in the back or clubbed from behind. Some still lived, writhing and groaning, the barbed shafts protruding from guts, chests, or thighs. The lucky ones had been hit in the heart or lungs, or subsequently had their heads caved in with a war club.
At the palisade gate, she found a nightmare. This had been the goal of the drive. Here people had crowded together before spilling out the gate, and the enemy archers had closed the circle. From the look of it, they couldn’t miss. A pile of dead, three deep in places, lay in a ring, many bristling with three or four arrows. Some still writhed and moaned; the sight of the moving dead numbed her souls.
She dropped to her knees, staring in horror. Her eyes refused to recognize the warriors, picking their way through the piled limbs, heads, and torsos before charging into the burning town in search of a vanished enemy. Instead she stared at the dead, who watched her from drying eyes, expressions slack, mouths hung wide. And in the pile, the dying writhed, groaned, and twitched, their bodies intertwined with the dead.
The odd question formed: Why are so many killed with our own arrows?
But then, where else would the enemy resupply but by robbing the houses before they fired them?
Later she remembered disembodied voices saying, “They came from the river. Swam in.” “They’ve taken our canoes.” “At least eight prisoners, probably a lot more.”
Someone else told her, “No one has seen the high minko or Screaming Falcon.”
When they came with questions, she just waved them off, saying, “You decide.”
The rest of the day became a walking Dream—like looking at the carnage through rippling water. Somewhere in that glassy quivering memory, she found Sweet Smoke’s body. Half charred by the heat from her burning house and clothing, she looked like clay—and with her coating of gray ash, not quite real.
Is this how the world ends?
Sixteen
A fit of shivering brought young Crabapple awake. In the name of the Ancestors, had he ever been so cold? He groaned, teeth chattering, as he sat up. Most of the leaves he’d piled over him the night before fell away; the rest, brown and crackling, stuck in his hair, and some slipped down his collar, scratching his goosefleshed skin.