“Do you know this man?” Washais interrupts.
“I do. He hurt me. A long time ago. Twelve summers.”
Washais does not blink; she just stares, evaluating, perhaps wondering why I do not tell her more. I honestly don’t recall most of it. Only one other person knows the fragments that I do, and she is one of the four people on earth that I would willingly, without a second thought, die to protect.
“What happens next?” Mother asks. Her expression is stoic.
I exhale hard. I can’t tell what Mother’s thinking or feeling. “I see the flowers of the World Tree, made of pure light, fluttering down, disappearing into utter darkness. The last thing, the most recent addition to the Dream—” I expel a halting breath before I finish—“is that a great hole opens in the cloud-sea beneath my feet, and I fall. Wisps of cloud trail behind me as though I’ve snagged them with my feet. I fall and fall, plunging through eternal darkness surrounded by flowers of pure light.”
“Do you ever strike the earth?” Mother asks.
“I just keep falling … as though Great Grandmother Earth is fleeing away from me.”
I meet each woman’s gaze. My eyes must be frightening, for several shrink away from me. Every moment a man lives is inexorably and deeply bound to the instant of his death. Every breath. Every heartbeat leads him up that shining path. I see that now. I see the path in their eyes. Perhaps when all is said and done learning to die is more important than fighting to stay alive.
Washais murmurs, “You understand that our village must pay a price for what you have done?”
“Yes, Matron.”
“And you must pay a price to your own clan.”
“I will do whatever the Bear Clan asks of me.”
Washais waves a hand. Mother rises to her feet and signals to the four warriors waiting before the entry curtain. “Take him outside while the council deliberates.”
Two men, men I have known since I was a child, stalk forward, roughly haul me to my feet, and drag me through the entry out into the cold afternoon wind. Storm clouds have massed over the treetops. Rain is falling. Gitchi quietly trots at my side, looking up. His yellow eyes are filled with love, as if he knows my souls are struggling to stay alive.
Thirteen
The crack of a palm against flesh pierced the slippery elm bark of the longhouse. Taya jumped as if it were she who had been slapped, and not Sky Messenger.
Grandmother Kittle’s seething voice seemed to shiver the air: “I will not rescind the death sentence on his head! You should have already killed him. It is your responsibility, Koracoo. Instead, you dare to bring a traitor into my presence!”
“The Women’s Council asks only that you hear his vision; then you may …” The voice faded until it was too low to hear.
Breathing hard, Taya slid through the narrow gap between the rear wall and the inner palisade. She needed to find a place where she could hear, but not be heard or seen. If Grandmother Kittle, the High Matron of the Ruling Council of allied villages, discovered Taya eavesdropping, Taya would be pounding corn with a wooden pestle until her arms fell off.
Taya took her time and continued easing along the wall toward Grandmother’s compartment at the far end of the Deer Clan longhouse. She had just enough space between the wall and the palisade to walk, and thank the Spirits the ground was wet after the rain. Quiet. It felt spongy beneath her moccasins.
As she moved, she stroked the wall tenderly. She had seen fourteen summers. This was the only longhouse she remembered. It stretched five hundred hands long, forty hands wide, and fifty hands tall. Porches roofed the curtained entries on either end of the longhouse. Inside, a line of twenty-five hearths glittered down the length of the house like a strand of amber beads. Each hearth was shared by two related families, whose compartments stood on either side of the hearth. In total, there were fifty compartments, twenty-five on each side of the longhouse, which housed two-hundred and sixty-two people. And the Deer Clan longhouse was only one of four houses in Bur Oak Village. The entire village contained over one thousand people. Taya loved it. She knew every dip in the plaza where water pooled, every piece of bark that stuck out from the palisade walls and snagged her soft doeskin sleeves, every gap in the longhouse walls where a girl could secretly peer inside to watch, or listen. Though she was no longer a girl, she still cherished such childish activities.
“I cannot believe your impudence!” Grandmother’s enraged voice carried. “Do you think me a fool that I would listen to his pathetic tale of woe? Sky Messenger released thirteen Flint captives. We needed those captives to replace our own dead relatives.”