People of the Raven (North America's Forgotten Past) (26 page)

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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

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But he wouldn’t. He wasn’t that brave.

Twenty-seven

T
he deep blue of dawn dappled Dzoo’s face, waking her, but she didn’t open her eyes. She lay on the sand, her bound hands in front of her. A few steps away, near the spring, men talked in low voices. She smelled smoke, but there was something else in the air: a cold dark scent, like the air from a deep cave that never sees light.

Coyote? Is that you? I’ve felt your hunger pulling at the edges of my soul.

Someone breathed.

Dzoo opened her eyes. The talking ceased.

Four men crouched around a small fire with cups of tea in their hands, staring at her. Ecan sat on a blanket to her right. Across the dark hills, campfires sparkled and blinked as tens of warriors passed in front of them. Dzoo examined the positions of the sentinels.

Ecan propped his elbows on his knees and bent toward her. He had coiled his long black hair into a bun on the left side of his head and pinned it in place with an ornately carved deer-bone pin. Shell and polished bone beads flashed around his throat, and rings glittered on every finger. He wore his usual long white cape and knee-high moccasins decorated with wolf tails. She thought him a handsome man, with his firm nose and green eyes the color of rain-soaked leaves.

In a soft voice, he said, “I finally remember you.”

Dzoo tested the bindings on her wrists. The sea-grass cord had eaten into her flesh, leaving raw bloody sores.

The Starwatcher smiled. “I’ll never forget the night the tattooed warriors ran into Fire Village, killed your parents, and took you. I recall every detail. We were celebrating the Spring Deer Hunt.”

Long-ago images flitted across Dzoo’s soul: Old Man Spots sprinkling Fire Village’s plaza with sacred seashells … the boom of the drum, slow, patient, leading the gods into the flickering firelight … six of them, masked figures with antlers, swaying and dipping, their feet pounding out the heartbeat of the world … then, out in the darkness beyond the plaza, hideously painted warriors rising up with spears …

Fire Village—the bright myth of her childhood. One that had gone boneless, empty, after a few lonely summers among the Striped Dart People on the great grassy plains to the far east.

“The muscular warrior,” Ecan said thoughtfully, “the one with the stars on his cheeks, swung you up under his arm and ran away with you.”

Dzoo’s heart ached for Pearl Oyster. Hoarsely, she answered, “I remember that night, too. You Danced ahead of me in line, and not very well as I recall. You were always clumsy, Ecan.”

The corners of his mouth barely turned up. “Are the stories true? Did they take you to the Daybreak Land where the barbarian Striped Dart People live?”

“They did. But do not call them barbarians, Starwatcher. Doing so implies a superiority you do not have.” Dzoo sat up and forced her bound legs out in front of her. “Were I you, Ecan, I would be asking questions about tomorrow, not yesterday. I would want to know about the partner you are Dancing with.”

“What partner is that?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you feel his cool breath upon your cheek? Isn’t that feathery touch in your stomach a warning?”

“Of what?”

“That you are Dancing with Death, Starwatcher. It will finish winding itself around you very soon now. Are you prepared?”

Wind Woman caught the edges of the hide he sat upon and flipped them around his moccasins. “Were I you, I wouldn’t speak that way. You’ll terrify my warriors. They have already begged me to kill you.”

“Then do it,” she said tiredly. “My presence no longer matters. Your son was the missing piece. The future is cast, Starwatcher. Oddly, it was you who tossed the final gaming piece. You didn’t kill him, you know.”

“Kill who? My son?”

“The puppy. It was dark; you only wounded him.Your cruelty has
cost you the future. Rain Bear has your son, and he is well on the way to destroying you.”

His composure strained. She saw it in the way the lines around his eyes deepened. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you have lost your son forever. You will never see the boy smile at you again. Never share those moments you had always looked forward to. Caress the corpses of your Dreams, Starwatcher; they are about to rise and dissipate like smoke.”

He didn’t look like he was breathing, but he bluffly said, “Do you think Rain Bear values your life so little?”

“He will not exchange the boy for me.”

He leaned closer, as though speaking for her ears alone, and the dark green wells of his eyes glistened. “It will be interesting to see what it will take. Will a single lock of your hair work? Or will it require your right arm? Perhaps a circlet from your skull?”

Dzoo didn’t even try to control her laughter.

“You find that amusing?”

When she caught her breath, she added, “Yes. I used to think you were a clever adversary.”

“And why don’t you now?”

“If you torture me, send a piece of my body to Rain Bear, you will solidify the Raven alliance. What they may not do for him, they will for me.”

The rich scent of baking codfish drifted from the warriors’ fire. Her empty stomach knotted. On the horizon the last Star People glimmered.

He watched her thoughtfully. “That’s all the more reason to kill you immediately, as my warriors wish.”

“Before you do that, perhaps you should ask your chief, Cimmis, if
he
wishes me dead. In fact, while you’re at it, ask him if he wishes to exchange the famed Healer, Dzoo, for a measly boy. Go ahead, Dead Man, ask.”

The muscles beneath Ecan’s left eye began to quiver. He stared at her for a long time.

When his warriors started whispering, he got to his feet and walked a short distance away. He seemed to be studying the guard silhouetted on the hilltop to the east. Soft yellow light painted the horizon behind the man.

For over a finger of time, Ecan stood rigid, staring eastward as if he could see all the way to Cimmis in Fire Village.

When he walked back, he dropped to his knees less than a handsbreadth from Dzoo. His eyes had gone cold. “They say brave men
lower their voices when they speak your name, Dzoo. I think that by the time this is over, you will lower yours when you speak
my
name.”

Dzoo leaned toward him and whispered, “I have learned a truth that you have not, Ecan: Love and Death are the most intimate companions of all. Their eyes are forever locked, because neither dares look away.
That
is the only thing I fear.”

He frowned, as though confused, then rose and stalked toward the campfire. As he neared the warriors, they leapt to their feet, expecting orders, but Ecan passed without a word.

His warriors muttered to each other, then gradually sat down again and picked up their conversations.

Dzoo curled onto her side to watch.

He stood alone in the dawn, his fists balled and trembling at his sides.

E
vening Star dipped a cloth in a bowl of warm water and continued washing the scratches that covered Tsauz’s face. The dead puppy lay across the boy’s lap, its dull eyes half closed. Tsauz’s shoulder-length black hair, unwashed for days, hung around his oval face in a stringy mass. His blind eyes kept jerking toward different locations in the forest when the guards moved. Rain Bear had assigned no less than thirty men to surround the boy.

“Is that better, Tsauz?” she asked in the cultured voice of a North Wind matron.

His fingers sank deeper into the dead puppy’s fur, but he said nothing.

They had just finished the trek down the mountain to Sandy Point Village after the ceremonial. People had packed the trail; each one wanted to be close to Tsauz—most for the purpose of killing him. Others, who had witnessed the Blessing of the Moon that had fallen on the boy, had the glazed eyes of desperate worshippers. Several fights had broken out when people leaped for the boy and the guards had to beat them back.

Evening Star thanked the Spirits that the storms had passed over, leaving a clear starry sky, but the temperature barely hovered around freezing. Every breath she exhaled frosted in the cold air.

Roe sat across the fire from them. She had been gradually adding wood to keep the blaze going. Her infant son, Stonecrop, slept at her feet, his body wrapped in a bundle of blankets. Five paces away,
Rain Bear, Dogrib, and Pitch stood talking. Their gazes kept straying to the camps. All around Sandy Point Village and down along the beach people lay rolled in blankets and hides. A few fires glimmered against the darkness.

Food was becoming a concern. The fishermen had managed to kill a whale and tow its carcass in to shore. It had taken the edge off, but it wasn’t enough. In addition to the fights on the way down, they’d heard grumbles about how little food they’d had at the ceremonial.

“Tsauz,” Roe gently asked, “why don’t you let me take Runner and lay him by the fire where he’ll be warm?”

“No!” He held tight to the dead puppy.

Evening Star exchanged a worried glance with Roe, but said, “Don’t you think you should get some sleep? It will be morning soon.You’ve been up all night.”

“I’m not tired.”

A handsome boy, he had full lips and large dark eyes. In fact, he looked a great deal like his father. She had to wonder: Did that extend to his soul as well?

“What about his head?” Roe asked. “Father said he took some hard knocks on the fall down the mountain.”

“With everything else, I haven’t had the luxury of really examining it yet.”

“Let me do that.” Roe stood, and long red hair flowed around her as she walked around the fire and knelt beside Tsauz.

“Tsauz, tell me when this hurts.” She tenderly combed the boy’s dirty hair with her fingers, then began to probe his skull for injuries.

Tsauz sat perfectly still.

Roe’s brow furrowed. “He has one really large lump on the back of his head, and a few smaller ones.”

Evening Star finished washing a deep puncture wound on Tsauz’s throat—he must have struck a branch as he rolled down the mountain—and dropped her cloth into the bowl. At least his face and arms were clean. They’d also given him a clean shirt and moccasins to wear. The brown knee-length leather shirt looked tawdry compared to the fine black-and-white hide shirt he’d been wearing, but it was the best they could do.

“Let me feel,” Evening Star said. “Where are they?”

Roe touched each, and while Evening Star examined them, she watched Tsauz’s face. His eyes tightened a little when she touched the large lump at the rear of his head, but other than that, he seemed oblivious.

Roe waved a hand in front of Tsauz’s eyes. “How long has he been blind?”

“Since my mother died,” Tsauz answered, and pulled Runner against his stomach. Evening Star hoped he wouldn’t squeeze so hard it would tear the sutures where they’d sewed the puppy’s insides in.

Evening Star stroked his arm. “What happened? Did you injure your eyes?”

“No, I …” He paused as though trying to decide what he could safely say. “My mother died … and I stopped seeing.”

Evening Star sat back. “Were you there when it happened, Tsauz?”

He wet his lips. “Before Red Dog dragged me out of the lodge I saw her with her hair on fire.”

As though the boy’s words had painted perfect pictures, her soul could see it all happening: the fire, the screams, the desperation on his mother’s face.

“I’m sorry, Tsauz.”

Tsauz hugged his dead puppy.

Stonecrop stirred at their voices and began crying.

Roe said, “If you don’t need me any longer, I think I will take Stonecrop back to our lodge, feed him, and put him to sleep.”

“I’m sorry I kept you so long.”

Roe smiled absently, gingerly picked up Stonecrop, and got to her feet. “I will see you both later. A pleasant evening to you.”

“And to you.”