People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) (11 page)

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

BOOK: People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past)
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Flying Hawk considered the problem as his canoes closed. The town had been built on a low rise, above flood stage, with fertile soils close by. The place had good access to the western uplands, while cypress and tupelo swamps were located just upstream. The resources could support a larger population, a stronger military presence, but it was difficult to force people to live so far from their relatives and clan holdings. It would be worse after this. Rot and curses, he wanted this place as a southern bastion of Sky Hand authority.
“Be ready,” his nephew Smoke Shield called. A different tension ran through the warriors. Their eyes sharpened as scouts appeared on the bank, waving the all-clear.
“Take us in,” Flying Hawk said evenly.
At his order, the canoes lanced across the roiling river, the first of them driving onto the beach as the warriors piled out. As if demonstrating their proficiency before their high minko, the warriors deployed in a perfect skirmish line, two of their fellows pulling the lightened canoe higher onto the bank. Canoe by canoe, his warriors landed and swarmed up the bank, shields held at the ready, bows and war clubs in their hands.
He felt his heavy war canoe grate as it slid onto the canoe landing. As quickly, the warriors leaped over the gunwales to pull the craft onto the beach. Paddles clattered as they dropped them for bows, shields, war clubs, and lances.
Smoke Shield was standing, hands on hips as he looked up the canoe landing toward Alligator Town. Apparently satisfied with the distribution of warriors approaching the town, he turned toward Flying Hawk and
strode through the beached canoes. The man moved like an agile cat, strength coiled in his smooth muscles. A fiery anger betrayed the calculating passion that burned behind his gleaming black eyes.
I see trouble brewing there, Nephew. Pray that this time you unleash it on our enemy.
Flying Hawk rose from his seat and took his war chief’s hand. His young nephew steadied him as he stepped out onto the shore. Smoke Shield Mankiller, Flying Hawk’s sister’s son, was next in line to follow him as high minko. The war chief had just passed his twenty-sixth winter, and—but for the hideous scar that marked his crushed cheek—would have been a most handsome young man. On this day he wore a spread of red, white, and black feathers in the high roach atop his head. A single warrior’s forelock hung down almost to the bridge of his nose. Three pristine white beads were knotted along its length. The forked-eye design had been tattooed around his eyes; but the red bar across his cheeks had been mangled by the deep scar that left the side of his face misshapen. For the purposes of this day Smoke Shield had painted half of his face red, gathering the color’s Power for war; the other half was black, symbolic of mourning for the dead.
Flying Hawk’s warriors had stopped in a defensive formation, feet braced on the packed sand of the landing. Their keen eyes studied the brush lines on either side, weapons and shields up in case of attack from the ruined village just beyond the terrace. Flying Hawk could see the partially charred walls of the palisade.
“Your litter, High Minko,” Smoke Shield said as porters came forward with his covered seat. Six brawny Albaamaha men lowered the litter to the ground, stepping back so that Flying Hawk could seat himself. He checked his hairpiece to make sure it hadn’t shifted. The ornament was made of thinly beaten copper the length and width of his forearm; a rendering of an arrow splitting a cloud in two. The base was inserted into the
hair bun he’d twisted tightly against the back of his head.
A bright cloak made from flamingo feathers Traded up from the south covered his shoulders, and a large shell gorget decorated with the symbol of his people—a human eye staring out of the palm of an extended hand—hung on his chest. About his waist was a warrior’s triangular-shaped scalp apron, the point of which hung down between his knees. The spotless fabric was bleached to a startling white and contrasted to the stylistic black hawk embroidered on the flap.
Smoke Shield handed him his mace. Chipped from fine chert and nearly as long as his arm, it flared at the top in the shape of a turkey tail, a symbol of his people’s victory over one of the monsters in the Beginning Times, before the current world came into being.
“Let us go and see to the damage,” Flying Hawk said as he settled himself cross-legged in the litter. His men barely tilted the litter as they lifted it to their shoulders and started up the terrace from the canoe landing.
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.
“We must retaliate,” Flying Hawk said wearily, as if he could feel the shifting of Power. The balance had been changed by the ferocity of the attack. He could feel the gods watching him, asking,
“What are you going to do about this?”
“It is late fall, Uncle,” Smoke Shield said, his gaze turning to the southern sky, where the sun was even now low in the horizon. “Most of our men are in hunting camps in the highlands. Our people are dispersed. No one expected a raid this late in the year. Not of this scope.”
“I heard his name,” one of the Albaamaha called out as he pushed past some of the outlying warriors. “He was young, this war chief. Little more than a youth. He wore a medicine box on his back. They called him Screaming Falcon.”
Smoke Shield glanced curiously at the man. “He wore the medicine box? You’re sure of this? It wasn’t just wooden armor tied to his body for protection against arrows?”
The man stepped closer. He might have passed forty winters, his hair going gray; the few remaining teeth in his mouth stuck up as brown stubs. A terrible wound had left a deep scar across his forehead, as if it had stopped an ax sometime in the past. As he came close he dropped to one knee, palms up in the supplicant’s pose. “Great War Chief, I know a shield when I see one. I also know a medicine box. These White Arrow People would not send a mere youth out with such a thing unless they set great store in his Power. I watched, War Chief. His warriors—many of them much older—never hesitated when he gave orders. He might have
been young, but he commanded and received their immediate obedience.”
Smoke Shield shot Flying Hawk a thoughtful glance.
Yes, he’s thinking the same thing I am. Screaming Falcon is no doubt a newly taken man’s name. Who would this young war chief be?
There had been talk about a young man of uncommon promise. He was a friend of Biloxi Mankiller, the White Arrows’ young high minko. Flying Hawk tried to remember the boy. It had been years since he had seen him. Bow Mankiller, of the Badger Clan, had been the lad’s uncle, as well as the acclaimed tishu minko at White Arrow Town. The boy’s mother had been Red Hair, an intelligent and attractive woman. But the boy … All Flying Hawk could remember was a scruffy-looking little urchin. Brown face, large eyes, skinny arms. Little boys all pretty much looked the same.
“Rise, good man.” Flying Hawk made a gesture with his hand. The Albaamo man did, unease in his movement. Not many of his people liked being the subject of such close scrutiny by a high minko of the Sky Hand. “Do not fear,” Flying Hawk added, his voice loud so that all could hear. “More than anything, we need the truth. If we do not know how this was done, we can’t stop it from happening again.”
“They will be saying that even their children can beat us at war,” Smoke Shield groused, his jaw muscles flexing and jumping as his hot gaze cataloged the ruins.
“Screaming Falcon?” Flying Hawk repeated the name. “A very young man, recently named, which is why we have never heard of him. The White Arrows were grooming a boy for the chieftainship. Amber Stone? Was that his name?”
“That’s it,” Smoke Shield agreed. “From one of the White Arrow Moiety clans, as I recall. I remember him from when I was there last summer. The White Arrow brag about the sort of war chief he will be. It is said that this Amber Stone will marry the Chief Clan girl, Morning
Dew, when she finally comes of age. Morning Dew is Matron Sweet Smoke’s daughter.” A thoughtful look cloaked his eyes. “The engagement has existed for some years.”
One of the Albaamaha called out, “They bragged, High Minko! I heard them cry out that this was a wedding gift! That they would kill the last of their captives in celebration of Screaming Falcon’s marriage!”
Smoke Shield stiffened, thunder behind his eyes. The tightening of his jaw made the scar on the side of his head twist into a terrible shape.
Flying Hawk said, “Sweet Smoke’s son, Biloxi Mankiller, was made high minko last year, wasn’t he?”
Smoke Shield appeared to get hold of himself. “I was there for his confirmation last summer. Remember? I thought him young, fat, and stupid. To get a man’s name, it is said that he killed an old Biloxi slave. He reminds me of a dead fish.”

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