People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) (17 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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Amber Bead raised the plate and blew to cool the
fish. “There will be chaos like we have not seen since the day the Chikosi lost their war medicine to the Yuchi, and the high minko named Makes War was captured and tortured to death in a Yuchi square.”
“You call that chaos?” Paunch asked. “The Chikosi replaced Makes War with Bear Tooth, and you’ll recall the sort of monster he was. It was a blessing when he burned to death that night. Things were better when Fire Sky was made high minko in the aftermath. What could the Chikosi have been thinking to confirm that murdering Flying Hawk in his place?”
“Smoke Shield carries the war medicine.” Amber Bead circumvented the tirade.
Paunch stared at him in incredulous silence as Amber Bead plopped a piece of fish into his mouth.
Finally Paunch said, “That’s insane! The war medicine is their heart! Lose it, and it will be like driving a burning stake through their bodies. They’ll be terrified that Power has turned against them! This could be the moment we’ve waited for!”
It would take but a single runner, someone who could pass into White Arrow Town and spill the whole thing like a stew at Screaming Falcon’s feet.
An excitement like he’d never known began to burn in Amber Bead’s breast, the fish forgotten in his mouth.
“Yes, Grandfather,” Whippoorwill cooed. “Do this. Watch our people Dance with fire. You will see Chikosi become Chahta, and the scalps of our people will be buried in a sack in the forest. A Councilor will die, and a new leader will rise in his place.”
“What do you mean?” Pauch turned worriedly to his granddaughter.
Her eyes, however, had fixed Amber Bead in their bottomless stare.
A Councilor will die?
“Then, the Chikosi will blame me?”
“Fear not, Mikko, you shall die an old man. But you balance on a thin rope. Below you, monsters snap in the
boiling brown water. Choose this path, and freedom might come for our people. Oh, yes. But at what price?”
“What are you talking about?” Paunch demanded, clearly unsettled.
Amber Bead stared into the girl’s eyes, like looking into an endless void. He felt himself falling, and reached out to brace himself, letting the plate of fish fall from his lap, where it spilled on the floor. An unbidden image of ruined villages, scattered corpses, and broken houses formed. He could see dogs, foxes, and crows feeding on the half-rotten bodies.
“Gods,” he whispered. He blinked, breaking her spell, and then rubbed his eyes. “What was that?”
“Life after the fall of the Chikosi.” Her voice sounded distant and muddled, as if he’d heard it through a hollow log.
“I don’t understand.”
Her eyes seemed to swell again. “Until my sister arrives, the fate of our people lies in your hands, Mikko. How do you choose?”
 
 
S
omeone turned the earth upside down. The air had to move somewhere else to make room,” Two Petals declared as she stared up at the great mound jutting into the sky atop the Cahokia bluff. The slanting sides of earth rose to a dizzying height, the building high atop the great mound looking small, the palisade like fuzz along the mound’s lip. “Did you bring me here to see all those ghosts?”
“No. I brought you to see a woman.” Old White reached down into the canoe, pulling his wooden pack from inside the hull. He struggled with the weight, happy to have Two Petals help him slip his arms through the straps and settle it onto his back. A cold wind blew dark clouds out of the northwest and sent ripples of murky
water to pat the sandy canoe landing. No less than twenty canoes had been pulled up on the beach, two of them belonging to Traders who had called greetings as they stowed loads prior to pushing off.
Old White patted his belt pouch, sure that it was snug at his waist. He looked at the trail zigzagging up the steep bluff. His aching bones didn’t relish the climb. Trees had started on the slope, a circumstance that once would have been intolerable. The sand here was black, filled with the ash of a thousand long-gone campfires. Broken pieces of fire-cracked rock, bits of pottery, and other trash were scattered about. The place reeked of old urine and feces.
“So this is the great Cahokia?” Two Petals asked.
“What’s left of it.” Old White reached for his staff and started forward, the white feathers fluttering in the gusty wind. He shivered as the cold ate through his hunting shirt. “It’s almost time for buffalo robes.”
“Too warm,” Two Petals replied, her eyes fixed on the stupendous mound rising above the bluff. Atop it, a wooden palisade barely masked the great building that rose three stories into the sky. “Could men really build such a thing? Did they Dance as they raised Mother Earth to Father Sky? It would have taken wings, beating in the sunlight. They would have blackened the sky, slipped sideways in the wind. Can you hear their voices, shish, shish, shish? Over and over.”
“I would have liked to have seen it when the lords of Cahokia were at their greatest,” Old White told her. He gestured with his staff. “The palace was once five stories tall. And the palisade, that was plastered with painted clay that caught the sunlight and shone like polished shell. Once this place ruled most of the world.”
She walked beside him, head cocked, listening to something he couldn’t hear. “Because of that, you became great. That has to be worth something.”
Old White shot her a sidelong glance. “Who are you talking to?”
“Her name is Lichen. She lives here.”
“Who?”
“Lichen,” she told him crossly. “This woman walking along with us.”
Old White followed her pointing finger, seeing nothing but trampled grass beside the trail.
Two Petals had gone back to listening, saying, “Yes, I’ll be careful.”
“Careful of what?” Old White asked.
“Black Tooth.”
He grunted. Everyone was careful of Black Tooth. Word must have traveled as far north as her village. “What else does this Lichen tell you?”
“Oh, about when evil Tharon lived here.”
“You’ve heard of him?” He shot her a glance, happy that she was having a good day. He had been worried that she’d float away to wherever her Contrary soul went. For the moment, her imaginary friend and the giant building atop its brown grass-clad mound filled her world.
“They burned him as a witch. Lichen says that he broke Cahokia’s power. That after that, in the reign of Petaga, a great war broke out.”
“There has always been war,” he grumbled. “It runs in our veins like fire. It is the heat that warms our flesh.”
She said nothing as they started up the winding trail from Cahokia Creek landing. Old White dedicated himself to the climb. He made the first switchback and stopped, puffing to catch his breath. “The first time I came here, I trotted up this like a yearling deer. Age is an inevitable curse.”
“Curses are never inevitable,” she murmured. Her hands were moving in a sort of fluttering agitation that he’d grown accustomed to. Sometimes she’d tap her fingers in a perfect synchrony.
He turned his attention to the city. Gods, even in his lifetime he had watched Cahokia deteriorate. How many times had armies sacked this place since the days
of Tharon and Petaga? How many peoples had conquered the once capital, thinking that they would restore the Power here?
“Once Power is gone,” Two Petals said, “it flies like the birds. North and south, settling here and there. You’d think there would be droppings under the branches.”
“Do you hear my thoughts?”
“Never.”
He gave her a worried glance and attacked the last of the trail. Stopping at the top, he stared. Old sections of palisade had fallen, the wood rotting. On the flat before him, grass waved in the wind where it hadn’t been beaten flat. Small copses of trees had sprung up between the tall square mounds. Had he not been here before, he would have thought the landscape hilly, but each hillock had once supported a grand building. Only a few temples remained standing; most mounds were topped with low piles of debris, their fallen structures looted of logs for building materials or firewood. Occasional patches of brown corn stalks rattled in the wind, but even they looked ratty, many having been taken for fuel.
“It’s huge,” Two Petals announced. “See the people! Hear the Singing?” Then she pirouetted around in a circle, her arms spread wide. “So many people. All Singing. The world is alive with Song.”
He shook his head, seeing the vacancy that now filled her eyes. A shiver prickled along his skin, more than just the cold wind with its threat of rain. The change came on her so quickly.
“Look at this,” she chimed, clambering over the rotting logs of the fallen palisade. “It’s all green and alive.” They were passing between the great mound and a line of four smaller mounds capped with saplings that grew out of the debris. “Who is playing chunkey over there?” She pointed at a forlorn cornfield. “Look how he’s dressed. Have you ever seen such colorful feathers? He could be made of living copper.”
If a chunkey court had once existed there, it was long gone. “You’re seeing ghosts, Two Petals.”
“They glow,” she said, rapt in wonder. “I think they’re made of sunlight.”
He glanced up at the skulking clouds. A little sunlight would be nice. He led the way forward, glancing down to see a partial human skeleton eroding out of a hole where a badger had disturbed the soil. The brown bones were flaking away, the skull crushed, dark orbits flattened, yellowed teeth like sordid pearls in the broken jaws.
Had the great lords ever dreamed their grand city would come to this? He looked up at the sparse palisade surrounding the temple atop the great mound. Black Tooth, the chief who lived there, belonged to one of the Dehegihan tribes, but most of his people were farther to the west now, living on the prairie edge of the Great Plains. The man was reputed to be something of a madman, but he still organized a Trade fair here every summer solstice, as if living on the legends of the past. Most of his energies went into maintaining the tall building atop the mound, as if that grandeur alone could maintain the Power of Cahokia.
The path ran past sunken storage pits and the rubble of long-decayed houses. Potsherds gleamed in the bottom of the path along with flakes of stone and bits of charred bone and corncobs. Cahokia was a place of trash.
They passed the base of the great mound, entering the grand plaza. To the right was a square mound topped with a thatch-roofed farmer’s dwelling much smaller than the splendid temple that had once graced its heights.
“Are we going up?” Two Petals pointed at the ramped stairway leading to the tiered heights of the great mound.
“Our destination lies there.” He pointed across the plaza to the south, past two low mounds. There a conical mound stood west of a larger square mound topped by a thatched structure. It was to the latter that Old White was headed.
“Charming place, I’m sure.”
“She has her ways,” Old White replied.
Two Petals’ gaze sharpened, and he could see her struggling. “Why did we come here?”
Old White smiled to himself. “To finish something started long ago. To say good-bye. To close a circle.” He paused. “And to see if she can help you.”
“Circles, circles,” she chided, slipping away again. Her eyes had taken on that vacant look. “Round and round. Like the world. Nothing straight.”
Old White glanced back at the great mound, seeing a lone figure high atop the stairway watching them. “No, nothing straight.” He led the way out onto the plaza, the grass at the side of the trail rustling as if trying to grab his legs.
The wind battered at them, almost knocking him sideways.
Not as spry as I used to be.
The pack seemed to weigh a ton. His cloth pack swung back and forth; it might have been maliciously trying to counter his balance. Did he feel the smooth stone within humming in time to the wind? How many years had he carried it, the weight forever reminding him of the past?
Should have left it behind years ago.
But the stone had become part of him, his burden and curse.
“Only the young walk with a sprightly step,” she said in a singsong voice.
“If only you knew.”
“I know everything.”
“Must be comforting.”
“Like a leaf in the wind.”
They followed the path in silence to the foot of the mound. Though dwarfed by the great mound, it was still huge. But being close, he could see slumping along the east side where a patch of earth had slid down to leave a scar. Virgin levels of clay and colored soil could be seen in the exposed profile.
Old White led the way to a stairway consisting of logs laid into the steep side of the mound. Some had
been recently replaced, as evidenced by their color, and disturbed earth marked where one had been dug out. He was winded by the time he made it to the top.
As he stopped to catch his breath, Two Petals climbed up beside him, looking back across the grand plaza with its abandoned mounds. The vista only emphasized the great mound with its three-story palace to the north.

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