People of the Weeping Eye (North America's Forgotten Past) (44 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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“Only a braver man than I would want a Powerful
Hopaye
looking so closely at his souls.”

Trader looked like he’d just swallowed mold.

Old White shot an evaluative look at Two Petals. She kept closing her eyes, and periodically, when passing knots of people, covered her ears.

“How are you doing?” he asked, leaning toward her.

“So noisy,” she whispered. “Everything is screaming.”

Old White cocked his head, hearing only the low mutterings of the warriors, the soft padding of feet on the trail, and the distant barking of dogs.

This could all go wrong. If the Yuchi Kala Hi’ki was the wrong kind of man, the sort who was preoccupied by his own petty concerns, it might give his reputation a huge boost to declare them enemies. Such an individual could gain prestige among his people, creating theater with the bloody, drawn-out executions of foreign witches.

Old White tightened his grip on his staff.
Let us pray the Power of Trade still holds here.

Twenty-six

T
wo Petals stumbled, trying to protect herself from the onslaught. Keeping her feet took all of her concentration. If only the confused voices babbling around her souls would be still! Some cried out in panic; others hissed warnings. Beyond those, a growing chorus of sounds and images spun around in the darkness. She glanced this way and that, catching phantasms of colored light in the darkness. At the peripheries of her senses, she could feel the blind man, could almost make out his bound eyes as he watched them approach. They were closing the distance between them with each step; his Power drifted through the very air, carried on the evening breeze. It lingered like a recent touch, hidden there in the odor of smoke, waste, and human sweat.

Panic rose, bubbling around her confused and frightened souls. She clapped hands to her ears and threw her head back, filling her lungs to scream.

A shimmering darkness slammed down around her. The sensation was akin to being slapped with a wet blanket. Mercifully, it blocked the circling sights and sounds. “Go away,” she pleaded. Old White’s question came through as an incoherent babbling.

“He’s right here, with us,” she tried to explain. The dark veil—thicker than any night—pressed down around her. She peered out at it, aware that it blocked anything beyond her immediate surroundings.

He’s placed a wall around you,
a disembodied woman’s voice said in her head.
He fears you.

Fears me? The very notion of it left her unbalanced. Why would anyone fear her, of all people? Her own terror was all consuming.

He doesn’t want your Power to run free.

After climbing a steep slope, they passed through a gate in a tall palisade that perched on the edge of the bluff. Two Petals imagined it in greater detail than she could see, given the gloom.

What place was this? She reached out with her hands, trying to part the gloom. In her fingers, the sooty darkness felt like soft fabric. Desperately, she ripped it aside.

Sensations, like a rupture in a dam, poured through. A howling of sound, like a great wind, blew over her. She stumbled. Thousands of souls rushed toward her from every direction. The people, gods,
thousands
of people, they all hummed with thoughts and life. She clamped her hands to her ears, tried to shut out the buzzing activity that swarmed around her like an impenetrable fog of insects.

Let it go,
a voice told her.
See them. Hear them. Become them. You only need to set yourself free.

She took a breath, frightened and horrified, reaching out with her senses in an attempt to escape the press that threatened to drown her. Bits of her souls were batted this way and that. Visions—the compressed memories of a lifetime—whirled around her like autumn leaves in a gale: a woman feeding a baby, two men arguing, a wife scolding her husband, a teenage girl cooking a pot of beans, a warrior in a sweat bath, a man coupling with his woman, a child crying from fever, and a thousand other images flooded through her.

“Too much! Too much!” she cried, seeking desperately to block it all out.

She blinked, trying to absorb it all: swirling lights, faces, bodies, souls. So many demands. Too many. Her
world whipped around, ever faster and faster, spinning like a top. She felt herself whirling in the tornado. Whirling, ever faster, falling … into gray oblivion.

“W
hat happened to her?” Trader demanded, dropping to one knee beside Two Petals. The Contrary had crashed to the hard ground with a soft thump. She lay with one leg bent, an arm sprawled out.

“I don’t know,” Old White said, crouching beside him. “She just said, ‘Too much,’ then seemed to lose her balance and fall.”

The Priests had turned, looking back in the light of the torches.

“Carry her,” Old White ordered as he glanced around at the muttering warriors and growing crowd of locals. “Here, I’ll take Swimmer.”

“Is she ill?” one of the Priests asked.

“I don’t think so,” Old White told him as he took the squirming Swimmer from Trader’s arms. “She was complaining of the noise, but I didn’t hear anything unusual for a city at this time of night. My friend can carry her. Let’s go find your Kala Hi’ki; perhaps he can determine what’s wrong with her.”

Trader heard the warriors growl darkly behind him. Gods, this was turning into a nightmare. He scooped Two Petals up and tossed her easily over his shoulders. The feel of her awed him; her muscles were locked, rigid. Her body barely flexed in reaction to his hurried steps. Catching a glimpse of her face, he saw a frozen rictus, her eyes rolled far back in their sockets.

Two Petals’ collapse had taken him by surprise, his attention on the city itself. The fortifications atop the steep bluff were tall, well made, and capable of withstanding an assault. The high archers’ platforms gave good fields of fire down the incline surrounding Rainbow
City. Around him were bent-pole thatch-roofed houses, looking like overgrown mushrooms atop thickly plastered walls. People were flocking out, watching, and talking to each other in low voices.

Trader gave a quick nod to Old White and resumed his pace. Their route took them west along the northern edge of the plaza. Passing a high moiety house, the Priests led them to a grand building atop a square earthen mound on the northwest corner of the plaza. Perhaps three times his height, the mound was coated with a layer of light-colored clay that looked pale in the torchlight. The Priests led the way up a ramped stairway, passed through a low palisade and into a yard. Fierce panther heads had been carved from the guardian posts on either side of the entrance.

As the warriors ducked through the gate, the Priest gave them strict orders, pointing to either side. The warriors hastily divested themselves of their loads. “You three, come with me,” the Priest added.

Trader managed to linger long enough to see a sweating warrior carefully set his medicine box on the ground beside Old White’s pile of Illinois bowls in their net bag. Then, like water through a hole in a cup, the warriors vanished through the gate.

Did he dare try to scoop up the medicine box?

“Trader?” Old White called from the temple doorway.

He turned, reluctantly, casting glances behind him as he carried Two Petals’ wood-stiff body.

Inside, the temple was elaborately furnished. A fire crackled, and illuminated masks that hung from the walls. Hide-covered benches lined the walls; beneath them beautifully carved wooden boxes, burnished clay jars, and intricately woven baskets had been placed. A low wide clay altar rose behind the fire; and on the back wall hung a beautifully crafted image of a warrior, a turkey-tail mace in one hand, a severed head in the other. The relief had been crafted from a great single
piece of wood, the image carefully painted. Parts of it were clad in copper. Shells and pearls had been inlaid. Real feathers hung from the apron.

The wall to the left was dominated by a huge wooden relief, the center of which was a spiral: three spinning wedges within a yellow sun disk. The spaces between the curving wedges had been left open. Surrounding the spiral was a ring that contained six copper moons evenly spaced; the area between them had been painted black and was dotted with white stars. The perimeter was a series of oblong white circles.

A competing relief hung on the opposite wall; this one consisted of two great rattlesnakes carefully carved from wood, their bodies intricately detailed in yellow, red, and white bands, while oval-shaped black portals—the doorways to alternate worlds—had been rendered along the serpents’ sides. In the center, the two snakes faced each other, large eyes done in copper, mouths gaping and filled with sharp teeth. Long tongues flicked out into the empty space between them that represented the opening to the Underworld.

The floor was of packed white clay covered with fine rush matting that had been interwoven with strips of fur. On either side of the doorway they had entered was an image of the sun carved from wooden planks, each clad in shining copper that reflected the firelight like rays of reddish gold light. Just below the ceiling, all the way around the room, shelving held a line of human skulls.

Just so mine doesn’t end up there.

He walked forward, lowering Two Petals’ wood-stiff body to the floor before the great fire. The war chief had taken a position guarding the exit. One of the Priests disappeared into the hallway leading to the back. The other stood watching, his arms crossed over his chest. The expression on his face was anything but friendly.

Blood and dung! There’s no escape from this place.

Trader placed his hand before Two Petals’ nose, feeling her warm breath. He could see the whites of her
eyes behind her thinly slitted lids. Her hair draped the floor in a swirl.

“Two Petals?” he asked, patting her cheek. “Are you all right?”

“She is not,” a raspy voice said in Trade Tongue.

Trader looked up. His eyes widened, and he swallowed hard. An old man had stepped out from the rear. While he wore a white triangular apron, the exposed skin of his bare chest was covered with scar tissue, the glassy kind that came from fire. A piece of neatly folded white fabric had been tied around the ruin of his eyes. Sometime in the past, his nose had been sliced from his face, leaving two oblong holes for nostrils. No fingers remained on his right hand. The gray hair, pulled back, was pinned to hold a shining copper headpiece that depicted a stylistic rendition of a tall mace or war club.

The old man stepped forward, sure of his footing. Blind he might be, but he walked right to them and stopped an arm’s length from Old White. He seemed to inspect the Seeker, his head held high. “Who are you?”

Old White set Swimmer on the floor, and Trader called him over, gesturing for him to lie down. Old White, his staff unencumbered, replied, “I am Old White, sometimes called the Seeker.”

“Ah, the Seeker! I have heard of you.” The blind man cocked his head. “What have you found?”

“A great many things. Some are wonders, others more terrifying than your worst nightmare.”

No humor filled the blind man’s voice when he said, “You would do well to avoid my nightmares, Seeker.”

From the looks of the man’s body, Trader could agree.

“Accompanying me is Two Petals, the young woman lying on the floor. She is a Contrary.”

The blind man stood silently, digesting that. After a time he said, “That might explain a few things.” A pause. “She has a poor handle on her Powers.”

Another silence, then Old White said, “The third person in our party is only known as Trader. We come
here under the Power of Trade; upon that I swear and bind us.”

“What is your purpose with the Tsoyaha?”

Old White shifted. “Only to Trade for strong bodies to paddle us upriver and then to portage into the headwaters of the Horned Serpent River.”

He considered that. “A traveling man must have a destination.”

“We do, Kala Hi’ki.”

A faint smile crossed his scarred lips. “Do not treat me like either an idiot or a simpleton. My body might be a wreck, but I assure you my wits are as sharp as they were when I was young. Your young woman called to my Dreams over a moon ago. I have had glimpses of her from Cahokia all the way to just inside the palisade. Why have you brought her here?”

“I spoke the truth, Kala Hi’ki. We are just passing on to the south.”

“To a mysterious destination. And, I am told, with the Split Sky war medicine box and some heavy content.”

Old White’s eyes narrowed. “The box came to us in the Kaskinampo lands.”

The blind man turned to Trader. “And do you have a tongue, Trader?”

“I do.”

“Where are you from?”

“The far north. I have brought packs of furs, medicine plants”—he winced—“some copper, and other things.”

The old man considered. “You are Sky Hand.”

How does he know that?
Trader felt his stomach fall. “I was born there. I have been away for many seasons.”

“How many?”