The Broken Land (13 page)

I gaze around. Dozens of my relatives stand at the edge of the firelight. Their backs are to me. They will have the opportunity later, if the matrons take the issue back to their clans for a vote, to express their opinions. For now, they may listen, but no interference will be tolerated.

All of the children are gone. The leather privacy curtains of the living chambers have been drawn closed so that I cannot gaze into the sacred eyes of the False Face masks that hang upon the walls. For now, even the Spirits of my clan have turned their backs to me. Despite the curtains, the moans and cries of the sick inside the chambers carry.

I scan the matrons around the fire. Mother is allowed to be here only because she is standing in for my ill grandmother, Matron Jigonsaseh.

“Go ahead,” Matron Washais of the Wolf Clan says. Her elderly face has a shriveled appearance, like a winter-dried plum. She’s pulled her red-and-black cape tightly around her frail body.

I shift on the floor mat, trying to find a comfortable position. With my hands and feet bound, it is difficult.

“The Dream always begins the same way,” I say. “I can’t feel my body, just the air cooling as the color leaches from the forest, leaving the land gray and shimmering. Then Brother Sky goes leaden, and the patches of light falling through the trees curve into bladelike crescents. Finally, I begin to sense my skin. My fingers work, clenching to hard fists, unclenching. Beneath me, a great cloud-sea moves, rising and falling like waves. The sea is punctured by a great tree whose roots sink deep into the water world far below. As though the birds know the unthinkable is about to happen, they tuck their beaks beneath their wings and close their eyes, roosting in the middle of the day. Insects that only moments ago twisted through the air like tiny tornadoes vanish. Butterflies settle upon the clouds at my feet and hide themselves in the mist. An eerie silence descends. A … a voice calls my name, and it is as though my heart has crumbled to dust and sifted through the cracks in my soul, leaving my chest hollow as a drum. Then Morning Star suddenly flares in the darkening sky, and fantastic shadow-bands, rapidly moving strips of light and dark, flicker across the cloud-sea.”

Matron Washais whispers to Mother, who nods and says something to Matron Agwidi of the Turtle Clan.

Morning Star’s appearance is always an omen. She is very powerful and rescues starving villages in times of famine.

Matron Washais says, “Continue.”

Fires blaze down the length of the house, keeping the sick warm, cooking food. For a man who has spent the past moon sleeping in the open forest, it’s hot. Very hot. “I become aware that I am not alone. I see the gray shades drifting through the air, surrounding me, and from a great distance I hear voices echo. I suddenly understand that I stand with the last congregation. The dead who still wait.”

Washais’s old eyes tighten, but no one speaks.

“As I look down through holes in the cloud-sea, an amorphous darkness rises from the watery depths and slithers along the horizon. Strange curls of black, like gigantic antlers, spin from the darkness and rake the bellies of the Cloud People.”

“Horned Serpent,” Matron Agwidi whispers.

My bound hands tremble. Horned Serpent tried to destroy the world in the Beginning Time. They must all be wondering if he’s coming to try again.

I squeeze my eyes for a moment. The images are as powerful now as the last time I Dreamed them. “Elder Brother Sun’s blazing face begins to darken. After an eternity, his last flash forms into a brilliant diamond, and blindingly white feathers sprout from his body. Elder Brother Sun is flying. Flying away into a black hole in the sky. Despair fills me. It is the end of all life … unless I do something. I know this. I don’t know how, but it is up to me to stop the death of the world.”

Mother turns slightly. She has not looked directly at me during the entire council meeting. Firelight reflects in the black depths of her eyes, but there is something else there, too: belief vying with disbelief.

I clench my jaw. My voice comes out too strong, sounding urgent. “Like an animal struck in the head with a rock, I stagger as my body wakes, then comes to life in a raging flood. Just as I turn to speak to the Shades … a child cries out. The sound is muffled and wavering, seeping through the ocean of other voices. It sounds like the little boy is suffocating, his mouth covered with a hand or hide. Fear freezes the air in my lungs. As though he has his lips pressed to my ear, a man orders, ‘Lie down, boy. Stop crying or I’ll cut your heart out.’ The Dream bursts, like shards of ice striking a rock. For a time, there is only splintered brilliance. Then I—”

“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

T
he 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.”

“He did it out of concern—”

“Concern? Don’t be ridiculous. He has never cared for this nation. Has he ever added to your clan? No. By all rights, he should be forced to bring home twice as many captives as a warrior with children. Your son doesn’t even know what that hard shaft between his legs is for!”

Grandmother’s contemptuous voice shocked like a hammerstone to the skull. If the blood in Taya’s veins stung, she could only imagine how Sky Messenger must be feeling.

“He realizes his failure in that regard and with your permission is willing to …”

Koracoo, Speaker for the Women of Yellowtail Village, murmured something else, but Taya couldn’t hear it at all. She picked up her pace. She needed to get closer, to hear better. When in council, Koracoo always spoke in soft tones, which made it hard to hear her if a person stood more than a few hands distant.

Taya stopped just outside Grandmother Kittle’s compartment, glanced through the tiny slit between the bark slabs that made up the wall, and surveyed the chamber. Grandmother must have ordered the area around her chamber cleared, because Taya couldn’t see any of her Deer Clan relatives standing close by. Speaker Koracoo sat across the fire from Grandmother, while Sky Messenger stood in the rear. He was tall, and his shoulder-length black hair was longer than was proper for a warrior, given the constant state of mourning in Bur Oak and Yellowtail villages. He’d clenched his teeth so hard his jaw was off center. He clearly did not wish to be here.

Carefully, Taya pressed her ear to the wall. The damp elm had a sweet tangy scent.

Grandmother said, “Your son is guilty of treason. I don’t care what story he invented to cover his cowardice. How dare you even suggest a marriage between Sky Messenger and Taya? It’s ludicrous. I would never consent to such a thing!”

Taya’s heart thumped so loudly it drowned out the voices in the longhouse. She’d been a woman for four moons. She’d had many suitors, all of them very high status, as befitted the granddaughter of the high matron, but no one, including grandmother, had yet suggested a mate to her. Sky Messenger was much older than Taya, twenty-three summers. Not only that, since he’d been back a flurry of activity had ensued—council meetings, arguments, violent clashes in the plaza, more council meetings. He was an Outcast! Taya’s thoughts raced, trying to figure out what she might have done to so offend Grandmother that she would consider marrying her to a traitor?

Speaker Koracoo responded, “Sky Messenger is not a coward. He freed the captives and left the war party because the Spirits of the dead
demanded
it of him. After the captives were free, his Spirit Helper came to him and led him out into the wilderness, where he was tested and afflicted with Spirit Dreams. Dreams of our future, Kittle. And believe me, his visions were not pleasant, his sojourn not easy. There is a great darkness coming. We must heed his visions, or we will all be destro—”

“Your son, a Dreamer? Ha! But then, Odion was never a normal boy.”

Taya quickly ducked to look through the slit. The sight of Grandmother’s beautiful oval face, her dark eyes glittering savagely, made her go cold inside. Many summers ago, before the birth of Taya’s mother, Grandmother Kittle was renowned as the most beautiful woman in the entire Standing Stone nation. Though she had now seen forty-four summers pass, men still cast admiring glances at her, and she brought many of these men to her bed. Grandmother’s indiscretions were wonderfully legendary.

Sky Messenger said something she couldn’t hear. His tone of voice, however, was insolent.

Grandmother laughed. “Finally, the deputy war chief shows his face again. I must say, I like this much better than the holy man charade.”

“I never claimed to be a holy—”

“Enough!” Koracoo sharply turned to Sky Messenger and ordered, “You will not use that tone with the high matron of our nation. Do you understand?”