People of the Morning Star (19 page)

Thirteen

The damp clay sank with each step Matron Columella took. She’d come to inspect the progress of the new mound her Evening Star House lineage was raising on the river’s high western bluff. The heights overlooked both the broad expanse of the Father Water and the endless sprawl of Cahokia where it stretched across the floodplain to the east. Given the elevation to which the new mound had already risen, Columella was exposed to the breeze blowing in from the west; it tugged playfully at her bright yellow skirt, heavy as it was with its decorative shell and copper beads. They glinted in the sunlight and had been sewn to the fabric in an Evening Star pattern. She had thrown her cloak back out of respect for the warm morning sun. Her hair was fixed in a bun and secured with an ornately carved eagle-bone pin.

Columella’s brother High Dance Mankiller, high chief of the Evening Star House, gave her a sidelong glance, refusing to betray his distaste for the short caricature of man who struggled to keep pace beside her. The dwarf called Flat Stone Pipe waddled precariously over piles of soft clay where they’d been dumped by the endless line of laborers. To do so, he had to windmill his arms for balance, his short legs almost flailing.

High Dance bit off an irritated curse. He was a handsome man entering his forties, tall, muscular, immaculately dressed in a yellow-and-black apron. He was everything that the dwarf was not.

“Building a mound,” the dwarf said, “is like creating an empire.” He turned his attention to the long line of laborers as they climbed the ramp, panting. Sweat streamed down dirty chests and shoulders. The closest man gave them a wary glance, slowed, and shifted his burden basket to touch his forehead respectfully.

Columella gave him a faint nod of acknowledgment and watched the man plod wearily forward and dump his basketful of damp black clay atop the thick layer of white sand. So far the struggling line of humanity had managed to cover half of the new mound top with a knee-deep layer of silty clay.

Immediately behind them, another twenty or so men tamped the black clay, using flat-bottomed logs like giant pestles to ram the basket-loads into a compact and flat surface.

The construction of a stable mound was an art, and it was here that Flat Stone Pipe, a noted engineer, excelled. Plain dirt piled into a pyramid would last only as long as it took the Tie Snakes in the Underworld to call a heavy rain. As soon as the soil became saturated, the sides of the mound would slump down into a gooey mess. Instead, a complex layering of loam, topped with clay, topped with sand, topped with loam, topped with clay was used. Loam provided most of the fill. Clay of just the right consistency was used to create a mostly waterproof cap. Sand acted to absorb any water that infiltrated past the overlying clay caps and let moisture slowly dissipate.

Where they stood atop the growing charnel mound, Columella could just make out the lumpy texture of distant forest to the west. Between that far tree line and the main Evening Star complex’s twenty-five mounds, palaces, and temples, lay a sea of houses. They’d begun as tens of independent small villages that had grown into one another to create chaos. Each “center” boasted a cluster of Council Houses, temples with their tall poles, and granaries. Around them what had been farmsteads were surrounded by a patchwork confusion of garden plots.

We should have planned better.
But who could have foreseen the constant and massive influx of entire peoples?

The air carried the redolent scent of a thousand fires as morning breakfasts were cooked, charcoal was burned, and potters fired their ceramics.

Evening Star City’s great plaza stretched immediately to the north, with Columella’s pitch-roofed palace atop its steep-sided earthen pyramid at the south end. To the east, just below the bluff, she could see the river’s wide expanse, its silt-laden waters catching sparkles of sunlight. Men bent their backs, driving pointed paddles into the water as they propelled an endless procession of canoes back and forth. From her vantage point, the east-bank landing thronged with activity, the distant shore littered by the parallel ranks of beached canoes. Even as she watched a raft of logs was being towed to shore just up from River Mounds City. Floated down from somewhere in the north by enterprising Traders, the logs would be muscled up on the bank. Then one by one or as a group they’d be dickered for. Cahokia was constantly in need of timber for construction, carving, firewood, roofing, house walls, and a hundred other needs.

Behind the landing, River Mound City’s tall buildings jutted from their palisade-topped mounds. Surrounding them were the Council Houses, warehouses, and the cluttered sprawl of the city’s great port. A smoky morning haze hid the normally visible heights of distant Cahokia where Morning Star’s palace jutted from the broad floodplain.

“Mounds are not just piles of dirt, old friend,” she told Flat Stone Pipe. “They are a re-creation of the world itself, Mother Earth reaching toward Father Sky. Each serves as a portal and a platform, a means of transporting between all three worlds. A gateway, if you will.”

Flat Stone Pipe nodded, his attention fixed on the disappearing layer of white sand as another of the long line of laborers dumped his basket of black clay beside its predecessor. Immediately a swarm of women began stamping the clay flat with their feet. Behind them the men followed with their logs to tamp the clay into a compact layer.

He said, “Clay to seal, sand to drain. And from my practiced eye, the thickness of the layers is perfect.”

“Why did you call us here?” High Dance asked. He’d never really cared for either the dwarf or the influence the little man had with Columella. And she hesitated to elicit her brother’s certain reaction by a reminder that Flat Stone Pipe had sired her firstborn son, Panther Call. The only thing she shared with that vile Blue Heron was a long list of husbands. For whatever reason, she always ended up with the dwarf in her bed.

“Power stirs,” the little man told them, his tiny hand shading his eyes as he looked off toward mist-hidden Cahokia. “The Ancestors were shooting streaks of fire across the night sky like flaming arrows in a battle. And this morning at dawn, an owl flew out of the rising sun.”

“Underworld Power aligned with the Sky World,” High Dance mused.

Columella pursed her lips, her attention, too, turning toward Cahokia. “Word is that Red Wing town fell without a fight. Morning Star has the last of the Red Wing Clan’s ruling lineage hanging in squares. The others, I’ve heard, were killed in the town plaza and the remains dismembered and thrown into the river as an offering to the Underworld.”

Flat Stone Pipe chuckled at some inner thought. “Old news, Matron. I’ve learned that as of this morning the squares are empty. My source tells me the Red Wing heretics were cut down alive and carried off. But to what fate, no one is saying.”

“Did you get that from Blue Heron?” High Dance tried to ask casually.

Flat Stone Pipe humored the stumbling attempt. “The Clan Keeper allows little to slip unless it serves a deeper purpose. I heard it from a passing Trader.”

That’s a pus-dripping lie.
But she knew from long experience that Flat Stone Pipe considered it a matter of honor to offer a suitable lie rather than the truth any time he found himself in High Dance’s presence.

Flat Stone Pipe, like Mother Spider herself, had a web of informants throughout Cahokia and its vassal towns. Nor did it bother Columella to substantially fund his activities. Since she had, the numbers of her relatives “honored” by the opportunity to found a distant colony had subsided to a trickle—and those were the ones she was only too glad to be rid of. The moment one of her kinsmen began to figure both prominently and unfavorably in Four Winds Clan politics, Columella was now able, for the most part, to maneuver the offender back into the
tonka’tzi
’s good graces.

That she had to do so, however, left a burning sting worthy of cactus thorns. Four Winds Clan was more than just the
tonka’tzi,
Matron Wind, Blue Heron, and, of course, the Morning Star. That so much authority had been concentrated in Morning Star House frustrated her to the bone.

High Dance shrugged as he accepted Flat Stone Pipe’s lie, the expression on his tattooed face smug. “Good riddance to them. The last of the heretics is gone.”

“There are others, good chief,” Flat Stone Pipe said evenly. “The heresy will never be completely dead. The Morning Star may have finally overcome one obstacle. But Power, like all things, must have an opposite. It is the nature of Creation.”

“But where does this new opposition to the Morning Star come from?” Columella asked.

“That, Matron, is the question.” He was watching her with knowing dark eyes. “Conjuring Power carries great dangers. It would have to be done with extreme care.”

“And why are you telling me this?” A constriction seemed to tighten in her chest.

“Because you, my lady, are the strongest and most capable lineage leader. Were Blue Heron given an incentive to look for rivals to
Tonka’tzi
Red Warrior’s rule, she would look here first.”

Columella stiffened, heart beginning to pound. Lightning blast him, the little man was reading her rising panic. “And what makes you think I might give her any incentive?”

His triumphant smile seemed to split his face; those eyes that knew her so well gleamed. “Why, never you, great Matron.” Then he shifted his slitted gaze to High Dance, saying, “Because as smart as the Matron is, not all of her relatives have the delicate finesse necessary to engage the Clan Keeper in a game of wits.”

High Dance just gave the dwarf a hard and distasteful glare. “I don’t know where you’re going with that.”

“Wherever it is, High Chief, let’s hope it doesn’t entail a square measured to fit your sister’s body.”

Columella, long familiar with her brother’s mannerisms, noted his shock.
What are you into, brother?

Fourteen

Seven Skull Shield leaned his head back, singing at the top of his lungs.
“Five days she laid with me, riding my shaft as if it were a tree!”
The split-cane roof overhead provided relief from the midday sun, and the shell workers often allowed him to loiter in their open-sided workshop. They were Deer Clan men, most of them third-generation bead cutters and shell carvers.

“
Her sheath so slick and tight, sucked in my shaft, giving pure delight.
” He added facial expressions as he bellowed out his song, hands pantomiming the action.

The men working around him shook their heads and grinned as they continued their shell cutting. The sour-onion smell of roasting shell permeated the air where the discard was darkening in the fire. The rasping sound of the cane drills rose and fell like hoarse cicadas accompanying the high-pitched screeching of chert microdrills as they bored tiny holes.

“Upon my shaft she rose so high, drove herself down, nearly broke my thigh.”

“Blood and thunder, man,” Elder Crawfish declared, “you have a voice like … like…”

“Cracking rocks?” Meander asked as he removed his drill from the piece of clamshell and wet the end of the cane in a pot of water by his knee. Next he rotated the damp end in fine quartz sand until it was coated. This he fitted back in his bow-drill and resumed cutting yet another perfectly round bead from the piece of shell.

“More like wounded and dying dogs,” Right Fist muttered. “And with songs like that, it’s no wonder he can’t keep a woman.”

“I keep them just fine,” Seven Skull Shield replied, overemphasizing his words. “And I don’t have to sing to do it.”

“That’s absolutely obvious.”

“It’s your refined sense of manners,” Meander offered flippantly as he fitted a fine-pointed chert drill tip in his hardwood dowel. With long practice he centered it on the bit of conch he was perforating.

“Surely not his fine looks.” Right Fist screwed his expression into distaste. “With a face like that, not even one of them corn-worshiping dirt women would look twice.”

“Gods, and you
know
what sort
they’ll
spread for,” Two Fish said with a gesture as he poured shell scraps into a carry sack.

Seven Skull Shield bellowed a laugh and shook his head. “Looks have got nothing to do with it, you needle-headed clods of mud. You’re overthinking this whole woman thing.” He slapped a hand to his muscle-packed thigh. “Oh, I know. I heard the same old hot blow from my old matron’s mouth. ‘You’ve got to be steady, respectful. Show her family that you’re solid, worthy to sire her clan’s next generation. Convince them you’re going to be a man of status, looked up to in the community.’ And that’s all night shit!”

“Night shit?” Meander looked up as his drill ate away the last of the shell and the new bead dropped free. “Then why am I working so hard trying to make a good impression on my wife’s clan?”

“’Cause you have to,” Seven Skull Shield told him.

“And you don’t?” Meander gave him a skeptical squint. “Like I said, men who sing about women do so because they sleep alone at night.” He shook his cane drill in emphasis. “And nothing you’ve said here leads any of us to think otherwise.”