“Then, come, let us fly.” Masked Owl leaped from the mound top, spiraling in the air. Looking back, he called, “Raise your arms and jump!”
Mud Puppy, his heart trembling in fear, raised his arms and spread his fingers, willing to try, even if Masked Owl laughed when his flailing arms dropped him back to Earth.
It was to his surprise, then, that he rose, carried by the powerful beat of his arms. He flew! His arms flattened into strong wings that silently caressed the night air. He could see the land, as though in muted daylight, colors oddly drained into a bluish gray cast.
Among the clouds he soared and spiraled. Lightning flashed silently around him, flickering from the spotted feathers on his broad
wings. Thunder Beings darted and hid among the clouds, showing their faces, only to vanish again, the memory of their grins left behind in the patterns of cloud and wind.
T
he sound of the birds brought Hazel Fire awake. He blinked, yawned, and sat up, his elkhide robe falling from his shoulders. Fatigue still hung in his muscles, the night’s rest hardly a payment on the debt he owed his body for the constant days of ceaseless paddling. But they had made it! He was here, just outside the legendary Sun Town. A place that Traders spoke of with awe-hushed voices. He and his friends were going to see this storied place with their own eyes, the first of their kind to do so. It was the stuff of legends.
The canoes were drawn up on the muddy shore just below his feet. He could see their bundled contents; everything glistened silver with beads of dew. A drop spattered on his head, and he looked up at the overhanging branches of the sweetgum tree. The star-shaped leaves hung listlessly in the still air.
Droplets, like little diamonds, shimmered on his elkhide as he laid it aside and stood. The effect was magical. A low mist lay over the silver-gray water. It drifted past the trees, curled around the sleeping bodies of his companions, and seemed to slither around the patches of hanging moss that clung to the branches. A fish jumped in the lake, rings widening in lazy circles.
Hazel Fire walked down to the water and relieved himself. For the moment he was limited to looking across the opaque surface of the lake that separated him from the mythical Sun People’s town. What little he could see of it was perched atop a gray cliff that rose to the height of four men above the distant shore. Several buildings—tall things with thatched roofs—looked ghostly in the silvered mist. One perched on a mound to the north. Another stood atop a mound to the south, just above where the bluff sloped to a canoe landing. Barely visible, the mist shrouded it again with a closing wall of white. Had it really been there?
Memories came back of their arrival last night, of the procession of torches that had wound down to the canoe landing. Tens of ten at least, so many they had cast a warm yellow light over the landing the likes of which Hazel Fire had never seen. The clamor of the voices had been fit to shake the waters and raise the dead. In that magical moment, the torchlit column of people, like a serpent of
light spilling onto the shore, had been dazzling in its spectacle. White Bird and Yellow Spider had called back and forth with the horde for what seemed an eternity, and Hazel Fire had suddenly wished he’d taken more time to learn this odd language. It sounded like turkeys squawking to him. Something impossible to wrap the human tongue around.
“Where are we? Is this real?” Snow Water had asked in awe from his canoe.
“I’ve never seen so many people,” Jackdaw had replied warily.
“Those are only a few of the tens of tens of tens who live in Sun Town,” Yellow Spider had assured them from his bobbing canoe.
“Are we going to land?” Gray Fox had asked. “My legs feel like wood.”
“For the moment,” White Bird had replied, “we will make camp there, on that island. We call it the Turtle’s Back. Being surrounded as it is by Morning Lake, it is protected as well as protection from evil spirits and hostile ghosts.” He had pointed, and the torchlight had been such that Hazel Fire had seen the black hump of earth like some monster lurking in the calm water.
“Who would have thought?” Hazel Fire wondered aloud to himself as he replayed the events of the night before. Until he died the sight of all those cane torches burning in the night would be lodged in his head.
“Thought what?” White Bird asked in heavily accented Trade pidgin. His head poked up from the painted buffalo hide he had slept under.
“That I’d really be here.” Hazel Fire turned and gestured back at the town, now hidden behind the mist like an eclipsed vision. “Is it really as you said? I mean now that we’re here, are we going to be disappointed? Are we going to find out that everything you told us is, well, shall we say, something of a story? A bit of imagination?”
White Bird laughed, a twinkle in his eyes. “No, my friend.” The young man threw back his painted hide and stood, stretching. Once again Hazel Fire admired his muscular body and the character reflected in that handsome face. Something about those shining black eyes made a man instinctively trust White Bird. No wonder Lark had fallen so deeply in love. Despite what Hazel Fire’s father, Acorn Cup, might have told White Bird, it had taken all of his Hickory Clan’s influence to keep Lark from running off to this magical southern land.
White Bird stepped down to stand beside Hazel Fire. “If anything, Sun Town is grander than I have told you.” White Bird placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I’ve been gone a complete
turning of the seasons, my friend. I wager a great deal more has been built in that time. It will almost be as new to me as it will be to you.”
“When do I get to see this mythical place? Three days? It will take a whole three days?”
White Bird’s smile remained infectious. “If all goes well.”
“Why so long?” Hazel Fire raised an eyebrow.
“We have come a long way.” White Bird pointed northward with his right hand. “Across many lands. We have been exposed to a great many evils. Spirits can attach themselves to us, or to our Trade. You know this. So before we enter the city’s protection we must drive them off, cleanse our souls.”
“Cleanse how?” He crossed his arms. “Some magician isn’t going to steal my souls, is he?”
White Bird laughed, his white teeth shining. “I sincerely hope not. I’m as fond of my souls as you are of yours. No. I know you, know all of you. We have shared too many trials, Hazel Fire. All of us have done something marvelous. No one has ever brought so much Trade to Sun Town at once, or from so far away. There is Power in that, good friend. Instead of six days, they will cleanse us in three.”
“Six? Three? What is the difference?”
“Three.” White Bird held up three fingers, touching each fingertip as he talked. “The worlds of Creation: Sky, Earth, and Underworld. Sky is the domain of Father Moon and Mother Sun, the place of sunlight, clouds, and birds. Earth is the surface where we live and the trees grow and the water flows. Third is the Underworld, home of the fish, the roots, moles, and badgers, the place where all things originated. We are born of the underworlds, raised into the light to walk the land, and doomed to forever Dream of flying through the Sky.”
“Hmm.” Hazel Fire rubbed his chin. “Among my people …”
“Yes, the Magicians can leave their bodies and fly. Here, too, though we call them the Serpents. You’ll meet one soon enough.”
“He won’t try and steal my Power?” Hazel Fire reached for the small leather pouch that hung from his neck.
“Your umbilical cord is safe.” White Bird referred to the dried loop of tissue that all Wolf People carried with them from birth to death. And woe unto he who through flood, fire, or accident lost his. The stories among the Wolf People told of sudden insanity, debilitating illness, and often a wasting death that came within days. It had been a matter of no little awe to Lark that White Bird and Yellow Spider could live, thrive in fact, without one.
“And yours.” Hazel Fire pointed to the necklace that draped around White Bird’s neck. “I always wondered about those tokens, but thought it rude to ask. I noticed that your necklace never left your neck. Is it magic?”
White Bird reached up, fingering the small stone fetishes hung there. Though some were cubes, others were sections of slate incised with geometric designs, but his fingers went to the little fat-bellied owl carved out of a bloodred stone. “Perhaps it is magic. A protection of sorts. My little brother, Mud Puppy, made this. Can you imagine? He carved each of the pieces, and him barely past ten and four winters when I saw him last.”
“I look forward to meeting him.” Hazel Fire saw the sudden reserve in White Bird’s eyes. “Is that a problem?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. He’s just strange, that’s all. A different child. Always has been.” The Trader’s eyes had focused on something in the distance beyond the fog.
“I suppose, Husband of my sister, that you are normal for your kind? You who braved everything to travel so far north in search of this magical Trade of yours?”
White Bird smiled. “I would like to think I am normal, but no, I suppose I Dream too much.”
“I could Dream of that young woman who ran down to wave at you last night.” Hazel Fire tried to look unconcerned. “A sister of yours, perhaps? Someone you could introduce me to?”
“Sorry.” White Bird had caught his subtle meaning. “She’s Rattlesnake Clan. There’s a chance I might end up married to her. She won’t be Lark, but …”
“She’ll be here,” Hazel Fire supplied with a shrug. “That is the way of things. Though I wouldn’t mind you coming home to be a permanent husband to Lark.”
White Bird kept his eyes on the shimmering wall of mist that hid Sun Town. “You don’t know how tempting that might be. I have no idea of the situation here. I could tell by my mother’s actions last night. By the way she stood. The clans are at it again.”
“And how is that? I would learn what I’m stepping into before it’s on my moccasin.”
White Bird’s preoccupation seemed to vanish. “Oh, you’ll be fine. They’ll treat you right. It’s in the nature of the gifting. You helped to bring the Trade. For that the clans will make you most welcome. Fear not. Just turn your Trade over with a smile, and they will shower you with gifts. Enough to more than fill your canoe before you must head north.”
“This giving interests me.”
“Giving, Trade if you will, is what binds us together. We are a people of parts and pieces. It goes back to the beginning, to the Creation. It is said that in those times we fought with each other, constantly at war. And then, one day, a magical Masked Owl, one of the Sky Beings from the Creation, came spiraling down to tell us that there was a better way.”
Hazel Fire nodded. “Go on.”
“We have two moieties.” White Bird squatted, using his finger to draw a circle in the charcoal-black mud. This he divided into two sections. “Everything we do is meant to achieve balance. My moiety consists of Owl Clan, Alligator Clan, and Frog Clan. Sky, Earth, and Underworld. We are the night side, that of the north.” He divided one-half of the circle into three to denote the clans. “On the other side is the world of day, or the south. The clans are Eagle, Rattlesnake, and Snapping Turtle. Again, Air, Earth and Underworld. Eagles live in the air. Rattlesnakes crawl across the ground and snapping turtles live in the mud underwater.” He divided the southern half of the circle into three sections.
“But that’s a total of six clans.”
“You’re right. Six is the number of directions that make up the world. Your people have four sacred directions: north, south, east, and west. My people believe them to be sacred, too, but we add up and down for a total of six directions. In our stories the clans came together here, at the center of the world, from each of the different directions. My people, my clans, my city, all reflect the world. Opposites crossed, night and day, north and south, east and west, up and down. Everything must be brought together to keep Creation intact. We constantly strive to do that, and gifting is how we accomplish such a seemingly hopeless task. The greatest challenge is to hold the world together. Forces, people, are always trying to split it apart. We have to work constantly to bind it back together.”
“You told me once that your clan will just give all of these things away to people in other clans.” Hazel Fire was frowning. “You won’t take anything back from them? Nothing in Trade? No reciprocity?”
“Oh, we’ll get our value back,” White Bird assured. “We just won’t get it in things. Our return comes from the influence our Clan Elder and Speaker have in the Council. We don’t collect large amounts of things because that would create envy. People who covet what other people have turn wicked, their souls are the perfect home for evil. But if you give necessary things to the needy, they cannot feel slighted. In turn, when you need, they will provide. We have a
very complicated system of give-and-take. It works, it keeps us together, and we keep the Creator happy.”
“But I know you were worried when we arrived last night. You and Yellow Spider were unsure about your homecoming.”
White Bird nodded absently. “I didn’t say that we do not compete with each other. It would have been very different had another clan gained ascendancy. My arrival could have proved, well, shall we say, uncomfortable, for Alligator or Snapping Turtle Clan had they become dominant.”