R
EDCROP WALKED STRAIGHT UP THE HILL KNOWING THAT the farther she went from the village and the safety of other people, the more danger she would be in. She knew it, and it gave wings to her feet.
She had lain awake in the tower kiva most of the night, watching Cloudblower stoke the ritual fire and thinking about what the War Chief had told her. He had stressed the danger, whispered over and over that she might not live through it. Their enemy was canny. No one had ever come close to capturing him before. But if they succeeded, the string of mad killings would end. By risking her life, Redcrop might be saving the lives of ten or even twenty people.
As she neared the crest of the hill, she crossed a deer trail covered with small heart-shaped prints. She stopped for a moment to study them. Four deer. Two of them larger. Probably two does and last summer’s fawns.
Redcrop followed the trail around a spindly clump of rabbitbrush. To her right, a cloud of woodsmoke rose over Longtail village. The fragrance of burning cottonwood drifted on the wind. Redcrop took it into her lungs and held it. It made her feel closer to her dead grandmother. Flame Carrier had always favored cottonwoods. She could sit for hours watching the trembling interplay of sunlight and shadow in the windblown leaves, her wrinkled lips curled into a smile.
Redcrop continued her climb to the top of the rocky hill, where she eased down on a crumbling sandstone slab and watched the molten streamers that wavered around Father Sun’s golden face. A rumpled tan-and-gray world spread before her, dotted here and there with bright splashes of autumn trees. To her left, the snow-covered peaks of the Great Bear Mountains formed a jagged blue line.
She heaved a sigh and watched a flock of pinyon jays flap over her head. Their slender blue-gray bodies sparkled in the sun.
She wondered where her grandmother would be now.
Once a soul passed the traps and monsters that dogged the road to the underworlds, the trail split. The Sun Trail on the left was a broad shining path of corn pollen. Good people took it. But bad people, people who had caused much pain in their lives, saw a coil of smoke rising down the right-hand trail, the Trail of Sorrows, and thought it was a village. Since they loved people and got pleasure from the harm they caused others, they hurried down the right-hand trail. At the end of the Trail of Sorrows, Spider Woman waited. She kept her sacred pinyon pine fire blazing. Spider Woman listened to the travelers’ tales of woe. Some she cleansed in pinyon smoke and sent back to the Sun Trail. Others were cast into the fire and burned to ashes. As the ashes fell upon the ground, Spider Woman tramped them down into the dirt, where they stayed forever. Dirt under the feet of the gods.
Redcrop hunched forward, braced her elbows on her knees, and rocked back and forth to ease the pain in her belly. Wind Baby taunted her, gentle one instant, snatching at her long hair the next.
“You must be strong, girl.”
The clarity of Grandmother’s voice startled her. Redcrop spun around and stared for a long moment at the sunlit slope, expecting to see her. Only the fresh dirt of the grave met her eyes.
Those were the first words she remembered hearing Flame Carrier say. Redcrop had seen barely three summers. The Matron had found Redcrop in the plaza helping the women grind corn, taken her by the hand, and led her to her chamber where she had gently told Redcrop of her mother’s death. Her mother had died quarrying stone from a cliff. A boulder had tumbled down and crushed her.
Dust gusted across the desert in the distance. Redcrop focused on it. She had no memory of her mother now, but she remembered screaming her mother’s name and had tried to run out of the chamber. Flame Carrier had caught Redcrop, pulled her against her chest, and hugged her tightly, whispering, “You must be strong, girl. Be strong and do your duty. Those things mean survival in our world.”
Looking back, she knew that’s when her life had truly begun. The person Redcrop was now had been born at that instant, and everything she had known about her own people, even her family, had died.
She’d never looked back, never indulged in resentment or anger, because it drained her strength, and nothing had seemed too great a price for the happiness and love Flame Carrier gave her.
The cloud of smoke hovering over Longtail village billowed as though someone had added more wood to the plaza fire. Redcrop reached beneath her cape and pulled her chert knife from her belt. The red blade glinted as she lowered it to her long hair and began sawing. She lifted each handful and let Wind Baby feather it from her fingers and scatter it across the hilltop.
By now, all of the Matron’s closest friends would have cut their hair in mourning. It was a sign of their grief, a way of openly acknowledging the loss and inviting the healing words of others. Those who had not been as close to the Matron would be filling their bowls with succulent robins, grass-seed cakes smeared with roasted bone marrow, boiled beans, and corn on the cob. After the feasting, Cloudblower would pass around baskets of pine nuts and toasted squash seeds, and people would tell wonderful stories of Grandmother’s life and generosity.
Red, white, and yellow capes flashed in the cottonwoods along the river, probably people who needed time away from the crowd. She saw Obsidian standing in the cottonwoods. Her wind-swept white cape flapped around her like huge wings. Redcrop couldn’t see her face, but she gazed in Redcrop’s direction. Was she looking at her? Or the bluff to the southwest? Redcrop turned. The sandstone shone golden against the sere blue sky. Eroded terraces dropped away from the flat top and descended into the river valley like a giant’s staircase.
Redcrop frowned and looked back at Obsidian. She hadn’t moved. She seemed to see something there that Redcrop did not.
Redcrop turned away. Jagged locks of hair patted her face. She wished Straighthorn were here. She needed him. But he would be safer in the village than with her.
When she opened her eyes, she noticed strange impressions in the sand below the crest of the hill. At first she couldn’t fathom what they might be, then it came to her: a child’s arms. The points of the elbows had dimpled the ground, and the forearms had smoothed the sand. Three body lengths down the slope she saw sandal prints. She followed them.
In several places the child had tripped over brush and stumbled, leaving overturned pebbles and mashed grass. As she followed the trail down the hill, the child’s stride lengthened into a run.
He was alone and running.
On an ordinary morning a mother might not know exactly where her
child was, but not today. Whenever the village adults were occupied—for example, when someone spotted a war party, and every person who could wield a bow had to take up a position on the walls or in the hills—all of the children under eight were gathered into the tower kiva, the safest place in the village. Redcrop had seen the children go into the kiva with old Black Lace before dawn. Black Lace had a reputation for being fiercely protective of the younger members of the village. None of those children could have escaped her watchful eye.
Redcrop paralleled the child’s path down into the drainage bottom and sand oozed up around her sandals. The tracks grew erratic, weaving back and forth across the drainage, running, stopping, running again.
Redcrop’s pulse increased when she saw the coyote den in the drainage wall. About four hands wide, the opening yawned like a dark toothless mouth. The tracks led straight to it.
Redcrop hurried.
CATKIN LURCHED TO HER FEET WHEN REDCROP DISAPPEARED into the drainage. Her long buckskin war shirt snagged on the brush that had been hiding her, and the slender limbs snapped and cracked.
What’s she doing? Browser told her to stay on the hilltop!
Catkin waited for a few instants, long enough to realize that Redcrop was not immediately coming back to her perch on the sandstone slab. What could have lured the girl into the drainage? Had someone called to her? Had she seen something that demanded her attention? But how could that be? Redcrop knew the danger. Browser had explained it to her in excruciating detail. Perhaps grief had taken the girl’s senses?
Catkin had lost her senses when her husband, Wind Born, died. Every moment had been a nightmare of loneliness. Was that how Redcrop was feeling?
Catkin pulled her war club from her belt and broke into a dead run.
IN THE BRUSH-CLOTTED DRAINAGE NEAR THE GRAVE, I MOVE
through their burial offerings, bowls of food, bits of colored cloth. I lick the side of a bowl, and sniff the fresh dirt where they stood. One of the females dropped a tear-soaked piece of cloth. I take it into my mouth and chew, savoring her salty taste.
I whirl at the sound of pounding feet and see the warrior Catkin dash by like the wind … and I know they are watching the girl.
I duck back into the shadows, breathing hard.
REDCROP FROWNED AT THE COYOTE DEN. HAD THE CHILD been looking for a place to hide, perhaps being chased? Orphans often sneaked up this drainage to get to Longtail village, and the raiders who’d murdered their parents frequently ran right behind them.
Redcrop knelt before the opening, and the sharp tang of coyote urine stung her nose.
“Hello?”
She glanced over her shoulder, then moved closer, her face inside the opening. A dank coolness coated her skin. “Hello? Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a cornhusk doll lying in the rear, six hands away.
Redcrop stuck her arm into the opening, but couldn’t reach the doll. She twisted sideways, slipped her arm in first, then tucked her head through the opening. As she grasped the doll, she noticed the scratches that lined the walls and floor.
Redcrop backed out of the den with the corn-husk doll. The painted lips and eyes had faded, but the doll’s long black braid hung to the middle of her back. She wore a grimy white deerskin dress.
A little girl’s doll.
Redcrop examined the ground. In her haste to peer inside the den, she’d disturbed many of the tracks. The War Chief would not be happy with her carelessness. She looked for the best place to stand, a place away from the sign left by the child, and spied a small boulder about two paces away. When she stood on it, her eyes widened. From this vantage she could see many things she had not seen before. Most of the small prints near the den had been covered with larger prints.
She swung around, searching for an intruder. As Father Sun rose higher into the sky, the sand shimmered with a blinding intensity. Redcrop lifted a hand to shield her eyes and squinted back toward the hill that overlooked the grave. Shiny filaments of yellow Cloud People trailed across the sky.
If she was in trouble, why didn’t she come down to us? Or call for help?
A Straight Path Nation child would have run down as quickly as
her legs could carry her. Perhaps the girl with the corn-husk doll had been born to the Flute Player Believers, or the Fire Dogs?
She looked into the faded brown eyes of the doll. Many of the orphans who wandered into Longtail village carried toys clutched to their chests and would utter inhuman shrieks if you tried to take them away even for an instant, to dress the child, or bathe him. It must have broken the little girl’s heart to leave her doll behind.
Redcrop slipped the doll into her belt and bent over the large sandal prints. The depressions cast shadows. The man’s feet had sunk deeply into the wet sand.
Her gaze followed them down the eroded drainage to the south. Twenty paces ahead, a deer trail cut the bank. The tracks headed toward it, but she no longer saw the child’s prints.
Had he carried her?
It was probably just a father who’d come to find his wayward daughter, but it might have been a raider tracking down an escaped child, or … or worse.
The War Chief had told her to stay on top of the hill and within sight of the guards. She’d disobeyed by coming down into the drainage. Could the guards still see her? Would they come if she started to follow the man’s trail? She stepped—
“What are you doing?”
Redcrop jerked around so fast that she stumbled and had to catch her balance.
Obsidian stared at her with slitted eyes. The wind had torn locks of long hair loose from their jeweled pins and spilled them down the front of her white cape.
“Obsidian! I didn’t hear you. Where did you come from?”
“What are you doing out here?” She walked forward with her fists clenched at her sides.
The anger in her voice stunned Redcrop. She stammered, “I—I wished to be alone for a time.” She folded her arms across her chest like a shield. “When I reached the hilltop, I found a child’s footprints. They led down to this old coyote den.”
“A child?” The lines around Obsidian’s beautiful mouth tightened.
“What did she look like? How old was she?”
“I didn’t see her, Obsidian. Just her tracks.” Redcrop gestured to the sand. “It looks like a man came to get her.”