Star Path--People of Cahokia Read online

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  To Robert Porter

  For

  All those years of support

  Thanks, Bob.

  Prologue

  As I stare down at the young woman, I am delighted by what I see. She’s just turned sixteen, finished her first woman’s moon, and has passed from girl to womanhood. She came to me still wearing her skirt tied with a prominent virgin’s knot.

  Not that she came willingly, of course. Her father’s lineage abducted the girl from her mother’s village. Muskogee are matrilineal, so while the girl might have been the man’s daughter, she was merely the product of his ejaculation. Not of his clan or lineage, and hence, not his family. Essentially his, but not his. Perfect for a sacrifice. Didn’t really cost him anything but a little emotional distress.

  Which is nothing compared to his and his lineage’s much more parochial desire to influence the scales of justice on their behalf. Seems the man’s uncle, a man he adored, had gotten into a little trouble with the local orata, or village chief. Something about a murder.

  Frowned on, you see.

  But in the convoluted way the Muskogee think, a word from me to the orata would set everything straight. Place the guilty cur beyond the pale of local retribution. Hence the offer of the girl.

  To me.

  And who am I?

  Some call me a witch. The Muskogee have given me the name Lightning Shell, for the mask I wear. It covers the horribly scarred left side of my face.

  I am as puzzled by that scar as anyone. One should remember getting burned like that. Must have been terribly painful. But I have no memory of it. As I have no memory of so many things since that day in the river.

  As I stare down at the girl, her eyes fix on the beautifully flaked long chert knife I hold. She is tied to one of the polished center posts that hold my roof up. It’s a heavy piece of black locust, driven deep into the ground. She can’t pull it up no matter how hard she struggles. The wad of cloth in her mouth will dampen her screams.

  Which disappoints me, but I do have to make some concessions to the town’s folk. The way they fear me already is almost irrational.

  I reach down with the blade and sever the rope holding her skirt up. As it slides down her young hips, her eyes widen and she shrieks into the cloth.

  Like my ancestors, I, too, have come to Cofitachequi after a setback.

  When the first Cahokian expedition crossed the Blue Mountains and followed the ancient trails into the east, they found a rich and fertile land. The Muskogee peoples who lived in small villages along the waterways called their country Kofitachake. Kofita means to scoop out, excavate, or dig out. Chake means shallow waters.

  My people, as they so often do, butchered the pronunciation and called it Cofitachequi: Ko feeta check ee.

  The Cahokians came to Cofitachequi a little more than a generation ago led by War Leader Moon Blade, a Four Winds Clansman in line for the high chair at Horned Serpent House. I was just a boy back then, but I remember the uproar. Cahokia had almost broken out in open warfare. Something about the work levy needed to flatten out and grade the Great Plaza. At the time Moon Blade, resisting the levy, was threatening to march Horned Serpent Town’s warriors on the Morning Star House.

  Blue Heron, who was a young beauty at the time, had outmaneuvered Horned Serpent Town’s clan matron, and Moon Blade was sent east by order of the Morning Star himself. Not that it was called exile—nor was Moon Blade’s departure from Cahokia anything less than a pageant; Moon Blade left at the head of nearly a thousand warriors and commanded a flotilla consisting of five hundred canoes.

  The journey down the Father Water, up the Mother Water to the Tenasee, thence east and across the Blue Mountains to the coastal plain of Cofitachequi had taken nearly nine months.

  The various tribes along the Tenasee would never forget. They paid for the army’s passage in stolen food stores, enforced labor, and when they resisted, in blood. Entire villages were left destitute.

  Once east of the mountains, Moon Blade’s disciplined warriors had made short work of the petty Muskogean chiefs. Being used to scuffling among themselves, the Muskogee—barely masters of the organized raid—had no chance. Disciplined Cahokian squadrons were able to surround and defeat them with little effort. The local chiefs and war leaders found themselves hanged in squares; their people were then taken captive and turned into work details.

  Nor was dissent a problem. Again, the key word is “petty.” So great was the animosity between the various local factions that the previously abused among them rarely hesitated to turn on their former chiefs when called upon to aid the Cahokians.

  Moon Blade was a man of many talents, not to mention charisma. And he had learned from the fine art of politics. After his arrival and conquest, he set about building his chieftainship. Adopted the local term Mikko, or high chief. Nor was he averse to women, seeing as he married a woman from each of the major Muskogean lineages. Eleven women in all. And he promptly went about siring children from them.

  In a sense, Moon Blade grew the colony into an organic blend of Muskogean and Cahokian. They worship the notion of Morning Star but don’t play chunkey with the same passion. Build palace-topped mounds but keep their old beliefs in the ancestral Spirits.

  Unlike Moon Blade, I have no idea how I got here. Seriously, no memory at all. One heartbeat I was underwater choking Night Shadow Star. The next, it’s half a year later and I am here with a horrible scar ruining the left side of my face, and wearing a shell mask.

  The night I appeared to them, lightning struck one of their sacred charnel houses. As it burned down to coals and charred bones, I came walking out of the smoke and flames, my shell mask on my face.

  After an entrance like that, is there any reason they shouldn’t consider me a Powerful sorcerer and witch?

  There are times when the simplicity of human belief leaves me stunned.

  Beyond the walls of my mound-top temple, lightning laces the storm-torn sky like tortured worms of light. Wind gusts shake the walls, cause the leaping flames in my central fire to twist and curl.

  The girl screams again, her eyes glistening with fear.

  She is a pretty thing. I trace the tip of my knife around her round breasts, tease the tips of her nipples with the knife’s point to make them stand erect.

  She throws herself against the bindings, tears leaking down her cheeks.

  Lightning flashes again. White and blinding, it is close. Followed by the head-splitting crack of thunder, as if it were breaking the world.

  “It’s all right,” I tell her,
knowing a Muskogee girl can’t understand a word of what I say in Cahokian. “I need to see the future. And to do that, I need your blood.”

  Her scream is so violent it puffs her cheeks around the cloth gag in her mouth.

  A terrible staccato of thunder bangs and booms, violent belts of rain pelt down from the storm.

  As a blinding stab of lightning—my Spirit Power—turns the clouds white, I make my first slice up from above her thick black pubic hair to just below her sternum.

  As her entrails spill out, I see the pattern. Watch as they slither, fold, and spill.

  The lightning’s blinding flashes enable me to see across the distance. The shape of my sister’s face is molded by the ropy knot of intestines.

  “So,” I whisper, “you think you are coming for me? Oh, my beautiful love, you have no idea.”

  I shall be ready.

  Ever so ready.

  One

  “He is waiting for you.” Piasa’s words sounded so crystal clear in the night. They snapped Night Shadow Star out of a deep sleep. The Spirit Beast’s mouth might have been but a finger’s width from her ear.

  She blinked in the darkness, her thoughts unusually sharp after being roused from such a deep slumber.

  Images flashed. The memories like second sight. Given the intensity and clarity of their details, she might have just stepped from Matron Columella’s burning palace in Evening Star Town. What she’d seen inside the blazing inferno haunted her: blood everywhere—a scarlet intensity as it soaked into the woven mat covering the floor.

  And there, laid out in a bizarre pattern, were pieces of Lace’s body. The tiny bits of arm, leg, head, and torso had been hacked from the fetus Lace had carried inside her. Each of the parts had been placed just so to create a partial circle—the beginnings of a portal that her brother believed would have allowed the Powers of the Underworld to flow upward into the Sky World.

  In the middle of the carnage, staring at her with gleaming and predatory eyes, a smile of anticipation on his bloody lips, stood her brother, Walking Smoke. Blood smeared his naked skin, partially obscuring where it had been painted in magical designs. The long chipped-stone ceremonial knife was held as if to mimic his straining and erect penis.

  Walking Smoke had indicated that partial circle of body parts on the floor. “The sacred opening, like that wonderful sheath of yours, Sister. The passage of life through which Piasa’s souls will emerge in order to consume my body.”

  He had believed that. Thought that through ritual he could call Piasa’s Spirit from the Underworld, that he could trap the Underwater Panther’s essence inside his own flesh as Black Tail had first done with the Morning Star.

  Memories. Just memories.

  Night Shadow Star stared up at the dark ceiling above her bed and replayed the events of that terrible day. She’d managed to defeat Walking Smoke. At Piasa’s whispered command, she had accompanied her brother as he fled the burning palace. Lured Walking Smoke out onto the river and distracted him. She had loathed every moment of it. The first time her brother had raped her had been so hideous, so terrible, that she’d denied herself the memory—buried it so deeply down between her souls it had taken Piasa and Horned Serpent’s Underworld Power to make her recall. Had that day started it all? Her violation, first by the newly reincarnated Morning Star, and then, within mere hands of time, by a jealous Walking Smoke? Was that the moment that forever set the three of them on this path that would end in the destruction of one or more of them?

  That day on the river she’d sought to end it all, stripped, offered herself to Walking Smoke once their canoe was well out in the Father Water’s current. She could almost feel her brother’s chilled body as he crawled on top of her. Rain was beating down in a hard and pounding cadence. She had heaved violently at his touch. In the last instant before he had driven himself into her, she had capsized the canoe.

  In the icy river’s depths, Night Shadow Star had struggled, his hands clasped tight on her throat …

  “He knows you are coming.”

  Piasa flickered at the edge of Night Shadow Star’s vision, a flash of glowing blue light in the darkness of her room. It no longer bothered her that no one else saw the Spirit Beast or heard its voice when it spoke to her. Most of her family and associates had taken for granted that she was possessed. That the creature owned her souls and used her for its own purposes.

  “It’s up to me to destroy him,” she said aloud as she stared at the darkness of her sleeping quarters. “The three of us, Morning Star, me, and Walking Smoke, we’re caught in a terrible triangle. Brothers and sister, torn between Sky and Underworld Power, locked in a combat of possession, jealousy, and incest.”

  Piasa hissed his agreement. She caught flickers of his movement among the shadows as he darted between her storage boxes.

  “Lady?” Fire Cat’s voice asked from her doorway. “Did you say something?”

  “Piasa says that Walking Smoke knows I’m coming.”

  Fire Cat stepped in, seated himself at the foot of her bed. Bound to her by oath, he was in his early thirties, muscular. In the dark she couldn’t see his pink, healing scars.

  “How can he? Some agent of his? A spy who sent word? Even then, he’s half a world away.”

  “He can feel the Power. Can feel me.”

  “Your family line is tangled in Power like a flock of birds in a net.” He paused, and she could imagine his smile. Then he said, “That or madness.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Lady, I no longer know. I have trouble accepting that your other brother, Chunkey Boy, really plays host to the souls of the Morning Star. After our journey to the Underworld, he taunted me. Told me outright that he was manipulating me for his own ends.”

  “Is it really so hard for you to believe that Morning Star is the resurrected god?”

  “I don’t waste my time questioning. I have other more pressing concerns.”

  “The journey to Cofitachequi? The knowledge that Walking Smoke knows I’m coming?”

  “That’s for later. My immediate concern, along with the preparations for the journey, is that you turned away two runners yesterday. One from Clan Matron Rising Flame, and the other from your betrothed.”

  “Don’t call Spotted Wrist my betrothed.”

  “Your clan matron has ordered you to marry him.”

  She felt the tightening in her chest, the fear that Fire Cat might be right. That somehow, some way, Rising Flame and Spotted Wrist would manage to force her to marry before she could escape downriver. It would be done through trickery, some threat. A manipulation that made her choose between two intolerable situations.

  “There are whispers.” She reached out in the darkness, laid her fingers on his knee. Felt his instant reaction, as if a charge had run through his muscles. Her own body quickened at the contact, brief as it was. This small intimacy was all that she would allow herself.

  “Whispers?” he asked somewhat hoarsely.

  “That we spend every spare moment with our loins locked together. That their spies can’t prove it? I think that drives them half mad.”

  He was silent for a time, thinking—no doubt as she was—about the bargain she’d struck with Piasa. Saving her world had come at a price. She might love this former enemy and slave of hers more than life itself, but the choice had been Fire Cat, or her city. Trained to rule, she’d chosen her people over the man she loved.

  “Lady, we have mere days before the canoes, provisions, and warriors will be assembled to take us east. Rising Flame and Spotted Wrist will have to move quickly. Spotted Wrist needs your name and standing to solidify his position. If he marries you, he joins the most powerful family in the city. That you have spurned him for so long has become an affront. People are talking about it. Makes him look weak, undesirable. For the Hero of the North, that must burn like cactus thorns in an open wound.”

  “He is placing as many of his people as he can in our expedition. Fire Claw has been replaced
by Squadron First Blood Talon and his picked men. All veterans from the Red Wing campaign. I would hope that you won’t let them provoke you.”

  “I have made my peace with what happened at Red Wing Town. How they dealt with my family. Power was at work. Shaping me. I shall not let them use my weaknesses against you.”

  And people wonder why I love this man?

  “Once again, Fire Cat, we are being tested. I have dreamed of you and me, alone in the forest, on a small farmstead. Just the two of us and our children. Living by ourselves, growing our own food.” A pause. “We are so happy.”

  “I know that dream.”

  “If we do this, if we destroy Walking Smoke, Piasa says there may be a way for us. A chance that the dream might become a reality.”

  She saw his head lower, as if considering very carefully. “You would do that? Leave your life here? Become nameless, a dirt farmer without fine dresses, without servants and porters?”

  “Are you happy, Fire Cat?”

  “Only to serve you, Lady.”

  “As long as I am Lady Night Shadow Star, they will be trying to marry me off to someone I cannot abide. As long as I am that woman, I remain a tool that Piasa can use for his purposes. Maybe if I were nameless, clanless, and worthless to them, they would let me be free.”

  “It is a wonderful dream, isn’t it?”

  She heard Piasa’s mocking laughter coming from the corner of the room.

  The Spirit Beast’s sibilant whisper carried in the night: “The most insidious deceit comes from the lies you tell yourself.” A pause. “In the meantime, be careful. They will try to use the Red Wing against you.”

  “What?” Fire Cat asked, recognizing the way she tensed.

  “Piasa. He says they will try to use you against me. It’s something they are plotting. Whatever happens, you must promise me that you won’t play into their hands.”

  Two

  The new Clan Keeper, Spotted Wrist, appeared like an avenging eagle as he strode through the palisade gate that opened onto the Morning Star’s high mound-top courtyard. Hard to think of him otherwise given the splays of feathers radiating from each shoulder, the feathered cape hanging down past his knees.