People of the Fire (22 page)

 
          
 
"Bah! Let him! He's been a festering pain
for too long. Now, you going to back me up, or not?"

 
          
 
"But Black Crow—"

 
          
 
Chokecherry grabbed her by the chin. "You
listen to me. If you back down, you'll find yourself with less standing than a
dog. You want that? To be like a beast?"

 
          
 
"Black Crow wouldn't—"

 
          
 
"No, but Heavy Beaver would. He's got
problems. His mother, for one. That boy's hated strong women all his life. Look
at who he married! But I've been around long enough, buried enough husbands to
tell you that after he's had a year or two to work on Black Crow, you'll be
right down with the dogs as a pack animal and breeding bitch."

 
          
 
Blood burning, Chokecherry hoisted herself to
her feet, wincing as her knees cracked. "You think about that, sister's
daughter. You think hard, because that's what Heavy Beaver's working for. Sage
Root stood against him. If he breaks her ... or kills her, there will be no
stopping him. The People, for all that we've come unraveled in the last tens of
seasons, will be no more."

 
          
 
She stalked off, aware of Makes Fun's eyes
burning into her back.

 
          
 
Tanager sat wrapped in a robe next to Elk
Charm. The peaks rose tall, ghostly in the moonlight. Behind them, the camp of
the Red Hand seemed quiet, peaceful. A dog barked until someone threw something
at it. After a yip, nothing but the soft murmur of voices bothered the night.

 
          
 
"I hate being in trouble," Tanager
complained.

 
          
 
"Well, if you'd stay home and help your
mother with the chores, and maybe stop beating up the boys, maybe you wouldn't
be in trouble all the time."

 
          
 
Tanager lifted a shoulder, ears tuned to the
sounds of the night. "I'll bet the elk calves are walking around. We could
sneak off tomorrow morning and—"

 
          
 
"See!" Elk Charm giggled. "How
are you ever going to find a husband if you never stay in camp?"

 
          
 
Tanager looked across at her friend. "Why
would I want a husband?"

 
          
 
"Husbands are a great help. You can't get
pregnant without one. They lift heavy things like logs to make animal traps

 
          
 
"I don't need a trap. I sneaked up to
within a foot deer once. I could have driven a dart right into her. And
besides, babies are trouble. There's lots of things you can't do when you have
a baby. You have to find someone to look after them when you go hunt. And then
you have to give part of the kill to whoever looks after the baby."

 
          
 
"Someday you'll be sneaking around out
there and get caught by a Short Buffalo warrior and he'll eat you."

 
          
 
"Be serious! If I can sneak up on a deer,
where's the stupid Short Buffalo man who can catch me? You've heard the stories
about how they stumble around in the trees. They don't know the trails. No one
knows the trails like me."

 
          
 
"Except
Ramshorn
and Never Sweat and Tall Fir and—"

 
          
 
"But I know most of them. And by the time
I'm a full woman, I'll know them all. You watch."

 
          
 
Elk Charm sat in silence for a moment, face
puckered in a frown. "Why are you like that? Why are you always trying to
be different from everyone else?"

 
          
 
Tanager shrugged, genuinely baffled herself.
"I don't know. It's like something in the trees whispers to me. Maybe it's
like when you go with your family to collect berries and you want to go home,
to be back in your lodge where you know where you are. You know that feeling?
It's just that I feel the same way about being out in timber and climbing the
rocks."

 
          
 
"You ought to be a boy."

 
          
 
"Maybe, but I don't know any boys that
run as fast as I do. And I've had Snaps Horn and Warm Wind try and follow me.
They slip off the logs and break branches and trip a lot. Not only that, I can
throw rocks straighten"

 
          
 
"You can't outwrestle them."

 
          
 
Tanager grinned. "No, but if I trip them
first, they can't catch me!"

 
          
 
Sage Root drank the last of the cold stew.
She'd sent Little Dancer and Two Smokes up to eat with Chokecherry. She had no
desire to cook anymore. She didn't want Two Smokes bustling around doing things
that intruded on her thoughts. She didn't even care about the lumps of hard
grease that floated in the tepid water.

 
          
 
Something black and ominous rose from Heavy
Beaver's lodge. Sage Root gasped, clapping a hand to her mouth. She shook her
head, blinking, feeling the icy chill in her soul. Peering fearfully up at the
stars, she found no sign of the black thing. Raven's spirit? Had Heavy Beaver
promised her to Raven Above in return for spiritual help?

 
          
 
She clamped her eyes shut, experiencing the
reeling sensation of lost balance. She was passing through life as if it were a
dream. Images shimmered and went glassy until she couldn't trust her eyesight.
Sounds seemed to become disjointed. Voices whispered out of the air. Nothing
seemed real except the cold in her soul, and fear.

 
          
 
"I'm not me anymore." And the chill
ate at her, increasing with each beat of her heart. How could she deny his
power when so many strange things happened? As the sun set, she'd seen the
trunks of the trees waver and dance to the thump of Heavy Beaver's drum.

 
          
 
She shivered uncontrollably, stomach
spasming
. Not that, please, not again. Every time she'd
eaten or drunk, her nervous stomach pumped it back up.

 
          
 
Sage Root sat in the rear of the lodge,
fingers idly tracing the ruins of the bedroll where Hungry Bull had so tenderly
held her. Here, in the confines of this very lodge, she'd borne her sons. Here,
she'd nursed them all, hugged and loved them. Two of them had died in her lodge,
their bodies cleaned and prepared to be taken and placed on a high ridge, where
their souls could climb to the
Starweb
.

 
          
 
Here she'd laughed at Hungry Bull's stories,
scolded him when he needed it, and smiled her love into his warm brown eyes.

 
          
 
The lodge looked dingy and ragged, the skirts
of the heavy hide cover tattered, rot-brittle around the edges. As the cover
had disintegrated, so had the poles been worn away as they moved from camp to
camp. What had once been a grand lodge, requiring ten dogs to transport, now
could be carried by five. Like the rest of her life, even this, her home, hung
frayed and stained.

 
          
 
A humming filled her ears with the sound of a
million bumblebees. Groaning, she pounded at the side of her head As quickly,
the noise stopped, leaving a slight ring from the battering she'd given
herself.

           
 
Heedless, she sat in the ashes of her life,
fingers absently tracing the holes burned through her belongings.

 
          
 
She couldn't bear to look at the dirt out
front. Horrified, she'd watched as Heavy Beaver had walked out and drawn a
series of lines into the earth.

 
          
 
"I could save you." He'd looked at
her through heavy half-lidded eyes and cocked his head. "You need only
admit your guilt. Bind yourself to me for purification."

 
          
 
The cry of horror had strangled in her throat
as she shook her head frantically.

 
          
 
He'd smiled, chanted some more, and walked
away into the twilight.

 
          
 
Fear had pumped like sparks through her veins
as she scrambled madly to wipe away the patterns of lines, scratching at the
dirt until her fingernails bled. Then she'd huddled into a ball and sobbed
until Little Dancer came to hold her. Two Smokes had picked her up and carried
her inside. Now the two of them slept like a guard before the door.

 
          
 
Hungry Bull is far away. I'll be dead before
he comes back. What then?

 
          
 
"Stop it," she whispered to herself.
"Got to believe it's a lie. Heavy Beaver can't Dance fire. He can't Sing
the stars. He's trying to scare me. That's all. Just trying to scare me."

 
          
 
And how do you know? the voice inside
demanded. How come your stomach
doesn
't work? Why do
you ache all over? How come you hear things? See things that
aren
't there? Why do your muscles shake all the time? Why
do you always feel so cold—even in the sun? You're dying. You can't fight his
Power.

 
          
 
The chill in her soul seemed to expand.
Despite herself, the old stories recited in bits and fragments in the back of
her mind. Tales from the Winter Counts, they told of witches who could steal a
man's soul. They told of the Hero Twins who brought human beings up from
underground and into this world. And when it was all done, one of the brothers
hit the other on the head, his blood dripping to become red jasper. The other
brother had risen to the sky, becoming one with
Starweb
since his people were safe from evil.

 
          
 
"Evil. And has that returned?"
Numbly, she stared at the moonlight outside. Flickers of moonbeams bent and
shimmered to break into a thousand spinning stars. Undone, Sage Root cowered
and covered her head. She lay that way until her body began to float away from
the earth, turning slowly in the air.

 
          
 
She gasped and jerked at the familiar shadows
of her lodge. Blinking to clear her sight, she dug frantic fingers into the
singed robes to reassure herself of the firm ground.

 
          
 
Somewhere the dogs were yipping and growling.
Outside, Two Smokes and Little Dancer huddled together in sleep, their shadows
speckled where the moonlight shot patterns through the cotton wood leaves
overhead.

 
          
 
Her mother had told of ghosts that walked the
winter nights, howling like the wind. Always restless, the ghosts would steal a
little girl away if she wasn't good and obedient. So the story went. Later,
she'd come to wonder. Now, when she was faced with soul death, perhaps Heavy
Beaver had found a way to call a ghost to come steal her soul? And why not?

 
          
 
Straining her ears, she could hear him,
chanting softly from the insides of his lodge, the faint thump of a drum like
the beat of her heart. The hair on the back of her neck rose in a prickly
sensation.

 
          
 
"I had to do it. I had to save the
antelope—-make it right for the People." She dropped her head into her
hands. "I had to . . . that's all. I just couldn't do anything else."
And now I'll die for it.

 
          
 
The faint thump of the drum echoed in her
head. She shifted, reaching for the water skin and froze. Only one stick
remained standing.

 
          
 
White Calf woke with a start. She blinked up
at the moonlight. A call had stirred her soul, left it trembling and afraid.
About her the night shifted, the feeling of unease slipping through the
moonlight like a capricious spirit on dancing antelope feet.