Authors: W. Michael Gear

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Native American & Aboriginal

People of the Longhouse (2 page)

BOOK: People of the Longhouse

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One

T
he call still echoed from the depths of the trees.

It made Sky Messenger push onward, down the leaf-strewn trail and into the dark filigree of shadows where glinting eyes watched him from the branches. Night was falling. Soon the owls would lift into the air and vanish like smoke on a windy day, but for now their gazes fixed on the strange old man with the limp.

He cocked his head, listening. The call was growing fainter. Sky Messenger propped his walking stick and continued on down the trail.

He’d first heard the Voice when he’d seen eleven summers. Since that time, the great unrest came upon him every Moon of Falling Leaves. He would be sleeping warmly beneath his hides, his soul walking through springtime meadows with his Ancestors, when suddenly his eyes would jerk open, and he would sit up in bed. It always began as a low keening. When he heard it, he would jump to his feet and dash out into the cold darkness. On and on he would run, as fast as his bad legs would carry him, away from the village and down the forest trails where bears and wolves prowled.

Four nights ago, he’d leaped from his hides, breathing as though slapped awake, and known the caller was close. The hair at the nape of his neck had stood on end. From far out in the trees, the Voice
came, clear and crisp, more real than ever before—
Odion … Odion.
He’d thrown on his cape, for his old body needed it these days, and rushed outside into the icy woods. It was unlike any human voice he’d ever heard, composed of many notes, like an eerie song. And he knew it, knew the speaker, in the depths of his heart, as he had never known another human being.

Sometimes he pursued the Voice all moon long, looking for it as though it were real. Speaking gently or shouting in desperation, he would limp along the trails like a madman. He used his crooked walking stick to probe beneath fallen logs, or stab into holes in the forest floor where supernatural creatures lived; or he would crouch in the underbrush for days, his eyes wide, sniffing the wind for that otherworldly scent he knew would someday be there. Listening. Always listening for that mysterious voice that called him by name, filling him with wild desires and a vague sweet gladness.

His obsession frightened his children and grandchildren. His clan had begun to say that he was insane, that he was chasing his own afterlife soul that had wandered away into the forest and become lost. None of that mattered. He
knew
he had to find the caller and look him in the eyes.

Sky Messenger stopped to take a breath and looked up into the overarching branches of a hickory tree. He especially enjoyed these rare autumn evenings when he could stand beneath the trees and hear them snapping and cracking as the night cooled.

The Voice faded.

Sky Messenger propped his walking stick and held his breath, listening. In the moonlight, the snow-coated trees had a bluish gleam that seemed to radiate outward into the air, turning it liquid and faintly silver. Deep autumn leaves rustled around his moccasins as he cupped a hand to his mouth and called, “Where are you?”

He searched the forest until he spied movement among the shadows. Concentrating, he thought he saw a black silhouette, standing tall and straight, its arms open to the night sky. Heat flushed his face. Was it real? Was it a … a man? Or did it have wings? Black wings that sleeked down its back? Or perhaps the hump was just a bulky Trader’s pack?

He slowly moved toward it. He was afraid of falling. His old bones had grown brittle, and he knew that a simple broken arm might kill him. As he sneaked closer, the Voice lowered its arms and turned toward him.

Odion. Are you coming?

For the first time since he’d seen eleven summers he was looking into the dark holes of its eyes. Terror made his hands tremble.

“Th-that was my childhood name. They call me Sky Messenger now.”

Hunched over, he limped toward the Forest Spirit, his ancient body aching. Every step was at once a threat and a gesture of love and need. The Voice seemed to sense it. Like all predators, they feared each other. It cocked its head, and its eyes caught the starlight and shimmered as though dusted with quartz crystals.

A fleeting instant later, it dashed out into the trees with twigs cracking in its wake.

“No, wait! Come back!”

Sky Messenger stumbled after it, thrashing wildly through the brush, trying to catch up. He chased it straight into a meadow where the starlight reflected so brilliantly from the snow that the Voice’s dark silhouette seemed to be floating above the ground.

“What do you want? Why do you keep calling me? You’ve been calling me for sixty-five summers.”

The creature growled like a cornered wolf, its arms extended as though preparing to take flight.

In a motion as old as predators themselves, Sky Messenger took a step backward, yielding the moment to his opponent, and slowly began to circle around the tree-lined edge of the meadow. He poked at rocks with his walking stick, and sniffed damp tree bark, precisely like the demented old man people claimed him to be. The Spirit kept cocking its head, watching curiously, and after a time it quieted and lowered its arms. But its quartz-dust eyes remained focused on Sky Messenger, charting his methodical progress around the meadow.

It stunned him that the Spirit seemed suspicious and afraid. What could an old man do to harm a Spirit? Then again, maybe it wasn’t harm the Spirit feared. Perhaps it was just the way of the chase. Run and feint. Let your prey catch up, then whirl around and snap at it, keep it at bay until the final moment. The final lunge for the throat.

Sky Messenger saw his chance and dashed out into the meadow, heading directly for the Voice … and the chase resumed.

Time and again he cornered the creature and tried to force it to answer his questions before it darted away. He stumbled after it in some incomprehensible ancient dance. Was it just a man? Sometimes he thought so. But why would a strong young man let Sky Messenger
catch him? The Voice ran until Sky Messenger was right on its heels; then it whirled around snarling. He would never have caught the Voice if it did not wish to be caught. Surely this was some Spirit game.

He halted, breathing hard, and let his gaze drift over the brush and trees.

I’m here, Odion.

He saw it. The Voice stood just ahead, hidden behind a frost-covered dogwood. Its eyes gleamed through the dark weave of branches.

Come … . Follow me.

It trotted away, repeatedly looking back over its shoulder, as if to make certain he was still behind; then it disappeared into the forest.

Sky Messenger worked his way down a winding forest trail dappled with snow and frost-rimmed leaves, simultaneously fearing and eager for what he would next see.

“Where are you?” he called. “I’ve lost you.”

From the dark depths of the forest came the call—a long drawn-out wail, his name in the voice of a wolf, howled with chilling effect.

Sky Messenger’s bony fingers tightened around the knob of his walking stick. He was close now. Very close, and he dared not be afraid of what would come. He swallowed hard and limped forward.

On the other side of a birch copse, the trail sloped upward to a high point overlooking a hilly country filled with great stretches of forests and shining creeks.

Odion.

There. On the trail below.

The Voice let him get to within thirty paces, and started slowly walking away.

Through endless towering trees, Sky Messenger followed, step after step, always twenty paces behind, until Elder Brother Sun rose red over the eastern horizon. As the air warmed, an exotic flowery fragrance wafted around him. His nostrils quivered. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the otherworldly sweetness, and his old heart began to slam against his ribs.
That scent!

In the distance, he saw flocks of birds gathered over a bridge, fluttering, waiting. All along the planks of the bridge, mice darted, their furred backs shining in the newborn light. There were other animals, too. A white-tailed doe, and a lean young wolf.

At the sight of the wolf, tears traced warm lines down Sky Messenger’s wrinkled cheeks. He had been running from this moment his entire life. He whispered, “Hello, old friend.”

The Voice stopped dead in the trail and let him advance to stand at its side. Sky Messenger shivered. He understood now.

He was answering the last call, walking at the side of the only brother who truly mattered. The brother who had always been there, as unobtrusive as his own shadow, watching over him, fighting at his side on the darkest days.

“You can tell me now,” he said, and took a breath to prepare himself. “What is your name?”

The Voice hissed, the sound like a truce being broken by an arrow, and he thought he made out the word
Sonon
.

“Sonon?”

Yes, do you remember me, Odion?

Ancient memories flooded up from behind doors buried deep in his heart, doors Sky Messenger had kept barricaded for sixty-five summers. Behind them monsters still lived and breathed.

He shook his head and stumbled backward. “No. No, I—I can’t—!”

Remember, Odion. You must remember now. It’s time.

All of the doors he had so carefully guarded vanished, and a sea of ghostly eyes started coming toward him.

Shuddering, Sky Messenger sank down in the trail and squeezed his eyes closed. As the monsters surrounded him, terror swept him back in time to that long-ago day when this journey had truly started … .

Two

O
dion

The patter of rain falling through branches fills the forest and mixes eerily with the laughter of warriors. The sound of children’s feet wading through deep autumn leaves is loud.

I dare to glance up. The storm has sucked the color from the trees. The giant oak trunks look black, their branches iron-gray. We are not on a trail, but march through scrubby underbrush. Ahead of me, one boy and four girls walk with their heads down. Some weep softly, but mostly they are as silent as the dead relatives they left behind in their burned villages.

As the enemy warriors herd us up a steep mountain trail, I see a small clearing ahead. Patches of sunlight penetrate the dark clouds and briefly blaze through the brilliant maples and hickory trees. They seem almost too bright. Painful. I squint and force my legs to keep walking until the clouds swallow Elder Brother Sun again.

I am young, eleven summers, and not yet a man. For as long as I can recall, I have feared that this day would come. Warfare rages throughout our country. Many villages have been attacked, and women and children taken as slaves. Now that I am one of them, I feel like a duck hit in the head with a rock—too numb to think.

When we enter the clearing, four white-tailed deer bound away, and I watch them with my heart racing. They are free … as I was yesterday.

The girl in line ahead of me stumbles. The warriors curse her as she regains her balance. Her name is Agres. She wears a beautiful white doehide dress. She arrived last night, and carries an infant in her arms. We all assume the baby is her sister.

I stare at the holes in the soles of the infant’s moccasins.

My People, the People of the Standing Stone, have a saying:
An infant’s life is as the thinness of a maple leaf.
We believe that each person has two souls: a soul that stays with the body forever, and an afterlife soul that travels to the Land of the Dead. Babies are just barely separated from the Spirit world, and vulnerable to being stolen back by unseen ghosts who follow their mothers. The holes tell the ghosts to stay back, that this child’s souls have been claimed by the living.

“Agres should throw away those moccasins,” I whisper.

If ghosts take the baby’s souls, she will be reborn in a new body and won’t have to face what lies ahead for the rest of us.

My eight-summers-old sister, Tutelo, tightens her grip on my hand and looks up. “What, Odion? What did you say?”

Tutelo has a pretty oval face with bright brown eyes. A long black braid hangs down the back of her tan dress. Tiny circlets of copper decorate her sleeves and hem.

“Nothing,” I answer, and squeeze her small hand. “Don’t talk, Tutelo. You know it causes troub—”

One of the Mountain People warriors—the one I have named Broken Teeth because of the jagged yellow teeth that fill his mouth—glares at me. I quickly look away.

Four warriors guard us. Each carries a bow and has a quiver filled with arrows slung over his left shoulder. War clubs and stone knives hang from their belts. Big Man, the one in charge, really scares me. He has a heavily scarred face, and every time he looks back at the line of children, his jaw clenches with hate.

Tutelo whispers, “Where’s Mother?”

“Shh.”

Tutelo has been asking the same question since midnight. Our mother is War Chief Koracoo. Yesterday morning, Mother led half of our warriors into the forests to scout for the enemy. Father, her deputy, was in charge of defending our village. The attack came at dusk; it was swift
and brutal. The People of the Mountain brought three times as many warriors to the fight. Yellowtail Village didn’t have a chance.

I remember little of it … Father dragging us out of our beds and ordering us to run … longhouses burning … screaming people racing through the firelit darkness … dead bodies. Then standing in the forest, clutching Tutelo’s hand, stunned, as enemy warriors rounded us up and marched us away as slaves. I must have more memories—somewhere inside me—but I cannot find them.

I don’t know if Mother and Father are alive, but I keep praying they are. If they survived, they are tracking us, coming for us.

Big Man holds up a hand. We all stop, and out in the forest I hear people moving. I search the shadows and see them weaving among the smoke-colored trunks. One warrior emerges, shoving three girls in front of him. All are beautiful, and have seen perhaps twelve or thirteen summers. The new warrior forces them to join our group.

No one speaks. We just stare at each other in fear and disbelief. The same thing happened last night. That’s when Agres and her sister arrived. Big Man has made four stops so far. The red quill patterns on the new girls’ capes mark them as Flint People. Was their village also attacked?

Mother says the warfare must stop. She hates it. Father calls her a “peacemaker,” and it always sounds like an insult.

Big Man studies the girls carefully, walking around them several times before he nods and hands over a heavy hide sack to the man who brought the girls. The man shakes it, smiles, and disappears into the trees like mist vanishing on a warm day.

They did not say a word. Have they made this kind of exchange so often they do not need to speak?

Big Man lifts his hand again, and we march, heading east through the sun-dappled forest.

“Where’s Mother?”

“Stop asking, Tutelo!”

Tears fill my sister’s eyes, but she knows better than to cry out loud. We have each taken a beating for crying. Instead, Tutelo clutches my hand in a death grip and sobs without a sound. My souls shrivel.

I lean down to whisper, “She’s coming, Tutelo, but we have to stop talking about it, or the bad men will hear us. You don’t want them to know Mother’s coming, do you? If they know she’s coming, they will ambush her. We must be quiet.”

Tutelo looks up with big, tear-filled eyes. In sudden understanding, she whispers, “All right.”

As we march deeper into the trees, the scents of rotting wood and damp autumn leaves fill the air. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

I keep praying that Big Man told us the truth: We will all be adopted into new families. We will have lots to eat, and though the work will be hard, our new families will come to love us. In time, Big Man says, we will forget our Standing Stone families and be happy in the Mountain People’s villages. I will become a great hunter, and Tutelo will marry a good man and give the nation healthy sons and daughters.

Usually, that’s how it works. I have seen many children, taken in warfare, brought to Yellowtail Village and adopted into families. Each is miserable at first, but within a few summers he or she seems genuinely happy. I myself was captured in a war raid. Father says I had seen six or seven moons. He pulled me from the burning wreckage of a longhouse and carried me home to Yellowtail Village. I know no other home, and I love my adopted parents with all my heart. Mother says that no people can create an empire, they must
become
one, and the best way to do that is to adopt conquered peoples into Standing Stone families and educate them as their own children, without distinction.

Unfortunately, I am beginning to think that Big Man’s promises of happiness are worthless.

These are not ordinary warriors. Even I can see that. They wear no clan sashes, and have no visible tattoos. In fact, I can spot places where they have cut off tattoos, or obliterated them. They never call each other by name, which makes me think they are afraid that one of us will later speak that name in the wrong company.

Broken Teeth trots toward Agres and her sister. All morning long his eyes have sought out Agres, and I do not like the way he looks at her. Agres wears beautiful polished copper earspools, and shell bracelets that click when she walks. She turns away and tries not to notice Broken Teeth’s attention. Instead, she occupies herself with caring for her infant sister. The hungry baby mews constantly. Though Agres keeps placing a wet twist of hide in the infant’s mouth to suck on, the baby just spits it out, wails, and tugs at Agres’ long hair with frantic hands. None of us has had anything to eat, and water only eases the cramps for so long.

As we walk, the endless mountains pass by. In the afternoon, we
enter a stand of enormous oaks. Big Man forces us to climb over bare exposed rock. Stones are the bones of Great Grandmother Earth, and like the bones of animals, they are alive. They deserve to be treated with respect. I try to walk gently.

I push Tutelo in front of me where I can watch her. Just ahead of her walks Wrass. He has also seen eleven summers, but he’s four moons older than I am—maybe the oldest boy here—and he’s brave. My father says that Wrass is destined to be a great warrior. Tall for his age, he has a face like an eagle’s, with sharp dark eyes and a hooked nose. Wrass can track better and shoot farther than any other boy in our village. I have always been jealous of Wrass. As the war chief’s only son, much is expected of me, but I have always been afraid. I am the boy who runs when the bear approaches. The boy who hurries home when darkness falls. And I’ve never been very good with a bow. Not like Wrass, who can shoot a bird out of the sky at fifty paces. For the first time in my life, I am grateful for his skills. My deepest hope is that he is waiting his chance to grab a war club and start a fight that will allow a few of us to escape.

When he turns his head, and I see his profile, my hopes evaporate.

Wrass looks as lost and terrified as the rest of us. Every time one of the warriors glares at him, Wrass starts shaking.

Sunlight pierces the rain clouds and slants across the forest, casting geometric patterns upon the rocks. I let my head fall forward to stare at them, and my shoulder-length black hair hangs over the front of my buckskin shirt. Some of the children have capes, but Tutelo and I scrambled from our beds so fast we didn’t have the chance to grab ours. Last night, when Big Man let us sleep for two hands of time, I curled my body around Tutelo to keep her warm, and dreamed of Mother leading a war party into the camp and killing Big Man and all of his warriors.

If I live to see one thousand summers, that dream will still be the best of my life.

Big Man leads us off the rocks and down a steep trail into a small clearing where he calls, “Make the children sit down.”

Two warriors trot down the line swinging war clubs, forcing us to drop to the damp oak leaves. Tutelo tucks her hand into mine. Her fingers are icy cold. I lift them to blow on them, and she shivers at the sudden warmth.

“We’re going to be all right. Just be quiet, Tutelo.”

“Where’s … ?” She stops herself from asking, and I clutch her hand and nod.

Only when I start looking around do I see that this small clearing has been used before. Holes have been scooped out of the leaves, as though many children slept here and covered themselves with the leaves for warmth. Fragments of a broken clay cup scatter the ground to my left. Beneath a fallen log, I see the top half of a girl’s cornhusk doll.

Has Big Man brought other captive children here? Why?

Big Man gathers his warriors around him, and they whisper to each other, but I can’t make out any of their words.

I look at the leaves, and my thoughts turn to those other children. I swear I can smell their last moments here. Fear sweat drifts on the air, and I pick up the faint coppery odor of blood.
What happened to you?

Wrass seems to smell these things, as well. He lifts his hooked nose, scents the wind, and his mouth tightens.

Tutelo bites her lip, looks back and forth between us, and asks, “Where’s Mother?”

The words are like spear thrusts to my belly. “Coming,” I whisper. “She’s coming.”

“When?”

“Soon. She and Father are tracking us. It will take some time.”

Tutelo heaves a deep sigh and leans her head against my shoulder.

At the head of the group, the three new girls start talking to each other.

Big Man says, “Quiet.”

One of the girls says a last word to her friend, and Big Man shouts, “I said,
quiet
!”

BOOK: People of the Longhouse

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