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Authors: W. Michael Gear

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

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BOOK: People of the Longhouse
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“Guards!” Gannajero shouts.
Kotin tackles Hodigo and wrestles him to the ground, growling in fury. “Stimon? Grab his legs!” Another warrior rushes over and throws his body over Hodigo’s flailing legs, holding them.
Hodigo’s wounded opponent sits down hard in the frozen grass. His friends gather around him, speculating on his wound. They keep giving Hodigo murderous glances.
“This is just beginning,” Wrass whispers. “Look at that blood. He’s going to die for sure, and his friends will have to avenge his death.”
I say, “Good. So long as they leave us alone, I—”
Gannajero throws her head back and lets out a bloodcurdling shriek that silences every person in camp. She spreads her arms like a huge bird and hops around in a bizarre dance that resembles Crow hunting mice in a field. As she dances closer to Hodigo and Kotin, men scatter, shoving each other backward to get away.
She stops beside Hodigo with her arms still out. Her black eyes shine and flicker as she cocks her head, looking at him first through one eye,
then the other, like a curious bird. Then, with agonizing slowness, she lowers the black feather in her hand toward Hodigo.
Hodigo goes pale when Gannajero leans over him. “What are you going to do with that, old woman?” he shouts, and tries to fight his way free. “Get away from me!”
In an eerie singsong voice, Gannajero chants, “You broke the rules. Hodigo broke the rules.”
“You crazy old witch! Let me go!”
She jerks Hodigo’s shirt away from his chest and uses the shiny black feather to paint a series of interweaving lines on his flesh. “Hodigo, Hodigo, empty soul, wants the girl, can’t let go.”
When Hodigo laughs, Gannajero uses the quill to stab a hole in his chest. He lets out a sharp cry of surprise. Blood wells. Gannajero dips the quill in the blood and continues drawing designs while she sings softly. The men standing around seem fascinated. They must be very afraid of her, or else they would jump her, grab their friend, and leave. Instead, they mutter ominously to each other and watch with huge dark eyes.
Gannajero removes a small black bag from her belt pouch. As she tugs open the laces, she says, “You’re safe now,” and sprinkles a white powder over the bloody designs, then drags out what looks like a freshly dug root. “Open his mouth.”
Kotin cranks open Hodigo’s jaws, and Gannajero shoves the root so far down his throat, he has no choice but to swallow it.
Hodigo’s face contorts, and he spits in Gannajero’s face and chuckles, “You can’t scare me! I am Hodigo, the greatest warrior among the Mountain People!”
Gannajero smiles as she wipes off his spittle on her cape.
Within moments, Hodigo starts to pant and writhe. Finally he screams as though being eaten alive by wolves. All of his friends back away.
When Gannajero tucks the bag into her belt pouch and rises, Hodigo lets out one last bellow and goes limp.
“There, there,” she gently says. “No more bad dreams.”
She grins at his friends and walks away. None of them try to stop her.
Holding the bloody feather to her breast as though she cherishes it, she walks out into the meadow to stare up at the sky. The afternoon is shading toward evening. Long shadows fill the forest. She pets the feather while she whispers to herself, or perhaps to the feather.
Kotin releases Hodigo and calls, “All right, get up, Hodigo.” He pauses. “I said, get up, you worthless …”
The man doesn’t move. Wrass and I stand up to see better. Our guards do not seem to care. They are all breathlessly watching Hodigo.
“What’s happening?” I ask Wrass, who is taller than me.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. He’s just lying there.”
Hodigo’s friends bravely move in closer. One man crouches and places a hand to Hodigo’s throat. “Blessed Spirits,” he says softly. “He has no heartbeat. Is he breathing?” He quickly places his ear over the bloody designs on Hodigo’s chest and listens. “I don’t … I don’t believe it! He’s
dead
.”
Gannajero chuckles, and my legs go weak.
Tutelo looks from Wrass, to the guards, and back to me, and sobs, “Odion? What happened to that man?”
I cannot look at her.
The other girl in our group silently rolls to her back. I do not even know her name. She is the quiet one. The child no one seems to notice. Short and skinny, with irregularly cut mourning-hair, she has a face like a chipmunk’s: round, with small dark eyes, and two front teeth that stick out slightly. She hasn’t spoken a word to anyone … until now. “Don’t be s-scared. It wasn’t the feather,” she stutters. “Sh-she probably used helleb-bore. If you gather the roots this time of year, it—it’s deadly.”
We all turn to look at her. The attention seems to unnerve Chipmunk. She curls onto her side again and turns her back to us. She’s shaking all over.
As I am. My legs feel like boiled grass stems. I sink to the ground and put my arm around my little sister. She hugs me tightly.
“It’s all right, Odion,” Tutelo whispers. “Mother and Father are coming. They’re coming.”
T
he northern sentry cried, “Two people on the northeastern trail!” Sindak climbed to a higher branch in the maple tree where he stood guard over the western trails. Glorious swaths of orange, red, and yellow leaves dappled the mountains. He scanned the winding stretches of trail he could see—even in the soft lavender gleam of dusk they seemed to glow. But he saw no travelers. Not that it mattered. He would know who they were soon enough.
He sighed and leaned against the massive tree trunk. A tall, muscular young man, he had seen nineteen summers. His beaked nose protruded far beyond his deeply sunken brown eyes. Shoulder-length black hair blew around his lean face. Few women found him attractive, which was one of the reasons his wife, Puksu, had recently divorced him. There were other reasons of course, not the least being that she despised him. He had committed two crimes in her eyes: He hadn’t yet gained acclaim as a warrior, and they’d been married for two summers without a child. Gratefully, he no longer had to listen to her endless complaining.
His gaze drifted back to the broad plaza of Atotarho Village. Arranged in a rough oval around the plaza were four longhouses, four smaller clan houses, and a prisoners’ house. The magnificent longhouses—the biggest ever built in the history of their people—were constructed of pole frames and covered with elm bark. The Wolf Clan longhouse was amazing; it stretched over eight hundred hand-lengths long and forty wide. The others were shorter, two or three hundred hands long, but still stunning, especially when viewed from Sindak’s height. The arched roofs were almost level with his position, soaring over fifty hands high. Each clan was headed by a matron, and each longhouse was inhabited by the male and female descendants of one woman—around whom many legends revolved—and her maternal female descendants. When a man married, he moved to his wife’s longhouse.
Since the People of the Hills traced descent through the females, a child belonged to his mother’s clan and owed obedience to its clan elders. Women also owned the fields and houses. That’s why women decided when to go to war. Everything at risk belonged to them. Men owned little more than their own clothing and weapons. It meant that men had fewer responsibilities, which freed them to fight, hunt …
A shouted curse rang out.
Sindak squinted at the council meeting where over five hundred people had gathered. The village matrons sat in a broad circle around the chief, discussing what should be done next. Chief Atotarho had just returned from a Trading voyage where his party had been attacked. During the fighting, his ten-summers-old daughter had been taken prisoner. War Chief Nesi had tried to track the enemy warriors, but had lost their trail in the rain. Atotarho had been hoping to trade freshwater pearls for food—but had failed.
Everyone was hungry.
The matrons said that the past one hundred summers had been unusually cold and dry. Sindak knew only that the corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers rarely matured. He gazed down at the six women pounding corn in the plaza. They used a hollowed-out log as a mortar, threw in handfuls of dried corn, then beat it to a fine powder with a heavy wooden pestle, about twelve hands long. The rhythmic
thunk-thunk
echoed. A short distance away two women stood roasting the corn that would be ground in the mortars. They roasted whole ears over an open trench filled with glowing coals. Y-shaped sticks stood at either end of the trench; then ears were hung from a pole placed in the crotches of the sticks and roasted until completely parched, whereupon the women shelled the kernels into a bark barrel and stored it until needed in the mortars. This time of year, there should be two hundred women pounding and roasting corn—not six.
The harvest had been very poor. Meager harvests made people hunt harder, but after so many summers, the animals were mostly hunted out. The simple truth was that they were all growing desperate. Winter was almost upon them, and they had little food to stave off the cold. When people couldn’t feed their children, they had to take what they needed from nearby villages. Stealing had become a way of life. When it failed, warfare broke out. Battles had been raging, off and on, for more than one hundred summers, but it had gotten particularly violent in the past twenty summers. That’s why a forty-hand-tall palisade of upright logs enclosed the village.
Sindak watched the people milling around inside the palisade. During the autumn most people spent every moment until total darkness down along rivers where the fields were, collecting the last green-corn cobs or picking late squash blossoms—but everyone knew this council meeting was critical.
Sindak climbed to a higher branch, where he could see better. Two of the clan matrons—both white-haired and skinny—waved their arms. Chief Atotarho, who had seen fifty-two summers, sat with his head down and his eyes closed, as though he could bear no more of this. He’d braided rattlesnake skins into his gray-streaked black hair, then coiled it into a bun at the base of his head and secured it with a tortoiseshell comb. The style gave his narrow face a starved look. On this cool day, he wore a smoked deerhide cape over his shoulders. Red paintings covered the golden hide, mostly images of men in battle, for he had once, a long time ago, been a great warrior. But now, the cape covered a crooked and misshapen body. Every summer, he seemed to grow thinner. The village Healers said he had the joint stiffening disease. His enemies, however, said Atotarho was a powerful sorcerer, a witch, and his evil deeds had come back to haunt him.
As evening settled over the land in a smoky veil, long purple shadows spread through the forest, filling in the hollows of Atotarho’s gaunt face. He had lost his only son in a raid seven summers ago; now his daughter was gone—probably being held hostage, maybe being tortured or worse. Atotarho must be frantic to get his daughter back.
Old Tila—matron of the Wolf Clan—leaped to her feet and shook her fist at Atotarho. More shouts rang out.
Sindak would love to be down there listening to the arguments, but his duty today was to keep watch on the western trails. Three other guards watched the northern, southern, and eastern trails. The
boredom was excruciating. He often caught himself wishing Standing Stone warriors would attack just for the relief it would offer.
Kelek—matron of the Bear Clan—shouted at Atotarho, and the chief dropped his face into his hands as though totally defeated. His False Face pendant fell from his cape and swung in the dim light.
It was strange to see it around the neck of a man. Ordinarily the sacred pendant was passed from clan matron to clan matron, but Atotarho’s only sister had died as a child. Since his mother had no daughter to give it to, the clan had bestowed it upon Atotarho when he became chief.
Sindak stared at it in awe. The pendant was ancient and chronicled the most sacred story of all: the great battle between human beings and Horned Serpent. At the dawn of creation, Horned Serpent had crawled out of Skanodario Lake and attacked the People. His poisonous breath, like a black cloud, swept over the land, killing almost everyone.
In terror, the People had cried out to the Great Spirit, and he sent Thunder to help them. A vicious battle ensued, and Thunder threw the greatest lightning bolt ever seen. The flash was so bright many of the People were instantly blinded. Then the concussion struck. The mountains shook, and the stars broke loose from the skies. As they came hurtling down, they hissed right over the People. Thousands slammed into Great Grandmother Earth. The ferocious blasts and scorching heat caused raging forest fires. The biggest star fell right into the lake on top of Horned Serpent. There was a massive explosion of steam and—as Horned Serpent thrashed his enormous tail in pain—gigantic waves coursed down the river valleys and surged over the hills in a series of colossal floods that drowned most of the People. Of the entire tribe, only five families remained—the five families who would become the Peoples that today lived south of Skanodario Lake.
Sindak propped his hand on his belted war club and checked the western trails again, ensuring they were still empty. He looked toward Forks River, where a group of young women were bathing. Several splashed around in the water. Another group sat on the darkening shore, naked, combing each other’s hair while they dressed.
He smiled, letting erotic thoughts run through his mind. He …
“Are you watching the trails, or a woman?” a voice called from below.
Sindak looked down. His friend, Towa, stood below with another warrior named Pova. At twenty, Towa had waist-length black hair and a face women swooned over: oval, with a straight nose, perfect smile, and serious eyes. Unfortunately, Towa didn’t see very well, which meant he couldn’t hit a longhouse with an arrow at ten paces. But he was especially skilled at war strategy, which was probably why they were best friends. They balanced each other’s weaknesses. Towa had recently been wounded in battle and still wore his left arm in a sling.
“I must be watching the trails. We haven’t been attacked, have we?” he called back.
“No, but it’s only a matter of time. The matrons voted.”
“We’re going to war to get the chief’s daughter back?”
“We are. Our elders do not believe we have the luxury of doing nothing. They say we must act quickly or the Standing Stone People will view our lack of response as a sign of weakness and attack us. That’s why I’m here. War Chief Nesi wants to see you. Pova will take your place as western sentry.”
“And do a better job,” Pova added.
Sindak grinned and scrambled down the tree, using the branches like a ladder. When he leaped off the last branch and landed in front of Towa, a burst of autumn leaves puffed up.
Pova chuckled at Sindak and climbed up to take the sentry position.
“Have I been chosen for the war party?”
Towa said, “You have.”
“What about you?”
He yanked a thumb toward his wound and looked miserable. “Nesi told me I can’t fight until the wind stops whistling through the hole in my shoulder.”
“Well, don’t worry. I’ll kill two Standing Stone warriors in your honor.”
Towa gave him an askance look. “Without me along to watch your back, I fear you may not even make it past our border. Be careful and don’t think too much. It always ruins your aim.”
“Thinking is for old women. I’ll take a good fight over a peace council any day.”
Towa walked beside him as Sindak headed back toward the plaza along the leaf-strewn trail. Fragrant autumn winds gusted through the trees, swirling leaves like tiny tornadoes. One careened along the trail in front of them.
“This war party is foolish, Sindak. If you can get out of it, do it.”
“Why? I need all the chances to prove my valor I can get. No one is ever going to marry me again if my reputation as a warrior doesn’t improve.”
“Maybe. But you and I both know that Atotarho’s daughter is probably dead, which means many of our warriors are about to die for no reason. Including you.”
“But the Standing Stone elders would be idiots to kill Zateri. They could demand a huge ransom of corn for her and get it.”
Towa gave him a somber look. “That would make things worse. If we emptied our food storehouses to buy Zateri back, we’d just have to raid someone else to replenish them. Besides, there’s nothing the Standing Stone People need. Their harvests were good this year. That’s the problem. Their storehouses are overflowing with food, and everyone wants it.” Towa exhaled hard.
Sindak shrugged. “We need it. Our people are hungry.”
“Yes, I know. We also need their hunting grounds, fishing lakes, nut forests, and especially their agricultural fields. As our numbers grow each year, our harvests get worse. To survive, we must take what they have. Where does it end? With all of us dead?”
Sindak frowned and kicked his way through a particularly high pile of leaves that blocked the trail. He didn’t like thinking. Towa was the thinker. Fortunately for the Hills People, they had the greatest number of warriors in the land. They could take what they wanted, and did. No one liked warfare, but if it kept the Hills People alive, it was necessary. Throwing away lives on a futile mission, however, seemed folly.
“I have worse news yet,” Towa said. “Because the council was divided on this issue, they only authorized Nesi to take twenty warriors on the war party.”
BOOK: People of the Longhouse
7.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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