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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

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Nine

“
P
itch?” A voice pierced the Dream like a sharpened stick. In it, Pitch had been conversing with Rides-the-Wind on a windblown shore. Strong white waves had battered the rocks below them while dark Power slipped and dove, flitting about them like a falcon on the stiff wind. In the Dream, the old man had been tossing a soul, like a glowing orb, from hand to hand.

Pitch blinked, shoved the tanned elkhides down around his waist, and raised himself on one elbow. His red war shirt was rumpled, and his skin itched where the thick fabric had eaten into his flesh. How long had he slept? The heaviness in his limbs told him it couldn’t have been too long. “Who is it?”

“It be me, Whisker.”

He blinked in the faint glow of the fire and saw the young woman standing in the cave’s rounded entry. She must have run to get here. Sweat glistened on her catlike nose, and black strands had torn loose from her bun and straggled around her oval face.

“Please, come, Pitch. Elder Ragged Wing say for you to come.
Now.
”

The Cougar People, distant relatives of the North Wind People, had a strange accent that had always been difficult for him to understand. They were hunters who lived for the most part east of the mountains at the edge of the plains, rarely fished, and insisted that fish did not feed the blood.

Pitch clambered unsteadily to his feet. “What’s happened?”

She wrung her hands. “Dzoo gone.”

“What do you mean? Where did she go?”

“Don’t know. Men hunt for her.”

Pitch pulled his cape from the floor and swung it around his shoulders. When he’d arrived at dusk, Dzoo had ordered him to get some sleep before they began their journey back to Sandy Point Village.

“She must be somewhere close by, Whisker. She wouldn’t have left the people in the sick cave for long.”

“Hope so.”

Whisker’s right hand rose, to clutch the little fetish tied around her throat, and revulsion ran through Pitch like a cold wave.

Witches’ fetishes had become so valuable that even ordinary people had begun to prowl the burned villages, collecting ears, toes, sexual organs, or a lump of human liver from the dead to make fetishes to sell. Those who bought them believed that the gods could not protect them from the North Wind People, so they had to protect themselves. Only that morning, a passing Trader had shown Pitch a hideous doll made from dried seaweed mixed with human fat and baked hard. He’d said the maker was a Powerful witch called Coyote. The Trader promised that if Pitch carried the doll, no spear would be able to penetrate his body.

“Dzoo probably just needed a moment alone to gather her thoughts, Whisker.”

“Yes. Please, hurry.” She grabbed his wrist and dragged him out into the cold wind, then rushed ahead.

Pitch tied the laces of his cape as he walked.

The night smelled pungent—a mixture of wood smoke and boiling willow bark tea they had Traded for from the far south. Big bags bubbled near the fires in the sick cave ten and five paces ahead.

Whisker sobbed suddenly and looked at Pitch over her shoulder. Her wide eyes were startlingly black in the firelight. “My mother gone, too.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes, I go to cave to talk. She gone.”

A chill settled on Pitch’s heart. In a gentle voice, he asked, “Did your mother’s soul fly, Whisker?”

“Don’t know.”

Whisker broke into a run, heading away from the caves and out into the forest.

Pitch stopped. “Whisker? Where are we going?” He could see that other feet had beaten a path into the snow.

“This way. You come this way.” She waved him forward. “Elder Ragged Wing needs show you something.”

“Show me what?”

The shake of her head looked more like desperation than a refusal to answer.

As they entered the forest, Pitch heard voices and caught the glimmer of a shredded-bark torch. A group of six or seven people stood near a large boulder. They had their backs to him and, for the most part, resembled dark, amorphous figures floating in the halo of torchlight.

“What are they looking at, Whisker?”

“Skinned … wings,” she said, and hesitated as if she wasn’t certain that was the right word. “Bloody feathers. You must see. Come. The elders wait for you.”

“The elders want me to see skinned wings?”

“Not all. Broken Sun not here.”

“Maybe he and Dzoo are together.”

Maybe your mother died and the carried her body out into the forest to be ritually prepared for the journey to the Underwater House.

People cleared a path for them. Two of the elders stood speaking softly. Behind them, a shape lay on the forest floor. A body, human from the looks of it. His heartbeat quickened.

“Who is it?” He stepped forward. “What happened?”

Chief Antler Spoon glanced at him, then walked a few paces to one side. Thin white hair matted his head, as though he’d just risen from his bedding. A pale caribouhide cloak hung down almost to the high wolverine leggings that covered his moccasins.

Elder Ragged Wing stood in front of the body. He had a sunken, withered face that reflected horror and disbelief. The elder put a gnarled hand on Pitch’s arm as he came forward, and said, “Whisker thinks this her mother, but I am not so sure. You know Dzoo better than any of us … .”

Pitch bent over the corpse where it lay in the track-pocked snow.

At first he could make no sense of what he saw. She lay on her side with a bloody white cape covering her torso, but nothing was in the right place. She looked deformed or … contorted.

“Skinned wings,”
he murmured.

The murderer had wrenched the victim’s arms and legs from their sockets and twisted them behind her back at unnatural angles; then he’d peeled the skin from her arms and smoothed it out flat on the snow. Pitch swallowed hard. They did resemble wings.

In the past twelve moons of raiding, the North Wind warriors had
committed a great many atrocities, but nothing like this. Hate-filled warriors often mutilated their victims, but they did it in haste, hacking and slashing. This had been performed with grisly patience. “Bring me a torch.”

Elder Ragged Wing took a torch from someone and held it over the body.

The killer had cut out her eyes, leaving bloody gaping caverns, and her cheeks bulged hideously from the fatty flesh stuffed inside her mouth.

Pitch’s hand hesitated over the cape before he nerved himself to pull it back. She was naked. Her breasts had been cut off—not with the quick hacking of a warrior, but with the surgical slicing of a practiced Healer with a freshly struck obsidian blade. He glanced at the flesh in the woman’s mouth and realized what it must be: breast tissue.

Pitch wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Weakly, he asked, “Did you find any clothing or jewelry? Anything that might identify her?”

“No, just this beautiful cape.”

The longer Pitch stared at her bloody face, the more his fear grew. He turned to the milling crowd. “Did anyone see Dzoo leave the village?”

Heads shook, and murmuring broke out. People huddled against each other as if in protection from some misty vapor that hung on the night.

“Someone must have seen Dzoo leave. Or seen Whisker’s mother leave. They cannot both have just vanished without someone noticing!”

“He did it for us,”
Antler Spoon whispered fiercely.
“For all of us!”

Pitch twisted around to look at the elder. Wind Woman blew wisps of Antler Spoon’s white hair. He was fingering a caribou-bone fetish carved in the shape of a great northern owl.

“What are you talking about?”

“He Traded her.”

“Traded who?”

Antler Spoon’s jaws clamped, as though he was afraid to say more.

“Who?”
Pitch shouted. “Who did you Trade?”

Antler Spoon pointed to the dead woman. “We had to give him someone!”

“Antler Spoon, answer me. Is this Dzoo?”

“No. Sweet Grass! We were too afraid to give him Dzoo! Broken
Sun, he say, Dzoo’s Spirit Helpers swoop down upon us and tear us to pieces!”

A small tendril of relief wound through Pitch, to be followed by guilt. He could hear Whisker crying softly somewhere behind him.

“Who did you Trade Sweet Grass to?”

Antler Spoon’s sticklike arms flailed uncertainly. “We call him ‘Coyote.’ Don’t know his real name. Or even what he looks like. He wear a coyote mask! He been coming here for moons, watching us. We knew he out there. Many of our people seen him. But he never tried to harm us or speak to us, so we don’t worry about him. Then, two nights ago, he came down from the forest and found Broken Sun.”

Coyote? Pitch frowned. The same Coyote of whom the Trader had spoken?

Antler Spoon stepped forward, and his grip tightened on Pitch’s arm. “He ordered us to bring him Dzoo! There was nothing we could do! He say if we didn’t give her up, witch sickness and his warriors would kill my people. Broken Sun told me the whole thing.” He took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out slowly. “We protect our village! Protect Dzoo! Sweet Grass dying!”

“Look! Out in the trees!”

A soft rasping sounded as stilettos and knives were drawn clear of leather sheaths.

Pitch’s blood began to pound. He followed the pointing fingers to a spot in the darkness. A slender black shape wavered among the shadows cast by the firs.

Ragged Wing shook his head. “Who is it?”

Pitch muttered, “I don’t know, but he’s coming straight for us.”

“Is Broken Sun?” Antler Spoon asked and lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the glare of the torch.

Pitch blinked, trying to make the darkness congeal into a recognizable shape. After several moments, he let out the breath he’d unconsciously been holding. “It’s … it’s Dzoo.”

“You certain?” Antler Spoon’s voice quavered.

“Yes.” Pitch took a steadying breath. “No one else moves with that inhuman grace.”

Dzoo seemed to float around the boulders, her black buffalohide cape swaying around her tall body. The hair had been turned in for warmth, and magnificent designs decorated the exterior suede: black lightning, spirals, strange birdmen, and huge rainbow serpents. A dreadful stillness possessed her. The Cougar People began to shift uneasily.

Pitch called, “Dzoo? Are you all right?”

She entered the halo of torchlight. “Gather your things, Pitch. We have no more business here.” Then her gaze faxed on Antler Spoon.

A curtain of long reddish brown hair swayed around Dzoo as she silently marched toward the old man. Not even the snow crunched under her feet. Antler Spoon went still, like Crab suddenly coming face to face with Seagull.

Dzoo stopped three hands short of the chief and stared at him through eyes as black as polished obsidian and strangely luminous.

A dripping sound caught Pitch’s attention. He looked down and saw drops of blood speckle the calf-deep snow at Dzoo’s feet.

“Dzoo, are you hurt?” Pitch reached out to her.

Dzoo’s delicate brows arched as she bent closer to Antler Spoon, extended her arm, and let something fall from her hand. It sank into the snow like a hot rock.

She whispered, “Betrayal is a costly business, Antler Spoon. Costly in every way.”

Antler Spoon stammered, “Wh-what are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

Dzoo turned, met every eye in the crowd. “Run. While you still can.”

Silently, she walked away toward the village.

No one moved; then they surged forward, asking questions, shoving each other to get a better look at what she had dropped.

Elder Ragged Wing dug it out of the snow: A globular thing, heavy, and covered with thick black—

BOOK: People of the Raven (North America's Forgotten Past)

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