The People of the Black Sun (46 page)

Forty-seven

Two hands of time before dawn, Baji lay snuggled beneath the blankets with Dekanawida's muscular arms around her. His soft breathing warmed her ear. They'd run until they'd started stumbling. As soon as they'd made camp at the base of a gray rock wall and crawled between the blankets, he'd fallen into a dead sleep.

Baji, on the other hand, had been staring out at the glistening forest, listening. The intoxicating far-off cry lilted through the darkness. It was especially powerful tonight, calling to her like a lover's summons, begging her to come. It had grown constant, echoing across the distances, sometimes barely audible, others times so loud it rang inside her as though the callers had their muzzles pressed to her ears.

At such times, Gitchi's gaze never left her.

The wolf lay close beside Baji, watching her as the campfires of the dead wheeled through the sky high above them. His yellow eyes were alert, attentive to the slightest change in her expression, looking up into her face with keen unfathomable interest. He seemed to be concentrating on her breathing, as though he greatly feared it might cease. Even when she tried to sleep, the strength of the old wolf's gaze woke her. Each time she blinked and yawned, his tail wagged, and his whole heart shone in his eyes.

Trying not to wake Sky Messenger, she eased her arm from beneath the blanket to scratch Gitchi's chest, and he sighed in that way that only a contented dog can. As she petted him, images fleeted across her souls. He'd been so small and scared when they'd found him tied up in that bag on the shore of the river outside of Bog Willow Village. She remembered it as though it had happened moments ago.

She, Odion, and Tutelo had heard Gitchi crying, and had followed the sound down to the riverbank. The shore had been strewn with refuse. Victorious warriors with packs of new plunder had cast their shabby old belongings on the ground just before they'd shoved off in their canoes. Threadbare packs and capes, blankets with too many stitched holes, and hide bags filled with who-knows-what, had littered the shore.

As they'd walked, a soft muffled “woof” erupted.

A short distance ahead, a sack wriggled. They'd all charged up the bank and encircled it. At the time, she'd seen twelve summers, Odion eleven, and Tutelo eight summers.

“Hurry, open it and let him out,” Tutelo had urged. “There's no telling how long he's been in there. He may be dying of thirst.”

Odion had hesitated, taking a few moments to gently pet the warm body inside. Barks had erupted as the sack had flopped around like a big dying fish.

Baji had taken Tutelo's hand, preparing to drag her away if the puppy emerged in a flying snarling bundle of fur.

As soon as Odion loosened the laces, a soft gray nose poked up through the opening. The little wolf had wriggled the top half of his lean body out onto Odion's lap and looked around with bright yellow eyes. He'd seen perhaps four or five moons.

“I'll bet the puppy was supposed to be dinner.” Tutelo had said as she'd edged forward to pet the puppy's silken back. “He's the color of a ghost. Maybe his name was Ghost.”

“Or
oki,
” Baji had suggested.

Odion and Tutelo had turned to stare at her.

Oki were Spirits that inhabited powerful beings, including the seven Thunderers, rivers, certain rocks, valiant warriors, even lunatics. Oki could bring either good luck or bad. People who possessed supernatural powers—shamans, witches—were believed to have a companion spirit, an oki, whose power they could call upon to help them.

“He definitely has some special power,” Odion had said, “or we'd never have found him. He called us to him. Oki sounds like a good name.”

Tutelo had shaken her head vehemently. “I don't like that. What if somebody thinks he's an evil Spirit? If somebody's having a bad day, that name could cost him his life.”

“Well … then think of something else,” Odion had said.

Baji smiled at the memories.

Gitchi.

Yes, Gitchi.
Baji had named him those many summers ago.
Gitchi Manitou
were words she'd heard from a Trader who'd come from north of Skanodario Lake. She had no idea what it meant, but she'd always liked it.

She lowered her hand to stroke his sore foreleg and Gitchi licked her fingers with his eyes half-closed in gratitude.

Gitchi had grown up on the war trail, and his white face testified that he was far older than the number of breaths he had drawn, or the long winter nights he'd slept curled beside Dekanawida. When Baji looked at him an old, old soul looked back, one that had witnessed far too much, and loved too deeply to ever be quite ordinary again.

Odion had been right. Gitchi did have a special power. She thought that maybe her souls, and his, were intertwined. Baji had been born Wolf Clan. Though Cord had adopted her into the Turtle Clan when she'd seen twelve summers, some part of her still heard the wolf songs that seeped up from the primeval darkness between her souls. Often, she wondered if Gitchi could hear them, too. It was a strange thing. There had been many nights last summer when she'd been lying in Dekanawida's arms, blinking dreamily into Gitchi's eyes, and she swore they had both drifted out of this world to somewhere beyond. Perhaps they'd sat together beside one of the campfires of the dead? She knew only that he was there with her, standing guard, keeping her safe. They'd scented the wind together, shared blankets, and listened to that far-off cry that Baji swore was the same cry she heard tonight. His devotion, in this life and the life beyond, was both wonderful and wrenching.

Last summer, she'd seen the effects firsthand when two Flint warriors, Ogwed and Yondwi, had gotten into a fight on the war trail. Baji had been a deputy war chief. She'd stepped between them to shove them apart and started shouting at them to stop. Gitchi, as usual, was curled up on the ground at Dekanawida's feet ten paces away, but he'd been watching. Ignoring Baji, Ogwed had swung a fist into his opponent's temple, and Yondwi responded by grabbing Baji's shoulders and hurling her aside like a cornhusk doll so he could get to Ogwed. She'd hit the ground so hard it had knocked the wind from her lungs.

The other warriors standing around watching the fight heard neither snarl nor growl, but a sound that more closely resembled a soul-chilling bellow, and they'd seen Gitchi's gray body streak across the ten paces and become airborne, launched straight at Yondwi. Yondwi had been in the process of drawing back his arm to throw another punch, when Gitchi slammed into the chest, toppled him backward to the ground, and grabbed him by the throat. Yondwi lived only because Dekanawida had shouted,
“Gitchi, no!”

While friends rushed to Yondwi's side to examine his bleeding neck, Gitchi had run circles around them, his fangs slathering foam, snarling ferociously. Every hair on his body had stood straight up. The threat had been clear:
Don't you ever touch Baji again.

The story had traveled through every camp, up and down the war trails even into enemy villages where Gitchi's name was whispered in the same breath as
Oki
and
Witch Dog
. Gitchi had become legend. No man or woman dared lay a hand on Baji if Gitchi was in sight.

“Maybe I should have named you Oki after all,” she murmured to him.

Gitchi wagged his tail and propped his muzzle on her blanket so that his black nose almost touched Baji's. For a long time, they breathed each other's souls. In his yellow eyes she saw stars reflecting, one in particular, bright and faintly reddish.

When the mournful many-voiced cry blared again, Gitchi pricked his ears to listen, but his gaze remained fixed upon her. She felt strangely certain that he was convinced she could not possibly leave him as long as he could see her with his own eyes.

Baji gently slid forward to hug him. His thick fur smelled of old leaves and campfires. “You're a good friend,” she whispered.

Gitchi licked her shoulder and vented a deep sigh.

In a sleepy voice, Dekanawida whispered, “Are you awake?”

“Yes, but you should sleep.”

As she lay down again, he shifted to cup his body against her, bringing his knees up behind hers, and encircling her with his muscular arms.

“Why are you awake?” he murmured. “What are you thinking about?”

Baji's gaze drifted upward to the Road of Light glittering across the belly of Brother Sky. “I was looking at the fork in the trail.”

Confused, he said, “Hmm?”

“The fork in what your people call the Path of Souls, and mine call the Road of Light.”

He nuzzled his chin against her long hair. “What about it?”

“Do you believe there's a bridge at the fork? A bridge where all the animals you've ever known wait for you? The animals who loved you protect you and help you across, while the animals you've hurt chase you, trying to force you to fall off the bridge in the eternal darkness below.”

She felt him smile. “I believe.”

Baji's gaze returned to Gitchi. He was still staring at her with that worried expression, something akin to grief, in his yellow eyes. She reached out to stroke the white hair beside his left eye.

“Do you think the animals call to you?”

Dekanawida's arms tightened around her. “You mean just before you die?”

“Or after.”

Where his wrist rested just below her heart, she felt his pulse speed up, thumping against her ribs. After ten heartbeats, he firmly said, “First, I've never heard any of our storytellers say that. Second, everyone saw you today.
Everyone.
Third, why did you ask? Do you hear something?”

Baji grasped his arm and pulled it more tightly around her. “No, but a holy man told me that once. I was just wondering if you'd ever heard of such a thing?”

“No, and I really wish you'd stop thinking about death.”

“Me?” she said in a teasing voice. “You're the one who keeps Dreaming the end of the world. How can you expect me to think of anything else?”

Offhandedly, he replied, “Well, there is that,” and tenderly kissed her hair. Then his lips moved down to her throat, warm and inviting.

Baji rolled to her back to look up into his eyes and found so much love shining in those brown depths that her heart ached. She smoothed her fingers down his side and slipped them beneath his cape and shirt to touch his bare skin. “My head is much better, you know.”

He reached around to feel her head wound, frowned a moment, then said, “Yes. It is.”

They laughed together.

As Grandmother Moon rose above the dark hills, the ghostly pewter landscape took on an opalescent sheen that painted every swell and hollow with an edge of silver fire.

Baji looked up into his face, haloed by short black hair, and her gaze slipped across his slender nose and blunt chin, coming to rest at the lines that cut deeply around his eyes. He had seen only twenty-three summers, but so many had been difficult. Her hand lifted to massage his left shoulder, broken by a war club when he'd seen eleven summers. It still hurt him on cold winter nights.

He whispered, “Baji, don't think about those days,” and rolled over to kiss her.

As his lips grew more passionate, she yielded completely to him, letting herself drown in the tingling warmth of his hands gliding over her breasts, trailing down her waist to her thighs, lifting her war shirt and whispering like ermine fur across her bare skin.
One moment of perfect happiness …

As if a fever had been lifted from her, she wept.

His whisper sounded loud in the buried stillness of the moonlit night. “Are you all right?”

“Happy.” She wrapped her arms around his back and pulled him hard against her, holding him desperately. “I want this to last forever.”

He kissed her and said against her lips, “I'll do my best.”

Their touching drifted with the silence of river mist into love. As Grandmother Moon rose higher in the sky, her light brightened and streamed through the forest. Baji never closed her eyes. She watched his leisurely movements repeat in vast amorphous shadows on the rock wall to her right. Gitchi kept wagging his bushy tail, and Baji kept smiling at him. All the way to the enchanted lavender dawn, she ached with joy.

 

Forty-eight

Kwahseti stood beside Gwinodje on the catwalk of Canassatego Village, overlooking the main trail below. Six hundred men and women with bows aimed, manned the catwalk around them. Another four hundred lined the trail that led to the village, standing in neat rows. Their nocked bows glimmered in the newborn sunlight that filtered across the valley. In the distance, two clan matrons, one from the Wolf Clan and one from the Bear Clan, walked at the head of a procession of approximately two hundred warriors—enough to protect the matrons, but not enough to threaten Canassatego Village.
No show of force. Interesting.