by Faith Hunter
“Then I will take you to sweat. And afterward, if you are ready, I will take you to water.” The words were similar to the traditional words of the shaman, the tribal helpers. Shamans and elders would assist, free of charge, any who asked, even the white man, for healing ceremonies, council, or more practical help.
Today, Aggie One Feather was hoping to bring me into contact with my true self, my spirit self, to steer me on the road to spiritual healing. And though I had not told her what I was, she knew bits and pieces of my story; perhaps she had guessed much more. I was hoping she could help me find the child that I once had been, so very long ago. Before Beast. Before I lost my memories. Before the hunger times, which I remembered only vaguely. Before I was found wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of human language. Finding her here in New Orleans shouldn’t have been a surprise—the People lived all over the States—but it still felt like one of the weird coincidences the universe tossed my way occasionally. Since it brought me closer to learning about my past, this time it was a welcome one.
Aggie lifted a stoneware pitcher of water and a long wooden ladle, which were ready on a table by the door. Both items looked like traditional Cherokee ware, and though I tended to have very few possessions, I suddenly wanted to own a pitcher and ladle like them. I curled my fingers in, to keep from stroking the pitcher, as she led the way outside and around back.
The sweat lodge was a low wood hut with a metal roof, located at the back of the property, hidden in the drooping limbs of trees. The smell of wood smoke was strong here, and wisps of smoke, nearly invisible in the pale half-light, wafted from a circular opening in the very center of the roof. I stood beside the doorway, watching as Aggie stripped off her jeans and T and draped them over a wood hook on the outside wall. Naked, she wrapped a coarsely woven cotton cloth around her and tied the overlapped ends above her breasts. Covered from underarms to knees, she entered the lodge. Heat blasted out. The door swung silently shut.
There were a dozen such hooks, each with its white covering, similar to Aggie’s, some long, some shorter. Feeling oddly uncomfortable, I stripped and tied a makeshift robe around me, leaving my clothes on a second peg and my boots against the wall. The covering was dry, and must have been hung since Ada passed. My hair was still in a fighting queue, tight to my head. I left it that way. Barefoot, I stared at the door. I had been all around the lodge in cat and human form, but this was the first time I would go inside.
I put a palm on the rough plank door and pushed gently. The darkness inside reached out to me, warm and solid. Holding the door open with one hand, I stepped in, ducking my head to avoid hitting it on the low door header and roof supports. My bare feet stepped on a hard-packed clay floor, level with the outside ground.
A memory came, unbidden, of another sweat lodge, this one with a long step down into the dark, the floor scooped out, flat and smooth inside, but a foot deeper in the ground. A single snapshot-type memory. Then it was gone. But the vision left me with a calmness that settled against my skin like the scented dark of the lodge.
Without asking, I knew that the floor of this sweat lodge had not been dug out because the water table was so high here. Water would have collected in any depression.
I released the door and it closed behind me. Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded me, steam rising from red coals and heated rocks piled in the center of the small hut. Beast yawned deep inside and settled herself in my mind. She liked the warmth.
I stood hunched over, my head brushing the roof supports, letting my eyes adjust. The fire was built on a low bed of rocks, other rocks ringing it. It had been burning a long time, long enough for the heat to feel alive and powerful, as if she had known I would come today. Around the fire were low seats made from logs that had been shaped and rounded for sitting. Aggie was on a log on the far side of the fire, her eyes on the coals, her hands busy in a basket beside her. There were other baskets woven from grasses, each with a woven lid hiding its contents. The pitcher was on the ground beside her, the ladle inside.
I lowered myself to the seat closest to the door, my knees rising, and I squirmed to find a comfortable position. Aggie seemed fine with the seat, and I copied the pose of her legs, but she was much shorter than my six feet and it wasn’t working for me. I stretched out my feet to the fire and waited, palms flat on my thighs, not knowing what was going to happen. No more memories came to enlighten me. I had lost so much of myself, of my past.
Neither of us spoke. Aggie, moving slowly, as if everything she did were choreographed, put a blackened length of wood on the fire, using it to shuffle the coals. Brighter red light seeped out. From a basket, she pulled something tied with twine. It was too dark in the lodge to identify, but it was a foot long, about an inch and a half in diameter, and she held it to the coals. Instantly it lit, throwing bright white light for a few seconds, the flames a greedy whisper as they ate into it. I drew in the scent. Sweetgrass. Sage. Something tart, like lemon camphor. Herbs used in making a smudge stick. I remembered. . . .
I closed my eyes and breathed. Time passed. Aggie added more herbs as the first of them smoldered into ash. My legs seemed to settle and relax. Sweat rose to my skin, beading, puddling, and ran in sluggish rivulets on my hands, along my arms and legs. Thick drops rolled down and plopped against the smooth clay floor beneath me. I sighed, the breath long and slow.
From somewhere came the soft sound of a drum beating a measured, rhythmic four-beat. I chuckled softly, little more than a breath. “A CD? In a sweat lodge, Lisi?”
From some part of my deeper mind, I knew the word li si. Grandmother. Though Aggie wasn’t my grandmother, it was a term of respect for an elder. “Yes. Lisi,” I said again. “Lisi.”
Aggie smiled in the dark. I knew it, though my eyes were closed, my head back, neck stretched out. I breathed in the scented smoke. Her voice like a whisper of a dawn breeze, Aggie said, “It is music from a Cherokee musician. With only the two of us, it would be difficult to call the drums.”
“Drums,” I said. “I had forgotten about the drums.” She lifted my hand and guided it to a handle, pressing it toward my lips. A ladle full of water. I drank. She took the ladle away.
I heard a sizzle, and knew Aggie had spilled water over the hot stones, like an offering. A gift. Steam sputtered into the scented air. As the music and the heat and the cleansing steam surrounded me, I relaxed, letting my body find the shape of the wood beneath me. Beast slept. Perhaps I did too.
Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa.” Granddaughter. “Tell me what you remember.”
The drums pulled at me, calling, calling. The herbs and the heat pressed down on me. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa, tell me what you remember.”
“E lisi.” My grandmother. An old, old, old woman, her skin pulled into drooping wrinkles, her hair black and streaked with silver, parted and braided to either side of her head, the plaits hanging down, tied at the ends with leather thongs and the bones and feathers of her beasts. Fire danced over her skin, down her cotton dress, to the drum in her thin hand. The drum she beat, so slowly. Four beats: one firm and three sliding, softer beats.
“E lisi,” I said again. “E lisi, e tsi, e doda.” My grandmother, my mother, my father. Words that had lost meaning, newly found. “E lisi had eyes like mine. Like my father’s. Dalonige i digadoli. Yellow eyes.”
From somewhere a flute began to play, the notes rich with sadness. I opened my eyes. Cave walls surrounded me, the roof melting down in drops and spirals, like the white man’s candles, the rock magical, soft and puddling, like the sweat from my skin. The cave roof was crying the tears of the world in soft plinks, the sound of tears merging with the drum and flute.
Elisi was speaking, measured and slow. But though I could see her lips move in the flicker of firelight, her words were lost, whispered echoes. Then my father spoke, and his words I could hear. In low, breathy tones he spoke animal n
ames. “We sa. Gvhe. Unodena. Usdia soquili. Gvli. Ugugu. Uwohali. When you are older, bigger, tlvdatsi. Tlvdatsi, like me. Dalonige i Digadoli, aquetsi ageyutsa.” Bobcat. Wild cat. Sheep. Pony foal. Raccoon. Owl. Eagle. When you are older, bigger, mountain lion. Panther, like me. Golden Eyes, my daughter.
My father’s voice went on, speaking the names of animals I could choose. But I knew already, though my body was too small to find them, that I would call we sa and tlvdatsi. Bobcat and panther. Like my father. Because he had told me so.
Dalonige i Digadoli. Golden Eyes. My name.
“Wake up, Jane. Wake up,” a voice murmured. “It’s time to go.”
I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back, looking up. I was at peace, so calm it was like being a feather on the breeze, floating. Above me, a shaft of sunlight pierced the roof, shining down through swirling smoke. Particles shifted and eddied in the bright light. I turned my head. I was in a dark room. Shadows crouched in the corners. The air was warm and dry, my skin crusted with salt. My hair, which had started out tightly braided, was loose on the clay floor beneath me and across my shoulders. I smiled. “I remember my name.”
A soft chuckle came to me through the dark. “Dalonige i Digadoli. Golden Eyes. It is a very pretty name.”
I sat up. Across the sweat lodge, Aggie One Feather sat on a carved log, her legs outstretched. She was smiling but there was a shadow in her eyes, hidden and private, closed and weighted, that she didn’t want me to see. Trepidation stirred in the calm center of me, like a whirlpool opening in a pond. “What?” I asked.
She stared at me, as if trying to read my soul through my eyes. “Dalonige i Digadoli, Golden Eyes, is not a traditional name for one of the People.” I shrugged, not knowing what to say. “And the animals you named. So many. So strange. Your parents were Speakers of the language of the People. Both of them.”
I understood what she was saying. The number of Speakers left among the People was less than a hundred, even counting both Eastern Cherokee and Western Cherokee. If my parents had been Speakers, then their names would have been known. Aggie would have heard of them and know they had lost a daughter. But she had never heard of such people, and therefore, I couldn’t have Speakers as parents. Yet I had memories of them speaking the language. It wasn’t possible.
But then, Aggie didn’t know how old I thought I might be. That was one of the secrets I had to keep, along with my skinwalker magic. I could tell her neither truth as my safety lay in my anonymity, though I had a feeling that Aggie had guessed I hadn’t been entirely honest with her.
“Do you remember their names?” Aggie One Feather asked, her voice carefully neutral.
I shook my head. “Edoda, my father, was ani gilogi, Panther Clan. Etsi, my mother, was ani sahoni, Blue Holly Clan. Elisi, my grandmother, was Panther Clan, like my father. I don’t remember anything more.” Liar, liar, pants on fire! Can she see the lie? “My name . . . I don’t know. It was just my name.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie to this woman. The People did not lie, even to the white man, who never spoke the truth. And one never lied, not ever, to an elder, even now, when most young had so little respect for the aged. So I asked a question instead. “The animals . . . What do you think the names meant?”
Aggie stood, lithe and fluid, her body belying her age, which was somewhere past fifty, if I guessed right. “I don’t know,” she said. “I will ask my mother. Come. It is time to go. And it is too late for me to take you to water today.”
There was something in her voice that led me to think she skirted the truth with careful words, either to keep truth from me because she feared it, or because she feared me. Or perhaps because she didn’t know what she wanted to say. But she didn’t look at me. Not once.
I followed her into the sunlight, which was blinding, the air after the hurricane clear, the sky almost as blue as home, in the mountains of the Appalachians, the mountains of the People.
Aggie stripped and turned on a spigot I hadn’t noticed, high on the wall. Water shot out and she rinsed, her skin pebbling from the cold. I kept my head turned, and when she was done and stepped away, Aggie kept her head turned as well, each of us offering the other privacy in a very public bathing. There were no towels, and we blotted off on the sweat-soaked robes before pulling our clothes on over wet bodies. Aggie gathered up our dirty robes in a bundle under one arm and gestured to the lawn, away from the sweat lodge. I plaited my hair in a single long braid as we walked, and let it hang, wet and dripping, down my back.
Silent, we crossed the yard to Bitsa. I stopped at my bike. Aggie came around to the other side and paused, her eyes on the bike. “Lisi,” I said, searching for formal words, proper words, to bring the truth from her. “Your heart is heavy. May I . . . share your burden?” That felt right.
She shook her head, eyes on the bike. “I am not burdened, daughter. I will call when I have a clearer understanding.”
And I would have to be satisfied with that. “Thank you, Egini Agayvlge i. I will wait to hear your counsel.”
Aggie nodded, and a slight smile crossed her face. “I wish my own children would be half so respectful.” She turned and went to the small house, opened the door, and went inside, closing the door behind her.
I helmeted up and took the long road back to the house I lived in until my contract was over.
When I got home, a car was idling at the front door. A man stood on the front porch, his jeans tight, the long sleeves of a button-down shirt rolled up to reveal tanned, fit arms. It was Bruiser, aka George Dumas, Leo’s first human blood-servant, and his second in command, his muscle and security. My heart rate sped up just a bit. Six-four, weightlifter but not to bulging excess, brown eyes and hair. Clean-looking with a primo sculpted nose, long and sort of bony. I had a thing about noses and really liked his. In fact I liked almost every thing abut Bruiser, and so did my Beast. He hadn’t been around when Leo came visiting last night. Had he known about the attack?
Bruiser swiveled like a dancer at the sound of Bitsa. His expression was solemn and he didn’t smile when he saw me. That couldn’t be good. I nodded stiffly, glad my face was hidden behind the face shield. Pulling Bitsa to the side and through the gate, out of sight, I locked the gate behind me. The ward was still on, and when I entered the house, a tingle buzzed against my skin, rough, like sandpaper, if sandpaper could hold an electric charge.
Molly met me at the bottom of the stairs, wearing wide-legged capris, a tee, and sandals. Energy fairly radiated off her body. “Do we let him in?” she asked, waiting for me to make the decision on security.
“Hi, Aunt Jane,” Angelina said, half hidden behind her mother.
I picked Angie up and hugged her, saying, “Hi, Angie Baby.” I handed her to her mother. “You two go upstairs, okay? Just for a few minutes. I have a visitor.”
“A bad man?” Angie asked, more in curiosity than fear.
“Not a bad man,” I said. “Just not a good one.” A white man, I thought. Someone I can’t trust. The thinking was left over from a childhood I could remember only in snitches and snatches, but it was powerful nonetheless.
Molly quick-stepped up the stairs, shushing Angie’s protests. The ward snapped off and a knock sounded instantly on the door, as if he had been waiting for it to flick off. Bet it had burned his knuckles the first time he tried. I opened the door and leaned negligently against the jamb, not asking him in, blocking the way, my body language aggressive and challenging. I might think he was gorgeous but I wasn’t ready to cede him that knowledge.
“Bruiser. To what do I own the honor of this visit?” My tone said it was not an honor, and George’s brows rose, the gesture elegant and refined and annoyingly superior. The gesture was oddly similar to Leo’s, reminding me that he had been with the Blood Master of the City for a long time. A very long time. It helped to settle my hormones.
“My master sends you greetings and a missive.” The words had an old-fashioned ring, a sure sign of a powerful vamp’s official notice.
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br /> I had a feeling that this formal visit might be only marginally better than Leo’s kerosene and fire visit of the night before, and that brought out a belligerence I usually controlled better. I narrowed my eyes at him. “No shit?”
George didn’t laugh, his eyes serious. He extended a roll of paper, a little smaller than standard eight-by-eleven notepaper. No, not paper; by the smell it was heavy vellum, rolled and secured with a scarlet ribbon. It was also sealed with bloodred wax.
“My execution order? A warning that I’m about to be burned out? If so, it’s a day late.”
Bruiser frowned, his brown eyes sincere. Not that sincere was anything to trust in a blood-servant. “I heard about it, Jane. If I had known what he planned, I’d have tried to stop him. Or at least I’d have called and warned you.”
“Big words. Nice plan. A day late and a dollar short. So, what is it?” I pointed at the roll.
Bruiser looked at the vellum, his frown deepening. “I don’t know.”
“Nothing good, then.” I took the vellum, slid the ribbon off, and gave it to George. I broke the seal with a fingernail. The note was short and pointed, handwritten in a slashing, cursive scrawl that screamed it was by Leo’s own hand. I read it aloud.
“ ‘To Jane Yellowrock, Rogue Hunter. The instant that your current contract with the Council of the Mithrans is completed, you will vacate the City of New Orleans. Should you decline to comply, you will be brought to me. You will not leave again.’ It’s signed, ‘Leonard Pellissier. Blood Master of the City of New Orleans.’
“Well, that was short and bitter,” I said. “I’m guessing the line ‘You will not leave again’ means that he’ll turn me, chain me in his basement, and let me starve. Not a pretty image. Your boss is certifiable, Dumas.”
“I like Bruiser better.”
“Tough.” I shut the door in his face.
Molly’s chuckle sounded down the stairway. I felt the ward come on, the whole house seeming to buzz for a moment until it settled. “You think that was smart?” she asked me.
