Moon Hunt

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  “It appears that the Surveyors’ Society took poorly to the theft of their surveying instruments,” he noted to Farts.

  Some of the people shot wary glances his way.

  “Seven Skull Shield?” a fellow to his right asked curiously.

  “As my mother’s only child, that’s me,” he said easily. As he turned to face the man, Seven Skull Shield dropped into a slight crouch, flexing his knees, back, and arms. Given what he called his “colorful” style of living—not to mention his predilection for seducing married women—a significant number of his chance meetings with people weren’t always amicable.

  He blinked in the dawn, ready for the attack, but couldn’t place the man’s face. “Do I know you?”

  The fellow was grinning, teeth white in the morning gloom. He was a big man, thick through the shoulders, his hair up in a common bun and pinned in place with wooden skewers. The tattoos on his cheeks were indistinct but reminiscent of the Panther Clan design. A deerhide cape hung down from his shoulders, and a long hunting shirt, belted at the waist, dropped down to his knees.

  He had a square face, the nose mashed flat and skewed to the right from having once been badly broken. The eyes were wide-set beneath a jutting and scarred brow. That Seven Skull Shield didn’t recognize him seemed hilarious to the man.

  “You have the advantage of me, friend,” Seven Skull Shield said easily, still ready for any sudden and bellicose moves. At his side, Farts had picked up on his unease, head down, the hair on his back rising.

  “I always have the advantage of you. Slow as you are, thick-witted, and clumsy. Why, if it hadn’t been for me, you’d have starved to death before your tenth birthday! But for me interceding on your poor behalf, you’d still be waiting to bed your first woman! Not to mention that they’d have hung you in a square by the time you were twelve if I hadn’t kept your sorry arse—”

  “Winder!” Seven Skull Shield cried as he launched himself at the man, clasped him in a bear hug, and tightened as if to squeeze the breath out of him.

  “’Bout time, you worthless bit of maggot bait!” Winder pounded his back, laughing like a fiend.

  Farts barked and leaped, tail thrashing, as he shared Seven Skull Shield’s apparent delight. The other spectators edged back from the wheeling and back-heeling pair as they hugged each other and half wrestled across the avenue. Unable to control himself, Farts made a flying leap that knocked them sideways, scattering the last of the crowd.

  Staggering for balance, Seven Skull Shield finally pushed away, laughing. He even had a few plums left in the now-crushed basket. He grinned and studied his old friend. “Where have you been?”

  “Up and down the rivers, you stump-shafted and pathetic turd. Following the Trade.”

  “Farts! Down! He’s a friend.” Seven Skull Shield waved at the big dog to decease his frantic barking. Wisely, everyone else had either fled or was giving them a wide berth. Only the dejected figure of the Quiz Quiz hanging in the square remained unimpressed.

  “What’s it been?” Winder asked. “Nine years? Ten?”

  “Definitely ten,” Seven Skull Shield told him. “It was just before the last lunar maximum celebration. Old Four Steps had put together a canoe full of Trade for the south. Thought he’d try to get all the way to the gulf coast, remember?”

  Winder’s knob of a head tilted quizzically. “So, did it work out? You still with her?”

  “Sometimes,” Seven Skull Shield managed a shrug.

  “Hard to think you chose a woman over me. Over the river. You loved the Trade. Loved the life. I’d never seen you happier than when you were riding the current, or the look in your eyes when we’d put in at some distant canoe landing. And there’d be this sense of awe as you looked around at the people, the buildings, at how they dressed and talked. You were a natural.”

  “I remember.”

  Winder studied him in the growing light, dark eyes pensive under the shelf of scarred brow. “So, was she worth it? You gave up a lot for her. Lost waif of an orphan as you were, no clan, home, no prospects … The river and Trade were your way out. The chance to become a rich man, earn some respect.”

  A hollow sensation formed under Seven Skull Shield’s breastbone. “I’ve wondered. More than once. Asked myself if I should have gone with you that day.” He waved it away. “Never saw you again after that, so the answer didn’t really matter, did it?”

  Winder spread his arms wide. “Well? Here I am! Happy and healthy! Some people call me the River Fox. I’m quick to take to the paddle, first to find that bit of Trade that will set fire to the desires among the Chitimacha, or to trick a Caddo into Trading the skin off his bones for a trinket. I tell you, Skull, Power favors me.”

  Skull. He called me Skull.

  The realization rocked him slightly, harkening back to those days so long ago.

  “What’s the matter?” Winder asked.

  “Nothing. Only two people on earth call me Skull.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Me. And … her?”

  Seven Skull Shield nodded his head, looking down at Farts, who was staring up at him through curious eyes, as if wondering at his master’s unusual tone of voice. “You would, too, if you could talk, huh, Farts?”

  The dog wagged his tail.

  “What are you doing with your life these days? Married? Children?” Winder laughed and thumped a muscle-hard thigh with a fist. “By the Tie Snakes! Imagine that! You, as a father?”

  “No wife.” He grinned evilly. “Any children—and by rights there are more than a few—are being raised by men who don’t know they’re mine.”

  “Now that’s my man.” Winder grinned. “Me? Let’s see. I’m up to fourteen now. Wives, that is. Trade being what it is, especially on the lower river, a man’s got to marry into a people and clan. Makes it a lot easier on me, I tell you. I’ve got a roof and a bed waiting for me from one end of the world to another. Sometimes it’s a stretch between homes, and most of them are matrilineal, so I don’t make a scene if I find her belly swollen six months into a child when I haven’t seen her for a year and half.”

  “Different ways for different Nations,” Seven Skull Shield agreed. “Pus and blood, Winder. I’ve missed you. To see you again, it really is a wonder. There’s so much to tell, to ask, to get caught up on.” He gestured his excitement. “What brings you here at this time of day?”

  “A job.”

  “Bit far from the river, aren’t you? Or are you looking for some special bit of Trade? Though anything you might find on the Great Plaza is usually available at the canoe landing.”

  “I don’t just Trade items, Skull.” A sly smile bent Winder’s lips. “I also Trade services.” He jerked a thumb. “I was sent to find a man. Turns out he’s here.”

  Seven Skull Shield followed the direction the thumb was pointing. “The Quiz Quiz?”

  “He’s not just any old Quiz Quiz, my friend. He’s a very special Quiz Quiz.”

  “I know. He’s Sky Star, a high-and-mighty war chief.”

  The light was good enough that Seven Skull Shield was able to read Winder’s surprise. “Now, how do you know that?”

  “I put him here. He stole something from the Surveyors’ Society. I got it back for them.”

  It might have been years, but the expression on Winder’s face when he was thinking hard hadn’t changed a lick. Finally, he said, “You know, hanging the high chief of Quiz Quiz’s son is going to have repercussions. Maybe the Surveyors’ Society might want to reconsider before things get a whole lot worse.”

  “You here to cut him down? Is that what they hired you for? If you are, old friend, I’m going to tell you now: Don’t! This goes a whole lot higher than the Surveyors’ Society.”

  “How high?”

  “Up to the Keeper, Tonka’tzi Wind, and probably the Morning Star. Especially if the surveyors don’t get to salve their wounded pride and get some retribution for having to spiritually cleanse and appease their Bundle.”

  “By
Piasa’s swinging shaft, this couldn’t get any worse, could it?” Winder made a face and shot an uneasy glance at the hanging Quiz Quiz. In the soft light, the war chief’s wounds could plainly be seen now. Not just the mauled and broken shoulder, but places where the surveyors had beaten him and sliced off bits of skin. The man’s genitals were painfully swollen from having been beaten.

  “Yes, it could,” Seven Skull Shield stepped close, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You are the best friend I’ve ever had. You kept me alive back then. You and me, we go back to the beginning. I’d give my life for you. So, you have to tell me, Winder. What’s your interest in all this?”

  “A couple of Sky Star’s warriors looked me up on the canoe landing. Said the war leader had been beaten up and kidnapped. Two of them had seen him being carried down one of the avenues to a Trader’s house. Some clanless scoundrel called Crazy Frog. One went to get the rest, and the other one was waiting, watching. Then some Cahokians came out of the yard and chased him away. By the time the rest returned, Sky Star was gone. They asked me to find him.”

  “Just find him?”

  “Just find him.”

  Seven Skull Shield sighed. “Here’s what you do. You go back to the plaza, find a place in the sun, and watch the Morning Star play his morning chunkey game. Then watch the day’s stickball games. Deer Clan from down in Horned Serpent Town is playing that shin-kicking Fish Clan team from west of Evening Star Town. People have been waiting for more than a moon to see this. Should be one bloody match-up.”

  He reached into his pouch, producing another whelk columella. “Trade this for the finest meal you can find, and feast. On me. Then watch the evening stickball game. You and me, we’ll meet up at dusk in front of Night Shadow Star’s palace, find a quiet place, and smoke, and talk, and catch up on each other’s lives. We’ll laugh. Tell jokes. Remember the old times. And tomorrow, you make your way slowly back to the canoe landing at River Mounds and tell the Quiz Quiz that you couldn’t find Sky Star.”

  Winder had pursed his lips, eyes on the columella as Seven Skull Shield talked. For long moments, he ran his thumb down the polished spiral of shell. “What if my honor demands that I tell them?”

  “There are times for honor, Winder. And there are times for good sense. Look around you. Everything you see—the Plaza, the avenues, the buildings, the mounds, the whole stinking city—was laid out by the surveyors. All of it measured by the fifty-pace cord and located by the strings and arcs in their sacred Bundle. Sky Star stole that selfsame Bundle. Like taking the thing that made this whole city. Don’t get in the middle of this.”

  “What’s your interest in all this, Skull? What do you of all people care? Why are you even involved? I mean, aren’t you just another of the nameless bits of human…?”

  Winder glanced away, unable to finish.

  “I was. Maybe part of me still is. But I’m no more the man I once was than you are. I can understand your obligation to the Quiz Quiz who hired you. I don’t want to see you end up in a square. I’ve been there. It’s no fun.”

  “You look pretty good for being hung in a square.”

  “It’s a long story involving Natchez, Maya Itza lords, and treachery. I’ll tell you tonight.”

  Winder’s expression had gone back to thinking. Then, slowly, he nodded. “If it were anyone but you…”

  “Thanks. That’s a load off my soul.” Seven Skull Shield grinned and offered the basket. “Here. Want a plum?”

  Ten

  It might have been the feeding, smoking, and ritual shown the Tortoise Bundle; or perhaps the Bundle had overheard—or somehow understood—her conversation with Fire Cat that morning. Whatever the reason, since then the Bundle had been mostly quiet in Night Shadow Star’s mind.

  In the resulting peace, she’d caught the usual glimpses of Piasa. The flickers at the corner of her eye. The shifting in the shadows. What terrible irony was it that the presence of the Spirit Beast—which usually terrified her—could ever be considered a relief?

  The southern breeze teased her skirt, batting it against her long legs as she climbed the last length of the Great Staircase. It tried to flip the spoonbill-feather cloak she’d draped on her shoulders and tugged at the intricately carved bone pins she’d used to secure her hair. She hadn’t painted her face, nor dressed particularly well; she did not want to appear vain just for a simple conference.

  Fire Cat tramped up the stairs behind her, the barest trace of a limp in his left leg. Whenever she went to see the Morning Star, Fire Cat insisted that he don his full armor, that he appear in the living god’s presence decked out in battle regalia. Partly—she assumed—it was because doing so irritated Five Fists right down to the man’s bones. The broken-jawed old war leader was head of the Morning Star’s security and cringed at the close presence of the armed heretic to the living god. And partly because her captive Red Wing heretic stubbornly clung to the belief that the Morning Star was a role played by a conniving Chunkey Boy.

  That Fire Cat remained a heretic bothered her at some deep and fundamental level, but if that was the only aspect of their relationship that annoyed her, she could live with it.

  “And what if he’s right?” Piasa’s subtle whisper caressed her ear.

  “Right?” she asked, face quizzical. “What do you know, Lord? Why would you plant that doubt?”

  “Testing.” Piasa’s sibilant response might have been a trick of the wind.

  She shook her head, refusing to be baited. If the Morning Star was nothing more than a role Chunkey Boy was playing with such finesse…?

  A series of memories rose up from the depths of her souls. Things that—were Morning Star not the living god—would be too unthinkable to endure. How he had called her to his room after the resurrection, leading her to his bed …

  “Pus and rot, beast! Why do you do this to me?”

  Faint laughter floated away on the wind.

  “Lady?” Fire Cat asked. Normally he let her conversations with Piasa go unchallenged.

  “My lord enjoys his little games.” As if it were a game.

  “Is it a warning?”

  “Just goading. Probably that jealousy Rides-the-Lightning mentioned.” She shot a glance off to the side, wondering if the beast would react, but nothing moved in the air around her.

  Reaching the top of the Great Staircase, she nodded as the two warriors guarding the high gate bowed and touched their foreheads.

  Before entering the palisade that ringed the mound top, she took a moment, letting her gaze travel across the great city.

  The air was filled with a smoky haze—the result of thousands of fires burning across the far-flung metropolis. Cooking, firing pottery, heat-treating flint, sintering shell, drying fish and meat, disposing of refuse—the fires of Cahokia never ceased.

  Her eye followed the Avenue of the Sun west, past the Four Winds Plaza and the Clan House, beyond the Great Observatory, all the way to Black Tail’s burial mound, where the avenue bent off to the southwest.

  In the distance, at the end of the urban sprawl, she could just make out the high palaces and Spirit poles of River Mounds City. The thickly packed structures masked the Father Water itself, but on the river’s far bluff she could faintly distinguish the outlines of Evening Star Town.

  To the south, at the foot of Morning Star’s mound, stretched the Great Plaza with its renowned chunkey courts, World Tree Pole, and stickball fields. The Avenue of the Moon ran south from the Great Plaza, paralleling the side of Rides-the-Lightning’s mound, and continuing on its elevated causeway down to the Serpent Mound. Then it angled to the south-southwest past marshes, farms, and fields until it ended at Horned Serpent Town. She studied the distance where it lay hidden in the smoky mist.

  To the east, the Avenue of the Sun continued past temples, charnel houses, and mounds, and climbed through a cut excavated into the eastern bluffs. Passing beneath two mounds that guarded the headlands, it extended a half-day’s run beyond her view to the Moo
n Mound—the great lunar observatory out in the treeless Great Prairie. There the road turned southeast along the lunar maximum line and could be followed all the way to the distant Mother Water River.

  All of this was built on the miracle of the resurrected Morning Star. How could Piasa hint that it was founded upon a hoax? Even in jest?

  Fire Cat was watching her ever so attentively. While he couldn’t have a clue as to her thoughts, he read her unease with an uncanny eye.

  Pus and sputum, how had anyone—let alone this one-time enemy—come to know her so well?

  He raised an eyebrow suggestively, which caused her to laugh and say, “Come on, Red Wing. Let’s go see what complexity the Morning Star wants to throw in our path this time.”

  She led the way through the gate. In the courtyard before the palace stood the towering red-cedar post, its sides carved to illustrate stories of the Morning Star’s exploits in the Beginning Times. The lowest engraving showed his birth, along with that of his twin brother Thrown-Away Boy, the Wild One. It depicted his chunkey game with the Giants; his resurrection of his father’s head; the ascent into the sky; and his metamorphosis into Bird Man. Or it once had before lightning strikes had traced their burn patterns down the mighty pole.

  She touched it reverently as she passed. Beyond it—rising against the sky—stood the Morning Star’s palace with its towering thatched wedge of a roof. The high ridge pole was topped with carvings of Hunga Ahuito. Workers hanging from ropes were retying bundles of thatch in preparation for winter. No other building in the world was savaged by as much wind and storm. Maintenance was a constant.

  People sat, slouched, or stood in knots, waiting for their chance to have an audience with the living god. Off to one side stood a Duck Clan man with two beautiful daughters. They looked excited and expectant, having been decked out in their finest dress. They kept flashing smiles, fidgeting, undoubtedly having been chosen to share the Morning Star’s bed. Not only was the honor sought by each of the Earth Clans, but the women would be considered doubly blessed if they conceived, and their value in marriage would increase twofold.