Moon Hunt

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  Blue Heron tried to cling to them—to the safety her memories represented. Down deep, she knew how those times would turn out. With that knowledge came reassurance. Fear arose from not knowing, from the uncertainty that pain, suffering, and ultimate defeat hovered just over the future’s horizon.

  Fight as she did to hold tight, however, the images faded, slipped away, and became gray mist as her head began to ache. The disappointing realization that she was desperate for a drink overwhelmed her.

  Blue Heron blinked her way into a world of hazy gray light and tried to shift, which brought more discomfort as every part of her body hurt.

  Smacking her lips, she forced a swallow down her dry throat.

  “Lady?” a voice asked.

  “Water,” she croaked in return, and a cup was placed to her lips. From it, she drank greedily, heedless of the fact that some of it spilled down her chin to drip on her chest.

  The room came clear, looking like an unfinished palace. The roof didn’t even have a coating of soot. Where? Hers?

  “Come back to us, have you?” another voice asked, and Columella stepped into view.

  “What happened to me?”

  “Your souls slipped away for a while, Blue Heron. That happens sometimes after a body has been battered and wounded the way yours was.”

  The cup had been refilled. She drank again, this time with more decorum. When she’d finished, she asked, “Help me sit up, please.”

  The servant woman and Columella both helped her upright on the sleeping bench—an action accompanied by gasps of agony as her broken ribs grated. And once there, her impulse to pant for breath hurt so much she saw stars. Had she ever hurt this badly?

  It did feel better to have the world come back into perspective. “It’s been a blur. I was in a crummy little moon temple. I remember the Quiz Quiz kicking the stuffings out of me. And then…” She squinted, realizing her left eye was puffy and almost swollen closed. “Did I imagine it, or was the thief there?”

  “Seven Skull Shield and Flat Stone Pipe followed the Trader who captured you back to where you were being held. The thief killed two of the Quiz Quiz to get you free. You’ve been here since, under my protection and well guarded by my best.”

  “Vomit in a pot, what else has been happening? That Trader, Winder, I remember him saying something about the Morning Star, some sort of problem.”

  “He was poisoned. By some girl he’d married. Apparently it’s all tied up with the Sky Hand and Albaamaha treachery.”

  “That little slip of a thing?” Blue Heron shook her head, then wished she hadn’t as the pain stabbed in response. “Dancing Sky said she’d be trouble. Where is the dear young thing? Hung in a square?”

  “Vanished. Five Fists has warriors all over the city looking for her.” Columella arched a disbelieving eyebrow. “The war leader says that before all this started, the Morning Star ordered him not to harm the young lady.”

  “Bah! That’s crazy. Besides, Five Fists can’t find his piss pole with two hands in broad daylight. Who did Rising Flame appoint as Keeper?”

  “Word is that she favors her uncle, but both she and the tonka’tzi have had their hands full. The Great Plaza is full of people. Maybe ten thousand of them. Standing vigil for the Morning Star. All praying for his souls to return to his body.”

  “And what do you hear the chances of that are?”

  Columella shrugged. “Night Shadow Star has traveled to the Sacred Cave, personally descending into the Underworld to try to get Morning Star’s Spirit to return to Chunkey Boy’s body.”

  “Not everyone who enters those foul caverns comes out again. And no doubt she’s dancing with Sister Datura again. Could this get any worse?”

  “Indeed it could.” Columella turned, ordering, “Bring the Keeper something to eat. Some of that corn stew with acorns.”

  As the bowl was brought, Blue Heron asked, “Worse how?”

  “Seven Skull Shield has sworn vendetta against the Quiz Quiz, who have sworn it against you. He invaded War Duck’s palace last night. Somehow he got into Round Pot’s room and demanded to know where the Quiz Quiz were hiding. Either the good matron didn’t know, or she played it coy. Someone called out an alarm, and your thief turned the place upside down making his escape. Made quite a ruckus.” She paused, eyebrow lifted. “Extinguished the eternal fire.”

  “That’s bad luck. Round Pot must be apoplectic.”

  “Doubly so. Flat Pipe’s agents report Round Pot and War Duck were planning a move against the other Houses the moment the Morning Star was declared officially murdered. Most of the River House supporters fled like bobwhite from a falcon. They feared that any action stemming from such a catastrophic beginning was doomed by Power to the worst kind of failure.”

  “And where’s Seven Skull Shield now?”

  “Trying to find the Quiz Quiz and his old friend Winder.” She arched that eyebrow again. “He’s still working with Flat Stone Pipe. They seem to have developed a rather unusual respect and appreciation for each other. A fact that gives me no little unease.”

  “Those two? Combining their talents to who knows what ends? Now that’s almost as frightening as the prospects of the Morning Star’s assassination.” Blue Heron took the stew and a bone spoon a servant handed her—and realized she was famished as she began to eat. “If the Morning Star dies, I’ve got to be back at Morning Star House. Wind is going to need me. The whole city is going to erupt.”

  “You shouldn’t travel, Keeper. Not yet. Your souls have just slipped back into your flesh. Give it a day or two to ensure that they stay where they belong.”

  Blue Heron grimaced as she handed the empty bowl back. As much as it hurt to just sit up, how was she going to pee? Defecate? Or even walk.

  “I’ve got to get back, Columella. That idiot Rising Flame won’t have the first clue about what’s going to come down when the Morning Star dies. River House is just the tip of the ice floe. Green Chunkey and Wolverine won’t be far behind in their mischief.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Such as?”

  “In all this confusion there’s a bunch of frustrated and angry Quiz Quiz who feel humiliated by your actions. The last message I got from Flat Stone Pipe was that old enemies are using them as a tool to murder you.”

  “If you won’t help me,” she growled, “I’ll do it on my own.”

  “No way you’ll do it on your own, Blue Heron. My healer says one of those broken ribs could puncture a lung and kill you if you move wrong, or fall.”

  “Will you at least do me a favor?”

  “I might.”

  “The thief is still around, isn’t he? Send for him. Seven Skull Shield will make sure that I make it home.”

  “He’s just across the river.”

  “My litter still outside?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I’m going.”

  So saying, she wobbled to her feet, stifling a yip of pain deep in her throat. More than ever in her life, Wind needed Blue Heron’s help. By Piasa’s swinging balls, when had she ever hurt this much?

  One step. Two. Spit and phlegm, she was better than this.

  “Come on,” she whispered to herself, the world beginning to spin. “You can do it.”

  Wasteland of the Soul

  I wonder what I have become. I have lost so much of myself I am surprised when I lift my hands and see palms and fingers. Or that my legs appear whole. That patches aren’t missing from hips, belly, or shoulders. I keep expecting invisible places, missing bits from my ever thinner shell of being. For there is nothing left inside to disappear, which leaves only the outside of me to slowly vanish into nothingness.

  Perhaps it is because I haven’t found a missing patch yet that I feel obliged to act. Had I awakened this morning and discovered that some body part had vanished into nothing, it would have been too late. It has dawned on me that if I am ever to act, it has to be before that occurs. Before my hand fades away, or my foo
t vanishes in the night.

  Before I lose the last of me.

  So I have done what I have done.

  Two Sticks didn’t understand what the little ceramic jar was when he went through my pack. He placed it in his carved storage box with the rest of the valuables I stole from the Morning Star’s room. He figures to Trade them when we leave for downriver sometime in the next moon. After, he says, the vigil for my capture fades away. For reasons I don’t understand, he thinks he can Trade my “bed services” to the Quiz Quiz for a start, and that the Trade will be most profitable. Something about “payback” that I haven’t had the energy to ask about.

  Mostly when he talks, I pay little attention. His ramblings change with the angle of the sun. One finger of time he’s excited about this possibility, then next he’s waxing on about something entirely unrelated that will make his fortune and fame.

  He does not notice that I am fading away. That surprises me. Each time he orders me onto the bed he should realize that there is less and less of me. That one of these times, soon, I will collapse under his weight. That I will crush like a hollow pot. Can’t he feel it when he jams his shaft inside? There’s nothing left inside, only dead space to stimulate him.

  I certainly can’t feel anything down there. Because of that, I am always surprised when he stiffens and groans, and finally goes limp.

  My souls are so transparent thoughts just pass through them, airy, floating.

  I think this as I sit on the side of the bed and study Two Sticks through emotionless eyes. He is breathing irregularly. His eyes flicker under damp lids, as if his souls are tortured. On occasion his fingers twitch, and one of his feet will jerk.

  I roll the little ceramic jar between my fingers and consider it a miracle that I continue to have sensation in my fingers.

  When I took the jar down before breakfast, I knew that it was empty, that at most a drop might be left inside. Turned out there were three. In addition I used a splinter of turkey leg bone to scrape out the inside, gouging out the porous clay and sifting it into his morning cup of tea.

  To my relief, he drank down the whole thing. Never even hesitated. Just as I had with the Morning Star, I used my body to distract him, throwing everything I had left into the act. He was so surprised, so pleased, he never even noticed that he was coupling with emptiness. Thought that the delirium was from his physical release.

  And like the Morning Star, he just drifted off.

  So I sit, watching him, rolling the jar in my fingers, and know what I have to do.

  I take a deep breath. As I can hold a breath, my ribs and chest haven’t faded away. But they might. At any minute they could vanish.

  “Just do this,” I tell myself.

  But what comes next? Will some of the missing pieces of myself re-form, sort of like an image out of mist? Or are the vanished pieces of me gone forever? Maybe the process is irreversible, and I will continue to fade until there is nothing left, not even a flicker of shadow.

  With that thought I reach for the water bag: a tanned buckskin piece with tightly sewn and stitched seams. It just fits over his head, and I tie the sealing string around his neck.

  Then I wait, watching as his lungs suck deeper and deeper breaths, each one contracting the soft leather sides of the sack before puffing it out again.

  I wonder if, when it is all over, he will fade away into nothingness, too.

  Fifty-one

  Midge—who had just turned two—erupted in her shrieking cry, her face contorting, eyes closed, mouth agape to expose barely budded teeth in pink gums. She began to bawl with a lusty squall. Her older sister, Fly, had pushed Midge down, and Midge had landed hard on her butt.

  Sitting at his breakfast fire, Crazy Frog watched his youngest wife—a girl in her late teens named Flower Reed—sigh as she turned from stirring the hominy pot. With comforting words she bent to the little girl and reassured her. Meanwhile, his third wife, Blanket, went after the obnoxious Fly with a wooden ladle. That provided just enough distraction that one of Crazy Frog’s sons, Scoot, grabbed away his little brother’s breakfast bowl. He slurped down its contents before shoving the empty bowl back into his outraged brother’s hands.

  A tussle broke out that caused Mother Otter to stop braiding oldest daughter Sly’s hair and dive into the middle of the fray to reestablish order.

  Sitting in his spot behind the morning fire, Crazy Frog grinned to himself and reflected that life was good. His greatest joy in life might be winning a fortune gambling on chunkey, but mornings around the breakfast fire with his five wives and their tribe of children filled him with a deep-seated sense of contentment.

  “So help me,” Mother Otter told him as she stomped back to Sly’s hair, “the next one that misbehaves is being Traded to a wily Caddo and sent downriver!”

  Crazy Frog adopted a somber face as he looked around the room and shook his head. “We’d have to Trade your Caddo something valuable, like the Morning Star’s most-prized chunkey stone, just to get him to take one of these little animals. No, I’d say the only Trader dumb enough to give us anything for one of these little weasels might be one of those Karankawas we hear about down on the gulf. And they’d only want one to throw on the fire and eat.”

  “Oooh!” Tight Hair, the pretty, second-oldest daughter, cried. “You’re not Trading me to any cannibals.”

  “Might,” Crazy Frog told her, smiling as he went back to his breakfast.

  He had just used his horn spoon to fish out a chunk of goose meat and hominy from his bowl when wife four, Wild Rice, leaned in the door from where she’d been milling corn at the pestle outside. “Husband? Someone to see you.”

  Her tone of voice left no doubt. The “someone” was important enough for him to interrupt his favorite time of morning.

  Setting his bowl to the side, he stood, arranged his apron so that the long point of it hung down between his knees, and grabbed a warm buffalo wool cape against the chill.

  Stepping out into the purple morning, he stiffened at the sight of the litter that had been lowered before the smoking remains of last night’s fire.

  The man stepping off the litter was huddled in a fine blanket, wore a Spirit Bundle headpiece, and carried a polished ground-stone mace.

  “We need to talk,” War Duck told him as he walked past, a brooding thunderstorm behind his good eye. The grim expression contorted the scar on his left cheek.

  Crazy Frog took a deep breath and followed the high chief around to the hemmed-in entrance to his storehouse. The guard started, wide-eyed, and snapped to attention, but at least he’d been awake.

  War Duck led the way into the storage house, setting aside the door and thrusting the fabrics out of the way. To the guard inside, he ordered, “You. Take your associate and go for a walk. Your master and I have to talk.”

  War Duck seated himself on one of the big wooden storage boxes, rearranged his blanket, and rubbed his scarred face. “Pus and rot, what a night.”

  “What’s happened?” Crazy Frog reached up to lower the fabrics in order to prevent anyone from seeing in, but War Duck gestured for him to desist.

  “No. I want to be able to see out.” A pause. “An assassin attacked Round Pot last night. Sneaked into the palace somehow, maybe during our planning. We had every Earth Clan chief, the squadron firsts, and some of the society house leaders come to discuss plans for when the Morning Star dies. People were coming and going all night, and many were invited to stay. The palace was full. Then, in the middle of the night, the assassin sneaks into Round Pot’s room and threatens her.”

  “Is she…?”

  “No. Praise be to Hunga Ahuito and his grace. The assassin made enough noise questioning her that one of the servants overheard and called to ask if everything was all right. That saved her. Apparently the man’s nerve broke, and he ran.”

  “And you want me to see if I can find him? Of course. I’ll have every single one of my people—”

  “That’s not my biggest concern. Thi
s assailant broke in to ask Round Pot where the Quiz Quiz were hiding.”

  Crazy Frog—veteran of survival in River Mounds City’s rough-and-tumble underside—kept his expression in check. His gut, however, did a flip. “How much did he know?”

  “He asked specifically about Winder. Knew that Winder had been to see me.”

  Seven Skull Shield! Crazy Frog felt the ground turn to sand beneath his feet. He’d have to be very careful. Playing all sides against the middle was a tricky business.

  “Piss in a leaky pot, how? Unless … yes. He’s one of the Keeper’s agents. She must have told Columella before her souls drifted out of her body. Last I heard she was unconscious, hanging to life as tenuously as the Morning Star.”

  “This whole thing has gone from bad to worse.” War Duck banged his fist on the box top.

  “Why did you order me to help Winder in the first place? I told you the Quiz Quiz could be a problem.”

  “The Quiz Quiz were supposed to steal the Surveyors’ Bundle so that I could embarrass Morning Star House. Use it as a means of getting Round Pot elected clan matron. My chance to declare, ‘Morning Star House couldn’t even protect one of the most sacred Bundles in Cahokia! Why should we continue to allow them to maintain such a position?’ What a club to crack them over the heads with.

  “But what happens? Somehow the Keeper gets the Bundle back, that fool Sky Star gets captured and hung in a square, their War Medicine gets stolen, and that greasy sheath, Rising Flame, is made Matron.”

  “It’s not all bad. In becoming matron, Rising Flame has dismissed Blue Heron as Keeper.” Crazy Frog crossed his arms.