Death's Rival

Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa.” Granddaughter . . . “Tell me what you did not finish.”

 

 

My mouth refused to open, as if I was caught in a dream, trapped, trapped, trapped. I sucked in a breath so deep and hard it hurt my ribs. I forced open my lids and they parted sluggishly, revealing Aggie through my tangled eyelashes. Aggie’s eyes were black in the dark, calm and quiet, like deep pools of water in a slow mountain stream. She cocked her head, as if she were a robin staring at a juicy worm. We were no longer in the sweathouse, but in the cave where she took me sometimes, and I didn’t know if this was vision or reality or some esoteric blending of the two.

 

The drum was deep, a reverberating beat, hollow against the cavern walls of my mind. A heartbeat of sound, steady and soothing. I couldn’t get my mouth to work to ask my question. I didn’t know what to ask.

 

Aggie smiled into the scented darkness. “You are stubborn. You are full of resentment. Only failure of the worst sort would cause you to resent failure. To fear it. To grow a tough hide that would make you never back down. Only failure.” She reached into the basket and brought out another smudge stick, fat and aromatic even before she held it to the fire. Yellow flames licked out and up, and light caught her copper-colored cheeks and forehead, darkening the shadows at the sides of her mouth, making her look older than she really was. Drawing out her mouth into a muzzle. Like a wolf.

 

I tried to tense, but my muscles failed me. I tried to push upright, but the world whirled around me as if I were drunk or stoned. Aggie’s mother was ani waya, Wolf Clan, Eastern Cherokee. Her father was Wild Potato Clan, ani godigewi, Western Cherokee. Aggie had magic I had only guessed at. Her snout stretched out. Her shadow on the cavern wall was all wolf. Teeth, wolf teeth, glinted in the firelight.

 

“My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother,” I mumbled.

 

I knew I was trapped in a dream when the wolf laughed. She held the smoking smudge stick into the air and saluted the four directions, north, east, south, west, and north again. The trailing smoke made a pale, thinning square in the darkness. “What did you fail at, Dalonige i Digadoli?”

 

I recalled a vision of shadows on the wall. A man riding a woman. My mother. Remembered the stink of semen and death. The soft cries of fear and pain. The slick feel of cooling blood. “I didn’t kill the killer of my father. I didn’t kill the white men who raped my mother.” I told the story of the fractured memories.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

 

I Never Had a Chance to Say Good-bye

 

“You were a child of five. You were no match for the white man.” Through my tangled lashes, I saw Aggie One Feather’s wolf snout tilt, like a robin, the motion unsettling, part wolf, part bird, all dream.

 

“I swore an oath on my father’s blood,” I said. “I wiped it on my face, in promise.”

 

“Are you certain you failed?” Her head tilted far to the side. “Who did you tell of this great crime? Who did you go to?”

 

Instantly, I remembered the sharp stick piercing my foot as I ran through the dark, my pale nightgown catching the moonlight through the stalks of corn. The corn towered over my head, the garden never seeming so large in the daylight. Down the hill to my grandmother’s house, the longhouse where she lived with her daughters and their husbands. This was a new memory, and my breath caught before I said, unsteadily, “I went to Uni Lisi, grandmother of many children, Elisi, the mother of my father.” I saw my hand banging on the door. Pounding on it. Saw the door open and the light/heat/brilliant colors blast out. Voices so loud they pulsed against my eardrums. My screaming. The women grabbing up weapons. A hoe. A long knife. My grandmother holding a shotgun. And the long horrible run back through the corn, racing ahead, Elisi letting me lead the way.

 

In the sweathouse, my heart raced with an uneven beat, like a broken drum, as my body reacted to the memory and its terror. I saw again my mother, in a heap on the ground, naked in the moonlight. The white men gone. The smell of horses. And man stuff. The sound of her crying. The warrior-woman, my grandmother, putting me on a horse, in front of her, and galloping into the night, her arm a band holding me close. The smell of her sweat and her anger. The smell of the pelt she carried. The feel of her beast roiling under her skin—tlvdatsi—mountain lion. Yet the pelt she carried over her shoulder was black.

 

A black panther, my white mind murmured. Elisi was a skinwalker. Like me. A protector of the Cherokee, a warrior of the tribe.

 

The door opened, the vision shattered. I sat up.

 

Aggie One Feather stood in the doorway, fully human, freshly dressed in the coarse woven robe she wore in a sweat ceremony. Just entering for the session. “I was delayed. My apologies.”

 

“No need to be sorry,” I said, sitting up, standing, my legs feeling wobbly. “But I think I’m done for the day. Can I come back? Soon?”

 

Aggie tilted her head, just like she had in my vision, but there the resemblance ended. “Certainly. If you’re sure?”

 

“Very sure. Thank you.”

 

*

 

Back home, I showered, dressed, and fell on my bed, face in the pillow. It smelled musty. I needed to change the sheets. Wash clothes. Maybe get a life. On that thought, I slept.

 

*

 

The sun was setting when I heard a ringing and forced myself awake.

 

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