People of the Earth Read Free Page B

contributed desultory tendrils of blue smoke to the evening. With a great
waving of arms and cackling speech, one of the old women dominated the group as
she told a story. Heads nodding and bobbing, the listeners watched enraptured.
The odd language carried to where Sage Ghost lay. Their tongue sounded like the
cooing and clucking of the mourning doves—and every bit as incomprehensible to
him.
                   Power had brought Sage Ghost to hide here
among the thick clumps of giant wild rye along the river. Here he could spy
upon the Earth People's dirt-covered lodges. The vision had told him that the
Earth People would kill him if they caught him. He glanced around anxiously,
peering through the tall grass as he sought to place every potential escape
route in his memory. If someone sounded an alarm, where could he run? He didn't
know this country, didn't have that feeling for the way the land lay, or how
the trails ran.
                   Sage Ghost carefully straightened his leg
where it had begun to cramp. He lay on his muscular belly, curled around
tussocks of grass like a human snake. The thick black hair over his forehead
had been pulled up in a roach and pinned with a buffalo-scapula clip; the rest
hung down his back in a tumbled, gleaming stream. A line of five black circles
had been tattooed across his forehead. Wide cheekbones gave his face a craggy
look, the skin sun-darkened and weathered. His long nose sprouted like an
eagle's beak over a broad-lipped mouth. From under heavy brows, keen eyes
studied the camp of the Earth People. Broad shoulders rippled with muscle, as
did his arms: muscles to power the gleaming darts gripped in his callused right
hand and the atlatl —a chokecherry shaft as long as
his forearm, with a curved antler hook in the end. The atlatl acted as an extension of the arm to increase the power of a cast dart by as
much as two hundred percent. The deadly dart—as long as a man was
tall—consisted of two parts: the stone-tipped foreshaft ,
which detached upon impact, and the fletched shaft that bounced back and could
be retrieved, quickly fitted with a new foreshaft ,
and thrown again.
                   Fear slipped along his spine on feet of ice.
                   The vision brought me here. Led me over the
long trail to this place. He raised his eyes, whispering as loudly as he dared,
"Where is the child? Haven't I proven myself worthy?"
                   He gazed into the deepening blue of the
late-afternoon sky. Sage Ghost had always felt a healthy respect for Power—but
he'd never sought it the way some did. He'd been content to hunt, to raise his
family and love his wife. Calling on Power left him uneasy; Power and fire were
a lot the same. They could be managed and manipulated when treated with
respect, or, if treated casually, they could scorch the world or sear the life
from an unwary man's body.
                   And here I am, far from my people and the land
I love. Where is the child? Or has the Power turned against me? Am I about to
be destroyed? Burned up and turned to ashes, with no one to mourn my soul?
                   Power was the business of the shamans—the
Dreamers and Soul Fliers. They knew the ways of Power as eagles knew the ways
of the air currents high overhead. Soul Fliers could loosen their souls from
the body and send them wheeling through the Dream the way Eagle circled in the
sky.
                   Sage Ghost had never had the calling to seek
Power. A Soul Flier might know how to free his spirit and sail like Eagle on
the winds of Power, but Sage Ghost had always known he would tumble to the
unforgiving rocks below.
                   Events change a man's life. Desperation drives
the most resolute to seek that which he's always avoided. The death of Sage
Ghost's daughter had changed his life, and the life of Bright Moon, his wife.
Stung by the grief in Bright Moon's