Zadayi Red Read online

  ZADAYI RED

  ZADAYI

  RED

  Caleb Fox

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ZADAYI RED

  Copyright © 2009 by Winifred Blevins and Meredith Blevins

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  [http://www.tor-forge.com] www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fox, Caleb.

  Zadayi Red / Caleb Fox.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1992-0

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1992-6

  1. Cherokee mythology—Fiction. 2. Gods—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.O89Z24 2009

  813'.6—dc22

  2009001782

  First Edition: July 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  M, let’s dance!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, wife, for being my partner, my muse, and my gang foreman.

  Thanks to my mentors, John G. Neihardt, Clyde Hall, Dale Wasserman, and Larsen Medicine House.

  The first distinction we need to make here is between prehistoric and historic. . . . “Prehistoric” has to the average ear a misleading ring of the primitive, the savage, even the prehuman, whereas all it really means is preliterate. Life without pencils is still life, and stories need not be written down to be remembered.

  —Robert Emmet Meagher and

  Elizabeth Parker Neave

  ONE

  A Time of Turmoil

  1

  Sunoya, isn’t it time?”

  She couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t tell him about the dream, couldn’t tell him what was basically wrong.

  Sunoya looked into the warm, acorn-colored eyes of her Uncle Kanu. The two of them sat across the center fire of the home they shared with the rest of their family. She knew he loved her. She loved him. But he didn’t understand. She’d been hiding the dream from him, uncertain of its meaning—terrified of its meaning. And she’d been dishonest with him. No doubt about that, and no choice.

  Now he thought it was time to honor her, to lift her up to replace himself as the village’s Medicine Chief.

  Impossible.

  She puffed breath out. She had to say something. “Uncle . . .?

  “Sunoya?”

  For weeks she’d been seeing something. It came to her at night, when she was sleeping. It came to her in the mornings, when she woke up early and lay in her elk blankets, looking at the small disc of sky through the smoke hole in the hut. It came to her in the afternoon, when she bent down to the river to fill her gourd with water for the family. She couldn’t stop seeing it. Dream, vision, it didn’t matter what she called it. She’d seen the Cape of Eagle Feathers bloodied, corrupted, fouled, stinking. It haunted her.

  She had to do something. Except that she was flawed. Might be flawed.

  For now all the tribe praised her. They pointed to the webbed fourth and fifth fingers of her left hand, an omen that came among women of her family every few generations and always marked a shaman. She had gone to the Emerald Cavern and been initiated in the tradition of the most powerful tribal shamans. Kanu said she had prodigious gifts, and told everyone that even at such a young age—she was barely beyond twenty winters—she should be Medicine Chief. The entire village was ready to honor her with position and power.

  “Sunoya, is something wrong?”

  Suddenly the hut felt oppressive. The faint light from the smoke hole at the top. The strong smells of burned wood and tobacco, the scents of the herbs hung over the door to keep out disease, odors of a dozen human beings living in close quarters. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  At least she had gotten some words out.

  She gave the old man a helping hand up and led him, ducking, through the door flap.

  She looked around at this village of the Galayi people as they strolled. Though their name meant People of the Caves, they now lived in dome-shaped, wattle and daub huts circled around a village green. On the east side of the circle stood an opening, and the two largest huts in the village faced each other across the space. On the north side mounded the hut of the White Chief, whose door was outlined in a geometric design painted in white, symbolizing peace. On the other side was the hut of the Red Chief, with a door outlined in a red design, symbolizing war. The Medicine Chief, Kanu, and his family lived in an ordinary hut in the circle of ordinary villagers. Medicine power, in the common view, didn’t rank with politics or war.

  Smoke wafted out of the holes in the tops of all of the huts. Inside some women were cooking evening meals, and the fires warmed the huts against the night. Outside other women were grinding corn from the harvest. Still others were making moccasins for their men for the coming fall hunt, which would supply meat for the winter. Men were flaking points for the spears, or lashing points to shafts with buffalo sinew. A few skilled men were making darts for their atlatls, long rods that acted as levers to hurl spears with great speed.

  Several families lived in each hut, grandparents, two or three daughters with their husbands, and a pack of children. She watched some boys throwing balls for their dogs in the middle of the green.

  These were her people, and this was their life, ordinary human lives painted in red and blue, the tribal colors representing success and failure. The men wore palm-sized discs of rawhide inside their shirts indicating the state of their endeavors, red paint for victory on one side, blue on the other side for loss. These emblems were called zadayis. When a war party defeated the enemy, it came back wearing the red sides outward. If it lost, the men wore the blue sides showing. The same held for hunting parties. All the tribe’s life was written in red and blue.

  Any Medicine Chief’s duty was to help these people lead red lives. Sunoya especially was bound by that calling. She knew that she could justify her existence only by taking care of the people. Otherwise, by the augury of her birth, she should have been killed at first breath.

  Her people were good at making physical lives—corn crops along the river, berries, acorns, chestnuts, and seeds, meat from the deer, elk, and sometimes buffalo. Clothes cut from tanned deer skins, blankets of elk robes with the hair left on, and every sort of implement that could be made from wood, stone, and the bones, hoofs, horns, and even stomachs of animals. In practical matters the tribe was strong. Their weakness was that they did not realize, not fully, that these blessings were gifts of the Immortals, earned by walking the red path of goodness and not the blue path of ignorance.

  Did she have the courage to act? Did she have the right to act? She was lost, and no one knew it.

  She had to tell her uncle. She turned to face him. “First I want to go to the Emerald Cavern again.”

  There, it was said.

  Kanu waited. It was the way of the Galayi people to be patient, let others speak their minds fully, and only then reply or ask a question. They had met other peoples who talked in a criss-cross way, comments and challenges flying like dogs barked, and they thought this behavior very rude.

  Sunoya couldn’t tell Kanu her vision of the Cape. If it was real, it was given as a responsibility to her, not to him.

  “I know you think I’m stalling. I know you want me to be elected and given your duties.”

  She also knew why. Since his wife died, he felt older than his sixty winters. He was afraid he couldn
’t keep up with what the people asked of him. A few wanted spiritual counsel, or healing of illnesses of the spirit. Parents wanted a name for a newborn child. Barren women wanted charms that would give them babies. Would-be lovers wanted songs to mesmerize the girls they pined for. Elderly people, as they approached the time of crossing to the Darkening Lands, wanted interpretations of their dreams. And much more.

  “You are right,” she admitted. “I came here to do what you’re asking.” She fingered the webbed fourth and fifth fingers of her left hand. Her mind drifted back over the seven winters she’d been here, ever since her mother died. She’d been sent to this village precisely to learn from Kanu. She thought with pleasure of her own growing mastery, and his delight in her flair for learning. He had no doubt she was a true shaman.

  She looked into her uncle’s eyes and felt awful for not being able to tell him everything he wanted to hear. So simple to say, ‘I accept this responsibility now. It is my path in life.’ But if she was a true shaman, and her birth had not corrupted her spiritual eyes, then what she had seen was true. That meant she was obligated first to do something about her dream.

  She twisted her mouth. All she could do was repeat lamely, “Right now I have to go to the Emerald Cavern again.”

  Kanu wondered what the devil was bothering his niece. Did she doubt herself? With her preparation and talent? Madness. Or was it something else?

  Galayi manners didn’t let him pry into her mind. When she wanted to tell him, she would. If she wanted to tell him.

  She said, “Maybe you will get your sons to take me.”

  “Of course,” Kanu said. He pivoted away and looked at the setting sun. That was that. His family’s effort would be considerable. She’d have to be escorted, even though all the territory was Galayi. His two sons-in-law (Galayi men always married into the woman’s family, not the other way) would have to pack food, moccasins, blankets, and winter coats on the dogs, take their wives, and walk with Sunoya for five days across several mountain ridges to the Soco River, up the river to the Cheowa village, and up Emerald Creek to the Cavern. Then they would visit relatives in the village and wait while Sunoya did something he didn’t understand.

  He turned to her and caught a flicker of fear on her face. She controlled it instantly.

  “Do you want to leave tomorrow morning?” Kanu asked. You who frighten yourself. You who hold yourself to standards no one else meets.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll speak to my daughters’ husbands now.” He walked away, his step uncertain.

  As Sunoya followed him, she shivered again. If I am flawed, how can I help anyone?

  By birth she had been bounteously blessed or hideously cursed, she didn’t know which. It was a secret she had to keep. If the people knew how she was born, they would kill her.

  2

  When Sunoya was thirteen, her mother Lyna knew she was dying. “Come sit close to me,” she told her daughter, her only child. Sunoya snugged up against her mother and leaned down close to her lips. Since her mother believed the old story about skunk smell keeping sickness away, the last person in the village to credit it, the creature’s stink glands hung above the door. Sunoya wondered whether, except for that, she would be able to smell her mother’s death. She could see it in the jaundiced face.

  “This story, it’s your story,” Lyna said, “you deserve to know. But if you tell anyone, the villagers will kill you.”

  Sunoya flinched. Her mother clutched her hand, as though to keep Sunoya from running away. She wanted to run, from her mother’s death, and from her dangerous knowledge. Lyna had been a difficult mother. She insisted on living alone, just the two of them, in a hut outside the village circle. Sunoya never had many friends, never got comfortable being around most people. She and her mother were misfits, loners.

  Lyna said, “Before your birth I had terrible fears.” She’d often told this part. She had a husband for ten winters. She yearned for a daughter or son, and she and her husband did what makes babies, laid for hours in each others’ arms exchanging breaths. Yet no children came. When she got a baby in her belly, she spent every day fantasizing about holding it, rocking it, tending to it. Then her husband, Sunoya’s father, was trampled by a buffalo and killed.

  But now Lyna went into a new part of the story.

  “I started having foul dreams where I gave birth to something unnatural, something horrible. I could never quite see what it was.

  “When my time came and at last I felt the big pain and the big letting go, I heard the midwife gasp. Fear grabbed me. I looked and saw her staring at your right hand.

  “I shrieked—I guessed it.”

  Sunoya could barely hear the whisper as Lyna spoke.

  “The fourth and fifth fingers were webbed. Both hands.”

  Sunoya felt dizzy, like she’d fallen and hit her head on a rock. The webbing of the left-hand fingers was the best of omens, of the right-hand the worst.

  “For a long time afterwards I wondered what I did, how I offended the Immortals like that.

  “ ‘A girl,’ the midwife told me. Luckily it was my aunt Oyu.” Lyna’s voice was graveled thick with emotion. “ ‘Both hands are webbed,’ said Oyu. It is true.

  “I couldn’t get air. When I did get it, I couldn’t let it out again. Finally I made wheezing words. ‘So long, so long’—I gasped for breath—‘Want child.’

  “Oyu raised her belt knife. Then I saw she was only going to cut the cord.

  “ ‘Girl . . .’ I coughed and threw words like rocks. ‘Cannot lose my baby. Cannot stand it.’

  “I watched Oyu tie the cord off. Her face was set hard.

  “ ‘Both hands webbed,’ I said. I was afraid she wouldn’t understand me. ‘Maybe the double sign, it’s new, it’s a good sign?’

  “Oyu set you down with her back to me and examined the hands.

  “I hissed out, ‘Let me see my daughter’s face!’

  “Oyu’s lips trembled and then began to move in a silent prayer. I thought, It must be the prayer that cleanses her from the taking of a life.

  “‘Be like the warrior’s zadayi?’ I wailed. ‘Fail or succeed, could be either?’

  “I kept babbling, like my words could grab Oyu’s hands and keep her from wringing your neck. ‘Maybe this is a gift, a great gift, twice a gift. Both hands webbed, never happen before.’

  “Oyu looked at your fingers with a sour expression.

  “ ‘Blessing and curse. Can’t we make it what we want?’ Hard time saying so many words in a row.

  “Oyu made a grunting sound, sliced the web of your right fingers, and stitched the skin with sinew. She was good with a needle. Then she laid you on my breast and hurried out.

  “A mother, me! Then I had a panic. Was my aunt hurrying to give out the good news or fleeing from a shameful act? Or both?

  “I decided that, whatever the medicine man named you, I would call you Sunoya. Do you know why? You were born under a bright, full Grandfather Moon, a huge sunoya. I kissed your forehead, wrapped you in a hide blanket, and tucked your right hand out of sight.”

  Lyna smiled and squeezed Sunoya’s left hand.

  “The family was so happy. About you, and even more about your left hand. In return for the loss of my husband, another medicine bearer born, a gift.

  “We fooled them, Oyu and me. I have never known if it was right thing to do. I will never know. At the end of your life you will know. Are you a gift of red? Or blue?”

  Lyna’s face rolled away, toward the flickering fire.

  Sunoya could hardly believe that her mother was suggesting that . . . Maybe they should have killed me. She thought of her name. It meant “moon,” or what her people called “sun living in the night.” Was she a sun? Or was her life enveloped in darkness?

  Lyna turned her face back to her daughter’s. “Oyu is dead now. Soon I am dead. You bite your tongue. If you tell, they kill you.”

  In two days her mother was gone to the Darkening Lands, and after
another week the family sent Sunoya to the Tusca village to live with Uncle Kanu. On the way she had her first moon time. That meant that when she got to her new village, she was immediately given a becoming-a-woman ceremony. At that ceremony she revealed the name given her by the medicine man, and from then on she was called by that.

  Her medicine name was Ay-Li, meaning middle, or half.

  She never told anyone, but she thought it had a bitter perfection. Her mother called her Sunoya—moon—so her proper adult name was Half. Half Moon.

  But was the moon waxing toward bright fullness, or waning toward darkness? Was her life painted red or blue?

  Sometimes at night, when she thought about that, her fear gave her a wrenching pain from neck to crotch.

  She would stick to the name Sunoya. She would make her life red. The first step was to go back to the Emerald Cavern to ask for a blessing for the people.

  3

  The panther Klandagi led Sunoya through the dark stone passages toward the room where Tsola, the Seer and Wounded Healer of the Galayi people, made her home. Blind, Sunoya kept her hand on the rising and falling shoulder blades of the black cat. Even when they walked in the cool water of the small stream that followed the tunnel, or got down on their hands and knees to crawl, Sunoya had complete confidence in Klandagi—he saw perfectly in the dark.

  She remembered the legend about how at the beginning of this life on Earth, all the animals had been challenged to stay awake for seven nights. Only Panther and Owl managed not to fall asleep, and their reward was good night vision. Though Klandagi was also Tsola’s son, few people had ever seen him in human form. His role was to guard the Cavern and its mistress, and no man could match a panther at that.

  Sunoya saw the low fire that was Tsola’s hearth, and made out the dark shape of her mentor next to it.

  “Welcome, Sunoya Ay-Li,” came the voice, Half Sun Living in the Night. Tsola was always formal.