The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [39]
“You know nothing of the mysteries,” the Onkala priest snapped suddenly, cutting Bloody Child off. “Only we know what will happen if Red Shoes fails.”
Bloody Child bowed his head and fell silent, but his face remained unrepentant.
“Must I do this?” Red Shoes asked. “War is coming. You cannot avoid it, whatever happens to me.”
“But we must decide what to do,” Minko Chito said. “I must know whether to join the Sun Boy or fight him. I must counsel my people one way or the other. You claim to be our war prophet, our seer. You claim to speak the truth. Go into Nanih Waiyah. Return. We will know what to do, or so the Bone Men tell me.”
Don't do this, Red Shoes wanted to say, remembering again the burning village of the Wichita, the people the angry power in him had caused him to slay. I am a snake trying to remember he is a man, he wanted to tell them. I am an accursed being trying to do good before his soul unravels and has no choice. This will hasten my end, if not end me. And then there will be no war, for what I will become will devour you and scorch your nation from the Earth.
But he could not speak. They might try to kill him on the spot if they knew what he was thinking, what he could do. Instead, he faced the great mound, bounded on the right by the still water of the Darkening, by cypress that made a cave of the sky; on the left by the shadowed forest. And there, at the point where the mound met the earth, waited a small, dark opening, just large enough for a single man.
He squared his shoulders and stooped into it.
It went down, a tunnel cut not through stone but through a hard, slippery clay. It descended into water—first to his ankles but quickly to his waist, his shoulders; and then only his head was out. The gray light behind him faded, and then the roof of the cave came down into the water.
He held his breath and ducked under. After an arms-breadth, the roof went up again, and he had air once more.
But no light, no light at all.
Should he make a shadowchild for light? No. He must not attract attention here. He must not. He must keep his shadow-children close, and quiet.
The tunnel continued, narrower and narrower. Though the roof in this section seemed very high, now Red Shoes had to turn sideways to squeeze forward.
He stopped to catch his breath, and above in the darkness he heard something like the legs of a very large spider brushing.
And music. The soft, distant pung pung pung of a water drum. The faint chanting of voices.
Inside him, the coiled snake stretched, and Red Shoes felt his bones, rods of lightning ready to burn out of his skin. He trembled there for a long moment in the dark, trying to remember who he was.
I am Red Shoes. Choctaw. I am not accursed. I am not the feathered snake.
He remembered his friend Tug, the sailor who had saved his life in Venice, who had become his companion these last ten years. Tug, his friend.
Tug, who ran from me. Who still runs from me.
But Tug had reason.
He remembered Grief, her quiet anguish, her fierce lovemaking.
He remembered the old man he had known as a child, who had battled the spirits and lost. His eyes as vacant as pumpkin seeds, his drooling mouth, not even able to feed himself.
I am Red Shoes. Not accursed. Not yet.
The trembling stopped, and he went on.
The roof drooped again, and once more he had to hold his breath and swim in the dark. But this time the tunnel slope did not rise again. It continued, until his lungs ached, and he suddenly realized he was swimming down, toward the bottom of the Earth, to the place where his people had come from. To where some still lived.
But then he found the skin of the water and cut through it, and was born again into darkness.
Or near darkness. But there was singing, and a small glimmering light, and a vast cave that could never fit into the hill of Nanih Waiyah. Song echoed about him, and the tapping of the water drum was like thunder.
From the darkness walked a woman. She appeared neither