The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [61]
“Or we may call you nothing at all,” Red Shoes answered. “You might be dead, and we do not speak the names of the dead.”
“I can't die!” Chula said. “Not when we have Red Shoes, the greatest hopaye of all to make our war magic.” Then his face twisted in fear, as he thought of something. “Do you see it?” He gasped. “Do you see my death?”
“I see you growing old and honored,” Red Shoes said, “so long as you are as cautious as you are brave. Always use your head. Never use your bow until all of your powder is gone, and never use your war club until all of your arrows are gone. And when your war club breaks, throw yourself into the forest, hide, and fight another time.”
“Now you sound like one of the old men.”
“They are old for a reason, Chula. Stupid men die young. Maybe very young.”
“I'm not stupid.”
“Good.”
Red Shoes saw the Sun Boy long before he saw the ships. He saw him as the old Wichita priest might have, a giant with legs like long, thin stilts, striding with his head almost as high as the Sun. Then again, when he blinked, he saw instead a tree of a thousand branches, and on each branch a hundred birds. Each bird was a spirit. In some places a branch was swollen, like the pustules on trees from which certain kinds of beetles were born. Again, when he blinked, they were more like wombs, with tadpole things curled inside.
He wondered how the Sun Boy would perceive him. Just now, he saw nothing, Red Shoes was certain. All of Red Shoes’ strength went to hide himself, to hide his fellow Choctaw, and to watch.
When the first airships appeared, a few warriors had to be restrained from giving the war cry and shooting at them—but not as many as he feared. Terror of witchcraft made them sober, even the berserk Hacho warriors. They kept to the cover of the trees, where Red Shoes could draw hoshonti, the concealing cloud, over them.
As Red Shoes suspected, the Sun Boy and his army did not plan to ferry all the horsemen across in the flying ships—with all those skittish horses, that would take a long time. And why should they, when the flying ships made building a bridge so easy?
It was interesting to watch. First they used airships to draw long, heavy cables across to the eastern side of the river. Seeing this, once again, some warriors began edging toward the enemy.
“Restraint,” Red Shoes cautioned Minko Chito. “We might kill a few if we attack their airship when they land to attach the cables. But think how many more we shall kill if we let them start across the bridge and destroy it.”
“Surely they will notice us before that,” Minko Chito said. “Surely they will establish themselves on this side, with the airships to protect both ends of their bridge.”
“Surely. But it will do them no good. Tell the warriors to go back into the swamps. Convince them to wait.” “It will be difficult. Now that they have seen the enemy, they want to blood themselves.” “They will spill more blood and take more scalps if they do what I say,” Red Shoes assured him.
* * *
Now the Sun Boy was a spider, spinning a great web, weaving lines of attractions and repulsions and threading spirits on the strands like beads, wheels within delicate wheels. Like a black sunrise, his web spread in the West, lazily spinning about the effulgent hole in the sky that was the Sun Boy.
Red Shoes fasted and chanted, let the snake grow sharp inside him, let the wings spread out on his back, took on the scent of the enemy; and when he was ready, he drifted up into the web and slipped in, to the heart of the Sun Boy's strength, to his right hand. Unnoticed, unnamed. And there he began to steal and murder, to weaken strands, to prepare to slip the knife into the Sun Boy's back.
Red Shoes was a weapon, yes—a thing made to kill. Not to kill the sun itself, but this false child of the Sun, this mockery of Hashtali.
All this he did with his shadow, and so powerful was he that he could slip back into his crawfish-clay human skin and instruct his people. He met with the Bone Men and with the shamans from