Skytrails

4-Black Feathers

Sharn went last to Dur'din's village, the only Kualii Edain village not on the great river. He had traveled to the other villages by canoe, speaking with the men and convincing them to send at least one person, usually the chief, but in two cases a close relative of the chief, to commit to go talk with the Minkaera.

Watu'rokii, the boy Sharn had been shaping the canoe for, had accompanied him the entire journey. The boy's father had breathed his last two days after Sharn returned to the village. Sharn and Watu both wore black feathers tied in braids that hung behind their ears as a sign of their mourning.

They walked through the forest south from their village. Eventually they came to a creek that had splintered off the great river. They followed the creek the rest of the way to Dur'din's village.

As the forest thinned, they could see the smoke of the bonfires and cookfires rising over the horizon.

Sharn expected to find some of the men fishing or hunting as they neared the village, or women gathering firewood and water. But they saw no one as they made their way to the edge of the forest. He noticed, too, the smoke ahead of them rose thick and black, and appeared as a heavy haze instead of individual columns. He quickened his pace.

As Sharn and Watu ran by the last young trees and into the open air of the empty prairie, they saw the charred remains of the village spread out before them.

It had been burnt to the ground.

Sharn dared to hope the people of the village would not be among the ashes.

He walked closer and saw the truth.

First, one body, then another, then another.

Not dead by fire or smoke, but by arrows.

He walked through the village in an oblong circle. The bodies of old men and women, a few clutching dead babes, lay sprawling in and around the roundhouses, the shafts of the arrows protruding from their bodies like tall grass.

Sharn followed the trail of corpses out of the village, further south, away from the forest. The bodies of the men and older boys spread from the edge of the village to a spot further south, where the fiercest of the fighting must have taken place. Many of the dead were Minkaera.

Sharn found the corpse of Dur'din. He fell to his knees beside the great chief's body. Oh Great Spirit, Sharn thought. Why? He felt a surge of anger well up from his gut. His hands shook with it. He took Dur'din's tomahawk from the ground beside the chief's outstretched hand, walked to the closest Minkaera corpse, and buried the ax in the man's head, splitting it in two.

Drops of thick blood hit Sharn's face. He let go of the tomahawk, stood, and wiped his face with his arm. He turned and saw Watu watching him. The boy had followed him.

"Watu." He said the boy's name, not knowing what else to say. He felt ashamed for letting his anger affect him so in front of one so young. "Gather wood for a fire. We will burn the bodies before we leave. All the bodies."

Watu stood rooted, his face unchanging. "Come, Watu," Sharn said, "We will collect the wood together." He walked over to the boy and placed his hand on Watu's rigid shoulder. "Come," Sharn repeated. The boy nodded and turned with Sharn back toward the village.

The man and the boy gathered enough wood from the remains of the village to build a mammoth bonfire. They worked long into the evening, dragging each body over the ground to the edge of the fire, then tossing or rolling it in. They pulled aside the weapons and some pieces of cloth to wear over their faces while they worked, but everything else they gave to the flames.