A November Sky

Chapter Five

Deep in winter, Kocoum called a senat with the Grand Council. My first senat, since children were prohibited—and unlike the men, who underwent huskanaw, a months-long trial in the wilderness, girls were only considered women at marriage. As the men filtered inside, the tribes women bustled through the room, refilling clay cups of cider and offering platters of striped bass. Not a true werowansqua, or female chief, I served with the women, standing against the repeating arcs of the well-bent saplings, my plate at the ready. A reminder that since my mother hadn't been born of a chief's line, my power came through my husband.

Kocoum sat on a raised sapling platform at the back of the longhouse, father's warbonnet low on his red-and-black painted brow. The flaming orange and red feathers, tipped in brown, looked out of place against his copper skin, black braid, and pooling blue eyes. He looked afire, as if the spirits themselves had alighted upon him.

At Kocoum's side, in a spot of honor, sat my father, his hair loosely draped over his left shoulder; he never had taken to the braids and ornamentation like the younger werowances. Though time had begun to blur the edges of his tattoos, his bare chest and shoulders remained firm, ready. This was the picture the Powhatan rendered for the visiting tribes. But I knew his body had betrayed him, the chest pains and his wet cough making it impossible for him to retain the chiefdom until Nehsandi came of age at fifteen summers. His steam therapy could only help him for so long.

Father turned to survey the room and his eyes met mine. "Daughter." He motioned me forward with a wave of his puccoon-stained hand. The tang of tobacco smoke drifted with him. "Sit. Speak with me."

Catanya, one of father's alliance wives—taken not out of love, but in an effort to infuse royal blood and kinship ties among the thirty tribes—hissed at me as I left the line, jerking her hand toward the sapling wall. I shuffled past her, curving wide to avoid her flailing arms, and sat beside my father on the packed dirt, waiting for the seven council members to filter in. I arranged the platter of striped bass in the middle of the oval and tucked my moccasins under my legs, shifting and tucking as I searched for a position where the leather soles would not dig into my shins.

Father snagged a piece of fish from my platter, glanced behind us, and laughed. He bit off a piece, speaking through his meal. "Do not mind Catanya. She has seen too many skies." It was true. She'd been given too many riches and too much importance, and now she felt herself entitled to such things.

"That's no one's fault but your own." I lifted a cup of cider from one of the younger tribeswomen, choosing the darkest clay, imagining it had begun as wet earth from the riverside. Father would have spoiled me too if I'd let him. Beads, ribbons, the finest dyes and clays: things my mother had valued above all else in her design work. I'd always accepted his gifts with grace, placing them around my hut or tying them into my hair often enough to appear grateful, but my true calling had been the outdoors. The water and sky and earth and wind, places where I could be, no expectation, just breathe.

Kocoum leaned close to one of the serving women, accepting a strip of venison from her platter. I'd never seen her before, so she wasn't from our tribe. Most likely an alliance wife, sent to tempt the young chief.

Father signaled her over, requesting a second cup of cider, and she scurried off to fulfill the request. "True," he said, "but they always made her less bitter. Great Creator only knows why I haven't sent her back to the Chickahominy."