“Brought you no captives?” asked the blood knives. “No warriors taken in honorable combat?”
Cat Mask shrugged. “The adults we killed were not warriors. It was too much trouble to bring them, so we killed them.” He looked at his companions, and they shared winks and nods. “And we were very hungry, so we ate them.”
Everyone laughed, since it was disgusting to think of eating a stranger, and one with sour flesh, at that.
“We thought it worthwhile to bring these children. A bundle plus two.”
“I only count a bundle,” said the eldest of the blood knives.
“Oh, that’s right,” remarked Cat Mask, scratching his chin. “When we came through High-Hill we met with Lizard Mask’s sister, who has settled there. She just lost her little son to the coughing sickness, so she took a pair of little boys thinking that, if she raised them, she might forget her grief over the other one.”
“Very well,” said the blood knives. “A bundle will be enough. But you who raid into the lands beyond the White Road must bring us strong captives as tribute for the gods.”
“If we can find any!” said Cat Mask with another laugh. “They looked pretty scrawny and weak. We had to fatten these little ones up on goat’s milk.”
“It is their blood we need,” said the blood knives, “not their flesh.”
They stepped forward to take the children, but before they could lay hands on them White Feather pushed past them and scooped up one of the toddlers.
“I claim this one for mine, to raise as my own!”
Her voice was loud, and her tone harsh, and the child hiccuped and sniveled into the growing silence as the blood knives opened and closed their hands and folk pressed forward to see what was going on.
Before three breaths had passed, a man with the delicate frame of an exile stepped out of the crowd and pulled an infant out of the arms of one of the mask warriors. “And I claim this one, to replace the child my wife could never have.”
“And I!” said a woman, coming forward to put her hands on one of the little walking ones. “For I lost my child and my husband when the Pale Dogs raided our settlement, just before the shadows fell over us. I want this child to raise.”
In her wake, other people in the market shoved forward—women and men both—and claimed children until only the oldest girl remained with her vacant stare and her terrified expression.
The blood knives raged, but they were few, and the crowd was many, and the folk who had a grip on the children looked very determined.
“These are the children of dogs! They are not our kind,” the blood knives protested.
“How will they know anything different,” asked White Feather boldly, “if they are raised among us?”
“It goes against our laws.”
“It does not!” she retorted. “In the days before, some among humankind walked together with our people and painted the clan marks on their bodies. In this way, they became part of the clans, and their blood and our blood mixed.”
“Yes! Yes!” cried the blood knives triumphantly. “And that turned the balance. You see what came of it!”
White Feather was burning with anger now. She was as bright as the sun. “I will not listen to you!” she said in a voice that carried like sunlight over the market square, where all commerce had come to a stop. “I listened once, when the last of you still ruled us in exile. What fools we were!”
“You were fools to allow your blood knives to die without training up those who could succeed them.”
“You know nothing, you who walked in the shadows while we struggled, while the land died around us! Hu-ah! Hu-ah! Let my words be pleasing to She-Who-Creates, who sustains us!”
Now she could not be interrupted.
“In those days as the land died and we died, the blood knives still ruled. Many had already died because there was not enough to eat. But in those days, when I was a child, there was a great sickness and most of the remaining people died. Dogs feasted on corpses, for there were none to prepare them for the death rites. Vultures grew fat on lean flesh. Bones lay everywhere. And still we died. After this, we abandoned the cities. The few of us who still lived scattered to the villages. There we lived as the fields withered and the birds laid fewer and fewer eggs. The lakes dried up, there were no more fish, and the rivers leaked away until they ran no more than a trickle of water. And still we died.
“At last the remaining blood knives decreed that in order to restore the balance and placate the angry gods we must offer to the gods the thing we valued most. I was young then, a young woman newly married. I had just given birth to my first child, a daughter.