People of the Silence by Kathleen O'Neal & Gear Gear Page A

whispered, “Thank you, Mother. For caring for me. For loving me. You are the most important thing in my life.”
    Snow Mountain’s eyes blurred, and she hugged him, awkwardly putting her arms around his heavy packs. Hoarsely, she said, “I love you, Buckthorn. I always have.”
    “I promise I won’t disappoint you.”
    She released Buckthorn and gazed up through swimming eyes. “Black Mesa asked me to give you a message.”
    “What?”
    She spoke the words slowly: “He said to remind you that ‘You must have the heart of a cloud to walk upon the wind.’”
    A smile warmed Buckthorn’s face. He touched a hand to his chest. “Please tell him I will not forget the many kindnesses he has shown me. I carry the words inside my heartdrum.”
    Snow Mountain nodded and stepped back. “Have a safe journey, Buckthorn. Save some of the blue corncakes for your first dinner with Dune. I put in extra pine nuts. I’ve heard he likes those.”
    “Thank you, Mother. I wish…” He stopped himself. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but I will return as quickly as I can. Goodbye.”
    Time after time, he turned to wave at Snow Mountain as he followed the familiar path down to the river. Once he’d been ferried across, he’d really be on his way.
    He glanced back at the Great Warriors, the twin pillars of rock. Watch over me, please. At least until I reach the holy Derelict. They jutted up in silence, stern guardians of Windflower Village, and of the lush bottomland they surveyed.
    Buckthorn’s next landmark would be World Tree Mountain. Her roots sank deep into the First Underworld, and her trunk twisted up through the other underworlds until it popped through Our Mother Earth’s skin. The branches spread out through the four skyworlds, but they were too great and powerful to be visible to humans, though, now and then, a shaman claimed to have seen misty green limbs wavering through the clouds above the jagged peaks.
    Buckthorn trotted past the waiting fields, remembering the sweet voices of the gods that had thrilled his soul. However this journey ended, it would be marvelous.

Four
    Cornsilk knelt on the north side of the plaza with two grinding slabs, one coarse and one fine, before her. An empty black-and-white bowl and a plain clay pot filled with red corn sat to her left. She had been here for over a hand of time and hadn’t made any apparent headway on the corn, though meal covered her hands and the skirt of her brown dress. As she studied the situation, it appeared that she had more cornmeal on her than on her slabs. Five paces away, a large pot tilted sideways on the hot coals of her firepit, reminding her of her duties. She leaned forward and pounded a handful of corn with the pointed end of her handstone, cracking the kernels.
    Morning blushed gold into the rolling hills around Lanceleaf Village and glimmered on the green spears of yucca choking the slopes. It shone on the up-tilted blocks of tan sandstone rising over the patchwork of empty corn, squash, and bean fields that lay on every flat area around the village.
    Billows of orange cloud burned swathes in the translucent eastern sky. Beneath them, the rugged peaks of the distant mountains were mantled in pristine white, and today they seemed to rip at the bottom of the clouds. At their base lay flat mesas, home of the Green Mesa clans who farmed the butte tops.
    To the north rose the Great Bear Mountains, the home of First Bear, who had raised the high granite peaks to shelter him in hibernation. The claw marks of First Bear had ripped the land under the mountain, leaving long twisting ridges of canted rock. Ephemeral creeks ran at the bases of those ridges, flash flooding in spring, tumbling whole trees down into the basins, and trickling cool and clear after misty winter rainstorms. Those washes brought life to the land around Lanceleaf Village.
    Generations ago, several families of the Ant Clan had come to farm the alluvial flats and mesa tops around