From the HBT Originals anthology Tales from Fallen Empires, by Evelyn Marlowe. This is a free preview — Part 1 of 3 — narrated version below, with the text underneath if you’d rather read.
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The morning the Green Corn fires were lit, Brown Stone found a crack in the great storage jar she had carried from her mother's house, and she took it as a sign that the world was preparing to shed its skin.
She stood in the courtyard of the Birdman's household compound on the southern slope of Monk's Mound, turning the jar in the grey light before sunrise. The crack ran from lip to shoulder, a thin dark seam in the shell-tempered clay, barely a whisper of damage. But she had lived long enough in this city to know that whispers were how endings announced themselves. She set the jar carefully in the shade of the compound wall and went to begin the grinding.
Below her, Cahokia spread itself across the floodplain like a sleeping creature — ten thousand souls and more, the thatched rooftops catching the first bronze light, the smell of cook-fires and damp earth rising together. The Grand Plaza was already alive with festival preparations. She could hear the rhythmic thock of wooden posts being driven, the laughter of children allowed to stay awake through the sacred night. From the top of the mound behind her, she knew, the priests had watched the sun's position against the cedar posts of the great circle — the woodhenge that stood to the west — and had judged the moment correct. Corn season completed. World renewed. The ceremony would last three days.
Brown Stone had seen twenty-three Green Corn festivals in this city. She intended, she told herself, to see many more.
Her given name among her own kin had been something softer, but the women of the Birdman household had called her Brown Stone from her first year of service, and she had worn it long enough that it fit like a second skin. She had come to the compound at twenty-two, a widow already, her husband lost to the flooding of the eastern fields, her infant son balanced on her hip and nothing else worth carrying. The Birdman's mother — the old matriarch whose name was still spoken with care — had taken her in not out of charity but out of practical need. Brown Stone had strong hands and a gift for the storage calculations that kept a great household fed through winter. She had stayed. The old matriarch had died. The son had become Birdman in his turn, had aged and grown powerful and then had sickened, and now his wife — the woman Brown Stone thought of simply as the Lady — lay on her platform bed inside the mound-top structure, burning with a fever that had not broken in twelve days.
It was the Lady who had truly kept Brown Stone here. Not obligation. Not fear. Something rarer.
She was finishing the second grinding when her son appeared at the courtyard gate.
Sparrow Tail was thirty-one years old and had his father's wide-set eyes, which always made Brown Stone feel a complicated grief to look at him. He had married well — a woman from the western precinct whose family worked the copper trade — and they had two daughters now, and another child pressing against his wife's belly. He stood at the gate in his festival clothes, red-ochre pigment on his cheekbones, but his expression was not festive.
"The runners came back from the Ozark traders," he said, without greeting, because he knew she would want the plain truth before ceremony. "The river passage is still open. After the spring rains it may not be."
Brown Stone set down the grinding stone. "We have spoken about this."
"We have not finished speaking about it."
"I cannot leave while the Lady lives."
He came into the courtyard and crouched near her, his voice dropping even though there was no one close enough to hear. "Mother. Look." He gestured, not at anything specific, but at everything. At the mound behind them, where she could see the fresh mud plastered over cracks in the retaining wall. At the plaza, where the new palisade posts were thinner than the old ones — the great upland forests two days' walk away now, the near timber long since consumed by the city's endless hunger. At the river channel visible through the gap in the southern mounds, running shallower and browner than it had in her memory. "The city is coming apart. Not quickly. But it is."
"Cities do not come apart in a season."
"No," he said. "They come apart over ten seasons. And then one day you look back and count, and you see that the coming-apart began ten seasons ago and you were standing in the middle of it the whole time." He picked up a fragment of old pottery from the courtyard floor — a rim sherd, painted red and white, from some older vessel — and turned it in his fingers. "My wife's cousin is already in the Ozarks. He says the land there is not exhausted. The soil gives back what you put in."
Brown Stone looked at the grinding stone, at the fine white dust of processed corn on her palms. The city had been feeding itself from these bottomlands for two centuries. She had watched the yields thin, the storage tallies tighten, the distribution arguments grow louder and sharper in the councils. She knew what he was saying was true. She had known it for years, the way you know a dream is ending even while you are still inside it.
"Come to the festival," she said finally. "Stay three days. We will speak again when the fires are banked."
He looked at her for a long moment, and she recognized in his expression the particular patience of a child who has learned that his mother's stubbornness is not hardness of heart but a kind of loyalty so deep it has grown roots. He stood, adjusted his festival wrap, and kissed the top of her head with the unconscious tenderness of someone who has done it since he was small.
"Three days," he said.
The first day of the Green Corn festival belonged to purification and to the living.
By mid-morning the Grand Plaza had filled, and Brown Stone moved through it on her way to the market precinct with the particular ease of someone who had memorized a landscape. She knew where the ground was soft from the last flood, where the packed-earth surface held firm, where to step around the subsidence near the old borrow pit that the city's managers had been arguing about filling for three years without filling it. The plaza was enormous — forty acres of leveled earth, bordered on its cardinal edges by platform mounds that rose like earthen mountains from the flat ground, each one faced with clean clay and topped with the structures of the powerful. Monk's Mound itself anchored the northern end: four terraces, rising above everything, the height of ten men standing on each other's shoulders. From its summit you could see the whole of the world as Cahokia understood it.
She had climbed it only twice in her life, both times in the Lady's company.
At the market precinct, the festival trade was already vivid. Shell gorgets from the Gulf — carved with the Birdman's spiral eye — lay next to copper plates hammered thin as leaves. There were pots in every size and style, the local shell-tempered ware sitting beside finer painted pieces from the southern polities, and cruder cord-marked vessels from the northern trading partners. There were dried fish and smoked venison, seed packets, pigment cakes of red ochre and galena, bundles of sacred tobacco, baskets of the green-black mussel shells used for tempering new clay. Brown Stone bartered two bags of processed corn flour for a small copper piece — a simple crescent, nothing ceremonial — and a length of fabric dyed with pokeweed, which the Lady had asked for, in her last lucid conversation, as a gift for her youngest granddaughter.
She was folding the fabric into her carrying basket when she heard the chunkey game begin.
It had started at the plaza's eastern edge, near the low mound that served as the game ground's boundary marker. A young man — one of the Birdman household's junior players, she recognized him by his copper ear spools — had rolled a stone disc across the packed earth, and two players were already airborne with their long throwing poles, each trying to predict where the stone would stop. The crowd around them was three deep and loud, and bets were changing hands in shell beads and surplus grain. Chunkey was the city's great constant: it had been played on this plaza for generations, the ground worn smooth and dense as fired brick from the passage of a thousand stone discs. Brown Stone had watched it her whole adult life without ever finding it as compelling as others did, but today she stopped, and watched.
There was something beautiful and clean about it, she thought. The stone rolling on its own momentum, the players committing to their prediction before the outcome was known, the whole game a wager on your own ability to read the world's direction. She thought of Sparrow Tail in the courtyard that morning. The river passage is still open.
She did not stay to see who won.
The Lady was awake when Brown Stone returned, which was itself a kind of miracle and also a kind of cruelty, because it meant she knew everything and could do nothing.
The structure atop Monk's Mound was divided into sections — the ritual space at the mound's south-facing summit, the storage areas, the sleeping platforms of the household's senior members. The Lady's platform was in the innermost room, lit by a small fire in its central hearth, the smoke rising through a gap in the thatch. The room smelled of fever-sweat and the dried herbs the healers had been burning for days, sage and something sharper that Brown Stone did not recognize. Two younger women of the household sat near the door, their voices low.
Brown Stone knelt beside the platform and held up the dyed fabric. The Lady's eyes, bright and precise above her reduced face, found the pokeweed purple and registered it with something that crossed toward pleasure.
"For Singing Creek," Brown Stone said. "As you asked."
"You remembered." The Lady's voice was reed-thin but the diction was still exact. She had always been exact. It was what had made her formidable and what had made her, in Brown Stone's private reckoning, genuinely admirable — not the power she held in the household, which was considerable, but the precision with which she used it. She had never been casual with her authority. She had always known the weight of what she carried.
"Your son was asking after the festival preparations," Brown Stone said, which was not quite true but was the kind of not-quite-truth that served the Lady better than harsh fact in her present condition. The Birdman — her husband — had died two years before. Her eldest son now held the title, and he was managing the political fractures of a polity under stress with the skills of a man who had been trained for a different, more prosperous world. Brown Stone felt a measured pity for him that she kept carefully out of her face.
— End of preview. The rest of “The Widow of Cahokia” continues in Tales from Fallen Empires, available now.
Get the full story (and four more) in Tales from Fallen Empires →
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