Free The Unfinished Song: Taboo by Tara Maya Page B

then! Instead of taking twenty years to build, they’d soar before your eyes! But clans are more stingy with their men than with their virgins. I have often envied your leader his bone flute, which, so it was said, drew men to him like swill drew rats.”
    “He was no leader of mine,” Kavio said. The river women ended their song.
    “The re— the megalith.” Hertio pointed.
    Black basalt, quarried and captured like a whale from a stone sea, rode trunks of trees, heaved and pushed by men. Forty men pulled the ropes. Ten men ran each final log back around to let the rock, on sled runners, glide over it again, a feat these men had done for countless miles.
    “That stone will stand in the pit here.” Hertio pointed. “Next to the stone where you killed a man.”
    “Strange honor.”
    “We never moved his skull. It’s crushed beneath the stone still.”
    “It might have been mine.”
    Hertio had the grace to stay silent. Kavio stared into the pit, aware that the strands of magic unleashed that day still tangled this hilltop. He had been trying all morning not to trip them, but they hissed around him now, snakes whose poison bite brought a Vision of the past, and pain. He wanted to howl out but could only croak before he collapsed forward into the cavity.
Kavio (Ten Years Old)
     
    “Look at the Dwarf Tavaedi!” The children working beside their parents in the fields pointed at him and snickered into their hands. “Dwarf! Dwarf!”
    Kavio ignored the taunts. Back home, ten-year old Tavaedies were common as acorns under an oak, but here he was a third thumb. He crossed the fields until he came to the pyramid of soil, which looked to him like a big wood-ant mound. Climbing the dirt was fun, but the top was the best. It was a checkerboard of pits. Some of these hole s were just depressions in the clay shored up by logs, but others already had been lined with huge, flat boulders. This is what kivas looked like before they were buried and hidden.
    Best of all, Kavio had the hilltop to himself. No other children played up here. The men who would have been working on the hill had abandoned their ropes, logs and backbaskets, to take up arms and stand guard against Father’s army camped in the surrounding woods. Father thought Kavio was back at the camp doing chores .
    Busy slaying imaginary foes, Kavio never saw the men until one grabbed him from behind. Sour milk breath tickled his ear; a dirty hand covered his mouth. They hog-tied him before he could fight. At first he was less afraid than he should have been because he didn’t understand who they were. He took this for another of Father’s tests, or, at worst, a prank by the local children. Only when the men wedged him into a ditch at the bottom edge of the pit, and he looked up into the crazed face of the man who had chased him once before around the Tor of the Sun, did he realize he was going to die. Crabs of fear pinched inside his throat and stomach.
    “Your father was a murderer.” The man’s teeth were too yellow, his eyes too white. Rotten Tooth, Kavio dubbed him. “How many deathdebts has he left unpaid, with none to collect them? Your father took my son from me, I will take his son from him.”
    “My father never murdered anyone!” Kavio screamed. “He’s a hero. He’s the one who fought the murderers!”
    “You’re all murderers,” said Rotten Tooth. “Your whole tribe is guilty. You’ll die here and no one will ever even find your body, no one will take your bones to be buried on Obsidian Mountain, no one will avenge your death.”
    Kavio squirmed at the bottom of the hole. When finished, the kiva would be encased in rock, megastones forming the floor, walls and ceiling. Two rectangular rocks already stood against the wall of the pit, upper halves above dirt level. He could see the space where the other obelisks would fit—he lay in one empty trough, a deep furrow against the wall of the pit—but he didn’t understand what the men meant to