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

red-and-white mouth dominated the bottom half of her jet-black mask, and a greasy gray beard hung to her waist. Long tangled black hair, dotted with tufts of cotton, fell over her menacing yellow eyes. Her mouth puckered in an eternal whistle. All his life he had been told that if he didn’t listen to his elders, the Monster Thlatsina would sneak up on him and suck his brains out through his ears. In her left hand she held a crooked staff to catch her victims. Her right fist gripped a huge obsidian knife: for dismembering those who refused to obey her.
    “Here!” Buckthorn yelled, and thrust the two dead mice at her. “These are for you!”
    The Monster slapped them from his hand, and Buckthorn watched the mice fly across the room, strike the wall, and fall to the floor with a dull thump.
    “Get up!” the Monster shouted. She slammed him in the shoulder with her crooked staff.
    Buckthorn jumped to his feet.
    The Monster pointed to the door. “Get out!”
    He scrambled beneath the door curtain and into the late afternoon glare. His mother’s room lay at ground level, on the east side of the building complex. Looking over his shoulder, he could see the twin knobs of rounded sandstone, the Great Warriors, that rose above the cliff.
    The River of Souls cut down through sandstone here, and the Straight Path people had found the rich bottomlands perfect for growing corn, beans, and squash. Over the years the village had grown from several small square houses into a three-story structure that rose under the sheer north wall of the cliff, watched over by the ancient bodies of the Great Warriors.
    Light snow had fallen last night and blanketed the village like a glittering layer of crushed gypsum. The high cliff dwarfed the gray clay-washed houses. To his right, southward across the mighty River of Souls, cornfields covered the floodplain. There, but a brief run from the village, the river flowed silver in the sunlight. Buckthorn could imagine those murky waters lapping against the cliffs that hemmed it on the south.
    People perched on the flat roofs, wrapped snugly in blankets, smiling, happy for him. His mother stood by the ladder that led down into the great kiva. She looked radiant in her red dress with black and yellow triangles around the hem. Eagle down fluttered on the crown of her head. He had to step up onto the circular lip of the kiva. Only about two hands of the structure stood aboveground; the other twenty hands sank deep into the flesh of Our Mother Earth.
    The Monster Thlatsina’s staff came down hard on Buckthorn’s shoulder. “Pay attention!”
    He spun to look at her. What should he pay attention to?
    At that moment his mother stepped back, and a long line of unearthly figures emerged from the black belly of the kiva. They trotted forward in a swinging gait, their feet kicking up sparkles of snow. Ruffs of pine encircled their necks, and their naked torsos gleamed with blue paint. They peered at Buckthorn with great bulging eyes. Their masks, part animal, part wondrous god, bore sprinkles of stars, zigzags of lightning, and dark ridges of sacred mountains. The slant of the sun threw their ethereal shadows across the plaza like leaping beasts. They shook gourd rattles as they came toward him in their loose-kneed shuffle. Their Singing resembled a breeze soughing through a thick stand of pines.
    Buckthorn waited in nervous silence.
    With each tramp of their sacred feet the Dancers wrested Power from the world, pulling shreds from all living things, and then drawing the Power about them like cloaks of iron—Power that could tremble the distant mountains and mold the thunderheads gathering in the deep blue sky.
    The Monster pricked Buckthorn in the back with her obsidian knife and ordered, “Walk!”
    He stumbled forward. People on the roofs lifted hands to him, their faces alight. Buckthorn tried to smile back, though he felt a little queasy. Two of the Buffalo Clan elders sat side by side, their legs