Daughter of the Sun Read online

  DAUGHTER

  OF THE SUN

  ALSO BY

  BARBARA WOOD

  Private Entrance

  Star of Babylon

  The Blessing Stone

  Sacred Ground

  Perfect Harmony

  The Prophetess

  Virgins of Paradise

  The Dreaming

  Green City in the Sun

  Soul Flame

  Vital Signs

  Domina

  The Watch Gods

  Childsong

  Night Trains

  Yesterday’s Child

  Curse This House

  Hounds and Jackals

  The Magdalene Scrolls

  DAUGHTER

  OF THE SUN

  Barbara Wood

  St. Martin’s Griffin

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DAUGHTER OF THE SUN. Copyright © 2007 by Barbara Wood. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wood, Barbara, 1947—

  Daughter of the sun / Barbara Wood.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36368-0

  ISBN-10: 0-312-36368-0

  I. Young women—Fiction. 2. Class—Fiction. 3. Prehistoric peoples—Fiction.

  4. New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O5877D38 2007

  813′.54—dc22

  2007016908

  First Edition: September 2007

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This hook is dedicated to

  my husband, George, with love.

  Acknowledgments

  Three amazing people deserve recognition. Sharon Stewart, dear friend and assistant; Harvey Klinger, the best agent a writer could have; Jennifer Enderlin, an editor wise beyond her years. Deepest thanks.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  BOOK ONE

  The Dark Lord

  One

  THE runner sprinted down the paved road, his heart pounding with fear. Although his feet were bleeding, he dared not stop. He looked back. His eyes widened in terror. He stumbled, fought for balance, and pushed on. He had to warn the clan.

  A Dark Lord was coming.

  Ahoté could not help his forbidden thoughts. There sat beautiful Hoshi’tiwa, just a hundred paces from where he stood at the Memory Wall, radiant in the sunshine as she spun cotton ribbons for her bridal costume. She looked so happy in front of her small adobe house shaded by cottonwood trees, with the fresh stream trickling nearby. All she had been able to talk about was the coming wedding day. But all Ahoté could think about was the wedding night.

  His father pinched him.

  Under the elder’s tutelage, eighteen-year-old Ahoté was reciting the clan history, using the pictographs painted on the wall as a guide. Each symbol represented a major event in the past. And as there were too many events recorded on the Memory Wall—symbolized by spirals, animals, people, lightning strikes—for the clan to remember, it was the job of one man, He Who Links People.

  This was the sacred calling to which young Ahoté was apprenticed and upon which he must concentrate. But his mind was wandering.

  His father scowled. Takei did not understand the boy’s lovesick state. When Takei had wed, years ago, a girl chosen by his parents, he had done his duty, begetting many children on her. He had never wasted his time in moony-eyed daydreaming and sexual fantasies. Sex was for creating children, not for idle amusement. If Takei had ever taken pleasure in the intimate act, he could not recall it.

  He glowered at his son. Lovesickness was exactly that—a sickness, and Ahoté’s mind was so infected with it, he could not concentrate on his recitations. If only the wedding day could be brought forward, Takei thought, tomorrow perhaps, so the boy could flush the lust out of his system. But the shamans had cast the fortunes of all involved and had declared that the soonest good-luck day was yet three months away!

  Takei experienced a ripple of fear. Lust and love seduced a man’s mind from his holy works. Was the boy in danger of weakening before the wedding, risking a spiritual pollution that would profane his sacred task?

  A dour, unhappy man who believed the gods had singled him out for a life of bad luck, Takei wished now he had not given in to Ahoté’s pleas to marry Hoshi’tiwa, wished he had had a matchmaker find a girl in another settlement, one not as pretty and clever as Sihu’mana’s daughter. Takei’s only hope was that this was just a phase, a matter of Ahoté wanting something he couldn’t have. Some men were like that, hungering for the out-of-reach, like desiring a married woman. Hoshi’tiwa was forbidden to Ahoté right now, and that fired the blood. But once he could have the girl anytime he wanted, day or night, the fever would leave him. Or so Takei prayed.

  As Ahoté’s hungry gaze strayed again to the lovely Hoshi’tiwa sitting in the sunshine, her poppy-red tunic a bright warm beacon, his boy’s body stirring with a man’s desires as he thought of his coming nights as a husband, another sharp pinch on his arm brought him back to the lesson, and he recited: “And then the people knew the Spring of Abundant Hunting, when elk came down from the plateau to offer themselves as food.” The symbol painted on the wall was an elk with arrows in its body.

  The last symbol on the wall was a circle with six lines trailing it, marking the sighting of a comet streaking the sky the summer before. No new symbols had been added since because nothing of significance had taken place. As he recited for his father, Ahoté wondered what new symbol would be added next, continuing the clan’s long history.

  Far down the highway, which cut through the vast plain and between plateaus, the runner fell, his right knee cracking in pain. As he struggled to his feet, he felt in the paving stones of the wide highway the vibrations of the thundering feet of the advancing army. He swallowed in terror, tasted blood and salt on his tongue.

  The cannibals were coming.

  Hoshi’tiwa looked over at handsome Ahoté at the Memory Wall, his sinewy body gleaming in the sun as he wore only a loincloth, and her heart swelled with love and hope. Life was good. Spring flowers bloomed everywhere. The nearby stream ran with cool fresh water and fish. The clan was healthy and prosperous. And Hoshi’tiwa, seventeen years old, was looking forward to her wedding day.

  She sat in the sunshine at the base of the cliff, spinning cotton for her bridal costume. She sat cross-legged as she twirled a wooden spindle up and down her thigh, deftly plucking clean fibers from a basket filled with carded cotton and adding them to the growing thread that would be dyed and woven into a ribbon for her hair.

  All around her the clan was going about the daily business of living: the farmers planting corn, women tending cook fires and watching the children, and the potters creating the rain jars for which her clan was most famous.

  As she spun her cotton, Hoshi’tiwa did not know that on the other side of the world, a strange race of people had named this cycle of the sun the Year of Our Lord, 1150. She was unaware that they rode on the backs of beasts, something her own people did not do, and used a tool called a wheel to transport goods. Hoshi’tiwa knew nothing of cathedrals and gunpowder, popes and Crusades, nor did she know that those strange people gave names to their canyons and rivers and hills.

  Hoshi’tiwa’s settlement had no name. Nor d
id the nearby stream, nor the mountains that watched over them. Many years in the future, another race would come to this place and apply names to everything they saw and walked upon. Two hundred miles to the southeast of where Hoshi’tiwa felt warm sun on her arms, a town would be established and called Albuquerque. The area surrounding it for 120,000 square miles would be known as New Mexico. The young bride did not know that centuries hence, strangers would roam the land to the north of her settlement and call it Colorado.

  There was only one place, far away in the southeast, that she knew by name, Center Place, so called because it was the hub of trade and communication for her people, and an important religious center. Even so, centuries hence, the name of Center Place would be changed to Chaco Canyon, and men and women known as anthropologists would stand in the ruins at Chaco Canyon and speculate and argue and debate and theorize over what they called the Abandonment. They would wonder, those people in the far future, why Hoshi’tiwa and her people, whom the anthropologists would incorrectly call Anasazi, had vanished so suddenly and without a trace.

  Hoshi’tiwa was ignorant of the fact that she would one day be part of an ancient mystery. Had she known, she would argue that there was nothing mysterious about her life. Her clan had lived at the foot of this escarpment for generations, and in all those centuries, little had changed. Hoshi’tiwa was a simple corn grower’s daughter who counted her blessings, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow would be the same as yesterday.

  Her thoughts broke like a bubble when she saw Ahoté, while his father’s back was turned, gesture to her. It was their private signal. She knew what it meant: At the first opportunity, he wanted to be alone with her.

  She nodded in secret response. And her heart began to race.

  The runner fell again, stamping his blood into the road’s sandstone surface, his knees scraped and bleeding, his bones screaming in pain. He could save himself, he knew, by running to the left, off the highway and down a narrow ravine that would shield him from the approaching army. But the people in the settlement were his kin. They were relying on him as the lookout to warn them in times of danger.

  Other families—entire settlements—were now completely gone because they did not have lookouts to warn them when the Jaguars came. If he died at the end of his run, at least his family would survive. And so he pushed on.

  Hoshi’tiwa’s mother paused in her labor at the grinding stone, where she was turning corn into flour, and squinted up at the sky. The world looked right, but it didn’t feel right. She glanced around. There was young Maya, sitting in the shade of a cottonwood tree, breast-feeding her greatgrandfather. Though her baby wailed in its basket on her back, it would have to wait until the elder was fed. The old man had long since lost his teeth, and now he was having difficulty swallowing gruel. Therefore, after the age-old custom of keeping the precious elders alive—for they alone had memories of what went before—his great-granddaughter nourished him with her own milk.

  From the mudbrick dwelling next door came screams through the gaping doorway. Hoshi’tiwa’s mother could see, in the darkness, her friend Lakshi, on her knees, her arms over her head with her wrists tied to a rope suspended from the ceiling. Kneeling in front of Lakshi and behind her, two midwives coaxed the babe into the world.

  All things normal, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet something was wrong. The air was too still, sounds too muted, sunlight too golden. Was this the day, Sihu’mana wondered, the day she had dreamed about in troubled sleep long ago? Had it come at last? Or was it just a mother’s nervousness before a wedding?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden cry.

  At the western terminus of the canyon, where the adobe houses ended and a dense forest of cottonwoods began, a cluster of boulders stood upon ground that had been declared sacred generations prior. Here the sun-watcher priest marked the cycles of the sun as it journeyed back and forth between the Solstices. The priest lived in a shelter nearby, never leaving his post, so that today, like every day, he marked the transit of the midday sun until the shadows disappeared beneath the boulders. Seeing this, he gave a shout.

  It was time for the noon meal.

  Those working in the fields laid down their digging sticks and baskets of seeds, said a prayer to the corn spirits, and began streaming back into the settlement—over a hundred men, women, and children, to be greeted by family members offering gourds of sweet water and places at the cook fires. The men were fed first, by tradition, being handed stacks of thin corn tortillas, or tamales filled with beans and squash, along with roasted onions, chili peppers, and corn on the cob.

  Ahoté’s father left the Memory Wall, his stomach growling, his mouth watering for the crispy pancakes he would fill with spicy beans. But Ahoté remained. He was hungry—but not for food.

  Hoshi’tiwa, laying aside her carding and cotton, gracefully rose to her feet, but she did not join her mother at their cook fire, where her father sank gratefully to the earth after a morning of hard labor and accepted the hot pancakes from Sihu’mana.

  Food was not on Hoshi’tiwa’s mind. She looked across the golden sunlight at Ahoté, whose eyes were on her. The breath caught in her throat and her heart pounded. When Ahoté spun about and dashed into the nearby cottonwood trees, Hoshi’tiwa lithely sprinted after him.

  Chatter and laughter filled the canyon as the men ate their fill and the women and girls served them, but Sihu’mana’s eyes followed her daughter into the forest. She felt her heart tighten with fear and dread. Remembering when she herself was young and love had sustained her instead of food, she grew alarmed. Was her daughter going to weaken before the wedding night?

  No mother’s head rested easy at night while her daughter existed in that fragile state between girlhood and marriage. Once Hoshi’tiwa was under a husband’s protection, Sihu’mana, like mothers since the beginning of time, would breathe more easily.

  There were two things the marriage partners brought to the union: the man, his courage; and the woman, her honor. Preserving her daughter’s virginity had not been easy, because Hoshi’tiwa was blessed—or cursed, depending on how one looked at it—with beauty. Whenever visitors came to the settlement, Sihu’mana kept a close watch on her daughter. Everyone still remembered, although they never spoke of it, the poor girl Kowka who, just days before her wedding, was with her sisters hunting for ground finch eggs when she had strayed upstream and a band of marauders from the north had happened upon her, alone and unprotected. She had survived the attack, but no man would marry her after that because of the clan’s complex rules and taboos regarding sex. The elders had declared her makai-yó—unclean—and despite pleas of leniency from her mother, Kowka was driven from the village and never heard from again.

  The sudden appearance of Kowka in her thoughts now alarmed Sihu’mana, and she quickly whispered words of good luck and traced a protective sign in the air. She had not thought of the unfortunate girl in years. Was it an omen?

  Hoshi’tiwa plunged into the dense trees, looking this way and that. “Ahoté!” she whispered eagerly. “Where are you?”

  She listened. Birds chirped in branches overhead. The fragrance of spring flowers filled the air. The forest was peaceful and sun-dappled. Hoshi’tiwa tiptoed forward, her ears alert for a telltale sound, her eyes scouring the ground for footprints or a shadow. “Where are you?” she called again, softly, relishing the moment when she found him. This was their private game—hide-and-seek—in which Ahoté pretended to chase her until she let him catch her.

  When Ahoté jumped out, she gave a mock cry and turned to run. But he caught her and swung her back, to take hold of her by the waist and pull her to him. He looked into her eyes for a long, breathless moment; then he gently rubbed his nose to hers.

  Hoshi’tiwa giggled. “My sweet funny Owl.” It had been her pet name for him ever since, one night the winter before, they had been gathered around the fire and Ahoté had been so frightened by one of the storyteller’s ghost tales that a five-year-old
boy had cried, “Uncle Ahoté, you are so scared, your eyes are as big as an owl’s!”

  While the women and girls of Hoshi’tiwa’s clan wore their hair long, the men and boys kept theirs cut short, hacking it off above the ears with a sharp obsidian knife. When Ahoté jumped out, he had brushed his short hair up into two “owl horns,” and Hoshi’tiwa laughed. She now reached up and smoothed his black hair down, bringing her hands to rest on either side of his face, her eyes glistening with love.

  As Ahoté touched his nose to Hoshi’tiwa’s, and she allowed him to kiss her in this fashion, he burned for more. How was he going to last the three months until their wedding night? When he lifted his hand and brushed his fingers over her breast, feeling the firm flesh beneath the fabric of her tunic, Hoshi’tiwa drew back, suddenly shy.

  Although she knew of the private ways between men and women, knew how intimate love was expressed, how men begot babies upon their wives, Hoshi’tiwa was uncertain how she felt about the intimacy she would soon share with Ahoté. Her mother had told her she would find it pleasurable, and Hoshi’tiwa supposed she would, but more important to her was the laughter they would share, the secrets they would whisper late into the night. When she thought of their lives together, she pictured herself cooking for Ahoté, delighting him with food, giving him children, making him proud.

  “I love you,” he murmured now. “Tell me you love me. It’s permissible. We are almost married.”

  Although she wanted to speak the words, her tongue froze. Hoshi’tiwa had been taught that emotions were powerful magic and therefore must always be kept in check, even such positive emotions as love. To release them by word or gesture was to set free a force that could wreak havoc upon the clan. Everyone knew that words of anger caused sickness, vocalized hatred brought about death; strong emotions destroyed crops and caused miscarriages. Even love, though good, had been known to incite envy, jealousy, and mistrust. So Hoshi’tiwa had been trained, like all her people, to be conservative in actions and speech. But it was all right, her mother had counseled, for husband and wife to exchange endearments—they were encouraged to, in fact, for such tender words enriched the womb and brought forth healthy babies.