Walter Williams: The Rift

He was a god to his people. He lived high above the earth, in the realm of his brother the Sun, and his rule stretched from the world of life to the world of spirits. His word was absolute. Even the gods respected his desires.

So why did the dogs disturb his dreams? It seemed unfair that he could not order them to stop their howling.

The unearthly crying of dogs awakened the Sun Man before dawn. Leaving the slave Willow Girl asleep on the pallet beneath her buffalo robes, he dressed himself in the dark- a cape of bright bird feathers, a headdress of white swan feathers that ringed his head like the battlements of a tower, an apron of pierced whelk shells brought two thousand miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico- and then he picked up his boots and made his way out of the long house and into the still, cool predawn air.

“How may I serve the Divine Sun, my husband?” said a voice.

The Sun Man was startled, then annoyed. His wife, the Great Priestess, had a habit of turning up when she was neither wanted nor expected. Now she lay before him, stretched full on the ground in a prostration of respect. He wondered how long she had been there.

The Sun Man dropped his boots before her. “You may lace up my boots, if it suits you,” he said.

The Great Priestess rose to her knees. She held out one of his boots, and he stepped into it. Her tattooed face pursed with disapproval as she worked the hide laces.

“That lazy Willow Girl hasn’t done the job?” she said. “She doesn’t know enough to protect the feet of the Divine Sun against the dew?”

“She was asleep,” the Sun Man said.

Her voice grew more severe at this weak excuse. “It is not her business to sleep when the Divine Sun is awake.”

“I will speak to her.”

“It is a whip of braided deerhide that will do the speaking,” the Great Priestess said. “I will see to it myself.”

The Sun Man kept his face still. “If you do not think such a matter beneath your notice,” he suggested hopefully.

“Nothing that concerns the Divine Sun is beneath my notice,” she replied.

The Sun Man restrained another sigh. His wife was the absolute ruler of the household, and he had no business disrupting her domestic arrangements. If she wanted to whip a slave, she could do so. He could only hope that she would do the whipping herself, frail and old as she was, and not order a burly male servant to do the job.

He would have to try to think of a way to make it up to Willow Girl later.

The problem, he reflected, was his wife’s common birth. If she had been born into the privileged and sophisticated Sun Clan, the divine rulers of the People, she would have had a greater tolerance for his flings with the slave girls. She would have known that his liaisons meant nothing, that he was merely exercising one of the perquisites of his birth.

But the Sun Clan was very small, and the noble clans weren’t very large, either, so both were required to marry outside of their caste, which meant marriages with commoners. The Sun Man’s wife had brought her commoner’s views into his household, and expected her husband to remain faithful to her bed as if he were merely a farmer or a stinking fisherman. Such behavior was proper to one of the lowborn, perhaps, but certainly not for an all-powerful autocrat whose rule had been ordained in heaven. The Great Priestess did not understand that his slave girls were not a threat to her own position, but were just a way of keeping his bed warm at night. They were an itch that he scratched, nothing more.

The Great Priestess finished tying the laces of his boot. She held out the other, and the Sun Man stepped into it.

“The funeral of your divine brother, the Fierce Badger, was very expensive,” she said, her voice deliberately casual.

Here, he thought, was the real reason why he found her waiting here in the doorway.

“True,” he said.

“And Eyes of Spring, your sister and the mother of your heir, is growing frail.”

“Also true.”

“It will be necessary to give her an expensive funeral as well. Should you not consider a war on the northern barbarians by way of acquiring spoils?”

“I will give the matter thought.”

He had given it thought- these facts were obvious enough- but it was clear that he had not given it as much thought as the Great Priestess.

“The war chief is new to his post,” she continued, “and we have a whole class of young warriors that require seasoning.”

“Relations with the barbarians are good,” the Sun Man said. “There hasn’t been any trouble between us in years. I do not want my old age to be troubled by wars, and a war would disrupt our trade northward for copper and pipe clay.”

“It is sad that Eyes of Spring is so weak,” the Great Priestess reminded. “There will be great mourning soon, and disruptions one way or another.”

She tied the bootlace with a little snap of finality, then turned her head to direct her stony face to the horizon. She had made her point, and now her husband was dismissed to go about his business.

Out in the town below, the dogs yowled.

“I will speak to my brother the Sun on this matter,” the Sun Man said, and walked across the level, grassy field atop the mound until he gazed over the edge at his sleeping kingdom below.

The Sun Mound on which the Sun Man lived covered ten acres, its base larger than that of Khafre’s pyramid in faraway Egypt. Across the plaza was another mound equally large, the Temple Mound from which the Sun Man worshiped his divine brother, the Sun. Each mound had been built over the last hundred years by the painstaking labor of thousands. The great mounds had been raised one basketful of earth at a time, each basketful dug by hand and carried to its destination by a dutiful citizen.

Twelve thousand people lived below the two great earthen mounds, half within the ditch and wooden stockade that surrounded the heart of the city. The City of the Sun was one of the great cities of the world, its population larger than that of barbaric Saxon London over four thousand miles to the northeast. Many more thousands of the Sun Man’s subjects lived in large towns linked to the city by road and river, and thousands more in small villages or isolated farms. If the Sun Man ordered the new war chief, his nephew Horned Owl, to make war on the barbarians of the northwest prairies, he could bring over three thousand warriors into the field, more if the Sun Man called in the allies. It was the largest armed force on the North American continent, and assured the Sun People’s domination of their world.

And the Sun People in turn were dominated by the Sun Man, the divine ruler who held the power of life or death over every single one of them, who spoke daily to his brother, the Sun, the great burning disk that ruled the heavens and commanded all things on earth.

The Sun Man regulated everything within his empire. The time of planting, the time of harvest. He kept track of the calendar, scheduled all ceremonies, festivals, and initiations; ordered entire populations to report for duty to build mounds, repair the stockade, or maintain roads. He collected taxes in the form of corn, and traded it for precious objects or distributed it in times of famine. Though other chiefs acted as magistrates, the Sun Man was the court of final appeal-he gave justice, imposed fines, and ordered exile, punishment, or death. Although the war chief led the soldiers into battle, it was the Sun Man who declared the war and made the peace that followed.