Kavio

Kavio smelled the costumes of his accusers before he could see them—corn-husks, horse hair, quilt skirts and shoulder blankets soaked with years of dancers’ sweat. He heard the rustle of many bodies, the clicky-clack of shell and chalcedony bracelets jangling upon wrists and ankles. The susurration of disapproving voices rose in pitch as people noticed his entrance.

Stone spearheads pricked him in the shoulders. Tiny trickles of blood coursed down his back, mingling with his sweat as a testament to his guards’ enthusiasm to see him judged for his crimes. The warriors guarding him had told him nothing. He had been blindfolded, stripped to a loincloth, and bound with his hands behind his back. Still, Kavio didn’t need to see to know he had been brought to his trial.

The cool, musty air, crisscrossed by rays of warmth, told him this must be the kiva where the Society of Societies convened for the most serious of deliberations. The underground amphitheatre was one of the few kivas with windows in the upper reaches of the room. Otherwise, the texture of the walls and floor—volcanic rock daubed with adobe and dung whitewash—felt no different from the rest of the Labyrinth.

The guards shoved him to his knees before one them tore off his blindfold.

Three dyed reed mats had been placed at intervals down the center of the rectangular room, one white, one black, and one orange. A large polychrome pottery vase painted in patterns of those same three colors had been placed beside the middle, black mat. Kavio knelt in front of the white mat.

Tiered adobe steps around three sides of the rectangular room provided seating for the Tavaedies and Zavaedis, the men and women of the secret societies. From the squeeze of costumed bodies, it looked as though every dancer in the Labyrinth was in attendance. All were masked. Many of the masks sprouted huge fans of woven cane, feather tufts, or carved wooden animal faces. Others sported horns, manes, or false beards. Still others displayed abstract shapes, ovals or diamonds, or a cascade of beaded fringes. It wasn’t easy for so many masked dancers to fit in the tiers. Feathered and beaded shoulder blankets, necklaces coiled as thick as snakes, and full corn-husk skirts took up space.

Only his mother, indifferent as ever to convention, wore no mask, just a simple white beaded dress. She sat stiffly on the lowest tier, face-to-face with Kavio. Even at her age, she was the most beautiful woman in the room. She was also the only one in the tiers who had no closely-pressed neighbors. No one quite dared sit next to her.

Opposite her, behind Kavio, rose an adobe platform taller than any of the tiered seats. He had to twist his head to look up the seven steps to the top of the platform to see the man who stood there in full regalia, holding a rain stick. Paint divided the man’s already severe features into an interlocked pattern of sharp edges and boxes. Colorful matching mazes were woven into his shoulder blanket and outlined in beads of obsidian and pearl. His massive headdress consisted of numerous coiled cords, horned and feathered and shelled. Beaded hoops rested around his neck, as did a gold coiled torque. The pin that held his shoulder blanket in place had also been beaten from gold, into the shape of a stylized wild horse.

The man pounded his rain stick on the platform. He had a voice of gravel and stone.

“Let it be remembered on the Memory Stick, that in This Year, yet to be named, I, the War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth and head of the Society of Societies in the absence of a Vaedi, have called all of the secret dancing societies together to sit in judgment at the trial of Kavio . . .”

He paused to make the ponderous trip down the seven steps to the floor of the assembly room. Even so, because Kavio had been forced to his knees, the other man had to look down to glower at him.

“. . . Kavio, my own son.”