“What!” Rosemary objected. Her skipping stopped. “How?”
Old Willow hobbled ahead a few steps as she answered, “By pulling something out of nothing.”
“That's impossible!” The girl had very adamant feelings about this story, which Gwen found hypocritical, considering how many impossible things Rosemary accepted every day in Neverland.
“Which is a testament to Raven's craftiness. He can steal such a wonderful thing as the world, even when there is nowhere to steal it from,” Old Willow assured her. “But worlds are made and unmade all the time. When Raven stole it, the world was not as interesting as it is now. It, too, was only a little bit of dirt.”
Gwen was already thinking about dirt. In particular, how dirty her feet were getting. The path started to dissolve into a goopy mess of mud. The muck squished underneath Gwen's toes, and her footsteps made a wet and sticky noise with every step.
“Raven suspected something more hid in the dirt and began pecking it. When he found a rock, he became convinced it was something like a nut, and a treasure of some unknown nature rested within the stone's shell. Raven, despite his cleverness, can sometimes be very witless. What he had found was a rock and only a rock. In his attempts to crack it open, he only hurt himself. His beak slipped while he pecked, and struck his own wing, which began to bleed. He hopped around in a furry, cursing the rock as he bled over the dirt.
“His blood wet the ground, and so the dirt grew so thick and red, becoming clay. Once he stopped bleeding and saw what he had created, he began to play with it. With his little claws, he started to etch shapes in the clay and mold small clumps into statues. When Sun emerged from the darkness, he put his warmth on the clay creatures Raven had made, and baked them into men. When Raven whispered a story to them, they came to life.”
Gwen considered the myth, and decided the raven story made for a better tale than the stork bringing babies.
“And that's where redskins come from?” Rosemary asked.
The path came to an abrupt end. A curtain of vines and a fallen tree blocked it off. “Yes,” Old Willow answered. She stepped over the fallen log and pushed the vines away, her hand caked with dried dirt almost the same color as her skin. “This is where they come from.”
The girls followed—Rosemary's quick steps and curiosity more unabashed than Gwen's.
A tingle passed down Gwen's spine, and she knew she had once again stumbled into an enchanted place, special even within the framework of Neverland. Just as in Old Willow's story, the wet ground was as red as a raven's blood in dirt. The thick clay made for strange terrain and an inanimate crowd stood in it.
A tribe of life-size statues, like earthy terracotta warriors, stood in lines. Two dozen different sculpted men and women stood, their unshaped feet still melded in the red clay.
Running Fox and Storm Sounds each fastidiously shaped a statue, building another inanimate clay brother. A massive, gnarled maple thrived in the center of this clay pit, and in its shade, Chief Dark Sun scraped eyebrows onto a statue and thumbed eyes onto its face.
Gwen could not articulate her awe; Rosemary could. “Oh my gosh this is so cool!”
Rosemary proceeded to talk and smile enough for everyone present. She raced among the statues, trying to pinpoint the subtle differences in height, shape, and features that made each unique.
“You've made an army,” Gwen remarked, amazed.
“We have been working ever since young Blink sent word of the invaders,” Old Willow answered.
Dark Sun left his finished sculpture and approached Gwen. “Lily on Fast Waters,” he greeted her. “Thank you for coming. We have need of your skills.”
His words almost frightened her. She always had to remember that his inexpressiveness was not coldness, only custom. The heavy flesh of his wrinkling face concealed a loving spirit, as colorful—Gwen suspected—as his vibrant headdress of phoenix and Never Bird feathers.
“What skills?” she couldn't imagine how she could help.
Rosemary laughed and danced around, delighted with the novelty of so many huge clay sculptures around her, and oblivious to Gwen's conversation on the other side of the clay pit.
“The skills that brought you to our land,” Dark Sun announced. “You are a storyteller, yes?”
“We have made the Braves who will help defend Neverland,” Old Willow said, “but they still need to be brought to life.” Crafted out of red earth, baked by the sun, these men were made just as in the creation myth. “Life always starts with a story,” Old Willow told her. “You can make a man, but he does not have a spirit until he has a story.”
“I don't know any redskin stories,” Gwen said, “except for the ones you've told me.”
Rosemary started to wander back, and heard as Old Willow explained, “I have told you all of our stories. If we are to have more redskins, we must have more stories, and those stories must come from the same place they always have.”
Gwen shook her head, and Dark Sun put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. He could be nothing but reassuring, even at his most inexpressive. “They come from you, Lily on Fast Waters. They come from the awe of children and the misremembered stories of your world.”
Once again, Gwen had to confront the reality that the redskins weren't real. They were a product, two hundred years in the making, of exaggerated accounts of the new world, colorful cowboy-and-Indian Western movies, and everything in between. Of course they depended on others for their stories. They weren't a culture, just a fantasy based on one.
“I—I don't think I can,” she admitted. She didn't even feel equipped to tell her own stories anymore. Starkey had pointed it out, and now she knew it. She didn't know how anything ended anymore, and she didn't know how to build a
