“I thought it might give me a certain hard-bitten appeal.”
Cassie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Unless the first words out of your mouth are, ‘Oy, mate! Ow’s me old mucker!’ nobody is gonna buy your act.”
“Just give it a bit more time. In another week, I expect to look quite ruggedly masculine.”
“It’s your face,” the pythia said resignedly as they turned to walk toward the dig site.
Off in the distance, a dozen people worked over a long shallow pit, marking off segments of ground with stakes and string. A middle-aged woman with grey-streaked hair drawn back into a pony tail was supervising their efforts. She wore jeans, high rubber boots, and an oversized flannel shirt. When she looked up and noticed the new arrivals, she smiled and came over to meet them.
“Hi, Griffin. Long time, no see.” She took off her work gloves and extended her right hand in greeting. Her features were broad with high cheekbones though her skin was very light for a native American.
Turning to Cassie, she said, “You must be Cassie, the new pythia. I’m Grace Littlefield—trove keeper.”
Cassie would have expected her to have a more poetic name like Jumping Otter. Grace Littlefield sounded downright commonplace. The pythia wisely decided not to comment.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport,” the trove keeper apologized. “I had to stick around here to keep an eye on things. We’re pushing it to continue this dig so late in the fall, but I wanted to keep going until we get a hard freeze.” She glanced ruefully at the cloudy sky. “By the looks of things, that could happen any night now.”
They walked a little distance away from the rest of the dig team. Cassie inferred that not everyone here was part of the trove keeper’s staff or part of the Arkana. Grace led them into a large canvas tent which held a variety of paraphernalia needed by the group onsite. There were piles of books, a card table, several camp chairs, plastic buckets, digging tools, and a cooler.
Cassie gazed out the tent flap at the staked pit. “What did you find here?”
“A long house,” Grace replied.
“That’s what the Iroquois lived in, right?”
The trove keeper hesitated. “We prefer to be called ‘Haudenosaunee,’ or ‘People of the Longhouse.’”
“Right,” Cassie blushed, remembering the Basque meaning of the name. She eyed the length of the trench. “When you say, ‘long house,’ you mean really long.”
Grace nodded. “Yep, most of them are long and narrow. About twenty feet wide but the length can range anywhere from fifty to a hundred and fifty feet.”
Cassie studied the staked indentation in the dirt. “It’s hard to picture what the building would have looked like.”
“This might help.” Grace reached for a book from a pile sitting in the corner. Cassie and Griffin looked over her shoulder as she thumbed through it to find the right page. “Here it is.” She laid the book flat on the card table.
Cassie studied a page of illustrations that showed the exterior and cutaway views of the interior of a longhouse. It was a tall single-story building with doors on either end. The exterior consisted of a wooden frame covered with bark panels. The interior was structurally supported by posts set on either side of a central corridor. The posts ran at regular intervals all along the length of the interior. Cassie assumed the stakes in the dig outside must have been markers for the original post holes.
The cutaway view showed the layout of the interior. The center of the room was a passage dotted with several evenly-spaced fire pits. The illustration showed groups of people sharing each of the fire pits for cooking. These were probably members of individual families. Smoke escaped through holes in the roof. Partition walls separated each family living space. People slept on shelves about a foot above the ground which were covered with animal skins and furs for comfort. Above the sleeping shelves were other shelves for storage. Animal hides were draped over the front of each partition for privacy.
“Your people sure must have liked togetherness,” the pythia said.
“It was an extended family arrangement,” Grace replied.
“The tribe was matriarchal,” Griffin chimed in.
“Really?” Cassie remarked with surprise. “I know you’ve told me some of this back at the vault, but I’ve also watched a lot of Westerns. There’s always a macho brave and a lowly squaw.”
Grace chuckled. “That only happened in some Hollywood writer’s imagination. Haudenosaunee women were powerful. They were the farmers, they owned the property, and they allocated all the food, even game killed in a hunt. Everyone’s lineage was traced through the female line to the first clan mother. When a couple married, the man came to live in his wife’s longhouse. If a wife wanted to divorce her husband, all she had to do was tell him to remove his belongings. Her property remained hers and didn’t transfer to her husband.”
“I also believe your people instituted a democracy long before the Yanks,” Griffin winked, knowing the term might rouse Cassie’s ire.
“Hey, a little respect, buddy.”
“That’s true too,” Grace agreed. “The Confederacy was an extraordinary accomplishment.” She paused. “Why don’t you two have a seat.” She motioned toward the camp chairs. “This story could take a while.”
After they were settled, the trove keeper drew up a chair and began. “Back in the bad old days, the tribes in New York State were always fighting with each other. A prophet named Deganawida had a vision of uniting them. Unfortunately, Deganawida was a very poor speaker, and the People of the Longhouse have always valued good oratory. So, the prophet enlisted the support of a Mohawk named Hiawatha who went from tribe to tribe preaching the prophet’s message of peace. The first leader to actively support his vision was a clan mother named Jigonsaseh. She is known as the Mother of Nations. Deganawida, Hiawatha, and Jigonsaseh defined the structure of the League. They strategized and negotiated
