West Winds' Fool and Other Stories of the Devil's West

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “May I watch?”

  He was a child. A child should not be exposed to such things.

  And yet, he was interested and eager to learn. Gershon could not bring himself to refuse such a student.

  “Move back and remain silent.”

  The clay was warm and rough-dried to the touch, giving only slightly when he pressed a thumb into it.

  Prying the half-dried mouth open slightly wider, Gershon reached into his pocket, and took out a tightly-rolled scrap of paper, carefully torn from one of the rebbe’s books, fresh letters inked in the blank space.

  This was no thing he should do, a reach he should not dare. And yet, the rebbe had tasked him with this; as shaliah, he could bind others to terms, could make agreements for his people.

  His hand shook as he placed the tiny scroll into the figure’s mouth and pressed the hole closed.

  “My name is Gershon ben Adão, of Shaaré Tikvah of the Territory. I have been tasked with ensuring the protection of our synagogue from those who would harm it, and those who have given us friendship and shelter. Adon Olam, if you find these goals to be worthy, grant life to this most humble figure of mud and dung. Ain Soph, who caused Creation in your wisdom, grant spirit to this flesh, that it may protect your children, all born of Adam, though they know it not.”

  “You give it life?”

  “Not I. I merely ask.”

  The boy nodded, more serious than a grandfather. “The winds will bring it life, and it will protect us?”

  Horsehair Boy spoke of the winds thus as well, in tones of respect and caution. Gershon shrugged, stepping back from the figure, his fingertips touching the fringe of his tâlçt, words of prayer gathering behind his lips.

  The golem’s eyes remained empty, its mouth pressed shut, its limbs clay without breath.

  “Your will be done,” Gershon said, and placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Walk me back to your village?” Because children had not been attacked did not mean they would not, but it would injure the boy’s pride to suggest he needed a white man’s escort home.

  On the riverbank, the wind shifted in the grass, and two fish splashed against each other in the creek. And when Gershon returned that evening to return the clay to the river, the figure was gone.

  That night, he ate his meal with the rebbe’s family. The old man was pensive, a single lamp on the table between them, the remains of dinner cleared away, his wife the rebbetizin shushing their daughter as they moved about in the kitchen.

  “Why now? What here?”

  The rebbe turned his hands palm up, a familiar gesture of acceptance, resignation. “Who are we to question HaShem?”

  “Who are we not to question HaShem?”

  That made the rebbe smile. “And did he not answer?”

  No, Gershon thought, looking down into his tea. Not the question I am asking.

  A runner came a day later, in the hour before dawn. He waited, panting slightly, while the men finished morning prayers. Unlike others, the runner did not exhibit impatience, but waited until ritual was satisfied and the rebbe came to speak with him.

  “Sweeps Water would show you a thing, if you would come to see it.”

  Even in a hurry, Gershon thought, they were polite. It was oddly unnerving to those used to being ordered about, forcing them to question the intent behind every request, sifting through words offered sideways to see where the sword waited. Offer no offense, they had been told, as though their very existence had not been considered offense enough, nearly two thousand years now.

  “We will come,” the rebbe said.

  By “we,” the rebbe had meant Gershon, who was younger and stronger and could walk more swiftly, and three of his choosing. Even so, the sun was well-risen by the time they came to where Strong Knee and the medicine man, Sweeps Water, stood in the debris, his ink-marked eyes narrowed, knees half-bent as though caught between a crouch and rising. Behind them, a young man Gershon did not recognize waited, his eyes more lightly marked, hair clubbed back to show a scar along his neck, livid and raw. An arrow, stung across flesh and half-healed. One of those restless young men, proving their worth by raiding other towns.

  But this had been no raid.

  They stood on the bank above the creek, the village too-quiet behind them, as though those within all held their breath. Even the dogs, rawboned and yellow-coated, lay still outside the doorways, waiting for humans to set things right.

  “We heard them come, past moonset.” Sweeps Water did not rise, but he was clearly addressing the newcomers. Abner and Ham shifted uncomfortably behind him, and Old Yosef coughed politely, waiting for the native to face them. Gershon did not bother.

  “And they did this?”

  “No. But you knew that already.”

  Sweeps Water did rise and turn, then. His skin was smooth, save for a cut through one eyebrow, but his hair grayed in thick streaks where it was tucked behind his ears, and the bare arm that gestured around them was corded with lean muscle and scar tissue. Gershon let his gaze follow the gesture, and wished he hadn’t. What they had taken for debris was bone, flesh intact save where it had been severed, more like a deer’s haunch than a human limb.

  Once seen, it could not be unseen: too many parts to be even three or five men. Seven at least, perhaps more.

  Ham gagged, bile rising and splattering on the ground as though he’d never seen dead flesh before. Abner muttered at him, shoving a kerchief at his mouth, then looked to Old Yosef, whose expression had not changed.

  Old Yosef had served in the army when he was young; he had seen men die before.

  “We heard them come, and we readied our arrows and our staffs. If this was to be a raid, we would meet it as warriors. But they did not enter the village. And then the screaming began.” Sweeps Water looked at him then, and rather than the fear or rage he had expected, Gershon saw only exhaustion and sorrow.

  Something acrid burned in Gershon’s stomach. “Your village was not harmed?”

  “None within came to harm,” Strong Knee agreed, but his voice did not say this was a good thing.

  “There is blood in the bones now,” the young man said, and Sweeps Water shot him a glance that clearly told him he spoke out of turn. The young man did not care. “Spirits linger where the bones are blooded. And we do not know their families, to bind and release them.”

  “A thing destroyed them,” Sweeps Water said to the men of Shaaré Tikvah. “You know of this thing.”

  Gershon forced himself to look at the remains of what had been men, once. “I do not know for certain.” He had seen nothing, could say nothing for certain. The figure had been gone, but that did not mean it had walked on its own. “I asked our god for aid, to protect us. And our neighbors.”

  They had asked before. Endlessly, before, and the only answer had been in broken bones and burnt homes, in suspicion in the eyes of neighbors.

  A muscle jerked in Sweeps Water’s jaw, and something in his eyes changed. Gershon did not look away. “If in doing so, we have given offense in some way…”

  The air stilled between them. He could offer no more chickens, no more calves, reminded once again how precarious their lives were, even here. Forever at the mercy of those who had no reason to choose mercy. Strong Knee had allowed them to build here, but Gershon had done more.

  Would this home, too, be taken from them?

  “The thing of clay you shaped. The creature of the bones and dirt.”

  Gershon swallowed, feeling the men behind him still once again, for different reasons this time. “Yes.”

  Sweeps Water studied him. “You worked medicine for us.”

  He had not; he had only petitioned HaShem. But Gershon merely nodded. What did the details matter? They had meant to help, had meant to share what little they had with those who had given them everything. He had not thought it would be unwelcome.

  “This one was correct: the bones are blooded, and we do not know their names.”

  Gershon heard what was
said: They could not honor those who had come against them. This land was beautiful, but it was strange, the people it made were strange, and his fingers touched the fringe under his vest, his lips moving in silent prayer that he might be given better understanding.

  “This is gratitude?” Ham burst out, and Gershon turned to snap at him to be silent, but old Yosef’s elbow landed in Ham’s ribs first.

  “Be silent, fool,” Old Yosef told him in the language they no longer used in this place, the syllables odd under the weight of open sky and heavy pine, and as though summoned by it, Gershon felt the regard of something silent, measuring and thoughtful.

  “It watches us,” Sweeps Water said, and both Strong Knee and the young man at his side tensed: they had not felt it, either. Gershon did not look at the men behind him, afraid to break Sweeps Water’s gaze, afraid to see what watched them from the shadow of the pines, hands wet with the blood of men.

  “It is a guardian,” Gershon said, searching for a word that would explain and finding none. “It will not harm you.”

  The other man’s eyes narrowed, the dark markings around them only emphasizing his expression ofnot doubt, but consideration. “So long as we do not harm you.”

  To live unharmed, unmolested, unthreatened. All they had looked for, coming to this new land. So many times before, they had called for help and been unanswered. Here, in this place, YahwehHaShem had answered. Gershon felt the weight of what watched on his skin, and his fingers fell away from his fringe. “I think … it did not see a difference between us.”

  But there was. A vast gap, that all the good will in the world could not bridge.

  Sweeps Water closed his eyes, his stern expression not slackening, but softening, slightly. As though he also felt what Gershon felt, both the weight and the gap.

  In Strong Knee’s face there was no suspicion, no anger; only sadness, and waiting.

  “These grounds will need be cleansed.” There was a command in those words, and a request, and Gershon bowed his head before them both, the acrid taste in his mouth softened by the faint mint of hope.

  Two days later, Gershon returned to the creek bed. His shoulders and elbows ached, and his skin was bruised from kneeling, his tâlçt fringe smudged with ash and soot from the offerings they had burned. It had been a small satisfaction when he saw how certain things rested comfortably against each other as they burned, rather than knocking each other aside.

  Perhaps he was wishful; perhaps it was a sign. He was no mystic, to tell such things. But he clung to it, nonetheless.

  Ashes into the ground and ashes into the wind. He would not compare it to the burnt offerings made at the Temple, in better days of better men, and yet he could not help but remember how the wind had swirled, dust sparkling in the morning light. Strong Knee’s people were satisfied, Sweeps Water’s eyes less shadowed.

  But there was one thing left yet to be done. A thing only he could do.

  “Bo elaiki anokhi yatzartikha. Come to the one who shaped you.”

  He waited, and it came to him, shoulders rounded by weight, hands restless, but face implacably still, eyes dull and feet a dry shuffle. It came to him, misshapen by man’s hands but glorious within. “Thank you,” Gershon said, then reached into its hollow pit of a mouth, and with two fingers removed the scrap of paper from within.

  The youngest son of Deer Walking found him there, hours later. The boy dropped to a crouch, small hands touching the lumps of clay where they had dried and cracked on the riverbank, as though something sloughed them off on its way back into the water.

  “They argue, over the fire,” the boy said. “Over what you did.”

  “I know.” Gershon had not gone to the village; none of Shaaré Tikvah had, waiting once more to be welcomed, before they would presume.

  “Sweeps Water spoke with the winds. For three nights. He has never spent that long with the winds before, and when he came out, his eyes were like an eagle’s.”

  Gershon had no idea what that meant.

  “It’s gone now, isn’t it? The thing you called.”

  The clay seemed to mock him, inert in a child’s hands. “Yes.”

  “Many are angry. But Sweeps Water said that,” and he was clearly repeating words he had overheard, “only fools refuse a hand that lifts them from the ground, or shields them from a blow. And that this guardian … we might have need of it, again.”

  Gershon cast his eyes down, a prayer of relief releasing from his heart. “Then we will ask, again.”

  The boy considered that, thoughtful. “And if the answer is not yes?”

  Gershon could only shrug, helpless before the Power that shaped them as the clay was helpless before him. “As AdonaiHaShem and the winds will it,” he said.

  A Town Called Flood

  The way the story’d been told her, a preacherman came into town before there was much of a town at all, just the saloon and a couple-three homesteads, looked around, and pronounced that they’d be the first washed away, come the Flood.

  The name stuck.

  There were mountains not far off in the distance, and a creek that ran along the west edge of town, and a dozen storefronts and a bank, and thirty families living in Flood now. “Thirty pieces of silver,” the boss called them, and would shake his head and laugh, and say they’d gotten that story all wrong, too.

  The boss had a sense of humor. Not a man could say he didn’t.

  Come mid-June in Flood, the sun got hot and the ground was hotter, and mostly folk stayed inside or underground. June sixteenth, Isabel woke earlier than most and stood on the front porch, watching the sun rise over the far end of town. Main ran east-west, not north-south; the day began at the blacksmiths, and ended at the saloon, the scent of brimstone and hot metal always in the air.

  She breathed in, letting the stink settle in her chest. Flood was the devil’s town. He came and he went, but you could always find him there if you came callin’. And people did, even if they didn’t always know they was looking for him. Back East, they called everything this side of the Mudwater River the Devil’s West, but this was the only place he truly owned. Not the land, not the buildings, but everyone who came here, everyone who stayed.

  “Izzy. What are you doing awake?”

  She didn’t turn around, but smiled, a gentle curve of her lips the way she’d seen the older women do. “It’s my birthday.”

  “All the more reason to sleep in.” The boss’ voice was deep and smooth, gentle and oddly accented, even in this town where everyone came from somewhere else. In all her years, she had never heard him yell. Angry, yes: his temper was legendary. But he never yelled.

  “I’m fourteen today,” she said.

  “Yes. You are.”

  He had been the one to draft her indenture papers; he knew what that meant.

  She turned, and he stood in the doorway of the saloon, two tin mugs in his hands. The mugs were battered and dented, and tendrils of steam swirled over the tops as though an unseen finger stirred it. Chicory and coffee, and a chunk of sugarcane boiled with it.

  She stepped forward and took one of the mugs, the thick dark brew sloshing slightly against the rim. “Thanks.” He was the boss; he shouldn’t be bringing her coffee.

  “Not every day a girl turns fourteen,” he said. “If you’re determined to be awake, put yourself to use. Ree could use help in the kitchen.”

  She sipped the bittersweet brew, wincing as it burned the inside of her mouth, and nodded.

  “And Isabelle?” he said before going back inside.

  She looked up.

  “Happy birthday, dearling.”

  She smiled then, for real, cupped her mug in her hands, and turned back in time to see the sun come full above the horizon.

  Fourteen. Eleven years since she’d first set foot on this porch. This was the only home she’d ever known; this three-story structure, the wide rutted street in front of her, the sound of the blacksmith’s hammers and the bellow of cattle as they were run by town, the f
lickerthwack of cards laid on faded green felt, the clink of glasses, the scrape of boot heels on wooden planks, and the stink of sweat and hope and desperation on human skin.

  Flood was home, the only one she could imagine.

  But she was fourteen, now. Everything changed.

  If she wanted it to.

  Ree was already arms-deep in work when Izzy slipped through the open doorway, reaching for an apron hung on a hook to cover her day dress, a brown striped gingham with a cream yellow ribbon, special for her birthday. She’d threaded it that morning, and her hands’d been shaking.

  Izzy prided herself on steady hands, and ordered thinking. She wasn’t having luck with either, since waking. That irked her, and took some of the shine off the day. Having her name on the kitchen roster tarnished it some more.

  It had been a cool morning, but the kitchen, running the length of the saloon, along the back, was steamy-warm already. Izzy didn’t dislike working the kitchen, but it wasn’t much fun, either.

  “Knead dough,” Ree said shortly, not looking up from his work. Ree was stern and mostly silent, but with an uncanny skill at getting every bit of flavor from some dish you’d swear you didn’t like even as you were going up for more. He might’ve known it was her birthday or might not, and most probably didn’t care.

  Izzy tied up her hair under a cotton band, to keep the sweat from her face, and set to work. The dough was a sticky mass in a clay bowl, and soon enough her arms ached with the effort of turning it into something useful, but the quiet warmth of the kitchen and the repeating actions of her hands and arms were an antitdote to the tangle of thoughts churning in her brain

  “Now leave alone.”

  Ree was talking about the dough. She’d been kneading longer than she realized. Izzy shook her arms out, wiping them with the warm cloth offered, and rolled her sleeves back down. She looked at Ree, frowning. His arms were covered with lines of ink, and he never covered them, not even when the wind turned bitter cold, and the horses grew their coats out thick.