The Year the Cloud Fell

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “And what did you say?” George asked.

  Storm Arriving smiled again, but ruefully. “I laughed at her. I told her she was stupid to think such a thing. Eya. I was the one who was stupid, to treat her with such disrespect. I told her that when you came you would be a great warrior. I said that you would help us and that we would make a big war against the vé’hó’e and drive them from our lands forever.”

  George chuckled. “You were both wrong. I am neither a philosopher nor a great warrior. A soldier, perhaps, but not a warrior.”

  “No,” Storm Arriving said and turned. He put a hand on George’s shoulder and looked at him with eyes as black as the space between the stars in the sky. George felt a great intensity in the Indian’s gaze. “No, you are not a philosopher. You are not a warrior. You are neither of those things. But you are here, and that is very important.”

  “What do you mean? What do you expect me to do?”

  “I do not know what you will do, but you will help us keep our land.”

  “But this isn’t your land. It belongs to the government, to the United States government. I can’t help you keep it. It isn’t even yours.”

  “Not ours?” Storm Arriving looked down on George from his full height. “Who lives in it? Who keeps it?” He took George by the shoulders and pointed him to the north.

  “There. That river. I played in that river as a boy. So did my father, and his father. And his.” He turned to the south. “There, on that ridge. See that tall dead tree, the one that looks like two bony fingers pointing to the sky? When that tree was young and green my grandfather stood beneath its branches and asked my grandmother if she would be his wife.” He pointed to the east. “And in that valley my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather fell defending this camp from the Wolf People. And there,” he said, turning to the hills to the west. “Up there are the sacred hills and the Teaching Mountain where the People were given our most sacred objects and where we have sought guidance from Ma’heo’o and the sacred persons for all time.”

  He took a step back and spread his arms wide. “We have lived and traveled from the Big Greasy to the Big Salty to Grandmother’s Land and to the mountains of the bighorn sheep. For ten years times ten years times ten years we have done this. We were created in this land. We are this land. We and the Inviters and the Cloud People and the Little Star People and even the Earth Lodge Builders. This is our land. Whose else would it be? Yours? Because one vé’ho’e writes it on a piece of paper? Because the chief of the Horse Nations gives some of the yellow vé’ho’e-metal to the chief of the Trader nation, that makes it yours? Did the chief of the Trader Nation ever live here? Are the bones of his father in that valley? Do the spirit powers of his people live in that mountain?”

  He leaned close and put a fingertip on George’s chest.

  “You cannot sell what is not yours. You know this. In your heart you know this. You cannot sell what is not yours.”

  George stood there, fuming at the affront. “This land belongs to the Union,” he rasped. “To the United States of America. We have paid for it, in blood as well as in gold. Fighting the French, the Spanish, the English—”

  “Fighting vé’hó’e! Fighting each other over something you do not own!”

  “We do own it! We bought it from the French.”

  Storm Arriving laughed and suddenly George felt like he was falling.

  “You cannot buy the land,” he said. “You cannot buy it any more than you can buy your own mother.”

  George threw up his hands in exasperation. “If can’t be owned, then how can you say that it is yours and not ours?”

  “Because this land is my mother, not yours, vé’ho’e.”

  George straightened, stung by the term. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “When you deserve your Tsétsêhéstâhese name I will use it. Right now you are talking like a crazy vé’ho’e.”

  George trembled with anger. He wanted to lash out, to strike, to destroy this man’s every hope. “I will never betray my country. Not to help you. Not to help your people.”

  Storm Arriving was calm once more, his passion tempered by confidence. “Yes, you will, vé’ho’e. You will help us. You know that what they are doing is wrong. And you know that this is my nation and not yours.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  “Yes. You do,” Storm Arriving told him. “Your heart knows. Your head just hasn’t stopped talking long enough to hear it.”

  George hit him with a fisted blow to the jaw that sent the Indian stumbling backward. Then he turned and walked away, shaking stinging fingers.

  “Where are you going, vé’ho’e?”

  “Away from you,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “Listen to your heart along the way,” came the reply. “Listen to it.”

  George walked. He felt the stares of onlookers like goads. He walked faster. Eventually he ran. He ran until his rage and his frustration were tamped down by fatigue and trembling muscles. When he stopped, he found himself far to the south of the encampment. The only sounds that reached his ears were the whisper of the wind in the grass, the flutings of distant whistlers, and the pounding of his own heart.

  Listen to your heart.

  The words taunted him and rekindled his anger.

  What arrogance! Why, that savage did everything but call us thieves. Thieves! Us! When everyone knows that they are the ones that….

  The thought died in his mind, unable to complete itself. The land around him had taken on a different aspect. It was no longer mute; no longer a vast, wild country that lay between him and the horizon like a dumb beast of the frontier—beautiful but untamable, visible but unknowable. Now, it had a voice, and it spoke of love and of war, of youth and of old age. Storm Arriving’s stories stood up from the roots of the trees and from the banks of the waters.

  Frustration clouded his vision with tears. He wiped them away and fought back the ones that threatened to fill the gap.

  “I will never betray the Union,” he said, and though no one was there to hear him, he felt stronger for having spoken the words.

  He sat for a long time on the hillside as the sun began its slow fall down toward evening. George watched the activities of the camp. Patrols came and went with regularity. The trails between the camp and the river were never empty as children went back and forth. There was a quiet, small-town atmosphere that seemed to George to be out of place in this rough manner of living.

  At length he lay back and watched the lazy transformations of clouds so white they made him squint.

  Should I run? They are not watching me. I could just walk away. And walk and walk and walk.

  The sun—warm—and the breeze—cool—doused his thoughts and lulled him into a slumber.

  “To’êstse.”

  He awoke with a start and sat up. He was in shadow and the sky had darkened to evening. He heard a footstep in the grass and turned.

  And froze.

  The walker chuffed twice, two harsh coughing calls that echoed across the bowl of the encampment. In a small calm corner of his mind he knew the beast was half-again the size of a whistler: at least ten feet tall and over twenty feet long. At the moment, however, the greater part of his mind was concerned with only one thing: its head.

  More specifically, its mouth.

  It straightened its neck and chuffed again and George smelled carrion. It cocked its head and peered down on George with a large dark eye. The head was long and narrow, like a bird’s, but no bird had ever had a mouth like this.

  The walker’s mouth was not beaked like a whistler’s; it was a long, lipless gash lined end-to-end with pointed, interlocking teeth the size of a man’s finger. This monster was no grazer, no browser. This was a predator of prodigious proportions and ferocity. George had seen what they could do and the memory nearly paralyzed him.

  “Ame’haooestse,” someone said. Only then did George notice the girth rope around the walker’s keel and the t
wo legs kneeling astride the huge beast’s back. A rider sat, perched atop the nightmare.

  “Ame’haooestse,” the Indian said. “Nenáasêstse.” He pointed downslope. “Nóheto.”

  George looked to where the man pointed. Way down at the foot of the hill stood a woman, Speaks While Leaving. She raised a hand in greeting. George waved back.

  “Nóheto,” the rider repeated, followed by a long string of words that George had no hope of comprehending. His gestures were enough, however, and George stood—albeit slowly and with unsteady knees—in the shadow of the walker’s terrible maw. When offered a hand to mount behind the rider George stepped back reflexively with emphatic motions of denial.

  The Indian laughed. He pointed again to Speaks While Leaving and told him with signs that she wanted to talk to him. George nodded. “Héehe’e,” he said. Yes, I will go.

  The rider said something more, only one word of which George recognized: vé’ho’e. He then turned his great beast with the touch of two fingers. Its tail cracked in the air over George’s head and then it was gone, loping off in ten-foot strides.

  It was a full minute before George reacquired the ability to walk. He descended the hillside with everything a-tremble. It seemed a longer trip down than it had been going up.

  “Come,” Speaks While Leaving said when he came near. “You must eat something before the council reconvenes.”

  “Thank you,” he said, though the thought of eating was inconceivable to him at the moment. They began to make their way through the camp.

  “How is your wound?” she asked, touching her forehead.

  “Oh,” he said. “Just a bad bump.”

  “You were insensible for quite some time. I think you make light of it.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But I feel fine now. Thank you…for your help.”

  “It was my pleasure. I have a great interest in your survival.”

  He did not want to speak of visions and prophecies, so he changed the subject. “You speak French very well,” he said, which was true despite her flat Québécoise accent.

  “I thank you,” she said. “My stories and my talents at healing have made me welcome in many homes, even among those of the Trader Nation. I have spent many evenings with them in the years I have traveled our lands in hopes of finding you.”

  And again it came back to signs and portents. He sighed, exasperated.

  “You do not believe in the truth of the vision,” she said, a statement of fact. “That is understandable.”

  He tried to put his feelings in words. “I just don’t know what you people expect me to do. I am an officer in the Army of the United States. How can I possibly help you?”

  “Before you were an army officer,” she said, “you were a man. It is the man who will help us, not the officer.”

  “But don’t you see? This confidence of yours—this faith in me—it’s unreasonable. I am the sworn servant of the Unites States of America. I took an oath. I will not betray that trust.”

  Her smile was kindly and her manner was full of patience as they continued to walk. “Our confidence is not in you, One Who Flies. Our faith is not in you. It is in Ma’heo’o and in the ma’heono, the sacred powers. It is through them that I saw the vision, and it was with their help that we were able to dance the vision and bring it from their world into ours. Our faith is in the spirits and in the vision. You, whether you accept it or not, are simply the vision made manifest. Or, to put it in words of your religion, you are an ‘instrument of God.’”

  George shrugged. “There is no point in arguing against such faith. I can only say that I will not turn against my own people.”

  She laughed then and shook her head. “You see things in such terms of this or that, all dark or all light. Very well, let me put it another way.

  “If your neighbor had an ailment—a fever perhaps—and you knew that a tea made from the bark of a red willow tree was good against such fevers, would you give your neighbor some of that tea?”

  “Yes,” George answered tentatively.

  “Even if you knew that the tea was very bitter and might even give him stomach pain for a while afterward?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Then you might do something unpleasant to someone if it would do them an ultimate good?”

  “I see what you are trying to say with this, but it will not persuade me to—”

  “I am not trying to persuade you, One Who Flies. The time for persuasion is long past. We have tried to persuade your people to see their errors for two hundred years but like a willful child you will not listen. We Tsétsêhéstâhese do not punish our children. In the case of your nation, however, we may have made an error.”

  George stopped and laughed. She turned, puzzled.

  “Children?” he said. “Us? Do you truly see us as children? How can you possibly, when we are so much stronger, so much more civilized than you? We have won every war we have faced. We have the weaponry, the industry, and the manpower to wipe you off the map if we put our resources to it.” He stopped laughing and looked at her with somber sincerity. “And we will. Soon, if you don’t cooperate with us. My country is running out of patience with your Alliance. We will come. And in greater numbers than you can imagine.”

  She signaled her agreement and began to walk again. “You are the stronger one, that is true; but being strong does not make you wise. Nor does it make you right. That is for Ma’heo’o to decide.”

  She continued to speak softly as she walked. “I had a dream several nights ago—not a vision, just a dream. I saw white men playing with my father’s bones. They kept his bones in a box, and the box was in a chest, and the chest was in a room, which was in a stone lodge, in a city. He seemed so far from this land that I was sad, and waited for his spirit to cry out. But then I saw that the city was in the middle of the prairie, in a place I know along the Unexpected River, and I realized that his spirit had long since cried all it could.”

  She faced him squarely and he felt suddenly uneasy beneath her inspection.

  “If you come, you will have to kill us all, and that will be a shame. But we will not be the first people you have erased, nor will we be the last. But I ask you to think about this: you are a brave man; it took great courage to fly the cloud into our lands. It also takes great courage to stand up to a great wrong. Do you know what it is to destroy an entire people? Do you know what it is to kill the last song of the last man? I remember the stories about the Sweet Water people that used to live on the far side of the Big Water. They are gone now, killed to the last one. This is a great wrong, One Who Flies.”

  He could think of no suitable reply. She regarded him with frank honesty. No guile, no hidden purposes. He could see that she meant every word that she said in all earnestness, but meant only what she said. Even her judgements—judgements he felt were harsh and false—were given without cruelty. Somehow, that made their impression all the deeper.

  “But I apologize,” she said. “We have talked too long and I have upset you. In answer to your question, I do not know what you will do, only that you will do something, and that it will help us. Let that be enough for now and we will speak of other things, yes?”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Please.”

  And so she turned their words to more mundane topics. They spoke of the weather—which they both agreed was not unusual—and of her journey back from the wreck of the Abraham Lincoln—which he thought remarkable and she found merely tiresome. But throughout their long walk and the quiet meal eaten under the silent stares of her father and mother, he could not forget her earlier words, nor those of Storm Arriving. All of their talk of everyday things only served to fill in the empty pieces in his puzzled view of these people. Every common scene, every detail made them all the more real, and just that much less alien. Finally, when the crickets were in full voice and the call came to reconvene the Council, he walked with her in silence. He entered the lodge and walked behind all the others as he had been
told one should. He sat down next to Storm Arriving without a word, and through the whole of the long evening, as the chiefs stood and spoke and politely listened, he did not wonder what they were saying. He heard only his own incessant thoughts and the questions that refused his ready answers.

  Storm Arriving listened to the arguments, most of which now tended toward keeping One Who Flies as a hostage or, hopefully, as an ally. During the day he had helped to inform the People of the morning’s occurrences, had talked to them as they considered their options, and had heard them speak to their elders, their chiefs, and the leaders of their societies. Their opinions had gelled during the day, and came back in favor of Speaks While Leaving and One Who Flies. Even most of the chiefs from the four allied tribes spoke in favor of the more prudent course of action.

  A few groups—the Suhtai band, the Elkhorn Scrapers, and the chiefs of the Little Star People—recounted their heavy losses against Long Hair in the war along the Big Salty and called for rightful revenge. The chiefs all spoke and listened respectfully, but stolidly held their ground. Unless someone changed their position, the deliberations would likely continue into the morning’s light.

  For a while Storm Arriving watched One Who Flies out of the corner of his eye. The vé’ho’e sat without looking or listening, and acted much differently than he had that morning.

  “Do you want to know what they are saying?” he asked him.

  One Who Flies shook his head, his eyes fixed on an invisible spot.

  “No,” he said.

  Storm Arriving left him alone then, and waited patiently as the chiefs crept toward consensus.

  Chapter 6

  Thursday, May 13th, AD 1886

  Washington, District of Columbia

  “It is, therefore, much more than your right to do so.” Custer’s voice echoed in the still House Chamber. It was a closed session. The doors were all shut and the gallery above hung vacant. He raised the sheet of paper he held and showed to all as he spoke. “In the face of these acts and this solemn list of youth that now lays dead beneath the soil of the Unorganized Frontier, it becomes more than your right. It becomes your duty—your sworn duty—to declare immediately and without equivocation that a state of war has arisen within our territories. By any man’s definition, this is so.”