“Amazing, child. We thought we’d lost you for good.”
Chapter Fifteen
Eli: Sacagawea
February, 1805
Thwap!
The bundle of rags lands in the snow. Well, of course it lands in the snow. There hasn’t been anything else for it to land in for months. And it’s far enough away that I think we can count it as extra bases, and say that North Wind Comes has a couple of RBIs.
It’s my first time back outside since Sacagawea and the others found me. I had to promise both Clark and Lewis that I wouldn’t run away and wouldn’t go looking for Clyne, “the big rumored lizard,” as Lewis called him, on my own.
I promised. And besides, I just barely escaped getting frostbite the last time. I’m still thawing out, still a little sore. And it won’t do Clyne or me any good if I get lost again.
Still, the two captains make sure there’s always somebody around to watch me.
Right now, it’s Gassy, watching the baseball game unfold.
He just told me that Sacagawea was inside the fort, having her baby. He heard the labor might have started a little early because she was outside in the cold so long, helping to find me. My hands go around the small jagged crystal she gave me, the one for good luck.
“Eli… I score?”
“A double,” I tell him, and hold up a couple of fingers.
North Wind’s English has gotten better in the three months we’ve been here. He’s picked up a lot from me and the other Corps members.
It’s better for both of us if he uses his English, rather than us being seen in high-speed Mandan/English exchanges that might raise a few eyebrows.
But even though he has a lingo-spot — he must — he still won’t tell me much about Clyne. A good shaman doesn’t reveal many secrets, I guess.
Including the secret of where Clyne has been spending the winter. I think, with the harsh climate, North Wind’s only been out to see him once or twice since we got here, anyway.
Once was to give Clyne the orange.
That was when I tried to follow him and it didn’t work out so well. And it doesn’t look like I’ll get another chance to do that.
“What did you think you were doing?” Lewis asked me after that first time, when he felt I was defrosted enough to answer a couple of questions.
“I—I…” I stammered a bit, then fell back on the classic you use with your parents, when you tell one of them that the other said something was okay. “Jefferson. Instructions… from Jefferson.”
Lewis shook his head. “I am dubious that your instructions included freezing to death in the Dakotas. In fact, I believe I am supposed to send you back in decidedly nonfrozen condition when the spring comes. Besides, a president shouldn’t keep secrets,” he added. “It’s bad for the country. Even if the rest of us,” and here he looked right at me, “walk around with secrets all the time.”
Did he mean my secrets? Or did Lewis have a bunch of his own?
North Wind came into the fort after my rescue to see how I was doing. “I have a message from your friend,” he told me. “‘Prolific thanks. And soon, a good time to meet.’”
A good time to meet. Clyne’s favorite greeting. But this time, did he mean we’d actually be seeing each other?
Clark was nearby and overheard. “Does Master Sands have another meeting planned with the Indians? So soon? You’ve barely warmed up from the last attempt. Unless it means we’re wasting money hiring Charbonneau and Sacagawea. Perhaps fate has already selected the translator’s role for you.”
It reminded me of something Thea told me once, when we were in Clyne’s time-ship. She got it from her mother, Hypatia: “The journey selects us, Eli. It calls us to it. Because, somehow, we fit the task.”
I think Thea was trying to make herself feel better since any thought of her mom usually made her sad.
But if the journey really picks us, instead of the other way around, then I do have to get to Clyne soon — not so he could be shipped back as some kind of specimen for President Jefferson — but so he and I can leave and find Thea.
So Clark should let Sacagawea keep her job, baby or not.
And that baby, it seems, is due any moment.
Lewis is with her, with his medical bag, along with some of the Mandans. LeBorgne, the Hidatsa chief, is in there, too. Since Sacagawea was captured by the Hidatsas, before Charbonneau married her, I guess he felt like he had the right to watch over things.
According to North Wind, LeBorgne’s been in a bad mood ever since his favorite warrior, Crow’s Eye, ran off.
That’s why North Wind isn’t in there helping out. LeBorgne has some kind of personal grudge against him because of the whole Crow’s Eye thing.
But despite all those people in the room, or maybe because of it, the birth wasn’t going smoothly. That’s what we heard each time Cruzatte or York or somebody ran out to find some more firewood to boil water, or old cloth to use for towels.
“I shouldn’t let LeBorgne keep me out,” North Wind said, as we paused our game of over-the-line to watch another firewood run.
“Do shamans help deliver babies?”
“Shamans just try to improve the odds for everyone.” He gave me a smile that seemed at least a few years older than he was. “Maybe even you.”
He sounded like Lewis, who was always wondering about “the real odds of any of this succeeding — this entire elaborate journey.”
Now Clark has come out. They sure must be using a lot of firewood in there.
He sees me, and tromps over as fast as he can in the snow. The look on his face isn’t a happy one. “The baby’s tangled. The baby’s not coming.” He looks at North Wind. “Sacagawea wants you. She insists. Lewis will handle LeBorgne.”
North Wind doesn’t reply right away, and in his panic, Clark turns to me. “Does he understand me?”
“He understands you.”
“She’s saying something about how North Wind Comes can speak with the animals, but she’s feverish, so we can’t be sure.”
Since nobody tells me not to, I follow them inside the fort, where the constant smell of smoke and grease and sweat is mixed with something else.
There are voices, Mandan, Hidatsa, American, coming from the next room. I step in there, and when my eyes adjust to the firelight I realize I’m still holding the stick bat and rag ball I was playing with outside.
But it doesn’t seem right to just set them down, even among the big mess of blankets and buffalo skins and pots of water and baskets of herbs and Lewis’s bottles of medicine. It doesn’t seem right to treat it like just any room, because you can feel in the air that something serious, something special is going on here.
This is before I see Sacagawea.
She’s on the other side, all bundled up, grabbing the hand of her husband, Charbonneau, who looks around like he wants a hand to grab, too. Amazingly, Lewis looks completely calm, kneeling next to her, dabbing a rag against her face.
She’s resting on a pile of padding and hides, not lying down all the way, but not quite sitting up either. There are some Hidatsa women behind her, helping to hold her.
Sacagawea’s eyes usually sparkled if she looked in your direction, like she was really sizing you up in an intense way. Even half-frozen that day in the snow, I could feel the intensity in her gaze.
Now her eyes are glossed over, like all her concentration has gone inside.
And then she turns and one of the blankets falls away and there are her legs, spread wide open, and I’ve never seen anything like that, even on the Comnet when I looked at an image bank I wasn’t supposed to go to. There’s blood and goop and hair and a head…
It’s the top of a little head, but it’s hard to see in the firelight. I’m squinting like crazy but yes, I think it’s the top of a head, peeking out from the middle of Sacagawea’s…
…privates. There’s more oozy stuff and a little of the baby’s hair. It has really blue skin, which looks weird. How can a baby have blue skin?
> I drop the bat and ball.
And then there’s a loud groan, and Sacagawea slumps back, and I lose track of the head, and the baby’s still not out. North Wind walks over to where Lewis is, but before he can speak to him, LeBorgne steps out from one of the corners of the room. I hadn’t even seen him. He spins North Wind around.
“He’s the one!” He points to North Wind for the benefit of everyone else, but Sacagawea just moans again. “Let him do some good now! He knows the lizard man! He will lead us!”
Lewis looks around, stands up, and wipes his hands.
North Wind isn’t sure what’s going on and calls me over.
“I thought I was to help?” he says to me, low, in Mandan.
“He wants to help deliver the baby,” I explain to Lewis. “He’s the shaman.”
“I know who he is,” Lewis replies. “But the labor is becalmed. The baby may be tangled in the umbilical cord. Someone in here said that a rattlesnake’s rattle, ground up and taken internally, might help the delivery. I never heard of such a use, but I’m willing to try it.”
LeBorgne puts himself right in the middle of the conversation, and switches into shout gear: “The lizard man kept Crow’s Eye from becoming a warrior! He makes things happen that aren’t supposed to happen! He’s the one to get!”
I turn to Lewis. “So how come he wants the, um, ‘lizard man’ if what you really need is part of a rattlesnake?”
“It was LeBorgne’s idea,” Lewis says in a lowered voice. “At first he didn’t want North Wind in here, but as soon as he saw him, he switched the snake talk to bigger game, and kept mentioning the lizard man.”
“He should take us!” The Hidatsa chief points angrily at North Wind. Sacagawea keeps making loud noises. I bet an argument in the birth room is just about the last thing she needs right now, but she keeps a firm grip on Charbonneau’s hand, which is a good thing, ’cause he looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin.
And then I see the women taking Sacagawea and gently turning her over, so that she’s up on all fours, on her hands and legs. She’s trying to push the baby out from a different angle, and there’s that blue head again, and everything else. I wonder if I’m blushing or if that’s just the smoke and grease again. Who knew that a time-traveling baseball cap would lead to all this?
“Does anyone think the lizard man can help?” I turn to North Wind, mainly so I’ll have something — someone —else to look at.
“They think his skin can. LeBorgne convinced them that if a small rattler is good, a giant lizard is better.”
“You mean—”
But LeBorgne answers the question for me: “With the lizard man’s skin, the medicine between Hidatsa and Mandan will be made right again!”
“They want to kill him,” North Wind tells me.
I look at him. “But they don’t know where he is. Only you do. Right?”
North Wind doesn’t speak.
“Right?”
But LeBorgne is full of answers. “And because we’ve had the shaman tracked, we know where that boy was heading!” He points at me. “We know the lizard man is hiding in the Spirit Mound! A new hunt calls to our wintering bones! Who is with me, to save this baby, and kill this wicked demigod?”
A cry goes up from a couple of the other near LeBorgne, who whoops back at them. The women in the room hiss back at him to be quite, but he ignores them and charges out, the men following.
“What just happened?” Lewis asks me.
“I think I’m going back out there,” I tell him. “I don’t have a choice. And I definitely won’t be alone.” I turn to North Wind. “Are you coming with me?”
He nods.
“All this time, I was trying to protect him,” North Wind says.
Sacagawea groans again. This isn’t what she had in mind when she called for a shaman.
Chapter Sixteen
Clyne: Silver Throat
February 1805
I’ve made contact with another mammal species here. Maybe I shouldn’t give up yet on the idea of getting home and filing more extra-credit reports. Not because, in the entire grand Cacklaw field of life, my own grades are important, but because things are so routinely unpredictable here that Earth Orange — and mammal culture — continue to cast doubt on every established Saurian theory about the orderly progression of life, and the ultimate purpose of evolution.
The other species I’m now in communication with are called wolves. At least, that is how humans have named them, and it is these wolves who have been living in the Spirit Mound, in a kind of nest-community called a pack. Their tribal leader is a matriarch called Silver Throat.
I am on a hunt with them now and remain hopeful that soon I will see Eli.
After my seasons living with the pack and healing up, I am also hopeful that my lower limb will again experience full and true functionality.
They were wolf eyes that surrounded us last winter in the dark.
“They have come to rescue their devil brother!” Crow’s Eye shouted, looking into the orb-populated shadows of the Spirit Mound. I gathered this meant Crow’s Eye had suddenly become a believer in the stories about this place. Trauma makes mammal minds very elastic. “Let us die bravely, North Wind! Let us give our tribes a new tale to tell in snow season!”
And then he had his knife against my throat.
“Why bother?” North Wind said, helpfully pushing the knife away from my throat. “They won’t tell stories about a shaman who could not protect a god-spirit.” He nodded toward all the visiting eyes. “And we still don’t know what kinds of stories they tell.”
Couldn’t either of my human companions smell the deep woolly mammal scent that goes with the eyes that are peering at us? Would it be up to me to make an introduction?
“Shamans talk too much.” The knife flashed back in my direction, and this time, North Wind couldn’t stop it. I rolled out of the way, even with the jabberstick in my limb and the deep rumbus of pain in my leg. The blade just missed, and I started to wonder if I would have to bite Crow’s Eye, or at least growl to scare him off. As ridiculous as mammals are, I’ve never had to hurt one. Yet.
“Crow’s Eye—”
But North Wind didn’t have a chance to finish.
The eyes began a long, low music together. A chorus. It reminded me of the Song of the Gurdlanger, a song cycle chanted by the armored, horned Saurians who served as King Temm’s guards, when the time came to bear his body away at last toward Saurius Prime’s two falling suns.
Like those songs, the Spirit Mound music captured both a sense of timelessness, of the eternal, and the utter, fleeting swiftness with which all things pass. It was sweet and sad all at once.
The howling, growling sounds must have reminded North Wind and Crow’s Eye of something, too. They stopped — Crow’s Eye forgot all about his blade and making a story out of me — and looked with new appreciation at the eyes encircling us.
One pair of eyes stepped into the pool of flickering light. She was fur-covered, walking on four legs. Long snout, inquisitive, intelligent face.
At first, I thought she was a dog, but the spreading rumbus of pain in my limbs was wreaking havoc on my taxonomy skills. She and her companions were larger than dogs. A pair had been kept in the zoo in Alexandria, in Thea’s time.
The one who stepped forward was silver gray, a female — and a leader. You could read it in her bearing. She cocked her head at me, forming a question with no spoken language whatsoever. Her eyes were fierce and filled with green fire. They stayed locked on me when she spoke.
In the snow outside… we watched. You left a substance that allows us… to understand the humans. And you.
There was some of the lingo-spot left outside after my experiments! And it was on her now!
We could hear it… resonate. I tasted some.
She’d ingested infected slow pox! My laboratory methods were getting so sloppy I could be set back several grade levels if I ever made back home.
“The substance you speak of… has become tainted, transformed,” I said, overriding my self-aches to speak up, so North Wind might hear me, too. “I would advise strongly against ingesting anymore.”
It was a sad piece of advice to dispense on a planet so in badly in need of good translation, like Earth Orange. I looked at North Wind.
“I should have told you sooner, but circumstances remained hopscotchy.”
“Is the talking-substance dangerous to me, then?”
“I am hoping it is merely changed — but I need to do more research.” The pain was getting the best of me. I wanted to make a few good notes before passing out. “So… what kind of mammal dances do you do?” I asked, not sure if that was the right first question to ask a new species,
The gray fur’s eyes widened. She uncocked her head and I looked at her face. I read acceptance and the merest whiff of a deeply wise sense of humor there.
Dances? Some mammals we hunt and eat; others we ignore; some we play with; others, lately come here, wish us harm. Those two-leggeds— she nodded toward North Wind and Crow’s Eye—call us “wolves.” My clan calls me Silver Throat.
Another wolf with reddish fur came up and growled something to Silver Throat. She answered the red-fur with a soft series of growls, then turned back to me. My daughter, Birdjumper. She tells me not to ingest any more creations of yours until you grow more sure of them. She reminds me to be wary. I need no such reminders. But what kind of two-leg are you? You look almost like a big fish.
That was my introduction to Silver Throat. I drifted in and out of consciousness for a few days, and while North Wind grew to accept our multi-mammal situation, Crow’s Eye did not.
Both of them eventually left the Spirit Mound, with the wolves’ blessings and the wolves’ guidance in finding hidden passages to take them out.
I remained, in order to heal. The wolves, for their part, would occasionally lick my wounds — especially after the jabberstick was removed with a searingly painful yank by Birdjumper — and Silver Throat and I would converse.
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