The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  The Cry of

  the Wind

  Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  Mouse Road Press

  Seattle

  The Cry of the Wind

  Book Four of the Fallen Cloud Saga

  Originally published under the title

  From the Heart of the Storm

  2nd Edition

  A Mouse Road Publication

  November 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is strictly coincidental.

  Mouse Road Press

  16034 Burke Ave N

  Shoreline, WA 98133

  United States of America

  Cover and book design © 2012 Mouse Road Press

  ISBN-13: 978-1480165199

  ISBN-10: 1480165190

  First Mouse Road Press Edition: November 2012

  Dedication

  To the bride of my youth,

  who lives with me still.

  Table of Contents

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Cheyenne Pronunciation Guide

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Imagine a world that began much like our own.

  Sixty-five million years ago, North America bade farewell to the islands of Europe from across the newly-born Atlantic, Australia stretched to separate itself from Antarctica, and the Indian sub-continent was sailing away from Africa, bound for its collision with the heart of Asia. In every place, Life abounded, and dinosaurs—some larger than a house, and others as small as your thumb—ruled the land, the sea, and the air, living out their lives in the forests and swamps that dominated the coastlands along the shallow Cretaceous seas.

  Then the world broke open, unleashing a volcanic fury the like of which had not been seen for an æon. The Deccan Traps gushed molten lava, covering half of India with a million cubic kilometers of basalt. The ranges of Antarctica cracked, spewing iridium-laced ash into darkening skies. For 500,000 years, the planet rang with violence. Mountains were born, seas shrank, and Life trembled. Across the globe, resources of food and prey disappeared as the climate shifted from wet to arid. Populations competed, starved, and then collapsed. Over the next million years, half of all species died out, unable to adapt in time as habitats vanished in a geologic heartbeat.

  In North America, the continental plate was compressed, thrusting the Rocky Mountains miles into the air. The inland seaway that stretched from the Caribbean to the Arctic began to recede, taking with it the moist marshes and fens upon which the last of the world’s dinosaurs depended. The waters ebbed, revealing vast sedimentary plains, retreating for a thousand miles before they came to a halt. The sea that remained was a fraction of its former size; a short arm of warm, shallow water that thrust up from the Caribbean to the Sand Hills of Nebraska.

  It was on these placid shores that a few species of those great dinosaurs clung to life. Reduced in size and number, the gentle sea gave them the time they needed to adapt and survive. Eventually, some species left the sea’s humid forests for the broad expanses to the north, finding ecological niches among the mammals that had begun to dominate the prairie.

  Life continued. Continents moved. The glacial ices advanced and retreated like a tide. In Africa’s Great Rift Valley, a small ape stood and peered over the savannah grass. Humans emerged, migrated into Asia and Europe, and history was born. Events unfolded mostly unchanged, until the European civilization came to the Great Plains of North America.

  In the centuries before the first Spaniard brought the first horse to the New World, the Cheyenne had been riding across the Great Plains on lizard-like beasts of unmatched speed and power. In defense against their new white-skinned foe, the Cheyenne allied with other tribes, and when the tide of European colonialism came to the prairie frontier, it crashed against the Alliance, and was denied. For a hundred years, the Alliance matched the Horse Nations move for move, strength for strength, shifting the course of history.

  Then, through advances in technology and industry, the Americans, led by an officer named George Armstrong Custer, began to make headway and the Alliance was pushed back beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Arkansas, all the way to the banks of the Missouri and the Santee. A few years later that same officer—now President Custer—sent his only son on a reconnaissance mission beyond those rivers, only to hear of his capture by the Cheyenne. In the three years since, young George has lived with the Cheyenne, and has sided with them against his own father’s forces.

  This is the World of the Fallen Cloud.

  Chapter 1

  Hoop and Stick Game Moon, Waxing

  Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell

  Sand Hills

  Alliance Territory

  The storm doused the world.

  George held the small medicine bag in his hands as the rain pelted down onto his head and streamed through his braided hair. He ran his fingers over the bag’s worn quillwork, the leather that was as old and dark as the skin of the man who had owned it. It h ad belonged to Three Trees Together, the preeminent chief of the People, a patient leader who had been shot dead pursuing peace for his tribe. George had loved and respected him, perhaps more than he did his own father. He looked up into the rain-dark sky.

  “God, damn it all,” he said as his vision swam with the sting of tears and cold rain. “Everything, God. Damn me, damn the world. Damn everything.”

  The storm threw its rain down from the west with a rising, vengeful fury. In the Sand Hills, on the shores of the Big Salty, the temperate waters kept the northern snows at bay, but they could not keep away the rains or the cold winds that blasted down from the great plains of the Alliance.

  From a few yards away, George’s whistler complained of the bitter chill and sheltered her nose under her tail. For his own part, he greeted the building violence of the storm, shivering in clothes soaked through by the winter’s weather. He had ridden for a week to reach this spot. It had been a journey of agony and privation, an appropriate ending to the devastating trip to Washington that killed Three Trees Together and nearly killed George’s father as well.

  He looked down again at the medicine bag in his hands. It fit in his palm, a small square pouch sewn shut to enclose the talismans of its owner’s spiritual strength. From the bottom of the bag hung an uneven, broken fringe and attached to the top was a long thong of leather that the old man had worn around his neck. Made of brain-tanned elkhide, the back of it wa
s bare, the leather soiled and hardened by decades lying next to the skin of the old man’s chest. The front of it was sewn with dyed porcupine quills; a geometric pattern with the right half covered in white quills, the left half in dark brown. Down the middle were open, wheat-colored diamonds that represented grasshoppers, and to either side were blue double-barred crosses: dragonflies. Grasshoppers, he knew, were a symbol of plenty, as they always presaged the buffalo on the open prairie, rising up in clouds before the herd’s advance. He touched the blue quills of the four dragonflies. He did not know what a dragonfly meant to the Cheyenne. For the past three years, he had called The People who ruled the Great Plains his friends, his family, his own; but still he did not know all their secret ways.

  His vision blurred over, but not with the rain that coursed over his face.

  “Damn it all,” he said again, and clutched to his breast the medicine bag that had belonged to his chief.

  Three Trees Together had died on the steps of the White House, brought down by a bullet meant for the assassin who had tried to kill George’s father, George Armstrong Custer, Sr., the President of the United States. He wished now, as he had while staring down at the blood on the white stone steps, that the bullet had taken him instead of that grand old chief. The chief’s death had brought no good, while his own death would have done no harm.

  He looked around at the rain-soaked land. The funeral party, traveling home weeks ahead of George, had picked a good spot for their leader’s spirit bed. Set atop the limestone cliffs high above the white sand shore of the inland sea, there would have been plenty of the leather-winged fliers to come and release the old man’s spirit from his flesh. There were remnants of the chief’s funeral strewn about: pale bones among the dark sedgegrass and woody thyme, a tattered war bonnet, a dream shield tied to one of the scaffold poles. But for George it was the medicine bag that embodied the chief. How many times had he watched the old man, sitting at the head of a Council meeting, his fingers idly playing with the fringe or rubbing the quills of its geometric design? How many times had the Council waited while Three Trees Together toyed with his medicine bag, his mind seeking the path of wisdom? A man of a hundred summers who, the day before his death, had stood with George on a balcony, catching snowflakes on his tongue. A man whom George loved more than his own father, and who had cared for George in return. Dead. Murdered on the road to peace.

  “My fault,” George said, his teeth clenched and his breath hard and sharp in his breast. He stood and, medicine bag in one hand, unsheathed his knife with the other. The blade glowed in the dim light, and he felt its bite with his thumb. He looked at the bag.

  “I just wanted to help,” he said to it, and to the man who had owned it. “I only just wanted to help. But everything I do, everything I’ve done...it always turned out worse than it was before.”

  He touched the blade to the skin of his arm. It was cold against his wrist.

  “What can I do for you now, Grandfather?” He shook his head, the old man’s words echoing in his head.

  One Who Flies, he had said, calling him by his Cheyenne name. My heart would be sad if you decided you no longer wished to be one of the People.

  “I know I told you I would go back, but that was when I still hoped. Now....” He let the blade score a line across his wrist. Blood rose, mixed with rain, and spread. He drew two more lines across his wrist, and blood flowed down his arm.

  There is a family for you with the People, I think, if you want it.

  “No, Grandfather. I have no family among the People. Not after the losses I’ve brought to them. And among the vé’hó’e I have been disowned; my own mother told me this. I am alone, Grandfather, caught between two worlds that do not want me. There’s only one thing I can do. Only one place to go.”

  He held out his arm and let the rain wash the blood from his arm down onto the ground. Then, with a quick move of the knife, he reached up and slashed through the braid of his hair. Released, wet hanks fell forward around his face. He dropped the blonde braid onto the blooded ground.

  “Something of me,” George said, “for something of you.” He put the leather thong over his head. The medicine bag hung down on his chest.

  “Goodbye, Grandfather. May you walk in beauty. For me, there is nowhere to go but to Hell.”

  He sheathed the knife and tucked the bag under the sodden hide of his tunic. Walking over to his whistler, he mounted. “Néhoveóó’êstse,” he said, and the creature rose on its strong hind legs. “Nóheto,” he commanded, and they headed off, away from the cliffs. The whistler turned toward the northwest and home, but George countermanded it with a touch of his right toe.

  “Not that way,” he told it. “Not for me.”

  Unwillingly, the whistler turned to the northeast and took him onward, into the rain.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, February 7, A.D. 1890

  The White House

  Washington, District of Columbia

  President Custer sat in the wheelchair, able to do little else, as Douglas pushed him down the hall toward the library. One of the chair’s wheels squeaked, annoying Custer as only a little thing can annoy a man so swallowed up by larger concerns. There was nothing he could do about the squeaking wheel—the right front wheel, he thought it was, yes, he was sure; definitely the right front wheel, going heep-heep-heep as they turned from the cross hall and through the library door—but there was nothing he could do about the larger things, either.

  He could not reverse the course of events that had occurred over the last month, could not send back the would-be assassin’s bullets, nor save his old friend, Three Trees Together, from the inaccurate but deadly retaliation of his own presidential bodyguard. He could not go back and preemptively remove the ambassador from the discussions that, until that bloody end, had gone so well. He could not clean away the damage done to his body, a body that had been a quiet pride, lean and agile, responding to his every thought, even as advancing age had started to come upon him. And neither could he undo the sadness that he saw in his dear Libbie’s eyes, though to him, seeing that sadness was a greater pain than all of his physical torment.

  He could change these things not a whit, could not even form the words to express his frustrations. These things were out of his control and beyond his power to effect, just as was the irritating squeak of the unoiled right front wheel on this, his carriage of incapacity.

  But unlike those other trials, the wheel was here within his view, and so it constrained his entire focus.

  Douglas wheeled him across the library to a place near the hearth.

  “How’s this, Mr. President?”

  Custer, released from the torture of the wheel, sighed deeply. On the rug before the fire, Tuck, the family’s old wirehair hound, sighed as well. The fire in the hearth crackled and he could smell the sharpness of bubbling resin as it seeped up out of the burning wood. He looked at Douglas, and tried to motion toward the fireplace with his right hand: a twisting, unnaturally difficult movement that was the best he was able to manage.

  “Pine wood, sir. Full of pitch, just the way you like it.”

  Custer closed his eyes and smiled a lopsided half-smile.

  “Coffee, sir? Tea? Something to eat, maybe?”

  Custer squinched up his left eye and cheek.

  “Just as you wish, sir.” From outside in the hall came the sound of voices and footsteps. “I’ll be right over there, sir. If you find you want anything, you just give me a look.”

  Douglas was the butler for the house, but for the past month, he had become Custer’s personal attendant, perambulating him from room to room, seeing to all his needs and most of his wants, even to dressing him in the mornings.

  On the first morning Custer had been scheduled to leave his sickroom, the old Negro had sensed his reluctance at venturing forth wearing only a dressing gown. The man’s hands were as strong and black as iron but passed along a gentle reassurance. Douglas had helped President Custer don his u
ndergarments, his trousers, his shoes and socks. He had buttoned Custer’s shirt, and had tied the crisp knot in his necktie, all without uttering a single word. Custer had never been touched in so familiar a manner by a Negro, and his estimation of this man, butler to seven presidents, was changed by his ability to serve without servility.

  By now, though, the regimen had become routine. Each morning Douglas helped Custer rise, helped him at toilet and bath, cleaned him, shaved him, and dressed him with quiet efficiency. On weekend mornings, he took him to breakfast with the family, while on weekdays he ate alone in his rooms. Douglas laid out the morning paper, turning pages as Custer read the day’s news. And three times a week, around noon, Douglas brought him here, to the library, for what Custer considered nothing less than an inspection by the commanding officer.

  Douglas took up his post behind Custer as the footsteps neared the library door. The library was Custer’s favorite room. On the second floor facing the south, it was a large square room with one semicircular wall composed of curved French doors that led out onto a balcony. The rippled panes of bowed glass let in the reflected light of day, snow-bright despite the clouds that hid the sun. Reading tables and armchairs stood near the balcony doors, flanked by floor lamps at silent attention. And then, lining the three remaining walls of the room, were the things that had drawn Custer here on the first day of his first term: the tall ranks of bookshelves filled with the imposing collection of history. Journals, atlases, treatises, diatribes. Books on logic, on political theory, on religion. Architectural plans and essays on crop rotation. Dictionaries, novels, plays, and Bibles. Books and folios, skinny and fat, grand and minuscule, bound in leather or cloth as age and style dictated, they all stood shoulder to shoulder, filling the available space with words, knowledge, and wisdom. Custer had loved this room, still loved it, except that now reading was a pleasure stolen from him, as even the simple act of turning a page was beyond his limited muscular control.