Speaks While Leaving sighed. The obstinate minds of the vé’hó’e never ceased to amaze her. How much easier would it be if the road had run with the river, instead of against it? The desires of nature were easy to see. Even when she closed her eyes and listened to the world, the swells of land and the rush of water were apparent to her, but the vé’hó’e, with eyes opened wide, seemed to fight the wants of nature on principle.
They continued onward, riding slowly toward the town, their weapons stowed away, and their hands in plain sight. The smells of manure from the horses soon gave way to the smells of human effluent, which the recent rains and the fresh sunshine combined to ripen.
“It stinks,” Mouse Road complained.
“Yes,” Speaks While Leaving agreed. “The vé’hó’e are not as concerned about such things.”
Mouse Road snuffled. “Even a day-old sparrow knows not to foul its own nest.”
Speaks While Leaving bid her be quiet with a gesture. “They are a young people,” she said.
As they neared the first rough buildings, people stuck their pale faces out of doors and windows. They gaped but did not run. Men and women stepped out toward the town’s main road to stare at the newcomers. Speaks While Leaving kept her gaze lowered, only glancing up occasionally to gauge the mood of the townsfolk.
One man came forward and shouted at them. Speaks While Leaving did not understand his English words, but his tone was clear. She kept her head low and did not challenge him with her eyes, but on the cradleboard on her back, Blue Shell Woman began to fret. The man curbed his tongue, chagrined perhaps at having made a baby cry, and stepped back toward his home.
Up ahead, at one of the larger buildings in town, was a gathering of men some of whom, by their clothing, might have been of the northern tribes. Hoping to find someone with whom she could converse in a civilized tongue, she headed toward it.
There were indeed men of the tribes at that place; more than she had thought. Of the twenty or so men who loitered near the doors of the building, only half of them were vé’hó’e. Of the other, ordinary persons, some were dressed in poorly-kept clothes of traditional cut, but most wore trousers and shirts of Trader’s cloth, and some even wore cast-off clothing of bluecoat soldiers.
To a man, however, red and white alike, she could see that they were deep in the well of fire-water. The acrid scent of it rose from them as they braised themselves in the drifting sun of afternoon. She reined in before them, her heart filled with a fury she could not explain. For the vé’hó’e who sat among them she felt nothing, but toward the men of the prairie, she felt a great deal.
While drink was not unknown among the People, it had been proscribed since before the star fell. Sweet Medicine, the most blessed of men to have walked the earth, warned the People of both the vé’hó’e and of the foul drink they brought with them. Young men, being curious, sometimes traded for it, sometimes even stole it, and of those who tasted it, some were lost. But the law was clear about its evil, and the evil it often caused. A man in camp found to be within its grip was beaten with quirts, and a man who was lost to it was sent away, removed from the body of the People.
There was youth among them, and mature age as well, but all of it—strength and wisdom—had been cast aside in favor of the vé’ho’e water-that-burns, and so it was with disgust and a sense of betrayal that Speaks While Leaving looked down from atop her whistler’s back. That she and Mouse Road needed them was regrettable, for these men had turned their back on their families, on their tribes, and on the gifts of their birth. It was regrettable that she needed these men, but it was so.
The men all looked up at them as at something new in the world. Droop-lipped and blank-stared, there was hardly a thought among them, and she could not tell from either clothing or habit what tribes they might have once called their own.
She reached within the pouch at her belt and retrieved the braid of blonde hair she had found at the funeral grounds. “I am looking for the man who belongs to this,” she said, trying first the language of the People. “Do any of you know of him?”
The men exchanged glances of slow surprise, and she asked her question again, in the language of the Inviters, and in the Trader’s Tongue. Remarkably, it was one of the vé’hó’e who responded to her query.
“I seen such a man as might belong to that,” he said with halting words. “He was on a beast like yours, and dressed like a red man.”
“What does he say?” Mouse Road whispered.
“He thinks he has seen him,” she replied, and then turned back to the man. “Do you know where he is?” she asked, holding the braid. The hawk feather at its end shone in the sunlight.
The man shook his head. “Gone,” he said. He waved a hand toward the east, toward the creek and the lands beyond it. “Days ago.”
Speaks While Leaving bowed her head. “I thank you,” she said, and put the braid back in her belt pouch. Then she gently toed her whistler into motion. The men stared as they started downhill toward the creek.
“He’s even worse than us!” the vé’ho’e shouted after them, and followed it with a laugh thick with deprecation.
“What did he say?” Mouse Road asked. “Tell me.”
But Speaks While Leaving did not know how to tell her that though they might find One Who Flies somewhere ahead, the man they found might not be worth the finding.
“Tell me!” Mouse Road insisted, riding up alongside her. “Is he alive?”
Speaks While Leaving sighed. “Yes,” she said, and then decided that her young companion was adult enough to deserve the truth. “He is alive, but is like those men back there.”
Mouse Road was silent for a long while as they left the tiny town behind. They checked the ties on their belongings and urged their whistlers into the muddy flow of the rain-swollen creek. The beasts pushed against the water’s force, singing to each other the words that only whistlers understood, finding the shallowest fording.
“What will we do?” Mouse Road asked as they reached the far bank. “About One Who Flies? What will we do?”
Speaks While Leaving looked at her sister and saw the conflict of fear and wanting in her eyes.
“We will find him,” she told her, and then rode her whistler up out of the creekbed. “And then we will decide what to do next.”
A wheel-worn path curvetted across the greening hills, drawing a drunken but generally consistent line eastward. Without constant use, the path would disappear beneath the insistent growth of the warming season, but for now, it was plain enough to lead them toward the next town.
And to the next one as well, Speaks While Leaving thought. If it must.
The whistlers’ pace ate up the ground, following alongside the path but not on it. The animals preferred the open ground and the prairie grass to the mudded tracks. To either side, homesteads sprouted: dark, squat, sod-roofed mounds or tall, sharp-angled structures that dotted the sun-bathed hills. Around each one, trees had been cleared and the land had been tilled, its fertility broken open in straight lines, ready for the seed. Within a short years’ time the region had been settled by the vé’hó’e and, as Speaks While Leaving regarded the new habitations that bruised the land all the way to the horizon, she knew that the People had lost this territory forever.
As she and Mouse Road rode past the vé’ho’e homes, tired horses lifted their heads in sudden interest, circling their corrals, ears pricked and noses testing the air as if even at this distance they could scent the whistlers; and Speaks While Leaving thought that perhaps they could. The Alliance had learned to count on the vé’ho’e horse’s fear of the larger, faster whistler. The whistler’s spice-scented, chameleon skin was a tool that the People had learned to use, creating panic among the horses from the upwind side, and enabling a camouflaged approach from downwind.
But the main thing that whistlers did so much better than horses was run, and their long-legged gait brought the two women to the next vé’ho’e town just as the sun began t
o set.
This place was even smaller than the last, with fewer than a dozen of the square wooden lodges the vé’hó’e favored. The springtime air had grown chilly with evening’s approach, and the path through the tiny town was nearly empty. There were no horses tied to any of the posts or rails, though set back from the path she could see a corral and stable where several horses stood, all nodding their heads and whickering to one another as if gossiping about the town’s newest arrivals. Warm lamplight shone through gaps in shutters and from behind draped windows, but along the short way through town, only two men could be seen. They sat on the steps in front of one of the larger buildings, leaning back-to-back against a porch post. Just as in the last town, these men, too, were thick with drink. Stuporous, they clutched their empty bottles with nerveless hands and slept open-mouthed to the gathering night. She looked down on them from atop her whistler. One of them was vé’ho’e, but the other was not. By his features, he seemed to be of the Cut-Hair People, and it was to him that she spoke, using the language of the Inviters.
“Wake up! I want to talk to you.”
The two men opened their eyes and the vé’ho’e screamed, startling the whistlers. They whined in alarm and darkened their skin, which only frightened the vé’ho’e the more. The other man, however, kept his wits, drunken though they were. With a steady hand he grasped his companion’s shoulder and calmed him, but though the vé’ho’e ceased his shouts, his eyes told Speaks While Leaving that he had never been so close to a whistler.
“I want to talk to you,” she said again to the ordinary man.
He nodded—a vé’ho’e habit—but before he could speak, the door to the building opened and several vé’hó’e came out, some with clubs, a few with rifles. Seeing the whistlers, they cried out in surprise and retreated to the cover of the doorway. Peering out, one of them shouted at them. Though Speaks While Leaving did not understand his words, his tone was filled with fearful anger.
“What does he want?” she asked the Cut-Hair man on the steps.
The Cut-Hair man stood up, one hand waving at the vé’hó’e in the doorway. He said something to them, and then looked straight at Speaks While Leaving—another bad vé’ho’e habit.
“They want you to go away,” he told her, his words slow and hard in coming, as if the language had slept within him for a long time. “Go away. They do not want you here.”
She took the braid of hair that One Who Flies had left and showed it to him. “I want to find this man,” she said. “Have you seen the man that belongs to this?”
The Cut-Hair man stared at the braid, and Speaks While Leaving saw recognition in his features. He spoke to the vé’hó’e, but they wanted nothing of what he was saying. They began to come out from the doorway, motioning at her and Mouse Road, making their whistlers shy and pale at their sudden movements. The Cut-Hair man was arguing with the vé’hó’e, now, but they were not listening to him. They came toward Speaks While Leaving, walking closer, shouting still. She glanced over at Mouse Road and saw the fear in her sister’s eyes. The vé’hó’e waved them away as if they were dogs at a feast fire. One of them pushed at her leg. They all stood alongside her, shouting up at her.
She gave her whistler a nudge. It took a smooth, sidling step toward the men, shoving them quickly backward, making a few of them fall.
The shouts stopped as the men scrambled away from the whistler.
“My apologies,” she said to the Cut-Hair man. “My whistler is a little nervous.”
A small but knowing smile touched the corners of the man’s mouth, and he passed her words along to the vé’hó’e.
“Now,” she said, holding the braid out again. “Do you know of the man who left this behind?”
“Please,” Mouse Road added. “We must find him.”
The Cut-Hair man regarded the two women, and Speaks While Leaving wished she could know what was going on in his mind. From his stance, she could see he still remembered pride and honor, but from the state of his tattered, filthy clothing and his person, it was obvious that he had forgotten many other things.
“You know where he is,” she said to the Cut-Hair man.
He nodded. “Why do you want him?”
“I have had a vision,” she told him. “I need him to make it true.”
“He is inside,” he said, without further hesitation. He motioned toward the vé’hó’e in the doorway. “But they won’t let us in there. And I don’t think they will get him for you.”
She made her whistler take a step backward, and she looked at the building. It was wide, and some segments had two stories with shuttered windows. If she couldn’t get inside to find One Who Flies she reasoned, she would have to call him outside.
“Ho’esta!” she commanded, and her whistler took a breath and bugled to the sky in a long, honking haroo that set every horse neighing. The bugling rose up the scale, became a flute-song, and then a piercing whistle that hurt the ear. Mouse Road commanded her mount to do likewise, and together the two beasts made sounds that brought a face to every window and doorway in the town. Up above, in the upstairs window, a shadowy figure appeared and then quickly withdrew.
“One Who Flies!” she shouted, adding her own voice to the din. “One Who Flies!” The street began to fill with people, and she feared their chance was escaping them.
“One Who Flies!”
The vé’hó’e in the doorway came forward once again, shouting at the two women. The whistlers danced away, and with a nudge of her toe, Speaks While Leaving made her mount turn full circle, its tail keeping the men at a distance.
And then he was there, standing at the doorway behind the vé’hó’e men, recognizable to her only in the hawklike intensity of his eyes.
“One Who Flies!” The two women grinned at the sight of him.
All the shouting and noise stopped as the men all turned to see whom it was that pleased them so.
One Who Flies was dressed in vé’ho’e clothing: a dark hat, a pale shirt, and close-fitting jacket and trousers. He appeared much as he had on that day when Speaks While Leaving had found him—how long ago was it? Years, now, it was—when the Thunder Beings had brought his airship down to earth in a terrible storm. He was now as he had been then; a reddish moustache above a delicate mouth and sharp chin, a long and aquiline nose, pale eyes of sky-blue set deep beneath a broad brow, his golden hair cut short so that it barely touched the high collar of his shirt. He stood on the porch, looking out at them, eyes snow-moon bright.
Mouse Road was the first to move. Leaping off her mount before it could crouch down, she pushed through the puzzled vé’hó’e. He watched her approach and Speaks While Leaving saw him blink and, ever so slightly, recoil. When she reached him, she grabbed his arm, and he looked away, up the road.
“One Who Flies,” she said, her words broken by tears. “One Who Flies, I am so happy to see you. I have been looking for you, I was so worried. I thought that perhaps you had died, but then, in the last place, they had heard of you, and pointed us this way. One Who Flies?” She tugged on his arm, but he would not look at her, and it was not just politeness. “One Who Flies?”
At the door was another man. Thinner, older, his neck was as wiry as an old walker’s, and his eyes were just as guarded. He hung back near the shadows but Mouse Road spied him. It was Long Teeth; the trader who had come to help the People dig the yellow chief-metal from the earth, and who had stolen it from them.
“No,” Mouse Road said to One Who Flies, tugging at his arm as she backed away. “Not him. You must not listen to him. Never again with him.”
She pulled at him but he refused to move. With a yank, he pulled his arm out of her grasp, and for the first time looked directly at her.
“Go home,” he said, and his words were thick and indistinct. Speaks While Leaving saw him blink—a slow, methodical closing and opening of his eyes—and knew that he was still steeped with drink. Carefully, she slid down from her whistler and, holding the cradleboard w
ith Blue Shell Woman, walked forward. The vé’hó’e parted to let her pass, but she gave them not a glance: her gaze was set on One Who Flies, filled with him. She saw the slow wavering of his stance like a poplar in the breeze. She saw the tremor in his right hand. And at the corner of his mouth, she saw the fleck of spittle. She approached him steadily, and saw everything about him.
“The men we passed in the last town were right,” she said to him in the language of the People. “You are worse than they are.” She stepped up onto the porch planks and stood before him, staring into his eyes. “You are worse than any of them.” Then she slapped him across the face.
“Now just a minute!” Long Teeth said, striding forward from the doorway. “You can’t just—”
She struck him as well, backhanded and hard, and her knuckles burned with the pain. The vé’hó’e around her spoke and stepped closer but Long Teeth held up one hand while he worked his jaw with the other.
“I guess I deserved that,” he said to her in the Trader’s Tongue.
“That and much more,” she said. “And if you were not surrounded by vé’hó’e, I should give it to you.”
Long Teeth glared at her. “Now look, you, what I did, well, I’m not saying it was right, but I’ve paid a price for it. Mais oui, I’ve paid a price.”
“Men died!” she shouted at him. “Hundreds, both of my people and yours. They died without need, over weapons that we could have bought with the gold that you stole. And you say you’ve paid for that crime?” She spat on his feet. “You’ve paid for nothing.” Then she turned to One Who Flies and reached for his arm. “And you? You need to come away from us. This place has infected you. The People are in trouble, and I need your help.”
Again, One Who Flies pulled his arm away. “Leave me,” he said. “Go home.”
“One Who Flies, we will not leave here without you.”
“I will not go with you,” he said with a glance over to Long Teeth.
She looked at the two men and wondered what had passed between them that would bind One Who Flies to his betrayer. What had happened to her friend to make him the puppet of such a man? Was it the drink? Or was there more to it?
The Cry of the Wind Page 13