The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “Long Teeth, I do not know how it is that you have this hold over One Who Flies, but I implore you: let him go. Let him come home with us. We have great need of him.”

  Long Teeth shook his head. “Not a chance, ma chère. Your One Who Flies and I, we have a...a business arrangement.”

  And “business,” to Long Teeth, meant digging for gold or cheating others out of it. She looked at One Who Flies, but his gaze retained a detachment, as if he watched them from a distance. He was not, she realized, a participant in this discussion. He was only a bystander, either unable or unwilling to take part in his own destiny.

  As you wish, she said to herself. Then I will deal with this man in my own way. I will make him want to help us.

  She turned back to Long Teeth.

  “You will let him go,” she said, “because I give you no choice.”

  He laughed at this. “And just how will do you intend to do that?”

  She indicated herself and Mouse Road. “We will not leave without him. We will not leave you alone with him. We will stay by you both, as close as we can, wherever you go. In every town, we will follow you.” She showed him the baby in her cradleboard. “We will tell everyone how you murdered my husband, of how you raped us both, and of how you now have abandoned your own child.”

  Long Teeth sputtered with laughter. “That’s not true,” he said, glancing at the gathered vé’hó’e, wondering if any of them understood the Trader’s Tongue.

  “I do not care if it is true or not,” she said. “We will say that it is, and if they do not believe us, we will tell every man of your thieving and your lies, which is true. And when you head north into Alliance lands, we will alert every tribe of your presence.” She laughed at the growing look of suffering on Long Teeth’s face. “You will not get what you want.” She turned and, taking Mouse Road by the hand, walked back toward the whistlers.

  “Tabarnaque,” Long Teeth said beneath his breath. “What in the Devil’s name is so all-fired important that you need this poor boy so badly?”

  She reached under her whistler’s jaw and scritched its neck. The whistler half-closed its eyes and breathed a large sigh.

  “We need him to speak with the Iron Shirts again,” she said plainly. “We intend to forge an alliance with Spain.”

  Long Teeth gaped at her, struck mute by her statement. He looked at the men around him, staring blindly at first, but soon Speaks While Leaving saw the ideas begin to bloom in his mind. He looked at her, then at One Who Flies, then at her again.

  “An alliance? Directly with Spain?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “With the help of the Iron Shirts, we can pay the Horse Nations to leave us alone. We were very close to an agreement before, but...” She swallowed against the memory of how the talks broke down.

  “I heard,” Long Teeth said. “It was in the papers, even out here. I was sorry to learn of Three Trees Together.”

  “My fault,” One Who Flies said from deep within his daze, but the words awakened his mind, and his gaze came back to the present. His brow contracted in remembered grief and his lips twisted into a sorrowful curve. “All my fault,” he said.

  “And if it is?” Speaks While Leaving asked him. “Are you going to stay here and drink yourself to death?”

  “Yes!” he shouted, suddenly animate. He pushed his way through the gathered onlookers and stood before her, fuming, his breath surging through flared nostrils. “If I choose to, I’ll stay here. I’m finished with your visions and your Thunder Beings. I’m through with all of it. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  Speaks While Leaving pointed to Mouse Road who stood nearby, not understanding the Trader’s Tongue that they spoke, but comprehending every look of grief and anger in her beloved’s eyes. “Do you want her to leave you alone?”

  One Who Flies turned away from Mouse Road. “She’s the one who turned me away, not the reverse.”

  Speaks While Leaving switched to the language of the People so that Mouse Road could understand. “And do you think she would be here if she still felt that way?”

  Shyly, almost fearfully, he glanced over at Mouse Road whose broad cheeks were wet with tears that shone in the evening light. She clasped her hands together before her breast, each holding the other back.

  “Please,” Mouse Road said. “Please come back to us. Come back to me.”

  Long Teeth cleared his throat and Speaks While Leaving turned her attention to the trader once more. “What about me?” he asked.

  Speaks While Leaving sneered. “Why should I care about you?”

  “Because you still need me,” he said. “Two Injun women and a penniless sot? How do you think you’ll be able to contact your Spanish friends without my help?” He waved a hand at the vé’hó’e who stood nearby. “Do you expect one of these fellows to help you? No, you need me. You need my wit and you need my coin.”

  Speaks While Leaving considered it. Some of the vé’hó’e had wandered off, no longer interested in the confrontation on the porch steps. The windows and doorways along the road, too, had emptied, now that the excitement seemed to be over. Only a few of the vé’hó’e remained, and they the ones who had first come out the door, ready to attack them. She saw the Cut-Hair man regarding her from his seat on the wooden step.

  “What do you think?” she asked him.

  The Cut-Hair man nodded. “Take the scrawny white one with you,” he said. “You’ve used up all your luck getting this far. You’ll need some of his to get where you’re going.”

  “Why should I trust you, Long Teeth? Why do you want to be involved in this?”

  The vé’ho’e trader grinned and raised his eyebrows twice. “Well, ma chère, the way I see it, there’s a great deal of profit to be made in such an alliance. And if I’m working with you, the chances of my waking up with an arrow in my back are just that much smaller.”

  “Smaller, but not impossible,” Speaks While Leaving said, and was rewarded by both a frown from the trader and a smile from One Who Flies. “It is agreed, then. Now, I want to speak with the ambassador from the Iron Shirts. He lives in the City of White Stone. What do you suggest? How shall we get there?”

  Long Teeth’s smile returned. He bowed to her and with a zealous sweep of his hand, pointed them down the road toward the far edge of the small town. There, she saw a tiny building, low and square, from which rose a tall pole crossed with a bar at the top. It reminded her of the icons the vé’hó’e often wore about their necks, symbols of their god who died and lived again.

  Strung from the crosspiece at the top of the pole was a wire, and the wire stretched away to another pole, and thence to yet another pole. Stepping farther into the middle of the road, she saw a long line of poles reaching eastward, the wire hanging between each in graceful arcs that shortened with distance until they disappeared over the curve of the land.

  “What is that?” she asked the trader.

  “That, ma chère, is a telegraph, and with it and a bit of silver, we can send a message from here to your man in Washington.”

  Speaks While Leaving had heard of this thing. Wire-that-talks, was the name some had given it, and she had heard of how Alliance soldiers destroyed them to keep the bluecoats from sending information to the City of White Stone. Never had she thought that she would be using such a thing herself. She turned to One Who Flies.

  “This is true?” she asked him. “We can use the wire-that-talks to contact Speaks for the Iron Shirts?”

  One Who Flies closed his eyes and sighed. “It is true,” he said. “It will take some doing to get a message from here to Alejandro, but it is possible.”

  “Good,” she said, and signed to Mouse Road: All is well.

  Mouse Road grinned. It was all she needed to know.

  They went to the telegraph shack where One Who Flies translated her words, composing a message for the Iron Shirt ambassador, Alejandro Silveira. He wrote of her wish to reopen discussions and of how the People had not given up hope of a
n alliance. The sun was setting when the operator put a hand to his key. Speaks While Leaving watched, fascinated, as the little man turned a whirring crank and began to tap on his device. She imagined the words, her lips forming their sounds, whispering them into the shiny brass lever that tapped with its odd rhythms; words of magic leapt from her mouth into the wire, running up to the pole, racing along the lines that glowed overhead like curved bows made of red sunfire. She gazed off across the distant hills, her sight keeping pace with her speeding thoughts, until behind her the sun dipped its fiery head below the earth’s rim, and the telegraph lines disappeared in the growing night.

  They spent the night beyond the edge of town, their whistlers far away and downwind from the vé’hó’e horses. She had insisted that One Who Flies stay with them, and not with Long Teeth in the vé’ho’e town. They ate a simple meal of boiled roots and dried meat, and settled in around the tiny fire. One Who Flies said nothing on his own and answered few questions, retiring soon after the meal was finished. It wasn’t until the moon rose that he began to shake.

  Mouse Road woke and went to him, cradling him in her arms. “What is wrong with him?” she asked, her worry growing toward panic.

  “Hush,” Speaks While Leaving said, rising up on an elbow. “It will be all right.” Beneath the covers, Blue Shell Woman fussed and Speaks While Leaving lay back down and pulled her baby close to her breast. She felt the baby’s little mouth seeking the nipple, felt her moist questing along the curve of her breast, and heard her whimpers turn to happy grunts as she found her way home and began to suckle. Warmth spread through her as her daughter fed, a tingling sensation that relaxed her entire length. Her baby contented, she turned her attention back to her sister-in-law.

  “This is normal,” she told Mouse Road. “I have seen it many times among our own people. He must separate himself from the poison he has been drinking. It is why I insisted he stay with us.”

  Mouse Road looked down at the man in her arms. He was curled up like a wounded dog, and shook as if he had been brought in off the winter prairie. His entire body shuddered—hands, arms, legs, head, even his chest writhed with shivered breaths—and his eyes flickered from bleariness to blindness. His lips were taut, pulled back from teeth clenched by a jaw locked in spasm, and his skin—pallid as the moon itself—shone with sweat, beads reflecting starlight from above.

  He moaned. “Stop him,” he said. “Stop him.”

  Mouse Road looked up.

  “He will see things,” Speaks While Leaving said to her. “He will rave and he will cry out. But you need not worry. It is the poison he fights, not us, and it is a battle we cannot help him fight.”

  They watched over him, taking turns, first one napping, and then the other. Little diving lizards flew through the fire’s pale dome of light, darting after nighttime insects, while from far away came a nighthawk’s sharp call. Closer, the brush around them was alive with the tiny travelings of mice and rabbit, and once Speaks While Leaving saw the glowing orange eyes of a coyote as it inspected their campsite.

  It was when Mouse Road lay in exhausted slumber that One Who Flies began once more to thrash and mutter. His eyes were open now, and he raised his arms across his face to protect himself, though his persecutors were only spirits of his imagination. Concerned that he might bolt in his fear, Speaks While Leaving got some strong buffalo hair rope and hobbled him. The constricting bonds did nothing to ease his distress, but it did much to ease hers.

  She retreated to her place by the fire and held her daughter close while she watched One Who Flies shiver and twitch beneath the heavy buffalo skins. When his features were not twisted by tremors, they were sunken and lax, like fruit that had laid tool long on the ground. Despite her own advice to Mouse Road, she worried about him. Fighting the effects of the water-that-burns was hard enough, but there was much more that she wanted from him. No matter the causes of his current condition, her needs for the future would be no less demanding, and no less free from peril. Bringing together two such ancient enemies as the People and the Iron Shirts would not be a simple thing. It would require a strength that she only hoped they possessed.

  Is it right, she wondered, for me to demand this of him? I do not even have the blessing of our own Council. Even my own husband and father do not believe in me. Is it right, then, that I should ask this of One Who Flies?

  But the memory of her original vision was strong, and the spirit-sense told her that the images of gold and ships and shields and power had not yet been completed. She thought of the Iron Shirts and of the People, and could not imagine them linked without seeing One Who Flies standing between them. He was a man of both worlds, capable of bringing them together. They did not fit otherwise, except as broken dreams of different ideas.

  One Who Flies was the key. If she was to make an alliance with the Iron Shirts, One Who Flies was the man who could help her do it, and as he sweated in the cold night air, she prayed that the earth fill him with its strength, and the sky make his breath come easy. She prayed to the guardians of the world, asking for gifts from the four directions, and hoping that when the time came, they would have what they needed.

  The sun rose swollen and red, painting the clouds orange and washing the night out toward the west where it lingered in the hilly horizon. Grass grew green in the morning light, and the stars faded into memory. Mouse Road stretched as the dawn touched her face. She rubbed her eyes and blinked into the morning before she suddenly remembered the night’s vigil and sat up to see if her charge was still with them.

  One Who Flies lay still, sprawled on his back, twisted slightly from when he had briefly tried to remove the rope from around his ankles. His head thrown back and his mouth agape, his skin was an unhealthy pallor except for his eyelids which were red and raw-looking. Had it not been for the thready pulse that drummed at his throat, Speaks While Leaving would have thought him a corpse.

  Mouse Road swallowed and looked over to her sister. “He is well?”

  Speaks While Leaving smiled. “He is better,” she said, “but not well. It will be a while before he is well.”

  Their voices roused him. He blinked and winced at the light of day, then uttered one long and pitiful moan before convulsing once, rolling over, and vomiting a mouthful of thin liquid onto the ground.

  Speaks While Leaving saw Mouse Road’s grimace of disgust and decided not to chide her for it. Much as though they both might care for this man, he was in a repulsive state.

  “Go get some water,” she said. “I will see to his needs.”

  Mouse Road bundled up the empty waterskins and went off toward the creek. By the time she returned, One Who Flies had been wiped clean and made to sit up, though he still only squinted out at the world around him.

  “What did you do to me?” he asked.

  Speaks While Leaving laughed. “Nothing,” she said. “And neither did you, for once.”

  He lifted a trembling hand to his brow. “I feel awful. Do you have anything to drink?”

  Mouse Road offered him one of the waterskins but he waved it off.

  “To drink!” he said, too loudly for his own head to endure. He moaned again and held his head in his hands.

  “No,” Speaks While Leaving told him. “We have nothing but water to drink, and water will be good enough. I need you healthy and with your mind sharp.”

  “Why?”

  In answer, she pointed off toward the town. One Who Flies looked that way.

  Long Teeth was trotting toward them. He saw them and waved a piece of paper over his head.

  “An answer!” the trader shouted as he neared the camp. “We have an answer!”

  “Do you remember?” she asked One Who Flies.

  “Of course I remember,” he said, glaring at her.

  Long Teeth slowed as he reached them, his lungs gulping in the crystal air and pushing it out in misted clouds. He stopped next to One Who Flies and, leaning over, rested with his hands on his knees. He waved the piece of paper. �
��An answer,” he said again.

  Irritated, One Who Flies snatched the paper from him and read it. “Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “What does it say?” Speaks While Leaving asked.

  “It says,” Long Teeth managed between gasps, “that your Spanish friend welcomes your continued interest in an alliance. He will arrange for a meeting in Cuba, where the matter can be discussed at greater length.”

  Speaks While Leaving felt her heartbeat quicken. “Cuba,” she said, thinking to the trip One Who Flies had taken to the City of White Stone. “That is an island, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” One Who Flies said. “Did you think he was going to come to you?”

  Unknowingly, until that very moment, Speaks While Leaving had to admit that she did. She looked down at her daughter, swaddled in her cradleboard. Blue Shell Woman’s eyes were large in her infant face, dark round orbs above shiny round cheeks.

  Where am I taking you? she asked silently. But to turn home now, what will we have accomplished?

  The baby gazed up at her, searching for her mother’s instruction. Speaks While Leaving saw the question in her daughter’s eyes. How should I feel, Mother? Tell me how to feel.

  Speaks While Leaving smiled at her daughter and waggled a finger closer and closer until she touched the baby’s nose. Blue Shell Woman laughed with a burbly sound, and her eyes turned up into crescents of comfortable joy, her every question answered.

  Chapter 12

  Spring Moon, Waxing

  Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell

  Between the Big Greasy and Lodgepole River

  Alliance Territory

  Storm Arriving lay in the green grass. The sun was a happy warmth from above, heating his hair and shoulders, and the grass around him danced side to side with the rhythm of the western breeze. He smelled the moist earth and the saltiness of his own sweat. They had been a long time on the trail, working their way to the south and east, testing the edges of the bluecoats’ strength, seeking its source. There had been no time for amenities, no time for comforts during their small campaign. There had been time only for riding, fighting, and more riding.