The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  One Who Flies emerged from the stairway, stepping up onto the deck and taking a look around. He saw the women at the rail and raised a hand in greeting.

  He looked better than when they had departed, with some color in his cheeks and eyes that were once more sharp and alive with thought. He had shaved off his whiskers and moustache, and looked like a human being again, despite his vé’ho’e clothing, but his mouth was dour and there was a harrowed pinch to the intelligence in his eyes. He may have been purged of the imbibed poisons, but he was not happy.

  “What is wrong with him?” Speaks While Leaving asked her sister.

  “Ask him.”

  One Who Flies came up to them, bowed, and joined them at the rail.

  “It is good to see you,” Speaks While Leaving began.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “But you look distressed. What troubles you?”

  “Nothing,” he said as he squinted into the rising sun. “I am fine.”

  “You see?” Mouse Road said. “It is practically all he ever says.”

  “And what would you have me say?” There was something new in his voice as well; a bitterness Speaks While Leaving had never heard there before.

  “I would have you tell me what it is that troubles you.” She turned to Speaks While Leaving. “He barely sleeps, though the tremors have nearly left him. He paces at night; I hear his footsteps. He will not speak unless spoken to, nor offer an opinion on anything, not on what he wishes to eat or if he cares to take a walk up in the sunshine. He says neither what he wants nor what he needs. It is like talking to a stone. A whistler would be better company.”

  “Then you should have picked your companions more carefully,” he said. “It was not I who insisted on this journey.”

  “Eya!” Mouse Road said, signing surrender with her hands. “My fault. As if I had forced you to come along.”

  “And you didn’t?” he asked. “‘I can’t let her go alone,’ you said. ‘I need you,’ you said.”

  “And I do.”

  “For what?” he said, turning to face her. “To fail again? To ruin everything again?”

  “No,” Speaks While Leaving said, jolting them both out of their disputation. She looked at them both, saw Mouse Road’s frustration and the pain that One Who Flies wore like a trophy. To speak of her vision and the role she was sure One Who Flies was to play would only anger him further. “I need you to try,” she said. “That is all. Only to try.”

  He stood a bit taller and glanced at her. “And if I do fail?”

  “Then you fail,” she said. “But you will fail having tried, and not lying in the mud, reeking of vé’ho’e poisons.”

  That shamed him—she saw it in the way his stance rounded and his gaze turned vacant—and she regretted her words. Shaming him had not been her intent. She needed him strong of spirit as well as of body. She tried to undo the damage.

  “Will you try?” she asked him.

  Quietly, he said, “Yes,” and turned to look once more toward the land of their goal.

  “How long will it take to reach their queen?” she asked.

  “I do not know,” One Who Flies said. “But here is someone who can answer you. Buenos días, Señor.”

  “Buenos días.” It was Alejandro, pale and unsteady on his feet, but on his feet at last.

  “How do you feel?” Speaks While Leaving asked him.

  “Better just to be within the sight of land,” he said as he peered at the sun-bright waters and white buildings ahead. “Brilliant Cadiz. Salty and clean, the Gate to the New World.”

  “Can you tell us, Don Alejandro, how long it will be before we can meet your queen?”

  Alejandro shrugged. “It is hard to say. Tonight, we shall stay in a small place my wife’s family owns nearby, along the Guadalquivir. From there we will take a carriage to Utrera where we will board a train for the trip. By train, it will be four, perhaps five days, but were we to travel by horse or carriage, it would be closer to two weeks before we reached the regency court.”

  “Two weeks?” Speaks While Leaving wondered aloud. “Your land must be as large as ours.”

  Alejandro held up a hand. “Hardly, my dear. A horse-drawn carriage is not a whistler, not by quite a margin, and even a whistler with a travois would quickly outpace a heavy carriage on a bad road. But the train shall save us that particular torture.” He turned back to the view. “For myself, though, I would walk barefoot all the way to Madrid if it meant an end to my ocean voyaging.”

  And I would do the same, Speaks While Leaving thought, glancing at One Who Flies, if only I could know that what I am doing is right.

  The city of Cadiz looked much like Havana, from what they were able to see of it. With low houses crammed up along the shore of a deep harbor thick with tiny boats and tan-skinned, dark-haired people working busily at tasks she could barely fathom, Speaks While Leaving would not have been able to tell the two towns apart had not the sun driven a different course through the sky in relation to the surrounding hills. Such comparisons were brief, however, as they quickly left the bright city on its sparkling bay and headed into those hills.

  The carriage Alejandro hired proved a rough ride, bouncing and jostling as it traveled along the pitted road and the air within grew close with the scents of four people ripe from two weeks at sea. The thing that Speaks While Leaving had missed most from her normal life was her daily bathe in the rivers near camp. On the ship, where the large vé’ho’e basins weren’t available for bathing, she had missed them most intensely.

  The road was dusty and, once they had crossed over the scrub-covered ridges and left behind the refreshment of the ocean breeze, the air grew warm and thick. They wound through the hills for hours, stopping at a small building every hand or two of time to water the four sweaty horses that pulled the carriage. Eventually, the hills dropped away and they began to meander their way down their sloping sides. Speaks While Leaving could see the lowlands ahead, a dark green fen laced with curving streams, stretching into a hazy distance.

  “Las Marismas,” Alejandro labeled it. “The delta of the Guadalquivir and breeding ground of the best fighting bulls in the world.”

  “Fighting bulls?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Alejandro’s voice was filled with admiration. “The corrida, or bullfight as you might call it, is a national sport in Spain. One man, one bull, in a contest to the death—usually the bull’s. Perhaps you shall see a corrida during your stay.”

  One man against one bull did not sound like anything worth watching to Speaks While Leaving. During the buffalo hunt, a lucky man might bring down two bulls in a single day, and that while riding amid the entire herd. One man against one bull did not sound like a contest at all, but she kept her opinion to herself as it was obvious that Alejandro took great pride in it.

  They reached the marshy lowlands and drove a twisting route along their limit. The road kept close to the hills like a child not wanting to stray from its mother, and from the look of the wet, swampy land beyond, Speaks While Leaving could see the reason for it. Every step through this land would bring solid ground and spongy muck in equal proportion. Greenery could just as easily cover a sink as a stone here, but what captured her attention were the birds that inhabited the fen. Everywhere—on water and on the soggy land—birds congregated.

  Ducks and geese were the only birds of a shape familiar to her, but were of types she had never seen. There were troops of long-legged birds like herons but smaller and blazing white. Flocks of smaller birds filled the air, flying between the gnarled, dark trees that marked the patches of more solid ground. And above, dark-winged against the blue sky, large birds soared on the rising air, circling like the little-teeth along the shores of the Big Salty, the feathers of their wingtips spread like fingers to catch the wind.

  While Blue Shell Woman slept in her arms, Speaks While Leaving stared out the dusty window, marveling with Mouse Road at the variety of birds large and small, pale and dark, unadorned
and painted with the brightest of colors, all of them new and unfamiliar.

  It was late afternoon when they arrived at the villa where they were to spend their first night, and despite the dust of the road, they unlatched their windows and slid them downward so that they could lean out and get a better look at the place. It was a long, low building built of pale stone, nestled beneath the branches of tall dark trees that shaded it from the westering sun. But for the breeze of their passage, the air was calm, hot, and thick with the smell of the swamps: moist, green, fecund.

  The carriage drove up along a path of packed earth and pulled up near the villa’s main entrance. Black timbers supported the deep eaves and the wrought-iron grillwork gated the entryway.

  The heavy front doors opened. Two men in simple cloth shirts, striped pants, and sandals came out and opened the iron gate. Then from the shadows within the house came a dark figure. It was an old woman, short and squat, clothed in a black skirt and a black shawl over a white blouse. She had a cane in each of her gnarled hands, and as she slowly emerged into the afternoon sun, Speaks While Leaving could tell that she was a relative of Olivia and Victoria, the two sisters who had married Roberto and Alejandro. Though advancing years had withered her beauty and bent her frame, her eyes still carried the dark spirit that Speaks While Leaving had seen in her younger relations.

  Alejandro greeted the woman warmly speaking to her rapidly in his own language. The woman spoke little, accepting his kisses on each of her cheeks, but her eyes never left the three guests that stood waiting to be introduced. When Alejandro did turn to present them to her, the old woman’s appraisal was frank and unflattering.

  “Please allow me to present Señora Doña Albina Augustina Álvarez de Baca, aunt to my wife, and our hostess for the night.”

  One Who Flies bowed, and Speaks While Leaving and Mouse Road curtsied as Alejandro had instructed them.

  Squinting at One Who Flies, the old woman leaned toward her nephew and asked a question. Alejandro laughed, a little forcefully. “Doña Albina asks if you are a Catholic,” he said, embarrassed by the question.

  “No,” One Who Flies answered him. “My mother is a Presbyterian, and that is the faith in which I was raised.”

  The woman was quite displeased by the answer. Speaks While Leaving could not understand more than a few of her rapidly lisped words as Doña Albina railed, pointing to One Who Flies, pointing at Speaks While Leaving and Mouse Road. She used the word católico repeatedly in relation to One Who Flies, but for the women she used a different word—pagana—and she used it with disgust. Alejandro tried to quiet her diplomatically at first, then with glowers delivered between glances of apology for his guests.

  “Paganas, en mi casa,” she went on, and then berated Alejandro himself on some subject that involved his wife, Victoria.

  “¡Ya basta!”

  Birds flew up from the trees as if blown into the air by Alejandro’s shout. The old woman looked at him, jaw slack, eyes wide. He said something else, quietly, and though Speaks While Leaving could see that he would win the argument, she also knew that he would smart for it when word traveled back to his wife.

  Alejandro ushered them into the coolness of the house with a drove of apologies. “She is a very devout woman,” he said, and, “She is very old.” “She doesn’t have many guests,” he added, and finally ended with, “It is only for one night.”

  Speaks While Leaving did not understand how simply sitting all day in a box that bounced along the roads could make her so tired, but it had. Her companions were similarly affected, and when she and Mouse Road were shown to the room they would share, they did not care about the chair, the table, or the door that led to the small garden patio. They saw nothing but the bed piled high with quilts and coverings, and immediately they collapsed upon it, Blue Shell Woman between them. Together, they slept, the day’s dissipating warmth their only blanket. They awoke to find it full dark outside, and the room filled with the aromas of meat. By the light of a single candle, Speaks While Leaving could see that on the room’s simple table, food had been laid out, left for them by silent servants.

  “I do not think the old woman wants to see us for the evening meal,” Mouse Road said.

  Speaks While Leaving laughed. “That is fine with me.”

  The three of them kept to their small room at the end of the long house, eating a dinner of thick stew and brown bread that only brought on another wave of sleepiness. Even Blue Shell Woman seemed to be happy to return to sleep.

  In the night, her dreams wrestled with the events of recent days.

  She awoke to the grey light of dawn. Mouse Road and Blue Shell Woman still slept, a thin blanket pulled over them against the night’s chill. She slipped gently off the bed, made water in the small bucket the vé’hó’e supplied for the purpose, and then, grabbing her moccasins and a blue-and-white striped blanket that lay on a chair, she let herself out the narrow door that led to the small garden.

  The air was cool, almost cold, and made the skin on her arms turn to gooseflesh as she stopped to put on her moccasins. Bricks paved the patio in a circular whorl in the center of which was a small table and two chairs. Plants surrounded the small area and enclosing the whole were walls made of the same brick as the pavers. Vines climbed the walls of garden and house, tendrils grasping mortared joins. In one corner, a pillar of thorny canes sprouted up like a flowered geyser, the pink blooms unnaturally bright in the pre-dawn gloom. She walked over to smell one of the flowers and her nose and mouth were filled, honeyed, and her stomach growled, made hungry by the scent.

  To one side she saw a small gap in the enclosing wall. Squeezing through the ivy-thick opening, she emerged at the side of the house. The sky was still indeterminate, a starless grey that could mean either a clouded or brilliant day ahead. The dark trees that protected the house stood silent in the still air. Beyond them, birdsong beckoned.

  She chafed her arms to brush off the chill and wrapped her shoulders in the blanket’s dark blue stripes like a shawl before she headed down through the trees. As she left the trees behind, the vista widened, revealing the same broad landscape that had filled the carriage’s windows the previous day. Flat and unobstructed but for the infrequent top of a large and contorted tree, the twisting paths and waterways stretched out before her through the veil of a morning mist. Birds swooped through the mist, and she heard the morning squabbles of waterfowl.

  A well-worn path led toward the waters, and she headed down it. At the far side of the drive, she climbed the stile over a split-rail fence and walked into a world filled with movement and life.

  The pale path wound its way into the fen, twisting around pools and slow-moving waters thick with weed. Though it was chilly, the waters looked inviting. Grass stood tall near the waters, heads heavy with seed and stalks already paling with the approach of summer. In the distance, a stalk of white egrets waded through the dark water. Nearer, ducks paddled the streams on either side, but she did not know them with their curious colors and stripes and speckles.

  “Who are you all?” she asked them as she walked along. “Do you know any from my world?”

  No, they said to her, winking their golden eyes. Where is your world?

  She laughed at the ducks’ question. “I do not know,” she told them, “other than to say ‘west, across the water.’”

  The thought filled her with a sudden sadness, for never before had she not known where her home was. Never before had she not known how to go home. She pulled the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders.

  She came to a place where the path turned to skirt a larger pond. The waters were covered with tiny green leaves that shone in the growing light of dawn. The golden-eyed ducks paddled out into the pond, nibbling at the floating plants, leaving dark wakes in the still waters. There grew in the air a flow of warbles, whistles, and cackles that came from the shrouding mist until a swallow flew close, skimming over the pond and the low-lying land. Another joined it, and then another.
They were three, four, eight, fifteen. Suddenly Speaks While Leaving was surrounded by a swirl of the tiny, sharp-tailed birds, all sweeping, gyring, calling out in wild conversation.

  They flew past her as she walked, flitting near her feet, past her hips. She heard the flap of their wings near her head, and felt the wind of their passage on her face. They spun around her, white-breasted blurs, black-backed darts. When she stopped, they swept the pond’s surface, discomfiting the ducks, but when she took another step, they returned, eager for the gnats and bugs disturbed from the grasses at her feet. She walked along with this corona of flight surrounding her, following her. She held out a hand as she walked, and one of the birds lit there, its throat rapid with breath, its wide mouth agape, panting. A second landed on her shoulder. They stared at her with beaded eyes.

  “Do you know my world?” she asked them.

  No, they said between breaths. You are a stranger to us here.

  “¿Señora?” said a voice, and the swallows dispersed as quickly as autumn leaves in the wind.

  A man was poling along the waterway in a flat-bottomed boat. He was staring at her as if at a spirit made flesh. “Señora,” he said again, “¿Estás espíritu o estás real?”

  She did not know what he might have meant, and so she simply smiled and raised two fingers in the sign that meant friend. The man in the boat asked his question again, a little more urgently this time. Afraid she might have inadvertently broken some rule of this strange land, she turned and headed back into the mist, walking back the way she had come. It was just as well, she knew. Mouse Road would be awake by now, and Blue Shell Woman would need her attention as well. She only hoped that the man in the boat did not cause any difficulty.

  Back at the villa, she found Mouse Road and Blue Shell Woman at their ablutions. The little girl stood in a basin of warm, steamy water, holding herself upright by keeping a pudgy grip on Mouse Road’s arm while, with her other hand, Mouse Road bathed her. Blue Shell Woman smiled and gurgled as she saw her mother come in.