The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “Good morning, Little Pot Belly,” she said, coming to help bathe her child. “Aren’t you in a good mood this morning?”

  “I am glad she is,” Mouse Road said. “Everyone else in the house seems to be rather sour.”

  “We shall be on our way soon enough.”

  “And I’m glad of that, too.”

  They bathed the little girl and played games with her nose until she was clean. As Mouse Road took her niece off in a cotton towel to get dry, Speaks While Leaving tossed the basin water out into the garden greenery and then took the ewer to ask for more warm water. She opened the door, seeking one of the servants, and spied two of them down at the branching of the corridor, whispering in earnest gossip. She went toward them, hoping the pitcher would make her desire clear enough—for none of the household spoke the Trader’s Tongue—but so deliberate were they that they did not notice her approach. She cleared her throat.

  Startled out of their conference, the two women clung to each other for support. Seeing her, they immediately touched their heads, chests, and shoulders in the warding sign of their faith. Speaks While Leaving presented the empty pitcher to them, but they only stared at her.

  “Pardon,” she said to them, holding out the pitcher. “Puis-je avoir encore de l’eau, s’il vous plaît?”

  The women warded themselves again and bobbed in quick curtsies. One, understanding either her words or gestures, reached out for the ewer, taking it with tentative hands as from a dangerous creature. The maid started off to fill it, leaving her companion standing there in the hallway, staring. Coming back, she grabbed the other woman’s sleeve and pulled her along. The second maid followed, though her gaze clung to Speaks While Leaving as long as possible.

  “Merci,” Speaks While Leaving said absently, not knowing what to make of the women’s odd behavior. She went back to the room. “They are acting strangely today,” she said to Mouse Road. “But not sour-faced so much as, well, as a little crazy.”

  Mouse Road shrugged. “Who can say of vé’hó’e? They never seem to know how to act.”

  It was an old adage, but generally accurate. In this odd house, in this odd land, it seemed particularly so.

  The water came, carried by another wide-eyed serving woman who smiled and stared at Speaks While Leaving as she curtsied her way to the dry sink to fill the water basin. Hands free, she made that same, four-pointed warding but, with a smile still on her face and her eyes still fixed on Speaks While Leaving, made her way out the door.

  “I think they are all simple in the head,” Mouse Road said.

  “I think you may be right.”

  It was a short time later that there was a knock on the door and One Who Flies and Alejandro entered. Speaks While Leaving saw her friend’s look linger on Mouse Road, and she was glad to see that some of his old affections seemed to be returning. Perhaps with those affections would come some of his old strength as well.

  “The house is in an uproar,” One Who Flies said. “What have you been doing?”

  The two women glanced at each other, then shrugged.

  “Nothing,” Mouse Road said.

  “Have you been in here all morning?” Alejandro asked.

  “Not all morning,” Speaks While Leaving said. “I went for a walk, earlier.”

  “Out in the marsh?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed to the blue-striped blanket on the chair. “With that?”

  “Yes. Was I not supposed to?”

  “What happened out there?”

  Speaks While Leaving did not understand their concern. “I went for a walk...It was cold, and I took the blanket. I walked along the water’s edge; I...looked at the plants and... listened to the trees and... spoke to some of the birds there.”

  “You what?” Alejandro asked sharply.

  It was a thing she had not expected Alejandro to understand, and looked to One Who Flies for support. “There were birds all around, in the water, flying around me as I walked—a few even landed on my arm. I...I spoke with them.”

  “You spoke to the birds?” Alejandro asked.

  Her embarrassment gave way to annoyance. “Yes. Haven’t you ever listened to the world around you? And if you listen, why can’t you speak to it? I was lonely, and I was thinking of home. There were many birds around me, and I asked them if they had ever been to the land of the People.”

  One Who Flies walked to the window, taking in her words. “And had they?” he asked in the language of the People.

  “No,” she said. “But I didn’t talk to very many. I wanted to ask the egrets but, this man came along in a boat and—”

  He began to laugh.

  “One Who Flies,” Alejandro said. “This is not a laughing matter.”

  He waved a hand as he laughed, moving to a chair to sit. “Oh, but it is. It is.” He laughed some more and when he looked up at Speaks While Leaving, he began to laugh again.

  Speaks While Leaving put her hands on her hips. “I am beginning to get angry.”

  One Who Flies got his humor under control. He looked at Alejandro. “She does not understand—”

  “I would like to,” Speaks While Leaving told him.

  He wiped his eyes as his laughter subsided. “You, see, my dear, sweet lady, you have created quite a stir.”

  “How?” she asked. “I only went for a walk.”

  “The man in the boat?” he said. “He came back with the most incredible story. He says that when he was out there, a woman appeared out of the mist. She looked like one of the houseguests, but she was dressed all in blue and white, and was surrounded by a swirling cloud of swallows, like a halo of sorts. Some of the birds had landed on her hand, and the woman spoke to them. And when the man asked, ‘Are you spirit or are you flesh?’ she only answered with her hand held up in benediction.” He held up his hand, two fingers extended upward in the sign that among the allied tribes meant friend. “And then she disappeared into the mist.”

  Speaks While Leaving still did not understand. Other than the man misunderstanding the sign she had made, it was precisely what had happened. Her perplexity must have shown on her face.

  “He thinks you were the Virgin Mary,” One Who Flies explained. “The Mother of God, of their god. The mother of the vé’ho’e god who died and lived again.”

  “Me?” Speaks While Leaving asked.

  One Who Flies signed with his hand. You.

  Now she laughed. She looked at Mouse Road, who still held Blue Shell Woman wrapped in a soft towel. “They think I am a spirit mother,” she said, and they both laughed.

  The three of them laughed together. Only Alejandro remained snappish. “You have to understand,” he said quite seriously. “These are a very religious people, especially the country folk, and they take such things very seriously. Word of this is spreading.”

  “Yes?” she said. “And how is that any matter to us?”

  “It matters to us, because word of this will travel with us. It may outpace us, as a matter of fact. We must be careful to neither encourage nor discourage it.”

  “Why?”

  “It is delicate,” he said. “If we encourage it, we are being disrespectful of the Catholic faith, using this misunderstanding to gain an advantage. We will lose credibility with the people and thus with those who govern them.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, we cannot deny what actually occurred, and if we discourage it too strenuously, the perception is that we are treating the possibility of such a vision as impossible, and again, we seem disrespectful of many other such visions that fill Catholic history.”

  Speaks While Leaving sighed. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

  Alejandro thought about it. “I don’t know, exactly. Though for a start, I’d suggest you curtail your conversations with the local wildlife.”

  The carriage provided by the Señora de Baca was larger than the one Alejandro had hired the day before, and so their traveling promised to be more comfortable by a similar margin. As they prepared to
embark, Speaks While Leaving turned to their hostess. The old woman’s demeanor was less acerbic today, more somber as she regarded her departing guests.

  “I thank you for your hospitality,” she said, and Alejandro translated her words from the swallowed tones of the Trader’s Tongue into the lisped staccato of the Iron Shirts. “It was a pleasant rest.”

  The old woman, her withered skin nearly as pale as her white hair, regarded Speaks While Leaving with a directness that would have been an insult among the People. With the members of her staff looking on with eyes widened in near-adoration, Doña Albina considered her words carefully. “Blessings upon you,” she said, “and good fortune in the tasks that lie ahead of you.”

  “May the great spirit watch over you as well,” Speaks While Leaving said, and then turned toward the carriage. Many of the servants, she saw, made the sign of their faith as she passed by them.

  Alejandro kissed his aunt on both cheeks, and climbed inside the carriage as well. The driver’s whip cracked, the team of horses stepped against their collars, and the iron-rimmed wheels creaked into motion. As the carriage turned around to head back down the drive, the staff waved: a vee of men and women, in aprons and working clothes, ranked to either side of their mistress, hands raised in farewell. Speaks While Leaving liked the look of them all—a small community of folk living on the edge of this grand, alien marshland—and she waved back, bidding them and the villa goodbye.

  The carriage rocked its way up the slopes to meet the rising sun, and within a few hands of time, they were rolling into a town filled with smoke, shouts, and the bustle of people, carts, horses, and donkeys. They debarked at a long, low building where the air, thick with the smell of machines, was filled with so much sound that it made Speaks While Leaving wince. She tried to protect Blue Shell Woman from its harsh edge, but the barrage of metallic shrieks, thunders, and percussive clanks could not be turned away and the baby added her wail to the din.

  “This way,” Alejandro said, leading them into the press of people. With his tall stature and imperious eye, he cut a swath through the throng and One Who Flies ushered them after him, the servants with their luggage following behind. They walked through a shadowed, echoing hall and then back out into the sharp noonday light where Speaks While Leaving halted at the sight before her.

  She had heard of the iron roads the vé’ho’e built across the land, and of the huge, black beasts of iron that rode along them, but she had never seen one before now. She had always imagined them to be dark things, massive like boulders, but this creation stunned her. It breathed.

  At the end of a line of cars, it crouched, steaming and breathing and hissing as it waited to be released. It was a living thing—but a dead thing, too—and it petrified her. She stopped, unwilling to move forward, unwilling to approach farther until One Who Flies returned to her and, with a gentle hand on her arm and a whispered word of encouragement, drew her toward it. When they settled into their compartment and the door was closed, blocking out the press of sound and vibration, she finally allowed herself to take an easy breath.

  She had just gotten Blue Shell Woman quiet again when, with a jolt and a crunch, the train started off. She looked out the window, staring at the world as it began to slide past, and told herself it was all perfectly safe.

  It’s just like riding a whistler, she told herself.

  But it wasn’t. When one rode a whistler, you felt the beast beneath you, felt its muscles flex and its bones move. You felt the wind in your face, smelled the grass through which you sped, and saw the land ahead of you.

  This was different. It was like being inside and outside at the same time, like being still and in motion at once. The seat on which she perched vibrated and shuddered with the clacking of the wheels. She waited for everything to break apart, but it didn’t, though it swayed and bucked as they picked up speed. It was a bilious experience, and the only good thing she could see in it was when the rhythm of the rails lulled Blue Shell Woman into a happy slumber, but that one good thing was enough, and slowly, Speaks While Leaving allowed herself to unclench.

  By morning’s end, they had passed up out of the hills and entered a land that made the strangeness of Las Marismas seem as familiar as the banks of the Red Paint River. They were in a tableland where the heat was already oppressive. Despite the dust, they slid the windows down to allow the air some room to move, and Speaks While Leaving draped a cloth over her shoulder and arm as a shade for Blue Shell Woman. Outside, the land to either side was a sere, dun-colored waste of plains and low, undulating hills. Tough-leafed shrubs grew in dark patches, breaking the monotony of the view between the roadbed and the mountainous horizon, and here and there a tree stood up against the sun’s tyranny. For hours, Speaks While Leaving saw little more than cracked earth, dry grass, rocks, and the shimmer of the heat above the baking ground.

  “This is a harsh land,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “The deserts of our southlands have more life than I see here.”

  “This,” Alejandro said, “is La Extremadura. It is a tough land that breeds tough people. Most of the men who conquered the New World came from here.”

  Speaks While Leaving could understand why. Growing up in a land like this would make a man angry enough to subjugate anyone who got in his way.

  La Extremadura, as Alejandro had named it, went on for hours, making the end of their first day and filling most of their second. They passed through stretches of land where dark-headed trees spread their branches to create pools of hot shade. Some of the trees had black trunks, while others were grey, red, and even bright orange.

  “Cork trees,” Alejandro explained. “The farmers strip off the thick bark. The brightest trunks are those most recently harvested. It takes many years for it to grow back, so the harvest rotates from tree to tree over the course of nearly a decade.”

  Speaks While Leaving knew of such harvesting; and had done some herself, taking strips of black willow bark as medicine, or making needle pouches out of steamed birchbark. Ten years was a long time to scar a tree in such a way, but by the size of some of the cork trees she saw, the practice had not hurt them.

  As Alejandro explained the world beyond the window, One Who Flies translated for Mouse Road. In turn, the young woman asked questions about everything that Alejandro had left out of his explanations. What is that plant? That bird with yellow wings? Look at that bright red rock! What is that man out there doing? Is that tiny building his home?

  But while Mouse Road peppered the men with her inquiries, Speaks While Leaving merely stared at the trees and the land around them. She had never been to a place where she could not identify a single plant or animal. Not only could she not find her way home from this place, but she would not know how to survive here. Left alone in this land, she would not know what plants could be eaten, or which should be avoided. She would not know where to find water, or the best places to set a snare. While the foreignness of the land excited Mouse Road, it frightened Speaks While Leaving. She felt a gripping within her breast, a small but insistent chill on her heart.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the land, wanting to hear its spirit as she often listened at home. She listened for the spirit wind that blew across the prairie, and the spirit heart that beat strong like the heavy steps of a buffalo bull, deep within the world. She listened for the tread of the Thunder Beings, for the hum of nevé-stanevóo’o, the four powers that protected the corners of the world. She listened for the voices of Coyote, of Bear, of Eagle, Hawk, and Blackbird. She listened for the hum of Dragonfly, the peep of Frog, the song of Cricket.

  But all that came to her ear was a panting breath, as if the land itself was tired out. Knowing this only made her feel farther removed from her homeland. Even in Las Marismas, she had been able to hear the land whisper, but in this place the land had no voice, and the farther into it they traveled, the quieter the land became. Was there nothing of the spirit powers in this land? Or did it simply speak in a language tha
t she could not understand, could not even hear? Was it like this in all vé’hó’e lands? Was this why they were so different? Was this why vé’hó’e did not understand about the earth they trod? Was it not that they ignored the voice of the land they inhabited, but that, in the lands of their creation, there had never been a voice to hear?

  Her thoughts made her want to weep, and her dread grew. Blue Shell Woman fretted, sensing her mother’s distress, and Speaks While Leaving worked to control her emotions.

  I must think of the People, she told herself. I am here for them, to bring One Who Flies before the Queen of the Iron Shirts, so that we may build a greater alliance. To protect the People. Surely a few lonely moons in a lonely land are worth that?

  They stopped their second night in a small village and stepped down onto the graveled bed with muscles made sore from hard seats and hours of confinement.

  Villages in this harsh land all seemed to be memories of the same thought, each with a small circular plaza that was the nexus of business and attention for the inhabitants. Speaks While Leaving, Mouse Road, and Blue Shell Woman drew long stares from the local folk as they followed Alejandro to the inn where they ate a meal and were met with a combination of servility and disparagement as the ownership dealt separately with Alejandro and his guests. They were shown to their rooms, where Speaks While Leaving slept heavily, ensnared by dreams of fiery lands and orange trees where dark-eyed people stared at her every move.

  By morning, however, the change had set in. Word had spread, from the footman that accompanied them to the porter who handled their baggage and thence to the stationmaster, from the stationmaster to the smith to the shopkeeper, and finally around to the innkeeper. Walking back to the station, suddenly it was Speaks While Leaving who was given the greatest deference. She and her daughter were greeted with smiles and nods. Women would kiss their fingers and touch her sleeve. Men would remove their hats and, covering their hearts, bow to her as she passed. Children stared at her in awe, their eyes as dark and shiny as their glossy black hair.

  Alejandro spoke to the footman on several occasions, requesting that he refrain from spreading tales, but the man shrugged off his suggestions.