The Rider did not answer this, and for the rest of our trek, which could only have taken half an hour but seemed much longer, we kept silent as we led our ponies up the gently rising slope, seeing the earth grow poorer with every step and the plants more desiccated, until we came to an obstacle that seemed to represent the entire spirit of the place. A makeshift barrier of thorns about six feet high and spiny as a hedgehog.
I could not see how to go any farther, and for a moment even wondered whether we had been led into a trap, where Black Cloud was about to fall on us. Then without any warning the thorns began to shake, and to shudder, and eventually to open—showing a little scratchy gap through which we could pass in single file.
We found ourselves in a compound about fifty yards long and the same across, with thorn-walls bristling on every side and the central area trampled flat, which made for convenience of a sort, except the dust was very fine and hovered in the air like mist. Why so much dust? Because there were so many people. People churning and tramping even though it was the middle of the night, while others lay on blankets in the open, or peered at us from the dozen or more tepees that stood scattered about, or stood close to the boundaries that hemmed us in, with their hands pressed to their faces as though they could not believe what they saw.
There were about a hundred of them, every one smeared in ashes like our companions, and every one equally dejected. A few children tottered to their feet and stared; one or two dogs ran about; occasionally a thin face turned to inspect us, then cringed away again. But no one spoke, and no one rose to greet us.
“Why did they bring us here?” I asked Natty.
“You know the reason,” she said. “To make us welcome.”
“But this isn’t making us welcome.”
“It is custom,” the Rider broke in. “They have to ask us—it is their way.”
“Even though they’re so miserable?”
“Even though.”
As if they had understood my questions, and to prove the Rider right, our guides then pointed to a rail where we tethered our ponies, and led us toward the center of the compound. Here the largest of all the tepees had been erected, a dingy affair smeared with filth and charred by flames.
The Rider told us we should wait while the guides disappeared inside to fetch their chief. When we had listened to a few whispers hissing to and fro, the flaps opened to reveal an ancient half-skeleton, half-man, wearing a tunic of moth-eaten bearskin and a necklace of bear’s claws. A crown of drab brown feathers was perched on his head, and his face was coated with the same pale ash that covered the rest of his people.
As our three guides took their places—one on either side and one behind him—he pulled himself up as straight as possible and confronted each of us in turn; his face was very weather-beaten and leathery.
The sight of the Rider made him frown; Natty almost made him smile; and I made him curious, so his eyes passed quickly from my face to the satchel around my neck, which he then reached out and opened before I had the wit to prevent him. When he saw the necklace inside he half-lifted it, allowing a few of the silver pieces to slip between his fingers, then withdrew his hand and stared at me. What was he thinking? I could not tell; his face was expressionless. But I do not believe he recognized the necklace, except in the sense that he knew it was valuable.
At last he roused himself to speak—a greeting I assumed, but I only heard grunts and growls, with the Rider acting as my interpreter; he said the chief’s name was Talks to the Wind, but he had no gifts to welcome us.
“We know that,” I replied. “We have none of our own, and don’t expect any in return.” Then, with the Rider speaking one beat behind me, we continued as follows.
“Tell him we come in friendship,” I said.
“Talks to the Wind is grateful. He offers you his protection.”
I doubted this would be possible, because the whole tribe seemed so wretched and feeble, but I did not say so. Instead, I asked where they had come from.
“The east,” I heard. “Many days’ march.”
“Why?” I said.
“The White Man,” said Talks to the Wind.
“I am sorry,” I told him, and bowed my head. “We would not all do the same.”
Talks to the Wind nodded impassively.
“Where will you go?” I continued.
“Where we can.”
“And where is that?”
“Where we are allowed.”
“But the country is so big! Endless.”
“Each of us has his place. We belong in the east near the ocean. We do not belong here in the desert or anywhere to the west.”
Talks to the Wind rocked on his heels when he had finished speaking and stared into the darkness. I turned to the Rider. “You are from the east,” I said quietly. “Did you know these people already?”
“I know they exist,” he told me. “I left when they left—we took different ways.”
“But you are going back.”
“If I can.”
“And they cannot go back.”
“It seems so.”
The Rider fell silent then, and at the same moment Talks to the Wind raised a hand to show he had finished speaking as well, whereupon two of our guides helped him back into his tent, while the third led us away to another part of the compound.
Here was our place for the night: a patch of bare sandy ground where I lay down without a word, and immediately closed my eyes. More than sleep, I wanted to blind myself to everything around me—but could not. The voices of the camp continued in my head for a long time, as if I was still upright and awake. A child sobbing and a mother in tears. A dog whining. Wind hissing through the thorn-fence. Before these things disappeared and I shelved away into my dreams at last, I thought I had never heard such desolate sounds in the whole of my life, and would be grateful never to hear them again.
CHAPTER 24
Healing the Sick
Next morning I woke thinking we should leave Talks to the Wind as soon as possible, and return to the trail that would take us east to the river that Hoopoe had told us we must find. But when the sun rose above the barricade surrounding the camp, and the shadows of its thorns scratched my eyes open, we seemed bound to delay again—because most of the tribe were crowding around us. Why had this not happened the night before? As they continued staring and I saw how gaunt they were, with their eyes half-closed and their bellies swollen by hunger, I thought they must simply have felt too stupefied to bother. But when we had finished our breakfast and wandered through the camp for a while to shake off our audience, I knew there was another reason as well.
The place was strewn with relics—offerings of some kind, I guessed, and all very grotesque. Rabbit skeletons dangling on poles. Desert foxes hollowed out by the wind. Collections of feathers, stuffed into leather bags and left on little platforms. Skins, stripped from small creatures such as mice and rats, then twisted together to make ropes and stretched between poles, or draped around the doors of tepees. Matted balls of hair, which were collected on a large red blanket, and laid on the ground beside the tepee belonging to Talks to the Wind.
“What are they?” I asked the Rider, but he only told us we must present ourselves to the chieftain in order to make our farewell. Then, when he had led us to the tepee, he surprised me by putting one arm around my waist and the other around Natty so that he could whisper to us both in confidence.
“Sickness,” he said. “That is the explanation for all these things.”
“Sickness?” Natty repeated anxiously. “You mean fever?”
The Rider nodded.
“Shouldn’t we leave at once, then?” she said.
“We cannot,” said the Rider. “We have something we must do first.”
“What sort of thing?” I asked; suddenly I felt as alarmed as Natty, with the dusty air thickening in my throat.
“I did not see last night. It is not just custom, bringing us here. It is something more. They need our
help.”
“What help?” I asked.
The Rider let his hands drop away and stared straight ahead, as though he could see through the walls of the tepee and envisage the scene inside. In the pause that followed, everything that had previously seemed mysterious about the camp began to make sense to me. These famished men with their sunken eyes and ashy hair. These women with their sallow faces and slumped shoulders. These children with their pot bellies and flies in their eyes. They were not just hungry. They were suffering another sort of hurt as well, and had invited us here because they thought we might heal it. We were not only guests but physicians.
I turned to the Rider and found him looking at me very gravely. “Mister Jim?” he asked. “Have you finished what you are thinking?
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
“We are all thinking the same thing,” the Rider said; then he bent down and opened the flaps of the tent, holding them apart so the three of us could enter together.
I stepped into twilight—thick, swimming twilight scented heavily with sage—and paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust. There was Talks to the Wind, wearing the same moth-eaten furs as yesterday and the same sad little crown, sitting on a mat of woven grass. What else? Dangling from the crown of the tepee: charms made of feathers and wood and even scraps of metal. Scalps too, dried up and crinkled like seaweed, one with its ears still attached. To the right of Talks to the Wind: a bench with a bowl of corn, uneaten, and half a dozen clay pots, some with steam drifting from their mouths. On the ground: dark brown rugs patterned with creamy lines, which made the air swirl around me although it was perfectly still.
And at the center of the tepee, an elderly woman cushioned on a deep bed of blankets. Dead, I thought—then at a second glance not dead, but sick. Very sick. A narrow face with graying hair in a plait. The plait coiled on her head and stuck through with a wooden pin. Her eyes wide open but seeing nothing, gazing into the crown of the tepee where sunlight soaked through like rust.
“Come,” said the Rider, leading me forward; I knew at once what he wanted.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Natty, who gave me a baffled look and shrugged her shoulders.
“He does not want your sorry,” the Rider said, nodding toward Talks to the Wind as he sat down beside us, keeping his eyes fixed on my face.
“I can’t help him,” I said. “I wish I could but I can’t. I have no medicine.”
“You have your medicine,” the Rider insisted, as though he had not heard me.
“I don’t,” I told him. “I wish I did.”
“That is not true,” said the Rider. “You can heal.” He spoke very stubbornly, as if he was making a plain statement of fact, and reached out to touch the satchel around my neck. “Here it is,” he said.
I looked down at his fingers, long and thin with skin so supple they almost seemed to shine. “How will this help?” I asked.
“You will find a way,” he said, and laid a hand on my shoulder, drawing me forward until I was standing beside the woman’s head, close enough to touch her.
“This is Fire Wife,” he said gently. “Wife to Talks to the Wind.”
I was not expected to answer, only to look at the thin face and the cracked lips; at the veins pulsing beneath the gray temples; at the specks of sand in the corners of her eyes, and paler sand-trails creeping into her ears, which showed where her tears had run down.
When I had seen all these things, and felt them weigh on me, a chant began outside the tepee, regular as a heartbeat.
“Mister Jim,” said the Rider, speaking even more quietly now.
But I did not need his encouragement any more. I reached into my satchel, removed the necklace, and slipped the cord around my neck. The slim oblongs of silver clicked as they settled, and the torchlight scattered their brightness into the half-light around me. Then I lifted my hands and laid them on the woman’s forehead, one upon the other.
Natty thought I was about to press down and gasped, “Gently, Jim, gently!” I did not answer. I kept my hands on the woman’s forehead, feeling its heat enter my fingers, and asked the Lord to bless her. Then I said His prayer—“Our father, which art in heaven”—and heard Natty join in behind me, her voice growing steadily louder until we reached the end—“the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen”—when I lifted my hands and made the sign of the cross. Three times. Once on the woman’s forehead. Once on her mouth. And once above her heart.
It took two minutes or less—and by the time I had finished, the chanting outside the tepee had risen to a crescendo, so the walls actually seemed to vibrate. Talks to the Wind remained as he was, his eyes sliding away from my face and fastening on his Fire Wife again. The Rider was also still as a stone, with his head down and his hands clasped.
Then the chanting stopped as though the people knew my healing was over, and my hands returned to touch Fire Wife on her forehead again. Her skin was much cooler now, and softer. Instantly—like that. I felt it and I believed it. So did Natty, when she came to stand at my shoulder. So did the Rider, when he lifted his head and saw the change in her. So did Talks to the Wind, when he climbed painfully to his feet and clapped his hands together.
As for Fire Wife, I would like to say her journey back to us was very easy. But it was not. She did not look into my face and smile. She did not turn her head to find her husband, or stretch out to clutch his hand. She did not speak. She merely blinked, and blinked again, then writhed and trembled so desperately that all four of us had to hold her still, in order to prevent her from heaving off her bed and crashing onto the ground.
What had she felt, I wondered, as she burst out from her dark underworld? Surprise. Terror. Disbelief. Amazement. Regret. Regret most of all. A moment before, she had been ghosting through a country without suffering. Now she felt sadness again and remembered the reasons for it.
Yet her distress did not last. As Talks to the Wind continued to hold her still, and spoke to her in his own language, and I suppose told her the story of the miracle we had seen, and pointed to the necklace I was still wearing, she began to quieten and breathe more easily, and at length even smiled to herself or perhaps at me. This smile was so radiant it brightened her whole face, and remained in her eyes when it had faded from her mouth.
Now it was my turn to feel a sort of paralysis. I could not respond at all. I stepped away. I told her (which she did not understand) that what I had done was nothing.
This, despite the cheering and shouting that now started outside the tepee. Despite the Rider, who clapped me on the back very proudly. Despite Talks to the Wind, who told me that I was his son, and embraced me, and held me so close I almost choked on the mustiness in his bearskin. Despite Natty, who I would also like to say was pleased by what she had seen—but cannot.
For when all these congratulations were finished, and I had slipped the necklace back into my satchel again, she took me aside to speak in private.
“You see?” she whispered.
“Natty—” I began, but she interrupted me.
“You’ve made her fall in love with you.”
This was so surprising I could only stammer at her. “That’s ridiculous! She’s grateful, that’s all, she’s not in love with me.”
Natty brushed this aside. “Either that or they think you’re a god. Like it was with White Feather.”
“He certainly did not think that; he couldn’t think of anything.”
Natty ignored this as well. “Whatever sickness this woman has,” she said, “we must get away from it as fast as possible.”
“We must—” I said, but got no further because Talks to the Wind stepped between us, and took hold of me, and made me understand that I must come outside with him now, so he could show me to the people and tell them what I had done.
I followed him as he wanted. I stooped through the doorway of his tepee and I faced the people, and I heard their shouts and the clattering din as they banged their spears together. When I
held out my hands to show I wanted to thank them, and not to receive their thanks, they did not understand, and only cheered me more loudly.
CHAPTER 25
The Thicket
In happier times we might have looked for feasts and dancing—for songs to celebrate our miracle. But partly at my insistence we did no such thing; Fire Wife remained in her tepee, dozing to recover her strength, and the rest of the tribe dismantled the offerings they had strewn around the camp, thinking they had now done their work.
Natty was very pleased by this lack of fuss, and wanted us to be on our way immediately. The Rider, however, persuaded her this would be discourteous and insisted we must stay a day longer, because there was no danger of our becoming sick ourselves unless misery was infectious. By the time it was sunset again, and we had smoked a pipe with Talks to the Wind, and then another pipe, and heard his stories of the land they had lost, and how they lost it, I thought the Rider was wrong. “Our lives are broken.” These were the words that Talks to the Wind spoke to me before we turned aside to sleep, and they settled in me as definitely as any illness has ever done. “I am tired,” he said, “and my heart is sad. I will fight no more forever.”
Others before me have written about sorrows such as these, about the ruin of the whole Indian nation, and it is not my business to record them in greater detail here. But in case I seem unfeeling, let me also remember the words that Talks to the Wind said next morning, when the Rider told us we had done our duty to custom, and could now be on our way. We had already received our instructions about where we would find our trail again; we had been embraced by Talks to the Wind and embraced him in return; I had shaken the hand of Fire Wife as politely as any English doctor; and now the warriors of the camp had pulled open the gate in their thorny barricade to bid us farewell. I thought Talks to the Wind might follow this with a final ceremony of thanks. Instead, he straightened his battered old headdress and looked out over the stony country.
“I saw the White Man,” he said, pitching his words into the emptiness. “I saw the White Man and was told he was my enemy. I could not kill him as I would kill a wolf or bear; yet like those things he came upon me. Horses, cattle and fields he took from me. Still he gave me his hand in friendship; I took it; while taking it, he held a snake in the other; his tongue was forked; he lied to us and stung us. I asked for a small piece of this land, enough to plant and enough to live upon; in the far south of our country, a place where I could scatter the ashes of my people, a place where I could lay my wife and child. This was not granted me. Now I am here. I feel the iron in my heart.”
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