by Ben Reeder
“Help me make a litter for him,” Toh Yah said. The swamper ran into the woods and came back a few minutes later with a pair of long saplings. He trimmed the larger branches off, and they trussed it up in an X shape before stretching a blanket across the lower half of the X. With their travois complete, they laid Caleb on it, and tied it to the horse. Toh Yah turned to Joe.
“You did the right thing in coming to me. Now go and drink the white man’s poison; die the white man’s death. That is the path you have chosen.”
Joe nodded and went back toward the approaching lights of the townsfolk, leaving Toh Yah to take care of the strange white man.
“Now, let us deal with you, Nayainazgana.”
Chapter 7
The first thing Caleb remembered lay in the past, a moment of jotting down figures to give to a runner before turning to look down on a small group of men and women crouched behind a wagon. A moment of hoping that the runner would make it back before the Confederate raiders made their charge, followed by the dread of knowing he wouldn’t. The wood grip of his Spencer rifle in his hand registered in his thoughts, then blackness sucked him under again.
He surfaced again in the present, though how he knew that, he couldn’t say. An old man stood over him, chanting and waving something out of sight. Four stripes of fire burned across his chest, and he saw wood and adobe of a hut. For a moment, the world went white, and he thought he was in the Verge. Another figure stood behind the old man, younger, but with eyes that held the weight of one much older. Then the world returned to normal, and the chanting continued as Caleb fell back into the swirl of dreams from which he’d emerged.
Another moment of disorientation, and he found himself walking once more in the past, this time in a cloistered hallway, the sounds of low, droning chants a balm to a war-weary soul. Serene voices lifted to Heaven in worship and praise. Then once again, into the dizzying maelstrom of near-oblivion.
Darkness gave way once more to light, and the old man beating a rhythm on a drum, chanting, his voice weaving through the beat. And again, the light became unbearably bright, casting the world in negative. A coyote sat across from the old man, and Caleb knew that an entire conversation took place in the heartbeat that passed. Then the lodge returned to normal, and Caleb slid back into chaos. Only the chaos didn’t rob him of consciousness.
This time, he sees another place, a place he has not yet visited but still recognizes, familiar as his childhood home.
“Greetings Brother Ephraim,” the familiar stranger will say. “I am-”
“Mistaken,” Caleb will tell the newcomer. “I no longer use that name.”
“Someone still does,” the newcomer will say. The future recedes, and he slid back into the present, then further, into the past. A round, smug face surfaced, and he was in Pittsburgh again. In an office that seemed too small, with a man who took up more space than he ought to. A round face leered at him, and opened its mouth to speak. But Caleb had already heard the excuses, the justifications...the lies. There could never be enough guilt in those memories, especially not over that first punch. Or the dozens that followed; there was never enough guilt over the pulped feel of the man’s head under his fists. Too much anger followed him through the back alleys and side streets of Pittsburgh, too much pride in what had seemed like the right thing at the time.
He rose into the present, gasping for air, the world brighter than white around him, the all too familiar sound of the Verge surrounding him, now a hiss, now a ringing note, now the silence deeper than Death. In stark reverse, he saw the old man, and Knew his name, Walks by The River. He Knew he was a singer of the Dine’, a hatáli. At his elbow sat One who was not a Coyote. Then Not Coyote licked his wounds, and some of the black tendrils that had dug into his chest retreated from the healing warmth of that touch. Not Coyote sneezed, and black droplets scattered. It licked at his face, and seemed to smile, if a Coyote could ever be said to stop smiling.
“I taste the blood of our people in this river,” Not Coyote said. “It is past time for you to do what needs to be done.”
“Then I’ll drink of that and leave the rest,” Walks By The River said. “Be patient, I’m doing it as it should be done, even if the rest of his blood is polluted.”
“I wasn’t just talking to you, friend,” Not Coyote laughed. Another figure appeared at Caleb’s hip, a tall man with strong limbs and fierce eyes. He raked Caleb with his gaze, the weight of his attention pressing into him like a mountain on his chest. Not Coyote growled, “He’s not perfect; none are. Stop balking, and see it done, elder brother. I grow tired of carrying this burden on my own. Or are you afraid?” The fierce gaze became a scowl, and the man held up his hand, gripping Eagle feathers in his fist. He took one feather and drew it across the wound. The black faded where the feather touched, but the pain became worse. A second feather brushed across his chest, and the pain intensified further. The third elicited a howl of agony as it caressed his skin. Suddenly the pain became unbearable relief, and he sobbed with the sudden change.
The tall man took the final feather in his hand and held it over Caleb’s body. Gone was the disdain and anger he had seen before. In its place was an eagerness. “Let us begin, little brother. We have much to do,” Caleb heard his own voice say, and the man plunged the feather into his belly.
Silence came then, just for a moment. Caleb drifted, not at peace, but tugged in enough directions at the same time by other forces that no single influence held sway. The darkness held no terrors, just the normal void behind the eyelids of any mortal being. He was warm, there was no pain beyond bearing, and the world, if not silent, had become quiet enough to ignore.
Caleb slept.
Chapter 8
Toh Yah hung his head while the white man’s breathing slowed to the normal rhythm of sleep, the first time in five days either of them found any respite from their respective labors. The white man, struggling simply to survive, and Toh Yah, to keep two peoples safe from yee naaldlooshii. Caleb Archer’s fight, for the moment, was done. He would live. For Toh Yah, only a brief rest had been granted. He slumped forward and closed his eyes, The Blessing Way and Enemy Way complete, his throat dry and rough from chanting through each night.
Time slowed to his perception, the scant one hour of rest he’d granted himself becoming as effective as twice that length with the Healing Song that ran through his thoughts. Muscles relaxed and unknotted, and the aches of hours of exertion faded through means Toh Yah had been shown but barely understood. He knew that his muscles made the very thing that told him he was tired, and it pooled in the blood around them like poison, acting like a stinging nettle to the muscles that made it. When he rested, he knew it was slowly washed away by fresh blood. The Holy People had revealed that to the Dine’ long ago. The Healing Song helped him wash those mild poisons away faster, and restore the balance within his body.
When the hour passed, Toh Yah opened his eyes. No bleary eyed awakening was this, but the return to clarity of a man who knew how to rest. The sound of Caleb Archer’s breathing was still steady and strong; the fire of his life burned bright around him, made more vivid by the touch of the Spirit World. The singer nodded, satisfied that his charge wouldn’t come to harm by his absence. He got to his feet and pushed aside the blanket over the door. Father Sun’s light poured in through the eastern facing opening.
He was not the first to stir in the morning light, and the cooking fires of the Navajo settlement brought the scent of smoke into the air, bringing with it also the smell of food. Frybread, mutton, sumac berry and venison all competed for his attention. He stopped by one of the fires.
“Yá'át'ééh, Toh Yah,” the woman cooking at the fire said.
“Yá'át'ééh, Doli,” the singer replied.
“How long since you ate?” she asked with a warm smile. She took a piece of mutton and a piece of flatbread and handed them to him. “You look like a stalk of grass!”
“Maybe you should feed me to your sheep!” Toh Yah
replied. He held up the still sizzling mutton and steaming bread. “Ahéhee' Tʼáá íiyisíí ahéheeʼ,” he offered in thanks for the food. By the time he reached his horse, the mutton and flatbread were both finished, and he took a drink from the waterskin hanging by the corral before he slipped it over his shoulder and pulled himself onto the back of a pinto he liked and rode out toward the edge of the settlement.
The sun was a few handspans into the sky when he reached the first of his protective wards. It was still strong, so he moved on, stopping every mile or so at the next, until he found the one he was searching for.
This one was weak, the corn in the pouch turned black and rotten by the attack of the skinwalker. He built a small fire and dumped the blackened corn onto the blazing twigs. His nose wrinkled at the stench, but soon the smoke was clean again, and he let it carry his voice in the Blessing Way for the ward. The last of the charred sticks was smoldering by the time he completed the Enemy Way, and the ward blazed with power once more.
He pressed on, completing the circuit when the sun was high overhead. The wards around Mendoza Springs were next, and he checked them not out of fondness for the white people, but because he knew that the first place they would lay any blame for anything they couldn’t explain on the Dine’. And the white men had a habit of bringing guns and fire when they didn’t understand things. Especially when the things they didn’t understand killed people and livestock.
Afternoon was fading into evening when he finished with the third weakened ward, and the last of the putrid smoke drifted away on the winds. This one and the last two were close enough to see each other, and all of them were on the same hill as the parsonage and the cemetery. He turned his horse toward home and urged it forward with a couple of clicks of his tongue.
Night had fallen by the time he had returned his horse to the corral and seen to its care and feeding. Not surprisingly, the white man still slept when he moved the blanket aside. His eyes moved under his lids, but his face was still serene; signs of a Healing dream, not unusual after so long a ceremony. Toh Yah sat with his legs crossed and waited. After a time, the white man awakened.
“Where am I?” he asked, looking around the hogan. He sat up slowly, one hand on his chest, the other supporting his weight. “Did I die?” The old singer Looked at him, and saw that half of his aura still fell in the Spirit Realm.
“Almost,” Toh Yah said. “You’re in my hogan.”
“I...know you,” Caleb said. “Toh Yah...it means Walks by Water...no, Walks by the River. You’re...a singer? How do I know these things?”
“You’ve been unconscious for seven days. For the last five days, I’ve performed the Healing Songs over you, to remove the taint of yee naaldlooshii from your wounds.”
“The other Indian, Joe, he said that, too,” Caleb said. When he saw the boys and when that thing showed up. What is yee naladoshi?”
“A thing so strange to you that your clumsy tongue can not even say it.” Toh Yah said. “White men have no word for what it really is. It is a creature made from hate for an enemy so strong that it consumes one’s mind, and lets a spirit of hate into the heart. It consumes the soul of the man who calls out to it, and it feeds on his hate, so that it hates what he does, but with more focus. More strength.”
“Who does this person hate that much in Mendoza Springs?” Caleb asked.
“Who?” the singer asked, shaking his head. “There is no ‘who.’ He hates the White Man, and every place he calls his own.”
“It sounds like...you agree with him.”
Toh Yah’s shoulders slumped and his features seemed to age. “Agree...no. I do not agree with him. But I understand him. I know his heart, and I know where he learned to hate like he does.”
“Then why don’t you try to change his mind?”
“Because he learned from those who worship hate, whose very God hates them so that they cower in terror of his damnation. He learned to hate from the White Man.”
“You’re wrong,” Caleb said, shaking his head. “God loves us all.”
“No, Caleb, your God does not love the Red Man, because we do not even exist in your God’s eyes. The book you carry might say your God loves all, but the one you have made in your image orders you to go out and shape all people in your image, or destroy them. You made treaties with us, forced us to let you protect us, then let others raid our herds. The men who were supposed to protect us raided and killed our people. And then, when we got tired of your lies, you forced us to move to a place that was too small, where our enemies already camped. We took the Long Walk, and many died. You did worse to other People in the past. But you call us savages, you try to erase us and make us into White People.”
“You make us sound like this yee nalodoshi,” Caleb said. His cheeks grew warm as his temper rose.
“No, the White Man hates everything and everyone, even himself. Yee naaldlooshii only hates one thing. It hates it so much that it infects those it kills with its hate. Even a wound from it can infect its victim, and if it does, another is born. Yee naaldlooshii can take the forms of its victims, so White Men call it the skinwalker, and confuse it with the monsters of other Peoples.”
“Why tell me all of this?” Caleb said. “I don’t understand.”
“Because, Caleb Archer, you have to fight it. You are one of the Hero Twins, Nayainazgana, Slayer of Monsters.”
“I was an only child,” Caleb laughed.
“It is like talking to a child, only a child knows he is ignorant,” Toh Yah said, shaking his head. “The spirit of the elder twin is in you, now. You are the Slayer of Monsters.”
“Why me?” Caleb laid back on the pallet.
“Because the ties between you and the Fourth World aren’t as strong. You always have one foot in the other world, like the skinwalker. You can kill it, once your healing is complete.”
“You said…” Caleb muttered. . “Said you healed the wounds the yee...the...skinwalker gave me.”
“You have other wounds...deeper wounds. It will take longer to heal them. Sleep now. Rest.”
“Can’t. Can’t stay. Don’t...want…” Toh Yah watched as his patient fell asleep once more . , then frowned. The world around him was too bright, the sounds too sharp. Caleb had brought them more than halfway into the Spirit World.
“You’re too ready to blame the White Man for anything that goes wrong,” Not Coyote chuckled at his side. “Sound familiar?”
Toh Yah glanced down at the visitor to his hogan. “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” he said with a sharp tone.
“I’m hilarious,” Not Coyote said. “But only to the wise. It is the foolish who find me less than entertaining.”
“Your older brother is not laughing.”
“He’s asleep. But I didn’t come to you to entertain. I came because I heard his restless spirit calling out for the trail. The path of his heart calls him elsewhere. You should let him follow it.”
“He’s halfway in the Spirit World right now,” Toh Yah said. “If I let him wander off like this, he’ll disappear back into the Third World, and you’ll lose your brother again, maybe for good this time.”
“It’s a risk he’s willing to take, I’m sure,” Not Coyote grinned. “So long as Caleb stays on the road, nothing interesting will happen.”
“But will he? White Men don’t like being told what to do.”
“White Men invented roads to tell them where to go. You don’t have to tell him to follow it, you just have to tell him that it’s safe. He’ll do the rest on his own. Besides that, you can’t keep him here if he wishes to go. There is no Harmony on that path.” Not Coyote narrowed his yellow eyes and his smile showed a few more teeth.
“His body is strong enough to travel,” Toh Yah conceded. “But will he even know the road from the wilderness?”
“I will guide him to where he needs to be.”
Mollified, the singer nodded, resigned to what must be done. “When he wakes, if he wishes to leave, I will let h
im.”
“How gracious of you,” Not Coyote chuckled.
“I will not stop him,” Toh Yah muttered. “You knew my meaning.”
“But did you?” Not Coyote’s voice faded as the world returned to normal. The old singer got to his feet and pushed the blanket aside. The smell of mutton and frybread was in his nostrils, and his patient would need to eat as well.
Chapter 9
Caleb awoke from dreams of coyotes that weren’t and hands that did things on their own. Morning light shone on his face, and he squinted to keep from being blinded. The singer turned to face him when he grunted in surprise.
“Heck of a way to wake up,” he muttered, raising a hand to shield his eyes.
“It is,” Toh Yah said with a smile. “That is why we put our doors on the east side of the hogan. We greet the Sun every morning. But now, you need food as well as sunlight. Eat.” He pointed to a wood platter piled with food. Caleb’s mouth watered at the taste of venison and the frybread. A clay jug held water that tasted better than any wine to him after so long unconscious.
“I need to get back to Mendoza Springs,” he finally said.
“I thought you might want to do that,” Toh Yah said without turning around. “It’s dangerous for you to travel right now.”
“Because of the skinwalker?”
“Because of you. You’re not all the way back in the World yet. If you’re not careful, you’ll wander into the Spirit Realm.”
“A man can’t wander into the spirit world,” Caleb laughed.
“Men do it all the time,” Toh Yah said. “The men on the back of the White Man’s trains. They walk in the Spirit World.”
“Riggers? Mister, I’ve been a Rigger, and I’m here to tell you, the Verge might be pretty darn strange, but it isn’t the Spirit World.”
It was Toh Yah’s turn to laugh, and it took Caleb aback. “There are many stories of trains arriving with fewer Riggers than they left with.”