by Multiple
Chapter Sixteen
“When I was your age,” Uncle Feeney said, “I was told the Creator was in the water, the light, the night, and the wind.” We were taking a break and finally sitting down again. “That meant I could swim in the Creator. I could stand in the Creator’s warmth, or coolness. I could feel the brush of the Creator’s fingers in a breeze.” I didn’t say anything.
I was focused on the cedar tree in front of me. I could feel it waking up. It had its roots deep into infinity and its highest branches were singing. We call them the Standing People in our language. We’re taught they live so much longer than we do it is hard to communicate with them. They speak and listen so slowly. It was dangerous to borrow the eyes of certain trees because you might forget your human body as you would unwittingly spend years looking at the world through their perception. It was one of the reasons an Elder always had to be with you in the beginning of your training, so you didn’t end up stuck and have your human body die.
“Long and long ago, the People would dance at night,” the Cedar began. “The Dance Chief held his ceremonial staff to open the dance, and it was as large as the ones you two are holding, but it was made of my sister’s wood. In those days, the Dance Chief would place one end of his stick on the shoulder of one partner and the other end on the shoulder of another. If they chose to dance together, they were married. After the first dance was over, a young man and young woman with beautiful long hair entered, but no one recognized them, or knew what village they were from. They danced well, with one partner after another, but the youth danced with only men and his sister danced only with women.
“Before the sun rose, a local young man named Black Wolf had fallen in love with the long haired youth, and had danced the Stick Dance with him. He and his sister had slipped away before anyone knew they had departed. But his new spouse had told Black Wolf he would need to have approval of the twins’ older sibling. Lightning Boy and Lightning Girl—for those were the names of the couple—vowed to return a week later when the next dance was scheduled. They had explained if Black Wolf were truly sincere in his love, he would prove it by fasting until then. He had agreed and eagerly counted the sun rises until the next dance.
“Black Wolf was the first one at the dance and waited until he caught sight of the beautiful twins who just seemed to have always been there. They happily shared their older sibling had given a blessing to their wedding, and after the dance they would lead the groom to their new home, but gravely informed him if he were to tell people where he went or what he saw, he would die.
“The village admired their beauty and grace, but did not see the three had departed before dawn and they left no tracks to follow. The twins showed Black Wolf a trail he had never before noticed, and they followed it until they eventually came to a small pond. With no hesitation, the couple stepped onto the still water.
“This startled Black Wolf, who did not believe he would be able to walk on water the way they were doing. His new spouse seemed to read his mind and explained they were not standing on water but on the path to their home. The Lightning Twins urged Black Wolf forward until he took a step onto the pond and discovered it was simply short soft grass.
“The three continued until the path ended in a River he knew well. The twins jumped in, but Black Wolf again paused, worried he might drown, since he was no swimmer. The two seemed to read his mind and explained there was no water, but that they had stepped on to the main road that would go past their lodge. The young warrior took a hesitant step forward and found no River, but tall and waving grass that was almost as tall as he.
“In only a few steps the trio had come to a cave near a powerful falls. The twins entered and invited him in telling him this was their lodge. They explained their older sibling would soon arrive. Black Wolf could hear deep thunder in the west. He joined them and watched the twins take off their beautiful long hair and hang it on an elk antler that was attached to the wall of the cave. His new spouse smiled at him, his head bald as a squash. Black Wolf did not believe this was really hair, and became frightened.
“Lightning Boy sat down and told him to sit beside him. But to the eyes of Black Wolf his seat was the shell of a big turtle that raised up its head and seemed to judge him. He refused to sit, since it was not a seat at all. The twins insisted it was simply a seat.
“The thunder grew louder and Lightning Girl urged him to sit because their older sibling was almost there. A huge clap of thunder behind him pushed him forward and he turned to see a woman standing in the entrance of the cave. The twins introduced him to their older sister. The woman entered and sat upon the turtle the young warrior had been avoiding. The woman looked at him carefully. She then told him she was headed to a council meeting and invited Black Wolf to join her. When the young man asked if they would be riding, she told Lightning Boy to bring his new spouse a horse. He left and returned with an enormous rattlesnake which twisted and curled along the length of the cave. Black Wolf exclaimed it was no horse and he would not be able to ride a snake. The older sister frowned and told her younger brother his new spouse might prefer to have a saddle and new bracelets for his arms and wrists.
“The twins returned with a saddle and bands for him, but in his eyes the saddle was yet another turtle they attached to the snake and the bracelets were living snakes they tried to twist around his wrists.
“He cried out in fear and asked what place he was in where he was expected to live with snakes and other foul things. The older sister yelled he was only a coward and lightning flashed from her dark eyes, striking him senseless with a deafening crash of thunder.
“When he regained consciousness he was standing knee deep in the cold River, grasping a bush growing from its bank. He looked around and saw no trace of the cave, or Thunder and her siblings. He was completely alone. He returned to his own village but discovered he had been gone for years. Everyone had believed him dead even though for Black Wolf it was simply the day after the last dance. When he told those around him what had happened, he died.”
I wondered if a same-sex couple legend ever had a happy ending. I didn’t think the Cedar Tree had a real future as a storyteller. I glanced over at Uncle Feeney, trying to imagine him being a Dance Chief, but my heart wasn’t in it. He was hit by a fireball and burst into flame. He had time for a ear-splitting scream before he became a smoldering pile of ash.
“You really didn’t think it would be so easy, did you?” The Native young man was still nude, still aroused, and still frightening me with his smile. Small flames licked around his fingertips.
“I had my hopes.” I whispered, “Moth, I need you,” and caught a flutter of brownish wings just at the edge of my sight.
“Don’t blame me,” she sighed. “You asked me for his Name and I gave it to you. It just didn’t do you any good in terms of trying to rewrite his Story. The whole point of this is to rewrite your own. A better question to me would have been, ‘What do I need to know to defeat my enemy?’—but—No. Instead of trusting in my wisdom, you thought you had figured it all out on your own.”
She flew towards me between the ashes of Uncle Feeney and the untouched Cedar. I called out, “What do I need to know to defeat my enemy?” Then she vanished in the flash of another fireball. Crap.
“Why are you assuming I am your enemy?” he asked his voice deep and sultry. “Think of me not just as your lover, but as your mentor—and tormentor. You will always learn more from your tormentors than your mentors.” I stood to face him, aware of how much shorter I was than he. I lifted the yew staff to the horizontal position I had used before. This time when the fire struck me, it was more of a wall than the size of a basketball. I barely was able to smell my charred flesh before I was unable to breathe. My body was burning and I fell back in excruciating pain. Then there was only blackness.
Chapter Seventeen
When I started to become aware again, my body felt as if I were a gigantic toothache. I was certain even my hair was hurting, assuming
I still had hair. My vision was overwhelmingly a deep gray and I could make out movements, but no detail. I concentrated and felt rough fingers smearing something cool on my arms. It felt like mud and I vaguely wondered how horrible it would be if someone was using pig turds as a salve. I was aware I hated my life.
I opened my eyes and saw a barely recognizable lump of mud in the shape of the Moth. I looked up and into the endless depths of my tormentor’s eyes. I thought I saw a hint of flame in the pupils, but it was gone so quickly I might have just imagined it. Pain surged and I looked down to see tiny eruptions of fire from his palms play along the muddy length of my arms. He seemed to be baking my flesh back on to my bones. I almost threw up when I looked lower and realized he hadn’t gotten around to the bottom half of my body. I was just a blackened skeleton from the waist down. The pain was so great I could hardly think. I passed out again.
I would wake up again for a few moments and feel his hands wet and sticky with the mud. I would black out when the fire would begin to burn me again. The fourth time I was breathing rapidly and I realized his large hands were wrapped around my cock and he was smiling. I looked into his hands and was shocked to see how huge he had remade me. It reminded me of a legend where Coyote’s penis was so long that in order to walk, he had to wrap it around his waist like a fire hose. “And what could you possibly do with a dick so large?” I asked. “Sit around and admire it?”
He laughed. “You know how the legend goes.”
Coyote cut most of it off, the way everyone knew Cancer would eventually cut off his braids to look like a banker. The Story ends with “—and that’s why a human male no longer has an enormous penis.” My tormentor pulled out a long knife that caught the light with a wicked sharpness. I passed out once more.
I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came back, his mouth was sucking on my revised and revived cock. Moth flew past in the drunken flight pattern of a butterfly. I felt once more I hadn’t been exposed to the appropriate set of legends to prepare me for this. Somewhere inside my head I heard, “If you lick it, they will come.”
I tried a quick inventory to make certain I wasn’t missing any parts, but he was very distracting. I started tensing various places and everything seemed to be where it should. I moved my head and relief flooded in as I felt the familiar weight of my braids against my shoulders. The warmth of his breath against my thighs excited me. I wondered if I should tell him I was a top, and then for a moment wondered exactly how many changes he had managed since he seemed to have completely remade me. My mind felt the same so maybe it was like hardware and software programs. I had gotten a hardware upgrade, but the operating system was a constant.
I enjoyed the attention, but was distantly aware of the fact I still had no erotic attraction to him. The fact he had incinerated Uncle Feeney, Moth, and me—just might have something to do with it. Spirits apparently had exotic courting rituals. With my Eagle and Deer, our relationship was definitely a child and substitute father one, which made sense given the fact I had started out at age eleven. A sexual animal power would have felt abusive back then. I was trying to make a connection of how that parental interaction was probably the norm, but then he sucked harder and my mind was suddenly blank.
I woke up with a start, awakened by Moth landing on my nude body, her sharp little feet digging into my navel. I looked around and didn’t see him. The area around me didn’t seem very stable, and lines and curves were indefinite. I wondered where we were. “Are you OK?” I asked Moth. What did it mean for a spirit animal to go through a shamanic initiation? Wasn’t that redundant? Or was it some sort of spiritual evolution? If so, it hadn’t seemed to work. Moth was reborn as Moth. It wasn’t a promotion. She still had the same dull muddy colored wings.
“You’re only seeing my wings as brown because you have a very limited perception of the spectrum. Borrow my eyes for a moment and see what I see.” I resented having her in my mind, but complied. I had never used the eyes of an intelligent being like this—borrowing the eyes of another human is taboo. Aunt Beans had told me early on it would either drive you insane, or the human you were invading. She said it was like a psychic rape. The only time it was permitted was if the other person was in a coma, and then it only worked because the senses of the patient were disconnected, so you technically weren’t borrowing. The technique then became just a way of directly communicating. That’s what had happened when I was trying to distance myself from Nathan.
Just so, the borrowing was almost instantaneous, and I felt disoriented by shifting to faceted eyes, but I was used to dragonflies and bees. Looking at my/her wings, I was rendered speechless by the patterns on them in colors for which I had no words. I didn’t know if I were seeing infra-red or ultraviolet—or hell, for that matter if I wasn’t “using” light, but seeing magnetic fields or gravity for that matter. I pulled out because my head felt as if it would explode. The closest I had ever gotten to this was suddenly having the sense of smell of a wolf, or trying to keep myself separate from a hive mind when I borrowed from a bee. “Wow,” I whispered. “Is this like, Moth 2.0, or have your wings always looked like this?”
“It’s hard to explain.” She fluttered up, landing on my shoulder. “We’re in an in-between space that has different properties than the world you’re used to. Otherwise, we’d both be truly dead. In the everyday world, you could be burnt to a crisp, but you couldn’t be rebuilt from the bone up.” She paused for a moment, and I could feel her poking around in my head. I frowned and pushed her out. “Ouch,” she said. “I was just trying to figure out how to talk about this in a way you’d understand it. Here your body was rebuilt, but your spirit-self remains the same. When you return to your everyday life, your body will be the same, but your spirit-self will be different. You’ll have easier access to the Spirit World.”
“So your wings will always look special in the in-between space, or in the Spirit World.”
“Close enough. We don’t really have the time for this sort of discussion. He’ll be back soon. He’s gathering food because when you are reborn like this, you need nourishment.”
“What happens now?”
“Think of it as supervised practice. You’ll go with him and learn to use your new body so you don’t end up doing something later that would accidentally injure others or yourself.”
I thought of Mrs. Suskin and wondered if whatever had pitied her had taken her out for “supervised practice,” or if the sense of corruption I had felt with her was due to the fact she had just tried to “wing it.” I sat up, disturbing Moth and looked behind me because I heard footsteps.
“I hope you’re hungry,” he grinned. He held up the rough cedar bark baskets one of my uncles used to make on the spot. They were the sort you didn’t tend to see in museums, but were the “quick and dirty” type you made when you were outside and discovered something you hadn’t expected to find but wanted to take with you. They were crudely stitched with deerskin laces. One of them held huckleberries. Which shouldn’t be ripe enough to pick until August, so I figured time wasn’t a constant here. I thought of the Cedar Tree’s story and how Black Wolf believed he had only been away for a single day, but in his own world, years had passed. Echo handed me a roughly carved stone cup to let me take a sip of water as a prayerful way of starting a meal. I automatically sang a table song, and after a few notes worried I should have let him take the lead, but he just sang along with me. Moth had gone off somewhere since as an adult, she wouldn’t eat—she didn’t even have mouth parts.
Chapter Eighteen
I finished eating my share of the huckleberries and continued to watch him. When he had returned he was no longer nude, but dressed very traditionally in brown deerskin fringed leggings with a matching loincloth. He wore beautiful moccasins stitched with dyed porcupine quills in designs that symbolized lightning. He had given me a similar set, but mine were made of white buckskin. My hair was neatly braided and he had placed the tail feather of a golden eagle in the ri
ght one so it stood up straight by my ear. He wore its mate, but a matching one was in his left braid. This was a style we would wear for certain Medicine Dances, and they made him look as if he had long ears pushing up.
“What now?” I took a last swallow of water and finished my prayer.
“Pick a Story,” he smiled. “Be a Story.”
“Any Story?” For a moment I wondered about choosing a nice gentle Story, where no one got hurt. I was surprised I couldn’t think of one off hand. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how apparently rare that sort of Story was. Even the specific stories for small children often involved ears getting yanked into rabbit length as punishment, or someone dying to get reborn as a stalk of corn. Hell, even the Story that the spirits of dead flowers became the rainbow had to involve the flowers dying.
Long time ago, there lived a poor Native man with his wife and children. He was a poor hunter and was not always good at providing for his family. They often went hungry and Taláyi, his oldest son, promised himself when he grew up he would do his best to feed his People. The boy loved his father who was a kind and thoughtful man who led a spiritual life, grateful for all the Creator had given him. He especially felt this way about his family.
One day when the sun rose he helped Taláyi put up a lodge for his Vision Quest. The young man was curious what sort of Spirit Power he would receive. Eagle? Buffalo? Wolf? Each brought different gifts, but all were valued. Sometimes seemingly the smallest Power brought the greatest strength.
he two went through a sweat with the other men and then the boy was truly ready. A medicine man painted him with the red ochre for protection during his Quest. In the beginning of his Quest he did not sit quietly in prayer and song the way most would do, but wandered around, intent on the experience—sensitive to the songs of the birds and insects and carefully observing the many types of plants. He wondered why some were good medicine and nourished the body and the soul, and others were poison. He would return to his lodge before the sun set and easily fall into a dreamless sleep.