Catania saw it was a remembered work-dance, not something they'd just decided to do.
"Dancing."
Mary nodded. "Duty-dancing. There is nothing more important than that."
"This is wonderful...."
"And from this building," Mary said, speaking loud, "—to the next and second-pulp grinding. Then slurry-sticking onto woven cloth. And in the third building, rollers and our treatment."
"Treatment... ?"
"Our secrets for finishing the paper, Catania. And no one else will ever know them.... Last is drying, cutting, stacking."
Catania tried to stop looking at the gear-wheels. Their turning was making her feel sick. Their screaming noises and the fast water running beneath were troubling her.
Mary saw it, and took her arm. "Enough for today," she said. "If you're good, and I decide to, I'll show you the second-pulp building. There, the dance is more intricate."
" 'Intricate'...?"
"Complicated," Mary said, and led the way back up the steps and through the building's floor. There, it was a little quieter, with only the stone's harsh grinding. "Really, Catania, you people must have copied a dictionary."
"We had a Webster's ... but we don't use all the words."
Garden people were still duty-dancing at the pit. Catania saw their lips moving. They were singing, or praying.
Mary went to the plank door, pulled it open, and they walked outside. It was a great relief to Catania to leave such noisy civilization, leave the worst of the growling and wheel-screaming behind her, and breathe cold air that didn't smell of wet chewed wood.
"Thank you, Mary," she said, and meant thanks for showing first-pulp, and thanks for coming away from it. "—I see why wheels are wonderful; they do so much. They used to move Warm-time Chevies from one map-state to another, and now they move the strength of water from one wheel to another."
"Yes," Mary said, and led the way up the path. "Our pulper is called a mill. It's four-lives old."
"Aren't you afraid of fire with buildings made of such old wood?"
"We're very careful," Mary said, "—and we have a Put-out-fire dance that everyone knows how to do."
"If something did happen," Catania said, "I suppose you could build it again."
Mary looked back at Catania, surprised. "Our mill was built by a long-ago Lady with the Rules of Engineering," she said, "—and that's why it's a treasure to care for."
* * *
"They are not as civilized as we thought."
Catania lay beside Jack just after fucking. She drew her fur aside to be cooled from sweating, and lay watching the stars.
"And why not?"
"Jack—they couldn't build their making-paper mill again! At least, not build it properly. They don't know how. They tend it like children doing what they've always done—they tend it dancing. And they sing ... or they pray; I don't know which."
Jack raised up on an elbow beside her, and looked out over the camp, its dying fires... sleeping Trappers. Catania saw he was watching for Tall-David Richardson, standing guard down by the creek. There would be one or two Gold-bracelets along the creek as well.
"—I think they're afraid we'll hurt the mill."
"There he is," Jack said, meaning Tall-David, and he lay back down. "We won't hurt the mill...."
"But it's so sad," Catania said.
"What, Trade-honey?" Jack said, and turned to kiss her.
"Don't you see, Jack? It means the Garden people are sliding down. It means we're all still sliding down, not coming back up to Warm-time ways."
"Didn't you know that?" Jack settled into his furs. "I thought you knew that. When I was in Map-Missouri, the people there talked about a man who tried to make black gun-powder lifetimes ago. But it only hissed and made smoke. When he kept trying, it finally made one of the old bangs and killed him. After that, everybody felt it was too uncertain to try in cold country—and bad luck, besides."
"It's just so sad! We're not stupid, Jack. Garden Mary's not stupid. Why are we all still sliding down?"
"Don't know.... Nobody has that many copybooks, really— and very few How-To-Do's. Mostly bad-people stories, and complaining stories, and love stories." He blew a puff of frosty breath up in the air, apparently to watch it silver in starlight.
Jack did odd boyish things at times, occasions that caught at Catania's heart as if he were her son and lover both. There was something boyish in his fierceness, too—but supported by a fighting man's cunning, and his terrible strength and quickness.... His contradictions, she supposed, held her to him, his sometime kindness out of coldness. Contradictions. Was there no word Warm-times didn't have?
Jack blew another breath, and they both lay watching it haze and glitter and slowly drift away. "Warm-time people had the weather to try things, and not starve if those things went wrong. The world hadn't been bad to them yet, made their hopes so cold...." He sighed, turned away from her, and soon slept.
Catania lay awake remembering the Garden people dancing their work. Duty-dancing at a first-pulp mill they could never build again. It was very sad, and frightening. It was a future-look at a bad future. A future, she supposed, that men like Jack and Tattooed Newton would manage well in.... A future bad for women, unless—like Mary One-eye—they became frightening.
* * *
Jack spit tobacco juice onto fragile snow. Just coming this far south, brought the summer nearer already, though the nights still froze things hard.
He'd chewed tobacco twice before, in Map-Michigan. It had been traded up a very long way, from south of south in the Empire, then up to Middle Kingdom, then a long way north to Map-Michigan. Not much of it had cost a sled of furs, though the Garden people seemed to have enough for easy sharing.— Joan Richardson had been given a bite, and swallowed it, not knowing better. Which made Trappers laugh, who hadn't laughed for a while.
The Garden people were rich. Jack had known men in Map-Missouri who would have come to this creek valley in numbers to take every valuable thing they wished. Take the pale fat girls as well....
Carlson Gold-bracelets—brown-eyed, his nose smashed flat in some old fight—sat cross-legged opposite Jack, chewing, spitting, and keeping up a conversation as they played. Carlson had won two games through the afternoon, but was losing now. He was a thoughtful checker player. Too thoughtful; he didn't care to take chances.... On the ice in Map-Michigan, the Ojibway had gambled for teeth or finger-joints, if they had no furs or dogs or daughters to spare.—Though none with fierce wives had dared gamble their girls. Better go home to the hides with teeth pried out than owing their sweet Moon-Shadow-Cynthia or Our-Dark-Doris to a warrior likely mostly white-blood, and lacking courtesy.
Carlson Gold-bracelets had won two true stories to be told, and now was playing the third game for an oath to fight beside and never against, a much more serious matter.
Jack let Carlson crown, certain he'd be so pleased he'd move that piece immediately and without care. Carlson did—and was jumped three times. It was the turn of the game, and Carlson said, "Now, I meant by 'beside and not against,' that unless the Lady orders it, I will not fight you."
"I understand," Jack said, and jumped another piece while Carlson was considering his honor.
They were playing on a caribou robe by the cooking fire in the Trappers' camp. Each morning, the Garden people brought them food—potatoes, cauliflower, the unpleasant turnips, and smoked birds strung on twisted plant-stem cords. Enough food, but never more than enough. The dogs got a mash of turnips and bird guts.
The first morning, Mary One-eye's daughter, May, and another Garden girl had come for Catania's books and taken them away to be copied. They'd taken Catania away as well, most mornings afterward, to visit with Mary in her house under the tree.
"This was a good bargain," Tattooed Newton had said to Jack. "We have women crying and men still silent. They need rest, time to swallow sadness and shit it out."
"A good bargain," Jack had said, "—if the Green-paints keep
it." As so far they had.
But Catania slept badly under the furs with him. She turned and turned and muttered in her sleep, so Jack knew the Garden Lady frightened her. She was afraid of what Mary One-eye might decide to do—afraid, and always being sent for.... Sent for today, she'd said, to spend the night under Mary's tree.
Jack gave Carlson Gold-bracelets a piece to jump—and in consequence, jumped two more of his. The Garden people lived too soft a life to play good checkers.
Carlson seemed upset, face wrinkled as a worried dog's. "You win the game."
"Listen," Jack said, "—you're a fighting man and a man of honor, so I know you'll keep your wager-word as best you can, and never fight against me if there's any other way." And saying so, he saw the obligation weigh a little heavier on Carlson Gold-bracelets. The Garden people lived too soft a life.
Torrey came over, said "Hello, Carlson," and sat beside them. "Listen, Jack, we need to run the dogs a little. They're rested and they're fighting, and we're getting dogs hurt."
"You decide what to do," Jack said. "Or ask Jim Olsen." Jack had learned from watching the Ojibway war chiefs, the red-bloods, not to waste commands on slight matters where any foolish or troublesome person might feel free to disagree.
"Well... I think we need to ask Garden Mary."
"You don't trouble the Lady for that," Carlson said. "You have no need to see her. I can tell you to go and run your dogs. But don't run so far that it's rudeness, and being bad guests."
"All right." Torrey stood up. "We'll go out one team at a time. No sled, just two people holding harness. Run them, and come back in."
"You can do that," Carlson said. "Don't do more, because we're still copying your books, and you have another week to rest here and be fed."
"A bargain is a bargain—with us as with you," Torrey said to him, and walked away.
"I meant no criticism." Carlson Gold-bracelets set the checkers out on the board again. The checkerboard was decorated with painted hardwood leaves that turned seasonal colors around its edges. In the middle of the board, a thin blue-gray dog was painted running.
"Don't you find the crossbow slow?" Jack said.
"Slow but sure," said Carlson, using one of the best of Warm-time's phrases. "You set this game's wager."
"On this game," Jack said, "—I wager for true friendship between us." And saw that Carlson could find no way to politely decline.
* * *
It had been a hard run for the Cree through the last of the day, and tiring. Meant to be tiring, since Paul Kisses-the-Girls had come with Edwin-Jim during a rest, and told Buddy that the warriors were getting weary of being in deep forest, where nothing could be seen that wasn't close.
"They wouldn't whine like women, if I wasn't so young," Buddy had said. "If Chief Much was here, they wouldn't say a word."
"Right," Paul said.
"—But because they're mostly older, they think they know everything, and I know nothing."
"Completely right, Buddy." Edwin-Jim had nodded as if he had good sense. "They complain like women with the monthly bloods."
"What are we going to do?" Paul had looked worried, so Buddy knew the men had spoken seriously to him.
"I'm going to run their asses off," Buddy'd said. "And that'll do two things—it'll make these old so-called warriors too tired to trouble me, and it will get us to the snow-devils sooner."
"Smart," Edwin-Jim had said. "—Smart." He was a friend, but he was such a fool it was disturbing to have him agree.
... Still, it seemed to have worked. The hard-running day was done, and the men had gone into their furs at dark with no complaints from any of them.
Buddy slept until almost dawn. Then, waking from a dream, he lay in his furs in the last of branch-broken moonlight. He'd dreamed of his mother, and the lake camp. The dream hadn't made sense, but it had left recalling behind it, so he lay remembering and remembering….
Uncle Paul had been in the dream. He'd played father to Buddy when he was little, while Buddy's real father, Charlie Chewapa, had been away trying to learn magical secrets—changing belly babies and so forth—from New Englanders. Which he hadn't.
"I'm a deaf man to deep magic." That's what Charlie had said to his friends when he came back after several years to practice ordinary spirit-sending. He blamed Buddy's mother, Charmian, because she was all white-blood, and had taken some of his power, fucking. So sometimes he beat her up.
But Charlie Chewapa was fair to Buddy, though he didn't love him. He never hit him, even with his hand.
And though not deeply magical, Buddy's father did have a good self-spirit for healing. He bought expensive dried plants and flowers from off the ice, and spit their juice into sick children's mouths and eyes and ears—and sometimes right up their asses—to make illness too sick to stay.
Buddy's father hadn't been in the dream. Uncle Paul had been, but he walked away and left Buddy and his mother fishing a borehole through the thick lake ice.
She'd caught a char, and pulled it up and cut it open to clean. "Buddy," she'd said, "—you're holding your line too tight. Just in your fingers ... to feel the little nibbles."
Buddy remembered that part of the dream very well, and had wakened wishing it had been longer.... His mother had died when he was sixteen years old. He'd gone hunting with Edwin-Jim, Pete Elbow, and Chris LaPlace. They'd been gone a moon month down the mile-deep valleys where the ice had cracked and pulled a little apart. They'd killed four white bears and skinned them out.—It was a very good hunt. But when they got home, everyone Buddy waved to had turned and walked away. There was no one in his yard when he went there, and no kids or dogs around either.
He'd pushed through the hides and called hello to his mother, and there she was. She had the pops.
Only Charmian's eyes were showing. All the rest of her was covered with little red bubbles; her eyes looked out through bunches of them growing on her face. When she saw Buddy, she tried to get up from the bedding, and Buddy heard some of the bubbles break on her back when she moved. His mother opened her mouth when that happened, and made a sound like one of the little birds that flew over the ice in the warmer weeks.
His father had been gone, gone again for more than a year, this time far west, talking with the Blackfoot. No one else, no shaman, would come to their place, so Buddy stayed with his mother and cared for her. Sometimes she would shit a little brown water, and he cleaned that up, and he cooked soup for her with fish-heads and bones for strength. Buddy would put his mouth on his mother's and squirt in some soup, but she usually could not hold it down.
The little red bubbles broke, but new ones came up on her hot skin. After seven days, she got soft and full of holes, and smelled like spoiled meat. Then, she was dreaming all the time. Two days later, Charmian Chewapa died.
After that, Buddy was a boy with a bad temper, and was no longer friends with people there. He went out onto the lake edge, broke the thin ice, and slid his mother under. When he visited, five prayer-days later, she was floating by frozen reeds, looking up at him. She was fine, except that the tip of her nose was worn out from bumping on the underside of the ice….
Buddy turned away from those memories, to hide from them in sleep.. .. When he woke at first light, a partridge was drumming in the woods.
I have been shown a first-pulp paper mill. I drew it as well as I could remember, folded the drawing and hid it in Jack's belt. He thought that was funny, since we can't build such a thing. But I hope we will meet people farther south who can. I do know this—the wheeling gears work; and what works, sensible people should be able to try until it's built again, and maybe better.
Mary took me up the valley to their copy-house. They've almost finished with my books, the drawings done very beautifully, but decorated with vegetables. I told Mary I thought any art was a bad idea on a page of scientific medicine, because of possible later confusions. She listened, but did not agree.
Jack says Mary's right eye is missing because, when she was
younger, she broke it with her thumb while the Garden people watched, then pulled the juice and broken stuff and optic nerve out of the socket, and threw that away to show what she could bear—and would bear—for herself and for Gardens.
Jack said he once saw a Map-Missouri woman, much older than Mary, who had done the same thing. And what she said to do, her people did, or she had bad things done to them.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN
CHAPTER 11
At dawn, Catania woke—and farted before she could prevent it.
Jack turned to her under the furs. "And what was that, little lynx?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing ... ?" He held her with one hand, and began to tickle her with the other.
"Don't!" The tickling and struggle made her fart again—and they laughed, wrestling naked under snow-powdered furs.
"I'm going to wash." Catania threw back her wolf-skins, got up and went down to the creek, scattered snow icy under her bare feet. This sparse snow and the night-time cold, but no winter winds. Summer was coming—a longer, warmer summer here.
She'd intended to put a trade-kettle on the fire for hot water for washing. Jack's liquids and her liquids had dried at her groin.—But coldness had called as if it was something of the Range that she could keep, so she walked naked along the creek, then stepped down the bank and into swift black water.
Ice or stones under there bruised her feet, and her legs were numbed as she sank into shallow whirling rapids streaming away toward the waterfall and mill. Her legs, then her hips, then all of her grew numb to her neck. She was locked into water that first burned, then soothed the burn, then took all feeling away. It was like death—but a death she could climb out of, and up the slope to a fire.
It occurred to Catania, as she steadied herself against the current on slippery stones, that real death might be something similar—and all her lost friends with their lost children might be standing by fires on a higher bank, still trembling after their climb from death's dark river.
SNOWFALL Page 13