by Alan Smale
“I’ve been trying to find out what we’re supposed to do. Not much, apparently. They don’t want us to screw anything up.”
Marcellinus could believe that.
“So we must stay clear, to the side, until after the jump. If we do something wrong and piss off the herd, they won’t agree to die, and they will leave.”
Marcellinus made a face and pulled off a glove to sign, Jump?
Isleifur shrugged. “All I know is that we must stay with the Dead Men.”
Marcellinus looked at Akecheta, who shook his head. “I cannot help you, Wanageeska. The Hidatsa speak in their own way, like shamans of their medicine.”
Marcellinus barely cared. He was beyond frustration at this point. He was thousands of miles from anywhere, on a fool’s errand that seemed more foolish by the day, and it took a Norseman to translate one Hesperian language to the other Hesperians.
Marcellinus had given up any realistic hope of finding Tahtay. They were all fish out of water, completely at the mercy of the elements and of people who might kill them without a second thought. His only hope was that they might live through whatever was about to happen—all of them, but especially Kimimela and Sintikala—and manage to struggle back to the Wemissori.
—
When they finally arrived at the hunt site, Marcellinus did not realize it. He did not know why the Hidatsa women were pulling the dogs together and cutting the travois poles off them, did not know why the men were readying their spears or recognize the four warriors with red-painted faces who had appeared suddenly. He had lost track of Sintikala and Kimimela; when everyone wore the same buffalo cloaks and hoods and the hiking was so shambolic, he often ended the day’s march among strangers. Then he blinked and saw even more men standing out ahead of him on the plains, solid thickset men spaced far apart and unmoving, staring at the skies, and in the distance he saw yet another herd of buffalo.
The Hidatsa men strode away. The poles and furs of the Hidatsa tipis were left where they lay, the dogs being hustled back the way they had all just come. Some of the Hidatsa hunters had cast aside their furs and run east, toward the sun. And still the row of tall men peered upward, unmoving.
Marcellinus wiped the tears from the wind away from his eyes and blinked again. Those still forms were not men. They were tall, narrow cairns of rock crowned with brush and draped with furs.
They were the Dead Men.
“Hotah?” Mahkah shoved back the hood of his cloak despite the chill and strode toward him. “You must come with us. You must run. You must stay absolutely silent. You understand? Any sound and the Blackfoot will kill you.”
Marcellinus almost said “Blackfoot?” aloud. He swallowed. The walk had made him stupid. He pushed back his hood and gulped air.
“Have your spear ready. Come. Run low.”
Marcellinus nodded. After days of trudging drudgery and little sleep, of his face being permanently chilled and his thoughts frozen, everything was happening too fast.
The tall piles of stones might not be human, but there were many more people around him now. Strong men and harsh, their faces smeared with vivid red war paint.
And on their feet, black moccasins. Marcellinus and Mahkah were running among braves of the Blackfoot tribe.
How had Aelfric described them? A rough lot. Hard. Warlike. Tough as nails.
Perhaps it was just as well Marcellinus was not permitted to speak. At least he could not say something stupid that would get him killed.
By Mahkah’s side, Marcellinus jogged up a gentle slope toward the nearest of the Dead Men. Not far behind them Sintikala and Kimimela were also running. He had lost track of Isleifur and Akecheta, had no idea where they had gotten to.
The buffalo were coming. Inexplicably the herd was on the move, walking in their direction.
A warrior bounded in from their left, grabbing at their arms. He was much taller than Marcellinus and clothed in what looked like a wolf-skin tunic, and his face was smeared in a pattern of savage ocher that made him look angry. Or perhaps he was angry. He spoke urgently in yet another language that sounded closer to Algon-Quian than to Hidatsa or Cahokian. The Hidatsa hunter running next to them made a complicated hand-talk gesture in return and kept going.
It had not occurred to Marcellinus that the Hidatsa and Blackfoot would not speak the same language. Perhaps Mahkah was caught out, too. “What? We have come to hunt. Kill buffalo.”
The Blackfoot warrior looked wary. “Hidatsa?” He shook his head, and his eyes narrowed. “Shoshoni?”
“Cahokia,” Mahkah said quickly. “Mizipi. Cahokia. Mound builders.”
The Blackfoot gaped at him, then looked more closely at Marcellinus. “Napikwan?”
Lost, Marcellinus pointed at himself and signed, No speak. He hoped that failing to answer a Blackfoot question was not in itself a capital offense.
But the Blackfoot warrior was nodding and shoving at them again, impatiently beckoning them to follow him. Marcellinus again broke into a run toward the line of Dead Men, panting, his spear in his hand.
Many of the Dead Men already had warriors or hunters behind them. The Blackfoot guided them to one that was as yet unspoken for. Marcellinus slipped in the mud and skidded and almost ran into the stone column. Now he saw another row of the columns several hundred feet away.
The Blackfoot glanced back at them and snarled a few words, gesturing. Mahkah said, “Hide, down, fall flat.” Immediately and without thought, Marcellinus did so, landing on his face in the cold, muddy grass. Beside him was another Blackfoot, his face also painted red. Despite the cold, this warrior wore only a breechclout, an elk-skin hood, and a necklace of bear claws, revealing an impressively broad chest and arms of solid muscle. The new Blackfoot was humming quietly to himself, watching the buffalo approach from his right, but now he glanced back. Seeing Marcellinus bare-headed, he gestured and then reached out to touch his hair.
Marcellinus gritted his teeth and allowed it. At Cahokian markets, traders from out of town would sometimes touch his short Roman hair. Sometimes Marcellinus would even squat down so that Cahokian children could rub his head. But for an unknown warrior of a fierce and deadly tribe to reach out toward his hair—and the scalp it grew from—was another matter entirely.
The Blackfoot reached past his head and pulled the hood roughly over it. Then he looked back toward the approaching herd.
Marcellinus could smell them now, the giant rank smell of livestock, but richer and wilder. Of course, if they could smell the buffalo, the buffalo could not smell him and the other Hidatsa hunters and Blackfoot warriors who hid behind the Dead Men, prone on the frozen ground. Perhaps the buffalo caller’s prayer to the winds had worked after all.
Out in front of the herd shambled a smaller buffalo with an odd limping, twisting gait, shoving itself upright, almost taking its weight on its hind legs and then dropping forward again. It was the most ungainly, warped creature Marcellinus had ever seen, not that any buffalo was exactly graceful to start with—
The malformed creature bleated, and Marcellinus knew it for Sooleawa. Half capering, half staggering, favoring her left leg to the point of swiveling as she hurried across the plain, Sooleawa squeezed out another of those awful high bleats.
A wounded calf. The buffalo caller was leading the herd onward by pretending to be a wounded calf. She looked bizarre to Marcellinus, an absurd caricature of a wild animal in pain. Even at the Hidatsa prehunt ceremony he had seen dancers who moved more like real buffalo than Sooleawa did now.
Yet it was working. Here came the buffalo in the thousands. From his prone position on the slope Marcellinus had no idea how many there might be, but he was looking at a sizable herd. The sea of animals had now passed the first of the Dead Men.
The logic of the Dead Men became clear. Two rows of cairns formed a narrowing channel three miles long, almost V-shaped. The buffalo instinctively stayed away from the Dead Men, preferring the middle of the drive lane.
Far behind the herd, out o
n the plains, living men were running now, trying to spook the buffalo into running faster, herding them into the drive channel.
Even as Marcellinus saw this, the buffalo herd broke into stampede, the ungainly beasts breaking from a trot into a full-force run. They panted, their breath puffing above them in clouds, but in moments they had reached a fearsome speed, perhaps even as fast as a galloping horse. As the buffalo passed them, Blackfoot hunters leaped out from hiding behind the Dead Men to wave and scream, driving the beasts on ever faster.
The rumble of the earth beneath Marcellinus’s chest turned to thunder. The buffalo herd had become a swarm of black pounding fury.
Sooleawa had dropped her pretense and was running flat out up the slope of the hill, bent into a sprint. Her buffalo cloak streamed out behind her despite all its weight.
Marcellinus glanced to the left and right, measuring distances. The herd was almost upon them, the cows out in front and the heavier bulls dropping back, so close that he could see the clods of earth being kicked up into the air by their pounding hooves, their fur shaggy, their faces empty and bovine but somehow malevolent. And Sooleawa was slowing and looking behind her as she reached the crest of the hill. Marcellinus expected her to change course, dart left or right, take shelter behind one of the final Dead Men on the path before the jump.
She did not. Sooleawa bounced on the balls of her feet a few times, her eyes narrowed, then turned her back on the lethal galloping herd and broke into a final sprint toward the escarpment.
The Hidatsa buffalo caller was sacrificing herself for the hunt.
“Merda!” Without realizing it, Marcellinus had pushed himself up onto all fours. He was at least two hundred feet from the woman and had no chance of catching her, and even now the buffalo were almost level with him, but he knew no one should have to do this, to give her life when it could be saved.
The first Blackfoot warrior’s elbow smashed into his jaw, and Marcellinus spilled over onto his left side. His head rang with the pain. Through eyes that suddenly stung with tears he saw Sooleawa reach the peak of the hill and leap out into empty space, her legs together and her arms out. For a dazed moment Marcellinus almost expected her to sprout Hawk wings and soar away into the sky. She did not. Hair waving, buffalo cloak billowing, the woman arced downward and fell away from his sight in her long dive toward the ground.
But right by them the damage was done; the lead animals in the herd had caught Marcellinus’s unexpected movement and veered away from the Roman toward the far row of Dead Men. For a moment the leading cows faltered in their headlong rush. Two cannoned into each other and fell onto their sides, skidding in the mud and snorting. The vanguard of the buffalo charge broke into chaos.
If it had happened farther down the hillside where the flaring V of the Dead Men was wider, the whole herd might have spilled into disarray, its momentum broken. As it was, there was no space; the sheer weight of numbers of the herd drove them on. More of the leading cows were bowled over by the animals behind them and rolled, scrabbling for purchase and goring one another. The rest of the herd tried to part around them but eventually pounded right over them. The herd continued its thundering rush.
Buffalo plunged blindly off the cliff edge in the hundreds, plummeting to their doom.
Now that the slaughter had begun, the Blackfoot were running out from behind all the Dead Men, calling and shrieking and raising a hullaballoo, driving on the panicked buffalo at the tail end of the mighty herd. Most of the animals ran on, following their fellows off the cliff into death. A few of the stragglers swerved, slowed, and turned their heads left and right, looking for another way out. Next to Marcellinus, the Blackfoot who had struck him raised his bow and sent an arrow into the closest buffalo just behind the last rib, then a second arrow above the hind leg. Enraged, the buffalo spun to face the threat, but more arrows flew and most struck their mark. Buffalo staggered, grunted, roared, and fell heavily onto their knees or crashed sideways. Mahkah raised himself up, cast his spear, then slid his bow off his back and nocked an arrow. From farther down the hill Blackfoot braves came running with stone-headed clubs and nimbly dodged between the buffalo to slam their weapons onto the stricken beasts’ skulls.
Marcellinus sat up and spit blood. His head still throbbed and dizziness threatened to claim him, but he did not think his jaw was broken.
The Blackfoot warrior looked up and down the killing slope, a new arrow nocked, but all the nearby buffalo were down, dead or dying. Blackfoot and Hidatsa were running by, ululating in their bloodlust of joy, but the warrior’s eyes were cold as he turned them on Marcellinus. He swung his bow around and pointed its arrow straight at Marcellinus’s face.
Without apparent haste, Sintikala walked in front of Marcellinus. She did not speak but dropped to one knee, ducked her head, and waited.
Marcellinus held his breath. He did not know whether to apologize or beg for mercy or whether speaking further would guarantee that the arrow would fly into his eye or Sintikala’s chest. Slowly he lifted his hands in an attitude of submission and surrender and, taking his cue from Sintikala, ducked his head.
The moments dragged out. From all around them came the joyful cries of the other warriors and hunters, elated at the success of the buffalo drive. The Blackfoot eased the tension on his bowstring and strode away from Marcellinus and Sintikala toward the crest of the hill.
Sintikala stood and reached down. “Stay silent, even now.”
Marcellinus nodded dumbly and allowed her to pull him to his feet.
Together they walked to the cliff edge and looked down on a sea of death. At the base of the sixty-foot drop buffalo were piled on top of one another in a mass five or six beasts thick, thousands of them. The reek of blood and gore reached them there, even at the top of the escarpment.
Not all the buffalo were dead. Some still thrashed, their backs or legs broken, lowing piteously or in fury. Hunters ran among them, clubbing the beasts they could reach, shooting arrows or casting feathered spears into the mass of buffalo flesh where the dying creatures were beyond range of their clubs. As well as putting the sacred animals out of their misery, stopping them from thrashing would reduce further damage to their valuable skins.
Even used as he was to the carnage of battle, Marcellinus felt nausea welling in his throat. He raised his head for a gulp of cold air and scanned the periphery of the killing field.
He grabbed Sintikala’s arm and pointed. Alive and well, Sooleawa stalked back and forth around the perimeter of the mass of beasts as if daring any of them to come back to life and flee the killing ground. She looked completely unharmed. Marcellinus shook his head, baffled.
Sintikala raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps they held out a buffalo blanket. Men were ready to catch her.”
Such men would have had almost no time to react once Sooleawa dived off the cliff, then only moments to run clear before the massive herd came barreling off the cliff edge after her. And the drop was sixty feet or more. Was that even possible?
“Or she just has very good medicine.” Sintikala grinned tautly.
Marcellinus tapped her arm again. The Blackfoot warrior who had struck him in the face and then aimed an arrow at him was approaching. Blood covered his legs and lips from the buffalo he had just slaughtered. Trying not to guess at what buffalo sweetmeat the warrior might have just popped into his mouth raw, Marcellinus stepped away from the cliff edge and adopted his pose of submission again.
“Cahokia?” said the warrior.
Sintikala stepped in front of Marcellinus and spoke in Algon-Quian and then Cahokian. “I am Sisika, daughter of chieftain in Cahokia. This man—”
But the warrior had already nodded and was walking away, beckoning them to follow him back down the slope.
Sintikala glanced at Marcellinus. “It seems we must go down.”
—
From ground level the pile of dead buffalo was even more intimidating. Blackfoot and Hidatsa men and women were now there in the hundreds, drag
ging the beasts out and carving at them.
Again Marcellinus tried not to gag. The stench of blood and fresh death was almost unbearable. The base of the escarpment was a charnel house of buffalo death.
The Blackfoot brave escorted them under the cliff and stopped, clearly puzzled. Stepping up onto a buffalo corpse, he turned around in a complete circle, surveying the butchery.
The Blackfoot had thrown aside their furs and tunics to keep them from being spoiled by the blood of the buffalo. All around them were men and women dressed only in breechclouts, carefully cutting into buffalo hides, carving out buffalo guts, hacking out clean hunks of bloody meat and stacking them in an efficient operation.
“Mingan,” said the brave. He jumped down and again led the way across the blood-soaked earth, around and through more buffalo corpses.
“Mingan.” Marcellinus stopped, but the brave shoved him forward. “Mingan? Cahokia.”
A Blackfoot brave looked around. His hair was shorn at the side, and like the others he had red war paint daubed across his cheeks, eerily matching the red that streaked his arms to the elbow from his butchery. Muscles bulged on his arms and legs. Unlike the other Blackfoot, he wore few war tattoos; like many of them, blood was smeared around his mouth.
Marcellinus blinked, and at his side Sintikala made an incoherent sound.
Kimimela caught up to them and stopped dead. Her mouth dropped open as she stared past them at the tall youth. “Tahtay?”
For a moment they all stood stock still, and then Tahtay put his head on one side. He raised a bloody hand to rub his eyes.
Beside them, a buffalo lifted its head and mewled piteously. As Kimimela jumped aside, Tahtay snatched up his club and stepped forward to bring the weapon down on the beast’s skull with a loud crack. The buffalo flopped back to the ground.
“Saved your life,” Tahtay said sardonically.