Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

Mention of her child shot fear through Aradia. She let Cyndell guide her to the back of the hut, where the old yellow dog slept.

  "Timov—quickly!" Cyndell beckoned at the thatched wall.

  Timov fell to his knees and tore at the withes and dried grass, opening a hole large enough for Aradia to crawl through.

  "Hide—hide—wherever you can!" Cyndell urged as Aradia and then Timov squirmed through the torn hole.

  Even as she spoke, Gobniu's broad shadow fell through the doorway, and the men behind him hurried to the back of the hut. Cyndell screamed and screamed again as the Tortoise men dragged struggling Aradia past the doorway.

  Timov had ducked between the men's legs, and he sprinted among the huts until certain no one pursued. Crouching around a corner, staring past the Mothers and children, who had come to their doorways at Cyndell's screaming, he watched the men tear the rabbit skin wrap from Aradia and stand her up naked in the noon brightness.

  Two men went into the hut. One pushed Cyndell into the clearing, the other dragged little Duru by her ankles and stood over her in the dust.

  The Mothers began to trill, the high, piercing cry of danger, calling their men back from the hunt.

  Gobniu waved, and the Tortoise men unstrapped their axes and rushed at the Mothers, who ducked into their huts and fell silent. The men returned to Aradia's hut. One flint-struck a flame to the roof sheaves.

  Aradia hung limply in the arms of her captors. Timov could see her face clearly in the daylight. Frightened—lips trembling, eyes fluttering—she did not struggle or make a sound.

  Cyndell clutched at Gobniu's knees, howling and sobbing, until he kicked her aside. Then she spat curses at him, flew to her feet and flung herself at him to rip at his eyes. Two men grabbed her. One smote her over the head with his ax, and she went down like a bundle of kindling, arms and legs twisted, and lay still.

  Flames leaped like red mice among the trusses of grass, and a python shape of white smoke coiled straight up into the still sky.

  At Gobniu's sign, the Tortoise men pulled Aradia toward the blazing hut. She struggled, kicking up dust and straining against the men, so that it took another man, lifting her from behind, to carry her to the flames.

  Timov's heart burst in him, and he could not breathe. The men heaved Aradia into the burning hut and danced back from the heat. When she came flying out, one of them struck her between the eyes with the flat of his ax. She collapsed, and they flung her back through the sheet of fire that veiled the doorway.

  The Mothers stood again before their huts, now trilling their slow, dirge wails. The boys had gathered in fidgety groups, their faces blank with fright. The conflagration settled a haze over the camp and with it a terrible, greasy stink of burned flesh.

  The hut collapsed, the fire withered, and Gobniu and his men left, taking the most convenient cliff-trail down to the beach.

  The Mothers hurried to the charred hut. They uncovered Aradia, a black, steamy bundle among the flattened ashes and wispy sparks. The Mothers picked up Duru, whose mouth gaped, gagging on a silent cry, and they carried her off. Several of the Mothers bent over Cyndell, and soon she wobbled to her feet.

  Timov noticed then that the boys had turned from the fire and had gathered around him, sitting staring at him where he crouched in the dust. He met their peculiar stares, their frightened and mockingly relieved expressions—relieved the chief had chosen his sister to propitiate the baneful spirits.

  With a defiant cry no louder than a whimper, Timov sprang to his feet and ran at the staring boys. They leaped aside as he flew past. Even as he kicked dust through the length of the camp and into the outlying hedges, they watched after him.

  At the far end of his strength, everything flung out of him, he crashed through the blowsy grassheads and flung himself into the dirt.

  The smell of the earth, the labor of rotting and rising plants, received him. He sat up, weak, his head full of bright gnats.

  He put his head on his knees and waited for the churning nausea to go away. After a while, chill fluted through him, and he trembled upright. The sky unfurled frayed clouds. Larks floated overhead.

  A new urgency occurred to him. He had to find Hamr. No matter the bush-snakes or panthers, tusked boars or dog packs, he had to find Hamr and tell him what had happened. Only then would his pain find its home.

  )|(

  Throughout the night, Hamr searched for the Beastmaker. No sign of Him appeared. He felt abandoned, and that, more than his exile or the death of Spretnak, convinced him that some truth held to Gobniu's accusation. Hamr thought that maybe he had been wrong to ride Blind Side of Life against the Eyes of the Bear. His own sacrifice might have fulfilled his destiny but taking the lives of the Forest men with the power of the Horse had been wicked.

  Adept, cunning, and fearless as he had once thought himself, he had blundered, he realized now. He had abused his divine privilege and had misused the Beastmaker's gift. Now nothing availed but to accept the truth of his error and find within himself the strength to propitiate the Beastmaker.

  At dawn, Hamr confronted Blind Side of Life. During the night only one sacrifice, apart from death, came clear as meaningful. He would return to the Blue Shell and then redeem the wrongful deaths of the Forest men by delivering to the Eyes of the Bear his horse.

  Probably, the Forest people would kill him as well as his horse. If that turned the evil spirits away from the Blue Shell, his death would be great and he would live on in memory as a Great Man.

  Resolved to this sacrifice, Hamr stood for a long time before his horse, admiring the creature's beauty. Heavy lids over sightless eyes winked away flies, and he pressed his wet muzzle against Hamr's comforting hands.

  How wrong he had been to seek greatness. This horse could have lived among its herd—and the Blue Shell could have been spared so many deaths.

  Cold with anger at himself, Hamr mounted his horse and began the slow ride back to the Blue Shell. The willows and oak and hazel bushes looked happy. Leaves jangled with sunlight and burst-open blossoms sparkled with dew. Hornets left amber tracks in the air. Small birds plunged in the wind. Grass billowed like clouds. Everywhere, the world shone with life.

  Hamr had no desire to die or to turn his mighty horse over to men who would club him and cut him down to meat. Yet, survival inflicted a worse fate: exile from the Beastmaker, loss of his greatness, and the doom of the Blue Shell. Far better to say farewell to the trees full of agile birds.

  A groan snatched Hamr's attention, and he spotted a scrawny figure slogging among the reeds in the bog. He recognized Timov, mud-caked, dazed, arms outstretched, fingers quavering for something to hold. Quickly, he dismounted, grabbed a willow branch and leaned his weight against it so that it fell within the boy's grasp.

  Timov had lost himself in the sedgegrass and had spent the night wandering through the bog. Most of the time, he had crept along the shaggy boughs of marsh trees, thinking he wended his way across the bog. When the old moon had come up after midnight, he saw that he had gone the wrong way, toward deeper wallows, where hippopotamus herds lolled like boulders.

  "Have you been following me this whole time?" Hamr asked after the boy had struggled to firmer ground and lay hugging the earth.

  "No, I went back." He sucked for air, not wanting to announce his news in a hurried breath. When he could speak clearly, he told Hamr all that he had witnessed.

  Hamr stood impassively, his face quiet, eyes slimmed as if he had not fathomed what he had been told. Yet the veins at the side of his thick neck pulsed. Soon his eyes seemed to draw closer together as he understood the depths of his error.

  The Beastmaker had not abandoned him. He had forsaken his own destiny. He had forgotten what Spretnak had told him—the very last thing the old man had told him. He remembered those words now with clarity that hurt his brain: "Whoever speaks of the Beastmaker, speaks lies. Only silence carries His power."

  A look came over Hamr that Timov had never seen before. All the blood dr
ained from the man’'s face, and the holes in the center of his eyes tightened to prick-points. The nostrils of his hawk-bent nose flared and set wide, and his mouth clamped tight as a rock-seam.

  He rose stiffly, mounted Blind Side and turned the animal toward the tall grass and the Blue Shell camp.

  Timov, wearied from his harrowing night in the bog, followed haltingly. Hamr pulled him up so that he rode behind.

  "What will you do?" Timov asked.

  Hamr said nothing. The boy persisted for a while, yammering incoherently about the Tortoise men, the fire, and his sister's soundless death. "What are you going to do? They'll kill you when they see you."

  Hamr listened. The boy mimicked almost exactly the frightened voice inside him. He said nothing. What was there to say? He knew just two things now for sure. The Beastmaker had not abandoned him and death waited ahead.

  When the Panther camp appeared through clumps of hazel shrubs and twisted thornapples, Hamr turned Blind Side of Life away from the huts. They rode through a stand of elm to a more remote rill than the one the people used for water. Here the boys sometimes came to catch frogs. The frogs liked it, because the rill had worn away the land from around tree roots providing many webby places for them to hide. Though not ideal for drawing water, it offered an adequate place to wash the mud from Timov's body.

  While Timov cleansed himself, Hamr strode to the top of a knoll and climbed a robust pine that had shot up among the elm. From a bristly branch halfway up the tree, he could see the Panther huts—the charred heap that had been Aradia's house—and beyond the sea cliffs, the Tortoise camp. The people moved about, too small to identify, but he was sure Gobniu waited there. The dugouts sat empty on the beach. No one fished with so many ill and dead to tend and to stow in the caves.

  Hamr checked the long, sloping trail that glided down to the beach through the giant cleft in the cliff. No one foraged there. Everyone remained in camp. If he rode Blind Side close to the clumps of shrubbery sprouting from the rock crevices, only the Panther people would see him until he reached the beach. Then, if he slipped the right way among the dunes, he could reach the Tortoise huts without Gobniu ever knowing he approached.

  Normally, boys playing among the dunes or girls and Mothers rummaging for cliff plants would see him. Now, they busied themselves dying or comforting the dying. The evil spirits would be his allies.

  Confident of his approach, Hamr came down from the pine and returned to his horse. Timov had washed away the bog mud and stood in a slash of sunlight, drying. He shivered involuntarily at the sight of Hamr. The man looked bloodless. Was he frightened, too? No tremor touched his pale face. His nostrils looked frozen in mid-gasp, jaw locked, eyes unseeing, seeing across a span of light to what would happen soon.

  Hamr mounted and Timov offered his hand, but Hamr did not take it. He looked down at the boy with his grim stare, then rode off. Timov hurried beside, asking again what he would do. Hamr did not look at him again.

  As he turned the horse around the base of the knoll and moved over the sloping sward toward the wide course that dipped into the cleft of the cliff, Timov stopped. He knew that way led to the Tortoise men.

  The Panther camp seemed asleep. The surrounding fields and groves stood empty. No children played or shouted. No old women sorted grains under the big trees. No old men sat by the drying racks flensing hides or carving wood.

  Timov walked through the camp as in a weird dream. Through doorways, he glimpsed people lying down or crouching. The dogs, too, seemed strange, wandering in and out of the tall grass at the far end of the camp, not chasing the mice that flitted there in swift shadows, just coming and going, as if afraid to approach the huts too closely and yet unwilling to drift out of sight of them.

  At the hut where Aradia had been killed, her body had vanished. The Mothers had scattered over the ashes the plaited grass dolls they wove by moonlight and hung on the dead.

  Timov did not stare too long. He hurried on, peeking into each hut he passed, until he found Cyndell. She huddled among the old women whom Timov had spent the last three winters pleasuring in the chill of night. Duru sat in her lap, clear-eyed, flesh pink yet no longer glossed with sweat.

  "Duru—" He took her hand, small and weak though no longer hot or slick. "The Mothers cured you."

  Cyndell, who wore a weary smile, shook her gray head. "No, the Mothers had nothing to do with this. The spirits spared her for their own reasons. Others are still dying. The evil is not through with us. Where have you been, boy?"

  He told her about Hamr, and the tired smile fled from her careworn face. Alarm tightened through her, and she looked side to side for the older women to take Duru. "I must stop him. He will kill us all."

  Duru rolled from Cyndell's lap, and one of the old woman embraced the girl. Cyndell jolted to her feet and pulled herself through the door.

  Timov followed. She waved him back, but he would not be stopped. He read her urgency accurately. Since he had crawled out of the bog, he had recognized the murderous look on Hamr's face. What could Cyndell do? He had no notion of her but that she was one of the Mothers. Her children had all died years before, one in childbirth, others in a tree-breaking storm, and one more at sea. The tribe respected her for her quiet strength and her uncomplaining grief. If anyone from the Panther people could intervene with the Tortoise clan, she might. In such matters of killing—clansman against clansman—what could one Mother do?

  Timov bounded ahead of her and picked out the fastest cliff-trail that he surmised a woman her age could manage. With her leaning on his arm, they skidded and hopped down the trail. She proved far stronger and more agile than he had guessed, and they completed their descent as Hamr appeared among the dunes. He had not seen them yet, nor had the Tortoise clan spotted him.

  Cyndell brushed away furies of sandflies that clouded up from the salt grass as they hurried through the sand to intercept Hamr. Blind Side had clopped ahead and disappeared among the dunes.

  When he reappeared, Hamr had already dismounted and hurried, spear in hand, across the open space toward the huts. The Tortoise women, sitting in the shade of a dune shucking clams, spied him and began their danger trill. Men appeared in doorways, axes in hand.

  By then, Hamr had reached the central hut of the chief, outside which stood Gobniu's coup, two large fishing-spears decked with silver seal-fur and garlands of rainbow-shot mussel. He knocked over the spears, kicked sand onto the fur, and crunched the shells under his sandals. Then he bellowed for Gobniu.

  The chief charged from his hut, spear lowered. Hamr had hoped for that. He had feared only that Gobniu would have cowered and made the killing less noble. Standing firm on the fallen coup, he invited the chief's attack and turned swiftly only at the last moment.

  Gobniu's spear ripped Hamr's antelope-hide vest and snagged. With his own spear, he banged down hard on the chief's weapon, and the two spears clacked to the ground. His hands found Gobniu's thick throat as the chief dug his fingers into Hamr's neck. Hamr, clearly the stronger, brought Gobniu to his knees.

  Other Tortoise men scurried toward the struggling men, spears raised. Hamr sensed them and heaved around so that the chief's back faced the spearmen. The men balked, drew their knives. In the same instant, Hamr shoved Gobniu into the sand, drew his own wooden blade, and poised its tip at the chief's throat.

  "Hamr—stop!" Cyndell shouted and came running through the salt grass between the dunes. "Do not kill him! If you ever loved your Aradia, do not kill him."

  Hamr had wrestled the chief flat on his back, with his arms pinned. In one stroke, Gobniu's lifeblood would spill from him. The Tortoise men danced from side to side, between fear for their chief, and eagerness to lunge at Hamr.

  Cyndell pushed her way between the Tortoise men. "Hamr! If you kill him, you will die here—and all the Panther people will die. The Tortoise clan will want their blood. If you ever loved your Aradia, do not do this to her people."

  "He'll kill you anyway—won't you? Coward! Kil
ler of your own people!" Hamr's face shivered with fury as he pressed the blade harder against the chief's throat. Gobniu's grimace froze, aware that even too deep a breath would cut him.

  "If you kill the chief," a voice spoke from the hut at Hamr's back, "then slaughter must visit the Panther people. The ancestors would expect nothing less."

  Hamr recognized the voice of the Tortoise Man, the tribe's new spiritual leader. His word sounded more deadly than the chief's, for he spoke with the authority of all who had gone before.

  "If you spare him," the Tortoise Man continued, "you will be spared and the Panther people as well."

  "I've come back! Broken my exile!" Hamr gasped past his rage. "For that alone, you will kill me. And all the Panther people as well. You have already slain my Aradia."

  "The death of Aradia propitiated the evil spirits," the Tortoise Man claimed.

  "Duru is healed," Cyndell confirmed. "Do not forsake her life and that of her people now. Relent, Hamr."

  "The evil will pass," the Tortoise Man announced. "In time it will pass entirely away. And so, your exile is lifted. Put aside your knife. Release the chief."

  "You will spare the Panther people?" Hamr asked Gobniu.

  The chief's eyes swore he would.

  "Speak it," Hamr commanded. "Tell everyone. Tell the ancestors. And if you lie, the evil spirits will destroy you and all the people. Speak it!"

  "I will spare the Panther people," Gobniu said through his grimace. "None will be killed."

  Hamr gazed hard into Gobniu's wrung face, imagined his throat slashed and his hot blood spurting. Then he stood and sheathed his knife, picked up his spear. He nodded to the Tortoise Man, and turned to go.

  "But—" Gobniu shouted, up again, his hand at his throat, "the Tortoise people will not have the Panther people among them any longer."

  Hamr spun about, face hard. The spearmen at the sides of the chief raised their weapons.

  "By morning," the chief said, "all the Panther people are to leave. Any who are found among our dunes, within our groves or our fields will no longer be our people but strangers—and they will be killed."