Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  By the time sheets of rain swept through the Forest, Hamr and Blind Side had found their way off the terrace and into the big trees. Lightning crashed on all sides. Blind Side jumped with each boom, forcing Hamr to ride hunched over, clutching his mount's neck.

  Darkness fell swiftly, and Hamr guided Blind Side to a pig-walk he had noticed earlier in the day. The rutted path stretched through wooded hollows and puzzled among knolls, eventually leading back to the vicinity of the witches' dell.

  Crouched over his shivering animal, dripping rain and plastered with wind-cast leaves, Hamr kept Blind Side in the muddy rut until he heard the femur bones of the witches’ skull totems clacking in the storm.

  A sprawling oak beside the farthest fence of the dell provided some protection for Blind Side. Hamr tethered him there before crawling through a break among the piled rocks. He ran crouched over, though the night of driving rain ranged black, illumined only by glaring fits of lightning. In each hand, he carried a spear. His footfalls sucked at the mud.

  At the first bunker of moss-matted boulders, he crawled on top, listened hard and heard nothing. When he poked his head in, he smelled the human musk of sleep, barely discerning the reclining shapes of the two tranced workers. The drumming rain masked his movements, and he backed off into the night and resumed his search.

  Woodsmoke tainted with an acrid whiff of incense guided Hamr through the dark to the next mound of grass-seamed rocks. Here vaporous light leaked from a vent hole, and rain glittered around it.

  Hamr listened, heard scraping. Pressing his face to the narrow space between the rocks, he spied hands using a chipped rock to peel strips of green spunk from a thick branch. The hands belonged to Timov.

  Hamr crept around to the front of the burrow, stood, and took a deep breath to steady himself. Then he charged through the moss curtain.

  The interior glowed amber with burning nut-oil cupped in root burls perched in crannies of the burrow. A twig-fire crackled in a small hearth, where curls of green spunk wisped aromatically.

  Timov sat alone beside the hearth, working with the same tranceful rhythm of the Longtooth slaves. Seeing him thus, Hamr's heart constricted, and he knelt before the boy. "Timov!" he whispered sharply.

  The youth looked up groggily and stared with glassy eyes a long moment before his mouth worked. "Hamr." His hands did not stop moving. His face remained slack. "Is it you?"

  Before Hamr could reply, the bone-beaded grass curtain at the back of the burrow parted, admitting the red-haired witch. Her green eyes widened—and Hamr advanced upon her. With the spear tips crossed under her throat, he guided her away from the curtain and pressed her against the damp wall. "Scream and you die."

  Kirchi gasped, shook her head.

  "Where is the crone?"

  "You came for the boy?" Kirchi gaped, astonished.

  Hamr pressed harder, making the witch gag. "Where is she?"

  With startled eyes, she looked to the grass curtain. "Inside—with her crystals."

  "What has she done to Timov?"

  "Trance-thorn—she pricked him."

  "Take me to the witch. She will undo it or I will kill her."

  "No! It will wear off. Quick, we must get away from here before she hears us. Take me with you, and I will help you."

  Hamr's scowl darkened. "You? You're a witch."

  "Not by choice. Please, we must hurry."

  "You're lying! You'll call the witch and her wolves down on us."

  Kirchi's face pleaded, her glance darting to the bone-beaded curtain. "She'll be out here soon. Please, I tell you, you can't stand against her power. Take me with you. I swear, I can help you."

  "How?"

  "The tracking stone—it uses the Dark Traces. It will draw the Stabbing Cat and the Lion down on you before you ever get near the ghost dancer. I have a better tracking stone."

  "Where?"

  She looked to the hearth, and Hamr stepped back but kept his spears trained on her. With another nervous glance at the grass curtain, she ran to the fire and dislodged the central stone behind the flames. A web of light sparkled from a cache of crystals. Kirchi withdrew a dagger-shaped jewel similar to the one that had drawn the evil spirit from Timov.

  Hamr leaned one of his spears against his shoulder and took the crystal. He turned with it—and felt a palpable chill come and go as he changed direction. He tucked the tracking stone in his loin-pelt, and pulled Timov to his feet.

  "Take me with you," Kirchi begged. As Hamr shoved Timov into the rain, she clutched at him. "If you don't, she will surely kill me for giving you the stone."

  Trying to gauge her truthfulness, Hamr stared hard at her. She had given him the tracking stone. That might have been a ploy to save her life. Yet, if he left her behind, she could immediately alert the witch. He seized her arm, pulling her after him into the night.

  "Wait," she whispered and lifted a bag of woven rush-grass from its niche beside the entrance. "My medicine bag—"

  Outside, the rain thrashed. Hamr braced Timov with an arm around his shoulders, leading him toward the stone fences.

  Kirchi blocked the way. She waved them in a different direction, hurrying through the pummeling rain. They darted passed the flooded fire-pit and toward the black pool, where the evil spirit had been driven from Timov. In flashes of storm-fire, the pool glowed.

  Kirchi led them on. Hamr hesitated only long enough to look back once: Silhouetted in flashes of thunderbolts, the two tranced Longtooth men ran across the field where he had headed until diverted by the young witch. He moved hurriedly after her. Timov shuffled under his arm.

  The witch led them past the pool and up a rocky rise sluicing with runoff. The slope leveled to a copse of young fir bunched close enough to thin the downpour. A stab of lightning ignited numerous yellow sparks among the trees—the eyes of wolves.

  Hamr raised the two spears in his right hand to use as a club. Kirchi faced him, arms spread. "Do not threaten them. They know me."

  She whispered to the eye-glints as she had often heard Neoll Nant Caw whisper. Her insides iced, wondering if they would indeed recognize her. She reached into her medicine-bag and clutched the moonstones there, whispering the song-chant that soothed beasts. "Yes, they will let us pass now."

  Hamr walked backward, one hand on Timov's shoulder. He did not take his eyes off the humped shadows as Kirchi guided them through the thicket. The wolves did not stir, and soon disappeared in the darkness.

  A flare of lightning revealed the stone fences at the edge of the dell. Hamr whistled, and the white shadow of his horse stepped from behind the distant oak.

  With the spears he pointed to Blind Side and with his other hand made Timov look. The boy's numbed face stared for what seemed a long while before his slack lips offered a tiny grin.

  Hamr cast a triumphant smile at Kirchi, who wiped the wet-strung hair from her face, casting a nervous glance back toward the burrow of the witch. She followed the hunters into the slick night.

  )|(

  Heavy rain flooded the rut that Hamr had followed to the dell, and he guided Blind Side of Life to higher ground. The stream that led back to Yaqut's camp roared invisibly in the darkness, and Hamr followed its sound. With the drumming rain, the horse weary from walking all day and into the night, and Timov trudging heavily as one asleep, laboring under the witch's poison, the trek went slowly.

  Hamr wanted to stop under the trees and wait for dawn, but Kirchi insisted they keep moving. "Neoll Nant Caw already knows we've stolen her good tracking stone," she said urgently. "She'll be after us. The rain may protect us from her wolves, but only if we keep moving."

  Following ridgebacks through the drumming rain above the stream, Hamr picked his way carefully. One misplaced step would send them plummeting into the engorged stream to be swept through the darkness and bashed among rocks. With his spears, he probed ahead, testing the footing on rocky ground and finding passages through stubborn hedges.

  When fire flickered in the distance—Ya
qut's campfire— Blind Side would go no farther. Hamr had Kirchi and Timov wait with the horse, and he hastened ahead. The spark of light brightened into a blaze far larger than the campfire Hamr had built. Yaqut had stoked it into a bonfire. As Hamr darted among the trees, he understood why. The roars of beasts resounded above the tumult of the surging stream.

  Hamr stopped, squinted into the wet wind. Then a bramble of lightning lit up the terrace where Yaqut had camped, and Hamr identified Yaqut standing before the bonfire waving a torch.

  On the ledge above, slinky shadows of Stabbing Cats paced back and forth. Big as lions, they displayed incisors long as knives. Hamr had heard tales of these beasts, ferocious hunters of the Hippopotamus and the Rhinoceros, from the elders, but he had never seen them before.

  Using his spears to brace himself, Hamr descended to the rushing stream to avoid the big cats. The soaked earth constantly slipped away from under him, and he slid through the darkness. Bramble and rocks slashed him as he went by. One of his spears snagged on a protruding root. The other fell from his grip into the churning torrent below as he used both hands to hang on. His feet kicked, found purchase among exposed roots, and he stood and inched his way upward.

  Now the frenzied roars of the Stabbing Cats battered the air louder than the thunder. Heaving himself onto a rock shelf, Hamr recognized that he had crawled to a terrace level with Yaqut and could see the hunter silhouetted against the smoking flames of his big fire.

  Wind drove the rain under the overhang, wetting the burning wood and scattering swells of smoke. Yaqut slashed with his torch overhead to keep the Stabbing Cats from pouncing onto his ledge while he dragged more dry wood out from the crevices against the rock wall. Soon the wind and the rain would defeat him, and the Stabbing Cats would close in.

  "Yaqut!" Hamr yelled, and the wind snatched his cry. He pulled himself up with his spear and ran toward the fire, keeping close to the rock wall so the cats would not spot him. When he reached the dwarf trees in the shimmering glow of the fire, he shouted again, "Yaqut! Throw away the tracking stone!"

  Yaqut glared at Hamr. His waxen face looked blurred with the strain of defending himself. He waved Hamr closer.

  "Throw the stone away!" Hamr shouted, afraid to move nearer. Beyond the dwarf trees, he would step into range of the Stabbing Cats, where they could easily leap on him. Their roars rose in volume, infuriated by the storm. "The witch deceived us! The stone is calling the cats to you!"

  Yaqut plucked at his waist-strap and held up the stone. "How do you know?" he cried.

  "I went back—for Timov! The young witch told me! Throw it away!"

  With an angry shout, Yaqut spun around and sent the stone flying into the blackness above the flooded stream. Immediately, the roaring of the Stabbing Cats died away. The lashing rain and the spitting fire drove them off.

  Hamr climbed over to Yaqut and took his torch. "You were right about the crone. She would've killed us to save the ghost dancer."

  Yaqut spat out a curse. "Why did you not tell me you were going back?"

  "You'd have tried to stop me." He turned and scurried away, Yaqut pelting him with bitter imprecations. When he returned with Blind Side, Timov, and the red-haired witch in his trail, Yaqut still fumed.

  "Have you lost your mind, man? Why did you bring her?" He turned his twisted eye on Kirchi and blocked her way to the fire. "She is a witch!"

  "She helped me." Hamr showed the long crystal. "This one won't draw the beasts down on us."

  Yaqut eyed the crystal suspiciously, refusing to touch it. "It may not draw beasts, but it will draw Neoll Nant Caw."

  Hamr looked to Kirchi. She nodded. "She will know where her crystal is."

  "And she will come after it, be sure." Yaqut waved the tracking stone away. "Beasts we can fight with fire. The witch—she is death itself to us."

  "You'd have died tonight, Yaqut." Hamr tucked the crystal away.

  "Maybe." Yaqut eyed Timov, where he stood beside Blind Side, staring blankly. "What happened to him?"

  "Trance-thorn," Kirchi replied. "He will come around in time. But he needs to be warmed and fed."

  Yaqut stood aside, let the witch and the boy approach the fire. As Hamr stepped past, he took his arm. "You abandoned me."

  "I came back, for Timov and for you."

  "We do not need Timov." The good side of Yaqut's face looked sour. "And we do not need Neoll Nant Caw stalking us."

  Hamr said nothing. He took Blind Side's rope and walked stiffly to the fire.

  Kirchi sat Timov close to the flames and blotted his soaked hair and damp flesh with warm ash.

  Hamr led the horse to the far side of the fire, near the wall, where they would not slip down the dark slope. Then he squatted beside the witch, and the chill that had penetrated him made him shiver. He bowed his head, throwing his long hair forward, and squeezed the rain from it.

  "I remember you from the Longtooth," Yaqut said to the witch. He squatted with a puff of exhaustion. "Your mother is a seeress. Why have you left Neoll Nant Caw?"

  "I never wanted to be with her." She stopped wringing the water from her hair and regarded the hunter with a steady but respectful gaze. "My teats are too small for the Mothers, so they gave me to Neoll Nant Caw. I hate being with her. I swear by the Mothers, I hate her ways."

  "What do you hate?"

  "The trances. The potions are bitter. They make me sick. I do not like leaving my body, seeing afar."

  "Have you ever seen a ghost dancer?"

  "In trance only."

  "Never in person?"

  "No. There aren't many left around here. Neoll Nant Caw hasn't seen one herself in seven years."

  Yaqut's stare made the witch look away. He kept staring. "Where are you going? The Longtooth will not have you back."

  "I ... I don't know where I'm going. Just away."

  "You think you can get away from Neoll Nant Caw?"

  "I was with her four years. I remember everything she taught me." She patted her woven-grass sack, strung to her waist. "I have my medicines and my charms. Maybe I'll go south, find a tribe that needs me."

  Yaqut frowned. "You will go nowhere till we kill the ghost dancer. If Neoll Nant Caw comes for us, you will stop her—or you will die trying."

  Hamr glared from under his hair at Yaqut. "Save your bluster and threats for the bonesucker, Yaqut. You'd be torn apart by those Stabbing Cats if not for her."

  Yaqut snorted. "Maybe that would be better than letting the old witch get us."

  "What will the crone do? Send her wolves? We've got fire."

  "Fire will not stop her. You have stolen her crystal." Yaqut reached over and took Kirchi's chin in his bony fingers. "You want to tell him what she can do?"

  Kirchi stared at his deformed face with undisguised revulsion.

  Yaqut released her and threw another branch on the fire. "Tomorrow we split up," he announced. "Can the boy travel?"

  Kirchi shrugged doubtfully. "He'll be very tired the next few days."

  "So long as he can walk. You—Hamr," he ordered. "You take the witch and the crystal north, out of the Forest. I do not want Neoll Nant Caw stalking me. The boy and I will go east to the bluffs of the Big River. We will move north this side of the river, and you come south. When we meet—if we meet—we will be closer to the ghost dancer. If I do not find you among the bluffs, I will take the boy to the Longtooth. He will live as a slave, yet he will have his life. By then, the bonesucker will be too far south to hunt."

  "You're more afraid of her than of the ghost dancer," Hamr realized slowly. "If she's that dangerous, then Timov is safer with you. I will go north with the witch as you say." He added in a show of bravura: "I went back for Timov. Now, if I must, I'll stand off Neoll Nant Caw."

  Yaqut sneered, shook his head dolefully.

  Hamr flinched, chanted silently to the Beastmaker: Help me out of this trouble. He had left Timov with the crone and now the boy had been locked in a spell. If he expected the Beastmaker to help, he had t
o confront the witch without exposing the boy to any further danger from her. He had to agree to Yaqut's plan and face the witch on his own. What is her magic? "She must be very powerful," he ventured.

  Yaqut gazed into the fire, the scarred half of his face rigid as ice. "You will find out how powerful soon enough."

  )|(

  Duru watched the flames of Baat's fire seizing twists of its dried wood as the Rain Master sent wet fingers of wind through the thicket to taunt the blaze. Baat adjusted the tinder to catch the gusts and burn brighter.

  Earlier, when the thunderheads swelled, he had carried Duru here, high above the stream where the Bear had clawed her leg. Under an outcrop of granite and behind a thicket of young birch, the Rain Master could not touch them.

  Duru lay on a bed of pine needles and feathery sumac. He had propped her head on a rock padded with moss, so she could watch the storm raging over the Forest. Baat crouched beside her, offering her sips of rainwater he had caught in a burl of willow bark. The willow resins would ease her pain.

  She experienced little pain now. The poplar plaster and the willow tinctures had soothed the wound. And she had slept. She woke deep in the night to find Baat mashing pine nuts. She ate those and the hackleberries he had gathered outside their shelter. Staggered lightning slashed over the Forest and lifted the turtle-backed hills briefly out of darkness.

  Now rested, her hunger appeased and the hurt in her leg dulled, Duru scrutinized the giant who cared for her. His marsh scent filled the enclosure with the fetid exhalation of stirred mud, the undersoils of Turtle and Frog competing with the pine smoke of the fire. She did not find the reek offensive anymore: It had the pungency of a slow kelpy river and brought to mind cattails and cress.

  Nor did his appearance strike her as frightful now that she knew he did not intend to break her bones for her marrow. Large as he loomed, his thick body moved lightly upon his bones, and even in this tight space, he turned and rose as graceful as smoke. His harsh face, carved sharply around steep cheekbones, seemed far more dolorous than dangerous. Those long, slanting eyes shone green with phosphors of sorrow.