Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  The low voices of the ul udi lulled Baat, too, and he strode across the rocky, uneven terrain in a purposeful trance. He had heard stories of the body of light many times before. All the stories had interested him once—how the stars blazed as suns, how everything had once cooked in the stars and been gathered into giant rocks that whirled about even more gigantic suns, and how the suns gathered in enormous whirlpools and the whirlpools linked in long chains across the sky: all of creation held together by lightning.

  The stories no longer interested Baat. He did not want to know any more. He wanted to experience for himself the celestial depths as a body of light and to feel the truth of those stories.

  As one of the People, his birthright guaranteed him a place among the ul udi of the upper air. There, he would join all the other People who had carried the cold fire while on earth. Soon, he would unite with the other ghost dancers who had made this journey north to where the ul udi could walk with the animals.

  Daylight streaks appeared as a soft rivulet of clouds in the east. While its gray waters pearled brighter, Baat sought out a grassy swatch beside a narrow lake. Under the thrust of a red sandstone boulder, he lay down and let exhaustion claim him.

  Duru woke as he put her down in the yellow grass. She watched the moon set, a breath of mist in the cold blue.

  Among green sedges of the lakeshore, Duru found sweet tubers that, even uncooked, tasted lovely. There could be no fires. So, she prepared the tubers by mashing them and mixing in insects and lizard meat she spent the day collecting.

  Twice, beasts wandered out of the stony ranges, big-shouldered hyenas and wolves with long limbs. A few thrown rocks sufficed to drive them off, and she did not have to rouse Baat.

  From the top of the sandstone boulder, Duru searched for Yaqut. The herd of woolly rhinos they had ridden yesterday dotted the southeast. In the west, bison rivered in long dark streams. White mountains shone in the north as splinters of ice. And, overhead, wedges of geese flew south.

  The short day charred to night swiftly. Baat rubbed sleep from his face and dismissed his dreams—more nightmares of the smallheads slinking through tall grass, faces smudged with bone-ash of his dead clan. He ate the tuber-mash gratefully. Before he finished, the shine seeped from out of the darkness and glossed the air around him.

  "How far is there to go?" Duru asked, when the dancing ultraviolet lace of the ul udi appeared around them.

  "We'll reach the Serpent Glacier before the new moon," he said.

  "Can you walk that long?" Duru asked, concerned. "The days are too short to rest."

  Baat smiled vacantly. "I have only to make this journey once." His grateful eyes looked down at her. "The ul udi will lead you back south. There, seek out the witch Neoll Nant Caw. She will find you a home among one of the northern tribes."

  "And my brother?"

  "Him, as well."

  If either of us survives, she meant to add, though there was no need.

  Baat nodded and said no more.

  The ul udi began their hypnotic stories. They spoke of the body of light's destiny, the illusion of time, unreal as the eerie perception of the sun and moon rising when in fact the world rolled in space as an egg, spinning in emptiness, whirling about the sun—and the body of light shone in reality as a broken piece of another dimension, deeper than depth, shorter than any height, thinner than width, and free of time. She did not listen.

  In Duru's mind, the image of her brother rose. As sleep immobilized her body in the arms of the ghost dancer, her soul climbed into the sky to meet him.

  Baat felt her go and felt a pang of nostalgia for the caring that carried her. Years had passed since he had cared for anyone. The larger awareness of the ul udi engulfed his longing.

  You are not alone. The People are with you.

  "They are with you, in the sky," Baat responded. He watched his footing carefully. Duru had withdrawn from her body, and if he dropped her now, she could easily die.

  The People are in your bones, in the marrow that makes your blood. Have you forgotten the stories of the shells that make the body?

  "Tell me again."

  Smaller than you can see are shells, round and flat like the carapace of crabs. They link together to make your flesh, your bones. In each shell is a piece of your life—and each piece contains all the lives that have lived before you, every grandparent, every distant animal ancestor of your oldest grandparent.

  "This is just a story."

  It is a true story.

  "It is a story, nonetheless. I am alone."

  Listen, Hollow Bone: Each piece of life in each of the many, tiny shells of your flesh is an antenna.

  "As on insects."

  Yes, you remember this story. Like the antennas on an insect that hear vibrations and feel changes, so the antennas in the shells of your body feel the light and the changes in the light. That is how we can be with you. We are bodies of light far above in the upper air—yet, the antennas in the tiny pieces of life in the shells of your body feel us, feel the changes that are our voices and our thoughts.

  "Why do the smallheads not feel you?"

  Their antennas are not tuned to us. They hear only themselves.

  "Then, I'm not alone. The smallheads are alone."

  Yes. The smallheads are alone with themselves. And when they grieve, they grieve alone.

  "I like the stories of the People better. I like the one that says each star is someone who has lived before, and when we die we appear in the sky."

  That is only a story. The stars are suns, far away.

  "I know it is only a story. I know it is not true. And that is why I like it."

  )|(

  Timov sat thinking of his survival. Absentmindedly, he spun the disk of tortoise shell around a thin reed and watched the markings blur. When Hamr had first shown him the wheel, a lifetime ago, among the Blue Shell, he had marveled at Hamr's words that the sun and the moon, too, turned round as the wheel. Now, looking at the sun bloat red in the west while the moon lifted gigantically orange in the east, he knew they held roundness.

  "Hamr talked to me about the wheel," Kirchi said, as if she could read his mind. "He told me about Spretnak. He told me that destiny is the emptiness at the center of our lives, around which our lives turn."

  "Yeah, Hamr loved that old man."

  They sat among a cluster of low boulders on the tundra, the Forest a line of indistinct purple to the south. The land lay flat on all sides, clearly revealing the synchrony of the sun's setting as the full moon rose.

  Experiencing this balanced moment, Timov, Kirchi, and Yaqut, who sat apart, could hear each in their own memories the chants their clans sang to greet the sun's pale companion.

  Yaqut hummed a moon-song he remembered and stared out over the fire at the dark flecks of a distant herd. He recognized the woolly rhino, the red shag giants who moved against the southern migrations of the other animals. Baat has surely used them to mask his flight from the Forest. Right now, he camps somewhere on the far side of that herd. Small flickers like heat lightning nibbled at the darkness in the north. Those will be the ul udi, coming down to comfort their monster.

  With his inmost marrow, Yaqut felt the certainty of finding the bonesucker out here on the flatlands. Yaqut had his home in the north. Its barrenness felt familiar to him. Here, he had learned the Ways of Wandering from his elders. Here, he had stalked and poisoned most of the tall bonesuckers. And here, among the rocks to the north, he had lost his parents. Their spilled blood chilled the air more sharply for him than the north wind.

  The ghosts of his tribal past would guide him to food and water, Yaqut knew. To find Baat, he needed Timov's inner sight. Glad now that the boy had smashed the tracking stone, he watched the moon lift like a grand skull.

  He remembered too well the unnatural ferocity of the Moon Bitch, and he felt grateful not to have the witch's crystal in his possession. The way that evil creature moved in eerie ripple-starts like a watery reflection, yet flashed fa
ngs and talons of keen reality and bellowed like a pride of lions terrified.

  Yaqut also appreciated that Timov had taken the young witch from him. His lust to dominate the woman had almost bested him. How corruptible is the flesh, he thought, looking down at the blackening wood the hungry flames fed upon.

  For his hunt of this most wily of ghost dancers to succeed, Yaqut understood he could not squander his power in sexual indulgence. The tight confrontation with the bonesucker, the death of Hamr, and the burning Forest had shaken his resolve, he realized now, and he had almost betrayed his purpose by lusting for the young witch.

  With a sidelong glance, Yaqut watched Kirchi and Timov playing with the tortoise wheel, smiling at each other. Let them amuse themselves, he decided. That would better enable him to focus on the hunt. Later, after the demands of the dead had been met, there would be time for the corruptible needs of the flesh.

  Kirchi could feel Yaqut staring at her. She shifted slightly, so she would not have to see anything of his broken face. Her stomach tightened to think how close he had come to taking her.

  With gratitude, she smiled at Timov, who reminisced aloud about Hamr's heroic deeds among the Blue Shell. In the broken moonlight, his dark eyes and hair seemed black as night itself, and his youthful face floated apparition-like. The hollows of his cheeks and the breadth of his jaw hinted at the man he would be—if he survived.

  Against the purple turbulence of sunset, the ruff of his lion-skin fanning out in the steady breeze, Timov had looked almost as masterful as her Hamr had. Even though his resourceful courage and cleverness had saved her from Yaqut, he was not Hamr, not the one she had prayed to the Great Mother to save her from Neoll Nant Caw. Hamr had done that. Hamr had slain the Lion and the Moon Bitch. Hamr alone had embodied the male-beauty she had wanted.

  Timov caught the sadness moving through Kirchi, and he put the wheel aside and brushed his knuckles against her cheek. So that she would not have to face Yaqut, he went to the fire and helped himself to pieces of the rabbit he had stoned earlier and that Yaqut had skinned and cooked. He expected some comment—perhaps a challenge—from the old hunter. Yaqut simply stared at him with an unreadable expression on his raw face.

  Kirchi and Timov ate in silence. The huge, crystal-bright sky lifted dream-shapes out of the landscape: Boulders shimmered like bearskin huts, shadow animals sneaked through ditch-grass, and bats swerved against the eternities of the sky.

  A shadow had edged closer. It ripped free of the darkness, billowed as a cloud of grassheads, then dissolved into a human form.

  "Duru," Timov whispered, almost afraid to breathe lest the apparition shatter.

  Kirchi shrank into herself at the sight of the young girl. Duru’s black hair and onyx eyes glinted with moonfire, her small, round face waiting as if to say something. As she moved to speak, her image scattered like seed tufts in the wind. Only moonlight slanted where she had been.

  The next day, after following Timov's cold-fire sense of his sister northwest over grass-stubbled land rutted with numerous trails, they sighted bison moving south. Though the herd milled a horizon away, the wind churned with the mulchy, drumming presence of them.

  "Longtooth," Yaqut declared and pointed his short lance into the dust shadows behind the herd. Squinting patiently, Timov and Kirchi spotted them: dots of movement, hunters following the herd.

  "How do you know they're Longtooth?" Timov asked.

  "They follow the Bison south. They are on their way to join other bands at Salamander Flats for the Frost Moon rites. I had hoped to be there with them, were it not for the trouble you have given me." Yaqut shook his head with regret.

  Now, inspired by the sight of his clansmen, Yaqut pressed their trek almost to a run.

  Kirchi faltered, then disappeared into a ditch rife with rock-ivy and the tall grass that had flourished where the herds could not reach. When Timov went back for her, he found her peeling the thick moss from the rocks at the soggy bottom of the depression.

  "I'm bleeding," she declared.

  Timov started down through the profusion of nettles and ivy.

  "It's moon-bleeding," she added, and he stopped as though she had uttered a curse. "Let me attend to myself and I'll be with you."

  Timov retreated hastily. When he told Yaqut, the hunter touched his genitals and waved his lance to ward off whatever blood magic might have smirched Timov. "I am going ahead. If you are wise, you will come with me."

  During the moon-flow, among the Blue Shell, Timov had to leave Mother's cave and sleep in the cold, damp root cavern with the slave Biklo. Otherwise, he would have been subject to the spirits that bled women to sate the blood-thirst of the Great Mother.

  "I used to believe that, too," Kirchi said later, when they were gathering kindling for that night's fire. "That's what the Mothers say, but the witches say different."

  The witches had spoken with the ul udi, Timov knew.

  "And the ul udi taught me that this is nothing to be afraid of. My womb is cleansing itself, preparing to receive the next egg that I may grow into a child."

  "No spirits?" Timov nodded. "No evil blood magic?"

  "No moon-flow, either," Kirchi smiled. "I've been eating wonder-of-the-night berries to skip my flow this month. I just pretended to bleed, because I knew it would get us away from Yaqut for a while. I'm afraid of him, Timov. I know he wants to kill us."

  "You're a witch," Timov said. "Isn't there something you can do, some magic—"

  "I'm not like Neoll Nant Caw. I can't shapeshift. And I've only begun to learn about poisons. I'm sure Yaqut knows more."

  "Then, we'll just have to wait."

  "For what? He's too cunning to deceive, too strong to fight. What can we wait for?"

  Timov watched the way the fox-fine angles of her face absorbed her concern into a concentrated alertness. She never seemed to brood or frown, only to be more watchful, as if fear were something that existed only outside herself. When she talked about being afraid, she meant she perceived real danger.

  Timov studied this with fascination, for it was so different from the continual dread that filled his body. For him, dread persisted—unshakable and vivid. The Blue Shell's Panther men had not sponsored him when boys two years younger had already been fully initiated. No one had wanted the contagion of his fear.

  And, for this reason, he had disliked Hamr before he had captured his horse and had become a great man. Hamr had laughed at fear – whereas, fear so wholly belonged to Timov that he had felt Hamr had been laughing at him.

  Remembering Hamr, recalling all that he had accomplished, all that had been lost, left Timov numb. He caught a few voles, which Yaqut cooked with the insects and grassheads Kirchi gathered when scavenging firewood, and they ate without talking. In the middle of their meal, the moonlight over the grass swirled, like flames on oil, and Duru appeared again. She floated closer.

  Timov looked up startled and started to speak. Kirchi stopped him, reached into her satchel and extracted one of her moonstones. She placed the pearly stone on the far side of the fire. The wraith fluttered above it like a wavering thread of incense.

  "Timov—" Duru's voice squeaked in the air, tiny as a bat's. "Follow if you must. But beware, brother. The Dark Traces are inside you. If you die now, they will torment you."

  "Duru, where are you? Are you alive?"

  A blur of some object flew past Timov's face, and a lance struck the moonstone, sent it skipping into the dark. Duru's image wisped away.

  Yaqut jumped into the firelight and retrieved his weapon. "I warned you about the witch," he said gruffly. "There will be no conjuring of ghosts on my hunt."

  Timov began to rise, a protest starting in him, and Yaqut touched the tip of his lance to the crook of the boy's collarbones and forced him down.

  The hunter backed away and strode into the moonlit darkness.

  )|(

  At night, the far rim of the earth glowed as though the world burned. Banners of celestial flames unraveled green
and yellow in the sky overhead, and their shreds fluttered on the horizon. Baat moved gingerly among unseen potholes, grass-hidden fissures, and the malice of sharp rocks.

  Twice in one night, his feet slipped from under him and he stumbled. Both times, he took the force of the fail on his back and lay gazing up through tears of pain and frustration at the lopsided moon, the sleeping girl cushioned against his chest.

  Duru used Baat's cold fire to go into a flying trance so that she could visit her brother. She accepted the great danger that she might be disturbed while out of her body. Her soul could be flung into the upper air, prey to the Dark Traces, who could keep her from coming back until her flesh died.

  Baat tried to talk with the girl about this. When the Bright Ones appeared at night, shining around them like formless man-sized snowflakes, the ghost dancer and Duru could understand each other. Duru agreed not to fly out of her body, just to rest. Yet, even when she did not try, her concern for her brother carried her out of herself.

  Baat could protect her from losing her body only by keeping the cold fire away from himself, so that Duru could not use it anymore. At nightfall, when the violent shine seeped from his skin, he raised his arms over his head and drew all the power into his hands. The energy burned in his grasp, hot as though he had thrust his fingers into the throbbing heart of a wood fire. Then, with a burst of pain, lightning twisted off his hands and writhed upward into the spectral night.

  Drained of his power, Baat carried Duru asleep in his arms through the night. At sunrise, he sought out kettle lakes and glacial streams. In that thick undergrowth, he located water and food. Then, he slept, and Duru watched over him and prepared their one meal of the day.

  Each day, the land became stranger to Duru. Spires of rock slanted out of the ground among silver ponds and water-filled sinkholes. The ground itself grew pebbly, strewn with smoothly worn gravel.

  Gradually, the rubble thickened, until frost-shattered rocks covered the earth. At one site, stones clustered in perfect interlacing circles as far as she could see. She believed them to be spirit rings.