The Sacrifice

by Diane Matcheck

  She seized the rope and followed it hand over hand into the gray torrent until she felt the stake. She jerked mightily and it sucked out of the mud.

  A cry came from above. She looked up and saw through the rain someone standing at the edge of the bluff, silhouetted against the brightening gray sky. His hands were moving as though treading water. Then, slowly, like a great tree, he fell. He toppled headlong down the embankment and crashed into the water twenty paces downstream.

  She stomped toward him, clinging to Bull’s bridle. Even before she drew close enough to recognize the form thrashing against the current, she knew it was Wolfstar.

  The freshly broken shaft of Two-voices’ distinctive red arrow jutted from the boy’s back.

  She loosed one hand from Bull’s bridle, snatched the dragging tether, and threw it to Wolfstar. “Tie it around yourself,” she shouted.

  “Go!” he gasped. “They are fetching horses.”

  The girl whipped the loose end of the tether around Wolfstar’s chest and knotted it. Bull snorted fiercely and pulled back at this weight, but she yanked him forward. She hooked her hand under Wolfstar’s arm and heaved him to his feet.

  “Climb on,” she commanded, crouching to boost him up. With a groan he managed to swing a leg up and catch his heel on Bull’s rump, and she threw her weight into shoving him over the top. He sat hunched over like an old woman, bright blood washing through his shirt.

  With horror she realized there was nothing in the wash but water and mud. No trees, no ledges, nothing to step up on.

  “Help me!” she cried, twisting tight a handful of matted mane and reaching out her free hand.

  Wolfstar hesitated, his gaze locked on the bare, black-grease-painted hand streaming with rain.

  “Help me!”

  He bit his lip and grasped her outstretched hand, clapped his other hand around her wrist, and with a groan heaved her, belly down, across Bull’s withers, like a carcass thrown over a packhorse. Hanging there, she pounded Bull’s ribs with everything in her.

  “Go!” she shouted. “Go!” And as she twisted around and found her seat, Bull broke into a gallop.

  23

  Wolfstar could barely hold on to the girl and was in such danger of being vaulted off Bull’s back that she reined the animal to a stop in mid-stride, and turned to secure Wolfstar.

  They had been riding hard into the driving rain, in a direction she hoped was toward the sunset, and had emerged on the other side of the storm. Behind them, the morning sun appeared as a bright spot in the low-hanging blanket of cloud. They must have started with a long enough lead for Bull’s stamina to favor them, for she had seen no sign of their pursuers. Still, the Pawnee might come charging over the horizon at any moment. She dared linger only long enough to cinch something around Wolfstar’s ribs to staunch the bleeding, and strap him onto the horse’s back.

  But one glance at Wolfstar told her that he could ride no farther. His skin, glittering with sweat, wore a gray cast, as if his blood had drained utterly. He was shivering. He sucked at the air but could not seem to find any, for it gurgled out his back around the broken arrow shaft.

  Anxiously she scanned the horizon. She saw nothing but yellow hills rolling off to the distant sky.

  “Leave me—I’m dying,” Wolfstar said in her ear. “Save yourself.”

  If she escaped, they would hunt her down, he had once said. She urged Bull to the top of a hillock and wheeled him about, peering toward the horizon. The flattened grass was still soaking and the wind gusted cool and damp. In the distance a ragged line of trees showed between hills.

  No movement.

  She turned Bull back down the hill and slid off his withers. Her face was burning.

  “I won’t leave you to die,” she told Wolfstar sharply, ashamed of having considered the idea.

  Her legs were weak and she leaned on Bull as she rummaged hurriedly through a saddlebag.

  She did not know what she hoped to find, but the bag, packed with dried buffalo meat and pumpkin rings, did not contain it. She stepped around Bull’s head and shoved aside a bow and quiver to dig through the other saddlebag. For the first time she noticed her tightly packed grizzly robe strapped to Bull’s hindquarters.

  “Here, wrap yourself in this,” she said, pulling his knife from its sheath and cutting the robe loose. She draped it over his shoulders, then cut the tether off his waist and eased him from the big horse and onto his side in the grass. To touch him, after so long not touching him, was terrifying and sweet.

  “I will return soon,” she said, and led Bull up beside a rock outcropping from which she could mount. Landing on his back, she kicked hard, and they raced off in the direction of the trees.

  * * *

  Cheeks stuffed with the inner bark of a cottonwood tree, she chewed hastily as she mounted Bull. But, facing the hills, she abruptly stopped chewing. Fear prickled through her. Which was the hill she had left Wolfstar beside?

  She rode ahead, cleaving to the hilltops so she might see farther. If she did not crest the right hill, she might walk past Wolfstar. And the right hill was impossible to distinguish among a thousand of its brothers. She stopped and started, afraid to ride too quickly and pass him by, afraid to slow down for fear she would not reach him in time.

  Atop a hill, she turned Bull in a complete circle. In every direction she looked out over hundreds of nearly identical hills. She had lost even the memory of which way the cottonwoods stood.

  At the corner of her vision she saw a reddish ridge, but it was lost again in the billowing grass. Uncertainly, she trotted Bull down between the swells, peering ahead.

  Then she saw it directly: her grizzly robe.

  She kicked Bull forward and slid off him at a run, falling to her knees beside the pelt. She opened and spread it away from Wolfstar. His eyelids were closed tightly. He lay slightly curled in on himself, clutching his medicine bag. Relief flooded through her at the sight of the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. He was alive, though his breath came shallow and rapid.

  She spat a mouthful of pale mush onto the bearskin. “This is the nearest I could find to aspen bark,” she said, skinning away his shirt as she talked. “Back home, I have seen a medicine man cure wounds with aspen bark. Even deep wounds; Cut-ear had an arrowhead broken off in his leg, and now he walks without a limp. Have you ever seen an aspen? I am sure this will work,” she babbled.

  “I thought you had left me,” Wolfstar whispered. His body shuddered like leaves in a wind, then was still. For one reeling instant she feared he had died. Her eyes scanned his face. It was twisted as if in a scream, and tears trickled from his clenched eyes.

  He was crying not in physical pain, but in the other kind of pain.

  “I told you I would not leave you,” she said, watching him, grasping at some way to keep him alive. He lay quietly now, wincing.

  “Don’t you know by now, my grizzly robe is far too important to me to leave behind?” she dared to joke.

  The wet crinkles around his eyes deepened, and the corner of his mouth curved upward. Relieved for no reason, she laughed emptily.

  “I must just take this shaft out of you,” she said as though she knew what she was doing. She had never pulled an arrow from a live creature. When she hunted, she did not bother with the arrowheads until well into butchering. This one would be difficult to remove, for the bone point protruding from his skin in front was wedged between two ribs. She must force the arrow completely through him.

  “As soon as you are well enough to travel, we will head to my country,” she said, her mouth dry. A thickish fluid bubbled out around the broken shaft when he breathed.

  “You’ll see the most amazing places along the way,” she continued. “I will show you where the Elk River falls into a golden canyon as high as fifteen or twenty of your earth lodges.”

  “I never wanted you to die,” Wolfstar said quietly.

  “I know, I know now.”

  “You once asked me abou
t Dreamer’s name. He dreamed an important dream, I told you. But I did not tell that this dream was about you. Of course, at first we did not know it was about you. The Morning Star has been sending this dream to my people since the beginning of time, demanding the sacrifice of a girl. Understand, we do not want to do it—we must! My people will perish if we do not give the Morning Star his due.”

  “Don’t talk now,” she said, shaking. “Here, bite down.” She slid the handle of his knife between his jaws. “I will be as quick as I can.” In the damp grass she wiped her hands until nothing was left of the grease-paint but gray and rose stains. Then she knelt behind him, wrapped both hands around the arrowshaft, and braced her elbows against her rib cage.

  She shoved with all her strength and Wolfstar screamed. The shaft did not move.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “I will manage from the front.” Gently she rolled him onto his back. Crying out in agony, Wolfstar let the knife fall from his mouth.

  She touched the bruised skin where the arrowhead poked through. “I will have to press on your ribs very hard,” she said. She began telling him again of the Land of Boiling Waters as she placed her hands on his rib cage. Something cold skimmed her wrist. Wolfstar’s hand.

  “No,” he said in a voice startlingly like his stepfather’s. “Just be with me.” Laboriously, he shifted to relieve the pressure on the shaft in his back.

  Not letting his words into her head, she uselessly mounded her cottonwood-bark poultice around the wound. Though she knew Wolfstar was dying, she talked on of the marvelous places she would show him along their journey, and the people he would meet in her village, and the new life they would lead there.

  “Give me your hand,” Wolfstar interrupted in a breathy voice. Hesitantly, she took his hand. It was cold and frightening.

  “I have not long to live. Let me speak.” A tear ran down his cheekbone to his ear.

  “All my life,” he said, “or all of it that I remember, I have been the young Wolf Star bundle keeper. This is what I am.” He turned his head and looked into the grass. “Every day of my life I have known: someday the survival of my people will depend on me. When the Morning Star calls again for a sacrifice, it will fall to me to guard the girl. I must be strong inside, clever and kind, so she will do anything I ask; for she must go through the ceremony of her own free will,” he whispered, sending a biting chill through her.

  “I was prepared!” he gasped angrily. “But how could I know the girl would be you…” Tears slipped down the sides of his shaven head.

  “When I saw the Spirit Star rise like fire so briefly,” he murmured, “I knew that the great person whose death he foretold was you. And I feared we were wrong to take your life. I don’t know,” he cried. “Are Pawnee dreams more important than Apsaalooka dreams? Are our gods more important than your gods? All I know is I could not bear to deliver you to your death. I could not do it.”

  His tenderness pierced her heart like a lance.

  “I fear … my father can never forgive me,” he said in a heavy voice.

  She smoothed the sweaty strip of hair from his forehead. “He will. Someday he will understand.”

  They were silent awhile.

  “This is the first time I have ever done anything the young Wolf Star bundle keeper was forbidden to do,” Wolfstar said. “It feels—like all those places you tell about. It feels like touching a cloud. Thank you for showing me courage.” He began coughing, and she sat by helplessly until he caught his breath again. “I hope … the Morning Star will be satisfied with my life,” he whispered.

  The sting in her eyes was overpowering and she could not look at him.

  He tried to speak again. She bent low to hear him. “I can’t … I don’t understand,” she said.

  Slowly, he lifted his left arm and laid it across the other, then pressed his wrists fiercely to his chest.

  She clenched her whole face to squeeze back the tears. I love you, also, she signed in return.

  For some time there was no sound but the breeze across the prairie grass and the gurgling of Wolfstar’s punctured back. Then Wolfstar began struggling to sit up, gasping for air. “What will become of me?” he said with sudden strength, as though crying out to the stars. “I have betrayed the stars!”

  “The stars will forgive you for following your heart,” she said, although she, too, was afraid. “They must. The Spirit Star shone for you, Wolfstar.” She worked an arm under his back and slid her other hand under his head and held him. Rocking gently, she began to sing to him in a wavering voice, “Even worms, each other they-them-love.”

  Wolfstar said nothing more before his spirit-soul left him. The girl kept cradling him and singing, her voice growing hoarse, until, when the sun had climbed high overhead, his body-soul, too, drifted away. The end of her song left a tremendous silence on the vast, windy plain.

  She looked down at his lifeless face, and a drop of water splashed on it. Another fell, and another. And suddenly a terrible live thing in her burst from her throat. She heard herself shrieking, and tears began streaming down her face.

  It was not true that she had no tears in her. She had cried as a baby, watching the colorful toys they spiraled above her brother’s cradleboard, straining for the sounds of their voices. She had cried, but her father poured water down her nose, and it was such a horrible drowning, dying feeling she quickly learned to stop. After that, whenever she began to cry, Chews-the-bear simply said, “I am going to fetch the water,” and she would gulp back her tears.

  For so long she had frozen every tear before it fell, each time she dreamed of her mother and woke to none, each time the village children had turned away or insulted her as she passed, each time her father greeted her accomplishments with “There is no room in a warrior’s heart for vanity.” Her tears numbered as many as the stars. And instead of falling, they had grown inside her into a great icy rage.

  Now the tears were melting, one by one. They hurt worse than any wound, like the pain when frozen limbs are warmed back to life.

  24

  The moon eased from behind a long cloud bank and again revealed the landmarks they had been riding for through the night: a huge bluff rising from the flat like a sudden mountain, and to one side, nearer, a stone needle piercing the sky.

  Behind Bull dragged a makeshift travois of cottonwood saplings, and atop it, wrapped in the grizzly robe, Wolfstar’s body. The girl looked straight ahead, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. She was numb as a stone in winter. She had been riding all night, and all the day before, stopping only twice, to pass water.

  The moon was setting when she reached the foot of the bluff. It was higher than it had looked from a distance, and too steep for Bull to attempt. She loosed his saddlebags and tossed them onto the bear hide alongside the body. With Wolfstar’s knife she cropped off what had grown back of Bull’s mane and tail. She stuffed the hair into a saddlebag, lashed the robe closed, and secured its ropes around her body. Without looking up, she began to climb the bluff. It was difficult with Wolfstar’s weight dragging behind her. Several times she followed a cut or a slope that looked promising, only to find that farther ahead it grew too steep to continue. All she could do was keep moving.

  The sky was beginning to lighten when the girl finally reached the flat top of the bluff and heaved the body after her. Prickles of light swam before her, and she leaned over, hands on her knees, waiting for the lightheadedness to pass. Wind whipped across the plateau, heedless of sage and stunted scrub pines. The bluff was so large that a few steps inward one could forget that this was not the prairie itself.

  The grave should have a view. She remembered that toward the sunset ran the river she and her captors had followed to this place. Bowing her head against the wind, she set out for that side of the bluff. A number of hares sprang out of her path as she walked, but her eyes did not follow them.

  She chose a large outcropping that looked down on the river snaking below and was narrow
enough to offer a view of both sunrise and sunset. At that moment the sun was rising bloodred.

  “Here you can touch a cloud,” she said softly.

  The dirt was too dry; the instant she broke into the crust it crumbled to dust and was blasted off the bluff’s edge by the wind. She would merely pile rocks on top of the body. It did not matter, for there seemed to be nothing but hares on this barren rock, and they would not meddle with flesh.

  She untied and opened the bearskin, half expecting to see again the rapid rise and fall of Wolfstar’s chest, but it was as still as she felt inside. His skin was faded, not the rich brown that it had been in life.

  She struggled to think ahead, to a future when this would all be a memory.

  Wolfstar was gone. She might never cry away her grief for him. But she had earned a place among her people. She would tell the story of her grizzly robe at their fires, and they would sing songs of her, and finally no one could doubt that she was the Great One.

  It was not thirst for glory that led her thoughts down this path; she was merely grasping for a reason to go on.

  Thus she pushed down her tears as she dragged the body into place near the point of the outcropping and began laying out his things beside him. She gave him most of the dried buffalo meat and pumpkin rings, and he could refill the waterskin from the river below. Bull’s mane and tail would give him plenty of horses. She thought of leaving him the bow and quiver, but he was no hunter, so they would be little use to him. She drew his knife from her twisted-hair belt and slid it into the sheath on his breechcloth.

  A robe!

  Her mouth dried up. The only robe on this vast prairie was her own. Her grizzly hide.

  He must have a robe; this was the Moon-when-the-leaves-fall, and bitter cold could come at any moment. There were the buffalo she had seen, but it might take days to bring one down, and time to tan, and she did not know whether the Pawnee were still tracking her. Desperately she argued with herself. She needed a robe, too, after all. But she was good with a bow; she could manage until she found game to make a new robe.