ELIM HADN’T GIVEN Ax more than a couple handfuls of feed. Even so, he was acting like he’d eaten a whole bucketful: excited and irritable and so full of beans that he couldn’t hardly stand it. He kept tossing his head as if he had a bad bit or flies at his ears, chewing at that little scrape on his shoulder as if it were giving him a fierce itch, and stiffening as if he might need to bolt at any second. If Elim had any notion left about vaulting up onto Ax’s back and tearing off east, this here was the death of it.
Still, Elim would rather ride herd on a hot, pissant horse than force-march a lame one any day of the week. So he led him like he would a colt who was only just learning his ground-manners: watching him every second, giving him a firm correction every time he got that telltale tension in his neck, and leaving plenty of slack in the line otherwise. At least the uphill parts gave him a use for all that energy.
It was a dark, humid day. The clouds scudded low across the sky, rolling out from the mountains ahead, cooling the earth and bleaching the color from the dry scrub as they advanced. Elim decided that he would be all right with getting caught in a thunderstorm, just as long as the water pooled somewhere where they could drink it. In the meantime, he would do just about anything to take his mind off the parched ache in his throat.
“Hawkeye,” he said, when the moment seemed right, “do you think he might could have eaten something? Do y’all have horsetail or lupine or anything like that out here?”
The Sundowner beside him looked up at the question. He wasn’t nearly so unsteady as he had been yesterday, but it would have been an over-reach to call him cheerful. “If you’re asking why he’s not behaving well, I think you already know my opinion.”
That thrust an unwelcome worry right back down Elim’s gullet. “I know, but –” Elim glanced back at Bootjack, and made eye contact for one unnerving second. But the tired-eyed Crow knight walking behind the wagon had already made his position clear: he did not care what anyone did today, as long as they kept going.
Elim kept his voice down anyhow, just in case Bootjack might have learned Ardish in the middle of the night. “... but I already told you, if he was gonna colic from drinking that, he would’ve done it already.”
Hawkeye sighed. “Do they talk about Merin-Ka, where you come from?”
Ax tensed again, and Elim gave his lead a firm sideways pull. The wagon was too cumbersome to circle easily, but the trail was shallow enough that Elim could at least snake him left and right, keeping him too busy with zig-zagging to rest his mind on any contrary notions.
And speaking of contrary notions...
“General Clay did what he felt like had to be done,” Elim said diplomatically, mindful that he was talking to somebody who almost certainly believed otherwise.
“I’m sure he did,” Hawkeye said. “But I was more referring to what happened afterwards. To the people he left alive.”
Elim had practiced plenty with his toy soldiers, but he never had played out Merin-Ka. It had been fun to line them all up on one side of the table and the Sundowners on the other and make them fight. It would not have been fun to situate the 163rd Infantry around the edges of an empty hog-trough, put all the Sundowners down inside of it, and refuse their surrender for the six months it took them all to starve to death.
Well, not all.
“I understand they did some unfortunate things,” Elim said, again with a mind toward delicacy.
“No,” Hawkeye said, with more vigor than Elim usually heard from him. “They did an unforgiveable thing. They ate their kinsmen. That they did it out of desperation is irrelevant. That that their relations had already died, and their children were starving, is irrelevant. They disobeyed Grandfather Coyote’s first law, one as old as gods or men, and became neither gods nor men.”
“All right,” Elim said, profoundly uncomfortable with where this was going, “but Ax ain’t neither one either. He’s a horse. He didn’t hurt anybody. He didn’t even know that there was people there to hurt.”
“No, of course not,” Hawkeye agreed. “But to deliberately torment living creatures is to unleash a powerful evil in the world... and to profit from their suffering, even accidentally, allows that evil to extend its reach. I think you understand that more than you want to admit.”
Elim nudged Actor back to the right again. He didn’t want to have to understand anything of the kind – didn’t want to have to think about any sinister, supernatural reason for the sweaty twitching of the poor critter’s skin, or the nervous flicking of his ears, or the unsettled turning of Elim’s own stomach. He blew out a deep breath. “I know,” he said at last. “I just want him to be all right.”
There was a little silence after that, filled by the soft nonsense of Bootjack’s voice. He looked to be talking to Way-Say, though the Crow prince’s answers were soft enough that Elim couldn’t make them out.
“You know,” Hawkeye said at last, “I have noticed some lupine growing on the shadier side of some of these hills. I’m sure you know more than I do about how it might affect a horse.”
Elim could not have named the change in the older Sundowner’s voice, or the reason for it. But it did occur to him that Hawkeye had done considerable noticing on this trip – not just about poisonous weeds, but about horseshoes and wall-writings and things hidden behind trees and under water that nobody else had clapped eyes on yet. He had the soft hands and flabby body of a middle-aged accountant, but yesterday he’d been able to count off the last paces towards that glittering white mesa as surely as a veteran trailblazer.
“You’re sorcerous, ain’t you.” It was not an accusation. “Like him back there in the wagon.”
Hawkeye smiled faintly, either at Elim’s days-late understanding or the words he’d expressed it with. “A little, yes.”
He wasn’t one of the Crow, though. Even Elim could see how little his hay-colored skin and small frame resembled theirs. He paused to correct the horse again. “Hawkeye, how come you serve these fellas? Why not just, you know... be your own man?”
He could do it. He was plenty smart enough. And this almost-lawless land out here was more than big enough for a man to pull up stakes and start over again, if he had a mind to. Elim was sure of it.
Hawkeye seemed to find that amusing too. He tipped his head. “I had thought about asking you the same thing. About that white boy you were with before.”
It wasn’t meant to be a jab, but being reminded of Sil cut him all the same. Elim sucked his punctured lip. “No, he ain’t – he wasn’t my boss, or anything. I just went along with him cuz it was part of the job. You know, cuz my folks needed it done, and he was the one to do it with.” Elim didn’t mention Sil’s big brother, but he couldn’t help thinking about him. None of this would have happened if Elim had partnered up with Will instead, just like usual and always.
Hawkeye paused to step around an especially big hole in the road. “Your ‘folks’ – your parents?”
No, of course not. Elim had never had any misconceptions about that. He’d gotten those toy soldiers as a present on his first birthday with the Calverts... or rather, what they’d decided was his birthday, which was to say October the 4th: the sale date on his papers. It had been a hell of a surprise. Boss had whittled them himself, and Elim couldn’t work out where in all the hard work of summer and fall he’d found the time to do that – and somehow in secret, too.
Clem had cleared that up for him. They wasn’t made for you, she’d said, when she saw him carving his initials into their bottoms. They was for my brother.
Her brother, which was to say, Lady Jane’s last baby. The boy she and Boss had wanted so bad – the one who hadn’t lived even a day. The one whose place Elim had been bought to fill.
Maybe so, Elim had answered, because by then he wasn’t afraid of answering back. But they’re mine now.
“Not parents,” he said, “but they are my family now.” And he needed to get back to them so bad it hurt.
Hawkeye nodded, as if this were t
he most ordinary and understandable thing. “It’s the same for me. I don’t belong to these two here. But I was asked to go with them, and I understand why.”
Elim tried to get his head around that. So maybe Bootjack and Way-Say were Hawkeye’s copy of Sil... and maybe he’d decided they were worth putting up with for the same reasons. “Cuz your family asked you to?”
“Not family,” Hawkeye replied, “but they are my people now. They’ve given me a place and a purpose, and I’m content with it.” His eyebrows lifted a little behind his blindfold, as if Bootjack had just said something especially interesting.
Back in Elim’s neck of the woods, there was a fine line between kindly enquiry and nosy intrusion. It was hard to know where that line was out here. “Me too,” Elim said. “I’d –”
Actor stopped and turned to chew that scrape again.
“Naw, c’mon, buddy,” Elim said, with a gentle push of his head. “Let’s keep on, now. I’ll keep them flies offa y –”
In half a second, Ax’s ears went flat. Elim had just time to see him flash the whites of his eyes and his teeth before that big black face whipped around and bit him.
“OW!” Elim jerked his hand back, and nearly dropped the lead.
“What?” Hawkeye backed up, startled. “What is it?”
What kind of question was that? Wasn’t it god-damned obvious? “He bit me,” Elim said, staring incredulously at the wound. “You trifling son of a bitch, you BITme!”
“Nankah!” Bootjack snapped, rounding the wagon in three quick strides. “Hihn yekwi?”
Hawkeye answered him in calming tones as Elim tried to do likewise for his own temper.
It wasn’t the horse’s fault. That was what Boss always said. A horse didn’t know anything but how to be a horse: he wouldn’t do anything but what you’d taught him to do, or what he felt like he needed to do.
Elim took a deep breath. He weathered the rest of Bootjack’s complaint, and by the time Hawkeye had managed to communicate that this was just a little bit of misunderstanding, he had his mind right again. It was just an accident. Ax hadn’t even broken the skin.
Still, Elim kept a close, careful watch on his ears as they started back up, and did not at all care for this new, mistrustful distance between them.
“Hawkeye,” Elim said, once he was sure they’d re-established their walking rhythm, “I know you can’t know what might happen to him... but boy, if you got any ideas on how we might put a damper on it, I sure would like to hear ’em.”
The Sundowner did not lift his downward gaze – and not for the first time, Elim wished like the dickens that he could see the man’s eyes. “Do you know anything about your other people? Your native parent, I mean, or any of their relations.”
Elim was hard-pressed not to bristle at the question. He was a good Penitent man, even if lately he’d taken to dressing like a vagrant shaman. “If you’re asking cuz you think I could witch him somehow –”
Hawkeye shrugged. “I was asking because I think you already have.”
“Like hell,” Elim swore. “And before you tell me about how he came back after that first night, or how I brought him back in this morning, or all the work I’ve sweet-talked him into since he’s went lame, let’s get it straight: that ain’t any of your devilcraft. That’s just what they do for you when you get an understanding with them, and if that’s sorcery, then I’m a fishman’s sister.”
Hawkeye said nothing.
Which gave Elim enough room to realize how unkind that had been. He sighed. “I’m sorry, buddy. I don’t mean to get shirty with you. But that – those other of my people, aren’t ones I know anything about, and I don’t too much like to think about them. So if – you know, if you happen to have any more regular ideas, I think I might do better with those.”
Hawkeye tipped his head left and right, as if rolling Elim’s apology around in his mind. “Well, I’m afraid I don’t have any useful experience with the effects of infection on living creatures. But –” and Elim clung with desperate, sweaty hope to that one little but “– it does seem that dead ones are relieved by well-intentioned, loving acts... especially by those who know them.”
At first, Elim didn’t understand the back-turned nod of Hawkeye’s head. Then he realized that the man was pointing at the wagon, with that peculiar chin-tipping politeness of theirs – and not at the wagon, but the person in it.
People, rather. Do-Lay, who Elim had heard twice now, and Way-Say, who had been taking such care to talk to him, set out food for him, and now even sleep beside him, ghastly as that was. Like you would for a sick person, or a baby.
“All right,” Elim said. “Can’t hurt to try.”
But as his left hand throbbed and his right ever-so-reluctantly returned to Actor’s hot, flinching side, Elim began to think that maybe he would rather swap back for a lame horse after all... and to hope that he was at least sorcerous enough to fix this one.
IT WAS NOT going to rain. Vuchak already knew that much. The Corn Woman had been killed long ago, and her grieving sisters did nothing now but scream and weep and roam the earth looking for her soul. They did not tie up their hair or sweeten their lips or wash their feet. They did not receive the Lightning Brothers into their beds. So the rain-carrying clouds passed on by, resentful, dissatisfied, and had no intercourse with the earth.
This is the World That Is, his father had said to him once, and pointed at the cooking-fire. And Yeh’ne is its people. What do you think of that?
Vuchak had looked at his baby sister, sitting bare-bottomed on the blanket and banging her sticks together. I think she would burn herself.
Just so, his father had answered. The infant cannot understand the fire. The fire cannot perceive the infant. So we need the gods, who see both together – and here he dipped his chin at himself – to guard us and teach us the correct way of being. This is atleya.
Vuchak had no difficulty understanding that. The World That Is was so old, so vast that it could not notice the fragile onion-skin of life that clung to its earthy shell. The people who lived on it were so small, so limited that they could not comprehend its nature. And every god or spirit that vanished was another lost aunt or uncle or grandparent, another irreplaceable elder whose passing left humanity that much closer to being orphaned on a deaf planet.
Vuchak knew all that. He’d never faltered in his belief. So it was strange, today, to hear himself blaspheming the whole lot of them.
“I’m glad the Corn Woman is gone,” Vuchak said as he followed behind the wagon. “I’m glad her people did away with themselves. Anyone foolish enough to welcome filthy disease-ridden half-men deserves what they bring with them. I’m only sorry so many of her children were left alive afterwards. They make terrible slaves – don’t you agree, marka?”
Weisei said nothing, of course. Vuchak doubted whether he was even awake. But he kept talking like that anyway, pouring out every horrible, perverse thought he could wring from his mind in a last-ditch effort to attract someone’s notice – in the madness of a child too desperate for recognition to care how it was answered. Because Hakai and the half-man were deep in conversation, and what would it say if a pair of slaves had more companionship than Vuchak and his life-mate?
So he said every vile thing he could think of, loudly enough for the West Wind to hear and spread the rumor: that Vuchak who belonged to Weisei Marhuk celebrated the Corn Woman’s death, and the misfortune of the Ikwei, and his own marka’s illness, which was exactly what he merited for so stubbornly refusing the help his atodak had offered him. And when they stopped at midday and the others went walking off to pay their debts, Vuchak opened that last stolen water-skin and drank as shamelessly as if it were full of Brant’s best back-shelf liquor.
But the West Wind did not stir. The Lightning Brothers did not strike him down for slandering their youngest wife. There was not a single crow in the sky, much less one who cared to swoop down and peck out his eyes for his vile words. And all of this confirmed t
hat gods and men alike had at last come to an agreement about him: Weisei and Pipat, the Island Town a’Krah and now apparently even Grandfather Marhuk himself – all had gone silent. All had turned away.
So Vuchak carried on his one-sided conversation, leaving clever pauses where a casual listener could believe that Weisei was replying in hushed tones. It was vitally important to be seen talking, especially when there was nobody left to listen.
AND THAT WAS how it went for the rest of the day. Keeping Actor steady and moving was a more exhausting job than Elim ever would have reckoned, and that was even after the road had smoothed back out again.
As a matter of fact, that kept him busy enough that it was not until the end of the day, when Elim had an excuse to sit up in the wagon-bench long enough to fish the rope and pickets back out again, that he finally noticed what might should have been obvious before.
Way-Say lay still beside the coffin, his body as black and gaunt as the frame of a burnt house. Naked except for his loincloth and blindfold, he lay sprawled out like a starving infant. His black-feather cloak had melted into his back and arms, his fingers ended in gnarled, scaly talons, and his skin-taut ribs rose and fell with quick, feverish urgency. He did not look like a Crow prince. He looked like he’d been shot out of the sky.
And far out in the gray scrub beyond, his shadow stretched by the mottled red light of sunset, Bootjack sat with updrawn knees, his head pillowed in his arms, and his shoulders heaving.
IN THE DREAM, Vuchak was clean.
IN THE DREAM, Elim was screaming.
VUCHAK SAT BOLT upright, his sleep shattered by a horrible, bellowing cry.
His first thought was that marrouak had found them in the night – that the remainder of his life would be measured in minutes.
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