Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  Waiting would not make her any more ready. Eyo wrapped herself around the feather, prayed, and launched herself back into the wind.

  ~*~

  A balcony lined the back wall of the Oneui settlement in Gevsilon, facing the border.

  Children played there in their idle moments, and laundry often hung from its railing. Still, the place had a touch of the sacred to it, and from time to time anyone who came out there would pause in their work or play and gaze at the border with Oneua, the unabated fury of the storm just a short distance away. Moss and flowers grew in the space between, since the thoroughfare had been blocked up.

  Ila sat in her accustomed spot just a pace away from that silent, sand–torn barrier. Waiting.

  A bell rang, near the center of Gevsilon. She’d grown accustomed to the sound since the Wilsl moved in, taking the place of the now–extinct Nigevi. Soon one of the children would bring her food, and brush her hair, and talk with her for a little while before leaving her to her vigil.

  She never troubled herself to wonder what would happen after she was gone. Her mother had promised to bring the feather to her. Ila’s faith was absolute.

  Something swirled by in the sand and was gone.

  Ila rose, so quickly her aging bones protested. Had she imagined it...?

  Then it came again. Without hesitation, she plunged her hand through the intangible barrier, from one world into the next, and took hold of what she’d seen.

  She expected to feel sand tear the skin from her hand, the flesh from her bones. Instead she felt a brief, soft caress—and then, before the storm could take her, Ila pulled her hand back.

  Slowly, not daring to breathe, she uncurled her fingers. Ona’s crest feather balanced in her palm, iridescent and gold.

  Tears slipped down Ila’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered to the storm, then turned to face the Oneui who had come to a halt on the balcony, raising the feather high above her head.

  Eyo had kept her promise.

  “Help me. Please. Don’t let them make more of me!

  Don’t let them make the world worse than it already is.”

  Pat McEwen

  The Forever Boy

  Patricia MacEwen

  Tsula was asleep on her feet, held upright by the crush of other people around her. She woke with a start as a shudder wracked the body pressed up against her back. She heard her mother moan a single hopeless word, almost a prayer. “No.”

  Then water splashed down her bare legs, warm as urine but stickier.

  Tsula pushed against everyone else enough that she was able to turn around, but that was all she could do. That and try to wrap her arms around her mother’s quaking figure. That embrace let her feel it when the next ripple passed through the muscles in her mother’s swollen belly.

  That’s when she knew what was happening. She was ten years old, and raised on a farm, after all. Tsula felt her heart leap with pure panic.

  “Help us!” she begged of the people surrounding them. “Please!” she cried. “We’ve got to make room. My mother’s having a baby!”

  There was no room to make. The night before, on arriving here, they’d been jammed into this stadium by men with dead eyes, dogs, and automatic rifles. They’d been forced to fill every inch of the space. They had no water, no shade, no food, and the heat of so many people, pressed together, was growing unbearable.

  There was nowhere to go. There was only the stadium’s PA system, making yet another useless announcement: “Your attention, please. The convoy bringing bottled water, emergency rations, and blankets is now expected to arrive at thirteen hundred hours. Please keep calm and help us maintain order. Your patience is appreciated.”

  Tsula tried again. “We need help. Please!” She screamed the words this time.

  A few of those closest to her tried to make way, enough so her mother could lie down at least. It didn’t work. Within seconds, those further away began pushing back and the sliver of space disappeared. Then there were hands, though, many hands, reaching out to her mother, taking hold of her wrists, her arms, her dress, and even her braided hair. They were holding her up, Tsula realized. Assisting her in the only way they could.

  They should have stayed in Chickasha. But when their hoard of food ran out, they’d headed north up I-44 toward Oklahoma City, on foot like everyone else. And got just about halfway there, she figured, before running into the National Guard.

  Tsula remembered being so happy to see them.

  The soldiers, though, hadn’t tried to help anyone on the road. They’d been shunted off onto a county road and then into the Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Home of the Sooners. Where the Guard was going to do… what?

  Maybe nothing, she thought, and was even more frightened by that prospect. Nothing meant no water. No food. No shelter. No hope.

  Her mother wailed as a fresh contraction seized her.

  “Help us!” Tsula cried. To the sky, this time.

  ~*~

  “What is that smell?” Dustu paused in the middle of the game, having caught the small deer-hide ball in the cup on the end of his stick. “Is there a feedlot around here?”

  His opponent was full-grown but still only waist-high to Dustu, who stood just a bit more than four feet tall. Uncle shrugged as he sniffed the fetid air. “It’s not cattle.”

  “Then what?”

  “Human things.”

  Feedlots were human things—places where cattle were penned up in muck of their own making, fed grain instead of good grass, and never ever given any room to run. Never a chance to play. To live. To be anything but a rump roast on four feet.

  It was all part of the wrong-thinking thing, where machines and gasoline somehow got to be more important than life itself, than taking care of the earth.

  “Ha!” Somebody’s stick swept around his knees and then upward to whack his wrist, hard. The ball went flying. A second player on the Eastern team struck out with his own stick, failing to catch the ball but propelling it downfield. The rest of the Little People galloped past in hot pursuit.

  “No fair!” Dustu hollered, dropping his stick to cradle his suddenly useless forearm.

  “It’s anetsa!” cried Uncle. “There are no rules to break, boy!”

  Before he could even reply, a complex three-part relay conveyed the small ball to the end of the meadow and through the gap between two saplings they’d cut down and stuck in the ground to serve as goalposts. The saplings, of course, were only a few inches taller than Dustu himself. The Yunwi Tsunsdi didn’t build much of anything human-scale in size.

  Dustu frowned, testing his wrist. The aroma grew stronger. They were downwind of… what? Oh. The big football stadium, where humans were apt to play far tamer games and wear all sorts of padding and helmets instead of a good coat of bear grease.

  “Play!” cried a team-mate, racing past him as he stood there, but Dustu held up his arm. “I’m out. It’s broken.”

  “Then play with the other hand!” Uncle shouted, flinging his long glossy hair back over his shoulder, hair almost as long as his own small body.

  “You know it takes me longer to heal than you do,” Dustu answered. He turned away just as another louder crack split the air, and his heart as well. Gunshot! It came from the stadium. What on earth? he asked himself, and was seized by a memory. Long ago. Somebody running. Running away from the Trail of Tears, trying for the trees, for a chance at freedom. A girl his own age back then, nine or ten. And the bluecoat raising his rifle. One sharp crack, just like that one, had sent the runner tumbling into a creek, half her head gone. For no other reason than she was a Cherokee who didn’t want to leave home.

  Sickness stirred in his middle. That feeling of helpless rage again.

  Dustu swallowed it, buried it in that armored place underneath his heart as he took his playing sticks off the field and laid them down by his other gear. Uncle strode toward him.

  “Is that all it takes to stop you, boy?”

  No, but the su
dden onslaught of memory, of nausea, was another matter. Uncle sighed, took hold of his bad hand and pulled it outward. Something grated in his arm as the broken bits of bone popped into alignment again. Dustu hissed like a snake, and then the pain died rapidly as Uncle held onto that hand and chanted a healing song he’d first heard on a mountain bald near Nikwasi. The whites now called that whole area North Carolina.

  When it was done, the forearm felt tender and fragile. The purplish-black bruise, however, was already fading. A week should see it whole again, as strong as ever.

  “Many thanks, Uncle.” Then, using mainly his left hand, he picked up his knife belt and gingerly tied it on over his loincloth.

  Uncle raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m going to find out what smells so bad.”

  Darkness gleamed in the little man’s eyes as his usual wry grin disappeared. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Dustu frowned, then nodded decisively. Better to know than wonder, stomach churning as he remembered more and more of his days on the Trail.

  “Then maybe I’d better go with you.”

  ~*~

  Tsula stared at the broken doll-shape that hung from the coils of razor wire topping the fence along the end zone. The sheer wrongness kept her from seeing what it really was for a minute or more—a body. A barefoot man who’d suddenly run at the fence and started to climb it with just his fingers and toes, screaming something in Spanish about water.

  Somebody cried out, “They shot him.”

  An answering wave of voices melded into a roar. People surged toward the fences. Some fought for handholds, attempting to climb it like the first man had, the one now hanging upside down, blood running down both arms. So wrong, that vivid crimson, when everything else was shades of brown. There’d been no water to spare for bathing, for laundry, for months now. Most people wore what they had ‘til it fell apart, then stole something newer and cleaner, or else went without in the dry heat gripping the whole Midwest.

  More gunshots, fired into the air this time, but the would-be climbers got the message and fell back, rejoining the masses on the playing field.

  “Do not attempt to climb the barriers,” bellowed the PA. “For your own safety. Keep calm and stay where you are. Assistance is on the way,”

  But why were they being confined on the field in the first place? Why keep them so jam-packed? The man with the mike was lying to all of them. Why? What were they really intending to do?

  Tsula heard a godawful shrieking from her mother. She fought the crush, turning back to her by jumping upward and pulling on random arms, on clothing. She was just in time to see the raw terror in her mother’s face. See the fresh wave of agony roll through her body. Hear the wet splat from down below.

  There wasn’t time to think.

  Tsula dove downward, swimming through body parts like they were snags in the Washita River. She followed her mother’s bloody legs down into the depths. There, she put two fingertips on a small form, caught hold of a tiny limb and forced herself upward again, with the baby in tow.

  ~*~

  Dustu’s stomach wasn’t happy. The smell just got worse and worse and the air was thick with bluebottle flies, like something had died. Something big.

  There were soldiers all over the place.

  Too quiet, too, he thought. Nobody here was joking around, just mumbling stuff as they huddled underneath what was left of the shade trees and sucked on their beer cans. More than a few were sharing needles, cooking something in teaspoons with cigarette lighters and then injecting each other. He was glad they couldn’t see or hear him while he was with Uncle.

  There were more soldiers guarding the gates and the ticket booths at the main entrance. So he and Uncle walked around the side until they found a service entrance. There, two big semis were backed up to a loading dock, disgorging enormous wooden crates. More soldiers were passing out the contents to their compadres—spray guns with hoses and weird bug-faced mask things and rubbery yellow suits and boots.

  “Move it along, boys,” a grizzled sergeant was telling the men. “All be over soon. This here is just another clean-up detail.”

  Dustu shot a puzzled look at Uncle, but the yvwi usdi pointed at a freight elevator almost full of yellow-suited soldiers, the bug-eyed things hanging from straps around their necks. The two of them slipped inside just as the doors closed.

  One of the soldiers, a skinny gink with a big Adam’s apple, aimed a finger at one of the spray guns held by an older man. “Does that shit work?

  “Sure. Takes a while, but it does the job. It’s like sprayin’ for roaches. You lay it down good and thick. Wait twenty minutes and bing bang bong—you’re done.”

  Dustu recoiled. The man reeked of cheap whiskey and too little soap. Long ago, there’d been another who smelled like that, who used that tone. “Lice. That’s all they are,” said the bleary-eyed bluecoat attempting to button up his trousers. “Just pop ’em between your fingernails and move on, son. Ain’t no point to buryin’ that.” He waved a careless dirt-crusted hand at Dustu’s sister where she lay naked in the dirt, legs splayed. So vivid was the memory that Dustu jumped when the older man in the here and now smacked the new guy’s arm. “If you’re gonna be sick, boy, don’t ralph on my boots.”

  “I’m not! I’m… okay. I just didn’t know it would stink like this.”

  That got a laugh from a couple of others. “We gotta clean up this shit,” one of them told him. “Whole damn country’s gonna smell better when we’re done.”

  Dustu’s hand landed on the hilt of his knife, but Uncle took hold of his wrist and shook his head, long black hair glimmering in the artificial light. They rode the rest of the way to the top in silence.

  ~*~

  Tsula surfaced with the baby. It was white underneath all the blood and muck and waxy stuff. So white. Translucent. Like a Christmas tree angel. The purple birth cord still hung from its belly, and it wasn’t crying at all. Not breathing.

  “What do I do?” Tsula cried.

  “Give it here,” said an old black man. He took the limp form, cradled it in one arm and hooked a filthy forefinger into the baby’s mouth, clearing out a wad of mucus. Then he compressed the baby’s chest with the palm of his hand, five times, quickly and gently. He bent to press his mouth down around the lower half of the baby’s face, nose and all. He puffed a breath in once, twice, and then went back to the chest compressions.

  Tsula prayed. To Selu, the Corn Mother, first. Then Water Beetle, who made the Earth and gave birth to all people back in the very beginning. And finally Jesus, just in case Aunt Inola was wrong about him.

  At length, the old man shook his head. “Sorry,” he told Tsula. “That’s all I know how to do.”

  He handed the baby back to her but Tsula’s mother surged forward and snatched the small body right out of her hands. She held the limp infant against her chest and burst into tears as she rocked him back and forth, still being held upright by everyone else. In her mother’s face, there was no sign of recognition even when she looked straight at Tsula. Something was gone. Broken.

  Tsula shivered, afraid as she’d never been before. Even when she’d found her Dad and finally understood why he never came home that day.

  She grabbed hold of other people and pulled herself up on top of them. She began swimming across the sea of sunburnt heads and bent necks and bowed shoulders. Kicking off against them, she groped for new hand holds in hair, collars, anything at all. She would find a way out. She’d get help for her Mom, or die trying.

  ~*~

  “Uncle, we have to do something,” Dustu said as they emerged into glaring sunlight along the outer wall of the stadium.

  “Do we?”

  Dustu stared at the yvwi usdi, reminded once again. He was human. The Little People weren’t. And they might have helped him, even taken him in, but they didn’t take sides in human quarrels. Even so…

  “It’s not right,” he insisted, heading across the vaulted roof.

&
nbsp; “Nothing human is. Blame Water Beetle for that. He was in such a hurry, he made you too quickly. That’s why you’re all a little crooked inside.”

  They climbed up another ladder to the top of the sky boxes. Up here, it smelled a lot better thanks to the ever-present prairie wind but now he could hear the mass misery rising from all the people trapped below, like the earth itself was moaning in black despair.

  A sound he’d long forgotten. Now it clutched at his gut.

  All these soldiers, he thought. All these guns, more deadly than anything the bluecoats ever had back then, when they uprooted everyone and began herding his people west.

  Uncle canted his head as he studied Dustu. “This is not a fight one man can win.”

  And he wasn’t a man, was he? Dustu hadn’t grown a single inch in those two hundred years since he ran away into the wilderness and the Little People found him. For the first time, Dustu wished he was taller. Meaner. More lethal. So he could take out every one of these whiter than white bastards wearing the arm bands.

  He should have remembered how it was that the Little People found him. That they could hear wishes and unspoken prayers. They could feel human terror and yearning and grief.

  “You are on the wrong track,” Uncle said, frowning. “If they kill your people for being Red, and you kill theirs for being White, how are you any different from them?”

  “How else am I gonna stop them?” Dustu demanded, refusing to back down this time around, the way he always had before.

  He got no answer. But that was the way of the Little People, wasn’t it? They didn’t change. And they didn’t jump in. Didn’t try to change others or alter the course of events. Their advice was always the same: Don’t take life too seriously. Don’t worry so much. Don’t work so hard. Have fun whenever you can.