Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  They never change. Is it because they can’t, he thought? Or won’t? They act like they’re kids too. Like nothing is up to them. Like dancing and singing and playing tricks on other folks is all that really matters.

  Tricks. Realization hit like a thunderbolt.

  Dustu turned back to Uncle. “We’re Laurel Clan,” Dustu said carefully. “Not Rock. Not Tree or Dogwood.”

  “That’s true.” Uncle nodded.

  “Rock Clan would punish them.”

  “If they did bad things to Rock Clan,” said Uncle. “Invaded their places. Cut down their trees. Stripped the tops off their mountains. Hurt them.”

  “And Dogwood Clan—they’d try to help those people, if they could, but they wouldn’t fight bluecoats.”

  “It’s not the way of the Yunwi Tsunsdi. Especially not Dogwood Clan.”

  “But… what if we don’t go to war. What if…” The idea was unfolding inside his head so fast he couldn’t quite find the words to keep up with it.

  Uncle could, though, and after a minute or two his gaze softened. He started to smile. “You’re right,” he told Dustu. “That is the way of the Yunwi Tsunsdi.”

  He took a deep breath to steady himself, then urged Uncle, “So call them together.”

  “I have already done so.”

  Dustu looked down at the parking lots surrounding the stadium. He could see them emerging. Hundreds of Little People popped into plain view, emerging from reflections off car windows, or any bright glint of light. They stared up at him. Waiting.

  ~*~

  Tsula finally reached the sidelines, where people were pleading with the soldiers on the other side of the fence. “Water!” most of them cried. Or a simple, “Help!

  More soldiers appeared, but these men wore bright yellow coveralls. What were they doing? They had a bunch of pallet jacks, each one loaded with big steel barrels of something or other.

  ~*~

  Dustu shook his head, backing away from Uncle. “Me? I can’t!”

  “It is not my place to speak for you,” said the little man. “Those are your people, and this is your idea.”

  “But they’re not my people.” You are, he didn’t say. Mostly because it no longer felt totally true. Inside, something had changed. And the people down there on the field—there were plenty of Cherokee, sure. Shawnee too, and Chickasaw. Creeks and Wyandottes. Caddoes and Wichitas. Other folks were black. And a lot of them looked like they might be Asian or Indian or Mexican or whatever mixed in with white or with something else. But they weren’t his people, any of them, because they had all died two hundred years back, even if they survived the Trail of Tears.

  “This matters to you,” Uncle told him. “Stand up. Speak your piece.”

  Dustu could not run away. Not this time. So he pulled himself as erect as he could and swallowed the lump in his throat.

  Trusting Uncle to make sure all the Yunwi Tsunsdi could hear him, and nobody else, he forced his first words out. No plan to it. Just whatever boiled up from the place where his heart had been.

  ~*~

  Tsula was reaching for the fence herself, ready to try and scramble up over it on her own, anything to get help for her mother. Or an answer. Or a drink of water. That’s when she heard it. A boy’s voice, not a man’s this time. And not on the PA system either, but almost as loud.

  “Look, I love you,” he said. “I always have. Being one of you—that’s all I’ve wanted for so long. You saved my life. You saved me. I’ll never forget that.

  Where was he? Who was he? Who was he talking to?

  “But if we don’t do something, right now, then terrible things are going to happen. Just like it did before. Only this time? It’s going to be worse. So much worse. I need your help. Help me stop it. This piece of it, anyway. I know you can’t do what we do. The human thing. That’s okay.”

  Human thing?

  Who was he talking to?

  “You can be you, though,” the boy went on. “That’s what I’m asking for. Do what we’ve…” He paused, “What you’ve always done. Make trouble. Play your tricks. Mess it up, whatever they try to do.”

  Tricks? What did he mean by that? Or was she going crazy? The boy’s tone changed. She heard tears in his voice now. Agony as he pleaded with somebody.

  “Help me. Please. Don’t let them make more of me! Don’t let them make the world worse than it already is.”

  ~*~

  There was nothing else in him, so Dustu stopped talking. He waited, his face wet with sweat, his throat sore. Eventually, he sneaked a sideways glance at Uncle.

  “Did they hear me?”

  His answer did not come from Uncle. Down below, something exploded. A reddish white cloud of ash or smoke shot up from the center of one yellow spiderweb. Whatever that was, it hit guardsmen who were not wearing the bunny suits. All of a sudden, there were angry voices shouting all sorts of things and the soldiers without yellow suits started running up the stairs in that section, hell-bent on escaping whatever it was.

  On the other side of the stadium, a barrel rolled into some of the soldiers and knocked them flat. A couple of soldiers got squashed. The bright yellow hoses they’d been stretching out toward their targets abruptly came to life. Some wrapped themselves around anyone nearby—hands, arms, legs or necks. Some guns either smacked soldiers across the face or rammed themselves into any open mouth as the owner screamed. Others reared up into the air and sprayed the soldiers all on their own, with that very same reddish-brown powdery stuff that had panicked the first bunch.

  From there, it was chaos. The crackle of gunfire erupted as those being sprayed with that shit turned their guns on the guys in the bunny suits.

  All of a sudden, the whole place roared.

  It was the crowd trapped inside the fence.

  Yes!

  Sensing a chance that might not come again, they let loose all of their anger. They started boosting each other up onto their knees, then their shoulders, their heads even. Human surf surged upward, over the tops of the fences, collapsing them onto the soldiers. Then masses of people burst free of the field and more guardsmen went down under thousands of filthy feet.

  It took only seconds, however, for more of the guardsmen to make an appearance at higher levels. To start shooting at the escapees.

  Just like the bluecoats.

  A cold rage ripped through him. Dustu ran for the ladder they’d climbed to get up there, not caring what Uncle might think or do.

  ~*~

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  Tsula fell flat, landing in between the seats as a guardsman appeared at the top of the section she was climbing and started spraying the people just ahead of her with an automatic rifle. He didn’t seem to care that he was hitting some of his own in the process while they struggled with the climbers. There was a blaze of madness in his blue eyes.

  Someone screeched as they toppled over. A woman. She landed on top of Tsula’s legs, blood spurting out of her in hot pulses ‘til she gave a couple of twitches and went totally still.

  Tsula crammed her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming about that. Play dead, she told herself, knowing it wouldn’t work.

  ~*~

  Dustu plunged through the big square doorway and into the dazzle of sunlight. Half blinded, he couldn’t hear anything but the gun going off rat-a-tat some fifteen rows down and off to his left.

  The man firing that rifle was laughing hysterically as he went down the steps one by one. He just kept right on shooting, mowing down people in great bloody swathes.

  It took no thought at all to decide what to do. Dustu pulled his knife free of its sheath and leaped like a deer down the rows of seats, taking two at a time. Didn’t matter how much of a ruckus he made. Couldn’t hear it himself, over everything else, so the laughing soldier had no clue what was happening. Not ’til he buried the knife in the soldier’s back.

  The man spun, trying to bring his gun to bear on Dustu, but a girl reached up from behind him to haul on
his rifle’s strap. When he toppled backward over the seat, she bent over him and pulled a bayonet from a sheath at the soldier’s waist. With a glittering sloe-eyed glance up at Dustu, she used it to cut the man’s throat.

  Rising, she stared at Dustu, then shifted her gaze to something behind him. Another soldier? He whipped around, knife ready.

  No. It was Uncle.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  ~*~

  The little man was beautiful—a knee-high boy doll in beaded leather leggings and moccasins. He was perfect in every dimension. Especially all that glossy black hair, falling down to his ankles. Just for a moment, Tsula could imagine a little hairbrush in her own hand…

  Then he moved. He stepped forward into the sunlight and spoke to the boy in Cherokee. She caught a couple words. Most of it—no.

  The boy answered in the same language, and she caught more, but that’s when Tsula realized he was wearing an actual breech clout instead of shorts. Moccasins too, and a feather in his hair. Like a picture in a history book.

  The boy stared back at her, then asked, “How come she can see me? How can she see you?”

  The little man shrugged. “It’s only twins can see us, easy. If we don’t want them to, nobody can.”

  Tsula frowned and stumbled over some of the words as she said, “I—I had a twin. She died before I was born.” Something happened with the birth cord. They should have done a C-section but there was no doctor anymore at the tribal clinic. She’d heard her mother tell Aunt Inola that late one night, the two of them drinking the last of the beer and crying about it when they thought Tsula was fast asleep.

  Tsula spun around toward the playing field. Where was her Mom?

  ~*~

  “What…” Dustu started to say, but a fresh burst of gunfire cut him short. There were firefights going on all over the stadium now as escapees took up fallen soldiers’ weapons and turned them against anyone in a uniform.

  There weren’t enough ways for the prisoners to get out of the stadium. Too many exits had been blocked off.

  “How are we going to get them all out?” he asked Uncle.

  “We? They’ll find their own way, given time.”

  But there wasn’t going to be time. At his back, Dustu felt a weird pounding sensation, a thudding heartbeat. He looked up to see a black helicopter swoop down out of the sky. It was coming right at him, it seemed like, so he ducked back into the entrance to the hallway behind him. The girl did too, bayonet ready, and Uncle as well.

  Once it dropped inside the bowl of the stadium, cannons on the front end of the copter cut loose, spinning like mad as they spat bullets everywhere. The sound of it was ungodly, and the bullets tore people apart by the dozens who were still trying to get off the field. Their screams of fright and despair cut a hole through his heart.

  “Mom!” the girl cried, although it was surely impossible to make out individuals in all that.

  “What do we do?” Dustu cried out, but if Uncle answered, he couldn’t hear it over all the fresh uproar. And then, as the heartbeat outside of him got complicated, two more of the ugly machines dropped out of the sky.

  There was no way to stop them that he could see. Not with a knife. Even the rifles the soldiers had were no match for those things. But as he stared upward, the light changed again. A big gray thunderhead had been blown between him and the sun, casting shade over more than a third of the stadium, and it wasn’t the only one up there.

  Where had they come from? Was a storm blowing in?

  Dustu’s jaw dropped. The Thunder Boys? Had they heard him? He turned his head Uncle’s way.

  “They heard her,” said the little man, nodding toward the girl.

  Hope blossomed, even in the dead place under his heart. “Can we...”

  Uncle’s gaze stopped him. “You know what they’re like,” said the yvwi usdi.

  “But they live in the sky! They can reach those bastards!”

  “The Asagaya Gigaei do nothing by half measures. If you call them down, there’s no telling how much destruction will follow.”

  “But if we don’t…”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. He knew what Uncle meant. People would die. On both sides of it. He would be striking down some of his own, too, in trying to save the rest. There’d be no way to choose who would live, who would die.

  “It is not a decision a boy can make,” Uncle told him.

  Dustu felt that painful lump reappear in his throat, and the girl’s gaze scalded him. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “The thunder boys? They’re just an old story.”

  “Really,” said Uncle, amused for an instant, not bothering even to point out the obvious.

  “Oh! I…” The girl’s far-too-thin face flooded with color, but she held her ground. “My Mom is down there.”

  But there was no other way. Lose some or lose all. That was the choice he had to make. No! Run away! said part of him. Run and hide! It was small though, compared to the things he had already done today. He’d made himself see this. He’d forced himself to do something about it, to stand up in front of his people—his adopted people, he thought, correcting himself with a tiny judder of shame and surprised regret– and he’d asked for their help with it. He’d killed a man. There was already blood on his hands. On his knife.

  “I know,” he told both of them.

  Uncle examined him one more time but a glimmer of sadness in his dark eyes was his only objection. “You’ll need to call on the female force too,” was all he said.

  Female rain came from the south, the gentle kind that nurtured the crops and filled the rain barrels without the rivers running wild. It was the kind the Asagaya Gigaei had brought them for two hundred years now, ever since the Cherokee were driven down out of the mountains and across the Mississippi. Women were the source of true power. Of life itself.

  He turned to the girl. “Do you know the Green Corn Dance?”

  Tsula’s heart sank. She wanted to fly down the steps to the playing field, to find her mother, to take shelter in her Mom’s arms and feel safe again just for a minute.

  “If we can save anybody,” the boy whispered, “we have to do that.”

  He was right. Slowly, she nodded. She moved to stand at his side. She spread out the bottom edge of her dirty t-shirt in place of the apron she didn’t have. The little man produced a dried snake’s rattle. He shook that instead of the usual kind and started to sing as the two of them took their first hesitant steps in a circle around him.

  ~*~

  Dustu bent over. With every fifth step, he spread his hands and then swept them together, scooping up imaginary corn from the concrete. He pretended to pour it all into the girl’s t-shirt. “Bring us rain,” Uncle sang, adding lines that weren’t part of the dance. “Bring us water. Bring us life!”

  The corn wouldn’t happen without them. Without corn, the people would disappear. Those who weren’t mowed down would starve. They were already starving. Dustu’s anger returned, and the rhythm of the dance and the song changed. Became louder. Faster. The quiet careful steps turned into a stomping progression and somehow his knife had jumped into his hand again. He began grunting as he swung the knife at the enemy he could now see in his mind’s eye. Beside him, the girl was still holding her shirt out on one side, but she had that bayonet. She made the same chopping moves with it. They had no war clubs to swing, but soon they were both howling a full-throated war cry, in unison.

  Their answer came in the form of a distant flicker of brightness, a buffet of wind. Then more clouds. A gathering darkness that plunged everything into shadow.

  The storm cloud above them had changed its contours too. It was bigger by far and part of it was angular now. Anvil-shaped. And the wind was still picking up speed.

  Lightning flashed, not a glimmer this time but a blast of light, and thunder crashed almost on top of it, louder than even the guns and choppers.

  He danced harder, faster, the girl matching every step. �
�They’ve killed the corn,” she cried suddenly. “They’ve killed the rain! They’ve killed my baby brother!”

  “They’re going to kill all the babies!” he shouted, remembering how many died on the Trail and how many were never born. “They want to end us!”

  The sky roared in outrage. Wind suddenly gathered its strength and struck them like fists, and then came hailstones. Small ones at first, cold as death, needle sharp. Then came big ones, apple-sized, hitting the seats and the stairways like ice bombs, shattering, flinging shrapnel every which way. They ran for the shelter of reinforced concrete, where the girl clung to Dustu as one, two, three! funnel clouds dropped down out of the madness above to hit the first helicopter and then the playing field and the stands.

  Something flashed, blindingly bright, and the ‘copter jinked sideways. It kept right on firing but didn’t recover. It rolled in the air, turning over and over until it came low enough, its rotors hit iron railings. A terrible clanging sent chunks of it scything across the stadium. Then the rest of it dropped straight down to explode in flames where it hit the ground.

  One of the funnels pulled people right off the ground, and then barrels and hoses off the stands. All that whirled upward and over the sky boxes, out of sight.

  The third funnel spun around inside the stadium, sweeping across the different seating levels and scrubbing them like a gigantic whirling toilet brush. Debris made it hard to see anything, let alone who was hit, who’d been taken, or even what side anybody was on.

  All the noise was now due to the Asagaya Gigaei and not guns. A hard pelting male rain struck, replacing the hail, and he couldn’t see anything anymore. He buried his face in the girl’s dark hair as they retreated further into the depths of the stadium. He kept his arms wrapped around her, his head bent over hers, trying to shield her. All the while, Uncle clung to his left leg.