She resisted the urge to speak sharply. “Can it do any harm?” she asked.
He considered this. “I suppose not,” he said.
Storm Arriving rode out to hunt for something to supplement their meager supplies while she prepared the lodge for the holy man’s arrival. By the time Ashes arrived, her home was neat, tidy, and smelling of fresh-cut juniper and roasting grouse.
Ashes was a man of many years and few teeth. His hair was metal-gray and wiry, constantly struggling to escape the bonds of its braids. When he entered the lodge, his gaze went immediately to the place where One Who Flies lay. Speaks While Leaving ushered him in to an honored place next to Storm Arriving at the back of the lodge.
“The food smells good,” he said, his eyes still on the invalid.
“Thank you,” Speaks While Leaving said. “Will you eat?”
A few heartbeats of silence passed, as if he were thinking about it. “Yes,” he said at last. “I think I would like to eat.”
Storm Arriving rolled his eyes and she glared at him; it was one thing to disbelieve in the man’s abilities, but quite another to be discourteous to a guest. He subsided and she relented. Then, with a knife, she cut a piece of meat from one of the cooked birds, showed it to the four corners of the world, the sky, and the earth, and laid it near the hearth as an offering to the spirits.
Ashes ate with a zeal that belied his years. Storm Arriving watched the old man devour an entire bird by himself, cracking the bones between two of his remaining teeth and sucking them clean of marrow. He ate in wordless appreciation, and when he was done he sat back, greasy hands on grease-stained knees, and smiled a black, toothless smile.
“That was good,” he said. “My thanks. And now, I think I would like to spend some time with our friend over there.” He pointed to One Who Flies. “Alone,” he added.
Storm Arriving began to say something but Speaks While Leaving stopped him with a hand on his arm and a poking finger in his ribs. “Of course,” she said, and grabbing a buffalo robe, led her husband from the lodge.
They stood outside for a few moments, unsure of what to do. A light snow had begun to fall, tiny flakes twinkling with reflected firelight like dust from the stars. They saw the old man’s shadow on the lodgeskin as he took out his rattle and leaned over One Who Flies. He began to sing in a soft, high-pitched voice, the rattle sizzling and snapping like fat in a flame. Speaks While Leaving took her husband’s arm.
“Shall we take a walk in the moonlight?” she asked.
He took the buffalo skin and put it about both their shoulders. The buffalo’s fur was soft, softer than hair, softer than feathered down against her neck. They walked off under the snowy sky, arm in arm, wrapped in warmth, and left their guest to weave his songs of healing.
When they returned, Ashes was gone. So were the leftovers from dinner.
On the fourth day, One Who Flies began to rock his head slightly from side to side. His eyes rolled beneath his lids. Speaks While Leaving tried to give him water, pouring a small amount in his mouth, but he only sputtered and coughed, and his wounds began to weep once more. She tried trickling drops of water on his cracked lips, and was pleased to see his tongue come forth at the taste of it. A few droplets at a time, she squeezed the water from a piece of soaked deerhide onto his lips. He took it in and swallowed, and thus was she able to address his thirst.
On the evening of the fifth day, she came home from tending others to find her mother waiting for her outside the lodge. Fearing that something had happened, she ran inside. Healing Rock Woman sat next to the bed where One Who Flies lay, her thin hands with their dark, leather-like skin holding his with its long pale fingers. Storm Arriving sat nearby, an odd expression on his face.
Relief. He was relieved.
She looked at One Who Flies. His breath was slower, longer. His head turned, and he opened his eyes.
“Speaks While Leaving,” he said in a rasped whisper. “The sight of you makes my heart glad.”
She kept her composure and did not let him know how worried she had been. “My heart, too, One Who Flies. I am very glad to see you.”
“Now,” said her grandmother. “Will you please rest? Your husband says you have not slept in three days.”
Speaks While Leaving looked at her grandmother. The old woman slowly closed her eyes and opened them again. The danger was gone. One Who Flies would live.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Sleep would be good.”
One Who Flies stayed on with them in the days that followed. She gave him no choice, and he could not argue as his injuries had left him not only too weak to travel, but even too weak to rise. Mostly, he slept, soundly and peacefully, which she knew to be a good sign. His thirst was overpowering, and at times he gulped the snowmelt so fast that it made his head ache. His invalidity, however, also left him no option but to endure the indignity of relieving himself into a vessel for her to empty. Against her husband’s wishes, she sent a buffalo robe to Ashes, but the old man sent it back, saying that One Who Flies needed it more than he.
And then one night, as he ate he wanted to talk.
“Storm Arriving,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
Her husband hesitated, glancing her way, then tried to laugh it off. “You were there. You know what happened.”
“No,” One Who Flies insisted. “I don’t remember.”
Speaks While Leaving felt a frown pull at her face. As Storm Arriving began to relate the tale of their strategy and attack on the final bluecoat fort, she felt her frown deepen and sink into her flesh like a hot iron into leather, searing her emotions onto her face. She busied herself with the duties of the meal—anything to keep her mind occupied. Still, she could not help but listen, could not stop the anger that built within her breast.
“When you fell,” Storm Arriving was saying, “we were carrying the battle inside the walls. They defended themselves well from behind lodges and roll-alongs. Many of the bluecoats ran away or rode out on horses, escaping into the coming night. Our soldiers wanted to follow, but the chiefs argued against it. The bluecoat fort was the target. That was what mattered.”
“So,” One Who Flies said. “We won.”
“Yes,” Storm Arriving said. “We won. We took all of the supplies they had and burned the fort to the ground. Many died; more than in any other war since the war with...”
“With my father,” One Who Flies finished.
“Yes,” Storm Arriving said. “But yes, we won.”
Speaks While Leaving gripped the ladle she had used to serve the stewed meat and white-root for dinner. She felt her knuckles creak.
“We won,” she said under her breath.
The two men stopped talking. “What was that?” Storm Arriving asked. “I didn’t hear you.”
She looked up at him, her frown having turned to a fierce glower. “We won,” she said, and heard the bitterness in her own voice. “We won. We won. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
Storm Arriving looked at her, worried. “It is what we went there to do. To win the war.”
“The war. To win the war.” The words started to pile up in her head. “Always the war. Win the war. Fight the bluecoats. Drive them out. The war.” The words spilled from her like snow sliding down a hillside, building up in speed and ferocity. “How long has it gone on? How long will it go on? Years? Tens of years? Tens of tens? Is it to be our whole life?”
“Please,” Storm Arriving said. “You and I can talk of this later. By ourselves.”
“Why? Because we might upset One Who Flies? He wants this war most of all.”
“No one wants this war.”
“No one? Then why do we have it? Why have I been alone for most of this last cycle of seasons? Even in winter you make war. No civilized person makes war in the winter.”
“We did not have the new weapons—”
She threw the ladle at him, spattering him with gravy. “Weapons! I am not talking about weapons. I am talking about men, fam
ilies. Dead men. Hundreds dead. And for what?”
Storm Arriving and One Who Flies just stared at her.
“You have accomplished nothing!” she shouted. “Nothing! You have killed bluecoats, you have counted terrible coup, you have destroyed their forts, but it is all nothing. They will just come back when the warmth returns. They will just come back across that bridge of theirs, and we will have to do it all over again. Forever.”
She was empty. The words had tumbled down, and now she was empty. And like the forest after an avalanche, what followed was the terrible, ominous silence. She looked from Storm Arriving to One Who Flies and back. She saw the bafflement on their faces. She ran from the lodge, into the cold night.
She walked for hours along the hillsides below the sacred mountains, questioning the spirits and herself as well, asking the world what it meant to do and why it couldn’t find a better way to do it.
When she returned home, cold and very tired, she saw the shadows of men on her lodge’s buffalo skin walls. Several men. She heard the low music of serious discussion, and recognized the voices of the leaders of the band’s soldier societies. She swallowed against a lump that had risen in her throat, and went to the lodge her family set aside for women during their moon-time. She sighed at the irony. She had not yet told her husband about the child growing within her.
In the morning, she awoke, cold and lonely. The fire she had built had long since guttered out and smoldered to ruin. She looked up through the smokehole and saw a sky overcast with clouds and the promise of more snow. From outside came the sound of shuffling footsteps.
“Speaks While Leaving?” It was Storm Arriving.
“Yes,” she replied from within.
“May we speak?”
“We are,” she said.
She heard his growl of exasperation. “I must tell you something.”
She wrapped the blankets closer around her shoulders. “Tell me.”
Feet crunched in the snow. “As you wish, then. I must tell you that I have to go. One more trip against the bluecoats.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and a defiant rage closed her throat. The only thought: What about me? What about me?
“Speaks While Leaving?”
Emotions rose, built, and burst forth. She cried out, howled, a wordless keening that cut. She did not hear the footsteps depart through the muffling snow.
Storm Arriving, Gets up Early, and Standing Motionless rode with their backs to the weather. Their whistlers—their fastest—were tired after a three days’ run back across the Sudden River, back toward the Big Greasy.
The wind was from the southwest, however, and that meant warmth, or something like it compared to the snows of home. Still, the whistlers were unhappy, for this was winter, and winter was a time for gathering the flocks and conserving strength for nesting in the spring. Storm Arriving was sure that his drakes would rather be huddled together with their hens, warding off the snows and frigid winds, instead of loping through the rainstorms of the southern lands. Storm Arriving empathized: better snow that one could shake off than rain that only soaked and chilled.
But what the whistlers wanted—and the men as well—was immaterial. What was needed was, simply, what was needed, and complaining only soured a man’s stomach. Storm Arriving tried to think of happy times, of happier things ahead. His mind’s eye only saw gloom, and his heart feared that this one last trip was one too many, and that it might mean the end of seven years of courtship and two years of marriage, the end of his story with Speaks While Leaving.
“Almost there,” Gets up Early said. “Do you want to continue on downstream?”
“No,” Storm Arriving said. “I don’t want to get close until tonight. One Who Flies says that this is the night when the vé’hó’e celebrate the ending of their year. All of the vé’hó’e will be drunk with their water-that-burns-the-throat, but not until tonight.” He looked ahead and saw a gully at the foot of a low knoll. “There,” he said. “That looks like a good place.”
Gets up Early looked at the sky behind them and the clouds that covered it. “I don’t think any place is a good place tonight.”
Standing Motionless laughed. “You old woman,” he chided the other rider. “You would be cold in a sweat lodge.”
They all chuckled, but to Storm Arriving, the humor seemed thin. As they descended into the narrow cleft in the hillside, ducking under the scratching arms of bare-boned trees, Storm Arriving felt his grasp on his own life slipping away. He could remember nothing but fighting, battle, and pain. He felt as though he had been at war his whole life: with his father, with Speaks While Leaving, with One Who Flies, with the bluecoats. He sat down with the others in the detritus of twigs and dead leaves, his back against a rough stone, a Trader’s wool blanket around his shoulders. The sky began to mist, like a cloud brushing the earth, and jewels began to form in his hair. He looked down the length of their narrow hiding place.
The whistlers huddled together along one of the shadowed walls. Their breath poured out in long, slow rhythms, creating gouts of vaporous fog that slowly filled the gully. Overhead, wintry branches reached for one another like the hands of ancient lovers. He saw stubborn leaves hanging here and there on the branches, fluttering in the wind, until one of the leaves fluttered up to another branch, and he saw that they were birds, each the color and size of an old, dead leaf. There were dozens of them in the boughs over his head, quietly flitting from twig to branch, tugging on lichen, searching for food. Dead leaves, living birds; it made him smile, and the smile made him remember her. He missed her, and wanted to be with her. He was tired of the path of war. He longed for peace. He longed for a time when duty meant living instead of killing, and honor came without a weapon.
He chided himself for whining complaints. I am a soldier of the People, he reminded himself. I will do my duty. Even if it means my life.
A drop of water plopped down his back. He pulled his blanket tighter around his neck.
Still, he prayed to the spirits, I would like a chance for a life beyond the end of this struggle. I would like to see my grandchildren play in the summer’s sun. I would like that very much.
The evening encroached, and the sun prepared to set behind the western clouds. In the gloaming, Storm Arriving and his two companions rose and made ready for their night’s work. From bundles on their whistlers’ backs they unpacked the thunder-sticks, the noise-makers, and the fire-cord. Storm Arriving held a blanket to keep the rain off while Gets up Early and Standing Motionless put the pieces together.
“It is dangerous, putting these together here,” Gets up Early said.
“It will be more dangerous to do it later,” Storm Arriving said. “We will just have to be careful.”
Gets up Early frowned up at him. “Very careful,” he said.
When they were done, Gets up Early handed Storm Arriving two large bundles of thunder-sticks. He wrapped them in oiled deerskin and put them in back in the bundle on his whistler. It was now full dark.
“Here,” Gets up Early said. He put a small packet in his hand.
“What is it?” Storm Arriving asked.
“The little-fire-sticks One Who Flies uses to light the fire-cord. Scratch the end against something rough and it makes a tiny fire. You have to work quickly, though. They do not last long, especially in the wind.”
Storm Arriving put the little packet in his shirt, under his belt. “We go,” he said.
They rode off into the night. The clouds covered the sky, and they trusted their whistlers to see with their eyesight what the men could not. As they traveled, the mist returned. By the time they heard the sound of the winter-swollen river ahead of them, the mist had become a drizzle. Storm Arriving felt his hands tighten up in the cold, and he chafed them and gripped them to keep the blood flowing to his fingers.
Up ahead along the riverbank, they soon saw lanterns, their light glittering off the waters like broken stars. The men rode a bit further, and then dismounted, leaving
the whistlers with Standing Motionless. Gets up Early and Storm Arriving took their rifles and slung them across their backs like bows. Then they took the bundles and headed off on foot.
The river mud was cold and soaked through their moccasins. Storm Arriving slipped on a rock and heard Gets up Early suck in a breath as he landed on one knee.
“Sorry,” Storm Arriving said as he took off his ruined mocs and threw them into the bushes. The drizzle had become rain, and bare feet would be surer than mud-slick leather.
When they got to within a bowshot of the lights, they could hear the singing: raucous, jovial, but also sluggish and uncoordinated. There was a great deal of laughter and shouting and general noise-making that filled the air as well. The two men snuck along the riverbank, and when they came to the waterfront buildings, they kept to the shadows beneath the warmly-lit windows. Their target lay ahead.
The bridge stretched across the river like a dark rainbow. Gets up Early gripped Storm Arriving’s shoulder.
“Wait for my signal,” he said. “I will give you about two fingers’ worth of time.”
“Yes,” Storm Arriving said, and then his companion was gone. Storm Arriving looked up at the bridge. He thought back to his last night at the camp of the Closed Windpipe band. One Who Flies had struggled up on one elbow as he and the leaders of soldier societies had discussed their idea, an idea born of the words of Speaks While Leaving.
They will just come back across that bridge of theirs, and we will have to do it all over again. Forever.
He envisioned in his memory the drawings One Who Flies had made on pieces of leather, and the tiny model of the bridge he had built of sticks. He went over his instructions in his mind and looked up through the rain at the immense structure.
The bridge did not reflect any light from the lantern-yellow windows around it. It ate the light. It stood, huge and enormous, the black bones of some great preternatural monster that died in the murky waters of the Big Greasy. Storm Arriving let his gaze wander its height and its length. He studied it, and remembered the points where One Who Flies said the charges should be placed: high atop the arch, out over the middle of the river.
The Spirit of Thunder Page 33