Beneath a Wounded Sky

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “Mouse Road,” he said, his head swimming. “It’s her first vision, too. Why isn’t she...?”

  Speaks While Leaving stood up from the newborn fire, twigs crackling as the flames bit and grew. She came over and made him lie down, a folded blanket beneath his head. “She is a woman. She is stronger than you.”

  And then he slept.

  He woke to the aromas of grilled meat and bubbling corn meal stew and felt his stomach growl.

  “He is up,” Mouse Road said, and then she was at his side.

  He blinked and looked up into her eyes. She was calm, but her small smile was tinged with sadness. “You saw it all?” She nodded. “I am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t expect I would have to leave you so soon.”

  “You won’t,” she said, taking the bowl of food Speaks While Leaving offered and handing it to him.

  His stomach snarled again but he ignored it. “Mouse Road, this has to be done.”

  Her eyes widened and she puffed out a breath of air. “I know,” she said. “But do not worry. We will succeed.” He took a breath and she countered him with a scowl and a raised hand. “Wait. Let me guess. We both saw it all, but you did not see me there.”

  “Well, no,” he said. “I did not.”

  “And so you think that means you must do this alone.”

  He felt cornered, but, “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Did you happen to think...no, you did not think.” Her tone was imperious. “Husband, you did not see me in the vision because you did not look to your side.”

  The sights of the vision flashed across his mind: the silvered paths, the bloodstained sky, the ghosts of ships, soldiers, and men. She was right; he had only looked ahead, had only seen the vision. But as it replayed, he felt the memory of a pressure, a presence. He looked down at his hand, remembering the warmth, the mutual grip, the tiny fingers clutching his palm.

  “You were there,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Besides, think back on what happened the last time someone told me where I could and could not go.”

  He laughed. In her last act of rebellion she had run away from several suitors, gone to the vé’hó’e border towns, pulled his drunken carcass out of a vomit-slick puddle, dragged him across the Big Salty to the royal courts of Spain, and come back a married woman. He held up a hand, yielding to her superior stubbornness. “As you wish,” he said. He took up the carved horn spoon and took a bite of the stew. “But what should we do next?” he asked.

  “You two must go where you must go,” Speaks While Leaving said, entering with an armful of blankets and travel-sacks. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I do,” Mouse Road said. “To the Man with the White Gloves. I do not know who he is, but he is the man we must find.”

  “I know him,” George said. “He won’t be hard to find. Just hard to reach alive.”

  “But what of you?” Mouse Road asked. “You will not be with us?”

  Speaks While Leaving’s smile was grim as she started to put necessaries into the travel-sacks. “No. My tasks take me somewhere else.”

  “To the Chief with the Grey Feather?” she asked.

  “Yes. I must go to the Crow People.”

  George became very worried. “I do not know which of us has the harder task.”

  They packed through the night, and as the tardy dawn of autumn bloomed in the east, Speaks While Leaving tied her parcels on her whistler’s back. Mouse Road and One Who Flies shouldered their parcels, ready to head out to the field where the walkers nested for the night.

  “Please,” Mouse Road begged her. “At least bid him goodbye. He is your father.”

  Speaks While Leaving clenched her jaw and wiped at a tear. “I cannot.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he would stop me,” she said, too sharply. She took a breath to calm herself. “It is the only path I still see unfixed. I have told our neighbors that we are going, but not where we go. They will make sure One Bear and.... They will make sure the Council knows that we have gone, and why.”

  Mouse Road ran forward and hugged her, then retreated to her husband’s arm.

  So much I see, Speaks While Leaving thought to herself. So much of the little girl is still within you. And yet, the strength of four grandmothers is in you, too.

  “I shall see you,” she said. She mounted her whistler and clucked at it to rise. The whistler stood and Speaks While Leaving toed it into motion. She turned and raised a hand in farewell. They did likewise, and she had to turn away before the tears blinded her.

  Chapter 12

  Monday, October 6th, AD 1890

  The White House

  Washington, District of Columbia

  Custer turned away from Jacob and the question before them. He leaned back against his worktable, and looked out through the curved glass panes, past the marble balustrade, to the gardens below. Summer was over; autumn was well underway. Libbie was out among the rose bushes, snipping the last blooms of the season, a light breeze tugging at her hems. Cook prowled the corn rows, selecting the best ears for tonight’s corn pudding, while a kitchen maid sought bright red tomatoes amid twisted branches and dark green leaves. Farther out, a groundsman drove a horse-drawn mowing machine across the south lawn, the grass lush, green, and growing again after the recent rains. And finally, beyond the sward of the new Ellipse, Washington’s monument stood like a colossal gnomon, built by Man so God could tell what time it was down here on Earth.

  He concentrated on this view, letting the serenity of the gardens, the languid pace of strolling tourists, and the silent strength of marble and granite infuse him, calm him. Behind him, he heard Jacob, his Secretary of War, grousing to himself as he penciled notes and totted up figures. Around the library that Custer used as his office, aides and advisors sat on divans reading reports or leaned across side tables in earnest tête-à-têtes. The room was charged with the sounds of quiet activity; the whisper of paper, the murmur of sotto voce conversation, the creak of leather, the clink of melting ice in forgotten glasses of sweet tea.

  In times past, the work behind him would have been intoxicating. He would have been infected by the urgency of war, exhilarated by the constant coming and going, the influx of information, the outflow of orders. The tightrope dance between resource and demand would have ignited his imagination and the movement of men and munitions across the stage would have been impossible to ignore.

  But now, for the first time, he was deaf to the siren’s call. Now, all he wanted to do, the one thing he truly ached to do, was to go down to the garden, take his wife by the hand, and walk with her beneath the maples, smelling the scent of her fresh-cut roses. He was growing tired of it all, something he never thought would happen to him. But the years of conflict, the constant pressure of his office, the crushing demands on time and energy; he was feeling their cost. His body was debilitated, his family torn asunder, his only son caught up in a storm that was about to break upon them all, a storm that Custer felt powerless to avoid and unprepared to face.

  There was, however, no alternative. He could not refuse the challenge; the duty was his to perform, was his by oath, and despite his longings for a relief, he was simply incapable of turning it all over to anyone else. He would have to see this through, come what may, so he allowed himself a few more moments of quiet indulgence, watched Cook come in with a basket of corn, green husks and silk shining in the afternoon sun, then turned back to the room and the work at hand.

  “So,” he said to Jacob. “You agree with him?”

  Jacob frowned, put his pencil behind his ear, but did not look up from his papers. The worktable was covered with maps and messages. Jacob paged through a fistful of telegrams, curling back the top corners with a wetted fingertip until he found the one he wanted. Custer waited while his friend double-checked his notes and recalibrated his figures. Jacob had lost weight in the past two years; his hair was thinner, too, and a grimness in his eye replaced the irrepressible optimism that even a de
cade in the field had never been able to wipe clean. His trusted friend was being worn down, just as was Custer himself, just as they all were.

  Had it been worth it? he wondered. Had his actions been worth the costs? He dismissed the feelings of mawkishness the question engendered and considered it seriously. Despite his best efforts and his true intentions, the situation had grown steadily worse. What began, years ago, as a shift in the military strategy used against a clever, adaptive enemy, had brought them now to the brink of war with one of the world’s oldest and greatest powers. What would the world have been like, had he—his mind cast back in time—had he died on the field at the Battle of Kansa Bay? Would they still be where they were? Were the United States and Spain destined to face one another in a territorial war? Were they in this fix because of what he had done? Or in spite of his actions? He recalled the day he watched his son sail his gas-filled dirigible off into a cloudy sky, remembered his feelings of pride—national as well as paternal—along with his absolute conviction that he was witness to the birth of a new form of military might. But the dream of that military power died when the dirigible went down beneath heavy weather, and from that day to this, Custer could feel the grip of fate hard on his neck. Had he been wrong? Had he been right? Or was it that his actions made no difference at all and, right or wrong, his nation would be embroiled in a battle with Spain?

  “Autie?”

  Custer blinked and came back from his reverie. “My apologies, Jacob,” he said. “Please, begin again.”

  “I was just saying that, well, yes, I agree with him.”

  “You’re sure,” Custer said, not really phrasing it as a question.

  “Yes. Look,” Jacob said and turned around a sheet of paper on which were columns of numbers cross-footed to sums and ratios. “It’s clear from Meriwether’s reports. Each time he engages the Spanish alone, he does quite well, but as soon as the Cheyenne enter the fray...”

  “The frame shifts,” Custer finished, shaking his head as he looked at the numbers. Action by action, Jacob had noted troops committed, enemy engaged, casualties, fatalities, expenditures. Meriwether had been harrying the Spanish, testing them, drawing them deeper into the Territory, stretching their supply lines. Each time he had been able to pick his ground, pick his moment, manipulating the Spaniards and predicting their textbook responses to each of his tactics. But as soon as the Cheyenne entered the equation, everything went awry. Where the Spanish were slow, the Cheyenne were lightning-quick. Where the Spanish met every attack with practiced chapter-and-verse Napoleonic defense, the Cheyenne met offense with offense, retreat, ambush, skirmish, or whatever other method was sure to cause the greatest chaos. The Spanish had the larger force and greater machinery but did not know how to use them in the open terrain, while the Cheyenne had the tactics but not the decisive superiority of numbers.

  “Like he says here,” Jacob said, showing Custer one of today’s telegrams. “He says that the Cheyenne use arrows to shoot his horses, not their rifles.”

  “And only shoot them in the rump, I’ll wager,” Custer said. “A well-placed arrow will turn a horse into a thousand pounds of havoc.”

  Custer stopped. Around the room, all other conversations had stopped while aides and advisors all eavesdropped on the two most senior military minds in the room. He knew that seniority didn’t mean brilliance, but the one thing he had definitely learned during his tenure in the White House was that the presidency required common sense much more than it required brilliance. Brilliance was for the field; that was why he’d put Meriwether out there.

  “So,” he said, coming back at last to the question that had begun all his rumination. “Double his troop strength, tripling his cavalry?”

  Jacob shrugged. “That’s his assessment, but I don’t know where we’re going to get all the troops. Still, the only fault I can see is that it doesn’t sound like he’s asking for enough men.”

  Custer grimaced. “He’s counting on winter, when the Cheyenne head to the mountains. But I’m not so sure.” He shook his head. “This means it’s a proper war, though. No avoiding that.”

  Jacob rolled his eyes. “Autie, we have Spanish troops in our territory and we’re blockading the main ports of Cuba. When was this not a proper war?”

  “As long as it’s undeclared—”

  “You can give up on that,” said a voice by the door. Samuel Prendergast, Custer’s chief attaché, came into the library with a new sheaf of papers and telegrams. He crossed the room, ignoring all the others, and held out the messages.

  Custer took them and read each one. The bold, block letters stood out, shouting the crucial words.

  FLEET. ARMADA.

  BLOCKADE. RELIEF.

  WAR.

  Custer looked up. The room was silent.

  “Spain is sending a fleet to break the blockade.”

  “Congress will respond as soon as the first volley flies,” Jacob said.

  “Before then,” Samuel said. “They’re meeting now.”

  Custer closed his eyes and sighed. Stray thoughts flew through his mind: how did we get here? And how do we not end up where we are headed?

  Chapter 13

  Plum Moon, Waning

  Four Years after the Cloud Fell

  Near the Elk River

  Alliance Territory

  Speaks While Leaving rode onward beneath the rising mass of darkening clouds. Her whistler breathed easily; she had not pushed the pace very hard and, truthfully told, she might even have held back, hoping to extend her journey for a few extra hours.

  The past two days’ travel had been a balm to her troubled mind. The solitude of the prairie calmed the anxiety caused by the spectral ghosts that haunted the encampment, and as her distance from home increased, the tension built by the bickering Council factions loosened its grip on her heart. She had guided her mount through the open country, always heading north and west but keeping to the plains instead of forests and hills. She let her whistler’s legs eat up the miles, allowing nothing to interfere with the peace she had so long been without.

  The wind freshened, and she smelled coming rain. Her whistler scented it, too, turning her head to eye the cloudbank building behind them. The whistler fluted a note of concern but loped on when Speaks While Leaving patted her shoulder. Miles ahead, the land rose and began to rumple. The green grass darkened with scrub-brush, sprouted trees with rising elevation, then climbed up into the shaggy foothills that marked the deep territory of the Crow People. She would be among them tonight, and then the real challenge would have to be faced.

  Soon enough, she said to herself. But not now. Not yet.

  The sun found a chink in the clouds, and she spotted a hawk’s shadow pacing both whistler and rider as they sped through tufts of high prairie grass. She smiled, sensing the hawk’s mind above her and she let her own inner eye travel up to it. In a blink she could see with preternatural clarity, saw herself from above, looking down as she rode her whistler through the sun-dappled landscape. She could see each blade of grass that she sped past, saw the wisps of her own hair that had escaped the short tail at the back of her head. When her whistler disturbed a grouse and sent it thundering off across the grassland, her vision reeled as the hawk stooped, spiraling down toward earth, speed stealing the breath from her nostrils, wind streamlining her body, plunging. The grouse drummed its wings in straight-line flight, easily marked as Speaks While Leaving opened her own wings, pulling up from the stoop. The grouse saw the shadow, sensed danger closing, saw sunlight glint from the dark eye as death swept down, stretched her talons, and struck.

  Speaks While Leaving blinked again, then looked to her left and saw the puff of feathers, heard the twin-throated shriek as hawk and grouse went down together, bonded in the eternal duet of survival and sacrifice.

  Her heart pounded with the memory of the flight and she could almost taste the blood in her mouth, so sharply had she seen it all. She often had dreams of flying, but it was never the flight of a bird.
In her dreams she was a feather floating in the sun, struggling toward earth, turned aside by the gentlest breeze, buffeted by whim. The flight she yearned to know was the flight of a bird, with wings to control her every move as master of the air.

  But which wings would she choose? Powerful, hunting wings like the hawk that had just given her a glimpse of it all? Or the short, stubby wings of the grouse, used rarely and usually in panicked flight. No, surely not that. Then what of the broad, silent wings of the owl, never heard until it was too late? Or the blurred wings of the hummingbird, zipping up, down, forward and back, hovering to taste each floret on a chestnut tree, sitting on the air as if the world had no hold on her at all?

  It was a childish fancy, this sort of dream-gathering, like the game her grandmother, Healing Rock Woman, used to play with the children of their band. “Would you trade your legs,” she would ask, coming up behind the first child, “if you could...swim like a fish?” And she would tickle up and down the child’s calves. “Would you trade your hands,” she would say to the next, hands ready to tickle ribs, “if you could fly like a bird?” She would go all around the circle of children, giggles preceding her, giggles following her, asking what they would trade for the shifting colors of the whistler, the roar of the walker, the sight of the eagle, or the claws of the bear. And dutiful to the game, at the end they all would ask, “What of the buffalo? What can we trade to be a buffalo?” And she would beckon them all close, and they would crowd in, her hands petting their sun-warmed hair as she explained what they all knew quite well. “I am sorry, sweet ones, but you cannot be the buffalo, for you do not have enough to trade. The buffalo is everything to us. He gives us his hide to make our homes, his pelt to keep us warm. He gives us meat to eat; he gives us his bones, his horns, his hooves for our tools and utensils. He has the strength to leap a whistler’s back, the courage to face the greatest hunters, and the heart to survive the deepest winter. His hooves make the world tremble like a drum-skin. No, children. We would have to trade away all that we have and all that we would ever have, just to be the buffalo for a single day. That is why we are so grateful, each time a buffalo gives up his life for us.”