Trail of Bones

by Mark London Williams

  But I have yet to fully master the “English” that Sally, Jefferson President, Eli, and all the others use, though I have picked up a few words and phrases.

  Until I can give some of the lingo-spot to Sally, those few words are all I have to communicate with. Aside from whatever Latin Sally remembers. Between the two tongues, we cobble together more conversation.

  “Yes, dear. Paris. In France. That’s not where you’re from, is it?”

  “Alexandria,” I tell her again, practicing English. “No slave.” I hope she understands.

  “You poor lost thing. How can you be from a town in Virginia and not be a slave? Maybe you are Brassy, and you’ve just lost your mind.” She lowers her voice so that Mr. Howard, who is studiously pretending to ignore us, will definitely not be able to hear. “They’ll eventually have to return you to New Orleans, you know.”

  I have to let her know I can’t go to New Orleans, either. I have to let her know who I really am. In order to fully explain everything. Perhaps, if I take advantage of the carriage bumps, I can dab some lingo-spot on her and make it look “accidental.”

  “We’ll have to teach you better English,” Sally says. “Jefferson will help. Wants his slaves to be educated. He discusses science and philosophy with me all the time, tells me how he still misses Martha, his late wife. He talks to me just like a free person. Yet he turns around and says it wouldn’t be fair to let his own slaves go. Says we been raised like children and couldn’t make our way in the world.” She shakes her head. “This coming from the same man who tried to put a passage about ending slavery into the Declaration of Independence, ‘til they made him take it out. I think slavery’s got white people all mixed up inside. I think, really, it’s worse on the spirits of the people who own the slaves, compared to the people who are the slaves. Some of them, anyway.”

  She doesn’t keep her voice low for that last observation. I wonder if Jefferson President could hear her, too, inside the carriage?

  “Martha died almost twenty years ago… And I’ve lived at Monticello, or traveled with that man, ever since. But he still won’t let me call him Thomas. He says we can’t be friends in public. But I won’t call him Mister either, and certainly not Master, if he’s going to be that way. So I just call him ‘Jefferson.’”

  Then Sally closes her eyes and leans into the rushing air. She looks serene. “So many mysteries. Starting with people’s hearts.”

  Show me.

  That voice again.

  Show me.

  It’s not Sally who’s talking…

  Show me!

  It’s the lingo-spot.

  The lingo-spot is exerting a will of its own now. Asking, or letting the thought be known, that it wants to be shown —given— to someone else. The way Eli gave some to me, back in Alexandria. The way I did, at Peenemunde, with the escaping prisoners.

  Shared.

  I reach behind my ear, feeling the spongy area where the lingo-spot melds into my skin. What does it want? To help us? And why is the organic/mechanical mass that makes up the lingo-spot suddenly exerting a will of its own, the way Clyne’s time-vessel did? What is happening to the Saurian technology?

  I look at my fingertips and touch the pulsing, glistening ointment there.

  Maybe…?

  I look at it again.

  …it wants to spread because it wants to reproduce?

  For reasons I can’t explain, I feel my cheeks flushing.

  But yes…reproduce, spread like a…

  “Fever?”

  It’s Sally, leaning over, almost off-balance, touching my face. “You’re turning all red, child.”

  Mr. Howard doesn’t like her moving around. “You crazy girl! Sit down, now!”

  I’m no child, but Sally’s a grown woman. Why does he call her “girl?”

  She looks at Mr. Howard, then stands up a little higher. “We all burn with fever! We burn with the life force of the universe! It surrounds us all and lifts us! “

  “Sit down!” Mr. Howard isn’t watching the road at all.

  Sally stands even taller, spreading her arms against the wind. “No one is a slave!” She’s yelling into the wind. Then she turns to me. “Not in their souls.”

  “Now!”

  We hit some holes and ruts. One of the horses stumbles.

  Mr. Howard jerks the reins in reaction—too late.

  Sally’s thrown forward. Without thinking, I reach out, grabbing just enough of her garment to break her fall. She twists and clutches the seat railing, as Mr. Howard struggles to regain control of the horses before we spill over.

  But I spill over, anyway, from catching Sally. And there is nobody to catch me. I hear screams.

  What a silly death, so far from home, before I was able even to…

  Reproduce.

  My face flushes again. I will die with crimson cheeks…

  “Brassy!”

  …trampled by…

  OOOF!

  …the horses— I’m tangled up with the horses, the still-moving horses…

  “Sooysaa! Sooysaa! Sooysaa!”

  I scream out the word for “horse” that groomers and trainers in the palace stables used in Alexandria.

  Holding on to the straps around one horse’s neck, I pull myself up —“Sooysaa!” —on the running animal’s back.

  Everything is still a blur. I grip the horse, trying to hold on.

  Without realizing it, I press the lingo-spot substance into the base of the horse’s skull. “Sooysaa…” I repeat, over and over.

  The first horse slows as I keep talking, and as its panic recedes, the other horse follows, until finally, at last, the carriage is brought to a stop.

  “Sooysaa…,” I stroke its neck, still clutching. “Thank you.”

  The horse’s eyes bulge. For a moment, I think it might bolt again.

  And then I realize…the lingo-spot. The lingo-spot. I’ve put the lingo-spot on the horse.

  Show me.

  Maybe the horse understands—and in understanding, has grown terrified.

  “Brassy.”

  It’s a male voice. But the name’s not mine.

  “Are you all right?”

  I stroke the horse’s mane. I won’t answer to a slave name.

  “Brassy!”

  There’s more dignity talking to a horse.

  Chapter Seven

  Clyne: North Wind Comes

  February 1804

  Snow is falling again, covering up the ice lenses I made, and, with them, any hope of continuing my research here in the field. A warm lab would be nice. But until I find one, I content myself with eating a new food which comes, once again, in surprising colors, while taking in the news that I have been mistaken for some sort of mystical being and that my life is in jeopardy.

  It is another bracing day here on Earth Orange.

  The new food is called maize. I believe it is the forebear of the grain known as corn, which I read about in some discarded nutritional guides — cookbooks — that I encountered while foraging for sustenance in Eli’s time. That was when I was an “outlaw,” and the security forces in his world were looking for me. I seem to be back in Eli’s world once again, though in a time before policing was so widespread.

  “Look. In the distance there. Coming toward us.” I point for the benefit of my friend, whose eyesight is, after all, only mammalian. “Two buffalo.”

  “Yes. We should leave before they get here,” he tells me. “Buffalo leave tracks. The hunters who are coming for you could follow those tracks. We should take you back to your den. You need to stay hidden.”

  “You said this place would keep them away. This Spirit Mound. I like to come here because it’s so quiet. It brings such a slowdown of body flow and thought. I was able to focus on some modest field research.”

  I need to share my results with him, but my friend is in a hurry. “The tales of the Spirit Mound won’t keep Crow’s Eye away. He thinks you may be one of the spirits. Grown to incredible size. W
hich would only bring him that much more glory as a warrior were he to kill you.”

  “Snow falls little on Saurius Prime. I have never seen so much territory chill-factored and freeze-blanketed all at once. I have created ice lenses for only the second time in my life! Can’t we wait for the buffalo? After all, they may wish to deliver greetings to their cousin, who you have wrapped around your shoulders.”

  The young shaman called North Wind Comes pulls the mammal fur more tightly around his body. “Just my luck. I train to be a shaman to bring wisdom to my people. Instead I find a serpent being, a totem more suited to a desert people than to Mandans, who makes comments about my ability to stay alive in bone-chilling weather. I can see that I am not meant to come by wisdom very easily.” He looks at me. “How is a desert lizard like you staying warm?”

  “I am a little frost-strewn. But the standard chrono-suit I wear resists weather excess. For a while.” I would smile at my friend, but I have discovered that Saurian mouths often contain more teeth than human mammals are comfortable with. Plus, the teeth have corn stuck in them, and my tongue keeps trying to flick the pieces out. “I am not trying to offend you, North Wind.”

  “No. I suspect not. But why must I work so hard at convincing you to preserve your own life, Many Lights? Crow’s Eye is the warrior who vowed to find you and bring you in, and he is not interested in your tales of seasonal displacement.”

  Seasonal displacement is the term North Wind Comes uses for “time travel.” His people, his tribe, the Mandans, who live in this place they call the Dakotas, don’t quite have the same words for “temporal” or “time” that Eli’s people do. They don’t think of time as a straight line, a one-way river. They think of it, somewhat correctly, as a circle. And they don’t have many words for it because they don’t monitor their lives, minute by minute, as is common in Eli’s day. In North Wind’s time, they tend to think of seasons.

  “Why does this Crow’s Eye warrior want me? Are his people afraid of me, too?”

  “The warriors imagine killing you will make them brave.”

  The security forces in Eli’s time captured me, and I found myself in the custody of two medium high-ranking mammals, a Mr. Howe, and a woman named Thirty. They played strange word games with me, believing I possessed mysterious “information” about a possible planetary invasion.

  Perhaps they thought I was from the Spirit Mound, too.

  I was then rescued by my friend Thea, who was piloting a time-vessel from my home world, and we reunited with Eli, who was in the company of a king named Arthur. Eli was trying to convince him to give up his sword.

  There was also another mammal, named Rolf Royd, from someplace called the Reich, who had rather sad and frightening beliefs, and he wanted the sword, too. Eventually the king decided to keep it — which I was led to believe made for a surprising twist on recorded mammal history — and the four of us headed into the Fifth Dimension. When the plasmechanical material that made up the time-craft became more animated, pitching us out straight into the flow of time, once again, the three of us — Eli, Thea, and I — were separated.

  But even infected plasmechanical material wouldn’t explain why we were brought to this particular time. Usually when there’s a disruption in the time stream, the attraction is a type of “prime nexus” — a moment when something happens, however large or small, that changes everything that comes after.

  What is the nexus here?

  If the buffalo know, they aren’t saying.

  Indeed, they aren’t even moving now. They’ve stopped to raise their heads. Since they come equipped with heavy coats, perhaps they are enjoying the freeze-blanketing, too.

  “Uh-oh.” North Wind worries a lot.

  Being tossed out of the time-craft felt like an uh-oh, too, for a few short beats of time. Everything was a blur of overwhelming feeling. That was soon replaced by the blur of almost infinite possibility, a mix of swirling colors that resolved, finally, into night air and stars. That was when I found myself staring into the eyes of the young mammal who speaks to me now: North Wind Comes.

  He was the first human to discover me here. Or perhaps I discovered him. He says he was undergoing a coming-of-age ritual, called a vision quest, when we met. “Just my luck,” he said, after we talked a while. “I have a vision who’s stranded and needs to be fed.” It may have been what the humans call a joke.

  North Wind jokes about his luck a lot.

  I stayed outdoors with him then — his “quest” was like the bush walks we had as growing nestlings on Saurius Prime — and we talked and shared our stories.

  North Wind is slightly older than Eli and Thea, and comes from a specific nest-community called a tribe. His people call themselves Mandans, and they live close to another tribe, the Hidatsas, to whom the young warrior Crow’s Eye belongs. Like hatchlings, they are born and raised in the same place, their villages.

  But sometimes they venture out for a time, depending on their callings.

  North Wind’s calling is to become a shaman among the Mandans, much as his own father was. A shaman, I gather, is a person who is somewhat like Melonokus was in the history of Saurius Prime. Melonokus saw things the rest of us did not: other realities, other possibilities for living. Indeed, it was largely thanks to his then-outlawed ideas and visions that our planet’s Bloody Tendon Wars drew to a close and an armistice was reached between the carnivores and herbivores.

  It was our great King Temm who signed that armistice. He then vanished, with Melonokus, who was never seen again. When Temm reappeared, he had the rules for Cacklaw with him.

  Cacklaw is the Saurian game that has replaced war on our planet. I miss it. I haven’t top-stomped in awhile.

  Nika-tc, the lingo-spot whispers, like a second voice.

  Yes.

  “Just my luck!” North Wind is yelling. He points to some other mammals now joining the buffalo: horses, who have ridden out from the low rising hills. Riding on these horses are two more mammals— humans, symbiotic with the horses, wrapped in shaggy buffalo skins no longer worn by their original owners.

  The humans hold long sticks. They may have seen us. They seem to be riding our way for a visit.

  “Run!” North Wind wants me to follow.

  “But who are they?”

  “The hunters! Crow’s Eye!”

  “Perhaps, if this Crow’s Eye finds me, I could teach him Cacklaw instead. Then he wouldn’t try to be a war maker.”

  “Warrior. And it doesn’t mean he wants a whole war. Just a small one with you. I told you, he believes it will bring him great honor to find the lizard man that the fur trader Banglees spoke of. But I do not intend to have the vision of my vision quest killed by some swaggering Hidatsa before I am made a shaman!”

  The horses are getting closer. I can hear the yelling of the riders in the distance. One of them aims his long stick in our direction.

  “If you expect to be my totem, my power animal, you can’t be captured or killed by somebody else. You can’t keep letting other people see you. Like that fur trader, Banglees. When he stopped by the lodge fire, all he could talk about was the lizard man who had saved him. If he hadn’t been a Frenchman, they might have made him shaman.”

  Just then, a couple of smaller sticks land in the snow near us. Parts of little Earth birds, the feathers, sprout out of one end. Why would you transplant bird feathers to a little jabberstick?

  Unless, perhaps, you were trying to insure that the jabberstick had as long a flight as possible?

  “Arrows,” North Wind says.

  The buffalo-covered horse riders are shouting and whooping. One has put his long stick away and grips a kind of stringed-instrument, pulling the bow back — to play a note? — with an arrow notched across it. He lets go and the jabberstick comes flying at us. I jump. It barely misses North Wind’s head.

  Everything was so quiet and peaceful, covered in the snow. I had plenty of time for ice lenses and theorems. How did this suddenly turn into such a shar
p, edgy day? But then, mammals are unpredictable.

  “Many Lights,” North Wind says urgently, “go.”

  “North Wind gave me the name Many Lights because of what he describes as a “vision of color” dancing in the air when I appeared to him. I believe it had more to do with localized temporal displacement, but I like the name. On Saurius Prime, once you leave the nest, you are given your name, and it doesn’t change. Agreeing to be known as Many Lights now would be breaking rules from home.

  “Many Lights!”

  But what could the harm be in having a different name for a while?

  Perhaps I really am becoming an outlaw.

  More arrows. One hits my tail. My tail! That hurts! I am able to shake it out and pick up North Wind in my arms. It is harder to get a good jump off the soft snow, but the horse-warriors are close and I have to try.

  “No! Save yourself, Many Lights—“

  North Wind wants me to go. But if I am part of somebody’s vision quest, which sounds at least as critical as a school project, I can’t just leave him. I gather him up just as the next volley of arrows skim by. I jump, land in the snow, almost drop North Wind, but don’t. However, I’ve jumped toward the crest of the Spirit Mound, right at a patch of freeze-blanket that has been in direct sun all afternoon. It is a little squishy.

  Landing, I sink right in to my belly line. Luckily, the horses are having trouble, too. Did those warriors ask the horses if this battle-hunt all right with them? Do mammals check with other mammals about these things? And does giving North Wind a ride make me a kind of horse?

  I struggle out of the squishy snow, preparing to leap over the summit of the Spirit Mound and down the other side, where I calculate that the shadows should make for an icier, firmer surface. I should be able to gain more distance from our pursuers.