Monsters of Our Own Making

by L. E. Erickson

  “Not a damn thing, right now. Just stand there and keep your mouth shut. Kalvis, how many—”

  While Jennett was still talking to him, Kalvis jerked. A dark stain bloomed on the shoulder of his uniform. And then, only then, the sound of a gunshot slammed into Kellen’s ears.

  “Shit!” Jennett’s .36 went up, pointed, fired. Rawle’s was a heartbeat behind.

  “Don’t be stupid!” The words were instinctive. Kellen shouted them despite knowing she shouldn’t. “Crow, Rawle. Get your Crow!”

  Kalvis’s knees buckled. He stumbled backward, and his weight pressed against Kellen so hard she almost lost her own balance.

  “Now!” Jennett barked. “While I’ve got the bastard pinned down!”

  Kellen grabbed at Kalvis’s arms, instinctively trying to catch him, but blood slicked his flesh. He slid from her grasp and wound up sitting half on her boots and propped against her legs.

  “Leave me,” he rasped. “Your Crow.”

  “Ward!” Jennett called out.

  Kellen flung herself into the link at the back of her mind, up and away from the blood and shouting around her and into the cold, metallic calm of the Crow.

  Before Kellen could do more than settle into her Crow’s sight, more gunfire rattled out.

  “I got him!” Rawle called out.

  “Don’t celebrate yet. Rawle, circle our location, make sure there ain’t more of them.” Jennett words were rushed, and he sounded winded. “Ward, head for the canoes. I want a report.”

  Kellen urged her Crow up, found the distant line of the Ohio to the north, and used it to point her Crow to the southwest. She didn’t bother with any cautious upward spirals. She flew her Crow as fast and direct as she could.

  She tried not to think about how the only thing between her and a bullet like the one Kalvis had just taken was Rawle and Jennett and their Crows.

  “Kalvis?”

  He didn’t answer Jennett. But his weight remained slumped against Kellen’s legs. She thought he was still upright.

  “Kalvis, damn it! You all right?”

  No, Kellen thought, feeling the stickiness of Kalvis’s blood drying on her hands. But as she edged her Crow up a little higher, trying to see clear of the treetops to the creek and through the rain to the canoes that Jennett had spotted and Kalvis had been spying on when he got shot, she spotted another Crow ahead of her. It flew low and slow over the treetops, and its wings tipped unsteadily, as if every raindrop knocked it off kilter. But it was there.

  “Leave him alone,” she said into the forest she couldn’t see around her physical body. “He’s flying.”

  “Shit.” But it was an oddly relieved-sounding cuss. “All right, then. Rawle, you go with them. I’ll cover us here. Ward?”

  Nothing yet, she started to say. But then there was something, a ribbon of shadow that cut through the rain-shrouded green. She winged her Crow higher, and at the bottom of that ribbon was a stream of bark canoes, manned by Cherokee warriors with faces and arms and bare chests painted black and red. Those not dipping paddles with deft efficiency carried muskets or wore quivers bristling with feather-tipped arrows. They wore tomahawks at their waists.

  These Indians had no peaceful intentions toward anybody.

  “I see them,” she said.

  “Go down together.” Jennett’s voice had gone as hard and flat as the tomahawk heads. “Do as much damage as you can. Convince ‘em to turn back.”

  Kellen’s stomach twisted. An awful, sour taste filled her mouth.

  Unarmed settlers. Women and children, she reminded herself. And if that wasn’t enough, there was Kalvis, his unmoving weight against her legs and his blood covering her hands.

  “We need to get this shit done and get the hell out of here,” Jennett barked. “Go!”

  There could be more scouts. Kalvis could be dying. Those were the things Jennett didn’t say.

  Kellen’s Crow had caught up to Kalvis’s. When it dipped its wings and dived toward the Indian war party below, she followed it down.

  6

  This time, the gunfire didn’t deafen Kellen. The thunder had given up on trying to make the afternoon shower into a storm and faded away. To Kellen’s ears, the distant gunfire was fainter even than the thunder had been, barely loud enough to be heard over the steady rush and rattle of rain in the trees. She couldn’t hear any shouts or screaming at all.

  Through her Crow’s eyes, the creek and its cargo of canoes spun beneath her. One warrior looked up. When several more black- and red-painted faces lifted toward the sky, Kellen realized that Kalvis or Rawle must have opened fire. She sucked in a breath and gave the command for her Crow to follow suit.

  The Cherokee warriors jerked, like Kalvis had but ten times over, twitching and spinning and jigging in place. Bright blood striped their torsos and their wide-eyed faces and the canoes, as if their scarlet war paint multiplied and spread. Some lifted their guns, only to drop them again as they died.

  Blood. Kellen’s thoughts felt disjointed, as if they whispered themselves into her mind. Blood in the water.

  Then the gunsmoke put out by the Crows drifted across most of Kellen’s vision. The view through her Crow’s eyes jittered and jumped as it kept spitting out the load of bullets it carried in its belly.

  “Enough.” Kalvis breathed out the word.

  Jennett must have been listening for it. “Ward?”

  Smoke. The only moving thing was gunsmoke, tendrils curling and spreading. Through it, Kellen glimpsed the creek, water turned impossibly dark, and broken canoes.

  And bodies. But the only thing moving was the smoke.

  No. Movement—there. Further up the creek, a pair of canoes trailing the others had stopped. The warriors in them were nearly as unmoving as the corpses directly below, but they sat upright and gaped at the sky.

  Leave them, some small, cold part of her said. Let them tell their tribesmen what happened here.

  “It’s enough.” Her voice sounded odd, strangled. “They won’t make it to John’s Creek.”

  “Won’t make it anywhere, ever again.” Rawle’s voice wavered. Kellen couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or about to cry.

  She was startled to realize she wasn’t sure which she might do, either.

  “Bring those Crows home.” Jennett’s voice crackled with tension. “Ward. Get yours set and get back inside your own head. Need you to take over watch so I can deal with Kalvis.”

  Kellen sucked in a breath and held it a second, until she was sure she wouldn’t let out either a whoop or a sob. Then she tilted her Crow’s wings and tugged it away from the dead war party, drawing it back toward her.

  7

  July 1806

  Indiana Territory: Tecumseh’s Town

  Wind Man guessed of Tecumseh’s approach several seconds before he actually arrived.

  The Shawnee people had gathered along the banks of Wapahani Sipi and waited in a mass of mostly-joyous impatience—although tension buzzed just beneath the surface. They stood with their feet pressed in the cool mud and humid air against their bodies. Those who could not fit onto the river’s banks filled the spaces between the trees that lined its shores.

  Far from complaining about the heat, they jostled together companionably, their voices a happy burble that out-sang the river. Many of the youngest children had been hefted onto shoulders. Closer at hand stood a gaggle of young women with their heads close together as they whispered behind their hands and laughed.

  One of those young women glanced past Wind Man. Eyes the color of buckeyes widened, and she hurriedly turned and hissed something to the other girls. Every last one of them dropped her hand away from her face, stood up straighter, and lifted her chin. From the way they fixedly did not look past Wind Man again, he could only assume that some handsome and eligible young man must be approaching.

  “He Who Faces The Wind.” A hand fell on Wind Man’s shoulder and clasped it. “Son of my father. How goes your day?”

  Son
of my father, not brother. The difference was slight in every way that mattered. That Wind Man was an adopted son and that his skin and hair were a shade paler than any true-blooded Shawnee had never prevented Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s father—or either of the brothers—from treating Wind Man like family. Foolish to wish for a different word when all else was exactly right. Wind Man was Shawnee clear to his heart, no matter the freckling across his too-pale nose or the pinkness of his lips.

  Wind Man eyed the girls who were fixedly not looking at Tecumseh and chuckled. “Not so good as yours could be going, I think.”

  Tecumseh followed Wind Man’s gaze. He’d wound a blue bandana around his head today, and for a moment the only movement was the ruffling of the single feather tucked into it. Then Tecumseh blinked, and his bronze of his finely-formed features darkened. He frowned.

  “Is your new wife not enough for you to handle? You should certainly not be looking at those girls.” Then Tecumseh’s face cracked a hint of a smile, and he clapped Wind Man on the shoulder again.

  “Laughing Girl is more than enough, yes.” Wind Man’s face heated in turn, but he grinned back at Tecumseh.

  Tecumseh laughed. But before the sound had died away, he was looking past Wind Man, past the still-posturing girls, and toward the place along the river where his brother—their brother—Tenskwatawa made his preparations. Tenskwatawa’s stunted frame stood turned away from the crowd and facing west, head tipped back and arms spread as he meditated before speaking to his followers.

  Tenskwatawa. Medicine man. Shaman. Leader of the tribe’s spiritual movement, as Tecumseh was of its martial strategies. “Tenskwatawa” meant “The Open Door,” but that hadn’t always been his name. Most of his life, he had been Loud Noise, a boastful, slothful drunkard whose only saving grace was that he was brother to the war chief Tecumseh.

  Until Loud Noise had passed out drunk and nearly fallen into the fire he sat beside. The drunkenness had not been a new thing—whiskey was a gift given frequently by the whites, and its illness swept the tribes with nearly as deadly an effect as the pox. When Loud Noise had passed out this time, they had thought him dead.

  But Loud Noise had not died. He woke sober, filled with a vision the Master of Life had put in his head. He had declared himself no longer Loud Noise but instead The Open Door, promising the Master of Life he would change not only himself but all their people.

  Tenskwatawa had kept that promise. Things had changed. Enough things that Tenskwatawa was soon enough on the tongues of white men. To them, he was known simply as The Prophet.

  “Laughing Girl is with her father today?”

  Wind Man grunted in response to Tecumseh’s question. Besides being Tecumseh’s blood brother and Wind Man’s adopted brother, Tenskwatawa was also the father of Wind Man’s wife. Laughing Girl stood beside Tenskwatawa, too far for Wind Man to see her face clearly. He recognized her by the just-so flip of black hair and the particular sweep of her hand as she smoothed the doeskin of her dress.

  Wind Man and Tecumseh stood in silence for a time among the crowd along the river.

  The Water of White Sands curved and churned between banks lined with oaks and sycamores and river birches, drawing strength from hundreds of creeks and streams upriver. The crops along the bottom land shoved eager green stalks through the black earth and stretched skyward. Behind them, on higher ground, stood the frame and bark houses of the town itself.

  To the east, the white settlers had driven the people from the lands to which they had belonged since time beyond memory. To the south and west, at the French post that had become a city, the white leader Harrison strove to do the same. If rumors coming from the Cherokee to the south held truth, Harrison was having some luck. But this place and this time, at least, still belonged to the people.

  “It is good. So many of them, healthy and strong.” A smile remained on Tecumeh’s face, but its corners tightened.

  Wind Man’s chest contracted. It was easy, too easy, to summon an uncountable number of faces that were no longer here. Two brothers, their mother, and more friends and tribesmen than Wind Man could keep track of. When the white man’s illness came calling in the dark of winter, the gravediggers could not keep up—and many of them had died, too.

  “This winter will be different,” Wind Man said.

  Tecumseh’s gaze darted to Wind Man’s face before returning to Tenskwatawa. “I pray it will be so.”

  Silence returned for a few heartbeats, a less easy one this time. In its grasp, Wind Man struggled for something to say.

  “I am surprised Tenskwatawa did not ask you to address the people along with him.” The words slipped out, harmless in intent. Wind Man winced as soon as he’d spoken them.

  Tecumseh’s brows drew down. “It is my brother’s turn to have his say, today. Not that he has not had plenty of that, lately.”

  Wind Man could think of no safe response, so he merely nodded. Tecumseh’s was a powerful personality—it was part of what made him such a successful war chief. But he was used to being the sole leader of his people. His vision of how things should be was as sharp and clean as a tomahawk’s edge, and he suffered little variance from that vision. Possibly that trait was also part of the reason Tecumseh seemed unable to keep a woman in his life. No person could ever live completely up to Tecumseh’s expectations.

  Tecumseh glanced sidelong at Wind Man. The lines gradually eased from his forehead, and he shrugged. “I suppose that since the words come from the Master of Life, Tenskwatawa can be forgiven for his long-windedness.”

  “Certainly those words have been helpful to our cause.” Wind Man treaded his sentences as carefully as a steep path. “Who better to inspire the people than one who has made such a miraculous transformation of himself?”

  Tecumseh grunted and looked again toward Tenskwatawa. “He has brought many, even from our brother tribes, into this town. They listen, they change. They join our cause. If we can unite them and all their tribes with ours, then we may yet drive the whites out of our lands and back across the sea. I cannot complain that what my brother is doing does not work.”

  Do not forget the eclipse, Wind Man refrained from saying. Tenskwatawa’s success at gathering people to his cause had drawn attention from the Long Knife Harrison, who fancied himself ruler of the lands the white men called the Indiana Territory. Two moons ago, Harrison had set out to the neighboring tribes a challenge to Tenskwatawa’s claims of speaking for the Master of Life.

  Demand of him some proofs at least of his being the messenger of the Deity, Harrison had cautioned the Shawnee and their brother tribes. If he is really a prophet, ask of him to cause the sun to stand still.

  Tenskwatawa had answered that challenge. More than answered it.

  8

  Involuntarily, Wind Man glanced toward high blue sky. The sun had not reached its midday peak yet, and it shone with violent brilliance. Even so, Wind Man shivered.

  Harrison should not have made such a challenge to Tenskwatawa. The white men underestimated him, all of them. Sometimes, Wind Man thought, even his own people did.

  Under that sparkling clear sky, Tenskwatawa stood with his feet planted on the river bank—Tenskwatawa, The Prophet, The Open Door, but no longer Lalawethika the worthless drunkard. The Master of Life had transformed him. He raised his arms and opened his hands toward the sky, and the riotous crowd quieted.

  Even transformed, Tenskwatawa was not a beautiful man. His defining physical trait was an empty right eye socket, covered in gnarled scar tissue. Another man might have managed to turn the defect masculine, even regal. But Tenskwatawa was short and squat. The scraggly line of a moustache marred his upper lip, and his voice was an unlovely nasal rasp. He decked himself in beaded scarlet clothing, and beaten bronze and silver dangled from his split ear lobes to trail across his shoulders, but no amount of ornamentation could hide his ugliness.

  Wind Man leaned slightly forward anyhow, his brow furrowing as he strained to hear Tenskwatawa’s words
. Every other Shawnee present did the same.

  “The Long Knife Harrison has demanded a sign,” Tenskwatawa called out. “He did not ask it of me or of the Master of Life directly. No, he went like a thief among the tribes, stealing their faith and replacing it with doubts. The Master of Life is unhappy with this.”

  The sun pressed its heat through the shirt Wind Man wore, which was of woven cloth from the white traders and not traditional garb like his deerskin leggings. Still, Wind Man felt a chill.

  “Yet I will give the sign Harrison asks for. The Master of Life has promised me that if I follow his words—if we, all his people, follow his words—then he will give us all we need to wash our lands clean from this white curse.”

  “Seguy,” Wind Man murmured, along with the rest of the people. “Make it so.”

  “On this day which I have named, there is no cloud in the sky. Yet, as the sun reaches its highest point, the Master will now take it into his hand and hide it from all men, red and white. As the sun stands still, the darkness of night will cover us and the stars will shine round about us.”

  Tenskwatawa paused, turning on the gathered people his one-eyed gaze that seemed so often lately to see more than could a dozen men with two good eyes each. When he spoke again, his unlovely voice carried a mysterious gravity.

  “With this act, the Master will waken the lenipinsia, the great storm panthers who stalk the skies, sending rain and wind at the Master’s command. By this sign, all men red and white will know that I am who I say I am.”

  Tenskwatawa raised open palms toward the sky and began to chant.

  Out of nowhere, a breeze blew up, cool enough to send a rash of goosebumps prickling down Wind Man’s arms. The light changed. The sky remained as clear as before, but the day seemed suddenly dimmer. More dingy yellow than bright. Unnatural.

  Despite the clear sky, thunder rumbled.

  “Tecumseh.”

  The boy who had spoken wedged himself between Wind Man and Tecumseh. Wind Man blinked, shaken back to the present moment.