Do not ask me, she repeated, looking from her father to her husband. Please, do not ask me.
“My daughter,” One Bear said, his voice unsteady.
Do not ask me. Do not make me choose between you.
They all were looking at her. Even the whistlers had grown quiet. Stands Tall in Timber stepped forward and walked over to where she stood. She turned away from them and stared at the ground.
“Daughter of One Bear,” the arrow-keeper said. “We seem to have forgotten you.” His voice was as deep and rough as a grizzly’s call in springtime. He stood before her, watching her nervous hands, but his words were pitched to the men who stood in two factions behind him. “We have forgotten that from girlhood you have seen beyond our world and beyond our time, telling us of things that were yet to happen. We have forgotten to consider your last vision, of gold, guns, and the Iron Shirts.”
“That vision is done,” Storm Arriving said. “We saw the end of it in the City of White Stone, when Three Trees Together fell.”
“We have not,” One Bear argued. “There is more to come, but not unless we rededicate ourselves.”
Stands Tall in Timber held up his hands. “What does she say?”
Speaks While Leaving wanted to run, to leave this place regardless of the shame or trouble it might cause her, her father, or her husband. The vision that had come to her, two summers past, remained a strong memory. White Buffalo Woman, the spirit provider for the People, had shown her how a piece of gold would lead to weapons and other things the meaning of which was less clear: a ship on the water, a chair of carved wood, and a helmet and shield in the old style of the Iron Shirts, the country the vé’hó’e called New Spain.
Some of that vision had already come to pass. The People had found gold, and it had led to weapons with which they had fought back the encroachments of the bluecoats and the settlers. And the previous summer, they had met the ambassador from New Spain, whom they called Speaks for the Iron Shirts. And there had been ships, and a seat of power, and a visit to the Iron Shirts themselves.
But it did not feel finished. She still felt the power of the vision in her heart, and still felt its yearning to become reality. After the vision had come to her, they had danced—almost the entire tribe had been involved. They had danced and she had felt the power of the vision, and the rightness of it. There had never been argument about the vision’s inception, but now, with bluecoat raids bringing death upon the People, with their greatest Grandfather slain, and with failures building as vé’hó’e still streamed into their lands, there was disagreement about its culmination.
Was it finished? she asked herself. And if it was, why would the spirits give her a vision that brought no benefit? Did they fail? Or was it still in motion? Was her father right? Her husband? Both? Or neither?
“Speaks While Leaving,” the arrow-keeper said. “What do you say? Is the vision complete?”
“I cannot say,” she told them.
“Cannot?” her father asked.
“Or will not?” Storm Arriving said.
She could hear the contempt in her husband’s voice, and it angered her. “I will not say what cannot be said.”
“My daughter,” One Bear said. “You will tell us, and we will decide how to fulfill the vision.”
She broke her gaze away from the ground and glared at her father. He blinked, surprised at her effrontery, and was about to chastise her when she cut him off.
“You,” she said, a pointed finger jabbing toward him. “And you,” she said to her husband. “You are both so sure of yourselves. You think you know what the spirits are thinking. You think you know what the ma’heono mean when they speak to me.” She glowered at them all. “When they speak to me!”
“Daughter! Remember your place!”
“I do, my father. I remember my place. I am Speaks While Leaving, daughter of Magpie Woman, who is daughter of the woman called Healing Rock. I am the one to whom the spirit-visions come. I am the one who tells you of my visions, and you are the ones who decide what they mean. You, my father, you know that the spirits intend to help us more, but demand first our suffering and our sacrifice. And you, my husband, you know that my vision is done, and that the spirits have abandoned us to fend for ourselves.” Her breath was harsh and frosted the air with puffs of anger. “But you cannot both be right, can you?”
She wheeled on the entire gathering. “Am I the only one? Am I the only one willing to admit that I do not know what the spirits want?”
“Wife!” Storm Arriving said, stepping forward and grabbing her by the arm.
She yanked her arm out of his grasp and pushed him in the chest. “The next words I shall hear from you,” she said with a wrathful glower, “will be an apology.” Bearing the cradleboard with her swaddled daughter on her back, she turned and fled.
“Speaks While Leaving!” her father called.
“Speaks While Leaving!”
She ran.
The snow was still thick and quickly sapped the strength that her anger had fed. She slowed, and finally stopped, surrounded by the silent trees. She unslung the cradleboard and took it in her arms. Blue Shell Woman, teething on a strap of hide, grinned at seeing her mother’s face. Speaks While Leaving sat down heavily in the snow, and stared out at into the wall of conifers that hid her from the encampment.
Chickadees hung upside down from snowy branches, picking at pendant cones and arguing with one another like old women. On a higher branch perched a grey dove as pale as the dawn, a ring of black around her neck and her throat filled with mourning. Above the birds, the sky lightened with the growing day. It would be a warming day that promised of spring. Snow would sigh beneath the sun’s attention, and boughs would drip as their mantles of white began to melt. It would be a day of cold air and warm light, a day of visiting, and of youngsters sliding down the long, twisting paths they’d slicked down during the dim months of winter.
But for her, with the yodels of whistlers echoing up the valley, with the songs of the soldiers filling the air as they started on their way, it would be a dark day, a day of worry. And a day of regret.
Why can’t I be like other wives? she asked herself. Why can’t I send him out to war, and take pride in his bravery?
She looked down at little Blue Shell Woman, swaddled against the cradleboard. Her infant daughter was fascinated by the birds that peeped overhead, her big black eyes gazed after them as they flitted from branch to branch, dumping dollops of snow on one another. She laughed at their antics, her voice as bubbly as a springtime creek.
Speaks While Leaving loved her daughter, but it was not simply for her sake that she was unable to support this war. Should her husband fall in battle, they would both be cared for. Whether against the bluecoats or against the Crow People, men died in war, and the People had long ago learned to care for the bereft. Her father or an uncle would step in to give them a home. Hunters would donate a portion of their kills to the widow and her child. Other relatives would hand down blankets and clothing; items quite usable after a bit of repair. Life without her husband would be hard, but life often was; though she loved Storm Arriving with all of her heart, she knew she would not die of a broken one.
“Then why?” she asked her daughter’s happy face. “Why can I not smile like you and send him on his way? Why can I not be a normal wife to him?”
If she ran, she could find them before they left the camp. If she ran, she could see him, and wish him well. She could ask him to bring her back a trophy from his first kill, or promise him a feast to celebrate the many coups she was sure he would count.
If she ran. And if she believed in what he was doing.
But she didn’t. And so she did not run to find him.
“Why can’t I be a normal wife?”
She stood and dusted the powdery snow from her rump, then covered her daughter’s face and shouldered the cradleboard. Walking downhill, she could still hear the soldiers’ rhythmic song. They were beyond the mouth of the v
alley, but the day’s stillness lofted their voices as clearly as laughter across a glassy lake.
The chickadees followed in her wake, singing jee-jee-jee to her daughter. They were nearly to the wood-gathering path when she heard a man’s voice ahead.
“You are not listening to me,” the man was saying. “It is important that you listen to me.”
She stepped onto the path and saw Mouse Road, her young sister-in-law, with Hungry Bear. A full head taller than the thin-boned Mouse Road and over twenty summers her elder, Hungry Bear towered over her in both stature and confidence.
“I respect your brother,” Hungry Bear was saying. “He has fought many battles and brought much honor to the People, but in this, I must side with One Bear and the others. And so should you.”
Mouse Road stood sideways to him, her arms holding a blanket tightly around her shoulders, her gaze fixed in a scowl that could melt the snow at her feet.
“After all,” he continued, “I will not tolerate a wife who refutes me. It is a wife’s duty, especially in matters of war.”
Mouse Road’s face suddenly beamed with a wide, overly-sweet smile. “Hungry Bear,” she said. “Did you just ask me to be your wife?”
Speaks While Leaving did not think the tall man could stand any taller, but he did, rising as if pulled by a skyward string. “I...well...yes. I had not expected this so soon, but you know that I wish you to be my wife. My lodge is empty without a wife, and my children cry for a mother’s love and caring. Would you be my wife?”
The smile disappeared. “Now it is your turn to listen to me. My brother may have given you permission to court me, but permission to marry will come from me and from me alone. Do not think that my brother rules my heart, for as you ask me now, and every time that you should ever ask me, my answer will be no. No, I will not be your wife.”
She turned and started up the path but halted with a gasp, seeing Speaks While Leaving standing there. Hungry Bear looked up and saw her, too, and Speaks While Leaving saw his dark skin flush darker with embarrassment. As Mouse Road looked back at him, his features changed. Speaks While Leaving knew that look, knew that collection of tightness and lassitude.
He loved her. This broad burl of a man was truly in love with little Mouse Road, and her sharp words had wounded him more than she knew and probably more than she intended. Drained of confidence, he turned away slowly—first his feet, taking a step away, then hips turning as well, then shoulders, and, finally, as he began to walk away down the path, his eyes looked away, but in that gaze Speaks While Leaving saw the last length of his resolve and his hope that all was not yet lost.
When he had gone beyond the first turn in the path, Mouse Road ran to her sister-in-law.
“I was coming to find you, but he followed me,” she said.
Speaks While Leaving took her in her arms and let her cry.
“I don’t want to marry him,” the young woman said, “but he just won’t leave me alone. I don’t want to be cruel to him, but he won’t leave me alone! And now, Storm Arriving is gone, and One Who Flies is still gone, and Hungry Bear, he—he just—”
“Shh, shh,” Speaks While Leaving said, stroking her sister’s hair and holding her close.
“He just wants a mother for his children.”
“I know,” Speaks While Leaving said, knowing that Hungry Bear’s desires were more complex than Mouse Road suspected, but choosing not to contradict the young woman.
“And I don’t want to be a mother. I mean, I do want to be a mother, but I don’t want to be his mother. I mean, I don’t want to be a mother to his children.”
“I know. Quiet now. It will be all right.”
“I want One Who Flies,” Mouse Road said, looking up into her sister’s face. “Why doesn’t he come back to us?”
Speaks While Leaving did not know, but that was another fact she left unvoiced. One Who Flies was long overdue. Riders from the Tree People—the band One Who Flies called his own—had not seen him, and he certainly had not come to the Closed Windpipe band.
Finding him, she feared, was crucial to many things; from the realization of her vision, to the happiness of the woman who leaned against her, crying at his absence.
Chapter 6
Big Hoop and Stick Game Moon, Waning
Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell
Winter Camp of the Closed Windpipe Band
Alliance Territory
The evening meal was unpleasant. Mouse Road sat in her usual place nearest the door. To her right was Speaks While Leaving, then old Healing Rock Woman, Magpie Woman, and finally, in the spot farthest from the door, One Bear.
One Bear ate in silence, spooning up stew, his face a frown that had nothing to do with the meal’s rich tastes. As a chief of the Council, it was incumbent upon him to maintain equanimity in all things, but in her past months of living with Speaks While Leaving and her family, Mouse Road had learned to read the moods of the family’s titular head.
He had barely spoken since the war party left that morning, keeping his words to himself if not his mood. He had spent the balance of the day among the family’s flock of whistlers, inspecting the animals, seeing which hens were preparing to nest. He worked at the identifying bands of beaded leather that were tied around each animal’s foreleg, repairing or replacing them as needed. These tasks kept him away from others and occupied his hands, leaving his mind free to turn over the problems he faced. Mouse Road had learned that whenever One Bear was among the whistlers, he was not to be disturbed, and when the dark, cold, and his own hunger had finally driven him inside, his distant gaze and clouded brow told that he was still not in a mood to talk.
Magpie Woman sat beside her husband, filling his bowl with the thick stew of boiled meat, white-apple roots, and cracked corn her mother had prepared, keeping the fire warm but not hot, and trying to ensure that nothing within her control would aggravate his already unpleasant mood. She occasionally glanced over at Speaks While Leaving, as if fearing another outburst from her daughter like the one everyone had heard of that morning.
But Speaks While Leaving sat, eating with a horn spoon from a wooden bowl, chewing small morsels that she spat out and fed to the infant in her arms. Her thoughts and features were as distant as her father’s, but where One Bear was biting back anger—at his son-in-law, at his daughter, at those who had so openly disputed him—Mouse Road could see that Speaks While Leaving was holding back her tears.
Only Healing Rock Woman, the ancient grandmother of the family, seemed unaffected by the emotions that roiled about the lodge. She ate slowly, but not because she had to roll the meat and chunks of root over to where she still had teeth capable of chewing. She ate slowly because she was talking so much.
“And when he returned from that raid,” she told Mouse Road, “he was driving all those whistlers before him. Everyone was amazed that such a young man, all on his own, could do such a thing.” She rolled another spoonful over to her good teeth. “Eighty-eight whistlers,” she said past her food, “and he sent them all to my father, as a bride price for me.”
Mouse Road saw the others nod in time to the old woman’s story, familiar with its cadences from repeated hearing.
“But my father refused him again, saying that now he had sent too many!” Her cackle was the sound of river ice in springtime, but it died when no one joined in her good humor. She glared at the others. “You are all stones today, I see.”
Magpie Woman spoke up. “No, my mother. They are simply hungry and cannot laugh without losing a mouthful of your stew. Why don’t you tell Mouse Road what father did next?”
“No,” the old woman said, looking around. “You are all stones. No point telling tales to stones.”
There was a footstep in the snow outside the lodge, and a voice called out in a not-so-quiet whisper. “Mouse Road,” Hungry Bear said. “Are you in there?”
Mouse Road could not help but give a little groan, and Speaks While Leaving reached over to pat her leg.
“I do not like that man,” Healing Rock Woman said. “He is too brazen. It is undignified. I do not know why Storm Arriving gave him permission to—”
“I am sure Storm Arriving had good reasons,” Magpie Woman said, warding against any friction.
Speaks While Leaving huffed. “Do not defend him on my account, Mother.”
“Hungry Bear is a respectable man.”
“You would not know it from the way he follows this young one,” the grandmother said.
“You just told of how strongly Grandfather pursued you,” Speaks While Leaving said.
“That was different,” the old woman said. “He was youthful. This man should know better.”
Mouse Road felt the blood rising to her cheeks and her heart race with embarrassment.
“Mouse Road,” came the call from outside.
“Go away,” Healing Rock Woman said.
“Mother,” Magpie Woman said, shocked.
The baby began to cry, as the women passed whispered chastisements around the fire.
“Mouse Road,” insisted the suitor out in the snow.
“Eya!” Mouse Road said, disgusted with the entire situation. She put down her bowl and picked up her blanket. “I am tired. I am going to bed.” She stood and headed out the door, hoping to dismiss Hungry Bear quickly as she walked from the main lodge to the lodge she shared with Speaks While Leaving.
Her suitor stepped back from the doorway as she stepped outside. He wore a striped Trader’s blanket cowled over his head in the traditional manner of a courting youth, eager to enwrap the object of his devotions within the privacy of a woolen lodge made for two.
“Mouse Road,” he said. “Let me speak with you.”
She wanted none of it, and walked past him toward her own lodge.
He reached out and plucked at the sleeve of her robe. “Let me speak with you, Mouse Road. Please.”
Torn, she stopped but did not turn. “Speak,” she told him, gently. “I am listening.”
She heard him come up behind her. Though a large man, he moved with the quiet sureness of a hunter’s step. Though he did not touch her, she felt his presence at her back, tall and protective.
The Cry of the Wind Page 6
