“The Kit Fox will be dancing tomorrow. I will dance with them, and I will strike the drum and throw you away. Tonight, I return to the Tree People. Tomorrow, I am no longer your husband.” He kicked his whistler into a run. She heard its heavy footsteps recede, gathered up by the wind and blown away.
She lay there, curled against the cooling stone, as the day was extinguished and night poured across the sky. The wind pushed the clouds, and the clouds brought a pattering of rain. The raindrops were warm on her arm and on her shoulder, but cool on the sting of her cheek. Swallows flew through the last of twilight, their garrulous chatter crisp in the deepening dark.
Speaks While Leaving wept. There was nothing else she could do.
Chapter 29
Moon When the Cherries are Ripe, Full
Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell
Along the Red Paint River
Alliance Territory
Mouse Road stepped out of her lodge and into the early morning air. Her lodge. Her lodge. A married woman, now, she no longer had to share a lodge with her relations, and had returned once more to the lodge that had been her mother’s. She took a deep breath, smelling the dew that beaded the grass and the seams of the lodgeskins, and wrapped her arms about her shoulders.
The doorflap opened behind her, and One Who Flies joined her in the blue light of dawn. He wrapped his own arms around her, and nuzzled her neck with his cheek. She laughed and recoiled from the scratchiness of his overnight beard. He was such a strange thing, this man who used to be a vé’ho’e. He was not built like one of the People. His legs were thicker, his arms thinner. He had pale hair on his limbs and dark hair on his chest, and hair grew on his face as quick as grass in springtime. And his skin! In the places where the sun did not touch it, his skin was as pale as a plucked grouse, but where it was exposed, it had darkened to the golden color of skillet bread. His head had the softest hair she had ever known, coming in dark at his scalp and paling to nearly white at the ends, ends cut short in his grief over Three Trees Together, and still not long enough to pull back into a braid.
“You are up early,” she said.
“I meet with the Council today. Remember?”
“Yes. Though I thought it might have been a cold bed that woke you.” She reached behind and grabbed his hips, pulling him close up against her. He held her tightly and she laughed again, slapping away a hand that grew too bold.
“You must be patient,” she said. “We do not want a baby so soon, do we?”
“I don’t care,” he whispered into her hair.
“You will,” she chided him. “When you want to go off with Alejandro we won’t want to have to bring the child...” Her voice trailed away as she realized what she was saying.
“Alejandro?” One Who Flies said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust that man again. This war is all his doing, and who knows what other tragedies he has had a hand in?” But her attention had been diverted, and she looked over at the neighboring lodge that she used to share with Speaks While Leaving and Storm Arriving.
Storm Arriving had been absent since their arrival, choosing to avoid her defiant elopement by staying in the Kit Fox soldiers’ meeting lodge. One Who Flies wanted to make things right between them, but she had counseled patience out of respect for her brother’s grief over the death of his daughter.
And as for Speaks While Leaving, neither had she returned to the lodge, and it was another morning when no smoke rose from the smokehole.
One Who Flies saw where she was looking. “She is still out there,” he said. “It has been four days.”
“And that is long enough,” Mouse Road said. She walked to the whistler that they kept tied near the lodge and unknotted the halter rope. One Who Flies said nothing, knowing her mind, and worked instead on tightening up the keel-rope and pad of the riding harness. He helped her up onto the whistler’s back. She slipped her moccasins into the riding loops and tucked her knees under the first-rope.
“Stand up,” she told it, and the whistler rose with a muttered complaint.
“Bring her home,” One Who Flies said. Then he took her hand and kissed it, another strange habit from of his vé’ho’e life.
“I love you,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“And I love you,” he said, releasing her.
She rode out of camp, heading through the empty places at a run. Her yearling whistler called to the flocks as they rode past, and the matriarchs replied with a two-note encouragement.
The air was thick and somnolent, with a mist that hung above the ground and graced even the plainest of plants with a web of moist jewels. She rode through its coolness, gathering gems in her hair, looking for the rock where Speaks While Leaving had made her hermitage. No one had bothered her during the four days since her return. Grief and mourning were respected, and the cause of hers was a story that had been well-told throughout the camp. But after four days with no word, Mouse Road worried that she might have moved from grief to despair, and done herself harm. She promised herself that she would only see that she was well, and then would return.
The mist thickened as she rode toward the higher ground, raising a wall of grey cloth that kept pace with her as she traveled. The outcrop was near, she knew it was, but finding it proved a challenge. The uphill slope of the land shifted downward and she knew she had ridden too far. She retreated, found the height, and directed her mount to walk along the barely perceptible ridge.
They proceeded, wrapped in the shroud of fog, seeing only the tired grass and an occasional patch of milk-wood plants. She guided her mount slowly, listening to the muffled morning, alert for any sound of distress until the fog shredded like a dream and there, a stone’s throw ahead through the coiling streamers of mist, was the grey-green pile of bouldered granite. She toed her whistler forward but reined in again as one of the boulders twisted and looked her way. Three other boulders grew heads and turned to see who it was had come, and Mouse Road felt her breath grow short with a gut-taut fear.
Pitted eyes stared out from beneath crevice brows. Their features were blunt and rough, their hair the mottled green of lichen. The mist swirled, and she blinked her eyes, seeing only four lumps of stone, boulders cold and immobile. Then she heard a voice from the other side of the outcropping. She kicked her whistler into motion and rounded the rocks to find Speaks While Leaving lying supine on a small patch of ground protected by an arc of stones.
“Yes,” Mouse Road heard her say. “I will. I will.”
Mouse Road slid off her whistler’s back and ran to her. Speaks While Leaving was rigid, her breath sharp and shallow. Her lips were drawn back and her eyes had rolled white, and Mouse Road recognized at once that she was in the grip of another vision. She took her hand and yelped when Speaks While Leaving grabbed both her hands and gripped them with a terrible strength.
“They are here,” Speaks While Leaving said, uttering the words with rapid breaths. “They are all around.”
“Don’t worry,” Mouse Road said. She looked at the stones that stood around them. They leaned in toward the two women, eager, and Mouse Road wanted to run, to take Speaks While Leaving and run away from this place. A low sound began, coming from all around.
“I see,” Speaks While Leaving said. “Yes, I see. I see.”
There was a rumble in the ground. The whistler cried out and bolted, halter rope trailing into the mist. Mouse Road called after it and tried to stand but was unable to free her hands from Speaks While Leaving’s relentless grip. Boulders creaked and moved, the earth trembled, and then Mouse Road felt a popping in her ears and a lifting in her innards. She shouted at the rocks around her, and everything went quiet. She heard her own breath, raw and dry. A stone clattered. A blackbird asked a trilled question. Another answered.
She looked down. Speaks While Leaving lay quietly, her eyes looking up into the clearing mist, her hands relaxed. She looked up and smiled a tired smile.
“Are you all right?” Mouse Road asked.
“I am fine,” Speaks While Leaving said, and slowly sat up. She reached out and caressed Mouse Road’s cheek. “You have been given a hard path, haven’t you?”
Mouse Road looked down at her hands. “Not as hard as some,” she said, thinking of what Speaks While Leaving had gone through in her life.
“Perhaps,” Speaks While Leaving said, and then reached out and embraced her. “Remember,” she whispered. “No matter how hard it is, remember that it will all turn out fine.”
She pulled away from Speaks While Leaving and looked her straight in the eye. “Are you all right?” she asked her again.
Speaks While Leaving took a deep breath and looked up into the clearing sky. The sun grew bright. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I am fine. Help me get up, will you?”
She stood and helped her former sister-in-law to her feet. Speaks While Leaving was weak-kneed from her days of abstinence.
“Let me go for a whistler.”
“No,” Speaks While Leaving said. “I do not want to be out here alone anymore. I am tired of being alone.”
Mouse Road took her arm over her shoulder and together they began walking back toward the camp. “So you think my brother will take you back?”
“Eh?” Speaks While Leaving said, not quite following her question. “Ah, that. No, Storm Arriving will not take me back any sooner than I will return to him. It will be some time before we are able to forgive one another. No, what I meant is that I’ve been alone too much. Out following my visions instead of building a future of my own.” She sighed. “I have been a selfish woman. Hard-headed and stubborn, just as your brother always said I was.”
“No more than he is,” Mouse Road said, and Speaks While Leaving laughed. “But what about the People? How will you help the People if you do not follow your visions?”
Speaks While Leaving leaned against her and pointed ahead. The mist had burned away and the camp was laid out before them, lodges forming the incomplete circle, broken where families and bands had failed to gather. “The People have been torn apart by my visions, and I have not helped by leaving them alone. I was wrong to think that I could bring these visions into being by myself. I cannot do it alone. I need the help of others, just as the People need the help of other tribes.”
Mouse Road thought of what Speaks While Leaving had been saying when she found her up at the rocks. “Is that what you saw up there, at the rocks?”
Speaks While Leaving was gazing ahead, toward the camp and home. “Yes,” she said. “The nevé-stanevóo’o came from the corners of the earth today. That is one of the things they told me.”
“What else did they tell you?” she asked, remembering, too, her words about the hard path that lay ahead.
“They told me that war is coming,” Speaks While Leaving said. “They told me that we must prepare.” And then she waved at someone.
Mouse Road looked and saw a rider headed their way, bringing two extra mounts with him. His short, pale hair bounced with his whistler’s strides, and his smile could be seen despite the distance.
“I believe your husband has come to bring us home,” Speaks While Leaving said.
“Yes,” Mouse Road said, feeling the conflict of happiness and apprehension. If war was coming, if a hard path still lay ahead of her, she was glad at least that she would not be alone and, as her husband rode up to them, the morning sun flashing from his unearthly blue eyes, she smiled.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge once again the Cheyenne people whose law, legend, and history have been such a continued enlightenment and inspiration. Without them, this book simply would not exist.
I would like to thank the readers I have met and heard from over the years. Your enthusiasm for these books has been both gratifying and contagious, and I hope to hear from more of you in the future.
I owe a great debt to my Second Readers for their helpful comments and critiques. The result of your input is a much better book, which I proffer in partial repayment for your efforts.
And, as always, to my wife, my greatest thanks for her greatest patience. May it all, in the end, prove worthwhile.
Cheyenne Pronunciation Guide
There are only 14 letters in the Cheyenne alphabet. They are used to create small words which can be combined to create some very long words. The language is very descriptive, and often combines several smaller words to construct a longer, more complex concept. The following are simplified examples of this subtle and intricate language, but it will give you some idea of how to pronounce the words in the text.
LETTER PRONUNCIATION
a “a” as in “water”
e short “i” as in “omit”
h “h” as in “home”
k “k” as in “skit”
m “m” as in “mouse”
n “n” as in “not”
o “o” as in “hope”
p “p” as in “poor”
s “s” as in “said”
š “sh” as in “shy”
t “t” as in “stop”
v “v” as in “value”
x “ch” as in “Bach”
‘ glottal stop as in “Uh-oh!”
The three vowels (a, e, o) can be marked for high pitch (á, é, ó) or be voiceless (whispered), as in â, ô, ê.
Also by Kurt R.A. Giambastiani
Dreams of the Desert Wind
Unraveling Time
The Ploughman Chronicles
Ploughman’s Son
Ploughman King
The Fallen Cloud Saga
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
The Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Learn more at:
http://www.seattleauthor.com
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