The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  He laughed wearily. “Yes, my son, I have known change. I have felt time rush by tike a river hi flood, bearing the wreckage of hopes downstream out of sight. Now do you understand why I have tried to bulwark my people against it?”

  “They must heed you,” Three Geese groaned. “Make a medicine that will open their eyes and unstop their ears.”

  “Who can make a medicine against time?”

  “If anyone can, father, that one is you.” The berdache hugged himself and shivered, though the air was still mild. “This is a good life we have, a gentle life. Save it for us!”

  “I will try,” said Deathless. “Leave me alone with the spirits.” He held out his arms. “But first come and let me embrace you, my son,”

  The old cold body trembled against the firm warm flesh, then Three Geese said farewell and departed.

  Deathless sat unmoving as embers faded and night welled up out of the earth. Noise continued, drum-throb, chants, feet stamping around an extravagant fire. It grew louder when the doorway brightened again. A full moon had risen. That gray went black as the moon climbed higher, though the ground outside remained hoar. At last the merrymaking dwindled until silence laid its robe over the whole village.

  No vision had come. Perhaps a dream would. He had heard that men of nomad tribes often tortured themselves in hope that that would call the spirits to them. He would abide with the ancient unforced harmonies. On a few heaped skins, one atop him, he slept.

  Stars fared across heaven. Dew glittered in deepening chill. The very coyotes had quieted. Only the river murmured, along the banks, under the cottonwoods, around the sandbars, on and on in retreat from the sinking moon.

  Slowly, eastern stars dimmed as their part of the sky turned pale.

  The hoofs that ueared scarcely broke the stillness. Riders dismounted, left their animals in care of chosen companions, approached on foot.

  They meant to steal the horses hobbled outside the stockade. A boy’on watch saw them and sped for the gate. He screamed his warning till a warrior overtook him, A lancethrust cast him to hands and knees. Little Hare gobbled around the blood that welled into his mouth. He threshed about till he fell in a heap that looked very small. War cries ripped the dawn.

  “Out!” roared Running Wolf before his house. “It’s an attack! Save the horses!”

  He was the first to dash forth into the open, but men swarmed after him, mostly naked, clutching whatever weapons they had snatched. The strangers sprang at them. Alien words yowled. Arrows whirred. Men screamed when struck, less in pain than in fury. Running Wolf bore a tomahawk. He sought the thick of the foe and hewed, snarled, a tornado.

  Bewildered, the villagers nevertheless outnumbered the raiders. The Pariki leader yelled commands. His men rallied to him, where he shook his lance on high. In a body, they beat the defenders aside and poured through the opened gate.

  Dawnlight strengthened. Like prairie dogs, women, children, old folk fled back into houses. The Pariki laughed and pursued them.

  Running Wolf lost time getting his dismayed fighters together. Meanwhile the Pariki made their quick captures—a woman or child seized, hauled outside, or fine pelts grabbed, a buffalo robe, a shirt with colorful quillwork— and regathered in the lane that went straight to the gateway.

  One warrior found a beautiful young woman with an aging one and a crone in the smallest of the houses, next to a round lodge. She wailed and clawed at his eyes. He pinned her wrists at her back and forced her along, regardless of struggles or of the others who sought to hinder him. A man bounded from the lodge. He was unarmed apart from a wand and a rattle. When he shook them, the warrior hooted and swung tomahawk at him. The man must dodge back. The raider and his prey joined the rest of the war band.

  Running Wolf’s men milled in the entrance. At their backs, those Pariki who had kept the horses arrived at a gallop, with the free beasts on strings. The villagers scattered. The forayers seized manes, got on with a single leap, dragged booty or captives up after them. The men who had already been riding helped injured comrades mount and collected three or four dead.

  Running Wolf bayed, egged his people on. Their arrows were spent, but enough of them finally came at his heels that the foe made no further try for their herd. Instead the Pariki rode west, .bearing their prizes. Dazed with horror, the villagers did not give chase.

  The sun rose. Blood glowed brilliant.

  Deathless sought the battle place. Folk were getting busy there. Some mutilated two corpses the enemy had not recovered, so that the ghosts must forever drift in the dark; these persons wished aloud for live prisoners to torture to death. Others tended their own slain. Three Geese was among those who worked on the wounded. His hands eased anguish; his low voice helped men bite back any cries. Deathless joined him. The healing arts were part of a shaman’s lore.

  “Father,” said the berdache, “I think we need you more to make medicine against fresh misfortune.”

  “I know not if any power to do that is left in me,” Deathless replied.

  Three Geese pushed a shaft deeper into a shoulder, until the barbed head came out the rear and he could pull the entire thing free. Blood welled, flies buzzed. He packed the hole with grass. “I am ashamed that I was not in the fight,” he mumbled.

  “You are long past your youth, and fighting was never for you,” Deathless said. “Buf I— Well, this took me by surprise; and I have forgotten whatever I once knew about combat.”

  Running Wolf stalked around, tallying the harm that had been done. He overheard. “None of us knew anything,” he snapped. “We shall do better next time.”

  Three Geese bit his lip. Deathless went impassive.

  Afterward he did undertake his duties as the shaman. With his disciple, who yesterday had never come near him, he led rites for the lost, cast spells for the clean mending of wounds, made offerings to the spirits. An elder mustered courage to ask why he did not seek omens. “The future has become too strange,” he answered, and left the man standing appalled. By eventide he could take a short span to console Quail Wing’s children for the taking of their mother, before he again went alone into the medicine lodge.

  Next morning the people buried the dead. Later they would dance in their honor. First, though, the hale men gathered at a place which had known happier meetings. Running Wolf had demanded it—no council of elders calmly finding their way toward agreement, but every man who could walk—and none cared to gainsay him.

  They assembled before a knoll near the bluff edge. Standing on it, a man could look south to the broad brown river and its trees, the only trees anywhere in sight; east to the stockade, the fields clustered about it, gravemounds both raw and time-worn; elsewhere across grass that billowed and shimmered, green and white, under a shrill wind. Clouds flew past, trailing shadows through a sunlight gone harsh. Thunderheads loomed blue-black in the west. From here the works of man seemed no more than anthills, devoid of life. Nothing but the horses moved yonder. They chafed at their hobbles, eager to be off and away.

  Running Wolf mounted the knoll and raised an arm. “Hear me, my brothers,” he called. Wrapped in a buffalo robe, he seemed even taller than he was. He had gashed his cheeks for mourning and painted black bars across his face for vengefulness. The wind fluttered the plumes in his headband.

  “We know what we have suffered,” he told the eyes and the souls that sought him. “Now we must think why it happened and how we shall keep it from ever happening again.

  “I say to you, the answers are simple. We have few horses. We have hardly any men who are good hunters upon them, and we have no skilled warriors at all. We are poor and alone, huddled within our miserable walls, living off our meager crops. Meanwhile other tribes ride forth to garner the wealth of the plains. Meat-fed, they grow strong. They can feed many mouths, therefore they breed many sons, who in turn become horseman hunters. They have the time and the mettle to learn war. Their tribes may be strewn widely, but proud brotherhoods and sisterhoods, oath-societies
, bind them together. Is it then any wonder that they make booty of us?”

  His glance fell hard on Deathless, who stood in the front row under the hillock. The shaman’s gaze responded, unwavering but blank. “For years they stayed their hand,” Running Wolf said. “They knew we had one among us who was full of spirit power. Nonetheless, at last a band of young men resolved to make a raid. I think some among them had had visions. Visions come readily to him who rides day after day across empty space and camps night after night beneath star-crowded skies. They may have urged each other on. I daresay they simply wanted our horses. The fight became as bloody as it did because we ourselves had no idea of how to wage it. This too we must learn.

  “But what the Pariki have found, and soon every plains ranger will know, is that we have lost whatever defense was ours. What new medicine have we?”

  He folded his amis. “I ask you, Deathless, great one, what new medicine you can make,” he said. Slowly, he stepped aside.

  Indrawn breath whispered among the men, beneath the damp chill that streaked from the stonnclouds. They stared at the shaman. He stood still an instant. Thereafter he climbed the knoll and confronted Running Wolf. He had not adorned himself in any way, merely donned buckskins. Against the other man, he seemed drab, the life in him faded.

  Yet he spoke steadily: “Let me ask you first, you who take leadership from your elders, let me ask you and let you tell us what you would have the people do.”

  “I did tell you!” Running Wolf declared. “We must get more horses. We can breed them, boy them, catch them wild, and, yes, steal them ourselves. We must go win our share of the riches on the plains. We must become skilled in the arts of war. We must find allies, enroll in societies, take our rightful place among folk who speak Lakotan tongues. And all this we must begin upon at once, else it will be too late.”

  “Thus is your beginning,” said Deathless quietly. “The end is that you will forsake your home and the graves of your ancestors. You will have no dwellings save your tipis, but be wanderers upon the earth, like the buffalo, the coyote, and the wind.”

  “That may be,” replied Running Wolf with the same lev-elness. “What is bad about it?”

  A gasp went from most listeners; but several young men nodded, like horses tossing their heads.

  “Show respect,” quavered an aged grandson of the shaman. “He is still the Deathless one.”

  “He is that,” acknowledged Running Wolf. “I have spoken what was in my heart. If it be mistaken, tell us. Then tell us what we should do, what we should become, instead.”

  He alone heard the answer. The rest divined it, and some wrestled with terror while others grew thoughtful and yet others shivered as if in sight of prey.

  “I cannot.”

  Deathless turned from Running Wolf, toward the gathering. His voice loudened, though each word fell stone-heavy. “I have no further business here. I have no more medicine. Before any of you were born, rumors came to. me of these new creatures, horses, and of strange men who had crossed great waters with lightnings at their command. In time the horses reached our country, and that which I feared began to happen. Today it is done. What will come of it, nobody can foretell. All that I knew has crumbled between my fingers.

  “Whether you must change or not—and it may well be that you must, for you lack the numbers to keep a settlement defended—you will change, my people. You want it, enough of you to draw the rest along. I no longer can. Time has overtaken me.”

  He raised his hand. “Therefore, with my blessing, let me go.”

  It was Running Wolf who cried, “Go? Surely not! You have always been ours.”

  Deathless smiled the least bit. “If I have learned anything in my lifetimes of years,” he said, “it is that there is no ‘always.’ ”

  “But where would you go? How?”

  “My disciple can carry out what is needful, until he wins stronger medicine from warrior tribes. My grown sons will see to the welfare of my two old wives and my small children. As for myself—I think I will fare alone in search of renewal, or else of death and an end of striving.”

  Into their silence, he finished: “I served you as well as I was able. Now let me depart.”

  He walked down the knoll and away from them. Never did he look back.

  XIII. Follow the Drinking Gourd

  A thunderstorm flamed and boomed during the night. By morning the sky was clear, everything asparkle, but the fields were too wet for work. That didn’t matter. Crops were coming along fine, alfalfa so deep a green you could nearly hear the color and corn sure to be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Matthew Edmonds decided that after chores and breakfast he’d fix up his plow. The colter needed sharpening and there was a crack in the whippletree. If he reinforced it, he could get yet another season’s use out of it before prudence called for replacement. Then Jane had a long list of tinkerings around the house for him.

  When he closed the kitchen door, he stopped and drew a breath on the top step. The air was cool and damp, rich with smells of soil, animals, growth. On his right the sun had just cleared the woods behind the bam; the rooster weathervane there threw the light back aloft into a blue that had no end. The yard was muddy, but puddles shone like mirrors. He let his eyes run left, across silo, pigsty, chickenhouse, over his acres that rolled away beyond them bearing the earth’s abundance. Could he, could any man ever make any real return for the blessings of the Lord? . Something flickered at the edge of sight. He turned his head fully left. You could see the county road from here, about a hundred yards off along the west edge of the property. On the other side lay Jesse Lyndon’s land, but his bouse was to the north, hidden from this by its own patch of woods. The Edmonds’ drive was also screened from sight, :lined with apple trees whose fruit was starting to swell among pale-bright leaves. Out from between them ran a woman.

  Chief, the half-collie, was helping ten-year-old Jacob take the cows to pasture. That was just as well. The woman acted scared when Frankie bounded forth barking at her, and he was only a fox terrier. At least, she shied from him and made fending motions. She kept on running, though. No, she staggered, worn out, close to dropping. All she had on was a thin dress that had once been yellow, halfway down her shins. A shift, would the ladies call it? Ragged, filthy, and drenched, it clung to a skin from under which the flesh had melted away. That skin was the shade of weak coffee.

  Edmonds sprang down the steps and broke into a run himself. “You, Frankie, quiet!” he hollered. “Shut up!” The little dog skipped aside, wagged his tail, and lolled his tongue.

  Man and woman met near the corncrib, stopped, stared at each other. She looked young, maybe twenty, in spite of what hardship had done to her. Feed her up and she’d be slender and tall instead of skinny. Her face was different from the usual, narrow, nose curved and not very wide, lips hardly fuller than on some whites, big eyes with beautiful long lashes. Hair, cut short, wasn’t really kinky; it would bush out if ever she let it grow. Edmonds thought with a pang how a slaveowner must have forced her mother or her grandmother.

  The wind went raw in her throat. She tried to straighten, but a shiver took hold of her. “Peace,” Edmonds said. “Thee is with friends.”

  She stared. He was a big sandy man, wearing clothes darker than most and a hat that was flat of crown, broad of brim. After a moment she gasped, “Yo’ Massa Edmonds?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” His voice stayed easy. “And thee, I think, is a fugitive.”

  She half lifted her hands. “Please, sub, please, dey’s aftuh me, right behin’ me!”

  “Then come.” He took her arm and led her across the yard to the kitchen door.

  The room beyond was large and sunny, clean-scrubbed but still full of sweet odors. Jane Edmonds was spooning oatmeal into Nellie, not quite one, while four-year-old William stood on a stool and manfully pumped water into a kettle fresh off the stove. Its earlier load steamed in a dishpan. Everybody stopped when Father and the Negress appeared.

  �
�This girl needs shelter, and quickly,” Edmonds told his wife.

  Herself fine-boned, hair peeping red from beneath a scarf, she dropped the spoon and clutched fist between fingers. “Oh, dear, we haven’t any real hiding place ready.” Decision: “Well, the attic must serve. Nothing in the basement to hide behind. Maybe the old trunk, if they search our house—”

  The Negress leaned against the counter. She didn’t pant or shake now, but wildness still dwelt in her eyes. “Go with Jane,” Edmonds told her. “Do what she says. We’ll take care of thee.”

  A brown hand snaked out. The big butcher knife almost flew from the rack into its grasp. “Dey ain’ gon’ take me live!” she yelled.

  “Put that down,” Jane said, shocked.

  “Child, child, thee must not be violent,” Edmonds added. “Trust in the Lord.”

  The girl crouched back, blade bright in front of her. “Ah don’ wanna hurt nobody,” she answered, raspy-voiced, “but dey fin’ me, Ah kill manse’f ‘fo’ dey take me back, an’ fust Ah kill one o’ dem if’m de Lawd he’p me.”

  Tears stood forth in Jane’s eyes. “What have they done, to drive thee to this?”

  Edmonds cocked his head. “Frankie’s barking again. Don’t wait, let her keep the knife, just get her out of sight. I’ll go talk to them.”

  Since his boots were muddy, he went straight out and around the corner of the house to the front porch on the west side. The drive branched off where the apple trees ended, an arm leading south. Edmonds hushed the dog and placed himself on the step before the screen door, arms folded. When the two men saw him, they cantered that way and drew rein.

  Their horses were splashed but fairly fresh. At each saddle was sheathed a shotgun, at each belt hung a revolver. One rider was burly and blond, one gaunt and dark. “Good day, friends,” Edmonds greeted them. “What can I do for ye?”