by Sharon Sala
I am not hiding, I am growing. I will see you when I am done.
Layla’s heart skipped a beat as she put a hand on her belly.
“Is this you I hear?”
Yes, my mother, you can hear my voice, and soon you will feel me, as well.
Layla sat down to keep from falling. She thought she heard a giggle, but was still in shock. It could have been a bird.
No. It was me.
Layla didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Don’t cry. Be happy. I am happy I will be your child.
“I am happy, too.”
Tell Cayetano that it is not the seed that makes a father. It is the love that guides a heart.
Now Layla was weeping when Cayetano found her, sitting beneath a mango tree with tears running down her face.
“Singing Bird! Are you ill? Who has made your heart hurt?”
“These aren’t sad tears, they are happy tears,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck.
“What has made you happy?”
“I have a message for you from this baby,” she said, and put his hand on the flat of her belly.
He frowned. “How can this be?”
“I don’t know how it’s happening, but I can hear her voice and she gave me a message especially for you.”
The shock on his face was evident. “If she is this connected to the spirits, then she knows I am not her father.”
“And that is exactly what the message is about. She said,
‘Tell Cayetano that it is not the seed that makes a father. It is the love that guides a heart.”
Cayetano was too shocked to speak.
“So she already loves you, not the seed.”
The scar at the corner of his mouth twitched. It did so when he was clenching his jaw, and she knew that was happening because he was trying not to cry.
“This is a good thing,” she said. “Be happy. I am. But enough about me, I could tell by the way you were walking when you arrived that you had something important to tell me. Am I right?”
“I will protect her with my life,” he whispered.
“She knows that. I know that. Now why did you come looking for me?”
“I want to go into the city where the New Ones are living. If Yuma is making a toy I cannot understand, I am curious as to what the adults are doing, but I cannot understand them.”
“Ah… you need a translator.”
He frowned. “I do not know that word, but I do need you.”
She smiled. “And I need you. So, I am ready to go if you are.”
“Yes. The guards wait. Where are the boys?”
“With Acat and two others. They are not alone.”
He nodded. “They must never be alone again while they are young.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“Then we go.”
She walked with a lighter heart—partly because she walked with the man who filled her soul—because her food was staying down, and because for the first time, her baby felt real.
***
Nantay was working on what would he hoped would turn into a ceiling fan that would be powered by a water wheel connected to the canal behind their house. It would take a little rigging but he knew he could do it. He was still fastening a fan blade to the frame when he saw a crowd coming down the street.
He stopped to watch and soon realized it was the chief and Layla Birdsong. It had taken all of them a while to understand she had once lived in this time as a woman named Singing Bird, and that after she brought them back in time, she would not have been able to live as the same spirit in two different bodies. Since it was a miracle they were still alive, it was easy to accept the miracle of Layla’s transformation, as well. He knew that she had recognized him, but would she feel the same toward the Navajo here, as she had before?
***
Cayetano was observing great signs of change. Some of the New Ones were building their own lodges, or adding to the ones they’d been given so that they had more than one room in which to live.
And the children who’d come with the New Ones were playing games that the other children didn’t know. Games that Singing Bird told him were called baseball, and hide and seek.
As they turned a corner, they saw two children sitting on either end of a fallen tree limb that they had balanced over the stump of a larger one. One child went up as the other went down, and they would reverse. Up down, up down. It was so intriguing that he laughed out loud. He was pleased by the long line of children, both from the People and from the New Ones, waiting to take a turn.
“Look at this!” he said, pointing and laughing. “What is this called?”
Layla was smiling. “It’s called a teeter-totter.”
“You did this as a child?”
She nodded. No need even trying to explain a Ferris wheel or a merry-go-round, let alone a roller-coaster. This teeter-totter was enough of a revelation. She had been wondering how long it would take for the first bit of modern technology to be adapted into this life, and now she knew. Children were always the most adaptable to change. They would be the ones who embraced the new bits of technology far quicker than others.
As they walked a little farther, she caught a glimpse of a familiar face and took Cayetano’s hand.
“Come see this man. Back in my other life, he was a policeman where we lived, like the guards who are around us now. When I was attacked, he came with my grandfather and stood guard outside my room as I healed.”
Cayetano was anxious to meet such a man. He had a momentof jealousy as he watched Singing Bird embrace the man, then realized it must be the way friends greeted in those times, because she then embraced others standing beside him.
“Nantay! Leland Benally! It is so good to see you! Are you well?”
Both men were smiling widely, then Nantay asked the question they were both thinking.
“We are alive, which is a miracle we will never forget. We heard you were seriously hurt when you came through the portal. You seem well. Is this so?”
“It’s true. My burns were bad. I could not see a thing for several days. It was a scary time, but as you can tell, I am well now. I want you to meet Cayetano. He is my husband here.”
They both eyed the chief curiously, but with respect.
“It is an honor to meet you,” Benally said. “There are so many of us, we are very grateful that you have welcomed us into your city.”
Layla quickly translated and Cayetano was pleased.
“You are most welcome,” he said. “Our shamans told us you were coming. We knew there would be many. If you have other needs, you must let us know.”
Layla translated again then asked Nantay a question of her own.
“Have the New Ones had trouble assimilating into this culture?”
“It’s been a learning experience for sure,” Nantay said.
“When I saw you coming, I wasn’t sure you would know me,” he said.
“Oh, because I look different? You should have seen the fit I had when I saw my face,” Layla said.
Nantay and Benally both laughed.
“I’m serious,” Layla said. “I didn’t know what would happen to us when we made the Last Walk. I just knew it was the path I was supposed to take to keep you safe. I didn’t know we were coming back in time. I honestly thought we would be going into the Anasazi’s future. This has all been strange for me, too. I still feel the same inside. I still feel like Layla, but now I remember Singing Bird, too.”
Benally grinned. “Double whammy, but it looks like you hit the jackpot. Cool dude,” he said, referring to Cayetano who was looking at the ceiling fan Nantay was building with great interest.
She laughed. “Yes, the chief is a cool dude. So how are the others treating you?” she asked. “You know they refer to all of you as the New Ones. It’s kind
of funny because, in truth, you are the old ones.”
Nantay shrugged. “It is all good. Not easy, but anything new is not easy. There are things to be learned. My wife is struggling to accept no running water or indoor toilets, although her grandmother still lived in a Hogan down in the canyons.”
“Where is Shirley?” Layla asked.
He pointed to the door of their dwelling. “Inside. She broke her leg on the Last Walk. It is healing, but she still can’t put weight on it.”
“Oh no! Could I talk to her?”
“Sure. Come inside,” he said, and walked back into the house.
Layla took Cayetano’s hand again. “His woman broke her leg on the Last Walk. She is a friend. I want to talk to her.”
He followed her inside.
Layla was taken aback but the interior. It was very crude compared to the palace. And there was no comparison to the home they’d had back on the reservation other than four walls and a roof. Here, they had one small window, an open door, sleeping mats, a pot to cook in, and a jug of water nearby. She could only imagine how Shirley Nantay was faring.
“Shirley, it’s me, Layla. I didn’t know that you’d been hurt.”
Shirley was a small woman with bright eyes and a ready smile—at least she had been. The woman lying on the mat was in need of a more comfortable place and her ready smile was gone. When she saw Layla, she stifled a gasp as she tried to sit up.
“Montford said that you had changed. I couldn’t imagine how. Now I see.”
Layla knelt at her side. “Only on the outside, Shirley. I am so sorry you were hurt. It makes all of this change even worse.”
The sympathy was Shirley’s undoing. She covered her face and began to cry.
Nantay was immediately upset and at the same time, embarrassed.
“She’s in pain,” Layla said, explain what was happening to Cayetano. “But most of all, I think she’s overwhelmed by the change.”
“Tell her that I will send Little Mouse. She will help.”
“You are truly a good chief,” Layla said softly, then patted Shirley’s arm. “Cayetano is sorry for your pain, Shirley. He wants me to tell you that he is sending a healer to you. Her name is Little Mouse. You will love her as I do, but now we’ll leave so you can rest.”
They walked out, with Nantay behind them.
“Thank you! Thank you so much,” he said. “Without any way of knowing what plants in this place are good for healing or dangerous to touch, I couldn’t even make Indian medicine for her, myself.”
Layla’s eyes widened. She’d been so busy thinking of how the New Ones would change the way of life here, that she’d forgotten they would also need to be taught about the land into which they’d come.
“I will see to it that Little Mouse, and others like her, will teach all of you what you need to know. There are some good hunters in our people. They need to learn how to hunt here, as they did before.”
“Yes, people have been talking about that. I will tell them it will happen. We want to make our living conditions better, but didn’t have any idea of how to begin. We need more building materials and many other things that have to be foraged, and we don’t know where to start.”
“Did we get here with any tools? We had to leave so much behind when we started to run.”
“Yes, we did. When we began lightening our loads on the Last Walk, I told the men who had tools and knives to keep them if they could. We have more than a thousand or so men who came here with different kinds of tools. We could build better, if we had the goods to do it.”
She quickly translated to Cayetano, and just like that, he knew who to talk to get that started.
“What else?” she asked.
“Their weapons are crude. They have metals, but they are mostly ornamental. It would be helpful to them if they had metal tips on their arrows and metal heads on their axes instead of bone or rock,” Nantay said.
“Even if you had the proper raw ore, you would have no way to—”
He smiled. “There are many men here who had held many different jobs. If we knew where to look, we could do much.”
Layla turned again to Cayetano, her eyes alight with excitement.
“Are there people from Naaki Chava willing to teach the New Ones where to find supplies they need?”
“I will think about the right people and tell them,” he said, then looked up at the sky. “It will rain soon. We go.”
“I’ll come back,” Layla said. “Spread the word. We’ll make things better. I promise.”
And he’d been right. They had barely reached the palace before the sky unloaded the near-daily downpour. They never lasted long, but were part of why the tropical aspect of this place existed.
***
It was about a week after their arrival before Evan was allowed to move around. He had to be careful, but was happy to be upright and breathing without being in pain.
Layla’s morning sickness was with her daily, but she endured it without fuss, and simply waited for it to pass before she put food in her mouth. She had not had another conversation with her daughter, and accepted that it would happen on the baby’s time and not hers.
She began to spend a lot of time teaching the boys the language of Naaki Chava and they were learning quickly. But the day she caught the twins speaking in their own private language, she was intrigued.
When Adam realized she had walked into the room, he blushed, then stammered.
“I didn’t know you were there.”
Layla was intrigued. “What language is that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”
“It’s our language,” Evan said. “We only speak it among ourselves.”
“And Yuma. We’re teaching it to Yuma,” Adam added. “I might be useful one day if we could talk to each other without people knowing what we say.”
Layla sat down on a stool as the boys gathered around her.
“Do you mean that you two made up an entire language that only you know?”
The twins nodded.
“Twin-speak,” she said. “I’ve read about it when I was in college, but I’ve never met anyone who had done it.”
Evan shrugged. “We had to. We knew how we came to be born and were afraid of what Mr. Prince would make us do, so we made up our own language. If he couldn’t understand us, then he couldn’t control us.”
At that point, Yuma came into the room with Acat and slipped into Layla’s lap. Despite his assurance that he was a man, there were times when he still wanted to be little, and this was one of them.
“I go to the marketplace,” Acat said, explaining why she was leaving Yuma in her care.
“She’s bringing back some sugar cane for all three of us,” Yuma said. “I asked. Is that okay?”
Layla grinned. “Of course it’s okay. Bring one for me, too,” she added.
Acat giggled and scurried off.
“So, back to our conversation,” Layla said. “What did you mean when you said, ‘how we came to be born?”
Evan looked at Adam. “You tell,” he said softly.
Adam nodded and began the tale. “Our mother was a gypsy who read fortunes. She could see the future and into people’s hearts. Mr. Prince found out about her skills. He also knew a man who could feel no pain. People could cut him or burn him, and he never cried out. Mr. Prince paid my mother and this man to make a baby. He wanted to know how a child would be from two people like that. Our mother agreed, not knowing that he meant to keep us. After we were born, he wanted her to go away but she wouldn’t. So he had her killed.”
Layla was shocked by his lack of emotion.
“What about the man who was your father?”
“We don’t know, but he didn’t matter to us because we didn’t matter to him.”
“What did Prince think you two were goi
ng to do for him?”
Adam shrugged. “It was always about gaining power.”
Layla frowned. “This is bad, but you are here now. One day you will grow up and have a family of your own.”
Adam frowned and Evan shook his head.
“No, we won’t marry. We are able to feel a connection to people, and be bound by honor, like we are to you. But we can’t feel love as you are intending. We love each other and that is all, but only because we are one and the same.”
Layla frowned.
“You can’t know this yet. You haven’t matured enough to—”
Adam shook his head. “But we do know this. Our mother was psychic, and so are we. Our father could not feel pain. We feel pain, but we cannot feel love. This is how we were born.”
“I am so sorry,” she said. “But I’m glad the man who owned you died. Murdering your mother was a terrible crime, but what he did to the both of you was a crime against nature.”
The boys shrugged. “He was a collector and we were part of his collection. He had all kinds of things that were supposed to be good luck and maps to hidden treasures. It was his portal key that got us here.”
“Do you still have it?” Layla asked.
They nodded. “We stole it back from Bazat when we ran away.”
“It needs to be hidden away,” Layla muttered.
“It needs to be thrown away,” Evan said.
“It needs to be destroyed,” Adam said.
“We’ll talk to Cayetano about this tonight. For now, just leave it wherever you’ve hidden it. The fewer people who know about it, the better off you are.”
The twins looked at each other and smiled. She had not asked where it was hidden, or asked to see it. Even more proof that she was not only a good woman, but one who could be trusted.
***
That night, she told Cayetano what they’d said.
“Do you mean they will never feel for a woman what I feel for you?” he asked.
Layla nodded. “That is what they said.”
Cayetano shook his head in disbelief. “My heart hurts for them. The greatest thing about being a man is being with the woman of his heart.” He pulled her close, running his fingers through her hair. “You are my heart, Singing Bird. Without you, the best part of me would die.”
