People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  Chapter 10

  It is only the ninth day since I parted with Kesbe-Rohoni and Gooni Bug in the skies above the Mother Canyon. Only the ninth day, and yet I feel as though I have stepped into a different world. I sit on my mat in the Kiva of the Fledgling and look up at the opening above to see the Rain Star enter the square of night sky made by the opening of the kiva. I chant with the other child-warriors who are becoming kekelt, but my mind is not on the Rain Star. My thoughts wander to Aronan House, where Haewi sleeps this night without me.

  Someone there cares for all the fliers who have been separated from their riders. I hope the one chosen for this duty tonight was Nyentiwakay. I saw him before Nabamida brought me to the kiva. I asked him how the aronan with black and amber wings was faring. He told me that it no longer sorrows. It awaits its rider. I bow my head and pray, but not to the Rain Star. My prayer is for Kesbe-Rohoni, that she may soon return.

  The girl Mahana sits on the prayer-mat next to mine. She has been in the kiva longer than I. She knows more about what will happen to me here. I long to ask her, but I dare not interrupt her chanting.

  Many songs and chants are given to the Rain Star before it passes from the square in the night sky made by the opening of the kiva. We all fall silent, as directed by the old priest who is with us. I hear a creak on the roof of the chamber. A shadow appears, blocking out the stars as it descends the ladder. The old priest lights a small fire, barely enough to see by as the form on the ladder becomes a robed figure bearing a glazed earthenware bowl.

  I hear the soft rattle of the scorpion-tail bracelets worn by the shaman Sahacat as she steps into our midst bearing the bowl. She stops and swirls the contents before the old priest, who sprinkles in something from a leather pouch. I cannot see what it is, the firelight is too low.

  Sahacat lifts the vessel above the fire. Its gleaming underside is marked with strange symbols. One looks like a picture of an aronan. Sahacat speaks over the bowl.

  “This is the drink that shall open to you the Road of Life. The first part of the way is that of the fledgling.” She turns, fixing her eyes on each one of us in turn. I feel as though I would shrink from her gaze. “Though you have been warriors upon your winged mounts, you are still children. You have yet to take flight in the realm of the spirit.” She kneels to Mahana, saying, “You are already far on the journey toward womanhood. Drink deep.”

  Mahana swallows great draughts and settles back on her mat. Sahacat is before me now. “Your feet have just met the path to manhood. Take only sips,” she commands, as I bend my head to the bowl. She will not let me touch it with my hands. The drink coats my lips with chalk, yet is oily upon my tongue. Its taste is bad. My throat wants to close against it and I have to force myself to swallow. How can Mahana gulp it like water? My stomach stirs uneasily. I wonder if it will make me sick.

  A while later I look toward Mahana. She has let her wrapping slip from her shoulders in the warmth from the fire. It is not that I have never seen her breasts or felt the stir below that the sight of them arouses, but never before have I felt such an urge to touch and stroke. My fingers ache for the feel of contact, my entire body has somehow become so sensitive that I can feel each strand of reed in my prayer mat as if it were a log. The fire’s heat prickles my skin. Though unbidden by my conscious will, my hand strays toward Mahana.

  Another hand whose touch is dry and old crosses my fingers. “Now is not the time for touching,” says the elder priest gently, without rebuke. “Turn the experience inward.” Silently I nod. He seems to recede as though he or I were in another place. Again my hand creeps, but it is I who catch it.

  My belly takes fire from the kekelt drink. The flame spreads outward along my limbs, up my neck to warm my face. I fling back my head, squeezing my eyes shut to look along my Road of Life. It opens before me, but it is a path through sky, not earth. Wind Laugbing’s wings bear me along it, with the air rushing past my body. I think of those wings, of their black and emerald beauty, of their sheen, their velvet softness and their smell of sage. I imagine being caressed by those wings and enfolded within their silken cradle…

  And then the dream jades to leave me once more sitting in shadowed darkness within the kiva with strange thoughts still spinning in my head. My flier has always been beloved to me, but it has been the simple love of children for one another. Now it has become something different, something that makes my skin tingle and my belly quiver.

  I glance to either side and see the faces of other child-warriors, eyes shut and heads tilted back. Surely they are meditating as they have been bidden. Do any of them feel this expansion of the senses that now sweeps over me? Do any of them have such thoughts? No, my mind answers and I add guilt to the swirl of emotions engulfing me.

  Is this just the effect of the drink I have been given, or is it something within me surfacing at last? Though my body was stirred by the sight of Mahana, my want centers on the one who is not of my kind, yet is closer to me than any other.

  I notice that Sahacat has bent down beside Mahana, grasping the girl’s elbow and aiding her to her feet. Mahana moves as one asleep. Where is the shaman taking her? They move to the rear of the kiva, not the roof ladder. My ears catch the whisper of a doorflap being pulled aside. My skin feels the faintest kiss of a breeze. Mahana has left the kiva by another way, but where she has gone, I don’t know.

  I wait. The old priest picks a boy across from me and takes him out in the same way that Sahacat did Mahana. I wonder if I will be chosen and what will happen. No. Those two are kekelt who have been longest in the kiva and who have drunk deepest of the bowl set to their lips.

  Drowsing on my mat, I wake as Sahacat emerges from the blackness of the kiva behind me with Mahana. The girl’s robes have the smell of sage. “You are ready for the next step,” Sahacat tells her softly. “Tomorrow night you leave this kiva and walk the trail that leads to the mesa cave. You will be summoned. We will await you there.”

  The shaman’s words are not jor me, but I seize and hide them in my heart. Ij Mahana walks tomorrow night, perhaps lean leant from her what is in store for me.

  Soon the old priest brings back the boy, and he too bears a variant of the same smell. It makes me think again of Wind Laughing, hut I am tired now, the effect of the drink has been drained from me.

  The ritual is over, the old priest says. We may sleep now on our mats on the earth floor, for this is the kiva of the initiates and will not he needed for other ceremonies. Mahana lies down near me. I wait until I hear Sahacat and the old priest climb the ladder, leaving us alone to sleep. Cautiously I reach out, shake Mahana’s shoulder.

  Slowly she rolls over to face me. Her eyes are distant, glazed. Her face is flushed.

  “Mahana!” I hiss. “Are you afraid?”

  “Afraid of what, Imiya?” She laughs sleepily. Something has made her happy and the happiness lingers.

  “Of what will happen to your aronan.”

  She is wide-eyed, yet still smiling.

  “Nothing will happen that should not. Why do you speak of fear?”

  “I don’t know what lies ahead for me or Haewi. Do you? Can you tell me?”

  “It would not be right. Sahacat has told us to trust in her guidance and the wisdom of the priests. Can’t you just do that?”

  I sigh, feeling small and miserable. “No, Mahana. Perhaps it is because I already fear too much.”

  She doesn’t answer. She is already asleep. Tomorrow she will guide me, though she is unaware of my plan. It is silent in the Kiva of Fledglings except for the Quiet breathing of those who were once child-warriors, and the crackle of the dying fire.

  It is again night and Mahana takes a trail from the village that I do not know. Perhaps her aronan, Desqui Deva, guides her, for the flier walks ahead, picking its way along the sandy face of the mesa. It is not easy for me to follow even when I know where they have gone, night enshrouds their footsteps and conceals the places where they have climbed. Several times I have startled myself
by nearly falling, I who dive from heights on my Wind Laughing. My aronan is not with me now, nor would I wish Haewi to be. Mahana’s aronan walks slowly, with head and wings down. The girl moves as if in a trance. The creature must be guiding her.

  Ghost-light glimmers from bushes near the trail. It is barely enough to see by. I see the faint gleam and hear the flapping of Mahana’s cloak in the night wind. Where does she go to seek her womanhood?

  For me it seems she has leaped from child-warrior to adult. When she entered the kiva many sukops or sixteen-day-periods ago, she was hard and thin and straight. She walked and ran like a boy. Now she has a supple sway as she moves beneath the night. Her flesh is rounded, her hips broadened. Is it the effect of the kekelt drink, I wonder, still tasting the strange chalky flavor on the back of my tongue. I know by the warmth in my belly and loins that the sips given me have already begun to work.

  The trail descends to the root of the mesa. Mahana and her flier go where they are summoned. I shiver in the night and follow after. I thought I would find priests or warriors along the trail to guide and protect this girl on her journey but no. She is entrusted to the night and to her aronan. And to a world where spirits would keep away any ill-fate that might befall her, and turn hack those who would follow in search of their own fates…

  I wonder if anyone is searching for me now. In the Kiva of the Fledgling, my prayer mat is empty. The Rain Star will appear in the opening overhead to be seen and celebrated by many eyes, but not mine.

  Hai, Mahana halts, turns her head slowly like one blind. Yes, light shines ahead and it is not the faint night-glow but the heart of afire deep within some cleft in the rock. Desqui Deva knows the way. It moves forward with a heavy step that speaks to me of grief or deep resignation. Mahana’s arm is extended to the flier, her hand clutching the bristles on its back.

  First the aronan, then the girl, pass into the crevice. I wait and watch them draw away, descending carved sandstone steps into the mesa’s heart. Dare I follow? The fire is deep within, the shadows heavy. All eyes will be on the one who comes, not the one who follows.

  I slip through to one side. Grit from crumbling sandstone clings to the sweat on my chest. I crouch, moving without sound, and yet still fearing that someone might know, with shaman’s magic, that I have penetrated this place of secrets.

  I find a way off the main path that may lead to the cavern’s depths. I take it, squeezing past boulders and through narrow ways where the roof nearly descends to meet the floor. I hear first the rasp of my own breathing, then, from deep within the cave, the sound of chanting. Mahana has arrived. The ceremony of adulthood has begun.

  Voices join in a strange song that echoes among the rocks. I struggle, I wriggle and climb, despairing because the way threatens to take me away from the sight I have come to witness. At last, with an unexpected turning, the song becomes louder. I climb on a ledge that lets me see between a chink in two boulders.

  I was long in reaching my hideaway. The ritual has already begun. I press my cheek to the gritty coolness of the sandstone. Priests stand on the cave floor, in the costumes of the ancient One-Horn and Two-Horn Societies. They bear the great back-curved horns bound to their foreheads and carry medicine-bundles. I see dancers masked as kachinas, carrying reed flails.

  Mahana’s cloak is taken from her shoulders by a shadowed form behind her. The figure’s sleeve slides back along an arm revealing a bracelet of twin scorpion tails which dance and glitter in the firelight. Sahacat! It is all I can do to keep my eye at the crack, hoping the rocks will shield me from the shaman’s senses.

  The same hand loosens the sash binding Mahana’s kirtle about her waist. The garment falls away. The girl steps forward, raising her arms to lift the swell of her breasts. The kachinas begin to dance around her, then beat her with flails. Welts rise on her skin, but her head remains lifted, her eyes fixed forward.

  They strike her so bard that I want to flinch, yet still her gate does not waver, even when she is knocked off-balance. Her body acts to recover, but her eyes do not even know that she was struck. The kachinas grunt with the effort of their beating, but their victim remains silent. At a handclap from the shaman, they fall back against the cave walls.

  I have forgotten Mahana’s aronan during this, but now I see Desqui Deva striding out of the shadows. Its head droops. It is weary and can no longer lift its wings. It and Mahana walk to each other, meeting in the center before the fire.

  I can see her eyes now. She does not look at her aronan in the way she used to. It is not pity, it is not love, nor hate, nor sorrow, but something beyond any of those. Have her senses been twisted by the kekelt drink that she would look on her partner so? She is distant yet as rapturous as the Sun Chief when facing the rays of dawn. If this is love, it is a new and terrible one. I am suddenly afraid.

  Desqui Deva is trembling. It lifts its narrow muzzle to her, caresses her with its antennae. She runs her fingers down the side of its neck, then steps abruptly to one side and seizes the wingspar where it emerges from the thorax. Drums begin. I press my face against the rocks, straining to see.

  Muscles flex in her arms. Is she twisting the wingspar? Of) gods of the aronan spirits, she is breaking it! I see the entire wing rotate grotesquely as she wrenches the wingspar loose from the creature’s thorax. Threads of muscle trail from the wound and fluid pours. The animal’s neck arches back and it seems to scream in silent agony, but does not fight back. Mahana, no!

  A priest of the Two-Tailed Scorpion steps forward to take the torn-away wing, which is a great shield, taller than he. Surely the girl is maddened by the draughts of liquid poured down her throat by the shaman in the kiva, for she seizes her aronan s hindwing and wrenches it back and forth until the joint parts. I am shaking. Tears of horror spill from my eyes.

  Somehow the mutilated flier cannot believe its rider would turn on it so viciously, for it still strokes and caresses the girl with its antennae, even as she prepares to rip away the rest of its wings. I hear the terrible crack and shut my eyes, for I can no longer bear the sight of this cruelty.

  As I scramble from the ledge I catch sight, through tear-blurred eyes, of the priests laying all of the beautiful wings torn from the aronan together to form a cradle for the girl. She lies down upon the bed of wings, sparing not even one glance for the now-flightless cripple watering the stone with its blood. By the gods, don’t they even have the mercy to kill it quickly before it bleeds to death?

  Oh, if I feared punishment for coming here, this is worse than anything I could have known! That the step from child-warrior to initiated adult demands such a sacrifice makes my heart sick within me. How can my people do this? What god does it appease, what purpose does it serve? I can barely see the path ahead for the flow of my tears.

  I think desperately of interrupting the ceremony long enough to plunge my obsidian blade into the mutilated Desqui Deva, to give it the release of death. No. I can do nothing for Mahana’s aronan, but my own Haewi Namij still has its wings. I swear by all the gods of earth and sky that Haewi will not meet this fate. Sahacat’s teachings are but an obscene lie. I have seen the truth now. I will go no more to the kiva. I will taste no more of the filthy drink given there.

  Shuddering, I flee the cave. I thirst for the clean wind outside, the stars in the open sky. Somehow I find my way back, running, stumbling, still weeping in rage and despair at what I have seen. A strange little voice still asks me if I really understand the meaning of what I saw? I have not been in the kiva long enough to gain the knowledge one must have to understand things of the spirit, how can I judge what I do not understand?

  Hai! I wrinkle my nose as I climb the trail and shake tears from my face. Some things you do not need many seasons in a kiva to understand. This is one of them.

  The trail ends at Tuwayhoima. I run to Aronan House, to Haewi Namij. Wind Laughing still has its wings. It will hear me far.

  I enter my chamber on the ground floor of Aronan House. Here is everything I need
for my journey. In the darkness smelling of clay, I sling my cloak around my shoulders, filling its drawstring pockets with sapiki and jerked meat. My spear too I take, and the bow and quiver made for me by my uncle, Nabamida. My hands pause. Perhaps I should first go to him and tell him what I have done and seen this night.

  No. I have gone too far on this trail and cannot retract my steps. I have sought secrets not given me to know and I have knowingly profaned the adulthood ritual of another. Even if Nabamida did not wish to punish me, he would give me over to the Council. Or to Sahacat, who would see to it that I walk in trance to the cave where Mahana tore the wings from her aronan.

  My hands shake like an old man’s with anger and grief. I will never do such a thing to Wind Laughing, nor allow it to be done. I have lifted the stone that hides this sacred rite of my people and have found something as hideous and poisonous as a two-tailed scorpion beneath.

  I climb the lashpole ladder from my chamber to the cell where Haewi bangs from its sleeping-rack. With a touch and a caution for silence, I bring it down. It lands without the usual flutter and scuttle, opening its wings and rubbing its head against me In the dark, I run my fingers over my flier, checking with touch what I cannot see. Never have I flown without inspecting Haewi thoroughly, but I have no light and the night is ebbing.

  Even as I swing onto Wind Laughing, I remember the black-and amber-winged creature who claimed Kesbe as its rider. Dare I bring it with me? One sniff tells me it is present among the other aronans in the sleep-racks. Another informs me that Nyentiwakay is also here, though sleeping. Again indecision tears at me. Perhaps I could speak to the lomuqualt. He was my friend, he would understand.

  But he too has passed through the dreaded ceremony, my mind answers. He too has done what Mahana did and what tradition would have me do. I must leave him asleep. I move stealthily between the sleeping racks, finding the flier I seek. Baqui Iba is tethered. My knife parts the rope. Antennae stroke my face, twine around my arm, asking Questions I can’t answer. I can only tell the creature to be silent and come.