People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  She worked quickly, grinding medicinal roots in a small mortar, then making an infusion with water. While it steeped, she examined Imiya thoroughly, going over him from head to toe. Not only did she touch, feel and examine, she smelled. She crept around him in almost an animal fashion, dipping her head to inhale his scent.

  “The flesh of the brain has been injured,” she murmured, eyes closed. “It swells, pressing against the bone vessel that encloses it, worsening the hurt. It is the swelling inside that will kill.” She jerked her head around, fixed Kesbe with intense eyes. “Was water given?”

  It was Chamol who answered. “Only a little. After a while, he would no longer drink.”

  “Hai, that has saved him. His body has dried. Without water, abused flesh cannot swell. Give me the heated stones.”

  She dumped the brazier’s contents into the gourd holding her infusion. The stones sizzled and steamed, sending up clouds of strong-smelling vapor. Sahacat seized Imiya, sat him up, forced him to breathe it.

  Kesbe was skeptical. To her this looked more like a cure for bronchitis than an effective way to treat a head injury. She stooped near the fuming pot, examined its contents, which now looked like rough porridge. “Do not inhale too much of the hishi,’ said the shaman. “It can stop your woman’s cycle or make you lose any child you might be carrying.”

  Wordlessly, Kesbe retreated. Whatever it was, it smelled powerful. Some sort of botanical steroid, perhaps. It made sense. She remembered a discussion on steroids that had been given in a course on emergency medicine she’d taken during her space pilot training. Anything that would disrupt human hormones would be a steroid or steroid-based and she had no doubt that the drug would do exactly what Sahacat said it would.

  Sahacat kept the boy inhaling the vapor, nearly pushing his face into the frothing liquid. When the potion cooled, she called for more heated stones and added more of the ground root. The vapor belching from the vessel grew even thicker and more pungent, wreathing the boy’s head and shoulders.

  She kept his face buried in it for what seemed like hours and then at last took the bowl away, letting him lie back. “The swelling inside is departing,” she said, thumbing open both eyes and displaying equal size pupils. With a murmur of annoyance, the patient pulled away from her fingers, fluttering his eyelids.

  He looked better. Something told Kesbe that Sahacat’s treatment had taken effect. As the vapor cleared, she looked down at the boy. Now he appeared like someone in a light sleep rather than a victim dragged down into coma. Sahacat, however, hadn’t finished. From the pouch bound to her waist, she drew out a pair of rattles that were similar to the ones used by the old medicine-woman.

  “Go now,” she said to Kesbe and Chamol. “I call the gods with dance and chanting to pray that the boy’s spirit will also be healed.” Immediately she leaped into a frenzied whirl, moaning out words that had not meaning.

  “Leave her,” Chamol said softly. “She will dance until she is exhausted, then fall into trance.”

  Kesbe wanted to argue that Imiya needed rest more than shaman’s dancing, but she let herself be steered out of the room. She yawned, blinked as she saw that daylight had turned once again to night. Her stomach reminded her forcefully that she had not eaten since a hastily-snatched bite aboard the plane. When Chamol ducked away and appeared with steaming bowls of wuwuchpi stew, she did not even think about hesitating. The food was gone before she knew it and she was letting herself sink onto a pine-branch pallet in another room while the shaman’s chanting faded from her ears.

  Haewi. Haewi! I cry out but no answer comes. Where is the wet stiffness of aronan-hristles against my legs? Where is the powerful heat of wings against wind and rain? Where is the one who fought to hear me even to the end of strength and life…Haewi.

  It returns to me. The fall. The rain beating down. The breaking of the wing shaft from my flier’s body. Mahana’s hands on her aronan’s forewing, twisting, tearing…I did not do this to Haewi. I flew Haewi away to escape such mutilation. Again and again I feel, I see, I feel the wingspar splintering, the wing tearing away and again I know the terror of falling and a shock so great it is beyond pain. Oh gods it is with me and I shall live it again and again without end forever…

  I fall with despair into sleep and then I wake, finding the dark soft and the same all around me. Once it hissed like the wind on the ridges, sometimes it roared. Now it is Quiet and parts of the dark have become hard beneath me. Pain beats in my head and thirst in my throat. There is singing. I do not want to wake, for this is a different world, one without Haewi.

  A shaman chants, bringing me back from the dark turning of the Road of Life. Her magic is strong. I have no choice but to return.

  I know that this is Chamois house and I lie on a pallet of pine boughs. The shaman who brought me back kneels hunched over beside me. The sobbing breaths tell me the shaman has danced to exhaustion. The shape of the body and the sweat-streaked bare back tell me who the shaman is.

  She sits up wearily, flinging back her hair. I do not want to meet her eyes, yet I find my gaze fixing on them.

  “You have traveled far, child-warrior,” she says. “Along paths many do not venture until they are much older. Have you gained wisdom by it?”

  I try to turn my face away, but she seizes my chin. “What did you see when you profaned the adulthood ritual of the girl Mahana?”

  Again there comes the image of hands twisting a wingspar, of a mutilated creature stripped of flight. “No…’ I moan.

  “Yes, you see the vision again. And you shall continue to see it and it shall be evil to you because you saw it through eyes that were touched with wrongness.”

  “I wanted—to know.”

  “To know that which was sacred. To know that which would have been given to you at the right time in the right way.”

  I feel my heart become stone within my body and wish only that the rest could follow. “What will happen to me now?”

  “I can tell you only what will not happen. You will not become kekel. You will not become lomuqualt. Your disobedience and arrogance has angered the gods so that they will withhold the gifts they bestow on youths of the Pai.”

  I trembled. “No…”

  She continues relentlessly. “You have chosen to remain a child, and a child you will be, even when your face is shrivelled and your hair is gray. None among our people will pay notice to what you speak, nor will you sit in council.”

  The pain batters my head along with the harshness of her words. Life without Haewi seems bitter enough, but to have such punishment heaped atop it—that I can not bear. I thought those tears I shed on the rain-swept rock would be my last, but more spill down my face.

  She is silent, watching me. “Would you turn this fate aside?”

  “Is there a way?”

  “The gods may yet be placated,” she says softly. “If one who is willful becomes obedient and learns to place his trust in his elders and teachers. If that is proven, then, child-warrior, you may walk another path.”

  “How?”

  She laughs, her eyes narrow. “Not yet. I will leave you to think about the choices. If you are worthy of a better fate than the one that lies ahead, then I will know.”

  She rises, passing a hand across my eyes that makes them suddenly heavy. The throbbing pain dies and everything else slides into the nothingness from which it came.

  The morning sun streaming in the window near Kesbe’s pallet painted a warm stripe across her cheek. It teased her eyelids, coaxing them open. She was about to bury her head in the crook of her arm to block out the sunlight when the memory of the previous evening broke in on her drowsiness.

  Imiya! Was he all right? She thrust herself up from the bed, ignoring the aching in her back from too many hours in the pilot’s seat. She blinked in the morning dazzle, groping for her boots. Chamol appeared in the doorway, her little son Jolo on her hip. His aronan-nymph scuttled around the hem of Chamois dress, peering up at her as if it too wanted t
o be carried.

  It was such a sweet ordinary domestic scene that Kesbe couldn’t help wondering if all the events of the past few days weren’t just a bad dream.

  “My brother is in a healing sleep,” Chamol said. “It is the best thing for him now. Come. There is food.”

  Kesbe followed the Pai woman, marveling how her partner in a daring aerial rescue had become once more a mother. Squatting on a mat in the central room, she ate hot waferbread while watching Chamol feed cornmeal mush to Jolo and pinyon seeds to the aronan nymph. She took a closer look at the small creature and saw the outlines of developing wings beneath the transparent cuticle of its back.

  The Pai woman smiled proudly as Kesbe stroked the nymph. “This one will moult soon and then it will be able to fly. Jolo will take his first ride. Perhaps you will be here for the celebration.” She finished feeding her son and let him crawl off her lap. He toddled over to the nymph, which gleefully knocked him down and rough-housed with him like a big dog.

  So that is bow the partnership starts, she thought, watching them. Imiya and Haewi were probably raised this way. That thought prompted others that she did not want intruding on her precariously cheerful state of mind, at least not this early in the morning.

  “Before Sahacat left, she asked me to bring you to the council meeting tonight,” said Chamol. “I said we would come.”

  Kesbe nodded agreement. It occurred to her that she would have the rest of the day to do with as she pleased. She might use the time to begin her investigation of what had prompted the boy to make his disastrous escape attempt. She couldn’t talk to Imiya himself—he was still asleep—but she could do a little snooping around and perhaps ask a few questions. Nyentiwakay might be a good source.

  She sighed inwardly, knowing she was only evading the real task. If she really wanted to know what had happened to Imiya, she would have to talk to the shaman. Sahacat. What a bewildering contradiction the woman was! She wore the trappings of one who healed by chant and ceremony, yet her powers were real. Kesbe fingered the flesh of the healed wound in her knee. Sahacat’s skill in diagnosing and treating Imiya’s injury was the equal of any technologically trained medic.

  Yet her capacity for healing seemed matched by an equal if not greater power for wounding. Kesbe still remembered the subtle yet paralyzing attack on her during the Cloud Dance. And then later, when she had thrown the black flute at Kesbe’s feet and made it shatter into twin-tailed scorpions.

  The first attack had been to deter her from reaching the black and amber aronan, the second to keep her from rescuing Imiya. But why?

  She smiled to herself, a little grimly. Whatever the source of the woman’s power, it hadn’t kept Kesbe from the flier, nor had Sahacat prevented her from finding the boy.

  She cast a glance toward the chamber where Imiya slept. Nabamida stood just outside the door-hanging, his arms folded. The expression on his face suggested he would guard his nephew with his life. Kesbe abandoned any thoughts that she could get in to see the boy.

  “Chamol, where would I find Sahacat this morning?” she asked.

  “She prays on the mesa, at the place where the Cloud Dance was given.” Chamol paused. “Do you wish me to come with you?” Her words made the offer, but the tone of her voice was uncertain.

  “No, I’ll go by myself.”

  She left the pueblo and trudged up the trail to the mesa. At least this was an excuse to tend Gooney Berg. In the rush of unloading Imiya from the aircraft and getting him to Chamois house, she hadn’t bothered with proper shut-down procedures. She would have to chock the wheels, set the control locks and make sure the aircraft was properly parked. She suspected she might not be using it for a while.

  Resisting the urge to do the easier task first, she sought out Sahacat.

  Peering against the sunlight pouring like white gold across the mesa, she saw a naked figure kneeling on an outcropping that overlooked the place where the Cloud Dance had been given. Her robes cast aside, Sahacat faced the sunrise, chanting, the sweat shining the curve of her breasts, her muscled belly and thighs. As Kesbe approached, the shaman sprinkled white corn-meal, first to the east, then to all three remaining directions. From a pouch on the ground, she drew two lashed twigs daubed with red earth and painted with symbols. An aronan feather-scale fluttered at the top, tied with white twine.

  After offering the paho to the sun, the woman gathered a small mound of gravel in which to plant it. She then laid a line of cornmeal from the prayerstick to the cliff edge to complete her ritual.

  Though she had intended to interrupt, Kesbe found herself waiting until Sahacat had finished. She watched with a strange mixture of envy and impatience, knowing that this sun-greeting ceremony was part of the heritage she had lost. Her grandfather had shown her once how Hopi corn was ground in a metate and the powder laid in a line to the east. It formed, he said, the Road of Life…

  No! She did not want to think of Bajeloga now or what he had taught her. After that one day of bitterness, she had turned her back on those pitiful shreds of tradition that had prevented her people from moving on with life. And they had mocked her for daring to find and follow a different way than tradition demanded for Indian women.

  But standing here, watching Sahacat enact a simple but powerful sun-ceremony forced Kesbe to face the memories once again.

  How many years ago had it been? Twenty-two, twenty-three? She had been trembling on the edge of her sixteenth year when she went to the mesas for the last time.

  She remembered how she and her grandfather rattled and bumped up the rough mesa road toward Shungopavi at dawn, how the engine in Bajeloga’s ancient electric van whined and moaned. She and her grandfather had talked a lot before setting out for this dance, but now they were quiet. The event was to be held on Second Mesa this year. First was long deserted, empty.

  She knew why they were going and yet she didn’t know. It was an act of leave-taking for both. A few days before, her notice of acceptance to the training center on Titan had come in the fax-mail. After this last visit to the mesas, she would take the lunar shuttle and then the ion-pulse transport to Saturn’s great moon. She shivered inside her flight jacket, fingered the fax flimsy in her pocket, felt the hollowness of impending loss and the excitement of great promise. She had started on the first step to her dreams.

  And Morning Bird Man had just signed a contract with an asteroid mining company to operate a core-digger in the Belt. He would ride with her on the lunar shuttle and see her off on her journey to Titan before he boarded the inner-system bus to the company headquarters on Ceres.

  She wondered if it was coincidence that both of them had chosen to leave Earth almost at the same time. Was it really such a big step? Her parents had already gone to a world around another star, her father realizing his own dreams as a terraforming engineer, her mother documenting the social development of the seed colony that would grow into a world society. Kesbe knew she could have gone with them, yet had chosen to stay behind to complete her schooling and cling to the hope that the pilot training center on Titan might accept her.

  And now it had. She should be on her way already, part of her mind scolded. Strapped in a shuttle seat, feeling the thunder of lift-off instead of bouncing up a rutted mesa road inside a worn-out electric van.

  They reached the mesa top and joined the line of vehicles forming at the entrance booth, near the sign that announced the dance. Some were slick, chromed, tops down, sound systems blaring, their drivers already raucous and half intoxicated. Tourists, Kesbe thought. Here to pay their money and have their fun.

  But she and Bajeloga paid too, the money passing from Bajeloga’s brown-veined hand into an equally dark but younger one reminding her that she was not that different from the tourists in the eyes of those who still lived here. She sighed, facing the fact that if the public did not pay to see these dances, they would have disappeared long ago.

  They rolled past the booth, were waved into a parking slot, paid again for a ticket
to recover Bajeloga’s squeaky old van after the dance, and trudged into the village.

  As Kesbe left the van, she hesitated, thinking perhaps she should take off the new pilot’s chrono-comp she now wore proudly on her wrist. And the white silk scarf held about her neck with a slider of Hopi silverwork which bore the image of a starship and a kachina. Bajeloga had crafted it for her, drawing on the skills of jewelry-making he had gained in his youth on the mesas. She didn’t want to lose either, but leaving them in the van, with its broken doorlocks, was inviting thievery. And perhaps there was a touch of arrogance in her decision not only to keep the items with her, but to wear them openly, as if to announce to her people that she, unlike they, still dared to dream.

  Feeling the desert wind in her hair, she gazed at a deep sapphire blue sky bare of clouds. Tufted seeds, perhaps from milkweed or dandelion, danced across it, whirling in the wind. In her childhood she had run after those bits of plant fluff, laughing and calling them “fairies.” Now they looked like flying stars against a deep blue universe. The sight struck sparks of joy from the child in her and seemed to echo the promise contained in the fax flimsy from Titan. Chance and botany had created a micro-universe for her in the sky over the mesa, as if playing a prelude for what was to come.

  “Little Bluebird, you are on another flight again,” said Bajeloga, coming up behind her. “The dance does not wait.”

  Laughing, she turned her gaze from the sky and strode with her grandfather past the hand-lettered sign pointing the way to the “Kachina Dance.” It injected a discordant note, flattening her happy mood. She knew the sign lied. There had been no true kachina dances since the followers of the Blue Star emigrated. This was a social dance, a descendent of the Buffalo and Butterfly Dances that were done as a show for visitors. The true kachina dances had always been secret, solemn, hidden from outside view. And now they were gone from Earth.