People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  First, however, she would need access to tribal records that would give the legends and history of the Pai people. Even though she had no idea if the Pai had a written form of their language, she thought that there must be something, perhaps some document or artifact from the original colony. Alternately the information she needed might exist only in the minds of Pai tribal elders. And who would be better able to deliver those records or tell her who might best remember than the most respected elder of all? Very well, then. She would go to the Sun Chief.

  “No.” The Sun Chief’s veined hand cradled a clay pipe from which smoke curled. The filmed eyes seemed to look right past Kesbe, though she got the uncomfortable thought that it was only an illusion and the Sun Chief could examine her very soul.

  “Honored one, the people from outside will come and take this land from your tribe unless I can provide proof that the Pai were here first. The proof lies in the records your priests and elders must have kept.”

  The ancient gaze sharpened. “You speak about the stories of the gods, of our people? They are not written down, but told by the elders to the young. And they are sacred. Only the ears of the Pai may hear. And you, warrior-woman, are not yet of the Pai.”

  “Honored one, I have heard tales of the People of the Axe and how your tribe was driven from the Fourth World. I tell you now that they come again, to claim the Mother Canyon.”

  Shrunken lips puffed on the stem of the pipe before the Sun Chief answered. “It would be a great wrong for the People of the Axe to invade us again. But it would be an even greater wrong to profane our ceremonials by allowing outsiders to hear them.” The Sun Chief paused. “You seek to do us good. It is a worthy thing. But if you would do the greatest good, you must do it for yourself and for us as your people.”

  The Sun Chief sat back. Kesbe felt as though another door had closed, forcing her back to the original way. “Baqui Iba,” she whispered.

  “The partnership must be brought to fruition,” said the Sun Chief. “Then will you be of our people.”

  But I have destroyed the partnership, severed it with anger born of terror, Kesbe thought as she lowered her eyes before the Sun Chief’s stare. Baqui Iba will take me now only out of need, not love.

  The seamed face lifted once again to gaze at the sun-star and Kesbe, sensing that her audience was through, retreated down the ladders that led from the roof of the pueblo to its lower levels. She walked away, letting her shoulders slump. She gazed longingly back up the path that led to the mesatop, Gooney Berg and Tony Mabena.

  “It is not that easy, warrior-woman.”

  Kesbe spun. The voice of Sahacat’s. Seeing that long-eyed Mayan face and the shaman’s robes thrust her back into memories of the dance and the horrors that had danced with her, leaving her groveling in abject terror and shame. To face the woman who had raised those demons from the secret wells of her mind was to relive that time. And worse was to know that this one who was enemy and opposite had access to her emotions in a way more intimate than anyone else could. She felt a strange tension that drew her toward Sahacat and at the same time thrust her away.

  She saw the lines of the shaman’s face shift as Sahacat made a grimace to capture her scent. Did a start of surprise mar that expression ever so briefly?

  “I left you amid the dark places of your mind,” the shaman said. “I thought you would be imprisoned there, but I find that you have gained freedom.”

  “Would you throw me back into that? You stained yourself with the filth you dug up. It was bitter, dirty magic,” Kesbe lashed out and saw that she struck a tender place with her words. “It was also useless.”

  “No. Not useless.” The shaman’s smile was slow. “Bitter, yes, and dirty, but I know now that it played a part in transforming one who feared her woman-self into one who understands it.”

  “Don’t lie to me about your intentions, Sahacat.”

  “I do not lie. You rebelled against me and disrupted my plans. I wished to be rid of you. I cast a stick into the fire expecting it to be consumed. Instead what has come forth is an arrowshaft, hardened and straightened by the flame.”

  Kesbe’s eyes narrowed. Beyond the manipulation, beyond the trickery, beyond the flattery, she heard the truth about herself. With Chamois help she had faced down terrors that rose from the darkest regions of her mind.

  But she had not mastered all of them. One still remained.

  She tested the air, wondering if Sahacat were once again enmeshing her in the influence cast by scent to bring forward the memory of the wasp and the sphinx-moth caterpillar. But the shaman’s odor was neutral, waiting.

  It is the final fear that stands in my path. I must choose to face it now.

  Kesbe cast the barriers away, letting the memory come through with full force. She remembered the feel of the caterpillar’s spiny tufts against her hand as it crawled across her palm and how it lifted up its head as if to rejoice in its rescue. She remembered placing the caterpillar in a glass jar and feeding it, hoping to see it form a cocoon and emerge as a moth.

  But the seven-year-old did not know that the wasp had already laid its eggs in the sphinx-moth caterpillar. Instead of continuing to grow, it grew torpid and died, eaten alive from the inside by tiny wasp larvae. She remembered how the screams tore her throat as she shrieked at her grandfather to throw the jar and its morbid contents away.

  She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. It almost overwhelmed her. She had wakened to the cruelty and horror of the world on that day, long before she was ready. She had denied it then, but she could not deny it now. Parasitism was the truth of things between the wasp and the sphinx-moth caterpillar. What of humans and aronans?

  She swallowed hard. The image of the wasp-ridden caterpillar hung in her mind, hazing her vision.

  The wasp and its prey act blindly, through instinct. Aronans once did the same. What is the difference?

  She struggled for an answer.

  The only difference is that we and the aronans are aware. We must both love and we must accept. What happened to Imiya showed me what can happen if we fail. But Nyentiwakay showed me that such a path can lead to joy.

  With a growing feeling of triumph, Kesbe realized that she could now see things as they were, not as she feared they would be. While she was haunted by the vision of the wasp-ridden caterpillar that meant a loss of control over her body, while the whole concept was so highly charged with repulsion and fascination, she saw the aronan-human partnership as something horrifying. She stood quietly before the shaman for a long time before she spoke again.

  “You once told me that a thing is evil when perceived by senses touched by evil. What kept me from understanding may not have been evil, but it did equal wrong.”

  Sahacat stood quietly, staring into space. When she looked back to Kesbe, something new and almost vulnerable came into her face. “It was evil, yet it was not. I speak this way, for I know this thing myself. Fear has touched my senses too—fear for my people.”

  Kesbe felt the beginnings of a truce between the two of them. “You are not my enemy, Sahacat.”

  “That is good. I am enemy enough to myself,” said the woman dryly, but with a note of rawness in her voice. Kesbe sensed what it had cost her to act as she had done. She found herself drawing back her lips in the flehmen-grimace to draw in the shaman’s scent and in it found a hidden note of bleakness.

  She realized there was another component to Sahacat’s odor. It was the scent of Baqui Iba. The thought that the shaman might have the aronan hidden or caged somewhere made Kesbe’s all-too volatile emotions threaten to swing once again to anger.

  “Where is Baqui Iba?” she asked.

  “The aronan came to me this morning, asking for death,” the shaman said softly.

  Kesbe felt as though freezing water was filling her from the ankles up. “No,” she said softly.

  “It spoke to me, saying that with no one to receive the gift it bears, why should it live?”

  Kesbe swallowe
d. “When I…attacked it…drove it away…I was mad from fright. I didn’t know…” The freezing water had reached the pit of her stomach. So Baqui Iba had asked the shaman to end its life. Dear winged one, had I understood the real truth, I would not have thrown hate at you. If you were still alive, I would accept your gift.

  The shaman stared back at Kesbe as if she knew her thoughts. A strange smile crossed Sahacat’s face. “So the bond is not broken after all. It is good that I delayed killing Baqui Iba.”

  The freezing water drained away, leaving numbness. Kesbe knew she had been tricked once again, knew she should feel a burst of outrage, but felt only a surge of relief that weakened her knees. She made herself straighten up.

  “You have been prepared by your training and by the kekelt drink I gave you during your time in the kiva. Will you receive the aronan’s egg?” the shaman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The lomuqualt ceremony will take place in a cave beneath the mesa. Come to Aronan Kiva at sunset. There you will meet priests to prepare you.”

  “One more thing, Sahacat. The youth, Imiya. He has been punished more than enough for any crime he may have done. I want him to be accepted and forgiven.”

  “The price of entry into Pai adulthood is the bearing of an aronan-child,” the shaman answered and added, “To birth.”

  “You can’t make him do it again!” Kesbe was shocked that the shaman would suggest such a thing. “It nearly killed him.”

  “The act cannot be repeated. As you have said, his body will not tolerate incubation again and there are no other fliers with more than one egg.”

  “Can one person…substitute for another? Could I…redeem Imiya in the eyes of the council by saying that any aronan-child I bear is to be considered his?”

  “The council may consider it,” Sahacat answered. “And I…may be moved to speak for such a substitution. It gives us what we need—a new flier.”

  And it gives your tribe back what you thought was lost. The mind and heart of a young man.

  “I will see Imiya before the ceremony,” Kesbe said. “To tell him what I intend to do.”

  “I will not interfere, warrior-woman.” Sahacat turned on her sandaled heel and strode away.

  I lie on my pallet in Nabamida’s house, thinking about what will happen.

  I could die and become part of the darkness that surrounds me. When Haewi fell, my life should have ended. But I lived to bear the egg of Desqui Deva and to feel my body kill the aronan’s child. Again I should have died, hut I lived and now I breathe and feel my pulse beat in my throat. I feel my face flush with shame and grief when I remember.

  Shame and grief and…fear. It was my fear that killed Desqui Deva’s child, fear and anger that would not let my body accept the nymph and provide what it needed, fear and anger that twisted the nymph into a pitiful thing that could not live once it had been expelled from my body. I know how it fought back, drawing strength from me, sickening me, swelling me…I am still so weak that it would be easy for me to choose the downward road.

  When I turned my face to the wall, there is only darkness. Behind me, away from my pallet, Chamol has set an oil lamp. Its flame is small, but it melts the enclosing dark Kesbe was here too. She left only her words. They do not burn very brightly, but like the oil lamp, they keep the shroud-dark from folding itself across me and claiming me.

  Kesbe came this morning, sat down by my bed and told me that she would walk the same trail with Baqui Iba that Mahana had walked with her flier. And if there is an aronan-child from the pairing between Kesbe and Baqui Iba, it will be given to the tribe as if it were mine.

  Perhaps the little flame inside me is not hope but more rage. In making her choice to stay and bear Bacqui Iba’s child, Kesbe has closed one path that might have let me escape. I still wonder ij I could have gone with her in Gooney Berg and lived a life apart from my people.

  No. There was no chance of that happening. The pull from Baqui Iba was too strong to let Kesbe go. I knew that from the time I launched the two toward each other. I have only myself to blame if I am trapped by her choice.

  I think of Mahana’s hands breaking the wings from her flier. The thought that Kesbe must do the same thing wrenches at me. I did not tell her what I witnessed for, as Sahacat said, I could not see it without distortion. Perhaps Kesbe can see more clearly than I did. When she returns, perhaps she will bear not only the aronan’s egg, but the truth about the ceremony.

  I am afraid for her, yet I know it is the honorable choice. It offers me a strange kind of redemption, but it is not a gift. If she can do what she has set out to, she will struggle and she mill need my help. For me to take the downward road and leave her alone would be a betrayal. I have lived through this and I have the knowledge, bitter though it is.

  If she finds the courage, if she is able to bear the strangeness and not break as I did…

  My eyes stray to the brown robe that Chamol left folded near my pallet. I reach out and touch it with shaking fingers. I wanted Kesbe to take it with her when she departed, but she gently pushed it aside. I know why. She is afraid that fear will shatter her determination even as she takes the final step toward Baqui Iba.

  You are strong, warrior-woman. And you are helped by your love for Bacqui Iba, which is as powerful as my love for Haewi Namij. It will bear you up as Haewi bore me. My strength is small, but perhaps it will be enough when added to yours.

  And when you return from your walk to womanhood, I will get up from my pallet and lay the lomuqualt’s robe on your shoulders.

  I close my eyes, drawing the robe to me and clutching it against my chest. At the smell and feel of it, at the memories it raises, I shudder, but I force myself not to cast it aside. Will I feel this way about Kesbe with she returns? Will I recoil from touching her, knowing what she has done and what she has become? Will I have to force myself not to turn from her?

  I clench my teeth. No matter what I feel, I will do what I have promised. If she returns as lomuqualt, the aronan-child will be mine in the eyes of the tribe. I will not be lazy and take this as a gift. It must be earned. She will need help, help only I can give.

  But if I am to offer help, it must come from one who is as whole as possible. I must attempt the healing I once tried. I hold the robe close against my chest and in my mind I begin to make a sand-painting.

  Kesbe sat in the pilot’s seat in Gooney Berg, staring out into the afternoon haze on the mesa. She let her eyes drift down to the instrument panel, with all its old dial-type gauges. She felt as though she were looking at it for the last time, trying to engrave the sight, the smell and the feeling of the old plane’s cockpit into her.

  It isn’t that I won’t be seeing you again, she thought, trying to shake off the melancholia that had seized her. But when I do, I will be…different.

  She heard steps on the floorboards behind her and Mabena’s musical voice. “Are you ready for company, dear pilot?”

  “Yes, I think I am.” She was grateful for his sensitivity to something he did not fully understand. It was not something she had expected to see in him, for she doubted sensitivity was a characteristic of people who hacked out a living on the frontiers of worlds such as Oneway.

  She had wondered whether she should try explaining to him what she was about to commit herself to and why. Now she was glad she had done so.

  He came up on the flight deck and rested his hands on the back of her seat. She breathed his scent, the musky, slightly acrid man-smell. The undertones to his odor told her that he found her attractive and the attraction could turn to lust. But she caught a sweet strong note that spoke of caring.

  He spoke again, his voice softly velvet as his dark skin. “So, will you do this thing?”

  His scent became touched with a slight metallic tang. Jealousy, perhaps, but gentle. She smiled to herself. What would he think if he knew she could read each and every turn of his feelings, that he could not lie to her. But even as the thought made its way across, she knew by his
smell that he would not want to.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Why?” The word could have been a demand. It was not.

  “I could say that I have no choice. I could say that I was caught up in a web not of my own making. But I hear my grandfather’s voice inside me saying, this is of your own making, so make it with love.”

  “You could choose to fight for the Pai without becoming one of the tribe.”

  “No, I can’t,” Kesbe turned in her seat. “The Sun-Chief is right. If, as an outsider, I try to help the Pai, I will do nothing but harm. And one cannot be partially Pai. One must take the essence of the tribe into mind and body, carry it in the belly…only then will I really know what is right.” She paused. “Does it sound hideous?”

  Mabena laughed softly and pushed his bush hat back on his head. He touched the raised tattoos on his cheeks. “To some people, the act of slitting the skin and then embedding charcoal into wounded flesh is hideous. Yet in the end there is beauty in the pattern. In the end, dear pilot, there will be beauty”

  Kesbe let herself rest in the cradle of Gooney Berg’s old leather seat, warmed by Mabena’s friendship. He took the opposite seat and said, “I would like to meet these people. I too made a judgment of them and I would like the opportunity to revise it.”

  “You will.” She hesitated. “Can you wait just a little longer? One person from outside was enough of a disruption. Think how long these people have been isolated, Tony. And the amazing thing is that they have preserved the things that my own ancestors lost. My grandfather tried to teach me, but he had only fragments.” She paused. “I’m not trained as a cultural anthropologist, but I know what the Pai are. What they have created is unique and valuable. Perhaps they are showing us a possible next step in the growth of human beings.”