The Wind in His Heart

by Charles de Lint

  For a long time she simply drank in the beauty. She realized she wouldn’t really mind if she never returned to her body.

  “Now that’s some view.”

  Turning from the panorama, she found Old Man Puma lounging on a nearby rock.

  Although he lived up in the mountains behind her house, Aggie didn’t see him often and even then, it was usually in his mountain lion shape. Today he was in another familiar guise, that of an old man with hair the colour of his ma’inawo fur, dressed in a white cotton shirt and jeans. His feet were bare.

  The ma’inawo loved to tell stories about him. Lately, they were all amused with the rumours that he was training a small group of young ma’inawo who were driving him to distraction. It was even said that one of them wasn’t a cousin, but a five-fingered being. Aggie wasn’t sure how much stock to put in the stories since ma’inawo were just as likely to make things up if they didn’t have any actual gossip to relate, and she didn’t know him well enough to ask.

  “Ohla, Diego,” she said. “I’d offer you some tobacco but I didn’t know I’d be seeing you.”

  “That’s okay. I never smoke up here. We’re already so close to the thunders we don’t need to try to get their attention.”

  “Just as well,” Aggie said. “They wouldn’t have any interest in an old woman like me anyway.”

  “You’d be surprised what interests the thunders.” His yellow-green eyes looked past her to the view before he added, “Our mountains were like these once. Untouched, unpeopled. No jet trails in the air. No hikers or hunters.”

  His full name among the ma’inawo was Diego Madera, and it was said that the mountains were named after him. She, too, remembered what it was like to see the incursion of civilization into the foothills of what had once been all wild land.

  “Sometimes people make poor neighbours,” she said.

  “The Kikimi have been good neighbours for a very long time now.”

  “Even with the casino and the hunters Sammy brings into the mountains?”

  Diego gave her a curious look. “Those ones aren’t really Kikimi anymore,” he said. “Not when they’ve turned their backs on their traditions.”

  Aggie had never thought of it like that before.

  They fell silent for a time. Aggie didn’t know what was on her companion’s mind, but she wasn’t thinking of anything. She let her eyes drink in some more of the mountains, let her ears listen to the music the winds made. But eventually she came back to wondering why she was here.

  “Am I dead or am I dreaming?” she said.

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Diego answered, “Maybe a little bit of both.”

  She turned to him again. “The one, I can understand, but how can you be a little bit dead?”

  He shrugged. “It depends on how close you are to dying, I suppose. What happened anyway?”

  He was looking at her midriff. When she looked down herself she saw all the blood on her blouse. Lifting the fabric revealed pads of gauze held in place with duct tape.

  “Huh,” she said. “I never noticed that until now.”

  Then she told him about Steve bringing Sadie to her place and everything that had followed.

  Diego frowned. “She cooked with you? She ate the food you made together? She drank your tea?”

  “She’s troubled.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “I suppose kindness might have killed me. Still, there are worse ways to go. And what did Crazy Horse say?”

  “Hóka héy,” Diego said. “It is a good day to die. But it’s also a good day to live.”

  Aggie smiled. “True. I still have stories to hear. Portraits to paint.” She looked down at her bloody blouse again. “If I don’t make it back to my body will you tell the other ma’inawo not to take it out on the girl?”

  “If you don’t make it back to your body, there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Still, I’ll pass along your message if the winds haven’t already done it for you.”

  “Is that what they do?” Aggie asked. “Because I hear their song, but not the words.”

  “The winds don’t have words the way you and I do,” Diego told her. “But most cousins know their language.” He laughed. “And it’s certainly easier than deciphering the language of the mountains. The stones can take a half a day just to say ‘ohla.’”

  “It’s a wonderful world,” Aggie said. “I’m going to miss it.”

  “Go back, then. See if you can’t wear your skin for a few more years.”

  “I get a choice?”

  “There are always choices. Maybe you’ll return to your body to find it’s failed. But maybe you’ll fit right back under its broken skin. If you survive, come see me. I know the story of a good healing medicine.”

  Aggie touched her stomach. Her blouse was wet and her fingers came away red.

  “I can’t feel that,” she said. “There’s no pain. Is that a good or a bad sign?”

  “It’s a sign that you’re not making your choice. Close your eyes. Decide to live or let go.”

  Aggie nodded and did as he said. As soon as she closed her eyes she felt as though she was floating in the starred sky that had unwound above them. She could no longer feel the rock underfoot. She couldn’t hear or feel the wind. She wasn’t sure if she was deciding to live, or letting go.

  And then she was no longer aware of anything at all.

  41

  Thomas

  As they walked through the desert scrub, Thomas kept turning around to look at the ruins of the old barn behind them until finally a dip in the land hid the structure from sight.

  “Don’t worry,” Consuela said. “They won’t follow us here.”

  “You said that before. What makes you so sure?”

  “Because now we walk the roads of the living,” Consuela told him.

  Roads? Thomas thought. He couldn’t even spy a deer trail.

  “But you’ll need to be careful,” she went on, “the next time you’re on one of the roads of the dead.”

  Her ghostly raven twin nodded at him from her perch on Consuela’s shoulder.

  “If I ever get home, I don’t plan on walking anywhere except in the world where I was born.”

  Consuela nodded. “Good plan. Unfortunately, you don’t always get to choose where the wheel takes you.”

  “That’s true. I might get hijacked again by some crazy immortal lady who can turn into a bird.”

  Consuela frowned at him, but the ghostly Si’tala threw back her head and cackled.

  “This did not go as I intended,” Consuela admitted.

  Thomas figured that was about as much of an apology as he was going to get.

  “So let’s go find Sammy and get this over with,” he told her.

  “We will. But we’re so close now. Don’t you want to see your aunt?”

  His dead aunt.

  Not particularly.

  But Consuela was pointing to a plume of smoke ahead. “It’s not far now,” she said.

  Thomas remembered what Morago had advised him before he’d gone off with Consuela.

  Make no promises and speak as little as possible.

  That hadn’t gone well so far. He was probably lucky she hadn’t already turned him into a toad or a lizard. Maybe that was still to come.

  “Sure,” he said, to mollify her if nothing else. “We’ve come this far, we might as well talk to my dead ancestors.”

  “Just one.”

  He nodded.

  “And in this place,” Consuela added, “she isn’t dead.”

  Thomas sighed. “So let’s go see her,” he said.

  His head was starting to hurt again. He’d seen Aunt Lucy dead, laid out in their cabin before the funeral. He’d seen her brought to Ancestors Canyon, her body a slender twig shape under a sheet.

  But in this place, apparently, she was alive.

  This place.

  He tried not to think of how the ground underfoot wa
s only a few inches of dirt over wooden boards that provided the sky for a whole other world than this. Not that he trusted this world, either. He kept stealing surreptitious glances at the cacti and stunted trees they passed, expecting them to be made of painted cardboard or wooden cutouts. And was that a real sky above them or the underside of yet another world?

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Si’tala studying him as they walked along. For a change, there was a sympathetic expression in her dark eyes, as though she knew what was going through his head. Then, as they walked down into a dry wash, she lifted from Consuela’s shoulders and flew on ahead.

  Thomas stopped dead in his tracks and watched her go. He’d never seen anything like that before. Animal spirit auras—so far as he’d seen—did not leave their hosts. They were auras, manifestations of their host’s animal blood, not separate entities capable of individual expression. Consuela’s aura had been different from the start, but he hadn’t realized how different.

  Consuela looked back at him from the top of the dry wash’s far bank. “What is it?” she asked. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

  Thomas could only point to the sky behind her. “Si’tala,” he finally said. “The raven. She flew from your shoulders.”

  Consuela nodded. “Yes, she does that from time to time. Are you coming? I can smell your aunt’s beans and flatbread from here.”

  Before he could ask how that was possible—that an aura could extract herself from her host—Consuela disappeared from view. He guessed there was no point in asking about the invisibility acts Si’tala could pull, either.

  He sighed and scrambled up the embankment, pushing through a gap between two palo verde trees and sidestepping the thorny arms of a cholla to catch up to her. Then it was too late to even try to pursue the subject because they’d reached…no, not his aunt’s house. His aunt was dead. Someone’s house.

  It was a ranch-style structure, longer than it was wide, with adobe walls and a roof of saguaro ribs. It had a dirt yard in front with a small corral to one side, a pair of outbuildings on the other that were little more than shacks. It seemed verdant here compared to the arid landscape around them. Thomas noted what must be a spring-fed pond just past the shacks. Green reeds and grasses grew up along its shore, spreading off into a small meadow just beyond. A tall river oak and a few large mesquite trees were also clearly benefitting from the water.

  In the shade of one of the mesquites was an adobe oven—the source of the smoke that Consuela had pointed out earlier. Standing in front of it, cooking, was a woman with long braided hair, dressed in a plain cotton skirt and embroidered blouse. Thomas felt a shock of recognition when she lifted her head and smiled at their approach.

  She looked just like his mother had when she’d been a young woman, who in turn had borne a strong resemblance to her two aunts, Lucy and Leila. Si’tala was perched on the chimney of the oven, obviously unfazed by the heat. Lying in the deeper shade close to the trunk of the mesquite was a large black dog, happily gnawing the meat off a soup bone. Thomas felt a small shiver go up his spine. The dog resembled Gordo, but Gordo was back there in the salvagers’ world.

  “Ohla,” the woman called to them. “You took your time. Gordo told me you’d be here a half hour ago.”

  Okay, Thomas thought. So not only could death spirit Gordo change size—or Transformer-like, turn himself into a vehicle—but he could also transport himself to another world at will.

  Still, that latest bit of information seemed trivial compared to this woman’s strong resemblance to his family.

  She laid down the utensil in her hand and stepped away from the adobe oven, opening her arms wide. “Thomas!” she said. “Come give your old Aunt Lucy a hug.”

  She didn’t look old and she didn’t look at all like his Aunt Lucy—or at least not the one the family had accompanied to the Ancestors Canyon after she’d died. That Aunt Lucy had been withered and all dried up, like a sad little figure of cacti ribs and braided dead grass, woven into human shape. She hadn’t seemed human. She’d no longer looked like any of the Corn Eyes women except for her surviving sister, Leila.

  This woman was vibrant and young, full of life.

  “How is this even possible?” he asked.

  From the oven’s chimney, Si’tala cocked her head as if to say, after all that’s happened today, you have to ask?

  “How is it not possible?” Aunt Lucy said, as enigmatic as the Aunties ever were.

  And as he let her embrace him, he knew that however impossible it might seem, it was his Aunt Lucy.

  His arms went around her and he held her tight.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She pulled back but held his face in her hands for a moment longer, as though she was memorizing every element of his features.

  “I have no idea,” Thomas said, then nodded toward Consuela. “You’ll have to ask her. She brought me here.”

  Aunt Lucy looked at the raven woman.

  “He’s drifting away from the People,” Consuela said. “I thought you could talk some sense into him.”

  Aunt Lucy looked back and forth between them, then settled her gaze back on Consuela. “We each have to define our own connection to the tribe,” she said. “You should know that.”

  “But all he wants to do is go away.”

  “Then that’s his definition, and who are we to argue?”

  “But—”

  Aunt Lucy shrugged. “Some of us are content to never see the next canyon while some of us have the wind in our hearts. So it will take him a little longer to connect. Sooner or later, everybody comes back.”

  “I’m standing right here,” Thomas said as they talked about him.

  Si’tala’s shoulders shook with silent laughter.

  “I know,” Aunt Lucy said. “And just look at what a fine young man you’ve turned out to be. Your mother must be so proud of you.”

  “Everybody comes back,” Consuela repeated. “But they don’t necessarily come back better. Look at Sammy Swift Grass. Turning his back on the People. Opening that casino. Hunting cousins in the mountains. Now isn’t the time to leave the Painted Lands to find oneself.”

  “I’m not some hero who can stop Sammy,” Thomas said before Aunt Lucy could respond. “Nobody’s going to listen to me. And why do you even care? You’re ma’inawo, not Kikimi.”

  “Except what happens on the Painted Lands affects my people too,” said Consuela. “Do you think there is so much free range left that the cousins can live wherever they choose? We’ve had our lands stolen too—without even the dubious benefit of a treaty for the five-fingered beings to break. The Maderas were a last refuge for many of us, but now we’re being hunted there, as well.”

  “You should be talking to Morago, not me.”

  “I did. But when I came to him, he gave me you. Remember?”

  Thomas nodded, unable to hide his regret. “And I’m only here to watch you kill Sammy,” he said. “All your problems will be solved then.”

  Consuela glared at him and Thomas took a step back. “I have yet to speak to Sammy,” she said. “Do you think I would kill him out of hand without allowing him to explain himself?”

  “I have no idea how you expect this to play out. But I’m pretty sure Sammy will be dead when the dust settles. Don’t pretend you haven’t already decided that.”

  “I have made no such decision. And even if his life does need to be taken as a blood-debt to the ma’inawo that were slain, it won’t change anything. Someone else will only step up to take his place.”

  Consuela glanced at Aunt Lucy. “They need to remember the ways of the People. How the Kikimi respect their neighbours and the land that hosts them.”

  Looking directly at Thomas, she added, “But how can this happen when someone such as you, gifted with a shaman’s vision, wants nothing more than to leave?”

  “Why do you even need a shaman’s vision?” Thomas asked. “All time happens at once,” he said. “Isn’t t
hat what you told me? Past, present and future. So you already know how this turns out, right? And if it’s already happened, what makes you think any of us can change it?”

  Consuela pointed to her raven ghost sister. “She knows, not I.”

  Thomas remembered what Consuela had told him when they were first driving through the otherworld—how it was Si’tala who had left the feather to wake his connection to the traditions. What had the raven aura seen in the future to make her do that?

  “The future isn’t permanent,” Aunt Lucy said. “The decisions we make today affect both the past and the future.”

  “You know that doesn’t make any sense,” Thomas said.

  “Not now,” Aunt Lucy said. “Not to you.” She took his arm and steered him toward an old wooden table on the far side of the oven. “I’ve prepared a meal for you. Come sit with me and tell me what it is you hope to find, away from the Painted Lands.”

  42

  Steve

  “So who do we go after first?” Calico asks after we’ve put some distance between us and the others. “Sammy or the girl’s father?”

  “I don’t see how we have to do anything,” I say. “Things’ll play out and people will know we’re innocent.”

  “I’m thinking Sammy,” Calico goes on, as though I haven’t said anything.

  “I’m with you,” Reuben says.

  I stop dead and wait for them to look back at me. “Seriously?” I say. “Anything happens to either of them, it’ll come back on us. Maybe it’ll even lend some weight to the kid’s crazy accusations.”

  “So?” Calico says.

  Reuben nods, agreeing with her.

  “What’s the problem?” Calico asks. “Justice is done and you can stay safely in the otherworld. What do you need that we can’t send somebody over to get for you?”