The Fire Arrow
Page 27
“How would you like to run into one of these on your path?” Winding asked.
“Why are they here?” Mercer asked.
Who could say? The sandstone overhang protected them; that was all Skye could make of it.
Mary was careful to touch every bone she could reach. She ran her small brown hand over the rock, her fingers into creases and over bulges, as if the bones were there to give her strength, and the more she touched them the stronger and wiser she would be. Victoria frowned. For her, the bones were sacred relics of her own origins, for she was one of the people of this bird. But Mary saw these bones her own way. Skye smiled at her and she smiled back. Touching the bones was giving medicine to her and she was harvesting the strange powers that lay within them.
“Many more,” Victoria said, pointing. Indeed, the trail ran another fifty yards through the mortuary of giants somehow trapped here and hidden from air and sun and wind until recent times.
Slowly Mercer hiked to the end of the bone yard and retraced his steps back to the monster that lay almost intact, the very first they had seen.
“So you suppose the earth, the whole universe, is very old?” he asked. “I mean, hundreds of thousand of years. Maybe a million years. Do you imagine that God is recent; the universe is older than God?”
Skye smiled. “That sort of thing is beyond me.” He would not speculate on things that seemed forever beyond understanding.
“Well, I’ve seen the bones,” Mercer said. “Now let’s measure them. As it happens, the length of my belt is exactly a yard, and I’ve marked off feet on the belt. It’s my wilderness measure.”
He pulled the belt from its loops. There indeed, on its interior side, were foot markers, and half-foot markers, and a set of six inches marked in some sort of ink or dye.
“How am I going to record all this when I lack so much as paper and pencil?” he asked.
It was a good question.
“I will bring your robe. We will put the marks on the robe,” Mary said. The Shoshone was dealing with the bones a lot more easily than Victoria, who turned tight and silent and maybe angry.
Skye watched Mary head back to the travois. But Mercer was already heading for that giant skull.
“I say, Skye, I owe you an apology. I didn’t imagine these bones could be real. Just a mystery or some madman’s art. Not something that taxes my limited grasp geology. Not something that turns my world, my theology, my universe inside out. I’m glad you brought me here.”
That was the thing about Mercer. He was always redeeming himself. Skye nodded and smiled.
Mercer crawled up on the shelf and began measuring. Victoria looked ready to explode. He ran his belt over the skull and finally pronounced his verdict: “Six feet four inches from the extremities.” Then he measured the eye socket. “Over a foot. No make that fifteen inches.” And then he measured the largest of the exposed teeth. “Can you imagine it? Eleven inches or so!”
Mary returned with the robe, some reed paintbrushes, and the small sack of ochre grease paint. These she handed to Victoria. “I do not know how to make the marks,” she said.
“Don’t give it to me,” Victoria snarled. The explosion was so dark and pained that Skye and the men paused.
“We’ll be leaving directly, Victoria,” Skye said. “We will be very respectful and do no harm”
Victoria sullenly turned her back on him. Skye had never seen her in such a state, and it worried him.
“Oh, not quite that fast, Mister Skye,” Mercer said. “I’ll want some sketches. Blast it for not having paper. But I’ll do what I can on the back of the robe. What else can a man do?”
Mercer laid the robe, hairy side down, directly on the bones and began the slow process of painting line drawings of what he saw. There was little room left on the robe, which now was filled with stick figures and pictographs. Mary cheerfully helped him but Victoria stormed away.
Skye saw the depth of her anguish and headed her direction, catching her at last well out of earshot of the others.
“He will doom us,” she said. “He has no respect.”
Skye didn’t argue.
“That is the Mother of my people. That is the great bird that came out of the heavens and gave birth to my people. That is the bird the ancient ones, the storytellers, speak of. We are the people of the great black bird. And whoever touches those bones will perish.”
Skye didn’t believe the legend. It was ingrained deeply in her very soul but he could not share it with her.
“You and I have not touched the bones or shown them disrespect,” he said.
“But Mary has! And so have the white men.”
“What will happen, Victoria? What does the legend of the Absaroka say?”
“We should not even be here. We should not even approach these bones without a purifying. A sweat and the smoke of sweetgrass and gifts to the spirits. You saw the gifts as we came here, bundles given to this spirit. The spirits of these birds are here. They are offended. Now we will perish, all of us, and I am at fault. I brought you here. I am a daughter of the People, a daughter of these ancient ones. They are my fathers and my grandfathers.”
Tears filled her eyes.
“I’ll fetch Mercer and the rest. We’ll leave the grandfathers alone, Victoria.”
“It is too late.”
Skye left her and went back to the bones, now resting in deep and cool shade under the sandstone ledge. Mercer was busy painting ribs and vertebrae.
“I don’t know what half these bones are,” he said. “How am I going to persuade anyone I ever saw them? London is a city of skeptics. The Royal Society is a body of squinting old men.”
“Time for us to leave, Mister Mercer. This is a holy place.”
“Leave! I just got here. I don’t have much to dig with, but I’m going to take a tooth. That’ll shake a few timbers.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE FIRE ARROW
Copyright © 2006 by Richard S. Wheeler
Excerpt from The Canyon of Bones © 2007 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by Dale Walker
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429915281
First eBook Edition : February 2011
First Edition: May 2006
First Mass Market Edition: February 2007