by Alan Smale
Once they exchanged the forest for the prairies and firewood grew scarce, they resorted to burning dried buffalo dung. The warriors among the crew did not care to touch it, but ever contrary, Hurit took it as her cheerful duty to go collect it from the grasslands; she found a short walk and a light load preferable to the duties of unloading and cleaning the ship or to cooking later. The buffalo chips burned well, smelled surprisingly floral, and even flew well when skimmed through the air like a discus.
In addition to the buffalo they saw herds of elk, antelopes with prong-shaped horns, and above their heads the occasional gigantic flock of pigeons that might take hours to pass. And there were bears, too, not the medium-size brown bears of Marcellinus’s acquaintance but larger, grayer, and more grizzled-looking creatures. They gave the appearance of viciousness but fortunately took themselves off promptly whenever the crew came across them.
—
“Hawk,” said Isleifur, and everyone on the longship leaped at once as if struck by lightning.
Rather unusually the afternoon wind was strong and stable, and the Concordia was proceeding upriver under full sail. Men who had rowed earlier in the morning were taking the opportunity to nap. Up here in unknown territory in the dark of the Thunder Moon, no one was sleeping well, anyway. The river here was narrow, and rarely did they find a suitable island or sandbar where they could moor. The shores were hilly, and the chances of a night ambush were too high for anyone to feel comfortable.
As far as any of them knew, the Blackfoot tribe did not possess Hawks. But here came one low and fast, its dark wings swept back and predatory.
“Bows up, arrows ready,” said Akecheta, too late, as most of the warriors already had their bows raised. Marcellinus always feared Greek fire, the Hesperian liquid flame, even in small pots; out there they were sitting ducks.
Isleifur shaded his eyes against the sun. “Oh. Stand down.” Mahkah was already sitting and picking up the whetstone and sunflower oil he had been using to sharpen his gladius.
“Sintikala?” Marcellinus looked at Kimimela, but her radiant smile was all the confirmation he needed.
The dark Hawk waggled its wings and shot over their heads toward the far bank, and as he glimpsed Sintikala lying prone beneath it, Marcellinus felt his heart lift to join it.
“Everyone mind the boom,” Isleifur said a little irritably, trying to balance the boat. “I suppose we’d better pull ashore and pick her up.”
—
“Avenaka’s shamans did not know it was me,” said Sintikala, “but they knew something new had happened. They searched, they asked, but they did not find me.”
She sat in the stern with Marcellinus, Kimimela, and Akecheta, wiping the sweat from her eyes, her muscles still shaking from the long flight. Isleifur pulled at the rudder, trying to steer the Concordia back into the best of the wind. Sintikala’s Hawk lay beside her, sleek and strong, and Kimimela kept eyeing it enviously and reaching out to touch the taut parchment-thin leather. Some of the crew had their ears pricked for news of home; most of the rest had nodded without surprise at Sintikala’s arrival, stowed their weapons, and gone straight back to sleep.
“And Enopay?” Marcellinus would have liked to talk to her alone, but it might be some time before he got the opportunity.
“Safe. He is often in Avenaka’s company. I saw him rarely. The Hawks hid me, and I spoke most often with Kanuna.”
“And the mood of the city?”
She drank deep from a skin of water and shrugged. “It is Cahokia.”
Kimimela stroked the spars of the Hawk again and then looked up at the sail and at the lush grasses onshore rippling in the wind. It was clear that she would rather be aloft than having this conversation. “Do the people love Tahtay as much as Enopay says?”
“They certainly do not love Avenaka. Tahtay is remembered fondly, and his father and many-fathers are still honored. But remember, I spoke only to the Hawks I trust and to Kanuna and Enopay and their friends. It is not as if the people sing songs of Tahtay every night around their campfires. As for the warriors, they will serve the man who promises them war.”
“What does Kanuna think? Demothi? Others who you spoke to? Can we depose Avenaka?”
“They do not know if this will work even if we find Tahtay,” Sintikala said bluntly.
“But they love you,” Kimimela said. “Everyone does.”
Sintikala smiled and shivered. “Everyone does not. I am not the answer. We need Tahtay, and I need to rest. We will talk more tonight.”
Marcellinus cleared his throat. “And what about the other Romans, the legions in the east? What news of them?”
“They have battled the Iroqua and tightened their grip on the lands they have taken,” she said. “They are supplied now by river as well as land. I sent word to the Tadodaho to do his best to harry them and cut the Roman supply line. He tries, but it is hard. The Romans are strong. They own the Oyo now, from the Appalachia to Woshakee and beyond.”
—
Later they camped on a low hill with a good view over the plains so that they could see anyone who approached. With the rest of the crew carrying bags ashore, Hurit on her walk for fuel, and Kimimela bossing everyone around as usual, Marcellinus stepped back into the longship for a quiet word with Sintikala. “Aelfric and Isleifur are beginning to recognize the scenery.”
“And?”
“Hidatsa territory. We are close.”
“Good.”
“And so you came back to us. I did not know that you would.”
“Did you not?”
“I am very glad you did,” he said.
Sintikala took in a breath to say something, then stopped and shook her head. She had the expression of a woman trying to bring to mind a word she couldn’t quite recall.
He took her hand and squeezed it. “Hello.”
She looked down. “I was glad to see Cahokia again. But I had to come back.”
“Did you?” he said.
“Yes. You know already that when my first husband died, I was not there. Perhaps I could have saved him. And you know that when Great Sun Man died, also I was not there. Here…Kimimela may be threatened. If ever I am not there for Kimimela and something happens, then that is the end of my life.”
Marcellinus nodded. “Kimimela, yes.”
And then said, “First husband? There was another?”
“No.” She looked away. “No other. I spoke poorly.”
“I see.” Marcellinus found a lump in his throat.
Kimimela saved them then, bounding across the shield wall and bouncing off the thwarts to crash into them both. “All together again! I love it!”
Sintikala looked quizzical at her exuberance. Marcellinus laughed and messed up Kimimela’s hair.
“Sorry to break in,” she said. “But this is where I needed to be.” She hugged them both and in the process pushed them closer, and for a moment Sintikala rested her head on Marcellinus’s chest and exhaled long and hard.
—
They saw the smoke from their fires first and then the tipis, a dozen grubby-looking cones of skin draped over wooden frames twice as tall as a man, all clustered around an open area. Marcellinus had never been inside a tipi or even seen one up close. Neither the Mizipians nor the Iroqua used them; both nations looked down on them as being old-fashioned, inelegant, fit only for the nomadic hunter tribes. Even the Algon-Quian in the east made huts or earth lodges. Not that there was a huge amount of wood in this area to make huts out of.
As the longship approached them, the Hidatsa came in ones and twos from out of the tipis and from the fields beyond. They looked unspeakably nervous, and with reason: in all likelihood they had never seen a vessel as large as the Concordia. Spears in hand, the men looked uncertainly back and forth between the longship and their women.
“Will they attack us?”
“More likely to run like hell,” said Isleifur.
Marcellinus took off his breastplate and put his gladius aside. “See anyone you
recognize?”
“Hardly. We were much farther upriver.”
Aelfric said something in a garbled, hiccupping kind of speech. Everyone except the Norseman looked at him blankly. “None of you speak Hidatsa, then?”
“Ha,” said Kimimela. “At last you’re useful for something.”
“Oh, thank you.”
Sintikala clapped her hands. “Hurit, Kimimela, Chumanee, Taianita? Be ready.”
Isleifur nodded. Aelfric grinned. “You’re going to charm ’em to death? Nice.”
—
“Yes,” Aelfric said. “They saw him. Tahtay was here.”
“Told you,” Hurit muttered.
“Gods!” Kimimela put her hands up to her mouth, her eyes wide. She took a few restless steps away, then hurried back. The Hidatsa youths watched her with interest. “Gods, really? Really Tahtay?”
Sintikala frowned. “Hush, all of you. Aelfric, you are sure they are not just telling you what you want to hear?”
“A tall thin boy with a limp who spoke to them in Cahokian, looking for a Blackfoot woman? I’m sure.”
They stood on the bank with five Hidatsa. The two youths still carried their spears, but the three elders now held Cahokian adzes and Roman pugios as their price for talking to Aelfric, and nobody expected any trouble. Meanwhile Isleifur had ambled past the welcoming committee, waved at an old woman who sat tending a fire outside her tipi, and squatted down to talk with her.
Marcellinus felt a huge weight lift from his shoulders. This was the very first Hidatsa village they had come across and obviously also would have been the first Tahtay would have arrived at as well. This was hardly coincidence or blind luck. Nevertheless, he was greatly relieved. “Where is Tahtay now?”
“I’m working on it.” Aelfric chatted to the Hidatsa for what seemed an inordinately long time and then turned back to them. “They liked Tahtay. He spoke well.”
“We know he speaks well,” Hurit said, almost stamping her foot in impatience.
Aelfric grinned at her. “He came last year, long before winter. The Hidatsa here sent a runner to the Blackfoot, and eventually a Blackfoot war party brought his mother over to pick him up.”
“Don’t hold anything back,” Marcellinus said, studying his face.
“All right. These boys here? They didn’t fancy Tahtay’s chances. The warriors who came for him were Fire Hearts. Tough as nails, the Blackfoot are, and the Fire Hearts are the fiercest and scariest of them all. And Tahtay with that wounded leg?”
“They said all that?”
“Well, in different words. Anyway, the Fire Hearts took him, and these folks haven’t seen him since.”
“And where are the Blackfoot?”
“Anywhere and everywhere,” said Aelfric, and in the sudden silence he shook his head and added, “What? You expected them to know where Tahtay is now? At least we know he made it this far.”
“Ask how long it took the runner to bring the war party,” Kimimela said.
“They say half a moon, but I bet that means they don’t remember. Doesn’t matter anyway. The Blackfoot people are nomadic; they won’t still be where they were last year.”
Belatedly, Isleifur strolled back to them.
“Any luck?” Aelfric asked, and Isleifur grinned.
Marcellinus’s heart leaped. “You know where the Fire Hearts are?”
“Nope,” said the Norseman. “But I know how to find the winter buffalo hunt.”
—
Eight days later they found the second band of Hidatsa, who were setting up their winter camp in a shallow valley. Although their tipis currently were grouped in a circle near the stream, their older braves and women were busy clearing the underbrush from a nearby cottonwood grove before moving the lodges into the trees for better shelter against the winter winds and snows. Here the Hidatsa would stay until the geese flew north, until the first thunder. Then they would pack up again and follow the buffalo herds out onto the open grasslands.
They were a small band, barely twenty lodges in total and mostly related by blood or marriage. Their tipis looked small and inadequate against the crushing weight of the winter that would soon descend on them.
Marcellinus was already perpetually cold, and the first snows had yet to arrive. Months earlier he had been worried about Cahokia and the new Roman invasions from the south and east. More recently he had worried about finding Tahtay. These last days, all he could think of was getting off the high plains and scurrying downriver before the ice came to the Wemissori and trapped them in this desolate hell for the next five moons.
The Hidatsa would remain, though, hunkered down in this valley as they had every winter for time immemorial, eking out a living.
“And they really don’t eat fish?” he said again. “With the Wemissori just over there, half a mile away?”
Aelfric shook his head. “No fish, no fowl. They’re unclean; everyone knows that. Buffalo, that’s the thing. Tasty, nutritious buffalo meat, dawn, noon, and night. And they need more if they’re to make it through the winter. Time to go fetch it.”
“But if it snows now—”
“They’d still go to join the Blackfoot and other Hidatsa in the last hunt. Whatever the weather. They have no choice.”
Marcellinus glanced inland and shivered.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Aelfric said. “You’re not going on the hunt, and neither am I. We’d be bad luck. Him they might make an exception for, because he’s half willow himself.”
“Half willow?” Marcellinus looked across at Isleifur Bjarnason, who was sitting next to Akecheta and Mahkah, smoking a pipe with the Hidatsa band chief outside his lodge. The Norseman was more stocky than willowy.
Aelfric shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I just know it’s a Hidatsa compliment.”
Marcellinus looked up the valley again to the plains. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for hiking into the wilderness, chilling his heels here while Isleifur and the Cahokians went would be even worse. “What will it cost?”
“Gifts?” Sintikala walked up to them, shaking her head. “You cannot buy passage to the hunt with an ax or a spear.”
“No?” Marcellinus said drily. Too many times already on the Wemissori they had handed over precious iron or weapons as the price for the privilege of coming ashore. Just getting access to the headman of the Hidatsa whom Isleifur was now smoking with had cost them one of their best water jars, three fine steel ax heads, and almost half a day of tactful diplomacy on the part of Aelfric, Akecheta, Mahkah, and Isleifur. The Concordia had brought stone adzes and bronze ax heads, the typical Cahokian gifts, but word had spread and the tribes of the Wemissori demanded iron and steel.
These were poor people, barely surviving. Marcellinus would have been happy to give them gifts as friends, but needing to buy their favor irked him.
“No,” Sintikala said. “We will find Tahtay if he is there and bring him out to you.”
“And if he won’t come?”
“If Tahtay will not come for us, he will not come for you.”
“Enopay would not agree,” said Kimimela. “And neither do I. The Wanageeska should go to Tahtay in case Tahtay will not come to the Wanageeska.”
Sintikala shook her head. “He cannot. It would show disrespect to the buffalo.”
“They have to agree to be killed, you see,” Aelfric said.
“The buffalo have to agree?”
“Of course,” said the Briton. “How long have you been in Nova Hesperia?”
Marcellinus eyed the clouds gathering above them. “When is the hunt?”
“Oh, the Blackfoot started a week ago,” Aelfric told him. “It takes a while to set it up. They have to wait this late for the big summer herds to break up into smaller groups as the grass dies back. And then they have to find one of those smaller herds in the right place or move one there.”
“And where is the right place?”
“Over there.” Aelfric pointed southwest into the grasslands.
“Yes, but
how far?”
“They won’t say.”
Marcellinus shook his head. “Marvelous. So it could be over already, and the Blackfoot scattered to the four winds, before Isleifur finishes his pipe?”
But now Akecheta was rising to his feet, and the Norseman and Mahkah, too, all practically kowtowing to the headman of the Hidatsa. The young woman by the headman’s side had stood up to usher the Cahokians away.
The four of them approached, Akecheta in the lead and Mahkah and Isleifur respectfully flanking the woman like an honor guard. Behind them the aging headman clambered laboriously to his feet and handed the pipe to another of his acolytes, who busily puffed at it to finish the tabaco. The headman bent and entered his lodge, and the doorskin fell back into place behind him.
“We will join the hunt,” said Akecheta. “Today we will purify ourselves and make ready. Tomorrow we leave at dawn.”
“And that’s all right with the Blackfoot?” Marcellinus asked, and the Hidatsa woman frowned and hissed at him.
“You will not speak again, Hotah,” Mahkah said apologetically. “Not at all.”
Startled, Marcellinus almost said “What?” but a sharp look from Isleifur silenced him.
“Nor you, of course,” Mahkah said to Aelfric.
Aelfric frowned and gestured, Hands, yes?
“Yes, you may hand-talk,” Isleifur said. “But no more sound from your mouths, no clapping of hands. No breaking of sticks. Try not to even fart where they can hear you.”
Obviously Isleifur himself had not been silenced. Marcellinus hand-talked: Why?
“Because that is what the buffalo require of you.”
This was not getting any easier to comprehend, and the Hidatsa woman was frowning at Marcellinus as if he were a moron. Mahkah glanced at her and leaned forward. “It is what you must do, Hotah, to be allowed to accompany us on the hunt.”
Marcellinus’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at Sintikala, who seemed as surprised as he.
“You must wear the skin of the buffalo and never take it off until the hunt is over and you are back here by the Wemissori. You must be purified so that the wind and the sun, the wolf and the buffalo, do not know you. And you must do exactly as the buffalo caller or any of the Hidatsa say. You agree?”
