Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  Paha Sapa is content to lie there on his back, half in his Vision Pit and half out, the cooling rock of the mountain strangely dry under his shoulders and head, and watch the stars fall.

  Suddenly a shooting star brighter than all the others streaks from the zenith. It is so bright that it lights up the skies, lights up the summit of the Six Grandfathers, lights up towering Evil Spirit Hill and all the other surrounding peaks. The millions of dark pine trees in the Paha Sapa suddenly grow silver and then milky white in the light of this falling star turned hurtling comet.

  —Ooooh!

  Paha Sapa cannot help making the noise. It is the same noise he made as a tiny boy watching the late-summer falling-star showers when there was an especially bright one. But he has never seen any star falling with such dazzling brilliance as this one.

  And, he realizes with a slow stirring of what might have been fear if he’d had more energy and presence of mind, it is headed directly for him.

  The shadows of the direction posts and of the few stunted trees near the rocky summit leap away in all directions from the hurtling brilliance directly above him. Paha Sapa can hear the falling star now—a hissing, roaring, galloping sound as the star burns through the air.

  Suddenly, silently, the falling star explodes, dividing into six different and only slightly smaller falling stars. They continue hurtling down toward him.

  Paha Sapa realizes through his hunger and exhaustion, with something like bemused detachment, that he is going to die in a few seconds.

  The six fragments of the Great Star hurtle lower. Each fragment is going to strike the Six Grandfathers; one, it seems, right here on the summit. At the last moment, Paha Sapa puts his forearm over his eyes.

  No impact. No explosions. No noise whatsoever except for the slightest stirring of the ponderosa pine trees and fir trees in a slight breeze.

  Paha Sapa lowers his arm and peeks out.

  The six stars are all around the summit but they appear now as six shafts of vertical white light. Each shaft must be two hundred feet tall. Inside each shaft or upright cocoon of light is an old man who looks to be of the Natural Free Human Beings, and each old man is wearing a perfect white buffalo robe and has one white eagle feather in his gray hair. All of them are staring at Paha Sapa, and their gaze is unlike any human gaze the boy has ever encountered. He can feel the pressure of those gazes.

  —Will you come with us, Black Hills?

  Paha Sapa’s head snaps around. He did not see any of their lips move. Nor did he hear the question, exactly. At least not with his ears. For many decades after this he will try to recall and describe their voices—certainly not sounds of the sort men make in their throats and mouths, or with their tongues and teeth, but more the subtle whisper of wind moving branches or the deep vibration of distant thunder felt or the slight bone-shake of approaching horse herds or buffalo such as the boy heard when, imitating the older men, he put his ear tight to the earth.

  Except none of these comparisons is right either. He knows then and later that it does not matter.

  —Of course I will come, Grandfathers.

  One of the giant forms reaches out a hand encased in white light. Paha Sapa takes one step and realizes that all of him fits perfectly into the weathered palm.

  They rise quickly and silently into the blazing night sky. Somehow, Paha Sapa can hear the sound of the stars—each star a voice, each voice a part of a chorus, the chorus of three thousand and more voices chanting a melodic prayer unlike any he has ever heard.

  When they are many thousands of feet above the starlit landscape, the six forms cease rising and hover, Paha Sapa comfortable and unworried in the warm palm.

  But when he finally leans over the edge of the giant, reassuringly cupped palm to look down upon the sacred Hills, Paha Sapa almost screams in terror.

  The Black Hills are gone. Everything is gone.

  Beneath him, beneath the hovering, cloudlike Six Grandfathers and him, an endless expanse of water stretches away to both of the distant, dark, and slightly curved horizons. The world is water without end.

  Paha Sapa realizes at once that he is looking down on the world without form that existed before Wakan Tanka, the Mystery, the All, brought forth land and the four-leggeds and then man. This is the world before man, when taku wankan, the Things Mysterious, walked abroad in the spirit world: the Wakinyan Thunderbird, the Tatanka Great Beast, the Unktehi One Who Kills, the Taku Skanskan He Who Changes Things, Tunkan the Venerable One. All the pure nagi spirit-beings who walked the skies above a world still drowned in placental water and waiting to be born.

  This is the all-water world that Limps-a-Lot has told him of in the Oldest Stories, but Paha Sapa has never been able to imagine it before this. Now the sea stretches out on all sides below him.

  Paha Sapa realizes that the stars have been occluded by high clouds. Now there are gray clouds infinitely high above him and gray, almost waveless water infinitely far below him. He understands in his heart that the Six Grandfathers are allowing him to join them for the Birth.

  Suddenly a single shaft of light—the boy knows at once that the light comes from the Mystery, the All—breaks the ceiling of clouds above and splits the intervening sky until it touches the sea below. The waters churn. Out of the World Sea rise, dripping, the hills and black trees and sacred stone of the heart of the heart of the world—the Black Hills. The shaft of light fades, but the Black Hills remain below, a tiny dark island in a vaguely glowing endless sea. For a while as Paha Sapa watches from the safety of the Grandfather’s curled palm, the only sound is of the wind caressing the trees and grasses and wavetops so far beneath him. Paha Sapa understands that the winds he hears whispering are the hushed voices of other great Spirits existing here before the first men arrived: Tate, the Wind Essence; Yate, the North Wind; Yanpa, the East Wind; Okaga, the South Wind.

  To all these winds has Paha Sapa prayed and chanted alongside Limps-a-Lot, training as a boy to be a holy man someday, and to all these winds Paha Sapa now silently prays again. Their presence makes him want to weep.

  The sun rises. The sunlight paints dark strokes of mountain-shadows and pine-tree-shadows on the face of the Hills and throws more shadows of small hills and isolated trees on the long meadows. Then the waters around this island world recede farther, and the prairies and plains and Maku Sichu Bad Lands emerge glistening into the light. Solid land has now replaced the covering seas from horizon to horizon. The world has become mostly maka, earth, and it is ready for the four-leggeds and the two-leggeds to live on it now.

  Paha Sapa wants to ask the Six Grandfathers why they are showing him these things, but his nagi spirit-voice is too weak—or the air up here too thin—for the word-sounds to reach the Grandfathers’ ears. He can only look up and nod at the ancient, lined but friendly faces shifting slightly as towering clouds tend to shift in sacred winds.

  Paha Sapa realizes that the Six Grandfathers have given him the wanblí keen vision of the eagle. When Paha Sapa looks to the southern wooded hills of the Black Hills, he can clearly see the opening of Washu Niya, “the Breathing Cave,” that sacred place that the unseeing wasichus call “Wind Cave.” He watches now with his wanblí vision as the first buffalo emerge into the light.

  Paha Sapa laughs aloud, and that happy sound is louder than his weak nagi voice. Limps-a-Lot and Sitting Bull and the other wičasa wakan were right in their how-it-started stories! The first buffalo are tiny, hardly larger than ants, and just as numerous. But the rich, still birth-wet grasses in the Black Hills and wider great plains beyond soon allow the tiny bison to grow to full buffalo height and mass. Again, Paha Sapa laughs aloud. The Six Grandfathers are showing him aeons of time in these few minutes.

  The sun rises higher, and now even the shadows of the bison grazing in herds on the endless windswept plains north and south of the Hills leap out in bold relief.

  Paha Sapa looks south again.

  The First Men crawl blinking from the Breathing Cave, rise on
their hind legs, and immediately send up prayers to Wakan Tanka, to the Six Grandfathers, to the other spirits, and to the gift of Mystery itself, giving thanks for being led up out of the darkness into this new world so rich with game and alive with whispering, guarding, and sometimes wonderfully dangerous spirits.

  Generations and centuries pass in minutes as Paha Sapa watches his people be born, hunt, marry, wander far, fight, worship, grow old, and die. He watches them hunt animals he has never seen or heard of before—great hairy, tusked beasts—and watches as the Natural Free Human Beings receive the gift of šunkcincala, the “sacred dog” miracle of the horse. He watches as his people spread far across the plains.

  Once again Paha Sapa is able to see the Black Hills as the heart-shaped center of the endless green-and-brown prairies of the obleyaya dosho, the wideness of the world. Once again he sees the Black Hills as the entire continent’s wamakaognaka e’cantge, the heart of everything that is. More than ever before, Paha Sapa sees the Black Hills as the O’onakezin, the Place of Shelter.

  He can see the Sun Dance River to the north of the Hills, what the wasichus call the Belle Fourche, and the Cheyenne River to the south. Farther to the north he can easily see the meandering line the wasichus call the Missouri River. All of these rivers are in flood stage, but the Sun Dance River the most so.

  In the distance Paha Sapa can see Wapiye Olaye I’ha, the Plain of the Rocks that Heal, and the Hinyankagapa Black Buttes and the He Ska White Buttes and the Re Sla Bald Place and back again to the Washu Niya Breathing Cave in the southern part of the Hills and half a hundred landmarks in the Hills and out that would take him days or weeks of walking or riding to reach.

  He can see the Hogback Ridge of reddish sandstone that borders the sunken Race Track around the Hills, like a band of muscle around a pumping heart, and can easily see the broad Pte Tali Yapa “Buffalo Gap” that allows easy access both for the four-legged animals and for the Natural Free Human Beings when they go to the mountains for sanctuary. Directly beneath him is the Six Grandfathers, nearby the higher rocky summit of Evil Spirit Hill and half a hundred other gray-granite ridges and red-rock needles and spires thrusting up out of the soft black carpet of pines that covers the Hills.

  It is silent up here as the sun rises quickly again and again, far too quickly to be in the harness of regular time or motion, and the shadows grow shorter so quickly as to be amusing. Again and again the sun hurtles into the sky, arcs across the perfect blue, and sets to the prayers of the Natural Free Human Beings. But suddenly that motion slows and there comes the wind-whisper, branch-murmuring, distant-thunder careful enunciation of the soft Grandfather voice in Paha Sapa’s mind. The eleven-year-old boy suddenly feels as if he is in his and his people’s future.

  —Watch, Paha Sapa.

  Paha Sapa watches and at first sees nothing. But then he realizes that there is a stirring and shifting among and within the rocks of the sacred Six Grandfathers mountain a mile or two directly beneath him, a trembling and vibration along the rocky ridge summit where he can still make out his muddy Vision Pit and his five direction posts with their wilting red banners. Paha Sapa’s enhanced eagle-vision allows him to focus on things at will, almost as if he has one of the Wasicun cavalry officer’s telescopes he’s heard Limps-a-Lot describe, and now, as one of the Grandfathers points again, he looks more closely at the mountain from whence he came.

  Small rocks and midsized boulders are shaking loose and sliding down the steep southern face of the Six Grandfathers Mountain. Paha Sapa sees the trees on the northern slope shake and shiver in unison. There rises a soft rumble as more rocks, large and small, tumble into the deeper valley on the south side of the sacred peak, and then Paha Sapa sees the earthquake in action as the very rock seems to become liquid, shimmering, and mile after mile of forest and meadow fold and rearrange themselves like a buffalo robe or furry blanket being shaken.

  No, something is coming out of the stone.

  For a moment, Paha Sapa thinks it is something erupting from the rock itself, burrowing up out of the stone, but then he swoops his vision closer and sees that it is the granite of the mountain itself that is reshaping, re-forming, emerging.

  Four giant faces emerge from the south-facing cliff just beneath where Paha Sapa has been praying and lying for days and nights. They are wasichu faces, all male—although the first face to come out of the rock might be that of an old woman except for the bold thrust of chin. The second face to emerge from the granite cliff like a baby bird’s beak and head from a thick-shelled gray egg is of a Wasicun with long hair, an even longer chin than the old-lady Wasicun on the far left, and a far gaze. He is looking up at Paha Sapa and the real Six Grandfathers. The third Head has a sort of goat beard that some Wasicun affect, but strong features and infinitely sad eyes. The fourth and final head, set between the far-looker and the goat-bearded sad man, has a short mustache above smiling lips, and around the eyes are two circles of what might be metal and glass. Limps-a-Lot has talked, rather wistfully Paha Sapa thought, of these third and fourth eyes that some wasichus put on when their own eyes begin to wear out; he has even given the Wasicun word for them: spectacles.

  —What…

  Paha Sapa has to ask the significance of these frightening heads, no matter how puny his nagi voice sounds to his own ears.

  Paha Sapa silences himself when he feels the phantom touch of an invisible Grandfather hand on his spirit-shoulder as the mountain below continues to change.

  The four heads are free. Then, in a way strangely familiar to Paha Sapa from earlier dreams, come the shoulders and upper bodies, clad in granite hints of wasichu clothing. Now the four forms writhe and twist—Paha Sapa can almost hear the grunting from exertion and can hear the rumble of boulders falling into the valleys and the flap and cry as thousands of birds throughout the Black Hills take wing.

  The heads must be fifty or sixty feet tall. The stone bodies, when they rise from their fetal crouches, balance, and stand, must be more than three hundred feet tall—taller than the spirit Six Grandfathers in their columns of white light.

  For a moment Paha Sapa is terrified. Will these gray stone wasichu monsters continue growing until they can reach the Grandfathers and him? Will they reach up and pluck him out of the sky and devour him?

  The stone Wasicun do not continue growing and do not look up at Paha Sapa or the Grandfathers again. Their attention is on the earth and on the Black Hills all around them. The giants stand there on their massive gray stone legs, two of them are actually astride the peak of the Six Grandfathers, and Paha Sapa can see them looking around with what he interprets as the same sense of wonder held by any newborn, four-legged or human.

  But there is more than wonder in those four gazes. There is hunger.

  Again comes the wind-pine-rustle, distant-summer-thunder whisper of one—or perhaps all—of Paha Sapa’s beloved Six Grandfathers.

  —Watch.

  The four Wasichu Stone Giants are striding through the Black Hills, knocking trees down in their wake. Their footprints in the soft soil are as large as some of the Hills’ scattered small and sacred lakes. Occasionally one or more of the giants will stop, bend, and rip the top of a mountain off, throwing thousands of tons of dirt to one side or the other.

  Paha Sapa has the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to giggle, to laugh, perhaps to weep. Are these Wasichu Stone Giants then mere pispía—giant prairie dogs?

  Then he continues to watch and has no more urge to giggle.

  The four Wasichu Stone Giants are plucking animals out of the forests and meadows of the Paha Sapa: deer from the high grasses, beaver from their headwater ponds, elk from the hillsides, bighorn sheep from the boulders, porcupines from the trees, bears from their dens, coyotes and foxes and their cubs and kits from their dens, squirrels from branches, eagles and hawks from the very air….

  And everything the four Wasichu Stone Giants pluck from the forest and fields, they devour. The huge gray stone teeth chew and chew and chew
. The gray stone faces on the gray stone heads show no emotion, but the boy can feel their unsatiated hunger as they bend and pluck and lift and pop living things with their own souls into their gray mouths and chew and chew and chew.

  Paha Sapa’s whisper is real, audible, formed by his nagi lungs and throat and mouth and forced out through his spirit-teeth, but it is also ragged.

  —Grandfathers, can you stop this?

  Instead of answering, the thunder-rumble, wind-in-the-needles whisper comes back with another question.

  —“Wasichu” does not mean “White Person,” Black Hills. It means and has always meant “Fat Taker.” Do you see now why we gave your ancestors this word for the Wasicun?

  —Yes, Grandfathers.

  Paha Sapa did not know and never would have guessed that his spirit-body could feel sick to its stomach, but it does. He leans over the curling fingers of his protective Grandfather’s hand and watches.

  The four Wasichu Stone Giants are striding out of the Black Hills now, each moving in one of the four primary compass directions as if guided by Paha Sapa’s poor little direction posts at his Vision Pit site. At first the boy cannot believe what he is seeing, but he uses his new eagle-vision to look carefully and his eyes are not deceiving him.

  The Wasichu Stone Giants are killing buffalo and other plains animals now, using their giant stone heels on their wasichu stone shoes to squash the bison or antelope or elk before lifting the mangled carcass to their stone mouths three hundred feet above the green-and-brown-grass prairie. Somehow time has accelerated and the sun sets, the stars whirl above the Six Grandfathers and the crouching Paha Sapa, the sun rises again—a thousand times, tens of thousands of times—but the four Wasichu Stone Giants, roaming the plains to the horizon and beyond but always returning, continue to smash with their heels, to pluck and to lift, and to chew. And chew. And chew.

  Then Paha Sapa sees something that makes him scream into the high, thin, cold air of the sky where he and the Six Grandfathers float as insubstantially and as impotently as clouds.