Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  —Oh, Paha Sapa. Oh, dear.

  —It’s time to go, Rain. We don’t want to be late meeting your father.

  PAHA SAPA AND RAIN are five minutes early at the steps outside the Administration Building facing the Columbian Fountain set in the broad waters of the basin. Her father arrives twelve minutes late.

  Miss de Plachette has said nothing since his story about Sitting Bull’s death. But she looks even paler than she did earlier. He assumes that she has been put off by his story—all the sordid details, from Buffalo Bill Cody showing up drunk to betray his old friend to the very real violence threatened by the Ghost Dance and its Prophet. He knows he will always love her for… if nothing else… that moment of standing higher than anyone else at the top of the Ferris Wheel, looking as if she were preparing to fly the way his spirit-self had flown more than once in his life. No, not just for that. Perhaps not for that at all. Just because he does love her and knows he always will.

  But she is, after all, a twenty-year-old wasichu girl, wise, perhaps, to the ballrooms and churches and embassies of Washington and Paris and the world, but having a four-year-old child’s understanding of the West and of her mother and of Paha Sapa’s world, where great warriors like Crazy Horse and rare wičasa wakan like Sitting Bull are cut down by little men no longer Natural Free Human Beings, little men neither natural nor free, little men on wasichu payrolls who wear oversized, flea-infested, cast-off cavalry blue coats and who kill the best of their own kind on Wasicun command.

  No, she will never understand Paha Sapa’s world. Even if she learned the language of the Lakota, he knows then, it would be as alien and adopted to her as French or German or Italian. More so, he realizes, since she has spent time as an adult or near-adult in those places, and remembers Nebraska and the West only in a distorted child’s blur of half memory.

  And he will not see her again, he knows. He is certain of this. As certain as if he had allowed another small-vision-forward-touching to occur. Miss Rain de Plachette may or may not move to the Pine Ridge Reservation with her father this coming September, but she and Paha Sapa will not meet again. Not after the terror and distaste and—alienation, he thinks, is the word in English—the wacetug la and wo he saw in her hazel eyes as he spoke.

  It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. Like so much else he’s seen and experienced and survived since the Vision of the Stone Heads emerging from the Paha Sapa and the wasichu Stone Giants rising to finish the job that is all but finished on the Plains and in the Hills, this is just one more thing that does not matter.

  Reverend Henry de Plachette arrives in a huffing hurry, accompanied by three men wearing very formal tails and top hats. There are introductions, but Paha Sapa does not hear or remember the names. None of the three men extends a hand to shake—they clearly see that he is Indian, despite, or perhaps because of, his ill-fitting suit and overly polished shoes.

  But the Reverend de Plachette is extending his hand there at the head of the stairway to the dark waters of the basin. He is saying something.

  —… so much for escorting my daughter to our little rendezvous here, Mr. Slow Horse. It is much appreciated. I know that Rain enjoyed the diversion and I appreciate your gentlemanly offer to escort the young lady.

  Paha Sapa grips the old man’s hand.

  The world swirls, the Great Basin becomes a huge mural, a fresco, larger than the Mary Cassatt mural in the Women’s Building, as the water becomes a vertical wall and the images and sounds and feelings rush in.

  And then everything is black.

  HE REGAINS CONSCIOUSNESS lying on the topmost step. One of the well-dressed men has dipped a silk handkerchief into the basin and is applying the wet cloth to Paha Sapa’s forehead. His head is on Miss de Plachette’s lap, and she is cradling him in her arms. His head is on her lap.

  Paha Sapa realizes that tears are flowing down his face. He has been weeping while he was unconscious. He shakes his head.

  —Too much sun…

  one man is saying.

  —Perhaps the vertiginous effects of that infernal Wheel…

  another man is saying.

  —A problem with the heart, perhaps.

  This last is the Reverend Henry de Plachette, who has taken over the mopping with the wet silk handkerchief. A small crowd has gathered, and uniformed Exposition personnel are running toward them from the direction of Machinery Hall.

  Paha Sapa blinks away the tears and looks up at Rain’s face above him.

  The images were few, fast, and terrible.

  The prairie. Wind blowing. A winter morning.

  The cemetery atop the small rise. There was one tree.

  The grave with the plain pine coffin just lowered into it.

  The Reverend de Plachette there, unable to conduct the funeral service. Surrendered to weeping.

  And Paha Sapa there—seen through the old man’s rheumy, tear-filled eyes—Paha Sapa looking older but not older enough. Paha Sapa taking the baby from the Mexican woman, a servant of the minister’s. Paha Sapa holding the baby as he looks down at the first clods of dirt falling on the coffin of his young wife, Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse.

  The image, from the Reverend’s point of view, the Reverend who is also ill and who would give all he has ever had or believed in to take his daughter’s place in that grave, the image of his Indian son-in-law, Billy Slow Horse, holding the distraught Reverend’s dead daughter’s only child—the baby who may have helped kill her in her weakened condition—the boy.

  The boy named Robert.

  Paha Sapa lies there on the top step of the staircase leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain, too staggered to try to gain his feet again no matter how embarrassed he may feel at lying there with his head on this young lady’s lap with the crowd gathering around.

  Her hand is stroking his forehead now. Her bare hand. She has taken her glove off. Her bare hand.

  Paha Sapa receives no vision from the contact, but he receives a terrible twin certainty: she loves him already and will do everything she must do so that they will be together; there is no escaping their fate-entwined destiny.

  For the first, last, and only time in his life, Paha Sapa, inexplicably, ineluctably, gasps out three words that cause everyone except Rain to freeze in place.

  —Oh, dear Jesus.

  18

  Near Twin Buttes

  September 1876

  PAHA SAPA IS RIDING IN THE RAIN. THE HORSE BENEATH HIM IS old, scabbed, and slow. And it is wearing a saddle. Paha Sapa has never ridden in a saddle before and it hurts his ass.

  The hard rain keeps wiping the blood off his face, but the blood keeps returning. He does not even bother to blink it out of his eyes.

  His eye. One eye is swollen shut or destroyed forever. He does not care which. The other eye sees only the blur of the fifty or sixty other men ahead of him and around him. He does not care that they are there. They are wasichu cavalry. He is dimly aware that he is their prisoner, to do with as they wish: torture, slow murder, whatever they want. He does not care.

  Paha Sapa has been slipping in and out of consciousness for most of this long, wet day. He knows that he’s riding with these dark forms and he knows that his head hurts more than any pain he has ever imagined. But he also knows that the Crow—the old man named Curly—did not strike him with the rifle butt in anything meant as a killing blow. After hours of half listening to Curly, who rides nearby and continues talking in his terrible, patchy language of the Lakota—the old man uses many words from the women’s language, which makes him sound like a boy-who-decides-to-dress-and-act-like-a-woman winkte. Normally this would be terrifically amusing to Paha Sapa, but today nothing amuses him.

  He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead. In a real sense, he is dead.

  He has lost Limps-a-Lot’s and his band’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that was the most important and wakan object the band ever had. Oh, why had Limps-a-Lot entrusted the pipe
to him, to Paha Sapa, to a miserable boy with no more sense or brains than not to look over his shoulder when traveling alone on the plains with the greatest treasure it was possible to carry?

  Two great treasures, he realizes through the pain and rain. The Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, lost forever now to the swollen river, and the details of his Vision, granted by the Six Grandfathers. Limps-a-Lot and the other elders and chiefs and holy men will never listen to his Vision now, even if he were somehow to escape the wasichu cavalry. By losing the pipe, Paha Sapa has lost all credibility forever. He is sure of that. Wakan Tanka and the Six Grandfathers and all the spirits and Thunder Beings would never grant a man or boy such a Vision and then steal the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa from him. Such a loss is a statement by all the gods and powers and the All himself that Paha Sapa is not to be trusted as their servant and messenger.

  His head hurts in unimaginable ways. He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead soon. He welcomes it.

  Each time Paha Sapa blurs out of his semiconscious, unhearing state, wobbling in the accursed leather wedge of a saddle, the old Crow, Curly, is talking at him. This old man keeps telling him how he, Curly, saved Paha Sapa’s life by knocking him down before the Fat Takers’ bluecoats shot him just out of meanness and misery—they have been lost and separated from their main detachment for four days now, terrified because Crazy Horse is said to be on the warpath nearby—and how he, Curly, the scout, told the wasichus that the almost-naked boy who had startled all of them by crawling up out of the mud and river was a Crow boy, probably a good scout but a little stupid, a little deaf and dumb and retarded, but it was worth keeping him alive anyway and giving the slowest horse, the one that had belonged to Corporal Dunbar before he was killed, to little Billy.

  Billy?

  Curly… When did he tell Paha Sapa his name? He cannot remember. Curly told the wasichu bluecoats that the near-naked and mud-covered boy’s name was Bilé, which evidently is Crow for “water.” The soldiers laughed, called Paha Sapa Billy, and gave him the dead corporal’s old, scabbed, slow horse.

  Paha Sapa, when he is conscious enough to form a thought, just wishes the stupid old man psaloka kagi wicasa Absaroka sonofabitch would just shut the fuck up. The words hurt Paha Sapa’s head, which already feels as if he is spilling out his brains. Sometime later in that rainy, gray, miserable day, he realizes that he has been shot by the other Crows, the wild Crows, and there is a filthy bandage wrapped around his upper arm. The bullet wound throbs. His head is going to kill him.

  He has lost the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  Curly. Paha Sapa remembers through his gloom and pain and blurred one-eyed vision and through memories not his own that Tashunke-Witke, Crazy Horse, had been called Curly Hair and then just Curly when he was young, before his father, Crazy Horse, gave his own name to his son.

  But this garrulous old psaloka Crow looks nothing like the Crazy Horse Paha Sapa has seen several times this summer. The Lakota Crazy Horse–Curly is blade-nosed, scarred, thin-faced…. This old Crow’s face is pocked with smallpox scars but otherwise unscarred by battle and is as round as the moon.

  But he won’t shut up with his continuous babble of bad Lakota mixed with lisping girl-man vocabulary. Maybe, Paha Sapa thinks through his pain, this old Crow is the kind of winkte who likes to fuck boys. Instinctively, reflexively, Paha Sapa gropes for the long knife at his belt.

  It is gone. As is his belt. His breechclout is now held up by a piece of rope given to Curly by one of the soldiers. Paha Sapa’s feet are bare in the idiot stirrups.

  If this Curly tries to fuck him, Paha Sapa decides, he will gouge out the old army scout’s eyes with his thumbs and chew off his ears. But, his bruised and mourning mind insists, somehow speaking in the wasichu babble voice of the ghost he swallowed less than two months earlier, what if all the wasichu cavalry try to fuck him at once?

  Paha Sapa once heard from Limps-a-Lot that Tatonka Iyotake Sitting Bull had said that it is possible for a real wičasa wakan to will himself to die… to will his own heart to stop.

  Paha Sapa concentrates on that now, through his pain and absurd saddle-bouncing, but fails. Of course he cannot do it. He is not wičasa wakan and now never will be.

  He is nothing at all.

  Not even a captured warrior. Just a boy who has lost his tribe’s Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa and who should be dead but has failed even at that simple act.

  Curly keeps talking all through the long, raining, bouncing, ass-sore, head-exploding, arm-aching, endless afternoon.

  This detachment of wasichu cavalry was part of General Crook’s force of combined infantry and Fifth, Second, and Third Cavalry troopers that had broken off from General Terry’s column to head east to cut off the Sioux and Cheyenne who had scattered after Custer’s death on the Greasy Grass. Crook, champing at the bit (as Curly put it), had left his supply wagons behind weeks ago, taking along a mob of Shoshone scouts and a handful of Crow scouts such as Curly and his friends Three Weevils, Drinks from a Hoofprint, and Cuts Noses Off Frequently. Paha Sapa heard that a famous wasichu, a certain Buffalo Bill Cody, had returned from his Wild West Show back east to lead Crook’s column, but he wasn’t with this bunch.

  The column was soon starving, unable to live off the land. They’d eaten all their packhorses, then shot and eaten many of their extra riding horses, and left hundreds of others behind. All a treasure to Crazy Horse and the other “hostiles” who are evidently trailing the cavalry that is supposed to be chasing them. Through his headache, Paha Sapa slowly understands why those Crow were on the warpath after him. The Great Plains north and east of the Black Hills have turned into an everyone-kills-everyone zone.

  Five days earlier, when this full force tried to plod across the hills of mud that had been the Badlands, Crook sent this detachment of sixty-some men swinging south and east with the orders to scout for hostile braves and then meet up with Crook’s main column near the headwaters of the south fork of Grand River… near two landmarks called Slim Buttes. This detachment, as hungry as the main column despite their swing south and east to the Black Hills and Bear Butte area where game was always plentiful, is at least three days late for that rendezvous.

  Despite the pain, Paha Sapa is beginning to focus on the situation when the bouncing, wet-wool-reeking wasichus reach Slim Buttes, his own destination, late that afternoon.

  The Crow scouts are sent in ahead, and Curly gestures angrily for “Bilé” on his slow horse to keep up. Paha Sapa is eager to get there and he kicks the lazy nag as hard as he can with his bare heels.

  The four Crows and one Lakota boy ride into the familiar valley beneath the low, wooded hills, and Paha Sapa sees at once that there has been a battle. No… not a battle… a massacre.

  Most of the tipis have been burned, but the few still standing show long knife slits where women, old men, children, and even terrified warriors cut their way out of the backs of the lodges in their panic. The entire valley stinks of ashes and human and horse shit, but much worse than that smell is the overwhelming stink of death.

  The four Crow ride on. Paha Sapa slides off his horse at the first sign of familiar tipis and faces.

  The only thing that gives him hope is that the few intact tipis here—or shreds of tipis—sport designs that look more like old Iron Plume’s tiyospaye rather than Angry Badger’s village. Many of the bodies here are burnt—looking too small ever to have been human beings of any age or size—but some are mutilated but otherwise intact, bloated and blackened by at least three days of late-summer sunlight and heat. Insects cover them. Animals and dogs—perhaps the dogs of this very tiyospaye—have been busy at them.

  But some are still identifiable.

  Paha Sapa sees Angry Badger himself, the little fat warrior’s corpse bloated to three times its normal size, lying on his back near the stream. His arms are raised as if in preparation to box. Paha Sapa somehow knows the gesture is only from a tightening of the muscles and tendons so visible where the dogs and coyotes and b
uzzards have been feasting. The bones of both forearms gleam white in the rainy gloom.

  Farther on, where Limps-a-Lot usually set his lodge, Paha Sapa finds the blackened and knife-carved corpse of Three Buffalo Woman. There is no doubt it is her, even though the wasichus cut off her large breasts. While most of her kind face is gone, he can still see the unhealed scars on her forearms and thighs where she cut strips of her own flesh to place in his wasmuha rattle for Paha Sapa’s hanblečeya only days ago.

  Centuries ago.

  Thirty feet away is another woman’s corpse with one leg and both arms missing, carried away, and the swollen, putrid face chewed off to the skull, eyes long taken, but her black hair, although pounded into the mud by the constant heavy rain, is still intact. It is Raven. Limps-a-Lot’s younger wife. Where Raven’s arms would have been is what is left of what was once an infant. Not hers, Paha Sapa knows. Possibly Loud Voice Hawk’s new baby by the selfish old wičasa wakan’s youngest wife, Still Sleeps. Paha Sapa can imagine Raven taking the child and attempting to save it, even during the madness of a full cavalry charge.

  A few paces farther on, closer to the cottonwood trees, he finds an unburned corpse, facedown, face gone, whose bloated but somehow still-withered arms show the faded tattoos that Loud Voice Hawk was so proud of.

  It looks as if everyone was killed here as Crook’s cavalry charged through, burning and shooting and chasing down warriors and women and children alike. The entire valley is churned up with the hoofprints of hundreds of cavalry horses and hundreds of ponies.

  Beyond this point, all the tipis have been burned, all the bodies reduced to blackened bird bones and charred flake-flesh. One of them might be, must be, Limps-a-Lot. He would not flee and leave his wives behind. Or his friends.

  The four Crow scouts come back as Paha Sapa is attempting to mount the hard-leather-saddled horse they gave him. Curly is holding a repeating rifle, stock against his thigh as he reins up. His pony is mud splattered from hoof to hindquarters. Even the oversized pony’s mane is matted and clotted with mud. Beyond him, the full detachment of cavalry has filled the valley and moved on along the ridge to the southeast.