Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  —Thinking of running, Bilé?

  Paha Sapa has not thought of running and now he wonders why. As if reading his aching mind, the old Crow laughs and says something in guttural Absaroke to the other three Crow scouts. They laugh. Curly spits and speaks again in his effeminate almost-Lakota.

  —It looks like General Crook and about a hundred and fifty cavalry from their main attachment did all this and finished their business with this village just a little ways beyond—there are more Sioux women’s and children’s bodies in the ravine just over that rise—and then the whole Fifth Infantry column arrived and bivouacked on a rise about a mile from here… oh… I’d say about three days ago, based on the state of the shit. But then the tracks show that about five hundred warriors arrived in a hurry from the south, your Sioux and Cheyenne both, most likely, based on the few corpses we found—the whole bunch almost certainly led by that bastard Crazy Horse—and while Crook’s cavalry must have outnumbered the hostiles at least four to one, that crazy bastard Crazy Horse attacked… the signs are clear on that… and then fell back to repel Crook’s counterattack. It looks like the tracks of the running fight continue on down the ridge for a couple of miles. Captain Shit-for-Brains here is pressing on to close up with Crook’s main column, but we’re sure that Crazy Horse is still out there somewhere, ready to pounce. Here, you may need this, Bilé.

  The old Crow tosses Paha Sapa a long-barreled Colt revolver. The thing is heavier than Paha Sapa could have imagined, and just catching it makes his head and arm throb worse and almost pulls him off the scabbed horse. He straightens.

  Curly is saying—

  —I don’t think Crook’s people have any supplies left and they didn’t have time to hunt before Crazy Horse’s bucks attacked, so even if we catch up to them they won’t have any food either and we… what the fuck are you doing, Bilé?

  Paha Sapa is lifting the heavy revolver, holding it steady in both hands. He aims it at Curly’s fat, smug Crow face and pulls the heavy trigger three times.

  The gun does not fire.

  All four of the Crow scouts laugh until they’re ready to fall off their muddy ponies.

  Curly digs in his vest and brings out his fist, opens it. Half a dozen cartridges gleam ever so slightly in the dying gray light. Rain beads on brass.

  —When you prove yourself, Bilé—or when Crazy Horse has us surrounded and we decide to shoot ourselves rather than become his captives—then you can have these.

  The four Crows surround him, their Winchester rifles cocked on their hips or thighs, bandoliers across their scarred chests, pistols in their broad belts, and Paha Sapa’s slow horse labors and wheezes to keep up as they follow the main column southwest out of the valley and along the hoof-trampled ridge.

  THEY MEET UP WITH GENERAL CROOK and many hundreds of other men (Curly tells Paha Sapa that there are two thousand men in the main body), and do what they call “bivouacking”—since the wasichus are afraid to set up a real camp because of the presence of Crazy Horse and his warriors—which means hunkering down in the pouring rain with nothing but mud underneath them and their ponchos or rain gear over their heads, eating what little hardtack they have left (Curly gives Paha Sapa two bites), and trying to sleep while every fourth man takes turns holding the horses.

  Paha Sapa now understands the word infantry, which Curly has used several times, not even attempting to put it into the Lakota language. Most of Crook’s men are foot soldiers. No wonder, he thinks, they were so willing to eat horses.

  Eventually the grumbling and idle chatter and cursing and farting die down until there is only the sound of the heavy rain on two thousand and more slickers, the nicker of horses spooked by the wasichus’ stink of fear, and then the snoring. Curly and his three Crow scouts fall asleep quickly, lying in the mud with their heads on wads of wet wool—their horses still saddled and held by one of the wasichu troopers ordered to hold the reins through the darkness and downpour. But although Paha Sapa is more tired than he’s ever been in his life, he does not even try to sleep.

  He has to think.

  Curly continued babbling at him right up to the second he started snoring loudly. Paha Sapa’s head aches almost as much from the new information he’s received in the past ten hours as from the rifle stock blow to his skull.

  It seems that there are different tribes of wasichus. For some reason, young Paha Sapa, in his eleven summers, has never considered such a thing, and none of the wise men in his life, including Limps-a-Lot, has ever mentioned it. But, through Curly’s effeminate gabbling, Paha Sapa knows it now and he thinks about this as he looks around on the hilltop at the hundreds upon hundreds of lumpish figures huddled under tarps and soaked blankets in the continuing rain.

  Different tribes and different languages, according to Curly, although the tribe that speaks what Paha Sapa hears as “the In Glass language” seem to be in control, the way Sitting Bull and the Lakota were over the Cheyenne at the Greasy Grass. But there are also Fat Takers here in blue coats who come from tribes named (and who speak and think in) Ire Itch, Jure Man, Dutch, Pole Acky, Sweee ’D, Eye Talyun, and even a tribe called Niggers.

  Paha Sapa saw these men from the Niggers tribe when the detachment joined up with General Crook’s main body this evening, and when he saw the soldiers with brown and even black skin, with their nappy hair, he was reminded of the black-Wasicun scout named Teat whom Sitting Bull called friend. And he remembers that despite Sitting Bull’s claim of protection for the wounded and slowly dying Teat at the Greasy Grass, back in the Moon of Ripening Cherries only two moons ago, the Hunkpapa woman called Eagle Robe shot and killed the black white man.

  But Teat was respected in Lakota villages and, Paha Sapa presumes, as a scout for Long Hair and the Fat Takers. This makes it doubly hard to understand why he just saw some of the other wasichu cavalry and walking soldiers here berating and insulting the few buffalo soldiers he saw here from the tribe of Nigger. Certainly anyone with such black skin and hair that so very much resembles the kinky, tightly curled hair of the sacred tatanka buffalo bull itself must be considered wakan, holy, even by these Fat Taker savages. Do they not see the strange as part of Mystery and therefore sacred? Are the Fat Takers so ignorant of the universe that they don’t see blackness itself—sapa—as a harbinger of holiness, as in the paha sapa to their south as they huddle here in the night rain?

  Paha Sapa’s head hurts.

  But he does not allow sleep to come. Rather, he lets down some of the barriers he’s kept up for two weeks now in his attempt to keep the flood wash of Tashunke-Witke’s life memories separate from his own few years of memories.

  Crazy Horse’s violent thoughts, emotions, and memories threatened to overwhelm the boy and threaten to do so now. But he needs to look there. And something about the injury to his head and arm—or perhaps something left over from the terrible Vision he has had of the wasichu Stone Heads and Giants emerging from the Black Hills—has made it easier for him to sort through the mass and mess and morass of Tashunke-Witke’s life thoughts, back to his youngest years, forward less than a year now, to five September, the Moon of the Brown Leaves, next year, when Crazy Horse will be killed while trying to surrender to this same General Crook at the Red Cloud Agency.

  Somehow, Paha Sapa thinks, somewhere in this flood wash of dark thoughts and hatred and triumphs that made up the confused thoughts and future-memories of Crazy Horse at the time the war chief touched him, somewhere there is an answer to Paha Sapa’s current dilemma.

  Allowing Crazy Horse’s memories to wash over him like this, even as the pounding rain does in the night, is painful. Paha Sapa leans against the wagon wheel he propped himself up against and vomits up the little bit of hardtack that Curly gave him. Now his belly is so empty, Paha Sapa thinks, that he can feel his belly button scraping against his spine.

  First there are all the faces and names to glance at and thrust aside, the way a man elbows his way through a crowd: other akicita leaders like Little Big Man
and Kicking Bear and He Dog. His father, called Worm now—Paha Sapa thinks of Limps-a-Lot’s solid horse, dead from the Crows’ arrows and bullets, another failure of his—and leaders Crazy Horse knew, only some of whom the boy knows, such as Man Afraid of His Horse and Red Cloud himself and Red Dog and Lone Bear and High Backbone.

  That last name triggers other names associated with loss in Crazy Horse’s jumbled memory—Rattle Blanket Woman and Lone Bear and Young Little Hawk and, above all others, They Are Afraid of Her.

  Paha Sapa weeps silently, his tears mixing with and being swept away by the rain, but the weeping is not for his own loss, not for the terrible Vision or for the certain death of Three Buffalo Woman and Raven and Loud Voice Hawk and Angry Badger and the other corpses flood wash of Tashunke-Witke’s life memories separate from his own few years of memories.

  Crazy Horse’s violent thoughts, emotions, and memories threatened to overwhelm the boy and threaten to do so now. But he needs to look there. And something about the injury to his head and arm—or perhaps something left over from the terrible Vision he has had of the wasichu Stone Heads and Giants emerging from the Black Hills—has made it easier for him to sort through the mass and mess and morass of Tashunke-Witke’s life thoughts, back to his youngest years, forward less than a year now, to five September, the Moon of the Brown Leaves, next year, when Crazy Horse will be killed while trying to surrender to this same General Crook at the Red Cloud Agency.

  Somehow, Paha Sapa thinks, somewhere in this flood wash of dark thoughts and hatred and triumphs that made up the confused thoughts and future-memories of Crazy Horse at the time the war chief touched him, somewhere there is an answer to Paha Sapa’s current dilemma.

  Allowing Crazy Horse’s memories to wash over him like this, even as the pounding rain does in the night, is painful. Paha Sapa leans against the wagon wheel he propped himself up against and vomits up the little bit of hardtack that Curly gave him. Now his belly is so empty, Paha Sapa thinks, that he can feel his belly button scraping against his spine.

  First there are all the faces and names to glance at and thrust aside, the way a man elbows his way through a crowd: other akicita leaders like Little Big Man and Kicking Bear and He Dog. His father, called Worm now—Paha Sapa thinks of Limps-a-Lot’s solid horse, dead from the Crows’ arrows and bullets, another failure of his—and leaders Crazy Horse knew, only some of whom the boy knows, such as Man Afraid of His Horse and Red Cloud himself and Red Dog and Lone Bear and High Backbone.

  That last name triggers other names associated with loss in Crazy Horse’s jumbled memory—Rattle Blanket Woman and Lone Bear and Young Little Hawk and, above all others, They Are Afraid of Her.

  Paha Sapa weeps silently, his tears mixing with and being swept away by the rain, but the weeping is not for his own loss, not for the terrible Vision or for the certain death of Three Buffalo Woman and Raven and Loud Voice Hawk and Angry Badger and the other corpses he has identified this day, or for the almost-certain loss of his beloved tunkašila, Limps-a-Lot, but for all those like They Are Afraid of Her whom Crazy Horse has lost to death.

  Paha Sapa sees, not for the first time, that it is hard being a man.

  Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid his mind of memories of rape and lust, of grown-man fury and of knife blades opening up bellies and cutting throats. He does not linger on Crazy Horse’s smug memories of himself counting coup or riding, arms out, across firing lines of wasichu cavalry and infantry.

  But it is in the battles that Paha Sapa now searches Tashunke-Witke’s great grab heap of emotion-charged memories.

  Paha Sapa searches for his own death in the coming hours and days, for Crazy Horse’s memory of killing the boy who angered him so back in the village just weeks before. Not finding that, he searches Crazy Horse’s memory of fighting the Fat Takers—so many fights, so much screaming of Hokahey! and of leading other warriors toward firing rifles and bluecoats—until he finally finds some memories of Crazy Horse and his men ambushing cavalry in the hills that must be east and a little north of here, of blue-coated wasichus falling that may well be Crook’s cavalry…. One of the dead and falling bluecoats in Crazy Horse’s memory may well be Paha Sapa himself.

  In the morning, they rise before the gray dawn—everyone coughing and cold and cursing and shaking soaked blankets or ponchos and tarps—and while some brew up coffee and some troopers still have a few biscuits, Curly and the three Crow scouts merely chew on more cold hardtack. They offer none to Paha Sapa, and the boy realizes that they are going to starve him to death.

  He feels the clumsy weight of the Colt revolver in his belt and prays to the Six Grandfathers for cartridges… but he knows in his heart that the Grandfathers are no longer listening to him. Perhaps they have deafened themselves to the prayers of all the Natural Free Human Beings.

  —Curly, I know exactly where Crazy Horse and his men are.

  The ugly old Crow repeats this to the other three scouts in his ugly Crow language, and all four men laugh. Curly spits into the mud. He is drying off his rifle with a long red cloth he has somehow managed to keep dry through the liquid night.

  —You talk shit at us, Bilé… O boy made of mud and water.

  —I don’t. I know just where Crazy Horse is hiding with his four hundred men. It is less than three hours’ ride on horseback from here.

  The old Crow does not translate this to his fellows but just stares at Paha Sapa with those black, bulging dead-man’s eyes of his.

  —How could you know?

  —I’ve seen him there. I’ve been with him there. Everyone in our band knows that this is the-place-where-Tashunke-Witke-kills-his-enemies-from-ambush. Crow, Pawnee, Shoshoni, Paiute, Cheyenne, Blackfoot… even wasichu when they are stupid enough to follow him there. And you… General Crook… almost has followed him that far.

  —Tell me, Bilé, and I’ll have Three Weevils or Cuts Noses Off Frequently give you one of the biscuits they’ve been hoarding.

  Paha Sapa shakes his head. The motion almost makes him vomit or swoon. His skull still aches and his stomach is too empty. But he can speak.

  —No. I know exactly where Crazy Horse is this morning. Exactly where he waits for Crook and the rest of you. Crazy Horse and his most important warrior-leaders—He Dog, Brave Wolf, Wears the Deer Bonnet, even Kicking Bear. But I will not tell you. I will tell Crook, through you.

  Curly squints at him for a long, long moment. It is still raining. The old Crow’s long braided hair is so soaked through that globs of bear grease stand out like yellow curds in it.

  Finally Curly throws himself up onto his horse, pulls the reins of Paha Sapa’s slow old horse from Drinks from a Hoofprint, and growls in his girly-language:

  —Get on the horse. Follow me. If you say the wrong thing to the general or if you are wrong about where Crazy Horse is hiding, I’ll cut your throat, scalp you, and cut your balls off myself. All while you watch, Water Boy.

  PAHA SAPA has never paid much attention to individual wasichus; except for the black ones, they all sort of blur together in his vision and memory. In truth, the majority of Wasicun he has seen have been dead.

  But General George Crook—he learns the full name only much later, as well as the nickname the Apaches had for him, Gray Fox—is somewhat more memorable than the corpses. The wasichu war chief has taken off his broad-brimmed hat to wring it out as lesser men prepare his mount for the day’s riding, and Paha Sapa sees a tall man with short hair that’s grown erratically into clumps on the narrow head. His face has been deeply tanned in his months in the sun pursuing Paha Sapa’s people, but the forehead is startlingly white. Beneath the jug ears begin side-whiskers that soon leap off the man’s face and down onto his shoulders, crawling almost to his chest. The general doesn’t have a real beard, just those wild side-whiskers that have spilled down onto his neck and crept back to meet under that weak excuse for a chin. Crook’s mustache is just an afterthought, a meek little bridge between two great statements of untended hair.

>   Crook’s tiny eyes squint at his Crow scout as Curly, shuffling in abasement and apparent embarrassment, conveys Paha Sapa’s statement that he knows where Crazy Horse is hiding this very minute.

  The watery little eyes fix on Paha Sapa for a moment, and the Wasicun says something to Curly.

  The Crow’s Lakota is worse than ever as he mumbles to Paha Sapa.

  —The general wants to know what you want. Why you would tell him this. What do you want in exchange?

  Paha Sapa is so exhausted and starved that he looks at the Wasicun without fear. Just a few days ago—an eternity ago—he, Paha Sapa, stood in the hands of one of the Six Grandfathers and spoke to them. How can he fear a mere Wasicun general?

  He tells the truth.

  —I don’t want anything. I just want to let you know where Crazy Horse is waiting for you.

  Well, it is almost the truth. Paha Sapa does want something for himself—he wants to die.

  He’s thought about the ways. Limps-a-Lot instilled a great revulsion in the boy for the very idea of taking one’s own life. Of course, Paha Sapa could just try to flee on his slow horse and Curly or one of the other Crows or perhaps a wasichu trooper would do him the service of shooting him dead. But this does not appeal to Paha Sapa. Not after the Vision of the Great Stone Heads.

  Paha Sapa knows that he will die if he can escape and present himself to Crazy Horse somewhere about ten miles to the northeast—from the fragments of Tashunke-Witke’s future memories, Paha Sapa is almost certain where the heyoka war chief and his warriors are waiting—but Paha Sapa does not want to die alone that way either.

  But, if he tells this Crook the truth about where Crazy Horse is waiting, just beyond the citadel place where Lakota war parties looking for Crows so often camp, ten miles or so from here, Paha Sapa has no doubt that this General Crook and his two thousand men will attack Crazy Horse and his four hundred warriors. After all, isn’t this the reason Crook and all these men have marched and ridden more than four hundred miles through summer heat and this odd, endless summer rain—to find and punish and kill Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Cheyenne who killed Custer?