Pentacle - A Self Collection

by Tom Piccirilli

  Where's Isaac?

  In a kiva. With Bear.

  I bought a sandwich and a warm soda at the trading post and ate quickly, irate over the fact that beer was illegal to sell on the reservation. A group of men sat across the road on a porch made of welded car hoods, talking and smoking those long acrid cigarettes I couldn't remember the name of. I walked up and the instant I got to within listening distance of their conversation one man said, "This isn't much of a place for tourists until the Snake Dances."

  "I'm looking for Isaac Spear-in-the-Heart."

  Again that same mix of emotions in the faces around me; his mother had been Hopi and his father Navajo, which was perhaps only twice as bad as a black man marrying a white woman in Georgia. They'd both died in Vietnam, a nurse and a soldier, further underscoring the duality of his life: war and healing. He was alternately—or simultaneously—considered a savior and a jonah, a shaman and a malefactor, yet remained a vastly respected pariah among both his peoples. They seemed to never let him forget it, even when he was saving their lives with his medicines and magic.

  They waited to see who would speak to me first; as it turned out no one did. Finally, one old man pointed towards the center of the village's dirt plaza. I could just make out the feathers on the ladder jutting from the kiva. I said, "Thank you." Without a word or gesture, they dismissed me.

  A kiva is basically a hole in the ground—a pole ladder sticks up from the entry hole to an underground temple chamber where priests and men of the snake society conducted ceremonies. I walked over and climbed down the ladder, past the juniper branches that blocked the hole.

  Down in the dirt, he sat surrounded by the unraveled shadows of his gods.

  Isaac Spear-in-the-Heart looked carved from the shale of the Black Mesa, his features handsome, dark, and deferential, neck muscles corded and heavily veined. His sleek black hair flowed over his shoulders and halfway down his back, with several beaded braids framing his face. He paid no attention to me, chewing on datura buttons and staring down the sipapuni, a small hole covered with a board, upon which the Holy People deities would knock to be let into the world. He held a prayer stick in one hand and a paho in the other, the eagle and turkey prayer feathers binding the male and female sticks. His shaman's bag was belted to his side.

  Two of his spirit guides, Big Fly and Corn Beetle, looked up and—I think—smiled at my entrance, their chitinous insectoid faces ugly yet trustworthy in their sincerity. They were infinitely ancient yet almost like children, somewhat naïve in earthly matters though serving as intermediaries between mankind and the Holy People. Their wings vibrated, spindly legs unfurling. To Isaac's left squatted his power animal, Bear, totem of his tribe, who licked his claws and growled a greeting. He still wore the scars of the evil sorcerer Redclay Fang's final assault on the Navajos; the flat part of his massive head was thatched with black welts, fur razed, and half an ear chewed off.

  Self jumped down and shook hands with the three of them, giving the standard Navajo greeting Yaah' eh t'eeh before going into a whining/ squeaking/grousing strange language I'd never heard him speak before. I sat beside Isaac and waited.

  Two hours later he still hadn't come around. By then Big Fly and Corn Beetle had faded back to Fourth World, the Holy people obviously unwilling to speak. Self reclined against Bear and made himself comfortable, the two of them buzzing. I asked, You learn anything interesting yet? but he ignored me.

  Another hour passed before Isaac finally grew cognizant of my presence. At first he thought I was his grandfather, then his father, and a host of other dead family members, cursing and begging forgiveness, and revealing secrets I'd never let him know he'd told me.

  Finally he recognized me. Even in his apparently weakened state, when he took me by the shoulders I could still feel the strength and power coursing through him. Isaac could break my arms without really trying, and I wondered if my face, too, held those many mixed emotions. "You came."

  "You called."

  He grunted and smiled sadly. "I called all right. I called everyone. Upon gods and devils of four worlds, the Holy People and yei, the chindi spirits of my ancestors." He slapped a hand around Bear's neck and petted him. "No one else answered."

  Self looked at me, brows furrowed in outrage. I told you we'd be alone!

  So you told me.

  Standing and stretching, his muscles like finely oiled machinery, Isaac Spear-in-the-Heart glanced up through the entry hole at the setting sun. "They won't let me help," he said. "The Hopi priests are interfering with my prayers. They won't aid me. They respect power, but, to them, I am Navajo. Medicine men are always suspected of sorcery, who might sicken the innocent in order to raise their healing fees."

  Witch hunts hadn't only killed and terrorized millions across Europe for nearly four centuries. The fanaticism and inquisitions existed even in the pueblo tribes, where anyone suspected of the Witchery Way was killed; effectively without jury, trial, or torture. And it was still going on. The fine lines between religion, magic, myths, priests, witches, gods, holy men, and shamans eluded me the way it had the rest of the tribes; what was sacred on one pueblo became evil on another. Gods changed names and representations from one village to another, over the course of a few miles.

  The wandering warrior Navajo had taken great ceremonial content from the pueblos without their organization, turning rain dances into blood dances, farming prayers into war songs. Cotton Mather had urged his followers to slaughter American Indians, calling them "those pernicious creatures." The puritan rationale could no more understand the Indian than it could Wicca.

  I said, "I thought you were of Honau-Bear clan, the highest status in the Hopi tribe."

  "I am. Sometimes. Sometimes not. You think white politics are bad? How the parties fight it out, all that muckraking? They're nothing compared to the Hopi and Navajo way of doing things. Convolution is a primal part of our creation."

  Beautiful, Self said. You're ass-backwards. Where's John Wayne when you need him?

  Isaac faced my second self directly for the first time; Spear-in-the-Heart was not used to dealing with white familiars. His spirit guides and power animals were conduits, pets perhaps, but not companions—and certainly not insulting ones. For a moment I thought Isaac might strike him, but he lifted the paho instead and gazed at it as if searching for his father. "The pueblos are built of many tribes, each with their own version of some fractured, greater truth."

  "What's been happening here?" I asked.

  Bear moaned: a nearly human, sympathetic sob.

  "Children are dying. Nineteen in the last three weeks. Mostly Hopi, but some Navajo as well."

  "Murdered?"

  His lips smoothed into a hard line of hate. "We are infected with a demon. The priests want to think illness because they want to count on medical teams in Phoenix to come and inoculate. Too much has been given up and taken for granted. They feign ignorance when they know the truth, choosing to play the savage. Too many of our prayers are simply said by rote, and something's taken advantage of that. Something hungry for our children." He slapped his hand down on the board, and it resounded with a dull thud. "And so we're in the right place. The kiva is a womb, the sipapuni an orifice through which the gods are born into our world."

  That's disgusting, Self said, and hopped to his feet. I'm not staying if that's where we are. Besides, I'm getting claustrophobic in here. Let's get some air. Bear held up a paw to stop him and the blood-heat suddenly raged in both of them. Death-lust screamed through Self's brain and I commanded him to stop. He gasped and fell back a step, his claws extended, fangs bared. He licked his lips, eyes squirming, and said, Someone's out there.

  Who?

  His mouth watered. Bear rose on his haunches, prepared for battle. Spear-in-the-Heart stood, turned, and swore, "No child will die tonight."

  And then came the screams.

  Women shrieking, followed by the horrendous screeching of infants in agony. I rushed up the ladder and heard all th
ree of them call, "Wait!" Self scrambled only a rung behind me, grasping my ankle, but somehow when I hit the outside air, he was gone. I heard nothing but the echoes of my own thoughts. I wheeled and the ground had sealed behind me.

  "Uh oh," I breathed.

  A bad mistake. I'd stepped out of time and place. The village lay opened like a dissected corpse before me, deserted, cattle pens and corrals empty, not only lifeless but with that scent of murder. Perfect illumination of starlight as Pollux and Castor burned in the heavens, but only a sliver of waning moon. I'd left the safety of the kiva—the womb, Isaac called it—and been born into what?

  "Nice trick." I fired repelling curses in every direction, lightweight spells just to see what would happen, and watched the exploding white sparks skitter off into the distance. Games; they always had to play games before they showed themselves. "Okay, I fell for it. Let's get this over with."

  The chindi ghosts splurged out of the air like desert rain, boiling around me. Dancers called "gatherers" fanned out among the dirt plaza and performed the Snake Dance. Holding their snake whips and pennants of eagle feather and horsehair, they each moved around a green cottonwood bower four times holding a snake, then dropped it and picked up another: diamondbacks, rattlers, bullsnakes, repeating the process until the end of the dance when they would run into the desert and release them. They turned in particular fashion: north, east, south, west. Night chants attracted the yei-be-chai, the most ancient gods. Rattlers were let loose to act as messengers of divinities, who, if pleased with devotion and ritual, would answer with kindness. Tourists always enjoyed the show.

  The air grew warmer and the chindi ghosts vanished. The scene had been interrupted, broken apart like reception going out. "I don't suppose you could say that again?" I asked. "In English maybe?"

  Laughter. A bitterness that held no meaning besides anger and spite; even more depraved because of the intense childish playfulness there, as if all humanity had been sheared off to leave a twitching stem of nerves and hatred.

  My fists flamed blue majiks.

  With a snarl, Coyote, the Trickster god, erupted from the earth behind me, dropped to all fours on the run, and came for my heart. I instinctively dove and felt his enormous paws brush my neck. Howls swarmed the air like flies, a thousand starving and insane coyotes calling.

  It's the only time I'd seen a creature's jaws actually slavering—Trickster wheeled and bounded, his twisted visage as lupine as his namesake, yet full of semi-hidden humanity and our failures. Like a hunted animal driven out of its mind, he came at me again. My hand trembled as I raised hexes and foisted names of power into his eyes. They stopped his charge and brought him up howling again, snapping blindly for my throat.

  No way to defeat a deity of this caliber; Coyote existed as an enemy of law and rules, always sitting in the doorways of the Holy People so that he never truly took part in their functions, yet not quite of the chaotic evil churning outside the galaxy. Devilishly mischievous—so why this fury? Legend told of his theft of the Water Monster's baby, and how he tricked the sister of bears into marrying him.

  I said, "Are you the slayer of children now?"

  Lips skinned back over his wolfish fangs, he glared at me with that same look of contempt the teenage Navajos had shown. I was white—of all the people of the tribal nations who might face him now, to defend their children and fall for his traps, who might be tricked, a white man had come.

  What did he have to do with the chindi Snake Dance? And what did the Dance have to do with anything? "Damn it." I hated when lore, legend, and religion brewed for too long. Isaac should have been here; he possessed the heritage, knowledge, and arcane posi, his eye to the animal kingdom. I was blind.

  Coyote's great paws curled into two ton fists and he brought a roundhouse at my chest that would have caved me in if it had connected. His fur scraped my skin, and I slipped away using Assyrian spells that conflicted with his magic, hexes misfiring and streaking around him like popping embers. His tongue flapped out the side of his snout, and he moved slower, with greater intent, the hint of a smile creasing his face. His jaws widened. I threw an incantation into his mouth that splashed away as harmlessly as chicken soup.

  "Trickster, I'd just like to say . . ."

  A hurricane of pain crushed me. I tried to scream but couldn't get it out, my chest bunching into my throat. He caught hold of my leg, whipped me high, wrenching my knee loose, and brought my body smashing down like a mangled kachina. Internal organs made hard turns. Coyote pounded me into the dirt, claws ripping through my incantations of protection, striking and striking until the agony spiked through my brain like a shiv and I died twice and came back twice. I heard my back break. Dirt clogged my nose and was driven down my throat as he buried me. With each blow he cried and howled in a language of horrors without words, as understandable as any human loss or jealousy.

  He kept saying, She's mine.

  A wooden board propped beneath my belly, and Coyote continued to pound me against it. My bones, hexes, and the wood cracked as one, splintering until I was wedged in Coyote's doorway, and fell through.

  Bear's mighty arm lifted me up out of the kiva's sipapuni hole and I shrieked, my tongue mostly bitten off. Spear-in-the-Heart looked down into Fourth World and said, "How the hell did you do that?"

  I coughed blood, sputtered and croaked without much of a tongue, "Bih trubble . . . Coyo . . . comin trough."

  Self said, You're a mess.

  Uh.

  Atlas vertebra is broken, spine, knees, ribs. You went in through the out door.

  The torture was unbearable. Help me!

  He cocked his head and stared down at this mess, features so similar yet different from mine, completely unreadable even to me. He thought about it for a moment before saying, Of course.

  Black motes rose from his eyes, invocations flooding his frame. Clambering up my back, Self licked along the length of my twisted spine, cuddling and cooing as I moaned and sobbed, magic coursing along his glowing hands, working the wounds.

  Isaac said, "Relax, you'll be fine," and held the heel of his hand to my forehead, using his Tu hikya medicine man talents, the natural earth turnings flowing into my flesh. He opened his shaman's bag, held herbs against my nostrils and placed them on my tongue; I smelled and tasted a past time of health, and even happiness, the psychedelics taking me places I couldn't go anymore. Muscles in my neck roped and tightened as I strained and struggled against memories. He didn't understand; I couldn't heal his way. Too much that I'd held back started to loosen inside like tectonic plates shifting. Self smacked the medicine from his hand and licked the spices from my mouth, the blaze of his soothing touch spinning in my blood, dragging up a piece of hell.

  Unprepared to witness such a kinship so foreign to his own kind, Spear-in-the-Heart grew uncomfortable and grunted, "Bear will guard the hole. Coyote didn't follow you."

  I blacked out and awoke on my feet, whole again, Self nuzzling my knees.

  Thanks.

  De nada, he said.

  Isaac left Bear sitting watch and said, "Let's leave this place. It's no longer sacred." I knew he meant because of my . . . rebirth? . . . as much as from anything else. We climbed the ladder.

  By the time the people of the village saw Isaac emerge from the kiva they had already started to cut for shelter. With a leader's voice, he told them to stay inside and lock their doors—if they had doors—and they listened. I wondered how soon it would be before the tribal police came and threw us in jail.

  It didn't matter how many of the clans truly knew Spear-in-the-Heart's power and how many simply thought him insane. He promised to stop the murders, and perhaps, for this night anyway, that might be enough. Isaac turned to me and said, "Why?"

  "Elucidate."

  "Why were you the only one who answered my call?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe I'm the only one you needed."

  "Braggart."

  The night air changed subtly as we surveyed the mesa. We look
ed at each other and understood that we didn't understand each other, and that it also didn't matter. He took a handful of pollen from his shaman's bag and blew it into the air, turning the same way the chindi had: north, east, south, west.

  As he blew the dust to the west, the Indian clown came out from behind the porch made of car hoods and danced past us, painted black except for lines of white dappled on his chest, arms, and legs, wearing a split mask: half a skull, half a grinning man.

  "It's a Koshare," Isaac said. "They mimic sacred dancers and amuse the tourist crowd during intervals in the ceremonies. They sometimes discipline the children." He strode forward, protector of his people, warrior of this hearth. "Haqumi?" he asked the figure. "Who are you?"

  "Pinu'u," it replied, and moved away.

  Self got caught up and danced along, adding a nice calypso step, throwing in a little rumba. Pinu'u? Never heard of him.

  Spear-in-the-Heart said, "It means, 'I am I.' Is this Coyote?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "Unless it's another of his tricks."

  The mask held more truths than at first appearance; duality, the split, me and Self, Isaac and his ancestry, Hopi and Navajo, always working to keep separation, his heart torn. He could never be certain if he faced the Dineh clan gods or those of the Hopis, or others lost in antiquity under the dead civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas. I thought he must dream of his mother and father every night. "Maybe it is Sotugnangu, god of the sky, the lightning, rain," he said. "The Navajo call him Talking God."

  "For a Talking God he's staying pretty silent."

  You're wrong, Self said, shuffling his feet, clapping his hands, kicking it into a mambo. He was good. It's Massau, the Skeleton Man, with another of his faces. Happiness in death.

  Why didn't you say that in the first place?

  De nada.

  Isaac frowned, wondering who was right, what stood before him, which of the pantheon would come down to him now. I said, "Do you have any idea what's going on?"