Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  Timov mechanically tested the roasting haunch by pressing his thumb against it and gave it another turn. "We saw three dead Panther men yesterday. Their heads were torn off. Was it the ghost dancer who killed them?"

  Yaqut hissed through his teeth. "The Thundertree are not real hunters. They are trackers. They follow their cats, who hunt best at night." He clicked a fingernail against the fang over his heart. "She taught me never to hunt them at night. And it is even better not to confront them by day. Those corpses you saw stood against him by day. He killed them with his hands."

  Yaqut removed a hide sash from his waist and opened it on the ground. Inside lay a dozen wax leaf packets. He peeled apart several, disclosing yellow powders, amber resins, and gummy black oil. "Poisons," he said, quietly, as if the venoms slept and should not be woken. "I have learned them all. The powders for tainting drinking pools and the resins and oils for tipping spears and knives." He meticulously closed the packets, folded the sash, and tied it about his waist. "The best way to kill bonesuckers is without ever seeing them until they are dead. Even in daylight, they can reach into your spirit and make you see and feel things that are not there."

  "Why do you call them bonesuckers?" Duru asked.

  "Because if they get you," Yaqut answered, with malevolent amusement, "they will do to your bones what we did to this deer's."

  )|(

  The end of the twelfth moon arrived, the Pine-Shouldered Moon, the first moon of the cold season, riding lower in the sky than the moons of summer and spring. Each day, the sun rolled farther south.

  Already the small changes of autumn had begun: Days shortened. The smell of snow opened in the mouth of the wind. The hard nuts had formed, and the seed-strewn floor of the Forest crunched underfoot.

  Watching the watery birches swell with the first chill, hearing the drone of bees lower as they moved their hives into the deeper hollows of trees, anticipating the next moon, the Frost Moon, Baat squirmed. If he was to reach the cairn of his ancestors in the north before winter, he would have to leave the Forest and cross the tundra immediately.

  The thought of trekking the grasslands alone stopped his breath. He had done it before, eight times. He knew well the dangers, but he had never dared to cross the thunder of the herds while being hunted by the smallheads. Out there alone, he knew for sure they would find him, and then his headless body would feed the dog packs and the crows, the ants would hollow his bones, and the Dark Traces would trap his body of light in the groaning wind and give him pain forever.

  Do not be afraid, a dulcet voice spoke from inside him.

  "Bright One!" Baat whispered with surprise. The red disk of the sun, though low among the trees, had not yet set. The ul udi only rarely came to him before dark.

  We came soon as we could to tell you: There is a way to go north, to the door of the mountain, the sweet voice said.

  Baat stepped through a windfall scattering of tiny brown apples and peered around a stout fir, looking for smallheads among the shallow stream-waters sliding by. Mists welled in the ditches of older rivulets, spilled over among the trees.

  The hulking silhouette of a bear lumbered by, smelling him and moving away. Otherwise, the twilit woods held still and empty. He could speak aloud without fear of betraying himself to the smallheads, and he said, softly, "Bright One, the smallheads hunt me everywhere. I must hide."

  Winter is coming, Hollow Bone. You must not tarry any longer.

  "I've been thinking of going east, Bright One, and wintering in the valleys, where the mountains break the big storms. I could come back here next summer and try again. By then, the smallheads may have forgotten me."

  You are too old to wait another season. Winter is harsh. If you die where we cannot help you, you know what will happen: The Dark Traces will take your body of light for their own. You must not wait. The smallheads will not forget. They will be searching for you till the end of your days. You must make the northward journey now, tomorrow—no later.

  A goldfinch sparked overhead. Baat clambered into a sprawling hickory and surveyed the surrounding land. The smallheads would be settling in for the night, he understood. He need not be afraid.

  Wren-song rode a breath of rain from the northeast, and the bear he had spotted rummaged among leaves looking for mice. "I'm afraid to walk the tundra alone. The smallheads will see and track me down."

  No. Travel at night. We will guide you.

  "In the day, when I sleep, their stalking animals will track me, and they will pounce on me. You will not be there to warn me."

  You will not travel alone. Your companion will watch over you while you sleep. And when your companion sleeps, you will hunt. You will travel together at night.

  Baat raised his empty hands to the lavender sky. "Bright One, I have no companion. I am alone."

  You are not alone. We have shown you that you are not alone. Do you not remember? Go—and take your companion.

  Baat sat on the tree limb, listened to swifts creaking in the higher branches on their way to sleep, and tried to remember. Looking down at his thighs, he watched the afterglow of sunset shining there. The darkling gloom brightened as a blue light came on around his body. The ul udi climbed down the sky toward him.

  Out of the sunset blur, the old ones appeared, faceless human shapes, the color of moonlight, standing in a circle around him. He bowed to them. They opened their arms, linked hands, and began to dance, silent as rising mist.

  The diaphanous shapes of the old ones danced like flames, like underwater shadows. They closed in. He held his arms out to them, watched cold fire bristling green from the tips of his fingers, sparking blue at his elbows.

  A whirling laugh spun him around, and sparkles unfurled from his body, fluttering through the leaves, high into the brown air and clicking among the first stars.

  He became the still point of the reeling earth. The old ones spun around him, effervescing to cold light. When he stamped his feet, neon snakes slithered away in all directions. When he clapped his hands, fireworks splashed in front of his face. Electricity veined his limbs, sent thin, hot wires shimmering through his hair and beard. Joy arced from his testicles to his brain. And he convulsed in a stagger-step dance to sizzling, cracking music of pure energy.

  All at once, he no longer danced but soared above the woods. The fog under the trees shone through the branches, phosphorous mist fleshing the black veins of creeks, brooks, and streams.

  Where are the Bright Ones taking me so swiftly?

  To the companion they had promised him, yes, of course. And when, in the next instant, his flight stopped, he stood in night-haze before a horse tied by a rope around its neck to a thick-shouldered man asleep under a craggy butternut tree.

  Baat remembered the beardless man and those around him—the white-haired scar-face, Yaqut, who had stalked him all summer, and the young brother and sister.

  The Bright Ones had brought him to these children the last two nights, when the ghosts of the old ones had come down from the sky to dance with him. Timov and Duru—he had heard their names, as alien to him as their swarthy looks.

  Both times he had been eager to return to the dancing rapture, and he had pulled away quickly, though not without the boy and the girl both sighting him clearly.

  That is strange. Except for witches with their crystals, smallheads never before had seen his body of light.

  Now Baat looked more closely at these smallheads. They seemed typical, except for the one with the broken face, who was far more sinister than any hunter Baat had seen before. Even in sleep, hostility snarled his mouth. Baat had been careful to keep his distance from this one.

  The girl whimpered, already sensing him, somehow fitting him into whatever she was dreaming.

  The boy stiffened. An alarmed tremor startled the eyes under his lids, and Baat realized that these two young ones already sensed him.

  Dance, a Bright One commanded.

  Baat stepped back. He felt the rhythm of his dancing body far back
in the woods, and he moved with it. He swayed, gently at first, afraid to lose sight of these smallheads in the bright smoke that streaked around him as he stirred.

  He noticed that his movements calmed the children. They lay still as he veered about, and he knew that, as they watched him in their dreaming, they became less frightened to see him dancing than when he simply stared at them.

  Of course, he thought to himself. I must look terrifying to these small things.

  So he gave himself to the music in the cold fire that fell from the sky. And, as ever, the fire carried him.

  Slippery green light swung him in circles, looped him into the air and back. Bodiless, he danced as he never could when anchored to his bones.

  Twirling in radiant motion, he rode the rapture of the ul udi, the hawk-rush, falcon-tilting pleasure of the Bright Ones, the meteor-stab, comet-feather, aurora dance of star-whirling night. He danced until he reeled, as with drunkenness, and collapsed.

  He woke alone, back in his body, lying face up. He stared through the leaf-rustle at the borealis painting the sky chill green. His breath pumped hard, and his ears rang with cricket-noise.

  He sat up, clutching his head. The ghosts of the old ones had gone. Only a faint glimmer shone on his skin, where he had worn the ul udi's cold fire.

  What has happened? Why have the Bright Ones made me dance for the smallheads? "Bright Ones—" he moaned.

  Hush. Sleep now. Tomorrow you must begin the journey north.

  "With those smallheads?"

  The Bright One kept silent. An owl's hoot floated through the trees. Crickets trilled. And a lithe rain began. Baat lay back and let the fog ruffle over him as the truth of what he had seen began to come clear.

  )|(

  At dawn, Duru and Timov sat huddled under the big fir where they had slept, chattering like the loud sparrows hidden in the branches above. "It was the ghost man," Duru asserted.

  "It didn't look like a man at all," Timov said. "It was spirits. It looked like the sky's night fire come down with the wind."

  "No, Timov," Duru said, with petulant certainty. "I saw him before he started dancing. It was the ghost man."

  "What happened?" Hamr asked, stepping out of the bushes.

  Timov and Duru looked at each other, and the boy saw that his sister would not speak about it. That frightened him. Maybe this was some bizarre Mother mystery. Stricken, he turned to Hamr: "We had the same dream last night."

  Hamr repressed a shiver. The night before, Duru had learned Yaqut's name in a dream, and that had saved his life. What is this long sight she has? A spirit—and is it possessing Timov as well? He turned a narrow eye on the girl.

  Under Hamr's gaze, Duru wilted, said quietly, "The ghost man came to me—to us. He stood where you're kneeling now. But he didn't say anything."

  "I didn't see any ghost man," Timov asserted. "Just ghost fire, like in the sky at night, whirling like a waterspout."

  "Let her finish, Timov."

  "The giant was the ghost fire," Duru piped, reclaiming her annoyance at Timov's distortion of her vision. "I saw him standing here, under these trees. When he started to move, to dance, his body melted almost, became liquid flames that swirled round and round. Then he rose into the air and was gone, like that. I couldn't see where he went."

  "He went where the rain lives," Yaqut said from the bushes. He stepped out, his hands still tightening the leather straps of his loin-pelt. "That was the ghost dancer. So, both of you saw him again?"

  "You did, too?" Duru asked, staring up at him with trepidation.

  "No, child. I dream only of what is past. But you—and your brother, too, it seems—have something of the seeress' gift. When we reach the Thundertree, that may prove useful. There is a priestess there from my tribe. She will know how to use your power."

  "When will we reach the Thundertree?" Hamr asked. He stood a head taller than Yaqut and looked almost twice as wide, but his voice had a hush of respect when he addressed the wiry man.

  "If we leave now, we will arrive before nightfall—before the ghost dancer comes in the flesh."

  The Blue Shell quickly gathered their satchels and strung them from their horse's back. In moments, they moved out.

  By midday, the travelers had left the flat river-forest. They climbed into a confused and beautiful land of tree-crested ridges overlooking a necklace of lakes.

  Blind Side moved falteringly through the undulant terrain, feeling his way cautiously among cobbles and boulders under twisted trees and across traps of glacial sand in the sudden glades.

  At the summit of a winding hill, Yaqut paused and pointed down at a somnolent hollow of giant oak and maple beside a kettle lake. From the center of the hollow towered an immense boulder, a glacial erratic, gigantic as a mountain's flank, with trees sprouting from its top like hair. Smoke threaded into the sky from among those trees.

  "Thundertree," Yaqut announced.

  Hamr shielded his eyes against the westering sun and gauged the distance across the tumbled landscape to the splinter of mountain. "We'll not make it before dark."

  Yaqut agreed with a nod, held up a disk of polished abalone, and flashed a sun-signal to the camp. A few moments later, an answering gleam sparked from the top of the massive boulder. "The Panther men and the priestess will meet us in an elm glade midway from here. We will be safe among them."

  Timov and Duru smiled at each other. Duru took Hamr's hand. Their long journey nearly over, she breathed deeply and for the first time since their exile began, something akin to a song rose up in her. She began to hum.

  Hamr's hand tightened on hers—proud to feel her ease, to know that, at last, his faith in the Beastmaker and in himself had been reward by the joy of those in his care.

  They marched down the grassy hill, among hot-colored rhododendron and brilliant green grass, and Timov sang the words to the tune Duru hummed—a song Mother had often sung to calm them when the dark came:

  Now that the sun is setting

  Panther walks like smoke

  sleek as the muscled rain

  where the night wind woke.

  )|(

  In a clearing made from a toppled giant elm, the priestess waited with a band of Panther men. The sun, low among the trees, pierced the glen with shafts of crimson light. The hunters loitered nervously under uplifted roots of the fallen tree, building a fire and making torches from their long spears. Their cats floated like pieces of night at the perimeter of the clearing, restlessly waiting for the command to stalk.

  The priestess, with her rock of fertility pressed against her naked, swollen belly, sat on a convenient limb of the prone elm. She stared down at the red and yellow circles painted on her bloated breasts and widening around her puffed-out omphalos, and she muttered to herself, "Yaqut—where are you? It is getting late."

  Since the ghost dancer had filled her with his child on the tundra five moons ago, she had resided with the Thundertree. Her clan in the Longtooth had sent her here with the rock of fertility to win the favor of the Panther people, to lure great souls into the wombs of their women. The Longtooth desired the indebtedness of the Thundertree so that they might shelter in the Forest with them when the terrible storms of winter raged.

  Power, the priestess said to herself with disgust. She had been sent to earn a privilege among these primitive people, and now, because of the ghost dancer, she had been doomed to bear a child among them.

  She had expected to return to the Longtooth, be called to the chief's hut as reward for her troubles, and bear his children. Never could she have guessed a ghost dancer would take her. There had been no ghost dancers in these woods for years.

  The priestess knew which berries to eat to abort the child, but then she would have to return to her clan to recover and lose her chance to convey her chief's power to the primitive Thundertree. Instead, she grew larger and lived like a chieftess.

  The priestess gnashed her teeth and silently cursed Yaqut's tardiness. His flash-signal had promised strays�
�ghost-dancer half-breeds. Well, if that were true, she could use them with the crystal to hunt down the ghost dancer who had done this to her.

  She wanted that creature's head, not just for her own revenge, though that thrived in her with the weird child growing in her womb—but she also wanted the giant's head to present as a trophy to the Longtooth chief, to assure that she would indeed have other children, noble children.

  The witches would hate her for this, for they used the ghost dancers to speak with the spirits, and hated those who killed them. They could have her weird child for their trance-work, so long as they left her alone to live out her life as a chief's woman and a noble Mother.

  One of the cats sounded a cry, and a Panther man broke from the group and hurried to the edge of the clearing with a torch. "Someone comes," he called.

  The priestess did not bother to rise. These fools had often been wrong. They relied almost entirely on their animals, beasts that growled and snapped at every hare.

  With disdain, she regarded the hunters in their mangy pelts, lax limbs sheened with animal fat to ward off biting flies and mosquitoes, beards braided about bits of bone. As soon as she dropped this weird child, she would take the ghost dancer's head and leave these smelly louts behind.

  From among the trees, Yaqut appeared leading the two dark-haired youths and the girl she had seen three days before, when she had been sent to free the spirits of the latest Panther men killed by the ghost dancer. The bigger of the youths, a beardless man strapped with muscle, held a rope looped about the neck of a horse that shuffled nervously before the panthers. Only the youth's constant reassurance kept the beast from rearing.

  The Thundertree men gasped and muttered at the sight of the regal animal, and their cats walked tight circles, fighting the urge to pounce, looking to their masters for the word to attack.