Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Ul udi," Hamr tried the name. "Like the spirit you drove out of Timov."

  "Yes. Now how about a fire for us? Or do you like your fish raw?"

  While they ate, the sun set, and the needle of the Frost Moon gleamed in the lavender dusk. Kirchi asked about the Blue Shell, and Hamr told her about his life on the sea cliffs, the wave that swept away his father and gave him his ambition to be a great man, how he captured Blind Side and won Aradia, and what he had learned of the gap between fate and destiny—before the destruction of the Blue Shell changed everything.

  From Duru's satchel, Hamr removed the tortoise wheel and spun it for Kirchi on a stem of cane. She listened intently to what he had to say about Spretnak's idea that life is a wheel and destiny the emptiness at its center. She questioned him about his destiny, and he talked about his visions of the Beastmaker, with His antlered head, man's body, and eyes like moons of blood.

  "When did you see Him last?" she asked.

  "Aradia watched the last time I saw the Beastmaker. I rode Blind Side on the beach, the same beach I used to run on till I dropped from exhaustion and beheld Him in the blood light pounding behind my eyes. Only that last time with Blind Side, it was the horse that got tired, and when he stopped, I lay on his back and heard his breath rushing. And in the sound, I heard Him, the Beastmaker, calling my name. With my eyes closed, He was there. He never said anything more than my name. That was enough. I knew He was pleased that I loved the Horse that He had sent me. I knew He wanted me for His own. And that's what makes a man great, isn't it? To belong to what is greater."

  Kirchi had lifted her head while he talked and stared past him, a peculiar look on her face. "There's one," she said.

  He turned. The last light of day lay across the sky above the bluffs like green marrow. At the edge of the creek, where mists flowed among cane and woodbine, yellow eyes blazed. Hamr started, then squinted to identify what animal had come to speak with the witch. No animal moved there—only eyes, floating bodiless, brighter than stars.

  )|(

  The day after the stormy night, Baat carried Duru north. She rode lightly on his shoulders, and though the gash in her leg throbbed dully, she ignored the pain. She felt no concern for herself anymore, only for Timov and Hamr. She knew they feared for her. This she tried to tell Baat when he stopped on a hillside above a flooded stream.

  Baat had no idea what the girl tried to say. At first, he thought she anguished over her wound. He unwrapped it, while she chattered and gestured. The gash had become lividly swollen and would hurt more now and in the coming hours than any time since the bear claw ripped her flesh. Happily, the healing had already done much to restore the torn tissue. The pain would end soon.

  Baat had chosen this site to stop, because the plants he needed for a new dressing flourished here. As he set to work gathering them, he watched the black islands in the flooded stream and the pale sandbars for smallheads. The heavy rain would slow them today, but they would be out, stalking him. The muddy ground and the added weight of the girl would make tracking him that much easier.

  Day travel imposed the most danger, and he had hoped to move only by night. Tonight, he knew, he would dance with the ul udi, dance to win their wisdom for the girl. She would have to meet them for her to understand the journey. There would be no traveling this night. He hoped to make up for that by day.

  Duru lay on her stomach, her gashed leg propped on a log, exposed to the styptic rays of the sun. The flawless blue of the sky seemed strange after last night's fury. Rusty stalks of burdock ranged the hillside. Their feathery bolls rose perfectly still in the windless air. Bumblebees and wasps surged among the marigolds. Their drones alone sounded in the hollow above the flooded woods.

  When Baat returned, he gave her a wedge of poplar bast to gnaw while he dressed her wound. He talked to her as he worked, pausing frequently to listen, to smell the still air, and scan the brightly mottled terrain. Awe, sadness, and fear mingled in his voice, low and guttural as a river in its rocky bed.

  "The herds are moving south now," he told her, though he knew she did not understand. "Soon you will see woolly rhinos darkening the plains, immense as evening. And the mastodons, their giant thunder shaking not just the earth but the clouds in the sky. First, we must get out of these dangerous woods. The smallheads are everywhere with their poisons. They are so silent and deceptive. The shadows are their allies."

  Duru sat on Baat's thick shoulders, and he carried her up the hill and down the other side into a confusion of dales and knolls. This complex land gathered the runoff from the far mountains into narrow lakes and a scrawl of streams and rills. In the basins, only tree crowns and the tops of giant boulders showed above the sunny mist. The ridges, threaded by waterfalls, mazed northward to where the giant icesheets had flattened the land and tall grasses shimmered like fur.

  Along the way, Baat stopped often to watch for smallheads and to gather food. Traveling went slow—Baat figured that at their careful pace, they would need ten days to reach the tundra, at least that long, because he had chosen a way that far skirted the Thundertree, where Yaqut lurked. The abundant land provided much to eat and unless the smallheads found them, they would not suffer.

  By evening, when they made camp beside a kettle lake under a long moon, they lay exhausted, Baat from walking, Duru from pain. Beside the windbreak of a boulder, Baat meticulously prepared Duru's bed of dried leaves with lit cattail punks on either side to fend mosquitoes and, because the air hung damp with the mist of last night's rain, a blanket of cane feathers.

  He studied the bed with satisfaction. Such beds he once had made for his own children. He decided that soon he must fashion a spear and begin collecting pelts for the cold nights to come. Then, he gingerly changed the dressing on the girl's hurt leg, while the red salmon he had netted with a vine basket at a creek earlier in the day steamed under hot rocks.

  Duru's eyes had glistened with tears all day as she thought of Timov and Hamr without her, fearing for her, perhaps thinking her dead. Baat, believing she wept from the pain of her wound, had offered her more poplar and willow bark. Angrily, she brushed the medicinal woods aside. "I want to go back to my people," she said again as she had been telling the giant all day. "Don't you understand? I belong with them. I can't stay with you."

  Baat frowned with sorrow, comprehending her pain though not her words. A child, she belonged with her people. If the Bright Ones had not chosen her for him he would never have thought she could help him. Let the Bright Ones explain themselves. He held up both of his big hands and showed her the blue glow between his fingers. That silenced her, and she lay back in her bed, eyes wide.

  "Don't be afraid," he said softly, his large face gruesome in the gloaming. He pointed to the sky and gestured downward to himself. So long as she was not afraid, the Dark Traces would ignore her, and he could call on the Bright Ones to come down and dance with him. Still, Duru recalled her dreams of the ghost dancer, and wonder and fear quavered together in her.

  Baat gestured for her to lie still. He stretched tall, reaching for the night sky, where stars flecked brightly in the ghostly green mane of the borealis.

  The air chilled—and a weird, clear light appeared around the giant's body. He turned his back to her, and his body-light intensified its blueness. Sparks flickered at his fingers and the tips of his ears. And when he came full around, his face had transfigured. The skin seemed to float like a hot haze on the pulsing glow of his skull. His eyes shone brittle as ice shattering sunlight.

  Duru gasped. A black wind rattled the trees and pressed the campfire down to crimson embers. Luminous darkness opened around Baat, like the giant wings of a crow. In that black shine, figures stirred—faceless human shapes glittering like mica.

  The wind lifted, and the old ones stood around Baat, their arms open at their sides, linking hands. They paced a circle around him, and he turned with them, obeying some unheard music, head bowed, arms winged. Blue fire crawled over his body, flurrying off him
and spinning upward into the purple edge of night.

  Slowly but with gathering speed, the ghost shapes narrowed closer, and sparks capered hotter and higher into the sky. Baat blurred among the encroaching specters, a vortex of blue flames. The old ones swirled around him, compressed to windy streaks of smoke.

  Abruptly, Baat stopped turning, and the smoky light spinning about him entered the cave of his chest. He stood before Duru dream-like, weighted with radiance, a meshing of starfire shaping around him. He reached out, his fingertips like pieces of the moon.

  Without thought, Duru raised her hand to meet his. When they touched, silence deepened. She could hear her heart's enormous footsteps. Beyond that, a far sound drew nearer: a voice like a glitter of rain, calling her out of herself, into the lighted depths of the night.

  )|(

  Neoll Nant Caw watched Baat dance until his blur sharpened to a star. Then she looked away, to keep from falling into the radiance. Beside her, the flame of an oil-lamp rose pale as a new tooth. With wet fingers, she snuffed it and immersed herself in darkness.

  Reassured that the child Duru lived, the witch let the night penetrate her. She became a numb lump, a rock. All her heat seethed out and floated above her, leaving her dense with cold. The cold sank deeper, till all her heat disappeared, given to the thermal swirlings trapped in the burrow. The mist of heat glowed infrared, churning and boiling into fiery clouds.

  Shaped by her rage, gangrenous odd shapes appeared out of the roiling air: slithery body organs blotched with tufts of electric fire, ulcerous sparks, and arcs of tiny lightning. The mutilated forms breathed with the heat of her being. They milled around her—tattered entrails, flopped off claws, snarling dogfaces in blue jellies.

  She assembled the Moon Bitch, as she had before, building a fiery body of wrath to defend the ghost dancer. He was a source of the tribes' knowledge and represented all that she had loved in life. To defend him, she would use everything in her power. Already the Moon Bitch had devoured all the witch's memories, all her hungers, her very will, and even her wobbly bones. Each night, she grew stronger: Her parts healed their defects and shone brighter. Her grim purpose burned keener.

  She would kill the hunters of the ghost dancer. She would kill the thieves who stole the tracking crystal. Above all, she would kill the traitor, Kirchi, who would use the wise ways to kill Baat.

  The Moon Bitch dreamed herself more real. Far away, Neoll Nant Caw watched, sitting under the skyhole of her burrow, a rock, patient and sure, as the starlight scratched at her cold surface.

  )|(

  The stars looked sharp, even through the gusty auroras. Hamr scanned the dark crests of the hills looking for movement, but only the whirr of bats disturbed the night. The yellow eyes that had stared from the creek had vanished hours ago. The mist still crawled there, lit up by the sky's glow.

  Kirchi had said the eyes belonged to the wraith of Neoll Nant Caw come to spy on them. Now the young witch lay curled beside the spent fire, snoring gently. Blind Side, too, snoozed calmly, twitching an ear occasionally against the whine of mosquitoes.

  Hamr could not sleep. Knowing that Neoll Nant Caw had the power to pursue them stoked his alertness. Talking with Kirchi had stirred him more deeply than the sight of the wraith. She was the first woman who had wanted to hear what he had to say about the Beastmaker. And the peculiar thought occurred to him that perhaps the Beastmaker had led him to her. Without him, she would have remained a captive of the crone—and without her, he would have been alone, perhaps forever, in his secret knowledge.

  Before she had fallen asleep, long after the demon eyes had blurred away, Kirchi had said to him: "Everything you've seen of the Beastmaker is true. I've seen so myself, at the ripped edge of sleep. That's where witches live, entranced by their potions, watching the dream that's living us. You see, that is why we need slaves. Most of each day, we are only half in this world, half woman, half dream. And knowing that the dream is far more real than the woman frightens me. Men and women—we are born and we die. But the dream goes on. It is the dream that makes us go on. For you, the dream is the Beastmaker, the Being made from animal jaw and human flesh. Is not that what is dreaming you, the beast becoming a man?"

  "And you?" Hamr had asked. "What's dreaming you?"

  "What dreams all women—the Mother. She births us and eats us. We are always in Her belly. We drop from our mothers and we fall into the earth. We're always with Her. She dreams me. That's why I can't be a witch. I'm just an ordinary woman. I want to be a Mother, a simple mother, not a witch."

  "What dreams the witches?"

  "The Word."

  At that, Hamr had blinked like a rabbit. "What word?"

  Kirchi had smiled at his befuddlement, not mockingly, but with understanding. "Sounds strange, I know. Before there were people or animals, before there was this huge, wild earth, or even the stars, sun and moon, there was the Word. Perhaps Thought is a better way to say It. But Thought sounds so quiet—and what happened was not quiet. What happened made everything that is. It began the dreaming. And the dreaming began the living—and the dying."

  "The witch told you all this?"

  "No. She just showed me the potions. Everything I've told you, I saw for myself, the same way you saw the Beastmaker. He's real. He's more real than we are, because He's closer to the Word."

  Hamr now looked at Kirchi, asleep on her side, eyelids fluttering. She was pretty in a strange way, and he thanked the Beastmaker for guiding him to her. For a long time, he had not thought much about the Beastmaker, not since the hyenas killed Cyndell and he had begun to doubt himself.

  A silent, ironic laugh twisted around his heart. He let it linger, to keep back the weeping that welled there: The Thundertree that he and the others had come so far to find, and that Cyndell had died for them to reach, these Forest-dwellers lived as cowards. They would not welcome strays with ghost dancers for ancestors!

  The strange pain of that thought lay heavy in him, and he reclined beside Kirchi, holding his spear hard to his side. He would get Duru back and Timov, too. Kirchi would help. She already had, by returning him to the Beastmaker, whose eyes like moons watched him relax into sleep.

  )|(

  Each day, as the sun dove behind the trees and the sky shone like water, the clouds like strands of red kelp, Baat danced. Blue fire dazzled out of his flesh and wove itself over his turning body, his swampy odor thinning away, replaced by the smell of thunder. And when the moon-tips of his fingers touched Duru, she felt herself fly out of her body and rise above the seaweed clouds and the swarming auroras to the stars.

  When she woke, she remembered nothing. At dawn, she would find herself in a different place in the Forest, Baat asleep among the shrubs or under a blown-over beech tree. She had slept deeply and woken refreshed. Her hair and pelts smelled like the air before a big storm.

  By day, there had food and water to gather. In the abundant Forest, this took little time, even with her injured leg. She hobbled through the lavish undergrowth with a sturdy spruce pole for a crutch, and she plucked berries and wedges of fungus from tree trunks.

  The rest of the morning, she ground the seeds and nuts she found on the ground, fashioned nets from creepers, and gathered the kindling at hand. In the afternoon, she cast her net into a bend of the nearest creek and used Baat's flint knife to scale and gut the fish she caught.

  While Duru worked, she idly wondered what was becoming of her. Since the first night that she had witnessed Baat's dance, her apprehensions had almost entirely vanished. She thought about her brother and Hamr, though she no longer worried about them or about rejoining them.

  That in itself inspired a detached concern. Yet, even more curious, an understanding had come upon her entirely on its own that she should stay near Baat, gather food, listen for large animals and for others like her: the ones hunting him.

  Pondering these changes, smelling the lightning in her hair, Duru began to recall snippets of her nights. A huge listening stillness o
ccupied that space in her memory, where before there would have been dreams.

  In that vast hush, swift images came and went of her hanging in the night among tremors of blue and green auroras. Looking down, she beheld herself slung over Baat's shoulders and he blazing with spectral fire, a living torch hurrying through the darkness.

  Gradually, over several days of deep listening, Duru remembered the voices in the trembling glare. Far away echoes rippled closer.

  Finally, on the turfy bank of a brook, waiting for her net to pull tight with that night's meal, the heard-before voices returned. Pliant with gentleness, they spoke in mellifluous chorus: Baat needs your help, young Duru. He is on a journey to visit us, at the door of the mountain, in the north. There, we walk the land fleshed in fire. We would walk with Baat. But he cannot reach us unless someone guards him by day from beast and man. Help him, Duru. Go with him across the tundra to the icefields. Watch over him while he sleeps.

  The voices disappeared, and their commands reached deep into Duru, to the deadness at the core of her being, where Mother, Aradia, and Cyndell had gone. These are spirit voices, from the other world, from where life comes and goes!

  They spoke with the authority of those she loved. Later, the Bright Ones told her that her thoughts and feelings consisted of electrical fields that they could shape the way she molded wet sand. She still believed that the Bright Ones were the guardian spirits she had first heard about from the Mothers.

  That first time the ul udi spoke with her, Duru deeply accepted their commands. And that gave her joy, for until then she had simply been lost. Now, she found herself on a journey to the north, an ally of spirits.

  Only Hamr and Timov had to be informed, and since Timov had already shared one dream with her of the ghost dancer, she felt sure the spirits would find a way to tell him.

  That evening while they ate, Duru tried to talk with the ghost dancer. She signed herself asleep, eyes closed, head resting on the back of her hand, and indicated with her other hand her ear, listening. She pointed to the sky, then tapped her head. "I understand now," she said. "I heard the spirit that watches over you."