Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

Timov looked up and wished the trance poison still turned in him, diverting his fear.

  Yaqut's ruined face nodded with satisfaction. "Hamr is dead. You are mine now. And you had better do just as I say, or I will skin you like this otter."

  Timov had no appetite for the cooked meat. He ate it, because Yaqut ordered him to. And when done, he stripped the bones off the remaining flesh as Yaqut commanded, braided the flesh with vine, and hung it from a branch over the fire, out of reach of ants and scavengers, to dry for the next day's hike. Then he banked the fire, crawled between two forked roots, and covered himself with leaves. Yaqut climbed into the tree above him and disappeared in darkness.

  Alone, Timov found the hard, round shape of Cyndell's bracelet in his sling-pouch. By feel, he followed the carved meander, chanting the daycount silently. They had journeyed deep into the Frost Moon, close to the meander's turn, where the First Snows begin. Before then he should be with Hamr again, and they would be closer to finding Duru—if she yet lived.

  On the nights that the trance-thorn had possessed him, he had fallen asleep swiftly and had slept dreamlessly. This night he lay awake, worried about his sister and afraid for himself. Then, in the midst of his fretting, he spotted the otter he had killed standing among blue cloverheads. His sleek body exuded a silver outline, and he smelled of honey. The look in his stare did not appear animal but human and crazy.

  Timov knew he dreamt and tried to force himself awake. The dream colors sharpened, and a frightful sound began—the thunder-like drone that he had last heard when the witch had flung him out of his body, far into the sky. A sense of impending calamity deepened in him.

  With a ripping sound, the otter's dream skin tore away from its dream body. The ragged pelt winged into the storm-green distance, leaving behind the crimson, raw-muscled body with its silvery tendons and small cage of teeth.

  Life eats life, an unseen voice said, and the human eyes in the otter's skull blinked. The humming thunder darkened and seemed to echo from inside his bones.

  Before Timov's eyes, the skinned otter decomposed: Strings of muscle and dangling fruits of viscera greened, fluttered, dissolved to blistery jellies. The skeleton broke apart, shattered to bone-chips. While storm-smoke closed in blackly, the melted flesh became plasma, and the bone-chips, stars. And all at once, Timov hung in the incandescent night under the auroras.

  You will die! a cruel voice said. And when you die, we will eat you—like this!

  Pain jolted through Timov, many tiny, needle-fine teeth stabbing into his flesh. He cried out, and his noise vanished in a loud static humming from inside him. The pain rose toward a convulsion, and fear suffused him as he struggled to wrench himself out of his nightmare.

  You will wake, the evil voice said. But when you die, you will never wake, and we will eat you like this—forever.

  Fear became consuming fire—so suddenly that he actually felt his skin blacken and curl away. He screamed in terror. His cry bled into a long moan, dissolving into the lion roar of the storm-wind.

  Look at the stars, a quiet voice counseled.

  Timov responded mindlessly to the benign command and stared through his pain at hard points of light in the darkness. Pain lessened, the thunder-drone softened. Look at the stars, and the Dark Traces will lose their grip on you, the gentle voice said.

  The stars shifted, became glinting reflections in the eye-facets of a giant fly. Its buzzing cut loudly through space. You will die—and we will eat you! the stark voice said again, and the stabbing agony in him sharpened.

  There is no giant fly, the gentle voice insisted. The sky is the void that holds the stars. See the stars.

  Timov did—and the pain eased, the buzzing dulled. He concentrated on the stars, noticing their watery colors, their fiery barbs. The pain vanished entirely. And the loud drone condensed to the muffled drumbeat of his own heart.

  The Dark Traces enter you when you are afraid, the calm voice said. Yaqut opens you to them. But you needn't be afraid. Put your attention outside your fear, outside your pain, and you will find us. We are the happy dreams of animals. We live in the sky—and we live in you.

  )|(

  This night, after eating, when the fire had shrunk to embers, Baat danced with abandon. Blue flames whipped from his whirling arms, scribbling the dark spaces with glittering tracks, comet tails, and meteor streaks. He approached Duru, and this time, when his luminous fingers touched her, she tried to stay awake, to hold on to her memory of the frail voices—the ul udi—and soared into the tangles of auroral radiance with her eyes open.

  The whisper-light of stars slipped through her. In the boreal glow, she watched the moon watching her as she pivoted in emptiness, and looked back the way she had come. There she slept, draped over Baat's shoulders like a dwarf deer, her hair bouncing as he bounded north through the woods.

  Duru stared ahead of him, across the canopy of the trees, the herded hills, and the webwork of streams shining silver in the moonlight. Mirror lakes glared. Fog breathed in the teeming darkness. And beyond the confusion of the many-faceted land, tundra opened, almost blue in the lunar haze. Somewhere out there, Timov and Hamr wander.

  At that thought, Duru felt herself swooping and watched treetops skim by. She plummeted into the darkness of the Forest. Timov had curled up there, buried in leaves, only his face visible, a soft moon in the shadows. Above him, eye-level with Duru, Yaqut lay on a bough, a patchwork of pelts warding off the Frost Moon's chill. His marred face looked as pocked as a gourd. His hair gleamed white as root-ends.

  Duru dipped closer to her brother and observed small stars bobbing in the air above him. When she touched one of the stars, she entered his dream: A silver otter hung upside down from a branch, staring into a bloody puddle at a reflection of Timov. He floated in the sky.

  She gazed up beyond the hung otter and espied him there, limbs outstretched limply as if he were floating on his back in a clear pool. She rose toward him and called his name.

  "Look at the stars," he said in his dream. "Look—or the Dark Traces will get you."

  "Timov—it's me, Duru."

  He looked at her, and a baffled shadow darkened his eyes. "Duru?"

  "Yes—I'm with the ghost dancer—and the ul udi, the spirits that visit him from the sky. They carried me here, to see you. Are you all right?"

  Timov's whole body trembled, and in his dream he reached for her. He touched emptiness. He shrank away. "Are you a ghost?"

  "No, I'm alive. I'm okay. The ghost dancer is not hurting me. He needs my help. We're on a journey." Concern came into her dream face. "Timov, where is Hamr?"

  Timov reached for her again, and his agitated effort pulled him farther away. "Duru—come back!"

  Duru willed herself closer. An inexorable force drew her down, back to the blood puddle and the silver otter's dead stare. The next moment, she lifted free of Timov's dream entirely. Caught in a celestial undertow, she flew back into the night sky.

  )|(

  Timov wrenched himself awake. Through a gap in the branches, the lemur-face of the moon gazed down. Somewhere inside him, he felt the dream continuing. This is not a dream, he realized. With eyes closed, he could still feel his sister's presence, further away now and moving rapidly—to his left, to the south. His flesh jarred on his bones as he felt her flight end. She had returned to the ghost dancer.

  "What is it?" a gruff voice broke over him.

  Timov flinched, thinking he heard the Dark Traces returning to torment him. When he opened his eyes, he saw Yaqut lowering himself from the branch above, soundless as a snake.

  "The dreams have begun again, haven't they?" Yaqut's face gleamed in the moonlight, almost jovial. "What did you see?"

  Timov told him and felt uneasy at the glint of cunning that edged the other's stare. "She's helping the ghost dancer," the boy said. "She's not in danger."

  "You believe that—after what the ul udi did to you?" The old hunter sneered. "The Invisibles can put any words they want into your sister's m
outh. For all we know, she may not even be alive anymore." He gazed in the direction Timov indicated his dream-sister had flown. "Sleep now, if you can. At first light, we are going to follow your dream."

  Yaqut climbed back into the tree and squatted on the bough above Timov, contemplating killing the boy now. The ul udi were in him—and that was reason enough to kill him. Both the priestess and the witch had recognized that bonesucker blood flowed in him. That truth also stayed Yaqut from plunging his poison-tipped lance into the youth: The spirits in Timov know how to find the ghost dancer.

  At the first smudged signs of dawn, Yaqut roused Timov, and they moved quickly south through loamy woods—more quickly than they had ever tramped before. The hunter made no pause for food, though they crossed the tracks of Fox and Marten and spotted Red Deer prodding a pine sapling, sharpening his antlers. Yaqut even broke his own rules of silence, rushing through leafdrifts, snapping tinder underfoot, startling coveys of Partridge.

  At midday, Yaqut stopped on a turf-bank, where the land divided before a fault that humped fir-strewn knolls to one side and on the other dropped into an oak grove of sunken glacial rocks. He looked to Timov. "Which way?"

  Timov shrugged.

  "Look inside," Yaqut said sharply.

  Timov squinted, bewildered.

  With the haft of his lance, Yaqut rapped the back of Timov's knees and toppled him. He bent close enough for the fallen boy to smell his sour breath, "Close your eyes. Think of your sister. Remember her carefully—and you will feel where she is. She is still now. The bonesucker runs at night. Feel for Duru. And when you find her, point."

  Timov closed his eyes, astonished by Yaqut's confidence that he had the power to find Duru. Only darkness greeted him. Even so, he did as Yaqut had told him and thought of Duru, remembered her baby-round forehead, the dimple in her left cheek, her swollen upper lip that was Mother's, and her large eyes that had always narrowed so drastically when she called him Saphead. Then, quivering shadows separated from the darkness behind his closed lids and began to glint with the bruised blood of a sunset.

  "We have to catch him asleep," Yaqut mused. "Then the killing will be easy."

  Timov grunted for silence. Tawny hues gathering in the dark behind his eyelids fitted themselves to his memory of Duru. She appeared in him, as she had been last night. Only now she did not move. She stood still somewhere to his left.

  He turned his head that way, toward the image of Duru leaning on a spruce pole under a slope of ferns. He raised his hand toward her, and Yaqut pulled him upright.

  "Come," Yaqut crowed. "We must find them before dark."

  Timov almost swooned under the heavy burden of his trance. As his head cleared, he began to realize that if his sister's visitation of last night had not been a deception, he had betrayed her.

  Yaqut did not wait for him. Unsteadily, the boy veered up the hillside. The moon hung overhead, milky in the day sky and followed them across the morning.

  When the hunter found his prey's droppings, he knelt. "Less than a day," he judged and scowled at the bloated sun in the treetops. He stabbed his lance into the leaf-matted stool. "We are close. We need a few more hours. That is all."

  A strange, divided relief flooded Timov's chest at the sight of the reddening sun. Strange, because he too wanted to reach the ghost dancer—to retrieve Duru. And yet, he feared what Yaqut would do when they found their prey. What did Duru mean?—that she is helping the ghost dancer? What can a child do for a giant?

  That had to have been one of the ul udi's deceptions. A tremor prickled his flesh at the memory of what the evil spirits had done to him, and his anxiety mounted with the approach of night.

  "We will track until darkness," Yaqut decided. He picked around the area with his lance until he found the ghost dancer's prints.

  Timov followed reluctantly, stopping only briefly to fit his foot to the giant's. It spread nearly twice his size.

  "Isn't it dangerous to get too close now—at nightfall?" he asked.

  "Quiet." Yaqut turned. His scar-hooded eye looked over his shoulder. "If your noise betrays me, boy, I will kill you."

  The giant's spoor led the hunters over a ledge of maple, whose crimson leaves mimed sunset, and down toward a dank fen. Timov recognized the slope of ferns where he had visualized his sister. They closed in. But the mushy terrain slowed them, and the sun's last rays fanned overhead while they pressed on, still knee-deep in the bog.

  On the ridge across the fen, a blue light flared among the trees, and Yaqut cursed. "We have lost him now. The Invisibles will warn him about us. He will stay ahead of us. And he will try and lose us in the streams."

  They climbed onto a hummock and struggled to flint-strike a fire with the few dry twigs they could find among the soggy sponge-wood. Over on the crest of the ridge, the spectral glow winked back and forth among the trees as the giant danced. Timov stared in wonder, until Yaqut barked, "Help with this fire or the mosquitoes will eat all our sleep tonight."

  With dry duff that Yaqut carried in his satchel, they started a twig-fire and used those flames to dry a small dead branch snapped from a scraggly larch. Once that limb ignited, they fed the fire damp chunks of wood. By then, the ghost dancer's eerie blue light had begun to move off quickly along the ridge.

  "He's going north," Timov observed. "Hamr will meet him on his way toward us."

  Yaqut spoke with crisp certainty, "Hamr is dead." He peered at the lad, who gaped at the ridge, watching the ghost fire spin away. Again, he considered killing the boy at once and leaving his body in the fen as an offering to the Beastmaker for His help with the hunt.

  "Why is he running north?" Timov asked. "Why doesn't he run south or east into the mountains, where he can find shelter from winter?"

  "He knows we are watching," Yaqut surmised and reached for his lance. "He thinks he can baffle us. Later, he will break east."

  "But he was moving north last night, when Duru visited me and he didn't know I was watching." Timov looked at Yaqut, his dark eyes bird-bright. "He's heading for the tundra. He'll run right into Hamr."

  Yaqut's good eye half-lidded. His hand moved away from his lance and reached instead for his satchel. He broke out the last shreds of otter meat and a handful of acorns and hazelnuts he had collected along the way. Perhaps the boy is right. Yaqut looked at the meager food supply, then offered the child half. "Tomorrow we will take food and more pelts. We are going north." He leaned nearer, placing the food in Timov's hands and staring with stony command into his eyes. "Watch your dreams. Tell me everything you see."

  )|(

  The sheldrake soared ahead of the flock. Hamr stopped Blind Side of Life and followed the arrowheads of ducks with his gaze.

  Since the attack of the Moon Bitch, the air had felt heavier, the chill never quite relenting even at noon, when sunlight slanted amber across the tundra. The shadow of winter, Hamr wanted to believe. Or death. Kirchi's avid care, her eagerness to please him—even pretending to ignore the menace in the air—assured him she thought him doomed, already killed by Neoll Nant Caw.

  Hamr watched the lines of birds waver into the turquoise light of the southern sky. For a while, he stared at distant dark firs, feeling as strong in his body as any of those somber trees and as pure in his mind as the deep sky. Then, he turned his horse the other way, toward the clump of wiry shrub, where Kirchi had already set camp for the night.

  Though Kirchi had not wanted to think of herself as a witch, the Moon Bitch had forced her to use what she had learned. Every night since then, she had placed her moonstones on the ground, each of them touching, forming a small circle. In the tiny opening they made, she gathered moonlight into smoke. The smoke quivered as radiantly as auroras.

  "Sky-fire," Kirchi called it the first night she showed Hamr. "Lightning caught in the air." She chattered on about tapping the ghost dancer's power, the way a tree could be tapped for syrup. Hamr paid little attention to how this magic worked. He simply wanted to see.

  Each night
, Kirchi and Hamr searched for Baat and Duru in the moonstones' plasma window. The tracking stone indicated they traveled southeast, in the Forest. Kirchi never found them with her magic. Most nights, they viewed only windy trees and animals drifting among silver paths of moonlight. She knew her incompetence with the plasma window thwarted her, yet she kept trying. The view lasted only as long as the moon shone, and it rose later each night.

  One night, as Hamr drowsed—dreaming of an upside-down tree hung in the sky, its naked roots tangled with stars—Kirchi woke him. "Look! I've found Timov!"

  Visible in the smoky light, Yaqut and Timov crouched in the watery glow of the moon, both asleep, the hunter in the crotch of a furry marsh tree, the boy among its thick roots, Cyndell's white bracelet in his hand.

  The vulnerability of Timov, asleep where any panther could pounce on him, frightened Hamr and inspired anger at Yaqut for separating them. He sat back from the misty peekhole and faced the darkness to the south.

  "The Moon Bitch is dead," he muttered. "We've gone enough nights without seeing any trace of her. Tomorrow we go back for Timov."

  )|(

  Baat gazed down below, on the meanders of all the brooks and creeks he had crossed to reach this crest of gooseberry bushes and twisted conifers. The People had names for the larger streams and for the big rocks, the giant slabs and immense tree-spired boulders the water sluiced around or disappeared under. He deliberately kept those names at a dim distance. Whom would I speak them to?

  Northward, the land fell to flat stretches of nuthatch groves and firs grown huge in the loam that silted down from these high rocks. Through weird-shaped trees, he peeked at tawny depths of autumn, blowsy clumps of fire colors among blue pinnacles of evergreen. One more night's march would cross that flat fringe of the Forest, and then the taiga's stunted pines, the wolfsbane brushlands, and the viper grass would lead them at last to the tundra.

  Baat looked down at Duru, standing in the seam of the rock sheets that had mated to form this crest. She leaned on her crutch and plucked gooseberries dangling from overhead, occasionally glancing up at him—probably wondering why he lingered awake.