Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  For a while, Timov survived, sucking shallowly at the air. Then, he stopped breathing, and by first light it could be seen that, though not a mark scathed his body from the Moon Bitch's attack, he lay dead.

  Yaqut, who had crept back into the camp after the battle, took a pinch from his poison pouch and burned a puff of acrid smoke under Timov's nose.

  Timov did not flinch. His cold face glowed blue in the dawnlight.

  Kirchi pressed her moonstones to his temples and shouted, and could not startle his eyeballs into movement. Her fingertips came away chilled.

  With a flat rock, Hamr dug a hole in the carpet of marjoram. He cut at the sweet decay under it, hacked at roots and tugged free rocks, all with locked-jaw strength and a fierce frown, as if attacking the Mudman himself. When he laid Timov in the hole, he did so gently.

  Kirchi gathered asters and placed their humid blue heads on his chest, so their fragrance would please him in the afterlife.

  Yaqut took the sling he had cut for Timov, fitted a stone to its strap, and wrapped the throwing strings about the boy's icy hand.

  Then, Hamr chanted greetings to the Mudman and acknowledgment to the Beastmaker, and midway a silent sob supplanted his voice, and Yaqut finished for him.

  Hamr waved the others aside after they had thrown their handfuls of dirt, and he covered Timov with the earth. He tamped it solidly, and tucked the minty carpet of marjoram back into place so the animals would not dig him up.

  Done, he sat on the grave and felt all the sorrows of his shared journey with Timov fill him to the rims of his eyes. The grief would go no further.

  Life is too hard to be softened by tears.

  )|(

  Timov woke up and faced the black turtleshell of the world drifting under him. He recognized it there only because the auroras outlined its shape against the star-hung darkness: Bluegreen veils shimmered over the carapace of the Great Turtle, outlining a black circle to the north, where its head must be. East and west, the ghostly lights condensed to fiery green fringes at the edge of the Turtle's shell.

  He floated downward in the night, returning to where he had begun. Since the Moon Bitch's attack, he had been drifting in a wondrous trance, full of voices and visions. When he closed his eyes, he viewed the sun blazing among thousands of suns, a majestic whirlwind in a maelstrom of fire.

  That trance already dissolved like a dream. He soared toward the azure apex of the earth, gliding over the day-side of the planet. Sight opened for him wide as the dawn. He surveyed land far below, clouds and color patches of autumn. There, life carried on as he remembered: Herds and flocks threaded south. Weather tugged its freights from the sparkling sea to the aloof mountains. And lives invisible in their tininess thrived in valleys and forests.

  He gazed back to where he had been—to the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Plasma rolled like fog in the black of space, veiling a disarray of stars. Up there, he had dreamed something wonderful, about all of creation. Though he had already forgotten almost everything, he grasped tightly what remained: Our bones baked in the stars, so they would be strong enough to lift us from the mud and yet delicate enough to hold the light of the mind.

  He feared to go back down, sensing that everything he had discovered here would shrink to a kind of puny wonder, reduced by the necessities of eating and killing to sleeping and forgetting. Somewhere below, Duru, Hamr, and Kirchi lived—and the ghost dancer. Yaqut, too, wandered there—all the predators weaning the herds of their sick and aged. So many lives wandering the Earth, regal with alertness, destitute with hunger. How many lifted their faces to the sky? How often had he looked up himself and wondered about the stars and ruffling auroras, only a moment later to turn his attention to some fiercesome growl among the trees or a wisp of meat crisping over fire?

  Far away, the thunderous fugues of the solar wind boomed against the sky. Inside that perpetual music, other music resounded—voices sang, beckoning him into the spirit stillness of the dark.

  He descended. The magical voices, calling with the beauty of sadness, thinned to a rapt memory. The nameless stars disappeared, leaving behind only the luminaries and the constellations. Then they, too, vanished behind the blue abundance of the sky. He passed through clouds, the color-patches of autumn, and crashed headlong into the Forest.

  Pain sank its venoms into him once again. Earth clogged his nostrils, and he groped blind. His eyes flew open and immediately stung shut. Mud gagged him, and in a panic he struggled to catch his breath, to move. The earth held him down, pressing him hard to her cold bosom.

  With a huge effort, Timov tore his hand free of the packed ground, ripped at the matted grasses smothering him, and wrenched himself upright in his grave.

  )|(

  The ceremonies ended. Eager to close in on the ghost dancer, Yaqut led the way along the dry creek bed until the tracking stone in Hamr's hand pointed them east. The land sank to blueberry-laden woods whose trees looked like wild dancers waving red rags. The clear sky above swerved with birds. Ahead, over the mountains, weather clouded and rain feathered the wind.

  Under a haze of midges, Yaqut knelt, read tracks in the soft earth, and hurried on. They no longer needed the tracking stone. Hamr held it anyway. His heart trotted faster with their quickening pace, afraid the ghost dancer might double back before the old hunter could read the land.

  He recognized the absurdity of that thought yet could not dismiss it after losing so much so quickly—Blind Side and Timov gone to the Mudman in one day. The wet wind seemed to slap at his heart. The sky cried for him, and he feared what the world in its grief might do.

  The tracks vanished among groundsel and bracken. While Yaqut scrutinized the earth and Hamr swayed back and forth with the tracking stone, feeling the chill of its direction, Kirchi looked around. This place held the broken end of summer. The land looked cluttered with harebells and red mushrooms. Tangles of ivy swarmed over fallen trees. And brittle leaves drifted among bush ferns. Beside a creek no wider than her wrist, a falcon's nest had fallen, scattering animal bones, tiny fish-skulls, shells, bleached twigs and haywire, bright as pieces of the moon.

  She hoped they would find the ghost dancer today. She prayed that he would drop the girl and flee from them into the mountains. But she knew that he would not. He had come back to die. She had grown certain of that. He needed Duru to accomplish it.

  During the summer, when Neoll Nant Caw had made her drink the trance brew every day and sit peering into the crystals for the whereabouts of Baat—hoping to find him before the hunters did—the crone had told her, "The Old People cross the tundra when they are ready to die. Baat wants to do the same. That is why he has come back. We must find him and help him."

  They had never found him. Unless he allowed the Dark Traces to use his body, the scry crystals, which only tracked the evil ul udi, could not see him. All summer, he had hidden in the Forest and not called down the Dark Traces.

  Kirchi had been glad not to have to look at him again. She remembered watching him in the spring, when the Dark Traces last used him, seeing how swiftly he had killed the Longtooth and Thundertree men before pumping his lust into the priestess.

  An upright shadow moved among twisted bilberry shrubs, and Kirchi shuddered. A cry escaped her. Hamr and Yaqut, spears ready, pressed past her, then fell back. Out of the shrubs, scabrous with mud and peeling leaves, Timov lurched.

  Hamr dropped his spear and slashed the tracking stone into a knife.

  "Pierce his heart!" Yaqut yelled. "That is a deadwalker's only weakness—the heart!"

  "Hamr!" Timov shouted.

  Hamr lunged forward, pressed the crystal dagger to Timov's chest.

  "Hamr! I'm alive!"

  Hamr stared into Timov's face, recognized the fearfulness of life in his wide eyes, and lowered the crystal. "I buried you, Timov."

  Kirchi put a hand to Timov's slimed neck and felt the blood-beat. "He was tranced," she said with awe. "By the Power of the Mother, he lives. The Moon Bitch did not kil
l him after all."

  "See if he bleeds," Yaqut yelled.

  Hamr shot him a dark look. "How'd you get out?" he asked Timov.

  The boy shook his head. "I don't remember. I was choking, couldn't breathe. I got out."

  "Build a fire," Kirchi ordered. "We should warm and feed him."

  "No," Yaqut insisted. "The ghost dancer is too near, and there is not time left in the day. At night, we become his prey."

  "We're building a fire," Hamr declared and held the gaze of Yaqut's bent face until the hunter turned. "Where are you going?"

  Yaqut said nothing, stalked off, and disappeared among the shrubs. Hamr sang a thankful song to the Beastmaker while he sparked a fire in the fallen falcon's nest and piled on dead branches. Timov's return provided the Beastmaker's sign that they would indeed create their tribe and that Duru would soon join them.

  Kirchi had won his heart with her caring wisdom and would always have a place at his side, but Duru, as Aradia's sister and the last female of the Blue Shell, owned his soul. She was truly his wife, and when she grew to womanhood, they would have children and begin a new clan.

  In the warm flush from the crackling wood, Timov discarded his antelope-hide and rubbed himself with warm ash. Water from the rill and wads of wet grass and moss cleansed the ash-softened mud. Kirchi gave him soapwort from her plant pouch, and he sudsed his hair, crouched, and let the creek wash over his scalp.

  When their elation over Timov's miraculous return from the dead had subsided to happy contentment, Timov told the story of his journey into the sky.

  Hamr listened as he awled holes in the Lion's skin with his knife and threaded thongs to secure the hide to the boy's body. So glad the youth had survived, Hamr happily let him prattle on.

  He even felt honored to give him the Lion pelt and speak his praise to the Beastmaker. He cut the skin with the black-glass knife. And he trimmed the hide so that the front paws would cross over Timov's chest and the mane collar his neck and block the wind at his back.

  Kirchi's hands worked absently, cracking nuts with a rock. Timov, his face clean and shining, told her raptly, "Everything you said is true. I met the ul udi. The Bright Ones. It's just as you say, Kirchi. Our bodies are equal to the sunlight."

  Hamr looked up from his cutting with a quizzical frown.

  Kirchi squeezed Timov's hand, reassuring him. "That's the chant I gave you after Neoll Nant Caw pricked you with her dreaming thorn."

  "It's true. I was light. My body had become light."

  "Your body was buried," Hamr said through his teeth, using them to tighten a knot.

  Timov chewed his lower lip, trying to remember. His journey to the sky now seemed no more than a dream, most of which he had forgotten. The wonder remained, a secret feeling no words could hold.

  He recalled only a few of the astounding things the Bright Ones had actually told him. Your body is equal to the sunlight. A star baked your bones. He remembered Kirchi whispering that into his ear, while he sat in the witch's burrow, enslaved by the dreaming thorn.

  He also remembered floating above the world's curve, the luminous blue crescent fleeced with clouds. And the ul udi had told him the same things. Only up there, they spoke with music—and the music had made him see the truth of what they said.

  "Our bones were baked in stars," Timov asserted. "The ul udi showed me." Distantly, he recalled staring up at huge stars above the blue haze of the world, and he had felt as though the stars emptied their light into him—that the star-gleam had sown bright ideas inside him, as part of him, as though he had always known that the earth was round, not a tortoise-shell after all, but an egg with an eggshell crust of granite, albumen of melted rock, and a yolk core of the hardest rock of all: He could not bring forth its name now. But he had known then, floating up there under the seething starlight.

  Kirchi put both of her hands on his, said excitedly, "I know something of what you saw. In trance, I've seen as much. That's why I gave you the chant. It's what the witch gave me. It's a place to start with the ul udi, a way of remembering their music."

  Timov's face shone. "That's what they are. Music."

  "They are light," Kirchi corrected. "We hear them as music."

  "What're you two talking about?" Hamr asked, not diverting his attention from his work.

  "We're made of lightning," Timov said, squinting to remember. "All of us—Horse, Lion, Bear, the People, Falcon, and Trout—even the trees and the rocks. All lightning."

  Hamr had been humoring Timov. Now, he looked up slowly, the thought occurring to him that something more had happened to the boy than simply being knocked out. "Flesh and blood don't look like lightning to me," he said and watched his companion closely to see if his near-death experience had addled him.

  "The lightning is inside. It's what makes the tiniest pieces of our flesh and blood and bones stick together."

  "Lightning?"

  "Yes. It's incredible. But it's no weirder than the Beastmaker, who cuts our bones down from antlers and squeezes our blood from rocks."

  Hamr sat up straighter. "The Beastmaker is greater than lightning," he replied testily and motioned for Timov to stand. Trying not to show his mounting irritation over the boy's talk, he placed the bulky mane on Timov's shoulders and pulled the tail between his legs, tucking up the rest of the large pelt to form a breech-wrap. He cinched the tail around the waist. "Lightning might hold the Lion together, but the Beastmaker put the lightning in the Lion."

  "I've heard Neoll Nant Caw talk about lightning," Kirchi interrupted softly. "There's an ocean of lightning in the sky, and that's where the ul udi live."

  Timov nodded, packing the nuts he chewed into his cheek so he could keep talking. "It's true. Even our thoughts are lightning. And many of those thoughts come down from the sky and into our heads, where we think them."

  "Nonsense!" Hamr said, slapping his chest. "We think in our hearts."

  "That's what we imagine," Timov insisted, "but, really, we think in our heads, in our brains."

  "That's crazy," Hamr derided. "The heart moves. And it moves with our thoughts, faster when our thoughts are excited, slower when we're bored. It's obvious. The brains are head marrow, they fill the hollows of the head bones. That's all. And I know for a fact there's no feeling there. When they drilled a hole into Gobniu's father's head, to let the head pain out, I was there. I saw the Tortoise Man stabbing his living brain with a sharp fishbone. The old man didn't feel a thing."

  Kirchi laced the waist-thongs on Timov's lion-leather wrap, stood back and nodded with satisfaction. "You won't be cold this winter."

  "If we see the winter," Timov remarked and sat down with Hamr. The memory of his journey to the sky continued to dim away, but one truth had come clear to him that he could not forget: The ul udi existed in reality—as real as the Beastmaker—and he had to make Hamr understand that. "If we keep after the ghost dancer, we may all die. His brain is shaped differently than ours. Somehow it can hold the lightning of the ul udi in ways we can't. Not just their thoughts, but their strength. When the Dark Traces enter him, they run his body."

  "I don't understand any of this ... whatever you're talking about. Even if it is so, then all the more reason to go after him." Hamr clenched his fists resolutely. "If the Dark Traces are in him, what will they do to your sister?"

  Timov pondered this for a moment. "She didn't seem afraid. You know, I think she's even happy with the ghost dancer. Maybe it's a trance-thorn. Maybe he's protecting her from the Dark Traces. Maybe we shouldn't try to get her back right away. We could follow from a distance for a while, see if I can reach her in dreams again."

  "Timov is right," Kirchi chimed in. "We've seen for ourselves, what Neoll Nant Caw says is true: Baat is old, ready to die. He's the last of his tribe, and he needs Duru to watch over him."

  "So he simply kidnaps her from us? No, he's nothing like us. We don't dare trust him." Hamr scratched at his new whiskers and shook his head at Timov. "You could be as wrong about his prote
cting Duru as you are about us thinking with our brains. Neoll Nant Caw attacked us." He cocked a glance at Kirchi. "The Moon Bitch would have killed you if Timov hadn't taken her blow. You can't trust the witch." He returned his stern attention to Timov. "And we can't trust the sky spirits, either—not with all their befuddling trances and visions of lightning in our bodies. Can't you see? They're trying to distract us. They obey the witch and the ghost dancers, because that's how they get their blood sacrifices. If we listen to them, they'll control us. I say we track down the ghost dancer and get Duru back, find out from her what she wants: us or the bonesucker."

  "The ul udi are powerful, Hamr," Kirchi said. Timov was alive, the Moon Bitch was dead, and Kirchi wanted Hamr to take her away from these woods before the Dark Traces could use Baat again to do their violence. "I saw how they can inflame Baat—and how terrible his slaughtering can be."

  "Let me try to reach Duru in trance again," Timov offered.

  "I'm telling you, we can't trust what happens in a trance," Hamr contended. "What if that bonesucker's raping her but these evil spirits are sending you visions of her happiness? She's your sister. And she came with us because she thinks she's my wife. I have to know she's all right—not dream about it."

  The sound of a twig cracking among the nettles interrupted them. Out of the purple light, Yaqut emerged and crouched beside the fire. The mottled shine of his scars glinted with sweat. While they had been talking, he had sat on a tree limb listening to the wind. His voice sounded low with fear of what he had heard. "He's coming for us."

  Timov perked up his head like a rabbit. "You saw him?"

  "Listen. It's too quiet. He's coming."

  Hamr held up the tracking stone, felt its scalding cold. He jumped up and swung around, and the cold level deepened in every direction.

  Kirchi read the alarm in his stare and whispered, "He's here."

  )|(

  Duru woke from the witch's trance and found herself once more lashed to a tree. Baat squatted in the morning steam staring at her with a heavy expression. She looked for the crone she had seen last night, and the tatters of dawn mist showed only emptiness among the crooked trees.