Elizabeth Henry took flight.
Adelaide watched with as much shock as the two little Mudge boys. She hadn’t know her sister could fly.
Elizabeth’s barking echoed. It came from farther north. Another bark then a horse whined and snorted as it went down somewhere out there. A young man’s voice called out once – Edward! – but was quickly silenced. Only one horse galloping now. There were two pistol shots. Then silence.
Adelaide came back to herself. She’d been so busy listening to the darkness that she’d stopped seeing what lay in front of her. Mrs. Mudge. The body not yet cold, but the soul already gone.
The remaining Mudge boys had split. They’d mounted Mrs. Barlow’s gelding together. Adelaide watched them ride to her. The 10-year-old held the reins. His younger brother in front. They stopped at Adelaide’s door. The boys looked at their mother then back to Adelaide. The 10-year-old’s eyes showed bright with rage, but it was the gaze of the 6-year old that chilled Adelaide. He watched her with a dispassionate eye, colder than a Montana winter.
“Mudges never forget,” the 6-year-old said.
His brother gave the gelding a kick and the two boys stole off on Mrs. Barlow’s horse.
* * *
First winter was the hardest test for any homesteader. First spring counted as the hardest after that. Eventually summer and fall would challenge the homesteader, too. And if you survived the first year, then the second loomed. After the third the land was legally yours. Many homesteaders, once they owned the property outright, returned to their home state and sold the land for profit. Others managed their resources and stuck around.
Adelaide and Elizabeth emerged from that first winter to find that by May the land had thawed back to its raw grace. They’d almost forgotten what the world looked like without its shroud of snow. Adelaide took Mrs. Barlow – Violette, as Adelaide called her now – up on the offer of help to secure a bank loan, and used some of the money to buy a gelding that Adelaide named Redondo.
A plow and harrow had been the next. Adelaide picked up an ax and hoe, rake and flail. She bought a four-burner stove with an oven so she could cook larger meals. She bought a rifle. She repaid Mrs. Barlow for the gelding the Mudge boys took. With the start of spring Adelaide planned to hire a man to come out and build a small barn but Grace and the other women built one for her. It rained nearly every day so this was soggy work.
None of the women would let Adelaide do much because she was eight months pregnant. She’d been wrong, thinking she’d never see Matthew Kirby again. She wondered whether the child would have his face, his hair, his shy smile.
Elizabeth stayed hidden in the root cellar when the barn was built. She never slept inside the trunk again. Adelaide used it to hold the baby clothes she’d sewn.
Grace and Stan were last to leave after the barn was complete.
“How’re you going to break the soil up with Redondo?” Grace asked. Stan, now six, held the reins of their horse and snuck bits of beet into its mouth.
“I’m going to get the plow on him,” Adelaide said. “Then after we’re done I’ll use the harrow.”
Adelaide tried to sound confident but at eight months pregnant she didn’t feel like much more than dead weight.
“I think you could guide the plow, even now,” Grace agreed. “But you can’t control your horse and slip that heavy thing on him. Let us stay.”
Stan pulled at the reins and the horse tugged back. The boy stumbled and dropped the beets in the dirt. He bent quick to snatch them, looking to his mother with worry. Grace must’ve warned him against this, for her own reasons, but now the boy brought himself within inches of the horse’s hooves. He stood exactly where Mrs. Mudge’s body had bled out..
“Be careful there, Stan!” Adelaide said quickly.
Grace turned fast and swatted her son, and he fell backward onto his ass. The horse was a good one; it stayed calm. Stan held his head and cried out, overplaying his pain.
“That’s what you have to look forward to, Adelaide.” Grace smiled. “Lots of theater.”
Adelaide touched Grace’s shoulder gently. “I appreciate your offer. Ride over on Wednesday. I’ll let you know if I need help.”
Grace agreed with a grunt and helped Stan onto the horse. Grace’s hand never had healed properly and she had enough trouble tending to her own land because of it. Adelaide didn’t want to add to Grace’s burden even if she had no idea how she’d manage plowing on her own.
Adelaide let her sister out of the root cellar when Grace and Stan were blotted out by the distance. For dinner Adelaide made rabbit, mountain cottontail. Elizabeth had turned out to be a talented hunter.
In the morning Adelaide woke to the sound of her barn doors rattling open. By this point in her pregnancy she couldn’t sleep deeply and her mind felt fuzzier than a mossy stone. She was too tired, too dazed, to act immediately. Instead she listened to the sound of something heavy being dragged from the barn. She wondered if the Mudge boys were back – Mudges never forget – stealing her equipment.
She sat up with some trouble. Elizabeth wasn’t inside. Maybe off hunting, patrolling the sky. Adelaide retrieved her rifle and looked out a window. She laughed at what she saw.
Elizabeth on all fours in the dirt and growling with intent. She had pulled the plow out of the barn and slipped her head through the harness.
Adelaide hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet, but these days she had a hard time keeping anything down. It was a sunny morning. A Montana homesteader should always take advantage of a morning without rain. Adelaide stepped back in for her coat and scarf and hat. She set down the rifle. She walked out to the plow. Her belly pressed against the high bar between the handles. Elizabeth tested the harness with a pull.
“I’m ready, Elizabeth!” Adelaide shouted.
The Henry sisters got to work.
Art by GMB Chomichuk
The Dance of the White Demons
by Sabrina Vourvoulias
* * *
1524
Guatemala
I dream in shades of green. The dusty hue of swallow herb; the new growth of little hand flower; the deep forest shade of cat’s claw. Plants are my calling and, as in waking life, they sprawl across boundaries.
The old woman dreams of deaths to come.
I wake to the sound of little explosions – ta-ta-ra-ta-ta – of copal cast into flame. When I come into my full power, the old woman will teach me the secret prayers, the ones only our kind intone because none other have such need to see under and beyond the world.
Perhaps the priests do too, but theirs is a much different calling. Though the incense that carries our prayers up to the heart of heaven is the same as the one they use, the words given flight are not.
I rise from the mat, secure my skirt with a sash, and pull my tunic over it so only a few inches of skirt shows above my ankles. I sing the names of my ancestors as I weave a ribbon through my braids: Names like vines that twist through leaf and branch; names like bits of cloud caught on the fingers of trees; names like the sound of air displaced by a bird’s wing.
It is nobody’s ritual but my own to sing this litany, but I – granddaughter, great-granddaughter, blood heir to generations – use the names to knit my bones more solidly to my flesh with each rising.
Every day of every year I’ve been with the old woman has started this way.
When I come out of the house, the old woman doesn’t even turn around. She’s on her heels by the fire pit, dropping copal into it. The smoke rises heavy above her head, then spreads wide instead of up.
“I noticed we’re almost out of snake’s broom,” she says to me, without looking around. “And thunderer root. And chicken herb.”
“Won’t we be preparing achiotl today?” I ask hopefully. We haven’t yet gotten the call for it but the old woman has assured me we will.
She looks at me then. I know she’s irritated at me by the way her crossed eye moves even closer to the inner corner. “Yes. But prepar
ing for war doesn’t mean the people won’t run fevers, or bleed, or give birth.”
She gets up and comes to stand next to me. She’s not much taller than me, for all that I’m only twelve and she’s lived years beyond my counting. “The Sun will soon show his face,” she says as she takes the cloth folded on her head and places it on mine. She adjusts it so the stiffest fold overhangs my eyes. Its shadow will keep them from watering.
I prefer to go bareheaded but the old woman’s gift is not to be ignored. She doesn’t need to mention again that she has foreseen people from other towns passing through our lands on their way to Utatlán. The people from our village are used to the way I look, but if these others chance to see me their eyes will slide over my white skin and white hair and freeze on my pink eyes.
Curses are passed along through prolonged eye contact. And fright, which is hard to treat and sometimes fatal.
The old woman is not my mother. She is not my grandmother, nor any relation that can be traced in straight lines. But the tree of life has crooked lines too, and her crossed eyes and my ghostly appearance tie us together in more worlds than just the one under our feet. My father brought me to her still tinted dark by my mother’s blood, but the old woman knew me anyway. The gods have made us family.
* * *
The paths I have worn through scrub and brush are so familiar I don’t pay attention to where my feet land as I trot down to collect the herbs. I look at the dawning sky instead and at the mountainside above me, still burrowed in the blanket of clouds it pulls over itself to bide the night. If the old woman’s visions are true and the message carried by the northerners prophetic, I wonder if the mountains themselves might be roused to arms at what is coming.
I find the patch of snake’s broom first. It is tall, with tiny yellow florets topping the bony stalks. It is a useful plant: we decoct it for massages that reduce swelling after childbirth. I pray before I start picking, and then I’m careful about how much I take. Plants are like villages, dependent on each other for well-being. Even far-flung seedlings know when their colony of origin has been decimated, and they stop thriving.
I move on to the stand of chicken herb, a styptic. The properties of the two plants partnered call up memory of my mother. If someone had mixed them – three parts chicken, one part snake – and administered a bolus, maybe her blood would have stopped flowing during my birth.
It is farther to go to get thunderer, and harder work to dig the roots from the earth whole. But it is important to do it well. The old woman long ago predicted that plague would anticipate war, and so it has. Fully a third of the people have died after burning so hot their bodies erupted in pustules – like volcanoes opening second and third vents to release what boils within. Thunderer, given in the right measure to the newly afflicted, is our best defense.
A light step and moist exhalation sounds midway through excavation of the third root. I look up. The doe’s eyes are dark and liquid, but the rest of her – small body, white pelt, reddish skin stark inside big ears – is me in animal form. She snuffles again, then butts my hand.
“I’m not done,” I tell her.
Her regard is steady, unblinking.
“Oh, all right,” I say. I put down my digging tool and get to my feet. I take off at a run behind the doe. She stops every so often and rises on her hind legs, feints toward me, then tears off in the opposite direction. We pursue each other, away and back, in a dance we’ve done together for as long as I can remember.
When I am too winded to continue, I drop to my back on the ground and close my eyes. I stretch my arms out to take advantage of the tender heat the Sun floods down this early in the day. I feel the doe nibble on my hair, then step away to a patch of something more savory.
I don’t know how long I stay like this, but too soon I hear her footfall again. She is an excellent timekeeper; I must go back, she’s telling me with her approach, to finish digging that root.
Only, when I open my eyes, it isn’t the doe who stands over me.
The boy is older than me, but not by much – fourteen at most. He’s a noble; his sandals and breechclout are bright with decoration.
“Where am I?” he says. Then, “Are you a white demon?”
I’m a girl, and as common as dirt despite my unusual look, so I shouldn’t venture to fully meet his eyes, much less with challenge. But I’m annoyed that he’s confused me for one of the gnomes that live under our mountains and hills. I’ve seen the carved white demon masks and there is nothing uglier.
“No,” I say. “My name is K’antel. And how is it that you don’t know where you are? Did someone knock you about the head and scatter your thoughts?”
“I was walking alongside my father’s house in Utatlán,” he says, “and after enough steps, I was in this clearing.”
He is a liar.
Utatlán, where the king’s fortress-palace stands and warriors are massing in preparation for war, is a two- to three-day trek from here. He does not have the look of one who has walked that far.
He casts himself on the ground next to me. That’s when I see it. The way the light sneaks through his flesh.
I scramble up. “You better come with me,” I say. “And hurry.”
He scowls. It turns his eyes shiny and hard, like the shells of the big, black beetles I find when I upturn certain roots.
“Nobody talks to me that way,” he says after a moment.
“I know,” I say, “but we don’t have much time. I must get you to the old woman. Else, you’ll wake from your trance in Utatlán and whatever wisdom your spirit knew to seek here will be lost to you.”
He shakes his head again but gets to his feet. “Maybe yours is that wisdom.” There is an odd sort of challenge in his voice as if he’s daring me to admit I think more highly of myself than I should.
When I don’t rise to the taunt, he says, “Lead on. I’ve seen you run, I’ll labor to keep up.”
I do, and he does, and he is a beautiful runner even when his feet don’t know the way.
The old woman knows, as she always does, when someone approaches our compound. She meets us with two cups of steaming liquid. Mine is frothy with honey, ground squash seeds, and corn. His will undoubtedly have some addition dictated by her foreknowledge of his arrival.
“Tekún Umám,” she says, then inclines her head a little in acknowledgement. I start. The boy isn’t just a noble, he’s royal. The prince.
“Umám,” he says. “I haven’t earned the Tekún.”
“It’s not earned,” the old woman says, “and you’ll vouch for it soon anyway.”
He catches a sigh before it fully leaves his lips. “Your granddaughter has made me run my heart out to be beneficiary of your wisdom before the trance that brought me here breaks.”
The old woman looks at me with her crooked eyes and for a moment I’m scared she will tell him that I am not her granddaughter, just a girl she’s cared for because she did not want to see me abandoned to the wild. But she doesn’t. She walks over to the fire pit, and we trail her. The smoke huffs up as if she has thrown something flammable on it; she follows the smoke with her eyes.
“Son of kings,” she says, “you know my gift of doubled vision just from looking at me. Your gifts are more carefully hidden. Tell me what they are.”
“I have a strong arm for sling or spear,” Umám says after a moment. “And enough breath to be a good shot with the blowgun.”
When she doesn’t say anything, he adds, “Warriors follow my lead without hesitation.”
“What else?” she turns to fix her eyes on him.
“He runs like the wind,” I interrupt.
“I wasn’t asking you,” she says.
Under her continued scrutiny, he finally answers, “My nahual isn’t like any other.”
“How?” she asks. I’ve never heard the old woman impatient before, which makes me search her face. Her crossed eye is where it always is, huddled near the inner corner, but her other eye… it’s in a ma
d shimmy from one corner to the other.
“My nahual lives outside and inside,” he says slowly.
The old woman nods, falls into thought.
“The message from the north warns that, like that great kingdom, ours will fall to the foreigners,” Umám says presently. “My father’s spies say there are not many sent forth to take down the K’iche’, but I fear they will try to gather our enemies to their ranks on their drive down.”
“Perhaps if your forefathers had not made enemies of so many…” she starts acidly, but doesn’t complete the comment
“I have been given many visions already,” the old woman says after a moment. “The foreigners have sent their hawk against you. And while hawks are swift and cruel when they hunt, smaller birds still dare harry them and drive them away. Even when those birds normally crave only song and peace.”
He stares at her. “You know which my nahual is.”
She nods.
“I would have preferred a jaguar. Like my father.”
The old woman’s smile is mocking. “Because yours is more commonly associated with women? I have known some with this same animal twin and I assure you, there is courage in it. Have you ever seen what happens to these birds when they are caught from the wild and caged?”
“They die,” he says.
“They choose death over subjugation,” she corrects.
“I have seen far into the future,” she adds. “Your name is still alive, even on the foreigners’ lips. And your nahual takes wing, they say, to fly higher than the eagle of the North or the condor of the South.”
“In truth?”
“In song,” she says. “Which holds a different kind of truth.”
After a long silence she asks, “What do the priests and advisors say to your father?”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 46
