Lovedeath

by Dan Simmons

  All right, I see you changing your tapes and know that this will not be recorded, but I want to explain something to you while you fiddle with the machine.

  When I describe the world Hoka Ushte went out alone into, you may recognize some of the places since you know these parts of South Dakota. But you are wrong. The Black Hills which Hoka Ushte visited for his hanblečeya are not the ones you can drive through today. And not just because there were no stone heads then, or towns or highways or ranches or rock shops or rattlesnake reptile gardens or taxidermy studios or Indian Craft souvenir shops or Jellystone Park campgrounds or casino towns or RV parks. No, the Paha Sapa were a different place because they were a different place. The Wasicun bring more than shitty souvenir shops and barbed wire fences, they bring a darkness and a bad smell that hides the sun that shone on the Black Hills where Hoka Ushte had his vision.

  Nor were the plains and badlands that Hoka Ushte is to visit in my story like the plains and badlands you may have driven to. It is not just that today’s high plains are divided and parceled by fence and highway, county roads and Interstate, nor that they are littered with Wasichu towns and crappy tract homes or mobile homes lined up along the highway like so many six-pack empties glinting in the sun.

  No, the difference is not just that the world was empty then and it is crowded with Fat Taker garbage today. Uh-uh. The world that Hoka Ushte rode his pony into that May afternoon so long ago was sparsely populated—a man could ride his horse for days without seeing a sign of another human being—but it was far from empty.

  On the grasslands then were the buffalo, still numbered in the millions when Hoka Ushte was a young man, and the animals—wolf and elk not yet driven from the prairie, bears still wandering far from the mountain homes, eagles soaring overhead, badgers in holes along the riverbeds, rattlesnakes and lizards, a single prairie dog metropolis with a population greater than Rapid City today, and, of course, there were the flies and insects and hoppers such as the ptewoyake which used to tell the Ikče Wičaśa where we could find the buffalo.

  But the world was full of more than animals: Hoka Ushte rode his pony into a landscape which was busy with hostile people.

  The Wasicun, yes, but he had never seen a Fat Taker and feared them only as one would fear a boogeyman. The terrible message of his dream made white people only more unreal to him. More real were the other Indians who were out there somewhere, camping just over the horizon or lying in wait for a lone wanderer. There were the other branches of the Ikče Wičaśa—the Oglalas, Miniconjous, and the Brulés Sioux. And there were those who would scalp a Lakota boy on sight: the Susuni, whom you call Shoshoni, and the Shahiyela, the Cheyennes, and the Kangi Wicasha or Crows, who were sometimes friends and allies and frequently deadly enemies, and the Blue Clouds, whom you call Arapahoes. There were older enemies such as the Omahas, Otos, Winnebagoes, and Missouris, whose land the Ikče Wičaśa had stolen or had tried to steal before Hoka Ushte was born. And there were the Pawnees and Poncas, whose land we were trying to steal in the days that Hoka Ushte knew. The Pawnees were ass-kissers and the asses they chose to kiss were Wasicun, even then, and in exchange for smooching Fat Taker ass the Pawnees were killing Ikče Wičaśa with muskets and even rifles which the Wasichu horse soldiers gave them.

  Beyond the Pawnee were the Three Tribes, the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, and they hated our people with a blue passion since we had stolen their land, killed their braves, and burned their villages on our own expansion west. And farther west, Hoka Ushte knew, were the Santees and the Yankonais and the Hunkpapas, all of whom regularly sent war parties east and south to kill any Ikče Wičaśa they might run across.

  And down from the mountains to hunt on the plains came the Ute and the Flathead and the Pend d’Oreille, and while they might not have the courage to raid a Lakota village, they would kill a lone Lakota brave to show what big men they were. Hoka Ushte knew that his scalp would be a prize hanging from the lance or lodgepole of any brave in a dozen nearby tribes.

  And all the tribes I have mentioned and many that I will not take time to mention feared the Blackfeet. And while the Blackfeet were busy slaughtering the River Crows, the Assiniboins, the Grosventre, the Crees, the Plains Ojibwas, and the big Ojibwas—the Chippewa—during the year of Hoka Ushte’s oyumni, they were not too busy to pass up slaughtering a lone Lakota brave who barely knew how to use his bow.

  Hoka Ushte knew that the empty land was not empty. But that is not the biggest difference in what he saw then and what you or any other Wasicun would see today.

  The landscape that Hoka Ushte wandered across was more alive than you can even imagine. Woniya waken—the very air was alive. Spirit breath. Renewal. Tunkan. Inyan. The rocks were alive. And holy. The storms that moved above the prairie were Wakinyan, the noise of the thunder spirit and sign of the Thunder Beings. The flowers that bloomed in the endless grass showed the touch of Tatuskansa, the moving spirit, the quickening power. In the rivers dwelt the Unktehi, monsters and spirits both. At night, Hoka Ushte would hear the howl of the coyotes and think of Coyote, who would trick him if he could. Or a spiderweb on a tree would bear a message from Iktomé, the spider man who was a worse trickster than Coyote. And at evening, when all of the other spirits were quiet and the sky was emptying of light and cloud, that is when Hoka Ushte could hear the breathing of Grandfather Mystery and Wakan Tanka himself. And at night, when the stars spread from horizon to horizon with no lights or reflected lights in all the world to dim their glory, then Hoka Ushte could trace the path of his own life, knowing that his spirit would travel south along the Milky Way when he died.

  So the world was not empty.

  I see the glaze on your eyes. I see the impatience in the set of your body.

  But I want you to understand a little bit. The world was different for Hoka Ushte.

  All right. Turn on your machine.

  For the first two days of Hoka Ushte’s wandering, he rode his grandfather’s horse east and then south across the grass plains, his back to the Paha Sapa and the more hostile tribes he knew to live in the west. At night he built no fire but ate the papa and wasna his grandmother had prepared for him: dried meat and pemmican pounded together with berries and kidney fat. Traveling food. On the third day he shot a rabbit with his bow and cooked it over a fire so small that, if it had been winter, he could have easily huddled over it with his blanket hiding the glow of the embers. The rabbit was tough and tasted nothing like the excellent meal his grandmother made.

  On the night of the third day, he lost his horse.

  It happened this way. All that day he had been skirting the edge of a dried-out and dangerous place which he knew as Mako Sicha and which you know as the Badlands. Hoka Ushte did not like the look of this place—all dust and rock and sinuous ridges and tortuous riverbeds left over from ancient floods—but more than that he did not like the stories he had heard about it. This dry place had been the battleground between Wakinyan Tanka, the great thunderbird, and Unktehi, whom some call Uncegila, the great water monster who had once filled the Missouri River from end to end. Before the battle was over, Unktehi had drowned most of the free human beings and only an all-out war between Wakinyan and his little thunderbirds against Unktehi and her little water monsters had saved the remnants of the Ikče Wičaśa.

  So on the third night, Hoka Ushte hobbled his grandfather’s horse in a relatively sheltered spot away from the Badlands, cooked his stringy rabbit, and settled into his blanket for another night of fitful sleep. But before hanhepi wi, the night-sun, had risen, a blue-black wall of storm crossed the prairie, hiding the stars, and rumbling like some ancient beast out of Good Thunder’s stories. Just as Hoka Ushte sat up in his blanket with a thought to soothing his horse, the air was suddenly filled with wakangeli, the bad-smelling electricity a storm generates, lightning flashed from sky to earth not a quarter of a mile away, and his grandfather’s horse slipped its inexpertly tied hobble and bolted away toward the Badlands.

  Hoka
Ushte leaped to his feet and shouted, but the horse did not heed him. The two raced across a prairie illuminated by sudden explosions from the approaching storm, the horse soon leaving the panting boy far behind. Hoka Ushte’s last glimpse of the animal was as it disappeared up an arroyo just before the rain began.

  Lame Badger hesitated at the edge of Mako Sicha, thinking that it would be wiser to go back to his camp and wait out the storm before going into those steep gullies and dark shadows. But he knew that if he did so, he would never see his grandfather’s horse again. The Lakota word for horse was a fairly new word since the horse had been with the Ikče Wičaśa for only a few generations; sunka wakan meant “holy dog” and the animal was still considered sacred because of its importance. Hoka Ushte could not go home again if he lost Good Voice Hawk’s horse.

  He entered the Badlands just as the storm struck with full force. The moon had been hidden earlier, but now the darkness was thick and absolute. It made Hoka Ushte think of the yuwipi ceremony where the holy man was wrapped tight in blankets and robes and left in a dark place so that the spirits could find him.

  At first the rain was merely an icy blast against his face and soaked clothing, but soon the downpour was so terrible that Hoka Ushte could not stand upright. He knelt in deep mud and water. The lightning flashes came so quickly now that the boy’s eyes could not adapt to either darkness or light and he was as good as blind. Thunder grew beyond thunder and became the ripping, tearing sound of Wakinyan Tanka’s huge beak and talons, the screams of the Thunder Beings. The ravines and gulleys and arroyos had become a terrible maze that Hoka Ushte could not find the exit from even if he had been able to stand and walk in the terrible storm. The wakangeli filled the air and made the boy’s hair stand on end.

  It was several minutes before Hoka Ushte realized that he would die if he stayed where he was. The water in the narrow arroyo was rising quickly, running in torrents from some high, rocky place deeper in Mako Sicha. Hoka Ushte squinted upward into the icy torrent: the ridgeline seemed a hundred feet above, its serrated edge outlined by a sky filled with lightning. Even as he watched, great yellow bolts struck boulders along the ridge. If he climbed, the lightning would almost certainly strike and kill him. If he stayed where he was, the rising water would certainly drown him.

  Hoka Ushte began clambering up in the steep hillside, sliding back as great sections of mud gave way and sent him plummeting back into the roaring torrent below. The water was above his waist the last time he climbed out of the gulley. The steep hillside was a maze of rivulets and muddy waterfalls. The rain had turned to hail now and was battering Hoka Ushte’s face and shoulders. He felt as if he were being stoned to death by the Wakinyan.

  Finally Hoka Ushte had to use his knife, sinking its blade deep into the hillside to find a grip against the sliding mud. He felt as if he were trying to stab the earth to death while the skies tried to kill him with icy fists. The hail tore his clothes now, ripping through buckskin and flesh. His hair was matted down over his eyes, his braids torn asunder, and blood flowed from his temples and brow. He could not open his eyes and only realized he had made it to the top of arroyo cliff when there was no more hillside to sink his blade into.

  Lame Badger lay there, straddling the narrow ridge as if he were on a bucking spirit horse, letting go of his knife to sink his fingers deep in the mud, face in the wet soil, toes scrabbling to stay put as the wind shoved him and the hail continued to pummel. Lightning struck a hundred places on the ridgelines around him. At one point, Hoka Ushte raised his bleeding face to the exploding skies and howled like a wolf, teeth bared, daring the Wakinyan to do their worst.

  Then the skies seemed to open further, the hailstones grew to the size of fists, and Hoka Ushte knew no more.

  When he awoke he thought that perhaps the skies had killed him. Then he squinted into a perfectly blue sky, saw the salt-white hills and gulleys around him already beginning to dry in the mid-morning sun, heard the trickle of the streams in the narrow folds below him, and realized that he was not yet in the other world where spirits go. There, he knew, colors were dim, the sun never shone brighter than on a foggy day, and sounds were muted. Hoka Ushte sat up on the ridge and looked down at himself in wonder.

  He was naked. Not even his breechcloth had survived the floods and hail. There were a hundred bruises and a thousand scratches on his bronze body. He moaned aloud when he shifted his legs, then stifled any further moans. He might not belong to a warrior society, but he was a brave of the Ikče Wičaśa and he must behave as one.

  His knife was gone. More than that, the very soil of the ridgeline had been washed away by the night’s torrent so that nothing remained except the oddly irregular stones that had lain beneath the dirt. Hoka Ushte began moving toward the edge of the Badlands by hopping from one to another of these regular stone ridges.

  He had advanced several hundred stones before he realized that these rocks were too regular. When he glanced back, still squinting in the glare of sunlight on white rock, he knew at once it was not rock upon which he had been treading.

  Hoka Ushte was standing on one curved plate of a great, exposed vertebrae: a gleaming white spine of something long buried in Mako Sicha and now partially uncovered by the night’s violent downpour. He realized at once that he was standing on Unktehi…Uncegila…the ancient serpent god who had lost her battle to Wakinyan Tanka ages ago when the rocks were young.

  The exposed spine stretched miles into the Badlands, disappearing where other folds covered it or revealed white rock that may have been more bones.

  Hoka Ushte began to shake. Unktehi was wakan, but it was a type of sacredness that carried more power than any Ikče Wičaśa holy man could deal with, much less a boy of seventeen summers. Hoka Ushte could feel the wakan power flowing up through his bare feet as if the wakangeli electricity of the night before had all been stored in the bleached white bones that curved away under him. He glanced toward the edge of the Badlands still a quarter of a mile away, then looked fearfully over his shoulder as if Unktehi might rise up, flesh materializing around the ancient bones as she did so, her serpent’s teeth the size of mountains, her eyes blazing more fiercely than the sun.

  He was tempted to slide down the steep hillside away from the exposed bone-boulders, slide to the shadowed gulley below where the last of the floods were drying. But wading through that mud and following the winding arroyos would take him hours, if he did not get lost or mired to his waist down there.

  Hoka Ushte closed his eyes, thought of his vision, stopped the shaking of his legs, and continued to hop from vertebra to vertebra, absorbing the power that flowed up through his feet and ankles and legs and groin. By the time he reached the grasslands and stepped from the last patch of white bone where the great skeleton seemed to burrow deeper into the earth, Hoka Ushte felt his entire body tingling and muscles jumping as if he were a yuwipi man filled with spirit force. Many of his bruises were gone and most of the scratches had healed.

  Two hundred paces onto the grasslands and Hoka Ushte looked back. Only white rocks and white sand gleamed in Mako Sicha.

  He could not find his camp. Not only were his horse and knife lost, but the floods had carried away or buried his bow, arrows, robe, blanket, flints, extra clothes, and the extra bits of food he had been saving. After an hour of searching, Hoka Ushte gave it up and started walking east.

  Naked, muscles still twitching from the wakan energy, limping a bit as his bare feet trod on cactus or yucca, the Badlands first fading and then disappearing behind him, he walked toward the horizon of a perfectly flat world.

  He saw them first as a shifting, four-headed creature coming toward him through the heat haze of the late afternoon. Hoka Ushte was certain that it was one of the monsters his grandmother had warned him about—a ciciye or siyoko. There was no place to hide, the grasslands stretched forever to either side, and Hoka Ushte had no intention of hiding anyway. He stood and waited for the monster to come to him.

  The four-hea
ded monster was neither ciciye nor siyoko, merely a pony with three young men riding it. Hoka Ushte realized that three braves from another tribe were probably more dangerous than a monster, but he continued to stand his ground. As they came closer, he could see that the pony was exhausted and lathered, the three braves no older than he. Their faces were streaked with war paint and when they saw Hoka Ushte standing there they whooped, raised coup sticks, and swung the laboring pony in his direction.

  It is a good day to die, thought Hoka Ushte, but the brave sentiment was just a phrase. He did not want to die and his heart was pounding. More than not wanting to die, he did not want to die naked and defenseless by the hand of Shoshoni or Crow boys who were not even old enough for each to have a horse.

  They were not Shoshoni or Crow. Hoka Ushte saw the face paint, heard their cries as they drew closer, and recognized them as Ikče Wičaśa, although their crude dialect suggested Brulé Sioux. He saw now that they were younger than he; the oldest could not be more than fifteen summers. On their part, the three boys on horseback ceased their wild coup cries and pulled their pony to a halt ten paces away when they saw Hoka Ushte standing there naked. For a minute there was no sound except for the rasping of the exhausted pony’s breathing and the dry leaping of hoppers in the grass.

  “Hoka hey!” said the oldest boy at last. “Are you a human being?”

  Hoka Ushte glanced down at himself and realized that he must appear more frightening than the braves, naked, scratched, and bleeding as he was. “Yes,” he said, and told his tribe and family.

  The oldest boy swung down off the pony and advanced with his coup stick still extended as if he were going to count coup on this strange apparition after all. After merely touching Hoka Ushte as if to confirm his reality, the boy stepped back and lifted his palm. “I am called Turning Eagle, the son of Cuts Many Noses. These are my friends Few Tails and Tried to Steal Horses.