Lovedeath

by Dan Simmons

  Realizing that he was with a war party, Hoka Ushte said, “I have no weapons.”

  “This is not your fight,” said the white-haired warrior next to Cuts Many Noses. “But you must identify the Susuni who killed our boys.”

  Hoka Ushte thought of how he had hidden with his face in the dirt while the Shoshoni horses had ridden over him. He said nothing.

  By nightfall they had reached the edge of the Badlands. The Brulé made a cold camp while scouts fanned out to continue trailing the Shoshoni. Their hope was that they could find the enemy camp at night, approach silently, and fall upon them at first light. The Brulé, like the other Lakota, did not enjoy fighting at night.

  They did not find the camp. All the next day they followed the trail but the large Shoshoni war party had broken into four or five smaller groups and their trails were all but lost on the rocky wastes south of Mako Sicha. After another day of hunting, Hoka Ushte was tired, hungry—they were eating only wasna and the cold meat of small things they killed—and eager to return to his own quest. No one had asked him, but he thought that Turning Eagle and his friends should not have killed the Shoshoni woman and her husband in the first place. He did not volunteer this opinion to Cuts Many Noses.

  On the fourth day two scouts returned to the war camp. They were very excited. Hoka Ushte listened to the gabble of Brulé dialect and realized that the scouts had found Wasichu, not Shoshoni. The boy’s pulse raced at the thought of seeing an actual Fat Taker, but he said to Buffalo Eye, “Aren’t you seeking vengeance against the Shoshoni?”

  The holy man squinted at him. “The Shoshoni are probably beyond the mountains by now. We will take vengeance where we can find it.”

  By this time the war party had traveled far west, farther than Hoka Ushte’s band liked to go because of the Wasicun place which the Lakota called Piney Creek Fort and the Fat Takers called Fort Philip Kearny, but it was near this place that Cuts Many Noses and his warriors set their ambush.

  Of the group, the actual chief was named Left Hand Charger, but Cuts Many Noses was the war chief and made the battle plans. He sent his white-haired friend, “Eagle That Stretches Its Wing,” and six others to lure the Wasichu south to the creek. This was brave work, and the warriors clamored to be chosen. Hoka Ushte did not volunteer because he was still uncertain what this had to do with his own quest and why rubbing out Wasicun soldiers would take vengeance for Turning Eagle’s death. He said nothing.

  While Eagle That Stretches Its Wing and his men lured the Wasichu band south by their taunts and attempts at counting coup, Cuts Many Noses set his warriors in ambush position along the north side of Piney Creek. Hoka Ushte was assigned duty holding the horses and keeping them silent in the cottonwood grove along the north side of a hill until the Wasicun were in killing position. From the trees there, he could hear the shouts and shooting, but could see nothing.

  The plan worked. Twenty-nine Wasichu soldiers and a wagon they were escorting from the fort gave chase to Eagle That Stretches Its Wing and his companions, killing only one of them—a man named Tall Crow Killer. The surviving six led the soldiers into the river valley. At the end, the white-haired brave had his warriors dismount and lead their horses as if exhausted to lure the soldiers the last way to the river.

  Once the Wasichu were near the river, where it was too deep to ford and too fast to swim easily, Cuts Many Noses and his men fell on them with their rifles, pistols, and bows. Two other Brulé fell—One Side who was shot in the eye and who died immediately, and Brave Heart who was shot in the stomach and took two days to die—but all twenty-nine of the Wasichu were rubbed out in the crossfire.

  As I said, Hoka Ushte saw none of this happening, but he came down to the river after the shooting stopped and saw Fat Takers for the first time. Most had been stripped by the time he arrived, but a few were still in their blue shirts and pants. The first Wasicun Hoka Ushte came to was a boy no older than Few Tails had been. Arrows had pierced the young man’s thigh, belly, and throat, but it had been the gunshot to the chest that had killed him. Hoka Ushte knelt in wonder at the sight of this Wasicun: the boy’s hair was a bright red and his skin was so pale that it reminded Lame Badger of a white frog’s flesh. The Fat Taker’s eyes were wide and staring and very blue. Hoka Ushte would have looked longer at this strange sight, but a Brulé named Kicking Bear came over and said, “His scalp is mine. I killed him.” It was a challenge, but Hoka Ushte merely backed away and let the brave claim his prize.

  A yellow dog was circling around and around the bodies of two of the dead men. “It is a Wasichu dog,” called Kicking Bear from his work on the red haired boy, “but we did not kill it. He is too sweet. We will take him home and train him to be a human being’s dog.”

  The Wasichu near the wagon lay stripped and dead, their limbs curled in the awkward positions of death. Cuts Many Noses’ men were eager to run down the horses and had done little to the bodies except count coup, retrieve their arrows, and claim scalps. Hoka Ushte noticed that the Fat Takers were ugly with their hairy faces, hairy bodies, and fish-belly skins, but they were only men—men with bellies, behinds, and child-makers like any of the real human beings.

  It was the wagon that interested Hoka Ushte. He had heard of such travois with wheels, but he had never seen one. This one was covered with white canvas in the back and when Hoka Ushte bent to look in, the face of a dying Wasichu boy-soldier suddenly thrust at him as if the Fat Taker were going to bite him.

  Hoka Ushte let out a cry and took a step back, but the Wasicun extended a hand with something metal in it, and then dropped it as he died. Hoka Ushte caught the metal thing without thinking. It was heavier than a knife, but useless as a weapon. It had two thin metal handles rather than a single hilt, and no cutting or hammering surface. Hoka Ushte found that by wiggling the handles, he could make the small metal jaws open and close. It was obviously a Wasichu tool for squeezing or pulling things.

  The gift will be given by a Fat Taker whose spirit has left him. The words from his vision. Hoka Ushte slipped the strange tool out of sight in his breech clout and mounted the horse Cuts Many Noses had loaned him.

  “We go back,” said the Brulé war chief. “We are rich with horses and revenge. The Wasicun will blame the Susuni and their vengeance will be ours.”

  Hoka Ushte nodded, but said, “I am pleased that Turning Eagle and his friends are avenged. But I must go now.”

  Cuts Many Noses frowned. “Lame Badger, my wives and I had hoped that you would come live with us and marry Sees White Cow.”

  Hoka Ushte blinked. He had caught only a glimpse of the girl when the ghost was serenading her. Why was everyone trying to marry him off? “This would please me greatly,” he said, “but the vision of my hanblečeya demands that I continue on.” He slid off his borrowed white horse.

  “Keep the pony as a present,” said Cuts Many Noses magnanimously. “He is called Can Hanpi—white juice of the wood—what the Wasichu call sugar, and he was stolen by Turning Eagle himself.”

  “Pilamaye, Ate,” said Hoka Ushte, bowing his thanks.

  Cuts Many Noses gestured and the warrior Eagle That Stretches Its Wing came forward with a knife, bow, arrows, and extra blanket for Hoka Ushte. Chief Left Hand Charger handed him a strange thing: larger than a gourd, sealed, sloshing with liquid, and smooth to the touch. It was a Wasichu thing.

  “It is a jug of holy water,” said Cuts Many Noses, using the phrase mni waken that the Lakota give to liquor.

  Hoka Ushte held the thing gingerly, knowing its power and danger.

  Left Hand Charger showed his teeth. “There were a dozen other jugs in the Wasichu wagon. Drink it with care. It lets spirits in whether you invite them or not.”

  Hoka Ushte nodded his thanks again, the warriors cried “Hoka hey!” and galloped back to the northeast, and Hoka Ushte turned his white pony south and west, away from that place of death.

  The Bighorn Mountains were an area hunted by the Mountain Crow, by the Shoshoni, by the Northern
Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, and even by the bands of Hoka Ushte’s Oglala Sioux Ikče Wičaśa, but the brooding hills were controlled by none of these groups and few braves entered there alone. Hoka Ushte did so, avoiding the rivers that the Wasichu forts seemed to lie along like beads on a string of buffalo gut. His pony, Can Hanpi, swam the Powder River easily, despite its chilling cold, and climbed steadily in the hills above Otter Creek, Forest Creek, and Willow Creek until there were no more streams, only the remnants of winter snow. The nights were cold in the highest places and Hoka Ushte huddled in the single blanket the Brulé had given him. The stars were so clear that they did not seem to twinkle. Hoka Ushte saw no one.

  Then for three days he did not bother to hunt or to eat, drinking only a few sips from the small brooks that ran out under the ice. It was as if he were fasting and purifying himself for a sweat lodge ceremony or a yuwipi vision, although he had no such ceremony in mind. He was just not hungry.

  On the fourth day he found the tipi set out on a long crag of rock swept free of snow by the wind that rarely ceased to blow at these heights. The mountains and valleys rolled below the crag; the plains were a dark shelf visible to the east. Hoka Ushte’s pony had not complained before this, even when he had led it into the icy river or guided it through belly-deep drifts of snow, but now Can Hanpi refused to go nearer than a hundred paces to the crude tipi.

  Hoka Ushte left his pony and carried his bow and a handful of arrows across the crag of rock. Three women watched him as he approached.

  The two peeking from the flap of the ragged tipi were the young women of his vision: twins perhaps, sisters almost certainly. They wore dresses of white doeskin, their black hair gleamed, their faces were as serene and unlined as the surface of a dream. The third woman, their mother it seemed, was something out of a nightmare.

  The old hag had a face of harsh lines, old warts, and raw boils. One eye was white with blindness; the other squinted balefully at Lame Badger as he approached. Her hair was a dirty yellow-white and her scaly scalp gleamed in places. Her dress was an unfinished robe of some animal with orangish hair and a bad smell. The old woman’s back was twisted like one of the gnarled trees which grew along this harshly treated ridgeline.

  “Welcome,” said one of the young women, stepping away from the tipi and ignoring the harsh gaze of her mother. She took Hoka Ushte’s hand and led him to the lodge. “You are far from home, young Wičaśa. Stay and eat with us and spend the night.”

  Hoka Ushte nodded but did not smile. He knew that this was part of his vision and that if he did not choose the right woman this night, he would die. And with his death would die the last chance for his people to triumph over the Wasicun plague that would soon sweep over the world like the ancient flood in the days of the Wakinyan and Unktehi.

  The two women sat with him as the old hag prepared a soup from some rank meat. The sun was setting as they ate and the wind lifted sparks from the fire and scattered them out over the dark hills spread out below and into the darkening sky until it seemed like the campfire was seeding the night with stars.

  It was full dark when Hoka Ushte finished his soup. He had noticed that none of the women were eating so he also ate none of the meat, and drank only a tiny bit of the broth. It tasted bad. When the last of the sparks had blown into the sky and the only light was from starlight reflected in the two pretty sisters’ eyes, Hoka Ushte stood and made as if to go.

  Both of the young women touched his arm while the hag-mother glared from her good eye. Their grip was very strong.

  “I am only going to hobble my pony for the night and to get my blanket,” he said. “I will be right back. Here, I leave my arrows and my bow to show you that I will return.”

  The sisters smiled, but one of them said, “Let me walk with you.”

  She did not leave the wide circle of rock swept free of snow, but Can Hanpi showed the whites of his eyes and backed away while the woman was near. Hoka Ushte calmed his pony as best he could, hobbled him well, and took his blanket and other things back to the tumbledown tipi with him.

  Crossing the rock, the young woman took his arm again and whispered, “Be careful, brave boy. My sister and my mother are not of this earth. They eat men.”

  Hoka Ushte pretended surprise. “How do they do this?” he whispered back, very conscious of her strong hand on his arm.

  The beautiful woman’s teeth gleamed in the starlight. “If you make love to my sister, she has teeth in a secret place. They will seize you until my mother kills you, drains your blood and fluids, and hangs you on the cliff behind the tipi in a sac.”

  Hoka Ushte stopped walking. “How is this possible?”

  The girl made a graceful motion and Lame Badger noticed her long nails. “My mother and sister are cousins to Iktomé, the spider man. They do not like human beings…except for dinner.”

  Hoka Ushte glanced toward the tipi. The beautiful sister and terrible mother were merely shadows near the cold embers of the fire. “And you…” he whispered.

  The girl lowered her head. “I am also cousin to Iktomé, and have…too many teeth…but I am not evil.” She touched his hand. “Trust me.”

  Hoka Ushte nodded. “Pilamaye,” he said.

  The night-sun seemed to rise below them, so high was the cliff’s edge which the tipi sat upon. The wind rose to a howl now. The old woman had retired to her robes but the sisters waited just inside the flap. One of them beckoned to him.

  “One minute,” he said. “I have to make water.” He noticed that his bow and arrows were gone, somewhere inside the lodge. He touched his back beneath his shirt to feel the knife Cuts Many Noses had given him.

  The beautiful sisters glanced at each other and waited.

  Hoka Ushte walked around the tipi, crossed the windswept rock to the cliff’s edge, and urinated into the night. The wind felt cold on his che. Like teeth.

  Hoka Ushte shuddered, glanced over his shoulder, and then knelt quickly to peer under the overhang. Row upon row of silken sacs hung there, attached to the rock by some sticky substance. In the dim light, Hoka Ushte could just make out a few things gleaming through the sticky webbing: a finger there, bare teeth there, an empty eyesocket here, a shred of white flesh farther back.

  Lame Badger stood, adjusted his breech cloth, and turned back to the tipi. One of the sisters had come up behind him in the dark. He could not be sure, but he thought that it was not the one who had spoken to him earlier.

  “My sister told you something,” she whispered urgently.

  “Yes.”

  She touched his bare arm. “It is not I who seizes my lover and holds him with hidden teeth until our mother carves him up,” she whispered. “I want to go away from here. My sister is the one who shares our mother’s taste for human flesh and human blood. Trust me, and together we will outsmart them and leave while we are alive.”

  Hoka Ushte nodded. “How does your mother do this killing?”

  The girl smiled for an instant. “You saw her back? It is actually a long tail with many barbs. While you are caught in my sister’s winyañ shan, screaming in pain, the old woman uncoils that tail and tears your flesh with it.”

  Hoka Ushte tried to smile but failed. The girl saw the direction of his glance. “Your pony is already gutted,” she whispered. “The old woman did it while you made water here. You could not outrun them.” She touched his back, her fingers tapping the small blade there, “Our only hope is for you to kill them when they least expect an attack. Choose me as your first lover and I will make sure that my little teeth do not harm you.”

  Hoka Ushte pulled his arm away from her powerful grip. “How will I know it is you in the dark?”

  “I will touch your cheek, like this,” she whispered, raising her fingers to his face. “Then, as we begin to make the beast with two backs, scream as if I have seized your child-maker with my teeth. When they come for you, kill them.”

  “Yes,” whispered Lame Badger, although the syllable may well have been lost in the
rising wind. “Go on ahead of me.”

  Her eyes gleamed. The night-sun was still rising cold and white in the dark abyss below them, “You truly cannot run.”

  “I know this is true,” said Hoka Ushte. “Go on. I will come in.”

  When the girl had become just another shadow next to the tipi, Hoka Ushte clenched his fists, raised them to the night, and whispered to the sky, “Wakan Tanka, onshimalaye.… O Great Spirit, pity me.”

  The wind whistled around him much like the elk flute sweetness of the wanagi in the Brulé camp, and a voice whispered in Hoka Ushte’s mind: Trust your vision.

  The boy nodded, lowered his fists, and went into the tipi.

  The lodge was very dark—there was not even a smoke hole and the thick hide blocked the moonlight—and the air in it was very foul. He waited until his eyes adapted as much as they would, but still he could see only the ugly mother huddled farthest away and the two sisters as dark forms nearer the tipi flap. They had laid his blanket between their robes.

  “What is this lump?” whispered one of the girls as she caressed the blanket.

  “A gift,” whispered Hoka Ushte and brought out the jug of Wasichu holy water. He unplugged it and offered it to the nearest shadow, but the girl held back, as if fearing that it was poison.

  “Here,” said Hoka Ushte and took a swallow of the mni waken. It burned terribly and tasted like the worst medicine his grandmother had ever made him swallow, but he managed not to choke or gag. “Here,” he said again, offering the Wasichu gourd.

  “No,” whispered one of the sisters, taking the jug and setting it away. “We are not thirsty. Come to bed.”

  Hoka Ushte rubbed his cheek. There went his only plan: put both the sisters to sleep with the Wasichu holy water and then deal with the hag-monster.

  Strong hands pulled him down onto the blanket. He smelled the sweet scent of girl-flesh all around him. One of the shadows lifted above him and tugged off his shirt. Other hands pulled off his moccasins and slid up his thigh. Hoka Ushte put his hand behind him and palmed the small knife there an instant before the unseen hands tugged down his breech clout. The sisters were like the ash-shadow of Turning Eagle’s wanagi now, their two forms flowing and interchanging above and beside him. Hoka Ushte kept glancing toward the hag, but the old woman was only a gleaming eye wrapped in robes across the tipi.