At the End of Babel (4 page)

Authors: Michael Livingston

There was a half-second pause, a heartbeat of realization. Then a second bolt of lightning branched down from the clouds into the bundle of freshly twisted metal. The knot of the two ships exploded in an eruption of red light and redder sound.

A wave of force slapped Tabitha back from the fiery skiffs, knocking the wind and the song from her chest as it sent her flying. The few flechemuskets still aimed at her went off, and she sensed the angry hornet buzz ripping the air around her. But then she hit the clotting mud and slid into rock as the next concussive detonation wave rolled forward across the mesa.

Tabitha looked up and saw men in flames, trailing smoke. They were screaming, but she couldn't hear them now. Tangled, shadowed shapes of machinery popped from the wreckage as remaining stores of fuel combusted. The captain was only a few meters away, sprawled sideways in the mud. Fragmented bits of metal protruded from his back, but he was moving. Lightning coursed across the sky in great pulsing veins. Waiting.

Tabitha gasped air back into her lungs, began to sing again. She couldn't hear her voice, but she could
feel
it, reverberating in her core. She felt it as sure as the wind and the rain and the mud and the sky.

One of the lancers had stumbled through the mud, had somehow avoided the scattering shrapnel. He came and stood above her, eyes fierce and determined. He raised the gun.

Tabitha stopped singing so she could smile at him.

Bright light flashed against his face, and an instant later, his chest caved in and out all at once and he fell backward into the mud.

Joseph Man of Sorrows knelt beside her, chambering another shell. Beams of moonlight had somehow pierced the churning veil of the clouds overhead, illuminating his face. He said something to her, but she couldn't hear it. She knew there was no stopping this now. Not after what had come before. Not with the power of Tsichtinako in the air.

She nodded. He smiled grimly, then stood and walked over to the still-twitching officer. He lowered the barrel to the back of the man's head.

Pulled the trigger.

Reloaded.

Walked to the next dying man.

By the light of moon and lightning, Tabitha could see a small group of the few remaining lancers firing flÃ©chettes at a low building not yet in flames. Its thick adobe walls glistened with the tiny slivers of plastic, but still, from a little window, an old-style handgun flashed, one-two, one-two. And down they went.

A handful of remaining lancers, scattered around the wreckage, saw their skiffmates go down by the little building, and they ran in that direction. But already a third shape was rising where the others had fallen. Malya had picked up one of the flechemuskets from the ground, and she trained it on them slow and steady. The military men stopped, hesitated, then dropped their own weapons one by one. Red Rabbit came out from the little building, and he, too, picked up one of their weapons.

The lancers circled up, hands raised. Lit by the burning wreckage and contorted with fear, their faces were the red of blood. Malya and Red Rabbit marched forward at them, pushing them closer and closer to the edge of the mesa. Tabitha motioned at them to stop. Great Eagle would not welcome the lancers. And this hunt was over. There had been enough death.

The others nodded. They began to herd the men toward one of the stronger buildings away from the fires. Perhaps, Tabitha thought, she would eventually teach them new ways of speaking. Or perhaps she would just let them go, let them explain to the world that gods grew old, but they didn't die.

Joseph came to her side, and when sound finally began to return to her senses, the first thing she heard beyond the roll of the thunder and the tremor of the sky was his voice, speaking her name.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

Beating war drums, the voices of gods thundered in time to the strikes of lightning that fell in a living rain upon the mesa: heavy, pounding, unrelenting. Occasionally, another skiff tried to approach the old ruins, but the flashing anger turned each of them back. Alone, Tabitha and Joseph knelt on the floor of the kiva, which sat untouched in the conflagration atop the mesa. The fires of the gutted skiffs poured heat through the walls, and their naked bodies glistened with sweat. There would be time to leave, they knew, time to reach the old forgotten canyons far to the west and there make a new home. Others would come. “We are few and weak,” Red Jacket once said, “but may for a long time be happy if we hold fast to our country, and the religion of our fathers.”

The dance her father had left unfinished, the song he'd never ended, was done. More storms were coming. They needed only to follow them.

But not yet. Not this moment.

For now, in the darkness, Tsichtinako was between them. And they thanked Her for what they had.

Malya's basket sat at the foot of the ladder, near the
tsiwaimitiima
altar that marked the place of emergence. The basket held many different kinds of seeds.

Together, Tabitha and Joseph went about creation. He was no longer a man of sorrow. And the raven's voice was soft, like fresh butter in spring.

And many moons later, when the next
tsatia hochani
would be born, she knew what they would sing to him.

*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *

At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.

âChief Seattle of the Duwamish (1780â1866)

#END#

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