Footsteps in the Sky (18 page)

Another elder—no relation to Sand at all—spoke up.

“If you could convince your sisters to let us be, what then? Would they aid us against the Reed?”

Tuchvala stared at the man.

Yuyahoeva turned to him, and though he spoke mildly, it was clearly a rebuke. “Cousin. Haven't you been listening? This is a question for another time. For when we and our children are safe. For now, I think, we have to help this Kachina help us. We have to put her in touch with her sisters.”

“How? How can we do this?”

Sand cleared her throat. Yuyahoeva looked at her expectantly.

“We need a powerful transmitter,” she said. “Like the ones we use to communicate with the Kachina satellites.”

Yuyahoeva nodded. “We have such a transmitter. It will be done.”

A young man spoke up. His voice was flat with anger or some other fierce emotion, and Sand realized that he was a clan uncle of Chavo's.

“There is another matter,” he grunted. “The matter of the lowland flyers. They have settled in a perimeter around our lands.”

“But not
violated
them,” Yuyahoeva pointed out. “They have not yet broken the unspoken truce.”

“We should be ready in case they do,” the young man snapped.

Yuyahoeva turned his ancient gaze upon the youngster.

“We already have. The warriors are preparing now.”

“Then may I join their preparations?” the other man asked stiffly.

“You have no head for council,” said the old man. “So you might as well. Go on.”

The young man nodded bruskly and pushed towards the ladder, but stopped at its base.

“What about him?” He said, abruptly, pointing to the Parrot-Clan man. “Him and that two-heart who killed my cousin?”

Yuyahoeva fixed him with a hard stare.

“Go on, I said.”

The warrior hesitated for another moment, and then went up the ladder. Light stabbed down briefly as he opened the trapdoor, then vanished.

Yuyahoeva craned his neck to look around the assembly before speaking again, as if by the touch of his gaze he could draw the all together.

“Parrot-Clan man. Come forward.”

The stranger rose shakily, avoiding Hano's eyes, which followed him as he moved towards the center of the circle.

“I will do you a courtesy,” Yuyahoeva told him. “I will not use the Ojo de verdad at this point. I will give you a chance to tell the truth yourself.”

The man looked up, and the firelight gleamed on the tear-tracks.

“I'm sorry about the boy,” he said at last. “Teng and I … he was trying to kill me. Teng was just defending me.”

“She killed a Kachina,” Yuyahoeva growled.

“I know. She doesn't know better, grandfather. She is from Earth.”

“Why did she come here? Tell me.”

The young man clasped his hands together and stared at them.

“My name is Alvar,” he said at last. “I'm sorry, but I can't tell you any more than that. I would have to lie, and I don't want to lie to you people. I don't want to do anything else to you people. Even if you use the ojo, you will only know that I am lying. You won't know what the truth is.”

“There are other ways to get that,” hissed one of the elders.

“I know,” Alvar replied, miserably.

“We must know what the Reed intends. You can see that, can't you?” Yuyahoeva said gently.

Alvar nodded, but said nothing.

Yuyahoeva clucked his tongue.

“As Mother-Father of this council, I suggest that we end this meeting. Our time can be better spent, if we are in agreement on certain points. Shall we help this woman who has come to us, this Tuchvala?”

“She is Kachina!” someone murmured, and a susurrus of agreement expanded into the darkness of the Kiva.

“I want to talk to the leader of the lowlanders, to Hoku. Does this seem reasonable?”

Another mutter of general agreement, though much less enthusiastic than the earlier one.

“Good. Then that is all I have to say. Ascend into the Fifth World.”

Sand sat still with Tuchvala as the gathering broke up. Two guards led the prisoner, Alvar, away. When everyone else was gone, Sand came slowly to her feet.

“I hope you know what to say to your sisters, Tuchvala.”

“So do I,” she replied.

Chapter Twenty

Yuyahoeva met Sand in the sunlight. He gently took her by the arm, and the three of them—Sand, the old man, and Tuchvala—walked towards the edge of the cliff. They stood staring at the void, at the mystery of distance. The old man rolled a cornhusk cigarette, lit it, and passed it over to Sand. She took a little puff and handed it to Tuchvala, who examined it curiously.

“Inhale through the other end, Tuchvala. Not too deeply, though.”

They offered smoke to the six directions, and the wind took the blue streamers quickly away. Sand smelled rain in the air, passing near.

The old man nodded out at the vastness.

“I may have been wrong, daughter,” he said at last. “I think you were right about your mother. I think the lowlanders killed her.”

“Because she knew all of this,” Sand said, miserably.

“She never told us,” Yuyahoeva said.

“She was going to. She left me a book. She was planning to tell you, but only when she was sure you would listen.”

Yuyahoeva nodded. He turned his seamed face up towards the sky.

“Sand, would you and Tuchvala come with me to my wife's house? I'd like to talk with both of you a little more.”

Kalnimptewa was a gracious woman, about forty years old with a delicate, thin face and a shock of grey in her long hair. She smiled minutely as she set out the plate of piki and corn soup in front of Sand.

“Thank you, grandmother,” Sand whispered. Her belly had forgotten hunger during the chase, but the memory was back, with a vengeance. How long since she had eaten? Before her mother died?

She dipped the roll of paper-thin blue cornbread into the broth and took a bite, savored the bread as it fell apart in her mouth. Yuyahoeva and Kalnimptewa kept their silence as the two young women wolfed down their food. When the piki was gone, the elder woman left and returned with a tray of steamed tamales and a pitcher of fruit juice. Stopping only briefly to show Tuchvala how to unwrap the savory rolls of cornmeal, Sand plunged into those too. She looked up to catch Yuyahoeva watching her with gentle amusement.

“Sorry, grandfather,” she said. “It's been a long while since I've eaten.”

He nodded. “You're too thin anyway. Eat all you want.”

Sand did. When her stomach felt comfortably packed, she pushed the intricately patterned plate away, finished off her peach juice, and sighed. Tuchvala imitated her, almost a parody, and the other three laughed, then laughed again at her puzzled expression.

“You look so much like Pela, when she was young,” Kalnimptewa remarked, her gaze traveling over Tuchvala. “It is so hard to believe you are what you say.”

“I don't really know what I am anymore,” Tuchvala replied, thoughtfully. “I'm not what I was.”

Yuyahoeva settled back in his chair. “Fascinating,” he said, wagging his head from side to side. “When a human being wears the mask of a Kachina, he becomes something different. He becomes the Kachina. I never thought to wonder what might happen to a Kachina wearing a human mask.”

“Is that what I am?” Tuchvala asked. I know your stories. I don't think I am one of your spirits.”

“I'm an old man,” Yuyahoeva told her. “I see things the way I want. But here you come in the skin of my dead granddaughter. You come from the sky, from far away, and you are one of the creators of this world—at least as we know it. In my eyes, if you are not a Kachina, then the difference is too small to measure. Can you understand that?”

“I can,” Sand interjected. “I can now.” She was chagrined to find a tear trickling down her face.

“You're back with us,” Kalnimptewa told her, very gently.

“This is what your mother came to understand, child,” Yuyahoeva told her. “Out there alone, running … a Hopi without her people is only half a person. Your mother was like that, too, after she came up from the lowland school. She doubted everything, thought she was alone, all by herself. Nearly drove her crazy, Sand. Keeping her secret all those years must have been hard, too. I pity her for that.”

“I don't understand what you're talking about,” Tuchvala said.

“We're talking about being Hopi,” Sand told her, brushing away the tear. “About belonging. The Kachina are a part of us, of what we are together. As real as stone or air. It doesn't matter that we can't touch them. But we need them. We need each other. I nearly got both of us killed, Tuchvala, because I was thinking as if I were the only person on the Fifth World.”

“I still don't understand.”

“Neither do I, Tuchvala. But now that I'm back here, I'm not afraid anymore.”

Yuyahoeva reached over to pat her hand.

“It's okay. And it's not all your fault. I called you a two-heart that day, because you made me angry. Because I was grieving for Pela. And. … Because I knew, deep, that you were right about your mother.”

“They killed her because of me?” Asked Tuchvala.

“I think so,” Yuyahoeva reluctantly agreed. “It's hard for me to think like a lowlander, like Hoku, Tuchvala. To kill someone just because there is a small chance that they might interfere with your plans. As if one person's plans could be that important. Pela would have told us, you see, would have warned us about your coming. I suppose that when the lowlanders knew your ship had started down, they silenced her. Not your fault, Tuchvala.”

“No, it's not,” Sand told her, and laid her arm on the other woman's shoulder.

“But,” Yuyahoeva added, “Now we can work together. Tuchvala, you can have a place here, in the mesas, if that is your wish. There must be a lot we can learn about each other. After all, we're both farmers.”

“Yes,” Tuchvala agreed, attempting a smile and almost making it look natural.

They sat in silence for a moment, and a cold, hard thought crept into Sand. It chilled her newfound warmth, sliced through her growing sense of harmony.

“What about my father?” she asked. “What about Red Jimmie?”

Yuyahoeva brought out his tin of tobacco, a cornhusk and a small pair of scissors and began to make a cigarette. He bent to the task intently, almost as if he hadn't heard Sand at all. She was close to repeating her question before he finally answered her.

“When there is trouble, I suspect Red Jimmie right away, Sand. I've always believed him to be an agent of the coast. But he has also served us well, better than the old woman who sent him here could have imagined. Jimmie really is a two-heart, Sand. His feet are in two different places, miles apart. It makes him sick. When the Whipper went out, as soon as I knew, I tried to call it back. The communications had been overridden. I knew it was Jimmie, then; he's too good with smart machines; he talked the Wings of the Whipper into being deaf, somehow. So we monitored his communications—caught him making a call to the coast. I sent some warriors to arrest him. He's over in the jail.”

“I want to see him,” Sand said, trying to keep the harshness out of her voice.

“You will. If it's any consolation, Sand, I really think he was trying to save you. If he hadn't called you out, the Whipper would have caught you both in your mother's house.”

“You know about that?”

“We went back over his calls. We found some even stranger ones; coded and scrambled and in a different language. We still haven't sorted those out.”

“Maybe he did try to save me. Maybe it was part of some larger scheme of his. I don't know or really care.”

Yuyahoeva shrugged.

“You can see him tonight.”

The jail was a squat building suffused with an antiseptic smell of disuse. It had only five cells; each the size of a good-sized room, formed from ugly red concrete with chainglass front walls.

The outworlder, Teng, occupied the one nearest the door. She was lying on a cot with a feeding tube in her arm, asleep. The next cell held the Parrot-Island man, Alvar. In the third was her father. He was folded into the corner of his cell, head resting on his knees. He looked up slowly as they came in. When his gaze crossed Tuchvala, his face seemed to drain of color.

“Jesus!” he croaked a word that meant nothing at all to Sand. “Jesus,” he repeated, and then rolled over, put his face into the corner, and began to retch. The air circulation picked up a sour fetor of vomit and alcohol.

“Get her out of here!” he shrieked, between his dry heaves, grinding his face against the rough concrete. “Get … her … out of here!”

Yuyahoeva took Tuchvala gently by the arm and lead her from the building. Sand watched her father's quivering form for several sickening moments.

“She's gone,” she said, trying to keep her voice flat. Was this the man who had first taken her out in a Dragonfly, first taught her to greet the sky? Or was it the man who beat her mother, who humiliated her in front of her family, who came home screaming and drunk?

And why was she thinking such silly shit? He was the latter, always the latter, and any good he had ever done was as useless and unreal as rain over the ocean.

Red Jimmie slowly turned around, wiping vainly at his face with the cuff of his beige shirt.

“It's true, then,” he grated.

“True enough.”

“What do you want?”

“What we all want. To know what you've been doing this whole time. To know what the lowlanders know.”

Red Jimmie looked at her for a moment as if stunned. Then he threw back his head and yowled. It took Sand some time to realize that he was laughing, a horrible, insane laugh.

“They don't know shit, daughter mine. They don't know anything. Hoku and his fucking … ignorant plans. Everyone thinks they know it all. …”

He slacked off, staring at the walls of his cage.

Sand moved up close to the transparent wall. She placed her hands against it.

“Mother is dead, father. How did she die?”

Jimmie sputtered again, less like laughter this time.

“No more questions. They've all been asking me questions. Sand, they have the ojo de verdad. They have other things, too. They'll get everything they want from me, eventually, if they think of the right questions.”

“I don't care about that. Who killed her? Who actually killed her?”

Jimmie lurched to his feet, lost his balance and leaned heavily against the wall. He swung his head around towards her, and she saw anger there, fury so bright it could be a star.

“Who?” he hissed, as softly as a foot on sandstone.

“Who?” he shrieked, and stumbled towards the glass. He cracked his face against it, an inch from her hand. She saw his nose spread comically against the chainglass, saw blood spurt and smear like a blooming rose. He lost balance and slid, leaving a red trail along the transparency.

“Who the fuck do you think killed her?” he snarled, as he crumpled to the floor.

“Who do you think?” he pleaded, eyes closed.

Sand nodded. Who else? And left the room.