People of the Silence (6 page)

A curious expression entered his eyes. Not fear, not apology, but a man bracing himself for a burden he could barely conceive. He took several deep breaths, then slowly straightened.

Wind Baby shrieked through the canyon, and Young Fawn thought she could almost make out frantic words. As though enraged that she did not understand, Wind Baby shoved her hard. Young Fawn staggered forward.

Sternlight rose and blocked her path with his tall body. He extended his arms and let them hover for a moment, then he embraced her and boldly drew her against him. “Let me hold you for just a moment. I want to feel you close to me.”

Fear pumped in her veins. A curious smell clung to his white ritual shirt, musty, bitter, like the scent of a long-abandoned cave. “Sternlight, I do not think—”

He tightened his powerful arms, crushing her against his chest. “Stand still. Just don’t move.”

“But, Elder, you are hurting me. Please!”

He began sobbing again, terrible wrenching sobs that shook his whole body. He buried his face in her hair and his tears soaked her temple.

“I beg you,” he said. “Don’t fight me. I must do this thing quickly!”

He dropped his right hand to his belt. Against the gold of dawn, she glimpsed a deerbone dagger. “I need your baby, Young Fawn.”

“What are you
talking
about? Let me go!” She twisted madly, watching him raise the dagger over his head.

Ducking and kicking violently, she broke free and dashed across the ledge, hair flying, racing for the stairs. The morning’s gleam covered the dimpled sandstone like molten coral, shadowing every hollow and crack. She leaped over a hole and her foot slipped on ice, breaking her stride.

Sternlight’s body struck her, slamming her to the ground. She cried out as pain lanced through her pregnant belly. The Sunwatcher flipped her onto her back and stretched out on top of her.

Tears beaded his cheeks. He held the bone dagger out to the east, the south, the west and north, then breathed a prayer as he lifted it to the glistening gold of the sky. He left it there, glowing in the sunlight, for a long moment.

“Sternlight?” she called in a shaking voice. “Please! I’ll do anything you ask. Just let me go!”

“What?” he cried. Terror creased his face as he looked around the mesa. “Who said that? Who
are
you? Boy? Boy, is that you?”

Like a man fighting to wake from a terrible dream, he shook himself and shoved back, straddling her, his wide eyes fixed on the north. After several moments, he sucked in a breath and blinked at Young Fawn, as if seeing her for the first time. Black hair danced about his broad shoulders.

“You are Solstice Girl,” he whispered reverently, and with lightning swiftness, he plunged the dagger down, offering it to Mother Earth through Young Fawn’s heart.

First Day

Sun Cycle of the Dragonfly, Moon of Prayerstick Cutting

Sixteen Summers Later

I sit in a shallow channel carved into the mountain’s side, my bare back against the cool limestone. I have been here since dawn, without food or water, or a companion’s voice to serenade me with forgetfulness.

Walkingcane cactus dots the soil around me. It is spring, and purple blossoms cover the limbs and trunks, scenting the air with a delicate bouquet. Far below, the Gila Monster Cliffs wind eastward in a striking range of colors. Morning light lances yellow into the gorge, glitters on the white and yellow walls and plays in the mottled pine trees blanketing the highlands. Occasionally a flowering bush splashes the hills with red.

To the north, a hideous pall of smoke rises like black billowing thunderheads, driven by west winds across the blue sky. The underbelly of that pall glows orange, as if the fire is born in the clouds.

I narrow my aching eyes. Am I witnessing the end of the world? I can believe it. After the things I have seen …

I am not an old man, familiar with the ways of the world and the treachery of human beings. I am young, sixteen summers. This is not easy for me. Friends. Enemies. Both have betrayed me.

My grandfather’s warriors have captured them and locked them in a room without windows or doors. A ladder thrust down through a hole in the roof is the only way in or out. They are under constant guard.

My people demand that I kill them.

But some of the captives … I love.

“All wounds are openings to the sacred,” the great holy man, Dune the Derelict, once taught me. “You must crawl inside those chasms. Go alone, on your hands and knees, and sit in that terrible darkness. If you sit long enough, you will discover that the worst pain is the breath of compassion.”

So I sit.

By day, I study the changing patterns of light that sheathe these lofty mountains; by night the movements of the Evening People stir silver ashes in my heart.

This wound is a doorway. I must be brave enough to go through it. And braver still to journey across the dark face of my familiar world and into a strange dawn land that can be grasped only with the hands of my soul.

Hallowed rain gods, I feel so empty.

Why couldn’t the Blessed Sternlight have let me die? So many others would have been spared.

I tip my head back to rest on a shelf of stone and stare unblinking into the vast smoky distances, listening to the perfectly clear silences, thinking of all that I am, and am not, remembering all that has brought me to this place.…

Two

The Time of Gestation

Buckthorn knelt on a willow-twig mat before the low fire in his mother’s home. The small square house, last in the solid line of the village, spread three body-lengths across. Dried vegetables hung from the rafters: corn, beans, squash, whole sunflowers, and red prickly pear cactus fruits. Rising smoke helped to keep insects and rot away. It also coated the plants with a shiny black layer of creosote. Through them, Buckthorn could just make out the pine ceiling poles. Swirls of soot marked the gray-plastered walls, covering the faded images Mother had painted there long ago. Since then, a collection of baskets had been hung over them.

In one corner stood a collection of reddish-brown glazed pots, storage for special possessions. In another corner, three big pots, their sides corrugated and rims weighted with sandstone slabs, held what was left of their winter corn and beans. Smaller cooking pots sat to one side, the outer surfaces charred from countless fires.

How familiar and safe it all seemed on this long-hoped-for and terrible day.

Buckthorn’s fingers tugged nervously at the fringes on his knee-length shirt. The white buckskin warmed his skinny body and reflected the firelight’s wavering patterns like a pyrite mirror. His mother had painted the black-and-yellow images of the Great Warriors of East and West on the shirt’s chest, and the Rainbow Serpent, a slithering line of red, yellow, blue-black and white, that encircled his waist. In the fluttering gleam of the flames, the Great Warriors blazed. The lightning lances in their upraised hands wavered, ready to fly across the face of the world in a great roar, to slit open the bellies of the Cloud People and offer life-giving rain to Our Mother Earth—or to bring eternal destruction to wicked human beings.

Buckthorn had not eaten in four days, a holy number, and he felt lightheaded and frightened. Soon, very soon, his life would change forever. He would no longer be the strange, lonely youth that the other children shunned and laughed at. His soul would tumble down the dark tunnel to the First Underworld, and he would either become a revered sacred Singer … or he would be dead.

Buckthorn frowned down at the Great Warriors.
Do they already know which it will be?

In the Age of Emergence, just after the First People had climbed through the four underworlds to get to this Fifth World of light, the Great Warriors of East and West had vanquished many monsters that threatened to eat the new people. In the last horrifying battle, the Warriors’ bodies had been turned to stone, but their heroism had earned their souls special places in the skyworlds, sparkling on either side of Father Sun. Father Sun often told them about things that would happen in the world of humans. When necessary, the Warriors soared to earth as shooting stars and walked among men, advising, helping. Sometimes they even killed.

Buckthorn had once known a boy named Little Shield who had been chosen by the elders, as Buckthorn had been, to journey into the underworlds. He had died horribly. At the first sign of trouble, the elders had dragged the boy up from the kiva, the womblike subterranean ceremonial chamber, and stretched him out on the plaza while they raced about gathering herbs and Power bundles, anything that might help tie his soul to his body again.

Buckthorn had been six summers old at the time. He vividly recalled the way Little Shield had thrashed about and screamed that he saw the Great Warriors swooping from the sky to tear his flesh from his bones. It had taken half a day, but the holy twins had finally sunk their talons into Little Shield’s soul and ripped it apart; then they had carried its pieces to the skyworlds and cast them loose in the brilliant light of Father Sun.

The elders said that Little Shield had not been strong enough to make the journey to the underworlds, and that the Great Warriors had killed him so his soul would not be lost forever in the darkness.

A shudder climbed Buckthorn’s spine. Little Shield had died with his eyes wide open, staring in terror at the evening sky.

Will that happen to me?

A low drumbeat outside reminded him that his heart, that all hearts, beat in rhythm with that of the Creator, and that she alone had the Power to decide how long a boy might live.

Buckthorn tugged at his turquoise necklace, fighting vainly to loosen it so he could get more air into his lungs.

Just breathe.

He’d been choking since dawn, when he’d bathed in the icy river and his mother had twisted his wet black hair into a bun on top of his head.

He forced himself to inhale and exhale.

Beyond the door, Our Mother Earth slept beneath a soft blanket of snow, gathering her strength for spring. The Wind-flower Clan tiptoed about—so as not to wake her. Yucca sandals crunched the snow, and dogs padded by his door. During the Time of Gestation, the forty Blessing days, no digging, plastering, or wood chopping was permitted. No one could cut his hair. Women had to clean their houses only after sundown, and then very quietly.

The lilting voices of the Singers in the great kiva wafted to him on the west wind. The kiva nestled on the west side of the rectangular plaza, while two- and three-story buildings stretched eastward under the sheer face of the buff sandstone cliff. The Singers prepared the way for him.…

“They’re coming,” he whispered to reassure himself. “They’ll be here soon.”

He let out a taut breath.

To lessen his fears, Buckthorn counted the beautiful baskets that decorated the walls, large ones on top, smaller ones on the bottom. Black geometric designs and tan people adorned the weaves. His mother, Snow Mountain, had arranged them in order of descending height along the wall to his left.

“Oh, Spirits,” he whispered, “I’m scared.”

From the time he’d turned four summers, the great Singers of Windflower Village had looked at him differently than at other children. Their sharp old eyes had watched the other children tormenting him and noted the times when he’d sought the solitude of the canyons that cut down through solid rock to the River of Souls—and they were many. The elders had marked every fight he’d broken up, and every moment he’d sat with tears running down his face listening to them Sing. Those Powerful elders had seen in him more than an odd lonely child—a boy who had lost his father before he’d seen one summer.

At a Winter Solstice celebration at Talon Town when he’d seen ten summers, old gray-haired Black Mesa had come to sit beside him, his deeply wrinkled face mottled with firelight, and asked, “Why do you cry when you lift your voice to the gods?”

Buckthorn had looked at Black Mesa, but hadn’t known the answer. His only reply had been that he couldn’t help himself. But he knew better now. Deep inside him, he felt such agonized love, such longing to hear the gods speak to him, to feel their comforting touch that it manifested itself as despair.

Seven days ago, Black Mesa had entered his mother’s home, and asked to speak with Buckthorn alone. Snow Mountain had bowed respectfully and left. Buckthorn couldn’t conceive any reason why the elder needed privacy to speak with him. He’d shifted uneasily as Black Mesa placed a gnarled hand on his shoulder. The old man’s seamed face had been somber.

“Buckthorn, I have been sent to ask you if you wish to give your life for love. For your people.” Black Mesa had paused, then added, “You may say ‘no’ and no shame will come of it.”

“Oh, but I do!” Buckthorn had answered with his whole soul in his voice. “I do.”

He forced himself to inhale again. His stomach had knotted.
But what if I’m not strong enough? What if I can’t travel into the underworlds and return alive?

He frowned down at the two dead field mice lanced on the stick beside him. Black Mesa had instructed him to offer the mice as a tribute to the masked god who would come to drag him away to the underworlds. If the god refused, Buckthorn had been told to expect death.

Perhaps I should have shot a deer, instead? That would seem a far better tribute for a god than a couple of measly …

Feet pounded across the snowy plaza.

He whirled to stare at the door curtain. It fluttered gently in the cold breeze.

The feet stopped outside.

Buckthorn gritted his teeth so hard his jaw ached.

A rumble of voices rose, getting closer, louder … the whole house suddenly erupted in shrillness when the Dancers began scraping the exterior walls with what sounded like knives.

Buckthorn’s heart nearly burst through is chest.
Blessed gods, what’s going on?