Scalpdancers (20 page)

Sparrow crisscrossed the remaining distance and disappeared over the rim. Lost Eyes felt his heart soar and followed a similar serpentine path to the crest. For one brief moment he was skylined against the cobalt-blue horizon.

The shaman fired—

Lost Eyes started over the top as Sparrow waited, allowing her horse a second's rest.

He called her name as something struck the side of his head and plowed a path along his skull. Blood spurted from the wound and drenched the side of his head. Somehow he managed to cling to his horse as Sparrow cried out in horror. The gray plunged past her, carrying its nearly unconscious burden beyond the reach of the guns below.

Lost Eyes knew he had been hit. He knew he couldn't stop to find out how badly. He might never start again. The world reeled. He managed to ignore the worst of it; the pain would come later. Right now his head felt numb, but his cheek and shoulder were sticky with blood.

“No!” Sparrow shouted. She pulled alongside him just as he started to topple. She managed to take his bow and then shove him upright on the gray. He fought back from unconsciousness.

“Follow the ridge,” he groaned, hoping she understood. Sparrow studied the terrain. The valley below looked unfamiliar, as if she were seeing it from a different perspective. The ground was hard packed and checkered with granite where rain and wind had eroded the thin soil. Unshod horses would leave no tracks over the table rock.

Time lost its meaning. A few minutes seemed an eternity as they galloped along the ridge until a suitable thicket of ponderosas and Douglas firs presented adequate concealment for a descent to the valley below. Sparrow looked over her shoulder. White Buffalo and the war party had yet to reach the summit.

Lost Eyes no longer gave orders; he needed all his strength and concentration to cling to his mount. His features were twisted with pain now, and he wore a mask of crimson. How much longer until he was unable to go on?

The trees… run to the trees. And then what? She didn't know. Sparrow caught the horsehair reins as they slipped from between Lost Eyes' fingers. He took hold of the gray's long dark mane. They started down through the pines.

The pain welled in him now, like a cascade that split the hills and plummeted, crashing, churning into a cold pool.

Lost Eyes listened and realized for the first time that what he took to be the rushing wind was indeed a cascade, the sound of a waterfall somewhere in the valley below. He lifted his battered head and willed his eyes to focus on the valley.

They were above Singing Woman Falls, directly opposite the ridge they had crossed a lifetime ago.

He tried to tell Sparrow, or warn her to change her course. But his speech was slurred. Sparrow heard his sounds but didn't understand. He quit trying. He clung to the gray and prayed for the All-Father to grant him strength.

The pines seemed to open to envelop the wounded man and Sparrow, who never once looked back. The forested slope offered concealment, but the war party must search it sooner or later. We need a place to rest, to heal—her thoughts raced as she tried to contain her panic.

“But where?” Sparrow said aloud.

“Here.”

The answer froze the young woman in her tracks. It had not come from her own mind. It had been spoken! She turned and glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye. She tensed and grabbed for her own knife as a leathery hand closed around her forearm.

Sparrow gasped and looked down into the age-seamed face of a woman, her white hair streaming, her dry lips cracked by a broad smile. Old and brittle, this one, but with eyes bright and burning.

“Come,” the old woman said and walked straight toward a massive jumble of boulders in the center of a nearby juniper thicket. She moved quickly for one so advanced in years.

Sparrow had cause to doubt her own senses. Was she dreaming? Or was the old one a spirit of the hill and not a person at all?

“Come,” the old woman said. “I have been waiting for you. Hurry.” She stood beneath a natural arch of stones precariously balanced above a cleft in the hillside.

Lost Eyes slumped forward, oblivious to this strange apparition. He groaned but somehow found the strength to remain on horseback. He no longer cared where they were heading. It didn't matter now. He tried to tell Sparrow to leave him, to save herself. All he could do was grit his teeth against the pain and try to keep the blackness from engulfing him.

Sparrow reached the cleft and found it to be a cave entrance just tall enough and wide enough to permit a horse to enter. She guided the nervous animal into the passageway, followed a dark corridor that widened into a torchlit chamber.

The old woman left her then and hurried back for Lost Eyes.

Sparrow dismounted and took in the cavern. It was a chamber roughly thirty feet in diameter. The clatter of hooves rang upon the stone and echoed off the water-sculpted walls as the old woman reappeared leading the gray.

Lost Eyes wavered, lifted his head. He looked directly at the woman and amazingly his eyes seemed to actually focus, despite the terrible appearance of his wound.

The old woman grinned, displaying a row of broken crooked teeth.

“They will find the entrance too,” Sparrow said.

“She can stop them,” Lost Eyes said in a voice that was little more than a croak. He knew he spoke the truth. He had never seen this woman in his life, yet he sensed a kinship with her. Then he slipped from horseback and crumpled at her feet.

The old woman said, “Yes,” in a voice dry as crackling flames. With hurried steps she returned to the entrance as Sparrow rushed to the fallen man.

The old woman began to sing and the song transformed her rasping voice. It became winsome, unreal, lilting, and then strikingly familiar. Sparrow cradled Lost Eyes, taking him in her arms, and listened to the song in a language as old as dreams.

Nothing happened—at first—and then with a rumble the entrance collapsed in on itself. The boulders shifted and crashed against one another. The song trailed off, lingering in the faintest of reverberations, which in their dying gave birth to recognition.

“You are the one,” Sparrow said, her heart pounding, her flesh cold. By all the spirits it was true! She was trapped beneath the earth with the ghost of Singing Woman Ridge!

11

Lost Eyes saw himself motionless, surrounded by a fog that swirled and writhed above the pool of water where the cascade plunged and spray billowed up from the surface of the water. The water was clear and the rocks upon the sandy bottom seemed inches from the surface when the depth was actually three feet. He heard an old woman singing and when he turned toward her, she acknowledged him with a wave and beckoned him through the rapidly thickening mist—but when he started to join her, the fog closed round, obscuring everything. It was then he began to sing and the spirit song filled him.

“All-Father, as

My voice is your voice,

My desire your desire,

Help me to find the way,

That I may follow the

Great Circle.

By your secret name I

Call You.

Lead me.

Help me to see beyond seeing.”

The mist dissolved, transformed in the turning of the hours and minutes, in the heartbeat of time. It became light and there were people around him, faces he did not recognize. He knew the old woman was there, standing beside him. She was called Singing Woman. Once she had had another name, long ago, before she walked in a dream. The light became brighter, white hot, and yet everyone continued to stare without going blind. At first Lost Eyes thought it was the sun, but the light increased and the words came to mind. Those surrounding him spoke in whispers and said the same thing: All-Father…

Lost Eyes opened his arms to the light, and the brilliance poured into him, transfixed him, and he cried out and went spinning up, up, up, into the light. The men and women lifted their voices until their songs filled the brightness and added to it.

He heard songs for the stillness, for grief, for joy, songs for the growing and the harvest, songs for the pleasure and goodness of life, songs that the world might not die.

Lost Eyes awoke and waited for his vision to clear before trying to sit upright. He touched his scalp, wincing as his fingers probed a tender spot near the bandaged wound. A concoction of roots and stems beneath the buckskin wrapping had already begun the healing process. His head throbbed a little, but mainly the wound felt warm.

He noticed Sparrow sitting near the entrance to the chamber. They were in another part of the cavern. Water flowed across the entrance and crashed into the pool, generating a permanent mist that with the cascade concealed the mouth of the cave. Lost Eyes had no doubt but the pool he gleaned through the rushing cataract was none other than the one below Singing Woman Ridge, only the voice of the mountain had come from an aged woman and not some spirit.

Sparrow had fixed her attention on the entrance. She rested in a patch of sunlight, her back to the stone. She turned, spied him sitting upright, and hurried to his side.

“You
are
alive,” she exclaimed, as if for a long night and part of the morning she had expected otherwise. Sparrow began to explain to him just what had happened, where they were and who the old woman was.

Lost Eyes waved her to silence and patted her arm. “I know, I know,” he said. Sparrow gave him a puzzled frown. “I walked in a dream.”

Singing Woman edged around the falls and entered the cave and waited in the sunlit part of the chamber as her eyesight adjusted to the cavern's interior.

“Her dream,” continued Lost Eyes, indicating the old woman.

The lead slug from White Buffalo's rifle had clipped Lost Eyes in the back of the skull and traveled around the side beneath the skin before exiting the scalp just above the ear. It was fortunate that the slug's velocity had been spent covering the distance. The wound itself was painful and had bled profusely, but it was not life threatening. Singing Woman's poultice had stanched the flow of blood.

Singing Woman chuckled to herself and, kneeling by the glowing coals of her camp fire, she filled a stone cup with a drink steeped from a combination of roots and herbs whose nature the old woman refused to divulge. There would be time enough to teach Sparrow the healing ways. She carried the cup to Lost Eyes. Sparrow intercepted their benefactor. She and none other would tend to the wounded brave. Singing Woman laughed softly in understanding. She too had loved and been loved. For her, though, the memories were like gray coals, dormant, waiting to blaze again in a night of dreams.

Sparrow tilted the cup to the wounded man's lips. Lost Eyes drank deeply of the bitter brew as he stared at Singing Woman, their eyes locked. He did not waver, nor did she.

“What is your name?” the old one asked.

“Lost Eyes.”

“No,” she said. “What is your name?”

The brave sagged against Sparrow's breast. With his cheek pressed close he could hear her quick heartbeat.

“What is your name?”

“Lost—” He shook his head, then gasped as the interior of the cave momentarily careened out of focus. He finished the contents of the cup and lay back upon a pelt-covered bulrush pallet.

“What is your name?” Singing Woman repeated.

“I—don't—know,” the wounded man replied wearily.

“Then you must find your name.”

“Where—do—I—look?”

Singing Woman placed her leathery palm upon his forehead. “In your visions.”

He began to breathe more easily, regularly, and soon he was asleep. Sparrow watched the old woman with renewed respect. Indeed, Lost Eyes seemed in capable hands.

“I must go,” she said. Singing Woman glanced up in surprise. “I must warn the people of my village.”

“There is nothing you can do. The worst has already happened.”

“No!” Sparrow exclaimed. “I can reach Elkhorn Creek in time. I know it.”

“You can die,” Singing Woman said. “Or stay here and live. Your people are no more. They are scattered. But one day they will gather again. Believe me. I have seen it in the flames.”

Black Fox and Yellow Stalk, dear loyal Blind Weed and Moon Shadow, Wolf Lance … what had befallen them? She longed to know. But the time was wrong and she would be powerless to alter the circumstances.

“What can we do?” Sparrow said, desperation in her voice.

“Watch and wait,” the old one sighed. “There is much for a Sparrow to learn.”

He walked alone in a dream. He passed from the country he knew and climbed higher, crossed the Backbone of the World. He saw ridges and mountains in the mist, he saw winding valleys and thousand-foot gorges and heard the wind sough in a thousand trees, and he drank from streams icy enough to freeze his gullet. He followed the sun, each day alone, and by night he slept in peace and let the moon fill his heart. He listened to the earth and heard at last the meaning of the songs, and he glimpsed the great truth that no mouth can speak nor any tongue tell except in song.

And these things too he beheld: mighty waters that crashed upon the land and stretched out to the horizon where the sun dipped below the edge of the world; then he stood upon a hillside overlooking a mighty river, and before him rose a timber cross like the ones the Blackrobes brought with them years ago, and upon the cross hung a white man. Wind howling, lightning crashing, amid storm clouds, the cross rose against the sky. And the man on the cross looked into the eyes of the dreamer. Then the dreamer saw a long knife jutting from the grass where it had been thrust at the foot of the outstretched man. And there were long knives and guns, and suddenly blood began to flow, to mingle with the rain and the long grass.

The vision faded and dissolved into a fierce, bright illumination that drew him into itself. He heard laughter and saw children at play along a creek bank. Five naked little boys dived and splashed and emerged from the creek only to leap once more into the silt-churned water. As the children dared one another to greater deeds of bravery, one of the boys paused and looked up and met the dreamer's stare with eyes that never wavered, and the dreamer realized he was gazing upon himself. The boy started toward him, leaving his friends behind. He bravely approached until he stood before the man. The dreamer reached out, and as their hands touched, the boy vanished, leaving the dreamer alone upon a dusty plain.