Authors: Mark London Williams
I have to find Clyne soon, and then we have
to find Thea, and
then
we all have to get back home, to
2019, and get all this bad history sorted out.
I have an orange that I’m holding, deep in
my pocket. It might be an orange freeze by now, but I know someone
who’d like it, no matter what.
I had to trade my Christmas portion of
brandy to get it, so it was well worth it. Lewis was handing out
some fruits earlier that Jefferson had sent up river for a special
occasion. He had originally handed the orange to Cruzatte.
“Another of Jefferson’s crop experiments
evidently,” he said, trying to figure out what it was.
“A crop experiment will not inspire za
muse!” Cruzatte said indignantly. So he was only too happy to
trade.
I’d like to go across the frozen river to
Mandan Village and show this orange to this shaman I keep hearing
rumors about. North Wind, I think his name is. He’s the one who was
supposed to have seen the same “lizard god” that the fur trader
Banglees saw.
But I can’t just leave by myself, without
permission from one of the captains. I’ve seen ’em actually whip
guys for stuff like sneaking off.
So I keep tromping through the ice and
blistery winds, somewhere in the Dakotas, trying not to get
distracted by the two things I’d normally be thinking about
today.
“Merry Christmas, Eli! Want to play some
baseball?”
It’s Gassy. He’s eating some of the dried
apples that Lewis passed out earlier for Christmas presents. He
also had a few big sips of the brandy that was part of Christmas
breakfast.
The apples had been in the crates with other
treats, and were meant to celebrate both the holiday and the fact
that we finished building the last part of “Fort Mandan”
yesterday.
The fort is really just a group of small
wooden huts surrounded by a big fence, right across the frozen
river from the Mandan village.
You can see the round huts from here.
Lewis said the Mandan village “is the last
known stop on the white man’s map. Fur traders come up here. West
of this,
terra incognito
.”
I’ve been meaning to ask him what that
means. Maybe he meant “terror”? Like he’s afraid of what lies
ahead?
The Mandans and their neighbors, the
Hidatsas, have been really friendly to us. They’ve sent food, and
visited us, and had us over in the village for feasts. They don’t
celebrate Christmas though.
Gassy’s still waiting for an answer. The men
all seem intrigued by “base,” as they originally called it, until I
updated them, since it was the game that helped get us out of that
jam downriver. I left Kentuck’s Fives ball with the Lakotas, but
I’ve managed to make another one out of some old rags, and that’s
been usable. Barely.
“I can’t right now, Gassy. I’m busy.”
“Busy? On a field of ice on Christmas Day?
The Fort’s built. There’s nothing to do but freeze. And play. Oh,
and fire off the cannon, tonight.”
He’s grinning when he says it. He’s weaving
a little bit.
“I know, Gassy. I’ll be there for the cannon
firing.” I mean, that sounds cool, as long as it’s not actually
aimed at anybody.
He holds up the rag bundle, and the small
willow branch I helped carve into a vague Louisville Slugger
shape.
“Come on, Eli. You can hit first. Christmas
present.”
Every mention of Christmas gets my thoughts
all churning up again. It’s not Gassy’s fault. The last Christmas I
spent was with my mom, in San Francisco, during World War II. And
that involved keeping her from getting blown up.
I don’t know what’s happened to her
since.
I don’t even think it’s been a full year
since that Christmas happened. Not for me. That’s another problem
with time travel. Holidays don’t obey any rules about how often
they’re supposed to come.
That might be good if, say, you really liked
Halloween, or chocolate Easter eggs. But not when you’re missing
somebody on Christmas.
I miss my family. And if I find Clyne, maybe
I can get back to them.
“Sorry, Gassy. I don’t think I feel like it
right now. I don’t feel very Christmasy.”
“But you feel cold, don’t you? That’s
Christmasy. And you said you love this game. Besides, what else is
there to do?”
I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. Maybe that
would cheer me up.
“Eli will be coming with me.” Lewis had come
out of the fort, wrapped up like some shaggy swamp creature from a
Comnet cartoon, like the rest of us. “I know it’s a holiday, but
I’ve got to walk across the river to the village and see about
hiring that French trader who came into camp. We could use him as a
guide for the second half our journey.”
“That Charbonneau fellow they were talking
about around the fire the other night? You want him to be our
guide? Sir?” Gassy asks.
“Well, I’m actually more interested in
hiring his wife. She’s not much older than Eli here. Her name’s
Sacagawea. She’s supposed to be a full-blooded Shoshone, and we’ll
be meeting that tribe sometime in the spring. She may know the
area, and we could use a translator.”
“Well that’s too bad the pair of you have
such highfalutin important business on Christmas Day,” Gassy says.
“Forgettin’ already it’s a holiday and such. But you both have
yourselves a good time with the Mandans.” Still grinning, he throws
up the rag bundle, swings the branch, and knocks a pretty good pop
fly out over the snow.
“You don’t mind the walk, young squire?”
Lewis asks me, after Gassy goes after the rag ball.
“It’s best to keep moving in weather like
this, sir.”
As we walk across the ice toward the
village, I lose my balance and almost drop the orange. Drawing
closer, we can smell the sharp smoke trailing from the
chimney-holes on top of the round huts.
“You seem to be feeling particularly alone
today, Master Sands,” Lewis says at last. The words are muffled,
and he has to say them more loudly than usual, in order to get them
past all the fur strips. “Missing anyone in particular? Anything or
anyplace?”
“Nothing — no one — that would make any
sense, sir.”
“It never does.”
Lewis lets the conversation stop there. We
cross from the slick river ice to the mushier snow on the banks,
which is a little easier to walk on. Lewis taps me and points to
the largest of the huts. We walk toward it and pull back the
flaps
“Hello!” Lewis says. “Happy Holiday.”
One of the Mandan men jumps up and begins
shouting at us. I think we startled them. They were all planning on
spending a cold day around the fire, and here we are, yelling about
a holiday on a calendar they don’t even follow.
The Mandan children surround Lewis and me. A
couple of them touch me, giggle, then run back toward the fire and
smoke, and the grownups, in the middle of the lodge. All of us in
the Corps still seem so strange to them.
We’re the outsiders, with the weird customs.
We’re like Barnstormer teams, showing up in a new town. Needing to
prove ourselves to everybody. To prove we can be trusted. Of
course, in Barnstormers, it never works out.
Closer by the fire, I think I see at least
one of the people Lewis had come for: Sacagawea. She’s young — I
mean, not as young as me, but she’s still a teenager. With long
black hair, tied in several rings down her back. And she’s
pregnant.
I walk with Lewis in her direction, when
someone taps me on my shoulder and says, “You are probably looking
for me.” I turn to see another young Indian, about the same age as
Sacagawea, who steps forward from the haze. He has a large painted
blanket wrapped around himself. There are wolves on it. There are
also stars, and what appears to be a planet, sort of Earth-like,
except with two suns.
He motions for me to head back to the corner
— well, the “round,” maybe, since technically there aren’t any
corners — with him.
“I’m looking for —” I have to struggle to
remember the name — “North Wind Goes,” I said. “The medicine
man.”
The Indian nods. “He may have medicine. Or
he may not. But ‘medicine man’ is a white term.”
Did I say something wrong? I know that
medicine
can also mean “power,” but I wonder if I’ve
offended him. Hey, wait. He understood everything I just said in
English. How could he? Unless…
“My name is now ‘North Wind
Comes
.’
It’s changed. I’ve gone out and come back.”
Come back from
where
? I want to ask.
Instead, it comes out like this: “I hear you might know the lizard
man.”
“The lizard man is just a rumor.”
I hold out the orange.
“If you know this rumor, if you see him,
would you give this to him? From me. That’s all.”
North Wind takes the orange in his hand, and
holds it to his nose. Then he looks into my eyes and nods.
“Then you must be Eli.”
Chapter Fourteen
Thea: The
Sklaan
Room
February 2020
I watch Eli’s father for several minutes,
walking around the room. He’s holding something in his hand: two
prongs with an arc and a ball of light, dancing between them. The
light changes color, turning bluer and bluer as he comes
closer.
He wears some kind of messenger bag at his
side.
This room hasn’t been lived in for a very
long time. There’s dust, and clutter, and the furnishings seem
strange even by the standards of Eli’s era, as though they’re not
quite of the same period.
Near me, on a shelf, is a brown glass bottle
with an orange covering. The covering says
OVALTINE
, and I try to pronounce the strange word.
No sound comes out.
Eli’s father hasn’t noticed me yet, either.
I don’t want to startle him, but I need to make my presence
known.
The blue light glows brighter still as he
turns the apparatus toward me.
I try to speak, but still nothing. I reach
for the Ovaltine jar but cannot grasp it. My hand goes through it,
like a specter, a phantom. And I realize that as I hold my hand in
front of the bottle, I can see both my hand and the glass container
behind it. I am in the same ephemeral state as the projected light
of Mother’s in the lighthouse. I am here. But not completely.
What does this mean? What happened to me
after I put on Eli’s cap in Jefferson President’s house? How is it
that I am
mostly
here… but not quite?
Eli’s soft helmet, the one he uses for
personal time displacement, seems to have affected me in a
different way.
Eli’s father is staring at me now. The
apparatus in his hand is a brilliant blue.
He’s staring at me, but he doesn’t see
me.
Instead, he sets the portable down on the
floor, where it continues to glow. Looking toward me, but not
seeing, he reaches into his pocket and puts on a glove. And then
another. Then he reaches into the bag, and pulls out…a cloth of
some kind. A…
sklaan
.
The
sklaan
. The
artificial skin covering I was given on Saurius Prime to keep me
warm or cold, as needed.
I had given it away to a woman named Hannah,
a refugee from Peenemünde. She was fleeing the slave caves of the
Reich, where captives worked on building rockets that would be used
to destroy more lives. That was the place that taught me just how
fearsome the future could be.
What is the
sklaan
doing here?
“Sandusky…”
I say his name. I mouth it. Still no
sound.
He looks at me, where I … where I’m not
standing. I’m floating. My feet aren’t touching anything solid,
either. It’s like being in a dream.
But Eli’s father keeps looking in my
direction, with an intense, yet quizzical, look on his face. I
remember those sorts of expressions on my mother’s face. And in
remembering, might cry damp tears if I were more solid.
Sandusky reaches into the bag, and pulls out
a small sharp blade. He begins to cut a piece off of the
sklaan
. Then he stands back and throws the cutting into the
middle of the blue orb, like tossing meat onto a fire.
The blue light explodes.
I am surrounded by arcing, sparking streaks
of lightning and other light that moves like liquid waves. It’s as
if a great sluice gate of water has been flung open, and I’m
cascading into the middle of the room.
Sandusky, surprised, is knocked back into
the shelves by the reaction. He turns to where I am, where the
light is most intense.
“Thea?”
Now he can see me.
I try to speak.
Still
nothing. I nod
instead.
“What are you…?”
He steps toward me, stands in front of me,
reaches out…and his fingers go right through me.
“Are you… are you… are you all right?”
I nod. Though how can I be sure?
“Are you a ghost?” He looks around, as if he
might want to retract that question.
I shake my head no.
But then again, how can I tell?
“Where’s Eli?” He’s staring at my hair when
he says it…
at the hat
. Even in an ephemeral state like
this, Eli’s cap is visible on my head.
He returns his gaze to my eyes. “Where are
you now?”
That’s a good question. Since I am not
fully
here, is part of me somewhere else? Has some of my
life force been lost, perhaps forever, in transit through the Fifth
Dimension? Am I also appearing as a ghost in Thomas Jefferson’s
Monticello at this same instant?
But I can’t ask any of these questions. Not
out loud. So instead, I shrug.
Mother always hated shrugs. She preferred a
good
no
to a shrug, even if she was looking for a
yes
. She loathed anything noncommittal.
“Is Eli all right?” A yes-and-no question. I
could nod, if I knew the answer. But I don’t want to shrug again.
For Eli’s father, that would be as bad as a
no
. So I nod.
It’s not quite a lie. It’s giving us all the benefit of the
doubt.