Trail of Bones (7 page)

“You said this place would keep them away.
This Spirit Mound. I like to come here because it’s so quiet. It
brings such a slowdown of body flow and thought. I was able to
focus on some modest field research.”

I need to share my results with him, but my
friend is in a hurry. “The tales of the Spirit Mound won’t keep
Crow’s Eye away. He thinks you may be one of the spirits. Grown to
incredible size. Which would only bring him that much more glory as
a warrior were he to kill you.”

“Snow falls little on Saurius Prime. I have
never seen so much territory chill-factored and freeze-blanketed
all at once. I have created ice lenses for only the second time in
my life! Can’t we wait for the buffalo? After all, they may wish to
deliver greetings to their cousin, who you have wrapped around your
shoulders.”

The young shaman called North Wind Comes
pulls the mammal fur more tightly around his body. “Just my luck. I
train to be a shaman to bring wisdom to my people. Instead I find a
serpent being, a totem more suited to a desert people than to
Mandans, who makes comments about my ability to stay alive in
bone-chilling weather. I can see that I am not meant to come by
wisdom very easily.” He looks at me. “How is a desert lizard like
you staying warm?”

“I am a little frost-strewn. But the
standard chrono-suit I wear resists weather excess. For a while.” I
would smile at my friend, but I have discovered that Saurian mouths
often contain more teeth than human mammals are comfortable with.
Plus, the teeth have corn stuck in them, and my tongue keeps trying
to flick the pieces out. “I am not trying to offend you, North
Wind.”

“No. I suspect not. But why must I work so
hard at convincing you to preserve your own life, Many Lights?
Crow’s Eye is the warrior who vowed to find you and bring you in,
and he is not interested in your tales of seasonal
displacement.”

Seasonal displacement
is the term
North Wind Comes uses for “time travel.” His people, his tribe, the
Mandans, who live in this place they call the Dakotas, don’t quite
have the same words for “temporal” or “time” that Eli’s people do.
They don’t think of time as a straight line, a one-way river. They
think of it, somewhat correctly, as a circle. And they don’t have
many words for it because they don’t monitor their lives, minute by
minute, as is common in Eli’s day. In North Wind’s time, they tend
to think of seasons.

“Why does this Crow’s Eye warrior want me?
Are his people afraid of me, too?”

“The warriors imagine killing you will make
them brave.”

The security forces in Eli’s time captured
me, and I found myself in the custody of two medium high-ranking
mammals, a Mr. Howe, and a woman named Thirty. They played strange
word games with me, believing I possessed mysterious “information”
about a possible planetary invasion.

Perhaps they thought I was from the Spirit
Mound, too.

I was then rescued by my friend Thea, who
was piloting a time-vessel from my home world, and we reunited with
Eli, who was in the company of a king named Arthur. Eli was trying
to convince him to give up his sword.

There was also another mammal, named Rolf
Royd, from someplace called the Reich, who had rather sad and
frightening beliefs, and he wanted the sword, too. Eventually the
king decided to keep it — which I was led to believe made for a
surprising twist on recorded mammal history — and the four of us
headed into the Fifth Dimension. When the plasmechanical material
that made up the time-craft became more animated, pitching us out
straight into the flow of time, once again, the three of us — Eli,
Thea, and I — were separated.

But even infected plasmechanical material
wouldn’t explain why we were brought to this particular time.
Usually when there’s a disruption in the time stream, the
attraction is a type of “prime nexus” — a moment when something
happens, however large or small, that changes everything that comes
after.

What is the nexus here?

If the buffalo know, they aren’t saying.

Indeed, they aren’t even moving now. They’ve
stopped to raise their heads. Since they come equipped with heavy
coats, perhaps they are enjoying the freeze-blanketing, too.

“Uh-oh.” North Wind worries a lot.

Being tossed out of the time-craft felt like
an
uh-oh
, too, for a few short beats of time. Everything was
a blur of overwhelming feeling. That was soon replaced by the blur
of almost infinite
possibility
, a mix of swirling colors
that resolved, finally, into night air and stars. That was when I
found myself staring into the eyes of the young mammal who speaks
to me now: North Wind Comes.

He was the first human to discover me here.
Or perhaps I discovered him. He says he was undergoing a
coming-of-age ritual, called a vision quest, when we met. “Just my
luck,” he said, after we talked a while. “I have a vision who’s
stranded and needs to be fed.” It may have been what the humans
call a joke.

North Wind jokes about his luck a lot.

I stayed outdoors with him then — his
“quest” was like the bush walks we had as growing nestlings on
Saurius Prime — and we talked and shared our stories.

North Wind is slightly older than Eli and
Thea, and comes from a specific nest-community called a tribe. His
people call themselves Mandans, and they live close to another
tribe, the Hidatsas, to whom the young warrior Crow’s Eye belongs.
Like hatchlings, they are born and raised in the same place, their
villages.

But sometimes they venture out for a time,
depending on their callings.

North Wind’s calling is to become a shaman
among the Mandans, much as his own father was. A shaman, I gather,
is a person who is somewhat like Melonokus was in the history of
Saurius Prime. Melonokus saw things the rest of us did not: other
realities, other possibilities for living. Indeed, it was largely
thanks to his then-outlawed ideas and visions that our planet’s
Bloody Tendon Wars drew to a close and an armistice was reached
between the carnivores and herbivores.

It was our great King Temm who signed that
armistice. He then vanished, with Melonokus, who was never seen
again. When Temm reappeared, he had the rules for Cacklaw with
him.

Cacklaw is the Saurian game that has
replaced war on our planet. I miss it. I haven’t top-stomped in
awhile.

Nika-tc,
the lingo-spot whispers,
like a second voice.

Yes.

“Just my luck!” North Wind is yelling. He
points to some other mammals now joining the buffalo: horses, who
have ridden out from the low rising hills. Riding on these horses
are two more mammals— humans, symbiotic with the horses, wrapped in
shaggy buffalo skins no longer worn by their original owners.

The humans hold long sticks. They may have
seen us. They seem to be riding our way for a visit.

“Run!” North Wind wants me to follow.

“But who are they?”

“The hunters! Crow’s Eye!”

“Perhaps, if this Crow’s Eye finds me, I
could teach him Cacklaw instead. Then he wouldn’t try to be a war
maker.”

“
Warrior
. And it doesn’t mean he
wants a whole war. Just a small one with you. I told you, he
believes it will bring him great honor to find the lizard man that
the fur trader Banglees spoke of. But I do not intend to have the
vision of my vision quest killed by some swaggering Hidatsa before
I am made a shaman!”

The horses are getting closer. I can hear
the yelling of the riders in the distance. One of them aims his
long stick in our direction.

“If you expect to be my totem, my power
animal, you can’t be captured or killed by somebody else. You can’t
keep letting other people see you. Like that fur trader, Banglees.
When he stopped by the lodge fire, all he could talk about was the
lizard man who had saved him. If he hadn’t been a Frenchman, they
might have made
him
shaman.”

Just then, a couple of smaller sticks land
in the snow near us. Parts of little Earth birds, the feathers,
sprout out of one end. Why would you transplant bird feathers to a
little jabberstick?

Unless, perhaps, you were trying to insure
that the jabberstick had as long a flight as possible?

“Arrows,” North Wind says.

The buffalo-covered horse riders are
shouting and whooping. One has put his long stick away and grips a
kind of stringed-instrument, pulling the bow back — to play a note?
— with an arrow notched across it. He lets go and the jabberstick
comes flying at us. I jump. It barely misses North Wind’s head.

Everything was so quiet and peaceful,
covered in the snow. I had plenty of time for ice lenses and
theorems. How did this suddenly turn into such a sharp, edgy day?
But then, mammals are unpredictable.

“Many Lights,” North Wind says urgently,
“go.”

“North Wind gave me the name Many Lights
because of what he describes as a “vision of color” dancing in the
air when I appeared to him. I believe it had more to do with
localized temporal displacement, but I like the name. On Saurius
Prime, once you leave the nest, you are given your name, and it
doesn’t change. Agreeing to be known as Many Lights now would be
breaking rules from home.

“Many Lights!”

But what could the harm be in having a
different name for a while?

Perhaps I really am becoming an outlaw.

More arrows. One hits my tail. My
tail
! That
hurts
! I am able to shake it out and pick
up North Wind in my arms. It is harder to get a good jump off the
soft snow, but the horse-warriors are close and I have to try.

“No! Save yourself, Many Lights—“

North Wind wants me to go. But if I am part
of somebody’s vision quest, which sounds at least as critical as a
school project, I can’t just leave him. I gather him up just as the
next volley of arrows skim by. I jump, land in the snow, almost
drop North Wind, but don’t. However, I’ve jumped toward the crest
of the Spirit Mound, right at a patch of freeze-blanket that has
been in direct sun all afternoon. It is a little squishy.

Landing, I sink right in to my belly line.
Luckily, the horses are having trouble, too. Did those warriors ask
the horses if this battle-hunt all right with them? Do mammals
check with other mammals about these things? And does giving North
Wind a ride make me a kind of horse?

I struggle out of the squishy snow,
preparing to leap over the summit of the Spirit Mound and down the
other side, where I calculate that the shadows should make for an
icier, firmer surface. I should be able to gain more distance from
our pursuers.

“Many Lights—“

I tense and jump, though the softness of the
freeze-blanketed surface hampers my liftoff. I manage to get both
myself and North Wind to the other side of the mound. We seem to be
clear of the horses and the hunters now, or at least we should be.
Yet I still hear a horse close by, which seems strange, because
they were behind us when —

Oh. I see what North Wind Comes was trying
to warn me about. There is another horse. In front of us.

On top, there sits another young man with
long black hair like North Wind, but more colors painted on his
face and more feathers in his hair. And not too much buffalo cousin
wrapped around his body. He’s showing lots of bare mammal skin. As
if he enjoys the cold. Or perhaps is challenging it.

We’ve been driven right to him. Trapped.

Bad Cacklaw move for me.

The ice under my feet continues to crack.
Like glass. Like frail lenses.

Always riding out

Never coming home

The trail takes me far

Blood and honor

dancing

The man on the horse is singing a song as he
slowly takes out a bow of his own.

“Crow’s Eye,” my shaman friend says. “Crow’s
Eye has found us.”

Crow’s Eye notches a jabberstick and is
about to shoot one now. From this distance, he won’t miss.

I am too young for this to happen. Who will
there be to report the findings about slow pox and
plasmechanics?

Crow’s Eye pulls the bow, and the ground
below us starts to roar. And opens up.

Chapter Eight

Eli: Journals

June 1804

June 8
^th
: A jentle brease proves a
welcome companyun on the second month of our great journey…

Error. Suggest: “gentle.” Error.
Suggest: “grease” or “breeze.”

Error. Suggest: “company,”
“companion,” or “comparison.” Suggest: Use Language Options Menu if
attempting to write in a language other than English.

…
much of which I have undertook in a canoo, these
past weeks…

Error. Suggest “can you,” “can do,”
or “cannolli.”

It’s no use. I may have to write on actual
paper. I’m amazed to still have a vidpad at all. It was rolled up
and stuffed deep in my pocket and stayed with me all the way from
my tumble out of Clyne’s ship, through the Fifth Dimension, and
back to Earth. It recharges with the sunlight, so I can use it
during the day when no one’s looking.

But even with power, it doesn’t seem to be
working right

function>

Suggest: Maintain spell check
function.

It’s like the vidpad is refusing to do what
I ask. It’s designed to handle being stuffed in a pocket, but maybe
not if that pocket keeps going through different dimensions and
times. I mean, now it won’t even let me override the spell check.
Which out here will be a real problem.

Everyone is keeping a journal: Clark, Lewis,
and a few other men, like Patrick Gass. Gassy has been showing me
some of his writing:
We should be respeckted…