People of the Nightland(135)

Skimmer climbed to the crest of the dirty, gravel-encrusted ice, and gazed westward. A rocky ridge thrust up in the distance, rising perhaps ten tens of hands above the tundra. Sunlight sheathed the boulders, turning them into a glimmering wall. To the south, lodges covered the tundra. Already, runners were sprinting from lodge to lodge, probably relaying the news about the sacred hole in the ice.

Ti-Bish sank down onto a boulder and lowered his face to his hands.

Skimmer said, “Are you all right?”

“No.” He looked up at her, soul sick.

“I’m sorry you had to hear those things,” she said, laying a gentle hand on his head. “But you needed to know. Nashat has done terrible things in your name. Half the world hates you. I hated you.”

In a tight voice, he replied, “I just need to pray for a time.”

“I don’t think praying is the answer, Ti-Bish. Nashat obviously disdains you and your Dream.”

He paused as though judging his words before he murmured, “Prayer is always the answer. The problem is that humans no longer know how to pray.”

She studied his tormented face. “Probably because so few people try these days.”

“I know.” His voice was small. He lifted his face and gazed out across the tundra at a herd of caribou grazing its way along the distant shore of Thunder Sea. Their shiny coats glinted in the sun. “Humans don’t pray. But the world prays all the time.”

“It does?”

He gestured to the lake. “Prayers are Sung every moment on the lips of breaking waves, and windblown branches, the whispering of leaves in the moonlight.”

A strange tingling sensation began in her hip. She looked down at the old Spirit bundle tied to her belt. A mixture of fear and curiosity tormented her. Very faintly she heard a voice. A man’s voice, deep and rich.

“Ti-Bish, I—I …” Her gaze was glued to the bundle as though attached with boiled pine pitch. “I hear …”

“Yes, I hear him, too.” Ti-Bish swallowed hard. “No wonder he wished you to have it. He wants to speak with you.”

“Who does?”

As though trying to decide if he should tell her or not, he twisted his hands in his lap. “Skimmer, I didn’t tell you the whole truth when I gave you that bundle. I’m sorry. I was afraid of what you might do.”

The tingling sensation had grown fiery. “Tell me now.”

“Raven Hunter gave me that bundle, and told me to give it to you. He wanted you to have it.”

Blood began to pound in her ears. “Why?”

“He didn’t tell me that. I think he worried that I was too stupid to understand.”

“You’re not stupid, Ti-Bish. Just innocent.”

“No, but there are times when I—I lose the”—he waved a hand uncertainly—“the boundary between myself and the world; it melts away, and I’m no longer sure if I’m seeing with my own eyes, or hearing with my own ears. I get confused.”

Skimmer looked down at the bundle. The tingling had stopped. The voice was gone. Had she merely imagined it?

“Ti-Bish, whose eyes would you be seeing with if not your own?”

He grimaced down at his hands. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. There are times when I feel as though every rock and river, bird and buffalo, everything that has ever lived, has always been there in my soul. I could be seeing through any of their eyes. And they through mine.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re stupid.”

Ti-Bish said, “Stupid may have been the wrong word. What I meant is that Raven Hunter can’t rely on the fact that ‘I’ am actually there when he explains things to me. So”—he sighed—“often he doesn’t.”

Skimmer flinched at the pain in his voice. “Why do you think he wishes to speak with me?”

“He speaks to a person when they need to hear him. Perhaps today you needed him.”

In the villages below, voices had risen and there was a flurry of activity. People raced around shouting and weeping in what sounded like joy.

“The word is traveling,” she said.

Ti-Bish nodded, then tenderly asked, “Skimmer, why didn’t you kill me?”

As though all of her strength had vanished in a heartbeat, she hunched forward and braced her elbows on her knees. “I …” The words came hard. “I came to get justice. To pay you back for the horror in the pen. For the dead babies and husbands, and ruined lives.” She paused. “Instead I found an innocent, a holy man. One doesn’t kill the innocent and holy, Ti-Bish. No matter how many lives your death would save.”

“My death would save lives?”