People of the Silence(6)

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.