From a High Tower (13 page)

“I won't be staying,” Kellerman said, as Leading Fox entered the wagon and carefully took a seat on the bench. “Unless you would prefer me to. Leading Fox told me that you and he will be able to converse by means of your familiar spirits.”

Well, that was less than accurate, but she let it pass. “I believe that we can,” she replied, “And I am perfectly comfortable in the presence of Leading Fox, if you have work you need to do.”

“Alas, yes, I do,” Kellerman replied, with regret. “A bugle will wake the camp, and a second bugle call will announce when breakfast is ready in the mess tent. It will not be much like the breakfasts that you and I are used to, but it is quite good. You will meet with the Captain then and go to rehearsal, and he will integrate you into the show.”

Well, how he was to do that without any shared language she had no idea. Still, wasn't that supposed to be what Leading Fox was going to address?

She thanked him, and Kellerman hurried away, vanishing immediately into the night and the camp, which had gone suddenly very quiet. These people went to bed at country hours, it seemed, no lingering at bedtime over a book or a beer. . . .

She turned to the Indian, who nodded, and whistled—not shrilly as Cody had, but softly. It sounded like a bird call, but it was answered by two winged creatures, flying in the open door. One was the Indian's little owl, the other a night-sylph. The owl flew to the Indian's shoulder, while the sylph balanced atop the cold stove. Her wings were a pale blue, very moth-like, and folded down her back as soon as she had landed, like a stiff cloak.

“You speak to me,”
the sylph, an imperious little black-haired beauty said.
“I will speak to the owl, who will tell his man what you said. And the other way around.”

Giselle nodded, and folded her hands in her lap. “Well . . . obviously Herr Leading Fox is an Elemental Master of Air?”

The sylph inclined her head to the owl, and silently conveyed what Giselle had said. The owl turned to the Indian and the same silent colloquy passed between them. It all happened in mere moments of course, in much less time than it had taken her to speak the words, and then the sylph had the reply.

“Leading Fox says that yes, he is very like that, and he is going to make it possible for you to learn English and Pawnee, as he promised.”

She was going to ask how that could be possible, but evidently the sylph already had the answer.
“His owl spirit is to spend the night here, and if you command it, I am to spend the night in his teepee, and the owl will put English and Pawnee into your mind while you sleep, while I do the same for Leading Fox and our tongue.”

She blinked. “And all I have to do is tell—I mean, ask you to do this?”

The sylph lost a little of her imperious demeanor.
“You—would
ask
me, rather than order me?”
she said in astonishment.

Giselle blinked again. “Well, of course. It is always better to be friends, is it not? The only time I might give an order to one of you is if there is no time to be polite about it. And then I would apologize for being so rude afterward.”

Now the sylph unbent entirely.
“You are much nicer than the one who was here before. He was rude, always ordering us about, and threatening if we did not obey immediately! You are as nice as the Bruderschaft are said to be! Thank you!”
She beamed at Giselle, who smiled back. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Leading Fox was smiling ever so slightly.

“Well, if you don't mind, would you please remain with Leading Fox and teach him German?” she said, with punctilious politeness. “I would very much appreciate it.”

“I would be happy to!”
the sylph crowed, standing on one foot in glee.

“But—” She frowned for a moment. “Couldn't Leading Fox have asked for himself?”

“He did not wish to offend us, since he is from so far away, and his Elementals are so unlike us,”
the sylph replied, and shrugged.
“Humans. I do not understand the rules you make for yourselves.”

“Sometimes, neither do I,” Giselle sighed, and through the sylph, offered the Indian a cup of tea, but he declined politely and got up to leave. The owl spirit lofted over to a shelf running along the very top of the left-hand wall and made itself at home; the night-sylph flitted out the door, following Leading Fox. The Indian walked as softly as Winnetou did in the books; she could not hear a single footfall as he vanished into the night.

Giselle considered the little owl, who blinked at her.
I should feed it. Or at least offer it something . . .

She could spin little orbs of the magic of the Air, and her sylph friends would devour them with glee, as if they were sugared fruits. Would the owl like them too? Well, it was an Air Elemental, chances were it would like the same thing the sylphs did.

She cupped her left hand, palm up, concentrated on seeing the currents of magic around her, twirled her finger in her palm, as Mother had taught her to gather some of that magic, and started to spin up a little orb. The wisps of magic followed the twirling motion of her finger, sparkling in the semidarkness of the wagon. The faster she twirled, the more the magic took on the shape of an orb about the size of a pebble, and the brighter the orb got. When it began to illuminate her palm, she held it up for the owl to see. The owl's eyes widened and his beak parted a little; she blew on it and sent it gliding toward him, and he snapped at it and gulped it down eagerly, and looked to her for more.

Well, if he was going to be giving her not one, but
two
languages, the least she could do was to feed him generously. She continued to spin up orbs and send them wafting to the little owl, who snapped them up with glee. When he seemed to have had enough, he flitted to another shelf just over the head of her bed, fluffed up his feathers, and settled down, eyelids drooping. Giselle took that as a sign she should be sleeping.

She closed the window above the bed and pulled the curtains shut, then jumped down out of the bed and closed the door of the wagon and pulled the curtains on the window of the door. A few moments later she was in a night shift; a moment after that and she had blown out the lantern and was trying to get comfortable in a strange bed. It was not as soft as her featherbed at home, nor were the sounds of the encampment anything she was used to. Somewhere out there, someone was playing a harmonica, or trying to. There were murmurs of voices from the nearer two wagons. Still, it was a great deal more comfortable than sleeping in a haystack, though it wasn't as nice as the bed in Tante Gretchen's cottage . . .

Her dreams were strange, colorful, scenes of Indians, including Leading Fox, out in some vast landscape that somehow looked
nothing
like what Karl May described. The sky was
enormous,
that was the only way to describe it. The scenes were all very disjointed, and didn't form any sort of coherent story. Unlike her usual dreams, where she was an active participant, she was a passive observer here. It was as if someone was opening a picture book at random places while she watched. There were scenes of hunting, of village life, of Indians with what she assumed to be American Cavalry, of dancing and feasting, and of . . . well, virtually anything that people
could
do. These people did not live in the teepees she had expected, nor the pueblos that Karl May had described Winnetou's tribe as inhabiting—they lived in homes made of earth and wood, round mounds with a square tunnel for an entrance. This was . . . unexpected. In fact, as she flitted from scene to scene, there was a great deal that was unexpected. Finally she just stopped expecting things altogether and merely drank in the scenes as they were presented to her. Once she did that . . . she noticed there was a sort of voice murmuring in the wind, too soft for her to hear properly, but always present.

Then she drifted off into true sleep, but still with that voice murmuring in the back of her mind.

She woke up as she always did, at dawn, and the camp was already stirring. As she lay in her bed, listening to the unfamiliar voices and sounds, she smiled to herself. She thought she was going to get along well with these people. They all sounded amazingly friendly for so early in the morning.

“Clem! Didja make sure the water barrel's full fer that new liddle gal? The sharpshooter?” a female voice—an older female, Giselle thought—called.

“Right an' tight, Maisy!” called a nearer, male voice. “Topped her off a liddle bit ago.”

And that was when her sleepy satisfaction turned to astonishment and wide-awakeness.
She could understand them!

Quickly, she looked above her, to the shelf where the owl spirit had perched last night, but it was gone. As she continued to listen to the early voices around her, she held her breath, almost unable to believe that what Leading Fox had promised last night had come true!

Then a trumpet or bugle call sounded over the camp, and the sounds of the camp
truly
coming to life began. It sounded amazingly cheerful. People shouted questions about animals, about costumes or properties, teased each other about being lazy, swore they were going to douse them in cold water to wake them up—

She pulled the bed-curtains aside and hopped down onto the floor of the wagon. Last night she had filled her bucket, kettle and pitcher for the washbasin with the water from the barrel at the tongue of the wagon. Now she put the kettle on the spirit lamp to heat while she considered her clothing. There was her own hunting outfit that she had taken off, brushed out, and set aside last night . . .

But I am supposed to be one of these people,
she thought, picking up the skirt and frowning at it.
I should start looking like them.

So instead, she selected a skirt that appeared to be made of a gold-colored canvas, a lighter-weight fringed shirt to go with it, and leggings to go under that. The skirt was, by her standards, scandalously short, but she supposed the leggings made it more modest, and like the skirt of her hunting suit, it had been split for riding astride. Both the shirt and the skirt were much softer than she had expected canvas to be, and showed signs of having been altered. She poured some of her heated water into the washbasin, added cold, and gave herself a quick scrub, then put on the new clothing. It was . . . well, surprisingly comfortable.

Dressed, she unbraided her hair, combed it out, and braided it up again. It didn't seem to be growing as fast. And . . . now that she was
here . . .
she certainly didn't feel as tense as she had been since her encounter with the
Hauptmann.

And the moment she remembered that, she had to put one hand on the table and the other on her stomach, feeling a little . . . sick. And guilty again. No matter what Tante Gretchen had said, a man was dead, and she was responsible for him being dead. Nothing was going to change that.

But nothing is going to bring him back, either,
she reminded herself.

So when the sick feeling passed, she took a deep breath, stood a little straighter and went out to find the mess tent.

The sun had just barely cleared the horizon, the air was fresh and crisp, and the sounds of people and animals echoed from every part of the camp. The camp was now altogether awake, with people heading in the same direction that she was, men washing, shaving, bustling about half-dressed. There was no sign of the women, but she suspected they were either clearing up their tents or wagons, or dressing in more privacy than the men seemed to need.

She made a turn that she remembered and found herself not only at the edge of the Indian encampment, but nearly face-to-face with Leading Fox.

“Rawah, Kiwaku Rahiraskaawarii,”
she said without thinking. Then her hand flew to her mouth as she realized that she had greeted him in Pawnee!

And she also understood in that moment that the
real
translation of his name was more complicated than “Leading Fox.” “Fox Roaming the World In The Lead” or “As The Leader.” Given how far he was from home . . . well that seemed almost supernaturally apt.

“Guten Morgen, Fraulein Giselle,”
Leading Fox replied, with an almost imperceptible smile and in faultless German. “I told you we would have each others' tongues in the morning.”

“But why could you not have done this with Herr Kellerman?” she asked. And then snapped her fingers. “Of course. Because he is not a—” she sought in her new language for the right word for “Elemental Master” “—a Medicine Chief.”

“Even so.” Leading Fox nodded. “Now that I have mastery of your tongue, however, I shall use a similar, but longer means to give it to the Captain. Even though I trust Herr Kellerman, there should be more than one of our company that speaks both German and English.”

“And Pawnee?” she asked. Leading Fox smiled a very little.

“Captain Cody is the genuine article, a working Scout,” Fox replied, this time in English. “He speaks tolerable Pawnee of both dialects, Apache in Chirakawa and Mescalaro, and Lakota Sioux. I believe he has a few words in several other languages.”

“Enough to get by. Mornin' Fox, Miz Giselle.” The Captain himself strolled around the side of a tent in the “cowboy” section and tipped his hat to her. “Looks like your witchery worked.”

“Tolerably, old friend. Tolerably. Shall we escort our new sharpshooter to breakfast before the plague of locusts devours everything in sight?” Leading Fox replied with a faintly raised eyebrow. With a laugh, Cody pulled off his hat and waved them ahead of him.

As soon as she entered the mess tent, Giselle realized that Leading Fox's wry comment about “the plague of locusts” was not altogether out of line. Unlike last night, when people had been eating methodically, but not ravenously, the members of the show seemed to be frantically gulping down food as fast as they could. Bracketed between Fox and Cody, she was at least able to get her tin dish full of fried eggs, bread, and bacon without being trampled, although she was unable to reach the pancakes being served, and there were already piles of tin mugs and pots of coffee waiting at the table where Cody guided her. She took her place at the end, next to a dark-complexioned woman with a great mass of blue-black hair who greeted her with a cheerful
“Buenos dias, senorita,”
and went back to eating eggs with some sort of flat, thin, pancake-like bread.