Hellbound Hearts (29 page)

Their adobe was a full level up from the common area, and while Cha'kwaina scurried easily down the ladder, her grandmother waited by the doorway, watching the activity; while her hearing was slipping away, there was little wrong with her eyesight and nothing at all amiss with her perception. Even though she went down to find out what the excitement was all about, Cha'kwaina found herself glancing upward to check her grandmother's reactions.

“What's going on?” Cha'kwaina called out as girls she knew ran
past. Everyone seemed to be abandoning their chores and heading back to their adobes. “What's happening?”

But no one took the time to stop and answer. Finally, Cha'kwaina spotted Wikvaya and his brothers at the far end of the plaza. They were huddled together with their father like a bunch of old men trading stories about a bygone hunt. Shouldn't they be working on her wedding attire? In five days she and Wikvaya would be married and he would join her grandmother's household, turning his attention and energy during the day to supporting her family's cornfields. If the great spirits looked on them with favor, the nights would work to ensure that they had babies of their own in the coming years.

Tired of trying to figure it out, Cha'kwaina strode to the men and touched her groom on the shoulder. He spun in surprise, his eyes unaccountably wild, and she almost back-stepped. “Wikvaya,” she said. “What is all the excitement about? No one will say.”

Instead of answering, he took her by the elbow and started guiding her back the way she'd come. “You must go home,” he said urgently. “You and your family must stay inside, and you must cover your eyes with fabric or skins—”

“What!”

“The whole village must do this,” Wikvaya continued. “Haven't you noticed? People have already started, and there's no time to waste. No one can remove the eye bindings until the spirit warriors tell the elders that it's safe.”

Cha'kwaina pulled against Wikvaya's hand, slowing him. “Spirit warriors? What has happened that we need those?”

“The warnings that my grandfather's grandfather gave us have come true,” Wikvaya told her. His solemn face was covered in fine desert dust, there were worry bags beneath his eyes, and his mouth was drawn into a hard grimace. He looked as though ten summers had passed since she'd seen him just yesterday. “I have found one of the gateways of which he spoke. The town must be rendered sightless until the opening is destroyed.”

“What?” Cha'kwaina repeated in confusion. “That makes no sense, not in real life. Those are just big stories told by old men
breathing smoke fire down in the kivas. If there really is a gateway, and
if
something comes through, blinding ourselves is the worst thing to do—we won't be able to see it, to run or fight.”

Wikvaya shook his head. “No, the tales are
true
. The ancestors testify that this has happened before, many times since the First People. If the gateway is not closed, a terrible creature will come through and destroy the world with fire just as Sóyuknang destroyed Tokpela, the First World. But this time, there will be no place for the People to hide, and we will all perish.”

Cha'kwaina stared at him. “But who among us can defeat a creature with that kind of power?”

“As has been written, the four spirit warriors,” Wikvaya told her. “The legends command that if a person cannot see it, the creature cannot see the person. It cannot harm what it can't see. Only the spirit warriors may remain sighted in order to battle and kill it.”

Cha'kwaina took a step back. “The spirit warriors—you mean you? Your brothers and father? You can't be serious.”

He scowled at her. “What makes you so doubtful? These are the ways of the People. We have always known this.”

“The ways of the
Old
People,” she said firmly. “I am nineteen summers and have never seen any gateway. It is a story invented by the elders to frighten children into behaving, just like the kachinas, when they come in costume, dance, and then hit the boys with sticks. The People have always been safe in the past, and they always will be.”

“Safety is not something to be taken for granted,” Wikvaya argued. “It is something to be watched over, and sometimes you must fight to keep it.”

“Times have changed, and it is silly to let ourselves be frightened by ancient, irrational myths. There is nothing here that threatens us,” Cha'kwaina snapped. Her face darkened as a thought slipped into her mind. “Perhaps you have reconsidered our marriage and this is nothing but a means by which to ensure that the wedding does not take place.”

Wikvaya's mouth fell open. “I have done no such thing. No one
would be so reckless as to do something so involved just for that. Our wedding will take place after the gateway is closed.”

“But—”

“And so it shall be,” a gravelly voice interrupted her. Cha'kwaina spun and saw her grandmother standing behind her. She had no idea how the old woman had climbed down the ladder. “Come. We return to our home now. We darken our eyes as instructed, and we do not come out until the spirit warriors say it is safe.”

Cha'kwaina started to say something but Grandmother Chochmingwu held up a weathered hand. “This is not a request,” she said. “You
will
do as you are told.”

And because she could do nothing else, Cha'kwaina bowed her head and sullenly followed her grandmother back to their adobe.

“We are too late.”

Wikvaya stared at the ground while the others crowded around, their expressions as horrified as his own. The sand painting was still there, but it had divided in and upon itself into dozens of pieces, all different shapes and sizes; the result was something huge, a visual cacophony shot through with streaks the color of dead deer's blood. Wikvaya realized that it hurt to look at it—it felt as though his eyes were being pierced by the spray from a hundred boiling pots. When they slapped at their eyes, he knew that his father and brothers felt the same. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks, but Wikvaya would not look away, would not allow himself the comfort of diversion. When the torment quickly passed, he couldn't help but wonder if what they'd felt had been real or ancient memory, an instinctive response built upon the experience of those who had come before. For, as the legend decreed, if they could see, so could whatever beast had passed through the gateway from the dark world beyond it.

“There.” Honaw pointed. “Just beneath the edge of the rock. The beast leaves us a trail.”

“Or bait,” Cheveyo said. “Knowing that we will follow—”

“—because we must,” Wikvaya finished. To his father, he asked, “What do you see?”

“The shadow of rotting blood,” his father said in a low voice. “Of death and evil, and the agony that will come if this creature is not driven back to its origins or killed.”

Something snapped in the dry summer grasses behind him and Wikvaya whirled, his spear ready. But there was nothing . . . he thought. No, he hadn't imagined it. His brothers were standing in a crouch to either side of their father, bows drawn, their faces ashen with tension.

“We must hurry,” Hania said. “If the beast should reach Oraibi . . .”

“They will be safe,” Cheveyo said. “They have been blinded. They have been warned.”

Wikvaya nodded and fell in step behind his father as the old hunter followed the traces left by the unspeakable creature, thin trails of sand that carried traces of black and red. Everything it had touched was desiccated, all moisture and life sucked away until nothing remained but twigs and powdery dust that might have once been leaves or small desert creatures. The generous rain this season had spotted the earth with bushes and tufts of bright green grasses, creosote and weeds; the acacia and mesquite trees were thick with leaves, while the cacti were plump with moisture and fragrant blooms over which bees and other insects challenged one another for the best position. But cutting through it all was the path that he and the others followed, a trail that reeked of decay and seemed to widen as it went along.

What this demon could do to the People was unspeakable, but Cheveyo was right—everyone
had
been warned. The plaza had been nearly empty by the time they had left, with only a few latecomers rushing to put their most necessary items where they could be found without eyesight.

All Wikvaya could do was head back to Oraibi and hope with all his spirit that those who waited could be patient and strong.

Cha'kwaina sat with her back against the wall and listened to the wind slipping past the windows on its way through the rest of the pueblo. It had intensified and was spinning dirt and pebbles against
the walls, occasionally pushing grit through the small openings and into the room where she and Grandmother Chochmingwu waited. The gusts made a noise that shifted between a thin wail and a moan, and the air felt heavier and uncomfortably hotter than normal, more oppressive with each thud of her heartbeat. She wished the wind would stop and that things would just go back to normal, that they would be rid of this nonsensical tale of legends and monsters and gateways to a dark spirit world that no one had ever seen.

The old woman was calm and silent and Cha'kwaina was too angry to make conversation. How long would they have to wait like this, with scraps of woven fabric knotted around their heads? It was a waste of time—she should be at her future mother-in-law's right now, preparing to show the woman how well she could grind corn and perform a wife's duties for Wikvaya. And what was he doing, her future husband? Out playing warrior with his father and brothers, perhaps painted to look like kachinas or striped like the Koshares, the black-and white-striped clowns that represented little more than gluttony and crudities. As angry as she was about the postponement of her wedding, Cha'kwaina knew that involving the entire pueblo in nothing more than an effort to procrastinate was unlikely, but was the whole village
really
in on this? Grandmother Chochmingwu had ordered her back to the adobe and they had moved so quickly that Cha'kwaina had been able to speak with no one.

Perhaps something else entirely was going on, something other than the ridiculous tale of gateways and demons that Wikvaya had related. It could be nothing more dire than a desert windstorm, and her fiancé was using it as a joke, some sort of premarital prank to elevate himself in the eyes of his brothers and his friends. If that were true, how would she and Grandmother Chochmingwu know, sitting here as they were, blindfolded and separated from those who inhabited the rest of the village?

Moving very carefully so that her grandmother would not hear, Cha'kwaina reached behind her head and untied the knot that held her blindfold in place.

Although it was a more difficult trek, they circled around and came down the ridge behind the pueblo, pushing themselves to travel faster than they normally would have dared. The path was there, but it was strewn with loose rocks and periodically angled to the point of being dangerous, well-camouflaged so that rival tribes could not find it. It took longer but would give them a double advantage: they could approach the village from a different direction than the one the beast had taken, and they would have a rare and unobstructed view of the entire pueblo at once. Standing there next to the men of his family, Wikvaya realized that sometimes the thing you work so hard to attain is also that which you're the least prepared to face.

Without the cover of the desert—the shrubs, tumbleweeds, and twig-choked branches of the acacia and mesquite trees—to conceal it, the track of the creature was impossible to miss. Its trail came out of the last stand of mesquite trees as a scrambled brown line at the western edge of the village; the closer it came to the dwellings, the more it drew in on itself as it twined from door to door, clearly searching for victims. It looked like the sandy dirt had become a living entity crisscrossed with horrid, sunken veins, pathways that wove among the adobes and around the three plazas and kivas, circling the central well a half-dozen times before moving on to the next doorway. The discoloration crawled up and around the pueblo windows, twisting inside and coming out again like a crazed spider trying to find a target in the ever-so-silent village.

Until its course eased into the doorway of a certain second-level adobe . . .

And disappeared inside.

It was standing by the doorway.

The blindfold fell away and Cha'kwaina gasped before she could stop herself. Despite the wailing of the wind, the creature heard; it spun and focused on her, then grinned terribly as it shuffled forward. She backed away, struggling against the thick scream that
tried to bubble out of her throat, knowing that Grandmother Chochmingwu, so frail and old, would still rip off her own blindfold and come to her aid. How foolish she had been not to listen to Wikvaya, to think that the old ways were dead and useless. All those warnings that she should have heeded . . . but she couldn't think of those now, they would do her no good. Instinctively she knew that covering her eyes would no longer help—she had already seen and her mind would now fill in that which her eyes could not perceive. Perhaps she could angle around and get outside, where she would have room to flee—