People of the Sky (21 page)

“Before Sahacat left, she asked me to bring you to the council meeting tonight,” said Chamol. “I said we would come.”

Kesbe nodded agreement. It occurred to her that she would have the rest of the day to do with as she pleased. She might use the time to begin her investigation of what had prompted the boy to make his disastrous escape attempt. She couldn’t talk to Imiya himself—he was still asleep—but she could do a little snooping around and perhaps ask a few questions. Nyentiwakay might be a good source.

She sighed inwardly, knowing she was only evading the real task. If she really wanted to know what had happened to Imiya, she would have to talk to the shaman. Sahacat. What a bewildering contradiction the woman was! She wore the trappings of one who healed by chant and ceremony, yet her powers were real. Kesbe fingered the flesh of the healed wound in her knee. Sahacat’s skill in diagnosing and treating Imiya’s injury was the equal of any technologically trained medic.

Yet her capacity for healing seemed matched by an equal if not greater power for wounding. Kesbe still remembered the subtle yet paralyzing attack on her during the Cloud Dance. And then later, when she had thrown the black flute at Kesbe’s feet and made it shatter into twin-tailed scorpions.

The first attack had been to deter her from reaching the black and amber aronan, the second to keep her from rescuing Imiya. But why?

She smiled to herself, a little grimly. Whatever the source of the woman’s power, it hadn’t kept Kesbe from the flier, nor had Sahacat prevented her from finding the boy.

She cast a glance toward the chamber where Imiya slept. Nabamida stood just outside the door-hanging, his arms folded. The expression on his face suggested he would guard his nephew with his life. Kesbe abandoned any thoughts that she could get in to see the boy.

“Chamol, where would I find Sahacat this morning?” she asked.

“She prays on the mesa, at the place where the Cloud Dance was given.” Chamol paused. “Do you wish me to come with you?” Her words made the offer, but the tone of her voice was uncertain.

“No, I’ll go by myself.”

She left the pueblo and trudged up the trail to the mesa. At least this was an excuse to tend
Gooney Berg
. In the rush of unloading Imiya from the aircraft and getting him to Chamois house, she hadn’t bothered with proper shut-down procedures. She would have to chock the wheels, set the control locks and make sure the aircraft was properly parked. She suspected she might not be using it for a while.

Resisting the urge to do the easier task first, she sought out Sahacat.

Peering against the sunlight pouring like white gold across the mesa, she saw a naked figure kneeling on an outcropping that overlooked the place where the Cloud Dance had been given. Her robes cast aside, Sahacat faced the sunrise, chanting, the sweat shining the curve of her breasts, her muscled belly and thighs. As Kesbe approached, the shaman sprinkled white corn-meal, first to the east, then to all three remaining directions. From a pouch on the ground, she drew two lashed twigs daubed with red earth and painted with symbols. An aronan feather-scale
fluttered at the top, tied with white twine.

After offering the
paho
to the sun, the woman gathered a small mound of gravel in which to plant it. She then laid a line of cornmeal from the prayerstick to the cliff edge to complete her ritual.

Though she had intended to interrupt, Kesbe found herself waiting until Sahacat had finished. She watched with a strange mixture of envy and impatience, knowing that this sun-greeting ceremony was part of the heritage she had lost. Her grandfather had shown her once how Hopi corn was ground in a
metate
and the powder laid in a line to the east. It formed, he said, the Road of Life…

No! She did not want to think of Bajeloga now or what he had taught her. After that one day of bitterness, she had turned her back on those pitiful shreds of tradition that had prevented her people from moving on with life. And they had mocked her for daring to find and follow a different way than tradition demanded for Indian women.

But standing here, watching Sahacat enact a simple but powerful sun-ceremony forced Kesbe to face the memories once again.

How many years ago had it been? Twenty-two, twenty-three? She had been trembling on the edge of her sixteenth year when she went to the mesas for the last time.

She remembered how she and her grandfather rattled and bumped up the rough mesa road toward Shungopavi at dawn, how the engine in Bajeloga’s ancient electric van whined and moaned. She and her grandfather had talked a lot before setting out for this dance, but now they were quiet. The event was to be held on Second Mesa this year. First was long deserted, empty.

She knew why they were going and yet she didn’t know. It was an act of leave-taking for both. A few days before, her notice of acceptance to the training center on Titan had come in the fax-mail. After this last visit to the mesas, she would take the lunar shuttle and then the ion-pulse transport to Saturn’s great moon. She shivered inside her flight jacket, fingered the fax flimsy in her pocket, felt the hollowness of impending loss and the excitement of great promise. She had started on the first step to her dreams.

And Morning Bird Man had just signed a contract with an asteroid mining company to operate a core-digger in the Belt. He would ride with her on the lunar shuttle and see her off on her journey to Titan before he boarded the inner-system bus to the company headquarters on Ceres.

She wondered if it was coincidence that both of them had chosen to leave Earth almost at the same time. Was it really such a big step? Her parents had already gone to a world around another star, her father realizing his own dreams as a terraforming engineer, her mother documenting the social development of the seed colony that would grow into a world society. Kesbe knew she could have gone with them, yet had chosen to stay behind to complete her schooling and cling to the hope that the pilot training center on Titan might accept her.

And now it had. She should be on her way already, part of her mind scolded. Strapped in a shuttle seat, feeling the thunder of lift-off instead of bouncing up a rutted mesa road inside a worn-out electric van.

They reached the mesa top and joined the line of vehicles forming at the entrance booth, near the sign that announced the dance. Some were slick, chromed, tops down, sound systems blaring, their drivers already raucous and half intoxicated. Tourists, Kesbe thought. Here to pay their money and have their fun.

But she and Bajeloga paid too, the money passing from Bajeloga’s brown-veined hand into
an equally dark but younger one reminding her that she was not that different from the tourists in the eyes of those who still lived here. She sighed, facing the fact that if the public did not pay to see these dances, they would have disappeared long ago.

They rolled past the booth, were waved into a parking slot, paid again for a ticket to recover Bajeloga’s squeaky old van after the dance, and trudged into the village.

As Kesbe left the van, she hesitated, thinking perhaps she should take off the new pilot’s chrono-comp she now wore proudly on her wrist. And the white silk scarf held about her neck with a slider of Hopi silverwork which bore the image of a starship and a kachina. Bajeloga had crafted it for her, drawing on the skills of jewelry-making he had gained in his youth on the mesas. She didn’t want to lose either, but leaving them in the van, with its broken doorlocks, was inviting thievery. And perhaps there was a touch of arrogance in her decision not only to keep the items with her, but to wear them openly, as if to announce to her people that she, unlike they, still dared to dream.

Feeling the desert wind in her hair, she gazed at a deep sapphire blue sky bare of clouds. Tufted seeds, perhaps from milkweed or dandelion, danced across it, whirling in the wind. In her childhood she had run after those bits of plant fluff, laughing and calling them “fairies.” Now they looked like flying stars against a deep blue universe. The sight struck sparks of joy from the child in her and seemed to echo the promise contained in the fax flimsy from Titan. Chance and botany had created a micro-universe for her in the sky over the mesa, as if playing a prelude for what was to come.

“Little Bluebird, you are on another flight again,” said Bajeloga, coming up behind her. “The dance does not wait.”

Laughing, she turned her gaze from the sky and strode with her grandfather past the hand-lettered sign pointing the way to the “Kachina Dance.” It injected a discordant note, flattening her happy mood. She knew the sign lied. There had been no true kachina dances since the followers of the Blue Star emigrated. This was a social dance, a descendent of the Buffalo and Butterfly Dances that were done as a show for visitors. The true kachina dances had always been secret, solemn, hidden from outside view. And now they were gone from Earth.

She walked through the narrow alleys between the pueblos, smelling the odor of garbage and animals. Skinny dogs and cats peered around the corners of the crumbling adobe houses or fled from beneath the feet of the visitors. It somehow seemed squalid, decaying, almost desperate.

What am I hoping to find here
, she wondered, and touched the fax flimsy in her pocket, as if to remind herself that another life lay ahead for her.

Taking her place among the people gathering in the plaza, she stood close beside Bajeloga and realized that she was slightly taller than he. In the final spurt of her growth and the beginning of his aged stoop, the two had changed places. She had always remembered looking up to him. When had that changed? Perhaps only this morning.

Around her, whites and Indians stood, leaning against adobe walls or sat in creaky rusting lawn chairs, wrapped in Navajo blankets. She saw eyes dart toward her chrono-comp, the silver slider on her scarf and look away again.

Overhead, the fairies that were also stars skipped and whirled on the breeze.

The first muffled steps of the drumbeat drew her attention to the plaza center and to the dancers starting to emerge. The elements of costume were there—kilts, sashes, brightly painted tablas crested with feathers, animal heads, deer antlers, case masks, beaks, horns and body paint—but they seemed jumbled. No one dancer was a recognizable god or spirit figure, instead wearing fragments of many. Kesbe squinted at the chaotic array, wondering if it was her memory
or the dancers’ regalia that seemed so disheveled.

The line of figures came from behind adobe walls, crouched down and bent over, as if by cringing they could make themselves invisible. Slowly each one rose to normal height, still keeping the stamp-shuffle. Kesbe glanced at Bajeloga. His expression neither moved nor changed, but the look in his eyes said as much as if he had frowned and shaken his head.

“Once they rose one by one from the kivas,” he said softly, “but the kivas are sealed.”

Kesbe nodded, understanding, but not accepting. To bring such futile play-acting into the dignity of a dance only sharpened the sense of how much had been lost. Even if the kivas were opened again, no one would really know how to use them.

Again she looked at the strange collection of costumes in the dance and tried not to see how rag-tag many of them were. Was this deliberate self-mockery? One man had on a set of red Union-suit long underwear with the classic back flap held by only one button, tai-chi shoes and a circle of white paint around one eye.

She felt her heart sink, watching the performance. They could barely keep in step to the drumbeat! They struggled toward unity, dignity, and fell far short.

Inwardly she sighed in relief as she heard the first raucous hoots and cries of the Koyemsi mudhead clowns who came scrambling over the pueblo rooftops like so many mud-splattered chimpanzees. This was what the visitors had really paid their money to see: the wild and lewd antics of the Indian clowns.

Although the clowns appeared even more disheveled than the dancers, Kesbe quickly saw that they were not. All the Koyemsis wore the correct costume for their ancient role. They matched each other, they worked together as they tumbled into the square and started their joyful harassment of the dancers.

Each mudhead had a reddish brown sack-mask with a ruff of painted rags. A tube beak poked from the front of the face. Three gourds were fastened on one at the top of the head and one over each ear, or where the ear would be if it were visible. The gourds were painted brown to match the sack-mask. The mudheads looked like animated clay dolls with arms and legs smeared brown and a ragged kilt made from a woman’s dress wrapped around their loins.

Frenetically they ran around the plaza, colliding with each other, bounding in great leaps across each other, shaking rattles and tickling people’s faces with feathers they carried. The dancers repulsed the clowns, driving them away with yucca whips, but it seemed to Kesbe that the clowns were stronger, more organized. The dance began to fall into disarray as the mudheads spread total chaos throughout the plaza. They yanked people from the crowd, white and Indian alike, taunted them, smeared clay on their clothes, pulled their hair.

Not wanting to be manhandled by the Koyemsi clowns, Kesbe began to back away into the crowd. Her new chrono-comp, momentarily forgotten, did something technologically ancient, annoying and disastrous. It beeped.

Instantly two Koyemsis, who had been making obscene gestures at a flustered tourist, were drawn to the sound. They raised their heads, emitting a shrilling note that echoed the chrono-comps’s beep. With a bound they were beside her, smelling earthy, sweaty and threatening. Their beaks stuck in her face, their hands were on her jacket. She jammed her wrist with the chrono-comp into her pocket to shield it from prying inquisitive fingers.

“Beeeep!” cried the clowns as they jostled and pulled her away from her grandfather. “Beeep. It’s time to eat. Beeeep! It’s time to sleep. Beeep! It’s time to piss. Beeep! It’s time to make love.”

Haughtily Kesbe ignored them, fixing her attention on the sky overhead with its collection of stars and fairies. And then, one of the clowns peered at the silver slider on her scarf, reading the
feel part of my dream is meaning of the starship/kachina image. He broke into derisive laughter behind the sack-mask.