People of the Sky (8 page)

She threw herself away from it, half-crawling, half-swimming, fending off bouts of
shuddering that threatened to paralyze her. Blinded by wet hair dragging across her face, she floundered to the beach. She heard Imiya’s shouts and the sound of his feet. A small strong hand grasped her elbow. She shook back her hair, thinking she had escaped when something ribbed and slimy slid along her right leg.

She heard Imiya’s soft “uruhu’ui” fear-moan as spikes bit her knee. Panic exploded in her gut. She jerked her leg frantically, oblivious to the pain lancing through her knee. The pincers fangs dove deeper. The tentacle began to retract, pulling her with it.

“Imiyaf she howled, feeling the boy’s fingers slip away.

She pulled the dart-pistol from her thigh pocket and emptied it at close range into the tentacle. She clawed at the pincers leathery skin with her nails, kicked with her free leg. When that didn’t work, she coiled like an angry cat and bit as hard as she could on a fold of flesh, making yellow serum stream down to mix with her blood in runnels of orange.

Something looming overhead made her duck instinctively. A stone crashed down on the neck of the pincer, making it jerk open. Imiya’s hand heaved the stone up, brought it down again, splitting half of the pincer lengthwise and driving its own spikes into itself.

When the remaining spikes pulled out of Kesbe’s knee, she shrieked aloud. Nausea curdled in her stomach while black blotches passed across her vision. She let her head droop, thinking if she were just able to rest a moment, she could summon the will to move.

From far away she heard Imiya’s voice breaking in a shrill cry. It seemed that other voices answered, although that was ridiculous. There was no one else here. Something whistled close over her head and struck with a solid thud against bone plate. She was beyond reacting, beyond even caring, as her last scrap of consciousness fled.

She was dreaming of the Deer Dance, of the booming drum and the heavy rhythmic stamp of the Deer-Mother. Once at age twelve, she had been costumed and taught her own child’s part of the ceremonial. It had been her grandfather’s doing, afterward there had been an argument.

She remembered Bajeloga’s angry rasp and her father’s voice speaking not in the way of the Indian but of the white. The old man had cried, “Will you take from her another chance to know the spirit of her people? The kachina dances are gone. This is the final giving of the Deer Dance. There are too few of us left now who understand the ceremonials.” He had not waited for an answer from her parents, but had swooped upon her and borne her off in her child’s beads and buckskins.

She had danced with the solid stamp of the women all around her. She had looked up into the heavy face of the one who danced the Deer-Mother and saw a kind of pride different from her mother’s, a pride she had now known in the other women of her family. She had wobbled and trembled, but she had danced. Once.

And then the two had come back to the house in Kayenta. Kesbe, still wearing her costume, flushed with effort from the dance, sat on her grandfather’s bony knee and faced her parents who sat in kitchen chairs across the table. Her mother, Lisa, was fine-boned, her face and hands delicate. In her peasant-style blouse and full embroidered skirt, she looked more Spanish than Indian. Her father, Dennis, stood up and laid his blunt-fingered hands on his wife’s shoulders. He was a short bearish man who wore plastic frame glasses and old-style shirts with too many mechanical pencils jammed in his front pockets.

“Kesbe had schoolwork tonight,” Lisa said. “If she wants to get into the academy on Titan, she can’t let her grades slip.”

“This was important,” Bajeloga replied softly. “To her and to me.”

“Why? The Deer Dance is not a kachina dance and it is Zuni, not Hopi,” Lisa retorted with a shake of her head.

“It is all part of the same tradition. And one that should not be scorned when so little is left,” her grandfather answered.

“Tradition.” Lisa looked away. “Sometimes I think that’s the only thing that is important to either one of you.”

Bajeloga said nothing. Kesbe tried not to squirm on her grandfather’s knee. Lisa turned to her husband, “Dennis, can’t you ask your father not to fill Kesbe’s head with tribal nonsense. That’s all she thinks about now.”

“That’s not true!” Kesbe burst out. “I think about being a space pilot, too!”

“Space pilots need mathematics, science, computer programming,” Dennis said. “You’ve got to spend more time on your schoolwork.”

She took a sorrowful glance back at Bajeloga’s set face, slowly got down from his knee, whispering that she was sorry.

“She is the only one who is willing to learn what I have to teach,” Bajeloga said pointedly. Dennis hung his head guiltily and looked away. It was not that her father wanted to ignore the tribal ways, it was that earning a living as a power transmission engineer took all his time and energy. He had done well in the white man’s world, but it had cost him his own.

Kesbe saw a strained guilty look come across her mother’s face as Lisa saw the hurt in both her own eyes and Bajeloga’s.

“All I’m trying to do is keep Kesbe from having unrealistic views about the past,” Lisa Temiya said, leaning on the table.

“You deny her the ways of our people,” Bajeloga replied bluntly. “You have not prepared her for initiation into the women’s societies, nor have you taught her how to weave her hair into the squash-blossom of the maiden.”

“Because she is a twelve-year-old girl with her whole future ahead of her, not a squash blossom waiting to be picked,” Lisa retorted. “Bajeloga, you’re not being fair to me. I’ve done everything I can to make her aware of her heritage. I’ve shared my research with her.”

“You speak of the things of our people as dead, gone,” Bajeloga said stubbornly, folding his wiry brown arms. “Something to be studied, not lived. You tell her of the old ways, you tell her how pots were made, how corn was ground, yet there is no clay or cornmeal on your hands.”

“My mother’s hands knew clay and cornmeal,” Lisa said, softly, but with intensity. “She also knew booze, beatings and a husband who shot himself after my sister was born. You lived through that time. You saw what happened when things broke down and we lost the gains we had made. You are not telling her the truth either, Bajeloga. The ugly things. The way our people rejected everything the outside had brought us. The way women were once again tethered to the
metate
and forbidden to dream. I swore that would never be my life.”

“Then you do not understand the Hopi way,” said the old man sadly. He held up one hand as Lisa, her fine features flushed, started to come around the table. “Daughter, I understand your pain and the pain of your mother before you. I do not deny it nor do I revile your efforts to shield Kesbe from it.”

“Then why do you paint the old life in such glowing colors that you make her wish she could relive those times? So much is open to her that would never have been possible even twenty-five years ago. I don’t want her to throw it all away for the sake of some damned…fantasy.”

“Lisa,” Dennis said softly, putting his hands on either side of his wife’s neck. It seemed to calm her. “Perhaps we should tell Bajeloga about the move we’re planning.”

“Move?” Kesbe asked. “Where?”

“Off-earth,” Dennis said. “I’m getting an opportunity to move into terraforming. They need good power systems people as part of a team to terraform a new world called Chinga. It’s a good opportunity for me, Dad,” he said, turning to Bajeloga. “You know the superconductivity grid business is old technology. Terraforming would be a big step up, and we’re going to need the cash to send Kesbe to the training center on Titan, if that’s where she wants to go.”

“And what will you do, Lisa?” Bajeloga’s gaze turned to Kesbe’s mother.

“I’ll be part of the same team, documenting the settling and development of Chinga. It will be something new for me, but I think I need a change from what I’ve been doing. You can only get so much out of the Anasazi sites and they’ve been gone over endlessly. These will be new settlers, facing the challenge of a new world. And I’ll be there to see it happen.” Her eyes were bright with excitement.

“And Kesbe?” the old man demanded.

Dennis took a chair opposite Bajeloga. “We won’t be going right away. The project will take two years or so to staff up. By then she’ll decide if she wants to join us on Chinga or stay here on Earth and prepare for her college and academy training.”

“Two years,” the old man muttered. “Two years to teach her those things that are so precious to me, those things that might be lost if she does not learn them now.”

“Bajeloga, history is one thing,” said Lisa, with a sharp look at Kesbe, “but don’t mix it up with fantasy.”

“She is a level-headed child. She knows what is fantasy and what is not,” said the old man. “Daughter, let me tell you once again about the taking of the eaglet.”

Lisa shook her head. “I know about that ritual. I have papers describing the social significance, the theology underlying it, how the ceremony and ritual varied in the last century, the names of the priests, words spoken, everything.”

Bajeloga chuckled. “Ah. Have you ever dangled by one leg at the end of a rope, reaching for the young eagle? Felt the rope slipping and burning your ankle? The hissing and flapping of the young eaglet and the feel of its down as you gather it up against your breast, feeling its heart beat as fast as your own? I was fourteen when I dangled over those cliffs, seeking the eaglet.”

“Didn’t you think that was a cruel thing to do?” Lisa demanded. “To steal an eagle from the few nests that were left and then tie it to the top of a pueblo only to wring its neck for the sake of some empty ceremony?” She took a breath. “There are no more eagles left now. The white man’s hunting may have killed many and poisoned more, but your ritual of stealing their young could not have helped.”

Bajeloga said patiently, “That is why I have reminded you of the eagle hunt. To you, it is an ugly thing, like the image of a woman grinding corn until her fingers bleed or walking behind her husband. But you must look and see that these things had a reason
for
being.”

Lisa tossed her head. “They had a reason for being, but they were cruel. What I say probably sounds like it comes right from a
pahana
, but one thing the whites are right about: anyone should have the right to be what they want, no matter what sex they are. Outside these pueblos, no one even thinks about it any more. And here we are, still struggling. Isn’t it time we grew up along with the rest of the world?”

Bajeloga looked at her. “I cannot say you are wrong. Nor can I saw you are right. What was done to women or eagles was done with the beauty of the whole within the heart. The old life was one that gave great sorrow as well as great joy, yet it gave us things we have little of now.” He paused and then his voice trembled a little. “Let me at least give Kesbe those things.”

The conversation had ended there, for it was late and Kesbe had to get up the next morning for school. But even the excitement and uncertainty of the changes she knew were coming could not drive the memory of the Deer Dance from her mind. That experience was one of those things Bajeloga had struggled to give her.

Now, in her dreams she danced again though her right knee throbbed at every step. It would be a disgrace to stop, even to falter, and so she danced on with the pain and the chanting around her, though someone kept touching her and pulling at her as if to take her from the dance. No, she could not sit down yet. Though her knee begged her to, she had to finish…had to finish.

The chanting faded. The stamping faded. The beat of the drum was the boom of the river, but the shaking went on. “Wake!” Imiya’s voice hissed in her ear. She didn’t want to wake. Drunkenly she slapped his hand away, but before she rolled back into sleep, she remembered what had happened before her dream of the Deer Dance. She struggled to sit up. “The wuwuchpi.” she gasped.

“Dead. My friends have finished killing it.”

“Haewi Namij?”

“Wind Laughing dries its wings in the sun. Come, you are needed.” Imiya tugged at her arm

She tried to get up, felt a fierce twinge from her knee “I can’t, Imiya,” she said in his tongue. “Why were you hunting such a creature?”

“I was hunting other prey when it decided to hunt me,” the boy answered. He pulled at her again. “Come.”

“What do you need me for, now that the thing is dead? Let me rest.”

“Hotopa Wuwuchpi lies on the river beach, but its spirit still wanders. You and I, we have the duty,” the boy said. His head turned sharply. “Hai, my friends come. They carry you.”

Before Kesbe could object, a group of slender figures ran up from the beach where the
wuwuchpi
now lay. They all kneeled about her, staring at her with solemn faces. Young faces. There was not an adult among them. Surprised, Kesbe turned to Imiya. “Where are the people who finished killing the
wuwuchpi
?”

“They are here.”

She scanned the circle of kneeling children. Most were barely Imiya’s age. She saw dark-skinned girls and boys, all bearing lances or bows and arrows.
But they are just children
…Kesbe almost said the words before she saw the stains of yellow on their weapons.

Many bared their front teeth in the strange grimace Imiya had used. They lapped air as if tasting it and panted with flaring nostrils. The expression fascinated and revolted Kesbe. There was something essentially animal in it, yet she could not decide what.

She let Imiya speak her name for her, as was proper. “This is the woman who struck the
wuwuchpi
and pulled it away from Haewi Namij,” he told the group. “She came on the wind, like a kachina, in a great aronan called
Gooni Bug
. Like the
rohoni
, the three-legged coyote-animal of our legend, she has no mate and sometimes does mad things, but her bravery saved Wind Laughing.”

“Apinu,” Kesbe answered in the formal manner, too taken aback to bristle at Imiya’s description of her. Two of the taller youngsters, a girl and boy, came forward to lift her. It was then she noticed that her injured knee had been bound up with a soft cloth soaked in herbs.