The High Missouri (22 page)

Surely the Chickadee would have him shot.

Nevertheless, every time he decided to head for the fort, his feet pointed another way. Usually he ended up walking up the stream toward the Blood village. He kept his distance. He stayed in the rocks on the side away from the river and watched one solitary tipi there. He wondered why it was apart from the others. Only one person seemed to live there, an elderly woman.

He imagined that this was She-Wolf. In his heart he knew she was a witch, and felt a terrible fascination observing her. She committed only mundane acts, picking up firewood for her tipi, getting water from the river, and once cooking something in a pot in front of the lodge, but that only made her seductive pull more awful. Too, something was familiar about the way she moved her body, and he was sure he’d been seeing her in his dreams. Yes, a witch.

To go to this She-Wolf would be the only real death.

He got tired and cold—he got cold easily these days—and went back to his cave and fed the fire and lay down again and napped in its warmth. That day, like the other days, he eventually realized that it was twilight and too late to go to the fort, because the guards wouldn’t see him in the fading light and wouldn’t be able to shoot.

But he was far too wise to go to She-Wolf. How could he let the body die without killing the spirit?

Dylan looked at Spider Woman. Sensations ran through him—feelings of warmth, pictures of other people, the sense of companionship, and most of all a sense of satiation, a wonderful fullness of belly. He could get rid of these feelings simply by turning his back on Spider Woman in her web. But then he got more and more miserable, his hunger ravening his spirit, loneliness forming on him like frost and crusting to ice.

When he could stand it no longer, he turned back to Spider Woman, and she spoke to him of food cooking over a fire shared with other people. Yes, she spoke to him without words, with only pictures and feelings. But that was subtle, for pictures and feelings were stronger, more enticing. Her web for him was food, warmth, human companionship. He would watch her and let her talk of such things without words, and finally he would turn his back and make them go away. She was a temptress, Spider Woman. She helped him get through the night, but she was a temptress.

He wondered if she was sent by the witch.

Dylan knew some Spider Woman stories from Dru, and some from Bleu. Such tales, Dru claimed, were borrowed from every band of pagans on the continent, for she was a heroine to all. She was a great helper—among her boons to the people were teaching them to weave. But Dylan was not fooled. Behind whatever temptations she might offer lay her trap, the web.

The other great hero of Dru and Bleu’s stories was Coyote. But this evil spirit had made no appearance yet. Dylan chuckled to himself. Apparently a fire could keep away even a spirit.

Sometimes he talked to Spider Woman out loud. “What I want,” he would say, “is Yorkshire pudding. Not to mention the rib roast, plenty fat. Then for dessert, cherries. Nothing else for right now—I shouldn’t overeat. Cherries…”

Then he would drift back into semidelirium. He knew he was half mad these days, along the processional of his starvation. “‘I am but mad north-north-west,’” he would rant suddenly, quoting. “‘When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’” He would be talking to Spider Woman or peering into the darkness for the eyes of Coyote or telling Mr. Stewart just how right he bloody well was or even playing an imaginary game of cards with Dru, and he would suddenly know he was mad, a bedlam, Hamlet north-north-west, or a small, pathetic Lear upon the heath.

Then he would turn his back to Spider Woman. He knew she wasn’t real anyway. Spiders didn’t live through the winter—or did they? He wasn’t sure. Dru said there were two kinds of spiders, those that made webs and waited, and those that crawled and pounced on their prey. He didn’t say whether they lived through the winter. This Spider Woman was a weaver of webs, but Dylan could turn his back and not get caught in her trap.

Which was going to the witch. Oh yes, that was the bait in her trap. But Dylan could ignore it. He needed to have no truck with pagan superstitions and creatures that weren’t even real.

The river fog hovered among the tipis. Or was that the smoke that rose from between their ears and softly glided back down through the bare limbs of the cottonwoods and swirled a man’s height above the ground? Was this the breath of the river? Or the breath of the people? Or both? It drifted, it shifted and changed shapes, now revealing, now hiding. It made the village eerie, mysterious, something from a dream, or from one of the Druid’s tales.

Dylan did not know how he’d gotten here. He didn’t remember walking, certainly didn’t remember deciding to leave the cave and come here. He’d simply come to full wakefulness standing on the edge of the village in the predawn light, peering in. Or was he? Perhaps these tipis shrouded in fog were an illusion. The fog took them away and gave them back at its will. Sometimes Dylan no longer knew whether he was awake or asleep, in a world of reality or fantasy. Maybe he was actually back in his cave, and dying, and this village was his last dream.

He had lost track of the days since he had eaten. Only intermittently did he have the presence of mind to do much for himself. Occasionally he went to the river and stooped for water and picked up wood for his fire. He never gathered rose hips anymore, or tried to make snares.

He did dream. Waking and sleeping, he saw a procession of wonders, of splendors of imagination—castles, enchanted forests, strange and wonderful people, animals that were shape shifters, like kit foxes that became ravens that became mice that became trolls that became vultures. His way to death was a parade of phantasmagoria.

Sometimes he talked to the shape-shifting animals, and they revealed to him astonishing secrets, the keys to the universe men had sought for centuries. Yet he could not remember them later.

Dylan remembered now. This morning he had followed Wolf to this village. Wolf appeared to him near the river, while he was gathering fuel. The creature looked at him, trotted a few steps, looked at him again, trotted. He understood that Wolf wanted him to follow, and Dylan did. Then Wolf pranced up and down, nodding its head yes, moved off again, and waited once more for Dylan to come.

Dylan followed for a while, he thought. He wasn’t sure, because he could no longer be sure what was real and what was not. He kept expecting Wolf to change shape into another animal or into a spirit. In Bleu’s tales Coyote was the shape shifter, the creature that moved from identity to identity and was fixedly none. Coyote was also the trickster. Maybe Coyote this time appeared as Wolf. Maybe this creature was an emissary from the spirit world, come to take him unto death. And that was well enough.

Maybe this village was not real. Maybe it was like Dru’s stories seen with the dreaming eye, blindingly true but not actual, true not in the limited world of the senses but in the larger world of the spirit, which is the real world.

You can’t eat it, laddo. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

In this shifting fog Dylan believed the village’s unreality and stepped forth into its mystery. He wondered, though, why Wolf had not led him to the village in his usual way, away from the river and circling back to the solitary tipi of She-Wolf. Instead they’d come from the river end of the village and were passing all the way through it toward the lodge of the witch.

At first he wondered why he wasn’t being intercepted. Where were the dogs? Mysteriously absent. Where were the warriors, alert to defend their families? Where were the monsters, guardians of this region of the supernatural, of conundrums, enigmas, riddles, secrets?

Then he understood. They were far subtler than he had imagined. In front of every lodge, hanging from a tripod, was a medicine bag, a skin pouch with the owner’s conjuring items. According to report, every bag held something different, unique to the owner, revealed to him in a dream and powerful for him only, ways of communicating with dark gods. Dylan suddenly understood that these were the true guardians of this nether-world. He was passing from a world made bright by a benevolent Father-God into a realm of strange and alien magic. Yet he could not stop. As his legs had brought him to the edge of the village without his awareness, they drew him on. He watched Wolf in the mists, and followed.

She was the only person invisible this predawn light, the old woman. Dylan had a spasm of fear. She would see him and cast a spell over him, take him to her lodge and feed him witch’s brew and make him her familiar. But all he did was watch Wolf and follow.

She was splitting wood with a tomahawk. Dylan noticed that her blows were almost soundless in the fog. Near her, Wolf disappeared, perhaps around a tipi or into a patch of fog. Dylan walked toward her. For a moment the mists closed in on him and he couldn’t see. He walked forward anyway.

Now, suddenly, he was beside the old woman, and she was picking up her firewood. Satisfyingly, Wolf re-emerged within the fog, part of it, a twisting shape, a breath of mist, a nothing.

Dylan noticed that the old woman wore something he’d never seen an Indian wear—socks. The incongruity of this imaginary touch reminded him that he was walking into a fantasy, the village was a mere dream, and he chuckled softly.

As though hearing him, Wolf played with the edges of the old woman’s skirt to alert her. When she picked up a stick, it nosed her hand and posed, abruptly still, looking at Dylan.

Dylan laughed again. His mind was wonderful. He stepped forward to reach out to Wolf and play with it, if it didn’t change back into mist.

Perhaps the old woman heard his soft laugh. She turned to Dylan and smiled.

Suddenly the world changed shape, shifted into a fog and crystallized in new form, a real form, not phantasmagoria but reality you can touch and hold against your bosom and it will keep you warm. Another world.

The old woman was the Druid himself, and she was smiling in welcome.

Dylan fainted.

Part Four

THE ROAD OF TRIALS

Chapter Twenty

“It took ye long enough, laddo,” said Dru as Dylan woke up.

He was holding a cup to Dylan’s lips, feeding him warm liquid. Dylan lay full length on a buffalo robe in the tipi.

Where was Wolf? The Druid’s last name meant
wolf
. Everything in this Indian world was a shape shifter. Dylan wondered whether Dru would shape-shift into Wolf. Or into the Chickadee.

Dylan raised a hand, took the cup from Dru, sipped broth. He wasn’t particularly hungry. He felt very sleepy, infinitely sleepy. He would drift off a little more. Why not? Who could tell what universe he might wake up in?

When he woke, Dru was trying to feed him with a spoon. Dylan slurped. He was beginning to feel hungry. He slurped again.

“Why didn’t you come get me?” he asked irritably.

“Oh, we checked on you every day, usually twice. You had to make up your own mind to come.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me and Saga.”

“You running some kind of test? I could have died before you decided I passed?”

“You had to make up your own mind to come,” Dru repeated simply.

“I didn’t,” said Dylan, embarrassed. “Wolf came and got me.”

Dru looked at Dylan in a lively way. After a moment he smiled. “Exactly,” he said.

Dylan looked for no reason toward a back corner of the tipi, where the lodge skin came to the ground. There stood a slender, translucent spiderweb. He had to look for a long moment to find Spider Woman in it. But there she was, near the earth, where she had waited for him.

Immediately Dylan felt her pull, the drag of sleep taking him back under, like sinking into warm water. He felt panicky for a moment, and told himself he had to wake up. It was urgent that he ask Dru why he was tricked out as a woman. If Dylan didn’t ask, he knew he’d gone mad. Or he was delirious, and all this was his dream, and he was dying? Still, he couldn’t bring himself to the surface and speak the words of the question.

Sinking, he felt panic suck him into the depths. He had not come to safety, nor was he living in the imaginings of a madman. He had crossed over into some strange world, which was still more dangerous. Changed in spirit, humbled by circumstance, he had come here and crossed over, he knew not how. He wondered where on earth or under heaven he was. His last thought, passing into deep sleep, was that here the dogs would be parrots, and squawk.

His last picture, sinking into the darkness, was of Dru, stirring his witch’s caldron with one hand, then stepping aside and squatting to pee.

He woke with a clear thought. He had come to a mad world, and he would accept it. For he wanted to live. Yes, he wanted to live.

Dru brought him some thin soup. It occurred to Dylan that this was one of the magic brews this witch would concoct. He accepted the bowl. Before he ate, he started to ask, “Why are you dressed up like a woman?” But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was afraid the Druid would answer, “I am a woman.”

He watched Dru walk to the fire, dip out some stew for himself—or herself—and sit cross-legged to eat. As Dru sat, Dylan studied his hips. Was this the pelvic structure of a man or a woman? He looked at the bosom of the dress—did Dru have breasts? The chest was flat, but old women often had scrawny dugs. Dylan tried to recall Dru’s voice. It might sound manlike, but elderly women sometimes had low, gravelly voices.

Somehow, he should not ask. That would be violating the new world he lived in. He felt it in a dizzying rush—bloody hell, but he wanted to live, yes, live at any cost in any circumstance, but live! To ask would be questioning his new existence, and he would not do that. He could only embrace it. He hugged the bowl and ate a little of the thin soup, and went back to sleep.

A faint sound woke him up.

“You’re sleeping a lot,” said Dru, “like the prince of the Lonesome Isle.”

“Whoozat?” Dylan asked sleepily.

“A great Celtic hero,” said Dru. “He undertook a quest—to save the life of the queen of Erin by bringing her water from the flaming fairy well known as Tubber Tintye. On the advice of an old woman and with the help of spirit guides, he journeyed toward Tubber Tintye, encountering many obstacles and having many adventures.

“Like you, laddo. You have made a long journey and passed through many hazards. You had the help of an old woman, me”—Dru cackled at this—“and you say the spirit guide Wolf led you here. By report, along the way you even survived the embrace of the succubus.”

Dru was smiling broadly. So he knew about Caro. Or did he mean Fore?

“You have come at last to this lodge, as the prince of the Lonesome Isle came to the castle of Tubber Tintye. Can you see this humble lodge as a great castle, laddo? Things are not always as they seem to be.”

For sure he could imagine this lodge as a castle. Not one sodding thing about this place was what it seemed to be, especially Dru.

“In the castle resided every manner of giant and beast and monster, even the great whale. In this humble abode I will have to pass as a wizard, and Spider Woman, she you were looking at earlier, as a dragon. The modern age is not as heroic as the mythical past.

“In the castle, the prince found a succession of twelve maidens sleeping, each in her own chamber, and each more beautiful than the last. In the thirteenth chamber he found the queen of Tubber Tintye, and she was by far the most enchanting of all. The gold around her dazzled the prince’s eyes. At her feet burned the fairy well. When he saw the queen, like you, he was overcome by the need to sleep. He lay beside her and slept for six days and nights.”

Dru got up, went to the center fire, dipped stew out of the pot. “Wanna eat?” he asked.

Dylan took the bowl. “But what does this story represent?” he asked irritably. “Did he get the water and save the queen of Erin?”

“Later,” said Dru.

Dylan was irked. Why start a story and not finish it? Was stopping a way of teaching? Or was Dru just moody? Again, he didn’t have the nerve to ask.

Dylan woke up in the middle of the night. Dru was stirring.

Dylan started to turn over and go back to sleep. Then he realized that Dru was going outside. Yes, Dylan needed to go to the bathroom too. He slid out from between the blankets and slipped outside. Considering how weak he’d felt all day, his legs seemed steady. He stood in the clear, cold night—stunningly cold—and looked at the stars and squirted onto the ground. A sideways glance told him that Dru was squatting to pee. He stopped his own stream and listened. Yes, to pee.

Panic moved its fingers in Dylan’s guts.

He looked up at the stars and sought out a couple of constellations. If earth was changed, at least the heavens were the same.

Dru touched him on the shoulder and pointed back into the lodge. A lodge, a fire, food, companionship, and mortal peril. His new life. He went.

In the dawn light Dru arose. “Stay in bed,” he told Dylan. “Sleep some more. You need to get your strength back. I’ll heat up some food.” With that he stripped off his dress and changed into another.

It was relief for Dylan to know that, in anatomy, Dru was still male.

Then it seemed doubly chilling. A man who acted like a woman? A man-woman?

Now Dylan couldn’t sleep. He brooded.

After his bowl of stew Dylan could wait no longer. “Why are you dressed up as a woman?”

“It’s a long story,” said Dru, and went back to doing whatever he was doing. It looked like quillwork.

Dylan tried to let it sit. Questions kept coming up his gullet. Pictures of Dru and some man in the buffalo robes kept forming. He tried to squelch all this, but it tasted like bile. Finally he blurted out, “Are you a man or a woman?”

Dru laughed. He beamed a smile at Dylan, a really lovely smile. Dylan felt a wash of relief.

“I’m not a buggerer,” Dru said easily. “I have no husband. Or lover. When I want sex, my choice is Anastasie.” He studied Dylan.

Did it matter? Dylan wondered. He’d crossed over. He was an Indian now.

“I live as a woman here.” He waited a little. “They call me ‘she’ and ‘her’ in their language. They treat me as a woman. I may own a tipi, put it up and take it down, cook, and do other women’s work. I do not have to go to the women’s lodge, because I don’t have the moon-bleeding. They expect fine craft work from me, and I do it.” He held up his quillwork.

“I’m here winters. They don’t use me for any ceremonies. They have a true man-woman for that. I couldn’t let them depend on me for ceremonies, because my time living as a woman won’t be much longer.”

Dylan asked tremulously, “Why are you doing it?” He did not add the words “at all.”

“You may interpret that as you will,” Dru said. “You may say that seven years ago I began to think a lot about being a woman. Began to feel I was missing half of life by living it as a man alone. Began to want to know how it would feel to be treated as a woman, and to look at the world as such a person. That would be true, as far as it went.”

Dru waited for a response. Dylan was not about to give one.

“You may say that I wanted to get the knowledge of healing herbs, and could get it only as a woman. My teacher is dead now, died just this fall. This knowledge was handed down to her from her mother, who got it from her mother, and many mothers before. The woman had no daughter. Except for me.” He looked up into Dylan’s eyes. “It’s a grand knowledge, and I wouldn’t want to be without it.”

Dru worked at his quills for a moment.

“Or you could say that I began to see myself as a woman in my dreams.” He regarded Dylan levelly. “I did. In my dreams there was no transformation from manhood to womanhood. I simply was a woman, and had always been. A wise man of this tribe helped me understand my dreams. He helped me make my decision. He prepared the people to accept my decision. For four of the last six years, among these people, during the winter, I have been a woman.

“They are a people to honor dreams. Among them, whatever you dream, you are free to be.” He hesitated. “No, it’s stronger. What you dream you must seek to become, or go against your nature. However peculiar your dream may seem, they encourage you to seek it. In that way they are much more understanding than white people of individuality.”

Dru smiled warmly at Dylan. “If that makes you uneasy, you’ll be pleased to know that my life as a woman is at an end. It was always temporary. I’ve learned what I came to learn. And I’m more comfortable as a man.”

Feeling Dru’s eyes on him, waiting, Dylan nodded. Nodded again, and turned over in his blankets and closed his eyes.

Bloody hell, a shape-shifting world.

His decision was, this is your life now. You’ve earned it, live it.

He wondered what in hell that meant. Except for living in hell.

Today hell took the form of Saga. He showed up about lunchtime, ate with them, said almost nothing, and watched Dylan with nettling curiosity. When Saga asked why he had at last come to the lodge, Dylan held his tongue. Dru covered the moment with idle words.

Dylan’s curiosity was why Saga was living in the fort right now. To frig Caro every night?

He bit back his anger. He spoke not a word to Saga during lunch. He felt desperate to hear something of Caro, but refused to ask, and Saga volunteered nothing. When Saga left, Dylan breathed again.

The most puzzling thing about Dru, a very puzzling man, was that he treated Saga like a son, somehow like a child Dru had once suckled. Which was both false and impossible.

Dylan was getting well. He was surprised that it took several days. His body was remarkably stiff, sore, and weak. He was constantly drowsy. He wondered if he was avoiding waking up to his new world.

He was ill in another way. It hurt to pee. His cod was dribbling pus.

When he told Dru, the Druid laughed and said he had a dose of the clap.

Caro, Dylan thought. He couldn’t prove it, but he was sure he got it from Caro. It just fit.

Using his old woman’s knowledge, Dru made a poultice that helped.

Dru helped pass the time telling stories, mostly short ones, like parables, told in the small intervals when Dylan was fully awake. Several were about the quest for the Holy Grail by the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. Dru explained that although the English had taken over the Arthur stories and claimed them as their own, Arthur was a Welshman, and the great grail stories were first Celtic.

The one that stuck in Dylan’s mind was about the very beginning of the quest. When the knights had seen a vision of the grail and knew that their great goal must be to see it in actuality, they decided to go forth into the world separately, seeking, ever seeking. To go together, they considered, would be a disgrace.

Dylan thought that notion, of the individuality and the loneliness of the seeking, was marvelous.

Then the knights set out and entered the forest, in Dru’s story, each in a place of his own choosing, a place where there was no path and where the forest was darkest.

That seemed to Dylan noble and inspiring.

Dylan told Dru about his infatuation with Lord Byron. The Druid had never heard of the poet. Byron seemed like the knights of the round table on their quest, Dylan said—unwilling merely to exist, willing to risk any effort and any unconventionality to go beyond ordinariness toward a nobility of spirit. Yet in this quest Byron often felt lonely, unloved, discouraged, cut off from mankind. Why?

Dru answered that what he knew of life came from the great stories of the Celts. In these stories, he said, the hero’s adventure was utterly solitary, and that to complete it, all customary ways of living had to be discarded. Chuckling self-deprecatingly, he said, “A man on a quest might even have to appear as a woman, and learn the secrets of women.” The farther the hero ventured, said Dru, the lonelier he always felt. But in the great stories, achievement of the solitary quest brought the adventurer back to the community he started from, and with a greater sense of community.

“I’m not so taken with Lord Byron anyway,” said Dylan, “not anymore.” He told the Druid how Caro had encouraged him to liberate himself, and then used her freedom promiscuously, and hurt him.

Telling the story, he remembered for the first time since he violated Caro on the gallery his mother’s opal ring. He had assumed their engagement was off, but what about the ring? Not wanting Dru to know the extent of his foolishness, he said nothing about the memento.