Alexander C. Irvine (19 page)

Archie splashed across the stream and paused long enough to replace the knife in his valise so he would have a free hand. “Follow you where?” he said, working his way up a steep path between bare slabs of snowy granite. They seemed to be moving south, but his flight through the forest had thoroughly scrambled Archie’s sense of direction.

The path leveled out and widened as they climbed farther above the stream. Maskansisil moved quietly, visible only when the moonlight caught him through a break in the trees. The moon seemed to follow him, as if it wanted to keep him in sight as it had the chacmool.

He didn’t look back, and Archie was rapidly losing what remained of his strength. Toting oyster crates hadn’t prepared him for this sort of exertion, and his ankle was about to give way.

At the top of a narrow ridge, Archie realized he’d completely lost sight of the Indian. He turned in a circle, looking for a path and half expecting the chacmool to burst from the trees and gut him where he stood. God in Heaven, I hope I haven’t come all this way just to be killed at a more convenient spot, Archie thought. Perhaps I should just take my chances on being able to find my way back to Lemon House.

But his legs wouldn’t carry him that far. His ankle was already swelling against the confining shoe, his hands were completely numb, and his thighs trembled just from the effort of standing upright.
I
could just rest a while,
Archie thought.

When Maskansisil reappeared, leading two horses, Archie shook himself out of his stupor. “I—I have to get warm,” he said. “I’m freezing.”

Wordlessly Maskansisil swept off his long coat and draped it around Archie’s shoulders.
Thank you,
Archie tried to say, but he couldn’t make himself understood through his chattering teeth.

“Can you ride?” the Indian asked. Archie shook his head. Growing up in New York, he’d never learned.

“Hm. No time now for lessons.” Maskansisil crouched down and laced his fingers into a stirrup. Archie stepped up, wincing as his ankle nearly buckled, and Maskansisil hoisted him onto the horse’s bare back.

As he swung up onto his own mount, Maskansisil said, “Get both hands into her mane and keep your weight forward.” With that he wheeled around and spurred his horse into the gap he’d come out of. Archie’s horse followed, and Archie did as he’d been told, leaning over the horse’s neck and doing his best to hang on.

They flew through
the forest at breakneck speed, bounding down precipitous drops and slashing across shallow streams. Hours seemed to pass, but the moon held perfectly still overhead, and Archie realized that either he’d lost his sense of time or time had lost its sense of him. Every impact of the horse’s hooves traveled straight up Archie’s spine to his head, which seemed about to split; after a time his body, battered and pushed to absolute extremity, simply shut down. His legs grew numb, as his hands had long ago, and the sounds of hooves and wind blended into a soft rush, lulling him into a kind of stupor. Often he felt himself tilting, and righted himself barely in time, keeping his hands tangled in the horse’s mane while the beast did its best to keep him mounted. Archie’s mind wandered: Wonderful horse, he thought. No glue works for you. Must find an apple for a reward.

They reached the floor of a broad valley and raced across fallow fields, startling a sleeping dog behind a farmhouse. The dog’s barking was lost in the rush of wind as the horses unwound into a final sprint, charging up a narrowing dell until sheer granite walls enclosed them and they were forced to slow.

Maskansisil picked out a winding trace where Archie had seen only shadows, and he led the horses through to a clearing sheltered on three sides by towering bluffs. Snow covered the ground completely here, and only a gentle breeze remained of the wind that had gusted around Archie as they galloped.

They’d run straight up the side of a mountain, whose knobby peak loomed just to the north. The rippling shadows of the Alleghenies spread in every direction beneath the frozen, unworldly moon; here and there a cluster of lights glowed. One of them, Archie thought, must be Summitville. But he had no idea which.

He looked up into the cloudless sky, the silence loud in his ears. That’s odd, he thought; not only is the moon still exactly where it was when we mounted these horses, but the sky is absolutely clear. He remembered the clouded darkness of the Lemon House’s back lawn, and wondered where all of the clouds could have gotten to so quickly.

Maskansisil halted his horse and dismounted. Archie tried to do the same, but couldn’t work his fingers free of the horse’s mane. It took all the concentration he could muster just to relax his hands so he could pull them free. When at last he untangled himself and stepped down, Archie’s legs wouldn’t hold him; he sat down hard in the snow, dropping the valise at his side. The horses stood blowing, picking up their feet as if they found it difficult to stand still.

Unshouldering a leather pouch, Maskansisil began pitching small objects from it out across the clearing, murmuring a breathy chant as he did so. When the bag was empty he shook it upside down and held his palms open to the sky, continuing the chant as he turned in a slow circle.

Archie leaned over and picked up the object that had landed nearest him. It was a strip of jerked meat, beef or more likely venison. The sight of it reminded Archie that he hadn’t eaten since an early dinner on the packet boat, just after noon. Not even a full day had passed, but the day’s travel on the Main Line Canal seemed like a distant memory. And overhead, the bright half-moon hung frozen in place.

Time
has
lost track of me, Archie thought. Somehow it’s not passing. He raised the strip of jerky to his mouth.

“Don’t eat it,” Maskansisil said sharply. Archie started to protest—he’d thrown the stuff away all over the clearing, what did one piece matter?—but when he looked up he saw the Indian pointing away from him, at a brush thicket sprouting from the base of a granite overhang.

An enormous bear ambled through the thicket and out into the clearing, its head sweeping back and forth as it took in the scents of men and horses. It stood on its hind legs, winter fat shrunken to folds of skin hanging from its belly, and grumbled, cocking its head from side to side and baring yellow teeth. Maskansisil stood before the bear, his lips silently moving with the chant. He showed no sign of fear. In fact, he looked expectant, and for some reason a bit sad.

Why haven’t the horses run away? Archie thought. He looked and saw that they had gone to sleep, their heads hung down nearly to the ground, the occasional twitch of ear or nose the only sign that they hadn’t been turned to stone.

The bear dropped to all fours again and pawed at the grass, tearing huge dark streaks in the thin covering of snow. Maskansisil gave voice to his chant again, and the bear found a piece of jerky and gulped it down.

As it swallowed, Maskansisil shouted “Hey!” and clapped his hands, the sound booming much louder than it should have even in the sheltered space. The bear looked up at him, and Archie held his breath, sure that he was about to see the reverse of the bear-baiting contests that passed for sport in the Five Points.

But instead of charging to tear Maskansisil’s limbs from his body, the bear just grumbled again, its tone inquisitive somehow and an expression that Archie could have sworn was confusion in its eyes. Then it padded over to Maskansisil and stood, clapping its paws on his shoulders in an unmistakable greeting.

“Mary, mother of Jesus,” Archie said quietly. He looked at the strip of jerky in his hand and threw it away into the snow.

“I have brought him,
sachem,”
Maskansisil said to the bear.

It swung its ponderous head toward Archie.
You have done well, Pathfinder. Many things might have gone astray this night.

Archie heard the words clearly though no sound had come from the bear. The voice was that of an old man, gravelly and patient.
Sachem,
Maskansisil had called the bear. That was what the Tammany bigwigs called each other.

He looked questioningly at Maskansisil, who nodded and said, “Repeat your question now.” The bear dropped to all fours and came to stand over Archie where he sat in the snow.

Its snout was close enough to touch, its breath smelling of fermented berries and tooth decay. Archie swallowed and said, “What is my role in this?”

We dead cannot read futures, Archie Prescott. Your role is yours to determine.

Perhaps it was disappointed expectation, or just fatigue, or a combination of the two. But for whatever reason, Archie’s composure simply snapped. In just the past twenty-four hours he had been nearly murdered twice, and here he was following a strange Indian into the Allegheny wilderness in order to have a possessed bear spin evasions to questions that meant life or death.

“Damn your dithering!” he shouted, standing up despite the pain in his ankle. “What
right
do you have to drag me off to this godforsaken wilderness and feed me bloody politician’s drivel? I was nearly killed tonight—
twice
that I know of—because through no fault of my own I’ve gotten involved in something I don’t understand, and you owe me some answers.”

The bear stood unmoving before him, and Maskansisil might as well have been a sculpture carved from mountain granite.

I was known as a man of peace,
the bear said,
not a weak man. Men did not speak to me in such tones when I was alive.

“Well, I’m the one who’s alive now,” Archie said hotly. “And I’d like to remain that way.” He pulled the chacmool’s talisman from his shirt and shook it under the bear’s muzzle.

“You go ahead and kill me—eat me if it satisfies your appetite or your pride—none of that matters to me unless I find a way to be rid of this.” He let the token fall back into his johnny. “And to do that I have to be rid of the damned chacmool, don’t I?”

You do.

“Then how?”

Save your daughter.

“My daughter died seven years ago,” Archie said automatically. The bear just looked at him.

Slow realization began to seep through Archie’s axiomatic denial. Here he was, dressed in undergarments and boots, berating a brown bear in the Pennsylvania mountains while the moon hung like a stopped pendulum in the clear night sky. Did he really think that he’d been brought out here, that he’d been somehow
excused
from
time,
just so a mischievous Indian and a trained circus bear could play an elaborate joke on him?

Wasn’t that somehow more insane than the idea that Jane had somehow survived the fire? That the hunched little body burned to a charcoal husk had been another girl?

That he had been seeing his daughter regularly for the past year, and denying what she surely must have known to be true?

When Archie spoke again, he felt as if he was trying to speak around something in his throat that he couldn’t quite swallow. “Save her from what? What does Jane have to do with this?”

Your daughter is the fulcrum on which the fate of this world balances. In the next twenty-one days you will either save her or lose her to the chacmool, which will use her to give new form to its god. If it succeeds in this, the fires you have seen in your sleep will darken the skies over real cities instead of the dead world you dream.

Archie’s brain couldn’t assimilate this; the words deflected off a vision of Jane plucking pennies from his palm as he brushed past her on his way to work.

“You must tell him from the beginning,
sachem,”
Maskansisil said.

The bear glanced over its shoulder at him, then settled like a dog onto its haunches. In its eyes Archie thought he could see ages, all the time that wasn’t passing in the world of the living.
Or do I still walk in that world”

The old man’s voice spoke gently, drawing Archie inward, away from the stinging cold and the guilt that tore like a hyena at his bowels.

I
am Tamanend
,
and have been called that name since before your
people learned to make marks on paper. The Lenape are my people; I led them across the sea of ice to this land and we settled in the far north, among the horned whales and the great white bears.

But the sun stays away from that place, and again we moved, following it south until our paths crossed the Snake. They saddened me even then, white man, because like the white men, they fed their god with blood. Once they had been beautiful, but in their debasement they saw beauty only in death. Their leader came to me with scales for skin, and told me that the favor of his god came at the price of our tribe’s children. War rose up between our peoples, and we drove them before us until they fled south beyond the desert.

We heard nothing of them for generations. My people followed the sun to its beginning in the sea to the east, and we settled there. We ate well and grew in numbers, but my mind was heavy with wondering when the Snake would return. After many years of peace, I left and walked south and west, crossing mountains and desert until I found the Snake. They had build cities of stone in a swamp ringed with mountains, and their gods had become numberless as the stars. Smoke hung over the cities, carrying aloft the spirits of sacrificed men and feeding them to the hungry gods.

They greeted me with arrow and spear, but seeing that they could not harm me took me before the creature whose voice spoke for their gods. Like me, it had lived many years; like me, it had drawn strength from the lands of its people. Men create gods, Archie Prescott, but those gods are no less real once worship gives them life and form. The chacmool lived because of the hunger of its gods, and drew its form from gods’ totems. It still wore scales for skin, but now jaguar’s fur sprouted from it as well, and eagle’s feathers; the form of a man had become difficult for it to keep. The stories of its people sustained it, as long as those stories and their sacrifices sustained their gods. The sound of their songs, the voices of their poetry hurt my ears because still they murdered, and composed songs to beautify their butchery.

I was saddened by the blood that had been shed between us, but peace can only be made between men; gods and spirits do not bargain with mortals. This creature, chacmool, had lost its humanity before we first warred, and had lost even the memory
of being a man by the time I w
alked south to search out the Snake. It wanted nothing of peace. Go back north, it said to me, before you leave your bones here and your people forget your name.

Still I stood before it. You have power now, I said, but that will not always be. And I, Tamanend, will keep my eye upon you; I will watch as you die and are scattered to the winds, and by the strength of my arm I will keep you scattered until your names and your gods have vanishedfrom the land.

We parted on these words and I turned my face north, even as the white men’s sails crawled over the edge of the sea. When the Snake were destroyed, I watched, and wept for the people they might have become. But the white men never set their gaze on
the chacmool—they knew it as Ne
zahualpilli and heard stories of this man who foretold the Spaniards’ coming, who was a sorcerer and made pacts with evil spirits. But the chacmool fled its name and its people, and hid itself in the place called Chicomoztoc, and despite my sorrow I remembered my resolve. I have been friend to red man and white, but never again will I be friend to the Snake.

When the chacmool stirred, and remembered the god they named He

Who Makes Things Grow, I had gone from the world where this bear walks. But Maskansisil lives, and watches in my stead.

“
I
watch
you
, Archie Prescott,” Maskansisil said. “I watch because I cannot act. Even if I killed every white man who spoke the word
chacmool,
I could not change the path you must follow. Bringing you here, I hoped the old story would yet hold meaning, and hoped as well that you would understand and act where I cannot.”