Empire of Unreason (5 page)

“Good enough’t‘ buy rum and tell lies’t’ a whore.” To prove it, he switched to the language. “Hey, you, what the hell you doin‘ tied up so?”

“Improving my character,” the man answered cheerfully.

“Then you wouldn’t have us cuttin‘ y’ loose?”

“I’m of the opinion that my character is improved by now.”

“Who did this?” Red Shoes asked.

“People who didn’t think much of my character. Will you free me?”

“Should I? Did enemies do this or your own people?”

“How should I know? It was dark.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Good-bye,” Red Shoes said. “I wish you luck with your character.” He started off.

“Wait!” the fellow called. “Not that it’s your business, but it was a simple misunderstanding involving a woman.”

“Woman?” Tug perked up.

“Yes. The wife of a chief, if you must know. A family matter—the chief is a cousin of mine.”

“Ah. Why didn’t they cut your nose off?” That was the usual punishment for adultery.

“They might in another day or so. Come, release me and I can be useful to you.

You’re a long way from home, yes? You could use fresh horses—some food maybe?”

Red Shoes shrugged. “Horses, yes. And we could use a guide, someone who knows the languages of the plains.”

“I’m the perfect guide. I was a tracker for the Frenchmen that came this way a few years ago. I speak a little of every language.”

Red Shoes considered, noticing as he did that the fellow’s eyelids were tattooed blue. It made him look like a raccoon when he blinked. Hadn’t he heard the Wichita were marked like that?

Red Shoes nodded at Tug. “Cut his bonds.”

The one-time sailor did so. The young man sat up, rubbing his wrists and ankles. “Thank you,” he said. “As the French say, I am at your service. Now, where do you need guided to?”

Red Shoes pointed.

“Northwest. Good. But where?”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“I’m not sure. A great distance. Maybe another few weeks travel. Maybe more.”

“You’re looking for someone, or something?”

“I don’t know.”

The fellow blinked, and a wary expression came over him. “Is this shaman business?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful.” He rolled his eyes.

“You’re still willing to guide us?”

“Will it give me something good to talk about? Will it make a good story?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Well, then. It’s probably best I’m not seen around here for a while anyway.”

He considered again. “My name is Tahanitsiaskase,” he told them.

“An‘ my name is Abakabakadakabar,” Tug retorted. “I can’t say that.”

“Ah—in French, ”Flint Shouting,“ ” the Wichita said.

“When will you be ready to leave, Flint Shouting?” Red Shoes asked.

The fellow looked at the sun, then glanced a little nervously southward. “The sooner, the better,” he replied.

As they moved north, Flint Shouting shed his nervousness like a snake rubbing out of a skin.

“They should have known better!” he said. “I can’t be caught, and when I am caught, I always escape.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“It may be that Tug and I are due some credit,” Red Shoes said dryly.

“The Dreams love me,” Flint Shouting said. “If they hadn’t sent you to release me, they would have sent someone else.”

“Dreams?” Tug grunted.

“The Frenchman I guided didn’t know about dreams either. Do none of the white people know about the Dreams?”

Red Shoes shrugged noncommittally. He didn’t know much about the Wichita, and though he suspected he knew what Flint Shouting was talking about, he wasn’t sure.

“They have their own names for things,” he said, “and some pretty strange ideas about the world. Why don’t you educate him?”

“Naw,” Tug said.“ ‘S okay.”

Flint Shouting ignored the ex-pirate. “Dreams are all around us,” he said, waving his hands at the earth and sky. “There are the
Itskasanakatadiwaha,
the Dreams-That-Are-Above—like the Sun, the Thunderbird or the Owner-of-Black-and-White-Knives. Then there are the
Howwitsnets-kasade,
the Dreams-Down-Here, which can be divided into the Dreams-in-the-Water and the Dreams-Closest-to-Man.”

“Huh. Angels is the first, maybe—the Dreams above? An‘ the second maybe divils an’—say! Dreams-in-the-Water? You mean like a mermaid?”

Flint Shouting only looked puzzled at these comparisons, so Red Shoes replied. “There are many dreams in the water— the serpent with horns, the white panther, and the pale people. The pale people are what you call mermaids, Tug, but you would not want to meet them, no matter how much you want a woman. They are not really of flesh, and they are soul stealers.”

“Like that thing you say you fought in Venice—the one as took Rev’rend Mather’s soul?”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Exactly.”

“So you
are
a shaman,” Flint Shouting said. “How did you come by your power?”

“When I was very young, Kwanakasha, the little man, called my name at night.

He spoke to me, sleeping and waking, though no one could see him but me.

Being a child, I did not think it strange—I thought everyone had a voice like mine, a kwanakasha. I did not know my danger, did not know that I was slowly being made into an accursed being, a sorcerer, a danger to my people. A servant of the Dreams-in-the-Water, as you call them. But my elders noticed him. They helped me lay a trap for the little man. We caught him and made him my servant. Now I fight them.”

“You have Dream enemies?” Flint Shouting asked.

“Every Dream is my enemy. The powers of the other world have decided that we must die, and I will not allow it.”

“
Who
must die? You two?”

“Human beings. All of the tribes and nations on Earth.”

Flint Shouting swore something in his own language.

“What?” Red Shoes asked.

“You an enemy of the Dreams, and me guiding you to the very heart of Dreams-Closest-to-Man. Maybe my luck
has
run out.”

“It surely has if you don’t find us those horses you promised, and soon,” Red Shoes said.

“Tomorrow we’ll come to a village where they still like me. I think.”

They camped that night by a clear, shallow stream racing out of the low mountains crouching on the southern horizon. Cottonwoods, elms, and willows whispered in a dry breeze. Tug and Flint Shouting built a fire, Tug EMPIRE OF UNREASON

doing most of the work while Flint Shouting directed.

Red Shoes climbed the nearby hill to stand first lookout. From there the earth spun away, turning the color of a strong bruise at the edges. Far, far east he saw tiny lights that might be fires. A village? A hunting party?

More than a day’s ride, whatever it was, and not in the direction they were going.

He smoked a little tobacco and tried to think, but his mind was tired. He found himself instead listening idly to Tug and Flint Shouting—by some trick of sound and the hollow below, he could hear them quite clearly.

“… used’t‘ be a pirate,” Tug was saying. “Sailed with Edward Teach, Blackbeard, when he took Charles Town, an’ later when he sailed out’t‘ the Roman sea and Venice an’ all. Aye, that ‘uz an adventure.”

“Then how is it you ended up here, with a Choctaw?”

“Huh. Red Shoes was on that last trip. Ten years gone, that. See, some wondrous terrible thing had happened, but nobody knew what. God-rotted big waves wrecked our harbors and boats, and in all America we hadn’t a flotilla unless we combined English, French, and pirate. But we did it, and we sailed back to mother England to see what was th‘ matter.”

“What
was
?”

“Don’t you know?”

“England is where you white people come from?”

“Damn, but y’r more ignorant than me. Yeah, it’s where th‘ best o’ us’re from, anyhow. An‘ what was wrong was a big damn hole where London once were.

Some French magicians had brung down a piece o’ the sky, we found out later.”

Red Shoes could hear the strain in the brief silence that followed. The Englishmen—even those, like Tug, born far from England—still took the loss of their mother country hard.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“It’s well known that the French and English have been enemies, but both are enemies of the Spanish,” Flint Shouting offered.

“Not no more. H’ant no England, no France, no Spain. Just us as call ourselves English or Spanish or whatnot. An‘ how true is it now? I don’t know, nor hardly care anymore.”

“That still hasn’t explained—”

“Well, Red Shoes ‘uz on the expedition, y’ see. He saved my life, an‘ then we were together at the battle of Venice, where our captain Blackbeard made his last stand. Well, after that, I’d about had enough o’ the sea, though I stayed on in Charles Town f ‘r six years. But a while back I took up the trading with the Choctaw, seein’ as I had a friend there in Red Shoes.”

Another pause. “And I’ll tell ya this,” Tug went on. “I h’ant never had a better friend. I’m a big man—people have been known to piss ‘emselves just lookin’ at me. Fear I’ve had, and respect, but true friends few. That In’yun up there is one of ‘em. You durst hurt or betray ’im, and or Tug’ll make you wish to y’r dreamy gods you hadn’t.”

“Understood,” Flint Shouting answered.

Red Shoes smiled briefly. If Tug knew he had just heard him, he would be mortified. He usually had to be good and drunk to get so sentimental.

The big man, for all his wicked ways, had nothing crooked in his heart. And whether he knew it or not, he was Red Shoes’ best friend, too. His own people had always feared him just a little too much to really like him. Even among family he felt set apart. But Tug—Tug had no questions, no reservations. Tug was his brother in a way no Choctaw had ever been or could be.

It was nice, from time to time, to know the big man felt the same way.

“Look like haystacks,” Tug said, regarding the village.

Having seen haystacks in Pennsylvania and Europe, Red Shoes had to agree.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

The Wichita houses were talf, rather conical frameworks of cedar and willow laths covered with bundles of grass. Each had two doors, one facing east, the other west. To Red Shoes, this made them more resemble beehives like the ones the Italians brought with them to South Carolina.

There were only twelve such houses, but each was large enough to hold a small family. There were also a number of open-sided ramadas—summer houses consisting of a roof to keep the noonday sun out and not much more. Even from this vantage, he could see the women moving about in those, cooking, pounding corn, weaving mats and baskets.

Except for the odd shape of the houses, it could almost be a Choctaw village.

Strings of white, red, and yellow corn, their shucks plaited in long ropes, hung drying in the eaves of the ramadas, along with strips of pumpkin and other sorts of squash. The sight of that and the smell of woodsmoke mixed with the scent of roasting meat made his mouth water. For weeks he and Tug had eaten mostly “cold meal,” parched cornmeal mixed with a little water. Sustaining but hardly appetizing.

Real food would be a welcome break.

He tried not to get his hopes up.
These aren’t my people,
he reminded himself.

They owe me nothing.
They might do anything to him, so far from the retribution of his own kin. It was said that there were cannibals under this western sky. And worse.

Five thickset, dark men on horses rode out to meet them. Each had eyes tattooed like Flint Shouting’s, and each had a number of small star tattoos picked out here and there. They wore loincloths and rode Spanish ponies, smaller than the sturdy Chickasaw horses in Red Shoes’ train.

One of the men called something to Flint Shouting in a challenging voice. Flint Shouting replied. Red Shoes didn’t know what he said, but in the next instant the leader of the men facing them brandished his ball-headed war club and kneed his horse toward Flint Shouting.

“Hey!” Tug snarled, reaching for his pistol.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

Red Shoes restrained him with a hand. The other men were sitting their horses, grinning, and Flint Shouting was whooping in a way that didn’t sound angry or frightened. He and the other man rode in circles, waving their clubs playfully, and then both dismounted and began slapping each other around, the way boys might. Both began laughing.

“This is my cousin, Headbreaker,” Flint Shouting explained. “He’ll trade your tired horses for fresh—they like the look of them, think they’ll be good for the blood of their herd. Anyhow, they just raided the Kapaha and have plenty to spare.”

“That’s good.”

“And a feast, tonight, to celebrate my coming. See? I told you they liked me up here.”

“Keep your eyes open, Tug,” Red Shoes murmured.

“Don’t trust him?”

“Not even a little.”

“These Witchy-taw. Are they enemies of the Choctaw?”

“Not that I know of. That is, I can’t remember any tales of war between us.

They live a long way from the Choctaw country, and there are plenty enough foes in the space between. Why bother coming all the way out here when we have Chickasaw, Kapaha, and Wazhazhe so much nearer at hand? The same with them, of course.”

“But yer thinkin‘ it might occur to one o’ these fellas that he don’t own a single Choctaw scalp, an‘ why not get it while it’s right in his hands?”

“They don’t see many white people out this way, either,” Red Shoes pointed out mildly.

“Oh. Yeah.” Tug cast longing looks at the women surrounding them. Some were passing pretty. Like the men, they were tattooed—concentric circles on EMPIRE OF UNREASON

their breasts with nipples in the very center, and straight lines that went down their foreheads, over their noses, and across their lips to their chins. “I wish they had some rum or sumpin‘.”

Night pressed the sky into a purple band on the horizon. Whippoorwills called from somewhere, and bats fluttered about like crazy leaves. Red Shoes wondered where they lived, the bats—caves? There were few trees around.

The Wichita didn’t seem dangerous. It was mostly women and children around them now, curious, asking questions they couldn’t understand. Flint Shouting was nearby, waxing poetic about something—probably explaining how he had saved Red Shoes and Tug from some terrible fate.