People of the Sky (16 page)

He did rolls, inside and outside loops. Immelmann turns and maneuvers that Kesbe couldn’t describe. He and his flier reveled in the freedom of the sky, dancing their farewell in an unforgettable high-speed ballet that left her breathless. As a finale, he and Haewi raced
Gooney Berg,
clocking up to 60 knots by Kesbe’s airspeed indicator before falling behind. Then he was lost from view behind a cloud wisp and she was once more alone in the sky.

After a moment’s thought, she took out her sectional map and marked on it the location of the mesa that sheltered Tuwayhoima. Then she put the map away and concentrated on the tasks of piloting. Only after she had put an hour’s worth of flight behind her did she realize she had
another decision to make.

As far as the planetary authorities on Oneway were concerned, the Pai Yinaye did not exist. It was the usual custom of those who discovered new species or races on unexplored worlds to file a report. Contact teams could then be sent in and the new discovery could then be integrated into the rest of the interstellar community.

But the Pai did not want to be found. Everything in their history and what she knew of their culture spoke of a desire to isolate themselves and suppress the memories of the technological civilization their ancestors had rejected. She would be doing the tribe no favor by exposing them once again to the rest of the world. The history of her own ancient Hopi people stood as a warning.

She smiled to herself as her choice stood clear. She would give Imiya’s people a gift they might never know. The story of the Pai Yinaye would remain unwritten except within her heart.

She flew on toward Mabena’s installation, leaving the vast-ness of the Barranca Madre to guard its own secrets.

It is only the ninth day since I parted with Kesbe-Rohoni and Gooni Bug in the skies above the Mother Canyon. Only the ninth day, and yet I feel as though I have stepped into a different world. I sit on my mat in the Kiva of the Fledgling and look up at the opening above to see the Rain Star enter the square of night sky made by the opening of the kiva. I chant with the other child-warriors who are becoming kekelt, but my mind is not on the Rain Star. My thoughts wander to Aronan House, where Haewi sleeps this night without me.

Someone there cares for all the fliers who have been separated from their riders. I hope the one chosen for this duty tonight was Nyentiwakay. I saw him before Nabamida brought me to the kiva. I asked him how the aronan with black and amber wings was faring. He told me that it no longer sorrows. It awaits its rider. I bow my head and pray, but not to the Rain Star. My prayer is for Kesbe-Rohoni, that she may soon return.

The girl Mahana sits on the prayer-mat next to mine. She has been in the kiva longer than I. She knows more about what will happen to me here. I long to ask her, but I dare not interrupt her chanting.

Many songs and chants are given to the Rain Star before it passes from the square in the night sky made by the opening of the kiva. We all fall silent, as directed by the old priest who is with us. I hear a creak on the roof of the chamber. A shadow appears, blocking out the stars as it descends the ladder. The old priest lights a small fire, barely enough to see by as the form on the ladder becomes a robed figure bearing a glazed earthenware bowl.

I hear the soft rattle of the scorpion-tail bracelets worn by the shaman Sahacat as she steps into our midst bearing the bowl. She stops and swirls the contents before the old priest, who sprinkles in something from a leather pouch. I cannot see what it is, the firelight is too low.

Sahacat lifts the vessel above the fire. Its gleaming underside is marked with strange symbols. One looks like a picture of an aronan. Sahacat speaks over the bowl.

“This is the drink that shall open to you the Road of Life. The first part of the way is that of the fledgling.” She turns, fixing her eyes on each one of us in turn. I feel as though I would shrink from her gaze. “Though you have been warriors upon your winged mounts, you are still children. You have yet to take flight in the realm of the spirit.” She kneels to Mahana, saying, “You are already far on the journey toward womanhood. Drink deep.”

Mahana swallows great draughts and settles back on her mat. Sahacat is before me now. “Your feet have just met the path to manhood. Take only sips,” she commands, as I bend my head to the bowl. She will not let me touch it with my hands. The drink coats my lips with chalk, yet is oily upon my tongue. Its taste is bad. My throat wants to close against it and I have to force myself to swallow. How can Mahana gulp it like water? My stomach stirs uneasily. I wonder if it will make me sick.

A while later I look toward Mahana. She has let her wrapping slip from her shoulders in the warmth from the fire. It is not that I have never seen her breasts or felt the stir below that the sight of them arouses, but never before have I felt such an urge to touch and stroke. My fingers ache for the feel of contact, my entire body has somehow become so sensitive that I can feel each strand of reed in my prayer mat as if it were a log. The fire’s heat prickles my skin. Though unbidden by my conscious will, my hand strays toward Mahana.

Another hand whose touch is dry and old crosses my fingers. “Now is not the time for touching,” says the elder priest gently, without rebuke. “Turn the experience inward.” Silently I
nod. He seems to recede as though he or I were in another place. Again my hand creeps, but it is I who catch it.

My belly takes fire from the kekelt drink. The flame spreads outward along my limbs, up my neck to warm my face. I fling back my head, squeezing my eyes shut to look along my Road of Life. It opens before me, but it is a path through sky, not earth. Wind Laugbing’s wings bear me along it, with the air rushing past my body. I think of those wings, of their black and emerald beauty, of their sheen, their velvet softness and their smell of sage. I imagine being caressed by those wings and enfolded within their silken cradle
…

And then the dream jades to leave me once more sitting in shadowed darkness within the kiva with strange thoughts still spinning in my head. My flier has always been beloved to me, but it has been the simple love of children for one another. Now it has become something different, something that makes my skin tingle and my belly quiver.

I glance to either side and see the faces of other child-warriors, eyes shut and heads tilted back. Surely they are meditating as they have been bidden. Do any of them feel this expansion of the senses that now sweeps over me? Do any of them have such thoughts? No, my mind answers and I add guilt to the swirl of emotions engulfing me.

Is this just the effect of the drink I have been given, or is it something within me surfacing at last? Though my body was stirred by the sight of Mahana, my want centers on the one who is not of my kind, yet is closer to me than any other.

I notice that Sahacat has bent down beside Mahana, grasping the girl’s elbow and aiding her to her feet. Mahana moves as one asleep. Where is the shaman taking her? They move to the rear of the kiva, not the roof ladder. My ears catch the whisper of a doorflap being pulled aside. My skin feels the faintest kiss of a breeze. Mahana has left the kiva by another way, but where she has gone, I don’t know.

I wait. The old priest picks a boy across from me and takes him out in the same way that Sahacat did Mahana. I wonder if I will be chosen and what will happen. No. Those two are kekelt who have been longest in the kiva and who have drunk deepest of the bowl set to their lips.

Drowsing on my mat, I wake as Sahacat emerges from the blackness of the kiva behind me with Mahana. The girl’s robes have the smell of sage. “You are ready for the next step,” Sahacat tells her softly. “Tomorrow night you leave this kiva and walk the trail that leads to the mesa cave. You will be summoned. We will await you there.”

The shaman’s words are not jor me, but I seize and hide them in my heart. Ij Mahana walks tomorrow night, perhaps lean leant from her what is in store for me.

Soon the old priest brings back the boy, and he too bears a variant of the same smell. It makes me think again of Wind Laughing, hut I am tired now, the effect of the drink has been drained from me.

The ritual is over, the old priest says. We may sleep now on our mats on the earth floor, for this is the kiva of the initiates and will not he needed for other ceremonies. Mahana lies down near me. I wait until I hear Sahacat and the old priest climb the ladder, leaving us alone to sleep. Cautiously I reach out, shake Mahana’s shoulder.

Slowly she rolls over to face me. Her eyes are distant, glazed. Her face is flushed.

“Mahana!” I hiss. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid of what, Imiya?” She laughs sleepily. Something has made her happy and the happiness lingers.

“Of what will happen to your aronan.”

She is wide-eyed, yet still smiling.

“Nothing will happen that should not. Why do you speak of fear?”

“I don’t know what lies ahead for me or Haewi. Do you? Can you tell me?”

“It would not be right. Sahacat has told us to trust in her guidance and the wisdom of the priests. Can’t you just do that?”

I sigh, feeling small and miserable. “No, Mahana. Perhaps it is because I already fear too much.”

She doesn’t answer. She is already asleep. Tomorrow she will guide me, though she is unaware of my plan. It is silent in the Kiva of Fledglings except for the Quiet breathing of those who were once child-warriors, and the crackle of the dying fire.

It is again night and Mahana takes a trail from the village that I do not know. Perhaps her aronan, Desqui Deva, guides her, for the flier walks ahead, picking its way along the sandy face of the mesa. It is not easy for me to follow even when I know where they have gone, night enshrouds their footsteps and conceals the places where they have climbed. Several times I have startled myself by nearly falling, I who dive from heights on my Wind Laughing. My aronan is not with me now, nor would I wish Haewi to be. Mahana’s aronan walks slowly, with head and wings down. The girl moves as if in a trance. The creature must be guiding her.

Ghost-light glimmers from bushes near the trail. It is barely enough to see by. I see the faint gleam and hear the flapping of Mahana’s cloak in the night wind. Where does she go to seek her womanhood?

For me it seems she has leaped from child-warrior to adult. When she entered the kiva many sukops or sixteen-day-periods ago, she was hard and thin and straight. She walked and ran like a boy. Now she has a supple sway as she moves beneath the night. Her flesh is rounded, her hips broadened. Is it the effect of the kekelt drink, I wonder, still tasting the strange chalky flavor on the back of my tongue. I know by the warmth in my belly and loins that the sips given me have already begun to work.

The trail descends to the root of the mesa. Mahana and her flier go where they are summoned. I shiver in the night and follow after. I thought I would find priests or warriors along the trail to guide and protect this girl on her journey but no. She is entrusted to the night and to her aronan. And to a world where spirits would keep away any ill-fate that might befall her, and turn hack those who would follow in search of their own fates…

I wonder if anyone is searching for me now. In the Kiva of the Fledgling, my prayer mat is empty. The Rain Star will appear in the opening overhead to be seen and celebrated by many eyes, but not mine.

Hai, Mahana halts, turns her head slowly like one blind. Yes, light shines ahead and it is not the faint night-glow but the heart of afire deep within some cleft in the rock. Desqui Deva knows the way. It moves forward with a heavy step that speaks to me of grief or deep resignation. Mahana’s arm is extended to the flier, her hand clutching the bristles on its back.

First the aronan, then the girl, pass into the crevice. I wait and watch them draw away, descending carved sandstone steps into the mesa’s heart. Dare I follow? The fire is deep within, the shadows heavy. All eyes will be on the one who comes, not the one who follows.

I slip through to one side. Grit from crumbling sandstone clings to the sweat on my chest. I crouch, moving without sound, and yet still fearing that someone might know, with shaman’s magic, that I have penetrated this place of secrets.

I find a way off the main path that may lead to the cavern’s depths. I take it, squeezing past boulders and through narrow ways where the roof nearly descends to meet the floor. I hear first
the rasp of my own breathing, then, from deep within the cave, the sound of chanting. Mahana has arrived. The ceremony of adulthood has begun.

Voices join in a strange song that echoes among the rocks. I struggle, I wriggle and climb, despairing because the way threatens to take me away from the sight I have come to witness. At last, with an unexpected turning, the song becomes louder. I climb on a ledge that lets me see between a chink in two boulders.

I was long in reaching my hideaway. The ritual has already begun. I press my cheek to the gritty coolness of the sandstone. Priests stand on the cave floor, in the costumes of the ancient One-Horn and Two-Horn Societies. They bear the great back-curved horns bound to their foreheads and carry medicine-bundles. I see dancers masked as kachinas, carrying reed flails.

Mahana’s cloak is taken from her shoulders by a shadowed form behind her. The figure’s sleeve slides back along an arm revealing a bracelet of twin scorpion tails which dance and glitter in the firelight. Sahacat! It is all I can do to keep my eye at the crack, hoping the rocks will shield me from the shaman’s senses.

The same hand loosens the sash binding Mahana’s kirtle about her waist. The garment falls away. The girl steps forward, raising her arms to lift the swell of her breasts. The kachinas begin to dance around her, then beat her with flails. Welts rise on her skin, but her head remains lifted, her eyes fixed forward.

They strike her so bard that I want to flinch, yet still her gate does not waver, even when she is knocked off-balance. Her body acts to recover, but her eyes do not even know that she was struck. The kachinas grunt with the effort of their beating, but their victim remains silent. At a handclap from the shaman, they fall back against the cave walls.

I have forgotten Mahana’s aronan during this, but now I see Desqui Deva striding out of the shadows. Its head droops. It is weary and can no longer lift its wings. It and Mahana walk to each other, meeting in the center before the fire.

I can see her eyes now. She does not look at her aronan in the way she used to. It is not pity, it is not love, nor hate, nor sorrow, but something beyond any of those. Have her senses been twisted by the kekelt drink that she would look on her partner so? She is distant yet as rapturous as the Sun Chief when facing the rays of dawn. If this is love, it is a new and terrible one. I am suddenly afraid
.

Desqui Deva is trembling. It lifts its narrow muzzle to her, caresses her with its antennae. She runs her fingers down the side of its neck, then steps abruptly to one side and seizes the wingspar where it emerges from the thorax. Drums begin. I press my face against the rocks, straining to see.

Muscles flex in her arms. Is she twisting the wingspar? Of) gods of the aronan spirits, she is breaking it! I see the entire wing rotate grotesquely as she wrenches the wingspar loose from the creature’s thorax. Threads of muscle trail from the wound and fluid pours. The animal’s neck arches back and it seems to scream in silent agony, but does not fight back. Mahana, no!