People of the Sky (22 page)

“Beeep! It’s time for girls to fly spaceships. Beeeep! It’s time for coyotes to dance.” Then, with a quick upward jerk of his head, he followed her gaze to a fluff-ball as round and symmetrical as a sun, drifting above her head. Trembling, she had fastened her eyes on it, determined to ignore the taunting.

With wolfish glee, the clown leaped up, clapping his hands together on the drifting seed-tuft. He came down with it smeared flat against his muddy palm, then wiped it contemptuously on his ragged kilt. He fixed his eyes on her through the slits in his mask.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven,” he began, parodying a countdown. “Beeeep! Six, five, four, three, two, one and we have lift-off!” He flipped up his kilt, jerked his pelvis at her several times and then whirled and danced away, waggling his hips. He leaped up, clapped another seed-tuft out of the air, looking back at her as if he knew her dreams were as fragile as the drifting seeds and as easily destroyed.

She felt rage flush her face and sting at the corners of her eyes. Other faces turned to her, saw what the clown had seen. It was too much. She turned on her heel, shouldered her way through the crowd, back through the alleys with their garbage and animal dung. She stood trembling at the edge of the mesa, trying to let the wind cool the heat of her anger. She scratched clay smears from her silver piece with her fingernail, blew away the adobe dust.

Then she spat at the wall of the nearest pueblo, ran out of the village, back to the van and shut herself inside it. It was then that she let the tears come.

They were sill running when Bajeloga came up to the van, got in beside her, stared straight ahead through the age-glazed windshield and said nothing.

Suddenly Kesbe hated the image on the silver piece. She took it from her scarf, knotted the scarf to keep it on her neck and handed the slider back to her grandfather.

“Keep it,” she said in a trembling voice. “It will only remind me.”

“Chosovi, it was rude to leave the dance like that,” Bajeloga began.

“Scold me later,” she snapped. “I want to get out of this rotting dump and forget I ever came!”

Without speaking, the old man started the van and set it whining along the dirt road. He flipped the claim ticket out the window. They were on the highway coming down the flank of the mesa when Kesbe’s rage found words again.

“It stank,” she choked, “of ugliness and envy and hate. That wasn’t a dance! It was a farce! How could you stay…after what happened.”

“He was only a clown,” Bajeloga answered, but his hands went tight on the wheel.

“Why don’t they just give it up? Leave the mesas, be like the whites? Even that would be better than sitting in mud huts in piles of garbage, wallowing in rotting traditions.”

“They will give it up soon, I think,” said the old man quietly. “The Blue Star migration took the heart of our people. What is left behind is only a corpse.”

Kesbe stared out the window, feeling the wind dry the tears on her face. “Why did I come? What could I have possibly hoped to find there?”

“A little of what I told you about in the old stories.”

“They’re dead” Kesbe crossed her arms. “They’re all dead.” She turned to him. “Do you know what it’s like to have someone spit on your hopes like that?”

“I do.”

She took out the fax, folded it with shaking hands, touched the wrist chrono-comp. “Even though this is still real, even though I’ll be leaving for Titan tomorrow, I feel part of my dream is
gone. Perhaps training as a space pilot won’t be what I hoped.”

“He was only a clown,
chosovi
” said Bajeloga again gently.

But he spoke the truth of what my people think of me
, she thought.
I don’t care. I don’t care about any of them. And I will never come hack here again.

She sank into a black mood and said nothing more for the remainder of the drive to Flagstaff.

Kesbe pulled her mind away from memories. Sahacat was coming down from the outcropping, her robe draped over her arm. Kesbe wondered why the shaman did not dress herself, realized that she was making assumptions based on her own feelings about confronting someone else while nude. Sahacat had probably worn the robe only as protection against the early morning chill, Kesbe thought as she placed herself in the shaman’s way.

Sahacat made no move to retreat or cover herself. Her nakedness did not make her seem vulnerable for she wore it like a mantle of power. The scent of her body was strong in the morning air. She swept back her dark flowing hair with one hand. The twin-tailed scorpions danced in their circlet about her wrist.

Kesbe’s first words were not the ones she intended to use. “Why are you trying to drive me away?” fell from her lips as she endured the knife-sharp gaze of those strange long Mayan eyes.

“Why?” Sahacat laughed, but it was a bitter sound, without joy. “Because I know you, warrior-woman. I know what you are and what you bring.”

Those eyes did not stare directly at Kesbe, but she felt that their sidelong gaze could see all that there was to know about her. Could they also see the external world that was starting to press in upon the Pai and their Mother Canyon?

“You have not given me a fair hearing, shaman. You speak as though I came by intent, but it was an accident that brought me to Tuwayhoima,” Kesbe tried.

Sahacat neither answered nor contradicted her. She turned away, her face toward the sky for several long minutes. When Kesbe thought she had been dismissed, the shaman turned back to her. “The Sun Chief believes it is chance that brought you. Nabamida and the rest also believe so. But I, who am skilled in reading the larger patterns of life, say otherwise.

“I feel shifts in the earth. I see changes in the sky. I have witnessed stars moving in ways that tell me they cannot be stars. The child-warriors have told me of strange bright arrows that arc through the sky at great heights over the Mother Canyon.” The shaman paused. “All of these speak to me of a coming loss of balance. And you, warrior-woman, are part of that process. You bring danger. Danger to me and my people.”

“You tried to drive me away. At the Cloud Dance. And then again when I set out to rescue the boy Imiya. How did you do it?”

“Magic,” the shaman said.

“No.”

“You are one who does not believe in magic. Or perhaps only certain kinds of magic, such as that which lifts your Gooni Bug. My power is the magic of the knowing sense,
tewalutewi
, the ability to make the mind believe what the nose smells and the tongue tastes.”

Kesbe bent her brows. Those two encounters still resonated in her mind with an intensity that had humbled her then and still frightened her now. Could they have been only hallucinations caused by an air-dispersed chemical as Sahacat seemed to imply? And how had she cast such an agent so directly and efficiently? Kesbe felt that the shaman wasn’t revealing much. However, she had not come here to ferret out secrets of illusion, but to find out what had happened to the boy Imiya.

When she asked about the youth, Sahacat’s face stiffened and her eyes took on a hard glitter. “Would you damage him further?” she hissed.

Kesbe was taken aback. “I didn’t hurt him! You and your self-righteous tribe were the ones who nearly killed the boy. I found him and brought him back while you all stared the other way.”

“So you had no part in his decision to turn away from the ceremony that would have made him a man? You spoke no words, planted no seed that later grew and gave forth an ugly flower?”

“I…” Kesbe hesitated. The shaman raised her eyebrows. “I spoke to him, yes. But I said nothing with the intent of undermining the things he had been taught.”

“It is not intent which determines whether things happen,” said the shaman severely.

Kesbe felt her anger rising. “You blame me for this, don’t you? I don’t think it was my fault. If the boy ran away, something else must have pushed him. If I can speak to him, perhaps I can discover what it was.”

“No.” Sahacat’s eyes were flashing now. “If Imiya is to reclaim his place among the Pai, he must have no more contact with you or the contamination you bring.”

“I won’t go, Sahacat. You aren’t going to scare me away.” Kesbe put her hands on her hips, expecting the conversation to flare into intense conflict. Instead the shaman’s expression grew calmer. “I have failed to drive you away, it is true,” she said. “Your strength is greater than I had thought. I must come to terms with that and discover ways to use it. But—“and here her voice hardened “—though I may be forced to accept your presence here, I can keep you from influencing the youth. Even as we speak, priests of the Twin-Tailed Scorpion are taking the youth from his sister’s house to a place where he will be kept safe.”

Kesbe saw that anger would gain her nothing. She had not doubt that when she returned from the mesa, Imiya would be spirited away. She eyed the other woman, wondering whether Chamol had known and whether that was why Chamol had sent her up to the mesa. She shrugged, decided it didn’t really matter. Sahacat had put on her robe and was walking away.
This round to you, witch. But there will be others.

The Pai Council of Elders assembled in the same sunken-floored meeting room they had previously used. Kesbe saw the same people, some of them wearing the same garments they had worn before, but the atmosphere in the gathering felt different. Now sidelong looks were taken at her and words muttered beneath her hearing.

Chamol was beside her on one side, but the space where Imiya had sat was empty, reminding her again of the purpose of this assembly. When everyone was present, the enigmatic Sun Chief gave the ceremonial blessing and opened the gathering to discussion. Kesbe asked leave to speak.

“I know I have been asked to this meeting to account for what has happened in recent days. Some of you may think I am not here by choice, but that is untrue.” She paused, gazed around the room and continued, “I am from outside, although from a people very much like the Pai tribe. I do not fully understand your ways. I have tried, but I have also made some mistakes…which have had unforeseen and tragic results. I am willing to take responsibility for my actions, but I need to understand more about your customs, specifically the rite of passage ceremony that the boy Imiya was to go through.”

She stood back while waiting for the stir created by her words to die down. The Pai Elders muttered among themselves.

“She is an outsider, yet she asks to know that which is sacred,” said one.

“Yet she can not atone for her wrongdoing unless she is given the means to understand it,”
argued another.

From among the blanket-wrapped figures wreathed in pipe smoke came the voice of Sahacat. “Our legends tell of strangers who came among us from the outside, seeking our knowledge. They brought sadness and destruction, as has this woman Kesbe. There has been enough of this contamination. Let it end.”

“Does it matter to any of you that Kesbe was the one who searched and found my brother?” Chamol faced the tribe, her voice brittle. “You who are Pai turned your back on him, while she who was a stranger sought to save him.”

“Imiya knew the consequence of trying to evade his initiation,” said Nabamida, entering the discussion for the first time.

“But why did he do it?” Kesbe asked, trying to bring them back to the point. “Was there something in the ceremony that would have frightened him into fleeing Tuwayhoima with Haewi?”

“He did not wish to give up his aronan,” said Nabamida. “That is something no child-warrior finds easy to face.”

“When a Pai child…gives up…the partnership with their flier, what happens to the creature? Is it killed?” Kesbe faltered as the faces around her closed. She could almost feel the room grow colder. She sighed heavily. “So that information is forbidden to me. May I ask why?”

“Even if you were told why, you would not understand.” This was Sahacat. “Our ways, our rituals can not be explained. They can only be believed and lived. Knowledge such as this must come at the right time in the right way. It should not be heard through ears that are
kahopi
or seen through eyes that are
kabopi
. Understanding can come only through the Spirit Door, the
kopavi
, the place at the top of the head that must be kept open to receive wisdom.”

Kesbe was silent for a moment, feeling the eyes of the Sun Chief and the others upon her. “You are saying that without going through the proper training and preparation, I won’t know what happened to Imiya.”

“You may think you know, but you will not,” said Sahacat.

“And you want me to just pack up and leave? What will happen to Imiya? What about Baqui…I mean the black and amber aronan. Will it be destroyed?”

The shaman had noticed her slip. She saw Sahacat’s eyes narrow. “Imiya has his own choice to make. He may yet regain his place among his people, but it will be difficult. It is best for him that all contact with you be ended. As for the rogue flier that you have mistakenly claimed, its life will be sacrificed painlessly as it should have been before you came.”

Kesbe tried not to flare. “That sounds cruel to me.”

“Life is not always gentle,” came the croaking whisper of the Sun Chief from across the room.

“You want me to agree to this?” she said, surveying the room. She saw Nabamida look away, Chamois eyes close in grief. In a way, it was tempting. She could drop all responsibility, stride back to
Gooney Berg
and leave it all behind. She could tear up the map on which she had drawn the location of the Pai Mesa. Perhaps she could even trust that Imiya would recover and be able to face his fate among his people without her help. It was tempting, but she knew that if she did walk away she would despise herself later. And there was also Baqui Iba…

She squared her shoulders. “You have called me a warrior, yet you do not treat me as one. I have asked to take responsibility for my acts, whatever that may entail. If the only way to do that is by becoming an initiated member of the Pai tribe, I will take that path.”

Eyes blinked. Lips parted. Pipes were taken from wizened mouths. Kesbe felt a certain
triumph.
They hadn’t expected this
! Even the Sun Chief looked taken aback.