Warzone: Nemesis: A Novel of Mars (2 page)

Lo-Bin was dying but could still move her head. “Captain Ik-tah is dead, and most of the crew are either dead or unconscious. I love you, Rik.” The death rattle in her throat was the only audible sound before her body stiffened and then relaxed as she took her last breath.

One by one the telepathic moans and cries grew silent. Rik-Bar’s duty was to destroy the vessel. The shame of his failure eclipse his grief over the death of Lo-Bin. Waves of intense pain from his internal injuries washed over him while he waited to die alone.

TWO HOURS EARLIER

“Good morning, sleepy head. By the time you wash up, breakfast will be ready.”

Twelve-year old Benjamin Begay rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His mother was singing softly to the music of the sizzling Navajo fry bread cooking in the cast-iron pan on her wood stove. The smell of sweet piñon sap his mother used to start the morning fire perfumed the air, but it was the fragrant aroma of the frying bread that moved the boy into action.

“Yes, mamma.” Ben stretched and hastily threw on his clothes. The cool water from the rain barrel felt good on his face, and he drank in the beauty of the summer dawn. The boy was starved and he made short work of the fry bread and warm sheep milk. He liked eating breakfast at home; it tasted a lot better than anything they served at the mission school. His mother would feed his two little sisters breakfast as soon as he finished eating and was on his way to the grazing lease.

Ben was born into the Coyote Pass People and born for the Bitter Water People. His maternal grandfather was from the Towering House Clan, and his paternal grandfather was from the Water Flows Together People. Before the white men put them on a reservation and sent them to school, Navajos only had one name, and were identified by their matrilineal family line. It was not Navajo custom to call the family by the husband’s name, but adapting to the white world under the reservation brought changes. As a result of those changes, all children of the same family were given patriarchal last names, often created by the white men that taught school. Therefore Ben was called after his father’s last name after the custom of the white man, Begay, and still identified with his mother’s clan, the Coyote Pass People. His father, Henry Begay was presently working away from home, breaking horses for a white rancher in Colorado. Ben’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Yazzie, had died from cancer after breathing the dust in the uranium mine he had worked in for twenty years.

Ben’s job was to herd the male goats and sheep away from the female flock, so mating didn’t result in winter births. The male goats and sheep were in a sheep pen outside of the hogan. Their sheepdogs Max and Betty greeted him with wet tongues and wagging tails, in anticipation of breakfast and another day of adventure on the mountain.

After feeding the dogs, Ben greeted Dawn Boy with a song and blessed the day with corn pollen from the medicine jish hanging from a leather thong around his neck, and a pinch of corn meal from his mother’s kitchen. Bucks and rams were harder to herd than the female flock, but he had proved time and again to his uncle that he could handle it. Besides, Max and Betty would help with herding the flock and keeping away the coyotes. Navajos didn’t keep dogs as pets; they kept them to help tend their flocks. To Navajos, sheep was life, woven tightly into the tapestry of their lives. Tending their herds was the way young Navajo children learned grown-up responsibilities. The meat from the flock fed them, and the women spent painstaking hours weaving rugs, blankets and clothing from wool and goat hair.

The times were struggling to change them from stock herders to something else. The Navajos were caught in changing times with no vision of the future. Ben had already spent one year at the boarding school run by Baptist missionaries and would be returning in the fall. He was a handsome and good-natured boy, in good health with dark skin and eyes, thick black hair and high cheekbones.

Councilwoman Annie Dodge Wauneka had convinced Mary Yazzie, his grandmother, that it would keep tuberculosis and pneumonia away if they didn’t sleep on the earth floor of the hogans. Ben’s uncle George Etsitty, in compliance with his mother-in-law’s wishes, bought each of them a cot from the army surplus store in Farmington. In Navajo culture, the matriarch is in charge.

The sheep pen had four-inch diameter piñon poles that served as a gate. Ben slid the poles to open the gate and released the male goats and rams. He picked up his staff, lunch bag, water bottle and flute as he bade his uncle and aunt goodbye. He and the dogs headed for the pasture on the family grazing permit where he would keep the male flock today. Uncle George’s two daughters, Ophelia and Esther, would take the female flock to another pasture after he left. The girls were quite capable and Uncle George’s dogs Skip and Millie were more than able to help them guard the flock.

It was the cool of the morning, and the damp soil was cool beneath the feet of the young boy. A “male” rain had occurred in the night and cooled everything off, and settled all of the dust, but would be forgotten by late morning. Its arrival was fast, very noisy and superficial, yielding no permanent benefit, rushing quickly down the dry washes without the ground soaking up much. It contrasted with what the Navajo people called the “female rain,” which was slow and gentle, lasting a while and soaking into the ground, giving life.

The morning smelled of the perfume last night’s shower left behind. Ben drank it in, thinking it was good to be alive.

Usually Ben walked along with the sheep and goats in the morning, and rode back on a tame ram. Today he was feeling playful on the way out to pasture. Besides, the patch of blue grama grass he would lead the sheep to this morning was at the same elevation, just south of them, so his ram wouldn’t fall with him on its back. He grabbed the hair on the back of the neck of the most docile of the big rams and hiked his leg over for a ride, laughing as he rode him down the trail.

He sang a traditional song of the Navajo shepherd children.

“Na’nishkaadgo ch’éédisháágo, deenísts’aa’ga’ yiistso’

Áádóó tóó shi naaldlooshgo bee na’nishkaadgo é’é’áá

Ná’níshka’ go deenísts’aa’ga’ honishchingo bee shénálkah

Sh££’ yówe danidii’nííné dashiníígo shich’anídahashkee.”

Translated into English…

When I herd the sheep and become tired,

It is discovered that I rode the ram because I stink,

And they scold me when I return home.

Ben was happy to tend the male flock in the summer. His uncle was full of the summer hogan stories of the Navajo people, and he knew of the outside world and spoke of it sometimes. But some stories of the Diné were only supposed to be told in the winter, and Ben was always away at boarding school then. Like all of the children sent to boarding schools run by white people, he was learning to read and write but only about half of his culture.

His uncle’s name was George Etsitty, and was married to Ben’s mother’s older sister, Elsie Mae. They had two twin girls, age eleven, and a baby boy. He had served with honor in the Fourth Marine Division in some far away place called Japan, but he never spoke of what he did there. He did, however, talk of great oceans of water as far as the eye could see and beyond, flying machines that took men above the clouds and lands that were green and wet. Uncle George spoke of travelling on boats and planes, which gave wings to young Ben’s imagination.

The only bilagaana (white men) Ben had ever seen were the teachers at the Baptist school he boarded in, but his uncle said they were as many as the stars in the sky, and more strange races in far away places.

It seem strange to Ben that many of the Navajo men went to war, yet when they returned, none of them had the cleansing ceremonies—the Enemy Way or Ghost Way chant—done for them by a hataalii. (Navajo holy man) To do so would mean they would have to say what they’d been doing, and none of them would. Instead, these men remained without being returned to
hozho
, not to be in harmony or to walk in beauty, not quite being whole. His aunt told him once she thought it had something to do with the bilagaana.

Ben moved the sheep and goats through the piñon-juniper woodlands at an elevation of eight thousand feet to the patch of grass where he would graze his sheep this morning. A humming noise was moving from higher elevations toward the stand of grass where he was moving his flock.

He arrived at the grass field to the excited barking of the dogs and the noises of his unsettled flock. The intensity of the humming increased to nearly intolerable levels as a large spherical object made of metal came crashing through the branches of the juniper trees surrounding the grass field, settling down hard on the grass which had been meant for the flock’s morning grazing. The dogs responded to the intruder by sounding their
threat alarm
with short, low-pitched sounding barks, standing their ground between the object and the flock. Some of the goats had gone back down the trail, but the sheep stayed put and looked confused.
Sheep are real stupid,
thought Ben. In his young life he’d never seen anything like this. Ben approached the vessel, the dogs stayed close by his side, showing their teeth and growling. The growling increased in intensity, and the hair on their backs stood straight up as they approached the vessel. Ben shared the dog’s distrust for the object—his heart pounded in his chest like a runaway horse and every nerve in his body was on high alert. He cautiously approached the vessel with his two guards and his staff in hand. The vessel had a door slightly ajar, so Ben peered inside.

His eyes met Rick-Bar’s, who was barely still alive. The ship’s first officer gazed into the young Earth man’s eyes with his pain-filled yellow eyes, and recognized that he had a good heart.

“Yá’át’ééh,” the sky traveler greeted him in Navajo. Or did he? His lips never moved. Bluish blood trickled down the being’s mouth. Had he truly spoken to him, or was Ben dreaming? If he was speaking Navajo and was not one of the Diné, was he Yei? (a god). Ben remembered his manners.

Yá’át’ééh,” the boy answered.

The being was dying and was greatly out of harmony. He shared his burden with the boy, not unlike a parishioner making his confession to his priest. This sky traveler was in great pain, but his tears were for his dead wife and the shame of failing to do his duty.

Ben felt empathy for the poor alien. The dying first officer felt that empathy, and it gave him comfort and courage to greet death. Ben’s eyes remained fixed on Rik-Bar’s until the clear yellow eyes glazed over and stared into the void, unseeing. Ben decided that he was not a god, for everyone knew that gods did not die.

Ben did not have any answers concerning who this was. Neither the hogan stories nor the Christian school stories explained this. He found himself in conflict concerning his life view but strangely in harmony. His comforting of the sky traveler while he died gave him a personal involvement that transcended his conflict about his life’s view. He would sort it all out later. He came to himself and then remembered the sheep.

The boy’s first responsibility was the flock, so he got the dogs to break off from the object and led the flock back home. He would have to take them north of the family’s hogans, and he would stop by and tell his
little father
, as maternal uncles were called.

Arriving at his aunt’s hogan, he found his uncle preparing to ride his sorrel mare down the mountain to Sheep Springs to trade for some needed supplies.

“Why have you returned?” George Etsitty thought the boy had run into some predators and decided to come back to go north, beyond where his cousins were tending the female flock. If the dogs were not sufficient to drive them off, he knew he might have to take his rifle and go back.

“Uncle! You have to come see this!” he breathlessly replied.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like this, it was flying and fell to the ground. There are beings in it, and they are all dead. I got there just in time for one of the beings to talk to my spirit as he died.”

“Beings? You spoke with one of them”

“Yes, Uncle. He was greatly out of harmony. I stayed with him until he died.”

“What did he say?”

“He felt ashamed and was crying for his wife.”

“Was he in a hogan?”

“Perhaps. I do not know what their hogans look like.”

“Did you enter that dwelling?”

“No, Uncle.”

“Tell me about the beings.”

“They’re not Navajo, human, or animal. Could be skin walkers or Yei Bechei.”

George studied the boy carefully. Ben was not a fearful boy. He’d seen him hold off black bears and coyotes with nothing more than a staff and two dogs. Whatever he found disturbed him, but strangely, he did not appear out of harmony.

“Put the flock back in the pen and we’ll go look.”

The flock hadn’t been grazing yet, but Ben put a handful of corn in a bucket and placed it in the backside of the pen. When the goats saw it, they went in and the sheep blindly followed. Ben put the pole gate back up and joined his uncle.

His uncle considered it for a moment and decided it was probably a helicopter crash from the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, or one of the other government agencies. He climbed into the saddle of his horse, and with one motion pulled Ben up into the saddle behind him.