Death Chants

"The Game of Cat and
Eagle" Copyright © 1987 by Craig Strete. First published in
In the Field of Fire
edited by
Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann. New York: Tor Books.

"As if Bloodied on a
Hunt Before Sleep" Copyright © 1987. First published in
Twilight Zone Magazine,
August
1987.

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strete,
Craig.

Death
chants.

1. Science fiction,
American.    2. Indians of North

America—Fiction.    I. Title. PS3569.T6935D4   
1988       813'.54      
87-33143

ISBN 0-385-23353-1
Copyright © 1988 by Craig Kee Strete

All Rights
Reserved

Printed in the
United States of America

First
Edition

With love to dear
dead Poek, whom I still love, and Timtim, who links I'm his mother, and to Irma, who made for me
a home I never had and is truly the center of my universe

Contents

Introduction:
Salvador Dali

Lives Far
Child

In the Belly of the
Death Mother

Another Horse of a
Different Technicolor

The Game of Cat and
Eagle

The Becalming of
Wind River's Horse

When Death Catcher
Paints the Wind

On a Journey with
Cold Friends: Novella

The Voice of a New
Instrument

So That Men Might
Not See

White Fox Talks
About the End of the World

As if Bloodied on a
Hunt Before Sleep

When Old Man Coyote
Sang the World into Being

Knowing Who's
Dead

The Fatal Joy of
Bound Woman

The Man Who Danced
with Wild Horses: Novella

HE IS AN AUTHOR OF
THE UNRESPECTABLE.

HIS WRITING
CONTAINS TWO GREAT LUSTS,

GENIUS AND
EVIL.

IT IS
HAUNTED

IT IS
NIGHTMARE.

IT IS ANOTHER
WORLD.

I CANNOT DESCRIBE
IT SO WELL WITH WORDS

AS I
COULD

WITH THE COLORS OF
MADNESS AND THE HUES

OF
OBSESSION.

THERE IS DALI IN
THIS WRITER. HIS CANVASSES

ARE
HERE,

STRETCHED BETWEEN
THE PAGES OF THIS

STRANGE MAN'S
BOOKS.

AS I READ, IN
BENEATH THE DIFFICULTY OF

TRANSLATION,
I

GET A SENSE OF
ALIEN THOUGHT, OF

AUTOMATISM IN
A

FRIGHTENING
SENSATION, AS IF NO MIND HAD

PUT THESE
WORDS

ON PAPER, AS IF
INSTEAD, IT HAD COME, FULLY

ARMED,
BY

SPONTANEOUS
COMBUSTION.

IT IS THE KIND OF
WRITING THAT IS

WONDERFUL AT
NIGHT.

IT IS BETRAYAL. IT
IS RARE AND TERRIBLE AND

DROLL.

IT ENGAGES THE EYE
AS IT EVISCERATES IT.

TO HEAR IT READ IS
TO BE SPLASHED WITH AN

UNKNOWN
BLOOD.

I CELEBRATE THIS
UNNOBLE SAVAGE WHOSE

WRITING TELLS
ME

THAT NIGHTMARE IS
REALISM.

I CELEBRATE
IT.

DESPITE MEETING
HIM FACE TO FACE, I REFUSE

TO
BELIEVE

THESE ARE THE
WORKS OF A YOUNG MAN.

THEY ARE TOO MUCH
LIKE THE MEMOIRS OF AN

OLD MAN
WHO

REMEMBERS THE
HORRORS OF LIFE AND FEELS

THE METAL
TEETH

OF DECAY EATING AT
HIS SKIN.

LIKE A NEW DREAM,
HIS WRITING SEIZES THE

MIND.

THE WRITINGS OF
THIS YOUNG MAN ARE

ÉCART
ABSOLOU.

BARCELONA,
SPAIN

SALVADOR DALI

"It was the
beatings," was all Lives Far would say, and she knelt down by the bed with the red and blue
Navaho blanket and wept.

"Seems to me, you
married a hard one," said Navana, her father. He sat cross-legged by the door of the hogan. His
hands were busy carving a small whistle out of elk bone.

"I don't mind the
beatings so much," said Lives Far, "but it is not good for my children to see. It shows them the
wrong path in life."

Navana watched her
with vague unease. Lives Far was five years old, just five, but she was a strange, strange
child.

Navana blew the
bone scrapings off the whistle and put it to his lips. He blew gently on it and it made a
pleasing birdlike trill.

Lives Far turned
and looked in his direction, her eyes bright­ening in spite of the tears.

He held it out to
her. "I made this for you, little one."

She came toward him
eagerly and took it from his hands. Her face was still wet with tears.

"Make it sing,
Lives Far," said Navana and his face lit with a brief hope.

She started to put
it to her lips, delight in her eyes, but some-thing stopped the delight and she became solemn and
her hands closed in a fist over the whistle.

"I'll keep it and
give it to my children," she said. "They are waiting for me outside."

Navana's second
wife, Winter Gatherer, stood in the doorway. She was of another tribe and her ways were sometimes
hard.

"That child must be
punished!" she said bitterly. "We have heard enough of her lies."

Navana put his hand
over the small child fist that held the elk bone whistle.

He smiled down at
the child with sadness in his eyes.

"My people teach
that lies are blackhearted and a child would be beaten if it talked like . . ." Winter Gatherer
started again.

Navana turned on
her angrily.

"I have heard
enough about your people and your ways! We do not beat our little ones! Always gentleness, always
respect and understanding, so I have been raised and so I will raise my children! Our way is
better."

"A stupid way to
raise children," she said. "But something will have to be done about her, if you're too cowardly
to beat her."

"Go outside and
play," Navana told the child.

"Yes. I've got
washing to do and corn to weed and hoe," said Lives Far. "And I better see to fixing supper for
Thomas or he'll beat me again."

She went outside,
moving slowly, like an old woman bent under the burdens of a lifetime.

At birth, Lives Far
was a child unlike other children. Her mother, Navana's first wife, slowly bleeding to death
under the birth blankets, had looked into the tiny red face and feared greatly what she saw. Her
own death, red and inevitable beneath the Pendleton blanket, did not scare her.

Death was an old
friend but the things she saw in her child's eyes were older than anything that ever moved in her
world.

When Navana had
come at last into the quickening room, he saw the obscene birds of birth and death perched on the
same withered branch of his living tree. His wife took his face in her hands when he bent down
over her. Gently she turned him away so that he might not look upon the face of the child at her
breast. For children at birth cannot hide themselves from the world until life is strong in their
bodies.

And she feared that
seeing the child for what it might be, he might wish to destroy it.

"I call this child,
Lives Far," she said speaking prophecy, and she kept Navana busy with her own death until the
child had taken enough of the world's wind into its body, enough living strength to hide its true
self. The old ones say such a happening is an evil birth, evil when the greedy child sucks the
life out of its own mother. But the child came into the world, evil or not, and was loved and
grew under Navana's nurturing wing.

Navana knew Lives
Far never played as other children played. She just sat in the sun and talked to people who were
not there.

Lives Far, so she
said, was married to a white man and had two children by him. His name was Thomas Morgan and he
drank and beat her and was evil. Yes, that was what she said. And she described him in great
detail, in a way no child of five could possibly know.

"Thomas burns with
drink and it burns his head inside, burns someplace deep until his hair no longer feels like
hair, but like a scalp of ashes.

"Poor Thomas," she
said and her child's voice seemed to forgive him everything. "The drink burns his tongue in the
roof of his mouth so the words of his war nightmares can't escape as he sleeps. It started not
just with his liking it, but his needing it, the drink, always the drink, because it is the water
of war and it made one forget to be afraid and promised other kinds of
forget-fulness."

Navana had felt
like screaming in the face of such solemn, straight-faced gibberish, if a part of him had not
been a little shocked by it, and a little frightened of it as well.

For though Navana
did not heed the words of the old ones, who would have seen this child, Lives Far, who took her
own mother out of this world, destroyed as an evil thing, still Navana was disturbed and uneasy
sometimes when the child was acting this way. He loved her with all his heart but his mind
sometimes saw shadows lurking all about her, and a darkness he could not fathom.

"But the
forgetfulness must have been too deep or not deep enough. The Thomas Morgan that I married never
came back from the war."

Her face was full
of sorrow. "He doesn't sleep with me any­more," she confided in a childish whisper. "I've begged
him, pleaded with him, but he won't touch me now. He just drinks now and sometimes beats me and
always, always, has night­mares. He used to be so sweet when he made love to me. Now he's a
stranger to my bed."

Coming from the
lips of a five-year-old, it was a tiny, almost mad horror.

Navana
brushed the elk bone shavings off his
lap.

Winter Gatherer
remained in the doorway, looking out at the squash garden. Her beauty was like a weapon, her
sharp tongue the point of her spear.

"She's just sitting
there like always, Navana, talking to her invisible family. She's head-sick," said Winter
Gatherer, finger­ing a beaded choker around her neck.

"She was always a
big-eyed child. Always in a dream," remem­bered Navana. "The sky is full of rabbits, yellow and
brown ones, she would tell me. Or fish are swimming in my ears, Fa­ther, make them
stop."

"Childish dreams
are one thing," said Winter Gatherer. "But these strange dreams have grown to truth in her mind.
She is like one possessed."

"Many were the
strange dreams I myself had as a child, but as time moved me down the path of life, those dreams
left me and new and proper ones came to take their place. So it will be with her, if we give her
time," said Navana, but there was very little hope in his voice as much as he wanted to believe
it.