Sky Coyote (22 page)

“To a baby? Don’t be silly, Coyote. He’d get so stoned, he’d never be right in the head again,” Moonflower chuckled. “Here, you just let an old woman who knows about these things see to him, eh? Come, poor little ugly baby, Old Woman Moonflower will bind you so you’ll grow up right!” She proceeded to bind Coyote’s penis to the cradle board, while he grimaced wildly in discomfort. “You have to tie them tight, that’s the secret!”

“I think you’re squishing his head too much—” gasped Coyote.

“Why, haven’t I raised more children and grandchildren than I can count? You may have sired a thousand little yipping brats, but you know nothing about them. Now you just keep that poor little creature tied up nice and tight, and he’ll be fine.” Moonflower drew her robe about her and left.

Coyote gestured frantically at Raccoon. “Take it off, take it off!” he begged.

Raccoon clasped his hands, looking befuddled. “But, Coyote, don’t you want your baby to grow up with a straight back?”

“It’s not a baby, you idiot!” Coyote growled. “It’s my penis, remember?”

Raccoon crossly crouched down and started untying the bindings. “First it’s a fishing spear, next it’s a baby. Really, Coyote, why you want to tell so many lies is beyond me! If you ask my opinion, I think we ought to call in Horned Owl.”

“All right! All right!” Coyote was twisting on the ground, pounding it with his fists, kicking his feet. “Anything!”

“All right, everybody?” Raccoon faced the audience. “Let’s see if we can find Horned Owl. Is he flying around up there in the night? Everybody crane your heads back and see.”

And while we were all staring up into the black night sky, past the fluttering banners at the million stars, there was a blinding flash of light from the whalebone doorway. All our heads snapped forward, and we saw a new figure standing there, wreathed in plumes of colored smoke.

It was Kupiuc again, wearing the astrologer priest’s feathered topknot with two big feathered horns. He had a big medicine bag at his belt, and whatever trick of makeup Lon Chaney would use to give his Phantom of the Opera horrible lidless eyes, Kupiuc had figured it out first. What a wide, glassy stare!

“Yes!” he announced. “It is I, Horned Owl, the powerful shaman! Is someone in need of my services?” And he spread his arms wide, so the folds of his feathered cloak spread out.

Raccoon bowed and scraped, rubbing his hands. “Oh, yes, please, Wise One! You see, Coyote here has broken his—”

“Nothing serious, Your Grace, I’ve just suffered a slight fracture of my seed beater,” interrupted Coyote, but Horned Owl drowned him out with a thunderous cry:

“Silence, dissimulator! By the position of the stars”—he turned his staring face to the sky—”and the augury of the sacred shells”—he threw a handful of clam shells on the ground, leaped into a crouch over them, and peered down intently—”I can see it is a penis and not a seed beater that has been broken!”

“All right.” Coyote lay down flat and dejected. “It’s useless to try to hide anything from a clever and powerful creature like you. I woke up this morning and found it had died in the night. I must have rolled over on it and suffocated it by accident.”

Horned Owl sprang to his feet. “The sacred shells tell me that you yourself assaulted your defenseless member!”

“Oh no!” Raccoon threw up his hands in horror.

Coyote began to weep loudly. “It’s true,” he sniveled. “I struck it in anger, and now it’s
deeaad!
Oh, please, great and ingenious healer, bring it back to life! Don’t let my poor flute go tuneless the rest of my days—”

Horned Owl flung out his hands, fingers crooked like claws. “I can alleviate your distress, but an injury this serious requires tremendous effort! The very patch of universe we occupy at this moment in time must be realigned with the heavenly bodies!”

“Oh, my!” said Raccoon breathlessly.

“And so I must have SILENCE while I perform the sacred dance to manipulate time, space, and the material plane!” Horned Owl raised his hands, and he had silence, all right. Then the flutes and rattles began, and the action of the play stopped while he performed the sacred dance.

It was a bravura display of the kantap’s secret special-effects craft. Horned Owl paced slowly. He stamped, and weird lights shone. Globes of fire came down and spun in the air like planets, scattering sparks as they rotated. Over beyond the sacred enclosure, spectral figures of gauze or smoke rose pale into the night, and the spooky music led them in a counterpointing dance. All very mysterious and scary. By coincidence, it was during this part that I picked up a sudden signal from somewhere out in the night, a strong flash of nearly hysterical rage and terror. Who was it? None of my Chumash, I could tell that much. I saw other immortals turning their heads in puzzlement.

Security?
I sent to our big silent guys, invisible in the trees.

Acknowledged
.

Did you bear that
?

Affirmative. Investigating. Beginning perimeter sweep now
.

Okay. Thanks
.

And that was all. Meanwhile Horned Owl had made green
flames rise in the central fire, and little things popped and chattered like ghosts speaking. The dance drew to a close with Horned Owl striking a dramatic pose.

“Unworthy creature,” he said, “the spirits have spoken to me. In your vile act of self-abuse, you have unbalanced your own cosmic order! Your interior self is blocked. Its channels cannot flow, because of all the gross matter backed up there! Or, to put the matter plainly—”

“He’s full of shit?” guessed Raccoon.

“It is so!” Horned Owl gave a dramatic leap. “And the spirits have therefore decreed that Coyote must have”—out through the whalebone doorway came bent figures carrying an enormous agave trunk with a wooden nozzle at one end—”an enema!” He seized it from them and brandished it aloft.

Coyote sat straight up as the audience rocked with laughter. “I’m feeling much better, suddenly!” he said.

“Silence!” shouted Horned Owl. “Your masculine apparatus yet lies lifeless before you!”

“No, really, he’s fine now!” Coyote held up the limp head and waggled it to and fro. “See? He’s standing up and waving hello! Complete recovery! Miraculous revival! Your lovely dancing must have done it, Your Reverence! What a genius you are!”

“Come now, it’s for your own good, after all,” scolded Raccoon.

“You think it’s so great,
you
have the enema!” cried Coyote. He got up on all fours to flee; but Raccoon caught hold of his tail, and in a single flowing gesture Horned Owl pretended to ram the nozzle where it would do the most good.

“Whoops,” quavered Coyote, frozen in midflight.

Horned Owl pulled the probe back, and Raccoon let go of Coyote’s tail. Yelping, Coyote began to race around in circles, dragging himself along on his buttocks at unbelievable speed.

“Is it supposed to have that sort of effect on him?” inquired Raccoon worriedly.

“In extreme conditions, the reaction is extreme,” stated Horned Owl. “But even now I can sense that his channels have begun to flow.”

The rudest noises now came from the musicians. Coyote pulled up sharp and began to flip and spin on his back like a break-dancer. “Gotta go, gotta go,” he yipped. “Look out, everybody!”

He backed up to the whalebone arch. “Drop and cover your eyes!” cried Horned Owl. “Here it comes!”

With an agonized howl, Coyote fell forward on his face. From behind him a jet of flame shot up, and then some unseen device belched forth a fireball that rose and exploded. When we opened our eyes, we beheld Coyote with his tail on fire, rolling and whimpering. A front-row toddler hid his face in his mother’s lap, wailing in terror. She rocked him but could not stop laughing.

“I bet he feels better now,” said Raccoon.

“Ow ow ow! Oh, my poor tail!” screeched Coyote.

Horned Owl accepted a woven pail of water from one of the crouching figures and doused Coyote’s tail. “Now then, Coyote, how do you feel?” he asked.

“I wish I was dead,” whined Coyote, where he lay panting on his side in a puddle of water.

“And serve you right, too!” yelled his penis, jumping up between his legs. Raccoon clapped his hands.

“Hooray! Hooray! Coyote’s penis is alive again! Let’s all dance and rejoice!”

He began to do a little hopping dance of triumph, in which Horned Owl joined; the musicians struck up a lively syncopated air; and out came Moonflower, and the seals, and the various bent-over creatures that had facilitated the stage business. At last
even Coyote struggled wearily to his feet, and they all did the Chumash equivalent of the Bergomask dance, with Coyote’s penis bobbing along merrily.

We cheered and cheered. And had they known, those hardworking kantap guys, that cameras filmed them that night, and the whole bawdy, silly, terrifying show would be watched by scholars and analyzed long after they were dust, would they have been proud? In a way it was immortality, and yet I wondered if it would be the same watching the show in cold daylight, on a gray screen in a clean room. You wouldn’t have the stars overhead, or the sound of the wind in the banners and the oak leaves, or the smell of wood smoke. And you wouldn’t
know
the players, you wouldn’t be thinking, Hey, there’s old Nutku, there’s Kaxiwalic, there’s the rest of them, and the firelight bright on the delighted faces of the old people and the young people. It’d be
like somebody else’s family pictures, meaningless to your heart, and the jokes wouldn’t be half as funny. We save so much for those future mortals, we preserve so much heritage they would otherwise lose; but in the end, maybe we can’t really give it back to them. Not the part that matters, anyway.

Not that I was thinking anything so gloomy as I congratulated the performers afterward, standing around laughing outside the entrance to the sacred enclosure as the audience staggered away through the night to their beds—some to lie down on furs in tule houses and some on shaped foam in modular cells. A couple of mood-elevating substances were passed around, of which I partook like a regular guy, though they had no effect on me—other than maybe to paint a more brightly colored mental snapshot of Kaxiwalic half out of costume, laughing, his face shining in the firelight, or Nutku flouncing around and waving his wig, talking to it in his gravelly baritone.

I felt at home. When you’re an old, old immortal, you’ve long since learned to make your home inside your unbreakable skull. You’ve learned to accept that the simpler time, the better time, the long-gone faces won’t ever come back. So you make a village in your head. And that’s where it’s always that good time, with your people telling jokes beside the fire, with everybody happy and everything all right.

But warming yourself by an image of a fire doesn’t satisfy when you see a real fire burning, when you have a chance to creep close to it and feel some real warmth for the first time in longer than you want to remember. It wasn’t really my fire; but for a little while that evening it had almost been. My village and my dead were almost there with me again.

Anyway, eventually we looked around and realized that nearly everybody else had gone, except for one or two chat-happy anthropologists who’d found insomniac Chumash to talk to. So I
made my farewells for the night and set off down the canyon trail that wound away to the sea.

It was late. Old stars had swung around to stare down disapprovingly at us unfamiliar wanderers in the night. I scanned and picked up the perimeter guard making an orderly retreat through the trees, and a long uneven string of Old Ones winding their way back to the base along the trail.

In fact… there were a couple of operatives up ahead, formless moving shadows by starlight unless you looked at them in infrared, when they became Mendoza and MacCool. They were going slowly because she was picking her way with finicky care. I could hear them, too. MacCool was saying:

“You know, what you want to do is ask one of the Indians to make you a pair of tule sandals. Then you can just stride along without worrying about rocks and thorns.”

“Thank you, but I’m all right.” I knew the expression on Mendoza’s face without seeing it.

“No, really, they’re happy to do it. Jacqueline got a pair, and they’re quite well made, ought to last for years! Better than you’d get in shops.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll ask for you, if you’d rather not talk to them.”

“We’ll see. Wasn’t that a wonderful show tonight?”

“Best I’ve seen in centuries,” he agreed. “But, can you imagine what our lords and masters would have made of it?” He laughed, and Mendoza chuckled along with him.

“I daresay they’d be horrified,” she said. “At least the ignorant prudes they assigned to run this mission would be.”

“Too right!” His amusement faded. “If the Company officers are the benevolent and all-knowing people we’ve always been told they are, why do they send a bunch of idiots to run a mission as
important as this one is supposed to be? Tell me that. Rude idiots, too. If any of them had gone in to make contact with the Chumash, they’d have been massacred.”

I heard Mendoza sigh. “That’s why they had us do it, MacCool.”

“Why, of course. We’re their slaves, the builders of their empire, the ones who go in and do the hard things. Now that I’m actually seeing the inhabitants of the future, it’s obvious to me why we were created!”