Trail of Bones (10 page)

“It would give the other slaves bad ideas,
sir, if they see her doing that. Especially when they know she
deserves to be punished. What would the governor say if you allow
her such privilege?”

“The governor, I am sure, will want his
runaway well-mended when we hand her over. Even if she is
high-spirited. And frankly, Mr. Howard, as long as she can answer a
couple of questions about the mathematician Hypatia, and the
library at Alexandria, I am willing to risk whatever the governor
might say.”

Hypatia!

Mother.

Then maybe Jefferson President knows who I
really am after all.

And where I really belong.

Chapter Ten

Clyne: Spirit Mound

February 1804

“We have to get you out of here, before the
little people get us.” It’s North Wind Comes.

We are someplace dark. I can hear, but can’t
see well. And my leg hurts. I’m not sure why. If I ever get back to
Saurius Prime, I’m seeing the student nurse before I deliver any
findings.

“Is it awake now?”

That’s
not
North Wind Comes.

“He’s not an
it
.
He’s a good
spirit. A helpful vision.”

Click.
A new sound.

“Well, there’s little honor in killing him
like this, in the dark, when he can’t even see me. Can you heal
him? Get him moving again. Then, at least, it would be a hunt.”

Click. Click.

Who’s speaking? Why does my leg hurt so
much? I reach out… there’s blood on my leg limb. My blood.

This perhaps can’t wait for school
nurses.

This perhaps reminds me, I may never get
home at all.

Still feeling my
gra-baaked
limb, I
notice a
perpendicular part
of that lower leg that was never
there before. Sticking out. Like a bone.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“Be careful, Many Lights.”

“You’ve given him a name? A demon? A
name
?”

North Wind Comes doesn’t respond to the
other human mammal. “You are hurt, Many Lights. Crow’s Eye hit
you.”

A jabberstick! That’s a jabberstick in my
leg! It’s not a bone. I wonder if that qualifies as “good
news?”

“And I did a fairly dishonorable job of it.
Wounding, not killing.”
Click snkkk
.

So that’s Crow’s Eye in the darkness, next
to us.

“Personally, although I am literally at
pains to say it, I prefer a mere wound to the alternative.”

The clicking stops. “He speaks. You didn’t
tell me he speaks.”

“You didn’t ask.”

Click.
Now a spark follows the noise.
Click.
Another.
Click-click.
And another. Crow’s Eye
has been striking two rocks together. I can see that now, because
one of the sparks has caught in some straw and started a small
fire. He blows on it. The fire grows.

“I think we will have heat now.” As the fire
grows orange — citrus-colored and warm, though there’s little sweet
about any of this — I get a closer look at Crow’s Eye’s face. It is
brown-red like North Wind’s, somewhat like Thea’s, with very black
eyes, and a kind of scowl. But it’s still a young face, and the
attempt to hold on to that fierce look, regardless of what he may
be heart-experiencing underneath, makes him look like a youthful
Cacklaw rear guard trying a head fake on new opposition.

Thanks to the light from his fire, however,
I can now not merely feel, but
see
the jabberstick in my
leg.

North Wind points to it. “Your arrow, Crow’s
Eye.”

“Yes, North Wind, that is my arrow, sticking
out of your demon friend. I suppose, since we are trapped here, I
should just wait for him to die from blood loss and then drag him
to the village, like an old woman who has found a beached trout and
brings it back as if she’s a great hunter. Then again, we will be
lucky if an old woman finds us here at all and fetches help. My
life as a warrior is over before it has begun. Instead I will be
like Coyote, chasing my own tail, acting like a fool.”

“I always thought Coyote offered much
wisdom,” North Wind says. “In his own crazy way.”

“Then perhaps I should offer myself as an
assistant to a Mandan shaman-in-training, cheering up his patients
before he works his wonders.”

Crow’s Eye isn’t happy at all. You don’t
even need to hear his words. With just the small light we have, you
can see it in the way shadows move across his face.

“Crow’s Eye. Look around,” North Wind says.
He’s not happy either. “We can’t wait for old women, or young
girls, or the rest of your raiding party, or anybody else. We have
to get out of here now.”

Yes, we do. Because I have brought some
plasmechanical material to this world that has become infected, and
if left untended, it could make life even more unpredictable for
these mammals than they make it themselves.

I also have to find time, away from Crow’s
Eye, to warn my friend that the gift I thought I was giving him —
the gift of understanding, from the lingo-spot — may be doing
things to his body.

Or his mind.

But first there is the problem of the
jabberstick jutting out of my leg. And how we all got in here in
the first place.

“Thank you, yes,” I say, trying to mimic at
least a faint cheerfulness. “ My jumping limb is aching fiercely, I
have lost more blood than I am comfortable with sparing, and if you
could keep me awake, I’m sure I can guide one of your medical
practitioners through the proper care and suturing of Saurian
wounds.”

As the Saurian elders are fond of
saying
,
You must count to one before you reach two
.
No need to wait for a far-off school nurse or even the lucky old
woman that Crow’s Eye mentioned, who might be looking for us. I
will simply use the first-aid training I learned as a vacation-time
assistant in the play area for nestlings, back on Saurius Prime,
and guide one of these mammals in the true healing arts.

That is, I would if either them were paying
attention to me.

In the dim light, Crow’s Eye finds something
scattered on the ground that intrigues him, and he begins grabbing
it up by handfuls.

“Now do you believe me, North Wind? The
devils that live here are not as harmless as you would wish.”
Crow’s Eye clutches a fistful of raw bones. Some are bleached with
age. Others have been more recently gnawed.

The bones are everywhere. Bones and skulls
and dried bits of skin and fur. You’d think the Bloody Tendon Wars
had just been fought here. Except, most of these remains are
mammal.

I am the only injured Saurian.

“Perhaps, North Wind Comes, you should use
your shaman magic to get us out of here.”

North Wind doesn’t answer right away, so I
take the opportunity to ask what I think is a sensible question
under the circumstances:

“Mammal men, how did we get inside the
Spirit Mound?”

I’m feeling a bit strange, lightheaded.

Arrak-du.

Lost lands up ahead.

“It happened, Many Lights, right after we
ran into Crow’s Eye’s trap. The ice, the snow, had frozen over an
opening. Your jumping, and the horse’s stomping, caused great
cracks to appear. We might have escaped the cave-in had not Crow’s
Eye arrow hit you just before the collapse.”

“I had dismounted and was going to finish
you off myself,” Crow’s Eye adds. “Perhaps it’s still not such a
bad idea. I will find my way out of here and take this demon’s body
back to the Mandans, to let them see where their shamans draw their
power.”

“You misconstrue, war mammal,” I say,
attempting to gently correct him. “Any power North Wind has is his
own. Do you think you could cut this jabberstick out of my limb
now?”

In the firelight, I could see Crow’s Eye
staring at me in amazement. I had switched from speaking Mandan to
the particulars of the Hidatsa tongue. I don’t know if that was the
reason he was starting to look even more upset. Or perhaps it was
because I was asking him to undo his handiwork with the
jabberstick.

“I trust I must have blacked out during the
fall,” I say.

“Only briefly.” North Wind is working his
way over to me, now that he can see me. Perhaps as a means of
keeping Crow’s Eye at bay.

“Crow’s Eye, if we are in a trap set by
devils, then the dishonor of being caught so easily would scarcely
be offset by killing the lizard man.”

Crow’s Eye considers this observation, then
says, “Is that the only mind-trick you have, shaman-to-be? Trying
to use words to change my purpose?

“His blood,” North Wind adds, “will only
draw the devils to us.”

“But there are no devils. That’s just a
story for children and shamans. A warrior wouldn’t really believe
such things”

“You just spoke of them.” North Wind
says.

North Wind and Crow’s Eye continue their
debate. No one is paying much attention to my steady blood loss, or
worrying about the eventual effects of necrosis on my wounded
extremity.

Nor are they worried at all, as am I, that a
technology from another planet has been infected with a disease
from another era, which may affect their world far more than small
devils, diminutive spirit beings, or tribal rivalries between
jittery mammals.

I look around in the expanding firelight and
see better the remains around us. I can also see that while neither
of my two companions has to contend with protruding jabbersticks,
the fall into the void has been hard on their bodies as well.

“We need to leave this place,” North Wind
says, deciding that will end his half of the devil argument.

“Yes. Well, my horse is still up there, in
the world,” Crow’s Eye replies, pointing. “Outsmarting all of us by
avoiding this fall. Perhaps you could call him and he’ll fly down
to us.”

North Wind doesn’t answer him. There’s no
horse and no flying, but all of a sudden there’s considerable
movement, the flickers of many shadows, and breathing.

A lot of breathing.

Glinting just out of range of the firelight,
there are many pairs of eyes staring at us from the darkness
beyond. I don’t know if these are the devils that North Wind and
Crow’s Eye were arguing about.

But now we have company.

Chapter Eleven

Eli: Good Humor Island

September 1804

The last time I had a gun in my hand felt
like a lifetime ago. Or at least a couple of months. It was Clark’s
rifle, and he wanted me to shoot a buffalo.

The buffalo was shot, all right.

It turned out Floyd — Kentuck — was coming
up behind us, and he was firing, practically right over my
shoulder. It was a dangerous thing to do, but he was a good
aim.

Floyd’s dead now. Just like the buffalo. But
with Kentuck, it wasn’t a gun. He fell sick and died in August.

We’d been going upriver, sketching the
animals, counting the fish, pulling the boats, swatting the
mosquitoes. It took so long to get anywhere. How did people do
anything except stay home?

Were Thea and Clyne on journeys like this,
too?

“My stomach ain’t right,” Kentuck said to me
one afternoon.

“I think it’s all this meat,” I told him.
“It’s like being stuck on some crazy grownup fad diet.”

But it never got righter. He couldn’t keep
any food down and he kept shaking from a fever. This went on for a
couple weeks or so.

The last couple days, we’d stopped
completely to let him rest. And he just died… in the middle of the
night.

Me, Clark and a few of the others were
sitting up with him when it happened. “Here,” Kentuck said. He took
something from under his heavy shirt and tried to press it in my
hands. He didn’t have much strength. “For good luck.”

It looked like a really old, really falling
apart, softball of some kind. A leather softball. “What…?”

“Shhh.” Clark said. “Looks like he was
saving his old Fives ball.”

“‘Fives?’ What is…?”

But Clark held his finger to his lips again.
He didn’t want to use up the last of Kentuck’s strength telling me
about some old softball.

It was hard to think of Kentuck with no
strength. The same guy who always made jokes with me in the
keelboat, or showed me how to cut and skin an animal that’s been
shot.

That’s what we did with the buffalo he
killed. Since I was already eating buffalo meat (I still am — it’s
the main part of our diet now, and it still makes me run off to the
bushes sometimes), I decided that maybe I had to take some
responsibility… for my food. It didn’t come in some tidy package
from a store, so I couldn’t pretend that the “food” had once been
anything else but a living, breathing creature.

So when Kentuck had his big knife out that
day and asked if I wanted to help, I said yes. He was covered in
blood up to his elbow as he cut through the stringy white and pink
tendons that kept the “meat” — the young bison’s fat and tissue and
muscle — connected to its skin and fur.

“You can live all winter sometimes off’n one
well-dressed animal, if it’s big enough.”

“Dressed? I thought we were cutting it
up?”

Kentuck laughed. I’m not sure if he thought
I was making a joke, or if he understood I really didn’t know what
he meant. It turns out that dressing an animal
is
how you
cut up the meat, and how you save the really big pieces — whether
you smoke them or cover them in salt — for eating later. Sometimes
a lot later.

“Whatever state you said you were from, must
be a lot of funny people there.” Kentuck smiled. Did I tell him I
was lived in California? “Here.”

He handed me two big handfuls of… guts.
Guts, stomach, intestines, I’m not sure which. I almost passed out
right there, thinking we were going to eat all that. Then I
remembered that these were the parts the men usually threw into the
river.