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Authors: Mark London Williams

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…privates. There’s more oozy stuff and a
little of the baby’s hair. It has really blue skin, which looks
weird. How can a baby have blue skin?

I drop the bat and ball.

And then there’s a loud groan, and Sacagawea
slumps back, and I lose track of the head, and the baby’s still not
out. North Wind walks over to where Lewis is, but before he can
speak to him, LeBorgne steps out from one of the corners of the
room. I hadn’t even seen him. He spins North Wind around.

“He’s the one!” He points to North Wind for
the benefit of everyone else, but Sacagawea just moans again. “Let
him do some good now! He knows the lizard man! He will lead
us!”

Lewis looks around, stands up, and wipes his
hands.

North Wind isn’t sure what’s going on and
calls me over.

“I thought I was to help?” he says to me,
low, in Mandan.

“He wants to help deliver the baby,” I
explain to Lewis. “He’s the shaman.”

“I
know
who he is,” Lewis replies.
“But the labor is becalmed. The baby may be tangled in the
umbilical cord. Someone in here said that a rattlesnake’s rattle,
ground up and taken internally, might help the delivery. I never
heard of such a use, but I’m willing to try it.”

LeBorgne puts himself right in the middle of
the conversation, and switches into shout gear: “The lizard man
kept Crow’s Eye from becoming a warrior! He makes things happen
that aren’t supposed to happen! He’s the one to get!”

I turn to Lewis. “So how come he wants the,
um, ‘lizard man’ if what you really need is part of a
rattlesnake?”

“It was LeBorgne’s idea,” Lewis says in a
lowered voice. “At first he didn’t want North Wind in here, but as
soon as he saw him, he switched the snake talk to bigger game, and
kept mentioning the lizard man.”


He
should take us!” The Hidatsa
chief points angrily at North Wind. Sacagawea keeps making loud
noises. I bet an argument in the birth room is just about the last
thing she needs right now, but she keeps a firm grip on
Charbonneau’s hand, which is a good thing, ’cause he looks like
he’s about to jump out of his skin.

And then I see the women taking Sacagawea
and gently turning her over, so that she’s up on all fours, on her
hands and legs. She’s trying to push the baby out from a different
angle, and there’s that blue head again, and everything else. I
wonder if I’m blushing or if that’s just the smoke and grease
again. Who knew that a time-traveling baseball cap would lead to
all this?

“Does anyone think the lizard man can help?”
I turn to North Wind, mainly so I’ll have something — someone —else
to look at.

“They think his skin can. LeBorgne convinced
them that if a small rattler is good, a giant lizard is
better.”

“You mean—”

But LeBorgne answers the question for me:
“With the lizard man’s skin, the medicine between Hidatsa and
Mandan will be made right again!”

“They want to kill him,” North Wind tells
me.

I look at him. “But they don’t know where he
is. Only you do. Right?”

North Wind doesn’t speak.

“Right?”

But LeBorgne is full of answers. “And
because we’ve had the shaman tracked, we know where that boy was
heading!” He points at me. “We know the lizard man is hiding in the
Spirit Mound! A new hunt calls to our wintering bones! Who is with
me, to save this baby, and kill this wicked demigod?”

A cry goes up from a couple of the other
near LeBorgne, who whoops back at them. The women in the room hiss
back at him to be quite, but he ignores them and charges out, the
men following.

“What just happened?” Lewis asks me.

“I think I’m going back out there,” I tell
him. “I don’t have a choice. And I definitely won’t be alone.” I
turn to North Wind. “Are you coming with me?”

He nods.

“All this time, I was trying to protect
him,” North Wind says.

Sacagawea groans again. This isn’t what she
had in mind when she called for a shaman.

 

 

 

Chapter Sixteen

Clyne: Silver Throat

February 1805

I’ve made contact with another mammal
species here. Maybe I shouldn’t give up yet on the idea of getting
home and filing more extra-credit reports. Not because, in the
entire grand Cacklaw field of life, my own grades are important,
but because things are so routinely unpredictable here that Earth
Orange — and mammal culture — continue to cast doubt on every
established Saurian theory about the orderly progression of life,
and the ultimate purpose of evolution.

The other species I’m now in communication
with are called wolves. At least, that is how humans have named
them, and it is these wolves who have been living in the Spirit
Mound, in a kind of nest-community called a pack. Their tribal
leader is a matriarch called Silver Throat.

I am on a hunt with them now and remain
hopeful that soon I will see Eli.

After my seasons living with the pack and
healing up, I am also hopeful that my lower limb will again
experience full and true functionality.

They were wolf eyes that surrounded us last
winter in the dark.

 

“They have come to rescue their devil
brother!” Crow’s Eye shouted, looking into the orb-populated
shadows of the Spirit Mound. I gathered this meant Crow’s Eye had
suddenly become a believer in the stories about this place. Trauma
makes mammal minds very elastic. “Let us die bravely, North Wind!
Let us give our tribes a new tale to tell in snow season!”

And then he had his knife against my
throat.

“Why bother?” North Wind said, helpfully
pushing the knife away from my throat. “They won’t tell stories
about a shaman who could not protect a god-spirit.” He nodded
toward all the visiting eyes. “And we still don’t know what kinds
of stories
they
tell.”

Couldn’t either of my human companions smell
the deep woolly mammal scent that goes with the eyes that are
peering at us? Would it be up to me to make an introduction?

“Shamans talk too much.” The knife flashed
back in my direction, and this time, North Wind couldn’t stop it. I
rolled out of the way, even with the jabberstick in my limb and the
deep rumbus of pain in my leg. The blade just missed, and I started
to wonder if I would have to bite Crow’s Eye, or at least growl to
scare him off. As ridiculous as mammals are, I’ve never had to hurt
one. Yet.

“Crow’s Eye—”

But North Wind didn’t have a chance to
finish.

The eyes began a long, low music together. A
chorus. It reminded me of the Song of the Gurdlanger, a song cycle
chanted by the armored, horned Saurians who served as King Temm’s
guards, when the time came to bear his body away at last toward
Saurius Prime’s two falling suns.

Like those songs, the Spirit Mound music
captured both a sense of timelessness, of the eternal, and the
utter, fleeting swiftness with which all things pass. It was sweet
and sad all at once.

The howling, growling sounds must have
reminded North Wind and Crow’s Eye of something, too. They stopped
— Crow’s Eye forgot all about his blade and making a story out of
me — and looked with new appreciation at the eyes encircling
us.

One pair of eyes stepped into the pool of
flickering light. She was fur-covered, walking on four legs. Long
snout, inquisitive, intelligent face.

At first, I thought she was a dog, but the
spreading rumbus of pain in my limbs was wreaking havoc on my
taxonomy skills. She and her companions were larger than dogs. A
pair had been kept in the zoo in Alexandria, in Thea’s time.

The one who stepped forward was silver gray,
a female — and a leader. You could read it in her bearing. She
cocked her head at me, forming a question with no spoken language
whatsoever. Her eyes were fierce and filled with green fire. They
stayed locked on me when she spoke.

In the snow outside… we watched. You left a
substance that allows us… to understand the humans. And you.

There was some of the lingo-spot left
outside after my experiments! And it was on her now!

We could hear it… resonate. I tasted
some.

She’d ingested infected slow pox! My
laboratory methods were getting so sloppy I could be set back
several grade levels if I ever made back home.

“The substance you speak of… has become
tainted, transformed,” I said, overriding my self-aches to speak
up, so North Wind might hear me, too. “I would advise strongly
against ingesting anymore.”

It was a sad piece of advice to dispense on
a planet so in badly in need of good translation, like Earth
Orange. I looked at North Wind.

“I should have told you sooner, but
circumstances remained hopscotchy.”

“Is the talking-substance dangerous to me,
then?”

“I am hoping it is merely changed — but I
need to do more research.” The pain was getting the best of me. I
wanted to make a few good notes before passing out. “So… what kind
of mammal dances do you do?” I asked, not sure if that was the
right first question to ask a new species,

The gray fur’s eyes widened. She uncocked
her head and I looked at her face. I read acceptance and the merest
whiff of a deeply wise sense of humor there.

Dances? Some mammals we hunt and eat;
others we ignore; some we play with; others, lately come here, wish
us harm. Those two-leggeds—
she nodded toward North Wind and
Crow’s Eye—
call us “wolves.” My clan calls me Silver
Throat.

Another wolf with reddish fur came up and
growled something to Silver Throat. She answered the red-fur with a
soft series of growls, then turned back to me.
My daughter,
Birdjumper. She tells me not to ingest any more creations of yours
until you grow more sure of them. She reminds me to be wary. I need
no such reminders. But what kind of two-leg are you? You look
almost like a big fish.

 

That was my introduction to Silver Throat. I
drifted in and out of consciousness for a few days, and while North
Wind grew to accept our multi-mammal situation, Crow’s Eye did
not.

Both of them eventually left the Spirit
Mound, with the wolves’ blessings and the wolves’ guidance in
finding hidden passages to take them out.

I remained, in order to heal. The wolves,
for their part, would occasionally lick my wounds — especially
after the jabberstick was removed with a searingly painful yank by
Birdjumper — and Silver Throat and I would converse.

“Perhaps someday you could see my home, as
well.”

You mean, journey with you?

“Yes. You might be able to get a job
teaching philosophy.”

To humans? That might be difficult.

“To Saurians. You could come to Saurius
Prime.”

Where you fish-people live? But you say I
wouldn’t be allowed to hunt.

I loved talking to Silver Throat.
Conversations with her kept me alert and ready for debate class. I
enjoyed talking to North Wind Comes, of course, but I didn’t see
him as often. His people have placed confidence in him as a healer
and now have more need of him.

And of course, there is Eli. After his gift
of the orange, it was my wish to leap straight into the Mandan
village to greet him quite loudly with maximum friendship.

But Silver Throat, and later North Wind,
advised me that wouldn’t be safe. Eli is traveling with an
exploratory regiment that might wish to harm me out of pure
reflexive action. North Wind doesn’t feel his people are ready to
have me show up in his village.

But when I heard Eli had come looking for me
and nearly perished, I felt I must make contact with him soon.
After all, we have to find the time-vessel and find out what
effects mammal-borne disease is having on it. I fear ever greater
chaos within the human time stream the longer we are delayed.

And so I have agreed to come on one of the
wolf pack’s winter hunts. To strengthen myself, to catch a glimpse
of the village where Eli is, and formulate a
gra-baak
-proof
plan to rendezvous.

If you join us on the hunt,
Silver
Throat said to me,
you can share the meat.

If I start actively hunting mammals,
I replied,
I will be in even greater violation of every Saurian
agreement made since the end of the Bloody Tendon Wars. I’ve
already been living off the meat you’ve provided. An even more
severe appetite for flesh would create enormous social problems on
my home world. And furthermore, would be very bad manners here
among my hosts.

I had eaten bird bones when foraging on this
planet, but I dared not purse larger game. Especially involving my
host phylum.

There is a stray, solitary ungulate ahead of
us — an elk, I believe — separated from its herd. Silver Throat
watches while members of her pack surround it. Soon she will join
them to take down their prey.

Thankfully, the limp from the jabberstick
keeps me from being a more effective hunter.

Did you not say that returning to this other
home of yours is a matter of both distance… and time?

I nod.

But time only moves in a single
direction. There’s no going backwards, no matter how much we wish
it. That animal’s life will end in a few moments
.
She
nods toward the elk.
In its last moments, it will wish to undo
its end. But none of us can undo endings. The stream takes us
all.

“That’s why I need to find my ship. The
stream may be flooding in all directions, if we’re not
careful.”

A ship like the watercraft that humans
use?

“More like the aircraft that they will come
to use in their future.”

The humans will be able to move around by
air? That is very worrisome.

The hairs on the back of Silver Throat’s
neck have raised up, ever so slightly. But it doesn’t seem to be
caused by the consideration of airborne humans. Her nose twitches,
then she springs to all four feet, growling.

BOOK: Trail of Bones
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