At the End of Babel (3 page)

“Neither is speaking in Keresan.”

“Bad enough to do that. But to do the dance.… You know what they did, don't you? The lancers? My husband wanted to dance with the others, with all the defiant ones. He came out here with them. To rediscover his ancestors, he said. He died with them that day.”

Even from several meters away, Tabitha could see the new expressions of emotion passing over Joseph's face. She ignored them. “I'm not asking for you to help,” she said. “But I won't lie to one of our people. I'm going to perform the dance.”

“One of what people? Who? This man here? Me? Joseph? Your ‘people' is the same as anyone else's now. It's the law.”

“Not for me,” Tabitha said.

“Then you're alone. And you'll die like the rest of them. Then what will have become of your
people?
Nothing but a few genetic quirks like us, absorbed soon enough. Maybe a troupe of half-breeds who fake dances for tourists in Santa Fe between night gigs at the poker tables. Some old crones making beaded necklaces to sell on street corners. Nothing more.” The woman turned away from Tabitha. She began to walk back toward Joseph and the building. “Dance. Die. Take your words with you,
sister.
No one will speak them when you're gone.”

*   *   *

The story was well known to Tabitha's people: how, in the winter of 1599, Spanish troops had come to Acoma, almost one hundred of them strong in their steel, to capture what they called the Sky City.

The Acomans went to the edge of their mesa when they arrived. They hurled stones and launched arrows at the Spaniards one hundred meters below. Yet the invaders climbed. Up and up.

When the Spaniards reached the top, they leveled a cannon at the Acomans. They filled it with small stones and began to fire. To the people, it was as if Father Thunder himself had turned against them, spewing the bone-rock of the life-giving Earth into their flesh, ripping and breaking. Eight hundred of them died that day, and their city was turned to ruin. Of those taken alive, all males over the age of twelve were made twenty-year slaves. Those older than twenty-five had their right feet cut off. Some few of the dispersed managed to return over the years. They rebuilt the pueblo. They returned to sing to the Mother, to beg for her return.

It had taken the Spaniards three days to fight their way to the top. It took her and Red Rabbit less than three hours.

Of course, it was easier now. When the Spaniards came, the only ways up were the steep stairways, hand-cut into the sandstone surfaces of the mesa walls. But twentieth-century ingenuity had seen fit to cut a road to the top, to what was then the oldest continually inhabited community in the United States.

At the top, she and her guide found what was left of the pueblo that those who'd returned had built. First was the church, the old mission of San Esteban Rey. It had been a tourist attraction once. Now it stood derelict, fiercely ravaged by time. The twin towers flanking the nave were broken, crumbled away to stubs rising above the wind-scarred roofline. Most of the windows were missing. Hard spring rains had carved great gouges into its plastered facing, and the series of steps leading to the gaping hole where once its oaken doors had stood were worn to a jaggedly rounded slope. But the church still stood. Tabitha didn't know if that should mean something or not.

She pulled a small bag tied with sinew string from the pouch at her side. She felt the hard plastic inside, then tossed it to Red Rabbit.

He looked at it. “You're done?”

“I'll dance. And I'll sing. For the memory. But, yes, I'm done. You've done exactly what I asked you to do. For that, my thanks. And an extra payment.”

Red Rabbit opened the bag with his calloused fingers. He whistled. “More than a little extra,” he said.

Tabitha shrugged. She wouldn't need it anymore. One way or another.

“You sure I can't do anything more?”

“You've done plenty,” she said.

She walked alone into the crumbled labyrinth of Acoma.

*   *   *

The rest of the pueblo hadn't fared as well as the church. Much of it had been ruins even in Tabitha's youth, when only a few holdout families lived on the mesa. But after the killings, after the skiffs were airborne once more, the lancers had begun the work for which they were so aptly named: they'd sent charged particles down from their cannons, slashing furrows across the summit and blasting holes through to the bedrock. There'd been no reason for the desecration. The lancers had searched the pueblo on foot. Tabitha suspected it was merely target practice for the men. Slaughtering traitorous Indians hadn't been enough fun for their day.

The destruction that the lancers had begun was taken up by the elements. The scars they'd ripped through buildings had further eroded over the years, the wounds becoming gaping open sores. Dozens of structures had collapsed to rubble that turned the streets of the old town into a maze. Tabitha could see that as many more were on the brink of failure.

Only the
kaach
remained as it did in her memories. Where she'd hidden in her youth. The place from which she'd watched her father die, watched his murderer absently wipe a splattering of gore from his hand as he walked back toward his waiting skiff and the sky. The building looked as if the weather had never touched it. Even the ladder protruding through the opening in its roof seemed solid—though she didn't attempt to climb it yet.
Maybe after the dance,
she thought.
Father was going to pray after the dance.

She summoned memories as she wandered through the ruined pueblo. Soon, she could almost hear the laughter of old women, see the sad eyes of young men. She could almost step to the shake-crack-shake of rattles keeping time to the beat of a stretched-skin drum. She could almost smell the scents of kettles that steamed with chiles, corn, and shredded meat.

She summoned them until she was with them, until the ghosts of the forgotten swarmed about her. Words. Rhythms. Voices. Drums. And when she found the central square where her father had died, she closed her eyes and fell away into a world that she alone could know—dancing in circles, like a dream-thief, through the red dust and mud-stone rubble, turning on isles of sand.

The Great Silence. Alone.

*   *   *

When it was done, when her father's dance was complete, Tabitha Hoarse Raven stood at the edge of a darkening sky, listening for the voices of her gods. The evening wind ran like wild horses up the cracked face of the mesa, smoothing her loose garments against the front of her body, molding them to the contours of her arms and legs. It flowed over and around her sweat-slicked skin like rushing, rising water—spreading her long black hair into tendrils of crow-night that reached with waving, furtive grasps for the relative security of the shattered pueblo behind her. She breathed deep in her exhaustion.

Voices should have been carried upon that wind, sounds swept up from the plains: the laughter of children weaving through the brush, heading for the steep and crooked stairways with rabbits over their shoulders and baskets full of corn; the chatterings of women and their clay jars, porting water; the lower tones of the men on watch, calling across the rocks along the way.…

No more. She heard nothing of the world beyond the echoed cries of a lone eagle balancing on split-tip wings and floating wide against the deepest blue of the sky. She saw nothing of the world beyond the light of the sun, lowering to stone reaches stained watermelon and blood red.

Tabitha heard nothing. She saw nothing. And she was not surprised.

Her gods were dead, too.

Darkness approached from the east. Far out to the west, where vacant pueblos slumbered in silent canyons, the sun seemed to hesitate, to hover in expectation of night. Brilliant swaths of red-yellow-turning-blue layered ribbons upon the sky.

“Come back to us, Moon,” Tabitha said, expecting the returned silence. “Bring us life. Bring us rain.
Za'tse katch, Tsichtinako.
”

She wondered what her grandfather had expected when he'd come to this reach and prayed, too—that last time, just five years after Gray Feather was killed for dancing, for singing an outlawed language. She wondered if it was when he had heard nothing that he jumped. Like the two women of Kadzima
.
Sudden death before starvation.

Tabitha looked down toward the base of the cliff as if she were tracing his fall with her gaze. The shadows were already thick down there, slow-moving in silence.

Tabitha slipped a single gray-and-red goose feather from the long leather pouch at her side. She smoothed it to a point, then stretched her arm out into the great void of air and wind and sound and sight and scent and possibility and used the feather-edge to trace the sign of the Spider across the plains far below her.

A good-bye.

And in that moment, from somewhere in the distance, from somewhere beyond the horizon to the west, she heard a rumbling sound. The waking of an angry god.

*   *   *

Tabitha turned at the throaty sound of the approaching skiff. It was coming down behind her, kicking the sun-dried clay into clouds of choking dust that blurred away the fading adobe walls. Lights flashed. Another skiff circled loudly overhead.

Doors opened. A ramp crashed. Even through the sudden haze of backlit dust-fog, she could see the dark helmets of the lancers making their way through and around the pueblo. Surrounding her. Some of them were already in place, already aiming.

Tabitha looked away from them, her gaze sweeping out to the horizon, where billow-black clouds rose up from the dry canyons to meet and swallow the setting sun.

To swallow them all.

*   *   *

Tabitha's arms were outstretched to the void. Feather in hand. Visions of Great Eagle swirled behind her eyes. But a gust of wind pushed back against her. She felt the wind, and she knew it for what it was.

She stepped back from the edge, opening her eyes as she turned to look at the gathered lancers.
“Za'tse katch, Tsichtinako,”
she said to them.

There was an officer among them, standing nearest the ramp. He stepped forward into the cleared, dry dust between the flechemuskets and the condemned. He was wearing a gray-to-black uniform emblazoned with two bars that attested to his good service to the state. A captain. His hair was close-cropped, peppered gray. His grin was full of vanity and loathing pride. He held a d-reader in his hand and he lifted it up. “Ms. Hoarse Raven, yes?”

Tabitha looked around at the flechemuskets, most of them pointed at her head. She glanced back over her shoulder to the west. Clouds were moving fast across the sky, carried on the wind. Already the first reaches of them stretched overhead.
“Ha, diya hatch,”
she said to the captain.

He blinked at her, caught off guard for a moment, before he smiled. “Then I suppose you're admitting guilt.”

“Ha,”
she said.

“You shouldn't have come back here,” the captain said. “Not on the anniversary with the moon and all, especially.”

Tabitha shrugged.
“Sa'ma.”

The captain smirked, then keyed a button on the d-reader as if he was initiating an injection. A part of Tabitha, a small and shrinking part, thought it unfortunate that a recording was used these days. She would've preferred the personal touch of a reading.

“One language, one people,” the d-reader said, its disembodied voice deep with authority.

Tabitha stood in half-amused silence, listening to the litany. Halfway through, great raindrops began to fall to the parched earth, impacting like soft bullets, pounding out little craters in the dust. Father's tears, falling to Mother.

Some of the lancers looked upward. Tabitha did not. She was watching the walls of the pueblo behind them, where the blur of dusk was turning to sharp shadow and light as the moon came up and shone its light beneath the storm. She needed to raise her voice to be heard over the d-reader.
“Ta'-u-atch,”
she announced.

Only the captain was listening, and he didn't care. He didn't understand.

The water was cold as it soaked into her linen garments, but at the same time, it felt good. It felt right. Thunder rolled in the depths of the clouds thickening overhead, the low growl of Black Bear Mother protecting her cubs. Tabitha felt it vibrate around her ribs. She felt its tone quickening in her chest.

At last, she looked up through the drops of rain into the dark and churning clouds that had gathered over the mesa. The lights of the circling skiff looked obscene against the belly of the storm.
“Ho-ak'a katch,”
she said, for the sky was, indeed, raining.

The d-reader ended its speech, which had always been more about helping those doing the slaughter than those being slaughtered. “One culture, one country,” the recording intoned.

“One culture, one country!” the lancers replied. The sights of the flechemuskets re-centered.

Tabitha felt the hairs on her arms perk up, the gooseflesh raised by something more than the cold rain on her skin. She breathed deep of the ozone washing through the curtains of water. It was raining very hard now.

“Ho-ak'a ma'-me katch,”
she said. She eyed the skiff in the air, and she began to sing a new song, with new power.

As Tabitha's voice split the air, Father Thunder's first strike hit the skiff above her, a whip cracking down from the heavens. The airship flashed white-hot, turned left, right, left, then nosed down and fell earthward like a child's broken toy. Ripples of electric fire coursed across its surface, the energy crackling in audible static as the craft plummeted.

The crippled skiff came down at a sharp angle, hitting one of the outbuildings. It fragged the adobe, blasting the ancient mud-brick and wood into splinters and rubble. The ship pounded deep into the hardpack, momentarily cratering the earth, and then it was airborne again, metal screeching as it bounced back off the bedrock and flipped through the air. Many of the lancers on the ground began screaming, trying to run. The airship that was already on the ground tried to move, bucking on its pads as its engines kicked into gear, but all too late. The hurtling, broken thing punched into its side with a terrible crunch, a spear breaching a wounded deer.