Death Chants (18 page)

The rat opened its
mouth, its wicked teeth gleaming. It spoke. "You lost only a lie and gained a truth in its place.
Your unan­swered secret, was only to know how to be human, and only a woman could see it for you.
Now, perhaps, it is too late, for you must die, and who else in the world will learn
it?"

The rat was
starving, ravenous, crawling up Yasheya's body to the soft flesh of the neck.

Yasheya tried to
raise himself, to meet death standing on his feet.

The ancient rat
enemy, squealed in alarm, falling back in fear, as if some unsuspected magic was about to
overtake him.

But the magic was
gone.

Yasheya got halfway
up and could go no farther.

He raised up one
arm, looking up at the face of shadow father, trying to take hold of the old one's shadow hand in
the dark.

His legs gave way
and as he fell, he whispered to shadow father.

"Did I have such
great glory in life?" asked Yasheya, riding the cold fist of the north wind into the last
storm.

The ancient one
feasted.

"Yes. Yes," said
shadow father, now riding on the back of the ancient rat.

"You were a human
being."

Two shamans were
eating together in their lodge. Katua was blind and Quetzal could only see things that were not
there.

"I do not know what
you call light," said Katua, "since I only see darkness."

"I call light the
first inviter. It is just a spirit that shakes its hand against us, and scorning us, says our
lives as shamans never tasted true passion, only pretense," said Quetzal.

A strange sound
came to them. Katua opened the door to the lodge so that he might see better with his blind eyes,
what had made the sound. It seemed to be a bird calling to its mate but it was a sound unlike any
bird call they had ever heard before.

"An omen stalks
us," said Quetzal. "I can tell you what it means if you can describe it to me."

"Yes, I see it. The
blind see all too well. It is a bird of marvel­ous strength. It has no eyes, no feathers, no
bones. It is made only out of sound, clear and high and echoing on the wind."

"If
that is what kind of bird it is," said
Quetzal, "then it foretells the death of us both."

"A pity," said
Katua. "I am not ready to die now, having yet to acquire the desire to be ready to
live."

"It is always death
when one hears the voice of a new instru­ment," said Quetzal. "All things new require the death
of old things. We are old things in this world."

"I am barely born,"
protested Katua. "I am so new to the world that I don't even have all my flight
feathers."

"Yes, you are so
young you are still an egg." Quetzal laughed. "You always tried to leave the nest wearing it.
That is why you have failed in life."

"If I have failed
in life, I will succeed in death," said Katua. "But you are no better than me. You too have
failed."

"Perhaps before we
die, we might redeem ourselves. We
might
yet cover ourselves in glory. Let us rush outside and try to catch the voice of a new instrument,
that bird with no body that never flies."

They rose up on
their skeletons and ran for the door of the lodge. As they ran, they hit a painted gourd filled
with water and it tipped over and fell. The water in the gourd moved with a special rhythm,
threatening to become rain.

They ran
insensibly, the sudden fever of their desire to see driving their legs down the path toward the
sound of the bird that was not there.

As the bird sang,
Katua fell into a fever dream, from which there was no waking.

In the dream he saw
the coming of the white man. Katua met an ocean of drowned pale children crawling blas­phemously
across the floor of once green land. There was a red snake there in the dream and one pale child
was trying to pull out its eyes to have something pretty to play with.

In the pale child's
hand, a shiny crucifix gleamed and gave off a strange light that did not belong in Katua's world.
And the animals in the forest burst into flame.

And white-skinned
child used the crucifix like a digging stick, and Katua dreamed through each slow century of its
coming, and through each year of the dream, spectral burial racks rose up like an obscene
many-treed forest, each burial tree, bearing rotting, pink, once human fruit.

In the dream, that
sang in Katua's blood, was the vanishing of his own people, the long slow cold-as-a-snake's-belly
death of a hundred hundred stolen years.

He saw the spread
of the white man from one end of the continent to the next. He saw the burial grounds of his
people turned into parking lots. Where once he read the future in the warm entrails of a dying
animal whose life touched his life, he saw now in their place, new metallic engines, shiny
machineries of night, placed by cold hands in the changed bodies of animals, or wired into the
heads of a new race of men.

He saw his young
wife of long ago, hitched to a plow, turning over the rich dark ground of mother earth, exposing
to view authentic, hand-crafted souvenirs, the last ones available before the desert.

His eyeless heart
filled with the last tidal wave of a shaman's life. Katua, once devoted to an unrelenting search
for a warrior's honor and glory, for what would never be, stared into a dark­ness, as deep as
death and more terrifying than blindness.

And the dream made
his heart walk upon the ground.

When the bird
stopped singing, Katua found himself alone, the last of his kind.

He saw a vision and
in that prophecy he was building his own burial rack.

"This is strange.
This that has passed before me does not release me to honor. My own survival in the face of all
deathness, becomes an unforgiving cowardice. In truth, it steals my bones, while I still stand in
them," said Katua. "I am dead, the last to die, so now I have to bury myself."

He shook his head,
disapproving. "This is not how I wanted life to go for our people. I am too insignificant to be
our stop­ping place. Still, if I am the last, I must leave some kind of monument for a vanished
people."

He took a sharpened
stick, fire-hardened, and plunged it into his body until it touched bone. On the bone, he etched
an epitaph.

HERE LIES THE LAST
INDIAN

HE WAS THE LAST OF
HIS KIND

HE DIED OF
ONESOMENESS

Katua went back
into the lodge to find a suitable pair of pants to wear to bury himself in. He managed to catch
the painted gourd of water that he and Quetzal had knocked over in their haste to leave the
lodge. He caught it before any water was spilled.

He arrived back in
the lodge before he had left.

It was not death or
birth, he experienced, but a place on another part of the circle of life.

He buried himself
in the womb of his mother, nicely arrayed in his best burial pants.

Later, like a
lizard casting off his tail, he was born shaped in a new fire, kissed into life as a healthy baby
girl, who would some­day grow to be a woman who could sing like birds no one could
see.

Quetzal chased the
bird with such skill and speed that he passed it on the path.

The voice of a new
instrument, having fallen behind him, seemed to spare his life.

He did not die in
the Indian world, he lived on in the white world.

That was a kind of
death too.

As he passed the
bird on the path, a flash of dawn lightning struck him and he stumbled on the winding path and
almost fell.

He experienced the
kind of birth ecstasy that comes but sel­dom to a man. He was dead in one world and born again in
the window of another one. It was a window that looked out, but never looked back.

He found himself
surrounded on all sides by people who could not see him. He cried out to them, as if asking, What
strange place am I in? But they could not hear him.

He looked around
for Katua, but of him, there was no sign and almost no memory.

"Sadness seems to
chase me," said Quetzal to the people who would not listen. "I face nothing, come from
nothing."

Quetzal walked
through fire and ice until he passed entirely through the window, jumped forever into a strange
land. Once there, he danced to other voiced, unancestral music, beyond the warm kind world of
green he once knew.

A white man, who
saw him less clearly even than the people who could not see him at all, got him a job working
high steel.

His new feathers
were riveted on his back.

Quetzal walked no
more in the land he had once come from.

Katua, when old,
having reared many children, sat in grand­motherly splendor in the wisest councils of the
people.

She had great
dreams, and powerful visions. But not every dream is truth, and not all visions are prophecy. She
talked of Quetzal, the one turned white who had disappeared and who would someday
return.

Quetzal had great
metal feathers on his back and one day, so her visions proclaimed, he would walk among the people
again and raise them to greatness.

Unaware of the
dream, and powerless to bring it, Quetzal raised seventeen-story monuments to someone else's
dream.

Katua died alone
and was buried in the ground far from her many children and the dream of Quetzal's return which
had betrayed her.

Quetzal became the
voice of a new instrument.

And walked uncaring
over Katua's grave, singing a conquista­dor song.

And now, to the
sounds of a new instrument, we all become

birds that no one
can see.

The jaguar woman
sang a night song. It dripped out of the dark-boned flute like black blood, reeking of beauty
that the sun never sees. All around her, the men of the village danced and played and sang,
sometimes to a tune she called, and sometimes when their spirits were strong, they danced to
music only they could hear. But not often, for her power, born of great beauty, was great and
seemed to smother them. Like the prey of some great spider, they dangled from her silken
web.

At night, she took
her dances inside the scalp house, into a hidden room, bleak and ancestral, so that the men could
not see. So that men could not see her strength was only beauty.

The dark bone flute
was forbidden. Only the woman could play it.

When the ceremony
of the dark flute was played in the day, the men had to lock themselves in their lodges, eyes
closed against a magic they could not see. The sound of it, was like a waterfall of blood, like
the cry of a bird tearing at the dead flesh of its prey.

Only the women were
allowed outside then, women dressed in forbidden jade, in cloaks made of woven sky and
brilliantly hued feathers from birds no man had ever seen. Here, in private splendor, the women
danced and traced patterns in the warm earth, that all men are blind to.

If a man by
accident or design, saw the dark flute, the flute carved from the bones of old lovers, the women
seized him and dragged him into darkness. There they raped him and put his eyes out. And left him
to burn in the unseen sun, the seeds of sight and male vision, killed in him. Such were the ways
of the women.

The beast in the
ground, the great dark crawling, yearning thing, that stirred in the dust of a thousand thousand
years,
knew nothing of this, only the
faint sound of the song, that dark, throbbing heartbeat of women singing.

But the beast
stirred in its grave, not alive, not dead, just there, pulsing with a sense of its own
strangeness. It came out of the ground, rose up and came slithering down on the village, drawn by
the sound of women singing.

It came close to
the village but stayed a way off, watching. The great beast saw what men must not see.

The grace of the
women dancing, displeased the dark one, for its own movements were the slow, dragging shuffle of
the half-dead. The clear sweet sound of their flutes, made the beast angry, for its own voice was
only the dry rasp of death, rattling in a monstrous throat.

Enraged, the beast
crept down on the women, scheming their destruction.

He clothed himself
in the flesh of a man. He sent forth a great wind and asked of the spirits how he might end the
noise and grace of womankind.

A shadow spirit sat
on his shoulder, the father of lies who only knows truth. "What would you ask of me, ugly
beast?"

And the loathsome
creature asked, "I would spoil the grace of women. I would make an end to the tyranny of their
beauty. I would drown out the sweet sound of their singing."

"You must drown the
wave in a bigger wave. Deep inside, in the writhing center, in the blackness, is such a sound,
such a wave that can drown out the sound and beauty of women."