Dreams That Burn In The Night (5 page)

Natina's face was white with terror. Her mind
was stunned by all that she had seen. Her heart raced, and there was a great rushing in her ears
as if she was coming upon the waves of the great sea.

She came to the old one slowly as if lost in a
great storm, blinded by the flash of lightning.

Uhlat thrashed in pain upon the
ground.

Wordlessly Natina moved to the old one, letting
him take her in his outstretched arms. As the old one touched her, he felt the pain and terror in
her mind and being, and it was not a good thing, not a good feeling in one so young. His spirit
went inside her and touched her life force. It touched the center of her being and became a dream
that danced into life behind her eyes. It was a dream of peace, of a quiet river that flowed into
the great for­ever.

He reached out and touched her face, and as he
did this, the bramble scratches on her legs and back healed. The white-head hawk fell asleep
peacefully on her shoulder, dreaming hawk dreams.

The old one went deep inside her life, touching
all things and seeing great and deep and lasting things in her young Hie. Her spirit was fragile
like a fawn, and his heart wept for the evil that had touched this life. And the old one could
not allow it to grow in this young mind.

With his great power, he reached into her life
even deeper, until he touched not only the moment in which she now lived, but all moments of her
life. He reached into yesterday and saw the things that would take this evil away, that would
banish it from the heart and mind of Natina.

Yesterday was a part of the circle, and the old
one saw the empty water gourds hanging in Natina's lodge. A small boy, who had once been the old
one, snuck quietly into the lodge. Without making a sound, his feet as silent as the flying owl,
this boy the old one once had been came into the lodge and stole away with the empty gourds. With
great joy at the strength in his legs, the young boy ran to the creek, where the moon lighted the
way for him, huge and full in a beautiful summer sky.

As quietly and carefully as he had come, the boy
came back from the river, gourds filled to the brim with sweet river water. With the same silence
as that in which he had come, he hung the gourds back in their places while the people in the
lodge slept on, undisturbed. What had not been done was now done.

Because the old one traveled in yesterday, he
took Natina with him, and she slept silently in the dark of her lodge as the young boy who was
the old one himself long, long ago crept in and out with the water gourds.

And Natina turned restlessly in her sleep; a
strange dream trou­bled her. There was an old one and demons that tumbled out of the sky. There
was an evil eater of flesh with no bones in his hand and a long green lizard with no face. It was
a strange dream and, like all dreams, it belonged to sleep alone.

The next day it would be gone, as the terror and
evil she had seen would vanish as surely as the snows of winter.

Uhlat used his one good hand. He clutched his
medicine stick tightly, digging one end into the ground, using it to pull himself up to his feet.
His eyes were red with pain and hate.

"I will wear your bones around my neck," cried
Uhlat. His eyes searched the clearing for the girl, but she had vanished as if she had never been
there. "You deny me my prize. For that alone you should die." He held up the ruined hand. "But
for this. Be­cause of what you have done, I shall tame you. Cage you and shame you. You shall be
my dog, cringing beneath the feet of my women, tormented by the children. Gnawing on scraps,
eating food not good enough for people to eat."

Uhlat raised his war shield, and a lightning
bolt crashed down from the darkened sky, striking the shield, turning it into a blue whirlwind
which left Uhlat's arm, spinning in a fiery, sizzling hoop toward the old one.

The old one let it come close, then opened his
mouth and breathed upon it. Winter came out of his mouth. Snow and ice and winds of winter caught
the shield and froze it in the air. The spinning blue flame froze; the shield dropped like a
stone to shat­ter into a thousand pieces upon the hard ground. Where it fell, the ground froze,
frost blue-white upon the broken shield frag­ments.

Screaming like an angry banshee, Uhlat ran
toward the old one, his stone weapon upraised. His hand went back, and he swung the hammer with
all his might through the air. A dead warrior sprang out of the ground, its bones sticking
through the skin, sharp as knives. It danced on rotten legs toward the old one.

Again the shaman from the north swung his stone
hammer. A dead buffalo bull, reeking of death and decay, rose up out of the ground, its great
horns red with blood, its eyes dead and sightless.

It pawed the ground and charged, smashing a
fallen log to bits beneath its thundering hooves. It came rushing down on the old one like a
great heaving mass of black death.

The dead warrior and dead buffalo rushed at the
old one.

The old one drew his hand above his head. A
spear made of writhing snakes, green and red with eyes of black and bodies hard as stone,
appeared in his upraised hand. With a quick thrust, he threw the spear.

The snake spear hit the dead warrior, and the
snakes wrapped around the moving body of bones. The body shuddered, its bone arms and legs pinned
to its side by the mighty coils of the great snakes. The body staggered and fell.

The snakes swarmed across it, pressing it down
into the ground. The body seemed to sink into the ground. Grass shot up through it; roots reached
up to pull the body down into dust and oblivion. The snakes vanished into holes that opened in
the ground. The dust from the dead warrior's cracking bones blew into the holes, sealing them
after the snakes as they vanished.

Alone, the great bull thundered down on the old
one. The old man stood calmly in the path until it was almost upon him, the great horns flashing
down toward him.

The old man waved his hands across his chest. A
great tree shot up at his feet, between him and the charging bull. A thick tree as solid as the
world. The bull hit it head on, its gore-bespat­tered horns driving deep into the living
wood.

The tree grew and grew. The bull, its horns
pinned deep in the hard wood, felt himself lifted off the ground as the tree went higher and
higher into the sky. Branches shot out from the trunk, driving like hard arrows into the side of
the dead buffalo. It writhed in agony, its rotten flesh pierced again and again by the living
tree. The branches grew through the buffalo, leaves thick and shining, an avalanche of riotous
green life.

The dead animal rose higher and higher into the
air. The tree sucked the essences of the dead buffalo into its being. The dead flesh fed it. The
hungry roots and branches stripped the buffalo of all its flesh. Soon only the moldering hide
remained and the white bones. The tree stretched and grew, tearing the bones apart, until the
white skull rested at the top of the tree, hidden almost by the great rush of green life that
surrounded it.

The old one stepped out from behind the
tree.

"You have lived too long upon this earth. I rid
the earth of poison, and you are what was once poison. I now take your life and make it nothing.
Your name is gone from this world." With those words, the old one flung his arms out, turning
slowly in the wind, calling in all four directions to the four winds.

The living world danced in his song, which came
tumbling from his lips like a raging mountain stream heavy with the melted snow of
winter.

The wind danced around him. A great whirlwind
raged on the palm of his left hand. Lightning and thunder raced up into the sky, splitting the
dark, held like a great spear of fire in his right hand.

Uhlat drew his hand up into the sky, and out of
the ground rose dead men and great beasts of ages past. They stood in front of him, rotten and
decayed, creatures of the nightland. They stood before Uhlat, an unliving shield, a last
desperate charm against the old one's magic.

But the whirlwind shot out from the old one's
hand and tore the dead ones up from the spawning ground, sent them spinning like feathers in the
wind. The great dark whirlwind leapt up into the sky with them, ripping their bodies into pieces,
scattering their bones across the land.

As each shattered bone and bit of decayed flesh
fell to earth, new grass sprang up underneath, its thick roots dragging the dead things deep into
the earth, to the dust they would soon become.

Uhlat turned then, and with the last of his
magic he would have become a great hawk, with wings as fast as thought. On mighty wings that
could speed him back to the north faster than anything on earth, he would have made his
escape.

But as the feathers formed on his arms, as he
tried to leap into the air, the lightning and thunder shot from the old one's hand. It went
across the ground like a great fire dance. It burned every­thing it touched, dead logs turning to
ash, the ground heaving as it scorched the very earth itself.

Uhlat strove to rise, to fly above it, but there
was no escape. The flame encircled him, went across him like a great wave of the big
water.

For a brief instant a great bird-shape ringed in
flame danced above the ground. All was flame; all was burning.

Uhlat did not even have time to
scream.

The fire was so great, nothing was left, not
even ash or cinder. The lightning took his smoke up into the sky. The dark clouds drank the
lightning that carried dead Uhlat's smoke and disap­peared as quickly as they had come across the
summer sky.

In the fire-ruined place, where all was once
brown and black­ened and withered, new life arose, green and strong in every place but one. The
spot where Uhlat had stood when the great fire overtook him was still black and ruined, still as
dead as the crea­tures of night Uhlat had summoned.

The old one looked up into the sky and saw
something on the wind very, very high in the sky. It came slowly and gently down toward him. It
was a single great black feather, carried on the clean summer breeze.

The old one smiled. It was the last thing of
evil that remained in this spot. The feather came closer and closer to earth. The old man cupped
his hand against his mouth and blew upward into the air. His breath caught the feather and sent
it spinning away from him.

The feather came down on the ruined spot where
Uhlat had once stood. It turned to dust as it touched the earth.

Wild flowers with all the colors of summer
pushed their way through the living earth where Uhlat the eater of flesh had died.

Their great beauty cleansed the place of the
evil that had once stood there.

And Uhlat was only a bad thing, an evil thing in
the mind of the old one.

"His evil and his name are gone forever from
this world," said the old one, but in his heart there was a tiny doubt even as he said
it.

It was the morning
of the sadness. Natina was the first one to awaken. The white-head hawk lay sleeping in the crook
of her arm. He awoke as she did, yawning and stretching his neck. She set him on her
shoulder.

She rose slowly
from her blankets, her mind still slow with a dream. What a strange dream it had been. It seemed
that there were whirlwinds and fire and things of great magic and great evil in it, but it was
only a dream. As her eyes cleared of sleep, so did her mind clear of the dream.

She was thirsty.
Natina went across the lodge to the water gourds, thinking to herself that she had forgotten to
fill them, the day before. But she was surprised to find the gourds full of sweet, cool water.
Arrow must have filled them, she thought, looking down at the still sleeping figure of her
younger brother.

She went outside
and sat in the sun which was just beginning to walk across the sky.

Morning was her
favorite time of day. The camp was coming alive all around her.

She heard voices
from within her family lodge and knew the others were waking up. Her mother came out, carrying a
cooking
pot and a long-handled wooden
spoon. Her mother walked very slowly, as if each step was a great effort. Like Natina, she was
very thin and still weak from the winter.

Natina sprang up,
took the heavy pot from her hands, and carried it over to the fire hole. Her mother
smiled.

Suddenly from
within the lodge came an anguished cry. Natina and her mother turned and looked back at the
lodge. Her father came stumbling out, his hands over his eyes. He screamed and staggered out
toward them. He took only a few steps before he tripped and fell.

At his shouts,
people from the nearby lodges came running out.

"I am blind!"
cried Elk Dancer, his hands clawing at his unsee­ing eyes. "All is blackness!" He moved blindly
through the camp, the people coming from all around to stare at him.

Domea, the
medicine man, pushed his way through the people gathered around. "Stand still so that I may look
at you and see this thing," said the shaman.

Obediently, Elk
Dancer stood still. He was a strong man, but there were tears in the corners of his eyes, tears
of sorrow and self-pity.