Ghostlands

FIFTY-TWO

“Dig it,” Colleen Brooks said balefully, scowling at the Ghost Dance Shirt she held up before her. “I don’t dance.”

Months earlier, May Catches the Enemy had known that if any of them were going to get anywhere at all, she would need some warriors, a few musicians and a natural-born leader.

Now, looking out at Cal Griffin and her other new comrades as they stood on the grassy plateau of Cuny Table, the sky a searing cold blue above them, not a cloud in sight to the end of the world, she knew she had gotten her wish.

The snow had melted off mostly, and the land was a dusty green where foliage grew and cracked brown earth where it didn’t. Minutes before, she had signaled Walter Eagle Elk, a frail elder with a sun-lined face like the Badlands themselves, to open the earth to let them emerge out onto the land.

Which was risky, she explained to them, as it could draw the attention of the Sick Thing at the Source…but vital, nonetheless.

She’d handed each of them-with the exception of Ely Stern and Christina Griffin, who watched from the sidelines-a Ghost Dance Shirt, which she herself now wore, and requested they don them. And they all had done so, even Howard Russo and Inigo, looking like kids trying to wear Daddy’s clothes.

All except Colleen Brooks. A real pain in the ass, that gal, and a ballbuster to boot.

But when the chips were down, May reflected, that might not be such a bad thing.

Doc Lysenko sidled up to Colleen, gave her a playful nudge. “Come, Colleen, you don’t want to be a wet blanket, now do you?” The fringe on the arms of the white leather shirt he wore rippled in the breeze.

“Viktor, what the hell are we doing here? I want to kick some Source Project butt-not boogy on down.”

May Catches the Enemy came up to her, gestured at the breathtaking vista about them. “Crazy Horse said, ‘My lands are where my people are buried….’”

“Yeah? And where’s that get us?”

May saw that Cal Griffin was studying her intently, a contemplative expression on his face. “Maybe nowhere,” he murmured. But she could tell from his tone that he intuited what she had in mind.

“We pray for all living things,” May Catches the Enemy said to them all, by way of preamble. “We pray through all the spirits of the world, through the two-legged people and the four-legged people, through the animal people and the bird people and the fish people, and especially the tree people. We pray through them to the Great God Creator. The spirit world is the real world.”

She fixed her gaze on Cal Griffin, and said in a quieter tone, “And when we speak to the dead, we say, ‘We shall see you again….’”

May nodded at Walter Eagle Elk, and to his grandson Ethan, whom he’d been training (the playfriend who, as a child, May had tauntingly called Ethan Ties Shoelaces Together). They began to beat their drums and chant in a mournful, hollow tone that rolled out over the tableland, drawing lilting responses from the cowbirds and meadowlarks, and the wrens who had not fled the brute winter.

And maybe this had once been a dance only for men, May realized, her pulse quickening with hope and excitement, and maybe only men had once been the warriors….

But this was no time for such distinctions.

May Catches the Enemy, who was sometimes called Lady Blade and who had once been May Devine, drew her knives and, circling, began to dance.

One by one, the others followed suit-including, at the last, a grumbling Colleen Brooks.

Griffin’s sister Christina was moving now, too, flowing in the air with deft motions that left streaks of entwined color and light in her wake. May Catches the Enemy found herself staring openmouthed at the fairy girl, knowing that her soul was that of a dancer.

Watching May and doing what she did, moving to the beat, Cal came up alongside Enid Blindman and Papa Sky. “Play with all you’ve got,” he called to them. “Play to wake the dead.”

They set to it with a will. Their music swirled and spiraled around the drumbeat and voices, gained assurance and majesty, filled up the sky and the land.

And from the Black Hills, from the rotted, cancerous Thing at its core, an answer came.

Angry black clouds spread out like a carpet unrolling, suffocating the sky, and from within them flared blinding flashes like worlds exploding.

The lightning rained down.

Howling, Stern took to the sky, breathing flame up at the heavens, deflecting the raging death strokes. Christina, too, extended her radiance, twisting the sizzling current away from the dancers to scorch prairie grass and barren trees scant yards away.

The lightning bolts increased their fury, pounding down like blazing fists, ravaging the land. Tortured, unthinking animals, summoned by the Mind that could not be denied, streamed out from the hills, shrieking maniacally, launching themselves with fang and claw, to be immolated on this killing ground.

“Keep dancing!” May called out to the others, and Cal took up the cry.

Slowly, barely perceptibly, the lightning began to die off, the clouds took on colors of red and blue and gold within the blackness, moving like the breath of a living thing.

The thunder came.

It boomed out like the universe clearing its throat and issued, not from the sick core of the Hills, but from somewhere deeper, and older still.

“The Thunder People!” May Catches the Enemy shouted over the roar. “The Thunder People summon their children!”

It reverberated through them and went on and on, rattled their bones and teeth, shook the ground beneath their feet, tumbled rocks and raised great plumes of dust into the muted and shrouded air.

“Son of a bitch!” Colleen Brooks exclaimed.

The land about them was rippling, turning over, like a rumpled sheet being reversed on a mattress. The ancient soil cracked, vented, bent away….

And where it folded, something rose up from below.

Shadow forms, many hundreds of them spreading over the land, wraiths of smoke and ember and will.

As one, they turned toward the dancers and advanced on them.

Larry Shango slowed in his gyrations, edged up to Cal. Their eyes were locked on the coming forms.

“Is this a good thing,” Larry Shango asked in a low voice, “or a bad one?”

Cal Griffin considered the figures, drifting toward them like fog. He could see now that some were shaped like men, and some like horses.

“A good thing,” he said at last.

The others had stopped dancing now, the music fading off and the thunder banking down to a low rumble.

The shadow ones stopped before them.

“Hua kola…” the warrior in front said, and his voice was shadowy, too. He was no more than smoke and vapor, but Cal could see he stood well-muscled and tall, and the shadings of color within the smoke revealed curly brown hair and pale gray eyes. He wore a single eagle feather and behind his ear, a stone. Painted on his chest were a lightning bolt and two shapes that, in time, Cal would learn were hailstones.

Ely Stern had come to ground beside Cal, and Christina floated down silently, in awe. The others, too, gathered around him to face this newcomer and his brothers, who had been called forth by the thunder and not the Storm.

May Catches the Enemy stepped up to them and smiled. “I’d like you to meet my ancestor,” she said, and introduced them to the one some had called Curly, and others Our Strange Man.

The one most had known as Crazy Horse.