“You meet the measure,” Ina Maka says again. You may walk the Blue Road now and not turn back. That is your right.”
“You can be released from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth,” says Tali.
“Or you can go back, now, to your life as Dakota Rivers.” The wolf cocks his head to look at her sidelong. “You can take up the work of rebuilding the world that humans have wrecked.”
“But I’m dead,” she blurts, remembering her ravaged body, the gaping wounds that laid it open from thigh to shoulder. “Dead. A mess. Cannot-resuscitate dead.”
“It is, in certain circumstances, a curable condition,” he says. His eyes glint with laughter.
“Stop wanting.”
“Stop desiring.”
“Stop willing.”
“Look again,” says Ina Maka.
The water swirls and clears yet again. On an open field two warbands slash at each other with blades like machetes, blows falling on round shields. Almost all are women. Some wear crude tunics, others the rags of manufactured clothing. As one warrior moves across her sight, she glimpses a Levi’s label at the waist of her tattered jeans. Clouds cross the sun, and when the light returns it shows the wreckage of a great city. Row houses line the street, mansions in their day. From one door emerges a veiled woman, covered from head to foot, not so much as an ankle showing. She carries a basket, and a large cross hangs from her neck. She passes other veiled figures on the street but speaks to none of them. Suddenly a scream pierces the air, and a woman, her face bare, streaks past, running for her life. Behind her, gaining on her, come half a dozen men, all shouting. “Whore! Harlot! Stone her!” As Koda watches, one of them trips her to the ground, and the vision fades. When it clears again, it shows only a long line of naked women, a few naked men among them, shuffling along in a straggling line. Their hands are tied behind their backs, while ropes link each to the two before and behind.
Appalled, Koda looks up at Ina Maka. “That’s not—”
“But it is. Slaves.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“It is a future,” Tali says softly. “It is what may be.”
“Or there may be this,” Wa Uspewikakiyape says. One huge paw stirs the water again.
The ripples clear onto another open field. In the center of this one, though, stands a sun dance pole, a cottonwood tree stripped of its branches and crowned with a buffalo skull. The dancing ground is marked off by arbors encircling it, leaving only a single opening to the east. A great drum beats out a steady rhythm, and a column of dancers enters with the rising sun behind them. The leader is a young woman with copper skin and golden eyes, with black hair that curls a little from her part to her braids, a generous mouth above a firm chin. A light is on her as she moves, her back straight, her shoulders square as she carries an eagle-wing fan before her. Behind her come young men and women of every color and shape, white and black and brown, tall and short, grey-eyed and almond-eyed. The young men wear the spruce wreathes of pledged dancers, their eagle-bone whistles hung about their necks. Behind them come their elders, and Koda starts as she recognizes Maggie, her hair iron grey now, and Andrews, with salt-and-paprika braids to his waist. At the end comes Tacoma, his chest scarred with decades of the Sun Dance, carrying the sacred pipe and the medicine bundle of the Sun Dance Chief.
She searches the faces of the dancers. “I don’t see—”
“Look here,” says Oka, pointing to a pair of figures seated beneath the arbor.
A small woman with pale braids, mostly grey now, sits in the place of honor. The stand before her holds dozens of pipes, some in traditional styles, others not. Her dress of white buckskin is embroidered thickly with turquoise and shell; over her bodice is worked the eight-legged shape of Inktomi, Spider Woman. Her face, though still lovely, shows the marks of hard decisions, and a faint white scar runs from the center of her brow to the outer edge of her left eyebrow. Beside her sits another woman, tall and copper-skinned and blue-eyed, her hair snow-white. In her hand she holds a pipe like a scepter; beside her stands a lance plumed from tip to butt with eagle feathers. Medicine Chief. War Chief. Not for more than a hundred years has one of her people been both.
Looking closely, there is something strange about the woman’s hands, markings of some kind, but she cannot quite make them out.
“That’s not—” she blurts.
“But it is,” says Ina Maka. “It is, if you choose to return. Understand. There will still be chaos, all those things you saw first. It is what happens next that will be determined by whether you stay or return.”
If she stays, she can be with Tali, her beloved, who has also passed beyond the wheel of birth and rebirth. She can sit at the council fire beside Wa Uspewikiyape, her teacher.
She will have peace. Wisdom.
If she returns, she will fight beside Kirsten, the other half of her soul. Beside her parents. Tacoma, Manny, Maggie.
It will be a lifetime of war, with peace, perhaps, at the end. A struggle that will last beyond any reasonable lifetime. A world thrown back into its own history.
She says, to gain time, “Who is she? The girl at the Sun Dance?”
Tali smiles and unfolds the shawl she wears. In the crook of her arm lies a swaddled infant, sleeping peacefully. “She will return, too,” says Tali.
For a time no one speaks. Finally, Koda bows her head. Not my will. “I will go back,” she says.
“Your choice is a wise one,” Ina Maka answers. “You will not go unprepared.”
Tali steps forward then, and kisses her gently on the lips. “Take with you the gift of speech without words and hearing without ears.” Her hand brushes Koda’s, a feather touch. “Be happy.”
Ina Maka lays a hand between Koda’s breasts. “Take with you the gift of an open heart, to know the pain and joy of those you will lead.” A warmth gathers in Koda’s chest, radiating out from under her heart to feel the pride and joy in Oka, the purity of Tali’s love, the deep grace in Ina Maka.
Last of all, Wa Uspewikakiyapi lays his great paws against her palms. “Take with you the gift of healing, body and spirit.” She holds onto him for a long moment, as she would another human, taking in a measure of his strength and courage.
“Until we meet again,” says Ina Maka. And she is falling again, falling through space, tumbling through the bowl of the Dipper where the renewed loss of Tali and Wa Uspewikiyape rips through her like a blade. With it comes the sharpness of Kirsten’s pain and her own grief, for Tali, for Wa Uspewikakiyapi, for Kirsten, for herself, drawing her down and down. Like a comet she plunges once again into the plane of the solar system, into the thin shell of atmosphere about the Earth. A winged shape rises to meet her in the dawn, and they spiral together down the air, Wiyo’s cry of triumph ringing through her soul. She breaks through the roof of the Westerhaus Institute, streaks downward to the sixth level through concrete and steel. The part of herself that hovers by Kirsten comes whirling back to her, and she slams once again back into her body and is flesh again.
She has a body. She is alive. She is acutely uncomfortable.
The three thoughts come to her as consciousness returns by degrees. Behind her, at the desk, Koda can hear the clatter of a computer keyboard. From the hallway comes a continuous spatter of water, and the acrid smell of smoke. Fire. We should probably get out of here. Like yesterday. But languor holds her where she is, and she takes inventory of her body. Her heart pumps satisfactorily. She can breathe; the odor of burning is evidence enough for that. Where there should be shattered bone, torn muscle, ruined blood vessels, screaming nerves, there is only warmth and knots of cramping muscles in her shoulders, her legs, her ribs. A great bell tolls in her head, pounding with the pulse in her ears. I thought— Gods, what a dream! Something must’ve coldcocked me.