Jatka looked up into the night sky, his eyes touched with tears. “Yes.” He looked at Pela and Gordon. “We will be a family.”
“Then I have had enough fresh air,” said Pela, taking Jatka by the arm and turning back to Ghaf’s tent. “I want to announce your coming-of-age ceremony.” They walked to the tent and entered, leaving Gordon alone beneath the stars.
He saw the reflection of a fire high in the sky, the light flickered in the distant treetops. It took him a moment but Gordon realized it came from the top of the cliff. Tonton Annajaka was back from her hunt. The conclusions she had reached had moved her up to her special place to consult with her gods. A rising breeze stirred up the snow on the ground into moving ribbons of haze that formed and vanished to be replaced by others as they crossed the path. Gordon turned his steps toward the cliff.
He climbed the trail in the dark, sensing his way by sound, touch, and the motion of the air as he had been trained in sniper school. On the last of the steep places above the men’s ledge, Gordon felt the hammer stone-carved steps to Tonton’s place. They were slick with ice and he climbed them soundlessly to a stand of cedars atop the sacred cliff. Pausing at the edge of the trees he looked up to where the naticha knelt before her fire, her back toward him. The wolf that had licked the fat from his fingers the night before sat motionless beside the trail. Gordon nodded once at the wolf and faced Tonton Annajaka’s back. “Naticha,” he said, “may I approach your fire?”
“You move silent as fog, God’n. Please come to my fire and sit.” Her voice was strangely calm.
Gordon came forward and sat to the naticha’s left. Her vantage point allowed her to look out over the village and toward Black Mountain. The wolf came and sat to Tonton’s right. The naticha smiled at the wolf. “My invitation, of course, extends to sister of God’n.”
Tonton returned her gaze to the mountain and looked up at the few stars bright enough not to be washed out by the moonlight. “I sit here many nights—no fire—and watch stars. In ancient belief, God’n, stars are hearts of dead ancestors who watch over their families and peoples here below. Now stars are prayers of men and women. Each time a star falls, Omiva answers a prayer.” She looked at Gordon. “What were you taught?”
Gordon thought back to Nascha, his mother. “I was taught stars are the shattered dreams of warriors.”
“Who taught you this?” asked Tonton.
“My mother. Her view of most things was different from the Dina—The People. Most believed my mother to be a witch.” He smiled. “There was a wise old man, Hosteen Ahiga, who told me my mother was sick.” He tapped the side of his head. “He also told me some of the ancient belief of the Dina.”
“I would hear it,” said the naticha.
“In the creation, the holy people—the gods—put out a great blanket that contained all the stars, the sun, the moon, and the rest. Then they proceeded to discuss at length where the sun should go. When they were done they placed the sun in the sky. They then discussed at even greater length where the moon should go. When they had at last agreed, they placed the moon in the sky. Then, one at a time, they began with the stars.” Gordon looked at the wolf. “Coyote, though, became tired of the endless debates, grew impatient, bit onto a corner of the blanket, and shook his head, flinging the rest of the stars into the sky.” He faced Tonton.
Tonton looked from the wolf to Gordon. “And what are the stars now?”
“More suns,” he answered. “Balls of burning air very far away, many like Ekav, many bigger, many smaller. Some of the points of light are huge gatherings of stars so far away they look like single stars.”
Tonton slowly faced the direction of the mountain. “I cross river today and climb to top of Shayvi’s Hill. I go to graves, look at damaged trees. On ground I find strange beds and green dust, bits, and pieces of time boat.” She was silent for a long time.
“In his home I also find man I sent to Shayvi’s Hill to become husband to Pela. Fisher, forty and one years, name of Baltok.” She tapped the side of her head. “He too is sick, God’n. Not sick when I sent him across river. Baltok stayed in woods, watched Pela for three days, making up mind. He say he prepared to present himself as Tana’s gift to Pela then heard a sound in the night air like fifty trees being broken at same time by hands of frost giant. Then a strange scream and the sky fill with blinding colors. At the center of the light was your time boat falling from sky. Baltok thought Zama was after him to pull him down to the darkness.”
“Perhaps he is not as sick as you think,” offered Gordon quietly.
“When I find Baltok he is at his house by river filling his pack. After he speak to me he fled for Yellow Claw country.”
“That’s even closer to the mountain than Red Cliff,” said Gordon.
“It is the difference between raindrops if we are all to die.”
Gordon studied the flakes of snow as they vaporized above the fire. “Back in your dwelling, Tonton, you asked me why I do not run.”
“Yes.”
“Why do you not run? Why do you not warn the people?”
She stared into the fire, gave a single laugh, then leaned forward, picked up a stick and threw it into the flames. A shower of sparks climbed into the night sky and died. “You have seen all my magic, God’n. I make you sleep, I talk to ghosts, I convince an old fisher to pretend to be gift of Tana. Eat too much meat, I make you something move your bowels.” She fixed her gaze on him. “Itahnika gave you eyes thousands of summers long. You move through time. You appear in flashes of light like crack of thunder. Wolf eat from your hand, you know our tongue in days. Much magic. Yet you stay here and die to protect future you have seen only a little of yourself.”
She sighed. “God’n, do the deaths of the Black Mountain clans protect nothing but good?” She waved her hand at the night sky. “Beyond now is there nothing bad that the lives of these peoples and the lives of their descendents might make better?”
Gordon took a long time to answer. “Those future summers are not all good. They are filled with ignorance, disease, want, cruelty, pain, and death. They are also filled with knowledge, discovery, kindness, courage, healing, beauty, and life. You are right: I have seen only a little of this future and know of only a little more. What I have seen and what I know others have seen have been this same mix of death and life. That I was a hunter of men speaks for the time in which I lived. That I learned to love others and to admire the work and creations of others also speaks for that time. I know much of what is to be. Would it be made better if the peoples of Black Mountain survive the great storm? Maybe it would be made worse or make no change at all. I don’t know. What you call my ghosts are just as ignorant. There are things they value above all else, though. They are things that might never be if we change things now.”
“What things, God’n?” asked the naticha.
“Gods, saviors, and prophets. Tribes, nations, monuments, talismans, and rituals.”
“Are their gods real or did the peoples of the future imagine them?”
Gordon grinned. “A very good question, naticha.”
“Does beyond now have an answer?”
“Thousands of thousands.”
“I think your ghosts tell me they can’t make you understand them. Something wrong with your head.”
He held his fingers on the scabbed over wound. “My injury.”
“Are they ghosts, God’n?”
“I don’t know.”
Between the clouds above the mountain Gordon saw a meteor streak into the atmosphere and burn itself out in a half-second display. “A prayer has been answered, Tonton,” he said. “I wonder whose.”