Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 68

As soon as the girl dropped down onto her pallet, the women were on her, screaming and pulling her back onto her feet. Shaking free of them, she cried out and ran off through the brush into the dark. As she plunged into the night, their voices mingled with the hot sounds in her head. There was the anger at her that she did not listen to them, that she did not care for what they said. She could hear their anger, but it could no longer reach inside her to make her feel shame. All she wanted was sleep.

But even in the blackness, she didn’t stop dancing. As she lurched from bush to bush, pulling herself back from the thorns that reached out of the dark to cut her arms, her searing pitch-blackened face, she didn’t stop. She followed the direction Sun went. Even when her feet told her she had entered the burned-out rocks, she kept going. The stony spines tore at her feet. If she were not blinded by the darkness, she would see the red blood filling the scrapes, trickling from the gashes. But she did not quit.

Now there were no voices. They were left behind, back in the light of the village. She could see in her mind’s eye how the women would have followed her out to the edge of the night, scolding her, saying her dancing had only started. Then they would have stopped their crying out, made silent by the blackness that lay around them. Even her aunt, who danced with her that night, would have been too afraid of what waited there to go with her. They would have turned away from the dangers and followed one another back toward the fires, saying that she was a bad one, not to be led, always doing what she pleased.

Still she danced on -- as they had said she should -- groping with her feet for a level place to step, afraid to stop again. The scratcher swung in rhythm from its thong round her neck. The buck-brush wrist-bands and headband dug into her flesh.

At last -- she did not know how long it took for it to happen -- she felt the ground give way beneath her, felt herself thrown into the gully. She grasped at the rocks to break her fall, then lay there, feeling the hotness in her head, the stone in her belly, afraid to look up into the sky or call out, afraid of what she might see there, what or who might answer.

She closed her eyes for just a moment, and there, inside her eyelids, she saw the bright man riding on Kai, jack-rabbit, toward her; heard the loon, neighing. The bright man behind her eyelids, like the one yesterday, over where the Bostons camped, over where she gathered the wood for this night’s fire.

Drop the wood, he had told her, and come with him. He had something to show her. He did. And his hair was golden. And his body… hiding hers, from Sun…thrusting.

Afterward, as she scrambled to pick up the wood again, his laughter hit her right in her back, forcing her upward, stopping her. What was there she dared tell them now, the women? Her mother? There was nothing. Nothing ever.

And this night, when she picked herself up from among the rocks, she could see, off to the east, low on the star-track, just stepped off of the earth-rim, Isis, morning-star, the one whom Sun would follow.