Eye of Cat Part 12

"Maybe we should do both," Elizabeth said. "But if we don't try helping him ourselves, then Walter's attack was for nothing."

"I'll be with you," Mercy said, "when we do. Some- body's going to have to take over here pretty soon, though, till the medics trip through. I'm getting tired."

"I'll try," Fisher said. "Let me watch how you do it."

"I'd better learn, too," Mancin said, moving nearer. "I do still seem to feel his presence, weakly. Maybe that's a good sign."

Sounds of hammering continued downstairs, from where a shattered wall was being replaced.

He crossed the water above a small cascade, knowing things would be relatively solid at its top. Then he moved along the southern talus slope, leaving a clear trail. He entered Black Rock Canyon and continued into it for per- haps half a mile. The rain came down steadily upon him and the wind made a singing sound high overhead. He saw a cl.u.s.ter of rocks come loose from the northern wall far ahead, sliding and b.u.mping to the floor of the canyon, splashing into the stream.

Keeping watch on driftwood heaps, he located a stick sufficient for his purpose. He walked near the water's edge for a time, then headed up onto a long rocky shelf where his footprints soon vanished. He immediately began to back- track, walking in his own prints until he stood beside the water again. He entered it then, probing with the stick for quicksand pockets, and made his way back to the canyon's mouth.

Emerging, he crossed the main stream to its north bank, turned to his right and continued on along Canyon del Muerto toward Standing Cow Ruin, concealing his trail as he went, for the next half-mile. He found that he liked the feeling of being alone again in this gigantic gorge. The stream was wider here, deeper. His mind went back to the story he had heard as a boy, of the time of the fear of the flooding of the world. Who was that old singer? Up around Kayenta, back in the 1920s... The old man had been struck by lightning and left for dead. But he had recovered several days later, bearing a purported message from the G.o.ds, a message that the world was about to be flooded. In that normal laws and taboos no longer apply to a person who has lived through a lightning-stroke, he was paid special heed.

People. believed him and fled with their flocks to Black Mountain. But the water did not come, and the cornfields of those who fled dried and died under the summer sun. A shaman with a vision that did not pay off.

Billy chuckled. What was it the Yellowclouds had called him?" Azaethlin" - "medicine man." We aren't always that reliable, he thought, given to the same pa.s.sions and misap- prehensions as others. Medicine man, heal thyself.

He started past a "wish pile" of rocks and juniper twigs,

halted, went back and added a stone to it. Why not? It was there.

In time, he came to Standing Cow Ruin, one of the largest ruins in the canyons. It stood against the north wall beneath a huge overhang. The remains of its walls covered an area more than four hundred feet long, built partly around 'im- mense boulders. It, too, went back to the Great Pueblo days, containing three kivas and many rooms. But there were also Navajo log-and-earth storage bins and Navajo paintings along with those of the Anasazi. He went nearer, to view again the white, yellow and black renderings of people with arms upraised, the humpbacked archer, circles, circles and more circles, the animals.... And there, high up above a ledge to his left, was one of purely Navajo creation, and most interesting to him. Mounted, cloaked, wearing flat- brimmed hats, carrying rifles, was a procession of Span- iards, two of them firing at an Indian. It was believed to represent the soldiers of Lieutenant Anthony Narbona who fought the Navajos at Ma.s.sacre Cave in 1805. And below that, at the base of the cliff, were other hors.e.m.e.n and a mounted U.S. cavalryman of the 1860s. As he watched, they seemed to move.

He rubbed his eyes. They really were moving. And it seemed as if he had just heard gunshots. The figures were three-dimensional, solid now, riding across a sandy waste....

"Always down on us, aren't you?" he said to them and to the world at large.

He heard curses in Spanish. When he lowered his eyes to the other figure, he heard a trumpet sounding a cavalry charge. The great rock walls seemed to melt away about him and the waters grew silent. He was staring now at a totally different landscape - bleak, barren and terribly bright. He raised his eyes to a sun which blazed almost whitely from overhead. A part of him stood aside, wondering how this thing could be. But the rest of him was engaged in the vision.

He seemed to hear the sound of a drum as he watched them ride across that alien desert. It was increasing steadily in tempo. Then, when it had reached an almost frantic throbbing, the sands erupted before the leading horseman and a large, translucent, triangular shape reared suddenly before him, leaning forward to enfold both horse and rider with slick membranous wings. More of them exploded into view along the column, shrugging sands which yellowed the air,' falling upon the other riders and their mounts, envelop-

ing them, dragging them downward to settle as quivering, gleaming, rocklike lumps on the barren landscape. Even the cavalryman, now brandishing his saber, met a similar fate, to the notes of the trumpet and the drum.

Of course.

What other fate might be expected when one encountered a krel., let alone a whole crowd of them? He had given up quickly on any notion of bringing one back to the Inst.i.tute.

Two close calls, and he had decided that they were too d.a.m.ned dangerous. That world of Cat's had bred some very vicious creatures....

Cat. Speak of the Devil... There was Cat crossing the plain, lithe power personified....

Again, amid a shower of sand, the krel rose. Cat drew back, rearing, forelimbs lengthening, slashing. They came together and Cat struggled to draw away....

With the sound of a single drumbeat, the scene faded. He was staring at anthropomorphic figures, horses and the large Standing Cow. He heard the sounds of the water at his back.

Peculiar, but he had known stranger things over the years, and he had always felt that a kind of power dwelled in the old places. Something about this manifestation of it seemed heartening, and so he took it as a good omen. He chanted a brief song of thanks for the vision and turned to continue along his way. The shadows had darkened perceptibly and the rock walls were even higher now, and for a time he seemed to regard them through a mist of rainbows.

Going back. A part of him still stood apart, but it seemed even smaller and farther away now. Parts of his life between childhood and now had become dreamlike, shimmering, and he had not noticed it happening. He began recalling seldom used names for things around him which he had thought long forgotten. The rain increased in intensity off to his right, though his way was still sheltered by the canyon wall. A trick of lightning seemed to show momentarily a reddish path stretching on before him.

"A krel, a krel," he chanted as he walked, not knowing why. Free a cat to kill a Stragean, find a krel to kill a cat...

What then? He chuckled. No answer to the odd vision. His mind played games with the rock shapes around him. The Plains Indians had made mare of a cult out of the Rock people than his people had. But now it seemed he could almost catch glimpses of the presence within the forms. Who was that bellicano philosopher he had liked? Spinoza. Yes.

Everything alive, all of it connected, inside and out, all over.

Very Indian.

"Hah la tse kis!" he called out, and the echo came back to him.

The zigzag lightning danced above the high cliff's edge and when its afterglow had faded he realized that night 'was coming on. He increased his pace. He felt it would be good to be past Many Cherry Canyon by the time full darkness fell.

The ground dropped away abruptly, and he made his way across a bog, probing before him with his stick. He cleaned his boots then before continuing. He ran a hand across the surface of a rock, feeling its moist smoothnesses and rough- nesses. Then he licked his thumb and stared again into the shadowy places.

Moments came and went like dark tides among the stones as he strode along, half-glimpsed images giving rise to free a.s.sociation, racial and personal.

It seemed to sail toward him out of the encroaching darkness, its prow cutting a V across his line of sight. It was Shiprock in miniature, that outcrop ahead. As he swung along it grew larger and it filled his mind....

Irresistibly, he was thrown back. Again the sky was blue gla.s.s above him. The wind was sharp and cold, the rocks rough, the going progressively steeper. Soon it would be time to rope up. They were approaching the near-vertical heights....

He looked back at her, climbing steadily, her face flushed.

She was a good climber, had done it in many places. But this was something special, a forbidden test....

He gnashed his teeth and muttered, "Fool!"

They were climbing tse bi dahi, the rock with wings. The white men called it Shiprock. It stood 7,178 feet in height and had only been climbed once, some two hundred years earlier, and many had died attempting the ascent. It was a sacred place, and it was now forbidden to climb upon it.

And Dora had liked climbing. True, she had never sug- gested this, but she had gone along with him. Yes, it had been his idea, not hers.

In his mind's eye, he saw their diminutive figures upon its face, reaching, hauling themselves higher, reaching. His idea. Tell him why. Tell Hastehogan, G.o.d of night, why - so that he may laugh and send a black wind out of the north to blow upon you.

Why?

He had wanted to show her that he did not fear the People's taboo, that he was better, wiser, more sophisticated than the People. He had wanted to show her that he was not really one of them in spirit, that he was free like her, that he was above such things, that he laughed at them. It did not occur to him until much later that such a thing did not matter to her, that he had been dancing a dance of fears for himself only, that she had never thought him inferior, that his action had been unnecessary, unwarranted, pathetic. But he had needed her. She was a new life in a new, frightening time, and - When he heard her cry out he turned as rapidly as he could and reached out for her. Eight inches, perhaps, sepa- rated their fingertips. And then she was gone, falling. He saw her hit, several times.

Half blinded with tears, he had cursed the mountains and cursed the G.o.ds and cursed himself. It was over. He had nothing now. He was nothing....

He cursed again, his eyes darting over the terrain to where, with a flick of its tail, he would have sworn a coyote had stood a moment ago, laughing, before it vanished into the shadows beyond the rise. Fragments of the chants from the old Coyoteway fire ritual came to him:

I will walk in the places where the black clouds come at me.

I will walk in the places where the rain falls upon me.

I will walk in the places where the lightning flashes at me.

I will walk in the places where the dark fogs move about me.

I will walk where the rainbows drift and the thunders roll.

Amid dew and pollen will I walk.

They are upon my feet. They are upon my legs....

When he reached the spot where he thought he had seen the creature, he searched quickly in the dim light and thought that he detected a pawprint. Not important, though.

It meant something. What, he could not say.

He is walking in the water....

On the trail beyond the mountains.

The medicine is ready.

... It is his water, a white coyote's water.

The medicine is ready.

As he pa.s.sed Many Cherry Canyon he was certain that Cat was on his way. Let it be. This thing seemed destined, if not with Cat at his back then in some other fashion. Let it be.

Things were looking different now. The world had been twisted slightly out of focus.

Dark, dark. But his eyes adjusted with unusual clarity. He would pa.s.s the cave of the Blue Bull. He would go on. He would take his rations as he walked. He would not rest. He would create another false way at Twin Trail Canyon. After that, he would obscure his pa.s.sage even further. He would go on. He would walk in the water.

Come after me, Cat. The easy part is almost over.

Weak flash. The wind and the water swallow the thunder.

He is laughing and his face is wet.

The black medicine lifts me in his hand....

The Third Day

WHEN THE CALL CAME.

through that Walter Sands was dead, having failed to re- spond to treatment, Mercy Spender said a prayer, Fisher looked depressed and Mancin looked out of the window.

Ironbear poured a cup of coffee, and for a long while no one said anything.

Finally, "I just want to go home," Fisher said.

"But we reached Singer," Elizabeth replied.

"If you want to call it that," he replied. "He's gone around the bend. He's... somewhere else. His mind is running everything through a filter of primitive symbolism. I can't understand him, and I'm sure he can't understand me.

He thinks he's deep under the earth, traveling along some ancient path."

"He is," Ironbear said. "He is walking the way of the shaman."

Fisher snorted.

"What do you know about it?"

"Enough to understand some," he answered. "I got inter- ested in Indian things again when my father died. I even remembered some stuff I'd forgotten for a long time. For all of his education and travels, Singer doesn't think in com- pletely modern terms. In fact, he doesn't even think like a modern Indian. He grew up in almost the last possible period

and place where someone could live in something close to a neolithic environment. So he's been to the stars. A part of him's always been back in those crazy canyons. And he was a shaman - a real one - once. He set out several days ago to go back to that part of himself, intentionally, because he thought it might help him. Now it's got hold of him, after all those years of repression, and it's coming back with a vengeance. That's what I think. I've been reading tapes on the Navajos ever since I learned about him, in all of my spare moments here. They're a lot different from other Indians, even from their neighbors. But they do have certain things in common with the rest of us - and the shaman's journey often goes underground when things are really tough."

" 'Us'?" Mancin said, smiling.

"Slip of the tongue," he answered.

"So you're saying this vicious alien beast is chasing a crazy Indian," Mercy stated. "And we just learned that the authorities won't go into those canyons after them because the place is too treacherous in the weather they're having.

Sounds as if there's nothing we can do. Even if we coordi- nate as a group mind, the beast seems able to strike back at us pretty hard - and Singer can't understand us. Maybe we should go home and let them work it out between them- selves."

"It would be different if there were something we could do," Fisher said, moving to stand beside Ironbear. "I'm beginning to see how you feel about the guy, but what the h.e.l.l. If you're dead, lie down."

"We could attack the beast," Ironbear said softly.