Eye of The cat, page 5
.…I feel like H-E-L-L5!
CHURCH OF CHRISTIAN RELATIVITY TAKES STAND
Her sensors held as the ship banked. Running the defense system would not be so difficult after all, her instruments informed her. She meditated for half a minute upon the flame and the water, visible mutabilities symbolizing the change-flame. Flow, she imaged, into the ancient forms
FLOODING IN L.A.-PHOENIX TUNNEL
MAN CARRIED TWO MILES
“Your horses are yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
“Your sheep are yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
“All your possessions are yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
“Your country is yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
“Your springs that flow are yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
“Your mountain ranges are yours again, grandchild,” he says as he sits down beside me.
* * *
Blessed again it has become, blessed again it has become,
Blessed again it has become, blessed again it has become!
He had crossed the dried lava flow, which in his day everyone had known to be the congealed blood of Yeitso, a monster slain by Nayenezgani. And then he had continued upward along the slopes of Mount Taylor, its heights hidden today by a great, rolling bank of fog. A nagging wind clutched at his garments with many hands, a black wind from out of the north. A holy place was necessary for the thoughts he wished to think on this bleak day. It had been over a century since he had visited Mount Taylor, but its nature was such that it had been left undisturbed through all these years.
Climbing…
Cat my chindi…Ever at my back . …
Climbing, his hair gleaming from a recent shampoo with yucca roots…
.…All things past come together in you.
Climbing, into the fog now, the wind abruptly dying, stones dark and slippery…
.…And how shall I face you?
. …Mountain held to the earth by a great stone knife, pierced through from top to bottom, female mountain, you have seen all things among the People. But do you know the stranger stars I have looked upon? Let me tell you of them…
The climb was slow and the mists pressed upon him, dampening his garments until they clung. He sang as he ascended, pausing at several places, for this was the home of TYirquoise Boy and Yellow Corn Girl, and in some versions of the story it was here that Changing Woman had been born.
.…I have lost myself among bright stars.
He passed a group of stone people who seemed to nod behind their veil of mist. The fleecy whiteness which surrounded him made him think of his mother’s sheep, which he had herded as a boy. His thoughts followed them from their old winter hogan, its forage exhausted, to the high summer camp, where meals were cooked and eaten outdoors and the women set up their looms between the trees. His uncle, the singer, would gather herbs and dry them in the sun. The old man held a medicine bundle for Female Shootingway, of the five-night chantway. He also did the five-night Blessingway chant and knew minor Shootingway ceremonies, as well as the five nights of Evilway. And he knew the Restoration way of every living thing.
When the word came that the government inspectors were waiting at the sheep-dips, a festive spirit danced among the settlements like a humpbacked piper. The camp was broken, and the sheep bells clunked as the animals were herded down from the mountains to the place of the dips. The dips themselves stank of sulphur, and the smell of sheep dung was everywhere, not least of all upon one’s boots. It was a slow, dirty business, as the sheep were run through the dips one by one, counted, collected together, certified as free of ticks and disease for another season. The air was filled with dust from the moving animals. Soon flocks of them covered the hills like fallen clouds, barking dogs moving among them.
As the day progressed, a holiday atmosphere would spread among the stench and the noises. The smells of mutton stew, fry bread and coffee, mingled with the fragrance of pinon smoke, began to move through the air. Laughter would rise with greater frequency. Gambling would begin. Songs would be heard. Here or there, a horse race, a chicken-pull…
And the garments would improve as the work was done. The woman who might have worn a wool shawl and carried a sun umbrella while herding her sheep from the pen to the dip now had on her best bright three-tiered skirt, a satin shirt and velvet overblouse with silver collar points and silver buttons running down each shoulder seam to the wrist, silver bowknot buttons down the front, a heavy squash blossom necklace, several strands of turquoise within it. The men appeared in velveteen shirts with silver buttons, silver and turquoise bands about their black hats, green and blue bracelets, rings, necklaces—from Pilot Mountain, Morinci, Kingman, Royston. And there were jokes and dancing, though no stories of the supernatural variety, for the thunder and the serpents were awake. He remembered his first squaw dance on such an occasion. He had had nothing with which to pay, and so he had danced and danced for most of the night, listening to the girls’ laughter, moving finally like a man in a dream, until an opportunity—perhaps intentional?—presented itself, and he fled.
And now…
This past summer he had visited a contemporary sheepdipping. The genetically tailored animals were immune to most of the old diseases. Still, a few parasites could cause annoyance. The sheep were run through a quickly assembled, lightweight, odorless aerosol tunnel, counted and sorted by computer and penned behind a series of UHF walls broadcast from tiny units dropped casually upon the ground. For the most part, meals were prepared in quick, efficient—if a bit old-fashioned—portable microwave units. The evening’s music was chip-recorded or satellite-broadcast. Most of the dancing that followed he did not recognize. There seemed to be fewer traditional garments in sight, fewer people doing things in the right manner. Not too many horses about. And a young man actually came up to him and asked him his name…
.…Mountain held to the earth by a great stone knife, pierced through from top to bottom, blade decorated with turquoise, color of the blue south, female mountain, upon your summit a bowl of turquoise containing two bluebird eggs covered with sacred buckskin, mountain dressed in turquoise, eagle plumes upon your head, you have seen all things among the People. For a man, however, to too much of change may damage his spirit. I have seen much. …
He climbed a lightening way, through the houses made of dark cloud, rainbow and crystal. When he emerged onto the high slopes, into brightness beneath an unscreened sun, it was as if he stood upon an island in the midst of a frothing sea. The land was covered over in every direction by a cottony whiteness. He faced each of the world’s corners and he sang, making offerings of cornmeal and pollen. Then he seated himself and opened his unwounded deerskin pouch, removing certain items. For a long while he thought upon the things that came to him then…
That line of clouds…so like a curved dirt altar. A mushroom in its nest upon it. Night. He had eaten the bitter medicine and listened to the singing and the drumming. The rattle and the feather fan were passed. Each person sang four songs before handing on the regalia. A feeling of extreme weariness had come over him even before it was his turn. He understood that John Rave had once said that this was the effect of the peyote struggling against a person’s vices. His throat felt constricted and very dry. He wondered how much of this was spiritual and how much physiological.
He had been going through a very unusual period in his life. He had been away to school. The old ways no longer seemed right, but neither did the new ones. He understood that the Native American Church had appealed to many who felt themselves between worlds. But he had also, already, taken anthropology courses, and he felt a thin edge of estrangement—like a knifeblade—inserting itself between him and the experience even now, after only a few weeks of Peyoteway. The brilliantly colored hallucinations were often fascinating, yet he and his thirst had stood apart.
But this night was somehow different from other nights…He felt this as he passed the rattle and the fan and, looking up, saw that a rainbow was forming. It did not seem at all out of place, and he watched it with interest. It seemed simultaneously distant and near, and as he stared there was movement upon it. Two figures—and he knew them—were passing along its crest as upon the arch of a great bridge. They halted and looked down at him. They were the Warrior Twins—Tobadzischini, Born-of-Water, and Nayenezgani, Monster-Slayer. For a long while they simply stared, and then he realized that it might not really be himself that they were regarding. From a sudden movement, he became aware of a great black bird, a raven, perched upon his left shoulder. Fleetingly, beneath the rainbow, a coyote passed. Nayenezgani strung his bow with lightning and raised it, but his brother placed his hand upon his arm and he lowered it.
When he looked again to his left, the raven had vanished. When he returned his gaze forward, the rainbow was smaller, fading…
The next day he was weak, and he rested and drank liquids. His thought processes seemed sluggish. But the vision was somehow very important. The more he examined it the more puzzling it became. Was it the raven that Nayenezgani had been about to shoot, or was it himself? Was the bird protecting him against the Warrior Twins? Or were the brothers trying to protect him from the bird?
In the light of his recent anthropological studies, it became even more involved. Raven did figure in some of the People’s stories—particularly around the Navajo Mountain, Rainbow Bridge, Piute Canyon area—as a demonic force. Yet this had not always been so, though the time when things were otherwise lay beyond the memory of anyone alive.
Raven was a principal deity among the Tlingit-Haida people of the Pacific Northwest, and these people spoke a language of the Athabascan group. The Navajo and their relatives, the Apache, also spoke an Athabascan tongue and were the only people to do so outside the Northwest. In ancient times there had been a migration which had finally led the People to the canyons and mesas of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. In the days of their wanderings they had followed hunters’ deities, such as Raven, Mountain Lion and Wolf, who had accompanied them on the long trek southward. But the People had changed when they had settled, attaching themselves to a particular area, learning agriculture from the Zuni and the Ptieblo, weaving from the Hopi and, later, sheepherding from the Spaniard. With the passing of a way of life, gods of the old days were eclipsed. Raven—or Black-god, as he was now known—had even fought an inconclusive duel with Nayenezgani between San Francisco Peaks and Navajo Mountain. So Raven was a figure out of the very distant past. He had been honored when the People had been hunters rather than herders, farmers, weavers, silversmiths.
The Peyote way, he knew, was an even newer thing, learned from the Utes. And it was new, in many ways, also for those who were lost, though it might touch upon ancient chords. The crossed lines on the ground behind the altar were said to be the footprints of Christ. He chose to regard them as giant bird-tracks. He knew that he would never go back to the Peyote hogan, for this way was not his way, though it had served to bring him an important message. For good or ill, he saw that he was marked to be a hunter.
He would finish school and he would learn the songs his uncle wished to teach him. He knew without knowing how he knew that both of these things would be important in the hunting he must one day do. He would venerate the old ways yet learn the new—the very old ways, and the very new— and in this there was no contradiction, for a Navajo was one of the most adaptable creatures on Earth. The nearby Hopis danced and prayed for rain. His people did not. They sought to live with their environment rather than to control it. The Pueblos, the Zunis, the Hopis lived clustered together like bellicanos in condominiums. His people did not. They lived apart from one another and families took care of themselves. Other tribes incorporated bellicano words into their language to explain new things. Even in the twentieth century the Navajo language had evolved to cover the changing times, with over two hundred new words just to name the various parts of the internal combustion engine. They had learned from the Anglos, the Spaniards, the Pueblos, the Zunis, the Hopis. They had flowed, they had adapted, yet had remained themselves. Not for nothing did they consider themselves descendants of Changing Woman.
Yes. He would learn both the new and the old, he had told himself. And Black-god would accompany him on the hunt.
And this had come to pass. Yet he had not counted on so much change on the part of the People in the time-twisted times he had been away. They were still the People, different from all others. But their rate of change and his had been different.
Now, looking across the world from atop Mount Taylor, he saw that Black-god, who had chosen him, had kept his promise, making him into the mightiest hunter of his time. But now he was retired and those days were past. It seemed too much of an effort for an individual to adapt any further. The People as a whole were an organic thing and had had much time to adjust, slowly. Let it be. His design was drawn. Perhaps it was right to walk away from it now in beauty and die like the legend he had become.
He began the mountaintop song for this place. The staccato words rolled out across his world.
As the day wore on the clouds became colored smoke below him. Something passed overhead, uttering a single cawing note. Later he discovered a black feather which had fallen nearby. As he added it to his jish in the unwounded deerskin pouch, he wondered at its ambiguous character. Black, the color of the north, the direction in which the spirits of the departed travel. Black north, from which the chindi returns, along with other evil things. Black for north, for death. Yet Raven might cast a black feather, send it to him. And what might that imply?
Whatever…Though he could not read its depths, he could see its surface. He drew circles in the dust with his forefinger, and then he rubbed them out. Yes. He knew.
But still he sat there, on his island in the sky, and the day drifted through noon. Finally the call he had been expecting came. He knew that it would be Edwin Tedders before he heard the voice.
“Billy, we are getting very nervous here. Have you gone over the data?”
“Yes.”
“Did you come up with anything?”
“Yes.”
“Can you trip through now?”
“No. There’s no box anywhere near here.”
“Well, get to one! We’ve got to know, and I don’t want it on the phone.”
“Can’t do that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“If the lady in question numbers among her other virtues the ability of knowing what people have on their minds, I don’t want her getting this from you.”
“Wait a minute. I’ll call you back.”
A little later, the second call came through.
“Okay. This is the tightest fit. Listen, Thrgetman will be a skip and a jump away from a box to no one here knows where. And it blows immediately after tripping.”
“If she can kill its juice—”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. We’re also calling in human psis.”
“There aren’t all that many and they aren’t all predictable. Right?”
“A few are very good. And some are here already.”
“They find you anything?”
“Nothing yet. Now, what do you have in mind? Can you state it in such a general fashion that we’ll have an idea without details she can use?”
“No.”
There was a pause. Then, “Christ! We’ve got to have something, Billy! We might be falling over each other.” “You won’t even know I’m around.”
“You will be in the area?”
“No details, remember? Your own psis might even get it from you—then she might get it from them if she misses you.”
“If you’re going to be in the neighborhood a psi might just as easily get it from you.”
“I don’t think so. Primitive people can sometimes go black on a telepath. I’ve seen it happen on other worlds. I’ve gone primitive again.”
“Well, how soon will you be on the job?”
Billy regarded the sinking sun.
“Soon,” he said.
“You can’t just state simply what you’re going to do?”
“We’re going to stop her.”
“You’ve become royalty or an editor? Or acquired a tapeworm? What’s this ‘we’? You have to let us know if you’re bringing other people in on this.”
“I’m not bringing other people in on it.”
“Billy, I don’t like this—”
“Neither do I, but it will be done. You won’t be able to reach me after this.”
“Well, goodbye…That’s it, then. Good luck.”
“Goodbye.”
He faced the white east, the blue south, the yellow west and the black north and bade them goodbye; also, the Holy People of the mountain. Then he climbed back from one world to the other.
The Iroquois called you
the Being without a Face.
I go to look and see if this is true,
great Destroyer
who goes about menacing
with couched lance and raised hatchet.
I put my feet down with pollen
as I walk.
I place my hands so,
with pollen.
I move my head with pollen.
My feet, my hands, my body
are become pollen,
and my mind, even my voice.
The trail is beautiful.
My lands and my dwelling are beautiful.
Aqalàni, Dinetah.
My spirit wanders across you.
