Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (36 page)

I said:  "I don't want to be here."

The Queen of Death Valley snapped her neck, bones cracking and crunching.  It didn't matter what I wanted; she was the queen, after all; I was one of her slaves.

I remembered the last time I'd ever seen my father.  He'd woken me up so early in the morning the sun hadn't risen yet.  He'd made me dress for the desert--long pants and long sleeves.  He'd said I could sit in the front seat of the car.

"I don't want to be here," I told the Queen.

Her army of Nunumbi came climbing out of the ground, treacherous little trolls with scales and squashed heads.  I tilted my head back and looked at the sky; and I didn't know whether the sketches up there were mine, or my father's.  There wasn't much of a difference after all.

The charcoal sketches converged and darkened until they were black.  The sky went black.  Everything came from the sky; and everything went back to it.  Sky was everything.  He was the first person who made me feel like a person.  That couldn't have been a lie.  When he'd chosen to love me, it couldn't have been a lie.

The charcoal drawings swirled apart.  The trails of light between them made for new lineart.  I recognized the shape of Sky's curls, the outline of his profile.  So they were my drawings, after all.

The colors and lights distorted in front of my eyes.  I felt myself returning.  The first thing I heard was the gurgling of a creek.

Creek hoyyoy.

The blurring of my senses disseminated.  I was kneeling on top of the Comanche kid who had called me Snake, Marcia Thunderbird's hand wrapped around my shirt.  My knuckles felt splintered.  The whole of the Creek tribe gathered around me in open-mouthed shock.

Dry air chilled the sweat on my clammy face.  I glanced around me in a stupor.  I must have been sleeping while awake, because I'd only just woken up.  The air in my lungs was real.  The ringing of dropped microphones, the papery sound of tribal flags on the air--those were real.  My head spun in a dizzying daze.  I felt like I'd climbed off a carousel; I couldn't find my legs.

"I'm sorry," I told the Comanche kid, just before Marcia pulled me off of him.

He coughed and he coughed--Dylan, I think his name was--but he didn't bleed.  I didn't like to hit so hard these days.

"S'alright," he said, sitting up slowly.  "So am I."

16

Porivo

I sat brooding in my bedroom with a bowl of milk and cornbread.  Liv Kristine crooned from the stereo under my desk.  That chick was boss.  The dove's feather in my braid drooped next to my cheek, the drawings on my walls curling at the corners.  I needed to invest in scotch tape.

Uncle Gabriel knocked on my door.  I mumbled, "C'min," and he did.  His reading glasses rested low on the bridge of his nose.  I wondered if he'd been skimming the community bulletin or something, because he wasn't big on books like I was.

"Mary's coming back to the reserve," Uncle Gabriel began.

My hair whipped around me when my head shot up.  "What?"

He took his glasses off.  He took his time folding them.  "I said, Mary's coming back to the reserve."

"When?" I asked, heart pounding.  "Why?"  I'd missed my sister.  At the same time, I was wary.

"As soon as September," Uncle Gabriel said.  Uncle Gabriel shook his head.  "Once she found out about Paul coming back..."

My gut twisted.  "Uncle Gabe," I blurted out.  "Paul took out the blood law on my dad."

Uncle Gabriel stared at me for so long, I wondered whether I'd opened my mouth and a foreign language had poured out.  Uncle Gabriel rubbed his face with his hands.  I hadn't seen that one in a while.

"I know you said it was outlawed," I began.

"He didn't," Uncle Gabriel said.

"Sky told me--"

"He didn't," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I did."

I rewound the conversation in my head.  It took almost a full minute before I realized what he was saying.

"No, you didn't," I said.

"I did," he said.  "I was the one who decided we had to resort to blood law."

"Stop it," I said, voice strangled.

"No," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I won't have you blaming Paul.  It wasn't Paul's decision to begin with.  If you'd like to blame somebody, blame me."

"You're lying," I said.  "You're just trying to make me shut up.  You've been right here, on the reservation--you couldn't have killed Dad.  Why do you always--"

"This isn't a lie.  Get your coat."

"What?"

"I said, get your coat.  You think I'm lying, so I'll prove I'm not."

My spine crawled.  For a second I thought he was going to take me to my father's rotting body.  My throat spasmed, but there wasn't anything in my stomach to throw up.  I milled slowly around the room until I found my gray jacket hanging off the inside of the closet door.  I pulled it on just as slowly, hoping to buy time.

"Sky told me," I mumbled.  "He said it was his dad."

"I'm not saying it wasn't."

I didn't understand at all.  I followed him out of the house and he locked the front door, a flashlight in his hand.  I zipped up my jacket, reveling in cold night air.

Uncle Gabriel didn't lead me to my father's body, but to the farming commons out west.  We walked past Aubrey's farm manor, my confusion only mounting.  I realized where we were headed when the sinkhole drew in view, the ochre-and-fireglass sand a silvery pink by moonlight.

"Did you--"  I swallowed.  Was Dad in there?  The water was so acidic, it gobbled up anything that touched its surface.  If you had to hide something, the sinkhole wasn't a bad idea.  I wondered why Dad had never thought of it.  He'd buried his bodies in the badlands, in the desert and the woods.

"Come with me," Uncle Gabriel said.

He started pushing against one of the petrified tree stumps.  I thought he'd lost his mind.  But then the tree stump actually moved; and I thought
I'd
lost my mind.  Uncle Gabe shone his light over the sizable hole in the ground.  A crude earthen staircase descended indefinitely.

"What's going on?" I asked, feeling stupid.

Uncle Gabriel said nothing, but climbed down the steps.  I followed him, must and stale groundwater sharp in the back of my throat.  After a good two minutes of walking we finally came to level land.  Uncle Gabriel gave me the flashlight; I looked around.

The sinkhole wasn't a sinkhole after all, I realized.  It was a cenote.  The white-green water pooled together in a shallow basin.  Small slivers of moonlight leaked in through the rocky ceiling.  When I looked to my left I saw the remains of a petrified tree, the golden trunk tall and thick, roots dangling over the dirt floor.  The wall directly in front of me was covered in some kind of complicated star chart, spirals, circles, and lines carved into the compacted soil.

"How long has this been here?" I asked faintly.

"Since before we lived on the Plains," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Our people originated in the Sierra Nevada, just west of here.  Even when Nettlebush wasn't our permanent habitat, we used to come here for religious ceremonies."

He took me by the shoulders, turning me around.  My eyes just about left my head.  The wall opposite the star chart was crammed with dizzying syllabics.  The writing started at the bottom of the wall, but climbed gradually; I had no idea just how high it reached.  A thin wooden ladder rested against the wall for ease of access.

"What alphabet is that?" I asked, my throat dry.

"Cree," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Most tribes borrowed their alphabet when we had an occasion to write something.  This writing is about eighty thousand years old.  It predates the population of every other continent save Africa."

"How can that be Cree writing?" I asked, cynical.  "I thought James Evans invented the Cree alphabet."

"He only said he did.  Father Bressani first reported literacy among the Cree tribe as far back as 1653--some one hundred and seventy-seven years before Mr. Evans arrived in the Americas.  Understand that discrediting our past achievements is crucial to invalidating us as a people."

I craned my head back to peruse the scripts on the wall.  My neck ached.

"What is it?" I finally thought to ask.

"It's a family tree," Uncle Gabriel said.  "Of every Shoshone who was ever born."

"Feel sorry for the guy who has to maintain this thing," I muttered.

"That would be me," Uncle Gabriel said.

We climbed partway back up the earthy steps.  Uncle Gabriel stopped me again.  He made me point the flashlight at a name carved on my left.  It read:

ᔦᓴᐊᓇᐁᓴ

"Wazzat?" I asked.

"Do you know who Sacajawea was?" Uncle Gabriel asked.

"Duh," I said, rolling my eyes.  Only the most famous member of our tribe.

"Yes," Uncle Gabriel said.  "But do you know her real name?"

"Lost Woman."  She'd been kidnapped by the Hidatsa tribe when she was nine, sold in marriage to a French fur trapper.

"But she wasn't a Lost Woman forever," Uncle Gabriel said.  "When she grew up, she found her way back to the Shoshone on Wind River.  So it was only proper that they gave her a new name."

"What was it?" I asked.

"Porivo," Uncle Gabriel said.

"Chief Woman?" I asked, translating as best I could.  "Sacajawea was a Daigwani?"

"Yes.  She was considered the wisest, most resilient among the Eastern Shoshone.  She was elected unanimously
and approved by the shaman."

I didn't know what to think.  I wished the staircase had a banister, so I could hold onto it.

"Here," Uncle Gabriel said.  He took the flashlight from me and pointed at the three names above hers:

ᑭᑕᐱᒣᔦᐱᔦᔭᓇᒋᔭ
- ᔭᓴᑲᒋᒋᐱᓇᒣᔭ - ᓯᓇᐯᑕᔭᔭ

"Those her kids?" I asked.

"Yes.  The firstborn is Jean-Baptiste, whose only daughter, Maria, unfortunately died in childhood.  The next is Toussaint Jr.--you probably know him as Bear Hunter, Daigwani of the Western band."

The same boy prince the Mormo
ns had tortured to death.  I swallowed, thinking of Sky for no good reason.

"So neither Jean-Baptiste nor Bear Hunter furthered their mother's bloodline," Uncle Gabriel said.  "That leaves the youngest of Sacajawea's children, and the only girl, Lizette Charbonneau."

"I didn't know Sacajawea had a daughter," I said.

"That's because it was kept a careful secret.  She happened to be born during a time when the US outlawed Daigwani--and decided to hunt them down."

I looked at him.

"What do you think really happened to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull?" he asked.  "Tecumseh, Hiawatha, and Attakullakulla?"

"But we weren't at war," I mumbled futilely.  "We weren't at war with the US."

"No, we weren't.  Still, it doesn't matter.  The past is the past."

"You brought me here to distract me," I said.  It almost worked.

"I absolutely did not," Uncle Gabriel said.  "I'm trying to explain to you why you can't hold Paul responsible."

I waited again.

Uncle Gabriel pointed the flashlight again at Lizette Charbonneau.  "Lizette went on to marry a Joseph Vertifeuille," he said.  "They had exactly one child together, a daughter named Victoire.  Victoire, in turn, gave birth to a girl called Gives Light--"

Yeah, that got my attention.

"--who, during the time of the Indian boarding schools, was baptized with the Christian name of Rumilly."

I sat down on the earthen steps.  I put my elbows on my knees, thinking.

"You won't tell anyone about this," Uncle Gabriel said.  "They aren't above killing us still.  Reservations are literally called 'Prisoner of War Camps' in today's federal records.  That should speak for itself."

"But there wasn't a war," I said, lightheaded.  "How can we be prisoners of war if there wasn't a war?"

"Questions like those are the ones they'll kill you for."

"We're related to Sacajawea?"  I couldn't keep up.

"As far as anyone is concerned," Uncle Gabriel said, "your oldest recorded ancestor is Rumilly Gives Light.  We don't know anything prior to that.  I mean it, Rafael.  You are not to repeat this to anyone."

"Not even Sky?"

"The only people who know are the tribal council."

"Your tribal council," I said, dazed.

"We didn't know whether we wanted to bring back blood law," Uncle Gabriel said.  "We hadn't needed it in centuries.  But when Eli left the reservation, and went into hiding, I knew we couldn't trust the FBI to stop him any more than they had stopped the first seven murders.  The FBI declines to prosecute 52% of crimes when the victim is an Indian.  It's literally a coin toss with them."

"But Paul could have just brought him back to the reserve," I said.  "And--"

"And what?  Hold him in the jail cell we aren't allowed to build?  Feed him, clothe him, and take care of him after all that he's done to our community?"

I didn't want to believe that there was no other way to stop my father.  I didn't want to believe it; but I knew it was true.