The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [26]
"Is he dead?" whispered Stern.
"Afraid so," said Innes.
Stern's eyes rolled back in his head. Innes directed his inert form gently down to the floor of the passage outside the cabin.
Doyle knelt beside Selig's body to examine something faintly scrawled on the wall. His eye moved to a small clot of mud on the tiles by the door. Traces of the same mud were visible beneath the nails of his right hand.
"Try to keep them out of the cabin for a while, would you, Innes?" said Doyle, taking a magnifying glass from his pocket.
"Certainly, Arthur."
"There's a good fellow."
ROSEBUD RESERVATION, SOUTH DAKOTA
The moon was one night from round. The first cold breath of winter rode in the pocket of the wind. Leaves already turning. Geese overhead, flying south, away from the motherland. She looked back from the rise at the tumbledown houses and huts on the reserve and wondered how many more of her People would be taken when the snows came? How many would be left to welcome the spring?
She hugged the blanket tight around her shoulders. Hoped one of the patrols would not find her out here beyond the walls and send her back onto the reserve. So much sorrow: disgusting food, whiskey, the coughing sickness. The blue coats' repeating rifles. Sitting Bull murdered by one of his own Whites with their lying treaties, ripping open the belly of the sacred black hills for their gold ...
And she was afraid to sleep because of a dream that the world was ending? How was that any worse than what she saw when her eyes were open?
She knew the world of the Dakota, their Way, was gone forever. One trip to their city of Chicago had shown her that The whites had built a new world—machines, straight lines, squared corners—and if it was that world she saw ending in the dream, why should she lose any sleep? If the world of the Dakota, the first human beings, could be destroyed in one generation, then no world could be made to last; surely not one built on the blood and bones of her People.
This dream was not a curse wished on the whites, although many had passed her lips. They had killed her mother and father, but this was no vision of revenge. This dream had crept into her sleeping mind unwelcomed, and in the three months since, it had become a nightly torment from which she could find no relief. Driving her to stand out here on the flats beyond the reserve and ask her grandfather for an answer, which still had not come after seven nights of waiting.
There was proud, strong medicine in her family, and she knew when a dream-quest came she must follow wherever it would take her. This vision held no medicine she knew—a dark tower rising into burning skies above a lifeless desert, tunnels carved beneath the earth, six figures joining hands; out of a hole in the ground the Black Crow Man rode a wheel of fire. The images reminded her of what the Christians called Apocalypse, but if it came to that she was not afraid to die: When the fighting began, and she was called upon as in the dream, her only fear was that she might fail.
Thirty summers. Many suitors; never a husband. Hard to accept a man who had never ridden the hunt, a no-fight man, a touch-the-pen who'd given up their Way. But the whites killed all the strong ones and whiskey took the rest. So she had learned to ride and shoot and skin, made herself a warrior in body and in mind. She went to the white school as law required, learned to read their words and understand how they lived. They baptized her—one of their many strange rituals; and they thought her people were primitives—and called her Mary Williams.
When it suited her, she would answer to that name, wear I heir clothes—these skirts, these uncomfortable binding stays—and make herself handsome with their paints, but she look a lover only when she wanted one and even then always held herself apart. She had known since she was small that he was making ready for a life of power. When the dreams started, she knew that