Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

the insides of his cheeks. He took the pipe away and held the smoke for a moment, then puffed it out. As he did so, a sigh went up from the watchers.

Black Hawk was standing before him. White Bear handed the pipe up to him.

"May you walk this path on which we send you with courage and honor," Black Hawk said.

He turned to the people. "This council is at an end."

White Bear knew he could not hold back his tears any longer. He sprang to his feet and blindly hurled himself into the crowd that was already beginning to disperse. He felt a hand on his arm, but he pulled away from it.

He began to run. He ran through Saukenuk, through the meadow, into the trees by the river's edge. He ran past the graves. He ran with the hard, steady stride of one carrying a message.

But a messenger did not run sobbing, with tears streaming down his face.

[87]

6
In the Ancient Grove

Redbird watched, an aching, empty place in her chest, as White Bear disappeared into the woods at the edge of the Rock River.

"What a fool!" Water Flows Fast, standing nearby, had spoken. "The pale eyes have steel knives and blankets and big sturdy lodges that are always warm and never leak. They always have enough food. I would be happy to go live with a pale eyes if he asked me."

"Is your prattling tongue never still, woman?" said her husband, Three Horses.

"It was my prattling tongue that agreed to marry you."

Redbird had no heart to listen to them bicker.

"Let me through!" she cried, and the crowd parted before her.

"Where are you going?" cried her mother. "It is shameful to run after him." She grabbed Redbird's sleeve. "All the people will laugh at you."

"Let me go!"

As Wind Bends Grass pulled at her, Redbird's eyes met those of Wolf Paw, standing beside his father, the war chief. He glared at her. She knew he, too, wanted to tell her not to run after White Bear. But if he showed that he cared that much, the people would make fun of him.

She turned her back on all of them—Wind Bends Grass, Wolf Paw, Black Hawk, Owl Carver—and began to run.

When she reached the riverbank she saw no sign of him. For one panic-stricken moment she thought, Did he throw himself into the river?[88]

Then, downriver, she saw a canoe gliding over the glistening water. He was paddling hard and was almost out of sight around a bend.

Her own small bark canoe, on which she had painted a bird's wing in red, lay a short distance down the riverbank. She pushed it into the water, jumped into the rear and seated herself in the middle. The canoe's bottom scraped over the riverbank as she pushed off with her paddle.

She stayed a distance behind White Bear, just close enough to keep him in sight. He might not want her to follow him. She could not guess what was in his mind right now.

What would she do when she caught up with him? She had hoped to marry him, if not this summer, then the next. Ever since she was a small child she had found him endlessly fascinating. More so than ever since his return from his spirit journey. Nothing, she thought, would make her happier than living with him. Sun Woman had told her all about what happens when a man and a woman lie down together—knowledge that Wind Bends Grass had insisted that she did not yet need. It sounded painful, pleasurable, frightening and exciting. She had looked forward to lying down with White Bear.

But now she was going to lose him. How could Sun Woman send her own son away from the tribe?

And send him away from me. Redbird felt more hurt than if her own mother had turned against her.

And did White Bear truly mean to go with the pale eyes? He had smoked the calumet. He must.

The current carried her canoe through the water, brown with silt caught up in spring flooding, almost faster than she could paddle. Ahead the river divided, flowing around an island near the right bank, thick with trees. White Bear turned into the narrow channel that ran between island and shore, and she backpaddled to slow herself and watch.

His canoe rounded a huge fallen tree, whose exposed roots clutched at the island's shore like the fingers of a drowning man, and disappeared behind the trunk.

She let her paddle drag in the water, first on one side then on the other, holding her canoe back until he had time to land. Then she glided into the narrow channel and around the dead tree.[89]

He had drawn his canoe up in a small sandy cove, and was gone. She landed on the patch of sand beside his canoe and pulled her canoe partway out of the water.

She listened, and for a moment heard nothing but the wind in the trees. A redbird, her namesake, trilled long and loud, and another answered from a more distant tree.

Then she heard a human voice. No words, just an outcry. A cry of pain.

She plunged into the forest that covered the island, pushing her way through the shrubbery toward the sound of his voice.

He was sobbing so loudly that she was sure he could not hear her coming. She had heard a man sob like that once before, a dying hunter whose leg had been torn to shreds by a bear.

She moved through some trees and saw him. He was sitting with his back against the big black trunk of an oak. He was in a grove of trees so big and so old that little grew in their heavy shade, and there was an open place to sit. The season was so young that their branches were still almost bare, and she could see White Bear clearly in the afternoon sunlight. He held a severed tree branch in his lap. His eyes were squeezed shut and his lips were drawn back from his teeth, and his cries of pain came one after another.

She stepped out of the bushes into the grove. He looked up, and the face he showed her was so twisted that she could not tell whether he saw her. He went on sobbing hoarsely.

Her heart hurt to see him suffer so. She sat down beside him.

For a long time she listened to him weep, waiting for a chance to speak to him.

She looked at the branch he was holding. It was almost as long as her arm, and, surprisingly, it had leaves at its tip, even though this was only the Moon of Buds. He clutched it as a child clutches a doll for comfort.

Gradually his weeping subsided. She reached out very carefully and patted his shoulder lightly. When he did not pull away, she rested her hand on him. She eased herself closer until they were pressed together side by side, and she slid her arm around his shoulders and held him tightly.

At first she felt no answering movement. He seemed only half alive. She wondered if he knew she was here. Then his head dropped to her shoulder. She felt the weight of his body yielding to her.[90]

She put her other arm around him. She held him as if he were her child. In spite of his sorrow and her own, it was a great happiness to hold him like this.

He sighed and wiped his face with his hand. She stroked his cheek, brushing away the tears.

She wanted to talk to him, but waited for him to speak first.

"There is nothing I can do," he said. "I must go with Star Arrow, my father."

She studied his face as he stared off into the forest. She could see now the features of his father in him. There had always been something odd about his eyes, but she had never been quite able to decide what it was. Now she saw that they were rounder than most people's. They were shaped like his father's. His nose was thin and bony, with a high arch, and sharp at the end, like the beak of a bird. His eyebrows were thick, black and straight across. His chin was pointed. She loved the strangeness of his face.

She said, "When it gets dark we could go back to the village and fill our canoes with food and blankets and tools and weapons. There will be feasting tonight for Star Arrow. Everyone will sleep soundly after that. We could cross the Great River tonight, and tomorrow we could be far away."

He stared at her. "But I do not want to leave my people."

She had not thought that far ahead, about what it would be like to be away from Owl Carver, Iron Knife, Sun Woman, her sisters, her mother, all the others. Yes, it would be a great loss. But she could stand the pain, she thought, if she were beside White Bear.

"But we would have each other. Would it not hurt you less if you had me with you?"

He did not answer at once, and that made her feel as if a rough hand had squeezed her heart. But then he smiled at her, and she felt better.

"Yes, if I could share my life with you, the pain of leaving Saukenuk would be less." Then his face darkened. "But we could not live on our own. A man or a woman cut off from their tribe can no more be happy than a flower after it is picked can continue to grow. And I would have dishonored the promise I made with the sacred tobacco. The spirits would turn their backs on me. My mother and Owl Carver say that if I go with Star Arrow, I may learn things that would help our people."[91]

She was thunderstruck to realize that he actually wanted to go with Star Arrow. Then what was all this weeping for?

He did not care for her as much as she did for him. That made her angry. She pushed herself a little apart from him.

"I see that I have been a fool to chase after you, just as my mother said. It means more to you to go and live with the pale eyes than it does to have Redbird as your woman."

His eyes widened. "We have never before today spoken of this, you and I."

"Did we have to speak?" She felt herself getting angrier and angrier. "Why do you think I went looking for you when you went on your vision quest? Why do you think I followed you from the village today? And why did I say I would go with you across the Great River? Yes, I did want to be your woman. But you do not want me. You want to go away with this pale eyes father of yours, and maybe you want to take a pale eyes woman for yourself."

His mouth as well as his eyes opened up in amazement. "I have never even seen a pale eyes woman. How could I want one? I do want Redbird to be my woman. And I weep at leaving Saukenuk because I must leave you."

Again she reached out to him, putting her hands on his arms. "I would rather be cast out of our tribe than lose you."

He shook his head. "We do not have to lose our people or each other. It was part of the promise sealed with sacred tobacco that I am to come back. If we ran away now, Earthmaker would be angry with us."

She moved closer to him. She had seen Earthmaker in dreams. He was taller than the tallest tree, and he carried a great war club with a ball-shaped rock at the end of it and looked much like Black Hawk, with a long black lock of hair coiling down from the top of a shaved head.

"I wish I could meet and talk with the spirits, as you have," she said. "Sometimes I think I do meet them, in dreams."

"It can be dangerous to meet with the spirits," he said. His eyes seemed to be looking into the distance. He had seen so many things she had not. It was unfair, she thought sadly.

She had gone out to him in the bitter cold when the world was an endless white waste. She might have frozen to death. She might have been punished by drowning in the icy river. She had risked almost as much as he had.[92]

"I do not say that I am as strong as White Bear, or as worthy to speak with the spirits," she said. "I only wish I had a chance to."

He took her hands in his and looked deep