Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 23
Hurriedly he got to his feet, shucking out of the shirt and reaching for his belt buckle. Jennifer moved past him and stretched herself luxuriously on the bed. “All right,” she said approvingly, watching, as he got out of his pants.
Naked, he stopped beside the bed. “Ah—just remember, it has been a long time.”
She laughed, making everything bounce and ripple. “The way it looks from here,” she said pointedly, “it’s definitely been long enough.”
She held out her arms and opened her thighs. “Come on, now. Time to get back on that bike and start pedaling.”
Heart hammering, he mounted her. At the first warm sliding contact she clutched at him and shuddered. “See,” she whispered, “you haven’t lost it. Haven’t lost a thing—”
THE REST of the night was a scented blur of couplings and uncouplings, of humpings and pumpings and ridings and bestridings, all over the big bed and then at various locations around the room and even once in the shower. Jennifer was an agile and imaginative partner with, it developed, no inhibitions whatever as to techniques, positions, or orifices. She was also able, somehow, to cause Graham to tap into unsuspected reserves of stamina, so that he found himself doing things he had not dreamed of for decades.
Gray light was beginning to filter through the window curtains when Graham finally fell asleep, feeling Jennifer’s breath on his neck and the soft flattening of her breasts against his back. From the rhythm of her breathing he thought she was still awake, and he wanted to speak to her, but the thought got away from him and he slipped away into the darkness.
When he awoke the room was brightly lit and Jennifer was no longer beside him. He sat up, after a confused moment, and looked around, just as she came padding naked out of the bathroom.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “I didn’t want to, like, wake you up.”
He blinked as she crossed the room and began picking up her clothing. “Man,” she said, “I must have been, like, totally shitfaced, you know?” She glanced at him and grinned. “Because, like, I don’t remember anything.”
She bent, stepped into the powder-blue panties, and hiked them up over her hips. Her movements were entirely unself-conscious, she might have been tying a shoe or brushing her hair.
“I mean, like, don’t get me wrong,” she added quickly. “I’m sure you’re a cool dude and we had a good time and all.” She grinned again, and this time she did look a little embarrassed. “It sure feels like we had an awesome time, know what I’m saying? But it’s just, like, totally gone. Those fucking blue kamikazes, I guess.”
She hooked the bra over her shoulders and fitted her breasts into the cups. “Don’t be, like, offended or anything,” she said, “but I don’t even remember who you are.”
His mouth felt very dry. “For God’s sake, Jennifer—”
She giggled. “Jennifer? Hey, dude, sounds like you got pretty wasted yourself. My name’s not Jennifer,” she said, hooking the bra’s catch. “I’m Stephanie. Guess you can’t remember either.”
She pulled the skirt on. “Hey,” she said, “are you, like, on TV or anything?” She zipped, buttoned, and made a small tugging adjustment. “That’s right,” she said, “they’re having some kind of, like, Star Trek convention or something, aren’t they? At, like, the hotel? I think I heard about that.” She shrugged into the top. “Are you, like, into that? I don’t know anything about it. I just went there for a drink because they’re not too careful about checking ID.”
Wonderful, Graham thought. An underage psycho with multiple personalities. If only I can get her out of here before she turns into Greta the Axe Murderer.
She bent again and picked up her shoes, looked at them, and made a dismissive face. “Well,” she said to Graham “like I say, it must have been pretty decent. Sorry I can’t remember. But hey, have a good one, okay?”
Picking up her purse, carrying the shoes in her other hand, she opened the door. “Shit,” Graham heard her mutter, “what fucking time is it, anyway?”
The door closed behind her. Graham lay back and, after a moment, laughed softly to himself. It wasn’t a very humorous laugh.
That was when the bedside phone rang. He cursed, rolled over, and grabbed up the receiver. “Yes?” he said.
A small timid voice said, “Mr. Graham? This is the front desk. I’m afraid there’s been some kind of mistake.” Graham heard apologetic throat-clearing sounds. “Apparently there was a phone call for you last night, but for some reason you were never paged. We’re very sorry—”
“Never mind,” Graham said quickly. “Where was the call from? Is there a message?”
“Yes, in fact, you’re to call St. Andrew’s Hospital at—”
“I know where it is,” Graham interrupted. “You’ve got the number there, don’t you? Go ahead and ring me through.”
A few minutes later Graham was listening to another faceless voice, this one a woman’s, cool and efficient-sounding but softened by an obvious sympathy. “Mr. Graham,” it said, “I’m afraid Margaret passed away last night, just before midnight.”
He bent forward until his face almost touched his knees. His mouth opened without making any sound. For an instant it felt as if all his skin had been stripped away.
“For what it may be worth,” the voice added after a moment, “it was very peaceful. It happened in her sleep and she never woke up. The nurses say she actually appeared to be smiling.”
Graham sat up as the voice talked on. He hardly heard, let alone paid attention to the words. The telephone receiver hung all but forgotten in his hand as he stared across the room, at the bright-red lipstick message printed on the mirror:
SO LONG
BIG STOOP
DAMN
WE WERE GOOD
2000
Smoke
William Sanders has ridden various literary horses during the quarter century that he has been writing professionally. A successful sports and outdoor writer for many years, he turned to fiction in 1988 with the alternate-history farce Journey to Fusang, for which he was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. After several more SF titles, he turned to adventure and suspense novels, then to mysteries, winning wide critical acclaim with his short-lived and much-mourned Taggart Roper series, the first two of which (The Next Victim and A Death on 66) were finalists for the Oklahoma Book Award.
In the mid-nineties he returned to science fiction and fantasy, publishing short stories—mostly on traditional Cherokee themes—in various magazines and anthologies. His story “The Undiscovered” won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 1998 and was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards as well. His sixteenth book, The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, was published in January 1999 by Yandro House.
In the story that follows, he takes us to a Cherokee village of the 1790s, where an old shaman must solve a mystery that threatens to tear his world apart.
Standing on the bank of the little stream, facing the sun that was just beginning to rise over the nearest ridge, the old man named Smoke poured tobacco into his palm, cautiously shaking the little buckskin bag until it was empty and tucking it into a fold of his fringed hunting coat. He raised both hands to face level, so that the rays of the rising sun shone full on the small mound of dark Cherokee leaf.
Now he stuck the forefinger of his free hand into the little pile of tobacco and began stirring gently. As he stirred, he raised his dry old voice in an igawesdi medicine song, chanting the secret words that were not Cherokee but a much older language.
At the end of the song he paused and blew very lightly on the tobacco; then he raised it to the sun again and began the igawesdi once more. Four times in all he sang the song, always stirring, always keeping the tobacco in the sunlight; four times he blew on the acrid-smelling crumbled leaves.
Done, he got out the little bag and carefully refilled it, making sure not to spill so much as a flake of the tobacco. It was good strong tobacco; he had grown it himself, in a secret mountainside clearing, protected by a charm to keep hunters and others away, since of course serious tobacco had to be grown absolutely unseen by anyone but the one who would be using it.
Now, however, it was “doctored” tobacco, “remade” for a particular purpose, and needing only to be smoked in order to release its power. And so it was to be treated with respect; it would have been very bad to drop any.
Stowing the buckskin pouch in the bigger medicine bag that hung at his hip, he turned and started down the narrow trail that ran alongside the fast-running little creek. But he had taken only a few steps when he heard the high young voice from somewhere downstream: “Ni, edutsi!”
He stopped, his dark, lined face registering anger. Then his expression cleared and he smiled very slightly. “M,” he called back.
A moment later the spring-green bushes parted and a half-grown boy appeared. “Osiyo, Inoli,” Smoke said. “What do you mean, coming up here and hollering when I’m making medicine? You know better than that.”
The boy called Badger said, “I heard you singing, Uncle. I waited till you were through.”
“How did you know I was done?” Smoke asked, trying to sound angry but not doing it very well. Badger was his only sister’s daughter’s boy and his favorite of all his younger relations.
“You taught me that igawesdi,” Badger said. “For finding lost things, right? Did you lose something?”
“Never mind that.” In fact, Smoke had lost a treasured ear ornament the other night at a stomp dance and was hoping to use the tobacco to help him find it, but he wasn’t going to admit that to the boy. “Anyway,” he added, “you shouldn’t trail your elders and sneak up on them like that.”
Badger tossed his shaggy black hair back. It was a warm day, and he wore only a buckskin breechclout and moccasins. He said, “Nine Killer wants you. Something bad has happened.”
“Doyu? Then let’s go.” Nine Killer was the town headman. Not that that gave him any right to issue orders to Smoke or anyone else: A Cherokee headman’s power was very limited, a matter of personal prestige rather than any vested authority. But Nine Killer was a good, smart headman, and respectful of custom; he wouldn’t have sent for the town’s senior medicine man without good reason. “What’s the matter?” Smoke asked as Badger led the way back down the trail.
“Otter’s dead,” the boy said over his shoulder. “Somebody killed him.”
“Eee,” Smoke said, surprised. “Who did it?”
Badger stepped over a fallen log and looked back. “Nobody knows,” he said. “That’s why Nine Killer wants you.”
“Big Head found him,” Badger told Smoke. “He was going fishing this morning, and when he went down to the river, there was Otter, lying on that sandbar below the bluff, with a knife stuck in him.”
By now they were passing through the town, which had come unusually alive this morning, though nobody seemed to be doing any useful work; people talked excitedly in little groups while others were walking in the direction of the river. News of Otter’s death must have spread like a brushfire in a dry summer.
The town was a fairly typical Overhill Cherokee community of the time: a loose collection of houses strung out along the river, between the high-water mark and the cultivated fields beyond. Most of the houses were solid log cabins, chinked with mud and roofed with pine bark, though a few families still lived in the old-style wattlewalled homes.
In Smoke’s youth the town had been a closer place, the houses clustered tightly together around the big central council house, and surrounded by a high palisade for protection against attack. But the raiding days were all but over now; most of the traditional enemy tribes—such as the distant but dreaded Iroquois nations to the north—were paying a brutal price for having helped the English king in his recently ended war with the white colonists, and were having all they could do just to survive, never mind bothering anybody else.
As was true for the Cherokees as well, of course; the final peace with the Americans had cost the Principal People much of their best lands, and yet still the pressure continued from the insatiable white settlers . . . but at least the days of blood were more or less at an end. Now the People could live in peace while they tried to adjust to the enormous changes in their world.
Only now something had happened that might destroy that peace. Smoke pulled his hunting coat closer about him; warm as the day was, he suddenly felt a little cold.
There was a considerable crowd down by the riverbank when Smoke and Badger arrived. They all stood well back, though, up in the shadow of the trees, above the still-fresh marks of the last spring flood.
The little sandbar lay white and clean in the sunlight, sloping gently down to the water’s edge. It would have been quite a pretty little scene if it hadn’t been for the dead man lying on his back on the sand, a few bowstrings’ length back from the water’s edge. Even from the high-water line, Smoke could see the knife handle protruding from the body.
Nine Killer stood beside the corpse, along with the man named Big Head. Both of them were looking very serious. So was everybody in sight, come to that. Except for the dead man, who didn’t look any particular way but dead.
“Stay back there,” Nine Killer called as Badger pushed through the crowd. Then he recognized Smoke. “Osiyo, Gog’sgi,” he said, relief in his voice. “Come see.”
Smoke walked slowly down the bar, watching the ground, keeping well clear of the lines of tracks that already marked the sand. “Osiyo,” he greeted Nine Killer and Big Head, and looked down at the body. “Osiyo, Otter, you drunken fool,” he muttered. “What did you get yourself into this time?”
“I found him,” Big Head said. His voice was a little unsteady. “He was just lying here like this.”
“Anybody else around?” Smoke asked.
“No,” Big Head said. His head wasn’t particularly big; the name came from a dream he had had. “Didn’t see anybody at all, all the way to the river.”
“I made everybody stay clear,” Nine Killer said to Smoke, “until you could get here. Figured we didn’t need a lot of people tracking around, messing up the sign.”
Smoke gave a quick nod of approval, without looking at Nine Killer. He was studying the body at his feet. Otter lay with his arms flung out to either side, his eyes open, staring blankly at the sky; a thin, long-limbed young man dressed in badly fitting trousers of dark blue broadcloth, such as the traders sold, but no shirt. His hair was chopped off at neck length, in the style some of the young men now favored.
The knife had gone in just below his breastbone; the angle of the handle showed that the killer had given an upward thrust, to be sure of striking the heart. The sand beneath and around the body was soaked with blood; the flies were already swarming, paying little attention to Big Head’s attempts to shoo them away.
“This is bad,” Nine Killer said in a low voice.
Smoke looked up sharply, switching his attention momentarily from Otter to the headman. Nine Killer was an imposing figure, tall and powerfully built; although no longer the young warrior who had killed nine Catawbas in a single battle, he was still a man in the prime of life, and age had only added dignity to his bearing. Standing there now, wearing only a breechclout and a blanket thrown over his shoulders—Smoke guessed he had come quickly when he heard about Otter, not waiting to dress properly—he could not have been mistaken for anything but an important man.
But just now he looked worried; there were lines about his eyes besides the ones the years had put there.
“A very bad thing,” he said, and shook his head. “There could be big trouble.”
Smoke knew exactly what Nine Killer meant; he had been thinking along the same lines, all the way down the hill with Badger. The situation had all sorts of ugly possibilities.
Murder was not unknown among the Cherokees, but it was far from common. Killing an enemy was an honored act—probably half the men in the town had names incorporating the verb “to kill”—but among themselves the Principal People were expected to keep their violent impulses firmly in check.
The penalty for transgression was simple and, except in very unusual cases, without appeal: the victim’s clan kin would take blood vengeance, a life for a life. It was not merely their right but their absolute duty.
If possible, the avenging clan would kill the slayer; but if this proved impracticable, any member of the killer’s clan could be taken instead. Either way, the execution would be a privileged act; no counterretaliation would take place. There would be no long-running blood feud.
Still, as Nine Killer said, there could be much trouble before this affair was settled. Tensions always ran high in the wake of a killing, and the sacred harmony of the community would be endangered. Nine Killer was right to be worried.
“Otter was Wolf Clan,” he said to Smoke. “They’ll be demanding blood. And right now we don’t even know who did it. Is there any way you can tell?”
Smoke looked at the headman for a moment. “A finding medicine for the truth?”
“Something like that.”
“Huh. Maybe.” Smoke kept his face straight. “Maybe we won’t need it. Let’s try using our own eyes first, and our good sense. Sometimes that’s all the medicine you need.”
He studied the ground for a moment. “Look at the tracks,” he said. “What do they tell you?”
The other two men glanced briefly at the lines of footprints in the crumbling sand. That was all it took; they were, after all, Cherokees.
“One set of tracks,” Big Head said. “Came out here, walked back.”
“A lot deeper coming out than going back,” Nine Killer added. His forehead wrinkled itself up like a folded blanket. “Somebody killed Otter and then carried him out here? That’s crazy.”
“Crazier than that. Look at all the blood,” Smoke said. “All of it right here, not a drop anywhere else. Otter was carried here while he was still alive. Then the other man stabbed him.”
