Zadayi Red Read online

  “Grandfather, I . . .”

  His shadowy eyebrows bristled as she hovered in indecision.

  “You hesitate because your old stories say that there is a price to be paid for such a gift.”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  “That is correct. I want you to understand precisely what the price is. Because of your devotion to your spirit guide, you will be permitted no personal life. No husband, no children. You will not accept the position of Medicine Chief or any other position of honor. Do you understand?”

  Sunoya felt herself quail.

  “Child, are you a virgin?”

  She was ashamed. No man had courted her. She was an old maid. No other woman in her village over eighteen years old was unmarried.

  “Speak up. I know the answer anyway.”

  “Yes, Grandfather, I am.”

  “You will remain one. This is a strict condition of the gift. If you have carnal knowledge of any man, even against your will, you will die at the end of the next day. Upon your death the guide will be released from the world of mortality and return to our circle here.”

  In Sunoya’s mind Tsola said, Be careful. Look into yourself. If you can’t accept the conditions, don’t accept the gift.

  “Granddaughter, do you understand?”

  Be sure, said Tsola.

  She shivered. “Yes, Grandfather. I am honored, and I accept.”

  “Then you will devote your life to this guide and to following the wisdom he gives you. You will live apart from your family, alone with your spirit companion. You will learn from him, give your people the wisdom you get from him, and use his counsel wisely.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. There are certain other guidelines. Your guide will have some ability to see the future, but he is not permitted to tell you what will happen. He can tell you what to do, but not what will happen according to whatever choice you make.”

  Sunoya looked down.

  “I see you don’t understand. Suppose your guide knows that an enemy waits along the left-hand path and says, ‘Take the right-hand path.’ Do as he says, but don’t ask him why, or what would happen if you went the other way. He is not allowed to disclose the future to you.”

  “I understand, Grandfather.”

  Thunderbird’s eyes gleamed at everyone in the circle. “Then what remains to us? To choose this young woman’s guide. Who wants to go with her? Who wants to live on Turtle Island for the rest of her life and help her people?”

  No one answered.

  Sunoya felt something crumple inside her. It is all going to be taken from me.

  Thunderbird said firmly, “I want every one of my guests to tell me, and this young woman, why he should not go to Earth and spend time as her guide. After all, time means nothing here.”

  Rabbit spoke up immediately. “The world is tricky. Everybody says I’m a trickster, and I guess I am, but the world is much trickier than me.” His split nose twitched, and his whiskers bristled. “Also, they say the way I run is crazy, wild with changes of directions. But life is the same. And human beings . . . ? Well, no one would let a trickster be your trusted guide.”

  Wolf growled at Rabbit, and they both chuckled. Then Wolf turned seriously to Sunoya. “The world is not what it appears to be, Granddaughter. For instance, in this land Rabbit and I are friends. There is no hunting here.

  “I have a reputation for being fierce, and your people have an expression, ‘the lone wolf.’ But I am the opposite of a loner. As much as any animal that exists, I am bound tightly to my family. Our pack is the hand, the individuals merely fingers. And fierce? Yes, we are fierce together, and for each other. We hunt as one, and survive as one.

  “Guide you? I cannot live in a human family. They seem so alien.”

  Little Deer said simply, “The anger of the Deer People has not disappeared entirely, so your guide won’t be me. I can only say that I’m not surprised that your people are about to get themselves into trouble by killing.”

  Owl hooted his words. “You human beings don’t understand me. Though I do have wisdom, it is about the realm of death. In your world I am the most silent and deadly of killers. Of all the animals, only I hunt, kill, and eat my own kind. You don’t want me for a guide to put a stop to killing.”

  Rattlesnake said, “Everyone knows that my people are the great friends of mankind. Long ago, when Grandmother Sun was angry and determined to burn up all the human beings, various animals went against Sun to stop her. After all others had failed, I succeeded. I bit and killed Sun’s daughter, and Sun was so grieved that she cried and cried, and on many days did not shine.

  “We rattlesnakes are your great benefactors in other ways. With our fangs your healers make cuts to apply medicines. Your warriors wear our rattles on their heads. You rub the oil from our bodies on your joints to take the soreness away. When great sicknesses sweep the land, you eat our flesh to ward them off.

  “You pray to us, and well you should. I think we have done enough for human beings.”

  Only Buzzard was left. His words were, “I have nothing to say.”

  “Very well,” Thunderbird said. “I gather that Buzzard has guessed the truth. Buzzard, I appoint you to be the partner to our granddaughter Sunoya.”

  They glared at each other.

  “Now say the words,” Thunderbird instructed. “As nicely as you can.” Thunderbird was in a kindly mood.

  Buzzard fixed Sunoya with his red-gold eye. She trembled a little at the oddity of having him turn his head sideways to her. Then she realized that was the only way he could see her.

  “Sunoya,” he said, “you are a young woman of great courage. I would be pleased to go to Earth with you and help your people.”

  Sunoya was stunned.

  Say ‘Thank you,’ said Tsola.

  “Thank you, Buzzard.”

  5

  Sunoya strolled through the pink grass, knee high in places. She kept glancing sideways at Buzzard on her shoulder, thrilled and shy at once. She could hardly believe what she’d done. Her blood fizzed.

  Tsola’s drum sounded faintly in her mind, the first warning.

  “Are we going to be friends?” she said.

  To her relief, Buzzard nodded. When she got to the orange creek, she sat on a knee-high, ruby-colored boulder. “Would you like me to stroke your feathers?” Buzzard hopped onto her knee, and she did.

  Tsola’s drum flicked an occasional accent into the rhythm, beginning to call her away from this mystic world, back to her home, Turtle Island. Listening, she calculated that she had a little time left here.

  “You didn’t want to come with me.” She figured that if she was going to brave, she might as well be foolhardy.

  Thunderbird was having some fun at my expense.

  She flinched—Buzzard was speaking inside her head.

  I will tell you the story. A long time ago, Thunderbird, Osprey, Hawk, some others, and I were visiting Turtle Island. When we’re there, we eat, like all animals. The others found the carcass of a buffalo calf and fed on it. I sat on a snag nearby and watched. They invited me to join them. I told them carrion was disgusting.

  Thunderbird was amused, in his superior way. “Fastidious, are we?” he said.

  He gave one of those gigantic laughs of his and flew straight into the air, facing me. You know he carries thunderbolts in his wings. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, he picked out the smallest one he had and shot it just past my head into a branch.

  It burned this beautiful head plume right off. It scorched my face. That’s why, when you see a buzzard on Earth, the face has no feathers. He seemed to shudder. Instead there’s that ugly, mottled red skin. And no rainbow.

  Now Tsola’s drum, so far away, began to insist.

  “I didn’t hit you,” Thunderbird always says. But he’s never quite forgiven me for my so-called fastidiousness.

  Since Buzzard didn’t go on, Sunoya slipped off her moccasins and dipped her bare feet in the cool water. Now Tsola�
��s drum was throbbing. They didn’t have long.

  You and I will do fine, he said. But this is Thunderbird’s little punishment. While I’m on Turtle Island, all the years of your life, I’ll wear that ugly red face and I’ll have to eat carrion.

  She couldn’t help smiling. Then she said, “Let me see your full beauty now.”

  He took a couple of flaps into the air, faced her, and hovered. His rainbow plume was very pretty, but the underside of his dark wings was magnificent, black on the body and the leading edge of his wings, silver on the flying feathers and tail. These colors were a high honor among the Immortals.

  “You’re magnificent,” she said.

  He turned his head the other way, spearing her with his other bright eye.

  She held out her arm, and he settled back onto it.

  “Here’s a gift for you,” she said. “A name—Su-Li.” It was the word for buzzard in her language. “I think it is a beautiful name.” Among her people, the Galayi, Buzzard was honored as the animal that shaped their world into mountains and valleys.

  A flutter in the drumbeat reminded her that her time was running out.

  She looked around at this eternal land. Su-Li was more beautiful here than he would be on Turtle Island. All the inhabitants here were immortal. When she was lucky enough to make return visits, she herself would always be young here.

  At that moment the drum shifted its rhythm. From a slow, easy heartbeat it accelerated to a hint of anxiety, then of urgency. It rapped harder and faster, thrumming like a pounding rain, hints of thunder flickering along its edges. Then it surged into a tremendous crescendo and ended with a ferocious bang.

  Sunoya jerked. Her body stiffened. The final whack of the drum froze her heartbeat in the Land beyond the Sky Arch, and that world eye-winked away.

  She rubbed her eyes and let ordinary reality come back into being, the realm they called Turtle Island, her home. She felt Su-Li shift his weight from claw to claw on her shoulder. Glowing embers came into focus, and she raised her eyes into the face of the drummer, her mentor and friend, Tsola.

  “Look around,” Sunoya said to Su-Li. “This is your new home.”

  They sat in deep shadows just inside the Emerald Cavern. Immediately the buzzard hopped to where he could see outside, uneasy with the confinement of the cave.

  To calm him, Tsola said, “Isn’t this world beautiful?” Before him glistened Emerald Pool, and at the far end its creek trickled away. The trees gushed with leaves of every autumn color. The mountain ridges cut jagged edges against a sky of puffy white clouds.

  Su-Li cocked his head this way and that, one eye outward to the bright world, one inward to the dark cave. But he said nothing.

  Uneasy, Sunoya said to him, “What do you think of all this?”

  No answer.

  Sunoya felt a sharp pang of sadness, like a string in her heart had been plucked, resonating all through her body.

  She shook her head and gave her attention back to Su-Li. “Do you like our world?”

  She felt swept away by grief, tumbled off her feet by feelings rampaging like a river in spring flood.

  When the river let her go, she understood. She traded a glance of understanding with Tsola and looked back into Su-Li’s red-gold eye. “So you also talk to me through emotions.”

  She heard his answer inside her head. Feelings are so much stronger than words.

  Sunoya nodded to herself, grasping to understand more about her spirit guide. Then she took thought and asked what she wanted to know. “You’re sad? Why?”

  Everything here is in the death-grip of Time. What could be more terrible?

  6

  Time meant tribulations. Sunoya didn’t mind the journey from the Cavern to her home village. She took advantage of the walk to get to know her new spirit guide, and got a very good idea from him.

  She didn’t hesitate when she got to the village. She walked directly through the village green, where everyone would see Su-Li. He seemed to make himself larger and take on a glow. She saw the gawks and heard the whisperings. She wished someone would shout, “Hooray! Unbelievable! We got a spirit guide.” But few human beings were that comfortable around magic, or around Sunoya.

  She went directly to Kanu’s hut. The old man came out blinking, his eyes unprepared for the noonday sun. They changed when he took in Sunoya and—incredible—Su-Li sitting on her shoulder.

  “My child!”

  Sunoya grinned at him. The older generation wasn’t given to big exclamations.

  She broke the news to him right away—she would not be able to take over as Medicine Chief, so he would have to stay in the job. Maybe an apprentice could be brought over from another village.

  Kanu barely heard her. “A spirit guide!” he said. “And a buzzard!”

  He held out his arm to Su-Li, but the buzzard turned away.

  “I don’t think he’ll attach himself to anyone but me.”

  One of Kanu’s dogs jumped up at Su-Li, and the bird fluttered up to the smoke hole of the hut. He said something crabby in Sunoya’s head.

  “Excuse me,” said her uncle. “Do you want to eat?”

  Kanu was a little late. Courtesy demanded that those be the first words to welcome a traveler.

  Sunoya called Su-Li from the top of the hut. As she stooped through the doorway, she felt his claws clutching and releasing her shoulders. The bird would never be comfortable cut off from the sky.

  As she munched cornbread, she and her uncle talked about necessities. She needed a hut to live in privately with Su-Li. Kanu said, now that they were back, he would ask his sons-in-law to make her a brush hut covered with hides today, and tomorrow start building a hut of mud and sticks.

  When she finished eating and accepted tea, Kanu could wait no longer. “What did you do, what did you say to the Immortals that made them . . .?”

  She told him what she had hidden from him earlier, that she had seen, repeatedly, the Cape of Eagle Feathers bloodied and soiled. Kanu dropped his head into his hands. When he finally looked up, he said, “What are we to do?”

  She didn’t answer his question as he meant it. “Change the future.” She was riding high on the confidence that the Immortals had shown in her. “Not even a seer’s visions always come true. They can be prevented. You know that.”

  Kanu’s right hand trembled. “Just the two of us? What . . . ?”

  “The two of us and a spirit guide,” Sunoya reminded him. Then she told him what Su-Li had suggested on the walk home, and how she and the buzzard had turned it into a plan.

  Kanu chewed on it. “All right,” he said. “The next meeting of the chiefs is in three days.” They met on every new moon and every full moon. “We’ll stick our necks out.”

  The White Chief Yano, the Red Chief Inaj, and her uncle Kanu took their seats at the sacred fire in the council lodge. Sunoya thought for the hundredth time that she wished the White Chief of peace didn’t look so pitiful next to the Red Chief of war. Yano was a thin wisp of an old man, doddering, barely a physical presence. Inaj was as fine a specimen of physical manhood as she’d ever seen, magnificently muscled.

  She waited until she was invited to sit with them. Every eye was on Su-Li.

  Since the village was at war with the Lena people who lived along the coast, the Red Chief, Inaj, was the head man. As a sign of their high purpose, Inaj lit the sacred pipe and smoked it ceremonially, adding tobacco to the aroma-thick room. It was a beautiful pipe, long-stemmed and with a bowl of polished black stone. Eagle feathers dangled from the stem.

  Sunoya rubbed the flesh that webbed the fourth and fifth fingers of her left hand. She smiled to herself. The real manifestation of her power perched on her shoulder, appraising the three chiefs with his brilliant eye. She knew their feelings. Though they told themselves they should be honored by the presence of the spirit guide, they were in fact intimidated.

  Su-Li said, Men of power don’t like to share it.

  Sunoya looked at her buzzard friend
and thought of what a gift he was. She also knew the obligations he brought, and the challenges they faced right now. We must change a people’s direction. We must prevent unspeakable suffering.

  You must, said Su-Li.

  Kanu handed her the pipe. She puffed on it and watched the smoke rise toward the hole in the roof. She thought, Carry this smoke, my breath, my prayers to the ears of the Immortals, and help me do what must be done. As she sent her hopes to the sky, she felt Su-Li echoing them.

  When she handed the pipe back to Inaj, he took a moment to consider his ceremonial address. To speak first was his right. He was astonished to see Kanu lift a hand to stop him.

  “My niece and I apologize to the Red and White Chiefs,” he said. “I know that you think I have brought her here today to be elected the new Medicine Chief of the Tusca village. But, because of surprising circumstances”—he nodded toward Su-Li—“I will remain as Medicine Chief for the time being.” His ancient voice sounded like sliding stones. The job would be hard on him. She looked at her uncle with pride.

  “Then why did you bring her?” Inaj’s tone was peremptory.

  “First, to present her to you as one of the two Medicine Chiefs of all the Galayi people. You can see she has ascended to that station.” He indicated Su-Li with a hand. “Second, to present to you formally a great gift the Immortals have made to us,” Kanu said. He spoke as though he didn’t know that these chiefs, practical, earth-bound men, didn’t have much patience for magic. “This is Su-Li, one of the Immortals, the Buzzard of the ancient legends, the one who shaped the land of the Galayi into high mountains and deep valleys. He has come to help Sunoya and all of us. As you know, this is a very great honor.”

  Neither of the chiefs spoke.

  Su-Li said, It seems your rules of etiquette don’t cover accepting an introduction to a spirit creature.

  She looked into the bird’s face for an ironic smile, but it was unreadable, as always.