Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (7 page)

“Me? No. Look it though, don't I? I'm from County Galway originally, in Ireland,” and he showed her a picture in his mind of a small green country over a great water, an island country. “but me mam was widowed soon after I was born and remarried a man from Roscommon. When the Great Hunger came, I was seven years old and she and all my kin died.”

“Just died? They didn't get shot?”

“No, but they were starved to death by the blackhearted devil of a landlord.” And now she saw from him fields of blackened crops, people being put out of burning houses, much as her people had been.

“Lots of my people starved too,” she said in her mind. “We're starving now, mostly.”

“I know,” he answered in the same way and though his face was lost in shadow she felt the clenching of his jaw and heard the bitterness in his tone. “I can see that. I've not enough rank to do much about it. At least your granny looked after you on the trail and though she's not much good to you now, you've each other.”

“Yes,” she said. “All of her people were killed too, she said. She's not from our canyon.”

“Is she not? Just took you under her wing did she and now you're repaying the favor?”

“Yes,” she said, but sharing his thoughts took her away from her own problems and she wanted him to go on. “How did you come here?”

“The landlord had little use for seven year old orphan lads. So he took all of us who couldn't work as hard as he wanted and put us on a rotting ship for America. Not many of us survived that. I was sick for a long time meself but I had to work anyway. As soon as I was old enough, I joined the army because they feed you really regular.”

“But they shoot people who haven't done anything wrong!” she said.

“That's not what my recruiter said,” he told her, smiling again as if he'd made a joke. “Too bad I couldn't read his mind like I can yours, the bleedin' whore's son of a—the bleedin' liar,” he changed his thought because she was a girl, and young, though she didn't feel young anymore. She felt as old as the grandmother.

Poor grandmother. She had lost everything coming here, even herself.

“Maybe she didn't lose it,” the soldier said. “Maybe it got taken from her. And I'd better tell you my name so you don't think of me that way...”

“Which way?”

“As a uniform with a gun in one sleeve and a torch in the other. I'm Pvt. Liam O'Malley at your service, young lady.”

“I'm called Horses Talk to Her,” she said. She would not tell a soldier, even this man, her real name. A real name would give him power over her and it was very possible he might be a witch since he could read her thoughts and she had never known any other human who could do that.

“Do they now? And do you talk to them too? As we talk?”

“I did,” she said, curling her arms back around her knees. “But your people shot them all.”

“Well, I'm very sorry about that, Horses Talk to Her. I'd have done it differently myself if the government put me in charge. If it makes you feel any better, when that was going on my shots went into the ground. No Irishman worth his salt would harm a horse. Too bad this company has a lot of that kind of Irishman. But never mind. You speaking of the wind reminded me of something I was told by me stepda's mam one time. She was a great one for stories, was Mrs. Donnolly. She was what we call a fairy doctor, was she. You'll be wondering what that is. I heard you thinking about witches just now, excuse me for intruding, but I couldn't help overhearing. We have witches in Ireland too but that's nothing compared to what the fairies do to folk sometimes.”

“What are fairies?”

His mind produced many strange pictures and she couldn't see what he meant. Then he said, “Well, it's said that one time they lived above the ground until the fought the next race of people to come along and had to go live in the underworld. But they don't much like it, see, so they're always playing tricks on mortal folks.”

“Like the Dine',” she said. “Here, living in our holes in the ground.”

“No—well, that is, yes, a bit. Except folk in Ireland know better nowadays than to treat the fairies poorly—bad things happen to them as do. And sometimes, people will just be minding their own business and things happen.” He showed her a picture of a baby sleeping peacefully in its cradle being stolen away by one of the people he called fairies, and another, crying angry sick baby put in its place.”

“Don't the parents know?”

“Well, the fairies change it so it looks like their baby and they only know by its squallin' that it's not normal-like. The new thing put in place of the baby is called a changeling.”

The word didn't translate well and he kept showing her pictures. Finally she thought she understood. “Oh, they're shapeshifters. Like witches.”

“A bit, yes.”

“Do the parents ever get their real babies back?”

“Yes, but you won't like that bit. They have to hold the changeling over a fire until the fairies fear for its life. Then they come and get it and give back the real baby.”

She nodded, “Barboncito says that when the white men wanted to trade captives, we gave back ours but they wouldn't give back our people. Maybe we should have held theirs over a fire...”

“Now there's an idea you don't want the captain hearing you speak of, young lady. The thing is, a fairy doctor now, like Mrs. Donnolly, they'll know different ways of doing things. And there's different sorts of changelings too. Sometimes the fairies will steal an old person.”

“I guess they need their wisdom, huh?”

“It's true. Fairies have been called a great many things but I don't believe wise is one of them. The point is, Horses Talk to Her, that when they take the old people, they also leave changelings—querulous, battlesome, trouble-making things, and an embarrassment to the person they're supposed to be.”

Dezbah was afraid. “Do they have to be put over a fire too?”

“No—no, they don't. There's another cure for that and what made me think of it was you and your dark wind. Because we sort of think the opposite, you see. If you want to get an old person back from the fairies, you must go to a crossroad and stand there until a whirlwind comes by, catch the dust in your hand and cast it on them, whereupon the changeling is taken away and the real person returns.”

“Really?” She got a very clear picture of this from him and wondered if he had tried it before—but she saw then from the picture that he had not. This was just the picture he got from what his Irish old one told him. “But what if you get the wrong kind of whirlwind?”

He shrugged, “Your guess is as good as mine. But herself there could hardly be worse now, could she?”

Dezbah cast a brief glance at the old one who had been her friend and shuddered, lowering her head miserably so that her cheek rested on her knees. The man sighed. He wasn't completely serious, Dezbah knew, just telling her a story to comfort her and because he was lonely. But there was no comfort in anything now. She heard his boots crunch the sand, the old one moan in the dark, and in the stillness of the night, the halt of footsteps, the man's voice speaking to the horse, and the hoofbeats gradually fading to the north.

The hooting of a hunting owl awakened her, and she blinked in a darkness without stars. Her hand found the roughness of the sticks that made her shelter, the rags and mud that covered the sticks. She was alone. She sat up, crawled out. There were the stars, the sand, the scrub, the blanket, but there was no old one.

Dezbah crawled completely out, stood and looked around. She saw the trail of rags leading across the sand, the footprints, all heading moonward, to the west now, and far off, she could see the movement of moonlight on skin that had not seen the sun and hair touched with silver.

She hurried after, scooping up blanket and rags as she ran, her young legs not as strong as they had been, because of exhaustion and poor food, but better than the old one's.

As she ran she realized she was sending her thoughts out, hoping the soldier might hear, “she's doing it again!” but no voice answered at all. He was too far away to hear her, she thought, and she could not hear him.

So she kept running after the old one herself.

Though the soldiers had little outposts scattered around the perimeter and sent pickets out to patrol for fifteen to twenty miles around them each night, they let the Comanches do a lot of their patrolling for them. Fear of those people kept the Dine' inside, close to the fort and the food. But not all of them. Some escaped across the desert. The messengers from Manuelito had reported that two of the ones who escaped made it, both strong boys who joined Manuelito's people in the hills.

The old one would never make it in the desert. She didn't remember what she knew about how to stay alive, Dezbah knew this. She knew that the grandmother's mind was confused, though she could not read it as if it were a horse's, or the soldier's.

She walked all night, it seemed. Sometimes she saw the old one just a little ahead of her. Other times she was afraid she lost her altogether. In the morning, as the sun rose and cast long shadows across the ground, Dezbah stumbled and found it was the old one over whom she had stumbled. She was lying there, face down in the dirt, her hair all straggly and with no clothes on. Dezbah covered her from the sun and did up her hair. She should have brought water, she knew. She found some brush and made a shelter for them with the blanket. Found a saguaro and used another stick to drill a hole in it, get at the juice from the inside. They drank this, she forcing some through the old one's lips.

So they were free of the fort but they were also free to starve, die of hunger, burn under the hot sun if she didn't take care of them. She couldn't hunt for food and leave the old one to wander off. There were not even the berries, grass seeds, yucca fruit, and pinon nuts they used for food at Hweeldi.

She slept till twilight, her arm tethered to the old woman's by a strip of rag from her skirt. She felt the rag twitch and awakened, in time to see the old one running off again. At least this time she was not removing her clothes. Dezbah grabbed the blanket and followed once more, further from the fort, toward the setting sun. She found the grandmother just as the darkness came. The old woman had found the river once more, and was sitting on its western bank. This was the river the soldiers called the Pecos, the same one where, further south, she and the other captives lived beside. Here as further downstream it was during this time of year little more than a collection of muddy pools. The old one yelled nothing, said nothing, didn't move. She was exhausted, despite her long rest.

Dezbah led her down into the river bed and the old one drank. But when Dezbah would have turned her back in the direction of the fort, she took off down the riverbed, heading north, toward the mountains.

Dezbah was heading after her when she felt a sudden pain in her head, as if someone was shouting at her.

She didn't try to answer. The soldier was a soldier and though he had seemed friendly and could thought-talk with her, he had not helped when she needed him.

She caught up with the old one easily this time and following the riverbed, they walked all night.

At dawn, in the distance, far across the desert, too far for hoofbeats to be heard or a voice to carry, low gray shadows traveled eastward in a line that lengthened as the sky grew brighter. A rider then. Not a soldier. The rutted track the army traveled ran along the river for much of the way between the last two towns to the north. Dezbah could just make out some of the smoke from the cookfires of Puerto de Luna, the village called Door of the Moon, a bit to the northeast of them.

The dust cloud was coming toward it, directly from the east. One of Manuelito's men, coming to his people with encouragement news of their relatives in hiding.

Dezbah was not cheered by the dust cloud. It was so far away, it might never have been for all the help she would have because of it.

They trudged onward through the heat, and watched the heat lightening in the sky. It brought no rain but occasional hot gusts that stirred the dust and agitated it into the little whirlwinds the soldier had called “dust devils.”

At a crossroads, he had said. If you caught the dust of a whirlwind at a crossroads, and threw it on an old one who was witched like the grandmother, the spell would be broken.

Where the Navajos' secret trail came to the soldiers' road, would there be such a crossroad?

It would be dangerous to go to such a place, so near the village, with the soldiers watching for escaped prisoners. But she was not trying to escape. She did not think she could return to her own country so easily. She only wanted the grandmother to regain her own spirit. If the soldiers came, she would tell them she had become lost while following the grandmother. That was true.

One more day they slept and one more night they traveled until they were so close to the town that she could see it. She would never see the hoofprints of Manuelito's rider, she knew, for the ground in most places was too dry. But as the sun was rising once more, she saw something in the riverbed and, looking over her shoulder, could see the smoke curling from the chimneys of the town. The old one was tired and she made her a shelter once more. Then, instead of sleeping, she made her way to the edge of town where the soldier road would have crossed that of the rider. There was little cover there, but she was small and it was very early yet.

As if it knew what she wanted, the wind twisted itself into many cylinders. But one spiraled off to the right, one to the left. One came straight for her but she saw that the rotation went against the movement of the sun and she jumped aside at the last moment.

A dark wind could not hurt the old one, but it could still steal her own spirit.

Time passed and more time. The morning drew on. Three more of the dark twisting winds came whirling in their unnatural way toward her, taunting her by blowing up the dust and sand from the crossroad so that she had to run to keep it from blowing into her face and infecting her with its evil.