Dan Simmons - Black Hills

—I won’t go in there.

Shoving. Shouting. A scout screams Go ahead! I have the gun! Do what you want with him! Crazy Horse is pulling away from grasping hands, leaping forward, away from the darkness, toward the opening and the light. Little Big Man is screaming Nephew, don’t! Don’t do that! Nephew! Don’t! Don’t do that!

—Let me go! Get your hands… Let me… go!

Blades are rising; rifles are rising. They are wasichu bayonets on rifles held by wasichus . Crazy Horse pulls out his blade for slicing tobacco, cuts Little Big Man’s flesh between the thumb and forefinger. As the older man shouts, Crazy Horse slashes Little Big Man’s forearm while he imagines cutting long strings of flesh away from a deer’s white bone.

— Kill the son of a bitch! Kill the son of a bitch! Kill the fucker! Kill him! Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch! It is Ken-ning-ton screaming. It is the language of Paha Sapa’s ghost, and Paha Sapa still cannot understand it. But he sees and feels and understands the spittle striking Crazy Horse’s face as the Wasicun continues to scream at the blue-coated soldiers and guards with their rifles and bayonets raised.

Perhaps the wasichu soldier-guard behind Crazy Horse only means to prod with the bayonet, but Crazy Horse is pulling violently backward at that second, losing his balance, and the blade possibly meant to prod tears through Crazy Horse’s shirt just above his left hip and keeps moving forward, piercing the war chief’s lower back, Crazy Horse’s own weight and movement driving the long steel blade deeper between his kidneys and into his bowels. Crazy Horse grunts. Paha Sapa screams but still hovers both as a bird above, beneath the roof but hovering, but also behind Crazy Horse’s own eyes.

Redness descending, Crazy Horse grunts in pain. The wasichu guard pulls the bayonet out, the butt striking the log wall of the inside of the guardhouse, then—as terrified as all the others but gifted with terrible action—by the drill— one, two, and three , but silently—thrusts the rifle and bayonet forward again, the point going deep into Crazy Horse’s lower back, between ribs, up into Crazy Horse’s wheezing left lung—depriving the chief of wind and words for a moment—then the guard is grunting and pulling the long blade free again, the steel sliding slickly and obscenely out of Crazy Horse’s bleeding flesh.

—Let me go now.

It is Crazy Horse, speaking softly amid the shouting and bedlam and shoving and screaming.

—Let me go now. You’ve hurt me.

The wasichu sentry circles, rifle extended, and lunges again, from the front this time, toward Crazy Horse’s belly. But the steel misses under Crazy Horse’s arm and embeds itself in the wood of the door frame. Little Big Man is holding Crazy Horse’s other arm and is screaming for the wasichu to do something—to stab him again?

Crazy Horse’s Minneconjou uncle Spotted Crow grabs the stuck rifle, pulls the blade free, and drives the butt of the long gun into Little Big Man’s belly, sending the short traitor whoofing into the dust on all fours.

— You have done this before! You are always in the way!

It is Spotted Crow screaming this as Crazy Horse falls backward into the arms of Swift Bear and two others. One of those three is saying haughtily, insanely, to the wounded warrior—

— We told you to behave yourself! We warned you!

Crazy Horse groans and finally leans, sags, and falls. The motion seems to take long minutes. Cartridges are being chambered and hammers clicked back on wasichu rifles all around. Crazy Horse holds both his bloody palms out toward the men around him, Indian and white man alike.

—See where I am hurt? Do you see? I can feel the blood flowing out of me!

Closed Cloud, a Brulé, brings a blanket to spread over the dying chief, but Crazy Horse grabs at the Brulé’s braids and shakes the warrior’s head back and forth even as Crazy Horse jerks his own head back and forth in agony and fury.

—You all coaxed me over here. You all told me to come here. And then you ran away and left me! You all left me!

He Dog takes the blanket out of Closed Cloud’s hands, crumples it into a pillow, and sets it under Crazy Horse’s head. Then He Dog takes his own blanket from his shoulders and spreads it over the fallen man.

— I will take you home , Tasunke Witko.

Then He Dog walks away across the parade ground toward a building there.

PAHA SAPA SHUTS HIS EYES, inner and outer, so that he cannot see more. But he does see more. He screams so that he cannot hear what he is hearing.

He awakens to Crazy Horse bending over him on one knee, just as he did at the Greasy Grass—the warrior’s face even more fierce than that time yet similar to the expression of disgust he showed weeks earlier. Crazy Horse is flicking water from a wooden bowl into Paha Sapa’s face.

— What do you see, Black Hills? Do you see my death?

— I don’t know! I can’t… It isn’t… I don’t know.

Crazy Horse shakes him harder, snapping Paha Sapa’s teeth together with the violence of the shaking.

— Will I die by the hand of the wasichu? That is what I need to know.

Crazy Horse’s shaking and slapping have hidden those final memories from Paha Sapa in a way that closing his eyes and covering his ears failed to do. The boy feels like sobbing. It’s not enough that he has become infected with a ghost that gibbers and mumbles all through his nights; now Paha Sapa knows that the flood of sensations and twice-removed memories that have poured into him during the contact with Crazy Horse almost certainly constitutes all of that weird warrior’s memories, from his earliest childhood perceptions to those of his death just moments or seconds beyond what Paha Sapa has just witnessed. There is no doubt that the white soldier’s wounding of Crazy Horse by bayonet thrust will be mortal.

— I don’t know! I did not see the… the final… the ending , Tasunke Witko.

Crazy Horse throws Paha Sapa back into the hides and robes and jumps to his feet. His killing knife is in his hand and his eyes are not sane.

— You are lying to me, Black Hills. You know, but you are afraid to tell me. But you will tell me, I promise you that.

The warrior turns and stalks out. Paha Sapa does sob now, weeping into his forearm so that Limps-a-Lot and the others outside the lodge will not hear him. He did not see how long it will take for Crazy Horse to die from the bayonet wounds—and the glimpses of Crazy Horse he was able to catch showed a warrior not much older than the man who just left the tipi, a year perhaps, no more than two—but Paha Sapa did see an absolute conviction in the heart and thoughts of Crazy Horse when the war leader forced him to use his gift.

Crazy Horse is going to kill Paha Sapa whether the boy tells him his future or not.

PAHA SAPA HAS BEEN ASSIGNED a lodge separate from the village. Limps-a-Lot visits him there that night, late. Crazy Horse and his men have ridden away to their own tiyospaye , but the chief said that he would return by midday the next day, bringing Long Turd and other wičasa wakan to identify the Wasicun inside the boy and then to drive the ghost out, even if the ghost-driving-out ceremonies take weeks. Paha Sapa has been told to fast and to purify himself in the sweat lodge that has been erected near his isolated tipi.