Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa bent over and tugged Hoot inside, slamming the door behind him.

The howl receded a few decibels. At first, Paha Sapa was sure that it was as dark and dust filled here inside the house as it had been outside—and freezing cold—but then he saw what appeared to be the tiniest of glows. It was like a campfire glimpsed miles away.

Tugging the groaning Hoot, he crawled toward it.

It was a kerosene lantern on the floor of the kitchen not six feet away. The glow waxed and waned, but not before Paha Sapa saw the faces clustered around it—only faces, the bodies in dark, soiled garments lost in the darkness—the faces of a whisker-stubbled rail-thin farmer and his thinner wife, their three children, and the wide white eyes of Lincoln Borglum and Red Anderson. They were all huddled around the low-flickering lantern on the floor like medieval worshippers kneeling around some holy artifact.

The wide eyes had just enough time to register surprise at Paha Sapa’s and Hoot’s appearance in the howling space when the lantern glow dimmed and flickered out altogether. There was no longer enough oxygen in the air to sustain a flame.

Paha Sapa whispered— Washtay, hecetu! Good, so be it!—and collapsed onto the chipped and drifted yellowed linoleum. He couldn’t breathe.

An hour later the deafening, unrelenting howl died down to a mere animal’s roar. The lantern was relighted and held the flame. A second lantern was taken down from the counter and lighted by the farmer’s wife. The glow now pushed six or eight feet or more into the swirling gloom. But the monster outside still banged and roared and shoved at the door and boarded windows to be allowed in.

The farmer was shouting something.

— Would y’all folks like something to drink?

Lincoln Borglum, his white eyes now red, nodded for all of them. Paha Sapa realized that he had been lying on his side, eyes open but unseeing, his kerchief choking him, for a long time. He sat up and leaned back against a cupboard under the kitchen counter. Hoot was on all fours, his head down like a sick dog’s, and he seemed to be moaning along with the rise and fall of the wind’s roar and moans.

The farmer stood, staggered in the whirlwind, and went to the sink. Paha Sapa could see things six, eight, ten feet away now, and his eyes marveled at the murky clarity.

The farmer pumped and pumped and pumped at a pump handle at the sink. Surely, thought Paha Sapa, a pump could not work now that the world had been destroyed.

The farmer came back with a single cup filled with water and handed it around, small sips for everyone, starting with the children, then the four guests, then his wife. It was empty when it came back to him. He seemed too tired to go refill it.

Thirty or forty-five minutes later—Paha Sapa was guessing; his watch had stopped in the first minutes of the sand’s intrusion—the roar died a little more, and the farmer and his wife invited the four of them to stay for dinner.

— Mostly just greens, I’m afraid. And the Injun’s welcome too.

It was the farmer’s hatchet of a wife speaking.

Again, Lincoln Borglum spoke for them, but only after he pulled mud and more solid dirt out of his mouth.

— We’d be much obliged, ma’am.

And, after a minute’s silence and still no movement from any of them save for the children crawling off into the darkness to do whatever they were going to do, Lincoln again.

— Say, you folks wouldn’t have any use for two really big submarine engines, would you?

PAHA SAPA SMILES as he hangs in the blazing cliff-bowl of August light and heat. He is under Abraham Lincoln’s roughed-out nose. It gives a little shade as the hot blue-haze afternoon thickens toward evening. He slides in the last of the charges. It is almost time for the four p.m. blasting after the men scurry off the faces.

Then Paha Sapa’s smile dies as he remembers the lost exhilaration when he realized a year ago that those storms from the Thunder Beings, perhaps from the All himself, were not going to drive the wasichus out of the world of the Natural Free Human Beings.

It would have to be him after all.

President Roosevelt will be there in just a few days, this coming Sunday, for the unveiling of the Jefferson head.

Paha Sapa has much to do before he can allow himself to sleep.

PAHA SAPA’S ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY COMES AND GOES, BUT THE boy is too busy fleeing for his life across the plains toward the Black Hills and his hanblečeya to notice the date, which he would not have noticed even if he had stayed in the village.

Limps-a-Lot advised him to ride with his two horses during the night and hide from Crazy Horse and his men during the day if necessary, but that is not necessary. The rain that started pouring down on him the night he left the village at midnight does not and will not let up. For three days and nights it pounds down, accompanied by thunder and lightning that keeps Paha Sapa away from the few trees along the rare streams and causes him to hunker down even while riding, and even in the bright blur of daytime the visibility is only a few hundred feet as the gray curtains of rain roll across the soggy prairie.

Paha Sapa travels by both day and night, but he travels slowly and he travels wet. Never in his short life has Paha Sapa witnessed a Moon of Ripening Berries this wet and stormy. The usual end-of-summer month is so dry that the horse herds never stray from what little water is left in the streambeds, and grasshoppers proliferate until walking through the high, brittle, brown grasses becomes a matter of wading through waves of leaping insects.

Now, after three days and nights with no sleep, almost no food, and a constant diet of fear, Paha Sapa is totally disgusted with himself. Any young brave his age should be able to find shelter and start a fire even in such a rain: Paha Sapa’s flint and steel strike sparks, but he can find nothing dry enough to burn. Nor can he find shelter. The shallow caves and overhangs he knows about are along the streambeds, but now those banks are under three feet or more of water as the streams flood far beyond their banks. Despite his bundles of clothing and gear being carefully wrapped in layers of inside-out hides, everything he owns is soaked through. For a few hours each night, huddled beneath one of his horses, Paha Sapa clutches two blankets around himself, but they only make him wetter and more disspirited.

And then there are the voices.

The dead Wasicun’s voice is more strident than ever, growing louder whenever the poor boy tries to sleep. But in the few days since Paha Sapa touched Crazy Horse and had all the man’s memories flow into him—at times Paha Sapa feels that the violation was like being pissed on and being forced to swallow it—the gabble and gibber of all those memories that are not his have made Paha Sapa ill.

The other-memories are not as clamoringly insistent as the ghost’s night babble, but they are more disturbing.

Paha Sapa is overwhelmed. He has only eleven rather uneventful years of his own to remember, while Crazy Horse thought himself to be thirty-four years old this summer when he poured all his memories into Paha Sapa’s aching brain, and—somehow, despite his will not to—Paha Sapa’s vision saw forward another year or two to Crazy Horse’s death by bayonet.