Dan Simmons - Black Hills

He does have access to Crazy Horse’s memories of his own successful hanblečeya , back when the war chief was a young brave still called Curly Hair, but even those recollections discourage Paha Sapa. The Minneconjou boy had the full help of Thunder Dreamers such as Horn Chips and his own living father, then named Crazy Horse, as well as his entire band’s certainty that young Curly Hair would receive a Vision from the Thunder Beings and become the heyoka and war chief they wished him to be. Even the memory of young Curly Hair–Crazy Horse’s actual Vision is confusing, since it seems little more than a fuzzy dream of lightning flashing, thunder crashing, and of Curly Hair’s nagi speaking to a spirit-warrior on a spirit-horse. Of all the people on the earth, Paha Sapa knows, only he and Crazy Horse know how fuzzy and uncertain that Vision was, although it began well, with a red-tailed hawk screaming for the boy’s attention.

And it ended well, with the post-Vision purification with the older men in the sweat lodge again, and these elders and wičasa wakans —other Thunder Dreamers all—interpreting the dream as a valid Vision, anointing young Crazy Horse as a heyoka and akicita tribal policeman, and announcing to all that Curly Hair would someday be a great war chief.

Every time now that the thunder echoes through the Black Hills, Paha Sapa flinches and huddles tighter. He does not want to be a heyoka. He does not want to serve the fierce and warlike Thunder Beings. And at the same time he is ashamed of this shrinking back, this cowardice, this stubbornness in wanting to refuse his role in life if that is the will of the All.

But the Thunder Beings do not speak to him there on the summit of the Six Grandfathers, even while real thunder echoes and lightning flashes and Paha Sapa huddles in his muddy hole, fearful of lightning in such a high, exposed place.

He is, he realizes, not only a failure as a vision-seeker, but a cowardly failure.

ON THE NIGHT of his ninth day of fasting, Paha Sapa realizes that he soon will be too weak to hunt or find food even if a Vision does appear to him. That night he stumbles down the long, steep mountainside to the vale where the two staked horses still crop and drink from the stream and—with infinite and slow-motion labor—he makes four rabbit traps, which he sets in the trees and shrubs on the hillside. Then, seeing how his sintkala waksu sweat lodge seems to be melting in the continued downpour, Paha Sapa takes his robe and the pipe now hanging from his neck by a sturdy strap and makes the long, arduous climb and crawl back up to the summit ridge, arriving just in time to make offerings and prayers to a sunrise hidden behind clouds.

On his tenth day of fasting, Paha Sapa tries to fly.

He is so weak now that he spends much of his time sitting and leaning against one of the Four Directions posts as he offers the sacred pipe, but he is also so weak and light-headed that his nagi spirit-self slips easily from his body. (Afraid that it will not return, Paha Sapa entices it back with promises of a rabbit cooked to perfection over a crackling fire.)

His nagi leans into the slight breeze that blows up here most of the time, feeling the wind against his spirit-chest much as he used to feel the water in a deep part of a stream or river and be ready to kick off to float and swim, but—unlike so many times before when rising into the sky came so easily—the winds now do not bear him up.

Even his spirit is too heavy to soar.

Thus on Paha Sapa’s tenth day of fasting and mumbling of prayers and heavy-armed offering of the stem of the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa to low clouds and rain, he thinks dully of admitting failure and going home.

Crazy Horse will kill me.

But certainly Crazy Horse must have moved on by now. The war chief was planning to lead his band against the wasichus in the Black Hills and then scout out the cavalry that were coming seeking vengeance for the rubbing out of Long Hair. The chance that Crazy Horse would still be with Angry Badger’s and Limps-a-Lot’s band camped near Slim Buttes is low.

And return a total failure, never to claim a vision, never to become a wičasa wakan like my adoptive tunkašila?

Better to be a failure than to be a corpse, Black Hills. You knew you were never cut out to be a warrior, a brave…. Now you know that you were not meant to be a holy man or an important man in the tribe.

Paha Sapa comes very close to sobbing. Sitting with his back against the western post, waiting for his sunset prayers, the red banner hanging thick, wet, and soggy above him, his sullen nagi aching in his chest, and the goddamned wasichu ghost always babbling in his aching brain, Paha Sapa decides that he will stay here on the Six Grandfathers for one more night, perhaps one more wet day, before surrendering his hopes and riding home.

If the traps have not captured a rabbit, you will die, unless you slaughter Worm or White Crane.

Shaking that thought out of his head, Paha Sapa closes his eyes in the rain as he waits for the approximate time of sunset behind the lowering clouds.

HE AWAKES LYING NAKED on his back near his vision pit. It is very dark, and the clouds have gone away. The sky is ablaze with the three thousand or so tightly packed stars he is used to seeing on such a late-summer night. For a moment he is panicked, thinking that he may have dropped the sacred pipe on the steep rocky summit, but then he feels the strap and finds the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa strangely warm across his bare belly.

Shooting stars scratch across the black between-the-stars night glass of the sky. Paha Sapa remembers that this time right after his birthing day has always been rich with shooting stars. Limps-a-Lot once told him that some elders believe that the falling stars celebrate some great battle or victory or Vision that has long been lost to the memory of the Natural Free Human Beings.

Paha Sapa is content to lie there on his back, half in his Vision Pit and half out, the cooling rock of the mountain strangely dry under his shoulders and head, and watch the stars fall.

Suddenly a shooting star brighter than all the others streaks from the zenith. It is so bright that it lights up the skies, lights up the summit of the Six Grandfathers, lights up towering Evil Spirit Hill and all the other surrounding peaks. The millions of dark pine trees in the Paha Sapa suddenly grow silver and then milky white in the light of this falling star turned hurtling comet.

— Ooooh!

Paha Sapa cannot help making the noise. It is the same noise he made as a tiny boy watching the late-summer falling-star showers when there was an especially bright one. But he has never seen any star falling with such dazzling brilliance as this one.

And, he realizes with a slow stirring of what might have been fear if he’d had more energy and presence of mind, it is headed directly for him.

The shadows of the direction posts and of the few stunted trees near the rocky summit leap away in all directions from the hurtling brilliance directly above him. Paha Sapa can hear the falling star now—a hissing, roaring, galloping sound as the star burns through the air.

Suddenly, silently, the falling star explodes, dividing into six different and only slightly smaller falling stars. They continue hurtling down toward him.

Paha Sapa realizes through his hunger and exhaustion, with something like bemused detachment, that he is going to die in a few seconds.