Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa’s whisper is real, audible, formed by his nagi lungs and throat and mouth and forced out through his spirit-teeth, but it is also ragged.

— Grandfathers, can you stop this?

Instead of answering, the thunder-rumble, wind-in-the-needles whisper comes back with another question.

—“Wasichu” does not mean “White Person,” Black Hills. It means and has always meant “Fat Taker.” Do you see now why we gave your ancestors this word for the Wasicun?

— Yes, Grandfathers.

Paha Sapa did not know and never would have guessed that his spirit-body could feel sick to its stomach, but it does. He leans over the curling fingers of his protective Grandfather’s hand and watches.

The four Wasichu Stone Giants are striding out of the Black Hills now, each moving in one of the four primary compass directions as if guided by Paha Sapa’s poor little direction posts at his Vision Pit site. At first the boy cannot believe what he is seeing, but he uses his new eagle-vision to look carefully and his eyes are not deceiving him.

The Wasichu Stone Giants are killing buffalo and other plains animals now, using their giant stone heels on their wasichu stone shoes to squash the bison or antelope or elk before lifting the mangled carcass to their stone mouths three hundred feet above the green-and-brown-grass prairie. Somehow time has accelerated and the sun sets, the stars whirl above the Six Grandfathers and the crouching Paha Sapa, the sun rises again—a thousand times, tens of thousands of times—but the four Wasichu Stone Giants, roaming the plains to the horizon and beyond but always returning, continue to smash with their heels, to pluck and to lift, and to chew. And chew. And chew.

Then Paha Sapa sees something that makes him scream into the high, thin, cold air of the sky where he and the Six Grandfathers float as insubstantially and as impotently as clouds.

Even before they kill the last of the millions of buffalo, the four Wasichu Stone Giants are chasing the people on the Plains and in the Black Hills and even those living far to the east and farther to the west: chasing and catching Paha Sapa’s Natural Free Human Beings and the Crow and the Cheyenne and the Blackfoot and the Shoshoni and the Ute and the Arapaho and the Pawnee and the Oto and Osage and Ojibwa, chasing the few pitiful remnants of the Mandan, sweeping up the Gros Ventre and Plains Cree and the Kutenai and the Hidatsa. All run. All are swept up. None escape.

Some of these little fleeing forms the four Wasichu Stone Giants tuck away in the stone pockets of their stone clothing, but others they throw far away, flinging the tiny, screaming, flapping human figures over the curve of the earth and out of sight forever. And some they eat. Chewing. Chewing.

— Grandfathers! Stop this! Please stop this!

The voice Paha Sapa hears next is softer than the one or ones he’s heard before: low, musical, subdued, a combination of birdsong and water flowing around rocks in a stream.

— Stop it? We cannot. You, our people, have failed to do so. Nor would it be proper to stop them. They are the Fat Takers. They have always been the Fat Takers. Do we stop the rattlesnake from striking its prey? Do we stop the scorpion from stinging the sleeping gopher? Do we stop the eagle from swooping down on the mouse? Do we stop the wolf or coyote from pouncing on the prairie dog?

The words rattle in Paha Sapa’s aching skull: sinteĥaĥla, itignila, anúnkasan, hitunkala, šung’ manitu tanka, šung’ mahetu, pispía…

What do these mere animals have to do with the slaughter and extinction of the Natural Free Human Beings he is watching below? What does the nature of a scorpion or wolf or eagle or rattlesnake have to do with the murder and capture of men by men?

On the wide prairies, the bison are dead, killed, eaten, removed. The lodges and villages of the Natural Free Human Beings and all their red enemies and allies and distant cousins are empty. The four Wasichu Stone Giants, fattened by their killing and chewing and taking of so much fat, are striding back across emptied grasslands to the ravaged Black Hills.

Paha Sapa leans so far over the edge of the giant palm and giant fingers holding him above miles of nothing that he almost falls. Instead, he finds his courage.

— Grandfathers, Powers of the World , Tunkašila of the Four Directions and of the Earth and Sky, Oldest Children of the Great Spirit, please hear my prayer! Do not let this vision become true, Grandfathers! Do not make me return to Limps-a-Lot and my band with this as my Vision! I beseech you, O Grandfathers!

Miles beneath him, the Wasichu Stone Giants have returned to the Paha Sapa, are lying down amid the shattered trees and tumbled rocks and burrowed mountaintops and are pulling the soil and stone over their gray granite bodies the way old men, after a feast, pull buffalo robes up over their shanks and distended bellies and old-men’s shoulders.

Paha Sapa feels himself hurtling down—not falling, but hurtling lower still in the palm of the Grandfather bathed in the white light—but now the Grandfathers speak as one and their voices are very difficult to understand, so mixed are they with the wind and thunder rumble and rushing-stream sounds.

— Behold, this was your nation, Black Hills. Your ancestors sang it into existence. Your generation shall lose it forever if you do not act. The Fat Takers are what they do, this the Natural Free Human Beings and all Our Children have known since they first saw the first Fat Taker paddling west in the day of your grandfather’s grandfather. Lose the buffalo, lose your lodges, lose this world with all your songs and sacrifices, and you lose us and all the other spirits and deep, dangerous forces and names to whom your little voices have cried for ten thousand summers and more. Allow the Fat Takers to take all this away from you, and you lose Mystery forever. Even God cannot exist when all his worshippers are gone and all the secret chants forgotten, Paha Sapa, our son. A people who have no power are not a people. They are only food for beasts and other men.

The six columns of light with the shadowy forms in them are flying low now. In a few seconds, Paha Sapa knows, they will set him down on the torn rocky top of the sacred mountain. Already the sun has set and time has slowed and the stars have faded and clouds are rolling in again.

— What can I do to help the Natural Free Human Beings from suffering this prophecy come true, Grandfathers? Please tell me!

It is the stream-and-small-birds voice that answers.

— This is not a prophecy, Black Hills. It is a fact. But you will be in a position to act. Of all Our Children who are now Fat to the Fat Takers, only you will be able to act.

— How, Grandfathers? When? How? Why me? Tell me how… Grandfathers!

But the great, warm hand has set his nagi back into his body, which lies faceup in the Vision Pit. The six forms in the six columns of light become shooting stars again and retrace their bright, flashing paths back up into the skies.

— Grandfathers!

The voice from the sky is only a whisper of wind.

— Paha Sapa, toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo .

We shall see you again with the eyes of our hearts.

PAHA SAPA WAKES. It is a cold, wet, rainy sunrise. He is shaking so hard that even when he finds his robe to wrap around his nakedness, his body continues to tremble for half an hour or more.

Clutching the sacred pipe on its strap to his chest, Paha Sapa manages to stumble down the mountainside. Worm has somehow slipped his stake tether and hobbles but has stayed near White Crane. Paha Sapa is so weak that he knows that if the rabbit traps are empty, he may not survive.