Dan Simmons: Black Hills

— Hecetu. Mitakuye oyasin.

So be it. All my relatives—every one of us.

Which means that the discussion, for this day, is at an end.

Sitting Bull nods to the others, gets heavily to his feet, and goes out of the lodge without saying another word. Long Turd and Foolish Elk take time to finish their pipes and then follow, pausing to whisper a few words to Limps-a-Lot.

When the other men are gone, Limps-a-Lot looks at his adopted son. His gaze looks weary, perhaps sad.

— They are breaking up the village early tomorrow, but in the morning, if more wasichus do not arrive to save their friends, Sitting Bull and I will go up and try to find the body of the bluecoat who has infected you and we will try to determine if it was Long Hair. You will lead us to him.

Paha Sapa nods. His hands have been trembling since he awoke safe in Limps-a-Lot’s lodge this evening and he continues to clench his fists to hide the shaking.

Limps-a-Lot touches his back.

— Try to sleep again, my son, despite all the crazy noise from the camp. We will leave before first light and while the other bands head west and north or back to the agencies—I think that Sitting Bull will take his people far away to the north—you and I will head east to home. There we will confer with the others and decide what to do about your ghost.

PAHA SAPA KNOWS THAT HE WAS BORN DURING THE MOON OF Ripening in the Year the Lightning Struck the Ponies.

He knows that Lakota children are almost never named after places—his name, Paha Sapa, Black Hills, is very unusual and it made the other boys snicker—but he also knows that on the night that he was born near Bear Butte at the end of that hot, strange summer when the lightning struck the pony herd three times, the three most important men in the village—their war chief, Angry Badger; their old, tired wičasa wakan , Loud Voice Hawk; and their best and real wičasa wakan , Limps-a-Lot—all dreamed of the Black Hills.

In his dream, Angry Badger saw a white wolf running out of the dark hills surrounded and backlit by lightning and the wolf spoke with thunder and on the wolf’s back was a crying and naked baby boy.

Loud Voice Hawk dreamed that he was young again and able to ride his favorite horse, Píšco —Nighthawk—who had been dead more than thirty years, and Nighthawk galloped so fast that he carried Loud Voice Hawk into the night air, into the lightning itself, and when the Black Hills were below him, a huge white cetán —a hawk like the one he had been named after seventy-four summers before—rose up out of those hills and the hawk was carrying a naked baby boy child in its talons.

Limps-a-Lot had not dreamed so much as had a vision. The thunder and lightning had wakened him and he had left his two wives and gone out into the hot, wild night—a night made wilder by the screams of Stands in Water dying as she worked to birth her child—and in the lightning to the north, beyond the hulking shape of Matho Paha , Bear Butte, Limps-a-Lot saw a baby boy’s face drawn by lightning in the clouds above the Black Hills.

The morning after that fatherless boy was born and after the mother had bled to death and been prepared for burial by the women, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and Limps-a-Lot met in a closed lodge for six hours, smoking the pipe and discussing their dreams and visions. They decided that—as odd as it would sound to all Natural Free Human Beings—the orphan baby, if he lived, should be named Paha Sapa, for the infant had come from the Black Hills in each of their dreams.

Paha Sapa has learned more about the details of his birth and about his dead parents than one might expect for a child who never knew his parents. He knows, for instance, exactly why his mother, Stands in Water, with only sixteen summers, died giving birth to him, and that her death was related to the fact that his equally young father, Short Elk, had been killed by Pawnee three months before Paha Sapa’s birth.

He knew that Short Elk, who had not yet fully seen seventeen summers, had won Stands in Water in a raid on a Crow village where Short Elk had shown either much bravery or incredible stupidity. The Lakota raiding party had hit the Crow village, scattered their horses, and carried away several women—including Stands in Water, a Lakota who had been captive of the Crow for four years—and when the Crow warriors finally found horses, the twelve Lakota warriors had fled. But Short Elk had turned back, shouted Hokahey! , lifted his arms as if flying, and ridden through the Crow lines as they all fired and shot arrows at him. Nothing touched Short Elk. Then he rode back through the Crow skirmish lines, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, and his arms out to his sides. For his courage, Angry Badger and the other warriors had awarded him Stands in Water as his bride.

But then, three months before Paha Sapa was born, Short Elk—quite full of himself now, with six beautiful ponies to his name—had joined five older warriors on a raid on a large Pawnee village far to the west of the Black Hills. This raid was for ponies only, and Wolf Turning, the older warrior leading the raid, told the others that when they got the ponies, they would ride hard and not stop to fight. But again Short Elk showed himself a hero. Disobeying Wolf Turning during the wild ride back across the plains, Short Elk had slid off his horse, driven a stake into the prairie, attached a ten-foot thong to the stake, and then wrapped the other end of the thong around his waist. The idea was that he would not move from that place. Short Elk cried to the other five Lakota—

— They cannot harm me! I see the future. The Six Grandfathers watch over me! Join me, my friends!

The five older men pulled up their ponies but did not go back. They watched from a grassy hilltop two hundred broad paces away while fifty howling Pawnee rode Short Elk down and—in their anger at losing the ponies—leaped from their horses and cut the young, screaming warrior to pieces, gouging out his eyes while he lived and hacking off his arms, finally cutting his still-beating heart out of his body and taking turns biting into it. The five Lakota watching from the hilltop immediately left the stolen Pawnee horses behind and fled in terror across the prairie to their village.

Stands in Water had been in mourning—weeping, screaming, moaning, tearing at her hair, and slicing flesh from her forearms and thighs and upper arms and even from her breasts—for the full three months between Short Elk’s death and her baby’s birth.

Paha Sapa knew these things even when he was very young, not just because he had begun asking questions of his elders as soon as he could talk, but because of what he thought of as his small-vision-backward-touching .

Paha Sapa had used his small-vision-backward-touching since before he could speak or walk, and he was well into his running-around little-boy years before he realized that not everyone had the ability.

It did not always work. It usually did not work. But sometimes—and he could never predict when—the young Paha Sapa could touch another person’s skin and receive a jumble of memories and voices and sounds and visual images that were not his own. It took him far longer to learn how to sort out these brief, powerful floods of other-thoughts so that he could make sense of them than it took him to learn to speak or walk or ride a pony or shoot a bow.