Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa nods again.

— Sitting Bull at first said he wouldn’t go with the policemen. Then he agreed. They let him get dressed. It had been dark when all the policemen rode up, but it was getting light by the time the old holy man came outside. Others had gathered outside the cabin. Sitting Bull’s youngest son—still a teenager—started mocking his father for submitting to the wasichu. Sitting Bull changed his mind again and said he wouldn’t go after all. There was pushing and shoving. Someone in the crowd shot a policeman, and that policeman, before he died, shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Another policeman shot Sitting Bull in the back of the head. When it was all over, there were six tribal policemen dead as well as Sitting Bull and six of his friends and followers.

— Oh, Paha Sapa. Oh, dear.

— It’s time to go, Rain. We don’t want to be late meeting your father.

PAHA SAPA AND RAIN are five minutes early at the steps outside the Administration Building facing the Columbian Fountain set in the broad waters of the basin. Her father arrives twelve minutes late.

Miss de Plachette has said nothing since his story about Sitting Bull’s death. But she looks even paler than she did earlier. He assumes that she has been put off by his story—all the sordid details, from Buffalo Bill Cody showing up drunk to betray his old friend to the very real violence threatened by the Ghost Dance and its Prophet. He knows he will always love her for… if nothing else… that moment of standing higher than anyone else at the top of the Ferris Wheel, looking as if she were preparing to fly the way his spirit-self had flown more than once in his life. No, not just for that. Perhaps not for that at all. Just because he does love her and knows he always will.

But she is, after all, a twenty-year-old wasichu girl, wise, perhaps, to the ballrooms and churches and embassies of Washington and Paris and the world, but having a four-year-old child’s understanding of the West and of her mother and of Paha Sapa’s world, where great warriors like Crazy Horse and rare wičasa wakan like Sitting Bull are cut down by little men no longer Natural Free Human Beings, little men neither natural nor free, little men on wasichu payrolls who wear oversized, flea-infested, cast-off cavalry blue coats and who kill the best of their own kind on Wasicun command.

No, she will never understand Paha Sapa’s world. Even if she learned the language of the Lakota, he knows then, it would be as alien and adopted to her as French or German or Italian. More so, he realizes, since she has spent time as an adult or near-adult in those places, and remembers Nebraska and the West only in a distorted child’s blur of half memory.

And he will not see her again, he knows. He is certain of this. As certain as if he had allowed another small-vision-forward-touching to occur. Miss Rain de Plachette may or may not move to the Pine Ridge Reservation with her father this coming September, but she and Paha Sapa will not meet again. Not after the terror and distaste and— alienation , he thinks, is the word in English—the wacetug la and wo he saw in her hazel eyes as he spoke.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. Like so much else he’s seen and experienced and survived since the Vision of the Stone Heads emerging from the Paha Sapa and the wasichu Stone Giants rising to finish the job that is all but finished on the Plains and in the Hills, this is just one more thing that does not matter.

Reverend Henry de Plachette arrives in a huffing hurry, accompanied by three men wearing very formal tails and top hats. There are introductions, but Paha Sapa does not hear or remember the names. None of the three men extends a hand to shake—they clearly see that he is Indian, despite, or perhaps because of, his ill-fitting suit and overly polished shoes.

But the Reverend de Plachette is extending his hand there at the head of the stairway to the dark waters of the basin. He is saying something.

— … so much for escorting my daughter to our little rendezvous here, Mr. Slow Horse. It is much appreciated. I know that Rain enjoyed the diversion and I appreciate your gentlemanly offer to escort the young lady.

Paha Sapa grips the old man’s hand.

The world swirls, the Great Basin becomes a huge mural, a fresco, larger than the Mary Cassatt mural in the Women’s Building, as the water becomes a vertical wall and the images and sounds and feelings rush in.

And then everything is black.

HE REGAINS CONSCIOUSNESS lying on the topmost step. One of the well-dressed men has dipped a silk handkerchief into the basin and is applying the wet cloth to Paha Sapa’s forehead. His head is on Miss de Plachette’s lap, and she is cradling him in her arms. His head is on her lap.

Paha Sapa realizes that tears are flowing down his face. He has been weeping while he was unconscious. He shakes his head.

— Too much sun…

one man is saying.

— Perhaps the vertiginous effects of that infernal Wheel…

another man is saying.

— A problem with the heart, perhaps.

This last is the Reverend Henry de Plachette, who has taken over the mopping with the wet silk handkerchief. A small crowd has gathered, and uniformed Exposition personnel are running toward them from the direction of Machinery Hall.

Paha Sapa blinks away the tears and looks up at Rain’s face above him.

The images were few, fast, and terrible.

The prairie. Wind blowing. A winter morning.

The cemetery atop the small rise. There was one tree.

The grave with the plain pine coffin just lowered into it.

The Reverend de Plachette there, unable to conduct the funeral service. Surrendered to weeping.

And Paha Sapa there—seen through the old man’s rheumy, tear-filled eyes—Paha Sapa looking older but not older enough. Paha Sapa taking the baby from the Mexican woman, a servant of the minister’s. Paha Sapa holding the baby as he looks down at the first clods of dirt falling on the coffin of his young wife, Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse.

The image, from the Reverend’s point of view, the Reverend who is also ill and who would give all he has ever had or believed in to take his daughter’s place in that grave, the image of his Indian son-in-law, Billy Slow Horse, holding the distraught Reverend’s dead daughter’s only child—the baby who may have helped kill her in her weakened condition—the boy.

The boy named Robert.

Paha Sapa lies there on the top step of the staircase leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain, too staggered to try to gain his feet again no matter how embarrassed he may feel at lying there with his head on this young lady’s lap with the crowd gathering around.

Her hand is stroking his forehead now. Her bare hand. She has taken her glove off. Her bare hand.

Paha Sapa receives no vision from the contact, but he receives a terrible twin certainty: she loves him already and will do everything she must do so that they will be together; there is no escaping their fate-entwined destiny.

For the first, last, and only time in his life, Paha Sapa, inexplicably, ineluctably, gasps out three words that cause everyone except Rain to freeze in place.

— Oh, dear Jesus.

PAHA SAPA IS RIDING IN THE RAIN. THE HORSE BENEATH HIM IS old, scabbed, and slow. And it is wearing a saddle. Paha Sapa has never ridden in a saddle before and it hurts his ass.