Beneath a Wounded Sky Read online

  Beneath

  a Wounded Sky

  Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  Mouse Road Press

  Seattle

  Beneath a Wounded Sky

  Book Five of the Fallen Cloud Saga

  1st Edition

  A Mouse Road Publication

  November 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is strictly coincidental.

  Mouse Road Press

  16034 Burke Ave N

  Shoreline, WA 98133

  United States of America

  Cover and book design © 2012 Mouse Road Press

  ISBN-13: 978-1480165861

  ISBN-10: 1480165867

  First Mouse Road Press Edition: November 2012

  Dedication

  To Ilene,

  my ever-fixed mark.

  Table of Contents

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Cheyenne Pronunciation Guide

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Imagine a world that began much like our own.

  Sixty-five million years ago, North America bade farewell to the islands of Europe from across the newly-born Atlantic, Australia stretched to separate itself from Antarctica, and the Indian sub-continent was sailing away from Africa, bound for its collision with the heart of Asia. In every place, Life abounded, and dinosaurs—some larger than a house, and others as small as your thumb—ruled the land, the sea, and the air, living out their lives in the forests and swamps that dominated the coastlands along the shallow Cretaceous seas.

  Then the world broke open, unleashing a volcanic fury the like of which had not been seen for an æon. The Deccan Traps gushed molten lava, covering half of India with a million cubic kilometers of basalt. The ranges of Antarctica cracked, spewing iridium-laced ash into darkening skies. For 500,000 years, the planet rang with violence. Mountains were born, seas shrank, and Life trembled. Across the globe, resources of food and prey disappeared as the climate shifted from wet to arid. Populations competed, starved, and then collapsed. Over the next million years, half of all species died out, unable to adapt in time as habitats vanished in a geologic heartbeat.

  In North America, the continental plate was compressed, thrusting the Rocky Mountains miles into the air. The inland seaway that stretched from the Caribbean to the Arctic began to recede, taking with it the moist marshes and fens upon which the last of the world’s dinosaurs depended. The waters ebbed, revealing vast sedimentary plains, retreating for a thousand miles before they came to a halt. The sea that remained was a fraction of its former size; a short arm of warm, shallow water that thrust up from the Caribbean to the Sand Hills of Nebraska.

  It was on these placid shores that a few species of those great dinosaurs clung to life. Reduced in size and number, the gentle sea gave them the time they needed to adapt and survive. Eventually, some species left the sea’s humid forests for the broad expanses to the north, finding ecological niches among the mammals that had begun to dominate the prairie.

  Life continued. Continents moved. The glacial ices advanced and retreated like a tide. In Africa’s Great Rift Valley, a small ape stood and peered over the savannah grass. Humans emerged, migrated into Asia and Europe, and history was born. Events unfolded mostly unchanged, until the European civilization came to the Great Plains of North America.

  In the centuries before the first Spaniard brought the first horse to the New World, the Cheyenne had been riding across the Great Plains on lizard-like beasts of unmatched speed and power. In defense against their new white-skinned foe, the Cheyenne allied with other tribes, and when the tide of European colonialism came to the prairie frontier, it crashed against the Alliance, and was denied. For a hundred years, the Alliance matched the Horse Nations move for move, strength for strength, shifting the course of history.

  Then, through advances in technology and industry, the Americans, led by an officer named George Armstrong Custer, began to make headway and the Alliance was pushed back beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Arkansas, all the way to the banks of the Missouri and the Santee. A few years later that same officer—now President Custer—sent his only son on a reconnaissance mission beyond those rivers, only to hear of his capture by the Cheyenne. In the three years since, young George has lived with the Cheyenne, and has sided with them against his own father’s forces.

  This is the World of the Fallen Cloud.

  Chapter 1

  Moon When the Cherries are Ripe, Full

  Four Years after the Cloud Fell

  Along the Red Paint River

  Alliance Territory

  Speaks While Leaving stood before the Council chiefs and waited for their stunned silence to break. It was her father, One Bear, who first recovered.

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?” he asked.

  “I mean no,” she answered. “I will not tell the Council of my vision.”

  This time her pronouncement was met with angry, disapproving murmurs. Chiefs spoke without regard for manners or propriety, and voices around the lodge increased in urgency and volume. The summer wind freshened and the dusty smell of dry grass swirled past the raised lodgeskins. The people sitting outside the lodge, hopeful for word about the new vision from Speaks While Leaving, began to stir as the story of what was transpiring crept toward them.

  “She refuses?”

  “She cannot!”

  Inside, “She insults us,” a chief said.

  “She insults the entire Council!”

  Tempers grew hot around her, knife blades glowing in the flame of her insolence, but from the tail of her eye Speaks While Leaving saw the one chief who remained cold as stone.

  Storm Arriving—her husband until just a few days past—only stared at her. Back straight, fists on cross-legged knees, his rage was a focused heat in his eyes. The sharp edge of his disregard cut her heart, her soul, but his anger had nothing to do with her most recent vision or her refusal to share its content. No, her former husband’s disapproval had begun months before, when they found themselves at odds about the future of the People.

  She needed to be honest with herself: her marriage to Storm Arriving could have survived that schism if she had stayed at home with the People. But she had not. She had left, traveling across the Salt Waters to the kingdom of the Iron Shirts, widening the rift between them. When their infant daughter died of the red fever during the homeward voyage, it was the killing blow. Last night Storm
Arriving struck the dance drum and threw away the stick—and with it his marriage. It had been a surprise to many, but not to her. She knew it was just the last breath of their union succumbing to a long illness.

  Her actions now could do nothing to deepen Storm Arriving’s disregard for her, but they would affect the Council’s opinion of her.

  All her adult life, Speaks While Leaving had been visited by nevé-stanevóo’o, the four Sacred Persons, guardians of the corners of the world, who brought her visions of the future, visions filled with advice and guidance for the People.

  Dutifully, she had always described these visions to her elders. But four days ago she had been given another vision, and the power of it had been immense, shaking the earth, rattling rocks in the river bed, panicking the whistler herds, and waking people all across the mile-wide encampment of the People. It was a vision unlike any she had ever experienced, in both its clarity and its urgency, and it was perfectly clear that it was not to be treated like anything she had experienced before.

  Her father stood to assert control over the growing tumult of the Council. He held out his hands to demand quiet. Slowly, the chiefs complied. When order had been restored, he turned to his daughter.

  “You have never refused to speak of your visions to the Council,” One Bear said.

  “No,” she admitted. “I have not.”

  “Does this vision deal with the future of the People?”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “Is it important that we hear this vision?”

  “Yes,” she said again. “Very important.”

  His voice rumbled with the constrained agitation that only a father of a recalcitrant, embarrassing child can feel. “Then why do you refuse to share it with us? This latest vision of yours...the ground trembled when the spirit powers visited you! That has never happened before. And yet it is this, the most powerful vision that you refuse to share? Why?”

  Speaks While Leaving frowned. “You are not ready to hear it,” she said.

  Again the lodge was filled with a hubbub of disbelief and affront. One Bear struggled to remind the gathered chiefs of their manners.

  Stands Tall in Timber, Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, rose to stand at One Bear’s side, and together their silent example brought the meeting back to order.

  “Speaks While Leaving,” One Bear said. “You have made your position plain. You believe that you know better than the collected wisdom of the Council. During your lifetime, I have known you to be stubborn, headstrong, and full of argument, but this is an arrogance I have never seen, even in you.” He paused to give weight to his disapprobation. “Tell me, Daughter: when will the Great Council, with its grey heads and its many years of experience, when will this body of elders be worthy enough to hear of this vision?”

  His rebuke hurt, but it was not unexpected, and she maintained her equanimity in the face of it. As arrogant as she had been—for she could not disagree with her father’s assessment—she knew that handling this vision called for even more. She steeled herself for what she had to say.

  “First, Father, answer me this,” she said, looking around her. “Where are the chiefs from the Inviters, our greatest ally? I do not see them here.” She saw her father’s gaze narrow and his jaw jut forward as it did when he was holding his temper in check.

  “And from the Cloud People, where are their chiefs? And the Little Star People? The Sage People? The Cut-Hair? Are we an alliance without any allies?”

  She turned full circle and looked at the chiefs around her. Summer was the gathering time for the ten bands of the People; a time of plenty, of hunting, of story circles, and of sweetheart dances. But this summer there had been strife, and as Speaks While Leaving looked around the lodge, she saw many more were missing than just their allies.

  “Where are the chiefs of the Hair Rope Band, my father? And the Flexed Leg Band? This is not the Great Council of the Alliance. This is not the Council of the Forty-Four chiefs of the People.” She turned to make her argument to them all. “This is the Council of Those who Agree with One Bear.”

  “Daughter!”

  “You have had your say, Father. Now I will have mine.” She gestured to the empty places around the lodge. “Our Alliance is fractured. The Council is fractured. The People are fractured. Who should we follow? Should we follow men like him?” she asked, pointing to Storm Arriving. “Men who believe only in the rule of bullet and arrow, who want only to spill vé’hó’e blood? Or should we follow men like you, Father? Men who believe that piety and sacrifice alone will bring forth the changes we desperately need? You two—my father and my husband—you have not been able to agree on anything for moons. Do you think that today you will be able to agree on the meaning of my vision? Do you think you speak for all those who are absent?”

  She turned as she spoke, addressing the body and no longer just her father. “The Council is split. We have no leader. The two factions are tearing us apart. You agree on nothing, and nothing gets done. When the day comes that both sides are willing to hear a voice other than their own, then you will be worthy of hearing from me!”

  From his place among the war chiefs, Storm Arriving’s voice cut through the silence, a growl made through clenched teeth.

  “Just what do you think you are, I wonder.”

  She stared straight at him, affronting him, insulting him in front of the entire Council.

  “I am the woman who was mother to your child,” she said in a flat, even tone. “I am the woman who was your wife. I am the woman who you once loved, and the woman who loves you still, despite my pain. I deserve respect from you, but I think you have forgotten how to respect anyone, yourself most of all.”

  She glared at him until her resolve began to waver, then turned and walked past the chiefs to the doorflap. She stepped out of the lodge and into the throng of people who crowded outside. They gazed at her with that mixture of wide-eyed wonder and reluctant fear that had dogged her all her adult life. But with that fearful wonderment, she saw also a yearning, an earnest hunger for answers to their questions.

  What will happen to us?

  Who should we fear?

  Who are our friends?

  What should we do?

  To her, the vision cleared the fog that shrouded the possible paths of their future, but the choice went against wisdom, against tradition, against her own judgment. The Council, split by interpretations of her previous vision, would surely splinter under the content of this one. And the people around her? They would be more lost than ever.

  The breeze tugged at the ends of her short hair, brutally cut in grief after her daughter’s death—was it only two moons since that awful day? Her grief was so fresh in her heart that, selfishly, she refused to cause others even more by giving them answers that would not soothe. She walked through the crowd and locked the secret of their salvation in her breast, praying that the time to reveal it would come soon.

  George was nervous.

  It wasn’t your standard, everyday, giddy-laugh-and-get-on-with-it type of nervous, no. This was an entirely different breed of nervous. This was a gut-flipping, hand-rattling type of nervous that came nigh on to panic.

  The blood sang in George’s ears and his throat was tight and dry. He swallowed against the knot and glanced over at the two friends who had volunteered to help him through this ordeal, but the dour expressions they wore only accentuated his own misery. He took a deep breath of fresh evening air and let it out, slowly, through taut lips. He shook his head.

  “Aw, Hell,” he said, putting some brass in his backbone. “This is silly. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Whistling Elk squinted into the distance, pondering the question. “He could throw the gifts back in your face, I suppose.”

  “Whip you down to the river,” Limps said, his voice as somber as his features.

  Whistling Elk nodded. “Yes. He could whip you down to the river, and then drag you through the camp, shouting to everyone how you took h
is sister to wife without his permission—”

  “Against his word,” Limps added.

  “Thank you,” George interrupted, stopping them. “Thank you, both of you. To be honest, I didn’t really want to hear what the worst could be.”

  Limps frowned. “Next time, do not ask.”

  George chuckled, more to manufacture some nerve than out of any good humor. “After all, the worst would be if he killed me outright, eh?” He laughed again and regarded his friends.

  “It is possible,” Whistling Elk said reluctantly. “I heard that he was very angry after the Council...”

  Limps stopped him with a gesture and studied George’s features for a moment. “He does not want an answer to that question, either,” he told Whistling Elk.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” George said, switching to English as he always did when a good curse was required. Sweat started to trickle down the nape of his neck, despite the cool evening breeze.

  The sun of the late summer’s day was setting and the roiling clouds wore clothes of rose-pink and salmon-red, glowing brightly against the deep blue sky. Musky smoke drifted in the air as evening meals were prepared over fires of dried buffalo chips.

  George’s lodge stood nearby. A thin line of smoke drifted upward through the hole in the top and from inside came the quiet tune that Mouse Road—now George’s wife—sang to herself as she went about her evening chores.

  Outside, the three men stopped dawdling and prepared for their own chore. Each man had an item for the coming ritual.

  At Whistling Elk’s feet was a bundled pair of buffalo robes, each pelt thick with wintertime hair. Next to Limps, a stake was stuck in the ground and tied to it was a pair of whistlers—the large, lizard-like beasts that the People rode instead of the slower, less hardy horses that the Spaniards had brought to the New World. And, in George’s trembling hands was a parfleche of folded rawhide painted with long diamonds and triangles in blue and white; inside the packet was a piece of red Trader’s cloth, and swaddled inside that were four black feathers from the tail of a mountain eagle.