The Spirit of Thunder Read online

  The Spirit of Thunder

  Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  Mouse Road Press

  Seattle

  The Spirit of Thunder

  Book Two of the Fallen Cloud Saga

  2nd 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: 978-1480032996

  ISBN-10: 1480032999

  First Mouse Road Press Edition: November 2012

  Dedication

  For Ilene

  Welcome to the next level.

  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

  Acknowledgments

  Cheyenne Pronunciation Guide

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Chapter 1

  Summer, A.D. 1886

  Red Paint River

  Cheyenne Alliance Territory

  The sweat on the back of George’s neck went cold, the ache from the stub of his amputated finger swept aside as he stared at the lump of raw metal in his bandaged hand.

  Gold!

  Even encrusted with dirt as it was, there was no mistaking that yellow luster, deep and dark—almost as dark as the marigolds in his mother’s garden.

  It was gold, pure gold, and a sizable nugget, too, the size of a hen’s egg. He felt the weight of it in his hand. At seven or eight ounces, it represented the better part of a year’s wages for a laborer or a clerk or...

  Or a soldier, he though with dim regret. Like I once was.

  A voice, followed by the sound of gentle laughter, brought him back to his surroundings. George looked up from the nugget and into smiling faces.

  The chiefs of the Great Council, the ruling body of what the Americans called the Cheyenne Alliance, sat around him, watching him. They were Indians—”savages,” George would have called them just a few short weeks before. Now, as he himself looked around, he knew them instead as comrades-in-arms, as friends, and in a few cases, almost as family.

  They all sat cross-legged on the ground. The buffalo hides that covered lodge’s conical frame had been pulled up to let in the breeze of early summer. It was a double-sized lodge—nearly twenty feet tall at its peak—and was reserved solely for the Council’s use.

  Beyond the perimeter of the lodgepoles the people of the camp had gathered to hear the proceedings. They sat and stood in the bright sunshine outside, silent each and every one, waiting to hear what would be said next.

  Within the lodgepoles and under the shade of the lodgeskin, the sixty chiefs sat. They sat with their backs to the place where the doorflap would have been, facing the place of honor at the back of the lodge, the place where the principal chief sat. Three Trees Together was an ancient Cheyenne; his face was lined and deeply creased, turning his features into an unreadable mask. His long braided hair was altogether white. George had been told that the man was more than a hundred years old and, judging by his appearance, George couldn’t doubt it, but his hooded eyes were lucid beneath wrinkled lids and when he spoke his voice was clear and deliberate.

  With the old man sat two of the secondary chiefs, both old and respected men in their own rights.

  George, as a guest invited to speak with the Council, sat near the front, among the elder, more respected members. With him was Storm Arriving, a warrior of repute, and George’s friend.

  One of the chiefs near George said something else and the men laughed again.

  “Stone Bear speaks,” Storm Arriving said, translating his own Cheyenne language into French for George’s benefit. “He says that the yellow chief-metal does not make vé’hó’e crazy like we thought. It makes them stupid.”

  Vé’hó’e. There was that word again. It was the Cheyenne word for white men, but it was also somehow inextricably tied to their word for spider, web-weaver, and to the name of some ancient Trickster-god. George did not fully understand the implications of the word, but he had always known that he didn’t like it.

  “One Who Flies,” Storm Arriving said, using the name the Cheyenne had given George. “Stone Bear is teasing. It was not an insult.”

  George calmed himself, aware that composure was a great virtue among these people. He had been thrown off-balance by the sudden revelation of a nearby deposit of gold. Stone Bear’s teasing was meant in good humor.

  Besides, George thought. I am a whiteman. A vé’ho’e. One of them.

  “Stone Bear is right,” George said in French. Storm Arriving began to translate. “But it only makes us stupid for a short while. Crazy comes later, and it is crazy you need to worry about.”

  He looked around the lodge.

  Nearby was One Bear, a chief of the Tree People band and father of the woman who had found the exposed vein of gold in a granite outcropping a few miles distant. He looked at George with calm attention. His face concealed all except for the interest in his eyes.

  From the vá’ôhtáma, the place of honor at the back of the lodge, Three Trees Together sat forward with his forearms on his knees. The old man’s hands toyed with the medicine bag that hung from his neck and he chewed on his bottom lip and stared at George through squinted eyes.

  They were all listening, polite and attentive, listening to what he, an outsider—a vé’ho’e—had to say. And George knew they would give his words just as much weight as those of any tribesman.

  “Mâsêhavé’ho’e,” he said. “‘Crazy white man.’ I hear you say this all the time. Vé’hó’e are crazy. Vé’hó’e don’t know how to act. We don’t know where the sun is in the sky. We are deaf to the spirits of the earth. We bury our dead in the ground and pile stones up into the sky. We do everything backwards. We are crazy.” He held up the nugget. It shone in the shaft of light that stole in through the smokehole above.

  “No matter how crazy we seem to you, this metal will make us ten times worse. This gold can be a great tool for you, and with it a great many problems might be solved. But it also brings with it a whole new set of risks. Its presence here must be kept secret—if at all possible—for if the vé’hó’e out across the Big Greasy ever learn of it, they will go crazy in the worst way and you will never keep them from your lands.”

  He put the lump of gold down at the edge of the cold hearthpit.

  “That is all I have to say.” He waited for Storm Arriving to finish translating his words.

  The chiefs were silent a while as was their custom between speakers. Finally, Three Trees Together straightened up and put his hands on his knees.

  “This seems like good advice to me,” George heard through Storm Arriving’s translation. “We should keep this knowledge with the People, and keep the vé’hó’e of the H
orse Nations from learning it.” There was general assent to this statement, and George saw the agreement pass beyond the perimeter of the lodge and into the crowd that surrounded it.

  “I would be interested,” the old chief continued, “in hearing more of how we might use this yellow chief-metal. Later, perhaps, One Who Flies can tell us more of his ideas, but at the moment, there is work to be done. We have spent nearly a moon here, waiting for our war party to return from the City of White Stone. The coup they counted on the chiefs of the Horse Nations was great, but now we must lay to rest those who fell along that path, and after that, we must move the People. The buffalo are far ahead of us, and there is hunting to do.”

  George looked down, flexing his wounded hand, remembering the past month. His lightning invasion and attack on Washington had not been without its cost. Physically, his only lasting scar would be the loss of the little finger of his left hand, blown off by an explosion in the Capitol rotunda. In his soul, however, the injuries cut much deeper.

  He had lost a great friend, Laughs Like A Woman, who had died saving George’s own life from American rifles. He had lost any hope of reconciliation with his father, President George Armstrong Custer, Sr., for his role in leading the Cheyenne to the Capitol building to force a parley with Congress. But his greatest wound, the knife-edge across his heart, came when he overheard the treachery of his own country’s congressmen; men who, while discussing peace with the Indian chiefs on the floor of the House, whispered how they might betray their own promises to achieve the greatest political gain.

  Though he had hinted at it, George had not told the chiefs of the congressional subterfuge. The hope that some senators from the United States Government would keep their promise, the hope that by the time the cherries ripened in June some representatives would come to meet with the leaders of the People who lived on the great plains of the American interior—that hope still flickered in George’s heart, wounded though it was. The dream that there were good men on both sides of the great American rivers still strove within him.

  Three Trees Together stood, signaling the end of the meeting, and the other chiefs did likewise. Though the sides of the lodge had been raised, the men all left by what would have been the doorway. As with all lodges, the doorway was on the eastern side. The east was the home of the rising sun, the place where all things began. For the Cheyenne, George had learned, and for the Great Council in particular, there was symbolism in everything. No chief would leave but by the proper direction.

  The lodge was a circle with a doorway that faced the east. As George and Storm Arriving left the Council lodge, they were in the center of yet another circle.

  The Council lodge was in a circular clearing in the center of the Cheyenne encampment. The clearing was about a quarter mile across, to George’s estimation, and in it, along with the Council Lodge, were dance rings, racing tracks, and the two great lodges that housed the tribe’s sacred objects, the nature of which George had no notion.

  As he looked around the clearing, George saw the camps that surrounded it, the camps of the ten bands that made up the whole of the Cheyenne people. They covered the undulating, green-carpeted landscape for a mile or more in every direction, bounded on three sides by the creeks and rivers that supplied so many people with adequate water.

  The ten bands were camped in their traditional sites around the circle. To the south, the Scabby band, the Hair Rope band, and the Ridge Men. To the west were the Poor People and the band that Storm Arriving called his own: the Tree People. To the north were the lodges of the Flexed Leg band, the Broken Jaw band, and the reclusive Suhtai, a band once lost but now found again. And to the east were camped the Eaters and the Closed Windpipe band. These last two were camped on either side of an opening in the immense circle, the sun road, a gap left open to admit the rising sun as through the door of a lodge.

  The camp was a circle; a lodge was a circle. George wondered at it. The more he learned of these people, the more of their symbols he could see in everything they did.

  The two men turned west, toward Storm Arriving’s home among the Tree People band.

  “How many people are here in camp?” George asked.

  “All of them,” Storm Arriving replied without hesitation.

  George smiled at the misunderstanding. “No, not how many of ‘the People.’ I meant how many people; how many men and women?”

  Storm Arriving looked around as they walked. “Ten thousands? Two times ten thousands? More? We have never counted. Besides, what does it matter? By the time a man finished counting, the number would have changed.” He gave George a sidelong glance. “That sounds like a vé’ho’e question.”

  George chuckled at the jibe and looked at the ground. “Not exactly,” he said. “It’s more of a soldier’s question.”

  “A bluecoat question, you mean,” Storm Arriving said, meaning a soldier in the U.S. Army. “But you threw your blue coat away. You do not need to think like them anymore.”

  George shrugged. “Perhaps, but not so for you, I fear. In order for you to succeed against the vé’hó’e—in order for you to survive—I think the People will have to start asking bluecoat questions.”

  Storm Arriving stopped. “You are talking about war, no?”

  George looked at his friend, so different from himself. Storm Arriving was a tall man with skin like tightly-stretched leather. The hair on the right side of his head—his temple and back over his right ear—had been shorn close, while the hair on the top and left side of his head was long and pulled back into a braid that fell to the middle of his back. Sunlight glinted from several silver earrings that dangled from his right ear, and the white feather at the nape of his neck lifted in the prairie breeze.

  His chest was bare, the scars of his recent skin sacrifice were still harsh and angry on his breast. He wore a breechcloth for modesty, and his leggings, fringed and painted with geometric designs, were long and dragged on the ground as he walked. His moccasins were decorated with colored quills. Over his shoulder hung a leather quiver and a horn and sinew bow, both festooned with fox tails and feathers, silver circlets and strips of red cloth. On one side of his belt hung a knife in its sheath and on the other, the tail of a white-tailed deer.

  He was, in every aspect, the picture of a savage that George and every other American had learned as a child: uncivilized and murderous, a creature and not a man. But as George had learned, that image was a lie. This was a man who knew the subtle play of politics, who knew the sting of injustice, and who knew the heartache of a frustrated love affair. He also knew the true meaning of war.

  Storm Arriving had not looked at George as he asked his question, and even now he kept his gaze fixed on the west, toward his clan’s camp, toward the flocks of whistlers, toward the sacred mountains that rose up from the horizon.

  “Yes,” George answered. “I am talking about war. War like the People have never seen.”

  “Worse than our war against Long Hair, your father?”

  George’s father, President Custer, had fought the Indians back in the ‘70s. In a terrible and bloody war, Custer, Sr., had taken the Missouri, Kansa, Yankton, and Santee territories away from the people who had called them home for untolled years. George had seen for himself, from both sides, the grief that the losses of that war had left behind.

  “Worse than that,” he said. “Especially if there is gold to be had.”

  Storm Arriving pursed his lips as he considered this news. His gaze still fixed on some distant point, he said, “There are perhaps eight thousand soldiers in the camp of the People. As twice as many again are the women, children, and the men too old for the path of war.” He turned and looked at George. “But we have our allies: the Sage People and the Cloud People of the south with perhaps three thousand soldiers of their own, and the Inviters and the Little Star People to the north who are nearly as great in number as the People.”

  George scowled. “Twenty thousand soldiers. That is not many. What about the o
ther allied tribes?”

  “Like the Ree and the other Earth Lodge Builders?” Storm Arriving dismissed the idea with a gesture. “They are few and have no soldiers to speak of. They are farmers and do not walk the war path.”

  “And your other neighbors?”

  “No. The Cradle People and the Crow People are powerful, but they are bitter enemies of the Alliance. Any other peoples are either too small or too far away to be of any help.

  “So,” George said. “Twenty thousand it is, then. It will have to be enough.”

  “It seems to me to be a great number of soldiers. There has never been a war fought with so many, not even against Long Hair.”

  George sighed. “My friend, when my people fought their Civil War, they sometimes lost twenty thousand men in a single battle.”

  Storm Arriving gaped incredulously. “You are joking.”

  “No,” George said. “It is true.”

  Storm Arriving laughed. “Then we will have no trouble beating the bluecoats. What kind of war chief loses twenty thousand men in one battle?”

  “The kind who starts with a hundred thousand.”

  Storm Arriving took a breath before he spoke. “One thing I have learned: it is not always numbers. The side with fewer can win, too. Having greater numbers makes a warchief confident, but having fewer numbers makes him clever. Do not count us lost before we have even begun.”

  George smiled, appreciative of his friend’s wisdom. “You will make a good chief someday.”

  They began walking once more and soon were among the lodges of the Tree People band. Women were out tending the meat on drying racks or tanning hides. Younger men were out working on arrows or shields. Old men sat in story circles and smoked, and children ran to and fro between the lodges. Many people greeted the two men by name as they passed, and Storm Arriving greeted them all by name in return.

  Each family had five or six lodges, some even had more, and they set them all close to one another in a circle around a main family lodge. Between family circles there was more room—fifty yards or so—and thus the camp was spread over a large area. Storm Arriving and his family had set their lodges at the western edge of camp, so the two men had over a mile to walk before they reached home.