The Year the Cloud Fell Read online

  The Year the

  Cloud Fell

  Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

  Mouse Road Press

  Seattle

  The Year the Cloud Fell

  Book One 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: 978-1479346332

  ISBN-10: 1479346330

  First Mouse Road Press Edition: November 2012

  Dedication

  To Ilene

  Thanks for looking up.

  Table of Contents

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Prologue

  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

  Acknowledgments

  Cheyenne Pronunciation Guide

  The World of the Fallen Cloud

  Prologue

  Moon When Ice Starts to Form

  Forty-one Years After the Star Fell

  Camp of Closed Windpipe Band, Red Paint River

  Outside the lodge, the crier’s strong, clear words carried through the chill evening air. “One Bear calls you. Everyone to One Bear’s lodge. Speaks While Leaving is a woman today.”

  Speaks While Leaving could hear the people of the camp as they gathered. She heard the crunch and creak of their feet in the winter’s first snow. She heard the smiles in their greetings and heard the tall pride in her father’s answers to their questions. Inside, she felt the beat of her mother’s drumskin like the pulse that lived beneath her flesh. She felt the heat of the fire before her and the cold of winter where it crept in under the lodge skins and touched her legs and back.

  She stood naked before the fire as the elder women of her family prepared her. Her aunt combed her unbraided hair, still wet from her bath in the dark waters of the Red Paint River. Her grandmother mixed the red clay with which she would paint her granddaughter’s entire body. Red, to swathe her in the color of warmth and home, the color of blood, to mark her in her first moon-time. The dusty smell of the paint mingled with the tang of smoke; earth and fire dancing in the air.

  Her mother, Magpie Woman, sang as she thumped the taut circle of whistler hide against the heel of her hand. The drum rang. The song was a simple one, the melody rising up in anticipation and joy.

  Behold her!

  Behold the newest woman in the world.

  On the bed, a finely quilled buffalo robe lay ready. At the central hearthpit, her other-mother—Magpie Woman’s sister—pulled coals from the hot fire. Juniper and white sage lay close at hand, their scents sharp and ready. From beyond the pale skins of the lodge, she heard again her father’s voice.

  “Red Feather Woman, Little Sea Shell, Sits Above,” he said, naming two widows and a man who had recently lost several whistlers in a raid by the Crow People. “A whistler to each I give you. In honor of my daughter’s passage into womanhood.” She heard the low murmurs of the people. Three whistlers.

  Truly, it was an exorbitant display of generosity. Speaks While Leaving knew she should have felt something—pride, joy—at her father’s honor to her, or at the prospect of womanhood, but she did not. All she felt was a deep encroaching fear.

  “Ke’éehe, náe’tótahe,” she said. Grandmother, I am afraid.

  Healing Rock Woman looked up from her mixing, deep lines growing deeper in an ancient face.

  “It is happening again,” the girl said.

  The old woman stood and came to her. She reached out. Speaks While Leaving felt her grandmother’s touch like a burning ember against her young skin.

  “You are ice.”

  “Ke’éehe.” The lodge blurred as the vision fever swooped across her brain. “Make it stop.”

  At a gesture from the old woman the drumbeat stopped and her aunt stopped her combing. “Go, my daughter,” she said to Magpie Woman. “The ma’heono are coming upon her. Tell the men to move away. They will not want to be so near and have their power overwhelmed by hers.”

  Magpie Woman pushed aside the doorflap. She looked back for a moment and Speaks While Leaving caught a hazy glimpse of darkness and glowing faces beyond the door. Then her mother was outside and the flap fell closed.

  Burning hands gripped the young girl’s arms. She moaned as the white walls bled out across her sight. She was taken to a bed and a roll of trader’s cloth was placed between her thighs. Fiery hands made her to lie down, touched her legs, her belly, her throat. Speaks While Leaving recognized her grandmother’s healing touch, but it did nothing against the vision fever that blinded her eyes and sucked the warmth from her body.

  “Ke’éehe, please, make it stop.”

  Hot fingers caressed her cheek. “If Ma’heo’o wants to talk to our little girl, who am I to say no?”

  “But Ke’éehe—”

  “Tsh-tsh-tsh. Let the vision come. If you fight it, you will only get sick. Then you will have the vision, and you will be sick, too. You remember the last time?”

  Speaks While Leaving signed her agreement, already blind to the world around her.

  “Good. Shut your eyes and do not be afraid.”

  “Will you stay with me?”

  “Yes, Little Pot Belly,” she said, calling her by her baby name. “We will all stay.”

  A skin of soft deer hide was laid over her, then the light touch of a blanket, followed by the heavy weight of a buffalo robe. The soft fur with its musky, familiar smell comforted her. She shivered and curled up on her side. Someone entered the lodge.

  “They are going,” Magpie Woman said, meaning the people outside. “The men thank you for the warning.”

  The murmurs and footsteps outside grew distant and silent. Speaks While Leaving could only hear the snap of wood in the fire, the quiet words of her mothers and aunt, and the thrum of her heart in her breast. Soon, even those sounds faded. Speaks While Leaving reached out through her silent white blindness. She found her grandmother’s hand. This vision is strong, she thought, and said so out loud, though she could not hear her own voice. She felt the hand that held hers give a squeeze of reassurance, and then she was alone, adrift in a pale sky.

  She waited for the vision to come.

  The world was white. She stood bathed in diffuse light. A wind lifted her unbraided hair and she smelled the wet dust scent of a coming storm.

  The world around her dimmed. The light receded into little pools of brightness, becoming smaller as the sky darkened. Finally, the light became the rising sun and the morning star. The pale blue of dawn glowed between the heavy clouds and the dark prairie.

  How funny, she thought. The thu
nder beings come from the west, not the east.

  The sun rose quickly, out of time in the way of visions, and its light fell on the prairie.

  Ahead and to either side she saw a line of men, or so she thought them. Each figure was wrapped in strands of fine thread, head to toe. The strands shrouded them, making a cocoon of each one. From each figure’s back stretched a single cord that shone in the sunlight like spun silver. She saw all the threads stretching back to a single point, and there she saw the Trickster, Vé’ho’e, the spider-being of legend, and she knew then that the men were vé’hó’e, the whitemen of the Horse Nations.

  The cocooned figures marched slowly toward her. Their shuffling feet crushed the tender shoots of spring grass. As they marched, their silver cords stretched, and Vé’ho’e spun more silk.

  Then from the sky she heard thunder and saw two men, thunder beings, their skin all black and with lightning bolts on their arms. They dove down out of the sky like arrows heading to earth. They flew past the marching men and rumbling power filled the air. Bolts of fire struck the ground before the line of men, but they did not stop in their marching. The thunder beings flew back up into the sky, stopping at a big cloud, grey with pending rain.

  The thunder beings took the cloud by the sides and brought it down towards the ground. Speaks While Leaving saw that on it rode one of the vé’hó’e. As it came overhead, the thunder beings made the cloud disappear and the cocooned man tumbled from the sky. Speaks While Leaving reached out and cushioned his fall. She stripped him clean of the clinging webs, even the one that tied him to Vé’ho’e.

  Then the thunder beings flew back up into the sky, arrows rising, while the whiteman stood beside Speaks While Leaving. The pair faced the east and the line of men split, making a clear space between them and the Trickster Vé’ho’e.

  Into this clear space rode ten whooping warriors. Speaks While Leaving saw that each rider bore the shield of a band of the People, so that all ten bands were represented. The riders spread out and cut the webs that tied the cocooned men to Vé’ho’e. As each strand was broken, one of the marching men disappeared. The riders cut and cut until the prairie was empty once more. Then the riders rode around Vé’ho’e himself, making a sacred hoop in the ground around him. Vé’ho’e could not move from the circle, and the warriors rode off.

  The sun set in the west, and the shadows of Speaks While Leaving and the man from the cloud stretched out toward where Vé’ho’e stood trapped in the sacred circle. When their shadows touched him, the Trickster disappeared into the darkness of night.

  Speaks While Leaving opened her eyes. She was very tired.

  “Ah. You have come back.” Healing Rock Woman smiled. Speaks While Leaving felt the cool caress of a damp cloth across her forehead. Magpie Woman knelt at her bedside as well, and she could see her aunt and her other-mother watching from near the fire.

  “I saw—”

  “We heard the whole of it,” Healing Rock Woman said.

  “You told the whole story as you saw it.” There was pride in Magpie Woman’s voice, but also something else. Speaks While Leaving looked into her mother’s face.

  “Do not be afraid of me, Mother. Perhaps this was just a dream.”

  Her mother and grandmother exchanged glances.

  “Little Pot Belly,” her grandmother said. “Do you think it was only a dream?”

  Speaks While Leaving looked up at the smokehole where the lodgepoles met. The power of the vision still ran through her body. She could remember vividly the shrouded men, the thunder beings, the man who rode the cloud. She knew she could not forget it.

  “No. It was not a dream.”

  “Good,” Healing Rock Woman said. “It is a bad thing to ignore a true vision.

  “But what does it mean?”

  “That is for you to say. Not for us. For now, though, we will tell the camp of this vision. Tomorrow, we will dance your vision from the other world into this one.”

  “No,” Speaks While Leaving said, suddenly sure of one thing. “We must wait. We should dance in the spring, when the grass is green and tender.”

  The elder women all agreed, for it was important to dance the vision at the proper time.

  “That is good,” her grandmother said. “Now, you rest.”

  But Speaks While Leaving was already asleep.

  Chapter 1

  Wednesday, May 5th, AD 1886

  Fort Whitley, Kansa Territory

  Captain George Armstrong Custer, Jr. looked back over his shoulder, toward the fort’s main gate. The cold breeze of early morning smelled of the waters off the Gulf that lay only a few miles distant.

  Fort Whitley’s tiny barracks were two hundred yards away, and its timbered walls enclosed the largest yard of any fort in America. Nearby, a table and two rows of chairs stood untenanted, looking lonely and out of place in the midst of such spaciousness. The space was necessary for their work, though, as Fort Whitley was not a simple frontier fortification, not just a lonely link in a chain that stretched out into hostile territory. Fort Whitley, as George liked it put, was where they built the future.

  “Still no sign of him,” Elisha said.

  “He’ll be here,” George replied. I hope, he added to himself. The knot in his stomach twisted a turn tighter and he turned back toward the yard.

  The wind grabbed the doors to the huge oversized barn and pulled them against the blocks that held them open. Men in blue struggled against guy ropes that hung from the huge construction above them. They tramped through the barn’s doorway and into the mud, pulling their prize out of the hangar and into the morning wind.

  The breeze freshened and the soldiers dug their heels into the soggy turf. One man slipped on the dew-wet grass and slid forward on his rear. Derisive laughter was cut short.

  “Stand to, you bastards,” Sergeant Tack shouted. “This is no time for games.”

  Elisha chuckled. “As if Tack ever allows that there is a time for games.”

  “Oh?” George said. “You forget poker.”

  Elisha’s smile broadened. “Ah, but I didn’t, sir. To Tack, poker is not a game, but a business.”

  The two officers shared a laugh and watched as the sergeant put his men and the subject of their labors back under control. The subject of their labors hung in the air above them. George looked up as its midsection emerged from the barn.

  It was huge; taller than a house and over a hundred feet long. The cigar-shaped frame was made from steel and the new metal known as aluminum. The white fabric that stretched to cover it shone in the morning light, making the craft look like some odd, symmetrical cloud lassoed and brought to Earth. Beneath its bulk, attached like some sucker-fish to the belly of an airborne whale, hung the cabin and engine cars. Cabling from the dirigible’s sides helped support the cars and steering vanes, and it was these wires that sang in the damp morning wind.

  George had fought hard for the giant contraption. He had pushed for its acceptance, had battled for its commission, and had overseen its construction. It was the child of his own work and that of his friend, Ferdinand, an obscure German count who had worked for the Union during the Civil War. Their discussions, with minor modifications and the application of American resources, had created the two things George had sought.

  First, the craft would provide the Army with an edge in its “conflict” with the Alliance. To call it a war was an overstatement in George’s opinion. To be sure, ever since white men had realized that the Gulf of Narváez could be crossed, there had been difficulties with the tribes of the Alliance, but these skirmishes and battles hardly constituted a war. America had weathered real wars with Britain, France, Spain, and even with itself. Now the only obstacle that stood in its way was the one that had been there all along: The Cheyenne Alliance.

  Second, it would provide George with a way to establish his name as his own, instead of simply being known as the son of his father.

  “This is the future,” George said as he stared up at the r
ecalcitrant craft. “No more horses and sabers for the Army. From this day forward we will rely on men and machines to lead us to victory.”

  Elisha shrugged. He flipped up the collar of his blue wool topcoat and held it close against the chill breath of Spring’s memory. “If you say so, Captain. For myself though, I just don’t see the generals lining up for a ride in this behemoth or turning in their fine stallions for one of those steam-driven carriages.”

  George tried to envision his father in one of the fanciful Benz carriages instead of on horseback and smiled at the image. He took a deep lungful of air and released a frosty breath. “You are right. There’s just something refined about sitting a horse that mechanical engines cannot replace. But horses are useless against the Cheyenne.”

  Elisha looked as though he might have argued that point as well, but the sound of voices from the direction of the gatehouse drew his attention.

  A squad of soldiers on horseback turned in from the road and through the gate into the yard. They were followed by four open carriages with high-seated drivers like in the days of Lincoln. The dignitaries—senators and a few representatives who had come to view the official launch—sat in the high seats and craned their necks for a better view of the huge aircraft. Behind the carriages were more riders, but not enlisted men. These were old men, most portly, all but one wearing the dress blues of the U.S. Army.

  The one rider who was not in uniform wore a long topcoat of dark wool, pale riding pants, and a high-collared shirt with a cravat of watered silk. From beneath his high statesman’s hat flowed his trademark: locks of golden hair, now paling with age. It was George’s father, the Boy General, Hero of the Civil and Tejano Wars, and the Savior of the Battle of Kansa Bay. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, Sr., President of the United States of America, laughed with the generals and congressmen as they rode into the yard beneath a clear, crisp morning sky.