“Have you always been wound so tight?” the raven woman asked Calico.
“Shut up,” Thomas said before Calico could respond.
Gordo rumbled a low growl, but when Thomas glanced at the dog, he saw its displeasure was once again directed at Consuela and no one else. The dog was panting lightly.
“Fine,” Consuela said, frowning at the dog. “I was just making conversation.”
Thomas hadn’t spent much time in her company, but he already knew that was anything but the case. Consuela was what Jerry Two Hawks referred to as a shit-disturber when he was calling out the ringleaders of the kids getting into trouble around the rez.
“Please be quiet,” Thomas said to her. “I’m trying to concentrate here.”
Bringing her stupid shadow sister out of Steve.
Which was a ridiculous thing to even be thinking of, especially when he had no clue what he was doing. Use his will. Yeah, if that were so effective, he could just will himself right off the rez, not to some godforsaken mountaintop in the middle of the otherworld.
“Fine,” Consuela said again.
She stalked off to where Sammy sat near the edge of the plateau, staring off into the endless sky with a dull expression on his features.
Calico touched Thomas’s arm. “Ignore them. You can do this.”
He looked from her earnest features to Reuben, who nodded in agreement.
“Medicine’s medicine,” he said. “If Morago thinks you’ve got it in you, then you need to believe that and find a way to pull it out.”
“It will be easier to do here,” Calico said. “Everything is magnified in the dreamlands. This is where your ancestors first found their connections to their medicine.”
Easier? That depended on your definition of the word. Because nothing was easy when you didn’t have a clue about what you were doing.
Thomas turned his focus back to Steve, trying to muster the same optimism Reuben and Calico seemed to have. He studied Steve’s face, looking for something in the slack features that would let him see Steve the way he saw people with ma’inawo blood walking around the rez—how the ghosts of their animal aspects settled on their shoulders, or rose up from behind their heads. Not that he thought Steve had an animal aspect—the man wasn’t even Kikimi—but maybe if he looked hard enough, he’d find some way into understanding the riddle of how the damn bird had entered him, and where they were now.
He held the crow feather up in front of Steve’s face and moved it slowly back and forth. There was something familiar about the motion, and it took him a moment to realize it reminded him of the swaying steps of his sisters when they danced. That called up the memory of the first time he’d seen Santana coaching Naya in the arroyo behind their house. Santana had seemed so self-assured. Later that same day, he’d asked her where she’d learned the steps because he couldn’t remember her ever taking lessons from anyone.
“I didn’t need to take lessons,” she told him. “The steps were already in here.” She laid a hand on her chest. “Auntie told me all I had to do was reach inside myself because all Corn Eyes women know how to dance. Naya saw what I meant right away.”
Maybe it would work for him, too. If he was born with shaman’s eyes, then maybe all he had to do was reach inside himself and…what?
See with those shaman’s eyes, he supposed. Consuela was certainly convinced he could. As was his dead Aunt Lucy, who wasn’t dead in the otherworld.
The trouble was, he didn’t know what he was looking for.
Studying Steve’s face, trying to access something he didn’t quite understand, the only thing that felt real was the slow back and forth motion of the crow’s feather.
Odd, he thought, that Si’tala had put a crow feather in his pocket with the medicine to wake him up instead of one of Consuela’s raven feathers. But maybe she did it because the lives of the crows of Yellowrock Canyon were so entwined in the lives of the Corn Eyes and White Horse families.
There were always crows around the house, lanky dark-haired men with their avian aspects floating on their shoulders. You’d see them on the cliffs and up in the arroyos, stopping by the porch to pass a few words, lending a hand with the heavier chores. Or the black-winged birds themselves, visiting with Auntie, perching on cacti and the roofs of the outbuildings, filling the air with their raucous songs.
When Thomas thought of crows, he thought of stories. There was an endless tangle of stories about them in the Painted Lands, but Thomas’s favourites were the ones narrated by Old Man Crow, who lived half in the canyons and half in the spiritworld. The kids at the community center loved them too. Telling stories was one of the main things Thomas did with the kids. He got most of his from Auntie, though he’d also learned a few from Reuben and Petey Jojoba.
“Some tribes,” Auntie told him once, “only tell stories in the winter.”
“Why do we tell them all year round?” he’d asked.
She’d rapped his head with a knuckle. “Because the skulls of Kikimi children are so thick they need the repetition to actually learn something from them.”
And his skull was thick. Everyone said that these stories were learning stories. That however implausible or arcane they might seem at first, if you understood the stories, you had the tools to live a good life. He remembered a favourite: “The Girl with a Heart of Stone.”
Old Man Crow found a girl named Anna Long Ears weeping by a dry wash in the moonlight because she’d been born with a stone for a heart and had been told she would never be able to love.
Old Man Crow took Anna to see various ma’inawo and spirit guides, whose imparted wisdom fell upon her deaf ears. Finally, just as the dawn was breaking from behind the eastern mountains, Old Man Crow reached into her chest.
“See,” he said. “Your heart’s not a stone. It’s an egg.”
Anna stared wide-eyed at the object that rested in Old Man Crow’s palm. She reached out a hand to touch it, but before her fingers could make contact, Old Man Crow took his hand away and put it back in her chest.
Her gaze was haunted when she lifted it to meet his.
“An egg’s no better than a stone,” she told him. “It still won’t let me love.”
Old Man Crow laughed. “No,” he said. “At least not until you let it hatch.”
“How am I supposed to—”
He didn’t let her finish. “Look inside yourself. What do you see?”
“I…I…”
Then her eyes went wide again as the egg in her chest cracked and a cactus wren pushed its way out, small but full-grown. It fluttered its wings before it wormed its way up her throat and burst from between her lips to fly around and around her head, filling the air with its cheerful song until it finally winged away.
Old Man Crow plucked a small brown feather from her lips and held it out to her.
“Everything we need,” he said, “to walk large and fulfill our potential can be found within ourselves. The trick is, no one ever looks for it there.”
Anna took the feather from him. She was still dazed from her experience, but her smile grew wide, then wider. Inside her chest where the bird had hatched, her heart beat a strong pulse like a hoofbeat on the desert floor.
“Make a medicine bag and keep that feather in it,” Old Man Crow told her. “Whenever you begin to forget, you can take it out and be reminded of who you are.”
Thomas stilled the motion of the crow feather he held between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a closer look.
Was this why Si’tala had secreted the crow feather in his pocket? To remind him of this story as well as to awaken his feelings for the tribe and their lands?
“Do you know the thing about time?” he asked his companions without looking away from the feather. “How it’s all supposed to happen at once—past, present and future?”
“Sure,” Calico said, “though I don’t know who can actually hold it all in their head at once.”
“I’m not sure that I believe it,” Reuben said. “It doesn’t make any logical sense.”
Since when did anything? Thomas thought, but Reuben’s words made him look up. His gaze went to Calico. “So is it true or not?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“I don’t suppose it does,” he said.
He looked back at the feather, then closed his eyes. Maybe he had a rock in his chest instead of a heart, just like Anna Long Ears thought she did—something that disconnected him from his heritage. Maybe he didn’t. But he could still use the story as a guide to visualize what he’d been told about looking inside himself. Except if he was going to imagine anything, he wasn’t going to imagine a rock, but an egg. And inside that egg was the bird that was his shaman sight. All he had to do was let it crack open and fly out.
He pictured the egg. Pale blue, with darker speckles of various shades of brown. The bird inside was tapping away at it with its beak, a slow heartbeat rhythm that reminded him of Auntie’s steady breathing when her gaze was caught on something beyond the horizon that only she could see. It was the shuffle-stomp of his sisters’ dancing, following the slow and steady sound that the drummers beat from their instruments.
The egg finally cracked and he could see the bird within as it pushed its head out of the hole it had made. No cactus wren, like Anna Long Ears’ had been, but a tiny perfect crow, cousin to its Yellowrock Canyon kin. He visualized it wiggling its way up his throat. He was doing such a good job visualizing it that he imagined he could actually feel its movement inside him.
Suddenly it was impossible to breathe. His airway was blocked. As he lifted his free hand to his throat, he heard a voice inside his head and could almost picture the tall, brown-skinned man speaking to him. Everything we need to walk large and fulfill our potential can be found within ourselves. The trick is, no one ever looks for it there.
It was the voice of Old Man Crow, rough and croaking, the way Auntie made it sound when she was telling one of her stories about him.
Thomas knew without a doubt that the bird he felt was his shaman’s eyes crawling up his throat.
No way.
He started to massage his throat to loosen the blockage, but suddenly his mouth was full of feathers. He coughed and the little black crow flew out from between his lips.
“What the hell?” he heard Reuben say.
No kidding, Thomas thought, except he couldn’t answer.
His eyes were closed, but he could see right through the lids.
He could see…he could see so far…so deep…
The endless sky grabbed his gaze and sent it spiraling off into ever more intense blues. He felt as though he could see right around the world. Right out of the world.
He was connected to everything. He was a part of the sky above and around him. He was just as big, just as blue. The wind was his voice and it sang a thousand thousand songs. He had roots that grew from his veins, from his nerves, from his bones. Roots that went deep into the rock below, slithering and sliding through tiny crevices, reaching for the heart of the world.
The immensity of the experience threatened to envelop him, making it almost impossible to remember who he was, as a separate entity from everything else.
If this was how Morago saw the world, he had no idea how the man could function.
But suddenly, like the unexpected gift of a spectacular sunset, he could see exactly how Morago could be connected to everything and still go about his business.
That gift of understanding was enough to bring him back into himself.
With an effort, he turned his shaman’s gaze to Steve’s face and saw a whole other world inside the man’s head. Implausible though it was, in there was a mountaintop like this one, with another Steve standing on it. That Steve had his head tilted back, all his attention focused on a woman who looked like just Consuela, except with big black wings and she was carrying off a white woman.
No, not Consuela. That had to be Si’tala in a mostly human form, doing Consuela’s bidding. Remembering the runaround he’d been taken on today, he felt for whoever her newest victim was.
This stopped now.
He reached out with the force of his will and pulled the raven woman back. He ducked aside as the ghost raven came tumbling out of Steve, eyes blazing, beak open and screeching, though he still couldn’t hear a sound she made. She caught her balance and rose high in the air. Thomas stood up, putting himself between Steve, Calico and Reuben and the bird as it came flying back.
He could feel the winds gather protectively around him. The sky was a pattern of medicine power, awaiting his word. He was rooted deep into the mountain under his feet, immovable.
“These three are under my protection!” he called, holding the crow’s feather up. “You have no power over any of us!” The words appeared to have no effect and Thomas braced himself for some kind of ghostly impact, but Si’tala turned at the last moment of her plunging descent and flew off.
Thomas tracked her until she disappeared from sight, then tracked her further through his connection to the sky and winds.
“How’s Steve?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on where Si’tala had disappeared.
“There’s no change,” Calico replied.
Reuben was looking at Thomas. “Who were you talking to?” he wanted to know.
Thomas finally turned and fixed his shaman’s gaze on Steve.
There was nothing to see. He could no longer look inside the man, and his deep connection to the earth and sky washed away.
“No,” he murmured. He wasn’t done. Though he’d pulled Si’tala out of Steve, he hadn’t brought Steve back.
But the medicine was gone. He was just Thomas Corn Eyes again, a young man holding this small crow feather between his fingers, standing on a desolate mountaintop with a sense of deep loss rising up inside him.
He started when Reuben put a hand on his shoulder. “Thomas? What just happened?”
“You didn’t see the ghost raven?”
Reuben shook his head.
“I managed to pull it out of Steve,” Thomas told him, “but the medicine’s gone and I don’t know how to bring him back.”
Calico gently moved Steve’s head from her lap to the ground and stood up. “Then I guess we do this my way,” she said and started to walk across the plateau to where Consuela stood over Sammy.