CHAPTER 71: A YOUNGER MAN’S DREAM
Enthralled.
Pale Beaver bowed his head against the humiliating thrum of desire in the back of his mind and added more water to the rocks. In the rush of steam that followed, he took a deep breath and tried to clear his head.
His legs had healed once he’d dug the silver out, but his heart had not felt this wretched since 1838, when the last ragged survivors of his butchered people had surrendered to the overwhelming white armies and had summarily been evicted from the home of their grandfathers’ grandfathers to make room for selfish, wasteful white settlers and their diseased plague of a society.
Marched a thousand miles, barefoot in the winter, without clothes or weapons, finding nothing but murder, disease, and hatred along the way, forced to cross rivers they couldn’t pay for, refused services by a whites who charged twenty times per Cherokee what they normally charged per white, leaving them nowhere to go as they starved to death under Mantle Rock…
It hurt too much to think about.
I will split their disgusting society open on the tomahawk of my vengeance, he thought, on a wave of ancient rage that had burned its own channels through his heart. May it burst at the seams to reveal the maggots within. He closed his eyes, his hands starting to shake at the memory of his unspeakable loss. May the white vermin wriggle in agony in the sun of truth as they relive their ancestors’ misdeeds before they die.
He’d been foretold a woman to help him conquer the pestilence swallowing the human race. He’d been foretold a return to balance. He’d been promised vengeance.
But never, not in all of his years of waiting, had he envisioned this.
Enthralled by a queen. He, a warrior and medicine man, exposing his soul to the sickness that rotted the rest of humanity from within. He’d sat beside her, gotten the bearing of her, liked her, bared his heart to her, and she’d shot him with the white man’s weapons and poisoned him with her fangs. Without warning, without an attempt to barter or discussion, without mercy.
Never have I been so wrong, he thought, remembering his hope upon learning of her heritage. It had been one of the Signs of his foretold mate. That she would carry the blood of his grandfathers…
He’d been so excited, so happy to finally be seeing his prophecy fulfilled that he had done away with caution. He had treated her just as another girl from a nearby tribe, a wife to be won with strength and gifts… He had intended to make her his consort, to protect her and blood of his people that she represented. He had planned to take his sons from that union and wreak death and fire upon the whites who had committed the atrocities, still squatting in choice territory that did not belong to them while his people lived in wretched, alcohol-soaked slums. He had so many plans…
And he had failed. He couldn’t even think about seeing her again without a wave of passion—a desire to do her bidding—threatening to overwhelm him.
The Third Lander duke had given him a minor antidote by drawing the queen’s magic out of her consort and forcing him to imbibe it as he babbled inconsolably where she had left him on the ground. The effects, however, would be long-lasting. Likely permanent. He could never come close to her again without the potential to lose himself completely.
For this reason, Pale Beaver had spent the last the last four days alone in the sweat lodge asking the spirits of his ancestors to help him battle the poison.
Thus far, the general range of their responses had been of amusement at his predicament, to disappointment at his weakness, to outright refusal to speak with him. Those that did choose to speak with him did nothing to quell the pangs of ache and desire to submit to the stranger that even then pounded at his head and chest, remained in his system.
Failed. It resonated through his entire being; mind, body, and soul. After seven hundred years waiting for his prophecy to be fulfilled, he had simply taken it for granted that their first encounter would end in his favor—she was just a woman, after all—and, upon seeing her the first time after waiting so long, had let his guard down.
And, now, fighting the desperate urge to crawl back to that nervous little queen on his belly, it was gut-wrenchingly clear he had failed. After seven hundred years. After surviving the Trail of Tears. After watching his people annihilated, their bodies torn apart by white man’s unnatural stones, their wives, sisters, and daughters raped, their elders tortured by invaders who saw them as sub-human, their villages of millennia burned to make way for herds and plows… After suffering that loss, the loss of his very soul, after seeing the wilderness shredded and replaced with concrete, after watching the sacred lands that were taken from him twisted, tainted, cultivated…
Failed. It hurt more than anything he’d ever known.
It had been his one chance to restore balance to the world, to wipe the white plague from the earth, but he’d failed. Utterly and completely failed. This little queen, raised in the rot that was white culture, now controlled him.
And, what was worse, his braves knew it. They had seen him return alone. They had seen the queen’s venom in his body. They knew he had failed. Already, two had left, abandoning him as the disappointment he was.
If only he could take it back, be more cautious. Pale Beaver looked to the ceiling of his sweat lodge, desperate for another chance, to reverse history…
History cannot be reversed, his Spirit Guide chided him. You of all people should know this. Hills Overhead stood ethereally nearby, watching him with that vague smile that Pale Beaver could never determine to be sarcasm, sorrow, amusement, or commiseration.
“But I waited my entire life for this,” Pale Beaver bit out. “To take back what is ours.”
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And rightly so, Hills Overhead replied. The white men despoil everything they touch.
“Then why?” he cried, fisting a hand and slamming it into the meat of his thigh. “She was going to help. It was prophecized.”
Prophecies can be fickle, Hills Overhead told him. His Spirit Guide sat down on the bench opposite him and began carving what looked like a flute.
Pale Beaver narrowed his eyes. “You gave me that prophecy.”
Hills Overhead hesitated, then touched his lips. Oh. I did, didn’t I? He grinned at Pale Beaver and went back to whittling his instrument.
“My warriors even now leave me,” Pale Beaver snapped. “I’ve lost their respect.”
True. Hills Overhead held up the instrument and blew on it, eying its length critically. But those who abandon their friends over their first mistake aren’t really friends, are they?
“How am I to win this war without them?” Pale Beaver snapped.
I’ve said this before, Hills Overhead said, returning his stone knife to the flute, but there are many ways to fight a war.
After such a devastating defeat, his Spirit Guide’s constant vague responses finally pricked that last bubble of self control. “Your vague and pointless words have done nothing but consternate me for centuries. Our lands are at stake and yet you sit there, whittling a stick, giving me no answers!”
Hills Overhead continued to distractedly work on his flute. It is my job to consternate you, my friend. From difficulty comes growth. If my companions and I simply gave you everything you asked for, you wouldn’t grow.
“I ask to help me subdue this queen so we can wreak vengeance upon those who wronged us,” Pale Beaver snapped. “I asked nicely once, offered her peace, and she shot me with white man’s fire.” He felt the bones in his fingers start to hurt from the pressure he was putting on them in his fists. “She’s as corrupted as the rest of them.”
She’s known nothing but the white plague, Hills Overhead replied. It stands to reason.
“So help me,” Pale Beaver insisted. “Remove her taint from my soul so that I may raise sons with her and do justice.”
Hills Overhead blew curls of wood from his stick, eying it critically. Has it occurred to you that any sons of this union might not feel the same passion for what was lost as you do?
Inconceivable. “I will teach them,” Pale Beaver snarled. “I will show them in dream.”
Ah. His spirit guide seemed to consider that. That is your right.
“It’s my purpose,” Pale Beaver snapped. “I alone remember what was wrought by these unnatural monsters. I alone remember the faces of the lost, the way their bodies were left for the flies, the way it took us weeks to bury them all. I alone remember the smell of the air, unspoiled by their factories, untinted by their cars. I alone remember the verdant landscape before they destroyed it.”
This is true, you are one of the oldest, Hills Overhead said.
Growing impatient at his Spirit Guide’s noncommittal responses, he said, “So I ask you to help us slaughter their children, dishonor their women, destroy their homes, drive them into deserts. To bring vengeance for the sorrows and ashes they have fed us since they started their invasion.”
Hills Overhead continued to whittle for a moment. A worthy goal. He cocked his head as he looked at his stick, apparently lost in thought. But does that not, in essence, make you what you despise?
“Fuck off,” Pale Beaver snapped, finally losing his calm.
Hills Overhead glanced up at him, his expression mildly humorous. If you insist. And then his Spirit Guide’s ephemeral form vanished, once more leaving Pale Baver alone in the heat and steam.
Pale Beaver closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. He had not come seven hundred years to fail. “Please come back,” he muttered, deflated.
It took his Spirit Guide a couple minutes to reappear, but eventually he did. Hills Overhead sat on the bench opposite him, the flute gone, his fine hands resting on a well-used walking stick, his gaze fixed on Pale Beaver thoughtfully.
“What I don’t understand,” Pale Beaver whispered, not looking at his Spirit Guide, “is that the spirit realm claims to back us, and yet you give me no warning or leverage in a situation with such dire ramifications for the future of our people.”
I can see where you would feel that way, Hills Overhead responded.
Pale Beaver, who by now was well-used to the infuriating replies of spirits, forced himself to calm with a practiced ease. “Then explain it to me. Why didn’t you warn me the queen would enthrall me?”
It seemed self-evident, considering the path you had chosen to take, Hills Overhead said. He wasn’t smiling any more. A path that, should you remember, I many times warned you against.
Meaning the use of Buðlungr to subdue the queen and her allies.
“I am not a blood magus,” Pale Beaver said. Just the thought of such magics left him feeling unclean. “I was told I’d need a blood magus to win the war against the whites.”
Hills Overhead gave him a long look. And who told you that?
It was the man who had introduced him to the Asian sky serpent and given him Buðlungr’s blood along with the ritual to summon him. A traveler who had seen the white man conquer Africa and wanted to help Pale Beaver teach them a lesson they would never forget.
Vengeance… It was a note of agony in his chest, remembering how his wife and child—neither of whom had known he was a vampire—had been murdered, their bodies hung upside-down in the sun from a tree to be pecked at by crows. His sisters, his brothers, his adopted parents, his tribe… Time and again, murdered in broad daylight and left where they fell, to be eaten by fishes and flies.
All so the whites could move in, sweep over their land like a scourge, and destroy it like they destroyed everything else they’d ever touched. He remembered the shamans they had slaughtered, the elders they had lined up and murdered, the women and girls they had forced into servitude. With utter selfish callousness, they had utterly destroyed the lives of those who had lived there before, the caretakers of the land, those who had respected Mother Earth and her many peoples, not just those of two legs, and they had replaced that balance with virulence.
It hurt so much to remember those losses, that agony of watching everything he knew to be good and right get systematically ruined around him, that Pale Beaver found his chest burning. He looked away to collect himself. “When I asked your advice, you told me not to fight. I am done not fighting.”
I told you to be patient, Hills Overhead reminded him.
“How is seven hundred years not patient?!” Pale Beaver screamed, losing his control yet again. “This man offered me an alliance to break the white man’s hold on our world. I took it.”
True, Hills Overhead said, but what have you lost in doing so?
“I am so tired of your riddles,” Pale Beaver whispered.
Hills Overhead gave him a long look, then sighed deeply and fidgeted with the top of his walking stick. Every soul makes choices. That’s what life is…choices. If I made your choices for you, it would no longer be your life.
“Is that why the spirits are ignoring me right now?” Pale Beaver demanded. “Because I made the wrong choice?”
His Spirit Guide met his eyes and there was sorrow there. In part.
Pale Beaver’s heart clenched, despite himself. “How?”
For a long moment, Hills Overhead didn’t look like he would respond. Then, looking him in the eye, the venerable old spirit said, This traveler you have allied with is not who he appears.
The clenching in his chest grew evermore painful. “Who is he?”
And then, without flinching, Hills Overhead said, He is the malignancy, and you are his puppet.