Death Chants (3 page)

She strained to
hear, as if listening for something that might stalk her, that might come for her. She heard only
distant bird noises and the hot dull sound of insects at first and then, faintly, the 
murmur of a voice.

His voice. Chanting
perhaps. Speaking once again to the an­cestors, perhaps telling them he was now ready to journey
among them.

She would have been
content to wait outside until it was over. Maybe the old man wanted it that way. It was hard to
tell. They did not talk to each other much. The hurts of the past had grown like a stone canyon
between them.

The sun beat down
mercilessly on her head and back, but she used to it. The sun was inescapable, and unrelenting,
like life
on the reservation

The
sound
.of his voice, echoing inside the dark building, changed.

Now it sounded like
the old man was crying.

It was not what she
would have expected.

She opened the
badly hung door and stared into the evil-smelling gloom. She saw his crooked back, broke saddled
with his old age, distorted in the ugly shadow.

There was a
strangeness in the room, in the air itself, as if something had come crawling out of a grave and
passed through the old stone and brick walls of the house. She shuddered. It was cold in here,
impossibly cold for a day as hot as this.

There was a smell
in here, an alien scent, not death, for that smell was all too familiar on the reservation, but
of something else. Perhaps the life's breath of some night walker.

What had happened
in here, she could not know. Nor did she care to know. The old man had his shaman's secrets and
she never trespassed on them, for they were evil secrets.

"What's wrong?" she
asked. "Why do you cry?"

"I cry because I
touched the faces of the dead. I felt their cold lips brush against mine," said the old man. He
said it, but it was not true, not completely true. He could not cry. He had seen too much in and
out of life for tears.

But he could never
tell her this. His fear, always about her, about all the men and women he knew, was that too much
of his real self, changed forever by the strange life beyond life he had met and paid worship to,
would someday show and they would think him no longer human.

"You should take
the medicine," said the old woman, staring at the untouched bowl at his feet.

"I'll take it when
my bones are two days dead and piercing mother earth, seeking cool water."

"It is late in the
day and you are tired," she said.

"It is early in the
first morning and I, just born, shall go dancing in a warm grave in the belly of the death
mother." The old man bared his yellow teeth in a cruel smile.

"I think not," she
said and recalled something that was long past. Everything was old and dying and long past in her
world.

"The sun reaches
across the sky, burning the day left to me," said the old man. "I have seen the last of it. I
shall see it walk the sky no more. I've had a vision and the land of dark beckons me, old
woman."

He lifted his hand
and stared at it. "I can see the bones showing through." He seemed suddenly pleased by that.
There was a strange, terrible smile on his face.

She felt her face
growing cold, her own heart going distant like a star in an unfriendly sky. He was a stranger to
her, as he had always been and would be. She felt nothing for him, only small sorrow for herself.
Her life had been empty, with no blood on her knife and no children to crawl across the cold
years with their welcome gift of sudden and lasting warmth.

He had taken her
youth from her, stripped it from her long ago, and the memory of it did not sleep easily, if it
slept at all.

"You are too eager
for death, old man!" she accused him. "Has it ever been the way of our people to embrace death?
To welcome it as an old friend, yes, that is our way, but you, old man, in your terrible way, you
almost make of death, an old lover come to make you feel young again."

"Yes. Death is a
sweet, ice-skinned woman, who kisses and kills in a darkened room. I long for her touch. I
welcome the growing cold, the cool hiss of it. Yes. I desire it greatly."

"You wish to be rid
of me, rid of this life."

"Yes." The old man
admitted it, not knowing if the words hurt and not caring.

Years gone by, the
words would have stung like hail on bare skin, but she was past all that.

"You are a ghost, a
shadow even now, old man, but you have long been dead with the wanting of it." The old woman
stared at the room, seeing the great emptiness. "We should have had children. We could have
chosen life over your magics, your strange journeys into . . ."

"Be still! I have
no regrets! I have lived as I willed it," said the old man, turning his one good eye away from
her. "Now is not the time to change the path, old woman. That time is past. You could have had a
different life but you walked my road, so let that be an end to moaning about it."

"Why have you
always pursued me with your coldness, given deadening chase to the heart of me? Why always to me,
I who have wished only to live with you and love you?"

"Power was more to
me than you. Power I could not always have. But you I always had."

"You were born with
the dead. You are a grave shadow, but yet with my old heart in your hand, I, now old and gray and
used up, I am the loving one you murdered."

He turned his one
good eye toward her and was shocked by what he saw. The bird of death, long and black and
eyeless, hovered above her and sand seemed to pour from the empty sockets of her hair-covered
skull.

The illusion passed
but not the reason for it.

"You!" said the old
man. He shook his head at the wonder of it. "As I die, so do you! I, who see many things no one
else can see, did not know it."

"I felt the little
knife of death in my chest this morning and knew the sun would not see me again," she said and
the look on her face was almost apologetic. "I have packed my face for the journey to take my
name out of the world."

The old man seemed
to shrink back inside himself. This was not something he had counted on. New thoughts, unwanted,
sprang to his mind. Feelings he hated within himself arose and overcame him.

Suddenly, he
regretted everything he had ever done to her.

For a moment he
wanted to ask her forgiveness. There would be a Tightness to that act. But he could not bring
himself to do this thing because his heart walked on the ground.

His whole life was
based on mastery, over her, over the world of shadows and men. If she saw the tender heart, his
true sorrow, she would gain mastery over him, and that he could never allow.

He was a man with
many dark secets, but the darkest, most unspeakable secret of all, was an old love for her, a
love unspo­ken and buried like a war pipe in the grave of yesterday.

As he thought of
her, a thousand thousand remembered cru­elties assaulted him, each memory like another bitter
branch on his funeral pyre.

Not forgiveness,
no, that was not in him for the asking, but sorrow, that at least he could admit to.

"Yes, old woman,"
he said, shutting his good eye, the words coming slowly, painfully, "I've treated you
badly."

"It doesn't
matter," she said and he knew she did not mean it.

He thought of all
the women he'd had, the boasts he had made to her about it, reveling in his own proud male
blindness.

Most of the stories
had been lies. But she had believed him and been hurt, again and again.

When the power
eluded him, when the tantalizing magics danced just beyond his grasp, then and only then did he
find solace in his women. But even then, he talked more conquests than he had made, that was his
way. Lie or truth, the hurt was the same.

"You know all my
old evils and cruelties. And there were many of them. I cannot unmake them nor can I forget them.
These old wounds are too much with me now. I find them large now in my heart," he
said.

"Don't talk about
them," she said.

"I had my outside
women and . . ."

"Yes," she said.
"There were women to share the warmth you could not give me. But why talk of it? That warmth has
long since cooled, the fires are dead, and the arms that held you do not have you as I now have
you."

"I traveled in
distant worlds. It was something you could not understand. I walked with the night walkers,
danced under strange suns, tasted poisoned burning water from hidden rivers no man ever saw. I
turned on the spit of my ribs in fires from other suns. Swam like an insect drowning in the
nightpool oceans of other worlds. You could not know the gleaming night horrors I have seen, met
and embraced, sometimes held in my arms, and even put my lips to and drank, inhaling the dark
foul rich blood. Such glory and strangeness did I have. But I could not take you with me. That at
least you understood. You stayed in your own world and you were safe there. You were just a woman
who had never traveled."

"And so you needed
the taste and touch of other dark women with eyes like black jewels who would understand your
strange­ness in ways that I could not. I have heard the tale often, but does it ever excuse the
old hurts?" she said, but there was no tone of accusation in her voice, only
acceptance.

"Yes," said the old
man. "Strange and beautiful women who ran with me to the far places, women without human names,
and I found solace and some little comfort in their shared heat from the spirit storms I
journeyed in. So it was."

The old woman
folded her hands in her lap. "You knew a
pretty woman when you saw one. There was one called Nihali. You talked of her often. You
loved this one much."

The old man's eyes
clouded with sudden memory. "Yes, that one. It was in the heat of a now dead summer. She was a
night child, half woman, half darkness. I burned in terrible fire for that one. But she is gone
as they are all gone and I am here with you. So it is."

The old woman bowed
her head.

"I still remember
the hurt, old man."

His eyes flashed
with anger, anger more at himself than at her. "You cried that season more than ever. You waited
up for me late in the night. Your heart smiled when I came back to you but your eyes said
something else. I always knew the feelings that lived in your eyes. They were truer than the
heart, which is often a great pretender."

"I tried to
understand," she said, not looking at him.

"But failed, as you
must, being only a simple living woman of one world. For what did you know of my great medicine?
I was a Great Spirit Being and drank of things that other men could not taste."

"There was a time
when I wanted to scratch her eyes out or drown myself in the river. That feeling is as dead as my
youth. I told myself that what you did was nothing bad-hearted. That all men did it. It was a lie
because few men love night spirits, but it comforted me, that old lie. In time, old man, I think
I even forgot it was a lie."

The old man felt
the bones of his chest. "My time comes soon, old woman. I dwell in sorrowful ways upon the old
hurts, but I was what I am and will always be."

"This is not a time
to ask forgiveness, nor can you speak for that because it is not your way. It is all long
forgotten. You were good to me in your fashion and we had a life together. Out of strangeness we
wove it, and nothing else matters," she said.

"It is not for you
to forgive me anyway. I must forgive myself if that is what must be. Only I know what I have
done. I have lain with the dark and terrible ones." There was still an element of boasting in his
speech for the old habit died hard. "The scars of that must survive in me always." Something
passed like a shadow across his face and for an instant he looked haunted,
tormented by all the old treacheries. His eyes were dark
and uncertain.

And then it
happened. The old woman saw into his power and into the distance beyond it, to the end and the
overcoming of him, once and for all time. She had never felt revenge in the snake of her old
woman's heart, but now it leaped with fangs from her breast.

"You know me and
you do not know me. I had my guilty secrets, too," she said proudly, the lie coming uneasily to
her tongue. A lie was new to her, alien to her being.

The old man smiled,
not believing her. He felt pain in his chest, but the thought that she could possibly have had a
secret sin still made him smile.

"Keep your secrets,
old woman. You might scare me with them and the shock would kill me." He almost laughed at
that.

His mockery reached
her not at all.

"I must tell you
about it. I don't want you to feel so guilty, thinking you are the only one who has gone down
strange roads. It will ease your heart to hear it. I never had the courage to tell you
before."

He was
contemptuous. "Nayee! You never had the courage to . . ."