At the End of Babel Read online

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  Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary that eagles should be crows.

  —Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Lakota (1831–90)

  No person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English.

  —Proposed Amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006

  * * *

  Tabitha Hoarse Raven, not yet thirty years old but already the last of her tongue, inhaled the cool air of the desert. Though she’d lived in hiding for nearly eighteen years, it had been a long time since she’d actually slept out beneath the stars, and she felt a strange thrill to be doing so again. If nothing else, she was excited to see the sky at night, free of the dissolving bubble of cityglow, free of the slashing scars of neon and steel, free of the burntrails from uplifting ships. A sky full of stars.

  She’d forgotten how many there were. Tabitha chose a blank spot of sky, an ebony rift between twinkling lights. She stared until her eyes watered, and she saw more stars.

  She thought of her old grandfather, who’d come to the Sky City to die when all hope had left him. And others of that last generation, who’d all come to die.

  I’ve come, too, she thought. Do I have hope?

  She took the carbuncle stone from her pocket, shook it into luminescence. Small creatures skittered away from the sudden glow, and a moth flitted white across her sight. It was a risk to use the stone, but her campsite was isolated in a thin, bending canyon. Not like the wide-open plains she would cross in the morning, a vast expanse where there was nothing to hide her light. Out there, a searchskiff would already be bearing down on her. Up here, she felt confident and safe.

  And that was assuming the authorities were even looking for her.

  Paranoia, she was sure. There was no reason to believe the unity government knew of the cycle or even remembered the old pueblo atop the high New Mexican cliffs. There was no reason to think they might expect someone to come out to its ruins, to try to talk to old gods in outlawed tongues.

  * * *

  The next morning, Tabitha awoke to the scents of brushed sage, clay dust, and wispy juniper smoke. She opened her eyes to see that already the sun was tipping over the edge of the horizon and pushing the crisp shadow of the east wall slowly down the west. The line of sky above the thin canyon was clear, pale blue. She heard little pops and cracks of wood burning. She smelled flatbread.

  Tabitha peeled herself out of the light thermthread bag. Her canyon guide, Red Rabbit, was squatting nearby, and he offered a pad of the warmed bread. She took it, felt stronger with its heat against her flesh. She imagined for a moment that she could actually see kneading ridges along its surface, just the size and shape of a woman’s fingers. But she knew such things were only a memory: the flatbread was the result of metal machines churning in some far-off factory. Every slice the same. One slice no different from any other.

  There was a small fire in the pit, surrounded by ashen rocks. Red Rabbit stood, then walked to the other side of it and sat down. He fished a package of cigarettes from his worn plaid vest, knocked one out, and then lit it using the end of a stick that he poked into the little dancing flames. He rocked back, puffing, and when he smiled, his teeth were yellow and broken. “We’ll need to go soon,” he said.

  Tabitha nodded, bit off a piece of the bread. It melted against the roof of her mouth, washing her tongue with flavors of wheat and wood.

  The shadowline crept further down the west wall. The juniper burning between them cracked, spat. The thinnest of snakes, a gray tendril of smoke slithered toward the morning sky, but it did not break the lip of the canyon.

  Red Rabbit looked up at the blue. “You will really go to Acoma, to the old pueblo? The new town isn’t far away. On the Rio San Jose. Good bars. More to drink than Acoma.”

  Tabitha said nothing. Only nodded as she ripped and chewed.

  Not for the first time, Red Rabbit frowned at her plans. “Why? No one lives there. It’s dead. Has been since the times of Gray Feather. Since after the skiffs came, painted it red.”

  Gray Feather. Red paint. Tabitha had to fight the urge to wince with each of the words. Red Rabbit couldn’t know that Gray Feather, old as he was, had been her father. That he’d symbolized his name with a single goose quill among the contrasting colors of his Tsitsanits mask: green for sky, yellow for earth, black for night. Red Rabbit couldn’t know how fine he’d looked in that mask, with its eagle feathers and buffalo horns, its white buckskin eyes, corn husk teeth, and fox-fur collar, or how well he and the rest of the katsina dancers had prayed with body and soul on that last day. Red Rabbit couldn’t even know what katsina meant. He didn’t know Keresan. All he knew was the diya tongue of the whites.

  She alone remembered.

  She remembered through a little girl’s eyes watching them dance to Tsichtinako on the last turning of the great moon cycle. She remembered the mixture of sadness and hope in their steps. Even then, they’d known they were the last of their tongue: rebels to uniformity, no longer even useful to the linguists who’d documented their speech for closed-door studies of dead things otherwise forgotten.

  Tabitha had snuck away from the dance in childish impishness that day, crawling down a thick-runged ladder into the darkness of the kiva, the kaach, where the chaianyi men would come for their final prayers after the dance. She’d wanted to hear them. She’d wanted to watch her father calling the gods.

  Instead, she’d heard the engine-roar of the federal skiffs landing outside. And when she’d reached the top of the ladder and looked out, she’d seen the lancers pouring from the airships, uniformed men with uniform guns. Marching. Corralling her people like cattle. She’d heard the officer in his blue suit clearing his throat to read the Writ of Unity, the death warrant for those who dared to disunite the power of the one state. “One language, one people,” he’d said. Just like they all did. Just like the posters.

  She’d slipped back down into the kaach while he read, though she could still hear him. There were boards across part of the floor, covering the Tsiwaimitiima altar: boards so holy that only chaianyi could dance upon them. She’d lifted them up without hesitation and wedged herself beneath them, curled up in a dusty darkness that smelled of old cornmeal. “One culture, one country,” she’d heard the officer say in the distance. And then, in response, she’d heard the voices of her people rising in defiant, ancient song.

  So the killing had begun, and soon the only sounds she heard over the screams were of fléchettes singing high in the crisp air. And when the lan
cers searched the buildings for survivors, Tabitha did not cry.

  She’d wanted to hear her father’s prayers. Instead, when at last she climbed up and out of the darkness and peered through a thin crack in the wall out into the square, she’d heard him dying, coughing down the wrath of Father Thunder even as he lay in a pool of his own blood. His legs twitched as if they meant to complete the dance despite him. His white-and-black eagle wings were painted red.

  He’d called until one of the last of the lancers came back, stood over his bloodied body, aimed his flechemusket at Gray Feather’s left eye, and pulled the trigger. Her father’s legs stilled. The dance was never finished. Father Thunder never came.

  Tabitha blinked away the images, blocking out the sounds of remembered death until all she heard was the burning of the juniper before her, and all she saw was Red Rabbit, rocking and puffing on his fading cigarette. “What would God be,” she said, “if there was no one to call his name?” No one to hate him.

  “Why call him now, though?”

  “Do you remember nothing of the old ways?”

  He shrugged. “I remember the old ways through the canyons. That’s why you hired me, yellow woman.”

  It was true enough. Since the killings, she’d lived in the cities. She knew nothing of the wild places anymore.

  Tabitha sighed. “The moon doesn’t rise in the same place every day. It moves along the horizon. Every eighteen or so years, it reaches its northernmost point on the horizon, rising as far north as it will rise before returning south to begin the cycle again. A lunistice, it’s called. And during that time, the moon, for just a little while, appears to rise in the same place. Some people call it a lunar standstill. It last happened a little over eighteen years ago. When I was eleven. It took me a long time to understand the why and the when. So, I know it’s about to happen again.”

  “The moon?” Red Rabbit looked as if he was trying not to laugh. “You’re going through this for the moon?”

  “Yes. It may seem strange to you, but it wasn’t to our people.” She ignored the look of exasperation in his eyes, kept talking. “Many of the pueblos were built to observe the cycle. Chimney Rock, for instance. Why would they build the pueblo so far above the plain? Far from water, wood, food…”

  “Maybe they liked the view. Pretty place. Casino there now.”

  “True. But if we were there tonight, and we watched the moon rise, we would see it come up between the two great rock spires to the north. We could watch it just as our ancestors did when they first built it over a thousand years ago.”

  “Why’d they like the moon so much?”

  “It wasn’t just our people. You could see the same thing at Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the pyramids in Egypt. When Tsichtinako created—”

  “Tseech-tee…?”

  “Tsichtinako. Thought Mother. Our legends say she created the universe through the hand of Uchtsiti, the All-Father. He built the world by throwing a clot of his own blood into the heavens. The chaianyi, what the whites would call medicine men, they taught that the sun represented Uchtsiti. It was the male. It was father. The moon was the female. We might call it mother. Both male and female are needed for life, but the male drives away what he most needs, so the moon flees to the north, toward death. It was said that if man does not call back the moon, she will leave us forever. The father’s consort will be gone. He can have no more children. What is will wither and die. Nothing new will replace it. It was said by the chaianyi that Thought Mother taught this much to the first peoples when they emerged from Shipapu, the darkness beneath the earth.”

  “You believe this?”

  It took her a moment to answer. She was remembering her father’s footfalls, his leather moccasins shuffling in the clay as he danced and sang, danced and sang. “My ancestors believed,” she said at last. “So it’s important to me.”

  “I don’t believe in gods,” Red Rabbit said. Suspicion flashed in his eyes. “I believe in money.”

  “Which is why you won’t get the rest until you’ve taken me to the top of the rock.”

  Whatever had been in his eyes vanished. “Then eat, Hoarse Raven. The trail to the Sky City is long.”

  She swallowed the rest of the bread, then stood and looked out through the canyon opening to the flat plain. Spread out before her, the patched and faded land reminded her of one of the woolen blankets her grandmother once made for her. And kilometers away, she could see where the mesa broke from the plain like the thumb of God struck through the parched, sage-strewn flats. Lifting a scope to her eyes, she could just perceive the outline of the blocks scattered upon the table of its summit.

  “We can’t leave yet,” she said. “I must prepare.”

  Red Rabbit had stood, too. He laid a hand on her shoulder. His fingers smelled of coals. “For what?”

  Now it was her turn to smile. Greedy and atheistic though he might be, she appreciated her guide. She enjoyed the simplicity of his life. She looked down at her tan jumpsuit and plain boots, the modern vest of factory-built fabric. “For one thing,” she said, “I cannot meet an old god in new clothes.”

  “You need to change?”

  “Yes. And I must prepare my soul.”

  * * *

  Tabitha stood naked beneath a circle of sky, her back to the multi-toned sandstone wall surrounding a well of rainwater. The crack leading to this place had been too narrow for her pack, so she’d pulled out what things she needed and left the rest outside with Red Rabbit. He would have helped her carry things in, she knew, but somehow it seemed best for her to carry it all in herself, as if the clothes were some sort of offering, brought to the sacred pool.

  Silly, of course, but fitting: Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone.

  Ohiyesa had said that. Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, the whites called him. Brought up among the Santee Dakota, he’d managed to get into Dartmouth, then earned a medical degree from Brown. He’d helped to establish the Boy Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls. Ohiyesa had verified the burial place of Sacajawea. He’d been the only physician to tend to the injured at Wounded Knee.

  So much irony, Tabitha thought as she slipped the simple fabrics over her body.

  It had taken her a great deal of time to find someone who could still make clothing in the old ways, using the old materials. The search had been so difficult that she’d often found herself wondering if she might risk jumping onto the grid for a minute or two, just to find what she was looking for, to find out where it was. But if she accessed the grid, they would know where she was, too. They would know that a speaker was indeed still alive, and they might even know what she planned to do. So she’d been forced to search on foot, by word of mouth, moving quietly through the slums of the cities. Always wary, always cautious. Never asking too many questions. Never answering many. It took over a year, but she’d found the old woman just in time, on her last search of Albuquerque’s Old Town.

  New old-style garments in hand, she’d looked for a mercenary-minded person who could guide her through the city screens, out into the wilderness, out to the old, forgotten places—someone who hated the lancers as much as she did and knew how to keep his mouth shut for the right price. A far easier task. She’d hired Red Rabbit only two hours later.

  Tabitha slipped on the moccasins, then stepped forward. Foot by foot. Leather roughing on sandstone. She summoned up prayers that hadn’t been uttered since the morning of the last dance. Prayers no one else alive could speak.

  When she reached the edge, she knelt and scooped the cold water onto her face, breaking its sheets against her skin. She rubbed it across her cheeks, into her eyes. She stood, faced the sun as it crossed the horizon of her sunken place. As it did so, she offered a final, unspoken orison. To the water, the rock, the sun, the sky.

  The Great Silence. Alone.

  * * *

  The sandhills began near the entrance to the secret well, and Tabitha and Red Rabbit followed a winding path over and
between them, pausing only briefly in the semi-shade of piñons. Tabitha felt growing impatience, wanting to get there, wanting to be done with it all one way or another. She had a hard time not watching the sky, and several times she tripped on exposed juniper roots, causing no small amount of pain to feet already aching from the new moccasins.

  An hour after departing the well, they left the sandhills and entered the flatlands. And although the sage and sparse-grass plain was more exposed to any passing skiff, they were able to take a more direct path toward the waiting mesa. Tabitha felt her mind begin to ease. There was no place to hide now. No place to run. If a skiff came, she’d be dead. Red Rabbit, too, probably, though he did not seem concerned about the possibility as he trudged ahead of her through the dirt.

  The wall of Acoma mesa, towering higher with each step they took, was rusted clay, a deep and rich color. Dark streaks ran down its many faces. The stains of ten thousand tears.

  Farther in the distance along the horizon, almost five kilometers northeast of the Sky City, she could see where yellow sandstone cliffs rose one hundred and twenty meters out of the dusty sea. The old stories told how the people had long ago lived atop those cliffs. It was a beautiful village, but there was only one trail to the summit. One day, the people went down to the plain to gather the harvest. Three women, though, were sick and couldn’t go. That day, terrible rains came. The waters washed away the trail to the village. The men tried to find another path up, but there was none. There was nothing anyone could do. Weeks passed, and the women grew quiet as they starved to death. One of them died. The other two, who did not want to die of starvation, walked to the edge of the cliff, looked down upon their families and their friends, then jumped, hoping to find the arms of Great Eagle or White Hawk. It was said that their cries could still be heard among the crags sometimes. The place had been very holy among the people.

  The whites did not understand this story. They called the place the Enchanted Mesa. To Tabitha’s people it had been Kadzima, the Accursed.