At the End of Babel Read online

  * * *

  Tabitha and Red Rabbit found a little farm at the base of the Acoma mesa. Dry farming. Her family had done the same until the skiffs and their crews of lancers had come.

  The farm was little to look at. A shanty of four weathered adobe walls, not more than four or five meters on a side, covered over with corrugated sheets of scrap metal, with two windows: one cracked and grimed, the other clumsily boarded over. Desiccated posts made of piñon branches marked the perimeter of a small yard in front of the building. Two chickens and a rooster, still contained within a battered wire mesh strung between those posts, were the only signs of life.

  At Red Rabbit’s urging, Tabitha stayed some distance behind him as they approached. He had an old-style gun in the holster at his hip, and Tabitha noticed that he kept his hand close to it and that he walked with a sort of balanced crouch. “I don’t think anyone here wants to hurt us,” she said.

  He didn’t turn around to answer her. “I don’t take chances. Never know who lives out here.”

  “Probably just poor farmers.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But there’s lots of crazies outside the cities. People like me.”

  Tabitha looked down at the ceremonial knife tied to her belt with leather thongs. She fingered it for a moment, then thought better of it. Instead, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called out. “Hello?”

  Her voice echoed back from the building and the silently brooding rocks. The chickens clucked in senseless reply.

  “Is anyone here?”

  Red Rabbit had turned to glare at her, but the sound of shifting rock spun his attention back around. There was a native woman standing among the jumbled boulders beyond the shanty. Her arm was extended to her right, disappearing into rock.

  “Show us your other hand!” Red Rabbit called.

  The woman hesitated, then drew in her arm, pulling a little cloth-covered basket into view. Tabitha waved, friendly. The woman waved back, more unsure, but slowly she began to walk back down to the building. Red Rabbit relaxed a little, though he kept his hand close to his side. “We don’t want any trouble,” the woman said when she came near.

  “We won’t give you any,” Tabitha said.

  “You’re not lancer scouts?” The woman’s weather-worn skin was the color of old saddle leather, coursed over with crisp ridges and furrows. There were long needles of wood in the braided hair at the back of her head.

  “Not hardly,” Tabitha said. “Just hiking to the old pueblo.”

  The woman nodded, but a new expression had come over her face as she listened to Tabitha speak. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so. My name is Tabitha Hoarse Raven.”

  “You used to live on the mesa.”

  “I did,” Tabitha said, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice. “How did you know?”

  “I was young, but I remember your father when he was the chief.”

  Tabitha involuntarily cringed at the term. It reminded her too much of what the diya whites had done to her people. “My father was tsatia hochani.”

  The woman looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “You can speak—”

  “Keresan, yes. Can you not?” Tabitha tried to hide it, but even she could hear something akin to hope in her own voice.

  “No. I lived in the city back then. I know only English.”

  “Oh.”

  “I came to the pueblo only a few times. But I remember Gray Feather. He invited us out for some of the dances. I remember his daughter.”

  Tabitha fought to ignore her own emotions and Red Rabbit’s sudden gaze. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

  The woman had relaxed a little. “It’s okay. You were even younger then. My name’s Malya Prancing Antelope.”

  “Antelope Clan?”

  “I think my uncle told me we were Badger Clan. But that was a long time ago. There aren’t any clans anymore, Tabitha Hoarse Raven. There’s just people. One people. And you, of course.” She stuttered a little at that and turned from them, blushing. She addressed the building. “They’re not scouts!”

  There was noise inside, and the door opened inward. A young man dressed in worn blue jeans and a tattered gray shirt stepped into the sun. He was young—Tabitha guessed him to be perhaps twenty years old—with strong native features: tall, with red-brown skin over a face of long and sharp angles, a wiry build, and black hair tousled in careless mats. But while Tabitha found him ruggedly handsome in his way, most of her attention was riveted on the shotgun he was carrying in his hands.

  “My son,” Malya said. “Joseph Man of Sorrow.”

  Joseph shouldered the weapon and offered his hand to Tabitha, who shook it at once. His long-fingered grip was strong. Red Rabbit, too, shook the young man’s hand. “We thought you might be scouts,” Joseph said. “There’ve been more of them around lately.”

  “Why?” Red Rabbit asked.

  The younger man shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe they’re looking for you. Funny to hike with a revolver,” he said, nodding towards Red Rabbit’s pistol.

  “We thought it best to be prepared,” Tabitha said before Red Rabbit could reply. “You never know who’s out here.”

  “Just us,” Joseph said. “No work in the cities this season. Came to the old farm.”

  Red Rabbit motioned to Malya’s covered basket. “What’s in that?”

  “Seeds,” she said. “I was going to plant.”

  “Oh,” Red Rabbit said. And he looked away, out across the plain they’d crossed.

  Joseph turned to Tabitha, smiled. “You’re pretty far from the cities, Tabitha Hoarse Raven.” He looked her clothes up and down, seemed to linger. “And you’re not dressed like a tourist. Why’re you here?”

  “I grew up here.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Enough, Joseph,” Malya said. “Fetch water for our guests.”

  Joseph’s smile faded, and his cheeks darkened. He started back toward the building.

  “Please don’t,” Tabitha said. “We have water. We’ll just be on our way up.”

  Joseph stopped walking, half turned. “You’re going up?”

  Tabitha nodded, even as his mother started to ask forgiveness for her intrusive son.

  “It’s okay,” Tabitha said. “I don’t mind. Yes, I’m dressed strangely. Yes, we’re going up. It’s time for the moondance.”

  Joseph looked confused, but Malya was shaking her head, her eyes furtive. “It’s not allowed,” she said.

  “Neither is speaking in Keresan.”

  “Bad enough to do that. But to do the dance.… You know what they did, don’t you? The lancers? My husband wanted to dance with the others, with all the defiant ones. He came out here with them. To rediscover his ancestors, he said. He died with them that day.”

  Even from several meters away, Tabitha could see the new expressions of emotion passing over Joseph’s face. She ignored them. “I’m not asking for you to help,” she said. “But I won’t lie to one of our people. I’m going to perform the dance.”

  “One of what people? Who? This man here? Me? Joseph? Your ‘people’ is the same as anyone else’s now. It’s the law.”

  “Not for me,” Tabitha said.

  “Then you’re alone. And you’ll die like the rest of them. Then what will have become of your people? Nothing but a few genetic quirks like us, absorbed soon enough. Maybe a troupe of half-breeds who fake dances for tourists in Santa Fe between night gigs at the poker tables. Some old crones making beaded necklaces to sell on street corners. Nothing more.” The woman turned away from Tabitha. She began to walk back toward Joseph and the building. “Dance. Die. Take your words with you, sister. No one will speak them when you’re gone.”

  * * *

  The story was well known to Tabitha’s people: how, in the winter of 1599, Spanish troops had come to Acoma, almost one hundred of them strong in their steel, to capture what they called the Sky City.

  The Acomans went to
the edge of their mesa when they arrived. They hurled stones and launched arrows at the Spaniards one hundred meters below. Yet the invaders climbed. Up and up.

  When the Spaniards reached the top, they leveled a cannon at the Acomans. They filled it with small stones and began to fire. To the people, it was as if Father Thunder himself had turned against them, spewing the bone-rock of the life-giving Earth into their flesh, ripping and breaking. Eight hundred of them died that day, and their city was turned to ruin. Of those taken alive, all males over the age of twelve were made twenty-year slaves. Those older than twenty-five had their right feet cut off. Some few of the dispersed managed to return over the years. They rebuilt the pueblo. They returned to sing to the Mother, to beg for her return.

  It had taken the Spaniards three days to fight their way to the top. It took her and Red Rabbit less than three hours.

  Of course, it was easier now. When the Spaniards came, the only ways up were the steep stairways, hand-cut into the sandstone surfaces of the mesa walls. But twentieth-century ingenuity had seen fit to cut a road to the top, to what was then the oldest continually inhabited community in the United States.

  At the top, she and her guide found what was left of the pueblo that those who’d returned had built. First was the church, the old mission of San Esteban Rey. It had been a tourist attraction once. Now it stood derelict, fiercely ravaged by time. The twin towers flanking the nave were broken, crumbled away to stubs rising above the wind-scarred roofline. Most of the windows were missing. Hard spring rains had carved great gouges into its plastered facing, and the series of steps leading to the gaping hole where once its oaken doors had stood were worn to a jaggedly rounded slope. But the church still stood. Tabitha didn’t know if that should mean something or not.

  She pulled a small bag tied with sinew string from the pouch at her side. She felt the hard plastic inside, then tossed it to Red Rabbit.

  He looked at it. “You’re done?”

  “I’ll dance. And I’ll sing. For the memory. But, yes, I’m done. You’ve done exactly what I asked you to do. For that, my thanks. And an extra payment.”

  Red Rabbit opened the bag with his calloused fingers. He whistled. “More than a little extra,” he said.

  Tabitha shrugged. She wouldn’t need it anymore. One way or another.

  “You sure I can’t do anything more?”

  “You’ve done plenty,” she said.

  She walked alone into the crumbled labyrinth of Acoma.

  * * *

  The rest of the pueblo hadn’t fared as well as the church. Much of it had been ruins even in Tabitha’s youth, when only a few holdout families lived on the mesa. But after the killings, after the skiffs were airborne once more, the lancers had begun the work for which they were so aptly named: they’d sent charged particles down from their cannons, slashing furrows across the summit and blasting holes through to the bedrock. There’d been no reason for the desecration. The lancers had searched the pueblo on foot. Tabitha suspected it was merely target practice for the men. Slaughtering traitorous Indians hadn’t been enough fun for their day.

  The destruction that the lancers had begun was taken up by the elements. The scars they’d ripped through buildings had further eroded over the years, the wounds becoming gaping open sores. Dozens of structures had collapsed to rubble that turned the streets of the old town into a maze. Tabitha could see that as many more were on the brink of failure.

  Only the kaach remained as it did in her memories. Where she’d hidden in her youth. The place from which she’d watched her father die, watched his murderer absently wipe a splattering of gore from his hand as he walked back toward his waiting skiff and the sky. The building looked as if the weather had never touched it. Even the ladder protruding through the opening in its roof seemed solid—though she didn’t attempt to climb it yet. Maybe after the dance, she thought. Father was going to pray after the dance.

  She summoned memories as she wandered through the ruined pueblo. Soon, she could almost hear the laughter of old women, see the sad eyes of young men. She could almost step to the shake-crack-shake of rattles keeping time to the beat of a stretched-skin drum. She could almost smell the scents of kettles that steamed with chiles, corn, and shredded meat.

  She summoned them until she was with them, until the ghosts of the forgotten swarmed about her. Words. Rhythms. Voices. Drums. And when she found the central square where her father had died, she closed her eyes and fell away into a world that she alone could know—dancing in circles, like a dream-thief, through the red dust and mud-stone rubble, turning on isles of sand.

  The Great Silence. Alone.

  * * *

  When it was done, when her father’s dance was complete, Tabitha Hoarse Raven stood at the edge of a darkening sky, listening for the voices of her gods. The evening wind ran like wild horses up the cracked face of the mesa, smoothing her loose garments against the front of her body, molding them to the contours of her arms and legs. It flowed over and around her sweat-slicked skin like rushing, rising water—spreading her long black hair into tendrils of crow-night that reached with waving, furtive grasps for the relative security of the shattered pueblo behind her. She breathed deep in her exhaustion.

  Voices should have been carried upon that wind, sounds swept up from the plains: the laughter of children weaving through the brush, heading for the steep and crooked stairways with rabbits over their shoulders and baskets full of corn; the chatterings of women and their clay jars, porting water; the lower tones of the men on watch, calling across the rocks along the way.…

  No more. She heard nothing of the world beyond the echoed cries of a lone eagle balancing on split-tip wings and floating wide against the deepest blue of the sky. She saw nothing of the world beyond the light of the sun, lowering to stone reaches stained watermelon and blood red.

  Tabitha heard nothing. She saw nothing. And she was not surprised.

  Her gods were dead, too.

  Darkness approached from the east. Far out to the west, where vacant pueblos slumbered in silent canyons, the sun seemed to hesitate, to hover in expectation of night. Brilliant swaths of red-yellow-turning-blue layered ribbons upon the sky.

  “Come back to us, Moon,” Tabitha said, expecting the returned silence. “Bring us life. Bring us rain. Za’tse katch, Tsichtinako.”

  She wondered what her grandfather had expected when he’d come to this reach and prayed, too—that last time, just five years after Gray Feather was killed for dancing, for singing an outlawed language. She wondered if it was when he had heard nothing that he jumped. Like the two women of Kadzima. Sudden death before starvation.

  Tabitha looked down toward the base of the cliff as if she were tracing his fall with her gaze. The shadows were already thick down there, slow-moving in silence.

  Tabitha slipped a single gray-and-red goose feather from the long leather pouch at her side. She smoothed it to a point, then stretched her arm out into the great void of air and wind and sound and sight and scent and possibility and used the feather-edge to trace the sign of the Spider across the plains far below her.

  A good-bye.

  And in that moment, from somewhere in the distance, from somewhere beyond the horizon to the west, she heard a rumbling sound. The waking of an angry god.

  * * *

  Tabitha turned at the throaty sound of the approaching skiff. It was coming down behind her, kicking the sun-dried clay into clouds of choking dust that blurred away the fading adobe walls. Lights flashed. Another skiff circled loudly overhead.

  Doors opened. A ramp crashed. Even through the sudden haze of backlit dust-fog, she could see the dark helmets of the lancers making their way through and around the pueblo. Surrounding her. Some of them were already in place, already aiming.

  Tabitha looked away from them, her gaze sweeping out to the horizon, where billow-black clouds rose up from the dry canyons to meet and swallow the setting sun.

  To swallow them all.

&nbs
p; * * *

  Tabitha’s arms were outstretched to the void. Feather in hand. Visions of Great Eagle swirled behind her eyes. But a gust of wind pushed back against her. She felt the wind, and she knew it for what it was.

  She stepped back from the edge, opening her eyes as she turned to look at the gathered lancers. “Za’tse katch, Tsichtinako,” she said to them.

  There was an officer among them, standing nearest the ramp. He stepped forward into the cleared, dry dust between the flechemuskets and the condemned. He was wearing a gray-to-black uniform emblazoned with two bars that attested to his good service to the state. A captain. His hair was close-cropped, peppered gray. His grin was full of vanity and loathing pride. He held a d-reader in his hand and he lifted it up. “Ms. Hoarse Raven, yes?”

  Tabitha looked around at the flechemuskets, most of them pointed at her head. She glanced back over her shoulder to the west. Clouds were moving fast across the sky, carried on the wind. Already the first reaches of them stretched overhead. “Ha, diya hatch,” she said to the captain.

  He blinked at her, caught off guard for a moment, before he smiled. “Then I suppose you’re admitting guilt.”

  “Ha,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” the captain said. “Not on the anniversary with the moon and all, especially.”

  Tabitha shrugged. “Sa’ma.”

  The captain smirked, then keyed a button on the d-reader as if he was initiating an injection. A part of Tabitha, a small and shrinking part, thought it unfortunate that a recording was used these days. She would’ve preferred the personal touch of a reading.

  “One language, one people,” the d-reader said, its disembodied voice deep with authority.

  Tabitha stood in half-amused silence, listening to the litany. Halfway through, great raindrops began to fall to the parched earth, impacting like soft bullets, pounding out little craters in the dust. Father’s tears, falling to Mother.

  Some of the lancers looked upward. Tabitha did not. She was watching the walls of the pueblo behind them, where the blur of dusk was turning to sharp shadow and light as the moon came up and shone its light beneath the storm. She needed to raise her voice to be heard over the d-reader. “Ta’-u-atch,” she announced.