The Empire Page 14
Kyle applied leg pressure to bring the horse to a trot. He trotted a few circles around the group, then asked the horse for more. The mustang broke into a gallop to the yips of the tribesmen impressed with Kyle’s riding skill. Kyle rode out of the village at high speed, wind blowing through his hair and the horse’s mane. Kyle laughed as he galloped the grassy plain, thrusting his pelvis in time with the mustang’s powerful rolling gait. He then turned and rode back to the group, sliding to a stop.
“I told you I’d look good on a white horse,” he said to Padma, flashing a brilliant smile.
“I am so hot for you right now,” she said.
Kyle swung his right leg over the horse’s head and slid off in front of Padma. He grabbed her by the waist and gave her big kiss. Padma swooned.
He turned to the horse’s owner. “That was fun—pee-lah-mah-yah-yea,” Kyle said.
He offered the owner a spare combat knife he had brought with him as compensation for the horse. The owner took the knife, admiring its shiny blade. The owner made a horizontal slicing motion with his hand, signifying that the two men had made a deal. Kyle echoed the hand motion.
“I’ve known you for two lifetimes, and I still had no idea you could do that,” Padma said.
“When I went to high school in Palo Alto, I used to hang with the Stanford polo team after school. They taught me how to ride. At the time, I never knew I’d have a practical application for polo.”
“Pegasus!” Padma said.
“What?”
“Pegasus—he’s going to help Bellerophon kill the fire-breathing Chimera,” Padma said. “Bellerophon—that would be you,” she added as she poked Kyle in his bare chest with her finger.
Kyle grinned. “Indeed I am.”
• • •
An hour later, Kyle, Padma, and Takoda stood in front of their tipi. Kyle wore his MP7 submachine gun strapped to a holster on his right thigh. His combat knife was fixed in its sheath on his belt. He held Padma’s smaller black backpack, which was stuffed with essentials he needed for his journey.
“You’ll protect my wife while I am away?” Kyle asked Takoda for the umpteenth time.
“Nothing is more important than the Messiah,” Takoda replied. “I will protect her with my life.”
Kyle turned to Padma. She took his face in her hands and kissed him hard. It felt like the goodbye kiss Kyle ’01 had given her seven years earlier in their honeymoon suite at the Soho Grand, before he went to his death.
Padma tried to summon strength in the face of her fear. She feared for Kyle’s life, as she had during his mission to the other Time Tunnel, though this was worse. Kyle was going to be gone much longer, leaving Padma alone—an alien in the Lakota world, entirely dependent on strangers for survival. All her skills as Empress of America amounted to nothing in this place. She didn’t know how to get food or build a fire. She was helpless.
She felt a panic ascend from her core. It felt like a child’s raw fear. She tried to fight it. She began to cry.
She could not stop the tears. Part of her, the Empress of America, criticized the part of her that was overwhelmed by a wellspring of feeling—mourning the loss of her first Kyle all over again and preemptively mourning the second Kyle, all the while fearing for her own life.
“I can’t lose you again,” she sobbed.
Kyle took her hands and kissed them. “You won’t. I promise I’m coming back, beloved.”
The empress reminded her that the Messiah needed to put on a good show for her flock. Her feeling side told the empress to fuck herself.
Padma wrapped her arms around his neck and held on tight.
“You swear?” she asked.
“I swear,” Kyle said. “Please don’t worry, love.”
She slowly pulled away from him, trying her best to put on a brave face, not for the Empress of America or for the Messiah’s multitudes. Instead, she tried to be brave for her courageous warrior, for whom the distraction of a heartbroken wife could spell the difference between life and death.
Kyle handed his backpack to Takoda, then leapt onto his horse. Takoda handed the pack to Kyle. He slung it on his shoulders and waved goodbye as Pegasus trotted southwest toward the town of Deadwood.
Standing Rock Reservation
South Dakota
September 13, 1890
12:29 hours
Timeline 003
Sitting Bull drew a knife across his forearm for the hundredth time. His arms were red with blood, which flowed onto his legs, bent akimbo on the floor in the lotus position. He sat on a bed of sage in a sweat lodge in total darkness. The heat in the dome-shaped lodge was sweltering. Sweat mixed with the holy man’s blood, soaking his loincloth, his only stitch of clothing. Sitting Bull breathed in scents of sage and cedar, intermingled with his own blood and sweat. Outside the lodge, Sitting Bull could hear a steady drumbeat. Yellow Bird sang.
The purpose of the sweat lodge rite of Inipi was to purify Sitting Bull and prepare him for his vision quest in the Sun Dance. Outside the door of the sweat lodge, facing east, a fire pit represented the sun. A crescent mound partially encircling the lodge represented the moon. These symbols represented the outer world, or cosmos, which held the inner world Inipi lodge like the womb of the universe. Inipi would rebirth Sitting Bull’s soul, leaving his impurities within the lodge when he made his eventual exit.
Three times over the course of hours, Yellow Bird had thrown open the lodge door to signify three of the four ages described in lore. Sitting Bull awaited the fourth age and his exit from the lodge.
The chief felt a stirring he had not known in years. Until the arrival of the strange visitors, he had been living a slow death on the white man’s reservation. The life of the Lakota people was over. They had been driven off their sacred green land in the Black Hills and deprived of their buffalo, around which their lives revolved. The Lakota people did not depend on the buffalo merely for food and shelter. They also relied on the herd to set the rhythm of their lives. Unlike the whites, the Lakota people were not stationary. They were nomads, flowing with the currents and eddies of the buffalo herd.
The buffalo were now all but extinct, as were the Lakota people.
Now in this wasteland, the Lakota people were forced to become farmers on land that could not be farmed. They were required to change their nature instantly to something completely foreign, as though a fish was suddenly required to be a tree.
With every draw of the knife blade against his skin, the pain awakened a part of Sitting Bull that he had thought dead. His pain, blood, and sweat pooled in the Inipi into a spiritual maelstrom.
The lodge flap was flung open, sending a shaft of blinding yellow sun onto Sitting Bull. He rose from his sage bed and emerged from the lodge. Hundreds of Lakota tribespeople surrounded the lodge, watching in reverence as the legendary holy man was reborn. They prayed that his rebirth would also be their own.
The drum continued to beat as Yellow Bird sang. Sitting Bull followed Yellow Bird from the sweat lodge to the Sun Dance pole, a large cottonwood tree trimmed of its branches and sunk vertically into the ground. Two leather straps were tied to the pole. Buffalo skulls created a circular perimeter around the pole at a radius of 20 feet. Yellow Bird stopped in front of the pole and brushed it with sage. He then turned to face Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull nodded for Yellow Bird to continue.
Yellow Bird held a piece of sharpened bone approximately five inches long. He placed the sharpened tip to Sitting Bull’s left breast, beneath the scarred flesh from his previous Sun Dance, and pushed the bone into the skin and muscle behind the nipple. Sitting Bull’s expression did not flinch as the bone was driven through the flesh, the tip emerging on the opposite side.
Yellow Bird repeated the process on the opposite breast. He then returned to the cottonwood pole and retrieved the leath
er straps. Loops were tied in the ends of the straps, which Yellow Bird fitted over the two bones protruding from Sitting Bull’s chest.
As Yellow Bird began to sing, a dozen drummers began pounding their drums in unison. Sitting Bull pulled hard against the leather straps, pulling his flesh away from his chest in twin cones. Blood seeped from the tears in his skin, flowing down his torso and into his loincloth.
Over the next two hours, Sitting Bull heaved against the straps as the drums pounded and Yellow Bird sang. Others from the tribe joined in the singing, swept up in their chief’s odyssey.
Sitting Bull gazed at the straps that connected his chest to the cottonwood pole. The old chief was exhausted from the sweat lodge, the blood loss, the excruciating pain. He questioned whether he had the strength to complete the ritual.
Sitting Bull gritted his teeth and roared as he summoned his remaining strength to heave against the strap. One of the bones ripped away from his chest. The strap hung with the bone and shreds of his flesh. The crowd went silent as they watched their chief, barely able to stand, his chest tethered to the pole by a single leather strap.
Sitting Bull paused for a moment, then gave another heave, ripping the second bone from his chest. He fell to the ground on his back, looking directly into the sun.
Though the sun was blindingly bright, he did not avert his gaze from it. He began to see small fuzzy dark patches float leisurely across the sun’s face. The patches began to descend slowly to earth, settling on the ground around him. They were feathers. At first there were only a handful of feathers. More feathers fell to the ground—dozens, then hundreds. Sitting Bull picked up one of the feathers to examine it. It was old and dry. The feather’s smooth vane was cracked and splayed. He looked around. The feathers now numbered in the thousands. A gentle wind began to blow from the east. The feathers began to tumble across the dried grass plains toward the hills to the west. Sitting Bull followed them. Millions of feathers now began to drift and tumble toward the Black Hills. Sitting Bull noticed that the hills seemed gray in color, as though the trees and vegetation were covered in dust. The feathers began to ascend, rising with the hills. Sitting Bull snatched one from midair. It was young again, flawlessly formed into a supple blade. The feathers began to converge toward a single mountaintop. A shape began to take form—a giant golden eagle! The eagle was female. The eagle gave Sitting Bull a hard look. Sitting Bull saw that the eagle was missing one flight feather from her wing. He reached behind his head, pulling his sole feather from his hair. He inserted it into the eagle’s wing, completing her plumage.
The eagle’s beak opened wide. A deafening screech quaked the mountain, shaking the gray dust off the trees and restoring the verdant green to the hills. Sitting Bull then watched as the eagle spread her wings and ascended into the blinding sun.
Sitting Bull opened his eyes. He saw Yellow Bird’s concerned face hovering over him.
“The woman,” Sitting Bull gasped, “she is the Messiah.”
South Dakota
September 13, 1890
21:10 hours
Timeline 003
Kyle watched the flames leap and flicker from his campfire. The sound of water flowing over stones in a nearby stream intertwined with the crackling wood of his fire. He pulled a piece of rabbit flesh from the bone. He had shot the animal that afternoon when it darted across his path.
Pegasus stood nearby. Full from munching grass and tired from the day’s ride, his eyelids grew heavy. He began to doze.
The Milky Way arced brilliantly across the sky, interrupted only by a crescent moon. Kyle now lived in a time when humans lacked the capacity to diminish the lights of the cosmos as they could in the twenty-first century. He wondered what else humans had lost in his time as they had bleached out the stars.
Kyle heard rustling in the brush. He pulled his MP7 from its holster. Its laser sight lit between the eyes of the yellow dog he had fed the previous day.
“I guess I’m stuck with you,” he sighed, holstering his weapon.
He picked up the remains of the rabbit and tossed them to the dog. The hungry dog downed the rabbit carcass, complete with bones, in seconds. He wagged his tail. The dog resembled a small yellow Labrador retriever.
“We’ll find more for you to eat tomorrow,” Kyle said. “In the meantime, what shall I call you?”
The dog looked at Kyle, wagging his tail. Kyle thought about the speed with which the dog had vacuumed the rabbit.
“Hoover,” Kyle said.
Kyle lay on the soft ground next to the fire.
“C’mon, boy,” Kyle said, patting the ground. “It’s OK.”
Hoover stepped cautiously to Kyle and lay down next to him. Kyle stroked Hoover’s head and back. After a few moments, Hoover let out a long sigh, relaxing his guard with his new human friend. Within minutes, they were both fast asleep.
Standing Rock Reservation
South Dakota
September 14, 1890
13:50 hours
Timeline 003
Daniel Royer held the reins of two horses pulling a buckboard wagon across the Standing Rock Reservation prairie. Bouncing next to him in the leaf-spring wooden bench seat was his nephew, Lewis McIlvaine, whom he had recruited to teach the Lakota people baseball.
Lewis was dressed for the occasion, wearing an Edwardian club collar shirt tucked into brown and white plaid knickers with calf-length socks. Leather suspenders were hiked over his strapping shoulders. A newsboy cap sat on his head. He held a leather baseball mitt in his hand, folded over a ball. A wooden bat bounced on the floorboard next to Royer’s Henry rifle.
Royer’s attire was inappropriately formal for the frontier. He wore a charcoal frock coat with matching waistcoat, a white shirt with a high-stand collar, and a black silk tie with a brass tie tack. A black derby hat sat atop a prematurely balding head of blond hair. Wire-rim spectacles perched on a beak-like nose. His full moustache was bordered by ample sideburns.
Royer had been named Indian agent at Pine Rock a few weeks earlier, the result of political misfortune. Newly elected President Benjamin Harrison had decided to make the office of Indian agent a political patronage post. Described as a man “destitute of those qualities by which he could justly lay claim to the position—experience, force of character, courage, and sound judgment,” the inexperienced Royer was the worst possible choice for constructive reconciliation with the Lakota people.
In his 39 years, Royer had already proven himself a failure in a variety of professions, including medicine, pharmacology, teaching, and newspaper editing. He was terrified of the Native Americans in his charge, so much so that the Lakota had named him “Young Man Afraid of Indians.” He always kept a loaded rifle in his buckboard, and had already shocked his nephew by firing it in panic at a band of blowing tumbleweeds he mistook for marauding warriors. Lewis had been brainstorming excuses to return to his native Huron, South Dakota, when Royer asked him to accompany him on a tour of the fringe of Sitting Bull’s village. At the top of his lengthy list of Lakota phobias was their new religion, the so-called “Ghost Dance,” which Royer mistook for a war dance. Royer was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Lakota rose up and wiped out the neighboring whites. From the moment he landed in his post, he issued telegram after telegram to Washington, warning of the Ghost Dance threat and anxiously requesting troops to disarm the Lakota people before the massacre that was sure to happen.
Leveraging connections from his newspaper days, Royer fanned the flames of hysteria through the media. Some publicly argued for the complete extermination of all Native Americans.
Ostensibly, Royer’s excuse for the buckboard excursion was to introduce Lewis to the tribespeople for their indoctrination into America’s favorite pastime. In reality, Royer had no plans to go anywhere near the Lakota people. His intention was to use his looki
ng glass to spy on the Lakota from a safe distance in order to gather additional evidence of their Ghost Dance and impending massacre of the whites. His buff companion Lewis was onboard purely for protection.
Royer fretted about the increasingly bizarre stories coming out of Sitting Bull’s village. It was said that Sitting Bull had broken the law by participating in a Sun Dance. Another rumor was that the ghost dancers were impervious to bullets. Stranger still was gossip that the ghost dancers had actually succeeded in summoning their messiah—a breathtakingly beautiful native woman who spoke perfect English.
Royer and Lewis drove south toward the creek that bordered the north edge of Sitting Bull’s village. As they approached, Lewis pointed toward a band of tribespeople—perhaps 30 men and women. They had crossed the creek and were approximately one mile north of the village.
“Shall we teach them the game?” asked Lewis.
Royer frowned. He had not anticipated encountering natives this far from the village. He felt his heart race, though he also felt the expectant eyes of his nephew on him. After the embarrassing shooting match with the tumbleweeds, he did not want to appear the cowardly paranoid that Lewis had already sized him down to be.
“We shall,” declared Royer, steering the buckboard toward the group.
Padma eyed the buckboard warily as it approached. Tired of being followed everywhere by the growing multitudes—now numbering well into the hundreds—she’d told Takoda that she needed a break. Takoda had reluctantly agreed to a walk outside the village, though he insisted that the party be accompanied by armed escort. A small army of two dozen warriors with rifles joined Padma, Takoda, and Sitting Bull’s wives, Four Robes and Seen By Her Nation, as well as his daughters, Lodge In Sight and Standing Holy.
“Young Man Afraid of Indians,” said Takoda, as he watched the buckboard approach.
“What?” exclaimed Padma.