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Was there a choice?
He began to examine the atlas more closely. He'd be with the current and going
south. Two weeks to Nawlins ten days if he got any breaks, three weeks if he
ran into trouble, as he inevitably would. Still, if the old boy was still
there,
and if he remembered Hawks, and if he was willing to put his neck on the line
just to twit the Council, and if he could somehow arrange to get someone who
would obviously be a plains native on enough skimmers to take him halfway
around the world there was a chance. Not much, but the alternatives were even
less palatable.
He went down to talk with Cloud Dancer.
He had thought about her a great deal over the past weeks, trying to sort out
his feelings. He had been lonely, and she had filled that loneliness. His
heart and mind had been leaden, and she had made them light. She was in many
ways the most amazing, wonderful woman he'd ever met. He both wanted her and
needed her very badly, he realized, yet he could not destroy her by returning
to Council with her, and he had determined that he could not remain here. Yet
now, when he knew he would return to Council only as a corpse, she still was
beyond his reach. She had already lost one husband; he could not ask her to
marry a walking dead man.
So now he walked down to her crude lodge in back of the Four Families' camp to
do the one thing that seemed even more difficult than the decision to read
those papers. He had to say good-bye.
"And so I must get to this man," he told her. "He is the only man with
sufficient power to save me and to whom this information will be meaningful.
He might save me only because I do him this service."
She nodded, although she didn't seem happy. "You mean to go alone?"
. The very question startled him. "I can see no way to do otherwise."
She seemed slightly hurt, but she covered it. "Have you ever been down the
river before? Do you know the skills of the canoe? Can you swim?"
"No, I have never been there, and I have no real knowledge of the canoe, but I
can at least swim."
"I have never been down that far," she admitted. "My husband, however, had to
go many days now and then to deliver messages and to trade with other medicine
men.
The river grows wide and often deep. It took both of us to manage the canoe in
many dangerous parts of the river."
He stared at her. "Are you saying that you wish to come along?"
"This is my world. I was raised in it, and I know it well. You would not have
come this far without me. You will not reach this man without me, either. This
I
know, and this you know as well."
"But we are talking weeks in the wild, and then a place strange to both of us
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and filled with danger. I will probably die, or fail and die, but if I do not
try this I will certainly die. For you, though, it is far more foolish. A
Hyiakutt woman among strange tribes you know what might happen. The city will
be even worse. Cutthroats, thieves, murderers, violators of women, and women
of no honor. If something happened to me, there would be no one who spoke
Hyiakutt.
Even together, you could speak only to me."
"There is no one else I would need to speak to," she told him seriously. "And
if
you die, what happens to me will be of little consequence. Do you not know
that now? Are you blind or so removed from us that you think of us as less
than human?"
Her comments both touched and stung him. "There is nothing more false than if
I
say I do not love you," he responded, feeling suddenly empty, even ill. "Yet,
do you not understand what my condition is? I am dead!"
"That may be true," she responded. "It will surely be true if you keep
believing it. Now, though, you must for once turn from yourself, spoiled
little boy that you are, and think of me. I understand your condition well.
Until you came, I
had been dead for years."
He felt sudden shame. What she says is the truth, he admitted to himself. I am
a spoiled, self-centered little boy. Never once, other than in sympathy, had
he ever really thought of her side in this. Who would not prefer a sentence of
death to one of a living hell?
"You do not have to marry me," she told him. "I will come with you in any
case."
"No," he responded. "Let us seek out the medicine man. If we are both in the
Demon's Lair, then let us be truly one there."
There had been no elaborate ceremony; although Hyiakutt weddings could be
fabulous and complex affairs, all that was truly required was a small ritual
binding to one another by a medicine man who served as witness before the
Great
Spirit, Creator of All, and that was it. Arranging for the canoe was more
difficult, although the marriage provided an excuse as long as neither of them
mentioned that the canoe was not likely to be returned.
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