Malekwa

From CleanPosts

Malekwa

The People who lived near the End Dome Hill at the base of the Enfilade Range possessed almost nothing except their horses, and even those were liable to be taken by the Northern Raiders from time to time. They survived by burning extensive swaths of the riparian forest in the Black River valley to create grazing ground which would attract large game animals. One autumn when the entire valley of the Black River was shrouded in fog, hunting parties from among the People stood upon End Dome and marveled. They called the large hill, in their tongue, the Island in the Sky.

Near the present day Lincoln bridge the Black River drops its load of silt in a cluster of islands and meanders out onto the prairie that is occupied by greater River City. Before the Lincoln Bridge was constructed in 1914 the islands in this bend, which are anchored by tall grass, offered the easiest ford across the river. In the early days massive herds of antelope and elk would come to water and pass through to the other side, and the People would take them for meat.

In the fullness of time, the elohim Binah made his long-delayed bid to enter the history of the planet-dwellers. With the assistance of Bat-El at the pool in Nyduly Wood, Binah ejected onto the Earth a black object that would later be known simply as the Artifact. It emerged through the wormhole into an identical pool at the base of hill End Dome.

Trailing a stream of water, the Artifact rose in an arc and crashed upon the summit of the hill with a great noise. A herd of elk grazing there scattered away, as well as most of the hunters stalking them, carried away by their own panicked horses. Only Malekwa from among the People stood his ground, along with his mount the noble war veteran Kaleetan.

The Artifact was a large black container that opened like a clam shell. In this way, the Sky Father (as Malekwa assumed it to be) gave the brave a small gift held within, a gift made of gold which could fit in his hand like the hilt of a knife. When the warrior squeezed it, a purple spear grew out of the Golden Gift, making a terrible hissing sound, and if he squeezed harder, the glowing spear blossomed into a purple cone that made a wind so fierce that Malekwa feared he would be pulled inside.

Malekwa mounted Kaleetan again and rode down off the hilltop with the Golden Gift in his hand. Malekwa found the largest of the regrouping elk and pointed the Golden Gift at its head. A hissing purple line briefly connected his arm to the animal's head, and there was no more head. The dead animal immediately dropped to the ground and his brother elk scattered once more.

Malekwa was joined by the other hunters again, who helped him field-dress the carcass down to easily-transportable slabs of meat and hide, to be dragged behind their horses on wooden skids. There were hard questions about the missing head, but Malekwa answered that he had offered the head to the Great Father of all. They accepted this and were ashamed to speak further, for they had all fled in fear when the deity appeared. As they rode to the encampment of the People further up the river, Malekwa kept the precious gift of the Great Sky God hidden in his pack.

Most of the elk meat was set aside to become smoked jerky for lean times, but the remainder was enough for a great feast. And that night it was heard tell around the communal fire how the Great Spirit came down to the Island in the Sky and conversed with Malekwa, and how He accepted the head of this very animal before returning to His home in the sky.

The Chief of the People did not witness this event, of course, for he stayed in the People's camp with his many squaws and was never on the hunt. But as the clan's alpha male he felt threatened by the divine favor shown to Malekwa and he watched Malekwa's body language for signs the beta was preparing to make his move to alphahood. Whey they locked eyes the Chief demanded to know if the tale was true.

Malekwa said nothing, but did not take his eyes away from the Chief, who grew infuriated at the defiance. The leader of the People took out his knife, an actual steel blade he claimed he took as war booty from a white trapper, but it was whispered that he really took it from a corpse he had stumbled upon by mere chance. It was, at any rate, the only such blade among the People.

"This will loosen your tongue!" he cried, and he moved toward Malekwa expecting the young brave to run as usual. But Malekwa knew he had the favor of the Sky Father and stood his ground, which unnerved the Chief. Everyone saw him hesitate. The Chief lost 'face' with each passing heartbeat.

Finally the Chief plunged the knife into the flesh of Malekwa's shoulder to end the farce. Malekwa stifled a shout and rolled away off the blade, then ran to his tee pee. The Chief considered the affair done. He didn't want to kill Malekwa after all, for he was a good earner. His squaw would tend the wound and it would be over. The betas just needed to be freshened up every now and then.

Malekwa emerged from his tee pee still bleeding, but with the Golden Gift in his hand. When he squeezed it, the shaft grew to a certain length, and then blossomed into a fat black cone of darkness. When he killed the animal at the river bend he only wanted to take the head. But now he took away the Chief, the whole Chief, and nothing but the Chief, all the way down to his moccasins, leaving the very ground he stood upon untouched.

After that the People were in a state of shock, and they greatly feared Malekwa. They had never seen such an obvious and deadly display of real magic. Even his own squaw was afraid, but she came to stand at his side anyway, knowing this was what her man wanted.

"'I sent the Chief to the Great Spirit,' Malekwa said in a loud voice. 'I will lead the People now.' And he crossed his arms regally, leaving the Golden Gift cradled in one of his hands. No one doubted that he had done exactly what he said. One by one the other hunters sank to their knees before him, with hands open to show they carried no blade.

Now Malekwa gave his first command as chief . 'In the morning we will decamp and dwell at the the river bend forever, near the place where the Father of the sky came and made Himself known to us.'

And it was made so. The dead Chief's five squaws were returned to their fathers, for Malekwa, even though he was a youth of but sixteen summers, was wise and humble and more than content with the squaw he already had. On the hunt, Malekwa waited for the herds of migrating elk and antelope to make the crossing at the only place they could. Upstream from the ford the Black River was too swift, downstream it was too deep. When the herd was halfway across, Malekwa would strike, taking one or two of them according to the needs of the People.

With the Golden Gift he would sacrifice the heads of the animals to the Great Father Spirit, and often it would be done in such a stealthy way the rest of the herd would barely notice.

For many years the People lived this way, in perfect harmony with the herds. But one day they saw the first wagon trains of white skins use the ford at the Black River. The second wagon train arrived at the same time some migrating elk were negotiating the ford, and the white skins used their fire sticks to drop some of the animals merely to clear the way. They did not even take the animals for food.

Fair enough, thought Malekwa, there is plenty for all. But as the years went by the herds got thinner, and many of the People remembered the fire sticks. One year no large game animals were seen at all. The People had to scratch a living from small game, or from scrawny solitary black-tail deer they chanced upon. Some of the warriors murmured openly, recalling the days of comparative plenty under the previous Chief.

The army of the whites set up an outpost nearby called Fort Shiprock, named for an unusual rock outcropping at the very end of the gorge. Captain John Smalley commanded the fort, and despite his bitter hatred for the dead-end post he had been assigned, Smalley maintained good relations with Chief Malekwa.

Smalley considered the People to be relatively peaceful, but contacts were limited because the People were so poor they had almost nothing to trade. “This fort isn't exactly a charity outfit,” he was often heard to say. In the Chief's visits to the fort, and in their less frequent visits to him, Malekwa did manage to acquire rudimentary skills speaking English with them.

Late one fall the Northern Raiders paid their last "visit" to the People. When Malekwa confronted them he used a gradually tightening squeeze so the black spear of wind emerged from the Golden Gift at a visible rate. The enemy saw that it was Chief Malekwa's magic which absorbed arrows fired at him. They saw it was Chief Malekwa's magic that sliced their leader in half, and the horse he rode in on.

Malekwa knew the Northern Raiders operated like pack animals with no stomach for sticking around once they lost their own Chief. And sure enough they fled, never to return to the river ford.

The following year the People saw a bizarre sight coming from the south: Six white skins mounted on horses, cracking whips, two on Point, two on Flank, and two on Drag, leading possibly three hundred animals that were bulkier than any game animal. The men drove their animals over the small islets dotting the ford.

Once across the river the white men drove the animals along without even the basic courtesy of offering the People one or two head as a toll. And then they were gone. It was the first cattle drive ever to use the Black River ford to cross from the open pastures at the foot of the Enfilade Range to the small town of Amnesty less than a day's ride to the north. Malekwa lost much face in this incident, and he swore to his People it would not happen again.

At night Chief Malekwa slept with his family in a tee pee upon the very summit of End Dome, next to the Artifact of the Sky God, which was protected by a cairn of stones. The rest of the People slept in a sizable pine wood lodge on a plateau about fifty feet below the summit.

At the foot of End Dome lay the small lake that had been the portal for the Artifact into this world. Sometimes at dawn the People would find large footprints, half again the size of a large man, leading directly into or away from the water, but never circling it. On even more rare occasions they caught a nighttime glimpse of creatures that walked upright like men, but much taller, with hairy faces and long swinging arms. They called these creatures Sasquatch.

Malekwa said the creatures were messengers of the Sun God and not to be feared, and he was actually correct, the Sasquatch were really nephilim servants preparing the world for the incarnation of Binah. They tried not to alarm the People as they went about their errands and returned to the Land We Know, but the People boasted of expert hunters and trackers, and the nephilim could not remain undetected for long.

Others among the People said the Sasquatch were evil spirits in animal form, or the shades of ancestors who were not at rest. When a young boy of the People named Shy Bear slipped under the waters of the pond while he was swimming there, and did not return again, Chief Malekwa could not make the People believe the Sasquatch were harmless.

So at Malekwa's direction the People constructed an earth berm, or mound, to enclose the pond in a perfect circle. There was one opening in the mound that pointed away from the lodge of the People, and after that the large footprints were found to be routed through this opening, leading far away from their hunting grounds.

Shy Bear returned from the “spirit world” one evening a few months after he disappeared and the boy came to Chief Malekwa alone, because he knew his parents and many of the other People would be frightened to see him returned from the “dead”. Shy Bear gave the Chief several sacks of strange fruit, a gift of the gods for the People because they ate a diet of mostly meat, and many had become sick from vitamin deficiencies. Shy Bear knew only that the fruit was called “medicine” by the gods and their servants.

When Malekwa asked about conditions in the afterlife, Shy Bear looked straight up at the night sky and said, “The stars are suns. The whites know this.”

Malekwa's gaze followed Shy Bear's gaze at the expanse overhead. “Very small suns?”

“Distant campfires, Chief” Shy Bear said, shaking his head no. “The suns are gods. The whites do not know this.”

Malekwa grew suddenly dizzy at the sudden enormous expansion of his own mental picture of reality. After a moment he said, “What else did you learn over there?” “The gods taught me to speak the white man's tongue?”

“Why you?”

“They said the young can learn more quickly.”

“Why must you speak to the whites?”

“Seven families of whites are coming here. The gods command us to extend our hospitality to them.”

After that Malekwa brought Shy Bear to his parents in the People's lodge. At first they were afraid of him, but their joy grew as they came to accept their son really had returned to them.

The next cattle drive the People saw was with five hundred head and eight men, with a leader out in front and a cook bringing up the rear driving a supply wagon. They, like the band of the preceding year, were coming off the range and making for the railhead at the town of Amnesty, which today is only a quiet neighborhood in River City.

From a vista high above them, Malekwa asked young Shy Bear if these were the whites the People were commanded to accommodate, but Shy Bear answered no.

So when about half of their herd was across the ford, Malekwa sent some of his hunters down from the gorge rim to raise general calumny with whoops and hollers and a few well-placed arrows. Meanwhile, he found a good position to take out one of the animals. He was curious to find out what they tasted like.

Unfortunately, four of the white skins were already across the ford as well, and they fought back fiercely with small fire sticks they could hold in one hand even while their horse was at a full gallop. Two good hunters from among the People were killed. Chief Malekwa pulled his men back to the safety of the hills, and from there he continued to watch the scene below.

Finally seven of the men and most of the cattle were across the river. The leader of the party of whites was a Mr. Paul Morrison. He remained on the near side of the river with only about thirty cows. Morrison yelled, "Boys, take what you got and try to make it to Amnesty. I'm gonna take this bunch to Fort Shiprock and see if we can get some help with our red skin problem."

So the party of white skins split up. The main herd went downstream along the river bank. Malekwa did not get to take a shot with his Golden Gift but he saw that a few cattle were straggling behind the main herd with arrows in their flesh. The seven cowboys saw them but wrote them off and remained with the bulk of the herd. Malekwa sent his hunters after the three or four cattle that were falling behind.

At the ford they encountered a train of sixteen wagons, with forty more white skins moving west, and Malekwa marveled that so many people were converging in this place at once. This party, which Chief Malekwa smelled before he saw (even over the funk of the herd of cows) was the die-hards of the Five Corners Free Congregation, fleeing a nearby state after it had entered the Union with a constitution forbidding first cousins from getting married. Chief Malekwa thought it was getting so crowded it wasn't a respectable wilderness anymore.

He could also see Morrison and his little herd getting smaller and smaller as they moved south towards Fort Shiprock, which was actually fairly close by.

At Fort Shiprock Captain John Smalley woke up from his midmorning nap and ducked outside to see what was making that infernal racket. And that horrible smell. When Paul Morrison saw him he took off his hat and said, "Twenty-eight free range cows for the United States Army Cavalry, sir, compliments of their owner, yours truly, Paul Morrison."

This was indeed the way things were done out here, palms greased with money and goods in return for other favors.

"Well, the Cavalry is much obliged, Mr. Morrison," came the reply. "I'm Captain John Smalley. And if there's ever a favor we could do for you in return, please don't hesitate to ask."

"There is the trifling matter of the red skins up there at the Black River ford. Sneaky bastards ambushed us when we were halfway across."

Captain Smalley took his pipe out in his hand. His handlebar mustache danced as he asked, "Northern Raiders?"

Morrison shook his head. "Wrong markings. I figure these are locals."

The Captain put his pipe back in his mouth. "That can't be right. The local Indians are real peaceful."

"These Indians didn't look like the kind to give up, Captain. We had to shoot two or three of them. They're probably harassing the rest of my herd right now on the north bank. If you hurry you can catch them before sunset."

Captain Smalley agreed with a sigh, and he gave the appropriate orders to gear up the Fort for action. A bugle call was soon heard.

Shortly thereafter about forty mounted soldiers were seen by the wagon train folk crossing the little tributaries and lime-silt islets of the ford, accompanied by Morrison. They seemed to want something, so Pastor Lange identified himself as the master of the wagon train with a tip of his hat. He said, "What can I do you for?"

"Did you people come down the river?" asked Smalley.

"Yes sir, we aim to stop here for a spell."

"Did you happen to see any Indians?"

"Yes sir, a short while ago, about the same numbers as your own fine company. Rode across the river here at a goodly pace. They didn't bother us none."

"I do appreciate the news," the Captain said. Now he had confirmation of Morrison's complaint, but he still had a hard time believing it was the local natives. He spurred his horse and led the men in pursuit.

They found a small group of the People's hunters rendering a fallen cow down for steaks. Smalley recognized the battle dress of Chief Malekwa and steered a course for his little group. Presently he and his men formed a circle around the Chief and a handful of his hunters. Smalley told another officer, Lieutenant Lambert Wells, to take the rest of the unit toward Amnesty to engage the rest of the Indians, and hand-picked four soldiers to stay behind with him.

As the lieutenant rode off with his thirty-four men, Smalley and Morrison moved closer to Chief Malekwa while the four soldiers supporting the Captain orbited them all at a stately trot.

"God damn it Chief, you know better than to start acting like the Northern Raiders."

"What are you going to do to him?" Morrison asked.

"Take him into custody for cattle rustling. The rest of these red fellows here were just following orders. They got families to feed. I'm going to let them go so they can pick themselves a new chief. Will that satisfy you, Mr. Morrison?"

"It will."

Malekwa followed the gist of what Smalley wanted to do to him, and he decided not to go peacefully. He had the Golden Gift in his hand and he pointed it right at Smalley. The purple shaft leaped out with its hideous sucking sound and sliced the head of Smalley's horse clean off. And then Smalley himself was rendered in two. That black line remained there, drinking in light and air, while five more horses and men ran right into it, including Paul Morrison.

After that Malekwa used the Golden Gift to get rid of the bodies of the men and the horses he had slain, but he knew he had a real problem now. The killing range of the Golden Gift was not much further than a real spear. Against a whole troop of whites armed with firesticks, he would be helpless. They would kill him, and his warriors, and no doubt all of the women and children and old men in the camp of the People as well in retribution for killing the white chief. Then the army of the whites would have the Golden Gift. Malekwa needed to think fast.

The bulk of the cavalry from Fort Shiprock scattered Malekwa's hunters away from the herd in ones and twos. The cows and their cowboys were safe. Chief Malekwa and five of his hunters returned to the river ford, where they found the encampment of Pastor Mark Lange. Now Malekwa had some quick thinking to do.

Even if he gathered all his other hunters together in time, they never were a match for the white soldiers. If he fled up river the soldiers would merely follow him and the slaughter would extend to the women and children. It had happened to other groups of natives before. So Malekwa made a difficult decision and laid the Golden Gift at the feet of Rev. Lange.

"Help us," he begged.