A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(56)
“Of course I know your name. I’m in your mind. Maybe I’m one of the four messengers, a hatioyake:ono, a sky dweller. Maybe I’m just a side of you—a part that you need and miss.”
“Why are you here?”
The woman shrugged, and the fringe on her shirt swung, then settled. “You called me.”
“Who are you?”
“Just a woman like you. I’m from the dark times, when no village was at peace with another. If a man met a stranger in the forest, the wisest thing to do was try to kill him, and if you were a woman, the wisest thing to do was run. Villages were built in high places, or on peninsulas jutting out into lakes, surrounded by palisades of tree trunks set into the ground and sharpened on top. I lived less than an hour’s walk from this spot. I was working at the edge of a field outside the village planting corn, beans, and squash with my sisters and cousins when I saw a warrior moving among the trees. He was a stranger who had come with eight friends to catch someone off guard and kill him. Our eyes met, and I turned to run. He tried to keep me from giving the alarm, but I got out a scream before the war club he swung hit my head.”
The woman half turned and pulled her hair aside, and Jane could see a huge gash where the bone of her skull had been shattered. The back of her beautiful dress was reddish brown where the blood had poured out and run down it. “All of the women heard me, and began running and shouting, so the warriors from the village came and chased down the man and his friends, and killed them all. I was nineteen.”
“It’s terrible and sad,” said Jane. “Nineteen is so young.”
The woman shrugged. “Everybody dies. The part that hurt me most was that I had a young baby, a beautiful boy. I took him everywhere, and right then he was hanging in his cradleboard from a branch of a tree. When the wind blew, it rocked him back and forth. When I saw the killer, I ran away from my baby to distract the killer from him. After the fighting was over, two of my sisters came back and got him from the tree.”
“What happened to him?”
“He lived to be a man. He was a famous runner and good fighter, and the men all listened to him respectfully in council. He fathered seven children by two wives, and died in a fight against the Cat People on an island in the Niagara River when he was over fifty. He’s satisfied with his life. My sisters and the other women of the clan did a good job raising him without me.”
“There must be a reason why you’re the one who’s here.”
“I told you why. You chose me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Maybe your mind chose me because I’m from the time when things were in chaos, before the great peace. My times are the reason why the Senecas and the other longhouse nations hate discord and anarchy. We lived it. We died of it. You live a violent life. You’ve killed people, and that’s not an easy thing for a woman. Killing strains against our nature. Maybe it’s making you sick. You know sken:nen means peace, but the same word means health.”
“I’ve only tried to keep people from being killed,” said Jane. “I taught them to evade, to run, to start new lives. How could anyone—man or woman—not do that much?”
“If that’s not what’s wrong, then maybe something is missing from your life.”
Jane sighed. “I wanted a baby.”
“You still do.”
“I suppose I do, but Carey and I have tried for years and it hasn’t happened, so I’m training myself not to keep longing for what I can’t have.”
“Now you’re setting a snare, trying to trip me up so I’ll accidentally tell you whether you’ll have a baby or not. I’m sorry, but I come from you. I know exactly what you know, and no more. Maybe I know a few things that you saw or heard but have forgotten. But you haven’t seen the future, so I haven’t either.”
“Admit that you were sent to me.”
“I was sent to you,” said the woman.
“By the good brother or the evil one?”
“You know better than to ask that. Which is God—birth and growth, or death and decay? They seem to fight, but they don’t.”
“Are either of them real?”
“If there’s a creator, he created your parents and grandparents, your mind, your memory, this dream, and sent me to guide you. If there is no creator, and your subconscious mind put me together out of memories and imagination because your mind needs me, then your brain sent me to guide you. Tell me which it is.”
“I can’t.”
“Then neither can I,” said the woman. “And my time will be up soon. This is your last REM cycle for the night, and it should be thirty minutes, or forty. The best thing you have in your life is Carey. It’s not always in your power to make him happy, but it is in your power to make him know that you love him.”
“Am I making him jealous by worrying about Jimmy?”
“He’s not jealous,” said the woman. “Maybe you think he should be.”
“I’m not interested in Jimmy that way. But being around him makes me—I don’t know—miss something.”
“Jimmy looks like a Seneca and speaks Seneca with you as your father did, so it’s natural to feel the connection. You think that you were supposed to marry a man like Jimmy but didn’t, so you feel guilty, and now you feel guilty for feeling guilty because that’s not fair to Carey. I can tell you that you were right to pick the man who didn’t just give you a faint friendly feeling. Instead you took the one who gave you a trembling in your stomach and weak knees.”