Black Hills

Black Hills by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online

Book: Black Hills by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online
Authors: Dan Simmons
slimy trails of Fat Frog spit all over Paha Sapa’s face.
    Paha Sapa does not wait to think; he balls his fist and strikes Fat Frog square in the middle of his fat face, bloodying his nose and knocking the boy backward into a prickly pear. Fat Frog screams and calls to his three older cousins standing nearby, boys who also live in Feet in the Fire’s lazy lodge, and the three older boys leap on Paha Sapa andstrike him with their fists and feet and with willow branches, all while Fat Frog is screaming and holding his bleeding nose and crying that Paha Sapa broke it and that he’s going to tell his grandfather, and Feet in the Fire will come find Paha Sapa and
kill him
with the knife that Feet in the Fire used to scalp ten
wasichus.
    When the three larger cousins are finished beating on Paha Sapa, they kick him in the ribs once or twice and go away. Paha Sapa lies there hurting, but he has no impulse to cry. It is all too funny, especially the image of old, fat Feet in the Fire chasing him with a scalping knife. He only hopes that he
did
break Fat Frog’s nose.
    When he gets up and dusts himself off, Paha Sapa realizes that he has got blood—mostly his own, he thinks—spattered down the front of his second-best deerskin shirt. Three Buffalo Woman will beat him for sure when he goes back to the lodge.
    Paha Sapa only shakes his head—still amused—and limps away from the village, wanting to be alone for a while.
    A little over a mile from the village, out of sight of all the tipis and even of the horses and the boys and men who guard them, Paha Sapa comes to a low, wide area where for some reason the prairie grasses are low, almost like what he will someday learn is called a “lawn.” Paha Sapa lies down on this soft grass and soft dirt and kicks off his
han’pa
—his moccasins.
    He lies there on his back with his arms spread wide, the soles of his feet turned down hard against the evening-cooling soil, and his curving, clinging toes—his
siphas
—curling hard into the dirt.
    Paha Sapa almost closes his eyes, squinting through what seem like tears even though he has not been crying, and looks up at a paling evening sky of a deep blue that seems disturbingly familiar to the boy. He relaxes completely—first loosening the muscles in his tensed neck, then letting his arms go limp, then releasing the pressure on his curving fingers and clawing toes, then uncoiling something deep inside his belly. For some reason he cries out
Hokahey!
as if he is a warrior riding into battle.
    What happens next is very difficult for him to describe later, even to himself. He will not tell his beloved
tunkašila
Limps-a-Lot about his
touch-the-earth-to-fly
experiences until several more years have passed.
    Paha Sapa senses the earth spinning as if it were a ball instead of a flat thing. He sees the stars wheeling in the evening sky even though the stars have not yet come out. He hears the song the setting sun is singing and can hear the answering song the grasses and plants are singing back to it as the light begins to fade. Then Paha Sapa feels his body grow cold and heavy and distant from him even as
he
—the spirit-self Paha Sapa—becomes more and more buoyant. Then his spirit-self floats up out of his body and away from the earth.
    He rises for many minutes before he thinks to roll over onto his stomach in midair and look down. He is so high that he cannot see his body that he left behind, so high that the village is only barely visible as a scattering of tan tipis under tiny trees along a river receding from sight. Paha Sapa rolls onto his back again and continues to rise, higher yet, rising past the few scattered clouds showing pink now in the low rays of the setting sun, and then he is higher than all the clouds.
    He looks and rolls over again. The sky above him grows black even as the clouds so far below begin to glow pinker and the shadows on the earth grow longer. Paha Sapa
knows
that it is terribly cold just outside his

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