TC27

“The sailors who tarried at the Wall of God heard feeble voices carried by the wind through a trick of sound reflecting on the stone precipice. Ever they walked the ramparts hoping to hear the voices of their loved ones, and when they did they deemed it bittersweet. As time went on the newly dead found they were forgotten by their friends and even their loved ones sooner than they would have liked. The more impact a person had in their life the more fragments they heard so they lingered more, but the humble accepted the truth sooner.

“At great length nearly all the dead came off the precipice and rested on a narrow lawn behind it, waiting, they were told, for an unknown destiny. The gods refused to speak to them of their final fate. The dead were told only, ‘Great gifts are sweeter when they are but revealed in their fulfillment unspoiled by hasty tidings.’

“Within twenty years every member of Captain Skulldaggers’s dead but resurrected crew passed on to whatever new life awaited them, and he alone remained. Skulldagger has attained a form of immortality through infamy, and never a day passes but that his name is spoken aloud by someone in Kemen. Yet more often than not his name is spoken with a shudder, as the story of the Will O’ The Wisp is told again to every new generation.”

Leliel finished speaking, and Jashen stared at har, blinking silently. As part of his contrition he had chosen to patiently hear her out. Yet it was a good story, with buried depths and overlapping meanings that even Leliel, perhaps, did not fully grasp, he thought, if she was offering it as something ridiculous Terah had cooked up. Jashen asked, “What did your father do when he heard this story?”

“He was so disgusted he departed from under the roof of his father and tended another man’s livestock to buy his own way.”

“Did your father think the point of the story was merely to describe the conditions endured by the dead?”

“I think he did, at first, but I know the story rolled around in my father’s mind long after he heard it, even when grandpa Terah was struck down in his old age and could not keep himself alive by his own toil.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“Because my father made his legendary assault on the Mountain of God immediately after my grandfather died, as though he wished to speak to him once more on that ribbon of lawn behind the precipice.”

“You already told me who he found instead, and how a third being arose from the joining of the two. You really are the daughter of Wakan Tanka.”

She nodded. “There is no need to tell your parents and others of the Kuwapi everything you have learned here when we go to them,” she cautioned. “Joshua Lange is fortunate. He has my scroll now, and a spouse who can feed it to him in pieces. Your people are going into this cold. Most people have already supplied themselves with answers to the big questions. They will not readily accept answers that cut across the grain of what they think they already know, no matter how truthful those answers may be.”

In her tipi Yuha had been sobbing quietly for days. Takoda tried his best to comfort her, but there was really nothing he could do. She said, “Nearly a full moon has passed since we have seen our son. Has the Crying For Vision ever taken this long?”

Takoda replied, “I will never lie to my own wife. Five nights the test was for me, and no more.”