SEPTEMBER 2007

NEW YORK

The Elephant Ironclads

Jason Stoddard

Jason Stoddard lives in Newhall, California, with his wife, Lisa (who writes under the name Rina Slayter), and a motley assortment of tortoises and cars. He has gone from the discipline of engineering to the halls of advertising, then on to the wild world of interactive marketing. His short fiction has appeared in SCI FICTION, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Fortean Bureau, Futurismic, and GUD, and he was a finalist for both the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Jason is currently working on novels based on his short fiction. His website is www.xcentric.com.

“The Elephant Ironclads” is another alternate history—based (as most of the best of the subgenre) on some unbelievable but actual historical events.

Now, those are healthy elephants,” Niyol Chavez said.

Wallace Chee ground his teeth. Ahead of them, a caravan loaded with Mexican sugar was coming down the dusty road from the Albuquerque airfield. On top of the lead elephant, a fat merchant in a gaudy Hopi outfit bounced, wearing the satisfied grin of a man who has made an excellent deal.

“See how they almost prance,” Niyol said, pointing. “Healthy.”

“Stop it,” Wallace said.

“Look at how they shake their heads.”

“Stop it!”

“They even sound like—“

Wallace turned and pushed Niyol, hard. Wallace caught a glimpse of his friend’s broad, playful smile, then Niyol’s legs tangled and he fell sideways into the scrub.

“I was joking!” Niyol said, his dark eyes flashing anger.

I didn’t know the elephant was sick, Wallace wanted to say. Images of the dead elephant, lying in the dust outside the skeleton of his father’s burned-out workshop, came unbidden. The slack stares of Niyol and Patrick and Jose, who had given all their Diné pesos for Wallace’s tales of an elephant of their own, a trade route that would bring them riches before they were fourteen. The flaming anger of his mother when she’d discovered he’d taken her precious tourist dollars to fund his dream. Her tears when she saw the carcass. The way she looked from the elephant to the workshop and back again. And, finally, the few pesos he’d been able to get from the butcher as he began the grim job of rendering the elephant down to dog food and bonemeal.

“I told you I’d pay you back.”

“No. You won’t.” Niyol picked himself up and brushed dust from his jeans.

“No?”

“We’ll both pay your mother back.” Niyol eyed the Diné airships that dotted the faraway field. “If there’s any work left, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“The caravans are already coming south, so they’ve probably already unloaded.”

Wallace grimaced. Niyol was as sharp of mind as he was of tongue. He would probably go back to school next year, to The-Years-That-Finish-You. And after his years at the Americanized school, he’d be able to get a job in California or Mexico, rather than Dinétah.

“There’ll be other airships,” Wallace said.

Niyol scanned the empty blue sky and shrugged.

As the caravan passed, the elephants’ trumpeting sounded like laughter.

At the Albuquerque airfield, a half dozen airships hung motionless in the clear blue winter sky. On one of the ships, Diné airmen were making repairs to the skyshields, their bright orange-and-red-tunics in sharp contrast with the blue fabric that shielded the airships from the ever-watchful eyes of the Diyin Diné. None of the ships wore gray stormshields, so they must be expecting the clear weather to continue. The sun was bright, but the early-March chill still bit with every breeze. On the ground, nothing moved. Stacks of crates and bags of sugar in the cargo shacks showed that the airships had already been unloaded. Big men lounged on the rough wood porches of the shacks, smoking cheap American cigarettes and telling poor jokes that poked fun at one another’s clans. Several of them gathered around a radio, which was chattering in English about a new war the Americans were starting in a place called Korea.

Wallace remembered the days when the Americans always seemed to be at war. His own war games with Niyol. Japs and Americans. Like Cowboys and Indians, or Elephant Ironclads and Cavalry. He was only nine when he’d heard about the end of the Second World War, coming in softly in Navajo over the Dinétah station. It was hard to believe the war had been over for five years. Niyol hung back, so Wallace introduced himself to one of the men and said they were looking for work. The man, cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, looked them up and down and laughed. In that moment, Wallace saw himself and Niyol through those men’s eyes, two scrawny kids looking to do heavy labor. Something seemed to crumple and collapse in his heart.

I’ll have to go back to Isleta, he thought. I’ll have to be a shepherd.

“You see?” Niyol said, after they’d walked out of earshot.

“Maybe I’ll become an airman,” Wallace said.

Niyol opened his mouth as if to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He grinned. “You, in Mexico? In America?”

Wallace frowned. He remembered black-and-white newsreels showing impossibly smooth streets and sleek, glossy cars. He remembered making fun of them, loudly, so the theater attendants came and made him and his friends leave.

“I could do it.”

Niyol looked doubtful.

“I could become an elephant tender.”

“Not elephants again!”

“I could earn it this time!”

Niyol shook his head. “Elephants are for rich men.”

“Elephants are the gift of the Diyin Diné!”

“To try our resolve,” Niyol said. Completing the common wisdom.

Wallace grimaced. He’d heard it from his mother. Elephants aren’t efficient pack animals. Their role in Diné independence was more luck than divine will. They ate too much. They tied us to the land. But he didn’t care. Just once, he wished the Diyin Diné would send a vision of the Elephant Ironclads, standing watch at the edges of the Four Corners. But that was just a story, too, if you believed the common wisdom.

Even if it was only a story, it should be true, Wallace thought.

“Let’s find some work,” Wallace said, and walked away, not caring if Niyol followed. At the airstrip office, gaudy color posters of Benjamin Hatathlie hung outside. Block capitals declared, CHIEFTAIN-AHNAGHAI. Wallace frowned. He knew from the newscasts that Hatathlie was running for president, but he frowned at the bald Americanization of the Diné word. They could have used the Diné

alphabet, or tried to render the proper pronunciation.

“Brother,” Niyol said, smiling ironically.

“You share clan with him?”

“Yeah. We’re both Chiricahua Apache.”

“So if he wins, my friend is the president’s brother.”

Niyol grinned. “The president’ll have many brothers, all asking favors.”

Wallace laughed. That was a good joke.

Wallace went to talk to the white-shirted office keeper, but the story was the same. No work here, especially for youngsters. Try when you’re older. There’s a guide who might employ you in a couple of years.

Wallace saw himself a shepherd, old and bent, watching dirty and indifferent sheep. He felt tears gather at the corners of his eyes.

Outside the office, Niyol put his hand on Wallace’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Wallace said.

But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. Wallace looked down at the earth and asked the Diyin Diné, What have I done to offend you?

A distant buzzing came from the sky to the north. Wallace looked up and saw a white speck in the distance. As it drew closer, he could make out wings, sticking out stiffly from a bright white fuselage. An airplane. Like the Americans used. Wallace grimaced. Loud, dirty, noisy…a terrible mockery of the powerful Thunderbird.

The little plane drew closer and dropped toward the airfield. The laborers came out from under the shed awnings to look up at it. The Diné airmen paused in the middle of their work to turn sun-brown faces to the apparition.

The airplane flashed across the sky, impossibly fast, impossibly loud, shattering the stillness of the day. Diné on the outskirts of Albuquerque came out of their hogans to squint up at the sky. The plane lunged at a long dirt road that paralleled the airships, sunlight glinting off its windshield. It touched down and bounced along the dirt runway, sending a long streamer of dust toward the dun-colored hills.

“Come on,” Wallace said.

“Why?” Niyol said.

“Maybe they need to be unloaded.”

“I don’t think they have much to unload.”

“They’re rich men from America. They’ll need something.”

Niyol shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Wallace sighed. “I’m going to make some money,” he said, and walked off toward the plane. After a few moments, he heard Niyol’s footsteps behind him.

By the time they reached the runway, two men had emerged from the plane. They stretched in that big, lazy American way and looked out across the plains, as if the distances were too far for them to grasp. One wore a dark brown suit and a thin black tie. The other wore a gray suit of some coarse fabric, with a royal blue tie knotted over an off-white shirt. Dark-tinted sunglasses covered their eyes. Their shoes, polished black, were already coated with the rich orangish dust of the Dinétah desert. Not even dressed for the trip, Wallace thought. In men this stupid there had to be opportunity. Brown-suit noticed them first. He tapped his companion on the shoulder. Two heads swiveled to look at him. Their eyes were completely hidden behind dark glasses, their faces motionless and expressionless. It was like being looked at by insects.

“What do you want, kids?” Brown-suit said.

“I’m Wallace Chee of Big Water Clan,” Wallace said.

“So?” Brown-suit said.

“Can I carry your bags for you? To your hogan?”

“No hotel. We have a car waiting.”

A car? In Dinétah? Wallace didn’t know what to say. When he found his voice, he croaked, “Guides. Do you have guides?”

Brown-suit snorted. “We have maps.”

“Maps won’t help you when the car breaks,” Wallace said.

“Who says it’ll break?”

Wallace grinned. “No highways. No service stations.”

“We’re loaded with gas.”

“And water?”

“Yes.”

“And a spare axle, for when you get caught in a rut?”

The two men looked at each other.

“And a guidebook to all the friendly Diné, who will help someone as strange as yourself?”

Another look.

“And maybe some padding in those clothes to keep you from picking up some buckshot?”

“Buckshot?”

“From the people who think you’re a skinwalker?”

“Skinwalker?”

“Dead returned to walk,” Gray-suit said. His English was thick with a strange accent. Wallace started. An American who knew something about Diné? He didn’t know men like that existed.

“Okay, okay,” Brown-suit said. “How much? Will twenty do it?”

“Twenty dollars?” That was almost a thousand Diné pesos. More by half than he spent for the dying elephant.

“Twenty-five, then.”

Wallace struggled to keep his face expressionless. “We’re worth thirty,” he said. Brown-suit frowned, rummaged in his pocket, and pulled out a thick leather wallet. He extracted a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Wallace. “Do a good job, and maybe there’ll be another when we’re done.”

Wallace folded the bill out of sight quickly, resisting the urge to look around. He could feel the eyes of the laborers on them. Hopefully they weren’t watching close enough to see the bill.

“I am Wallace Chee, of Big Water Clan,” Wallace said. “Pleased to do business with you.”

Niyol stood stunned. Wallace elbowed him. “Niyol Chavez, of Chiricahua Apache Clan.”

“What’s with the clans?” Brown-suit said.

Gray-suit smiled. “They say that to honor you in formal greeting.” He held out a hand. “I am Frans Van der Berg, of no particular clan.”

Wallace took his hand, briefly, remembering that this was what white men did. It was cool and greasy. The other didn’t offer his hand. “Herbert Noble. No clan.”

As the men started unloading their heavy, olive-colored canvas bags, Niyol leaned close to Wallace.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, in slow Spanish.

“Making us a lot of money,” Wallace said.

“We don’t know where they’re going.”

“We’ll find out.”

“We don’t know what they want.”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re being male again.”

“I know,” Wallace said. But, as the drunks say, spend enough stupid and sometimes there’s a return.

The two men led them to a low shack that fronted stables, grinning as the boys struggled with the heavy bags. Wallace worked happily, the slick paper of the twenty-dollar bill sticking to his leg inside his jeans. Outside, a small sign read: ALBUQUERQUE HORSE STABLE AND RENT—NONLOCAL WELCOME. A smaller sign hung below, newly painted: AUTOMOBILE.

In front of the shack was an even more ramshackle stand that advertised FRIENDLY INDIAN GUIDES in faded sky-blue paint and shouted SAFE PASSAGE—UNIQUE SIGHTS—LOCAL HOSTESSES in weathered white below. Smaller, it said, GERALD MANYCOWS, HOOGHAN ANI, PROPRIETOR. A chubby Diné sat cross-legged in front of the low wood counter.

“Can I offer you gentlemen guide services?” the chubby Diné asked.

“Already have them,” Herbert said, nodding at Wallace and Niyol.

The chubby Diné—presumably Gerald Manycows—frowned. His eyes followed Wallace and Niyol as they passed, as if asking, Who are you to steal my custom? Wallace was glad that the rental shack was out of sight of the runway. There was no chance Gerald could have seen the money that changed hands. Still, his heart pounded.

The rental shack was little more than a front to the stables. Inside the front door was a tiny room and a low counter. A grimy window looked out onto a dirt area in front of the stables. Three horses grazed in the shade of the gray, warped wood roofs.

In the middle of the dirt area, a sleek Ford sedan sat. It was the color of new cream. Chrome sparkled in the sunlight. Around the Ford, traditionally dressed Diné chanted and whirled through a Blessingway ceremony.

Herbert and Frans pushed through the back door to the dirt area and watched the Diné, hands on hips. Eventually, a stable boy came forward to the office.

“Nice of them to do this all for us,” Herbert said, nodding at the ceremony. Wallace hid a smile. He didn’t know what the Blessingway was for, but he knew it was more likely to protect the land from damage by the car than to assure the safety of a couple of foreigners. But of course they wouldn’t understand.

The stable boy pretended not to hear. After the Blessingway, money changed hands. Wallace and Niyol loaded the bags into the car. The rental-office men watched them out of the corners of their eyes. None of them could be younger than fifty. Wallace felt he was being measured against some Diné standard he couldn’t hope to understand.

What was the bigger insult? Wallace wondered. Helping the men find their way around Dinétah, or renting them a car?

The sun was setting as they drove off into the eternal west. Herbert drove. Wallace sat beside him, watching the great chrome gauges swing and chatter. The car even had a radio, but it produced only static. Niyol and Frans made the backseat a country of silence.

Wallace tried to imagine the car was a great Elephant Ironclad, like the ones of legend that won Dinétah its freedom. But it didn’t work. It was just another loud, ugly mechanical thing, alien and wrong. The big Ford roared and bounced into the setting sun. Behind them, the airships were beginning their long trip north.

They didn’t go far before nightfall. The lights of Albuquerque’s airfield were still visible in the valley below when Herbert Noble gave up and pulled the car off the road. He looked back toward Albuquerque with a look like he’d just bitten into a sour peach.

“You weren’t kidding about the roads being bad,” Herbert said. “If you could even call that a road.”

“Not many cars here,” Wallace said.

“Should have gotten an elephant,” Niyol said.

“Really?” Herbert said.

“No,” Wallace said. Niyol was making fun of him.

“Why not?”

Elephants are for Diné, Wallace thought. “They’re not good pack animals. They eat too much.” In the gathering dusk, Wallace could imagine Niyol’s grin, hearing the blasphemous words come out of his mouth.

“I believed Lincoln’s elephants were the reason for Dinétah independence,” Frans said. His accent was thick, guttural, almost familiar.

“Not Lincoln’s,” Niyol said.

Frans raised his eyebrows, politely surprised.

“Some escaped on their way over the Rockies. Most came from the Confederate States, after the American Civil War.”

That was what they taught in school, Wallace thought. He preferred the old story, the one that said the elephants emerged from the ground like the Dinétah themselves, a gift of the Diyin Diné. Still, he remembered old filmstrips showing photos of grizzled southerners working in smithies, riveting iron plate in curves suggestive of an elephant’s flanks. But they’d never shown a completed Elephant Ironclad. We did it, Wallace thought. The Elephant Ironclads are ours.

Frans nodded. “Nevertheless, they are impressive beasts.”

“Are you German?” Niyol said.

Bang. That was the accent. Wallace had heard it in a dozen bad American war movies. But Frans just smiled. “I am Dutch. It’s said Dutch sounds Deutsch, if you speak with enough force.”

“Dutch?”

“A small country in Europe, with beautiful windmills,” Frans said.

“I’ve heard of it,” Niyol said. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Herbert interrupted.

“Give me five dollars, and I’d keep going.” Herbert peered out along the road.

“You would break something,” Frans said.

Herbert sighed. “Probably.”

“There will be time tomorrow.”

For what? Wallace wondered. He glanced at Niyol, but his friend refused to meet his gaze. The two men insisted on setting up camp by themselves. They pitched two camouflage-patterned tents with US ARMY SURPLUS stenciled on the side in dripping black, and sparked Coleman gas lanterns, throwing pale light on the green of the early-spring grass and scrub. They hauled two small, heavy bags into one of the tents and zipped it shut.

Wallace sat with Niyol on a big boulder, watching the last color bleed from the twilight sky.

“What did you get us into?” Niyol said.

“A lot of money,” Wallace said, pulling out the twenty-dollar bill. He’d seen American money before, mainly coins. His mother pulled in dollar bills from time to time for her pretty skystone and silver jewelry. But he’d never seen such a big number printed on a bill. “I’ll have money left over, even after I pay everyone back.”

“We’ll have money left over.”

Wallace felt his face go hot and red. “Yeah. We.”

“They’ll ask us where we got it, back in town.”

“So?”

Niyol rolled his eyes. “Just don’t buy any more elephants.”

Herbert and Frans lit a small camp stove and called them to come over. The stove hissed gas into blue flame. They boiled water for coffee and heated pork and beans from cans.

“How long are you staying?” Niyol said.

Herbert and Frans looked at each other before Herbert answered. “A week, we think. Could be longer.”

“Thirty dollars gets you a week,” Wallace said.

“You’ll get more if we stay longer.”

“What are you doing here?” Niyol said.

Another shared glance. “We’re rock hounds,” Herbert said.

“Rock hounds?”

“People who collect rocks.”

“I know.”

“You flew into Dinétah for rocks?” Niyol asked.

“Niyol,” Wallace said.

“It’s okay,” Herbert said. “If I was you, I’d ask, too. Probably a lot earlier. Wouldn’t want any furriners poking around, taking things we shouldn’t.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

Herbert laughed. He looked at Frans.

“We are looking for unusual stones. We will take some photographs. If you do not want us to remove the stones, we will leave them where they are.”

“Why?”

“We’re rock hounds!” Herbert said, as if that explained all.

Niyol nodded and looked down, frowning.

Herbert sighed. “We’re allies. Remember the codetalkers.”

“They won World War Two,” Wallace said.

“They helped,” Herbert admitted.

“Without them, you wouldn’t have a way to whisper secrets. You might’ve lost the Pacific. We read about it in school.” Just like the prophecy said. Diné will save the white man. But you didn’t talk about that to foreigners.

“Maybe.” Herbert drew the word out.

“The atomic bomb won the war,” Frans said.

For a long time, there was no sound except the low sigh of the wind. Wallace remembered photos from the atomic tests in Nevada, and the famous photos of the blast over Hiroshima. Eventually, Herbert and Frans started clearing the plates and scraping the pans. Wallace and Niyol helped in silence.

The two men shared one of the tents, and the boys shared the other. Night breezes made the dark fabric snap and mutter. It was what Wallace imagined a skinwalker might sound like as it stalked past outside. Their sleeping bags were musty and rough, and the darkness was absolute.

“What if we’re gone for weeks?” Niyol said softly in Spanish.

“What if?” Wallace shrugged inside his bag.

“Your mother will kill you.”

“Not when she sees her money back.”

Niyol said nothing.

Wallace sighed and turned over to face the invisible wall of the tent. Eventually he slept. The Diyin Diné sent Wallace a dream. He dreamed of elephants with shining steel armor, marching beneath a sky full of iron-plated airships. But the elephants carried no Diné. And Wallace knew that armored airships were impossible. They would never fly. The riderless elephants advanced into the setting sun, unstopping, like machines. Wallace smelled acrid smoke and turned. Behind him was the Canyon De Chelly and the peach orchards, burning.

Wallace awoke with a start into pitch darkness. The wind had died to a whisper on the tent’s fabric. Niyol breathed softly beside him.

Wallace squeezed his eyes tight and waited for sleep.

He waited a long time.

After a bland breakfast of powdered eggs, they set off into the west again, through the old Valencia land grant toward el Rito and Paguate. The foothills of the San Mateo Mountains rose in the distance, still wrapped in early-morning mist. The scrub shimmered with dew, silver-green in Dinétah’s brief spring. The road wasn’t much more than a donkey track, narrow and heavily rutted from the recent rains. The Ford bounced and groaned over the ruts. The tires spun and the engine roared. Herbert cursed and fought the wheel.

In the backseat, Frans Van der Berg looked up from a map that was marked in smeared blue fountain-pen ink. “Beautiful,” he said, pointing at an airship that floated in the west. They could see the tan-colored gasbag above the groundscreen. A blue-painted passenger cabin poked through the screen, pierced by many small round windows that reflected glints of the sun. Perhaps tourists heading for the Grand Canyon.

Or people like Niyol, heading for the opportunities in California, Wallace thought, frowning.

“Creepy,” Herbert said.

“What is creepy?” Frans said.

“That camouflage.”

Frans sighed. “From what I understand, the fabric barrier is not for camouflage.”

“The skyshields keep us from marring the sky,” Wallace said. “In case the Diyin Diné are looking up from their homes in the earth.”

“Diyin Diné?”

“Gods,” Niyol said.

“Gods in the earth, looking up,” Herbert said, shaking his head. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

“Do not insult our guides,” Frans said.

“What did I say?” Herbert asked.

Frans just shook his head. “It is a beautiful way to travel. Silent and slow, like a bird soaring.”

“It keeps us from marking the land with our presence,” Wallace said. Not that it mattered, this far out of Four Corners. But he supposed all of Dinétah should be respected, even if they had overreached their ancestral lands.

Herbert snorted but said nothing.

They didn’t go far before Frans called a halt. The two men got one of the heavy bags out of the trunk and extracted rock hammers and a hinged aluminum box.

Wallace followed the men, but hung back. They knelt at the ground and picked at rocks, turning them over in their hands like raccoons given a blob of dough. The chill of early morning still bit deep through Wallace’s thin chambray shirt.

“I need the money,” Wallace said.

Niyol just looked at him.

“Not just to pay you back. I need to make something for myself.”

“We all do.”

“You’re going to go to The-Years-That-Finish-You. Then you’ll be gone.”

“Who said that?”

“Everyone can see it,” Wallace said. “You’re smart.”

Niyol shook his head. “Nothing’s certain.”

Silence for a time. The men moved to a shallow stream channel, already dry from the last rains. Wallace and Niyol followed. Niyol walked closer and watched them carefully.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Wallace asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You seem worried.”

“I’m worried they’ll find something they want.”

“So? They said they won’t take anything we won’t want them to.”

“What if they come back with more men?”

“Then we bring more men, too.”

“And if they bring the army? Will your beloved Elephant Ironclads appear out of the earth, to save the Diné once again?”

Wallace looked away. Compared with the powers that strutted on the newsreels, even armored elephants and airships seemed small, easily swept away. He remembered his dream from last night and shivered, wondering what it meant.

“What do we do?” Wallace asked, finally.

“Just watch. For now.”

The two men knelt in the streambed and picked at rocks in its side and bottom. They opened the aluminum box, did something with it, shook their heads. After a while, they moved to another location and did the same thing.

When they finally headed back toward the car, Herbert wore a fake smile and Frans a convincing frown. Wallace suppressed a grin. Whatever they were looking for, they hadn’t found it. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.

The rest of the day was the same routine, endlessly repeated. Drive west, stop, pick at rocks. The San Mateo Mountains seemed as remote as ever. Wallace scuffed his foot on the thin brown dust, wishing something would happen. The men came back with the same expression, a little grimmer every time. At their last stop, a Diné shepherd watched them. He stood silent and motionless as his sheep milled and cropped the new grass. His black, unblinking eyes were like a weight on Wallace. Like an accusation. Is this a sign? Wallace thought. Is this a man, or one of the Diyin Diné, clothed in the form of a man?

Wallace walked closer to the two men, who were using the aluminum box again. Frans took a slender metal wand out of the metal box and held it near some of their rocks. Niyol jumped, as if he had been goosed.

“What?” Wallace said.

Niyol shook his head and walked closer. Wallace followed. The metal wand was connected to the aluminum box with a coiled black cord. Inside the aluminum box was a big dial and a cluster of black Bakelite switches. It made a slow clicking noise.

Frans looked up as Niyol approached. He saw him looking at the box and put on a big fake smile.

“What’s that?” Niyol said.

“It’s an instrument.”

“What does it do?”

“It tells us what the rocks are made of.”

Wallace felt his stomach lurch and slide. Something seemed wrong, very wrong. Would rock hounds have something that was so obviously sophisticated and expensive? Was America that rich? For once, he wished he knew more about America than the newsreels and whispers from the radio stations in Kansas and Colorado.

Wallace expected Niyol to ask more questions, but the other boy nodded, as if satisfied. They walked back toward the car. The shepherd still watched from amid his sheep.

Niyol’s eyes flickered from the shepherd to Wallace and back again. He rubbed his hands together, as if trying to scrub the dirt off them.

“What’s wrong?” Wallace said.

“We have to get out of here,” Niyol said.

“Why?”

“Shh.” The men were coming back from their little dig, looking more disappointed than ever. Wallace noticed that their ties had disappeared during the course of the day, and their suits were smudged with orange and brown earth. Herbert had a handprint in the center of his forehead, dark against his pale skin. Before they got in the car, Wallace drew Niyol aside and said, in Spanish, “What’s happening?”

“Not now,” Niyol said.

Wallace ducked into the car. The sound of the door slamming was leaden and final. Wallace didn’t get to talk to Niyol until they were done with dinner. Herbert and Frans hung close, as if sensing that something had changed. Niyol chattered, complaining about the blandness of the American food, saying that the food they were used to was more Mexican than traditional Diné, and that all you had to do was look around at the place-names to see they were more Spanish than anything else. Wallace frowned at him. Niyol was acting like a scared old man, talking to keep the silence away. The two men eventually drifted off to the car and came back with a bottle of whiskey, which they shared in little tin cups. Wallace watched them, feeling a slow burn of anger. That’s why I don’t have a father, he thought. White man’s booze.

Niyol saw his gaze and pulled him away into the darkness, claiming he needed to take a piss. Wallace didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.

“That was a Geiger counter,” Niyol said, pissing.

“A what?”

Niyol sighed. “You should stop making fun of the newsreels and watch them once in a while. A Geiger counter measures radiation.”

Wallace started, remembering similar clicking wands from the footage of Hiroshima. Except those didn’t click. They buzzed. “So they’re going to bomb here?”

“No,” Niyol said. “I think they’re looking for uranium.”

“Uranium?”

Niyol rolled his eyes. “The stuff they make atomic bombs out of. Didn’t you pay any attention to that American film, The Promise of the Atom, in Science Track?”

Wallace shook his head. He might have slept through it. Or skipped class.

“Why do they want more uranium?”

Niyol frowned. “To make more bombs, probably.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

Niyol laughed, long and hard. Wallace saw the two men swivel to look their way, then go back to their bottle. “Why would a boy want to buy an elephant?” he asked.

Wallace looked down. Because it was my destiny, he thought. He remembered his excitement. Coming home from Pepe’s Bar, his head ringing with the thought that here was an elephant, almost affordable. He’d even started to rebuild his father’s burned-out workshop. He’d even started to imagine beating steel into shapes that would cover his elephant.

“We need to get out of here,” Niyol said. “We have to tell someone.”

“Who?”

Niyol shrugged. “Chief of Albuquerque. Or Benjamin Hatathlie, if he’s campaigning. Someone who can take it to the president.”

“What will they do?”

“If these guys are American army, it might not matter what they do. But they don’t seem like army.”

He remembered meeting one of the codetalkers who was out recruiting. There was a certain distance to him, a faraway look in his eye, a comfort in silence. Like Diné, but more. These men seemed just…men.

“Wait until they’re asleep, then head back?” Wallace said.

Niyol looked at Wallace, his eyes reflecting sparks of stars. “Exactly.”

“I’m not a sellout.”

“I know that,” Niyol said softly. Wallace saw the curve of his smile and grinned back. Wallace looked back down the road, east toward Albuquerque. The glow had long since disappeared behind them. Wallace had never been so far from home. But they hadn’t gone that far. Not with all their stops. If they walked fast, they could be in Albuquerque by morning. They could wait outside the town adobe and wait for the chief to come in.

They’d be heroes.

Wallace wondered if there might be a reward.

In the perfect darkness, Wallace felt a hand on his arm. He jumped and almost cried out.

“It’s time,” Niyol said.

Wallace felt his face go hot. He’d fallen asleep! If it was up to him, they’d have slept until morning, and been trapped with the men for another day. Some hero.

“I…I…,” Wallace began.

“Shh,” Niyol said.

Niyol pushed the flap of the tent open, and starlight slashed into the tent. The moon was only a tiny sliver, but to Wallace’s dark-adjusted eyes it seemed almost as bright as day. Wallace followed Niyol back to the road. It stretched in front of them, a stark relief of charcoal and black in the low-slanting moonlight. They walked softly until the camp had disappeared behind a low rise, then picked up the pace.

“I’m sorry,” Wallace whispered.

“For what?”

“For getting us into this.”

“No harm done,” Niyol said. “In fact, if Dinétah can do something about it, you may have done us all a great service.”

Pride swelled in Wallace, and he walked a little faster. Maybe he would be a hero. Maybe there would be a reward.

They crested a low rise. Ahead of them was a small campfire, casting long flickering shadows from four men. Two horses stood alongside, heads down, enjoying the new grass. The sound of laughter, low and rough, carried on the night breeze.

Wallace had a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach. “Go back,” he hissed, grabbing Niyol’s arm. Niyol nodded and turned around.

Wallace glanced back at the four men. One now stood. He shielded his eyes and looked toward them. The sliver of moon sat low on the horizon ahead.

They can see us, Wallace thought.

From behind them came rough cries.

Wallace ran off the road, toward thicker scrub that might have some chance of hiding them. He heard the crash of Niyol’s feet behind them. Then, moments later, hoofbeats.

The horses galloped past them, throwing up white moonlit dust. The riders brought them around to a quick stop in front of Wallace. He skidded to a stop, and Niyol stumbled to the ground beside him. Both horses carried two riders. One hopped down and approached. In the dim moonlight, his face looked familiar. The chubby Diné from the guide shack. Gerald Manycows. Many cows, many hogans, Wallace thought desperately.

“Where were you two going?” Gerald said. “Did you already steal all their money?”

“We got homesick,” Wallace said, squeezing his eyes shut and willing tears. He snuffled and let the tears cut channels down his cheeks.

Gerald laughed. “Sure,” he said. “We believe that, don’t we?”

Titters from his companions.

“What do you want?” Niyol said.

“The money.”

“What money?” Wallace said.

Gerald stepped closer. His breath smelled like sour beer. “Everyone at the airfield saw money change hands. Don’t make me hurt you.” He pulled a long knife from his belt. Wallace dug in his pockets and handed Gerald the sweat-slick bill.

Gerald held it up in the moonlight. “Twenty dollars? Twenty dollars!”

The others drew closer, as if pulled by invisible threads.

“Why did they give you twenty dollars, kid?”

“They set the price, not us,” Niyol said.

Gerald shook his head and turned away, muttering something that Wallace couldn’t hear.

“How much more money do they have?” Gerald asked.

“I don’t know,” Wallace said.

“Maybe a lot, if they’re dumb enough to give you this.” The calculation of greed spread an ugly grin on Gerald’s face. Wallace’s stomach flipped over. He imagined that was what he’d looked like, when he’d told Herbert and Frans they were worth thirty dollars.

“Search the boys,” Gerald said. “See if they’re holding back.”

Wallace and Niyol were disrobed and thoroughly groped. The night air froze Wallace’s skin, and his teeth clacked and chattered. The flunkies noticed this and laughed. After an age, they were allowed to get back into their clothes.

“What now?” Niyol said.

Gerald laughed. “You’re going to help us get the rest of the money.”

“How?”

“We’re all friends here. You can introduce us to your other friends.”

“They’re asleep,” Wallace said.

“That’s even better. Maybe nobody gets hurt.”

Wallace saw the men, their throats slashed, their bodies buried in shallow graves. Like the stories you sometimes heard, Diné gone bad, imagining all the old conflicts. “You don’t need us.”

Gerald laughed. “I don’t need you telling the police, either.”

“We wouldn’t do that!”

“Not after helping us.”

“They’re looking for uranium,” Niyol said. “We left so we could turn them in.”

Gerald frowned. “They’re looking for what?”

“Uranium. What they make atomic bombs out of.”

For a few moments, there was silence. Then Gerald shrugged and said, “I don’t care if they’re looking for Changing Woman herself.”

“But—“Niyol said.

“Shut up,” Gerald said, and punched Niyol in the face. Niyol fell to his knees, grabbing his nose. Blood seeped through his fingers, black in the moonlight.

“Any more questions?” Gerald said.

Wallace shook his head.

Gerald remounted his horse. One of the other riders stayed dismounted, to prod them along with a knife. They made their way back to the Americans’ camp, silent except for the snuffle of the horses and the crunch of their feet on the dirt.

The two tents stood silently under the moonlight. The big Ford sedan was painted white like a ghost. The fire, long dead, still telegraphed the scent of smoke into the night. Gerald had them all dismount when they spotted the camp. Gerald’s knife prodded Wallace forward. Wallace thought of yelling to try to warn the men, but he couldn’t make his mouth open. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Niyol. He knew his friend’s accusing eyes would be dark and sad. Diyin Diné, I ask your help, Wallace thought. If we escape this, I will learn to be content. Gerald had them stop by the Ford, positioning it between them and the tents. The front flaps of the tents faced the car, making it easy to see if anyone emerged. Gerald told them all to stop moving. Silence descended. No sound came from the tents.

“Look at all the stuff,” one of the flunkies said, pointing inside the car. Tools glittered, spilling from an open bag on the backseat.

“Neat,” Gerald said. One of the others opened the trunk. It popped open with a metallic bonk that was incredibly loud in the still night.

“Even better,” Gerald said, looking at the bags. “We do the car first, then the face-to-face.”

“Maybe the car’s enough, Gerald,” one of the flunkies said.

Gerald shook his head. “I’ll say what’s enough.”

“But they might have guns.”

Gerald turned to Wallace. “Do they have guns?”

“I didn’t see any,” Wallace said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because you’ll be first in line if bullets come our way,” Gerald said, watching Wallace. Wallace just looked at him.

They cleaned out the car first, gingerly easing the heavy bags out of the trunk and carrying them over to the horses. Wallace kept hoping for them to drop one of the bags and raise the alarm, but they made little noise other than a few muffled thuds and a quiet whinny from one of the horses.

“After this, you introduce us to your friends,” Gerald said. “Just remember, you’ll be standing in front.”

Gerald popped the car door open and handed the tool bag out. He left Wallace and Niyol in the care of one of his companions and disappeared into the car, running his hands under the seats, looking for more loot.

The flunky in charge of Wallace and Niyol took no chances. He held them close, pressing twin blades against their necks. He breathed heavily, and Wallace could see his eyes darting back and forth. There was a sharp crack and the flunky’s head exploded in a fountain of gore. Wallace felt warm blood spatter his cheeks. The flunky made a single surprised sound, something like a sigh, and the pressure of the knife at Wallace’s throat fell away. The flunky crumpled to the ground. Wallace moved without thinking, snatching the knife out of the flunky’s hand. Niyol watched, wide-eyed, then bent and did the same.

The flunky who had been watching the tents moved fast to get behind the car, but he wasn’t fast enough. Another crack split the night, he went down, clutching his stomach and screaming. Another crack and muzzle-flash from the tent, and the screaming stopped.

Gerald wriggled back out of the car, like a fish on land seeking water. He saw the boys huddled in the lee of the car. He saw their knives. He grabbed his own knife out of his belt and held it at the ready. Wallace tried to copy him, crouching below the roofline of the car. He knew nothing about knife fighting. Out of the corner of his eye, Wallace saw movement. The tent flap opened, and Herbert Noble emerged. He pointed a long rifle out at the car.

“Come on out,” he said. “This is a thirty-ought-six. I’ll shoot right through the car if I need to.”

Gerald just ducked below the level of the windows. Wallace and Niyol copied him. Three knife points faced one another in the Ford’s shadow.

“I’m not kidding,” Herbert said. “I’ll shoot you right through the car.” His voice was dead calm, as if it was something he said every day.

“First we dance,” Gerald said, lunging at Wallace with his knife. His face was an insane mask of anger. This is the last thing I’ll ever see, Wallace thought.

“Stop,” Frans said from the scrub behind Gerald. There was the click of a pistol cocking. Gerald snarled and turned away from Wallace. Wallace saw Frans lying in the scrub, holding a small pistol. Somehow, he’d gotten out of the tent and circled the back of the car and they hadn’t noticed. There was another crack from the direction of the tent, followed by a thud. Wallace risked a glance in the direction of the horses, and saw Gerald’s third flunky crumpled there.

“Drop the knives and stand up,” Frans said, getting to his feet.

Wallace and Niyol dropped their knives. Gerald grabbed his tighter and rushed at Frans. Frans frowned and squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times. Gerald rocked back and fell dead at Frans’s feet. Frans prodded Gerald once with his shoe, then turned his gun on Wallace and Niyol. Herbert came around the other side of the car, his rifle held at the ready.

He raised his rifle and pointed it at Wallace. Wallace felt the world go swimmy and gray. He clutched at the door handle, his legs suddenly weak. Diyin Diné, I am sorry if I offended you, I should never have helped the outsiders who can never understand.

“What were you doing?” Herbert said. “Trying to leave us?”

“No…we were…we…”

“Bullshit! We saw you leaving!” Herbert screamed.

“We were scared!” Wallace said, closing his eyes against tears. “We wanted to go home!”

The barrel inched closer. “How true is that guide crap you fed us? Do we really need you?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Why?”

“Some Diné shoot without asking. Some only help Diné.”

Frans put a hand on Herbert’s rifle barrel, forcing it down. “They are only children,” he said.

“We’re sorry!” Wallace said, letting the words pour out of him. “We won’t try to leave! We’ll be good guides!”

“We were just homesick,” Niyol whispered.

That was enough. Herbert’s rifle barrel dropped the rest of the way.

“Time to clean up the mess,” Herbert said.

The two men made Wallace and Niyol help them dig a long, shallow grave. Wallace dug steadily, trying not to think about what kind of men could be so unaffected by the killing. Army? He didn’t think even the army could be so cold.

But that’s what Americans do, his father had always told him, in the days before he drank his mind away and disappeared. They’re always fighting. That’s just how they are. Wallace let his body settle into the pattern of digging. He cursed the tiny folding shovel as blisters formed and began to run. He didn’t dare look at Niyol. He could only imagine the black disgust on his face. When they were done, Herbert transferred the bags from the horses to the car. “What do we do with the horses?” he asked.

“Take their saddles and let them go,” Niyol said. “Someone will be happy for the gift.”

“We shouldn’t shoot them?”

“I don’t think we can dig a grave that deep.”

Herbert frowned and unbuckled the saddles. Wallace noticed that he was wearing Manycows’s knife in his belt, as if it were some great prize.

They buried the saddles with the bodies. Gerald Manycows’s blank eyes looked up at them, his mouth open in a silent scream. Wallace winced as the first shovelful of dry earth struck the chubby man’s face. Light painted the eastern sky when they were done covering the bodies. Wallace wanted nothing more than to crawl into the tent and sleep, but they had to pack up the camp and move on. As they bounced along the dirt path south of the San Mateos, Wallace realized he’d never pulled the twenty-dollar bill out of Gerald Manycows’s pocket. It was now under a couple of feet of dirt, miles behind them.

He felt laughter welling up inside of him. He clamped it down. If he started, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop.

Instead, he remembered Frans Van der Berg’s words.

They are only children.

Later that morning, they had to swing the car off the road for a small caravan of three elephants, weighted down with heavy bags and crates. A merchant sat on a thick padded platform atop the lead elephant. He wore a bright white shirt and new blue jeans. Two children rode the other elephants, frowning as they bumped along the road.

Wallace looked at Niyol, daring him to say anything. Niyol just shook his head. The merchant waved at the car as he passed, offering a puzzled grin. Probably wondering why Diné and white men were sharing a car in the middle of Dinétah. Wallace waved back, trying to smile. He wanted to get out of the car and tell them, It’s all a mistake, I only did it for the money, but I don’t even have the money now, can I take it all back, can I go with you.

“They may be impractical, but they are impressive,” Frans said, watching the elephants recede into the distance in his rearview mirror.

They stopped at a long channel that had been cut by runoff coming out of the San Mateos. The land at the base of the hills was rugged and rutted, carved into fissures where raw rock and earth showed. Nothing like the unearthly beauty of northern Dinétah, but better than flatland and scrub. The men had Wallace and Niyol stay close. Herbert wore a pistol in his belt, and Frans used the Geiger counter openly. They dug deep into the riverbed and appeared excited when they found some yellow rock. But the Geiger counter clicked only slightly faster when they placed the wand near it. Frans wiped off the yellow dust and frowned.

Maybe they won’t find anything, Wallace thought. Maybe we’ll get out of this yet. After seeing the guides die, though, he doubted it. Wallace rubbed at his face, remembering the dried blood he’d washed off that morning. He still felt unclean.

No. They will keep you around as long as you’re useful, and then they will dig two more graves. Unless they could find a chance to escape. Wallace tried to catch Niyol’s eye, but his friend wouldn’t look at him. When he tried whispering in Spanish, Herbert frowned and told them to speak in English. They took the car farther into the mountains. Another stop. Another slow clicking from the Geiger counter. Lunch came and went. They passed a Diné man leading a group of donkeys, heavily laden with bags. He stopped and watched the car pass, his head swiveling to track them. His expression didn’t change, and he didn’t try to wave.

Another stop. They were well into the foothills. A ravine rose nearby. Wallace kept looking at it, wondering if it was a possible escape route.

Niyol saw the direction of Wallace’s gaze and shook his head slowly. Wallace looked away. Niyol was right. Even if he made it to the ravine before he was shot, he didn’t know how deep it would go. He imagined Herbert following him until the ravine narrowed, his own Canyon De Chelly. The Geiger counter clucked a little faster this time, but the men still looked disappointed. Wallace suppressed a grin as they walked back to the car.

Another airship passed over them as they reached the car, almost invisible against the blue sky. This one’s skyshield was taut and seamless. A cargo ship, perhaps heading for California. Wallace remembered his jest about becoming an airman. You could be on that ship now, heading for California, he thought.

But this was his path. He created it. He would have to walk it to the end. They drove past the little town of Paguate, where shepherds watched over dirty brown sheep that cropped the new grass. It wasn’t yet birthing time, so there were no new fluffy white babies among them. The shepherds watched, but they didn’t wave, as the car chugged past the little adobe village. Another stop. This one at the base of Mount Taylor. Herbert and Frans paused at an outcropping of loose rock that bore a darker stain running through it. They chipped away at the rock with their hammers. Wallace noticed that Herbert’s suit was torn at the shoulder, and a huge orange-brown ring of dust and sweat had worked its way into his open collar. Frans had removed his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, exposing arms lightly frosted with pale hair. The backs of his hands bore strange ridged scars, as if his flesh had melted and been made whole again.

They struck more yellow rock and wanded it with the Geiger counter. The counter buzzed loudly, and the two men exclaimed, juggling the yellow rock in their hands. They dug deeper with their rock hammers, beads of sweat flying in excitement.

“This is bad,” Niyol whispered.

“We could run. Now.” While they’re distracted.

“Boys, stop talking!” Herbert said. He pulled his gun out of his belt and held it at the ready as Frans continued digging.

“Looks like a whole vein, running right into the mountain,” Frans said.

“Is that good?” Herbert said.

“It is amazing!”

They collected some of the yellowish stone and brought it back to the car.

“I thought you said we could decide what you took back,” Niyol said.

Herbert smirked but said nothing.

They followed a thin trail up to the north, now to the west of Mount Taylor. At the next stop, the Geiger counter buzzed excitedly again, and the men collected more stones. These were dark and looked like nothing more than ordinary rock.

They want the magic of the sacred land, Wallace thought, remembering tales of Mount Taylor. “Pulling out the heart of the Diyin Diné.”

“What was that?” Herbert said.

Wallace shook his head. He wasn’t aware that he had spoken his thoughts. He felt numb from lack of sleep and constant fear.

“You said something. What was it?”

“You’re pulling out the heart of the Diyin Diné,” Wallace said. “The gods.”

Herbert chuckled. “Stupid superstitions!”

“Do not insult them,” Frans said. “Navajo mythology is very specific about where their gods reside.”

Herbert shook his head and muttered.

Their last stop was far into the foothills. Barren land that grew no scrub and little grass. Not even suitable for grazing. And yet Wallace saw that someone had set up a tiny shack at the base of the hills. It had fallen in on itself, its contours gone swaybacked.

The first rocks they uncovered made the Geiger counter click with only moderate speed. They followed a streambed up toward the mountain, toward the shack, pulling more rocks. The buzzing got steadily faster. Wallace thought of a wasps’ nest, buzzing anger into the summer heat.

“This is a rich land,” Frans said when the counter finally buzzed frantically. “There’s ore virtually everyplace we look.”

Herbert just smiled. It was a terrible expression, like that of a naked skull. They were close to the shack. Close enough that Wallace could see how strange it was. It appeared to have been covered with metal scales at one time. Rust coated the lumpy remains heavily, bleeding down into the pale earth. From within, smooth pale timbers poked through the sides. No. Not timbers.

Wallace walked toward the shack, his heart beating frantically. He heard his breath coming in short gasps. He heard a shout behind him. He ignored it and walked faster.

Another shout.

He could see it now. Bone.

He ran. Expecting the shot. Not caring.

He stopped just short of the remains. His feet scuffed through the blood-red rust into pale soil. He saw the tusks thrusting out of one side of the rusted armor. Bright white ribs showed where metal links had broken and the armor’s plates had separated. A large leg bone was half buried in rust-red dirt. Wallace shivered. They were real. The Elephant Ironclads. They were real. Herbert skidded to a stop and took Wallace’s arm. Wallace shook him off and stepped forward to touch the rusted metal plates. Oxidized iron flaked off on his fingers. He rubbed them together in front of his face.

Real. They were real.

Their remains had been here all along. No reason for passersby to go look at the old collapsed shack. Here was the proof that everyone wished for, but nobody really believed. The elephants had been more than just beasts to scare the settlers. Chee Dodge’s friends had come to Dinétah after the fall of the South. They had made Elephant Ironclads. It wasn’t just a story. It was like all the old men whispered about.

It was true.

“What is it?” Frans said, bringing Niyol. Niyol’s eyes widened, looking past them to the pile of bones and rusted iron plates.

“It’s an Elephant Ironclad,” Wallace said.

“A what?” Herbert said.

Wallace just shook his head.

Frans stared down at the remains of the Elephant Ironclad. Something that could have been understanding flickered in his eyes. Wallace imagined Frans telling Herbert it was okay, they should let the boys go.

“This is an amazing sight,” Frans said. “But we have larger concerns.”

Herbert nodded, glancing down at the remains one more time. They could have been dust and rock. They exist, Wallace thought. He wondered if, like the shepherd, it was a sign. And if it was a sign, what did it mean? Did it mean their fate was to slowly dissolve into the sand? Or was this supposed to fire his heart and make him into a great warrior?

Wallace realized just how little he knew. If he had taken the time to visit Grandfather’s hogan and really learn the ancient ways, he might understand more of the signs.

Diyin Diné, if I live through this, I will learn.

Herbert Noble flogged the poor Ford north as the sun painted the western sky. He hummed a happy tune. The flat-topped Zuni Mountains tracked their passage, purple-gray in the sunset. Wallace stared straight ahead, wondering if he would die that night.

“This is good,” Frans said when the path had become little more than a trail. Ahead of them was nothing but scrub and dirt. Farther north was Chaco Canyon, where men who had attracted the attention of the Dinétah authorities were said to hide.

They stopped and made camp. The two men made Wallace and Niyol work as they drank whiskey from the bottle and watched. Wallace caught shards of conversation:

“Need to run a full radiographic survey…”

“What kind of skills do we need…”

“We need to let the fearless leader know…”

When the tents were up, Herbert unpacked one of the larger bags. Inside was a gray metal box with a big round knob on the front, a wet-cell battery, and many feet of wire. Wallace recognized it instantly from class: a shortwave radio. Frans strung the antenna as Herbert connected the battery. Vacuum tubes bled orange light from the louvers in the radio’s case. Herbert twisted knobs and mumbled into the mike. The radio blatted unintelligible answers. Frans watched the boys, never looking away for a moment. Who are they calling? Wallace wondered. The scofflaws in Chaco Canyon? Or Colorado, where the Americans were supposed to have an army base? Which would be worse?

“I’m sorry,” Wallace said.

“You already said that,” Niyol said.

“I needed to say it again.”

Niyol looked down. “I’m sorry, too.”

Wallace frowned. “Why are you sorry?”

Silence.

“Niyol!”

“Remember when you built the airship?” Niyol said.

Wallace smiled, remembering. They were eleven. One chill winter’s end, like this one. Niyol had brought a paper bag and had shown Wallace how it could be made into a little airship by holding it over a hot fire. Something he learned on the Science Track.

Seeing the floating paper bag, Wallace had a vision. He would build his own airship. He would fly over Isleta, and people would look up in wonder. He would float north to Albuquerque, where the airmen would swarm around, their eyes bright with wonder at the boy who had built his own airship. He might even be able to carry goods, like a merchant. He saw himself rich and happy, beaming down at the shepherds and their flocks.

Over the next weeks, he spent his savings on the lightest linen he could find. He borrowed his mother’s sewing machine and frantically worked the treadle, sewing together a patchwork gasbag. Eventually, he had a thing that was twenty feet long and almost as wide. Wallace tied a small harness to the bottom and made padded loops for his arms.

Niyol watched and helped, telling him stories about Thomas Baldwin, the southerner who had brought his balloon act to Dinétah in the 1880s, then worked with them to build airships in the new century. Wallace tried to ignore him, wanting to keep his airship to himself, to the Diné. Wallace cut a hole in the tin roof of his father’s old work shed and pulled the fabric bag up on top of it. It hung like a hand-me-down dress. He filled the work shed with kindling and firewood while Niyol told him that he’d kill himself.

Don’t, Niyol said, when he lit the match.

Wallace lit the kindling carefully and went outside to grasp the harness, imagining his ascent into the sky. The big fabric bag rippled and began to billow upward from the shed. It began to take on the roundness of an airship, but in a crazy patchwork way. He’d used remnants of every color. Pink, blue, orange, sand, ocher. Fabrics with stripes and zigzags and flowers.

The top of his airship rose higher. Soon it would rise over the small hillock that separated their hogan from the town proper, and the people of Isleta would come out to see. But the groundshield. It had no groundshield.

Wallace gritted his teeth. Hopefully the gods wouldn’t be looking that day. Or maybe they would laugh at the young-man-that-would-fly.

Wallace felt the harness tug his hands. He grinned at Niyol, whose eyes had gone big and unbelieving. He was going to fly!

The bag burst into flame.

Not slowly. Instantly. One moment it was a smoothly swelling patchwork, the next it was a collapsing wall of burning linen. Wallace fell to the ground and saw flames falling toward him. He scrambled away frantically, kicking his legs to escape the burning fabric. He shrugged out of the harness and ran. Flames struck just behind him. Hot wind pushed him.

Wallace turned to see flames engulf the work shed. Niyol ran to the pump to bring buckets of water. Wallace followed. It was futile. The flames grew, and the shed folded inward on itself, as if it were made of paper.

Wallace shook his head, coming back to the present. “I’m an idiot,” he said softly.

“But you dream,” Niyol said.

“You should have stopped me.”

Niyol shook his head. “Sometimes you have to dream.”

After dinner, Niyol tried to get himself killed.

“So you’re going to make a bomb?” Niyol said.

Herbert paused with the second bottle of whiskey halfway to his mouth. Frans turned to look at Niyol, giving him an ironic grin.

“If only it were that easy,” Frans said.

“You’re not Dutch. You’re probably some German scientist. What’s your real name? Viktor?”

“Niyol!” Wallace hissed.

“It seems you know all our secrets,” Frans said. “My name is still Frans, however.”

“You can take our land, but you can’t take our souls,” Niyol said, looking at Wallace. The two men snorted and went back to drinking.

“We won’t help you,” Niyol said.

“Niyol, stop!” Wallace said.

“You might as well kill us now.”

Herbert Noble returned the grin. “Nope. Radiographic surveys are a hell of a lot of work. You’ll be helping, plenty.”

“We won’t help,” Niyol said.

“Yes, you will.”

“No, we won’t,” Wallace said.

Herbert opened his mouth as if to say something, but the low drone of a plane from the west cut him off. He looked out over the moonlit valley, where red and white lights blinked slowly in the sky, falling steadily lower. Herbert went to the car, got a flare, lit it. The little plane circled once, falling lower. This is the end of the path, Wallace thought. He imagined a dozen big army men piling out of the plane, ready to finish the job the white men had started, so many years ago. The plane aligned itself with the rough road and fell out of the sky. It bumped down the road and coasted to a stop in a cloud of dust. A single man got out and walked toward them. When the light of their fire touched his face, Wallace started. He looked at Niyol, but his friend only nodded, as if he wasn’t surprised.

It was Benjamin Hatathlie, the vice president of Dinétah.

Hatathlie’s expression didn’t change as his eyes paused for an instant on Wallace and Niyol. In the flickering firelight, they were dark and impenetrable, like chips of obsidian.

“Who are the boys, Mr. Noble?” Hatathlie said.

“Guides,” Herbert said, his jaw set stubbornly.

“Should we walk and talk?”

“No. They know what we’re doing.”

“They know?”

“Some other assholes came after us. Had to kill them. They saw it.”

Hatathlie turned to Wallace. “Who did they kill?”

“Gerald Manycows, of Many Hogans Clan. And three of his friends. We didn’t know them.”

Hatathlie blinked, once, slowly.

“It was them or us!” Herbert said.

“What did you do with them?”

“We buried them,” Wallace said.

Hatathlie nodded.

“This is the smart one,” Frans said, nodding at Niyol. “He saw the Geiger counter and knew what we were doing.”

“Is that true?” Hatathlie asked. “How does a boy know this?”

“Movies,” Niyol said.

Hatathlie grinned. “Of course. Education from the screen. I should have known the American fables would have effects.”

“And now you’ve sold us out to them!” Wallace said.

Hatathlie chuckled. “To the Americans? No. They have their weapons. It’s now time that we develop our own.”

Oh my Diyin Diné, living in the earth, Wallace thought. This couldn’t be happening. A Diné who rode willingly in a plane. A Diné willing to tear out the heart of the earth. It wasn’t possible!

“Should we be telling them this?” Herbert said.

Hatathlie nodded. “Of course. This is our new path. There’s no turning away from it.”

“I don’t know,” Herbert said. “They seem pretty stubborn.”

Hatathlie knelt down in front of the fire and turned to face Wallace and Niyol. He let a big grin spread across his face. It transformed him from a scary, powerful man to someone who would look at home telling stories in front of a fireplace.

“Would you like to hear how Dinétah can become great again?” Hatathlie spoke softly. Herbert shifted uncomfortably. “And Texas.”

Hatathlie ignored him.

“Tell us,” Niyol said.

Wallace almost protested. He almost said, No, not for any reason. If you are to rip out the heart of the earth and kill the gods, I don’t want to know how great it will make us. But he looked at his friend and saw the intense and desperate look in his eye, and said nothing. Maybe it would be better to know. Maybe, for once, it would be good to follow Niyol’s wisdom.

“Once, the Diné were great,” Hatathlie said. “We owned this land and the land beyond. Where we walked, others fell by the wayside. The Apache and Hopi respected us. We were the most powerful tribe on the continent.”

And we still are, Wallace thought.

“But we were fooled. I no longer believe the elephants were a gift of the First Ones. I think they were a gift of Coyote, to fool us into following a path and losing our soul.”

“We won Dinétah!” Wallace said.

“Yes!” Hatathlie nodded. “And now we’re surrounded by America. Rich, strong America. Infecting our brightest with their own ideas.” He looked at Niyol, and Niyol looked away.

“To the south, Mexico. Still richer than us. At all points of the compass we’re surrounded by more powerful countries. We’re trapped in a cage of our own making. We could be so much richer if we embraced the present and changed with the world.

“And the world is changing. You’ve seen it. The atomic weapon ended World War Two with a single stroke. It is the greatest power the world has seen. And in a few short years, many nations will have their own. Including ours.”

“And Texas,” Herbert said.

“Yes,” Hatathlie said. “Dinétah, joined with a newly independent Texas, will be a great force in the world. Where we lead the change, rather than turn away from it.”

“Who are you, then?” Niyol asked Herbert. “The Texas governor?”

Herbert laughed. “No! He’s just a lapdog of the Americans. I’m an independent businessman. With connections.”

“A mobster, in other words.”

Herbert frowned. “Kid, your movies make you too smart for your own good—”

“Shh,” Hatathlie said. “We’re having a friendly conversation. Let’s keep it that way.”

Herbert grumbled and fell silent.

“If Dinétah is rich in uranium,” Hatathlie said, throwing a glance at Frans, who nodded enthusiastically,

“we have three choices. One, we can wait for the Americans to discover it, and decide that letting us keep Dinétah was a bad idea. Two, we can try to sell it to them, which will make some of us very, very rich. But in the end, they will have the uranium and the bombs, and they will decide what we do. If they decide they want Arizona and the New Mexico territories back, if they want to make Colorado and Nevada slightly larger, they’ll do it. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them. Three, we can mine it ourselves, develop our own weapons, and establish ourselves as a nation with the foresight to be a true world power. Which would you choose?”

Wallace sighed. It all sounded so reasonable. So proper. So right. But why couldn’t they just leave the uranium where it was? Why couldn’t they just hide it, forget it ever existed? Why did Hatathlie bring these men out here? Why did he have to start this whole thing?

Wallace shook his head. He wished for words, old words, powerful words that could change the world. Words that would make Hatathlie change his mind in an instant. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Hatathlie shook his head. “No choice? None?”

Wallace shook his head and looked at Niyol. Niyol looked away.

“I understand,” Hatathlie said. “It’s a difficult thing to think about. We’ve been small and poor for so long that we can’t think of ourselves as rich and powerful. But it’s time to end the tyranny of that idea.”

“I never thought we were poor,” Wallace said.

Hatathlie laughed. “You’ve seen the American movies, their sprawling modern homes, the families with two cars and a television, and you think we’re not poor?”

“Those are only things, ” Wallace said.

“Things matter.”

Wallace shook his head. “I am Wallace Chee of the Big Water Clan. That matters.”

“And I’m Niyol Chavez, Chiricahua Apache Clan. Hello, brother.”

Hatathlie frowned and put his hands on his hips, as if confronting a stubborn mule.

“You look Diné, but you are white,” Wallace said.

Hatathlie’s frown deepened. “If President Lincoln hadn’t accepted King Mongkut’s gift of the elephants, this might be a very different world today. It is time for us to accept our own elephants.”

“No,” Wallace said.

“No,” Niyol said.

Hatathlie sighed. “Maybe you’ll listen to reason in the morning.”

Not if it’s your reason, Wallace thought.

He turned away from the boys and addressed Herbert and Frans. “I understand we’re in business.”

“There’s an entire vein of high-grade ore running into Mount Taylor,” Herbert said, pointing at a map.

“And more, scattered here and here.”

“This appears to be an area extremely rich in uranium ores,” Frans said. The three men shared a new bottle of whiskey around and huddled over the map, laughing and gesturing excitedly. The boys could have been statues. More than once, Wallace thought about running, but he couldn’t imagine outrunning the men.

The men eventually finished their discussion and agreed to take turns watching the boys as they slept. Wallace sighed and lay down on the ground as far from the fire as he could. Niyol lay beside him. Wallace looked up at the stars, bright and cold and uncaring. Even though he was exhausted, sleep wouldn’t come.

“I’m going to leave,” Wallace whispered. Herbert had been watching them. Now he sat by the fire, head down, apparently sleeping.

“Where?” Niyol hissed, eyeing Herbert.

“Away from here.”

“Who are you going to tell?”

“Everybody.”

“What can they do?”

Wallace frowned. “I have to try.”

Silence for a time. Wallace wished that an airship would pass over them, low enough that he could shout for help. He wondered if they would stop.

“I’m going,” Wallace said.

“I’ll stay here,” Niyol said. “In case he’s not asleep.”

“What will you do if he isn’t?”

A crescent of white teeth showed in the moonlight. “I don’t know.”

Wallace smiled back. He turned over on his belly, as if rolling in his sleep. He waited, then edged forward, pulling himself away from the camp. Slowly, over a period of several minutes, he crawled away from the camp.

No noise from Herbert. He snuck a look back. The man’s head still hung at an uncomfortable angle. When Wallace was about twenty feet away, he moved to hands and knees, crawling fast. Still nothing from Herbert.

Wallace stood and jogged as quickly as he dared, his feet making soft shushing sounds on the loose sand and dust. His shoulder blades itched, as if an invisible sight were trained between them. He remembered the flunky’s head exploding, drops of gore spattering his face. He resisted the urge to look back. Soon he would be far enough away, over a series of low hills and behind some of the taller scrub. Then he’d have a real chance.

Wallace sprinted up the first hill, rising like a bread-loaf mound in the desert. He held his breath as he crested it and dropped out of the camp’s line of fire. At the bottom, he grinned and looked back, happy to see that he could no longer see the embers of the fire, the car, or the plane.

“Stop right there,” said a voice, behind him. In Navajo.

Wallace froze.

“Turn around.”

Wallace turned, slowly, to face the voice.

A man stood in front of him, clothed in traditional Diné garb. The bright colors were gray and pastel in the moonlight. His skin glistened as if oiled. Smooth black hair piled above deep eye sockets. He looked like a picture out of a history book.

“I am Ahiga, of Shining Elephant Clan,” the man said, in Navajo. Wallace frowned, the words running ahead of his ability to translate. When they’d all registered, he said, clumsily, “I am Wallace Chee, of Big Water Clan.”

Ahiga bowed. “Greetings, Wallace Chee. Why are you here? Why are you leaving your companions?”

“I, uh…” Wallace searched for words. “Men come…to steal land.”

“Speak English, if it’s easier.” In English.

“Yes. Thanks,” Wallace said. He started a quick account of who the men were and why they were there, but his voice died when he saw the elephants.

Two of them, standing quietly in the shade of one of the low hills. Covered with some kind of blankets. If they hadn’t moved, he never would have seen them. One still carried a rider. Ahiga’s gaze flickered to the elephants and back to Wallace. He cocked his head to the side and told Wallace to go on.

Wallace had to explain that the men had found a precious metal and were plotting to take over Dinétah. He told Ahiga about Benjamin Hatathlie. He told him about Niyol, still in the camp. He asked for Ahiga’s help.

Ahiga said nothing. He made a gesture with the fingers of his right hand, and the elephants walked over to stand at his side. They moved almost silently.

Up close, Wallace could see that the rider of the other elephant was an older man, also dressed in traditional garb. Wallace couldn’t see his eyes, but he got the feeling the old man was looking at him.

“I am Yiska Laguna, of Shining Elephant Clan,” the old man said, his voice thin and reedy. Wallace told him his name and clan. Yiska nodded once, as if satisfied. Shining Elephant Clan. Like the Elephant Ironclads, shining in the orange light of sunset in a thousand old paintings. But the elephants they rode weren’t armored. They were covered with heavy blankets, layered like scales.

Blankets with frayed edges that exposed tiny lines of shining metal. Blankets that clapped against one another with a faint metallic song.

They’d padded the armor. Of course. That made sense.

Wallace felt suddenly light-headed. The Elephant Ironclads still exist, he thought. They’re real, and they’re still here!

Wallace knew he had to be dreaming. He slapped himself in the face, willing wakefulness. Nothing changed. The elephants still stood before him. Ahiga gave him a strange grin. Yiska sat imperturbably on top of the other elephant.

“Are you…are they the Elephant Ironclads?” Wallace asked.

“They have been called that,” Ahiga said.

“They’re beautiful,” Wallace said.

And they were. They were everything he imagined. They stood towering over him, topped by the multicolored warriors of legend. Wallace imagined the scene set against a backdrop of sunrise, with airships rising from the east. It was Diné, it was Dinétah, it was everything that Benjamin Hatathlie wasn’t.

“Where have you been?” Wallace asked.

Ahiga smiled and looked around, as if indicating all the land. “Everywhere.”

“But…nobody believes you really exist.”

“People who need to know, know.”

“You don’t know how important you are!”

Ahiga just looked at him.

“Will you help me?” Wallace asked.

“With what?”

Wallace realized he hadn’t finished his story about Herbert and Frans and Benjamin Hatathlie. The mention of uranium produced only blank looks. Wallace tried to explain about nuclear weapons. More blank looks. Finally, he settled for telling them uranium was something like gold, and the men wanted to mine it.

Finally, Yiska stirred. “These bilaganna want to tear out the heart of Mount Taylor?” Yiska said.

“That’s where they said the vein was,” Wallace said.

Yiska’s ancient face puckered into a deep frown. “This Hatathlie…he agrees?”

“He’s helping them,” Wallace said.

The frown deepened. Yiska motioned Ahiga over to his side, and they had a short conversation in Navajo.

“We will help you,” Ahiga said.

Ahiga mounted his ride and reached down to help Wallace up. Wallace sat behind Ahiga. The warmth of the elephant, even through the plates and fabric, was almost overwhelming. Wallace realized he could feel the beat of its heart, a low thudding beneath his legs. He laid his head on the elephant’s back and heard the rush of breath in its lungs, the faint creak of bones and muscles, the singing of tendons. Ahiga made a small noise, and the elephant started moving. It was like his first time riding a horse when he was very, very small and the horse seemed very, very large. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

Wallace looked up at the stars. They were no different from the stars earlier. But they no longer seemed cruel.

The elephants approached the camp almost soundlessly. Wallace saw the last embers of the fire, tiny red sparks in the charcoal-drawn landscape. Herbert was slumped to one side, snoring. The other two men lay on the ground, unmoving. Niyol was still wrapped in his sleeping bag.

“Which is your friend?” Ahiga whispered.

Wallace pointed at Niyol.

Ahiga caught Yiska’s eye and pointed at Niyol. Ahiga nodded.

Yiska made a low, harsh bark.

The elephants charged. Wallace grabbed at the fabric to keep from being thrown off. He felt wind in his face. He didn’t know elephants could move that fast.

The elephant’s footfalls merged into continuous thunder. They raised their trunks and trumpeted. In camp, Herbert was first to jump up. He grabbed at the .30-06 and started bringing it up, squinting into the night. Then he stopped and stood openmouthed, the .30-06 dropping butt-down in the dirt. Ahiga’s elephant charged straight at Herbert. And for a moment, it was as if Wallace were watching the elephants through Herbert’s eyes. Monsters from hell, huge trumpeting demons with scaly gray skin and great shining white fangs that shrieked in anger and towered over them. Painted in nothing but moonlight and darkness, they were impossible, heart-stopping.

Wallace smiled. This is the weapon of the Diné.

Benjamin Hatathlie and Frans Van der Berg threw off their covers and scrambled for weapons. When they looked up, they also stopped, eyes wide in terror.

Ahiga’s elephant struck Herbert with its head. Herbert’s .30-06 flew into the night and Herbert tumbled to the ground. He scrambled to get back up, but Ahiga’s elephant had already stopped. It put a foot on Herbert to hold him in place. Herbert scrabbled at Manycows’s knife, still at his side. The blade glinted with reflected firelight. The elephant bore down on him. Herbert groaned and dropped the knife. Three shots rang out in quick succession. Wallace saw Benjamin Hatathlie calmly firing at Yiska’s elephant as it charged toward him. The elephant bellowed and shook its head. Hatathlie’s eyes went wide as the beast bore down on him. He squeezed off another shot and turned to flee. Yiska’s elephant picked up Hatathlie with its trunk and shook him like a rattle. Hatathlie tried to point the gun at the elephant’s skull. The elephant shook him harder and Hatathlie dropped the gun. Ahiga leaped off his elephant to chase Frans, who was running toward the car. Ahiga caught him when he was opening the door, slamming the bigger man into the car with a sharp metallic bonk. Frans’s head cracked against the window frame and he slumped to the ground.

“Wallace?” Niyol’s voice came from below him.

Wallace looked down at his friend and grinned. “Who else?”

“I thought I was dreaming.” Niyol stepped forward to touch the elephant’s fabric-wrapped armor. The beast turned its head to look at him, but did nothing more.

Ahiga dragged Frans back to camp. Soon, all three men were securely tied, facing a new fire that cast their shadows into the night. The elephants grazed calmly in the background, their fabric-covered armor making soft rustling noises.

“Fellow people, why do you bind us?” Hatathlie asked, speaking Navajo.

“We bind for truth,” Yiska said. He sat facing the three men, backlit by the fire. “Strong accusations have been made.”

“What has the boy said?”

“He said that you will tear out the heart of our land for some metal that shines like gold. He said you will give our land to our enemies.”

Hatathlie sighed. “May I speak my vision?”

“Yes,” Yiska said.

“You are a proud group,” Hatathlie said. “Descendants of the men who won our land from the Americans. I did not know you existed. I salute your bravery and what you have done. I hope your resolve will help you understand what I see for Dinétah, and for the Diné.”

Yiska nodded, his expression blank.

“I see the Diné rising again. It has been said that we will one day save the world. Some people say this is what our codetalkers did. I do not think they did. I think the prophecy is literal truth, and we will save the world.

“You may know that the United States has an atomic bomb, as does the Soviet Union. Two powerful nations, now both with the power to destroy the world. Dinétah is a small nation, rich in culture. Now we find we are gifted with the resources to make our own atomic bombs, to become a nuclear power. Two legs do not make the stool. We can be the third leg. We can be the counterbalance. We can stand aside and say no, this land is sacred, it shall not be destroyed.”

“After you’ve mined all the uranium,” Wallace said.

Yiska looked at Wallace and shook his head. Wallace felt his face grow red.

“With this atomic bomb, we would be as powerful as the Americans?” Yiska asked.

“Yes!” Hatathlie said. “We would never have to worry about losing our land again. We could go to Washington and speak as equals. Maybe even more.”

Yiska nodded again. “Diné could sleep secure in their hogans, knowing this.”

“Yes!”

“And we could keep the land as we once did.”

“Yes.”

“After we remove the heart of a sacred mountain.”

Hatathlie’s mouth clicked shut.

“You did not introduce yourself or your clan when we met,” Yiska said.

“I…I was scared. I’m Benjamin Hatathlie of Chiricahua Apache Clan…”

Yiska sighed, stood up, and turned his back on Hatathlie.

“What…what does that mean…,” Hatathlie said.

Ahiga stepped out of the shadows from behind Hatathlie. He held a long blade that glowed orange in the reflected firelight.

The blade fell, swiftly, slashing Hatathlie’s neck. He gurgled and screamed and fell over on his side, tugging at the ropes that bound his hands and feet. His eyes, wide and dark, seemed to settle on Wallace. Wallace tried to keep his face expressionless, but he wanted to smile. You were not Diné, he thought.

Hatathlie’s struggles became weaker. Eventually, he lay motionless. A great sigh passed out of him, and he was still.

Wallace heard a sob. Beside him, Niyol was crying.

“Why are you crying?” Wallace asked.

Niyol just shook his head and turned away.

Was it possible that his friend believed what Hatathlie said? Did he stay with them because he wanted to be part of the great new nation?

A low noise from Frans broke his thoughts. The man was mumbling something, his eyes heavenward. Praying.

Herbert looked Ahiga directly in the eye. There was no fear in his expression.

“Go ahead,” Herbert said. “Kill me. It doesn’t matter. There are lots of others like me. And it’s either us or the United States. And you know what the United States did to you. You could have worse partners than the mob.”

Yiska shook his head. “We will not kill you.”

“What?” Herbert said.

Frans stopped praying and looked up.

“This is for Diné. You are not Diné.”

“They killed Diné!” Wallace said. “They killed four of us!”

“Is this true?” Yiska said.

“They attacked us first!” Herbert said.

“Is this true?” Yiska asked Wallace.

“They…these men shot first.”

Herbert frowned. “If we hadn’t, they would have taken the money. And maybe killed these kids.”

“Is that true?” To Wallace.

Wallace looked away. It was true. He doubted if Gerald Manycows would have left any witnesses. But they had to kill them! What Herbert said was true! It was them or America. Eventually, one of them would come in and take everything away. Wallace envisioned US Army tanks rolling across the orange-red desert, to face a line of Elephant Ironclads ridden by brightly clothed Diné warriors. It would be an incredible sight. In its own way, it would be beautiful.

It would be a massacre.

“It’s true,” Niyol said.

Wallace turned to look at his friend. Anger clenched his hands into fists. He wanted to strike him to the ground, and keep hitting until black blood flowed.

“Is this true?” Yiska asked.

Wallace looked at Yiska. What would he do if I said no? Would I sit facing the firelight like Hatathlie?

“It is,” Wallace said.

Yiska stood up. “Then we do nothing.”

Herbert tugged at the ropes that bound his arms. “Let us go!”

Yiska nodded. “We will.”

“Now!”

Yiska ignored him and went to talk with Ahiga.

“Hey!” Herbert said.

Ahiga and Yiska pulled down the tents and piled the fabric and aluminum rods next to the car, ignoring Herbert’s protests. Frans remained silent, perhaps satisfied enough in keeping his life.

“Why’d you cry?” Wallace asked Niyol.

“He was my brother.”

“He’d kill us all.”

Niyol shook his head.

“Do you want us to be like America?”

“No,” Niyol said. “I don’t know. I just want to go home.”

Home. Back to Mother and her little skystone jewelry stand, back to the sheep and the shepherds. Wallace just shook his head.

When Ahiga and Yiska began to push dry brush under the car, both Frans and Herbert yelled in protest. Wallace laughed and went to help.

Soon, the night was lit by two new fires: the car and the plane. Both burned uncertainly for a time, then fountained upward in pillars of fire as the gas tanks caught. It was bright enough to illuminate the far hills. When the fires guttered and went out, Ahiga and Yiska untied Herbert and Frans. Herbert rubbed his wrists and gave the two elephant men a calculating look.

“You may go,” Yiska said.

“Where? You’ve killed us,” Herbert said.

“I do not believe that is true.”

“We’ll be back.”

Yiska smiled. “And we will still remain.”

“Let’s go,” Frans said, pulling at Herbert’s arm.

“You think you’ll stop us, but you won’t!”

Frans tugged harder.

“We’ll be back!”

One more tug. Herbert tore his arm away from Frans, but walked away with him. The two men shrank into the distance, following the road back toward Paguate.

Yiska and Ahiga mounted their elephants. In the wan moonlight, they looked like ghosts drawn in shadow. Wallace looked up at them. They were what Diné should be.

Wallace heard Niyol’s footsteps crunching away into the night. He turned to see his friend walking down the road, following the two men.

“Niyol!” Wallace cried.

Niyol kept walking.

“Niyol!”

Niyol didn’t look back.

He has something to go back to, Wallace thought. I have nothing.

Wallace looked up at Yiska. “Can I stay with you?”

“That is one path,” Yiska said.

Wallace imagined himself atop a great shining elephant, leading the Diné against whatever might come. Maybe even helping them understand this strange new world they lived in. He could be the avatar of change. He could be the one who saved them all!

“And there is your friend, and what he follows,” Ahiga said.

Wallace turned to look at Niyol’s shrinking figure. Yes, there was his friend. And the men who had promised to come back.

“That is another path,” Yiska said.

The elephants were beautiful. Wallace looked at them for a long time, burning the image into his mind. Tears welled, but he willed them away. He was not their savior. He might not ever find any great path.

“Good-bye,” Wallace said.

Yiska’s expression never changed. He nodded once and turned his elephant around. Ahiga followed. They were almost completely silent.

Wallace waited until they were nothing more than shadows against the stars. Then he went back to camp where Herbert had fallen. He picked up Manycows’s blade.

He stuck it in his belt and started walking, back toward the men, back toward Paguate.

Ardent Clouds

Lucy Sussex

Lucy Sussex was born in the South Island of New Zealand and lives in Australia, where she works as a researcher and writer. She has published widely, with a particular interest in crime and Victoriana.

Her fiction has won Ditmar and Aurealis awards and been shortlisted for environmental awards and the International Horror Guild Award. Her short stories have been collected in My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, and Absolute Uncertainty. She has also written three books for younger readers, two for teenagers, and one adult novel, The Scarlet Rider. Of the four anthologies she has compiled, She’s Fantastical was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. She also writes the “Covernotes” column for The Age and The West Australian newspapers and is completing a nonfiction book, Cherchez les Femmes, on early women crime authors and detectives. Sussex is an expert at creating vivid, believable characters, flaws and all. She does so in “Ardent Clouds,” a story about an extremely dangerous profession and those who embrace it.

Call me suicidal (many do). Call me a paparazzo, specializing in subjects blowing their top. Call me a groupie for danger. I just love the smell of sulphur in the morning…or any other time. Someone from film school said it best: “You, Bet, are a powdermonkey.”

Yeah, powdermonkey, those boys employed by the British navy to feed gunpowder to the cannons, darting through the noise and smoke of battle. I can just see myself in navy breeches and pea jacket, my A-size breasts concealed beneath a bandage, wrapped tight. Way back then, if a girl wanted a career that didn’t involve babies, wanted adventure, she disguised herself and went to sea. I’d have loved it!

But in terms of fire, noise, and explosion, a cannon just doesn’t cut it for me. Give me a volcano anytime. That’s how I make my living, travelling from eruption to eruption, filming the biggest, most explosive, most uncontrollable things on earth.

It started with an SMS from Spider, as I call him. To others, he’s Herr Professor Dr. Sigurrson, theorist of volcanology. Spider makes his lair at a university in a cold and geologically stable part of Europe. There he sits, at the centre of a web of information stretching all over the planet, like lines of longitude and latitude, provided by seismological sensors. If there’s a twitch from a volcano anywhere, Spider knows about it.

But he can’t go and investigate, because he’s in a wheelchair, some sort of fragile bone syndrome. He doesn’t travel, and we met only once, at a conference on his home turf. When we met, he couldn’t even risk shaking my hand, in case I squeezed his too tight and broke a finger. That’s how some tell if others are okay, by the handshake. Spider does it at one remove, visually. The clear blue Viking eyes behind those bottle glasses, they looked me up and down.

It wasn’t with desire, either: I tend to the stocky and have no-nonsense hair. I also dress super-sensibly—that’s not a gun in my bulging pocket, but a spare lens. Volcanologists do fall in love and get married, even Spider, who has Magga, a devoted nurse-wife, always one pace away from his wheelchair. But their real passions are elsewhere. You could see lust in the eyes watching my film, of an undersea volcano hitting the ocean surface in a maelstrom of steam, stink gas, and lava. In my accompanying presentation, I threw in a few specialist volcanological terms, to show I was smarter than the average nature documentary maker. And, to show I meant business, told how I’d bribed the coast guards to take me into the danger zone. The boat had been bucking underneath me, I had to keep wiping pulverized pumice off the lens, I was drenched in sulphur-tinged spume—and none of that mattered, because I got great footage.

I also gained something else: a boss. Every grouping has its moieties, opposing parties. I privately grouped volcanologists into Spiders and Powdermonkeys. My family, who are old air force stock, distinguished between Shiny Ass fliers and Aces. The former flew desks, the latter Spitfires. If I’d had the math to be a volcanologist in actuality, instead of just a hanger-on paparazzo, I’d have been an Ace, yes siree! If Spider hadn’t been doomed by nature to a life lived apart from his precipitous, dangerous objects of research, he might have been the same. Instead, he was king of the (computer) desk fliers, and as such needed a proxy.

Spider and I have a deal: He tells me where the volcanological action is, I go there and film it. I also report back: I’ve been his ears and eyes all over the world. In the process, though I’ve never seen him again, we’ve developed a rapport. He gets oddly solicitous: If I’m going to Alaska, he tells me to wrap up warm; or in the Philippines, he’ll recommend insect repellent. All this for someone at a far remove, going places he can never physically visit.

“Do you envy me?” I e-mailed him late one night.

The reply came at the end of a long list of technical data, stuff I really had to know for the latest hot spot in volcanology. Then he got, briefly, personal.

“No. Sometimes when I see your footage, almost. Then I remember that I’m better in my office, away from the explosions. Magga says she doesn’t know why anyone would marry a volcanologist otherwise. Someone like you gets up close, but I get the big picture. I don’t envy Bet the ant, walking on a ticking bomb.”

Which was to me, and to many of the people I met in the field, or at conferences, precisely the fun of it. The Powdermonkeys, we got dirty and dangerous, taking photos or collecting gas from steaming fumaroles; the Spiders kept their distance, analyzing the figures, building mathematical models. I guessed that more likely Spider-proxies, grad students or colleagues, were ruled out for reasons of possible professional jealousy. And in choosing me, I don’t flatter myself falsely that he’d been very astute. Not even top volcanologists can go where I’ve gone. Money is tight in universities these days; business schools are more important than science. What with teaching, grant applications, and admin, few volcanologists can drop everything and dash off to an incipient eruption. But I have connections to TV

networks, specialist heat-and chemical-resistant cameras, and an ever-increasing reputation for spectacular images.

“I don’t know how you do it,” said Cody Veitch from CNN. “Always the money shot.”

I bit my lower lip. Network execs tend to the crass, but it was true—although my money shot was large-scale, rather than in the intimate, bedroom realm.

“It’s like you go there, the volcano blows. I remember being an anchorman way back with Mount St. Helens, waiting God knows how long for the fucker to shoot its load. And thinking: Hurry up, it’s a real slow news day! With you, it’s like you’re in and out of the hot spot within twenty-four hours, with your footage. So what’s the secret?”

“Connections. The best.”

Silken ones, I thought, leading to my master, sitting in his wheelchair in front of a computer screen. But latterly I had begun to wonder: How come Spider gets it so right? Sometimes a volcano can get active, but just sits and grumbles, letting off gas or steam without doing anything newsworthy, let alone cataclysmic. The locals would get evacuated, a costly exercise, and nothing would happen. Spider might have the best information, but clearly he had something else. Scientists don’t sacrifice goats and consult their entrails, even for something as unpredictable, even godlike, as a volcano. Spider was a theoretician, and I figured he was perfecting a theory, perhaps a formula: If x = y to the power of z, then the volcano will blow. Being able to predict eruptions would have huge prestige—it would pay to get it absolutely right.

Someday, I thought, I’ll be at the Nobels, filming Spider as he wheels himself up for his glittering prize. In the meantime, though, I was having the greatest of times. I went everywhere from Iceland to Antarctica, following volcanic action. I’ve even been undersea in the Mir submersible, filming the weird and wonderful fauna that hang around hydrothermal vents, and their warm, mineral-rich emissions. After that anything seemed possible, like a trip to Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io. A girl can dream…

When the mobile peeped, five AM in my Miami hotel room at a documentary film fest, I knew we were in European time, and that Spider was calling.

It was an SMS message, one word: CHILLIPEPPER.

That was the nickname of a volcano in South America. The real name signified some unpronounceable pre-Columbian fire god; Chillipepper was the easy alternative. Obvious, since it was dead centre of an area famous for its chilli production. The soil around volcanoes is typically fertile—it’s one reason why people don’t keep the hell away from them. Chillipepper’s pickles had a cult following, almost an appellation contrôlée, as the hottest and tastiest peppers around. The jar labels even featured an erupting volcano, a bit of a fiction, as Chillipepper had rumbled into life a few times last century, causing a stir, but nothing really dramatic.

The name rang a recent bell, but I couldn’t recall anything more. Early in the morning is not a good time for my synapses. I ordered coffee, double strength, from the dozy room service and got onto the Net, Googling for more information. A name instantly familiar hit the screen: JOE BOY BARRETT. I groaned. Spider might rule the desk fliers, but Joe Boy, Emeritus Professor Barrett, was King Ace and thus eternally at war with Spider & Co. He proclaimed that no theorist could predict an eruption; you had to get up there, smell the sulphur. Like some of the flying aces I’d met as a kid (okay, the family were ground crew), Joe Boy had elephantiasis of the ego. He was big, boomed a lot, and shook hands like it was a strength contest. He had a cowboy image, too: boots, Texas buckle on his jeans, and once he’d hosted a formal conference dinner in a genuine Nudie suit, complete with sequinned volcanoes. When I started out, I might have idolized him like the postgrads he trailed in his wake, as the man who would stick sensors into smoking fumaroles while the mountain shook beneath him and lightning danced in the air. After working for Spider, I saw things differently; in his quiet, abstracted way my master was getting things right, while others strode around, trailing sulphuric glory and yelling: Look at me, Look at me!

Now I avoided Joe Boy, especially since he’d started putting the hard word on me, not sexually (he had another of these devoted faculty wives) but to make a documentary about him. He even had a title for it, The Danger Man.

I shuddered, sipped more coffee, intent on my laptop screen. This long weekend Joe Boy would be keynote speaker at a Chillipepper conference, to be held in a city literally underneath the volcano. I scanned the list of speakers: mostly Joe Boy’s pals or, if not, considered to be no threat, or easily put-down-able. Not like Spider, the ultimate physical weakling, but who on an intellectual level fought like Shelob. Relations were so poisonous between the two they wouldn’t even e-mail. I sent an SMS back to Spider:

JOEBOY! MUST I?

(Spider’s response to The Danger Man had been in Icelandic and, he assured me, obscene.) A few moments later, he replied.