Fuck the Sacred Duty.
Back in the Haudenosaunee, the sachems – forever peering cautiously over their shoulders to check the matriarchs approved – had told him all the 'Nationalistic Crapola' (his phrase, not theirs), all the white man/red man dogma, all the 'Them-and-Us' bullshit: it was a state of mind. The Confederacy had found its place and its path in this topsy-turvy post-Cull world, and anyone who made the effort to stand in their way or interfere was designated 'The White Man' – whatever their skin tone. Simple as that.
Rick would have gone on to point out the flaws in this terminological morass – mainly that it was fucking stupid – except at this point in the conversation the sachems generally parroted the same trite platitude that inevitably cropped-up in the answer to any challenge to the status-quo:
'If it was good enough for the ancestors…'
At the bottom of the stairs he could see the interior of the front door. A heavy-duty lock – well oiled, well tended – had prevented his entry from outside. Hmm.
Actual skin colour, the Confederacy maintained, didn't matter in the equation any more. How could it, when at least half the modern Haudenosaunee were as Caucasian as they came? They'd been welcomed into the tribes with open arms (altruism or smugness? Rick secretly wondered) and taught the interminable lessons of the past. What mattered, the matriarchs croaked, was not the identity of those practicing the Old Ways, simply that they were being practiced.
Pushing open a connecting door into the service area, Rick reflected gloomily on how eagerly the new white Iroquois had embraced the lifestyle, the ceremony, the trappings of something culturally genuine. He'd been hearing the same old stories all his life – born and bred on a cockroach-infested reservation – and couldn't remember it ever filling him with the same sense of childlike glee and religious satisfaction as Leicester and the others. Smearing their snowy skins with ash and paint, eschewing modern clothing – and there was plenty of that about, since the Cull – for old style jerkins and deerskin rags.
Somehow, deep down in the (plentiful) ocean of his immaturity, Rick had felt betrayed. Jealous, even. How dare they, these interlopers? How dare they show up out of nowhere, join the tribe, and get twice as fucking much out of it as he did?
The problem was this:
He'd spent all his childhood, all his years of education, all his earliest years of adulthood, trying so hard to be white. How dare the world roll on its head? How dare every bastard suddenly want to be Iroquois!
The shop smelt of dust and cigarettes, with the faintest tang of ancient alcohol. He pushed through a mildewed bead curtain into the storeroom out the back, and paused to yank cobwebs out of his hair.
Whenever he was in a really bad mood, Rick tended to call the white Iroquois 'Tourists'. He'd call the quaint little village-lodge a theme park, and loudly offer to take photos of fat Yankees wearing branded ethnic costumes for a mere $5. Then he'd caper about trying to sell make-believe hotdogs, or guided tours of the casino complex cunningly disguised as a wooden longhouse.
Last time he pulled this routine, one of the Sachems had beaten him so hard he'd had to sleep sitting up for a week… but it had been worth it, just for the look on everyone's face.
The point was… The point was, it was all such a joke! The Confederacy existed – thrived! – because its way of life worked. In this twisted devolving excuse for a world, it worked. It worked because its infrastructure remained when everything else collapsed. It worked because it created ties that didn't rely on material benefits or familial ancestry. It worked because it was a shared equalitarian society that would only – could only – function when everyone was progressing together.
Rick was confident about this. He'd been studying social sciences when The Cull began.
That put a stop to that.
The point, the point, the point. The point was there were reasons for the good old Injuns to swap places with the Pale Skinned Devils as the most stable and viable community, and none of them had anything to do with the old stories and religions and myths. Running and dancing round fires, throwing clods of earth, chanting and smoking and yadda yadda yadda.
Theme park stuff.
Worse still, despite their voluble claims to the contrary, the council simply weren't playing it as fair as they said. Otherwise how in the hell did he, Rick, a so-called 'pureblood' Onundagaono – who had never given a shrivelled racoon's cock for the history or religion of the Haudenosaunee – been chosen for a sacred role any number of the white tribesmen would have happily killed to fulfil?
It was, in a word, bullshit.
They'd given him three gifts before they sent him out. That was a headache, too. Sort of mythic: three fabulous tools for a bold knight to take on his quest. Scant goddamn consolation for being thrown to the wolves, in his opinion. It wasn't like any of the gear was even worth much.
From the matriarchs who ran the Confederacy from the sidelines, the bike. XR650L Honda street bike with mismatched tyres, scavenged engine parts and highly unreliable homemade saddlebags. A clapped out piece of shit, by any other name, but they'd been so proud as they wheeled it over. Rick remembered being mystified. The lodges had access to much better gear than that, but the womenfolk had stared at him so earnestly, puckered faces intense, and warned him of dire misfortune should he desert the vehicle.
Don't you lose it, they'd said. Don't you leave it behind.
Great.
From the sachem council, smiling toothlessly, nodding and gurning, he'd received a packet of the sickly weed the old bastards smoked relentlessly in their shanty lodges. Rick would've appreciated that one, at least, if the stuff in question wasn't notorious amongst the Haudenosaunee as having some… strange properties. No one knew where the old men grew it (certainly not in the same carefully-cultivated beds as the dope the youngsters raised), or what they added to it, or how it worked. But it did… things.
Given that they'd sent him on a holy mission, Rick had been quietly astonished that they'd thought it was a clever idea to give him two ounces of dried Brain Death for the ride.
And finally, from the Tadodaho, a tiny bundle of fabric, with something hard at its centre. Rick had been a little more positive about this. He and the Tadodaho had always got along; the old man was alone in all the tribe in being prepared to listen to Rick's gripes and answer them – patiently, infuriatingly, correctly. Rick had fumbled open the fabric wrapping with excited hands to find…
A needle. A silver sliver of metal, like a sewing-pin.
'Should come in useful, that,' the Tadodaho had said, nodding sagely. Rick had felt like the victim of an awful joke.
And now, days later, he could feel the same package, bundled-up in his back pocket. He gripped it vaguely through his leathers, blinking in the low lighting of the dusty store and glancing around himself with the trailing vestiges of his mental tantrum retreating.
He let his jaw hang open.
He'd never seen so many guns in his life.
An hour or so later – or so it seemed – in the upstairs bedroom full of mouldering dollies and toys, Rick awoke to someone shouting.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Not a good start.
Ungumming his eyelids carefully, the afternoon sun did its meagre best to piss a few half-hearted rays through the QuickSmog, between the mouldering frames of the upstairs window, and onto his face.
'Fuck…' Rick mumbled, wiping dribble off his chin. He hadn't meant to fall asleep.
Looking back over the tail-end of the dream he'd been woken from, he supposed he must have been vaguely aware of something coming; the grumbling tone of an engine, the creak of the General Store's front door: all incorporated into some rapidly-diminishing abstraction involving tomahawks painted white, flocks of shrieking crows with heads like hash pipes and a fat cat telling him, in the Tadodaho's whispery voice:
'If it was good enough for the ancestors…'
Well, thanks. Thanks very much, oh glorious old ones. Now he was good and fucked.
'Ram?' the voice snarled from halfway up the stairs, chain-smoker-deep and alcohol slurred. 'Ram? That you? Where'd you get that pieceashit fucking bike, man? Looks like it got squirt straight outta the junkyard's prick!'
Rick visualised his battered ride. The voice had made a pretty fair assessment.
