The Six Messiahs

you why but I felt that what we saw tonight and what I've been going through are somehow related. I consider myself a logical man, Mr. Doyle; I hope you will never hear me utter a more perfectly illogical statement.'

Doyle felt his responses to Stern softening; once the man unburdened himself of his initial reluctance, his honest modesty and intelligence grew considerably more appealing.

'When such a feeling comes from deep levels of the intuition, I advise anyone to pay attention to it,' said Doyle.

'That's why when the Captain said he could not help us I turned to you: I've read newspaper accounts of your assisting the police on a number of mysterious cases. You also strike me as a man who is not afraid to take a stand for what he believes in....'

Embarrassed, Doyle waved off the compliment. 'Where is your copy of the Gerona Zohar now, Mr. Stem?'

'Under lock and key in the ship's hold. I checked it this afternoon.'

'And your companion, Mr....'

'Mr. Selig. In our cabin. As I told you, Rupert's concerns for our safety have been even greater than mine. Since we sailed, he's refused to go out on deck after dark....'

Innes snorted contemptuously—in the tradition of the Royal Fusiliers—then realizing the inappropriateness of his response, disguised it as the onset of a protracted coughing fit.

'Must be the goose feathers in my pillow,' said Innes.

'Perhaps we should have a word with your Mr. Selig as well,' said Doyle, not stooping to dignify Innes's outburst with even an evil eye.

Lionel Stern knocked softly on the door to his cabin: three rapid knocks, then two slower ones. Innes was appalled at the lack of luxury in this second-class passageway, but in mixed

company decided such an observation was best kept to oneself.

'Rupert? Rupert, it's Lionel.'

No reply. Stern looked at Doyle, concerned.

'Asleep?' asked Doyle.

Stern shook his head and knocked again. 'Rupert!'

Still no answer. Putting his ear to the door, Doyle heard a creak of movement inside, followed by a slight click.

'Your key?'

'Left in the room,' said Stern. 'We decided it was best not to go walking around the ship with it.'

Innes rolled his eyes skyward.

'We should ring for the steward,' said Doyle. 'Innes?'

Doyle gestured him off with a toss of the head. Innes sighed and idled down the hall in search of a steward, thinking they must be a rare sight down here among the unwashed.

Stern rattled the door handle. 'Rupert, please open the door!'

'Keep your voice low, Mr. Stern. I'm sure there's no reason for alarm.'

'You told me to pay attention to my intuition, didn't you?' He banged his fist on the door. 'Rupert!'

Innes returned with a steward, who absorbed a quick explanation before opening the cabin with his passkey. The door jerked to a halt at six inches, stopped by a taut security chain.

The steward began explaining the chain could only be removed by someone inside when Doyle raised his boot and gave the door a mighty kick; the chain snapped, the door flew open.

The cabin long and narrow. Double bunks bolted to the left wall. Closed and locked porthole over a washbasin at the far end.

Rupert Selig lay on the cold steel floor, legs fully extended, arms raised to the level of his shoulders, fists clenched, mouth , and eyes frozen open in as perfect an expression of ungodly terror as Doyle had ever witnessed.

'Stay back,' said Doyle.

The steward ran for help. Stern slumped against the wall; Innes propped him up with a free hand. Doyle stepped cautiously over the bulkhead, pausing to absorb as much detail as possible in a room that he knew within minutes would be trafficked beyond usefulness.

'Is he dead?' whispered Stern.

'Afraid so,' said Innes.

Stern's eyes rolled back in his head. Innes directed his inert form gently down to the floor of the passage outside the cabin.

Doyle knelt beside Selig's body to examine something faintly scrawled on the wall. His eye moved to a small clot of mud on the tiles by the door. Traces of the same mud were visible beneath the nails of his right hand.

'Try to keep them out of the cabin for a while, would you, Innes?' said Doyle, taking a magnifying glass from his pocket.

'Certainly, Arthur.'

'There's a good fellow.'

ROSEBUD RESERVATION, SOUTH DAKOTA

The moon was one night from round. The first cold breath of winter rode in the pocket of the wind. Leaves already turning. Geese overhead, flying south, away from the motherland. She looked back from the rise at the tumbledown houses and huts on the reserve and wondered how many more of her People would be taken when the snows came? How many would be left to welcome the spring?

She hugged the blanket tight around her shoulders. Hoped one of the patrols would not find her out here beyond the walls and send her back onto the reserve. So much sorrow: disgusting food, whiskey, the coughing sickness. The blue coats' repeating rifles. Sitting Bull murdered by one of his own Whites with their lying treaties, ripping open the belly of the sacred black hills for their gold ...

And she was afraid to sleep because of a dream that the world was ending? How was that any worse than what she saw when her eyes were open?

She knew the world of the Dakota, their Way, was gone forever. One trip to their city of Chicago had shown her that The whites had built a new world—machines, straight lines, squared corners—and if it was that world she saw ending in the dream, why should she lose any sleep? If the world of the Dakota, the first human beings, could be destroyed in one generation, then no world could be made to last; surely not one built on the blood and bones of her People.

This dream was not a curse wished on the whites, although many had passed her lips. They had killed her mother and father, but this was no vision of revenge. This dream had crept into her sleeping mind unwelcomed, and in the three months since, it had become a nightly torment from which she could find no relief. Driving her to stand out here on the flats beyond the reserve and ask her grandfather for an answer, which still had not come after seven nights of waiting.

There was proud, strong medicine in her family, and she knew when a dream-quest came she must follow wherever it would take her. This vision held no medicine she knew—a dark tower rising into burning skies above a lifeless desert, tunnels carved beneath the earth, six figures joining hands; out of a hole in the ground the Black Crow Man rode a wheel of fire. The images reminded her of what the Christians called Apocalypse, but if it came to that she was not afraid to die: When the fighting began, and she was called upon as in the dream, her only fear was that she might fail.

Thirty summers. Many suitors; never a husband. Hard to accept a man who had never ridden the hunt, a no- fight man, a touch-the-pen who'd given up their Way. But the whites killed all the strong ones and whiskey took the rest. So she had learned to ride and shoot and skin, made herself a warrior in body and in mind. She went to the white school as law required, learned to read their words and understand how they lived. They baptized her—one of their many strange rituals; and they thought her people were primitives—and called her Mary Williams.

When it suited her, she would answer to that name, wear I heir clothes—these skirts, these uncomfortable