At the End of Babel by Michael Livingston Page A

the canyon.
    Red Rabbit looked up at the blue. “You will really go to Acoma, to the old pueblo? The new town isn’t far away. On the Rio San Jose. Good bars. More to drink than Acoma.”
    Tabitha said nothing. Only nodded as she ripped and chewed.
    Not for the first time, Red Rabbit frowned at her plans. “Why? No one lives there. It’s dead. Has been since the times of Gray Feather. Since after the skiffs came, painted it red.”
    Gray Feather. Red paint. Tabitha had to fight the urge to wince with each of the words. Red Rabbit couldn’t know that Gray Feather, old as he was, had been her father. That he’d symbolized his name with a single goose quill among the contrasting colors of his Tsitsanits mask: green for sky, yellow for earth, black for night. Red Rabbit couldn’t know how fine he’d looked in that mask, with its eagle feathers and buffalo horns, its white buckskin eyes, corn husk teeth, and fox-fur collar, or how well he and the rest of the katsina dancers had prayed with body and soul on that last day. Red Rabbit couldn’t even know what katsina meant. He didn’t know Keresan. All he knew was the diya tongue of the whites.
    She alone remembered.
    She remembered through a little girl’s eyes watching them dance to Tsichtinako on the last turning of the great moon cycle. She remembered the mixture of sadness and hope in their steps. Even then, they’d known they were the last of their tongue: rebels to uniformity, no longer even useful to the linguists who’d documented their speech for closed-door studies of dead things otherwise forgotten.
    Tabitha had snuck away from the dance in childish impishness that day, crawling down a thick-runged ladder into the darkness of the kiva, the kaach, where the chaianyi men would come for their final prayers after the dance. She’d wanted to hear them. She’d wanted to watch her father calling the gods.
    Instead, she’d heard the engine-roar of the federal skiffs landing outside. And when she’d reached the top of the ladder and looked out, she’d seen the lancers pouring from the airships, uniformed men with uniform guns. Marching. Corralling her people like cattle. She’d heard the officer in his blue suit clearing his throat to read the Writ of Unity, the death warrant for those who dared to disunite the power of the one state. “One language, one people,” he’d said. Just like they all did. Just like the posters.
    She’d slipped back down into the kaach while he read, though she could still hear him. There were boards across part of the floor, covering the Tsiwaimitiima altar: boards so holy that only chaianyi could dance upon them. She’d lifted them up without hesitation and wedged herself beneath them, curled up in a dusty darkness that smelled of old cornmeal. “One culture, one country,” she’d heard the officer say in the distance. And then, in response, she’d heard the voices of her people rising in defiant, ancient song.
    So the killing had begun, and soon the only sounds she heard over the screams were of fléchettes singing high in the crisp air. And when the lancers searched the buildings for survivors, Tabitha did not cry.
    She’d wanted to hear her father’s prayers. Instead, when at last she climbed up and out of the darkness and peered through a thin crack in the wall out into the square, she’d heard him dying, coughing down the wrath of Father Thunder even as he lay in a pool of his own blood. His legs twitched as if they meant to complete the dance despite him. His white-and-black eagle wings were painted red.
    He’d called until one of the last of the lancers came back, stood over his bloodied body, aimed his flechemusket at Gray Feather’s left eye, and pulled the trigger. Her father’s legs stilled. The dance was never finished. Father Thunder never came.
    Tabitha blinked away the images, blocking out the