The Gate of Time

The two aviators sat down at a five-legged table of smoothly planed but unvarnished pine. The woman served them, then busied herself working around the kitchen. She pumped water out of a handpump over the sink. Two Hawks felt a touch of nostalgia and homesickness at this, since it reminded him of the kitchen pump in his parents’ farmhouse in upper New York when he had been a little boy. The man paced back and forth, talking to the woman, then sat down with the two and began eating from a large bowl. This was of ceramic with some symbols painted in blue on it. One of them was the likeness of the broken mask Two Hawks had seen in the cellar.

When he had finished eating, the farmer stood up abruptly and gestured at them to follow him. They stepped out through a swinging screen door with a mosquito net made of closely woven cotton fibres. Its interstices seemed too large to do its job, but the threads had been soaked in oil. Suddenly, Two Hawks recognized the odor. It was the same oil with which the woman had plastered her hair.

Although the oil was not sunflower seed oil, it triggered off a sequence of thought. Some of the older women on the reservation near his father’s farm had used sunseed oil on their hair. His mind leaped at a conclusion which he could only reject because it was incredible. But there was also the undeniable fact that he now recognized the speech of the two peasants as a form of very peculiar Iroquoian. It was still largely unintelligible. But it was not Rumanian nor Hungarian nor Slavic, neither Indo-European nor Ugro-Altaic. It was a dialect related to the tongue of the Onondaga, the Seneca, Mohawk, and the Cherokee. Not only in its phonology but in its structure.

He said nothing to O’Brien but silently followed the man and girl across the now dark barnyard. They passed an outhouse, and O’Brien made a request which Two Hawks tried to pass on to the farmer. The man was impatient, but he agreed. A few minutes later, they resumed their path to the barn.

O’Brien said, “We’re really in the sticks. They don’t have no paper; there’s a pile of clean rags and a bin for dirty ones. They must wash them afterward. Geeze, and to think we was eating from food she made. I bet she doesn’t even wash her hands!”

Two Hawks shrugged. He had more important matters to thing about than sanitation. The man opened the barndoors, and they stepped inside.

The two large barndoors swung shut with a creaking of wooden hinges. In the darkness, Two Hawks put his hand on O’Brien’s shoulder and pushed gently to urge him several feet to the left. If the farmer pla

Then the farmer moved through the straw on the ground away from Two Hawks. Slightly metallic sounds made Two Hawks wonder if blades, or maybe guns, were being taken from a hiding place. Suddenly, a match flared, and he saw the farmer applying the flame to the wick of a lantern.. The wick caught fire; the farmer adjusted the flow of oil; the interior of the barn was cut into light and shadows.

The farmer, seeing them crouching on the ground, smiled briefly. His smile seemed to indicate more of approval than anything else. He gestured for them to follow him. They rose and came after the farmer and the girl. Near the back of the barn, a pig grunted from a stall. Large brown eyes looked at them in the lantern light from behind wooden bars. Cows and pigs and sheep, thought Two Hawks, but no horses. Could the Germans have taken them all? Perhaps they had requisitioned all the horses of this particular farmer. But the photographs taken by reco

The farmer stopped before a shed built on to the back wall of the barn. He knocked three times, waited several seconds, knocked three times again, waited, and rapped three more times. The door swung open; the shack was dark inside. The two natives went inside, and the farmer gestured at them to come on in. As soon as the two fliers had entered, the door was closed, and the farmer turned up the lantern flame.

There were six people crowded inside the shed. The odor of dried sweat and rancid hair oil was strong. Four men, dark, eagle-faced, dressed in heavy cloth garments, were squatting or else leaning against the wall. All wore small round caps with single red feathers projecting from the top of each cap. Two had muzzle-loading, long-barreled muskets. One had a quiverful of arrows strapped to his back and a short recurved bow of horn in his fist. Two had the same type of rifles with revolving cartridge chambers that the soldiers had carried. All had long knives in scabbards at their belts; the handle of a tomahawk was thrust into the belt of one.

“Jeeze!” O’Brien said under his breath. He may have exclaimed because he was in a trap or because of the oddity and disparity of the weapons. More probably, he was startled by the sixth person, a woman. She was dressed in the same clothes as the others, but she was obviously not one of them. Her skin was very white, where there was no dirt, and her long hair was golden. She had a pretty although tired looking face with a snub nose and a sprinkling of faint freckles. Her eyes were large and deep blue.

Two Hawks, standing close to her, knew she had been in her clothes a long time. She stank, and her hands were dirty, the fingernails half-moons of filth. The whole group had the air and looks of fugitives. Or of guerrillas who had been a long time from their base.

The leader was a tall man with hollow cheeks and burning black eyes. His coarse black hair was cut to resemble the shape of a German helmet, and he wore heavy leather boots. His shirt was of buckskin and hung outside his belt. The backs of his fists were tattooed with the faces of monsters or demons.

He spoke at length with the farmer and his daughter. Now and then he glanced sharply at the two Americans. Two Hawks listened with his ears tuned up. Occasionally, he could make a little sense out of the rapid firecracker explosions. Yes, the phonology was familiar, and so was a word or a phrase here and there. But he would never have understood anything if he had not had a fluent knowledge of all the Iroquoian languages, including Cherokee.

Once, the leader (his name was Dzikohses) turned to speak to the blonde. He used an entirely different language then, but it was one that also seemed vaguely familiar to Two Hawks. He was sure that it belonged to the Germanic family and that it was Scandinavian. Or was it? Now he could swear it was Low German.

Abruptly, Dzikohses focused his attention on O’Brien and Two Hawks. His index finger stabbing at them, occasionally indicating items of their uniforms, he rattled off one question after another. Two Hawks understood the pitches of interrogation, but he did not understand the questions themselves. He tried to reply in Onondaga, then Seneca, then Cherokee. Dzikohses listened with his eyebrows raised and a puzzled, sometimes irritated, expression. He switched to the same speech he had used with the blonde. Finding that this was not understood, he tried another language and worked his way through three others before Two Hawks could comprehend a word. The final attempt was in some form of Greek. Unfortunately, although Two Hawks had a fair reading knowledge of Homeric and Attic Greek, he had not conversational ability. Not that this knowledge would have helped him much, since Dzikohses’ Greek seemed to be only distantly related to those that Two Hawks knew.