The Dove (Prophecy Series) (38 page)

Within seconds the place was teeming with armed men and weeping women. They took one look at her limp bloody body in Yuma’s arms and began to wail. They thought she was dead. She looked dead. She wasn’t moving, and it didn’t look like she was even breathing.

****

Pain rolled through her in waves like the water that had lapped at the banks of Rio Yaqui. She knew the cat was gone because she’d felt the spirit leave its body.

Then she felt Yuma’s hands and heard his voice. She tried to concentrate on the words but the pain was deep.

“Snap out of it, Tyhen! You kept me from burning to death. Now stop the blood leaking out of your body and do it now!”

Evan?

“Yes, it’s me. Stop the blood. You can feel it leaving your body. It is that warmth you feel running down your skin. Stop it now.”

So she did.

****

When the flow of blood began to stop, Yuma thought it was because it was all gone. But then the scratch on her cheek began to close, and then the ones on her belly, and then her legs, and then her arms.

Someone saw and shouted out to the others.

“The bleeding stopped. The scratches are going away. It is true! It is true! The Windwalker’s daughter cannot die.”

Yuma heard. He was witnessing the healing, but he needed to see her eyes. He needed to see her looking back at him. He was covered in her blood and his voice was shaking as he tried to wake her up.

“Please, my love, please. Open your eyes and see me.”

So she did.

He took a quick breath. “Do you see me?”

“I see you,” she whispered.

He gathered her up into his arms and then carried her out of the draw, and he continued to carry her in his arms until they found water in a swift-running creek.

While the New Ones were filling their water jugs and drinking their fill, he walked downstream with her and stripped her where she stood.

The cuts and scratches from the wounds were completely healed, but there would be scars. It made him think of the scars Laya Birdsong wore when she took them into the canyons to escape Firewalker.

“I will have bad dreams for the rest of my life,” he said shortly as he helped her down into the water and began to wash away the dried blood. Even now, his hands still shook just thinking about what had happened.

“If I had waited, at least one of them would have died. There was no time to think,” she said as she sluiced water onto her face.

“I know that in my head, but my heart is not happy about the decision,” he muttered.

Her hair was wet and clinging to her face and neck as she wrapped her arms around his neck. Now he was as wet as she and he didn’t care.

“I am sorry you were afraid, but I will never leave you. I swear on my mother’s life I will never leave you.”

He closed his eyes as their foreheads touched. Today had been too close to call.

****

And so they kept moving; one day much like the next and the next until one day the New Ones called a halt.

The elders gathered with the Nantays and with Yuma and Tyhen, and they studied the geography of their location against the maps that had been drawn, and then in the end, turned to Tyhen for the final verdict, but the result was all the same.

For the first time since the journey began, they would no longer be traveling due North. They were well into the land once called North America, and as close as the elders could guess, somewhere between what had been New Mexico and Arizona. They showed her their approximate location on the map.

“Where to from here?” Yuma asked.

Tyhen put her finger in the middle of the space.

“We go here. Into the heart is where we go.”

The men looked at the map and then at each other.

“That’s right about where Kansas used to be,” Johnston said. “Why there?”

She hesitated then quickly closed her eyes, picturing it in her head before she answered.

“Because of the gathering.”

“The gathering. What do you mean by that?” Johnston asked.

“Many tribes are on the move. They will be waiting for me there. That place has space and water for many people. It is where we have to be.”

“Then that is where we go,” Yuma said.

****

They moved on, stopping when they could to replenish their stores and making clothing for the time they called winter.

She didn’t know yet what that meant, but if it was colder than it had been on that mountain in the snow, she was not going to like it.

She remembered the vision she’d had back in Naaki Chava, where her feet and legs had been wrapped in furs and also cloaked in heavy fur. It was yet another thing to dread.

The march had taken on a life of its own. It became a thing that lived, powered by the feet and hearts of the people in it, and the mark they left on the land in their passing was like a slow-healing wound. There was grass beaten beneath so many feet that a blind man could have followed their path and dead trees gleaned from the woods to make their fires. Animals could not run fast or far enough to escape their arrows. And even though they longed for the fruits and vegetables readily available from the jungle, they were rarely hungry. With that many hunters, people were always fed.

Only once did they stop because of a death. One morning a man who had called himself Coyote Charlie did not wake up. When they went to check on him, they found his heart had stopped beating. He had been ailing for some time and talked about this moment with his friends and now he could walk no more.

At his request, they left his unburied body on the highest rise around them, so that he would have a shorter distance to travel on the road to the Great Spirit, and then they kept on walking because there was nothing else to do.

Life now was a kind of limbo like the time when a baby dwells in his mother’s womb, growing bigger and stronger until the day of birth when it moves into a different realm. So it was with their lives as well. They were simply doing what they had to do to keep moving, growing leaner and stronger for that day when they would leave the protection of the Windwalker’s daughter and do what was needed to make the change.

On this day when the sun had been slow to show its face and the wind had a bite as it breathed down their necks, they came over a rise and then stopped as if they’d run into a wall.

Slowly, the people began to fan out from behind, wanting to see what was holding everyone up, and they kept moving toward the front until they were three deep and stretched along the ridge for almost a mile.

Below was a sea of black moving as one across the slope of a hill and down into a valley and the thin ribbon of water that ran through it. They kept spilling across the land and with no end in sight.

Tyhen knew what they were because she’d seen them in her dreams. “I know this animal. It is the animal with many names,” she said.

Yuma nodded, pleased that she had remembered. “Yes. Each tribe has a name for this animal, but the white man called them buffalo.”

Tyhen was struck by the silence around her, and by the expressions on the New Ones’ faces. Some were quietly weeping. Some had fallen to their knees. She leaned closer to Yuma, afraid her question would somehow be misconstrued as rude.

“Why do the people cry?” she whispered.

“It is our first sight of how the world used to be before the strangers destroyed the balance between earth, animal, and man. Our ancestors took this world as normal, and by the time the New Ones were born, this was no more.”

“What should we do?” she asked.

“We wait until the animals have moved on. We do not want to get caught in their stampedes.”

And so they stood on the ridge staring down into the valley below and watched the herd as it fed and watered, and the day grew colder and the wind blew harder and they took the clothes with fur out of their packs and put them on, and as the herd began to move, Tyhen began to hear drums.

At first they were faint, and very far away, but as they came down off the ridge into the valley, intending to camp by the water for the night, the drums seems louder.

Her heart skipped as a knot coiled low in her belly.

In this foreign place where nothing, not even the weather, stayed the same, she felt a sudden sense of the familiar.

“Yuma!”

He turned at the sound of her voice. “I am here.”

“Do you hear them?”

He cocked his head. “Hear what, my love?”

“Drums. I hear drums.”

His eyes narrowed. They must be getting near the place of gathering. “No, I don’t hear them. What are they saying?”

She sighed, her gaze sweeping out across the vast plains of the land before them.

“They are calling me home.”

The End