Wind Walker (81 page)

The first gunshot roared from somewhere on the far side of camp.

He bent to kiss her mouth, recognizing the unspoken fear in her eyes.

As Slays in the Night shoved aside the frozen door flap and hurled himself outside, Scratch rolled up onto one knee and started for the door.

“I am right behind you, Popo!” Flea cried as he lunged onto his feet and followed his father into the gray before dawn’s arrival.

All around them in that instant, men were bursting from their lodges to join those few who were already scuffling across the snow, gathering at the middle of the lodge crescent. Loud voices were raised: a few of the clan chiefs shouting orders to their men, others demanding answers for the unanswerable, fragments of songs and sacred chants just beginning as a few took up the reins to their favored war ponies staked securely at a lodge door … and through it all came the high-pitched wailing of the women and the screams of children from the far side of camp.

In that direction, gunfire became steady, hot. Hoofbeats, male voices louder still, and coming their way.

“The enemy has entered the camp!” Pretty On Top called out from behind the lodges.

Suddenly the young chief appeared in view through the frozen, misty air, gauzy and stinging to the skin with sharp and invisible ice crystals. The old friend caught Bass’s eye, waved him on.

Grabbing the white man’s elbow, Slays in the Night said, “That one, he is a brave man. He wants us to go with him into the fight.”

“These are the men who took your wife, your horses,” Scratch explained hurriedly with a rasp. “They have been brought here to your hand, my friend.”

“Yi-eeee!”
Slays called out in a shrill voice as he bolted into a run beside the white man.

“Nothing lives long but the rocks and sky!” Titus reminded him as they lumbered across the snow behind others on their way to stem this challenge to their camp. “If this is our day to look at last upon the face of the First Maker … then let it be known that we died protecting everything dear to us!”

By the time they had covered not more than thirty yards, Bass and Slays in the Night rushed up to a line of warriors, most of whom were kneeling against some lodges, firing their weapons against a crescent of unseen, shadowy gunmen. All a man could tell of his enemy was the flicker of some movement, the orange and yellow muzzle flashes of their firearms. Balls whined overhead, slammed through the stiffened, frozen lodge hides, splintered poles. Inside a few of the lodges, tiny voices cried out in terror.

“Some of our people are trapped!” one of the Crow bellowed.

“Cut them out!” Titus roared as he started forward off his cold, stiff knees. “Cut them out of their traps!”

Flat Mouth was there ahead of him, just as a ball whined past his cheek. Wrenching his long and well-worn skinning knife from its scabbard, Titus plunged it into the back of the rock-hard, frost-stiffened buffalo hide of the lodge and attempted to drag the blade in a downward motion. The knife would not budge. Quickly propping his rifle against the lodge, he gripped the knife in both hands and put his weight behind it, managing to slice a five-foot-long laceration in the back of the lodge cover. Even before he could get his knife yanked away from the bottom of the opening, the first child appeared, all legs and arms, terror-filled eyes and screeching throat. Six of them squirted through the opening before he realized Slays was calling to him in the noisy tumult.

Whirling on his heel as a warrior raked a slice open in a neighboring lodge, Scratch found Slays in the Night with
Turns Back and Flea—all three of them pointing behind them … back to the side of camp where their lodge stood.

“The enemy!” Turns Back cried in frustration, shaking his smoothbore.

Flea’s breath streamed out of his mouth like a white streamer, “Father! The enemy has made us fools! They have circled around the camp and are attacking our rear!”

“Come, you fighters!” Slays shouted, standing in the open and making a grand target of himself. “Come, my Crow friends! Kill them all!”

A long, long time their peoples had themselves been enemies—but in this dim light, on this ground, Turns Back and Slays in the Night stood fighting a common foe, side by side.

“Go!” Bass shouted at the trio and started toward them across the trampled snow. “Go to the lodge! I am coming!”

The Blackfoot had arranged a fine diversion for their attack on the Crow village: staging their feint on the north side of camp where part of the herd was grazing in a windswept meadow, while most of their attackers plunged in among the lodges on the south part of the village—where Magpie and Waits waited with the children.

When they were no more than ten long strides from the small, smoke-blackened lodge, horsemen swirled out of the mist ahead of them. Evil faces, eyes glaring with hatred. Faces smeared with dabs and streaks of color. Feathers fluttering from fur caps and the hoods to their blanket coats. Bass heard the
thung-thung-thung
of bows as he raced on, his cold, aching knees protesting. First two, then more than a dozen riderless horses suddenly careened into view, forcing the four men to leap aside in both directions. Right behind the horses came the first of the Blackfoot raiders—some of them leaning off to swing a stone club or taking quick aim with their short, elkhorn bows, others attempting to aim and pull off a shot with their firearms—

That’s when Titus recognized their cries.

His eyes went directly to the lodge, finding that opening like a black oval in the frost-coated buffalo hides where
Waits and Magpie had their faces, watching the battle, waiting for a chance to leap into the open.

“Don’t!” Bass cried as he ducked out of the way of a warrior’s wild swinging of a war club.

The round, stream-washed rock grazed the top of his right shoulder, pitching the white man onto his side in the snow, knocking over a warrior’s medicine tripod erected in front of the man’s lodge. As he rolled onto his hip, he saw Waits already stepping out of the lodge door with Crane positioned under her arm. Magpie was right behind, clutching her babe in her arms.

“Don’t come out!” he screamed at them, his voice high and shrill. “Don’t—”

Waits was already running across the icy rime, hand in hand with little Crane. Her pockmarked face was gray with terror as her moccasins repeatedly slipped on the trampled ground. But still she heaved and stumbled toward her husband. Slowly, slowly lumbering into the open.

“Go back!” he cried, standing to wave at her with that arm. How the shoulder hurt! “Please! Go back inside!”

Behind Waits and Magpie more horsemen appeared out of the frozen mist. Grayish-black forms suddenly squirting between the lodges, weapons leveled, mouths O’ed up in some war cry as their eyes narrowed on a selected target.

Once more he hollered, “Get back inside—”

—as the muzzle of a short smoothbore spit a dirty yellow flame just behind Waits-by-the-Water.

“No-o-o-o-o-o!”
he shrieked at the instant Magpie tripped and spilled to the side, almost under a horse’s slashing hooves.

But it was not his daughter, or the grandson he had held for the first time last night, that was the enemy’s target.

Instead, the ball’s impact slammed his wife’s body forward, her back arching reflexively as her fingers flew free of Crane’s tiny hand and the little girl stumbled, tangled up in her mother’s flailing legs as Waits-by-the-Water desperately attempted to maintain her footing.

But there was no ground beneath her moccasins. She was
already in the air, sailing awkwardly until she spilled onto the dirty, hoof-hammered snow. The side of her head skidded across the trampled crust as he brought up the rifle at his hip instinctively. There had to be more than ten of them. No matter. He wanted only the one in the red capote, the one who jumped his horse over the woman’s body and bore down on the white man with a frightening cry.

Jerking back on the trigger, Bass felt the weapon jolt in his hands, watched the ball strike the warrior in the side, twisting him slightly on the bare back of his war pony. Clutching his wound and crumpling over on the animal’s withers to keep from falling, the Blackfoot managed to stay atop his horse as he and the rest thundered on past, shrieking their war cries and shouting in triumph. His ball had struck the warrior, but not near good enough to unhorse the man.

Then Titus was spinning round, not intent on reloading—no matter the danger now.

He skidded to his knees beside his wife’s body as Magpie scrambled onto her knees and crawled over with her baby in one arm.

“Mother?”

Scooping Waits into his lap, Titus stared down at her scarred face, wiping some of the crusty snow from her cheek and mussed, unbound hair. Her eyes fluttered half open, found his face, and then widened as she held her gaze on him.

“Ti-tuzz—”

“Sh-sh,” he whispered as the roar of battle ground around them, slowly rumbling into the rest of the village. “L-look at me. Yes, keep looking at me.” He knew that if she did not, her spirit might well fly away—

“I don’t feel my legs,” she groaned. A ribbon of bright blood leaked from the corner of her mouth.

Tears already burning his cold cheeks, Titus crushed her against him and rocked slightly back and forth—pressing one hand harder and harder against that warm, wet gush of blood from the gaping hole in the middle of her chest. Harder and harder still he pushed against the blood and
frothy bubbles, moaning himself … not words, just wild and feral sounds as he blinked and blinked to try clearing his eye of tears. His spilled on her cheeks, smeared with the ooze of blood on her chin as more and more gushed from her mouth.

“Don’t go!” he commanded her, feeling her rigid, quaking body begin to loosen.

“Ti-tuzz …,” she whispered with difficulty, heaving with a shudder, her eyes glazing as she continued to stare into his. “Always with you, Ti-tuzz.”

“You can’t go!” he yelled at her as the gunfire withered, fading to the far side of the village.
“No-o-o-o!”

“See me soon … on the mountaintop,” she whispered with another gush of blood, her eyes fluttering. “In your dreams … see me real—always see me … in your dreams … real for all time to come—”

He knew it when her body went limp and her head slowly sank against his arm, a last gush of blood spewing from her mouth onto his wrist. Bass pressed harder and harder on the wound, but the more he tried to plug up that hole, the more limp she became. Finally he stopped pushing so hard and slowly brought her against him again, folding her limp, lifeless body into his as he crumpled over her with a wracking sob that shook him to his core. His loose, gray hair spilled across her face and neck. Never had he felt such a cold hollowness like this—

“Mother!”

He heard Magpie’s cry.

Suddenly his head jerked up and his eyes narrowed on his daughter’s face. “Get Crane and your baby into a lodge!”

“Mother? Is she—”

“Hide them in a lodge with you, Magpie!”

Her eyes widening, she was once more his daughter, his little girl again. Magpie’s eyes registered the same mixture of grief and terror as was in little Crane’s as she scrambled to her feet. Crane instinctively lunged toward her mother’s body, clawing at Waits’s limp arm.

“Take her now, Magpie!”

As he pulled the little girl’s hands off her mother’s arm Crane began shrieking.

“Go with Magpie!” he ordered, his words harsh, mechanical. “You must get out of danger. I will bring your mother with me. Now, go with your sister!”

Reluctantly Crane let him pull her hand free from her mother’s blood-soaked sleeve as Magpie dragged her younger sister away toward the closest lodge—

Five riderless horses suddenly hammered through the lodge circle, lunging this way and that to avoid the small child and woman clutching her baby. Magpie shoved her little sister into the neighbor’s lodge, both of them gone from sight through the gaping black oval. He was alone with the body of his dead wife.

And an emptiness he had never before felt swallowed him whole. Nothing he had experienced with the death of friends or that young towheaded grandson. Not even with the unexpected death of their stillborn infant. No, none of the pain he had ever suffered in life had prepared him for the cold, gaping emptiness that had instantly taken a ravenous bite out of his insides and left nothing but a hollow, oozing pit.

It was only slowly that Scratch became aware again of what existed outside his own flesh as the sounds swelled around him once more, the roar of blood that had surged in his ears gradually lessening now as the hole within him yawned all the deeper—threatening to suck him in after it.

Gunfire and the hammer of hoofbeats thundering on the iron-hard winter ground. Men’s angry shouts and the shrill wails of frightened, mourning women. The snarl of camp dogs and the high-pitched, frightened cries and chatter of terrified children.

Of a sudden he felt the warmth touch the back of his shoulder, almost like a fingertip brushing the back of his neck where his tousled gray hair had bared the skin. Slowly he looked up, over his shoulder, saw how the light was just then tinting the frosty branches of the skeletal cottonwood with a pale rose, the color of her blood smeared on his hands.
The sun was coming up. A first, pink light had entered the river valley.

“Arrrghghghghgh!”
he cried in utter anguish, hot tears spilling from his eyes onto his cold cheeks, spittle spewing from his lips as he cradled her lifeless body against his hollow breast.

“D-don’t take her from me!” he roared as he tore his face away from her hair, from that most familiar scent of her, and stared at the newly awakening sky.

“Damn you!”

How he cursed the spirits, the First Maker, this God who could chip away at him life by life. Leaving him hollow, empty of everything but for a smoldering hate that he immediately knew would drive him on until he had brought these killers to a reckoning. How long that would take, he did not know … but this craving for revenge was like a force of its own and would carry him on for as long as it took.

Bass’s face hardened as he started to sob once more, slowly rocking his wife in his arms, groaning in a feral way like some wild thing caught and with but one way out of a trap. Except—this time he knew it was different. This time he would be required to sacrifice more than a paw imprisoned in the jaws. Gazing down at her face, he sensed those glazed eyes still somehow looked into his … then Titus reached up with his bloody fingertips and gently closed her eyelids.