Winter Rain (15 page)

“Let Young’s most dangerous fear now become his greatest undoing!” Jubilee had roared at them, his eyes finding those of George, the Negro manservant who dutifully stood nearby, outside the wall tent where the woman lay.

He knew George did not believe in the way of the Church, yet steadfastly believed nonetheless in Jubilee Usher. It did not matter, Usher had decided long ago. For, after all, for those of color—the black African, the red-skinned Indian, and the yellow-hued Oriental—the feet of none were yet taking the right path. None but the white man had been blessed by the Christ and his mighty angels come to visit ancient America. From time to time people of color were placed in Usher’s path to serve him and the greater good Jubilee was to play in this life on earth.

Still grappling with the dog, with one hand now he reached behind him and found the plate of bones George had collected at last night’s supper. Seizing the biggest his fingers could blindly determine, Usher presented his favorite
hound a dilemma. Slowly he brought the big bone up before the animal’s eyes, where it could plainly see the temptation. All the while the dog never loosened its tension on the bone held perilously between it and its master’s jaws. Jubilee watched the eyes, glorying in that instantaneous indecision he caused the animal. He saw the first flicker of bestial desire flame into jealousy, then the moment of action as the hound opened its great, salivating jaws and lunged for the bone Usher held in his hand.

As quickly Usher flicked away the temptation.

Rather than chase down the new treat, the hound immediately lunged back for the bone it had been tussling with its master for—yet it too was gone. Usher had risen. All of it in smooth, seemingly orchestrated movements, calculated precisely. Knowing animals the way he did, perhaps Usher was able to read eyes the way he did better than any man he knew—to act before others had time to react.

The menacing growl rumbled from the animal’s throat as it rocked farther back on its legs, as if ready to spring with its teeth exposed, staring up at its master now in anger, robbed of not just one, but both the bones.

“You’d love to gnaw on my flesh, wouldn’t you, Alexander?” he said, reaching out to pat the top of the great head.

The hound snapped at the hand. And as quickly that huge, manicured hand batted the dog’s head aside with a ringing snap. It lay whimpering a moment, sprawled in the grass, then picked itself up, a totally different being from what it had been a moment before: now contrite and pleading for its master’s beneficence. Usher stroked its neck, presenting the hound the bone.

“Go on now, Alexander. There are more where that came from.”

Jubilee straightened and held his hands out before him. George hurried up, a china bowl cradled between his
ebony paws like a pale offering of a full moon in the blackness of the firmament, a crisp hand towel draped over one forearm. Usher washed hands and face, dabbed them dry, then dropped the towel over the Negro’s shoulder.

“Time I should awake the woman,” he told no one in particular, as those who had gathered began to move off of their own accord, back to the breaking of camp, the loading of the wagons, and the saddling of horses brought in from the good grass down by the river where they had been hobbled of last night.

Yes, he thought. How he loved gazing upon her skin in the morning, slowly disrobing her, taking her hands and placing them around his own flesh to arouse himself, bring himself to readiness. At long last across these years, he had finally brought her flesh back to a pristine, milky purity by keeping her out of the sun—and the horrendous toll that it took on a woman’s beauty, aging her before her time. Usher had instead stopped the clock, allowing the woman only the shade of a tree, the depths of the shadowy ambulance, or the protection of their oiled tent. With such vigilant protection, she would stay every bit as beautiful as this, for many a year to come.

Her eyes found his as he came in and closed the flaps behind him. Then those same blue eyes crawled to and held the top of the tent. And did not move as he unbuttoned his britches, took her hands, and wrapped the unwilling fingers about his swelling flesh.

Jubilee eagerly set about slowly pulling apart the folds of her sleeping gown, aroused at the pure, unsullied beauty of her.

Truly, this was one woman worthy of him—worthy enough to be the wife of the new Prophet of Zion.

Bull drove the
pony relentlessly down into the shallow riverbed, sandy spray glittering like a thousand gold-starred nights in this red-tinged coming of day, galloping
to join the rest as they surged down the north bank of the Plum River, completely filling the riverbed, screaming and screeching, their guns barking, iron-tipped arrows snarling in the cool dawn air at the half-a-hundred. Scarlet light played off the ten-foot buffalo lances bedecked with colorful streamers and scalp locks of many hues, every man resplendent in feathers fluttering from rifle barrels brandished overhead as they came on.

Bull was now among them, deep in their throbbing midst, a part of that massive flow like a red tide, a crimson coursing of a heartbeat destined to pound all life right out of the half-a-hundred. The leaders swept close to the sandbar, forcing their wild-eyed cayuses into the river itself, circling north of the island as they dropped to the off side of their ponies, there to hang by nothing more than a heel and wrist clutched in the matted, beribboned manes, from first to last of them firing, yelling, lobbing hissing arrows among what frightened, milling horses the white men had not already killed themselves.

The scene had almost a surreal effect on the young Shahiyena: this great flood of warriors washing over the river valley. Never before had he been part of something so overwhelming, so savage, so undeniable. It not only gave his heart strength for the coming fight, but gave his spirit rebirth for the days to come when he would hunt the one he sought more than any other.

The hundreds had appeared out of the west as if out of nowhere, as if the ground itself sprouted the naked horsemen. Suddenly blooming out of the thickets, up from the streambed itself, they magically appeared at the top of every hill, in every direction as they swarmed toward the helpless whites, every mouth screeching its own irreverent death songs.

There had been no sound when first he had drawn off and stopped to look back on the white men reaching the island—then nothing more than the echo of hammering
hooves. But with his next heartbeat, the riverbed flooded with screeching, painted horsemen sweeping past the island. High-Backed Bull had actually felt the breast of the earth tremble beneath his pony’s legs before he urged the animal into that great cavalcade two thousand hooves strong.

Yipping like coyotes out on a bloody spree, waving blankets, firing their bows and rifles, the whole heavy procession became a blurred parade of colors running out in water-strewn streamers of new light seeping into the valley of the Plum River.

As Bull brought his pony about and in a wide sweep to the west once more, to make a second pass along the north end of the island, he caught a glimpse of three of the whites who had not joined the rest among the thrashing carcasses of their horses on the sandbar. While most hurled themselves down in the tall grass and swamp willow, hiding behind the plum brush and the first of the dying horses, there were three who hung back, hugging those murky shadows beneath the low, overhanging riverbank. From there the trio could not be seen by the onrushing warriors until it was too late and the horsemen were directly in the teeth of the white man’s guns.

In the first charge the three had done their greatest damage. As the great red wave split at the western end of the sandbar, the horsemen were forced to veer sharply to drop off the low bank into the dry part of the riverbed. Now a handful of the Shahiyena and Brule already lay in the sand. More fell in their second charge as the three rifles exploded in the face of the red man’s attack, forcing its way down the bank into the very gut of the river itself.

Bull reined up and watched a moment, horrified, three more heartbeats. Brown-skinned warriors crawled, wounded and bleeding, dragging themselves up the dry wash into the willow and plum brush, into hiding. Those that were spotted by the white men were shot where they crawled.

He had to let others know. Roman Nose … Pawnee Killer, anyone. Yet Bull reined up, knowing he alone was called upon to drive the three from their burrow.

His medicine alone had shown him where the trio hid, firing their rifles into the face of each renewed charge. His medicine alone had chosen him to wrench the badger from its hole.

As he grappled with what his plan would be, the mounted chargers pulled off, followed by a half-dozen riderless ponies still heaving at a gallop in the chase. High-Backed Bull cursed: the white men had broken their concerted charge. And for that failure dead and wounded warriors lay less than the length of two arms from the sandbar. The half-a-hundred now forced the horsemen back to their old way of fighting: the circle. The spinning, whirling wheel that pitted each warrior, solitary and alone with his own medicine, against those hated white men hunkered down on the grassy island behind the bloody carcasses of their big American horses and mules.

Behind the leg-flung carcasses the enemy scraped at the sand, clawing up chunks of grass and knotted roots, beginning to scrape their way down.

While a new charge formed itself.

“Stop!” Bull warned, knowing as he did how senseless was his warning.

Instead he could only watch helplessly the blur that wound itself up like the spinning of a dust devil whipping mindlessly across the sun-blistered prairie. Down the horsemen tore into the glittering riverbed, beating their way past the north shore of the island, across the riverbed to leap their ponies onto the south bank, back up the bank in a grand sweep, and into the riverbed once again in a whirl of color and numbing noise. From beneath their snorting ponies’ necks they fired arrows, but it was mostly rifle and pistol fire, each horseman dropping from the far side of his little pony at the critical moment approaching the end of the sandbar.

While the white man’s repeaters kept up a steady racket, unshod hooves reverberated against the dry riverbed in a thunder of terror and noise, the screeching of the horsemen matched only by the cries of their wounded ponies as the animals reared, fought, and pitched sideways as each successive bullet struck.

And on the island, those mad curses muddled with grunts of angry, scared men, scrambling and scratching at the sand—with every precious second digging lower and lower still, like frightened burrow mice as the hawk swoops overhead, claws outstretched.

Still he recognized the squeal of the last of the frightened animals as it struggled, reared, and lunged back to fall on its handler—flinging up cascades of golden, gritty, blinding sand as it went down. Here and there the island cracked with the sharp blasts of the white man’s Colt’s pistols.

Eerie, the young Shahiyena warrior thought as he watched, that humanlike screaming of the horse as its rider shot a bullet into its head, bringing that last of the big animals down in a resplendent spray of sand and blood. It fought to the last: biting, hurling phlegm and piss as it thrashed headlong into the grass, legs still fighting as a second bullet crashed into its brain.

The white man lunged behind his huge brown barricade, safe from the oncoming charge. Another rush came from the north bank, the white men frightened by the quirts slashing, slapping pony rumps as the horsemen tore past. There was more deafening sound now, thunderous and numbing to the young warrior as he grappled with how to reach the trio of white men huddled beneath the bank. To ride until he drew near … or do it all on foot.

Frightened voices filled the steamy air above the island. Though he could not understand it all, Bull did know some of the white man’s tongue: what he had learned from his mother—even more, what he had learned from the
white man who had fathered him. Those words he believed he knew best: the profane, desperate prayers. The cries of men hit and bleeding, calling out for help.

It took no special talent to know the warriors had severely hurt and crippled the half-a-hundred in their first few charges, in less time than it took a man to light and smoke a small pipe bowl of tobacco. But they had failed to squash the enemy the way they had planned. It had not been the quick work they had whipped themselves into believing it would be.

For now it became nothing more than hot, gritty labor—the white men having plopped down behind the heaving carcasses of their dying horses, laying their hot-barreled many-shoots rifles over the still-quivering bodies of their dust-slaked, bloody, arrow-pocked barricades. Gray-black powder smoke drifted like a smudge against the blue sky above the sandbar. Below erupted clouds of spurting yellow dust as warrior bullets struck here and there, yet to find a target.

And in the midst of the sandy riverbed lay the naked bodies, most not moving any longer, picked off by the white men on the island, perhaps finished by the three under the bank in their burrow.

The hair on his arms tingled at the faint bugle call from upstream, brassy and clear on the cool air of that dawn. Likely it was one of the renegade turncoats who proudly carried his shiny medicine at all times—soldiers once themselves.

That one who called himself Kan-sas. Cly-bor was his white name. But the Dog Soldiers who had taken him in when he had deserted the pony soldiers called him Kansas. He carried his shiny gold horn on a leather cord over his shoulder. It was likely he who called with his horn for another charge now because many of the horsemen were milling upstream, as if waiting for someone to take control of them.

“Where is Roman Nose?” Bull wondered aloud, reining about and moving out upstream to see for himself. Porcupine would be with him, he knew. No matter what the other war chiefs might try, it remained for the Nose to bring order out of the chaos of those first few charges.

And now near the upstream end of the island, the bullets from Shahiyena snipers began to fall among the hastily dug rifle pits behind the carcasses. Some of the brown-skinned horsemen had abandoned their ponies, diving among the reeds and willow along both sides of the sandy riverbed. There they parted the brush and fired at anything that moved on the sandbar. Still, Bull considered as he gazed along the shallow, sandy riverbed, the white man had exacted his terrible damage on the horsemen. Across the sand and in the lapping river itself lay not only the wounded and dead warriors, but the dying, squealing war ponies as well.