Winter Rain (22 page)

Hair. The source of the Kwahadi warrior’s greatest pride.

Tall One touched a braid wrapped in the fur of a buffalo calf as he peered east, wondering about that man from his memories.

Every day it seemed he grew more and more filled with doubt that he had ever lived another life, more than he was filled with yearning or remembrance of the past. Still, he could not deny that smoky wisps of ghostly trails troubled his mind when some smell, some sight, some texture, triggered recall. He always choked them down, afraid the memories would cause him doubt in what he was, who he had become with the Antelope People.

Most of all, Tall One was frightened to death that the Kwahadi would find out he was not what he wanted most to be—a young Comanche warrior waiting for his first pony raid—but that he was nothing more than a lying, thieving, murdering white-tongue after all. No different from all the rest of the lying, thieving, murdering white-tongues.

He shuddered in the dawn breeze as light ballooned around him, the sun rising reddish-yellow as a prairie hen’s egg from the far eastern edge of the earth, a great blood-tinged benediction at the far edge of everything he had ever known.

It would not be a good thing to be found out, Tall One feared, for his people to think him no better than a lying, thieving, murdering white-tongue. Especially after yesterday when some far-roaming Kiowa warriors carried their news to the Kwahadi village of last winter’s struggle with the enemy soldiers far to the east in what was called Indian Territory. That sort of thing always made the pale-eyed war chief laugh, his white teeth showing as he threw his head back, hands on hips, finding it very funny that the white man would call a section of all of this country “Indian Territory,” when it all belonged to the Indians.

Long ago the Kwahadi themselves had roamed far to
the north, where a few buffalo hunters were only beginning to shoot their way into the endless herds here and there beyond the banks of the Arkansas. Comanche war parties had wandered far to the east, where the
tai-bos
had driven the tribes from their native eastern lands, and clear to the south, where the pony soldiers and the Tehanno Rangers fought and struggled against the Mexicans. Just about everywhere now,
tai-bo
settlers wanted to grow their crops and raise their spotted buffalo.

On ground the Comanche had ruled for generations, making war and driving out the Caddo and Tonkawa. This was a land the speedy Kwahadi ponies ruled, they and their red-skinned war lords of the fourteen-foot buffalo lance.

Tall One had seen the older boys practice with those graceful, deadly lances, more a weapon for warfare than a tool for hunting nowadays. Riding in at a full gallop with the lance level with the undulating prairie, the young horsemen practiced spearing a burlap sack filled with grass and brush, rocks weighing down its bottom to give it the heft of a full-grown white man sitting saddle-high on a scaffold of mesquite branches. Each of them was taught to drive that grooved lance through the enemy’s chest, to use it as a huge lever as they picked up their victim and unhorsed him, leaving the enemy to lie writhing on the plain.

Oh, how he wanted to go to war.

“You are unhappy the pony soldiers did not attack us last winter?”

Tall One whirled with a start, surprised to find the pale-eyed war chief behind him, his voice fracturing the dawn silence of this broken country east of their village, where he had gone to take refuge with his thoughts. Here the dogs did not bark, the ponies did not snuffle or whinny. Here he had believed he would be alone.

“Yes.” Then he thought better of his answer. “No. I … just—”

“You want a chance at the
tai-bo’
s soldiers, just as an
Kwahadi warrior docs,” the pale-eyed one replied. “Me too. Sometimes I want so badly that we ride them down and get this war finished once and for all time, Tall One. To wipe this land clean, return it to what it once was for ourselves and the buffalo. To drive the white-tongues out forever.”

He recognized that distant fire burning behind the pale eyes. Tall One grumbled, “The Kiowa messengers say the soldiers slaughtered the camp of Black Kettle’s Shahiyena camped on the Washita River.”

The war chief nodded. “Then those soldiers turned around and fled when the Kiowa and Arapaho camped downstream rose up and hurried to meet the attack.”

Tall One smiled at that. “How I would love to have been there to see the look on those soldier faces when they saw the warriors rushing to chew them up.”

A smile crinkled the corners of those pale eyes. “Still, even though those soldiers fled, they came back the following moon, to harry the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Satanta. Almost hanged both chiefs from a tree.”

His throat constricted uncontrollably. “A terrible death, this hanging—for the soul cannot come out the mouth.”

He put a hand on Tall One’s shoulder. “You are learning well, my friend. And one day soon these will be more than mere words—they will be the feelings in your heart.”

Tall One felt stung, challenging the war chief. “I feel it in my heart now!”

“Easy, Tall One. No one questions that you are Kwahadi already. All I mean is that the more you learn with every day, with every turn of the season, the more you become one of the Antelope People.”

“You are my family now. The only … only family I can remember having.”

“When we brought you here, you became part of a
larger family still, Tall One,” he said, gazing to the east as the red globe finally cleared the edge of the earth. “There are other bands of The People. Root-Eaters, Buffalo Followers, and Honey-Eaters. Others you belong to as well.”

“More than anything, I want to belong to the same people you do,” he said, yearning for the comfort of having his place.

The pale-eyed one looked down into the young man’s face with a kind smile. “Perhaps you have touched more truth than you know. Perhaps, in a way, you and I do belong to the same people. Yes.”

“Your mother?”

“You know of her?” He grinned. “Yes, of course you do. The others have told you, of course.” Then he turned away as a cloud of something dark passed over his face, gazing up at the cloudless spring sky above them as he spoke sadly. “Winter before last, I learned that my mother was dead.

“We knew she had been captured by the Rangers, knew they returned her to the white-tongues, the Pah-kuhs, the ones she lived with before my father captured her to live with the Kwahadi.

“The
tai-bo
who told me at the Medicine Lodge council with the peace-talkers—he said she died of a broken heart.”

Tall One’s eyes wandered to that cloudless spring sky above them too. He could more than imagine how it must feel to be so lonely for your people, filled with so much yearning that your heart seemed as empty as that cloudless sky overhead. How the woman must have mourned, yearning to be returned to the people she loved. There were times when Tall One had imagined he knew just how great such grief was.

But that was before he had come to this life with the Antelope People.

The war chief gazed down at Tall One. “Tell me, my
friend—if the white-tongues come for you, will your heart be glad to go back to what you had before?”

The words stabbed him with panic. “No—”

“Or will you find your heart truly broken when they take you back, find yourself missing the rain and wind in your face, the smell of many fires on your skin, the feel of a pony’s muscles at the chase beneath your thighs? Will you long for the feel of this freedom no other man knows?”

“Yes. Yes!” he repeated eagerly. “I would remember. But—I am not going anywhere—”

He interrupted the boy by gently placing his fingertips on the youth’s lips. “I wanted to know. For my own heart. For, you see, Tall One—the soldiers did roam across this country all winter long.”

Tall One tugged the war chief’s hand from his mouth. “I know that as well as any. Our skill in hiding kept us far from the wandering soldier columns all through the winter, even after the camp of Kiowa-Apache and Honey-Eaters was attacked and driven from their lodges, forced to abandon everything they owned.”

“The soldiers are coming, Tall One. I want you to know that. Come a day soon, their Tonkawa eyes will find our village and the soldiers will attack. Come that day, what side will you be on?”

“The People!” Tall One answered strongly.

“Will you fight—and die alongside Antelope warriors—die to protect our women and children?”

“I will! I will!”

“There is nothing in your heart—no remembrance of your time among the white-tongues, nothing that will change what your heart feels now?”

“Nothing.” And then Tall One gazed steadily up into the pale eyes. “If the white-tongues take me by force, then—like your mother—I too will die of a broken heart. Knowing that I have been ripped from my true people, Quanah Pah-kuh. Unlike you, I alone will know that great
pain your mother knew. Like her, I too will die of a broken heart.”

In these first
days of summer, beneath the full Moon of Fat Horses, High-Backed Bull rode once more with the Dog Soldiers of Porcupine.

For much of last autumn and winter, he had journeyed far, hoping to discover word of the one who had fathered him, perhaps some whisper of where his mother had gone. But from the Little Dried River far to the south, to the Powder River country in the north, no one had heard of Shell Woman, or her daughter, Pipe Woman. More important, no one knew the whereabouts of the tall heads-above white man who had long ago hunted for beaver in the snowy mountains, the one who they said now scouted for the white man’s army in these troublesome days.

This hunt for him would take time, for Bull knew the man he hunted could disappear among the whites like a big fish diving through endless clusters of minnows.

With the coming of spring and the rising of the short-grass like a green blanket spread across the breast of the prairie, Bull had come across Porcupine and all his old friends. This season they rode with the Dog Soldier camps of Tall Bull and White Horse after last summer’s death of Roman Nose and the infuriating standoff on the Plum River. The winter was spent preparing for their new raiding season. As the Kiowa of Satanta and the Brule of Pawnee Killer had raided last summer, as they themselves had raided across the length and breadth of Kan-sas, the Dog Soldiers vowed they would again make the buffalo ground run red with the blood of white men. This year they would push even farther north, push into the country the enemy called Ne-bras-kas, sweeping wider, ranging farther east, before they finally cut south as summer’s long days waned and autumn made its coming known.

Only then would the Dog Soldiers retreat from the
land stolen by the white settlers, leaving in their wake the dead and wounded, the slaughtered cattle and the charred ruins smudging the clean prairie sky. This would be a summer to drive the white man back to the east, where it was said he numbered like the blades of grass.

“I cannot believe this,” Tall Bull had declared haughtily when confronted with that frightening but questionable news by messengers from tribes who lived farther to the east. “Your words are only the scared talk of those who would rather run than fight the white man.”

“Neither do I believe it,” Bull had said. “As a child I grew up around the white man’s forts.” The war council grunted their approval of his statement. “I have never seen so many white men that they would even number the blades of grass where Tall Bull raised this lodge of his.”

He was proud of the smile those words had elicited from Tall Bull and White Horse both. And ever since, the Dog Soldier chiefs had seemed to desire the counsel of the young warrior of twenty-four summers, never failing to include Bull in those talks made to decide on which path the Hotamitanyo would take.

That recognition proved to be a pain-giving balm: soothing some of his self-loathing, taking his mind off his hatred of his own white blood. For too long had he wanted acceptance by his father’s race. When Bull did not find it among the whites, he returned to his mother’s people, only to discover that they too distrusted him, if not shunned him outright. Sired by a white man, born of a Shahiyena mother, and wanting nothing more than acceptance—for too long Bull found a home among neither people.

But now, it seemed, not only had the fierce and renegade Dog Soldiers made a place for him at their talks, they truly desired his counsel.

Quite by accident Bull had discovered that the only way he could find acceptance among the Shahiyena was to turn his back completely, irrevocably, on his white father
and the white world. Although there were enough reminders of the mixed blood flowing through his veins, what Bull nonetheless hated himself for was the white taint to that blood. More than anything he feared that it would one day prove a stain to his medicine, his power, would ultimately undo his life.

Try as he might through that solitary journey of his last winter, Bull’s time alone had done nothing more than allow him to brood on just how much he differed from the rest of these young warriors crowding the camp. Though he stood taller, though he might be bigger, of greater muscle, Bull wanted none of that. More than anything, he wanted to be dark-haired, black-eyed like them. He wanted most to have a father he could walk with through this camp of Hotamitanyo. A warrior father. A father he could be proud of. Not one of the enemy.

So he sat and cleaned his heavy pistol this last day before they would ride forth at dawn, drawing the cleaning cloth in and out of the barrel of the Walker Colt he had taken out of the dead, frozen hands of a soldier near the pine fort two winters before at the place where the Shahiyena and Lakota had slaughtered the hundred-in-the-hand. Others had claimed the muzzle-loading rifles. Bull had instead rushed in to claim one of the many-shoots pistols: a powerful, destructive weapon.

“You clean that gun so much, you will wear it out,” chided Porcupine as he settled to his haunches in the shade beside his friend.

“Yours could stand some cleaning too,” Bull said sourly, not looking up from his task.

Porcupine sighed as he leaned back against the buffalo-hide lodge. “This magic that sent you riding into the teeth of last winter, it did not help you find the father you seek. Why are you so sure you will find him now?”