Winter Rain Page 8

  Upstream from the camps of Tall Bull and White Horse stood two large villages of Brule Sioux who rode under the bellicose Pawnee Killer—where High-Backed Bull now waited impatiently with the other young warriors for the council to conclude. Only then could they be about this business of killing the half-a-hundred.

  It was Pawnee Killer himself who had brushed up against none other than George Armstrong Custer’s gallant Seventh Cavalry one summer gone now, when the short-grass time filled the bellies of the Lakota war ponies grown sleek and fast. And for this summer’s hunt, the Brule had joined the Shahiyena camps composed mostly of Dog Soldiers under fighting chiefs. Close by stood a much smaller camp circle, a few Northern Arapaho who traveled in the formidable shadow of the mighty Roman Nose.

  For the sake of mutual strength following their independent raids on the settlements in Kansas, these warrior bands had come together with the rest to hunt buffalo here where the immeasurable herds still gathered in the great valley of the Plum River, what the white man called his Republican. Last moon, while celebrating their annual sun dance on a tributary of the Plum called Beaver Creek, roaming scouts from the villages had first reported spotting the half-a-hundred. From their dress, the fifty did not appear to be soldiers. Still, this was a season for some precaution. The news of the white men caused the bands to begin migrating to the northwest. Surely, the tribal leaders reasoned, if we see these white scouts on our trail, close behind will come the long columns of soldiers.

  It was aggravating, yes, having such an annoyance on their backtrail. Still, the half-a-hundred were hardly worth the effort of putting on one’s paint and taking the cover from one’s shield, thought High-Backed Bull as he paced back and forth in the bright sun of that waning afternoon.

  “These are fighting men, warriors—this half-a-hundred,” declared Porcupine when he had finished tying up the tail of his pony in preparation of battle.

  “They are not soldiers!” High-Backed Bull snapped, the unrequited tension pinching his face like the coil of a rattlesnake. “They are nothing more than ground-scratchers … the same sort of white men we have killed all summer long.”

  Porcupine shook his head. “No. I think you are wrong, my young friend. I am afraid we will find this band of ground-scratchers is something very different from those who fought us beside their dirt houses.”

  “How are they different?” Bull demanded. “Because this half-a-hundred comes looking for us? Like foolish old hens?”

  “No. They are different because they are not soldiers, who are paid to fight. This half-a-hundred comes with some quarrel in their hearts for us.”

  “Why would you fear some white men who might have a quarrel with us? We have left many to grieve after our raids across the white man’s settlements.”

  “I fear any man who comes into a fight with the strength of his heart to make him strong,” Porcupine said. “Much better for me to fight a man who has only the power of his muscles, perhaps his cunning and wiles. But—the one I fear the most in battle is the man who comes to make his heart right. On and on that small band of white men has followed our trail, like a persistent wolverine intent on clawing its prey from their hole. Following … forever following.”

  Try as he might, Bull struggled to put the warnings of Porcupine, his mentor, out of his mind. For a moment or two at a time he watched the Dog Soldier and Brule camps alive with the steady throb of war drums.

  “This half-a-hundred poses no threat to us, Porcupine,” he declared a short time later when he squatted in the shade of a lodge, watching the chiefs gathered in Pawnee Killer’s council a few yards away. “You confuse me. Those white men are so outnumbered that this time not one man among us will have to worry himself with protecting our villages while women, children, and old ones escape onto the prairie—just as Pawnee Killer’s band had to do when Long Hair attacked last summer.”

  “Aiyeee!” cried Hair Rope nearby. “This time we will work to even the score for Pawnee Killer. This time we will attack and wipe these half-a-hundred off the face of The Mother of All Things!”

  “Hear this, for what I say are the words of a warrior of the Shahiyena!” Bull shouted in reply, his blood running warm. “Those white men. Those half-a-hundred. Some are wearing scalps that soon will hang from my own belt!”

  By this time the Lakota and Shahiyena delegations had finished their proscribed meal and passed around the pipe. As well, the young warriors in all camps were now stripped of their hunting clothes, having donned their finest war regalia. In this warm season that meant most wore nothing more than moccasins and breechclout. Still, what marked each individual’s battle costume was not his clothing or lack of it—rather it proved to be his headdress, perhaps a simple hair covering fashioned of a stuffed bird or small animal totem, setting off his peculiar face and body paint, all of which added to those decorations each man had lavished on a favored war pony.

  Bull stroked the muzzle of his animal after he had tied small eagle wing-tip feathers down the length of its mane. Small, fleet, wide-chested little cayuses we will ride this day, he thought to himself as he watched the imposing figure of Roman Nose from afar. These grass-fed ponies would now carry their owners into battle as the Lakota and Shahiyena butchered that small band of white men foolish enough to march squarely into the steamy gut of this ancient Indian hunting ground.

  The white men had now become the quarry.

  The afternoon dragged on so that by the time a young, flat-nosed warrior announced the council’s conclusion from the doorway of Pawnee Killer’s lodge, the sun had fallen well past midsky.

  “We ride them down before the sun sets in the west!” the Brule chief exclaimed as he emerged from his lodge.

  The immense Lakota village shrieked with renewed fever as the other war chiefs emerged into the afternoon light. Young boys scurried through camp, bringing extra war ponies in from the herds. Women chattered loudly, no one in particular listening, as they brought forth the weapons their men would use. Out into the sunshine of this battle day came the short-horn or Osage-orange bows, skin quivers filled with long iron-tipped arrows fletched with owl and hawk feathers. Out came axes, knives, and war clubs—some of river stone, others carved wood, a few nail studded like archaic maces. Long buffalo lances shadowed the ground, many more than ten feet long with tiny grooves radiating from the huge iron spear points, the better to drain a victim’s blood. Here and there the afternoon light glinted from a firearm, either pistol or rifle. These were white-man weapons bought with blood beyond the Lodge Trail Ridge two winters gone: a glorious fight when many of these same warriors had joined in butchering Fetterman’s soldiers, the hundred-in-the-hand.

  Last into the light of a battle day came the potent, protective shields, pulled ceremonially from their hide wrappings by the women. Gently each wife smoothed the fluttering feathers and straightened tiny, tinkling brass cones, perhaps brushed a finger over the magic symbols painted across the bull-hide surface or stroked the teeth on a small weasel skull or a badger jaw, perhaps elk milk teeth or a buffalo scrotum filled with private power. These were powerful totems: the strongest of war medicine evoked come this moment of battle. Come now this time to slaughter the half-a-hundred.

  “Porcupine!” Roman Nose called out as his face emerged into afternoon light. “Bring the young Bull with you!”

  “We are going to kill these white men at long last?” asked High-Backed Bull as they hurried over to the tall war chief.

  Roman Nose nodded, bending his head and whispering, “Long ago I vowed never to become a chief—like these old men. Too much like women, I think: much talk, and not enough fighting!”

  As some Brule herders brought up the council’s ponies, Roman Nose turned slightly, lifting his nose into the air as he was greeted with the fragrance of stewing meat and fry-bread pungent on that warm afternoon breeze. As was the custom at this season of year, the Lakota women had prepared the council’s meal outside beneath the hide awning so that the interior of Pawn
ee Killer’s lodge would not be unduly heated beyond the chiefs’ endurance. Roman Nose began to rub his stomach, signifying his satisfaction with that ceremonial meal just completed.

  “Your belly is as full with meat and bread as are your ears with the words of the old chiefs?” Porcupine asked the Nose.

  When the war chief failed to answer, High-Backed Bull turned to look at Roman Nose, finding the war chief’s hand frozen where it lay on his belly, a grimace of horror crossing his features, as if he suddenly had trouble swallowing something, as if his throat had constricted.

  Three Brule women huddled over two steaming kettles where they had boiled the hump meat Pawnee Killer had served his guests. A third, and smaller, kettle crackled with spitting grease, where the women fried their bread made with flour stolen in those recent raids along the white man’s roads and in the white man’s settlements.

  Bull watched the big chief’s eyes narrow as he was handed the reins to his war pony by a Brule pony boy. Still Roman Nose refused to take his gaze from the old Sioux woman who repeatedly speared the fry-bread from her kettle … each piece impaled on the tines of an iron fork.

  Iron!

  In terror Bull instantly realized the seriousness of this transgression, knowing that Roman Nose’s personal medicine had been destroyed. The young warrior looked back to his war chief.

  His eyes misting in realization, Roman Nose quietly began to keen the soaring notes of his death song. His gaze fell to the ground. Only then did Roman Nose turn away to climb slowly aboard his pony like a man touched-by-the-moon—weakened by grief, crazed with terror.

  “What is this?” Tall Bull demanded of Roman Nose, brusquely pushing his way past Bull with his own pony. “We should be celebrating the deaths of the half-a-hundred! Why do I see you crying as if a relative of yours has been killed?”

  “Yes, Roman Nose!” chided Chief White Horse as he brought his pony to a halt nearby. “Why this look of mourning, when it will be the white man who will be slaughtered!”

  “Long ago,” Porcupine began as his war chief continued the wail of death song, “Roman Nose’s medicine-helper forbade him from eating any food that had been touched with the white man’s iron.”

  Tall Bull looked from the young warrior again to the face of Roman Nose, confusion on his face. “Yes … all Shahiyena know of his powerful medicine calling. But I do not see what that has to—”

  “I can use the white man’s weapons,” Roman Nose interrupted suddenly, his words drenched with overwhelming grief. “I can touch anything with my hands. But I am not to take any food into my body that has been touched by the white man’s own medicine!”

  “What are you telling us?” White Horse demanded, his own eyes flaring with the first hint of fear.

  “Behold!” Roman Nose roared with the fury of a man who had received his death sentence. He pointed to the shadows beneath the awning where the old Lakota woman dipped her fry-bread from the spitting kettle with a crude iron fork. “Behold my death!”

  As quickly as he had shown them the cause of his grief, the tall war chief turned away without uttering another word, leading Porcupine and High-Backed Bull, along with many of his faithful Hotamitanyo, veterans all of so much bloodletting over the length and breadth of Kansas.

  For the first time that momentous day, a day when all should be celebration, when all should have been total victory in wiping out the half-a-hundred, Bull sensed a tremor in his own medicine, a shaking to the root of his own power, knowing that the potency of Roman Nose’s medicine—magic that had seen the Hotamitanyo through countless skirmishes and battles—that medicine was now gone the way of summer snow

  7

  September 1868

  BLOOD FROTHED AT the man’s lips, his red-flecked orbs gone walleyed in pain, as much as in fear of staring into the face of death.

  The face of Jubilee Usher.

  How Usher always relished this power, momentarily cradling a man’s life in his hands—in this case, feeling the slow, unmistakable crackle of cartilage in his victim’s windpipe as the trachea collapsed under the ever-tightening vise of the Danite leader’s clawlike grip.

  “G-g-ghg-ghg …,” gurgled the victim, his fingers frantically, desperately raking at Usher’s hands as the colonel continued to squeeze all hope of breath reaching the lungs below the crushed windpipe.

  Jubilee tore his eyes away from the pasty gray of his victim’s swollen face, the man held at arm’s length, legs dangling, boots barely skiffing the grassy sand of their camp on the west bank of Muddy Creek, putting Usher’s army west of the Green River and Fort Bridger, closing in on Zion.

  “Look, ye of little faith—and remember!” Usher roared, finding again a fascination with his own voice at this decibel. “Mark it well on your memories and fail me not. For just such a fate awaits the next of you who would entertain even the faintest thought of trifling with the woman!”

  “He didn’t … didn’t mean nothing by it—”

  Usher whirled on the speaker, his present victim still dangling at the end of his huge arm, legs dragging behind like a clumsy, ill-stringed marionette out of control. The man had already wet himself, a dark stain down one leg.

  “You dare tell me he meant nothing by his sordid transgression?” Usher spat into the speaker’s face as the man backed a hurried two steps, suddenly stopped by the solid cordon of his cohorts.

  “I found him with her,” Jubilee continued, sensing his victim’s grip loosen at his wrist. The man was dying, if not already dead. “He had the woman’s dress up … well, let’s just say he had shamefully embarrassed the woman by near disrobing her when I discovered him … surprised him, those filthy britches of his opened. Ready to commit his nameless sin against this helpless woman. And you say he couldn’t help himself!”

  “J-just that, Colonel …,” the man stammered, dragging his own hand across his throat as his eyes bounced between Usher’s and the bloated, ashen face of his friend, “none of us, we ain’t had no … no women since’t—”

  “This is not the first time I’ve demanded chastity from you, men!”

  He swallowed and nodded eagerly as a pup who wanted to please a master. “And the woman likely was looking … she was—”

  “Looking?” Usher bent over to scream in the man’s face, spittle flung across the henchman’s unwashed, sun burned cheeks. “You mean to tell me you’ve been casting your eyes at her too?”

  “N-no!”

  With an audible crunch of the last of the trachea’s cartilage, Usher hurled his arm around, flinging the dead man at the end of it into the brash speaker. Screeching in sudden fear as he fell over backward, sprawling on the ground beneath the body, the Danite pushed and struggled to get out from under the corpse of his dead friend as it voided its bowels in a noisy, gaseous explosion. Jubilee stood over him as the man finally clambered to his knees, almost whimpering, staring up into the bright afternoon light until the sun’s own rays were eclipsed by the huge form.

  “Just whose side are you on in this battle of God versus evil?” Usher inquired, this time so quietly that it caught every man of them by surprise. “This final battle at the end of the world, a battle between the faithful and the heathen? Between the clean”—then he pointed down at the dead man crumpled beneath his feet—“and the unclean. Where stand you?”

  “Colonel Usher!”

  Jubilee wheeled about at the call, the rest turning with him. A rider came skidding to a halt in a spray of dust that sent golden spires through the slanting afternoon sunlight. The dust settled in a cascading cock’s comb that Usher strode through to reach the horseman. Two more riders came to a halt on the heels of the first.

  “Heber—what changes have the years wrought in our City of the Saints?”

  As Heber Welch slid from the saddle, wind galled and dry as a high-plains buffalo wallow in late summer, Usher caught him up and gave the man an immense, intimate embrace. It was meant only for this sort of trusted friend—the one Jubilee had chosen weeks b
efore to ride ahead without delay, reaching Salt Lake City to determine the condition of affairs for Usher’s return after these many years away from the real seat of Mormon power.

  Welch’s eyes flicked over the rest quickly, then hung on Usher’s as Jubilee pulled back to arm’s length. “Your father, Colonel … he—”

  “You saw my father? He was your namesake.”

  “I am his godson. His namesake.”

  “So you have been like a brother to me,” Jubilee said, studying the man’s face for the portent of the news brought him at a gallop.

  “He is ill.”

  Jubilee sensed the very real stab of remorse as the news pierced him through. “I have done my best over the years to correspond with him. To apprise him of my good works …” Then his eyes went half-lidded of a sudden, suspicious. “He is still a member of the Council of Twelve?”

  “The others have … they’ve removed him, Colonel.”

  Swallowing that news like something foul, fetid, and raw, Usher gazed into the distance, a bit south of due west. “The rest—they cower before Brigham Young, yes?”

  “Your father …,” Welch started to say, paused, then finished, “it seems—he doesn’t want you to come back to the City.”

  Usher turned back to Welch slowly, his face gone almost expressionless below the smooth skin of his bald head, its long fringe of coal-black, curly hair hung from ear level to drape far past his shoulders like a silken shawl. He pushed a perfumed ringlet behind an ear. “Not back to the City. Why in God’s name would my father tell me not to come back?”

  Welch gulped slightly. “Your father …”

  “What does this have to do with my father any longer?”

  “Only that your father says the Prophet has … has—”