by Jon Sharpe
Fargo steadied the spyglass as Duke fell forward over Valeria, dropping his knife, then twisting around to glare in the direction from which the shot had come, eyes bright with fury. All at once, the Indians dancing around the fire stopped and turned in the same direction, their singing transforming into a cacophony of angry snarls and exclamations.
An enraged voice rose in English, “Attackers!” Duke translated the shout, and instantly the crowd began scattering, the men dashing northward along the stream, heading for the bluff, the women and children fleeing toward the lodges.
Fargo lowered the glass and glared at Prairie Dog. “Nice shot!”
“It was a pretty good shot for these old eyes, ya damn ingrate.” Prairie Dog stared down the bluff, at the surging black mass sprinting toward the river, the fleetest braves already splashing into the water. “But what the hell we gonna do now?”
Fargo cursed and looked back toward the fire. Valeria lay sprawled atop the animal skins. Duke knelt on one knee beside her, clutching his right arm as he glared toward the bluff.
Fargo cursed again as he dropped his spyglass into his boot well and grabbed his rifle. He and Prairie Dog might have spared the girl for the moment, but, doing so, they’d pretty well blown their own lamps while doing nothing for Valeria’s future. To try to get around behind the approaching horde of raging Indians would be sure suicide.
And, to top it off, Duke was still alive…
“Well,” Fargo said, on one knee as he stared down the bluff at the Indians yowling and crossing the stream, his steady voice belying his frustration, “I reckon we’d better run.”
Down the slope before him, the Indians grunted and yowled, loosing rocks and gravel as they scrambled up the bluff toward the interlopers. Clutching the Schuetzen, Prairie Dog scrambled to his feet and bolted into the trees behind Fargo.
“Skye, old son, I like how you think!”
12
Fargo squeezed off three rounds over the lip of the ridge, hearing a couple of grunts and enraged screams amongst the Indians approaching from below, then turned and followed Prairie Dog further into the woods. In spite of the inky tree columns and low-hanging branches, he ran hard, overtaking Prairie Dog in about seventy yards.
“Keep going!” Fargo growled. “I’m gonna circle around, see if I can sneak the girl outta the village!”
Prairie Dog took several more leaping strides through the woods. “But, hell, I won’t make it, neither, so I reckon I’ll see ya on the other side!”
“I’ll see ya back at the fort!”
Fargo swung right into the trees, his keen night vision picking out deadfalls, which he hopscotched, ducking under branches, tracing a wide angle down hill and back toward the stream. He bolted through a juneberry thicket then stopped, listening.
Behind, branches and shrubs cracked under running feet, and the rasps of labored breaths rose.
Fargo ducked behind the thicket and edged a look back the way he’d come. Two jostling shadows ran toward him, starlight dancing on spear heads and on bone talismans hanging around the braves’ necks.
Fargo snapped the rifle to his shoulder, triggered a shot. The Henry’s bark shattered the heavy silence, and the brave on the left screamed. There was a heavy, crunching thud as he hit the ground and rolled.
The brave on the right kept coming, screaming, starlight reflecting from his wide eyes as he bolted into the thicket, drawing his spear back behind his ear, preparing to throw.
Fargo shot him twice in the chest. As the dying brave drove the spear into the ground and continued half running and half falling, propelled downhill by his own momentum, the Trailsman ejected the spent shell and continued scrambling down the bluff’s steep shoulder.
He stopped beside a sprawling box elder at the lip of the stream bank, and turned back toward the Indian village. He could see nothing but the willows and cottonwood saplings lining the stream. Up the hill behind him came the occasional distant whoop of a brave still on Prairie Dog’s trail.
Taking his Henry in one hand, Fargo grabbed a stout root bowing out of the bank, and dropped down to the soft sand lining the riverbed. He plunged through the willows and straight into the water, which, in spite of the sweat basting his shirt to his back and soaking his beard, braced him with its chill.
On the other side, he climbed the bank, water sluicing off his buckskins. Slogging through the scrub willows and sage and knee-high wheatgrass, he angled back toward the village, which he couldn’t see from this distance.
When the lodges became conical shadows against the stars, the fire glowing ahead and right, near the confluence of the streams, he moved forward quickly, crouching, keeping his head below the tops of the scrub willows. A dog barked somewhere to his left. Fargo hoped the beast was tied, or his position would be discovered in no time.
Continuing to steal through the scrub, ignoring the sting of prickly pear and hawthorn, he crept between several dark lodges, firewood piles, and stretched buffalo hides. Edgy, angry voices rose around him—men’s as well as women’s—and several times he changed his route to avoid braves lurking about, armed with rifles or nocked arrows.
He crabbed around a heap of split wood, and stopped. Thirty yards away lay the fire, which had diminished considerably since Prairie Dog’s errant shot. Fargo had just begun to scan the ground around it for Valeria, when angry female voices sounded faintly on his left.
He swung the Henry around, heart thudding. The cackling harangues, muffled as though by buffalo hide, seemed to originate from a nearby lodge.
Fargo jogged toward the voices but dropped when two braves jogged toward him from the fire. When they’d disappeared in the darkness, he continued forward. He didn’t stop again until he knelt beside the closed door of the lodge from which cackles, angry snarls, and Assiniboine epithets emanated. Inside, a girl was sobbing, and there was the smack of a strap on bare flesh.
Fargo cursed, looked around, and crawled on hands and knees to the lodge’s painted deerskin door. He lifted an edge of the flap and peered into the shadows jostled by a fire in the lodge’s center, the smell of buffalo hide and smoke nearly taking his breath away.
Two Indian women knelt in the shadows, on either side of a pale figure writhing upon a buffalo robe. One woman had her hand on the back of Valeria’s neck, forcing the girl’s head down hard against the robe, while another, who wore her silver-streaked brown hair in a long braid down her back, lashed a strip of rawhide against Valeria’s bare bottom.
As Fargo pushed through the door and stood, aiming his Henry straight out from his right hip, the woman facing him gasped, rising and stumbling straight back toward the far side of the lodge. The other remained kneeling before Valeria but turned toward Fargo.
She was a crone with a wizened face spotted with warts, and slanted, evil eyes. She neither gasped nor started but regarded Fargo coolly, almost bemusedly.
Fargo wagged the Henry’s barrel and warned the women in his rough Assiniboine to think twice about calling out, for he had no qualms about shooting ugly Indian wenches. He’d barely slung the insult before he realized the woman facing him from across the lodge was far from ugly.
No older than eighteen, if she was that, she was strikingly beautiful—her black hair long and thick and burnished by the leaping flames at her side. She wore a wolf cloak around her shoulders, and her eyes in her heart-shaped face, with its strong nose and well-bred jaw, were almond-shaped bits of obsidian flamed by the thick wings of her hair.
A true Indian princess if Fargo had ever seen one. The slight drop of her chin and the flicker in her eyes told him she’d read the appreciation in his gaze.
Neither she nor the crone said anything as Fargo moved forward, grabbed a skinning knife from an overturned gourd, and reached down to cut the hide strap tying Valeria’s right hand to a stake above her head. Long red welts streaked her back and buttocks.
It wasn’t until he’d freed her left hand that her eyes snapped open, and she turned her head slightly, b
linking as she stared up at him.
“Skye?” she said weakly.
“Shh.” He waved his rifle back and forth between the princess and the crone. The princess kept her chin down, upper lip curled, lustrous black eyes squinted.
When he’d cut all the straps, he held the rifle on the two women with one hand while awkwardly pulling Valeria up with the other. Obviously, she was too drugged to walk, so he drew her naked body over his shoulder. Hand clamped across her thigh, her head hanging down his back, he rose, backed to the door, and repeated his warning to the Indian women about calling out.
They glared at him like dark statues.
Fargo turned, bolted through the lodge’s door, and crouched as he glanced around quickly. He hadn’t taken more than two strides back the way he’d come before the crone in the lodge began shrieking like a hyena in a bear trap and the girl began shouting out the door in her quick, guttural tongue that a tall white man was making off with the fire-headed whore.
Wishing he had shot them, Fargo broke into a run, meandering between the lodges humping darkly around him. He turned past a large meat rack when men’s voices and the clatter of running feet rose ahead.
Wheeling, he sprinted toward the horse remuda, the girl groaning and grunting down his back. He tripped over a lodgepole brace, and fell forward, the girl rolling on the ground before him, sobbing and yowling his name accusingly.
Behind him and left, enraged voices and footfalls rose.
Fargo reached for Valeria. “Sorry.” Grabbing her arm, he tossed her over his shoulder, scrambled back to his feet, and, holding the rifle in his left hand, sprinted forward again.
If he could nab a horse, they’d have a chance…but the yowls of pursuing braves trailed him like devils’ screams.
As Fargo passed the last lodges at the camp’s southern edge and bounded over the lip of a steep gully, a panting, growling dog shot toward him like a missile and, when he was halfway down the slope, clamped its jaws around Fargo’s left ankle.
“Fuckin’ mutt!” Fargo barked, his left boot flying out from beneath him. The girl flew out of his arms and a half second later they were both tumbling down the grassy slope, limbs tangled, rolling over and over.
The girl groaned as she rolled in the grass before him. When they hit the gully’s brush-choked floor, he reached for the rifle that had hung up on a shrub.
He swung the Henry around, but before he could poke his finger through the trigger guard, he froze. While the snarling cur tugged on his pants cuff, three long-haired, bare-chested figures stared down at him, nocked arrows cocked back behind their ears, the sharp stone tips aimed at Fargo’s head. The ash bows creaked like leather.
“Hold it!” a voice boomed on the ridge, in English. “I want him alive!”
Fargo stretched his gaze beyond the three braves slightly relaxing their bows before him. Two men stood on the gully’s lip. One, pale skinned and blond haired. The other, just as tall but slightly stooped and wearing a plumed warbonnet and buffalo robe, a feathered tomahawk in his right hand.
“We’ll kill him and the girl together, thus doubling the amusement of Kundra-May-Na-Tee…and doubling our power against the white-eyes!” With that, Lieutenant Duke raised his arm above his head, waved his hand, and danced in place, howling like a coyote, then wheeled and strode away.
Chief Iron Shirt descended the slope, eagle feathers shimmering in the firelight behind him, necklace teeth clattering softly on his chest. He pushed between the braves to squat before Fargo, the man’s black eyes meeting the Trailsman’s. Iron Shirt smiled, showing naked gums between his long eyeteeth, the creases in his long, haggard face deepening.
“Skye Fargo,” he grunted. “The war gods told me you would come. They spoke to me the night I learned you killed my son, Blaze Face. They told me you would come, and I and the war god, Yem-seen, who speaks in the voice of Lieutenant Duke, would satisfy my desire for revenge.”
“Skye!” Valeria cried as one of the braves grabbed her hair and jerked her to her knees.
Fargo lunged toward him, bounding off his heels. Before he knew what he was doing, he felt the brave’s neck in his hands. The brave screamed a half second before his spine snapped.
Fargo let the body fall, and wheeled. In the corner of Fargo’s right eye he saw Iron Shirt flick his hand toward him, starlight winking off the stone club in his fist. The back of Fargo’s head went numb, and the last sensation he had was of falling back into the brush, staring up at the sky, and watching the stars wink out.
13
A voice called to the Trailsman, but he couldn’t make out the words that seemed whispered to him from outer space. Lolling at the bottom of a deep, chill, black ocean, he heard little more than a slow, garbled murmur.
Then the ocean floor surged, and his head bounced up from the sandy bottom. Pain shot through his ears and deep into his shoulders.
The caller seemed to move closer, and Fargo could make out his name. His eyelids fluttered, light penetrated the black water, and he found himself staring up at a beautiful, dark-skinned, heart-shaped face framed in raven hair streaked with burnished copper.
The girl smiled, showing white, perfect teeth except for a single chipped one, before she turned away from him, throwing her arms wide and careening through the air. Her hair flew about her shoulders, streaked by dancing flames.
As the girl disappeared in the shadows around him, Fargo felt the ocean floor surge again. But it wasn’t an ocean floor he lay upon.
Turning his head slightly and rolling his eyes around, he saw that he lay on a bed of trade blankets and buffalo robes. The ground vibrated beneath him with the rhythmic throbs of several drums beating like an enervated heart.
The walls of the stitched and painted buffalo-hide lodge glowed with the light of the fire within and several fires without. The glow was interrupted by the silhouette of the dancing girl—the beguilingly beautiful princess Fargo had seen earlier with the crone. Her shadow revolved about the walls like the specter of some bewitching, otherworldly goddess, hair flying, her arms flung out as though she were swimming through air.
She danced around him several times to the throbbing beat of the drums. It made Fargo’s eyeballs and head ache to watch her, but he couldn’t help himself.
In her deerskin smock, which was cut low at the neck and under her arms, so that he could see the half-moons of her light brown breasts when she turned sideways, the nipples jostling against the deerskin as she danced, she seemed a creature from another universe. She seemed at once a woman and a child—sinister and frightening yet rife with primordial sexuality.
A necklace of light blue beads clattered softly around her neck. Her legs and feet were bare. When she twirled, the smock rose above her thighs to reveal her well-turned legs and smooth, round bottom.
The drums grew louder, but their rhythm slowed. She stopped before Fargo, stared down at him, her thick hair obscuring her eyes like a giant raven’s wing. As the drumbeats grew suddenly faster and louder once again, she crossed her arms and lifted the smock above her head, tossing it aside to reveal her slender yet voluptuous body in all its naked splendor.
Her brown, pear-shaped breasts rose and fell sharply, the hard nipples distended.
In broken English she said huskily, “You who killed my brother are a brave warrior.” She rubbed her flat belly in a circular motion. “You, before you die, shall fill me with a warrior just as fearless and strong, and he, our son, will fight against you and your people. Such is the wish of the war gods.”
The drumbeats raced for a time, and a man’s singing rose amidst the cacophony, dying suddenly when the drumbeats slowed once again to the rhythm of a fast-beating heart.
The girl dropped to a knee, pulled the trade blanket off of Fargo. He looked down at himself. He was as naked as she was, his fully erect shaft angling back toward his belly.
“Christ,” he muttered.
The situation was as bizarre and disorienting as any he’d ever been in. He’
d eaten peyote a few times with the desert tribes, and, such was the beguiling influence of the girl and the firelight and his aching, swimming head and uncontrollable lust, that he felt as though he’d eaten a few now.
Was he really about to be studded to this girl?
The girl turned, dipped three fingers into a wooden bowl on a small log table, then turned to Fargo with the pale dollop of what smelled like bear grease on the tips of her three fingers. She closed her hand, lightly coating the palm, before wrapping her fingers around his cock.
Fargo stiffened as though at the prick of a sharp knife, and groaned. Her hand was smooth and warm, the grease slightly cooler. Slowly, she smeared the bear grease onto the swollen head, then began working it up and down the thick, throbbing shaft, the grease crackling and snapping as she worked.
“Does that feel good, white man?” she asked softly, her voice almost inaudible above the beating of the drums.
Fargo had to admit to the keenness of the girl’s talent but, wincing against the sweet torture of her slowly pumping hand, he said only, “Christ.”
She chuckled throatily and lowered her head to lightly nibble his balls, then moved up to his chest.
As her hair tickled him, she slid her breasts across his shaft, sending even more violent shockwaves of desire through his loins. She slid her breasts slowly around on him, the grease on his member crackling, her buttonlike nipples raking him sweetly.
Fargo’s heart skipped several beats before continuing its rhythm, which had somehow been synchronized to that of the drums outside.
He was surprised to find that his hands weren’t tied. Duke and Iron Shirt must be confident that the girl’s charms were enticing enough to keep Fargo from snapping her pretty neck.
He considered it, but killing her would only get him killed all the more quickly. The silhouettes of two braves in fur capes and wolf heads shone through the lodge wall, on either side of the lodge’s flap. They were guarding the door—ready sentinels with spears in their fists.