The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  They mounted up. He led them south, heeling left just beyond sight of the bluecoat advance. They rode over a gentle sigh of land and halted in disarray, as if surprised to meet their enemy. The bluecoats reacted swiftly, running to form defensive ranks, but Storm Arriving kicked his mount into motion, heading east, avoiding a battle most surely lost, but drawing his foe’s interest away from northern targets. The column did not follow, but he hoped to change that in time.

  The whistlers’ lungs sucked in the prairie air and their powerful legs pressed them forward, eastward. They rode for a day, sent out messengers at sunset, and rode on through the night. With each mile, with each moonlit rise they topped and each star-filled stream they crossed, he felt his blood cool and thin. He flew in the darkness, soaring through the night. The wind flew with him, and his body tightened, hardened. Dream armor encased him, and his heart slowed. They all flew, skimming the ground from whistlerback, as silent as the little-whirlwinds; soldiers no longer, they were weapons themselves, living darts with which to prick a massive bear. He looked back, half-expecting to see a twister, but only night pursued, thunder-dark and ghostly.

  That, he said to himself, will be good enough.

  By noon, the land had rumpled itself into unkempt folds. Woods filled gaps between larger streams and grasses competed with sharp-fingered juniper and fields of prickly milkweed, their downy heads dancing in the westerly breeze. They rode through this, too, not pausing but to give mounts and man brief rests for water. Messengers came and went, linking the three forces as they ranged eastward, and toward evening, as his force drew near his goal, Storm Arriving sent out his final orders.

  He reined in on a knoll, deep in lands he had not visited in years, lands that had changed a great deal in a very short time.

  All around them were the square, dark homesteads of vé’hó’e, their windows glowing with lamplight, the land around each home torn and cleared of native growth. The forests that packed the water-rich land only a half-day west had here been felled by an appetite for wood: to build, to fence, to burn. Now the lands that rolled toward the Big Greasy were naked and broken, torn into corrugated squares and planted with lines of corn, wheatgrass, and many plants that Storm Arriving could not even identify.

  Farther, more settlements gathered along the banks of the river, changing it, too. Where he had known broad, sandy banks and quiet, tree-canopied eddies, lodges and structures now crowded side by side. Along muddy shores where hardbacks had splashed and grumbled, grazing on waterborn weeds, boats of every size now rested or sat bobbing at anchor, tugged by the great river’s sluggish summer current. It was a town divided by a river, linked by ferryboats, and it was the focal point of every vé’hó’e settler for miles and miles.

  Whistling Elk nudged his mount next to Storm Arriving. “I am afraid I know what you are thinking.”

  Knee Prints by the Bank laughed from the other side. “It does not take any special wisdom to see it.”

  “Do not do this,” Whistling Elk said. “There is no honor in it. It is shameful. The Council has forbidden it.”

  “The Council has forbidden us to do anything,” Knee Prints by the Bank said.

  “But even Three Trees Together agreed—you told me that before he died he promised the vé’hó’e we would not to do this sort of thing.”

  Storm Arriving sneered as he stared at the only thing his enemy seemed to value. “Before he died,” he said. “Before he was murdered.”

  “Died, murdered, yes, but he promised not to do this thing.”

  “And Long Hair promised not to do that thing,” Storm Arriving shouted, pointing back to the west, to the bluecoats, and their advance on the People. “Vé’hó’e promises,” he said, “are like water in your hand. You can drink of them now, but you cannot save them for tomorrow. They slip away, until nothing is left but your thirst.”

  “But it is wrong,” Whistling Elk said, begging him.

  He was silent a moment. “Do you know what the vé’hó’e call us? They call us savages. They call us animals. This is nothing more than what they expect of us.”

  “But these are families.” Whistling Elk grabbed his arm, tears on his face. “Families, not soldiers. Not bluecoats. These are wives and children. What if they were yours?”

  He glared at the man-becoming-woman. “I have no wife,” he said. “I have no child. The vé’hó’e have taken them.” Then he jerked his arm out of the other’s grasp and addressed his soldiers.

  “Start with the farms,” he commanded. “And take fire to the town. Kill the men. Use the women if you wish. Leave the children to starve. We go!”

  Riders scattered, spreading out in threes and fours toward the lamplit homes. Whistling Elk did not ride forward. Storm Arriving glanced over as the first sounds of murder could be heard.

  “It is only what they expect,” Storm Arriving told him. Then he nudged his whistler into motion, leaving him to hold the knoll alone.

  Chapter 22

  Tuesday, July 8, A.D. 1890

  White House

  Washington, District of Columbia

  The cursive letters evaded Custer’s will, twisting as he attempted to set them on the page. He wrestled with them, with the pen itself, the mere feel of it alien in his left hand. It was nothing but an ink-dipped stick, but it spun and bucked within his grasp, seeking escape, a goal it had already achieved twice this morning as evidenced by the stains and smears on his desktop blotter. Inanimate yet willful, it felt both stiff and rubbery in his clumsy fingers, but he strove against its dominance, gaining ground with each letter, gaining confidence with every word.

  He sat back and stretched the cramping muscles of a neck and shoulder unaccustomed to attacking a piece of paper from the left. Morning sunshine streamed into the library, bouncing up from the floor to fill the coved ceiling with woodgrained light. A wet breeze moved sluggishly in and out through the open French doors. Custer looked back down and regarded the two lines it had taken him a quarter hour to write:

  My dearest Sunshine Girl,

  It is the first day of Spring, and you sit by the

  window, bathed in Sun’s sweet glory.

  It was a belated letter, one of the many he had composed for Libbie and stored in the shelves of his memory, but the words and the moment—now months behind him—had remained crisp and vivid. Committing these long-held thoughts to paper was not only good practice for a President’s recalcitrant body, it was the least he could do for the woman who had stood by him through the past difficult months. Though he had been able to communicate to her through the slurred speech of his handicap, he had never been able to utter the words of love and devotion that had been so much a part of their relationship. For twenty-five years, from courtship and through wars and politics, he had forever spoken frankly of his adoration for Libbie Bacon, the prettiest girl in Monroe, but from the day an assassin’s bullet stole his loquacity and turned his words into sounds best fit for a farmyard beast, he had been unwilling to bear hearing the words of his devotion so perverted.

  And so he had saved those words. Until now. Until the time when the faculty of the written word was once more within reach if his inept fingers.

  He regarded the product of his efforts. The penmanship was atrocious, but he had to learn how to forgive that, so he decided instead to pride himself in the fact that the slowness of his hand had enabled him to achieve perfect spelling. A simple attainment, perhaps, and one better suited to a schoolhouse pupil than a nation’s leader, but it was a start. With diligent work, he would be ready to return to the tasks of his position. A few things needed to be brought into play first, though, his strength and stamina not the least of them. With attention to every move, he reached over and redipped his nib in the ink, tapped it twice against the pot’s rim, and brought the pen smoothly back to the page.

  Three knocks sounded at the library door.

  “Yeh,” he said, still unable to manage a good and sibilant “s” with his stroke-palsied tongue. He had
learned to forgive himself for many things during this difficult year. “Come in.”

  He glanced up as Jacob entered. “Good morning, Jacob,” he said as he returned his attention to his letters.

  “Good morning, Autie,” he said as he took a seat in the chair before Custer’s worktable. He looked troubled, with splotches of color in his pudgy cheeks and eyes peering out from beneath a wrinkled brow. Even his mouth—usually so ready with a smile—was bunched up under his moustache, giving him the aspect of a terrier denied the chase.

  “I know that look,” Custer said. “That look means trouble.”

  Jacob put a small stack of papers on the table. Custer recognized the half-sheets of telegraph transcriptions and the densely-typed, oddly-indented foolscap of military reports. Jacob, as Secretary of War, often had such papers in hand, but his demeanor gave Custer a bad feeling about what today’s report contained.

  “Things are bad out there, Autie.”

  “How bad?”

  “Very bad.” He stabbed the papers with a daggered finger. “Homesteaders killed. Whole families slaughtered. Towns burned to the ground. Your Cheyenne have gone mad, Autie.”

  Custer frowned and paused in his writing. This was not good news, not at all, but gone mad? “No,” he said, working hard to make his diction crisp. “Not mad.” In his entire experience, the Indian had never been the crazed killer depicted in novels. They had often been incomprehensible to white men, but their motives, once known, had always been logical.

  But this time...he couldn’t see what they were doing. Attacking the homesteads and tiny hamlets of the newly-settled southern region would gain them nothing except the immediate retribution of the garrisons and forces already in the region. He could not decipher their goal, unless...

  “Wait. Where?” he asked. “Where are they?”

  “Along the eastern borderlands,” Jacob said with the exasperation of a man who cannot get his point across. “They’ve even crossed the Missouri. They’re attacking towns and homes in Santee Territory and Yankton. We weren’t prepared—”

  Custer laughed.

  “Autie, I don’t see that this is a laughing matter!”

  He waved his ink-stained hand to calm Jacob’s indignation. “Brilliant,” he said.

  “Killing women and children can hardly be called brilliant.”

  Custer laughed some more. “Why not?” he asked. “We did it.”

  “Our soldiers did not scalp and rape and burn!”

  Custer shook his head. “Jacob. Are you sure of that?”

  Jacob swallowed his next retort. “No, I’m not.” His anger melted into petulance. “I still don’t see the ‘brilliance’ of this.”

  “Come, Jacob. Think back to West Point.” He jabbed a finger down on the tabletop. “You are here, hidden and protected by miles of prairie.” Now he drew a line from the side toward that spot. “And here I come toward your position. You can’t get away. What do you do?”

  “I draw you off with a flanking maneuver.”

  “And if I don’t take the bait?” He drew a new line back behind the oncoming force.

  “I move behind and attack you from the rear.”

  “And if that fails?” He extended the line farther back to the rear of the advancing column.

  “I attack your supply lines.”

  “Yeh. Now what if you can’t? What if you know at the beginning that your numbers are not enough to achieve a victory in direct combat?”

  Jacob puzzled at it but shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Custer drew the line even farther back. “If I can’t keep you out, I make you want to leave.” He brought a clenched fist down on the table. “I hit what you must defend. I draw you back.”

  Jacob’s frown deepened. “That’s despicable,” he said.

  Custer gave a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s war. Did you tell Morton, yet?”

  “Hm? Morton? No, not yet.”

  “Good,” Custer said and put his hand on the reports. “Let me.”

  Jacob reached out for the papers. “Autie, I have to tell him. It’s my duty.”

  “No, your duty is to get the information to him. Leave it here. I’ll make sure he’s told.”

  “Autie...”

  Custer didn’t push farther. “What other news?”

  “Psh,” Jacob said with a dismissive wave. He sat back in his chair. “Everything is bad. Morton has the navy prowling the southern coasts to ensure ‘free navigation’ from Spanish privateers—not that we’ve seen any—and we have reports of trading caravans making their way up from Tejano into the Territory. Heavily guarded caravans. And we’re pretty sure that the guards are more than just guards.”

  “Military?”

  “Undoubtedly. I tell you, I think that man is doing everything he can to get us into a war. If he’s not thumping his chest about ‘Spanish arrogance,’ he’s thumbing his nose at the Spaniards with guns and supplies to Cuba. Did you hear that he’s dispatched warships to Havana to ‘protect United States interests in the region’?”

  Custer nodded. “And in return?”

  “In return, Spain has dispatched a fleet of her own. Havana harbor is going to be stacking them in like sardines. Our ships will be cheek-to-jowl with the dapper dons.”

  Custer grimaced. “That won’t be good,” he said.

  “No,” Jacob agreed. “It’ll be a powderkeg.” He shrugged. “It serves us right for running you with a businessman and not a politician, I suppose.”

  Custer lifted his right hand, already twisted and starting to wither like an apple too long on the tree. “How could we have known?”

  The news was disturbing. Events were culminating more swiftly than Custer liked, and sooner than he feared he could handle them. He brought his pen back to Libbie’s letter.

  “War is coming, Jacob, but it is not inevitable,” he said, taking extra care with the multi-syllabic word.

  “But Autie, with Spanish ships in the Gulf, Spanish soldiers in the Territory, and the Spanish weapons in Cheyenne hands...”

  “We could lose the Interior,” Custer finished. “I agree. And that is why we will work to avoid this war Morton is heading for.” He frowned in concentration as he drew the intricate curls of a capital “D”.

  “The Cheyenne are one thing,” he went on. “Spain, entirely another. We are not prepared to go to war with Spain. I need you to prepare a meeting, Jacob. In a week. Maybe a little longer.”

  “Of course, Autie. With whom?”

  He glanced up from his work and gave Jacob his best rendition of the old Custer wink. “With the Cabinet.”

  Jacob swelled with excitement at the prospect. “It will be my pleasure.”

  Custer nodded. “Keep it quiet, though. I don’t want Morton to know until I’m ready.” He nodded. “Thank you, Jacob.”

  Jacob stood. “Thank you, Mr. President.” He reached for the stack of papers but Custer touched them first.

  “Leave those with me,” he said.

  Jacob hesitated, ready to insist. “You’ll see that Morton gets them?”

  “I will personally make sure that Morton is informed of the situation.”

  Jacob knew his old friend and commander, and probably knew what Custer was thinking. After a long moment of consideration, though, he relented. When he left the library, however, he did so wearing an expression quite nearly as troubled as the one he’d worn on the way in.

  Yes, Custer thought, you know me. And you know that I didn’t say I’d tell Morton. You’re walking down the hall, now, trying to think it through, trying to remember precisely what is I did say I’d do.

  He put down the pen and picked up the reports that detailed the Cheyenne attacks and their results. He thumbed through them.

  Civilian casualties, they read. Depravities visited upon women. Mutilations. Livestock slaughtered. Homes burned. Shops burned. Towns burned. Langtree. Homeview. Westgate.

  He let the pages fall back into place and closed his eyes. He hadn’t
seen reports like this for nearly a score of years, but the images of torn bodies, bloodied fields, and the smoking ruins of homes were all too real, all too easy to recall.

  What are you doing? he asked the unseen warriors of the prairie. What changed you? Why this sudden cruelty?

  He shook his head, resigned to the fact that, most likely, he would never know the answer to those questions. Then he took the reports and put them under a pile of other papers, off to the side of his worktable.

  Morton would be informed, all right. He promised Jacob, and he intended to keep that promise. And in a few days, when the story hit the papers, he would make sure that Morton saw the reports. Waiting a few days would not change the outcome in the West. People would die, homes would be burned, livestock would be killed, but no more tomorrow than if he told Morton today. What would be different was the public reaction to the news. Hearing such news with a sympathetic leader on hand to tell them that steps had been taken to crush the violence would soothe the situation, but hearing it and then seeing your leader caught flatfooted by the reports, that would lead to outcry, and public outcry was just the pry-rod Custer required to get Morton out of his chair.

  “My chair,” Custer muttered, and then, looking at his writing, “Aw, Hell.” In his distraction, he had misspelled “Darling,” and while penmanship might be somewhat out of his control, he would accept damnation before he’d accept less than excellence in the things he could control. He crumpled the letter, brought out a fresh sheet of paper, redipped his pen, and started anew.

  My dearest Sunshine Girl,

  Chapter 23

  Moon When the Whistlers Get Fat, Waning

  Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell

  The docks

  Cadiz, España

  The carriage’s iron-rimmed wheels clattered and banged along the rough cobbles that led to the wharfs. The streets were lined with townsfolk, all come to bid farewell to their country’s newest friends. They waved hats and kerchiefs in the bright sunshine, standing on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the travelers.