“You four, take the right. The rest of you, with me on the left. Take out those guns.”
They aimed and fired. The Hotchkiss cannon continued fire. Herron put another cartridge in the rifle block and slammed it shut. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder. At the Hotchkiss, the gunner leaned forward into the sunlight, and Herron saw the blond hair of a white man. He grinned.
“All of you, with me. Take down that pale-haired bastard on the left.”
He aimed.
Empty casings sang a song of hot brass as the cannon kicked them loose. The empty magazine clanged in the holder. Pine tossed it behind him and replaced it with a full one. The hardback slammed the ground with its clubbed tail, unhappy with the noise of the cannon. George aimed to compensate for the hardback’s movement as Pine put his hand back to the crank.
A bullet spanged off the barrel housing. Another zipped past. Pine cried out, hand to his face, and fell back. George turned but felt a huge hand grab him by the arm and spin him the other way. An unseen fist slammed into his ribs, and another cracked him across the brow like the kick of a mule. Dazed, he stepped down off the hardback, blinking at the white spots that suffused his vision. He stumbled and fell to one knee. He blinked again. His vision cleared a little, and he saw Pine was by him, lying motionless in the dirt, a wound below his eye. George felt the searing rod of pain in his side. He looked down and realized that he’d been hit.
There was a hole in his deerskin tunic. He reached for it but his left arm refused to move. Another hole told him of a wound to his upper arm, but there was no pain for it. All agony was reserved for his body. With his right hand he explored the wound in his chest. He felt the space where the bullet had punched through his rib. A thick droplet of blood landed on his leg. He touched his brow and found blood there as well.
Aw, Hell, he thought as the white spots across his vision were exchanged for dark splotches. Now I’m going to die. Aw, Hell.
Storm Arriving led his squad around the side of the fort. He ran his whistler past the barricades, up the breastwork, and directly into the trench. Bluecoats shouted and screamed as he drove his whistler through them. The animal’s bulk filled the trench, its spade-clawed toes breaking men, cutting men, as it ran. Ahead of him, bluecoats scrambled up out of the trench as fast as they could. Behind him, the rest of his squad trampled anyone he missed. They plowed forward, leaving death in their wake.
He whistled, three notes, and hung on as his beast climbed up out of the shallow trench. He swung back away from the gate and the explosions from the great rifles One Who Flies commanded. He glanced over and saw that one of them stood unmanned.
Horses ran out of the yard, some with riders, but most with empty saddles. Another thunder-stick exploded overhead; the last signal. War cries filled the air as the soldiers of the People turned and took their assault inside the fort.
“Inside,” Storm Arriving shouted, and they swung back in the direction of the breach. Again he looked toward the mammoth rifles and One Who Flies. He saw men lying on the ground.
He kicked his whistler into motion, streaking out toward the hardbacks. One Who Flies and Pine both lay in the dirt, faces upturned to the sky. He leapt off his mount and checked them both. Pine was dead. One Who Flies still lived.
He tried to remember all the things Speaks While Leaving had told him about her healing arts, and he cursed himself for not having listened more attentively. One Who Flies was wounded in the arm, in the head, and in the torso. The blood was not terrible, but there was a lot. He had to stop the bleeding. What was it his wife had said about bleeding?
He took his knife and began cutting at clothing, exposing the wounds, making strips of cloth and leather to bind them.
“Do not die,” he pleaded. “I do not think this is part of the vision.”
The sound of battle intensified. Riders on horse and whistler chased one another out of the yard and into the open. The firing of guns was constant, like hard hail against a lodgeskin. Soldiers retreated, driven back by the bluecoats on horseback. Storm Arriving tied off the last binding, grabbed his rifle, and mounted his whistler.
“Do not die,” he said, and rode back into the fight.
Custer slammed the door so hard it failed to latch and swung back open. He turned, grabbed it, and rammed it closed. Then he turned and regarded his “guest.”
General Charles Brandeis Herron stood near the desk in Custer’s private office, at stiff attention despite the cane and the arm in a sling. He seemed a stark, angular figure against the ethereal light from the world of snow and marble outside. His uniform seemed nearly black, the brass buttons almost white. The dark wood of the furnishings and the pale, shell-jacquard silk that covered the walls combined to create a scene of contrasts; everything dark was limned in light, and everything bright was tinged with shadow like an artist’s chiaroscuro. Custer took a breath, and stepped into the painting.
“I’ve called you here to talk about your performance, General,” he said as he walked around his worktable and sat down in the straight-backed chair. “Would you please tell me how you account for it?”
Herron’s gaze remained fixed on some indefinable point on the far wall. “I cannot comply with your request, Mr. President.”
Custer blinked. That, certainly, was not what he had expected. Excuses, perhaps. Reasons, certainly. Even a certain amount of mea culpa would have been comprehensible, anything but a flat refusal.
“General, explain yourself.”
“I cannot, sir.”
Custer felt his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palm. “General Herron,” he said slowly. “Please explain yourself, or lose any hope of ever again holding a command.”
“Mr. President, sir,” he replied, and Custer heard the rough edge of emotion in his voice. “We both know I’ll never again command men in the field.”
Custer sniffed. “True enough. Your career is over. You know it. I know it. But if that’s true, you have nothing further to lose and can answer my question. How do you account for your complete failure to achieve any of the objectives laid out for you.”
In the light from the window, Custer saw the hard edge of the general’s jaw pulse and clench. Still at attention, still staring at that infinite point, General Herron took a long breath and said, “I cannot comply with your request, Mr. President.”
“Damnation, General, you will comply, or I’ll have you up on charges and ruin more than your career! You will comply, and you will tell me how you managed to lose four installations, fifteen hundred men, and every inch of ground gained in the past year and a half. Now, General.”
Herron’s nostrils flared and his mouth wrinkled in barely suppressed anger. “Sir,” he said, and Custer saw him working to collect himself. “I failed, sir, because the enemy has advanced, in the course of less than a year, from a tradition of small force strike-and-retreat tactics to a campaign of fully-cohesive, well-coordinated, large force combat strategy, including the demonstrated knowledge of demoralization tactics, supply-line dependencies, demolition techniques, siege warfare, and use of artillery. They have in effect, sir, progressed through fourteen hundred years of military history in ten months.”
“And to what do you attribute—
“If you will permit me, sir, I will tell you how they achieved this. Simply put, sir, they were taught. Someone taught them, someone coached them.” He broke from his stance and looked Custer straight in the eye. “Someone educated in such things, sir.” Then he resumed his pose at attention.
A feeling of dread began to worry at Custer’s soul. An educated man. Educated in military history and tactics. An Army officer.
“Sir,” Herron continued, “it is my opinion—”
“I have heard enough, General.”
“No, sir, you have not. You will hear the whole of it.”
“General, I am warning you—”
“Sir, I do not care. My career is over. Retirement or insubordination, it makes little difference to me. B
ut by God, you’ll hear that it was your son, sir, your son who taught them.”
Custer’s vision paled, the white silk on the walls bleeding out across the world, covering it. “My son?” he whispered. “How do you know?”
“I know because I saw him,” Herron said. “Laying into my men with a cannon looted from the train he derailed. I know because I killed him. He’s dead.”
The air went out of Custer’s lungs, stolen as if by some passing demon, sucked straight out of him at the utterance of that one phrase, that one word. Dead.
“Thank you, General,” he said softly. “That will be all. Samuel will see you out.”
Chapter 11
Winter, A.D. 1888
Near the Red Paint River
Alliance Territory
Speaks While Leaving patted the corn cake into shape and flopped it on the iron griddle. The griddle-cake sizzled and hissed and filled the lodge with its warm scent of toasting corn. On the other side of the fire, soaked beans were cooking in a pouch made from an antelope’s stomach. She rolled the pouch to let the other side cook for a time, spooning some water over it to keep it moist. It sputtered as the water steamed, and she went back to the cakes.
Her mother, Magpie Woman, and her grandmother, Healing Rock Woman, sat opposite the fire from her, working on their quilling and mending. With so many men making war against the bluecoats, One Bear had been pressed into picket duty, so the women had come together for the evening. Speaks While Leaving welcomed the company and the opportunity to provide the meal. Storm Arriving had spent most of the past year walking the path of war, and Speaks While Leaving had been relying on her relations for provisions and food from the hunts. Meager and insufficient as it was, this evening gave her the chance to repay in part her family’s long kindness and generosity.
Healing Rock Woman used her iron awl to punch another hole in the strip of elk hide. Squinting, she threaded the strand of sinew through a piece of red-dyed porcupine quill, then passed the sinew through the hole she had made. She pulled the sinew tight, punched another hole, picked up a piece of black-dyed quill, and repeated the process. She sniffed the air as the cakes began to cook through.
“More grease,” she said without looking up.
“Yes, Grandmother.”
“And make extra,” Magpie Woman said. “Your father will be hungry when he comes in.”
“Yes, Mother.” She smiled as she dipped two fingers into a jar and worked another touch of rendered fat into the corn dough.
Small sounds filled the lodge: the seething of the pouch of beans and the sizzle of the griddle-cakes, the sibilant shifting of feet and the gentle rustle of hides as the women worked their sewing. The lodge had been so quiet for so long...it was nice to have some noise to liven things. Of course, that would change. She smiled again.
“Which do you hope for, Mother? A granddaughter? Or a grandson?”
She glanced up from under thick lashes. The two older women stared at her.
“Is it true?” her mother asked. “So soon?”
Her smile broke into a grin. “Yes,” Speaks While Leaving said. “I know it is soon, but I felt it was time. Storm Arriving and I have wasted years enough.”
Healing Rock Woman had not moved. She sat there, mouth slack, hands frozen in mid-punch.
“Grandmother?” Speaks While Leaving said, worried that the ancient mother would disapprove of a child so soon.
The old woman reached over to slap Magpie Woman’s leg. “Ha!” She put her quillwork back in her sewing bag, got to her feet, and walked around the fire. She stopped in front of Speaks While Leaving and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “My thanks,” she said. “I did not know how much longer I could wait.” Then she walked back around the fire and sat back down to continue with her quillwork. “Ha.”
Speaks While Leaving was pleased. Most women waited four or five years after marriage to have their first child, and she had been afraid of what the family might have said about having a child after only two years.
A distant wail interrupted them—a woman, anguished. She heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow outside the lodge, and the doorflap opened. It was her father, One Bear, his face a thundercloud.
“They are coming in,” he said. “The army. There are many wounded. Many dead.”
She stared at her father, searching his face for some hint of disaster. “Storm Arriving?”
“I do not know,” he said, and left, leaving the doorflap open.
Speaks While Leaving looked to her mother and grandmother. “My apologies,” she said.
“We will tend to things here,” her mother said. “Go where you are needed.”
“Thank you.”
“Send us word,” Healing Rock Woman said. “As soon as you know.”
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
From behind one of the wicker backrests she took the parfleche that held her healer’s tools and supplies. Then she left as well, following her father out into the wail-filled night, out through the blue, moonlit snow.
The men were coming in to the lower end of the hillside encampment. Wives were coming down the slopes to meet their returning husbands or receive their returning dead. The snow-draped forest muted the sounds of grief, dark trees collecting dark moans, an empty sky passing shouted prayers to the stars. Laughter, too, Speaks While Leaving heard, high-pitched and hemmed with tears of relief. She looked from face to face, searching for her husband, and she saw in the eyes of the returning men a darkness for which the night did not account.
“Storm Arriving?” she asked one of them. He lifted a doleful arm, pointing back along the way he himself had arrived.
“He comes,” the soldier said.
I seem always to be waiting for him, she lamented as she headed toward the back of the line. When will we have time to live?
“Daughter,” her father said, calling her away from her search. “Over here.”
A long line of wounded were being pulled in on travoises. She went to them and began her work, inspecting each man, speaking to the lucid, trying to determine whose needs were most urgent. But one after another, she found, they could all wait. The soldiers had done their best on the field, and those who needed a healer’s immediate care had simply failed to survive the trip home. She recognized faces, even through their pain or their unconsciousness, but she did not see her husband. How far back was he? If not with the wounded, with the dead?
She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find him standing beside her.
Can it be as simple as that, she wondered? She looked up into his eyes, and saw the same darkness in him as was in the others. She saw the bloodstained bindings on his arm and hands. But it was him. Her husband.
Is that all I have to do? Simply turn around, and he is there? And all my fears can fly?
She reached for him, slowly, through a veil of blurring tears. She felt his hands on her shoulders, around her back. She took a breath and smelled his scent, his warmth, his closeness, and did not want to let the air from her lungs, fearing that in her next breath, he would be gone. But he squeezed her in his embrace, and her breath came out in an exhalation of joy and liberation.
But he said nothing. The muscles of his arms and back were still tense. She looked up into his face. There was something in him, something she had never seen before. He took her by the hand and led her toward the end of the line of wounded men.
Moonlight reflected off the blond hair sticking out from under the deerskin that swathed the head of One Who Flies. She ran the last few steps to his side. His eyes were closed. His skin was pallid and cold despite the buffalo pelts piled high atop him. She put her ear to his mouth to listen. His breath was short and shallow, with little energy. She touched the great vein in his neck and felt the quick, weak pulse. She turned to her husband.
“He has been like this since it happened. He bled for two days on the way home. I am sorry. I could not remember all the things you told me.”
She understood
it, then, the thing in her husband’s eyes. He was afraid. That was what it was. The thing in him she had never before seen. Fear. She reached out and touched his cheek.
“We will do what can be done.”
They moved One Who Flies into their lodge where she could watch over him whenever she was not tending to others around the camp. The wounds the soldiers suffered in this new kind of war were strange; they were not the clean wound of an arrow or lance, nor were they the blunt crush of a club. Many had died on the way home, and of the ones who had survived the trip, more would die still.
Her husband’s wounds were minor—cuts and stabs—nothing worse than what he and experienced in a whistler raid or during the ritual of skin sacrifice, and for it, she thanked the powers of the world. For One Who Flies, however, a different speaker wove the tale.
On his brow, a bullet had made a long gash, cut his scalp, and creased the skull, but it was not serious. The wound that pierced his upper arm, aside from the threat of fever, was likewise not a worry to her. These she drained, cleaned, treated, and dressed without a second thought.
But the wound to his chest, however, was of great concern. The bullet had passed through him, breaking a rib on the lower left side on its way in, and coming out beneath his ribs in the rear. She found pieces of cloth and leather pulled into the wound, and she was silently thankful for his unconsciousness as she cleaned it. He had bled a great deal, though, and there was nothing she could do for that except keep him quiet and warm, ward against any fever, and pray the spirits chose to save his life.
One Who Flies fluttered on the edge of death for three days, a moth around an open flame, seeking life in the deadly light. Speaks While Leaving took care of him as best she could, tending to his body, but feared it was not enough.
“Do you think Ashes would agree to come and sing over him?” she asked her husband.
Storm Arriving squinted one eye in mistrust. “That old trickster? He will do anything if it means a free meal.”
The Spirit of Thunder Page 32