by T C Donivan
“What is it?” I asked.
“Crow, a party of twenty I’d guess,” Hawker said.
Are they friendly?” I asked.
“That they weren’t at the Rendezvous means they’re not feeling sociable,” he answered.
“Are we in danger from them?” I wondered.
“Likely they’ll avoid us. We’re too well armed, but I fear for our friend, Kingfish if they catch up with him and the woman,” he said. Tree Owl nodded in agreement.
We ran our horses with renewed vigor, attempting to make up the lost time between us and our prey while keeping an eye out for the Crow. But as the trappers had predicted, a savage rainsquall came roaring down over the peaks of the Rockies by afternoon, forcing us to shelter until it had passed. The storm continued on into the night leaving us soaked and muddy. No dry kindling could be found, so we suffered without the benefit of fire or warm food. For the sake of propriety, Annie and I did not share a blanket. Instead she comforted Sosanna, helping Mozart build the frail girl a shelter beneath the trees to keep her dry. My exile from my newfound love made the evening all the more miserable.
Hawker, Noah and Trotter sat sullenly swapping horror stories of the practices of various Indians tribes they had known and the things they did to their prisoners, while Zenobia tended Sebastian as if he were an invalid child. For the first time since we had begun our journey, I felt a terrible trepidation, as if an evil had descended upon us that would not be easily exorcised. Round about midnight, unable to sleep, I got up to check Elijah and found Spencer stroking the nose of his horse, Blue. I cleared my throat so as not to startle him.
“I knew you were there,” he said.
“Can’t sleep?”
“I’m thinking about Rachel. I did not heed the warning,” he said cryptically.
“What do you mean?”
He turned to face me, his bright, blue eyes shining crazily in the darkness. “Mozart interprets my dreams. He told me this would happen if I didn’t listen, but I ignored him.”
“I supposed Tree Owl was our guide to the astral plains,” I said half jesting.
“If something happens to me, listen to him,” Spencer said.
“Who?”
“Mozart.”
You talk like a mystic,” I said.
“More than you know,” Spencer replied.
Though I valued my own dreams, I could not continence the validity of Spencer’s. “I’m sorry about Rachel. I had no idea you felt so deeply for her,” I consoled.
“I disguise my feelings with grand talk. It’s my failing. I inherited it from my father,” he said.
“Our parents mold us in ways we cannot imagine,” I agreed.
He craned his neck up at the dark sky as if seeking solace or revelation. “Sexual intercourse is both the most ennobling and demeaning act human beings engage in. It can raise us up to the height of demigods, or lower us to the level of animals. Even war is not so psychologically demanding, for we do not reveal ourselves in violence, rather conceal our humanity. War is aggression. One closes off the mind in order to survive violence. To experience the sexual is to surrender and within that, we express our most hidden secrets. Rachel was my fountain. I have never drank so deeply, or revealed myself so fully.”
I was embarrassed at his intimate confession and felt a loss at what to say. Though our conversations had covered many far flung subjects in the months we had been together, we did not speak of sexual intercourse so bluntly except in the usual, bawdy joking way of men. When I made no reply, he stared at me like a school proctor.
“Don’t you have an opinion? You’re always willing to debate me on any philosophical point.”
“I do not speak of such things,” I said.
“Come now Clayton. I know what you and Annie were up to last night. It was exquisite wasn’t it? I admire her, but she is more of a woman than I could manage. Rachel is more traditional. She’s helpless in her way, dependent upon a man. She’s the perfect trap for me.”
“I’m sorry I pursued her. I didn’t realize you felt so deeply about her,” I said.
“That was nothing. I maneuvered you both to prove a point. Now tell me what you think about my theories of love and war,” he demanded.
I ignored out his ridiculous and insulting statement, allowing for the emotional condition he was in. To accept that he had stage managed Rachel and my illicit coupling would make me no better than a cuckold and himself a voyeur.
“All right, I’ll concede that you’re vastly more experienced with women than me, but how do you claim to be an expert on war and violence?” I asked rising to the challenge.
“There are many thing about me you do not know Clayton. I have lived many times before. I was with Alexander as he crossed the Alps and Caesar when he defeated the Teutonic hordes,” he said straight faced.
“The reincarnation of the soul into another body? Isn’t that the same nonsense Mozart was claiming when he said he’d known Suleiman?”
“It’s more complex than that, but for lack of a better term, yes, let’s call it reincarnation,” he told me.
“Complex how? Tell me what you believe,” I said becoming intrigued.
“He isn’t ready,” came a voice from the shadows.
Mozart appeared beside me. His eyes were white lanterns gleaming in his stygian face. He looked at me with a monstrous intelligence that made me shudder.
“Tell him,” Spencer demanded.
A look passed between the pair that spoke of shared secrets. The moment seemed suspended in time. Finally, Mozart turned to me. He spoke in a clear voice barely burdened by the heavy accent he had affected as long as I had known him.
“Berkeley was half right. Reality is perceived as a fixed moment in time, but one can cross between its different places like points on a map. Think of it as a wheel. At the center is eternity. All of time, past and future, can be accessed from the hub. They call it Eternity’s Compass. One need only have a guide,” he explained.
I wanted to laugh at such a preposterous notion coming from this uneducated young slave, but the gravity of his demeanor gave me pause. “What did Spencer mean – that you interpret his dreams. The pair of you sound delusional,” I said.
Spencer spoke up, “Mozart is not entirely real you know. He is part man, part fog. He treads the path between the worlds. Remember the Pathless Sky you saw when the buffalo herd trampled you? How do you think you survived that day? You were dead beneath their hooves till he intervened,” he said gesturing toward the small African. The boy smiled.
“Spencer exaggerates; all I did was seize the moment. Sometimes eternity rests upon the head of a pin. I’m as real as you or him. I’ve only learned to slip through the cracks of reality when they open.”
Listening to such fantastic notions, I wondered if the little darkie had acquired powers of somnambulism over my friend. “Spencer, I think we should all go and get some rest. In the morning we’ll find Kingfish and sensibility will return,” I counseled.
Spencer seemed to lose touch with reality, his voice taking on a disconnected tenor. “Mozart is upset with me. Rachel is lost. We cannot change the fates.”
Mozart studied Spencer as one would a child. “I did not say that. I told you that if you pursued the girl, she would be lost, and I knew that you would try, regardless. If you had let it be, she would have been returned to you. We chose our own fates,” he said.
“If I had wings I would fly to her,” Spencer said casting a forlorn look to the western sky.
The rain was still falling and my boots were filled with water. I felt tired and miserable and could bear no more of the wretched display or asinine talk.
“I’ll see you both in the morning,” I said and headed back to my sopping blanket.
The others had all retired except Trotter, who sat dozing on sentry duty at the perimeter of our camp. Tree Owl was propped against a tree beside where I had thrown my bedroll, his eyes closed, apparently lost in slumber. I checked to make sur
e Annie and Sosanna were all right. They lay together in semi-dry blankets in the shelter of cut pine branches my darling one had prepared for them. I lay down on my own, wet blanket. I had barely closed my eyes when Tree Owl began to chant softly. His song had a lullaby effect. I was half dreaming, slipping into the memory of the night at the Sioux camp and the fantastic dreams I had experienced there when he spoke to me.
“I thought at first he was a Wihio, but I think now, he is a messenger of Motzeyout.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked him without opening my eyes.
“Wihio is the trickster-spider who brings chaos to all things. Motzeyout is called Sweet Medicine in your language. He is a prophet. I think that is what the little dark one is, but I would not rule out Wihio,” Tree Owl answered.
“I don’t understand.”
“You must open your mind if we are to go on our grand adventure my friend,” Tree Owl said.
“Has reason fled from our all minds?” I asked in frustration.
“I will chant to Ma’heo, the spirit that inhabits all living things, that he will guide us,” Tree Owl replied.
He began to sing again. I was soon asleep and dreaming. I was home again in my father’s house. Mother was alive, but sick and dying in the other room. Father sat beside me and we spoke of many things. In the morning when I awoke, the storm had passed. No one spoke of our strange nocturnal conversations. We headed west with the sun.
Chapter 19 – Warriors
It was late afternoon before we picked up the trail again and then only because of Tree Owl and Hawker’s keen eyes. From what appeared a pile of bent twigs half buried in mud, the pair discerned the remnants of a camp and more.
“Crow,” Tree Owl said.
“The same band as yesterday?” I asked. He nodded grimly.
Hawker and Noah circled outward from the camp in an ever widening arc. When they returned, horror was written on their usually stoic faces.
“What is it?” Spencer asked in a choked voice.
“The Crow came on them in the night. They took the girl and headed north,” Hawker said.
An anguished cry shook Spencer.
“What about Kingfish?” I asked.
Hawker pointed to the hills. “He escaped, but they took his horse.”
“I don’t care about him. We must rescue Rachel,” Spencer implored.
The wretchedness of my friend’s condition struck me like a blow across the face, the once confident scion of wealth now reduced to a mass of crippled emotions.
“I concur,” I said.
Hawker eyed us. “It’ll mean a fight.”
Young Sebastian spoke up, his spirits roused by the prospect of gunplay, “We’re marksmen all!”
Hawker nodded. “If we ride hard, we may be able to catch them. I doubt they know we’re coming.”
As if with one mind, we spurred our mounts on, slurping water and chewing on dried meat in the saddle, resting only long enough to empty our bladders and keep the horses from complete exhaustion. I feared for dainty Sosanna, but Annie had taken her under wing like a mother bird her babe, so we rode on without rest.
Nightfall came and Tree Owl went ahead so that we would not stumble into the Crow encampment by accident in in the dark. It was nigh on midnight when he returned as we rested by the trail. He slid down from his horse as graceful and seeming fresh as if he had just risen from a restful slumber. We gathered round him to a man and woman.
“Two miles ahead, in a thicket. Nineteen warriors. No sentries posted,” he said.
“Rachel?” Spencer asked.
He had not uttered a word since that morning when we had discovered she had been taken by the Crow. Tree Owl gazed at him with a look that bespoke of both his high regard for Spencer and a conveyance of things that could not be spoken aloud in mixed company.
“Alive,” he answered simply.
I watched as the whites of Spencer’s eyes seemed to turn red with frenzy. “What are we waiting for?” He asked.
“A plan,” Hawker told him. He crouched down and drew in the mud using his finger for a pencil. “We’re ten, counting Mozart and Sosanna who are unarmed, eight combatants versus nearly a score, but they will not expect us coming.” He glanced at the two youngest members of our party. “We’ll stash you two away from the trouble, then the rest of us will ride in. Annie, I want you and Tree Owl to form one party. Trotter, you handle your two men,” he said indicating Sebastian and Zenobia. “Noah and I will go with Spencer. We’ll make a three pronged attack. Try not to kill each other, or the girl. Once we enter the camp, all hell will break loose.” He turned his attention to me. “I’d prefer it, if you would look after the two children and the horses.”
“They’re hardly children, and I won’t be put off. You’ll need my firepower,” I said patting the Colt revolver, feeling insulted that he had picked me to leave behind.
“Clayton is a good shot. I saw him clean out a nest of rattlesnakes,” Zenobia said in my defense.
“These are snake of a different breed,” Hawker replied.
“Let him come with me, he’ll be all right,” Annie spoke up.
She and Hawker exchanged a long look, “By your word,” he said.
A cold front had followed the rainsquall and the night was icy, the still wet ground now frozen underfoot, the mud crackling like an icy pond beneath our horses’ hooves. Hawker found a suitable grove in which to hide the horses, leaving them in the care of Mozart and Sosanna in whom he instilled the importance of their mission. Should we lose our mounts, we would be in dire straits so far from the fort. I wavered in fact at the thought of such an important mission left in their inexperienced hands, but ultimately could not bear to let the others go on without me. As we prepared to leave, Mozart handed me a small, smooth stone.
“Keep this in the pocket over your heart,” he told me.
I had put the previous night’s lunatic conversation out of my head, chalking it up to Spencer’s being driven half mad with worry for Rachel. But as I looked into Mozart’s eyes, I saw the light of clever madness burning within them, compelling me to listen to him. I accepted the amulet and tucked it into my pocket.
We advanced on foot through a stand of tall pines, stumbling over fallen logs and tree roots that acted as snares to our tired feet. Finally, we saw the red glow of a campfire through the trees. Guttural voices drifted on the breeze like rasping ghosts. We checked our rifles and pistols as Hawker made our final deployment. His party would circle behind the Crow, while Trotter would take the north approach and we the south.
“Wait for us. We’ll go in first. Shoot to kill,” were his final words.
As Annie, Tree Owl and I circled round to our position; she turned and touched my hand. We had had no opportunity to speak intimately since our mad adventure had begun the previous morning.
“Clayton, stay beside me. Give me your rifle. I’m a better shot with a long gun. Concentrate on your pistol. Aim carefully.”
I gave her my rifle then she kissed me, just a peck on the lips, but it enervated me for the job ahead. We snuck upon the camp, the light of their fire dancing mad shadows on the trees. I could see some of the warriors moving about despite the lateness of the hour. I tried to make out Rachel, but could not find her. In fact, the limits of my vision terrified me. Shapes were scattered upon the ground wrapped in blankets and buffalo robes. One of them had to be Rachel. How was I to differentiate between friend and foe? My foot stepped upon a leaf, crunching it underfoot and I froze, but no one in the camp seemed the wiser. We continued on until we were but feet away, then knelt and took up firing positions. I readied my pistol.
As I did, I saw what looked like a bloody, skinned animal lying near the fire. One of the Crow walked past and kicked it. It moved and I stared at it in disbelief as recognition came to me. I blocked the possibility from my mind and made ready to do the work at hand, armed now with a deadly resolve. We waited for what seemed an eternity. My legs began to cramp and my belly rumbl
ed in protest to the neglect I had shown it for the past two days.
Three shots roared out from the far side of the camp and the night came alive as if all the demons of hell had been loosed. As the first shots flashed into the encampment, Tree Owl and Annie fired their rifles as did Trotter and his contingent. My hand shook so badly I could not aim the pistol so I held my fire for fear I would kill one of my own. The Indians leapt and fell about convulsively, some from wounds, others attempting to escape the ambush.
I saw Hawker, Noah and Spencer charge into the camp like madmen, pistols and long Bowie Knives drawn. Trotter, Zenobia and Sebastian did the same, firing their repeating pistols. Tree Owl rushed forward, tomahawk in hand. Annie took me by the arm and propelled me forward with her into the midst of the fray, attempting to fight our way to Rachel’s side.
A warrior came at Annie and she lashed out with her long knife, cutting a bloody swath across his face, sending him howling into the night. Yet another warrior charged us. My arm still shook, or more accurately, my entire body, but I squeezed the butt of the pistol firmly in my hand and leveled it, firing off one round and then another until the maddened savage fell at our feet, the smoke of the pistol choking me as I inhaled the fumes. All around us, men grappled, some rolling together upon the ground in death struggles blocking our path.
“We have to get to her!” Annie shouted above the melee.
I put my back to hers to shield her and she darted forward. We had nearly crossed the distance to where Rachel lay, when a Crow warrior, already crippled by a killing wound that pulsed blood from his chest like a suppurating wellspring, lunged at the tortured girl and fell upon her with a stone club. So traumatic was the scene, my mind has erased the memory of the blow that finished her. I recall my own actions though, as I emptied the remaining chambers of my pistol into his chest and stomach. He fell forward onto Rachel in a grotesque heap of gore. As if signaling the end of the battle, hostilities ceased, the only sound that of cursing and dying.