Sacred Is the Wind (40 page)

Rebecca moved quickly now. She took up the war shield she had made for Panther Burn, and as the war chief stepped back from the fire, Rebecca clamped the shield over the flames with a single sudden motion that smothered them out. When she lifted the shield, only a thick column of gray-black smoke spiraled upward toward the night sky. She held the rawhide shield aloft then so the moonlight shone upon the Morning Star she had painted on the surface. Panther Burn stretched out his arms and she placed the shield in his hands and said softly,
“Hena-haanehe”
, which means “It is ended.” Panther Burn turned and walked back to the ridge, where he could better watch the village below. The valley floor was dotted with campfires. Zachariah was seated on a stump, Panther Burn's Winchester and his own Hawken at his feet. He had cleaned and loaded both weapons and sat slumped forward, the picture of depression and fear.

“Our people have been coming into the valley all day. I think they have come to watch us do battle with the soldiers …”

“Good,” said Panther. Burn.

“I do not think they will help us.”

“Good,” Panther Burn repeated, staring out at the night. The townspeople had no place during such an action on the morrow. He glanced down at Zachariah.

Somewhere behind his weary eyes, the little boy Zachariah Scalpcane had once been still lived. Panther Burn could see the fear in the younger man's expression. He did not blame him. Tomorrow would not be easy.

Zachariah sighed. “I wish Joshua were here with me. I would like him to know how we faced the soldiers together.”

“The story will be sung around the campfires and he will hear and feel proud.” Panther Burn reached forward and patted Zachariah on the shoulder. “The All-Father has blessed me. For I have two sons and both have made me proud.” He noticed how the younger warrior's shoulders straightened with pride at such an admission. “The many-times-firing gun is yours,” Panther Burn added. “Carry it with you tomorrow.”

Zachariah sucked in his breath, then took up the rifle and gingerly caressed the tempered metal and worn but solid stock. Bravado conquered fear as he sighted along the barrel. Such a fine weapon this was.

“I wish Uncle Joshua were here too,” admitted Panther Burn. He walked back the way he had come. Above him, the sky was draped with clouds like bridal veils strewn upon obsidian seas. And windrift was the world below, where the branches of the pines rustled, weeds trembled, and the creek was a diamond-studded ribbon uncoiled through the valley. Half a dozen wild ducks erupted from a cluster of scrub brush, the rush of their beating wings like tearing silk. Beauty was in the night and Panther Burn's heart was glad. Glad, too, that Rebecca waited for him by the still-warm embers of the sacred fire. Panther Burn sat next to her and took her hands in his.

“I journeyed many miles to reach this place. I have seen the towns of the white man, I have seen the way he lives. I have cut his fences and eaten his tame food and drunk from his dead water. I have seen things I do not understand. Yet I know this, I do not belong. I am saying this because I want you to understand.”

“
Saaa
. I know who I love. Do you think you are a mystery to me?” Rebecca answered. She remembered lovemaking, and secret words; she remembered his rashness, his incorruptible will. He had been born to ride to war. He had been born for the morning about to come; a panther cannot be tamed. “You are of your father's blood, a warrior.” She placed the palm of her hand upon his chest. “My heart and yours are one and the same.” She lay back and pulled him to her, and although her eyes glistened in the night, her voice was strong and there was magic in her embrace. “One and the same … always.”

The night lay soft and quiet and seemed to fill the bed-room with the promise of fall. Michael sat propped against the pillows, an open notebook upon his lap, a few lines of prose scrawled upon the pages. He studied himself in the vanity mirror on the wall opposite the bed. His wound had indeed looked far worse than it was. The bullet had struck at a peculiar angle and glanced off his skull, saving his life by a fraction of an inch. Ignoring a savage headache, he had spent a few hours Wednesday on his feet. Today the dizziness had decreased and he had spent most of the afternoon out of bed. Kate had been away. The ever-increasing number of Cheyenne arriving in Lame Deer for ration Friday always meant an opportunity for Kate to recruit new patients. There were always young women whose term of pregnancy needed to be assessed and children with a gamut of cuts and bruises, some of which needed treatment. He could hear her downstairs. She was working in the kitchen, softly humming as she prepared an evening meal for them. He stared at the notebook before him and wrote a line, frowned, marked it out, tried another line, and decided it would do. He had never tried this before … writing, putting his own thoughts and emotions down on paper, his penmanship a struggling scrawl. It pleased him, even more than reading. Footsteps sounded on the stairway and a moment later Kate appeared in the room. She carried a tray and brought it over to the bed. Michael smelled eggs and bacon and fry bread, and Kate had added a clay bowl of chokecherry pudding to dip the bread in. She noticed the notebook and looked over at his open saddlebags and realized it was his. She had never seen it before. Then she remembered his desire to write when his heart could no longer contain his feelings.

Michael put the notebook aside, seemingly embarrassed at her discovery. Kate placed the tray alongside the bed. He glanced at the food and wondered if his father was hungry on what was probably the last day of his life. He reached down and took the tray and placed it on a table near the bed.

“You need to eat,” Kate said.

“Maybe later.” The curtains on the window fluttered inward, roused by the gentle kiss of an autumnal breeze. Kate walked to the window and looked out at the dark and silent hills. She understood the reasons for his lack of appetite. “Perhaps Rebecca will talk him out of it.”

“She loves him too much to try,” Michael said.

Kate looked around at him. “I do not understand such a kind of love.”

“Who can?” Michael said. Then he lowered his gaze to the notebook. “Not I,” he went on. Then he brightened again. “Tell me. Did you heal many Cheyenne today?”

“Not many,” Kate said. She heard the note of sorrow in his voice. He dreaded the morning. She did not blame him. She yearned to comfort him and yet when she felt he needed her, Kate could not escape her own professionalism. He was her patient. And what she was feeling was most unethical.

“Come here,” he said, cutting through the silence, his voice guttural and thick with emotion. Humor, sadness, and a fierce and abiding appreciation for life, balanced on the knife edge of a passion too long restrained. It hurt too deeply to hide. Kate had changed from the woolen dress she wore as a uniform—somehow, the more formal her attire, the more respect she received from the skeptical families that lived back toward the Divide. A coarse cotton nightgown covered her from neck to ankle and a brown robe covered the nightgown. Tonight her hair hung loose and free, flowing over her shoulders and down her back. She stepped back from the window. His soft brown eyes wore a haunted look. His finely chiseled features revealed his pain. The bandage on his forehead showed starkly white against his coppery flesh. His hands opened, to hold her.

“Be with me.” He sighed.

She walked to him, her mind full of arguments, her heart full of surrender. “Your wound …”

“If I get dizzy you can take over.” He rose up from the bed, the covers falling away from his naked flesh. In one brief motion he extinguished the lamp. Moonlight through the windows flooded into the room; a beam of silvery light crept across the rug, vanquishing the darkness. Michael's arms entwined with Kate's embrace as she came to him, needing him as desperately as he needed her. Robe and gown were swept aside. Lips joined in a fevered kiss, then flesh in fiery union. A cry of momentary pain. A moan of unimagined pleasure. Quick breaths, sudden ecstasy in oneness … peace. Darkness dispelled, two called together slept upon the tousled sheets, two lovers, lying close, loving and loved, but at last, asleep. In the trembling glow of a solitary candle, the journal lay open to the place where Michael had set his thoughts, in art, upon the page:

Kate—

Love me still for the weariness I hold

thrown round me like a robe of sorrow.

I step helpless on a path so cold.

In the lonely dark, be light, my love aglow.

24

Ration Friday, Septeaber 27, 1889

I
n late September, in
tonoove-he-ese
, which is the fall-moon, summer ends and the world welcomes the dying of the year. The cycle of renewal begins, the past is discarded for the promise of the future. Leaves curl, shudder in the cool wind's embrace, leaves run riotous red or turn the color of raw gold shining in a pool of melted ice. The world in
tonoove-he-ese
dons war paint so all men may witness what they are about to lose. And gain. The world wears a mantle of glory in autumn, and grieves not the coming of winter, for it has heard the promise whispered in the sacred wind, that nothing is forever except the Great Circle. Out of loss comes gain, out of death … life.

Panther Burn dabbed his fingers in a shallow cup of clay dyed with crushed berries. He placed two fingers on his forehead and slashed down, leaving twin trails of crimson across his eyes and cheeks. He glanced up at the sky. The far horizons wore morning's first blush. Zachariah busily applied a mask of black clay over forehead and chin. He wasted little time in his preparations, fearing to tarry lest he lose heart. He mounted and sat motionless, cradling his Winchester in the crook of his arm. Zachariah kept a respectful distance from Panther Burn and Rebecca. And there was a touch of sadness in his heart, for he had no one to bid farewell or hand him a war shield as he rode out to do battle. He thought of his mother and of Warbonnet Creek. So many years ago, so many deaths ago. The memories were painful to relive, but he clung to them for courage. Hate was all he had now. It was all he had ever had.

Rebecca had lived with the knowledge of this moment. Now, it had finally come ….

“Woman, it is good you do not weep,” Panther Burn said, finishing his own preparations.

“Am I not a warrior's woman? I cried my tears long ago,” she said. “My heart has grown used to the sadness I feel. And used to the joy.” Rebecca frowned, trying to put her feelings into words; she tried to speak them now, for fear she might never get the chance to say them to him again. Panther Burn looked toward the horizon where the clouds billowed upward, shaping and reshaping themselves. There a winged horse, an eagle's talon, a waterfall, a mountainous realm for the All-Father. Panther Burn lowered his gaze to Rebecca. He was drawn to her eyes, for they were the windows of her love.

“Listen for the bells,” she said. “It will be Uncle Joshua.” And swallowing through the tightness in her throat, Rebecca handed him the war shield she had made magic over. He took it from her and walked over to his horse and swung up on its back. She studied him as if committing to memory every detail. His moccasins and fringed leggings, the porcupine-quill breastplate, the raven feather he had fixed into a headdress to hide the shame of his close-cropped hair. He carried the war shield in his right hand and the war lance in his left. The spear was ten feet of pine sapling tipped with a sharpened stone point and trimmed with raven feathers below the tip and just above his fist. He had smeared war paint upon the horse's flanks to better hide the cavalry brand and painted white circles around the animal's eyes that it might frighten his enemies in battle. He walked the mount toward Rebecca.

“One day I will come riding, you will hear me call you by name. I will carry you away, Rebecca Blue Thrush. And on that day, there will be no leaving … ever again.” He leaned forward and his eyes blazed with fire and his voice rang with a truth, impossible to deny.

“There will be no leaving,” Rebecca said, her voice firm. The wind blew the strands of her black hair across her features and concealed the moistness she had been unable to hold back. She reached down and scooped up the ashes from her medicine fire and placed her handprint in the center of the shield, in the heart of the Morning Star. At that gesture Panther Burn reared his horse and whirled around and cried out because he could no longer contain the feelings that filled him with both a sense of loss and yet such wild joy. He rode at a gallop back to the crest of the hill where Zachariah waited, where they could watch the sun rise and listen for Joshua Beartusk to summon them down into the valley.

A hundred soldiers representing K, and C troop on loan from Fort Keogh, were formed in a double row across the north end of the valley about a quarter of a mile out of the settlement. The two lines were staggered so that each trooper might bring his carbine to bear. Directly behind the soldiers but flanked to either side were better than six hundred Cheyenne men, women, and children. They had gathered in the early-morning hours, in darkness, singing and praying: they had come to see the last warrior and the last battle. Michael Spirit Wolf was there, standing in the bed of Father Hillary's buckboard. He too had come to be with the father he had never really been allowed to know. The Cheyenne families around him watched him closely as if expecting him to ride to his father's side. But he knew his place, he knew where his battles must be fought and won. His were the days to come. And if his people did not understand now, one day they would. He waited and looked to the hill where two lonely figures watched and kept vigil with the sun as it poked above the hilltops, sending a silent shimmering of light rushing down the hillside flooding the valley, warming the dew-laden ground. Kate stood next to Michael and when she spied the two men on the bluff her hand tightened in his. Three men rode up behind the wagon and Michael glanced over his shoulder at Captain Henry Morbitzer, Sabbath McKean, and Jubal Bragg. Behind the three, Tyrell Gude waited nervously in the shadows of his canvas-covered buggy. He was anticipating the worst possible scenario, that the Cheyenne would rise up in support of Panther Burn and attack the soldiers. But the young captain had assured him everything was under control. He had more than enough men to handle any emergency.