The Holy Road

himself.

'I think this might be Christine Gunther.'

All the men had dismounted now. They stood in dumb silence behind their captain.

Stands With A Fist blinked.

'Are you Christine Gunther?'

She had not heard the name for more than eleven years, not since the time Dances With Wolves had first come among them, not since Kicking Bird had implored her to remember the tongue of her birth, not since she had lain semi-delirious in a bed of rushes next to a fast-running stream and remembered her mother call out the name that belonged to her.

It was not in answer to the hair-mouthed man's question that she spoke. In her disoriented state she was merely echoing a long-buried memory when she parted her lips and rolled her tongue and let the word come out of her mouth.

'Christine.'

'God Almighty, it is her!' the captain gasped.

He lifted his hat and held it lightly against his chest.

'The Maker is with us today, men.'

Struck by the piety of the moment, the three rangers who had lately vied to see which of them would rejoice in the taking of her life and the skinning of her cherry-colored head doffed their hats and held them meekly to their chests.

Stands With A Fist stared at them uncomprehendingly, and a ghastly feeling swept over her, the first realization that what was to come might be worse than the death she had thought certain minutes before. Her breath grew faster, her shoulders began to heave, and a torrent of tears, accompanied by piteous sobs, rained onto the ground at her feet.

When they gently tugged at Stays Quiet she screamed and flailed, it was only after she realized she would be given back to her as soon she mounted that she relaxed her grip.

As the gentle hands of her would-be killers, stained with the blood of friends, lifted her onto a white man's saddle she became inconsolable, abandoning herself so completely to grief that rangers had to ride either side to steady her.

To a man they regarded her as one of their own, and the profound grief that had overwhelmed her was taken by them as a temporary insanity — an understandable trauma at finally being delivered from the clutches of her Comanche captors. It occurred to no one that leading her back to the slaughterhouse that was once her village would be upsetting.

There she was made to wait, a hand covering the eyes of her daughter, as they piled the bodies and belongings of the women and children and men she had known so well into an unceremonious pile. Red Dress and Magpie Woman, the wives and children of Iron Jacket and Left Hand and Hears The Sunrise, Lone Young Man, Feathered Lance, and scores of others were dragged across the ground before her eyes, unrecognizable except for a dress she knew or a telltale scar or an unusual piece of jewelry.

Women she had danced and sung with or aided in difficult births or comforted in times of loss. Children whom she had loved as her own. Men who had shared equal measures of danger and joy with her husband. All were paraded before her as meat, faces reduced to mush, intestines curling like rope in the dirt, legs and arms and torsos hacked open.

When the piles had been set afire the rangers rode east, taking their legendary prize with them. Stands With A Fist tried valiantly to think one thought over and over to make her heart strong: that Dances With Wolves and Snake In Hands and Always Walking still lived. But invariably that thought would lead to the inescapable conclusion that she would never see them again.

She imagined that she would never stop crying and, as the sun set behind her that evening, she felt the whole of herself going gradually numb. The nightmare she had feared so intensely through all her life as a Comanche was nothing compared to the reality of what had happened.

The woman called Stands With A Fist had been rubbed out as surely as those who had gone up in smoke. But as she cradled Stays Quiet through the long and sleepless first night of what the gaunt leader called her liberation, she envied the fate of those who lay dead in the village.

Before the sun was up the next morning they had taken the trail, making haste for the safety of white settlements in the east. She thought constantly of grabbing one of the ranger's guns and pressing the barrel against her head or of lifting a knife from its scabbard and drawing it swiftly across her throat, but the little girl sitting in front of her made such action impossible.

Every step the big American horse she was riding took seemed to drive her deeper into the bottomless depths of a misery that could only be tolerated through the preservation of hope. But she was unable to construct even the flimsiest hope, and as the country became more and more unfamiliar, she found herself facing a future of unrelieved despair she was powerless to oppose.

Chapter XVII

From his vantage point, far out on an ocean of grass, the world was flat as the cloudless sky and the horizon was of a length and straightness only the Mystery could make.

Smiles A Lot had seen the same grand picture every day of his life and the enormity of its simple components never failed to stir his feelings. Unaware of any presence but his own in such vastness made him small and large at the same time, a combination that infused his spirit with an incomprehensible blend of fear and fearlessness.

But on this day as he sat on his pony, gazing across the infinity that led to home, there was something amiss, something tiny but distinct that disturbed the picture before him. curling almost imperceptibly at the limit of his sight was a thin, black column of smoke. Pushed by the breeze it angled to one side as it rose like a wisp on the horizon.

The smoke was so out of place that he studied it for several minutes. Smiles A Lot doubted that the grass was on fire. The weather had been too still to start something like that, and even if it had, a wildfire would have spread out across a wide swath of country. This smoke was rising into the sky from a single spot, and for reasons he could not decipher, it gave Smiles A Lot a bad feeling. Though the black funnel was several hours' ride away it lay in the general direction of the village and he pressed on, hoping that his feeling was wrong. His ponies were fresh and he jumped from one to the other as he rode, certain that if he forced the pace he could reach the village before twilight.

The sun was dipping toward the horizon and the column of smoke had long disappeared when he finally neared the village, puzzled at the absence of lodge tips against the darkening sky. A natural berm he knew well lay in front of the village and as he crested it Smiles A Lot saw what had happened.

At first sight none of it seemed real. The village was gone, its place taken by half a dozen still-smoldering piles of refuse. In the heavy twilight haze of dust and smoke, some people were moving without discernible purpose. Others were clustered in small groups at the fringes of camp, huddled as though they were shivering against the cold. Few took notice of him, and those who did regarded him without expression. He could see a handful of ponies near the stream behind the village. Like the people, they were bunched together still seeking safety long after the danger had passed.

The blackened piles of debris were larger than he first thought, and, coming near, he understood that it was corpses, most of them now burned to ash, that had fueled much of the dark column he had seen hours before. Now there was nothing left but shards of bone, the tips of lodge poles, a cook pot or two, and the lingering heat of the recent conflagration. Only then did Smiles A Lot fully realize that the village and the people in it had been annihilated.

He straightened on his pony to survey the survivors again and was struck this time at the paucity of men. Everywhere he looked he saw the bedraggled forms of women and children. The fired corpses were in the main unrecognizable, but the few he had seen which still resembled people were definitely women or children. Unable to