One warrior found a beautiful young woman with an aging one and a crone in the smallest of the houses, next to a round lodge. She wailed and clawed at his eyes. He pinned her wrists at her back and forced her along, regardless of struggles or of the others who sought to hinder him. A man bounded from the lodge. He was unarmed apart from a wand and a rattle. When he shook them, the warrior hooted and swung tomahawk at him. The man must dodge back. The raider and his prey joined the rest of the war band.
Running Wolf’s men milled in the entrance. At their backs, those Pariki who had kept the horses arrived at a gallop, with the free beasts on strings. The villagers scattered. The forayers seized manes, got on with a single leap, dragged booty or captives up after them. The men who had already been riding helped injured comrades mount and collected three or four dead.
Running Wolf bayed, egged his people on. Their arrows were spent, but enough of them finally came at his heels that the foe made no further try for their herd. Instead the Pariki rode west, .bearing their prizes. Dazed with horror, the villagers did not give chase.
The sun rose. Blood glowed brilliant.
Deathless sought the battle place. Folk were getting busy there. Some mutilated two corpses the enemy had not recovered, so that the ghosts must forever drift in the dark; these persons wished aloud for live prisoners to torture to death. Others tended their own slain. Three Geese was among those who worked on the wounded. His hands eased anguish; his low voice helped men bite back any cries. Deathless joined him. The healing arts were part of a shaman’s lore.
“Father,” said the berdache, “I think we need you more to make medicine against fresh misfortune.”
“I know not if any power to do that is left in me,” Deathless replied.
Three Geese pushed a shaft deeper into a shoulder, until the barbed head came out the rear and he could pull the entire thing free. Blood welled, flies buzzed. He packed the hole with grass. “I am ashamed that I was not in the fight,” he mumbled.
“You are long past your youth, and fighting was never for you,” Deathless said. “Buf I— Well, this took me by surprise; and I have forgotten whatever I once knew about combat.”
Running Wolf stalked around, tallying the harm that had been done. He overheard. “None of us knew anything,” he snapped. “We shall do better next time.”
Three Geese bit his lip. Deathless went impassive.
Afterward he did undertake his duties as the shaman. With his disciple, who yesterday had never come near him, he led rites for the lost, cast spells for the clean mending of wounds, made offerings to the spirits. An elder mustered courage to ask why he did not seek omens. “The future has become too strange,” he answered, and left the man standing appalled. By eventide he could take a short span to console Quail Wing’s children for the taking of their mother, before he again went alone into the medicine lodge.
Next morning the people buried the dead. Later they would dance in their honor. First, though, the hale men gathered at a place which had known happier meetings. Running Wolf had demanded it—no council of elders calmly finding their way toward agreement, but every man who could walk—and none cared to gainsay him.
They assembled before a knoll near the bluff edge. Standing on it, a man could look south to the broad brown river and its trees, the only trees anywhere in sight; east to the stockade, the fields clustered about it, gravemounds both raw and time-worn; elsewhere across grass that billowed and shimmered, green and white, under a shrill wind. Clouds flew past, trailing shadows through a sunlight gone harsh. Thunderheads loomed blue- black in the west. From here the works of man seemed no more than anthills, devoid of life. Nothing but the horses moved yonder. They chafed at their hobbles, eager to be off and away.
Running Wolf mounted the knoll and raised an arm. “Hear me, my brothers,” he called. Wrapped in a buffalo robe, he seemed even taller than he was. He had gashed his cheeks for mourning and painted black bars across his face for vengefulness. The wind fluttered the plumes in his headband.
“We know what we have suffered,” he told the eyes and the souls that sought him. “Now we must think why it happened and how we shall keep it from ever happening again.
“I say to you, the answers are simple. We have few horses. We have hardly any men who are good hunters upon them, and we have no skilled warriors at all. We are poor and alone, huddled within our miserable walls, living off our meager crops. Meanwhile other tribes ride forth to garner the wealth of the plains. Meat-fed, they grow strong. They can feed many mouths, therefore they breed many sons, who in turn become horseman hunters. They have the time and the mettle to learn war. Their tribes may be strewn widely, but proud brotherhoods and sisterhoods, oath-societies, bind them together. Is it then any wonder that they make booty of us?”
His glance fell hard on Deathless, who stood in the front row under the hillock. The shaman’s gaze responded, unwavering but blank. “For years they stayed their hand,” Running Wolf said. “They knew we had one among us who was full of spirit power. Nonetheless, at last a band of young men resolved to make a raid. I think some among them had had visions. Visions come readily to him who rides day after day across empty space and camps night after night beneath star-crowded skies. They may have urged each other on. I daresay they simply wanted our horses. The fight became as bloody as it did because we ourselves had no idea of how to wage it. This too we must learn.
“But what the Pariki have found, and soon every plains ranger will know, is that we have lost whatever defense was ours. What new medicine have we?”
He folded his amis. “I ask you, Deathless, great one, what new medicine you can make,” he said. Slowly, he stepped aside.
Indrawn breath whispered among the men, beneath the damp chill that streaked from the stonnclouds. They stared at the shaman. He stood still an instant. Thereafter he climbed the knoll and confronted Running Wolf. He had not adorned himself in any way, merely donned buckskins. Against the other man, he seemed drab, the life in him faded.
Yet he spoke steadily: “Let me ask you first, you who take leadership from your elders, let me ask you and let you tell us what you would have the people do.”
“I did tell you!” Running Wolf declared. “We must get more horses. We can breed them, boy them, catch them wild, and, yes, steal them ourselves. We must go win our share of the riches on the plains. We must become skilled in the arts of war. We must find allies, enroll in societies, take our rightful place among folk who speak Lakotan tongues. And all this we must begin upon at once, else it will be too late.”
“Thus is your beginning,” said Deathless quietly. “The end is that you will forsake your home and the graves of your ancestors. You will have no dwellings save your tipis, but be wanderers upon the earth, like the buffalo, the coyote, and the wind.”
“That may be,” replied Running Wolf with the same lev-elness. “What is bad about it?”
A gasp went from most listeners; but several young men nodded, like horses tossing their heads.
“Show respect,” quavered an aged grandson of the shaman. “He is still the Deathless one.”
“He is that,” acknowledged Running Wolf. “I have spoken what was in my heart. If it be mistaken, tell us. Then tell us what we should do, what we should become, instead.”
He alone heard the answer. The rest divined it, and some wrestled with terror while others grew thoughtful and yet others shivered as if in sight of prey.
“I cannot.”
Deathless turned from Running Wolf, toward the gathering. His voice loudened, though each word fell stone- heavy. “I have no further business here. I have no more medicine. Before any of you were born, rumors came to. me of these new creatures, horses, and of strange men who had crossed great waters with lightnings at their command. In time the horses reached our country, and that which I feared began to happen. Today it is done. What will come of it, nobody can foretell. All that I knew has crumbled between my fingers.
“Whether you must change or not—and it may well be that you must, for you lack the numbers to keep a settlement defended—you will change, my people. You want it, enough of you to draw the rest along. I no longer can. Time has overtaken me.”
He raised his hand. “Therefore, with my blessing, let me go.”
It was Running Wolf who cried, “Go? Surely not! You have always been ours.”
Deathless smiled the least bit. “If I have learned anything in my lifetimes of years,” he said, “it is that there is no ‘always.’ ”
“But where would you go? How?”
“My disciple can carry out what is needful, until he wins stronger medicine from warrior tribes. My grown
