Concentrating through the sweat and sand and blood he repeatedly blinked to clear. That particular strip of quillwork running all the way from the top to the bottom of the legging, there at the moccasin.
His eyes locked onto the toe of the moccasin—finding it had the same central design as the legging strip, the same colors.
Maybeso like Bird in Ground’s people—those colors were the bastard’s own power, his private medicine in both form and color.
If he could not move, could not raise a hand … at least he would vow to remember those colors, that pattern, those leggings and moccasins.
As the black seeped down over his consciousness again, Scratch stared, studied, and vowed he would never forget this warrior who had scalped him.
Maybe all that was left was for the son of a bitch to come over and finish him off right where he lay. Bass figured that was next, now that the coup had been counted and the scalp taken—just a quick flash of a sharp blade across the windpipe … or the less-than-pretty river rock bashing the side of his head to jelly.
Just a matter of moments now, he told himself as the black oozed down once more.
Death would be better than this waiting. Death better than not being able to defend himself. Death was better than …
Then black was all there was.
As if it were coming out of a dense winter fog, Scratch heard sound. Sodden and muffled.
It hurt his head to listen. So instead of giving heed to the noises around him, Bass kept his eyes closed and willed himself back into that warm immersion in nothingness. Everything else hurt too damn much.
He was dimly aware that more time slipped past. From the blackness he came to dwell on his heartbeat. How it grew in volume to crowd out the gentle rustle of the leaves suspended just overhead in the brush. Thrum- thrum … thrum-thrum. So loud, it pounded at his ears with a growing ache.
Slowly the awareness of aching grew. He hurt everywhere, so it seemed. There wasn’t a place Bass could not feel pain as the warm bath of that unconscious immersion gradually cooled. Then his left leg and arm began to grow cold. And he sensed the breeze stir across the flesh on the right side of his face—like sunburn.
How long had he been lying there?
For some time he remained content to stay right where he was without pushing the ache: suspended halfway between the oblivion and the total awareness he was certain he would know once he allowed himself to awaken.
Beside him the water continued to whisper. Above him the leaves churkled from time to time as the cool breeze excited them. And from somewhere farther still some birds called. He imagined them sitting on branches somewhere above him, watching him. And with the way some calls moved past him too, Bass imagined them swooping by to look at him sprawled beside the river.
That’s why his leg had grown so cold. He twitched the foot. Feeling. Yes, the bottom of his left leg lay in the river. It and his left hand. Must be the way I come to rest here on the rocks, on the sand, he thought, painstakingly climbing his way out of the safe, dark pool of nonawareness.
First the leg. He struggled to drag it from the water there on the damp, sandy bench beside the river. Now for the arm. At first he flicked his fingers in the cool water—fully aware now that he had been right about the river, although his head was turned away from the water—but he had yet to attempt opening his eyes again.
Behind his lids he saw again a portrait of what he had seen the last time he’d opened them. As if it were being played out slowly—then stopped … slowly again—then stopped. The excruciating remembrance of that warrior scraping at … at his own scalp there beside Titus as he lay wounded on the bank. The Arapaho rose to his feet, stuffing the long brown-haired trophy beneath the narrow leather belt from which hung his breechclout, leggings, and the sheath for that knife as he bent over and swished the weapon in the river before plunging it home in the rawhide sheath.
That pattern of color on the leggings, across the toe of the moccasins as the warrior turned toward him, took a step his way, then lunged up the bank. And away.
Lying here now at this moment, Bass squeezed his closed eyes tightly, as if he wanted to dispel the terrible vision that remembrance brought him. Then he decided to draw both eyes into thin slits and allowed that crack of light to penetrate his thick blanket of nonawareness.
Realizing the shadows had lengthened. Branches and leaves and the trunks of the cottonwood around him— all of it had the colors of late afternoon now. Not the bright, severe colors of midday. Not that last light he remembered seeing on the warrior’s moccasin.
And now his left eye pained him. Blinking to clear it, he found he could not. So matted with sand and grit, dried sweat, and the solid crust of old coagulate.
Trying his left arm, Bass found that with some struggle he could drag it out of the water, sweep it around in a wide arc, and then fold the elbow so the damp fingertips reached the eye where that side of his face lay on the sand. There was far too much there to wash off with what little dampness he had brought from the river—but it was enough that he could rub, then rub some more until the eye gradually opened without the pain of grit, opened with a blurry dance, with liquid motion.
It was late in the day.
Behind him, where he felt the sun on his back, on the bare flesh of his right cheek, and there on the back of his head—Bass knew the sun was still in the sky, but sinking low. By the length of the shadows, by the colors of the leaves and the tree bark, the texture of the sand near his face and the touch of the breeze against his sunburned flesh—he knew the sun would soon drop behind the tall cottonwoods. Very, very soon.
And then it would become dark—and he would need a fire.
His belly rumbled hungrily.
Then he moved his right leg willfully. Both of them cooperated as he tested his hips by rolling a little this way, a little that.
All that was left was to move that right arm.
God—
Clamping down his teeth, he forced himself to move the arm a little more—causing his empty, rumbling stomach to lurch with the pain. He recognized it as that peculiar nausea the body produced when confronted with unbearable torture. It, too, was something he would push himself through. Like stepping through a door—that’s all he had to do. Take a step: move the arm a little more.
It was so sore through the whole shoulder, the upper arm, down into the upper part of his chest … maybe just because he had been lying there all this time without moving it, he told himself. Convincing himself that to move it a little more, then a little more after that, all that he did would help. Every inch he managed to drag it up and toward him, every twitch of movement to dispel the numbness would eventually make this exquisite, rising pain a bit more bearable.
Then, before he realized it, Scratch had both arms beneath him, propped, pushing up, heaving against the weight of his upper body. The right arm shuddered and trembled as it drew his chest up.
Blinking quickly in the shifting of the sun’s light as he came off the sand, Titus looked down, his head so damned heavy … looked down and saw the dark smudge blotting the sand. Then slowly turned his chin, focused his eyes on his right shoulder there near the arm. That right arm was trembling as it propped him halfway up, Bass realized.
A puddle of dried blood below him. Sand caked on the right side of his chest where more blood had soaked through the leather of his shirt.
By then the pain in the shoulder and arm was more than he could bear any longer. As his stomach lurched and he gagged with that first heave, Titus willed his legs beneath him so that he could sit up, hunch forward, and puke out what little his stomach still had in it from a predawn breakfast so, so long ago. The bile coated and burned his tongue. But he got through it.
Realizing he needed water as he spit the last of the yellow phlegm from his sand-crusted lips, Scratch slowly volved around on his left hip. Pulling himself around with his left arm—remembering that it had been in the water.
There it was. He dipped that hand back into the cool river. Soaked to the elbow he was already, seeing the dark leather as he brought the first cupped hand to his lips. Savoring the precious drops that didn’t spill as he
