Usher turned back to Welch slowly, his face gone almost expressionless below the smooth skin of his bald head, its long fringe of coal-black, curly hair hung from ear level to drape far past his shoulders like a silken shawl. He pushed a perfumed ringlet behind an ear. “Not back to the City. Why in God’s name would my father tell me not to come back?”
Welch gulped slightly. “Your father …”
“What does this have to do with my father any longer?”
“Only that your father says the Prophet has … has—”
“Has what?”
“Declared you without the grace of the Church.”
That seized Usher cold, low in the pit of him. “He has cast me out?”
“Your father told me—”
Jubilee clamped his hands on Welch’s shoulders as a man would seize a brother in crisis. “Is he bedridden?”
Welch nodded, his thin lips pursed in resignation. “There is little fight left in him now, Colonel.”
Releasing Welch, Usher turned away, staring into the west once more. “Brigham Young waits only for me to return—so that he can excommunicate me. Is that it, friend Heber?”
“Yes,” he sighed, as if admitting something reluctantly. “Yes, Colonel.”
Usher was a long time in replying. Behind him the men stood quietly for the most part, taking this sudden turn of their communal affairs in stunned silence.
When Jubilee finally did utter a sound, it came behind a long sigh. “The Prophet has become concerned for his own private power, men. Any fool could see that. Brigham Young is casting out all those who pose any threat to his godless usurpation of the Church’s power. My father knows this—that’s why Young saw him removed from the ruling Council.” He whirled on Welch. “Isn’t this what my father told you, friend Heber?”
“Y-yes, Colonel.”
Usher turned on the rest, some three dozen of his most faithful. “The time will come to test the Prophet’s power against my own.” Jubilee liked the effect those words had on that band of brigands he had nourished over the years. The eyes of a handful showed some recognition of that power held by Brigham Young. Usher vowed to remember those who showed such outright fear of the man who was of a time the best friend Jubilee had in this world.
But the rest of the faces showed instead the intense glee he himself felt at the thought of pitting his power against the dynasty of Brigham Young. These he would remember as well, and reward them once he had ripped the mantle of the Church from the hands of the false Prophet.
“Young’s hands are tired, men. We have no choice but to remove the Church from his control one day soon. Not now—but soon.”
“Colonel,” Welch reminded. “Your father.”
He gazed at Welch. “We will make sure my father, my family, is safe before moving against Young. You can return with word from me that he will be safe.”
Heber shook his head. “No. Not that he is in danger. Just that—he worries for you, Colonel. Wants you to stay away, ride far around the City. He wants me to remind you of Brigham Young’s power to send gunmen.”
“Gunmen? Heber—I was always one of those gunmen. The blood I shed in those early days for the sanctity of the Church. The lives I took in the name of Brigham Young!”
“Your father wants you to stay far from the City.”
Usher’s stomach leapt with bitter shock. “Ride far around? Just where should we be bound now, if not back to the seat of Zion itself?”
Welch pointed. “South. To the far lands. Where your father suggests you stay and recruit yourself. Until he can regain his health and send word for you to return at last. In triumph.”
“South,” Jubilee said the word almost reverently. “What in God’s name is south of the City of Zion, except … desolate waste?”
“Your father told me your family has an old friend there. A man you will remember. A friend who will remember you.”
“Yes?”
“You are to stay with his people. Your father said them folks don’t get along with Brigham Young neither. Not much anymore.”
“Who is this my father suggests we stay with until our appointed hour, friend Heber?”
“Name of Lee.”
Usher nodded, a grin forming that lighted his face. His dark eyes crawled across some of his faithful. “Do any of you remember brother Lee?”
He saw a few heads nod in recognition. “Yes. Then you will remember the Mountain Meadows. And how brother Lee led an army of our faithful against a wagon train of vagabond Gentiles come out of Missouri to invade our sacred State of Zion.”
“The righteous killed ’em all!” a voice called out.
“Lee took up the sword and killed them all!”
There came a sudden explosion of cheering, a roaring of blood lust remembered.
“Men, women, and children! Yes—all!” Jubilee shouted above the melee. Then as suddenly he shushed the crowd into silence. With a long, mighty arm he dragged Welch beneath his shoulder, clutching him there fraternally.
“Yes, my faithful. For the time being we must wait, forcing us to ride south … and there we will stay within the bosom of our own kind. At dawn we ride for the land of John Doyle Lee.”
As quickly he decided to ask a few others to join him on a black-night raid on the white man’s horses. If no others would join him, he had decided he would ride alone. No matter what, the young Shahiyena warrior was not about to wait out the night before spilling white blood.
As the war chiefs gazed over the combined forces of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho warriors, numbering more than ten-times-ten, and ten times over again, a thousand horsemen in all, they reluctantly gave in to the failing, red-earth light of that summer day. No man in fear of his own soul would consider fighting at night. If a warrior were killed during a battle after the sun had disappeared from the sky, his spirit would forever roam this earth, unable to walk the Seamon, the sacred road of the dead. He would not spend his forever days beyond the stars in Seyan. No man dared tempt such a fate.
That is, no man but High-Backed Bull.
“The rest won’t ride until the sun climbs out of its bed,” Bull told the first friend he felt he could trust with the horse raid.
Wrinkled Wolf’s eyes grew big. “You aren’t waiting?”
“We will go as soon as it grows dark enough,” the Bull answered. “There won’t be but a fragment of moon tonight—”
“We will get caught!”
“I won’t!” Bull whispered harshly, slapping his chest. “There are white men wearing scalps this night, scalps that I want to carry on my belt. I want to take that hair before the others have the chance. Are you with me?”
Wrinkled Wolf nodded reluctantly. “Yes. You said I would get the American horses we take.”
“You, and your brother, Four Bulls Moon. Get him to come along with us too. You will share the white man’s horses. I don’t want any—only the scalps. Only to cut out tongues and eyes. To hack off hands and feet, to slash off the manhood parts and stuff them in the lying mouths. That is all I want this night. Go. Get your brother. See if he has friends who still have courage to ride against the white man in darkness.”
As High-Backed Bull waited in a plum thicket at the edge of the Dog Soldier camp, his pony picketed nearby in readiness, tearing noisily at the summer-cured grass, the warrior listened as the great Shahiyena village assumed a festive atmosphere. With news of the white riders drawing close behind them, every man sixteen summers and older had prepared for battle, readying his medicine, caring for his weapons. Most of the firearms now possessed by
