the snow, knocking over a warrior’s medicine tripod erected in front of the man’s lodge. As he rolled onto his hip, he saw Waits already stepping out of the lodge door with Crane positioned under her arm. Magpie was right behind, clutching her babe in her arms.
“Don’t come out!” he screamed at them, his voice high and shrill. “Don’t—”
Waits was already running across the icy rime, hand in hand with little Crane. Her pockmarked face was gray with terror as her moccasins repeatedly slipped on the trampled ground. But still she heaved and stumbled toward her husband. Slowly, slowly lumbering into the open.
“Go back!” he cried, standing to wave at her with that arm. How the shoulder hurt! “Please! Go back inside!”
Behind Waits and Magpie more horsemen appeared out of the frozen mist. Grayish-black forms suddenly squirting between the lodges, weapons leveled, mouths O’ed up in some war cry as their eyes narrowed on a selected target.
Once more he hollered, “Get back inside—”
—as the muzzle of a short smoothbore spit a dirty yellow flame just behind Waits-by-the-Water.
But it was not his daughter, or the grandson he had held for the first time last night, that was the enemy’s target.
Instead, the ball’s impact slammed his wife’s body forward, her back arching reflexively as her fingers flew free of Crane’s tiny hand and the little girl stumbled, tangled up in her mother’s flailing legs as Waits-by-the-Water desperately attempted to maintain her footing.
But there was no ground beneath her moccasins. She was already in the air, sailing awkwardly until she spilled onto the dirty, hoof-hammered snow. The side of her head skidded across the trampled crust as he brought up the rifle at his hip instinctively. There had to be more than ten of them. No matter. He wanted only the one in the red capote, the one who jumped his horse over the woman’s body and bore down on the white man with a frightening cry.
Jerking back on the trigger, Bass felt the weapon jolt in his hands, watched the ball strike the warrior in the side, twisting him slightly on the bare back of his war pony. Clutching his wound and crumpling over on the animal’s withers to keep from falling, the Blackfoot managed to stay atop his horse as he and the rest thundered on past, shrieking their war cries and shouting in triumph. His ball had struck the warrior, but not near good enough to unhorse the man.
Then Titus was spinning round, not intent on reloading—no matter the danger now.
He skidded to his knees beside his wife’s body as Magpie scrambled onto her knees and crawled over with her baby in one arm.
“Mother?”
Scooping Waits into his lap, Titus stared down at her scarred face, wiping some of the crusty snow from her cheek and mussed, unbound hair. Her eyes fluttered half open, found his face, and then widened as she held her gaze on him.
“Ti-tuzz—”
“Sh-sh,” he whispered as the roar of battle ground around them, slowly rumbling into the rest of the village. “L-look at me. Yes, keep looking at me.” He knew that if she did not, her spirit might well fly away—
“I don’t feel my legs,” she groaned. A ribbon of bright blood leaked from the corner of her mouth.
Tears already burning his cold cheeks, Titus crushed her against him and rocked slightly back and forth— pressing one hand harder and harder against that warm, wet gush of blood from the gaping hole in the middle of her chest. Harder and harder still he pushed against the blood and frothy bubbles, moaning himself … not words, just wild and feral sounds as he blinked and blinked to try clearing his eye of tears. His spilled on her cheeks, smeared with the ooze of blood on her chin as more and more gushed from her mouth.
“Don’t go!” he commanded her, feeling her rigid, quaking body begin to loosen.
“Ti-tuzz …,” she whispered with difficulty, heaving with a shudder, her eyes glazing as she continued to stare into his. “Always with you, Ti-tuzz.”
“You can’t go!” he yelled at her as the gunfire withered, fading to the far side of the village.
“See me soon … on the mountaintop,” she whispered with another gush of blood, her eyes fluttering. “In your dreams … see me real—always see me … in your dreams … real for all time to come—”
He knew it when her body went limp and her head slowly sank against his arm, a last gush of blood spewing from her mouth onto his wrist. Bass pressed harder and harder on the wound, but the more he tried to plug up that hole, the more limp she became. Finally he stopped pushing so hard and slowly brought her against him again, folding her limp, lifeless body into his as he crumpled over her with a wracking sob that shook him to his core. His loose, gray hair spilled across her face and neck. Never had he felt such a cold hollowness like this—
“Mother!”
He heard Magpie’s cry.
Suddenly his head jerked up and his eyes narrowed on his daughter’s face. “Get Crane and your baby into a lodge!”
“Mother? Is she—”
“Hide them in a lodge with you, Magpie!”
Her eyes widening, she was once more his daughter, his little girl again. Magpie’s eyes registered the same mixture of grief and terror as was in little Crane’s as she scrambled to her feet. Crane instinctively lunged toward her mother’s body, clawing at Waits’s limp arm.
“Take her now, Magpie!”
As he pulled the little girl’s hands off her mother’s arm Crane began shrieking.
“Go with Magpie!” he ordered, his words harsh, mechanical. “You must get out of danger. I will bring your mother with me. Now, go with your sister!”
Reluctantly Crane let him pull her hand free from her mother’s blood-soaked sleeve as Magpie dragged her younger sister away toward the closest lodge—
Five riderless horses suddenly hammered through the lodge circle, lunging this way and that to avoid the small child and woman clutching her baby. Magpie shoved her little sister into the neighbor’s lodge, both of them gone from sight through the gaping black oval. He was alone with the body of his dead wife.
And an emptiness he had never before felt swallowed him whole. Nothing he had experienced with the death of friends or that young towheaded grandson. Not even with the unexpected death of their stillborn infant. No, none of the pain he had ever suffered in life had prepared him for the cold, gaping emptiness that had instantly taken a ravenous bite out of his insides and left nothing but a hollow, oozing pit.
It was only slowly that Scratch became aware again of what existed outside his own flesh as the sounds swelled around him once more, the roar of blood that had surged in his ears gradually lessening now as the hole within him yawned all the deeper—threatening to suck him in after it.
Gunfire and the hammer of hoofbeats thundering on the iron-hard winter ground. Men’s angry shouts and the shrill wails of frightened, mourning women. The snarl of camp dogs and the high-pitched, frightened cries and chatter of terrified children.
Of a sudden he felt the warmth touch the back of his shoulder, almost like a fingertip brushing the back of his neck where his tousled gray hair had bared the skin. Slowly he looked up, over his shoulder, saw how the light was just then tinting the frosty branches of the skeletal cottonwood with a pale rose, the color of her blood smeared on his hands. The sun was coming up. A first, pink light had entered the river valley.
“D-don’t take her from me!” he roared as he tore his face away from her hair, from that most familiar scent of her, and stared at the newly awakening sky.
“Damn you!”
How he cursed the spirits, the First Maker, this God who could chip away at him life by life. Leaving him hollow, empty of everything but for a smoldering hate that he immediately knew would drive him on until he had brought these killers to a reckoning. How long that would take, he did not know … but this craving for revenge was
