half second later they were both tumbling down the grassy slope, limbs tangled, rolling over and over.
The girl groaned as she rolled in the grass before him. When they hit the gully’s brush-choked floor, he reached for the rifle that had hung up on a shrub.
He swung the Henry around, but before he could poke his finger through the trigger guard, he froze. While the snarling cur tugged on his pants cuff, three long-haired, bare-chested figures stared down at him, nocked arrows cocked back behind their ears, the sharp stone tips aimed at Fargo’s head. The ash bows creaked like leather.
“Hold it!” a voice boomed on the ridge, in English. “I want him alive!”
Fargo stretched his gaze beyond the three braves slightly relaxing their bows before him. Two men stood on the gully’s lip. One, pale skinned and blond haired. The other, just as tall but slightly stooped and wearing a plumed warbonnet and buffalo robe, a feathered tomahawk in his right hand.
“We’ll kill him and the girl together, thus doubling the amusement of Kundra-May-Na-Tee…and doubling our power against the white-eyes!” With that, Lieutenant Duke raised his arm above his head, waved his hand, and danced in place, howling like a coyote, then wheeled and strode away.
Chief Iron Shirt descended the slope, eagle feathers shimmering in the firelight behind him, necklace teeth clattering softly on his chest. He pushed between the braves to squat before Fargo, the man’s black eyes meeting the Trailsman’s. Iron Shirt smiled, showing naked gums between his long eyeteeth, the creases in his long, haggard face deepening.
“Skye Fargo,” he grunted. “The war gods told me you would come. They spoke to me the night I learned you killed my son, Blaze Face. They told me you would come, and I and the war god, Yem-seen, who speaks in the voice of Lieutenant Duke, would satisfy my desire for revenge.”
“Skye!” Valeria cried as one of the braves grabbed her hair and jerked her to her knees.
Fargo lunged toward him, bounding off his heels. Before he knew what he was doing, he felt the brave’s neck in his hands. The brave screamed a half second before his spine snapped.
Fargo let the body fall, and wheeled. In the corner of Fargo’s right eye he saw Iron Shirt flick his hand toward him, starlight winking off the stone club in his fist. The back of Fargo’s head went numb, and the last sensation he had was of falling back into the brush, staring up at the sky, and watching the stars wink out.
13
A voice called to the Trailsman, but he couldn’t make out the words that seemed whispered to him from outer space. Lolling at the bottom of a deep, chill, black ocean, he heard little more than a slow, garbled murmur.
Then the ocean floor surged, and his head bounced up from the sandy bottom. Pain shot through his ears and deep into his shoulders.
The caller seemed to move closer, and Fargo could make out his name. His eyelids fluttered, light penetrated the black water, and he found himself staring up at a beautiful, dark-skinned, heart-shaped face framed in raven hair streaked with burnished copper.
The girl smiled, showing white, perfect teeth except for a single chipped one, before she turned away from him, throwing her arms wide and careening through the air. Her hair flew about her shoulders, streaked by dancing flames.
As the girl disappeared in the shadows around him, Fargo felt the ocean floor surge again. But it wasn’t an ocean floor he lay upon.
Turning his head slightly and rolling his eyes around, he saw that he lay on a bed of trade blankets and buffalo robes. The ground vibrated beneath him with the rhythmic throbs of several drums beating like an enervated heart.
The walls of the stitched and painted buffalo-hide lodge glowed with the light of the fire within and several fires without. The glow was interrupted by the silhouette of the dancing girl—the beguilingly beautiful princess Fargo had seen earlier with the crone. Her shadow revolved about the walls like the specter of some bewitching, otherworldly goddess, hair flying, her arms flung out as though she were swimming through air.
She danced around him several times to the throbbing beat of the drums. It made Fargo’s eyeballs and head ache to watch her, but he couldn’t help himself.
In her deerskin smock, which was cut low at the neck and under her arms, so that he could see the half- moons of her light brown breasts when she turned sideways, the nipples jostling against the deerskin as she danced, she seemed a creature from another universe. She seemed at once a woman and a child—sinister and frightening yet rife with primordial sexuality.
A necklace of light blue beads clattered softly around her neck. Her legs and feet were bare. When she twirled, the smock rose above her thighs to reveal her well-turned legs and smooth, round bottom.
The drums grew louder, but their rhythm slowed. She stopped before Fargo, stared down at him, her thick hair obscuring her eyes like a giant raven’s wing. As the drumbeats grew suddenly faster and louder once again, she crossed her arms and lifted the smock above her head, tossing it aside to reveal her slender yet voluptuous body in all its naked splendor.
Her brown, pear-shaped breasts rose and fell sharply, the hard nipples distended.
In broken English she said huskily, “You who killed my brother are a brave warrior.” She rubbed her flat belly in a circular motion. “You, before you die, shall fill me with a warrior just as fearless and strong, and he, our son, will fight against you and your people. Such is the wish of the war gods.”
The drumbeats raced for a time, and a man’s singing rose amidst the cacophony, dying suddenly when the drumbeats slowed once again to the rhythm of a fast-beating heart.
The girl dropped to a knee, pulled the trade blanket off of Fargo. He looked down at himself. He was as naked as she was, his fully erect shaft angling back toward his belly.
“Christ,” he muttered.
The situation was as bizarre and disorienting as any he’d ever been in. He’d eaten peyote a few times with the desert tribes, and, such was the beguiling influence of the girl and the firelight and his aching, swimming head and uncontrollable lust, that he felt as though he’d eaten a few now.
Was he really about to be
The girl turned, dipped three fingers into a wooden bowl on a small log table, then turned to Fargo with the pale dollop of what smelled like bear grease on the tips of her three fingers. She closed her hand, lightly coating the palm, before wrapping her fingers around his cock.
Fargo stiffened as though at the prick of a sharp knife, and groaned. Her hand was smooth and warm, the grease slightly cooler. Slowly, she smeared the bear grease onto the swollen head, then began working it up and down the thick, throbbing shaft, the grease crackling and snapping as she worked.
“Does that feel good, white man?” she asked softly, her voice almost inaudible above the beating of the drums.
Fargo had to admit to the keenness of the girl’s talent but, wincing against the sweet torture of her slowly pumping hand, he said only, “Christ.”
She chuckled throatily and lowered her head to lightly nibble his balls, then moved up to his chest.
As her hair tickled him, she slid her breasts across his shaft, sending even more violent shockwaves of desire through his loins. She slid her breasts slowly around on him, the grease on his member crackling, her buttonlike nipples raking him sweetly.
Fargo’s heart skipped several beats before continuing its rhythm, which had somehow been synchronized to that of the drums outside.
He was surprised to find that his hands weren’t tied. Duke and Iron Shirt must be confident that the girl’s charms were enticing enough to keep Fargo from snapping her pretty neck.
He considered it, but killing her would only get him killed all the more quickly. The silhouettes of two braves in fur capes and wolf heads shone through the lodge wall, on either side of the lodge’s flap. They were guarding the door—ready sentinels with spears in their fists.
Fargo raised his hands to the girl’s delicate shoulders, ran them down her thin arms as she groaned and
