by Jon Sharpe
He clutched the bed beneath him, as though at the edges of a swamping canoe. As his head fell back against the robes, his lids dropped like fifty-pound seed bags over his eyes, and downy white birds wafted across the purple gelatinous murk that had become his brain.
The birds winged through his skull for a long time, lulling him into a sleep nearly as deep as death. It was his own name that called him back as the ocean floor once again surged beneath him.
Recognizing the voice, he swam up from unconsciousness, hearing the birds’ final muffled cries and wing beats, and opened his eyes. Wincing at a pain spasm, he found himself reclining against a naked, sand-peppered thigh. He was outside, on the ground, and staring up at the pretty, pale countenance—framed by mussed, sand-streaked, fire red hair—of Valeria Howard.
Frowning down at him, raking her hands through his hair, she exclaimed in a trembling voice, “Skye, you’re alive!” She ran her hands across his face as though she were blind. “Oh, God, what did they do to you?”
Fargo glanced down at the ten half-moon-shaped cuts in his chest, and remembered the mauling he’d taken from the princess. He rose onto his butt, found that his wrists were bound with braided rawhide. His ankles were bound, as well, with an additional length connecting his ankles to a cottonwood post embedded firmly in the ground a few feet away. He and Valeria were naked, scraped, sand-caked, sunburned, and tied like dogs.
He cursed, yanked on the lanyard binding his ankles to the pole. Feeling as though he were still locked in the belly of a bizarre dream, his head still swimming from the braining, the tea, and the sex, he looked around.
The sun was angling westward in a cloud-spotted sky, which meant it was early afternoon. He must have been out here since last night. The buffalo-hide lodges rose above the willows in the south, smoke rising and floating between the lodge poles. In the north, the confluence of the two streams gurgled and rushed softly, while birds flitted in the brush lining the banks.
Only thirty yards west lay the cold, gray ashes of the fire pit.
Valeria sat back against the pole they were bound to, arms covering her breasts, knees raised. The sun and mosquitoes had splotched her otherwise smooth face. Her hair was tangled about her head.
She looked at once indignant, enraged, and terrified. “I thought you were dead.” Her eyes dropped to the cuts on his chest. “What on earth did they do to you, Skye?”
Fargo felt his face warm with chagrin as he glanced away from her. “Some things are just too awful to talk about.”
The brush along the river snapped. He turned toward it, ducked quickly as a rock careened over his head to bounce across the sand behind him.
The boy who’d thrown it—maybe six or seven years old and wearing only a loincloth but armed with a slingshot—threw his head back, pointing at Fargo as he laughed. The other two boys making their way out of the shrubs behind him laughed, as well. The three broke into runs as they headed for the village, cackling and chortling.
Fargo picked up a stone and slung it after them.
“They’ve been doing that all day,” Valeria said hatefully. “The children come by and throw things. The dogs bark and growl. The braves make lewd gestures. An old woman came out and rapped me with a willow switch. I don’t understand how you slept through all that.”
“Well, I had a long night.”
“I’m so scared. The braves have been gathering wood for another fire.” Valeria’s voice trembled as she turned her eyes to the fire pit, on the other side of which fresh willow and cottonwood branches were heaped. “What’re we going to do?”
Fargo pulled at the leather lanyard binding him to the pole. There was no give whatever, and the expert knots were small and taut as sutures.
He inspected the braided rawhide binding his wrists. Those knots, too, would be impossible to untie, impossible to cut without a knife.
Clarifying rage burning through him, Fargo flung his wrists apart, the rawhide snapping taut and cutting into the chafed skin. If he didn’t think of a way out of here soon, he and Valeria both would no doubt be sacrificed to the Assiniboine war gods, under the sharp knife of demented Lieutenant Duke, and to the ethereal singing of Iron Shirt.
Fargo exhaled slowly and peered toward the dun hills rising beyond the stream, where Prairie Dog Charley had no doubt met a slow, bloody end last night.
“What’re we gonna do?” Fargo mused through a long sigh. “Good question.”
14
Skye Fargo was not a man to give up easily, but after trying several times to loosen both his rawhide bonds and Valeria’s, and receiving nothing for his efforts but broken, bloody fingernails, he threw in the cards.
He’d never be able to break the stout cottonwood post to which he and the girl were tied, but he gave it a couple of furious attempts…receiving little for that effort but a sore back and neck and adding more misery to his throbbing head.
The Indians only watched and laughed, a couple warriors wandering up to point out Fargo’s and the girl’s privates. One grabbed her breast, then sprung away, laughing, as she lunged to slap him. A stocky, middle-aged warrior who seemed to enjoy impressing the younger braves, came up and urinated on the post that Fargo was trying to pry out of the ground. Laughing and tucking himself back into his loincloth, he walked away, muttering to the others about dressing for the ceremony.
Fargo slumped down beside Valeria, on a dry side of the post, and propped his elbows on his naked knees. The girl hung her head and sobbed, which she’d been doing for the past few hours. Fargo didn’t try to comfort her. She’d seen the wood the braves had gathered and chopped and seen, too, the post they’d erected in the middle of the fire pit. She’d read enough stories of Indian atrocities to know what the post was for.
She and the Trailsman were not to be stabbed or run through with war spears. They were to be burned at the stake, naked as the day they were born.
He turned to the boys tossing the chopped wood around the base of the stake, then glanced at the sky. The sun was nearly down, deep shadows bleeding out from the hills and knolls. The water gurgled beyond the cattails and willows.
He was still staring in silent frustration at the brush along the stream when, just after sundown and during the kindling of the first stars in the east, a drum began throbbing somewhere on the far side of the village.
The girl started.
Fargo turned to see five braves walking toward him through the willows, their purple shadows raking the sage and buck brush clumps. Three were bare-chested while one wore a tunic of bobcat hide with several emblems painted on it. Their eyes were dark, faces expressionless. The man in the tunic carried a wide-bladed, bone-handled knife down low in his right hand, while one of the others carried a spear. The other three fixed bows to arrow strings, angling the bow tips threateningly toward Fargo and Valeria.
Fargo stared hard at the approaching braves but directed his words at the girl. “Don’t show fear. They don’t respect fear, only bravery.”
“Does it really matter at this point?”
“Just do as I tell you, damnit. It’ll go worse if you show sign of weakness. And, if you see an opportunity, run to the river and swim for your life.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll put in a good word for you with the war gods.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The approaching braves spread out in a semicircle around Fargo and Valeria. The one in the tunic, the oldest of the five, gestured for the two captives to move back away from the pole.
When his orders had been obeyed, he stepped forward, crouched, and chopped through the two cords connecting Fargo and Valeria to the cottonwood post. As the man straightened, Fargo eyed the knife in his hand. If he could somehow grab it and chop the leather strap binding Valeria’s feet, he might give the girl a chance, however slim, to live.
The Indian followed Fargo’s gaze to the knife in his hand, and smiled. He stepped back, grinned conspiratorially
at the other braves flanking him, then turned back to Fargo, open challenge in his eyes. He extended the knife toward the Trailsman in his open palm, as though daring him to grab it.
The Indian then closed his hand about the knife handle, swung his arm down to his right side, and snapped it up. The knife careened about six feet over his head, turning end over end once before falling. Falling, it turned end over end twice more before the handle dropped back into the Indian’s extended hand.
The Indian stared with wide-eyed mockery at Fargo, then grinned broadly, his flat cheeks dimpling. He cut his eyes toward the other braves, who chuckled.
Fargo laughed.
The laugh died on his lips as he lunged off his bound feet, throwing himself up and forward and chopping his bound fists down against the hand in which the Indian lightly grasped the knife. The brave gave a startled grunt and stumbled straight back as the knife hit the ground in front of his moccasins.
Before the other braves realized what had happened, Fargo grabbed the knife, then twisted around and sprang toward Valeria, diving toward her feet. With a single chop, he cut her ankles free.
“Run!” he shouted, as an arrow parted his hair and sliced into the ground behind him. “Head for the stream!”
He quickly chopped through the ties binding his own ankles, and straightened. An iron-bladed hatchet careened toward him at the end of a naked brown arm. Fargo ducked. The hatchet whistled over his head, blowing his sand-crusted hair.
Instinctively, he thrust the knife forward and up.
The Indian grunted sharply, and warm blood gushed over the Trailsman’s right fist. Before he could pull the knife out, an arm snaked around his neck, drawing his head up as it tightened, pinching off his wind and blood, and making his head feel like an overfilled balloon. Each heartbeat felt like a hammer smashed across his brain plate.
As the Indian drew him back and down, he glimpsed Valeria running off to his left, toward the confluence of the two streams. One of the other braves was close on her heels, yowling as he dove, wrapping his arms around her feet, tripping her. She fell face-first in the brush, screaming.
Fargo dug his fingers under the arm of the brave strangling him. Seeing two other braves standing before him, arrows aimed at his face from two feet away, their faces pinched with silent fury, he opened his hands, turned them palm out in surrender.
The arm of the brave in the wolf-hide tunic slackened around Fargo’s neck. One of the braves before him slitted his eyes, drew his aimed arrow back slightly.
The brave under Fargo asked the enraged brave, in Assiniboine, if he would cheat the war gods’ fire. Both warriors quickly lowered their arrows. The arm drew away from Fargo’s neck, and the warrior in the wolf-hide tunic shoved him aside, rising and cursing in Assiniboine as he turned away from Fargo to the brave kneeling with the knife still embedded in his belly.
Calling the brave a girlish fool to be killed so easily, he reached down, pulled the knife from the brave’s bloody gut. The brave threw his head back screaming, then fell straight back in the brush, thrashing. The warrior in the wolf-hide tunic extended the blood-drenched knife toward Fargo, wagged it up and down from a good five feet away, the mockery in his eyes replaced by wary respect.
Swallowing, trying to reopen his pinched, battered windpipe, Fargo straightened. Behind him, the girl sobbed and kicked against her captor, who dragged her by the hair through the brush, and tossed her down at Fargo’s bare feet.
“Pick up your whore, white man,” the warrior in the wolf-hide tunic ordered, grabbing Fargo’s own Henry repeater off the ground, racking a fresh shell in the chamber, and aiming at Fargo’s head. “Then over to the fire pit, where the war gods will enjoy seeing you dance together in flames.”
Fargo reached down to where the girl sobbed, legs curled, her head buried in her arms. He grabbed one of her arms, gently drew her up beside him. She no longer tried to cover herself, and her bare breasts, sandy and dusty and spotted with grass seeds, jostled and swayed.
“Sorry,” he grumbled as the braves flanked him from several cautious feet away.
She rose up on her tiptoes, kissed his lips, then turned to let him guide her toward the fire pit. “Thanks for trying, Skye.”
Thanks for nothing, Fargo thought, as the Indians prodded him and the girl into the fire pit, turning their backs to the post. She would have been better off dying by Lieutenant Duke’s knife than dying with him here tonight—slowly, by fire.
Valeria didn’t seem to feel the same way, however. Fargo was amazed at how stoically she suddenly seemed to accept her fate.
As three warriors held the rifle and the bows on her and Fargo, the fourth bound them to the cottonwood pole with coiled rope. The rope was wrapped around their bodies and the pole between them from their shoulders to their ankles, drawn so taut that Fargo could take only shallow breaths.
The brave had no sooner knotted the rope around the base of the pole than a distant drum began to throb, and the Indians—old and young warriors, old and young squaws, children, and their dogs—began to filter onto the ceremonial grounds from the lodges. A handful of warriors rode in on sweat-lathered mustangs, dismounting and howling victoriously, as though fresh from a raid, joining the milling throng around the fire pit.
When they’d all gathered, dancing and singing, dogs barking and running with the children, a torch shone in the direction of the village, a bright, flickering light in the thickening darkness.
“Here we go,” Fargo muttered.
The girl, out of sight behind him, on the other side of the pole, said, “Skye?”
“Still here.”
“I would never have admitted this under ordinary circumstances, but…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly, dwindling beneath the din of the surrounding revelers.
“If it’s a long confession, you’d best hurry.”
“I love you.” Valeria paused as the drum’s beat grew louder, the torch grew brighter before Fargo. “I fell in love with you the moment I first laid eyes on you in Mandan.”
“Figured as much.”
In the corner of his right eye, Fargo saw her head turn sideways to the pole. Rage trilled in her voice. “You bastard! That’s all you have to say?”
“Right changeable, aren’t we?”
A rock careened out of the milling shadows of the crowd to his left, struck the pole just above his and Valeria’s heads. A little boy, naked and holding a short, feathered lance, ran into the crowd, grinning devilishly.
“You little urchin!” Valeria cried. “Can’t you people raise your children any better than that?”
The drum grew louder. Fargo stared straight ahead as a tall, blond silhouette and a stooped, stocky figure approached through the willows, flanked by braves carrying torches, the hide lodges lifting conical shadows behind them.
Lieutenant Duke, wearing nothing but a loincloth, a red bandage on his upper right arm, moccasins, and a hide thong around his head, grabbed a torch from a brave, held it aloft, his eyes fluttering, trancelike, as he sang in the ethereal, ceremonial tones of the Assiniboine. His tattooed breasts were hideously scarred from the sun dance ceremony.
Light, sparking embers, and shadows danced bizarrely.
Beside Duke, clad in warbonnet and buffalo robe, the regal Iron Shirt thumped the drum in his hands, taking little march-dancing steps, rising on the balls of his feet, as he and Duke drew up to the ring of branches mounded about the cottonwood post.
The pair stopped in front of the ring of wood piled haphazardly around the stake, about ten feet in front of Fargo. Both men locked gazes with the Trailsman. Iron Shirt’s tobacco brown eyes were glazed with solemn religious fervor. Lieutenant Duke’s blue eyes, above small lightning bolts of chokecherry die on the nubs of his sunburned cheeks, owned as much zeal as Iron Shirt’s, but the white man’s zeal was sheathed in raw, blind insanity.
The man should have been locked up in the funny house. Instead, here he was, having thrown in with one of the most powerful war chi
efs on the Great Plains, exacerbating Iron Shirt’s hatred for the whites. In addition, he’d convinced Iron Shirt that he had a direct link to the Assiniboine war gods, and could lead him in war.
As Duke and Iron Shirt sang, Duke’s features garish in the light as he waved the torch, the Trailsman spied the princess he’d coupled with last night, standing about ten feet to Lieutenant Duke’s right.
Beside her stood the gray-haired crone who had whipped Valeria’s bare bottom. On the other side of the crone stood another, heartbreakingly pretty Indian girl—obviously the princess’s sister though slightly taller, her belly rounded with child.
Duke’s child, judging how the girl stared at the crazed white man with gooey, proprietary admiration.
The princess who’d shared Fargo’s robes last night held a fox cloak around her shoulders, her hair glistening in the firelight. She must have sensed his stare. She turned toward him, gazed at him obliquely, then quickly turned to the two men leading the ceremony, drawing her cloak tighter about her shoulders and shaking her head haughtily.
Fargo turned back to Duke and Iron Shirt still singing and waving the torch and thumping the drum while the throng sang and danced and the children laughed and the dogs barked.
Fargo clamped his jaws and shouted, “Just get on with it, you long-winded sonso’bitches!”
As if to comply with the Trailsman’s wishes, Duke moved to his right, Fargo’s left, and touched his torch to the dry wood. The brittle brush instantly caught fire, glowing, sparking, and smoking.
The wind pushed the smoke toward the stake, making Fargo’s eyes sting. Valeria coughed and swung her head from side to side.
Still singing, Duke walked past Fargo, to Fargo’s right, and touched the torch to the brush at the west end of the ring. He danced back toward Iron Shirt, singing, dancing, and waving the torch, his blue eyes flashing the religious zeal of the unequivocally mad, and reclaimed his position beside Iron Shirt.
