She waited for them to sleep, and almost succumbed to it herself. She could barely keep her eyes open and her mind clear after downing such a meal as that one. The embers died, and the night shrouded her, pressing down, the darkness suffocating her, a terrible weight
It was weight. One of the voyageurs had come to her robes. She cried out, rolled, stopped herself from cursing in his tongue, and fought as hands clapped her wrists and a massive weight pinioned her to the grass.
“Aiee!” she cried.
No one helped her. She heard no uproar in camp. She fought hard, bucking and writhing, biting and kicking, and won a momentary reprieve when she threw him off and he rolled. Swiftly she plucked her robe and vanished toward the horses—toward Skye. She could no longer tell exactly where she was because the blackness offered no clue.
“Victoria.”
The quiet voice lifted from almost underfoot, so soft it barely reached her ears.
“Here.”
She found him and dropped beside him, her heart hammering. She waited there for the sounds of pursuit but heard nothing. The utter blackness would foil her pursuer—if she kept quiet.
Slowly, softly, her hands found Skye’s arms and followed them to the thong binding his wrists behind him. She choked back her terror, pulled out her keen knife, and gently sawed, working in blackness, afraid she might slice into him. But a thong gave, and she unwound the binding. She found his ankles and released them. He paused, found her hands, and pressed them between his. There would be more, much more, but the feel of his hands over hers, warm and tight, was overwhelming in its sweetness, and tears welled up in her.
Then came the hardest part, slipping away, making no noise, finding the ponies on an overcast and moonless night in which she could not even tell sky from ground. She gathered her robe and took the thong as well—it would have its uses—and tried hard to fathom what direction to go. Little by little she came to an understanding. The night remained as black as ever, but an interior vision formed within, some mysterious understanding of where she was and where the ponies would be. She knew Skye would not have this gift given to the People, and so she quietly helped him to his feet—better to walk than shuffle on hands and knees through grass, making noise. She led him confidently away from camp, her inward vision sure.
She smelled the horses before she came to them, their acrid odor familiar and joyous. They tugged back on their picket lines. She guided Skye to the one she had prepared for him and lifted one bare foot to the wooden stirrup. He climbed on, and the horse grunted and sidestepped. She feared the whole camp heard. She pulled the pony’s picket while Skye found a rein.
Then the camp did erupt into shouts. They had heard. Someone put wood on the fire, but she ignored that. She freed her own pony, climbed on, and kicked it straight toward the bluffs. Skye followed, depending on the soft sound of hooves to guide him.
She heard talk, anger, and shouting behind her, but never paused to look back.
forty—nine
Skye rode through darkness so thick he had no notion of where he was going. Victoria rode nearby but he could not see her. He thought they were going uphill, away from the Oldman River, but he couldn’t be sure.
He rode through a tunnel without light, without direction, and it occurred to him that portions of life were like that, and that one penetrated various tunnels of life. He had spent much of his life in such darkness. He knew Victoria was near, but only the soft rustle of her horse confirmed it. That, too, was familiar. For too much of their union she had been beside him but invisible to him.
And yet she was there. She had come, brought horses, found a way to free herself from the Bloods. He had come for her, and she had come for him. She had left him, only to return, and in the act of returning and finding and freeing she had said everything that needed saying. He felt himself rejoicing that she was near. Neither of them spoke, and he knew he was afraid to speak. Maybe she was, too. He almost dreaded the moment when they would speak, for fear he would use the wrong words—or hear the wrong ones.
Maybe she didn’t really love him. Maybe she just wanted to help him. He realized he was simply tormenting himself, and stopped it. She was there beside him and what more needed to be said?
After a while he stopped. It would not do to ride too far, because they would probably trace a circle that would bring them perilously close to Governor Simpson and his men. Better to wait until the distant dawn, get their bearings, and ride away. Her horse stopped when his did. He strained to see something, anything, but the overcast hid even the heavens, and the night lay so thick that there seemed to be no other world. Only himself and Victoria. Maybe that was how it should be just now: no other world at all.
She touched his leg, startling him. He had not heard her dismount. He could not see her even that close. She said nothing, as afraid to talk as he was. He sensed she was standing right there, touching him, holding the rein of her horse, waiting for him to respond. Perhaps she was afraid. He found her hand with his and held it. He wished he could see her face, read it, understand what lay upon it.
The darkness held. His wife, his lover, his mate was there—yet not there to his eyes. Everything about this trip through the tunnel of darkness was an act of faith. Slowly he dismounted and stepped into cold grass, which poked between his toes and chilled his feet even more than they had been. The horse had been his salvation, his mobility when they had removed his moccasins from him to keep him within their wilderness cage.
He knew she was close, and hesitant to come closer, so he drew the small hand to him, and found all that it was attached to, and drew her to him in the blackness and held her. She held him, and in the sacred holding they renewed themselves. He kissed her, and discovered her face wet with tears, the tears he could not see. The wetness flooded down her cheeks and now filtered through his beard and wet his own cheeks, until the wetness from his eyes mingled with the wetness pouring from hers.
Thus they held each other for a long time, coming to the end of the darkness. She bid him to sit down, and a moment later he felt a robe enclose his cold feet and she joined him on the wet grasses, the warmth of the robe and love greater than all the coldness on earth. It was a good time to sit and hold her, an arm about her shoulder, and a time to say nothing in words because no words would do. She held the rein of one horse and he held the rein of another, and they heard the horses eat grass and wait to go somewhere else.
Life is like that, he thought. We walk through blackness, wanting to go where we will go. But in the blackness we cannot find our way, and we walk in another direction. Sometimes we find, when we come out of blackness, that it was a better direction after all, and it would have gone better for us to surrender to the unknowing, the uncertainty, than to insist upon the direction we had chosen. Maybe God permitted the blacknesses in all lives that we might let go, surrender, learn to trust in the guiding hand—or in no hand at all. Skye sat, content, knowing that the blackness had already passed. This Victoria, the chastened tear-stained woman in his arms, was not the Victoria who had followed her will into her blackness. He was not the same man, either.
Some time later the darkness began to soften, and with it their blindness. In time they found themselves on a lonely plain, without landmark, a vague place between heaven and hell, a place to choose a direction—any direction—and start on a long ride. They would have a long way to go through a dangerous country that was disputed by Blackfeet and Cree and Assiniboine. Chance, bad luck, a wrong turn could kill them. Daylight could kill them. But he wasn’t really thinking about that. It was better to believe that they had already chosen a new direction. He would not go east and leave the mountains. She would not leave his side.
She pulled free, found some jerky in her kit, and handed him two pieces. They didn’t assuage his hunger. Yet he didn’t mind. She dug farther and extracted two pairs of Blackfoot moccasins. One set was too tight, the other too loose. He wore the tight ones, knowing they would stretch. She had thought of ever
ything and found the means to bring it.
They had not yet spoken, and he was glad. All of this reunion was freighted with more than words would bear. But now she smiled, tentatively, half afraid. He drew her to him and held her again, and she held him very tight until their heartbeats were one. Then it was time to go.
The overcast denied him direction, but he wasn’t really lost now They had ridden from the right bank of the Bow, or maybe the Oldman, which trended northeast. So they were not traveling in a northerly direction and could not without crossing the river. When the sun came, they would get their bearings. He wasn’t sure where they would go. Maybe she would choose a path.
She was as afraid to speak as he, so they didn’t. He helped her mount her horse, and he swung up on his, and they rode, two solitary figures over a sea of dewy grass, silvery in the softest gray light of dawn. The Hudson’s Bay men might follow their hoofprints, so he did not tarry, but rode with Victoria into an unclear future. All that morning they rode without design, toward nothing they could discern. But then the overcast lifted piecemeal, a wan sun gave them shadow, and they turned pale shadow into compass and drifted southward under a patched sky.
Thus they continued through the quiet day, ever southward as best as they could tell. They watered themselves and their weary horses at an alkaline seep and continued until late in the afternoon, when they descended a grassy slope and discovered a slender stream of sweetwater at their feet, bordered with chokecherry and box elder and willow brush. They scared up a mule deer there, a doe, and regretfully Victoria pierced it with an arrow and paused solemnly beside it, saying some Crow prayer to the departed as it spasmed and died. A spotted fawn lingered there and then drifted away, frightened and alone.
They filled their starving bodies that evening, but the image of the fawn kept coming to him. It probably would fall victim of a coyote or wolf or lion, its small life truncated. He took the episode as an image of life, which was not fair, which upset one’s hopes and dreams, which killed randomly. They spent much of the twilight butchering the doe, which was hard and slow work. They roasted the meat to preserve it, and stowed it in their kits. They kept the hide, which might be useful to two refugees with little between them but a few things swiftly gathered when she had fled the Bloods.
All that day, too, they barely spoke to one another. It didn’t seem right to talk, and words seemed shallow. They were each participating in a sacred ceremony of reunion, and words would spoil it. For once, Skye didn’t trust words. He trusted her smile, her tenderness, and the touch of her hands. She searched him constantly for signs of his acceptance and forgiveness, and he gave them to her in his touch, his hugs, and once by wiping away one of her tears. They needed understanding, and she gave him hers, and he was giving her his. But often they gazed upon each other, reading souls, peering into the wells of the eyes and drinking the cool water that lay there.
They did not make love that night beside the prairie creek because it wasn’t what was needed. That would come sometime when they found their bearings. But they held each other through the darkness, under the sparkle of a heaven full of diamonds, listening to the coyotes, and he was glad when she fell asleep with her head burrowed into the hollow of his shoulder.
That night he spoke. “I love you,” he said.
She cried and drew him tight.
The next day caution returned. They saw a distant movement, specks of humanity on a distant ridge, and hid in a slough, which upset the ducks. But nothing happened, and they rode onward toward a new life together. This day they talked now and then, and she told him everything that had happened, from the time she had been captured by the Bloods to that moment. And he told her all that had passed in his life. She faltered only when she mentioned Beckwourth. It did not matter. Someday he would see Beckwourth again, maybe at some rendezvous, and it would all pass by. She had chosen Skye, not the flamboyant Crow chieftain.
He estimated that some time that day they had crossed the 49th parallel and were back in United States territory, far east of the Rocky Mountains. He knew little of this land, except that it could be the home of Crees or Assiniboines, who probably were friendly. But they had to be alert for invading Blackfeet, who whirled out of the horizons and dealt death.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Wherever you go, that is where I want to go, Mister Skye,” she said. “My home is where you are.”
That reminded him of the biblical Ruth.
“Maybe Bridger and Fitzpatrick and Sublette will take me back.”
“Then we will go there.”
“If we can find any of them,” he added.
“Our home is wherever we are,” she said.
He liked that. Home was here, with Victoria.
“Then we are home,” he said.
By Richard S. Wheeler from Tom Doherty Associates
SKYE’S WEST
Sun River
Bannack
The Far Tribes
Yellowstone
Bitterroot
Sundance
Wind River
Santa Fe
Rendezvous
Dark Passage
Going Home
Downriver
The Deliverance
The Fire Arrow
The Canyon of Bones
Aftershocks
Badlands
The Buffalo Commons
Cashbox
Eclipse
The Exile
The Fields of Eden
Fool’s Coach
Goldfield
Masterson
Montana Hitch
An Obituary for Major Reno
Second Lives
Sierra
Sun Mountain
Where the River Runs
SAM FLINT
Flint’s Gift
Flint’s Truth
Flint’s Honor
PRAISE FOR RICHARD S. WHEELER
“All of the details and characters ring true … . The pacing of the novel is impeccable. He blends the various white and Indian cultures together into a believable world with never a false beat. Dark Passage is well worth reading.”
—The Missoulian
“[A] deftly crafted … exciting installment.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dark Passage
“An exciting story of a young man coming of age and growing into a reality greater than his dreams.”
—Roundup magazine on Rendezvous
“[Skye] has enough adventures to satisfy the most discerning Western fan, and they ring surprisingly true.”
—The Lincoln Journal Star on Rendezvous
“Wheeler creates characters who never react or behave like clichés.”
—Booklist
“Wheeler is a genius of structure and form.”
—El Paso Herald-Post
“Wheeler is among the two or three top living writers of Western historicals—if not the best.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Wheeler continues to be one of the best of Western novelist/historians.”
—Salt Lake City Observer
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DARK PASSAGE
Copyright © 1998 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781466828681
First eBook Edition : August 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5934-6
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5934-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-23486
First Edition: November 1998
First Mass Market
Edition: September 2000
Second Mass Market Edition: August 2007
Dark Passage Page 29
