Winter Rain полностью

He shuddered in the dawn breeze as light ballooned around him, the sun rising reddish-yellow as a prairie hen’s egg from the far eastern edge of the earth, a great blood-tinged benediction at the far edge of everything he had ever known.

It would not be a good thing to be found out, Tall One feared, for his people to think him no better than a lying, thieving, murdering white-tongue. Especially after yesterday when some far-roaming Kiowa warriors carried their news to the Kwahadi village of last winter’s struggle with the enemy soldiers far to the east in what was called Indian Territory. That sort of thing always made the pale-eyed war chief laugh, his white teeth showing as he threw his head back, hands on hips, finding it very funny that the white man would call a section of all of this country “Indian Territory,” when it all belonged to the Indians.

Long ago the Kwahadi themselves had roamed far to the north, where a few buffalo hunters were only beginning to shoot their way into the endless herds here and there beyond the banks of the Arkansas. Comanche war parties had wandered far to the east, where the tai-bos had driven the tribes from their native eastern lands, and clear to the south, where the pony soldiers and the Tehanno Rangers fought and struggled against the Mexicans. Just about everywhere now, tai-bo settlers wanted to grow their crops and raise their spotted buffalo.

On ground the Comanche had ruled for generations, making war and driving out the Caddo and Tonkawa. This was a land the speedy Kwahadi ponies ruled, they and their red-skinned war lords of the fourteen-foot buffalo lance.

Tall One had seen the older boys practice with those graceful, deadly lances, more a weapon for warfare than a tool for hunting nowadays. Riding in at a full gallop with the lance level with the undulating prairie, the young horsemen practiced spearing a burlap sack filled with grass and brush, rocks weighing down its bottom to give it the heft of a full-grown white man sitting saddle-high on a scaffold of mesquite branches. Each of them was taught to drive that grooved lance through the enemy’s chest, to use it as a huge lever as they picked up their victim and unhorsed him, leaving the enemy to lie writhing on the plain.

Oh, how he wanted to go to war.

“You are unhappy the pony soldiers did not attack us last winter?”

Tall One whirled with a start, surprised to find the pale-eyed war chief behind him, his voice fracturing the dawn silence of this broken country east of their village, where he had gone to take refuge with his thoughts. Here the dogs did not bark, the ponies did not snuffle or whinny. Here he had believed he would be alone.

“Yes.” Then he thought better of his answer. “No. I … just—”

“You want a chance at the tai-bo’s soldiers, just as an Kwahadi warrior docs,” the pale-eyed one replied. “Me too. Sometimes I want so badly that we ride them down and get this war finished once and for all time, Tall One. To wipe this land clean, return it to what it once was for ourselves and the buffalo. To drive the white-tongues out forever.”

He recognized that distant fire burning behind the pale eyes. Tall One grumbled, “The Kiowa messengers say the soldiers slaughtered the camp of Black Kettle’s Shahiyena camped on the Washita River.”

The war chief nodded. “Then those soldiers turned around and fled when the Kiowa and Arapaho camped downstream rose up and hurried to meet the attack.”

Tall One smiled at that. “How I would love to have been there to see the look on those soldier faces when they saw the warriors rushing to chew them up.”

A smile crinkled the corners of those pale eyes. “Still, even though those soldiers fled, they came back the following moon, to harry the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Satanta. Almost hanged both chiefs from a tree.”

His throat constricted uncontrollably. “A terrible death, this hanging—for the soul cannot come out the mouth.”

He put a hand on Tall One’s shoulder. “You are learning well, my friend. And one day soon these will be more than mere words—they will be the feelings in your heart.”

Tall One felt stung, challenging the war chief. “I feel it in my heart now!”

“Easy, Tall One. No one questions that you are Kwahadi already. All I mean is that the more you learn with every day, with every turn of the season, the more you become one of the Antelope People.”

“You are my family now. The only … only family I can remember having.”

“When we brought you here, you became part of a larger family still, Tall One,” he said, gazing to the east as the red globe finally cleared the edge of the earth. “There are other bands of The People. Root-Eaters, Buffalo Followers, and Honey-Eaters. Others you belong to as well.”

“More than anything, I want to belong to the same people you do,” he said, yearning for the comfort of having his place.