Winter Rain

“Your belly is as full with meat and bread as are your ears with the words of the old chiefs?” Porcupine asked the Nose.

When the war chief failed to answer, High-Backed Bull turned to look at Roman Nose, finding the war chief’s hand frozen where it lay on his belly, a grimace of horror crossing his features, as if he suddenly had trouble swallowing something, as if his throat had constricted.

Three Brule women huddled over two steaming kettles where they had boiled the hump meat Pawnee Killer had served his guests. A third, and smaller, kettle crackled with spitting grease, where the women fried their bread made with flour stolen in those recent raids along the white man’s roads and in the white man’s settlements.

Bull watched the big chief’s eyes narrow as he was handed the reins to his war pony by a Brule pony boy. Still Roman Nose refused to take his gaze from the old Sioux woman who repeatedly speared the fry-bread from her kettle … each piece impaled on the tines of an iron fork.

Iron!

In terror Bull instantly realized the seriousness of this transgression, knowing that Roman Nose’s personal medicine had been destroyed. The young warrior looked back to his war chief.

His eyes misting in realization, Roman Nose quietly began to keen the soaring notes of his death song. His gaze fell to the ground. Only then did Roman Nose turn away to climb slowly aboard his pony like a man touched-by-the-moon—weakened by grief, crazed with terror.

“What is this?” Tall Bull demanded of Roman Nose, brusquely pushing his way past Bull with his own pony. “We should be celebrating the deaths of the half-a-hundred! Why do I see you crying as if a relative of yours has been killed?”

“Yes, Roman Nose!” chided Chief White Horse as he brought his pony to a halt nearby. “Why this look of mourning, when it will be the white man who will be slaughtered!”

“Long ago,” Porcupine began as his war chief continued the wail of death song, “Roman Nose’s medicine-helper forbade him from eating any food that had been touched with the white man’s iron.”

Tall Bull looked from the young warrior again to the face of Roman Nose, confusion on his face. “Yes … all Shahiyena know of his powerful medicine calling. But I do not see what that has to—”

“I can use the white man’s weapons,” Roman Nose interrupted suddenly, his words drenched with overwhelming grief. “I can touch anything with my hands. But I am not to take any food into my body that has been touched by the white man’s own medicine!”

“What are you telling us?” White Horse demanded, his own eyes flaring with the first hint of fear.

“Behold!” Roman Nose roared with the fury of a man who had received his death sentence. He pointed to the shadows beneath the awning where the old Lakota woman dipped her fry-bread from the spitting kettle with a crude iron fork. “Behold my death!”

As quickly as he had shown them the cause of his grief, the tall war chief turned away without uttering another word, leading Porcupine and High-Backed Bull, along with many of his faithful Hotamitanyo, veterans all of so much bloodletting over the length and breadth of Kansas.

For the first time that momentous day, a day when all should be celebration, when all should have been total victory in wiping out the half-a-hundred, Bull sensed a tremor in his own medicine, a shaking to the root of his own power, knowing that the potency of Roman Nose’s medicine—magic that had seen the Hotamitanyo through countless skirmishes and battles—that medicine was now gone the way of summer snow

7

September 1868

BLOOD FROTHED AT the man’s lips, his red-flecked orbs gone walleyed in pain, as much as in fear of staring into the face of death.

The face of Jubilee Usher.

How Usher always relished this power, momentarily cradling a man’s life in his hands—in this case, feeling the slow, unmistakable crackle of cartilage in his victim’s windpipe as the trachea collapsed under the ever-tightening vise of the Danite leader’s clawlike grip.

“G-g-ghg-ghg …,” gurgled the victim, his fingers frantically, desperately raking at Usher’s hands as the colonel continued to squeeze all hope of breath reaching the lungs below the crushed windpipe.

Jubilee tore his eyes away from the pasty gray of his victim’s swollen face, the man held at arm’s length, legs dangling, boots barely skiffing the grassy sand of their camp on the west bank of Muddy Creek, putting Usher’s army west of the Green River and Fort Bridger, closing in on Zion.

“Look, ye of little faith—and remember!” Usher roared, finding again a fascination with his own voice at this decibel. “Mark it well on your memories and fail me not. For just such a fate awaits the next of you who would entertain even the faintest thought of trifling with the woman!”

“He didn’t … didn’t mean nothing by it—”