The Arrow Keeper’s Song (33 page)

Tom Sandcrane was red to the elbow before he finished his butcher's work. And then the drums died, the warriors vanished in shadow and smoke. He staggered back, gasping for breath, his sides heaving. The thing at his feet no longer resembled a man, and he turned away; the tomahawk's shaft now too slick to grasp, he let the weapon drop to earth. He saw the freight wagon. He sensed Joanna watching him and was grateful he could not see the expression on her face. He tried to walk but his legs gave out. He tried to brace himself but his left arm only feebly responded, and the hand had no feeling at all, so he pitched over on his side.

Tom brought his right hand up to his face and wriggled his fingers. “I'm still alive,” he said, but the words were garbled and faint. And the darkness Tom had held back for so long at last swept forward in triumph to claim him.

CHAPTER THIRTY

O
NE MOMENT DARKNESS, SILENCE, NOTHING
. T
HEN CONSCIOUSNESS
. He was aware of a creaking axle reverberating beneath him, the crunch of iron-rimmed wheels over stone, a jostling motion, and pain. He moaned and opened his eyes to stare at a pair of dim faces whose features he struggled to identify through the haze of his blurred vision. A woman leaned over him, cradling his head, and tilted a canteen to his mouth. Cool water trickled between his parched lips. A man seated next to him spoke gently, his accent graceful and melodic.

“Do not die, my friend.”

“Pull up a moment, Willem, one of the bandages has worked loose,” the woman called out, and the motion gradually ceased. “Tom.” She was unable to hide the concern in her voice. “Tom Sandcrane.”

No! He didn't know anyone by that name, and closed his eyes.

Darkness … silence … nothing.

Red dreams.

He heard drums and chanting, the far-off voices of ancient ones who had gone before; prayers and whistles and the pad of primitive feet tracking buffalo across a sheen of frost. Images of fur-clad hunters faded, became a single warrior in a breechclout, leggings, and quill breastplate. His hair was braided, and he wore a buffalo hat adorned with eagle feathers, its horn tipped crimson. He sat astride a hammer-headed roan. This Cheyenne sentinel was familiar, but for whom did he watch, his fierce eyes brimming with wisdom and primal danger? For whom did he wait?

Me.

The image shimmered and drifted apart. And in the place of the warrior, a brilliant amber light almost too painful to face.

I hear laughter
.

Two men approached out of the brightness. Mere specks at first, they increased in size as they closed in on the watcher. One of the men was Tully Crow, and alongside the wiry Creek breed stood Philo Underhill. They were speaking, their mouths moving, but no sound issued forth.

It is my fault. I carry your deaths upon my heart.

Tully grinned, or grimaced, and began to laugh. Or was it a scream?

Eano-vetano! Eano-vetano! Forgive me!

The brilliance faded and the world became a shadow place. The watcher stood with lantern in hand upon a broad, flat plain where a lonely wind sighed. A bloody hand ax lay at his feet upon a patch of earth dark with the moisture of a slowly spreading stain. On the perimeter of the firelight, barely visible in the flames' eerie glow, lay the grisly vessel of what had once been a man, bleeding from a dozen wounds, leaching his life's fluids into the thirsty soil.

Weariness and sorrow had followed the rage, and everywhere was pain, and he walked the land of the dead, like the ghost he had once claimed to be.

A voice whispered against his ear. “Tom Sandcrane.”

Yes. I am
.

Tom Sandcrane walked in a dream and saw an array of faces he recalled: Seth, kindly Father Kenneth from the reservation, green-eyed Emmiline, the Tall Bull brothers, Allyn Benedict with his smug, satisfied smile, and Clay, his son. Suddenly he was standing among the tribal elders who had gathered around him in a circle, and firelight illuminated the ceremonial lodge so that the Maiyun danced like shadows on the wall. And in the corner of the lodge, seated apart from the circle, stood Tully and Philo, dead arms raised toward him, beckoning their friend to follow.

Tom opened his eyes and, lying still, took a moment to assess the situation before calling attention to himself. The wounded man had drifted in and out of the conscious state so often, reality and hallucination were thoroughly intermingled. He remembered the hardwood wagon bed and some of the jolting ride through the mountains. He thought he remembered lying by a campfire with Joanna, Willem, and Celestial nearby. Then Tom had awakened only to find himself in a canvas tent, surrounded by the plaintive cries of suffering souls whose identity he could only guess. An orderly approached him and began spooning broth into his mouth until he choked, and then the man mercifully left and Tom was alone again, too weak to move. Sweat trickled from his forehead and neck, soaking the blanket folded beneath his head. Then he had been grateful when the world shifted out of focus, and he again succumbed to the dark.

So Tom had good reason to doubt the reality of his surroundings when he found the tent gone, the din of sick and dying replaced by stillness, and the faint buzzing of a mosquito. Sun-washed curtains fluttered to the caress of a breeze through an open window. Tom wrinkled his nose and inhaled the saltwater scent of the sea. This wasn't Rosarita. And the mountains were far from the ocean. He lay in a brass bed in a mostly barren room with whitewashed stucco walls. To his right a water basin had been left upon a nearby cabinet along with a clay pitcher and a cup. He ran a tongue around the inside of his mouth and dry-swallowed; some water would sure go good. He looked to his left and found the room's only other article of furniture, a high-backed rocking chair on which a blanket and pillow had been casually tossed as if someone intended to pass the night there. Or several nights, he thought, and perhaps they already had.

He heard the sound of distant explosions and frowned, wondering how he had come there and if he was a prisoner and where the battle was raging. He seemed to remember fragments of a long journey.
Tosa-a!
Could he be in Santiago? His face felt hot, his eyes like coals, and his left shoulder throbbed like hell. He was feverish, sick with infection and poison and possibly dying. If that was the case, then he did not want his life to end in ignorance.

The view from the window might provide the answers to his questions. He tried to push himself up off the bed with both arms only to find his left arm crudely bandaged to his chest to keep it immobilized. His shoulder, upper arm, and side were tightly wrapped with gauze. He stared down at his left hand, clenched into a fist and pressed against his chest. He tried to wriggle the fingers, but he might as well have been trying to will the walls to speak for all the success he had. He noticed a khaki shirt, blue trousers, and coat neatly draped over the rail at the foot of the bed. Lifting the sheets with his trembling right hand, he found he was wearing a faded pair of long johns. He was looking past the foot of his bed at the dark oaken panels of the bedroom door when it swung open and a diminutive woman in a scarlet-and-orange-striped cotton dress and white blouse started into the room, saw that Tom was awake, did an about-face, and hurried back into what was apparently a hallway. He could hear her calling through the house. Tom searched the room for something he could use for a weapon, settled on the clay water pitcher, and struggled to swing his legs over the side of the bed. It seemed to take all his strength and willpower, but he persevered, though his head began to throb and the room reel like a river raft. His bandaged side hurt like the devil, but he worked through the pain and reached for the pitcher. The world careened wildly and he promptly lost his balance, grazed the clay jug with his fingertips, and curled forward onto the floor, landing with a loud and ominous thud. The pitcher shattered a few feet away.

Tom had no sense of how much time had elapsed—he thought only a few seconds—but when he came to again, Joanna Cooper and a Cuban woman were lifting him into bed. He watched Joanna through slitted eyelids as she leaned over him.

“You're on the outskirts of Santiago. This is the ancestral home of Antonio Celestial.”

“Battle …?” he weakly asked.

“It is the Fourth of July. The army and navy are celebrating their victory over the Spanish forces. It looks like we missed the war.”

Missed the war
, Tom thought. He'd gotten his friends killed, nearly himself too.

“I've asked Bernard Marmillon to come take a look at you when he's finished in the military hospital. Celestial gave a full account of your heroics. Colonel Roosevelt was pleased.”

He was drifting off again. He could hear Joanna, though her voice seemed to echo in his head as if he were standing at the bottom of a deep well and her words were drifting down from above. Colonel Roosevelt was pleased. Tully and Philo and Enos were dead and the officers were pleased. Small comfort.

“You have to fight to live, Tom. Fight to live.”

Why
? he wondered.
For what purpose?
So that he could sell out his people again or maybe find some other friends and lead them to their deaths? While day turned to night, he listened to the beating of his heart as his pulse slowed and he sank into a comalike state.

Red dreams. Red visions.

Hea-vohe
, the deathbringer, was hunting. He assumed the shape of a hawk with wings red as blood, swift against the dreadful gray sky, riding the wind in lazy spirals, transfixed against the gunmetal clouds, regal in his beauty. He glided aloft, poised to strike; cunning, swift, and merciless; certain as fate. Tom watched and waited, helpless, unable to run for fear of attracting the wraith. The hunted have nowhere to hide. Suddenly the demon hawk plunged earthward.

Hea-vohe
attacked, in a blur of motion and flight, and the rush of its wings was a terrible thing to hear. The hunter loomed larger, larger; there was no escape as Tom raised his hands to ward off the inevitable. The wraith-hawk struck a crushing blow, talons tearing, skewering his chest and legs like so many lances. The noise of the impact sounded like ice cracking at first thaw.

“He's
in pretty bad shape, Joanna. And you look exhausted. Of all the rash and foolish things you've ever … every time
I
think of you sneaking off like that
…”

“Can we save him, Bernard?”

“
I think that is up to Sandcrane. It depends on his will to live. Look at this wound. There is so much damage to the brachial plexus. He will have no use of his hand
, I
should imagine, and only marginal movement in his arm. Poor bastard. I doubt an Indian would wish to go through life a cripple.”

“You don't know him.”

“And you do?”

In dream time a minute, an hour, a day, were all indistinguishable; the vision unfolded at its own pace, like a blossom in sunlight, revealing its truth a petal at a time.

Deathbringer, in the shape of a hawk, carried Tom aloft, and he was helpless and dying in
hea-vohe's
grasp. Upward into the wind where loneliness reigns, then soaring beneath the lowering clouds, the wraith-hawk bore its struggling prey across familiar country—rolling hills, thickets of scrub oak and slash pine and cedar.

Now the sky darkened, turned from gray to charcoal, and thunder drowned out Tom's cries. The
hea-vohe
would be his killer, and there would be no one to help. As the storm unleashed its fury, the wraith-hawk swooped down and alighted upon the muddy bank of a rain-swollen river. Shattered trees and jagged clusters of roots rushed past, trapped by the fury of the flood. It was in this place of noise and elemental violence that
hea-vohe
chose to finish his prey. Beak and talons tore at Tom's flesh and he was powerless to resist. His blood mingled with the rain. The last thing he would see on earth was the onrushing river framed by a shattered tree trunk and reeds bowed beneath the downpour, and … what else? What was it? His gaze was drawn to the muddy debris left by the floor. Among the broken branches and mud and a patch of tattered buckskin, he found the heart of his vision. Four feathered shafts half-buried in the silt.

The Sacred Arrows! White, black, yellow, and red; their obsidian tips jutting from the muddy riverbank, they lay just inches from his fingertips. He stretched forth his hand, every muscle straining until he touched a wooden shaft. Using one Arrow, he maneuvered the others into his grasp, and when the Mahuts were his, he began the chant. The words sprang more from instinct than memory. He sang of the power of Mahuts and the way of Maheo, of sunsets and harvests, of a red dawn, and rebirth. There was no change in the outward appearance of the Arrows. And yet strength flowed into Tom and he was restored and the storm became his ally.

He sensed the fear in
hea-vohe
now as the wraith-hawk spread its wings and pummeled the air and battled the battering rain, seeking to escape its former prey by taking to the sky. But the chant had a power and a life all its own. A flash of lightning sprang from the Arrows and outlined the hawk in iridescent blue fire.
Hea-vohe
, the deathbringer, shrieked and plummeted into the raging waters and was instantly swept away, its protests lost in thunder. In that moment the downpour, its fury spent, became a fine, calm mist that settled on the Dream-Keeper of the Arrows and broke his fever and saved his life with the cooling kiss of peace.

I
NTERLUDE

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Oklahoma Territory, February 1899

I
N THE TIME OF THE
L
lTTLE
H
OOP
M
OON
,
SOMETIMES CALLED THE
Little Hard-Faced Moon, a chill wintry wind frosted the windows of Panther Hall and rattled an unfastened shutter like a prowler testing for a way to enter. An occasional snowflake fluttered out of the night sky to settle on the brittle remains of last summer's firewheels and paintbrush and sunflowers.