Disclaimer: The characters used herein, with the exception of original characters (please don't borrow) are the property of MGM and Trilogy. No profit sought or accepted.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language, violence
Notes: Yakoke, Adrian, for a heart deep and true; words cannot say how much you mean to me, and to my writing. And to my new friend, Lynne Smith for beta-reading and valuable suggestions.
Josiah laid back against his saddle, his fingers loosely braided over the modest swell of his well-stuffed belly, which rose and fell on a sated sigh. He was watching Vin across the camp taking up his rifle and saddle, hardly rippling the air with his comings and goings of late but bright in Josiah's senses, burning with significance. He was not the only one to know this, either, by the watch Two Badgers and several of the elders had on Vin. The tracker had been riding through each day without reins, going where the moment took him as if it were a blessing to be so taken, a relief to have no choice. But Josiah knew the ultimate personal destination was one Vin dreaded, and how, stubborn a man as he was, he made his own will lie quiet to be obedient to the larger forces at work was something Josiah was trying to decipher. He had no doubt, though, that Vin would do what was right with the same passion he'd spent on doing it wrong all these years.
The burly preacher sighed again as Vin faded into the darkness, and he let his thoughts roam where they would, his eyes likewise wandering the still-bustling camp. He thought he knew where Vin was going, and even why. From outside the glow of firelight this camp spilled in a golden tableau against the star-filled night, beautiful and vibrant as living art. He was getting used to the odd vantages that overtook him without warning, images and sounds of startling intensity that yanked him out of himself into bird's eye view of the great wheeling circle that turned them all within it. The first time it had happened, he had trembled with fear of it.
So many fates being blended and merged and sent off in their own directions, a dizzying spin too fast for him to wholly grasp, though he tried as much as a mortal man could. So many circles closing within that great wheel, individuals and nations and the world itself reaching a place where one age ended and another began. He didn't know how he could be at peace witnessing these things when so much of inestimable price might pass away forever, but he refused the instinct to struggle against the visions and sought his own purpose in what was to come.
He'd walked a wide circuit of the camp earlier in the evening, no more knowing what prompted him to do so than Vin likely did, circling it like a curious crow around a shining object. Exploring senses that had seemingly been remade in the last few days, observing as if from a distance a world that looked the same, but had changed profoundly. Storing up memories, perhaps, for when this time was gone, this age passed into history; searching for a voice to explain what it was to live among the people.
He closed his eyes for a moment to better appreciate the single song all their sounds made in his ears, finding ironic comfort in the people his soul couldn't help grieving for. Light hearts in those voices, bright memories and a shared relief Josiah hadn't expected, but had understood at once. What had been dreaded for so long was finally at hand, war no longer an amorphous fear against which no blow could be struck, no longer an elusive or uncertain threat, but a foe plainly set before them. Better to act than to fear, the people knew what was coming and were satisfied to have their enemy defined. Even more satisfied, by the light in their faces when they turned them to the north, in the first battleground - the Rosebud. Many times they paused to look that way, the distance between them and that land gone in their eyes. Earth sanctified by generations of hunts, by the bones of the Lakota who had taken to the Spirit Road from that rich place. The Rosebud knew them in the springtime of their strength, it was the land of winter's end more profoundly than ever before. Was his own winter's end to be found there as well? Would he see it?
The people were called to do what they did best, to honor all that was sacred by throwing themselves against the enemies of the earth they loved so passionately, and it was enough to do that glorious thing they had been born to do. The notion of these plains empty of the Lakota was not a thing they could conceive of, so utter was their faith. But he knew his own kind, and Vin did, too, and he'd seen that knowledge darken Vin's eye even when laughing, even immediate in the pleasure of the people's fierce joy. The pleasure was all that mattered now, though, this contented moment and this sense of being drawn into the living world was too marvelous, too long and fervently sought, to dilute with his own hopes and fears of a tomorrow he couldn't touch. He was blessed beyond every hope he'd ever had to have the wind and the earth and the power that drove it all, God or Creation, welcoming him. Holy. He was trying hard to be worthy.
At the many campfires across the narrow flood-plain beside the river the celebrations of the hunt and the business of smoking meat and rendering fat and marrow for transport to the Rosebud went on. Groups of women used the light of celebratory fires to flesh hides and rub the raw skins with buffalo brains to keep them from hardening up before they could be fully cured. Young men came in from sentry duty and dipped into a paunch set over glowing coals for the savory meat simmering within; the paunch itself would be consumed when it was empty. The throb of drums and the muffled cadence of moccasined feet dancing on the earth, laughter as the women fleshing hides teasingly called out those that had been found pierced with more than one arrow from the same bow. Spirals of sparks leapt in twisting curls into the night as wood was added to the great fires. All of it was order, logic, patterns as old as time and as timeless, spooling out around him, coming closer to the heart of the people's cause, of Vin's - and his own as well, could he but find it.
One of those causes lay stretched out flat beside him on his bedroll, snoring softly, and there was an indulgent paternalism in the smile he gave the sleeping gunslinger. Meat was lightest, Little Eagle had said to Chris, when it was carried in the people's bellies, and no one had mistaken the challenge in her gestured invitation to eat. Slender as he was, Chris had an appetite that had surprised many, and he'd taken up the gauntlet she'd thrown with a confident grin that hadn't lasted long. She'd sent him to his bedroll with a dismissive wave of a greasy hand holding a half-consumed joint of meat, and a full mouth that still managed a cackle of mocking laughter. Chris' astonishment had been cause for great hilarity, which he had compounded by a suspiciously scowling inspection of her sleeves and a protest that she must be hiding meat somewhere on her person.
That old woman and Chris Larabee had never, that Josiah knew, exchanged a word or a gesture or a look composed of anything but sarcasm and sharp edges, yet no one doubted the respect between them, it was as strange and marvelous a friendship as any Josiah had ever seen. That it would not have long to exist only made it sweeter, he thought, and he thought Chris knew that, too, having a soul more capable of tenderness than many folks knew.
Chris stirred beside him and settled again, and when Josiah looked up from him he saw Vin coming, his bedroll over his shoulder and his gait loosely clumsy with exhaustion. Quiet in the world as Vin was, Josiah heard a distant thunder, dark eyes followed his progress so he knew he was not the only one to hear it. He greeted Vin with a nod and said nothing as he shook out his bedroll on the far side of the glowing coals and folded himself down by stiff degrees, unable to wholly hide a groan of discomforted relief. Josiah kept Vin in the corner of his eye as the tracker folded his legs in front of him and leaned his elbows on his widespread knees, stretching his deeply curved back to one side, then the other. It had been hard work butchering so many buffalo, and Josiah ached across the shoulders and the small of his back, so he knew Vin, with a slightly crooked spine that gave him more trouble than he'd ever let on, must be feeling it even more, particularly on unhealed ribs and who knew else what damage nobody had seen on him. Vin never mentioned it, though, and Josiah would've been surprised if he had.
Finally the tracker sighed and looked over at him with a directness that meant he had something to say, and Josiah turned with patient interest and waited.
"Been meanin' t'thank you, Josiah ..." Vin said, a dark peace in his wide eyes and an acceptance of expected grief coming fast upon him. "I'm glad you're here for Chris."
Tomorrow they'd be at the Rosebud, and it wouldn't be long thereafter that Vin would have his ceremony, he wasn't a man to procrastinate once resolved. But tonight there was apprehension in the sudden shift away of Vin's look, in the contemplative love too plain in his face as he examined the gunslinger. Vin didn't show his heart that plain, ever, and Josiah wondered what he saw that no one else would, wondering what vantage Vin was living and how he kept hold of himself in the flood. What ran a river through him must be a torrent in Vin. It wasn't like him, either, to offer polite preambles to things he wanted to say, so Josiah knew it was something laid deep that needed time to find words.
He wondered, then, as Vin's eyes were again drawn to Chris, if either of them fully understood the opposing forces that bound them, against all logic, closer than friends. Different in temperment and habit and history, but love like kin between them - and yet what bound them was the very thing they'd never shared. Just as he was congratulating himself for that insight, clarity wiped like a hand over fogged glass and overtook him, swept him from the vantage that had been outside into the heart of the power that he was not, after all, destined only to observe. It shook in him, mocked his philosophical distance, moved like a storm in the quiet stillness of the moment.
How had he never seen that there was, in everyone, a thing kept that should be let go? Somewhere in a man's history something snagged him in that deadfall that held some from the rest of their lives. With Chris and Vin, it was love that couldn't be lived without. And what had he kept for too long that did him harm? There wasn't even a heartbeat between the question and the answer, his father's disapproving face hove into memory dragging anger and fury and that rage blazing behind it all like a blazing comet-tail, that rage that frightened him more than anything ever had. In the grip of all that was so true in the souls around him and the days he was living with them, he could not deny it. For him, it was hate. No ... his own truth forced through ... it was fear - fear that his father had always been right.
Vin noticed the flutter of panic Josiah knew he couldn't hide, he knew his mouth was open in startlement but he couldn't close it. The ghost of a smile crossed Vin's face, knowing what Josiah didn't but having no intention of influencing the Preacher's path. Vin looked down at Chris again while Josiah stared at his own hands, composing himself. This would not be dealt with in a moment, or a day. But having seen it gave him the face of his enemy at last, and as unnerving as it was to have it be his own, he understood the peace in Vin's eyes even shadowed with anticipation of grief coming fast.
"It's a hard thing I've asked of him ... " Vin finally said, so quiet he seemed to be talking to himself, uncertainty not for anything he had to do himself, but for this friend he'd brought into it. The flicker of blue eyes was half-ashamed of being too cowardly to do it alone and half-proud that Chris was standing with him. And yet ...
"Josiah, he ain't got no idea ..."
They regarded one another soberly, knowing the Keeping ceremony might be harder on Chris than he could imagine once caught up in the spirit that would sanctify it. It would be powerful, there was no doubting that in the ferocious mix and swirl of power and events and intentions around them, and Vin was at the heart of all of that somehow. Chris thought he'd just need to stand by Vin with no comprehension of what would be invoked nor how significant it would be beyond Vin's ceremony, and neither Vin nor Josiah were certain Chris would want what might be called up from his own heart. Obviously Vin was feeling badly about that and having second thoughts.
Josiah let it settle in him awhile, looking at it himself from all sides as he knew Vin had before speaking of it. Then he reached his big hand across the coals and capped Vin's bony knee, feeling the tracker start at the intimacy but maybe wanting him startled enough to listen.
"Vin, things'll be as they should be for all of us, now isn't the time to question it. You aren't a selfish man nor inconsiderate of others, you care for him yet you asked him to stand with you ... and I don't think it was just because you needed him, you don't much ask things much for yourself, I've noticed. We're all being led where we're supposed to be."
One iron-grey eyebrow quirked significantly as he patted Vin's knee and sat back. Vin wasn't surprised that Josiah felt the forceful push and pull of Creation, he'd assumed he would, inviting it as he always did, and maybe even counted on it some. It was why he'd brought this matter to him, the only one who could give him this counsel. But Chris - well, he might feel it, but he sure as hell didn't know what it meant, or what such awareness might cost him.
"I suspect you had no more choice in the asking than Chris did in agreeing." Josiah said, and Vin didn't have to ask what he meant. The ghost of Chris' wife and child were as much torment to the gunslinger as Duley had been comfort to Vin, but who was he to say it was time for Chris' circle to close just because it was time for him and Duley?
"I don't want to be the thing forcin' his hand, Josiah, it ain't fair, maybe he ain't ready - hell, look how long it took me. If'n he does this for me, n' he ain't ready ... " A distracted motion of his hand, distressed and uneasy. "Wouldn't be right, it's like askin' yer friend t'take a bullet along with you so's you won't die alone. Just ain't right."
Josiah smiled at the analogy, knowing Vin was dead serious but following the instinct to contentment in the direction things seemed to be going.
"A man won't walk a trail he doesn't want to walk even if you point it out to him, Vin, even if the one he's on leads right off a cliff." His broad brow creased thoughtfully, "I don't think it's his wife and boy he needs to let go of so much as his guilt over not being there to save them."
Vin considered that, and the fact that he wasn't surprised to hear it, listening carefully to the strange timbre of Josiah's voice and what he could hear beyond the words. Josiah was in the weave, too.
"It's a punishment he's sentenced himself to, a constant state of war against ever being so helpless again. But you know as well as I do that there have to be times when a man accepts helplessness." By his glance, Josiah was doing some accepting of his own along that vein, and Vin squinted at him, needing to be sure.
"He was lookin' for answers, Josiah, and I never had 'em for him. I never told him I was just as ruint as he was, just better at hidin' it."
"Who says you never had answers for him, Vin?" Josiah said, a meaningful lilt to his voice that made Vin look hard at him. "Or him for you?" This big Preacher had insights Vin couldn't guess at and as shamed as it made him feel to think so, he couldn't help but hope Josiah had an answer that would ease his guilt and still allow Chris to stand with him when the time came.
"Maybe it just wasn't the time for those answers for either of you. And maybe now is. Maybe he'd never let go of Sarah and his little boy any other way but you asking him to stand with you when you do that very thing yourself. It's in motion no matter what doubts you might have, you can't stop it, and you can't control what it is to Chris." A roll of one powerful shoulder, a philosophical tilt to his broad jaw, "I aim to stand for you both."
A short time of silence laid down upon them warmly, each looking and feeling his way along his own direction. Still, Josiah heard the sigh and knew the moment Vin surrendered to all that bound him and Chris Larabee, expected and unexpected. A pragmatic settling into unalterable realities that was uniquely Indian in Josiah's experience; what could not be changed must be serving Creation, and a wise man would accept that.
"Y'know," Chris' voice startled them both; he hadn't moved, but he stretched a little now and pushed himself up to a sitting position, that iron-cold look on his face that Buck had learned to fear.
"I ain't nearly as dumb as you two seem t'think. Don't sleep like the dead, either."
But neither Vin nor Josiah could yield to Larabee's offense at having his private life discussed; that time, too, had passed, and Chris pursed his mouth and sat back a bit with a sharpening eye, wary to see that in their faces and setting his heels against it in pure instinct. He'd been listening the whole time, and what had been said assumed a new significance in the stubborn openness of their eyes. The rush to anger quieted in him, shuddered into dreading stillness. He wasn't ready ...
Vin looked down at his threaded fingers and then up at Chris again, took a breath like a man getting ready to jump off a precipice.
"Duley's always been like my shadow, Chris." Low and soft, and Chris felt frozen in place. All he could see of Vin's face was a flickering slant of cheekbone and jawbone and hatbrim.
"Like she was standin' just out of sight here ..." A quick sweep of fingers across his chest and up to the point of his right shoulder, "Just out th'corner of my eye. It was wakan ..."
A smile edged across his face to know Chris understood the Holy thing that Vin's poor words would make sound foolishly superstitious. Jade eyes held him with desperate trust that Vin could no longer avoid. The time for solitude, too, was over, and he shivered through a momentary confusion of terror.
"N' if I told anyone," he went on firmly, not searching for words or stumbling to be understood but letting them come without the filter of his own fear or pride, "I'd have t'know she was gone n' let her go."
Telling Chris about her now was letting her go, though he stopped as if he'd tripped. Chris knew he was fighting the instinct to get up and run because that instinct clamored in him as well, and for a moment there was a naked plea in every angle of Vin's face, in the wide-open well of eyes fraught with that irrational fury he knew so well at losing someone too dear to be without. Vin would run for the wilderness and solitude, Chris would run to liquor and violence.
"N'it's just that way now, come t'pass."
Larabee's face was hard and still, and there was a cold warning in his eyes that Vin knew was more fear than threat. Love wasn't always merciful, though, and Vin had to finish this, he had to give Duley to Chris so he would know her to let her go. He had to ask for Sarah and Adam in return. He held Chris' eyes, apologized for the pain and offering himself as kin and comfort at the same time, seeking it in Chris for himself. It was that need Chris couldn't defend against.
Vin said, "I guess every man comes t'the same places in the end. All that's different is how long it takes t'walk the whole circle."
Chris flinched visibly, but Vin had withheld these truths from them both for too long. A man should take better care of his friends than that, and the current was flowing too fast to stop now. Chris had buried his wife and son, and Vin needed to know how he'd done that and lived with that vision in his heart all this time without going insane, without dying from it. Because he didn't know if he could hold his mind, or if he would want to hold his life, once Duley was truly gone.
"I hear her voice," Vin said, and she was a distant music in the dreaming tilt of his head, "I see her," Hands faintly describing her on the space in front of him. "She's been with me all these years like a shadow off my heel nobody else can see. In dreams I can taste her, touch her ... have her touch me."
Chris' mouth compressed, but despite the galling envy to have such proof of more merciful ghosts than his own, he couldn't begrudge the comfort Duley was to Vin any more than he could resent Sarah's memory for being a torment.
Josiah, silent in the shadows, dropped his head to hide his understanding of the grief that lay ahead for Vin, a rocky rapids fast approaching that the tracker already saw and wasn't trying to avoid. Chris had laid the bodies of his family in the earth and had that finality, at least, a step farther than Vin had ever gone. He watched the war in the gunman's eyes between his loyalty to his dead family and the loyalty he felt for the man sitting across from him with his living heart in his eyes. Creation chose such men for a reason.
One who spent his life grieving and another who had refused to ever begin, a symbiotic crossroads reached between them, a mutual need both had always known and never acknowledged the true depth of.
But Chris could not be so sanguine; it wasn't the same, he was sure of it, he'd buried his wife and child, he'd already done what Vin was only now coming to, it was over for him. Wasn't it? Could he survive doing any more?
"Sarah doesn't ..." Chris stopped as abruptly as he'd begun, his mouth closed in on itself and he blinked hard. He hadn't intended to speak, it'd just ... A sudden jerk of his head averted his face and his hands fisted on his knees. There wasn't anything about Vin that Duley hadn't known, they'd been a single heart, not one good heart providing salvation to one far less worthy. It wasn't like that with him and Sarah, she was everything pure and good and he'd never let her see his baser nature, she'd never known the man who could whore and kill and do wickedness with glee in his heart. It wasn't the same, so he could help Vin bury his wife without his own grief coming into it. Couldn't he? He wanted Vin to be easy with having asked him to stand with him, it didn't have to be any more than that, he had to make the tracker understand. He had to take the pity out of Vin's eyes even if it meant denying him comfort, the cost of it was too high and Chris wasn't willing ...
"Sarah never talked to me, Vin, like Duley does to you." His voice a bare murmur tight and brittle with feelings held back. "It isn't the same."
Now it was Vin who was still and silent, his fingers smoothing the beaded tail of his scabbard between them over the hollow of his crossed legs. He knew what Chris was asking for and he wanted, by the friendship he bore him, to grant the excuse to turn from this. But he couldn't, not and call himself Chris' friend, he couldn't shy from anything now that he knew to be necessary. Finally he said with helpless honesty,
"Right now I wish Duley didn't talk t'me."
Chris's eyes narrowed, his head tilting and weaving slightly to follow Vin's unconscious rocking. A bare movement to reveal how overwhelmed he was because he didn't know he was moving, himself, Chris was sure of it, focused iron-hard on his own fingers all Chris could see of his face was his mouth going thin and flat. It felt to Chris like he was exploding inside, doing everything he could, with every shred of will he had, to hold at bay what Vin was saying he couldn't anymore.
Chris didn't have to be told, and it wasn't something Vin was capable of saying; the only reason he could have for not wanting to hear Duley's voice was knowing it would say good-bye. A deep shudder worked its way down his spine ... it'd always been like this with Vin and he'd never understood it, insisted that he still didn't. That woman was what had always haunted Vin, not being orphaned and coming up hard-scrabble and alone. Duley had haunted Vin as sure as Sarah haunted him, and even being a ghostly comfort that he envied, that love had damaged Vin ... Josiah caught his eye, and it took a second for Chris to realize that what he first took for a shared sympathy for Vin instead encompassed he and Vin together. That love that damaged Vin ... the same way it damaged Chris. Both like bugs in amber, forever pressed against a lost day and numb in that backwards regard to all that came after. She was the place Vin's eyes drifted to when he looked out past the horizon, and she was the shadow on days when life was really good, and whether buried or not, Sarah was the same for him. None of the whys or hows mattered when the time came to let go of them. They were once in a lifetime.
For a long suspended hour the three of them sat in silence, not avoiding each other's eyes or the understandings being wrestled against, and toward. Josiah passed his pipe after awhile and none misunderstood Vin taking a thoughtful draw, though he did not smoke casually. Chris passed his flask, and each took a drink of private salutations, a white man's ceremony that acknowledged their whiteness and all they knew of their own kind. This bleak certainty they could share only with one another, and only wordlessly.
A spear-flight away voices rose in exultant excitement, a group of young warriors re-telling stories of the hunt, a good story being told many times in a night and enjoyed every time. Catch the Bird was telling Vin's hunt, though Vin himself had not. No one had pressed him to do so, although the yellow buffalo was on everyone's mind, but it was too significant to the people to go unspoken and unappreciated, being as much to them collectively as it was to him privately. That skin shone like beaten gold in the shimmer of firelight as Two Badgers wife lifted and turned it in her careful work.
The Big Horn mountains eroded in ever-gentling runs down into a vast plain of sharp-topped hills and broad valleys tossed like a great wrinkled canvas down upon the earth, folds and dips big enough to hide a herd of buffalo or an entire Indian nation. Four rivers came down the mountains onto the plain in an orderly progression that left them, for the most part, the same distance apart from one another, like a giant had drawn four fingers spread wide upon the earth to lead the waters onto the plains.
Grasses in every shade of green swept down the flank of the mountains in a rippling blanket tipped with silver, decorated with meandering threads and sudden dense patches of spring flowers and trees along the waterways and in all the low ground. Table-top flats and rough draws with springs and trees, the grasslands with breaks giving cover to mule and white-tail deer, antelope and upland birds, pheasants and sharptail, sage grouse, geese and ducks, turkeys foraging for seeds and insects. Broad slanting meadows and hidden ponds among the hills, creeks picked out like veins in an endless green leafe by darker growths of brush and cottonwon, and the dark outline of mountains on the far horizon like a line of clouds and a sky so enormous it could've held a hundred worlds.
The Rosebud, favored place of Grandmother earth where she sheltered and fed her children and shared all her most generously loving ways.
The camp of the Lakota nation was set across all the four rivers just below the sharp eastern turn of the Yellowstone, it spread in a broad band bounded on the east by the Powder and on the west by Tullock Creek, alive with activity. Their lodges rose on both eastward-forking banks of that Creek and on both banks of the Rosebud, the Tongue and Mizpah rivers, the lodges of the warrior societies defending the western bank of the Powder and all along the Rosebud. Beyond them to the east was the endless ocean of eastern prairie broken by soaring table-top buttes that gave to way to a broad and deceptively placid delta of grass.
He was here, and suddenly everything was stunningly real.
His heart rose in one dizzying jump and a sigh was all the sound that could come through his throat around it. He had never had words for the power that moved through him at such times, the spirit that swelled like a great shout into his bones and blood. Here the Lakota and Vin were one, not understanding any other way. Why would anyone want to stand outside the circle of power and plenty and peace? How many times had he looked at floorboards beneath his feet in Four Corners and thought about how the earth beneath must suffer to be imprisoned in darkness, nothing growing, nothing living forever in that patch of soil? How much of the land would suffer that numbing fate as the whites came west and built cities that never moved so the land could never be renewed?
A haze of smoke and dust hung over the valley and it seemed as if a mist also lay over Vin's eyes, as if he were dreaming of things long passed into legend, the world full of echoes and emptiness. He'd thought he was ready for everything that was to come, but now, even in his joy to see them, the grief he'd avoided for so long came full circle and encompassed everything his eyes saw and his ears heard and his heart hungered for.
He was afraid to get down off Peso's back and touch the earth, to be overwhelmed, time moving too fast in him and a terrible sense of something getting away from him. For a moment he held his own, for a moment ... until Duley answered the same beloved sight by sweeping up out of the shadows she'd held to since that night on the mountain, bursting vibrant and alive into his unready heart. Its beat stopped and with a choked moan he bowed sharply over the pommel, eyes snapping shut and everything closing down to cling to the sudden fullness of her. Memories or the voice of her spirit exclaimed her pleasure and there was light and warmth in every corner of his soul again, her touch on the back of his hands where they gripped the reins and he didn't care if he was crazy or if it hurt like nothing else ever could, he welcomed her with everything in him. Spirit she might be, but these were her people, too, as he was hers, and even being the only right thing that could be done made it no easier for her to leave than for him to let her go. She'd never been the quiet sort, he thought, wanting to laugh but it was impossible. So near it was, now, nearly upon them, and how could he have thought she'd go quietly?
Teeth grinding, he tried to sink himself deep so she could have his eyes and his ears and his skin with this wind touching it, so he could give her this moment. He owed her too much to resent how it hurt to feel her filling him up like she always did, to know how much harder it made letting her go. Her ghost couldn't help answering this sight, and he reckoned he had to be brave enough to bid her good- bye in person, strange as that would sound to anyone else. She understood, always smarter than he was, he could almost see the tender chiding in her golden eyes. It wouldn't be just a ceremony ending the Keeping that had gone on too long, no, of course it couldn't be that way. He couldn't hide from her and do this thing right, nor let her hide from him in her mercy. She deserved to say her own farewells after biding with him for so long against nature and her own need to be free. His hand spread wide on his own chest and felt her beloved body in his embrace, felt her lay against him and kiss his face. He would look at her and touch her and face her dying, he would hear her farewell and watch her go from him forever, taking the child she'd born into the world that would never leave her. Of course that was the way it had to be done.
Josiah and Chris waited at the bottom of the ridge, watching Vin for a long time up there. Even Peso stood still as a graven image, ears funneled forward toward the great river valley that Chris and Josiah had yet to see, having come around low on the hillside behind a screen of trees.
It was not the sunset that gilded Vin and flowed over him and bent him under a weight he held close as beloved. No, Josiah knew it was not just the sunset, that much felt certain.
But it was Chris who understood what it meant: Duley Tanner was tangible.
Once, years ago and long gone in tangles of guilt and bitter rage, he'd sat above the burnt-out remains of his homestead and felt Sarah that way, every hair on his body prickled in remembrance. Like an ephemeral embrace, like she'd been everywhere. Just as Duley was everywhere on the Rosebud for Vin.
This time there was no envy at such a vivid haunting, not altogether the blessing he'd thought it was now that he felt it himself, not comfort - at least it wouldn't have been for him, because even the faint distant memory ... it made him wonder how Vin had stayed sane and alive all these years with Duley constant at his shoulder.
Sarah and Adam had never haunted him that way, never alive even in his dreams once they'd been taken, not like Chris could see Duley in Vin. The prospect of letting her go terrified Vin more and more, but that scarred emptiness was old and familiar ground to Chris. A shudder worked quickly up his spine and down again as Chris finally understood, looking at the bleeding freshness of Vin's grief, that his own had long since become a habit of violence and empty guilt. It wasn't the same ... he'd said that himself and damned if it wasn't true. He'd seen his wife and son laid into the earth, his family had been gone from him for years, and all that was left unfinished was the single grating fact that whoever'd murdered them still breathed. What was that but stubborn pride, having nothing to do with them? Guilt that he hadn't been able to protect them, frustration in failing to get justice for them? It was a lonely understanding, but at the same time ... he sighed without knowing he did, unable to name what was suddenly released in his heart.
The two men moved only when Vin did, having unconsciously mirrored his stillness, and Josiah turned toward the camp and urged his horse a few paces down a steep slope past the screen of trees. The sudden startled brace of the Preacher's heels in the stirrups as he stopped short drew Chris' attention and brought his pistol to his hand. His horse turned under the long quick twist of his body with a jerky skitter.
Josiah didn't even notice him when he came to a sliding halt beside him, wide-eyed, the pistol falling uselessly to his thigh.
"Great God Almighty ..." Josiah breathed, a fervent invocation at the sight that opened up below, "I'm glad they like us."
It was a second before Chris could answer, his throat clicking dryly on a swallow as he scanned the verdant sprawl of landscape and the gathered nation incredulously,
"I sure as hell hope so ... " Alarm sizzling all through him, his fingers went white on the pistol-grip and his legs gripped like iron on the horse so it danced, ready to run in any direction.
They stared for a stunned moment, and finally Josiah glanced over at him with a dryly measuring eye and said, "Probably be prudent to holster that."
Chris did so with an odd look on his face, unaccustomed to having his gun be a useless appendage but recognizing the care that had to be taken here. He leaned back, easing the pinching ache that came and went in his chest, and then said, "Y'know, Josiah, I don't think I ever felt quite so white before."
Josiah knew just what he meant. By unspoken agreement they waited on Vin and proper introductions, sitting side by side trying to absorb the sight that would have them shaking their heads in wordless wonder until the day they died.
It couldn't have been more breathtaking, that wide verdant panorama dressed in early summer flowers, and upon it a legendary nation in vivid life. Few whites had ever seen the gathering of all the seven campfires of the Lakota, and Josiah saw Cheyenne here, too, and Arapaho. He crossed his hands over the broad pommel of his saddle and let the sunset wash over him, wishing every easterner hell-bent on killing every Indian in the west could witness this. They would know, if they could feel the great current flowing through the people and the world, what a terrible sin they were bent on committing here, and had already committed in the irrecoverable loss of tribes already made ghosts upon the earth.
The leading edge of the camp they'd been traveling with frayed into the welcome of those who came streaming out to meet them from east and west and north, and mounted warriors from both camps met in a high-spirited weave of bursting dust-lines, their faint sounds like wolves at distant play. The Lakota spread out across the fertile river valley like a good crop come to ripeness, there must have been four thousand lodges laid in groups and scatters behind the screens of cottonwoods along the meandering rivers, horseherds on the meadows between the spreading arms of the rivers and creeks and streams, circling swirls and vague thunder.
When Josiah looked at Chris again, he was grinning like a boy taking an irresistible dare.
They expected Vin to go on into the camp, but he didn't, and neither questioned him when he came to a stop several yards away. Strange as he'd been acting all day, neither were sure he even knew they were there. His face was strained and gaunt, but lit as if a fire blazed inside and he was avid after every inch of that valley, eyes roaming and keen, nostrils flared after the air, mouth parted to taste it.
Josiah wondered what he saw and what he remembered, and saw a dark empathy in Chris that only another widower could possess. No one spoke, and they kept a ready eye on him.
He'd been behaving strangely all day, sticking close to them on the trail and jumpy as a trapped cat, obviously itching to take off on his own but holding himself back like he was constantly fighting some private war he alternately won and lost. Then at odd moments he'd turned as talkative as J.D. about troop movements and where they'd deploy and what strategies they'd use, trying Chris' patience by interrogating both of them about everything they remembered of the fort, what they'd seen and heard and knew. He never seemed to notice his own strangeness, and all day he kept up this fractured conversation, starting and stopping in feverish fits, abrupt silences sometimes coming mid-sentence as his attention was captured elsewhere by something neither Chris or Josiah could see or hear. Alternately ferociously focused and then gone away into silent distraction like a moon in a wildly elliptical orbit that he had no control over whatever. Chris' eyebrows never unknotted themselves all day. Vin had seemed calm before today, like he had a handle on things, but suddenly it was like that handle kept slipping out of his grasp, keeping him scrambling after it.
Neither Josiah or Chris said a word about it, not even when the day grew long and Vin finally vanished into himself so deeply that he didn't even hear them talk to him, and only bracketing Peso between them kept the black from deciding his own course. It worried Chris, he'd never seen Vin act so crazy, and it worried Josiah, too, he could tell, but the Preacher just answered every questioning look with a shake of his head warning Chris off interfering or asking, so Chris bode his time.
He watched Vin now from a few paces away, and though Chris had no idea in hell what Vin was waiting for, he waited right along with him.
Josiah waited, too, witnessing the struggle for surrender in one and for uncharacteristic patience in the other, but both had so far resisted ingrained instincts to run or fight. The more unlike themselves they acted, however, the truer they were to what they needed to do now, and he was finding his own truth the same way, keeping himself quiet and pushing back the urge to interfere or offer advice. There was a quiet in the center of Josiah that had never been there before, and from it he saw the patterns, mesmerized, in a flow so wide no man could grasp it all - but he could know it was there, and find his place in it. Threads he'd thought loose and meaningless were picked up and woven into the whole until it couldn't be imagined otherwise, and it was no longer difficult to refuse his impatience for answers or silence the pride of an intelligent and well-educated man who assumed he understood what was before his eyes, because over and over he was being shown he did not. Over and over he saw how much more it was than he could ever have assumed. A humbled man was made able to learn. This journey, from start to wherever it finished, would occupy his deepest thoughts for a long time to come, and his life would never be the same - Chris' would not, and Vin's certainly wouldn't. But he couldn't regret it even ignorant of what the final result would be for any of them. The light went pink, then shaded into red.
Not until a group of warriors came walking out of the camp did Vin move, clarity fighting its way out of the muddle of his eyes at the sight of them. He straightened with a quick suck of breath and an air of expectant ceremony, lifted Peso's reins and went at a rocking canter down the slope to meet them.
Josiah and Chris followed at an uncertain distance, only partly reassured to see Two Badgers leading the contingent of chiefs in finely beaded and tufted shirts and leggings, the sigils of their deeds and honors in patterns and symbols and feathers notched and painted. Except for one slight and unimposing warrior in a plain elkhide shirt with a single eagle-feather slanting from the crown of his head who came walking from a different direction, and who the chiefs, by their quick looks and quiet words to one another, were very surprised to see.
Crazy Horse, there was no mistaking the unusual lightness of his skin and wavy brown hair, nor the piercing command of his eyes. Neither Josiah nor Chris knew what to make of it that this famous chief had come out, and neither made any assumptions even knowing Vin considered him a friend. The chiefs seemed unsure about his presence themselves, and it was a time of war between Indian and white people, they had to figure there'd be some in this enormous camp with reason to be ill-disposed to white men no matter whose friends they were. Chris' nape bristled and a cool vague defiance simmered unhidden in his pale eyes, but Josiah knew he couldn't help it and these chiefs wouldn't be offended by a strong man standing up as one. Chris was a warrior and had a warrior's urges and instincts, but Josiah knew he was about to find out how far, indeed, Chris had been taken into the heart of these matters. He shook his head and pushed himself off useless worrying, there was too much he wanted to see; things would be as they should anyway, he remembered to be content with that.
Vin dismounted respectfully and walked the last few yards to meet them, reaching for Tashunke Witco's hand and quiet-seeming, but his eyes leapt for the understanding of what was upon him that was in that warrior's face. Tashunke Witco stepped forward quickly before Vin's inattention to the other chiefs gave offense, concealing some alarm at the riotous confusion that possessed the tracker. His clasp was strong around Vin's forearm, and he laid his other hand on Vin's shoulder, holding them eye to eye with a strong flex of fingers that steadied Vin in the fast current where Spirit swept him. Creation hummed in the man, twitched and pulsed in him, and yet, to the warrior's deep dismay, the tracker struggled against it as if he did not know better. He was not, however, surprised, knowing this man as he did.
For a few quick breaths Tashunke Witco studied him as the tracker found a momentary balance, besieged with emotions and intentions and earnest will. Clearly Tanner was already half in visions, feverish with that gnawing and dreadful excitement that Tashunke Witco well knew and would not interfere with. It was hard to see or hear anything else when Spirit was upon a man that way, hard to want anything but to be alone in that sacred space where he could hear the voices that spoke to him. Yet Tanner struggled against it now, which was not a good thing even if the man believed he did so for the people's sake, knowing his own value in any council of war against white soldiers. Tashunke Witco had hoped this, too, but Spirit had set Vin's course and had set the pace of it according to wisdoms beyond human beings, and that had to be honored first.
He had known from the first sight of Tanner many weeks ago that his Nagi Gluhapi was part of the greater purpose of the Lakota, and not even the people's need for what Tanner knew and had seen with his warrior's heart and his hunter's eyes could be allowed to take precedence over that long-delayed ceremony. There was a wild burning in those eyes now, the color blue as hot summer skies but the look of them a frozen stillness, a desperate and frightened and painfully forced stillness. Tashunke Witco was not a man who presumed to know what was good for others, and he seldom spoke his first thoughts casually, but he said to his friend now with certainty;
"Your camp must be apart from the people."
Vin's eyes flared in denial, understanding at once all the things that meant, he even stood back from Tashunke Witco as if he would openly disagree, but the gentle smile on that man's face and the gentle hold that did not let loose stripped away his flimsy self-delusion with shocking ease. Vin dropped his head with a deep inner tremble and a rush of shamed heat, and quick as that, in the instant of conscious understanding, Creation flooded into the suddenly helpless and empty places he'd hidden in all day. So many frustrated hours convincing himself he must hold back from the flow of Duley's Nagi Gluhapi so he could be of help in the council, and all of it a sham of nobility covering a cowardice he thought he'd already overcome. He couldn't delay Duley's farewell even in duty to the people - in fact, in trying to, he disserved them and her and all the forces of Creation working in such enormous harmony here.
Tashunke Witco kept hold of him and gave him a friendly little shake as Tanner saw this truth and did not try to escape it. It was easy even for the strongest men to divert themselves from Spirit's will, which could be frightening, easy even for the wisest to do wrong in trying to do right if it went against the flow that pulled the world into harmony. He had only reminded Tanner of what he already knew and Tanner's eyes admitted it readily. Now was not the time for Tanner to be among the chiefs. Tashunke Witco nodded, concerned for his friend and empathetic to his suffering, but certain.
All who took part in this council must be right with Creation, what was decided there would decide the course of the great war they undertook together, and the darkness of Tanner's unexpressed grief would quarrel with the balance they needed among them. His disturbance would disturb the flow set in motion for the Lakota, so the council was not his purpose among them. Heh. It was good enough to have such proof that Spirit could overtake white men, too, and fill white ears and white eyes and white souls.
Tashunke Witco said a brief prayer in his heart and let go, turning Tanner surreptitiously as he did toward the gathered chiefs who had waited patiently, although not all were unoffended. It was as difficult as it was joyous to have all the campfires together in such tumultuous times, a delicate balance of influence and pride, of patience and impatience. Tanner had to go to purify himself for the ceremony he had come so far in both distance and time to carry out, and Tashunke Witco had to find the way to restrain the young from foolhardy courage and convince the wise and experienced warriors that this war must be fought like none before.
He looked speculatively at the two white men still horsed a stone's throw away, the bearish Holy Man Little Eagle spoke so well of, the narrow gunman she had also come to like, much to the people's surprise. Certainly Tanner's friends were warriors as much as he was, deadly and skillful in their own right, and though they'd come to stand with Vin in his duty, perhaps they, too, had a purpose greater than he, or they, suspected. Not one soul was here but with purpose, and he cocked his head, determined to find theirs. He smiled at them and raised a hand in greeting as a friend would, curious, now, to see if they might be willing to stand for Tanner in more ways than the one. The chiefs would have had no compunctions about asking Tanner every question that needed answering to defeat the soldiers that came, because there was no betrayal of a people Tanner didn't claim as his - but they couldn't know this of the other wasichu.
Tashunke Witco shrugged unconsciously, taking his eyes off of the pair as he realized they were growing nervous in his continued regard. They would do what they would do, he put little stock in his own wishes and wants, and all his trust in the Great Spirit. Nevertheless, he felt a small pang of regret to understand that he would not have Vin's fierce skills beside him in the coming war. This was not a war for wasichu, even allies. Even brothers.
In the twilight, the newcomers were fed at many different hearths and their lodges raised with glad efficiency. Little Eagle had chosen a camp-site near a quiet-moving tributary at a goodly distance from the main camp, knowing as well as Tashunke Witco that peace and somber privacy was needed to prepare for the Nagi Gluhapi. The gathered nation made a merry camp of relatives long apart and a glorious cause to excite every heart, the campfires rang with story and laughter, the whole valley lively with games of war prowess and horse-races, and the young men sheltered marriageable girls in their robes. It was a glad place, it lifted hearts to the sky to see all so well-fed and their weapons plentiful and keen, the horses fat and meat on the racks and in every pot. she was an old woman, she had seen many gatherings of the ocekti, but even she felt the sacredness of the high swift spirit of gladness. Tanner's duty, though, was a serious one - as was the Lakota's under their present joy, a dark current in bright waters, she was not the only one to carry this knowing even in her smiles.
Little Eagle had set the lodge the wasichu would share and then directed that Chased-By-Water's be placed on the east of it and Two Badgers' on the west, Bear Tooth's also among them, a clear sign to the young warriors that these wasichu were not to be molested. Catch-the-Bird had reinforced that instruction by telling stories of the battles they had been in on their way here and the ferocity and deadliness of these white men who had escaped from the Fort and caused many horses to come to the Lakota. The elders who had traveled with them also spoke of their courage and loyalty. Little Eagle had done more with her expression alone as she met them at the edge of the camp and led them here, walking at the gunman's side and touching the tracker now and then to direct him when he wandered or slowed to a stop. She had seen at once that the spirit of his wife was upon him, and the joyful grief with which he bore her, and she knew why he paused sometimes and listened and looked and got lost for long moments as he showed his wife the glory of this camp and the generosity of the land as he looked on it and walked over it. Tender as a mother, Little Eagle was with him, and as fierce, it was a wonder to many who saw it that Little Eagle claimed the three wasichu as friends, and the camp was attentive to her.
An initi had been erected near the lodges, and the Kept Spirit was now upon an altar in Little Eagle's own lodge rather than the smaller symbolic lodge it had occupied for so long. A kettle of good stew and platters of fry-bread were brought to the white men's camp and Little Eagle served it herself, unoffended when Tanner declined as if only half-aware it had been offered, rapt on the camp and the plains far beyond it as if looking for a great thing coming. All the people looked for the same thing.
Though the Holy Man was aware of the power here and balanced well within it, the gunslinger cast worried glances at Vin. The tracker would not eat nor sleep for the next few days until his ceremony had been concluded, and Little Eagle's eyes were soft on him and filled with compassion. He was a good man, strong-hearted, and no matter how mistaken he'd been in refusing his duty for so long, he went to it now without faltering - and in the company of worthy friends. Little Eagle had said that to Chased-By-Water's wife with satisfaction as the chiefs had brought them, pointing with her chin at how close the two wasichu kept Vin, protecting him in his distraction but honoring his pride in not seeming to.
Two Badgers ducked through the doorway of his lodge bearing a thick parfleche painted with white and red figures, and this he extended gravely in both hands to Vin, who stood to receive it, seeming startled and staring down at it in his hands. He recognized it, and knew his warshirt and leggings were within. His thanks were given in a voice so sickly that Chris stopped eating to watch the exchange. Two Badgers spoke to him in Lakota, somberly and gently, and though Vin looked up at him sharply as if to refuse, he did not. His expression was a conflict of gratitude and terror that moved Two Badgers to reach out and touch his arm, understanding that now every step Vin took was significant, bringing him closer to this farewell he must finally make. It was not easy to refuse him the distraction of the council, but blue eyes admitted the rightness of what the heart could not.
Vin sat down again without knowing he did, holding the parfleche in both hands and staring at it as though it were a ghost ... What else had Two Badgers saved from their camp? He'd never returned to it after that bloody nightmare, he'd left everything but the clothes on his back and his weapons, always with him, when he'd brought her body to the people. He had to stop all thought but her, now, he had to let himself be swept into the river of his grief and be carried wherever it was meant to take him. Even now it came cresting in him, the last barrier removed, the last struggle lost, and he sighed like a child that has cried itself to sleep and let go any pretense of control.
For a long while he just sat there at an angle away from Chris and Josiah, staring into the plains. Now and then, in tiny movements, he would react to things neither Chris nor Josiah could see or hear, startling them, although they pretended not to notice anything amiss.
Without warning his hand swung out too fast for Chris to get out of the way. Chris huffed an incredulously pained breath as the tracker's knuckles struck him in the chest with an audible thump, nearly oversetting himself in backing away, his hand leaping defensively to the healing wound Vin had just missed.
"What in hell ..." He got his balance and looked to Vin with a confused scowl, but Vin wasn't even looking at him, still captured by the endless horizon as if he'd never moved or spoken.
"You tell 'em where they are." Vin said quietly, and Chris' eyebrows knotted in irritated confusion, rubbing at his chest and looking to Josiah, finding a dawning understanding there that annoyed him even more because he didn't comprehend this himself.
"What?"
"You tell 'em where Gibbon n' Crook and that bastard Custer are." An odd rhythm to his words, breathless haste, "Go to the council and tell 'em all I told you, all you told me, they can't ask and it should've been me but I ... can't." Babbling almost, the words tumbling out of him and his hand gestures awkward over the parfleche laid across his thighs, but when he turned to look at them he was with them, suddenly focused and clear-eyed, and they knew it, and that he couldn't manage it for long. He was talking fast because he had very little time, "Offer," He said, trying not to plead, trying to remember they were white and had not dwelt among the people and might not even be welcome at the council, "If it don't make you feel like traitors - "
But the infamy being carried out in this sacred country wasn't anything either Chris or Josiah wanted to claim, and Josiah answered without a moment's hesitation; "We will, Vin."
But Vin's eyes were on Chris, looking there for what he needed, and Josiah saw the moment the gunslinger finally understood what Vin's strange behavior had meant. It had been a hedge in entrusting all he knew against just this eventuality, Vin had known in his own unconscious heart that it would not be him at this council. Chris did not disappoint him, a terse nod and a gentling in his eyes all Vin needed. Vin sighed then, a contentment falling onto him that he'd held off for so long, and he stood up without another word and walked off into the trees with the parfleche.
He had done all he could, and now he let down every guard and flung wide every closed door in him where Duley was no longer a face or a voice but an all-consuming spirit, free-falling into the expanding distance that had to be between the worlds of men and of spirit. Stronger than her love was her good-bye, and it was time for him to give her that final and most costly gift.
The council of the chiefs gathered under the cottonwood trees where a bend in the Little Big Horn river made a place surrounded on three sides by running waters. A large fire sent light leaping high into the trees around that place and it painted the many faces of the chiefs and warriors and interested parties in a broad deep ring behind them, and the pale faces of Josiah and Chris as the stars winked to life above. Two Badgers and Bear Tooth sat on their left, and Tashunke Witco on their right, Little Eagle at his shoulder, so all would know they were honored and respected guests.
Every hair on Chris' body prickled as if a constant lightening ran among the warriors that struck him, too. He breathed high in their accelerating spirits, too open not to feel the power in so many gathered so close, jade eyes bright and his teeth set hard in his jaw.
So it was that two white men smoked the pipe with the greatest chiefs and warriors of the Lakota on the edge of war, and gave to them everything they knew and all that Vin had told them.
All the while Vin lay in the grass on that slope where their daughter had been conceived, a sheltered bower far enough from the farthest edges of the firelight to be lost in darkness. Firelight had gleamed and slipped over her skin, sparkled warm as mid-summer in her eyes, he spread his arms along the earth with a soft moan and then lifted them to the sky, embracing the memory of her small and vibrant body without knowing he did. Both had been sure, when her courses had stopped, that it had been this place, knowing the night and the joy that had forged their child. Grief surged and pushed against walls so old he was no longer their master, he could not let them down, only let them be broken when they would.
A great line of men in brilliantly beaded aprons and long beaded collars around their shoulders stepped into a circle of women on a broad meadow of grass between the reach of river and creek. All on the same beat of the drum the dancing began, the line of men following the arch of women who stepped softly in place at the edge, a gentle bouncing in time with the men until the rhythm of their feet and the drums made a heartbeat on the earth. Women ringed them in a bobbing arc, stepping softly in place, fringe and feathers and strings of beads swaying, adding to the rhythm.
The dancers dipped close to the ground, graceful as bending reeds, steps deliberate and in perfect synchronization, starting and stopping exactly on the beat of the three great skin drums at the eastern edge of the dancers, laying the grass down and flattening it in a great sweeping circle that would be the sacred floor of all the dancing to come.
Building a church, Josiah saw from his place beside Chris, who sat raptly fascinated as a child, a church more solid and real than his own of stone and mortar and wood. A holy place built of feet upon the earth and hearts opened to all Creation, each movement an offering, cleansing and purifying, moving into communion. When they had made the place, other dancers came as if floating in wide-winged swirls on the piercing cries of eagle-bone whistles, eagle feathers all along their arms, swooping and soaring. A spiral of song rose up from one of the drummers, then two, then three, until the voices curled high into the night, and deep into Vin's soul, caught up together with spiraling tendrils of smoldering sweet-grass and the dust of the earth that was mother, protector, provider. Each step brought them deeper into the heart of Creation, each danced with that spirit alone, and Vin sat up in his dark bower as if pulled to watch, his eyes smudged with exhaustion and shadowed hard and dark with privation, but bright.
Now, as then, he looked into the camp from the shadows upon the broad golden heart beating in drums and dancing feet, mortal men and all Creation dancing the turning of the world and the blowing winds and the tumbling waters, all together, all in balance. He and Duley had been so, too, perfect with each other, two sides, male and female, of the same soul.
Then the round dance came, men and women together dancing with Creation, and it was during this dance long ago that her eyes had found him across the fire and claimed him. And he who never danced had danced that night with his feet drumming thanksgiving onto the earth, and he had danced the glory of his soul as it flew to a promise he had never expected or anticipated, and he had danced with his heart that seemed to grow so big he could hold the whole world beloved within it.
In the solitary darkness his mouth opened without voicing the keening cry that echoed into every place she was in him, his eyes filled and ran and filled and ran and dripped off his chin and he breathed deep and hard. He crossed his arms hard over the piercing ache in his chest, holding his heart together, holding it back from shattering and dying before his task was done. Not yet could he let it die. Not yet. The pain opened so wide, so deep, endlessly welling up from a wound that had never healed, and he stood up. Then he ran, blind and fast, and the pain ran with him sorrowing.
Chris and Josiah didn't see him for the next three days, and Chris got no answers beyond shrugs or smiles when he asked about him so he knew he shouldn't be asking, but he couldn't help himself. Josiah told him Vin was probably in the hills somewhere nearby fasting and praying, but he couldn't tell Chris how Chased By Water knew to start the fire to heat the stones for the initi the evening of the third day.
Vin came down from the hills to the west before dawn of the fourth day, haggard and unshaven and trembling, but despite those signals of his body's deprivation, his distant eyes were peaceful. He did not speak to anyone, he went to the river and stripped off his clothes and walked into the cold water, and after him came Chased By Water and Two Badgers and Bear Tooth, as if they had expected just this. They said nothing, unsurprised, to find the gunslinger stripping down beside them without a qualm, his pale sinuous body ghostly in the cold dawn, the Holy man at his side, power in every broad white sweep of muscle and bone and quiet in that power as a calm sea. Chris' eyes ghosted after Vin anxiously, but he said nothing, did nothing, put off by an intensity that felt to him like an empty house boarded up and ominous.
They walked to the initi together, steam curling in wisps off their wet skin in the morning, the sounds from the camp beyond muted as if all sensed the power gathered in this small part of their camp. For the first time Vin did not seek the spot by the door, but moved to the back of the initi as if into the protection of a mother's embrace. There could be no escaping his duty, and this time his discomfort, those instincts to have escape near to hand, had to be ignored. Pure and wide-open was the only way he could leave this sweat, ready to surrender everything he had and all he was even with her murmuring and touching inside him like a woman wandering through a beloved home being abandoned.
I have not included all the details of the Nagi Gluhapi, nor necessarily kept them in order, in respect of things sacred to the nations.
A solemn young girl wearing a pale and beautifully decorated dress came for Chris and Josiah in the early afternoon, a distant expression in her dark eyes that told Josiah the ceremony had already begun. He looked at Chris, not surprised to find his pale eyes full of questions, and sure every hair on Larabee's body was standing on end. Stillness wasn't his usual answer to confusion. They went with the Lakota girl, Chris wary and attentive to everyone and everything.
Chased By Water stood with a fine pipe cradled in his crossed arms in front of a large ceremonial lodge. It was an obvious and beautiful amalgam of several older lodges sewn together, and behind him through the wide-thrown doorway they could see the dull gleam of the yellow buffalo skin wrapped around an upright post, a low altar before it laid with sacred items. Whether by design or an accident of timing, these things in the somber shadows of the lodge were cast in a slanted column of white light from the smokehole. The scent of sage laid lavishly on the lodge floor was intoxicating and Josiah inhaled deeply, his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes bright as an eagle and his heart gladly open to the poetry in every detail.
Chris, on the other hand, became a cautiously blank slate in regarding the unexpected numbers that arrived, three more groups from different parts of the camp led by young girls sharing a shy pride in their formal grace and downturned eyes.
Little Eagle smiled at them as she arrived, her face rich and beautiful in every wrinkle, a nod recognizing that the power was working in Josiah, and even in the gunman, different in everyone, but the same power, and strong here. Strong.
They sat, over twenty with the young girls, Lakota who were friends to Vin, chiefs who had a responsibility to the Power gathered here in their war-camp and who had prayers to send with the soul who would be set on the Spirit Road. It would usually be more, usually the whole camp would participate, but Tashunke Witco had said Tanner was a shy man and the ceremony out of balance by having been delayed so long, so although he and an impressive number of important chiefs went to that ceremonial lodge, the rest stayed away. In the muted awareness that lay on the wider camp around them, however, could be heard prayers in songs and soft drums, and the people went about in a manner mindful of the Sacredness brought among them by a washichu - one that Tashunke Witco called his friend. It was strange, but it was a time for new ways of doing things.
The wives of Chased By Water and Two Badgers invited them to sit on robes laid in a shallow scraped-out circle beside the lodge, surrounded by slender trees. The earth from the excavation created a mounded altar not far away, a cross pressed into the top.
Josiah could feel Chris hovering close, vibrating like a tuning fork, but his volatile energy seemed to be accepted as part of the gathered forces, necessary simply because Chris was with them. He had a purpose here, too, though no one knew what it might be. A bit of subtle byplay went among the Lakota that was a smug pride in Little Eagle, as if Chris was achieving something no one expected he could; rock was stubborn, too, she'd said, a person could stand firm-footed upon rock.
As they sorted themselves politely into a circle, Tashunke Witco sat down as if by chance beside Chris, and he offered a smile when the pale eyes turned to him as if expecting someone else. The gunman did not smile back, but there was a recognition in his eyes Tashunke Witco understood.
Chris looked away quickly; for a second it'd felt like Tanner, that quietly deep-rooted presence he'd grown so used to at his shoulder. Counted on. It was no comfort to realize Vin had acquired that from these people and this life. Vin had more years and deeper connections among the Lakota than he did to his own kind, they understood what was happening here in ways Chris knew he didn't, but he wasn't as naïve as they likely thought - a man didn't have to be an Indian to know this ceremony of Vin's would change things in ways no one had any handle on. He was also having a hard time sitting peaceably among the same men who'd given him hard looks and suspicious words last night, and he didn't have it in him to be shy about the cock of his chin inviting their best. But because Josiah sat peaceably, he did, too, wise enough to know his own ignorance and take his cues from the preacher, aware of the frail balance being held here.
A good buffalo stew was brought, and though Vin should have taken this meal with them, all knew the meat was from that yellow bull, as everything from every buffalo he had taken in the last hunt had been made a gift to the people. The last from the pot, except a small mouthful in Chased By Water's bowl, was consumed with thoughtful ceremony by the four girls who had fetched them.
Vin came quiet as a ghost through the trees from the river, and Josiah wasn't prepared for all that he realized at the sight of him. He stood up from the circle, big and broad as a mountain with a surprisingly forceful denial rushing into his heart, hardly noticing that everyone else stood up as well except for the sharp sense of Chris' dismay.
His tawny hair was loose but for one thin braid at the crown where two notched and red-tipped feathers stood, a third slanted down. His war-shirt was beaded in broad bands of blue and soft yellow over the shoulders and across the chest, hung with tufts of bead-caught horsehair on the sleeves and down the leggings, an elkskin breech-cloth revealing a strip of white-skinned flank when he walked. His moccasins had squirrel-tails sewn to the top of the heel and his belt was hung with beautifully decorated pouches and a horn cup, a costume lovingly made for him and carefully kept since that creating hand had stilled. It looked as though he'd been born in elkskins and deerhide and never worn anything else.
Several of those gathered went to meet him before the lodge, and Josiah prodded Chris into motion as well, understanding the gunman's trepidation in seeing Vin in a way he'd never seen him, but understanding more of what he saw than Vin's clothing.
It was the long rifle in Vin's hand, that elegantly workmanlike weapon in a wolfskin scabbard he'd never seen. And it was Peso led by a finely braided hackamore at his shoulder, shining and combed like he'd never seen him, ears high and eyes curious.
On occasions such as this, momentous ceremonies, the one for whom it was convened would give gifts of equal significance, and Vin was giving all he had. Everything he held priceless: That rifle, and that homely stubborn horse.
Josiah had known this before, but he'd been too distracted by his own experiences to fully acknowledge how profound this ceremony was to Vin. Now it was undeniable.
Vin would not be the same man when it was done, and Josiah knew with certainty then that Vin had no idea what sort of man would be left when this was done. And he didn't care, either. Only that he couldn't remain with the dead. Couldn't hold on to this life anymore, these good people and good places he loved. Reconciled to the loss of more than his wife. For the first time Josiah considered that Four Corners might be part of what fell away from Vin. He was as likely to find his peace in the wilderness as among men he understood to be his friends - indeed, he'd count on that affection to go his own way unchallenged. Josiah hoped that wasn't what would happen, he hoped fiercely that wasn't it, because he would miss Vin, and the town would, too, they needed him, and he needed them, whether he knew it or not. But in that gaunt and haunted face was a distance Josiah had never seen before, even as solitary and strange as Vin had ever been. So far in himself he might never come back, and that mattered not at all to Vin. He saw nothing beyond this day, looked to nothing past it. Perhaps wanted nothing more past it. A chill shivered through Josiah.
Vin went to Bear Tooth and gave him his knife and a beaded scabbard obviously made for it. He gave Tashunke Witco one of the pouches on his belt, and the slight warrior held it and looked down at it and said not a word. One by one he gave until his belt was empty, and he looked each recipient in the face for a long moment as he did. Then he came to Chased By Water and handed him Peso's reins, his face all bone and blue eyes. Chased By Water accepted without comment despite Peso snaking out a chop of ivory teeth toward him. Then Vin turned to Two Badgers and extended the Sharps in both hands, not surprised when it was not immediately accepted. Two Badgers knew what this weapon had done in Vin's hands, and it was the blood of so many buffalo spirits on it made him hesitate. Vin had expected that, Two Badgers was a man of deep spirits.
"You have war coming. It is a very good rifle." Vin said, holding it steady in front of him.
Two Badger's mouth thinned; Vin would have thought carefully about his gifts, and he would bestow them as the Creator moved him to do. He took the rifle with a nod of thanks and examined it with brief appreciation before handing it to his wife - perhaps the gun should regain honor in serving the people.
The gifts accepted, they returned to the circle, Vin moving as if only peripherally among them, almost unaware of them but happening to be in the same place. He sat without making eye contact with anyone, looking past them all and now and then his hand would press into the center of his chest gently and he would bow his head.
He walked, and he spoke right words and did right things, that much he knew and could feel, but he was ghost so insubstantial that every gust and current threatened to make him evaporate.
Chased By Water filled the polished red stone bowl of his pipe, hung with ribbons in the colors of the four corners of the universe and an eagle feather so the thoughts of all who smoked would rise high as eagles. The long wooden stem, straight as the words and mind and body must be, was carved with images of all the nations of the earth, all that flew or swam or ran or crawled. Each piece of tobacco placed into the pipe gathered all of Creation to them, and they watched him with solemn and partaking attention. He lit it with a coal Little Eagle brought on a piece of stone from the ceremonial lodge, and it was passed sunwise with the proper praises given to the spirit being released and to the Creator who had so lovingly made her and every ancestor whose spirits had been gathered around them for days now.
He heard Chased By Water's voice and knew the words he was saying without hearing anything more than a murmur. He drew in the smoke and watched it curl into every corner inside him, watched it curl around her as she waited in the pale deerskin dress she'd worn on their wedding day. He couldn't see her face through the smoke, but he could feel the rise of her heart.
When Chased By Water rose and placed his pipe carefully into the cross of the top of the earth mound, his wife emerged from their lodge with the beaded bundle of Duley's hair across her hands. As she came to her husband, who had kept this spirit for so long, all could see that her tears were real, and her soft crying of true bereavement. Many had known Duley Monroe with great affection, and the eldest among them also honored the respected spirit of her father, who had been a true friend to the Lakota and a man who knew Creation.
Chris kept his eyes on Vin, holding his breath like he was watching a high-wire act. Now and then Vin's eyes drifted across his face and all he could see was torment in them no matter that he moved and spoke and behaved as calmly as anyone here.
The world moved fast, now, and he felt the spirit of every person gathered, knew where they were and what their faces held even with his eyes closed. He couldn't reach them and didn't try. He stood outside himself, outside this circle and yet it's center. She moved inside him, paced and looked out and out and out where he could not follow.
Chased By Water accepted the bundle and held it before him across his broad palms. "You, O Soul, were with your people, but soon you will leave. Today is your day, and it is Wakan."
Moments rose like trout breaking up out of the water, a face around the circle or a word spoken suddenly leaping into focus so he was in a constant startlement, every sense and instinct standing high. It was upon him, the adamant power that pushed and pulled and flowed in a mighty river with headwaters a thousand years past, blindingly bright in all that was her and all that was around him ...
"This is your day." Chased By Water went on, "It is one of joy. All that has been with you in the past is here with you today."
Again and again Vin felt himself slipping, again and again he fastened on the bitter iron sense of Chris somewhere near, or Josiah like a rock sunk deep into the immovable earth. Holding on, astounded to watch himself moving so calmly to this thing his desperate instincts clamored against as against death itself. Cold white visions of her face came in lightening flashes without thunder, and though he'd always been able to see her face, had a rich deep mine of such memories - those he saw now were the ones he'd worked to forget. Struggling and screaming and her eyes begging for help he didn't have to give. Sweating and straining and the tendons of her neck like ropes, her hands talons on him so he still bore faint scars inside his right forearm from her nails. They stung like crescent brands under the shirt she had made him. No soft voices now, no sweetness or comfort, only pain as fresh as if she were dying before him in each of those strikes of remembrance.
Chased By Water's voice resonated in the little clearing, strong; "Today your Father, Wakan Tanka, is bending down to see you. All of your people have arrived to be with you. All your relatives love you, and have taken good care of you. Behold! This is the sacred day!"
She beat against the imprisoning bars of his heart in a rush to deliverance that ruined him past hiding from any of it, and he no longer tried. All had to be taken from this, every bone and scrap of hide and tooth, nothing could be wasted. She wanted to go to what waited in the stars - wanted, at last openly, to leave him and unable to hold it from him anymore with the moment at hand. His heart was a sharp rock in his chest. How long had she refused the yearning that had grown and grown until she couldn't be sorry about it any longer, even knowing how it hurt him?
He stood up, obedient to the forces moving him and without knowing why he did, but everyone else stood up also and no one was surprised.
"Iye tohatu." Chased By Water said, and Chris didn't need anything more but Vin's face to know what he'd said. It was time.
Vin's knees wavered and Chris saw the words pierce him, felt the great down-wash of bloodless denial and the sense of time long and slow and out of synch. A quick step brought him up against Vin's side as if by accident, his hand unobtrusively braced for a steadying moment at the small of Vin's back, keeping a sharp eye on his white face from under his hatbrim. Vin didn't seem aware of him or of being touched, but took a short breath and walked after Chased By Water.
Chris claimed a place at Vin's left shoulder unapologetically and he went with the few going into the big lodge without asking anyone's leave. No one seemed to think this untoward, and Little Eagle was not the only one to notice he did not look at the Preacher this time before he acted. He was past being led, now.
Josiah went at Chris' shoulder, and Vin's eyes never left the case in Two Badger's hands.
Two Badgers and Chased By Water and his wife, Little Eagle and Tashunke Witco, a few others who knew the boy Vin had been and the brother he'd become, stooped into the lodge and walked sunwise around the post until all were within. Vin turned to look at Chris as they took their places around the altar and the robe-wrapped post, his eyes unexpectedly lucid and a more unexpected fear startling clear ... Chris had never seen Vin so afraid or had him look to him for reassurance, he didn't know how to give it but to look steadily back and touch his sleeve briefly in a promise to be near.
Two Badgers dug a small hole before the post and buried the last mouthful of stew there with quiet words. Duley Monroe had taken her last meal.
Little Eagle leaned over to the coals beside the altar and lit a thick bundle of sage, and Two Badgers moved the beaded case holding Duley's hair in a circle above the fragrant smolder. He lifted it toward the south and said,
"Grandchild, you are about to leave on a great journey. All your relatives have loved you. Soon they will be happy."
Then he came to Vin and stood above him, and it seemed like the resolute love in his eyes was all that drew Vin to his feet. Chased By Water offered the lock, and for a timelessly uncertain moment it looked like Vin would refuse. But he did not. He sat back down and laid the beaded length of hide across his splayed knees, and he opened it with the precise delicacy of a spider.
That color rich and strange that he'd only known once in his life. Jeweled ruby, glowing wisps, vivid motion and dark-shaded stillness on firelit furs.
The lock of Duley's hair slid out across his calloused palm and he didn't know when he'd picked it up out of the case, didn't remember ... exquisite pain hammered his head and heart simultaneously. Nothing moved in him, not heart or blood or thought, nothing was noticed. Only that cool silken length between his fingertips and a rush of beautiful memories that swept like air into a smothered place.
"Christ." He whispered, prayer and oath, a soft moaning sigh of agonized pleasure. That perfect lock of hair, all of her that remained. The sight of it forced him to accept at last that it was all of her that remained. Then he noticed at the top of that bright stream, tucked into the beaded leather that held the cut end, a pale downy tuft. For a moment he cocked his head at it like a curious dog until he realized what it was. He jolted backwards with a curse too dark to be anything but involuntary and the lock of hair dropped from his fingers in a brilliant slithering spill as he started to rise as if he'd been attacked when he wasn't expecting it, glassy-eyed and gasping as a fish on a riverbank.
Chris caught his arm without knowing why he did, an instinct, reaching to catch something being yanked away in the wind, and Tashunke Witco breathed a word, his eyes unfocused and his voice soft and nearly indistinct,
"Iyopteya." Fulfill.
The was a rustle as the chiefs looked at one another in amazement, uncertain whether the word was for Tanner or muttered to himself in some vision they could not know, their strange man seldom spoke in gatherings and never so personally! But Tanner seemed to hear, and in the momentary grace of their attention to Tashunke Witco, Vin's knees flexed and he sat down again. It took him a long moment before he could pick up the lock, his expression horrified as he laid it on his knee, not wanting to touch it but his fingers hovering, yearning, over it.
He looked up at Chased By Water, dumbstruck, and the lines of that old man's face drew down in helpless sympathy. Tanner had never spoken of this, never mentioned it in any way, but surely he had to know it was fundamental to the circle he closed today.
Grief he'd thought more than he could bear, pain he'd thought blunted enough by the past three days of cutting her out of himself into her freedom ... But it all came back, all of it and doubled and he'd thought he'd been ready ... but he'd forgotten ...
The child he'd felt under the swell of her warm belly so many times, the child he'd known in his heart and in a thousand father's hopes and dreams that had never come to him, child or hopes or dreams. The child who had never even opened her eyes for one look to know him, or he, her. How could he be expected to let go of what he'd never had? A few moments of the cold slick curl of the tiny body that had killed Duley, the fragile curve of her skull as he'd held her tight to his chest and stared at her because he couldn't bear to touch Duley or see her empty of the soul he loved more than his own. He'd stared at a dead child and held her in his hands until his fingers were as pale with cold as she was. As both mother and child were.
Together in life and in death, never parted ... leaving him out of that circle that was his by right, by love, by starving need. She'd promised never to leave him, and he'd believed her, the only one who would ever know how much that belief had meant for a man like him, or what it took out of him to have it proved false. Driving from the world of men he'd only just managed to enter, making him a hermit on a mountaintop even in their midst. Killed what could hope in him forever. Hurt burst in a fury of blame he'd never known was there, it shamed him, but - They had both left him. Duley had taken his child with her, his child had taken his love, both had left him, and now both waited for him to let them go. Duley, who was his soul, and her child, whose spirit had been imprisoned on the earth she'd never walked for longer than the span of her life in Duley's womb. He felt himself slow suddenly, the rush of his mind and relaxation of his body he didn't direct as if there was a thing he would not see going so fast.
How much he'd wanted to see the soul in the daughter they'd made. Faint and wistful, this thought flowered up out of a place in him he didn't know, and it blossomed as it rose into that moment in the meadow on his knees with his hands and his head pressed to their daughter within her. All the world had been there in that moment, and all the love in the world. He'd never known what to do with the well of love that deepened with every changing swell and he drifted in that thought and watched as if it was a voice speaking the delicate trace of his index finger following the pale curl.
Of course. It settled in him with the heaviness of a truth that could never be turned from once seen.
That was why, and that was why, now. Not random, and not for the people's sake, either, though the spirit had used her to that end.
Her reason for forcing him to release her that was not any willingness of hers to leave him. Duley would have stayed with him no matter the cost, she would have forgone her rightful place and her spirit's deserved peace to keep with him until the day he died, if he wished it. As much fool as he, every bit as much.
Their daughter was the force that moved them to do what was right, both of them. Duley knew that, too, and he'd never seen that look in her eyes that he saw now, not seeing him, not hearing him.
Chased By Water rose from his place and sank down in front of Vin, concerned by his visible trembling and harsh breath, knowing the tracker was fighting to stay and do this thing. It was urgently necessary that he do so, the chiefs were uneasy and looking at one another and Tashunke Witco was studying the tracker carefully. There was an enormous amount of power gathered in this lodge, and a very great purpose in motion beyond it, and though power was neither good or bad, it could either flow in the paths made pure and sacred by the rightness of the people, or it could break against wrong-doing into terrible ruin.
"Their souls of your woman and your child must be released to the Spirit Path, my friend, you know this is right." Two Badgers said in a bare murmur, saying it out loud, breaking the world with quiet kindness. The Milky Way, she'd named it, and the memory of lying bare in the summer meadow with her pointing it out to him in lazy sated sweeps of her arm flitted like a spark and disappeared. He could hear every word now and wished for deafness to return.
But he could not stop this. He could not, had not the strength or the will or the heart to stand against anything her heart moved her to do, trusting hers more than his own. She stroked his cheek and his head tilted to that, his eyes falling closed, Little Eagle sighed to see her in the smoke of the sage.
"Maya Owichapaha is an old woman, she will judge them worthy and send them to the right, to Wakan Tanka. Let them wait for you there and no more wander the world like the souls of bad people."
Firmly, but with captivating tenderness, Little Eagle told Vin this, and the words breathed down in him. Chased By Water took the lock of hair from Vin's hands, which remained palm up on his knees, unresisting. The old warrior waited a moment to be sure Vin realized what he meant to do, and when he did not object even tethered to it by his eyes, he rose gracefully and turned to face the doorway. The chiefs were disturbed by the uncertainty over whether this ceremony would be completed as it should be, wasichu got lost so easily in unfamiliar spirits ...
"Always look back upon your people, that they may walk the sacred path with firm steps!" He cried, and it hurt like blood should be running from every pore; the old warrior took a step and repeated the phrase, heartfelt and grieving but with joy.
Like his heart was being cut out, her heart tearing free of his, leaving an emptiness so enormous he couldn't hope to live with it, couldn't want to ... she went from in a gentle draining wave, so gently, so kindly taking every hope from him forever. Love washed through him and she couldn't know this final gift only made the emptiness more profound. A vacant darkness that nothing could ever take root in again. He would sit where he was and he would dry up and blow away into the wind. This seemed very peaceful, and it calmed him darkly.
Once more Chased By Water stepped toward the door with the same prayerful words, and there he paused and looked back at Vin, waiting.
The tracker's eyes broke Chris' heart, Vin's mouth opened as if he would call her back had he been able to get a breath, half reaching toward the bundle in Chased By Water's hand, and Chris couldn't take it anymore. He didn't care what anyone thought with Vin looking like a man with a rope stretching at his neck, he slipped by Josiah's restraining hand with a sinuous twist and rose into a squat, pivoting awkwardly so he put himself right in front of Vin without coming between his line of sight on Two Badgers. Without hesitation he dropped both of his hands into Vin's empty ones and gripped them hard, refusing the panicked tug as his touch registered and refusing to let Vin's eyes go once they broke in cold fury and came to him.
He held, with his hands and his eyes and all his considerable will, he pressed his touch with bruising force, not about to let go. Chris had learned on this long wild ride what Vin could learn, too, if he gave himself half a chance, the proof of it burned in a heart he'd thought too scarred for it, and it had Mary's face.
He was dizzy, Chris' face looked strange and he could've broken his grasp easily, he could've broken this ceremony, broken his word and her heart and kept her, not caring what became of him or what he ruined in that wrongness. Afraid of what it would be to live with her captive in him, and how long before she came to hate him and was finally be driven to the mercy of killing him so he could go with his family. Even knowing what a crime, what a sin, it would be, he almost ...
"Vin." Chris said, and nothing more. Just his name, just that, and every shred of what Vin meant to him, to the boys and Four Corners and Mary and Nettie Wells, all of it was in that word.
He heard a surge of echoes, many other voices, and in them he followed the way she'd always said his name every time he came into her sight. In the guidance of her whisper he heard love, the one thing his starving stubborn heart could not refuse.
Chris' knuckles whitened, but Vin stopped trying to pull away and his eyes cleared in a slow sweep like blue sky from blinding winter. A ferocious grip came in slow degrees as Vin folded down onto himself, sinking until his forehead pressed brutally against the hard bones of their clenched fists.
It had never been a victory to have had her and kept them all so long from the voices of the trees and the wind and the water, and the flow of the world through his wide-open soul. She rejoiced in a leap of sweetness and his mouth ached at her kiss, her hands on his face and her golden eyes delighting in him, and though his soul withered at the sense of her pressed against him one time more, he surrendered her, and he surrendered his daughter, and he surrendered himself onto their right roads.
A sob tore out of him like it should leave a bloody wound and he couldn't hold it in past that. He'd always believed that if he never grieved for her, she would never be gone, so he never had. But it had only waited, patient as her soul.
Chris closed his eyes, his mouth a thin slash as he hunched protectively close to Vin, and the tracker's sorrow was so deep and mighty that it moved in everyone within the lodge like a storm unleashed that he was the heart of.
Chris well knew the gaping pit losing the woman you loved opened in a man. Losing your salvation, all that made life noble and worthy and meaningful, and because he didn't know how hard Vin would hold to living without her, he held onto him himself like an anchor. Not until Josiah's hand spread wide and warm on his shoulder did he realize he wept himself.
The chiefs looked at the three white men, and this time it was not only Two Badgers who saw the tether of light between them. All within that lodge felt the glad rising of their ancestors gathering close, and their prayers flew upward in the echoes of those beloved voices with the smoke of the sage and the soul who was going home.
For the fourth and final time Chased By Water said, "Always look back upon your people, that they may walk the sacred path with firm steps!" The moment he stepped from the lodge, Duley and the daughter Vin had never known were free.
The following dawn came bright even without a hint of blue sky, cold and ghostly through pearly mist. Slants of pale light speckled the meadow far beyond the treeline, worlds away, and Vin wondered from his distance if things would ever be real again, faded and still inside even as he tossed the saddle up. He felt the eventual ribbon of warmth across his shoulders as the day came and he looked up without knowing why into a slow sail of quilted clouds, their perfect pattern frayed on the trailing edge into pale streamers. He noticed that the wisps falling away from the rest slowly evaporated and became nothing, and the clouds sailed on. He took a breath, thought he did, one of those wisps falling away and fading though he stood there and breathed and saw the cloud and felt his heart beating. Still beating.
There were times in the dark heart of the night when he hadn't known how it could, and times he'd prayed to die rather than feel it another moment. But though the night still had hard cold hooks in him, his heart hadn't stopped beating and he hadn't died, though he hurt to his bones. Only the cottonwood at his back and the constant angled shadow of Chris nearby had anchored him to the earth through that terrible night, drowning in his grief.
Near morning he'd fallen asleep watching the thin curl of smoke from Chris' cheroot slip dreamily into the faint light from the camp behind him, too brutalized not be comforted. Not to be taken lightly, friends like that. Maybe a reason for them that was more than Larabee's stubbornness, he might it figure out if he had time. He had come awake like a ship-wreck survivor cast up somewhere he'd never been.
The pony arched its back, stiffening under the unfamiliar saddle and tack, so he stroked the warm brown and white neck with a firm hand and a soft word, easy as the slow measured knock-knock of a female raven echoing in the still break of day.
"You headin' into the mountains?" Soft and dry as a rustle of leaves and carefully detached.
Vin's hand stilled and he didn't turn around, though he felt his shoulders rise defensively against the sudden rush of color and sound Chris's voice brought into the safe muted place he'd held around him. After a moment he continued saddling the horse, hearing a creak of leather as Chris shifted impatiently.
"Well, I reckon I'll just come along with you, then." Casually said, but there was steel in it.
Vin wasn't surprised to find them both ready to travel when he turned around, Chris with his hip cocked and his eyes keen, head at a tilt Vin knew was pure stubbornness. Josiah leaned amiably on the gleaming haunch of the only pack mule they'd kept, a stubborn flop-eared cuss with a long bony head it used like a sledge hammer on the unsuspecting.
Chris wasn't going to take no for an answer, and Josiah's shrug confirmed it and was satisfied with it.
Vin hadn't been thinking past his next breath and now could only stare helplessly, too raw and strange to make sense of himself or how he felt much less what he should say. He had no control over anything but what he meant to do, and he turned back and finished his saddling in a stiff silence, anxious in the primal way of an injured animal wanting to be alone to heal or die.
When he had finished, he took a deep breath, hearing it shake and stutter, he squeezed his eyes closed until black lights popped and resolutely settled this reality into the ruined disarray of his thoughts. It made sense to have them at his back with war in these mountains, dangerous men to deal with, dangerous things to do. It couldn't be changed.
Finally he said, "You ever been in the mountains north of here, cowboy?"
Relief flooded Chris, and he answered at once; "Nope, and you'll never see 'em, neither, you call me a cowboy again."
He hadn't wanted to argue with Vin about this or push himself where Vin didn't want him, but he was determined not to let him go off alone - Buck had taught him about a man sometimes needing a friend whether he wanted one or not, and it'd be different if Vin decided on a drifting life after he'd had time to think about it awhile with a friend at hand. Chris had a piece to say, and he wasn't letting Vin go until he'd said it and knew Vin had heard.
Josiah hadn't been so sure, but now he knew Chris was right. Vin had a frail and uncertain feel to him this morning that made it right. Vin wasn't meant to go alone through the grief that still gripped him, that would surge and fall in him for a long time to come, nor was Chris meant to leave him yet. Josiah was glad Vin realized that, too, because it let him hope.
Then they stood close among the trees and talked a little while, Vin with his hands on his hips and his head half down listening to the logic of their decisions, easing himself into the living world they wove for him with their faces and motions and voices. Sight and sound had a sudden clarity he didn't understand, but the familiar feel of them was restful and kind and he needed it too much to turn away.
Josiah had decided to head back to Four Corners and take word where they were going - as much as he could, because Josiah didn't know but that Chris would come home alone, this venture into the mountains a shared last journey between parting brothers. Chris never said so, but Josiah knew he thought the same thing. Didn't matter, though, Chris would stay with him until Vin made up his mind, and he'd have his say at some point, it was all a man could do.
Vin told them about a gunrunner he knew, and of places in the mountains where Tashunke Witco would expect caches of whatever he managed to get, ammunition was an urgent need. He didn't tell them what else he'd told that warrior, the dream that had swept into the emptiness Duley left as if it had waited for that place to be made. He didn't try to make sense of it, just told what he'd seen, from a flying height, of three great arching pincers from west and east, and Three Stars, Colonel Crook, eight days march to the south from the Rosebud. Knowing things, the way his mind worked in absorbing and making sense of sign, of where prey could be cut off or moved in purposeful directions - Crook was no admirer of Custer's ambition, he'd told Tashunke Witco, and certainly Custer was killing his men with hurry to be there first.
Tashunke Witco had smiled at him, his eyes warm with realizing that the surge to solitary glory would be the end of the unwise Yellowhair. He thought it was funny that just when the Indians were learning to fight like white men, the white men started fighting like Indians used to, and Vin had smiled with him to hide his breaking heart.
So humble and slight a man to have the glory of the nations burn so bright in him, a servant of the people more bravely than anyone Vin had ever met. Keeping nothing for himself of spoils or glory, heeding no voice but Creation and faithful to his bones.
Catch the Bird had come running from the remuda leading a fine war-pony the color of red earth with white patches, pride in the lifted toss of his head and endurance in its deep chest and stocky legs, and he had handed the lead to Tashunke Witco with carefully restrained excitement. Tashunke Witco had thanked him and then handed it to Vin, his eyes shining with pleasure.
The young man soon to be a warrior watched from a respectful distance, proud to have been chosen to bring this great gift. This horse had carried Tashunke Witco into battle more than once, he himself had tied the earned feathers into his mane and he wished he had anything so fine to give to Tanner. The braided halter was all he had and he said nothing about it, but there was a secret pleasure in seeing both of these men he honored hold it in their hands.
Vin couldn't speak, but it didn't matter, Tashunke Witco always saw more truth with his eyes than was ever spoken to him.
They had parted knowing they would never see one another again, hand signs doing what words could not in naming one another friend, forearms crossing over their chests at the last for the abiding affection between them. Vin engaged Catch the Bird in these farewells with a significant glance at the braided lead, inexpertly done but beautiful in the alternately meticulous and distracted weave of youth. That young warrior felt like his heart would burst with pride.
But Vin had gone with an ache in his soul, knowing he had taken his last look at more than Tashunke Witco - he would never see the Rosebud again, either. It was not his to roam any longer, but he honored the fierce hope in his friend's dark eyes that it was still the Lakota's.
He sighed and pushed those thoughts away, useless and maybe even dangerous to bring into the great wheeling power encircling the nation, quickening. The world would change in ways he couldn't predict or affect and he didn't know where solid ground was anymore.
Chris bumped him as he turned his horse toward the trail, jade eyes calling him to the moment and a flash of a smile that promised to keep doing that. The moment Vin smiled back, they were brothers again with a trail ahead of them to ride. Josiah mounted with a private grin as hope grew.
As Vin and Chris set boot to stirrup, a horse burst with startling speed through the trees nearest the camp, throwing its head so ferociously against the loop around its lower jaw that a less masterful rider would have lost the rein. Chased By Water was a fine horseman, though, and he was grinning at Peso's raw power and strong spirit, a proud Horse Person as a warrior appreciated. The old warrior pulled the sweating black up near them and said with breathless pride, "In battle, this horse will fight with hooves and teeth as much as I do with my gun and knife! A fine horse!"
Chris chuffed a sardonic laugh and said with honest and unwitting rudeness,
"That horse is as likely to try to scrape you off on a tree, God Himself don't know what he's gonna do next."
Chased By Water laughed, unoffended, because the man eyed the horse like a worthy adversary and his tone was friendly. Wasichu and not knowing the sacredness of this animal that was Vin's gift, but a brother's heart for Vin and a man as respectful of the Lakota way as he knew how to be.
Both wasichu had been surprised that Vin had given the horse, Chased By Water had seen it and already knew Vin's rough affection for that horse, it was what sanctified the giving. Vin's smile today as he watched the black stubbornly refuse to be still was uncomplicated by regret, and he had honored Chased By Water deeply in giving what was most precious. His breath caught in his throat as he looked down at Vin, knowing he would never see this man again who had shared his camp and would have shared his hearth had not another warrior chosen to teach him first. But though there was sorrow, it was good to know how strong a man he had become, and how strong the friends he had at his back.
The whole camp knew they were leaving this morning, Two Badgers was coming to say good-bye, and a scatter of young warriors drawn by the power these men created together, but Chased By Water had only just heard what Tanner planned to do rather than go back to his safe town. This fight would not be a matter of one or two decisive victories no matter what the hot blood of young men said, and it was a great risk for Vin to undertake gunrunning now when there would be fighting all over these mountains - he was as likely to be shot by Indians for being white as by soldiers for helping Indians.
It troubled him and made him want to see Vin once more even though they had already said their good-byes, so he asked his wife to pack some of her fine pemmican so the wasichu would not have to risk hunting with their guns. She had obliged him gladly, proud that Vin had not abandoned the right ways nor left the ritual undone to bring trouble for all the people. He had come and done all things as a true-hearted man would, and he had eased the hearts of all who loved him in doing that right thing.
"Pemmican." Chased By Water extended the heavy pouch and had it swing wildly as Peso pretended startlement, but Vin reached it easily and handed it to Josiah,
"Take some of this, Josiah." Knowing it was meant for the preacher as well, and Chris drifted along with Josiah to the mule at a slow backward walk, his eyes keen and curious. Vin was starting to feel like ... well, like Vin again, but there was something that felt unfinished in him, and Chris had a gunman's sense of something waiting to happen.
Chased By Water got down and stroked Peso's cheek happily, keeping an already practiced grip on the hackamore under his whiskered jaw as he went to examine the pony under Vin's saddle with great appreciation.
"It is a very fine horse!" He said over his shoulder, and in the gladness of his dark eyes clarity breathed down deep into Vin, a warm instant in Spirit's eyes and ears and heart.
Wisdom came in the glimpse of Duley in Chased By Water's dark eyes, and he knew it was her gift that would never leave him. He understood the pleasure in Chased By Water's face that had nothing to do with the fine horse and everything with the honor the gift was, being from Tashunke Witco. Believing Vin deserved such honor and pride … and more that he'd never seen in anyone but her.
As Peso would evermore recall the people to his heart, love would always be this look of Duley's in someone else's eyes. She lived in Chased By Water now, as she lived in so many he had never dared to see, his always, immortal.
In an instant caught up in power and seeing rightly, Vin acknowledged the waste of never having gone wholly into the people's affections, mistrust too ingrained, cruel experience forbidding vulnerability. Safe walls - he heard laughter in the rushing power and it flew, trailing brilliant light through the empty places that were not barren forever, as he'd thought, only empty places waiting to be filled again if he was wise enough, brave enough.
Walls he'd built around his battered heart, and in thinking himself safe, he had unwittingly denied himself the very thing he'd craved since his mother died. Duley had coaxed him among them, shown him the power love was and tried to open his frightened heart, but she'd been all he could see and he'd guarded himself against all others by instinct and habit, giving his heart to no one but her, trusting no one else inside it but her.
It had not kept him safe from loss and grief, it had not kept her with him one moment longer than God willed. And it had not kept love away even keeping himself blind and deaf to it, even refusing it, always there as it was now in Chased By Water's eyes - as it would be in Josiah and Chris if he turned to look at them, that same force, patient and devoted and alive, unasked for and unexpected and even unwanted.
This time he didn't lose his feet in the great force, this time he stood and looked into a great truth even Duley had never been able to teach him, though she'd known it, and she'd tried. It had nothing to with how love came or how long love stayed, or even if he could see it, only that it did come, because it was never left once it had.
All the times he'd seen it and not recognized it for what it was, all the times he had deliberately turned from it … and yet it came whether he acknowledged it or not, and it was priceless whether he took it or not, a power beyond him or Duley or any mortal heart to forbid or create or rule. The brightest and most perfect gift Creation could offer.
In the next heartbeat the power released him, changed forever, and he rocked forward onto the balls of his feet and reached after balance, sucking in a breath as if he'd been too long underwater but finding the earth solid under his feet and the world real all around him. He used that breath in a shaken prayer of thanks as he took the revelation of Chased By Water's eyes to his heart, a relative he'd never risked seeing, longed for and fearfully despised and always his no matter what he did.
His lowered smile was a slow and beautiful thing that no one but Chris saw, as none but Chris had seen that moment that had snatched him up and shaken him and then let him go. His hand had flown to the butt of his gun, but he'd known with an instinct he didn't recognize that this was not an enemy he could fight, nor a fight he could win for Vin. He could only wait and hold his unspoken hope high in his heart; that smile told him all he needed to know.
Vin went to the pony and tossed the stirrup up over the horn, loosening the belly band as if it wasn't setting right, and he asked Chased By Water as he did about the best ways to get where he wanted to go. Chased By Water told him about a pass over a saddleback ridge a few miles north, and described the landmarks along the way as Vin slipped the saddle to the ground, then the blanket and the halter until the pony looked Lakota again.
Josiah looked around, then rose to see what had captured Chris' quizzical attention.
Chased By Water was very pleased that Vin would honor the horse by riding him as he was accustomed to being ridden, it was obvious the saddle was unwelcome, and even the halter strange.
Vin looped a braided rope around the horse's lower jaw and Chased By Water took the proffered lead without knowing why Vin handed it to him, perhaps wanting to check the horse's hooves. When Vin simply stood there, Chased By Water, confused, held the lead out to him to return it, but Vin raised his hands and would not take it.
"This pony should run for the people in these times." He said, and Chased By Water's mouth opened, but Vin came near to him, praying Duley was right because he couldn't hope for words as good as his heart in his eyes.
"If I had one for every day you did for me what no man should ask another to do for him, it would not be enough for this, and for all you have done for me all my life, Uncle."
Chased By Water was speechless, holding in each of his hands the leads to horses Vin had given him and his spirit shining not with those gifts, but with the honorific Vin had never used before.
"Josiah, is he givin' his horse away again?" Chris murmured, but Josiah didn't answer, caught up in the power that was not yet done with Vin and the sense of an important thing in the indistinct quiet of their voices, their eloquently focused attention on one another.
They heard a horse slowing to a stop behind them, Two Badgers dismounted and walked to them but went no further, respecting the sacred place Vin and Chased By Water had created. Chris glanced at him, pride keeping him from insisting on the answer Josiah and the Lakota warrior obviously possessed, and then not caring whether they told him or not because he understood as much as he needed to.
"Well," He said lazily to no one in particular, shaking his head with fond exasperation and eyeing the mule's stubborn stance, "I guess that mule's enough like Peso t'suit im."
Two Badgers laughed almost too quietly to be heard, knowing Vin would be proud to ride that mule for the chance to give such a gift as the one that had come to him from Tashunke Witco. The white man understood this about their friend no matter how he scoffed at the impracticality.
The old warrior had not yet spoken, but he touched the pony's chin with the hand closed around that lead in wondering humility, and he looked deep and seeking into Vin's blue eyes before transferring the leads into one hand and laying the other on Vin's shoulder. The old Lakota stood straight and proud as a tree, a man honoring a relative who would never been seen again, and his words reached to the foundations of Vin's newly opened heart.
"You have fed those without hunters in their lodges since you learned to hunt. You have lived among us generously and kindly and have fought our enemies as your own. Even now when you must leave us, you walk rightly with us. We go to do an important thing and all the people know it must be done, no one thinks of anything else now. You have helped our warriors take a great herd of good horses and many good guns to fight with, now that we must fight. You have brought things to our council that will help us, and you have brought power and sacredness to the seven campfires in the honorable things you have done."
Vin's chin was about of all of his face that could be seen by that time under his lowered hatbrim, a band of ripe color over his cheekbones when he half turned his head, feeling wholly unworthy of praise from this man who had stood in his place all this time. Like kin, he had honored the duty Vin had forced on him, holding the balance Vin couldn't without blame or resentment, and only now did Vin know it was for love of him as much as honoring the duty he'd imposed.
"Now you will go to do dangerous things in dangerous places for the people's sake, glad to do it for us." A father's pride given to a fatherless man, and Vin trembled to feel the true force of it. Every step he took away from the Lakota taught him more about what he had lost in his stubborn solitude.
"I will ride this horse," Chased By Water said, indicating the brown and white pony that was edging its haunches into Peso belligerently, "and wear the honor like a shield into battle." Vin nodded, knowing Peso would win that same trust with this old warrior, his heart filled to imagine it. That warrior's hand slipped down Vin's arm and passed over Peso's lead into Vin's fingers, curling them when they didn't move and breathless in the every-increasing honors of these horses that wove a binding from wasichu to Lakota and back again. Vin stared at their hands dumbly.
"This horse ..." This time it was Peso's lead he meant, his fingers weaving it into Vin's, "This horse I would treasure even if he never let me up on his back again. It is the only gift worthy to give you now, this horse is the one my son gave to me."
Vin's heart caught and his fingers clutched convulsively around the lead, around Chased By Water's hand, swamped with emotions so big it didn't seem flesh and bone could contain them. The old man drew him quickly into a fierce embrace, their hands clasped around Peso's rein between them and the beat of each other's hearts known.
Chased By Water held him until he breathed again without breaking, taking gratefully into himself the love Vin gave as helplessly as a child. His heart soared.
"Hechete welo!" Two Badgers proclaimed with great satisfaction when they finally broke apart, still holding on and looking into one another's faces, and Josiah's "Amen" was stout and heartfelt. Chris, astonishment plain, laughed out loud with wordless delight. Not understanding the sacredness of it, Two Badger's knew, but the rightness of it, and he moved to stand beside the gunman and he said again, quietly, for Chris' benefit alone, "Hechete welo …".
Chris heard him, and they grinned at one another eye to eye, made brothers in their common love of Vin Tanner.
Peso stood, gleaming and proud, as Vin saddled and bridled and packed him for travel, his hands trailing over the warm black hide and his eyes trailing over the camp and the warriors, Lakota and white, who loved him like kin, his peace reaching out into the valley and the blue sky, a blessing given and received.
When they were ready to mount and the land breathed into a bright morning, Chris casually handed his rifle and a saddlebag of shells to Two Badgers with a fierce smile, one warrior envying another's ride into the great and noble fight that awaited him. A graceless gifting, but his pale eyes gave it honor and Two Badgers knew he understood what honor gifts were and meant this rifle in that good way.
"I'm figurin' it could've gone either way with Vin when you took 'im in ..." A child already dangerous and scarred nearly past his own humanity; "Could've ended up just another man ruined past caring." Honoring the brotherhood that had salvaged Vin's soul and forged the man who'd come to be his friend. Promising in his eyes and the clasp of his hand to keep that friend as safe as anyone could.
The three of them rode out as the Sundance tree was being raised on the flattened earth of the camp, a great wheel of dust rising majestically from their prayerful dance and a throb of drums echoing the great beating heart of the world.
"Are you finished with that, Judge?"
Travis glanced up from the newspaper in his hand and then down to the one on the coach seat beside him, half the headline visible and just as lurid as the one he was reading now, the latest in weeks of the same.
"I am." He said.
Ezra reached across and, after folding a few pleats into the newsprint, commenced to fanning himself against the smothering heat of West Virginia's late summer. He was disconcerted to feel discomfort in the muggy greenery of the south, and something near horrified to find himself looking forward to dry heat and wide-open vistas. He kept both smile and voice darkly droll as the paper rustled in his hand; "Best use this piece of yellow journalism can be put to, I'm sure."
Travis' mouth quirked in a brief and bitter smile. Amazing how often they agreed these days.
Custer, a hero - it still boggled his mind, but the truth, even when proffered by military strategists and Custer's own colleagues, was being ignored with a cunning that pained Travis to understand. Arrogance and foolhardiness and a rush for personal glory had cost those exhausted and insufficient troops their lives, and still Custer was declared a martyr, his death unifying the nation behind manifest destiny. But Orrin knew, as few did, how much more useful Custer's demise was than that - his spectacular failure provided a highly effective distraction from revelations that might have otherwise averted the course that was now cruelly inevitable.
His cleft chin tucked back and his mouth pursed with distaste as he read yet another account of the 'massacre' of the Little Big Horn, of the appallingly villainous savagery of the Indians who must now be totally subjugated or eradicated. Too few knew what crimes and criminals were sheltering in the pricked pride of a nation too young to know what would be lost.
This despite all their efforts, despite Judiciary and governmental officials too canny to be distracted by the bombast of war being declared. Though an investigation had been commenced in the Justice Department and a surprising number of entrenched politicians had suddenly forgone their re-election campaigns, it was galling to know at last that this forced retreat from the public trough would be all the punishment many of them would suffer.
He was glad only to be leaving Washington, and gladder still that they had survived to do so.
Three attempts had been made on their lives, his and Ezra's and Elizabeth's, before they'd managed to get the matter of the illegal land grants before the Judiciary and into the public record. Once on the train heading east in the guise of robbery by outlaws, once at their hotel in Washington where a fire of mysterious origins had consumed Elizabeth's suite - but not her brother's records, which Ezra had assumed guardianship of - and once with desperately suicidal boldness on the street in the capitol as they went to give their depositions, two gunmen opening fire in a brazen assassination attempt. Ezra had killed one with his sidearm and the other, almost simultaneously, with the derringer up his sleeve.
Orrin glanced almost fondly across the jolting coach at Ezra, his fine-boned face contemplative as he gazed out into the verdant countryside. Probably planning some questionable scheme that would undoubtedly take advantage their new friendship, Orrin's affection didn't change Ezra's basic character and, indeed, created many opportunities. The man couldn't help it, Orrin knew, to Ezra it was a pure sin to let opportunities go by untaken, he just couldn't do it. It didn't matter so much any more, and his smile, though rueful, was genuine.
"This may be of some interest to you, Ezra." He said, fishing Mary's latest letter, received yesterday just before they'd departed, out of the inside pocket of his coat and passing it over. He didn't miss the faint hesitation of surprise in the green eyes nor the quick warmth of pleasure that the Judge would share his personal correspondence with him. This one, at least, had some good news in it, a commodity the Judge had nearly given up on.
From Mary's previous letters, they knew that Josiah had returned several months ago without Chris or Vin, and her worry had been clear in the number of times she'd mentioned that in subsequent letters, as well as her frustration that Josiah would not expand on the reasons for their absence. Travis had inferred that the two of them were assisting the Indians in some way, probably gun-running, and Ezra had not disagreed, though he'd thrown up his hands at what he deemed an utterly useless risk. Tilting at windmills, he'd said, and Travis, looking out the window now at the late afternoon light flashing through the trees, sighed with a regretful shake of his head. Indeed, Ezra was right, as much as he hated to admit it.
The gambler's face eased immediately as he began to read, an unconscious smile that Orrin was not surprised to see. Ezra's heart was not as self-fixated and immovable as Ezra wanted others to believe - and perhaps even believed himself. Orrin had found that Standish often revealed a far more tender inclination if one bothered to look, and he watched him, knowing he would surmise as much from Mary's unwritten words as he had himself, touched by the warmth of true relief in his expression.
Chris and Vin had returned, both alive and well even if pared down to their sinewy essentials. A slight frown became a quick quirk of an admiring smile as he read that although Nettie's eyesight had not altogether returned, she had decamped back to her farm and was managing it, and her independent life, with stubborn resilience.
Although Mary had included very little of a personal nature, Travis hadn't missed the 'Chris and Billy' did this and went there and did that together, a man who would not allow himself to grow close to Billy unless he had intentions toward Mary that he was finally declaring. Ezra didn't miss that, either, and a wickedly anticipatory smile flickered up at Travis.
Admire Larabee as Orrin did, he'd more than halfway expected him to end up shot dead in the street from a gunbattle - or worse, if the savage darkness in him got loose, from his own hand. Long experience on the bench, senses too keen when it came to damaged men, meant he couldn't be sanguine about having a gunslinger married into his family, particularly one of such merciless reputation and dangerously impulsive instincts. That wouldn't be changed by marriage, nor would Mary's stubborn idealism be subdued by love. How suitable Larabee would be for Mary, and vice versa, was a question he imagined still loomed very large for the two of them despite the undeniable power of their attraction to one another. But if they'd taken a step in that direction … well, that was territory where he didn't belong, and he'd do his best to stay out of it as long as no harm came to her or to Billy.
Ezra's soft snort of amazement told him where in Mary's letter he'd come, and when the gambler shook his head in disbelief, Orrin recognized on his handsome face the same reluctant hope he'd felt himself. It was a remarkable development, and one that Elizabeth - and especially Jules, who had dramatically despaired of ever finding her Uncle again much less seeing him, would be deeply gratified to know.
Vin Tanner, who wanted no roof but the sky and no bed but the earth, skittish as a half-tamed feral cat even among friends and never anything but short-hairs bristled out of his beloved wilderness, had taken up residence in Nettie's spare room. This was one frontiersmen who would not, it seemed, and against all expectations even of those who loved him, just disappear into the wilderness never to be heard of again. At least not for the time being.
Though Mary wrote that he was installing railing for her porch steps and otherwise modifying her house and yard and outbuildings to accommodate her dim vision, Orrin knew Vin was not doing so, as Ezra and others might at first assume, out of any guilt over Nettie's damaged eyesight. Certainly Nettie wouldn't have allowed it for that reason, and Vin couldn't have fooled that old woman no matter how well she could or couldn't see. Nor would Vin feel obliged to explain himself, trusting, as Orrin did, that the boys would figure things out on their own eventually. He hoped it was as much comfort to them, when they did, as it was to him, because Vin's unspoken declaration had eased a deep worry in Orrin's heart that had been there from the moment he'd recognized the tracker's unexpected nobility.
Rootless and haunted and wary of mortal attachments as a man long past any other way, one of many lost souls Orrin had encountered in his court and in his life on the frontier who found peace only in solitude … but Vin had finally claimed a place for himself, and kin. How he'd come to that was a tale Orrin looked forward to hearing if Vin would tell it, and if not, well, he was satisfied enough with the result. Of course, there was no predicting how long the tracker would remain under that roof, his restlessness was bone deep, but at least Vin now knew he could make such claims, and was willing to.
Orrin's smile was brief, but peaceful, and he turned back to the world outside the coach, dark eyes focused far past the blue-green forests into memories of cragged mountains and rippling grasslands running with buffalo, wild rocky rivers and sweeping heights where a man seemed to see the ends of the world. Sky so wide and blue the heart could hardly accept it.
Mists rose up in the lengthening shadows of evening as the cooling air met hot damp earth, and it lay a dreaming haze on the world, as if all the wild and open places were already passing into myth and memory. He closed his eyes and saw distant purple mountains and the endless canopy of sky in all its rough and tender moods, he smelled the pungent richness of sage and felt in the coach's movement the remembered rumble of buffalo running, hoarding the memories, yearning toward them, like a wild thing preparing for winter. This was a winter that might have no spring, if spring was the season of rebirth and hope. This season might be the breaking of all other seasons to come, interrupting, perhaps fatally, the rhythms of the world that the Indian nations understood so well, and his own not at all. His years lay heavy on him, and these memories were a golden weight of all the frontier had once been, peopled by so many ghosts of reckless and courageous and curious men roaming the wild trackless places with a freedom he sensed was ending for all time. The last of their kind, such men, and a treasure of spirit and resourcefulness that would not be seen again, it was a terrible loss he couldn't bear to contemplate.
To his dying day he would carry that bitter moment in the grand echoing halls of Justice when he had finally accepted there would be no real justice for the Indian nations. That moment when his love for the logic and immutable truth of the law had run out of him like water out of a pierced canteen. Accused of nostalgia, of refusing the natural order of progress, as if it was an old man's folly to protest the destruction of treasures both tangible and spiritual that his peers could not even see much less realize would be lost.
His letter of resignation had been delivered to the Justice Department that afternoon. He had closed his house in the city and put all his eastern holdings on the market, and he had entered this coach with Ezra knowing in his heart that he would never return east again. Now he, always been so firm of purpose, so unwavering in his belief that his nation was destined for greatness, was bereft of both purpose and belief, adrift on the verge of a new age he did not want to see much less be part of.
He who had forged his own path, set guideposts for all who came after, now relinquished all his hope into the hands of others. Hope in the stubborn resilience of the Indian nations and their tenacious will to survive, to hold fast to the circle of Creation, and in the maturing of a nation that might look back on the legacies of the wilderness and remember what had been so raw and so real to him and those of his age. If it could only be preserved long enough to still be there for them to rediscover, to understand what there was no time for now.
They had done all they could, all of them, and it did no good anymore to wonder 'what more', 'what if', 'how could'. It would not be stopped, and he who had spent a lifetime looking fearlessly at the truth now, in the twilight of his life, wanted no part of it. All he wanted was that little town far enough out on the frontier to distance the 'progress' that came for awhile. A grandson hungry to know about all that would be gone before he could grow up, seven men who embodied the magnificent spirit of a bygone era, and a daughter who would weave their vivid stories into the lasting fabric of history, the annals of an age written into the record for future ages to read.
That was enough cause, in the end, for an old man to hold onto. Perhaps enough for all the generations to come.
Fin
I dedicate this book to my Mom, who is teaching me to honor her life more than mourn her death, and to hold her love to be more real and more lasting than the emptiness her passing has left. She endures in all of us who love her, she remains the gentle and steadfast heart of our family, and the special bond we shared is the solid ground under my feet as I learn to walk in a world made strange by her absence.
I thank both my parents, who instilled a curiosity about and respect for all peoples, and who admired the cultures and traditions of American Indians as well as the frontiersmen who explored the new world with wonder and nary a thought of ownership or plunder.
Of course I must thank Vin and Chris, Buck and Josiah and Nathan and J.D., Ezra and Mary, and all the folks that populated this story, and my life, for so long, actors who transcended their art into reality for so many of us.
Heartfelt appreciation to the readers and writers who rode this long trail with me, some of whom wrote many times along the way to share what this story meant to them. You enriched the writing, and me, in incalculable ways.
Also to Netan Tokahe, who taught me more about the Lakota way in his demeanor alone than any book could ever convey, and who shared his knowledge of the Keeping Ceremony and the harmful imbalance of ignoring this sacred duty; I am truly privileged to know him. His great-grandfather fought at the Greasy Grass.
Thanks go to a few Spirited Women Writers of the West who know who they are, who supported this work with resources and feedback and encouragement and friendship - and above all, really twisted humor - Lub ya all!
To the Tapestry Foundation, where the stake has been pounded hard into the ground for all the nations. They Stand.
Most particularly, Yakoke to my friend Adrian, who opened a generous and patient soul and a magnificent world to me. This story, and I, owe her more than can ever be repaid, I am blessed in such a friend. To Jo, Carol and Harrison, pioneers in a frontier more dangerous and testing than any wild country of any age - they are cherished with affection and honor in my heart; they know why.
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