The High Missouri (39 page)

On a less exalted level, would Red Sky catch her quarry, the mythological Père Noël? And would he and Dylan catch up with them before she performed her symbolic act? And would they let her take the hairy token of revenge?

Love was the greatest changeling of all.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Red Sky was frustrated. She wanted to know for sure what was going on, and by God, or whatever spirit the Frenchmen took their strange oaths by, she didn’t.

She was pleased with herself in every respect but this frustration. She had observed how the land lay, she had seen the sources of water, she had noticed the lie of the great herd on the plains, she had asked herself where she would camp, and she had calculated very well. Here she was, within sight of Père Noël’s tiny bivouac, by a rivulet in a fold on the plain, with willows but no wood and nothing to mark the spot but the lean-to facing a low boulder. This could only be his camp—and now it didn’t make sense.

If she had been raised to be a warrior, as she asked her father to raise her, because he had fathered no sons, she would have learned to wait and watch patiently. But she had not. No one had paid any attention when she said she was bom to be a warrior, a female warrior.

Now she was having to learn everything by herself, without instruction. Even Owl Claw could not help her. Owl Claw had married a man, raised children, taken fully the woman’s role. Only after the end of her years of menstruation did she become as she was, and live with a woman. Nor did Owl Claw know a woman among the people whose medicine had called her to be a warrior. There were stories from the time before the memories of the oldest grandfathers, and Red Sky nurtured herself with these stories. But there was no teacher and no living exemplar. Had there been, Red Sky would have known sooner what her medicine was, and would not have waited until her seventeenth year to take the warrior’s path. To learn to make weapons and to use them, to track animals and men patiently, to perform the act of blood power, taking the life of living creatures and bringing it to your lodge and to feed your family’s life.

She supposed sixteen-year-old male warriors had as much trouble waiting as she did. And she supposed that she could move silently down to that camp and see who was there, if anyone. Not invisibly, not in broad daylight, but silently.

Maybe no one was there. That was what she was afraid of. This morning four Minnetarees had gotten up, made medicine, and ridden off in different directions. Curious, she thought, that they should go in different directions. Perhaps each hoped his medicine and his alone would find the white buffalo, and depended solely on that.

In the half day since, nothing had moved in the camp. There was no sign of Père Noël. But this was the place he would camp. And there was that lean-to pitched low to the ground, the way Frenchmen did when they didn’t have their canoes to sleep under, and no Minnetaree had slept in that, or would sleep in it.

Maybe Père Noël was gone, and his Frenchman gear was stored under that piece of canvas. Maybe while she was stealing close, he would ride into camp and see her, and raise his rifle at her. Maybe he was asleep, drunk, under there. Or maybe he was taking his pleasure on the body of a weeping fifteen-year-old Minnetaree girl.

Red Sky snorted. Most likely the last.

She could not wait for dark. The four Minnetarees would come back. Now, as the sun rose to high noon, was the time.

The lean-to slanted toward the low boulder, as though in a salute. She would make the boulder memorable for Père Noël.

Dru smiled grimly at what he saw through the glass. In the spirit of every man, he believed, this story roamed. When it told itself in the night, you called it a nightmare. Which was a small word for a fear that earthquaked both mind and spirit. To be spread out on a rock, naked, at the mercy of a woman you’d stuck your own blade into, and she holding a knife with intent to cut your balls off.

Dru handed the glass to Dylan.

Dylan adjusted the focus of the telescope two or three times. His breathing was coming hard, his chest tight.

He saw Père Noël spread out on a boulder. Red Sky was standing over him, a knife in her hand.

Père Noël’s face was…

Père Noël was his father, Ian Campbell.

Dylan looked sideways at Dru. His mind slipped and slid, panicking.

OhmyGod.

They had no horses. He looked around wildly, frustrated.

His father…

He started running.

OhmyGodbleedingJesus.

He ran faster.

Twenty minutes earlier Ian Campbell had smiled sardonically.

It was all turned to rot in his nostrils.

He did not look at it in his mind from every angle, as he was accustomed to do, mocking himself. He did not tell himself how many ways he had failed, and on what a grand scale. He did not dwell on the two women who died, whom he loved. Nor the two country wives he once had, natives of the interior, whom he had callously abandoned. Nor the Cree daughter he had doted on, and who died in his arms that terrible winter.

He snorted. That winter he had stayed in the interior because she was sick, stayed away from his true family in Montreal, worried them to death, that winter he got the illness, the rheumatism that felled him now. That winter cost him the love of his one son, Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell, who now so rejected his paternity that he had changed his very name.

He coughed, and his chest spoke of his mortality. He rolled over his blankets, onto his back. No position was comfortable for long, the way his joints hurt.

Isn’t it fine, Ian Campbell? Isn’t it fine?

He had thought himself a man of size and strength, ambition and vision, grand desires and grand fulfillments. That was why he had set out into the wilderness to begin with. The wilderness was unshaped, open, malleable, and a man could with force of will and energy seize what he wanted from it, even the foundations of empire itself.

He raised his hand and looked at it. Crabbed, distorted, the hand of a cripple. He worked the fingers toward a fist, ignoring the pain. This fist had seized nothing. It had hurt people, maybe—it was a fist. But it had reached for dominion, for riches, for power, for rule. It had reached to make by might what other Scots had made, even here in Canada, the foundations of a clan as great as the old clans, a resurrection of the House of Campbell.

Ah, illusion.

Now his fingers were drawn up permanently into a grotesque caricature of a hand. Joke.

Yes, a great and macabre joke on himself, now an old man while only fifty, sick unto dying, owner of a single, pathetic, small fort in a wasteland of savages and uselessness, partner of the fool who had married his daughter, emperor of emptiness.

This, he mocked himself, this is your son’s patrimony. This is why you worked this too-short lifetime, this is what took too long to create. This is why you named your headquarters Fort St. Nicholas as a last, all-surpassing gift to your son. This is what you dreamed of placing into his hands with pomp and ceremony. This is your legacy, your final Christmas gift. He gave an evil chuckle.

Now he mocked himself openly. Your son left hearth and home, rejected you, rejected your advice to him. Well enough, you said, if he’s to be a fur trader, let’s make him a prince of fur traders. I’ll build something, shape something worth handing down. But my joints have betrayed me. Not enough life left. Ian Campbell was able to leave only a few hides, a few trade goods, one small fortification, that was all.

He wouldn’t be able to hand over the white buffalo either. He had hoped, but it was too late.

He did not cry out, My son, oh my son. No, he forbade himself that. That utterance would kill him, and he wished to perpetuate this great madness, this insistence on half living, sick and hobbled, yet still plodding forward, in some direction, on the way to dusty death. At least it gave him the satisfaction of despising himself.

A shadow.

He had heard nothing, which showed the diminution of his powers, but the shadow fell on his face.

He looked sideways into the opening of the lean-to.

The young Piegan girl he had stolen.

She was looking at him, an obsidian knife in her hand, and bloodlust in her eye.

What was her name? Red Sky at Morning. Take warning, indeed. He had tried to tame her with his cod, to no avail. Ah, futility.

He smiled at her, an acrid, fearless smile, monstrously welcoming.

“Death, thou hast a comely face,” he said in the English he knew she didn’t understand. “A comely face, but a dry twat.”

Red Sky had prepared herself, and she was preparing Père Noël.

She was staking the slaver on the low boulder in front of the lean-to, hands and feet tied to stakes. He acted damned uncomfortable and damned scared. That was the way she wanted him. She was almost sorry he had not resisted more, but the spirit was gone out of the man. He had started to rise, slowly, feebly. She cracked him once on the head with the side of her tomahawk, and the slaver collapsed. And why not, since he didn’t revere spirit?

She tied a rawhide rope to his left hand and stretched it out diagonally away from his right foot. The man would be spread-eagled, utterly vulnerable.

He was stripped naked. That had been hard for Red Sky. She didn’t even want to look upon his body. She hated the sight of his cod, as the Frenchmen called it, especially. His oots-chee-naan. But this was the sacrifice she had promised, and prayed for, and his physical nakedness seemed right, a sign of spiritual nakedness.

She tied the right hand and drove the stake deep.

She had prepared herself since those days in the sweat lodge with Owl Claw, way back in the moon when the geese fly south. She had opened herself to spirit in a thousand ways, and looked at her own heart, and had come to know a rightness there. She had prayed this morning, and every morning.

She had chipped dozens of obsidian blades for this moment. Now she lashed the sharpest and most beautifully formed to a piece of grizzly bear jaw Owl Claw gave her. It was ready.

It would be hard to take the scrotum of a man, and cast the testicles on the ground, and leave the body to bleed from the crotch until the spirit dribbled out with the blood and mingled with the wind. Owl Claw had emphasized that when a warrior let blood flow, she touched powerful medicine, powerful for good, powerful for ill. It was dangerous. It was also the path her medicine helpers asked her to walk.

She finished tying the left foot, pulled the entire body taut, and pounded the stake into the earth.

He was stirring, lolling his head back and forth, half conscious now. It made no difference.

She arranged the tinder and twigs she’d brought, struck her flint, blew on the sparks in the tinder, and got a small flame.

Now she must cleanse herself in the smoke of the cedar.

When she heard the pounding of feet, her spirit wrenched. How had she not followed spirit?

At this distance she could only see a figure running. Still kneeling in front of the fire, she washed her arms and breast and face once more in the smoke of the cedar.

She would not perform the bloody act quickly before the runner came. It was not an act to be hurried.

She stood and faced the runner and waited. As she began to make him out, she wondered.

Dylan slowed and walked toward Red Sky and his father. His mind could barely see what his eyes saw. The father, the ogre. The nakedness under the sky. The angry young woman. The black blade in her hand. He walked slowly.

Red Sky was careful not to move, except to turn her head to watch Dylan. She wondered, wondered at everything.

Dylan came close to look upon his father—it was his father—and then forced his eyes away from the naked loins. Progenitors of grief, those loins. And of pain, and of conflict, and of turmoil, and of… life.

He felt washed along, borne up and down and around, twirled and tumbled, swept and lifted and buffeted and… He was in the river of his emotions, at the mercy of their sweep and thrust.

Pain and conflict and turmoil and strife and riot and tumult—they were all there, and other things as well, majesty and passion and exhilaration and rapture, and he was of them, and this was the river, and the river was blood. The words
love
and
life
tossed into his mind like jetsam, but he pushed them away.

He turned to Red Sky because he knew what he had to do. “Put down the knife,” he said calmly. “Père Noël is Ian Campbell, my father.”

When Ian Campbell heard the voice, he managed to raise his head. His mind had crossed over Jordan in advance of his body—he didn’t want to be around to feel his body suffer—and he had trouble coming back. Besides, his eyes were bleary with fever and from the pain shooting through his sodding head. Therefore he could not credit what he saw.

His son, who despised him for what he’d done with his cod. The Piegan girl, who despised him for what he’d done with his cod. Facing each other with battle alertness, their bodies tense, their eyes locked, their wills engaged.

His deliverer unto death, and his potential deliverer back to life. But they both wanted a piece of Ian Campbell, ah, yes.

He did not know what he wanted, or from whom, and he didn’t care. They would fight over this weak, old, naked, trussed-up carcass, and take whatever they pleased.

He nodded and grinned and felt a mad laugh bubbling up from his gut, and let it burst out.

Dylan didn’t know what she was going to do. He thought she might fight. They had practiced together, and he had shown her what he knew, and he did not underestimate her. She would be quick and dangerous. Especially because, as Dru often told them, it was the size of the spirit in the fighter that counted. In Red Sky spirit shone fierce.

He felt no anger toward Red Sky. He felt bound to her in comradeship, even kinship. But it was simple. He would protect his father against her or anyone.

He waited. He accepted. They would fight or they would not. They would live or die. Ian Campbell would live or die. Dylan did not know. But he would play the game as it came to him.

He watched her eyes, and saw it all in the balance.

Red Sky felt the force within her, raging, like a rushing river that slams into a rock wall and gushes up in roars of white water. She did not think, but only felt the violence.

After a long while she felt it roil back, felt the torrent swell sideways and coil itself and surge on downstream.