In an hour or a little more, she knows, the sun will rise, and the quiet woods and fields in this lonely corner of South Dakota will explode with the noise of battle. The thought does not frighten her; she has spent the last weeks with a gun scarcely out of her hand. She has condemned men to the slow death of thirst and starvation in the Mandan jail; has blown gods know how many androids into electronic oblivion; killed a man with her own hands. There will be nothing new to her in the violence to come. The difference tomorrow will be in her assigned role as communicator to the divided wings of the troops gathered here to close, at the appointed time, on the enemy force.
And there is Kirsten, whose safety will be her primary responsibility, on whose skills their survival beyond tomorrow may well depend.
Without sound, two shadows separate themselves from the trees behind the line of trucks and move toward her. One, tall and bareheaded, is her brother; the other, shorter and stockier, is Manny. “Hau, tanski,” Tacoma greets her.
“Han, thiblo. Shick’shi.”
Tacoma draws a small leather bag out of his jacket. From it he takes a bundle of dried sweetgrass and sage tied with a red thread and half a dozen packets of folded buckskin. Carefully he lays them out on the truck’s wide bumper. “I’m glad you’re up.” A grin lights his face. “Or did you already know we were coming?”
She smiles in return. “I should have.”
“Other things on your mind?” Manny nods toward the truck.
“Han. It’s not good for so much to depend on one person.”
“No,” her brother agrees quietly. “But she’s our best bet to stop the droids. You’re our best bet to keep her alive to do it. That is not in question.”
“It ought to be.”
“No. It shouldn’t.” Manny gestures back toward the stretch of highway where a squadron of Black Hawks and Apaches are parked. “You’ve got to know that my orders are to get you two out of here safely if it all goes to hell when the sun comes up.”
“Damn it, Manny—“
“And I don’t want any argument from you or Dr. Ice Maiden if it comes to that. There won’t be time—oh, damn,” he says very softly.
Silhouetted by the faint glow of the heater, Kirsten stands holding the open flap above them. There is no chance at all that she has not heard Manny’s reference to her, and Koda can almost feel the heat of embarrassment radiating from him. But Kirsten speaks evenly, looking down at the small packets on the bumper. “I’m sorry, I’ve interrupted you. I’ll go out the other way.”
“No.” It is Tacoma, his voice firm. “Please join us.” He reaches up to hand her down, and after a moment’s hesitation, she accepts. “You’re a warrior, too.”
Kirsten stands motionless for a moment, then says softly, “Thank you. I’m honored.”
Tacoma hands Koda the sweetgrass bundle, and shielding a match with his big hands, carefully lights it. Smoke billows up from the herbs, and, closing her eyes, Koda waves it toward her, over her head and shoulders, breathing in its fragrance. Calm settles over her, a stillness that begins just under her heart and ripples outward until mind and body alike are quiet. She passes the smudge stick to Tacoma, who repeats the ritual before handing it to Kirsten. Her face pale as the snow, Kirsten follows their example, bowing her head in reverence as the peace of the ritual takes possession of her. When Manny has completed the purification, Tacoma gently opens the small leather bundles. Five packets hold finely ground colors: white an black and red; red and yellow ochre. In the sixth is a knob of rendered buffalo fat.
Tacoma dips a finger in the tallow and mixes it with a sprinkling of the red ochre. Carefully he draws a blazing sun on his forehead and the pug marks of a large cat on either cheek. Manny follows suit, marking his face with black arrows tipped in red.
Kirsten, who has watched with a look of rapt attention, accepts a bit of the fat from the bundle as Manny offers it to her, together with some of the red and black pigment. There is unexpected certainty in her movements, and Koda stifles the impulse to offer help. Deliberately, precisely, the other woman traces a double spiral in red on the back of each of her hands, a black lightning bolt down her cheek.. When she has finished, she turns to offer the paints to Koda.
Tacoma’s hand intercepts them. “Let me.”
Koda opens her mouth to protest, but Tacoma says, very gently. “No, tanski. Tshunka Wakan Winan. Let me.”
A tightening in her solar plexus sends alarm along her nerves, something near panic screaming down her blood. The calm of a few moments before is shattered, its fragments falling about her in brittle shards. All unexpectedly, she has arrived at a moment of crisis, something she knows she is not prepared for, something there is no way to prepare for. Her mouth goes dry as cotton, and her tongue feels thick and unwieldly as she forms the simple word she does not want to speak and knows she must speak. “Ohan.”
No sound carries her consent, and she repeats, whispering. “Ohan.”
“Washté,” Tacoma answers quietly, and begins to mix white pigment in his hand.
Koda feels the pressure of h is finger as he draws a jagged lightning bolt from her hairline to her chin. She swallows hard against the fear that rises in her, knowing somehow what is coming. When her brother begins to dot the paint onto her cheeks, she grabs his wrist. “Tacoma, no!”
He makes no effort to resist her, but says quietly, “It is right.”
The night has begun to fade around them, and she can see her brother’s eyes. They are a warrior’s, deep brown and steady, but there is a spark of the shaman’s gift in them as well. He says again, “It is right.”
She submits, then, allowing him to paint on her face the symbols that Tshunka Witco of the Oglala, Crazy Horse, saw when he cried for a vision. Ina Maka, she prays silently as a weight settles across her shoulders, a weight that now only death will lift from her. Mother of us all, help me to carry this burden and not to fail.
Above her in the fading darkness she hears the high scream of a hawk. Just as the sun clears the horizon, a red-tail settles in the bare sycamore above her. Crazy Horse had worn a red-tailed hawk in his hair. Wiyo, though, looks down at her with a clear golden gaze that is somehow both loving and pitiless. It is validation of her office, and completion.
Tacoma follows her gaze as she looks up at the hawk. “Hoka hey,” he says. “It is a good day.”
“It is a good day,” Kirsten echoes him. “A good day to fight.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE EARLY SUN lies lightly on the valley, spreading a transparent wash of gold over the new snow that blankets the meadow to the southeast of the river. From the low bank to the woods, still bare with the lingering cold, it lies porcelain smooth for almost half a kilometer. Branches of beech an sycamore cast their shadows across it in a grey-blue web as delicate as a spider’s. Here and there among the trees, a peeling of bark takes the light in a flash of silver, almost indistinguishable from the occasional glint off metal where the line of soldiers stands along the margin of the trees. Koda can make out the long barrels of the two howitzers drawn up behind them only because she already knows where to look. Below the downslope of the hill where she stands, mist rises off the Cheyenne to curl around the pylons and rails of the narrow bridge, coiling, loosing and coiling again as it spirals across the meadow, breaking like surf where it climbs against the steeply rising piedmont of the Paha Sapa to the northwest. Tacoma and most of their infantry lie concealed in the folds of those basalt ridges. The mist gives them further cover as it seeps by fissure and rock chimney into the badlands, though it cannot hide them from heat or infrared sensors.