Chapter Nine
For a moment, she felt no emotion. It was as if she’d been hit hard in the stomach; all the breath had gone out of her. Then the pain came deep in her soul, and it hurt worse than anything she had experienced—hurt worse than birthing a baby. She bit her lip to keep from crying out and tasted blood. Oh, God, why had she hung on to the subject? This was something she didn’t want to know.
“I—I’m sorry, Summer.” He sounded like a beaten man, so different from the proud, arrogant one of only moments ago. “It meant nothing to me. You had returned to Boston. I thought you had betrayed me, gone of your own free will. I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”
She was so hurt, she was struggling not to weep, and yet she was so angry, if she had had a weapon, at that moment, she would have killed him. “How like a man!” she said wryly, “can’t do without a woman to top, doesn’t matter who she is!”
He made a dismissing gesture in the moonlight streaming through the lodge opening. “That’s not true and you know it. I thought you were gone forever.”
“Was she good?”
“Why do we have to get into all this now that I’ve admitted it?”
“I just want to know; was she good?”
“Not like you; never like you. She was there, I hadn’t had a woman in weeks, she threw herself at me.”
She turned over and began to cry, angry with him for . admitting it. “Why in God’s name did you tell me? Why didn’t you deny it?”
“I tried. You insisted on the truth.” He attempted to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away.
“You cheating, cheating bastard!”
“It doesn’t matter that I thought you didn’t love me? That I believed you were never coming back?”
“Excuses! Why is it men always make excuses?”
“I don’t see any point in dragging this out any longer with questions that you obviously don’t intend for me to answer.” His voice was grim. “I told you it didn’t have any love in it, only lust. What happened in the late fall of ’58 while you were in Boston is history; that’s a long time ago.”
“Not long enough.”
“Little One, I am sorry; I never meant to hurt you. I love you like I have never loved another woman.” Again he tried to put his arms around her, and she slapped him.
“Get your hands off me, you cheating, rotten bastard.”
“If you were a man, I’d kill you for that!”
“And if I were a man, I’d kill you for hurting me!” She got up, sat down near the fire, put her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. The baby in her cradleboard began to cry. “Now see what you’ve done, you woke up Garnet.”
“I—” He started to say something, cursed under his breath, and turned his back to her.
The two little boys stirred restlessly in their sleep, and Summer picked up the baby, shushing her quietly as she soothed her and offered the child her breast. Garnet sucked hungrily, and Summer closed her eyes. At least it was relaxing to nurse her baby. Her Cheyenne warrior had given her three of the most handsome and endearing children. They meant more than anything in the world to her—except him.
She both hated him and loved him at the same time, but he had hurt her in a way she had never experienced before. No one can hurt you like someone you love, she thought dully. What to do now? She was wounded and she was angry. She listened for Iron Knife to sit up, reach for her, take her, baby and all, back to his buffalo robes to cuddle and kiss. Once long ago when they had argued and she had taken her blanket and gone to the other side of the tipi, he had come across that tipi, swept her up in his arms, and taken her back to his blankets to make love to all night long.
He didn’t move now, and she couldn’t be sure whether he slept or not. She sat there until almost dawn, holding her baby. She couldn’t sleep anyway. When she closed her eyes, she tortured herself with mental images of Iron Knife and Gray Dove together, him lying between the Arapaho girl’s brown thighs, his mouth on her big breasts. Had she been more exciting, a better lover than Summer? Did he ever think of the girl’s body wistfully and compare her lovemaking to Summer’s?
Stop it! she thought, but it was difficult to force it from her mind. More than that, what was Summer going to do in the future? She couldn’t think at all right now; all she could do was hurt inside. She felt betrayed. His reasoning that he thought Summer had left him forever was a weak excuse. Of course, some might point out that when she’d gone back to Boston, she’d gotten herself engaged to Austin Shaw, her old childhood sweetheart, but she hadn’t let him take any liberties, like sleeping with him. Not that a very proper Boston gentleman would have taken advantage of a lady.
What was she going to do now that she knew? She might ask Cherokee and Silver for refuge, but Cherokee was a friend of Iron Knife’s, and Silver struck her as a no-nonsense type who would probably tell her to forgive and forget. How could Summer forgive when she could think of nothing else right now? She might contact her rich father; but he would enjoy saying “I told you so,” and Summer was too proud to ask for his charity. Silas Van Schuyler had not built his fortune by being soft and merciful; he was a hard, unforgiving man.
If she took her children and went to Denver, what kind of a job could she get? At Miss Priddy’s Female Academy, they had taught her to speak French and play the harp. No one expected a wealthy, aristocrat girl to ever support herself, be anything but decorative. Todd Shaw, her old fiancé’s younger brother, might try to get her a job at the newspaper; but she had no journalism skills, and she was too proud to accept Todd’s charity. The longer she thought about it, the more Summer faced the fact that she probably had no alternatives but to stay with her man. How many women over the centuries had been stuck in this very same predicament? Millions, she thought, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.
In the morning, the atmosphere between her and Iron Knife was cool, distant. They avoided looking into each other’s eyes. Summer wished now she had never found out about Gray Dove. He was evidently angry that she had forced him to admit his transgression and then became furious with him for behaving like most men would. Summer couldn’t think rationally anymore. She might be behaving like a jealous, hysterical bitch, but the image of her man in the arms of an enemy girl who had once plotted to kill Summer infuriated her. If it had been anyone else but the Arapaho slut, perhaps she could have pushed it out of her mind.
She loved and hated him at the same time. She wanted to throw herself in his arms and listen to him tell her he loved her, and she wanted to attack him with both fists because of the anger that burned within her.
He came to her that night, tried to take her in his arms, but she remained as stiff as a ramrod. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
He started to kiss her, but she turned her face away so that his lips only brushed her cheek. “I—I just never thought that you would ever touch another woman.”
“You left me; what was I supposed to do?”
She whirled on him, her fists clenched. “I was kidnapped, I didn’t leave of my own free will. You could have at least trusted me enough to wait and find out the truth.”
“Maybe I should have, but I’m a man—”
“And men do their thinking with what hangs between their legs!” She was working herself into a fresh rage.
He half-raised his hands as if he would embrace her, seemed to think better of it, then dropped them to his sides. “If I could go back and change that, I would, Summer; it tears me up to see you so hurt. The past is set in stone; I can’t change it. You were and are and always will be my once in a lifetime love, and I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t lose me”—she kept her voice glacier cold as she turned away from him—“I don’t seem to have many alternatives except to stay.”
“And we’re going to live like this from now on; you turning away from me when I touch you?”
“What do you expect me to do, say ‘it doesn’t matter, sleep around anytime you want’?”
He sighed. “I’ll do anything I can to make it up to you. What is it you expect me to do?”
She didn’t know. He had apologized, but that didn’t change the fact that he had lain with another woman after he had been making love to her. She clenched her small fists, resisting the urge to strike out at him, beat him in the face and on the chest until she fell panting with exhaustion. That wouldn’t change what had happened; that was what was making her so sad and so angry. The past was set in stone, and it couldn’t be changed, no matter how sorry he was. In her mind, she saw him between Gray Dove’s thighs, thrusting hard into the Indian girl, putting his mouth on her big breasts. It seemed she could think of nothing else.
“I love you,” he said again. “Will you stay and give me a chance to make it up to you?”
She shrugged, her voice cold. “I don’t seem to have a great many options with no income, no place to go and three little children.”
“I am sorry I have no money to send you wherever you want to go,” he said with great dignity, “but you knew that when you chose me. And if you think I would let you take my children from me to be raised by another man, you know me better than that.” He twisted his fingers in her pale hair, turned her face up to his. “You are mine, Summer Sky, and I will not give you up. I love you too much.”
“Don’t speak to me of love; all you feel for me is lust.” She pulled away from him. “All right, I am here for your convenience, to cook and warm your bed. You can trade me off for a rifle or a good horse, just like other warriors have done with their captive women.”
“If that’s the way you want it.” He glared down at her. “I’m a proud man, Summer Sky, and I am not used to begging. If you won’t forgive me and I won’t give you up, we’ll run this relationship on your terms.”
“As master and captive?”
He swore under his breath. “If you say so.”
“Then you can take a second wife, an Indian wife,” she snapped curtly, flinging her head so that her hair fell across her shoulders in a golden swirl. “I will have to lie there at night and pretend to be asleep as you enjoy her—unless you feel an urge for me that night.”
His dark eyes were cold and hard with anger. “I may just do that—white slave girl.”
It was cold that first week of January that the Cheyenne called Okseyeshihis. The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux gathered in the northeast corner of that vast area that was already being called Colorado to plan their revenge raids.
Summer and Iron Knife had been like two strangers sharing the same lodge the past few days. Now, when she knew that the warriors were to ride out to attack the stage station and the town of Julesburg, Summer felt she must protest, at least in the privacy of their tipi. “Can’t this be solved in any other way without killing people?”
Iron Knife’s expression was cold and remote. “You answer that, veho squaw; your people spilled much blood at Sand Creek.”
She winced at the hardness in his eyes, but her hurt and anger had not faded. “I forget I am only a captive and not permitted to speak without knowing my master may beat me.”
For just a moment, she saw his eyes soften, and his hand trembled, almost seemed to reach toward her; then he squared his broad shoulders. “Even now, the soldiers are no doubt plotting to attack us again, treacherous as rattlesnakes. What will happen next is out of my hands.”
“And you expect me just to sit and wait while the warriors of this band kill other whites?”
“You are a captive, remember? You said so yourself, with no standing in this tribe. Neither of us could stop this should I want to, and at this moment, my heart is filled with bitterness at the whites. We will attack that place called Fort Sedgewick.”
“But there’s a town there, Julesburg, with a stage station. There’ll probably be women and children.”
He frowned at her. “There were women and children at Sand Creek, remember? Have you seen little Bear Cub? Remember that young, gentle boy who only wanted to be an artist and draw pictures? With that leg injury, he will limp the rest of his life.”
She looked at his stony face as he turned and left their lodge, realizing he no longer listened to her and his heart had gone hard. She blinked back tears as she soothed her baby. What had happened to the once in a lifetime love that had been meant to last forever? Deep in her heart, she knew she had had a hand in killing it with her jealousy, her screeching accusations. She had moved her blankets and buffalo robes away from his so that she no longer slept in his arms at night. Once, a long time ago, when she had insisted on sleeping alone, he had come after her, forced her back into his bed where he could kiss her and hold her close. Now she slept alone with her children clustered around her, and Iron Knife didn’t seem to care.
Little Garnet looked up at her and took her thumb from her red rosebud mouth. “Mama sad?”
“I—I’m all right.” The realization hit Summer. Her child spoke Cheyenne. Unless she began to teach them immediately, her children would never speak English. She was rearing white savages to live in tipis and skin buffalos while her friends’ children back in Boston would be learning to curtsey and dance the waltz. If the Indian wars didn’t end, someday her sons would be riding the war trail with their faces painted; her daughter would be scraping hides and begging around forts for scraps of food.
She heard noise outside and went to the entry of her tipi to watch Storm Gathering galloping past on his pony with the other little boys, pretending to be a dog soldier raiding party. He was darker, more like the Cheyenne in temperament than his older brother. When he grew up, her son would kill white people and eat raw buffalo liver—if there were any buffalo left by then. She had loved Iron Knife with all her heart, and nothing else had mattered to her; but since they had grown apart these last few days, life among the Indians seemed like a hopeless prison sentence. She was indeed nothing more than a white captive.
Iron Knife strode to the camp circle where the honored warriors met in council. As a dog soldier, and a carrier of the Dog Rope, he was one of those who sat in the circle inside the big lodge. Outside, he saw the half-grown Bent sons, half-breeds who had fled their father’s trading post and rejoined their mother’s Cheyenne people.
Iron Knife, his uncle and his two cousins sat cross-legged in the circle. He waited respectfully as the pipe was lit and offered solemnly to the earth, sky and all four directions before being passed around the warriors. Spotted Tail and Pawnee Killer of the Sioux were in that circle, as where chiefs who had survived Sand Creek. A young leader of the Oglala Sioux, Sitting Bull, impressed Iron Knife with his thoughts on battle strategy. After much talk, it was decided that yes, they would attack Fort Sedgewick which guarded both the buffalo plains and the stagecoach and wagon routes along the South Platte River.
Iron Knife stood to speak. “You know me and my deeds of war.”
“We know you have a white wife,” a very young and scornful dog soldier snorted.
Everyone glared at the young one. It was not proper to interrupt a warrior who had stood to speak. Iron Knife glared at the offender. “Coyote pups make much noise,” he said gravely, “but men fear the silent adult grizzly.”
The others smiled and nodded at the retort, and the outspoken one slumped down in his place, humiliated.
“Once I was in favor of peace,” Iron Knife said, “but it seems we cannot count on even the whites’ flag flying over us to keep our women and children safe. Some of those here have lost loved ones at Sand Creek, and some of us will carry scars of that attack forever.”
Again there was a murmuring of assent among the warriors. Iron Knife’s and his cousins’ valor were well known. “I say to you that if we hit the fort, remember they have the talking wires, the telegraph that will need to be cut so they won’t be able to sound the alarm.”
Scalp Taker looked at him gravely. “Now that Deer Slayer has told us why the Medicine Arrows were bloody, and we’ve done the cleansing ritual, I no longer fear to fight. Can we take this fort?”
Iron Knife nodded. “If we plan our ambush carefully. Remember, too, that we can use the food and supplies we will find at the sutler’s stores there in the town. There may also be good horses since Ben Holladay’s stagecoaches stop there.”
Pawnee Killer listened for a long moment. “The Cheyenne dog soldier has the advantage of the white thinking. The Sioux would like him to help plan the ambush.”
Iron Knife hesitated. Once he would not have ridden against white settlers; but now his body was scarred from the attack of Sand Creek, and he no longer thought of himself as white. He was Cheyenne, son of War Bonnet, with many coups to his credit. Summer Sky would be sad if he helped kill whites, but he had hardened his heart because she had spurned him and his apologies. A proud man could only humiliate himself so much before rebelling. “I would be honored to help plan this raid. We will be sending a message to all whites that we will retaliate when attacked!”
A murmur of approval went around the circle, and the pipe was passed to him. He did not hesitate as he asked the great god, Heammawihio, for guidance and took a puff before passing it gravely to his cousins. His old uncle, Chief Clouds Above, fingered the bear claw necklace that hung around his wrinkled throat and pulled his Pendelton blanket around his bent shoulders against the January cold. His grave smile and nod told Iron Knife how proud he was of his nephew.
His mind was troubled when the meeting broke up, so Iron Knife did not talk much to his cousins, Two Arrows and Lance Bearer. Clouds Above was having trouble again with the clogging of the lungs that cold weather sometimes brought to the old. He did not think the old man would survive the harsh winter, but then, he had already lived a long time for a Cheyenne warrior. Most of them died young in battle, and he expected that it would be the same for him. If old Clouds Above died, that would make Iron Knife the oldest of the warriors of his family, with his cousins looking to him for wisdom. And he was not even a respected master of his own lodge.
Iron Knife went out on a rise and offered prayers. He also sacrificed small pieces of skin cut from his body in hopes of a successful raid. This custom was the inspiration for the Cheyenne name in sign language, a cutting motion of the right forefinger across the left. Their Sioux allies had given them the name Shahiyena—strange-talking people—when they had first met, and the name remained.
It was cold, a sharp wind blowing this first week of the new year, 1865. What it would bring, he was afraid to contemplate, but he sat before his own fire late that night, long after the chanting and drumming of war parties around the big camp fire had ceased.
Summer watched him from her blankets, but pretended to sleep. He had been staring into the flames for hours. Finally she could stand it no more. She sat up and looked around at her children sleeping soundly in the glow of the fire. “You ride in the morning?”
He only nodded.
She didn’t know what to say. She loved him still, and the idea that he would ride out to battle with this silence between them upset her. Then she thought of the old white people, the women and children who might die on the morrow, and her heart hardened. “Is there no way to stop this?”
He turned and looked at her. “If you think to ride and warn the settlers, you would never get out of this camp.”
“You trust me so little, then, that I might plot in ways that would get you killed tomorrow?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. I look at you and see a yellow-haired stranger, not my woman.”
She didn’t know what to say. The gulf between them had started as a crack and now seemed to be a canyon. “You’ve been treating me like a stranger, a captive.”
He only grunted and, wrapping himself in his blankets, turned his back to her and slept.
Summer did not sleep all that night. She was not sure he slept much, either. She lay there waiting for the cold, gray dawn, knowing that he might be killed today as might some white people. There was no good answer.
With the dawn, Iron Knife and the other warriors began to make their preparations to ride out.
Summer watched him gather his things in silence, the dream shield, called a howan, the Dog Rope, his buffalo robe and his weapons. As was the custom, he stripped to a small breechcloth and moccasins. The eagle bone whistle that marked him as a dog soldier hung from his sinewy neck, and in his right ear gleamed the brass button earring taken from the uniform of a dead cavalry officer. His hair shone as black as obsidian as he combed it with a porcupine tail brush and drew it into a braid over his left ear. Hammered silver coins and otter fur decorated his braided hair.
They did not speak as he began to apply his war paint in the mirror of a shiny brass pot. From a burned tree struck by lightning, he had made ebony paint and now drew black, jagged lightning streaks on his face. With yellow clay, he painted hail marks of the mighty storm on his brawny chest. At last, he put on his father’s fine eagle feather war bonnet. In the past, he had worn the usual dog soldier raven feather bonnet, but he had won enough war honors now to wear his father’s. Each eagle feather advertised a coup, an act of bravery. The band was decorated with dragonflies, and in the center of the band was painted one tiny bluebonnet flower, to represent Tejas, that place called Texas, where War Bonnet had stolen Iron Knife’s mother from a wagon train, the white girl with eyes as deep blue as the prairie flower.
Now Summer Sky reached for his howan, the dream shield he had inherited from his father, and took it from its tripod. Made from the tough hide of a buffalo bull, it would deflect lance and arrow, even some bullets. A dream shield came with its own taboos. Its owner must not eat an animal’s heart or eat from a kettle in which such had been cooked before he went into battle; to do so would bring him bad luck, possibly even death. It was a beautiful, savage thing, she thought, fringed around the edge with the feathers of gray eagles and sandhill cranes with bear claws sewn to the four cardinal points of the circle. In the middle was a large painting of a dragonfly because this insect was a predator, a warrior among insects, difficult to see and difficult to catch. She handed it to him, and he hung it over his mighty arm.
“You are taking the Hotamtsit, too?”
“You know I am. Why do you ask?” He took the red, long leather band, richly decorated with porcupine quills, and hung it over his shoulder.
Then he went out to ready his bay Appaloosa stallion. With white clay, he painted jagged lightning bolts down Spotted Blanket’s forelegs to make him swift. Along his flanks, Iron Knife painted magic dragonflies to make the steed dart fast and sure. On the horse’s shoulders, he put red and black handprints to show the owner had fought and killed other men in hand-to-hand combat. Now he tied up his stallion’s tail as was the custom. Finally, he sprinkled the magic gray powder, sihyainoeisseeo, on all four hooves and blew it between the horse’s ears to make it invulnerable to wounds.
He turned to his children. “Take care of your mother, my sons, until I return.”
Storm smiled. “You will kill many enemies, Father. I wish I could go with you!”
Summer winced. Back in Boston, her friends’ children would be learning how to handle a fork and proper diction. Hers would be learning how to cut a man’s throat so swiftly he could not cry out a warning and how to take a scalp.
“Summer?” He waited.
She blinked back her tears, looking up at his tall frame. With the war paint, his handsome face seemed almost a grotesque mask. A stranger, she thought, the father of my children is a savage stranger. Then she saw the longing in his eyes. He wanted her to give some sign that she cared for him, and she almost weakened. Abruptly, she saw an image in her mind of him lying on the ripe body of the Arapaho girl, Gray Dove, and thought of the whites who would die today. Instead, she held out his buffalo robe and his weapons. “You will need these.”
He took them from her, and his face hardened. “If that is the way you want it.”
Was it? She was so torn by emotion, she wasn’t sure how she felt about him anymore, so she did not answer.
With a sigh, he turned from her and began the final preparation. He rubbed the magic gray powder all over his body to protect himself from bullets. Now no woman might touch him until he returned from battle; to do so would nullify the magic.
Taking his weapons, his buffalo robe and his dream shield, he mounted his horse. Spotted Blanket seemed to know they were riding into battle because the stallion stamped its feet and danced with excitement. The Pawnee scalps hanging from the decorated war bridle swung with the motion. The long tails of Iron Knife’s war bonnet trailed almost to the ground, and the wind blew the feathers as Iron Knife looked at her.
She wanted to run to him; but he had already applied the magic powder, so she dared not. Instead, she took her two sons by the hand. “Go with God,” she said.
He nodded, put his heels to his stallion’s flanks and loped out to join the others.