Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

a scalp wasn't enough, after a fight like that. Raoul got a firm grip on the thick, stiff-standing hank of black hair in the center of his enemy's head and brought the knife down on the brown throat. Chopping and slicing and sawing, as if butchering a steer, Raoul cut through the thick neck until at last the head came free.

He lofted the head in his left hand, looking up at the still-open dead eyes.

"There, you goddamned redskin son of a bitch! Thought you could kill me, huh?"

A shrill woman's voice broke in on his triumph.

He turned to see a witchlike woman wrapped in a blanket. Her finger was pointing at him. Her voice went on and on, screeching at him.

She was tall, but starvation had stripped the flesh from her bones. Her sunken eyes seemed to glow in her skull-like face. He felt as if he was facing some horrid spectre.

He threw the warrior's head down. Curse him, would she? He snarled like an angry wolf as he reached for the woman. She didn't even try to get away. He seized the scrawny neck and pulled her to him, bringing the Bowie knife's point up against her throat.

She started singing, a weird, high-pitched caterwauling. He'd heard something like it before. Where?[384]

When he'd been about to shoot Auguste and those two other Indians at Old Man's Creek. They'd sung like that right at the end.

Her dark eyes held him. They were not clouded over with anger or terror, but clear with full understanding that he was going to kill her. She was not afraid. He wished he could frighten her, force her to grovel, but someone might try to stop him from doing it. Her voice went on and on, chanting, up and down.

He'd silence her now. Redskin bitch.

He drove the knife into her throat and jerked it sideways. Her song ended in a sickening rasp.

Still the brown eyes were fixed on him. Her blood spurted out of the gash he had cut open, splashed over his knife blade, poured hot on his hand. It spread down over her dress and over the gold lace on his sleeve. He looked down at his red hand and felt some force within him stretch his lips and bare his teeth.

He thrust the woman away from him. Her eyes were still open, but she looked at no one and nothing. She fell to the ground like a bundle of sticks. She lay on her back, the deep wound in her throat spread wide, her eyes staring up.

He stood over her and saw that something shiny had fallen out of the front of her dress and lay beside her head. Tied around her neck with a purple ribbon was an oval metal case splashed with blood.

He had seen the case, or one like it. He reached down with the knife and slashed the ribbon. He wiped his knife on his jacket and slammed it into its sheath, then picked up the slippery case and opened it.

A pair of spectacles. Round, gold frames, thick glass lenses.

They looked exactly like Pierre's old spectacles. Was that possible? How could this Indian woman have gotten them? Stolen from Victoire, when the Sauk burned it?

Or had the mongrel somehow gotten his father's spectacles, taken them with him when he fled from Victor? Pierre's watch had disappeared then; Raoul was sure Auguste had stolen it. And if this woman had Pierre's glasses now, could she be the Sauk woman Pierre had lived with, the mother of his bastard son?

Despite the August heat beating down on the clearing, the air around Raoul suddenly felt winter cold. All day long while he fought the Indians he'd struggled with his fear of being killed. Now a worse[385] fear had him in its grip, a fear of something worse than death, of having called down upon himself a vengeance that would follow him beyond the grave.

My God! I've just killed Pierre's squaw.

The spectacles stared up at him like accusing eyes. The flesh of his back prickled.

He shut the case and dropped it into his pocket. If it was Pierre's he couldn't just throw it away.

The few remaining Indians, a flock of women and children, huddled weeping with their backs to a big tree, arms around one another. Some were already wounded and screaming in pain.

Tiredly Raoul told himself he must reload rifle and pistol and get on with the killing. But his anger was spent. He felt empty, worn out.

From somewhere behind him came a shout of, "Cease fire!"

It was welcome. He'd done enough.

"Yonder come the bluebellies," said Levi.

"Ah, merde," muttered Armand, standing with red-dripping bayonet above a pile of bodies.

Raoul looked around. The order to stop the shooting had come from their rear, from a short, stout officer who, as Dodge had, was advancing with drawn saber. Colonel Zachary Taylor.

Taylor looked around the smoking glade at the dead, big bodies and little ones, brown flesh and tan deerskin splashed with bright red, eyes staring, limbs helter-skelter.

"Jesus Christ." He turned to Raoul, pain in his bright blue eyes.

Raoul felt his face grow hot. "Colonel," he said, "you understand why we had to—"

Taylor's expression changed from sadness to weariness. "I've been out on the frontier for over twenty years. I don't see anything here that I haven't seen before." He turned away before Raoul could answer and called, "Lieutenant Davis!"

A tall young officer with a handsome, angular face came up to him and saluted.

Taylor said, "Jeff, run ahead and make sure any Indians left on this island get a chance to surrender." He turned to Raoul again, shaking his head.

"Why let them surrender?" Raoul said.

"There's only a few left alive," said Taylor. "And we're not going[386] to kill them. And if you need a reason, it's because I wouldn't feel right about it, and I know a lot of the men wouldn't feel right about it."

Taylor turned to one of his men, a red-faced trooper with a thick blond mustache. "Sergeant Benson, get me that Sauk man we captured. We'll be needing to talk to the Indians. We want to find out what's happened to Black Hawk."

Raoul was painfully aware that Taylor's eyes had shifted to his right hand, covered with blood. He wanted to hide it behind his back.

He looked Raoul up and down. "Good God, man. Do you know you've got blood all over you?"

"Enemy blood," said Raoul.

"I see you've got a scalp tied to your belt," Taylor said. "General Atkinson issued an order against mutilating enemy dead."

Raoul felt himself shaking again, not with fear, but with anger. "I saw one of my best friends shot dead with an arrow through the throat today."

"And this?" Taylor asked, pointing to the severed head of the big brave lying a few feet from Raoul's red-spotted boots. "Was this to avenge your friend too? You'd better get back to your steamship, Mr. de Marion. I don't think we have any more need of your services here."

It was not so much Taylor's words, but the mingled contempt and pity in his voice that enraged Raoul. His fist clenched on the handle of his knife.

Taylor wore a pistol and carried a saber, but he was a far smaller man than Raoul, and his stout body, dressed today in a blue jacket and knee-high fringed buckskin boots, seemed to invite attack.

Taylor's calm blue eyes went to Raoul's hand, then back to his face. He stood motionless, waiting.

God! What am I thinking? The regulars would shoot me down the minute I drew this knife.

Raoul silently beckoned to his men and started back through the broken trees the way they had come.

After walking a short distance, Raoul saw the sergeant Taylor had sent behind the lines coming toward him with an Indian walking beside him.

Raoul glanced at the Indian and stopped dead.[387]

He felt as if the arrow he'd been expecting and fearing all day had finally struck him.

There are no ghosts.

But Auguste couldn't be alive. He'd been shot to death at Old Man's Creek.

Was this what killing Pierre's squaw had brought on him?

The man before him had gone hungry for a long time. His almost skull-like face was a chilling reminder of the woman whose throat Raoul had slashed. But his gauntness also made him look more like Pierre than ever before. His buckskin leggings, like those of the Indians Raoul had just killed, were dirty and full of rips and holes. But the pale scar line running down his cheek, and those five parallel scars on his bare chest, left Raoul in no doubt who this was. Auguste's dark eyes burned at Raoul, alight with a fierce hatred.

The sergeant pulled Auguste by the arm. As the mongrel turned, Raoul suddenly saw that the middle of his ear was missing, the empty space bordered by partly healed red flesh.

Stunned speechless, Raoul looked at Levi and Armand, who stared back at him. They couldn't speak either. They were just as shaken.

Still burning at Taylor's high-and-mighty dismissal of him, Raoul was staggered by the shock of this meeting. But he saw one thing clear. All right, Auguste was still alive. That meant Raoul's revenge on the Sauk was not complete. Auguste was a traitor. Auguste was a murderer. And Raoul was going to work day and night to get him hanged.

[388]

21
The Red Blanket

Longing to hear that White Bear was safe, Redbird could not stop thinking about him. She sat cross-legged on the ground with Floating Lily bundled in a blanket on her lap. She gazed out at the small lake where Black Hawk and his few remaining followers had set up camp. This was a peaceful place, but with White Bear gone and her dread of what might have happened to her loved ones at the Bad Axe, she could feel no peace.

"A lovely place, this lake," said Owl Carver, sitting beside her.

But it is far from White Bear.

The thought of White Bear's having to make his way through Winnebago country haunted her. She longed to look into the birch forest behind her lean-to and see him walking toward her through the white tree trunks.

She missed Yellow Hair and Woodrow too. They were to her another sister, another son. She hoped that by now they were out of danger.

She had left so many people behind at the Bad Axe, people who had always been part of her life—Sun Woman, Iron Knife, her two sisters. In the seven days since Black Hawk had led their little group north on the ridge trail leading to Chippewa country, there had been no word from the rest of the band.

Redbird's fear for the people she loved was like a ferret eating away at her insides.

From his medicine bag Owl Carver took the pale eyes time teller White Bear had given him and opened its gold outer shell. Redbird saw black markings on its inner surface and two black arrows.[389]

Could it tell me when White Bear will come back?

The old shaman dangled the time teller by its gold chain over Floating Lily's tiny head. The gold disk gave off a regular, clicking sound, like the beating of a metal heart. Floating Lily's brown eyes opened wide and her flower-petal lips curved in a wide, toothless smile.

Eagle Feather, sitting beside Redbird, said, "Grandfather? Is it right to use a sacred thing just to make the baby smile?"

Owl Carver smiled. His face these days seemed to have caved in. All of his front teeth were gone, and his mouth was as sunken as Floating Lily's, while his chin and his nose jutted out.

"A baby's smile is also a sacred thing."

Redbird said, "Have you asked the spirits what has become of the rest of our people?"

From a cord around his waist Owl Carver untied a medicine bag decorated with a beadwork owl. He opened it, let little gray scraps sift through his fingers and sighed.

"Last night I chewed bits of sacred mushroom," Owl Carver said. "I saw pale eyes' things—lodges that travel over the ground on trails made of metal, smoking boats with bonfires in their bellies, villages as big as prairies. Crowds of pale eyes seemed to be cheering for me. It made no sense. It told me nothing about what happened at the Bad Axe. Maybe I took too much."

Redbird glanced down at Eagle Feather. His mouth was a circle, and his blue eyes as he stared up at Owl Carver were so wide that she could see the whites above and below them. He strained toward Owl Carver, his longing to follow his father and grandfather in the way of the shaman showing in every line of his body.

She had always felt that same longing.

"Let me try your sacred mushrooms," said Redbird. "Sun Woman says sometimes women can see into places