“Will you tell us the content of the vision?”
Ripple had whimpered in horror.
Water Bow then said, “There is another way to end this: You could deny that Old Woman North ever came to you. Say it never happened. Tell your people that it was just a story. A way for a young man to impress people. They’ll understand.”
He doggedly shook his head, only to have it twisted down by the guards so he stared at his crotch. He blinked, seeing Larkspur’s fingers, slick with blood as she took a second yucca leaf and placed the hard point against the skin of his penis.
Had he shrieked again? He couldn’t remember. He had been sobbing after that. Tears had silvered his vision. But one image—clinging through the blur—had been of Larkspur, her pink tongue flicking as she licked his fresh blood from her long brown fingers.
I didn’t break. By the gods, Cold Bringing Woman, I didn’t betray you. The thought rolled over and over in his head.
When he finally threw up, thick yellow bile soaked the broken roots of his teeth and burned like bitter fire through the side of his head.
The ache in Bulrush’s bones, joints, and muscles sucked at his exhausted souls. He had never felt as weary as he did when he half stumbled into the dusty plaza in front of his home. His back was bowed under the weight of the burden basket. The food he and his companions had cooked along the way had helped; sweet boiled corn had given him enough strength to tote the load down the wash trail to Saltbush Farmstead.
He looked around, now half afraid of what he’d find. No one sat beneath the tattered ramadas, or lingered in the shadows of the three shabby pit houses. The southwest wind chased little trailers of dust across the packed clay of the plaza, and flipped bits of juniper bark, flecks of charcoal, and other litter around.
Gods, was anyone still alive?
He glanced over his shoulder where Uncle Sage trudged—head down and dust-streaked—his hair batted this way and that by the aggravating wind. The older man’s feet shuffled doggedly toward the low dome of his own dwelling.
Over the last couple of days, Bulrush hadn’t been sure they’d make it. None of the men who left on the raid had been in good shape to start with. All had been gaunted by hunger, their reserves depleted.
But now we’re home. We did it!
A rush, like ecstasy, charged his aching limbs, only to drain away as he swung the heavy basket to the ground and glanced up at the rounded roof of Gourd Pendant’s house. The familiar ladder uprights, one side longer than the other, thrust desolately up from the smoke hole into the brassy summer sky.
Bulrush sighed, his mouth too dried from thirst to call out with more than a croak, and, step by step, climbed the notched pole that led onto the curved roof. He crawled across to the ladder and looked down into the shadowed interior. “Anybody here?”
“Bulrush?” Gourd Pendant called.
He squinted down into the dim room. Below him, beneath the ladder, the fire pit was nothing more than a gray stain of ash. He could see the mealing bins in the corner by the deflector. A sandal last, half covered with woven yucca leaves, lay abandoned on the floor as did two corrugated cooking pots, one resting on its side next to the sandstone slabs used to prop it over the fire. Gourd Pendant’s prized tchamahia, along with the one she’d inherited from her mother, lay flat in the dirt, as though they no longer mattered. Two yucca-fiber dolls looked abandoned on the stained floor.
Swallowing down his dry throat, he turned his gaze to the bedding along the west wall, terrified of what he’d find.
He could see them lying on their willow-mat bedding. Blossom and Lizard were tucked under his wife’s right arm. All three of them looked so thin, nothing but sticks of brown flesh, too-round heads black-thatched with filthy mats of long hair.
His children stirred, looking up with hope-filled eyes that sucked at his souls. In unison they asked, “Father?”
“I’ve brought food.” It seemed so difficult to say. He wanted to laugh, to jump around, wave his arms, and shout. Instead, an inexplicable tightness pulled at his throat, and tears—impossible given his thirst-ridden condition—rimmed his eyes, dripping one by one like silver drops of rain into the dark interior.
In the end, he wept, his voice breaking as he repeated over and over, “We will live. We will live.”
Eighteen
Deputy War Chief Leather Hand squatted on his muscular brown legs and studied the ground. He cocked his head, reaching down to run his fingers through the pale yellow dirt between his feet. He tightened his fist, lifting the powdery soil and watching it run between his fingers—only to be whipped away by the unforgiving southwest wind.