After the Thunder (28 page)

“Did you ever see it before? That mighty, blazing star?”

“No.”

“Then it’s a sign. For us. Because we love each other! Because we made love.”

He sat up, too, and pulled her, trembling, into his arms to warm her. To try to stop the words he knew would come.

“What does it mean?”

“It means love … and life! It means you aren’t going to … die,” she said, choking on the dreaded word. “It means we’ll both live … and love each other for years and years and years.”

He rested his chin on top of her head so he wouldn’t have to look into her great, shining brown eyes while his heart broke into tiny pieces inside his chest.

“Don’t … get your hopes up again, my sweet
holitopa
. Please, Cotannah, don’t.”

The star stayed with them all night. Cotannah fell asleep as soon as the excitement of finding it had become the great hope that had settled, warm and sustaining, in her heart. She nestled spoonlike into the curve of Walks-With-Spirits’s body, wrapped both her arms around one of his hard-muscled ones, and slept, deeply, until just before dawn.

When she woke the night was at its blackest, clinging desperately to the sky for its last hour, the moon and many stars beginning to fade. But their star shone on, splendidly bright and immovable.

For a long time, she didn’t realize that Walks-With-Spirits was awake.

“It’s an irony, isn’t it?” he said, and his low, rich voice rumbled softly in her ear as his chest rose and fell
against her back. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be teaching you.”

She waited, but he didn’t say any more.

“Does that mean you believe me now, about the star?”

“I want to,” he said, “but that’s not the most important thing. I had no right to tell you not to hope. Your spirit is brave, and it flies high; I shouldn’t stand on the ground and try to shoot it down.”

She turned within his embrace to face him and snuggled deeper into their cozy bed until her head rested in the crook of his arm. She grinned at him in the light from the fire.

“Fly with me,” she said. “We might see your friend Hawk that you claim sits on your shoulders. I hope he comes to visit while we’re here in his valley.”

He gave her a look that made her blood run hot again.

“You’re the only friend I need.”

When he bent his head to kiss her she met him halfway.

They got up and dressed, shivering in the frosty morning, after the sun splashed its first light into their faces, made a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs and bread toasted on sticks, ate it ravenously, and set out on foot across the valley meadow.

“The wild horses may not be anywhere near here anymore,” Walks-With-Spirits said, swallowing up the ground with his long, effortless stride, “but this valley and the one over the next ridge will have good grass during the Cold Time, and they wintered here last year.”

Cotannah stretched her long legs and tried to keep up.

“I guess so. The turkey grass is knee-high here.”

Suddenly, she whirled around and walked backward,
staring at Pretty Feather grazing near the bank of the river.

“What if they’re behind us instead of over this ridge? Would your wild stallion try to steal my mare while we’re gone?”

He shrugged and walked faster.

“Who knows? She’s hobbled, so I doubt he could take her far.”

“But what would happen if he did? Could we get her back from him?”

“No,” he said, in a teasing tone, “we’d have to stay here forever.”

Cotannah looked around, at the sunshine glinting off the silver frost that covered every leaf, every blade of grass, every rock. At the intriguing white mist she loved to watch rising along the length of the river. The deep wine red of the sumacs and the brighter oranges and yellows of the oak and sweet gum leaves shimmered beneath the frost like sweet promises, the evergreen junipers looked blue in places, so thick was their burden of berries.

The sky picked up the blue again, one shade deeper, and the mountains showed every blue in existence, rolling on and on until they darkened with distance into purple and indigo. And back there, at their camp, their fire glowed, safely banked within its circle of stones.

“That’s fine with me,” she said, drawing in a long, deep breath of the forest-scented air. “There’s nowhere I’d rather stay forever.”

They walked on in silence, then, afraid to say any more lest they ruin this first precious day.

The herd of wild horses was grazing and playing exactly where Walks-With-Spirits thought it would be, in the circular valley on the other side of the nearest wooded, rocky ridge paralleling the river. Halfway down
the other side, he signaled her to be quieter yet, and when they slipped through the trees at the bottom of the hill and peered out through a screen of close-growing cedars, the horses appeared to be completely unaware of them.

Cotannah had to clap her hand over her mouth to stop her gasp of delight. The adult horses had their heads down, lazily grazing, scattered across the frosted grass like different-colored jewels spilled out on cotton—burgundy bays, yellow buckskins with black points and dorsal stripes, blue and red roans, blazing red sorrels, blacks and whites, solids and paints. The sun streaked their pasture and set their hides to gleaming, picked at the edges of the frost crystals that had formed on their backs in the night, made them twinkle.

“But look over there,” Cotannah said, trying to speak in that way of Walks-With-Spirits’s in which the sound was less than a whisper. “That’s the best of all.”

He nodded. Of course. He had spotted them before she had.

They were three young ones, yearlings, like the deer, and every bit as quick and graceful, dancing and prancing between the trees and the herd, running in spurts and then sliding to a stop, slowing down only to pretend to kick and bite at each other, bursting with pent-up energy that threatened to explode from beneath their little hides. They were so silly, so full of vigor—they had to have been playing hard for quite a little while, they’d gotten themselves hot enough to have steam rising from their backs.

The sight of that steam stirred some picture in the back of Cotannah’s mind, something she couldn’t quite catch long enough to know it. She shook her head and looked again, especially at the yellow dun colt, but the connection or the memory or whatever it was wouldn’t
come to her. She tried again, almost got it. Then it was gone completely.

Then she forgot about it because the spotted baby and the yellow one reared at the same time, stood on their tiny back hooves and pawed at each other with their forefeet, sending out high, baby squeals of masculine challenge. Cotannah looked at Walks-With-Spirits, and they both stifled laughter.

The stallion thought that was ridiculous, he threw up his head and called to the rowdy colts in a tone that sounded like a reprimand and that made it even harder not to laugh out loud. He was a dictator, that stallion, she could tell by his attitude. A tall, muscular buckskin, he had stationed himself behind the mares and young ones, grazing off to one side, watching them constantly. From time to time he lifted his nostrils to the wind and his eyes to the hills, searching for danger anywhere in the mountainous country that surrounded his herd.

Now, after he watched the yearlings for a minute and saw to it that his get were causing no harm, the horse turned to face her and Walks-With-Spirits. He whinnied softly, his gaze directed exactly at their hiding place.

“He’s asking us in,” Walks-With-Spirits said.

“I’m not crazy about visiting him,” she said.

He laughed, and said, “You’re with me.”

And so they left their hiding place and walked slowly out to the herd, first stopping at the stallion for him and Walks-With-Spirits to renew their acquaintance. After that, they wandered at will among the wild horses, talking to them, even petting them, and none spooked, none ran away, none even tensed a muscle in fear—except for the babies, who frolicked away into the trees again when Cotannah slowly started toward them.

“This amazes me in one way and then, in another, it
doesn’t surprise me at all,” she told Walks-With-Spirits. “Why should it? Any man who has a mountain lion and a coyote for traveling companions ought to be able to talk to wild horses.”

Everything they did that day amazed her, as did the next and the next. They explored the hills in the four directions from their camp, they saw deer and rabbits, squirrels and possums, every kind of wildlife that lived in the Nation, and they lay on their backs at night looking up at the sky while Walks-With-Spirits told her legends about stars that danced and boys who were sent from earth to visit the sun and moon.

Walks-With-Spirits came to dread the coming of darkness, though, and he began to pray for clouds or fog because no matter how many stories he told her or how many lessons she learned, they were never enough to distract Cotannah from her obsession. The special, brilliant star that she called “our star” remained fixed in the place where they’d first seen it, high in the sky to the southeast of their camp. One night after another, every night, they looked up and it was there.

“It’s going to give us a revelation,” she would tell him, turning to him with her face alight from within. “I tell you, Walks-With-Spirits, it’s going to show us how to save you.”

But no revelation came.

So he would take her in his arms and they would share the miracle of making the growing love between them a physical thing, a passionate thrill and a splendid comfort. And a triumphant victory.

Surely she was right, he would think, afterward, when he lay sated and exhausted, with her in his arms, with her sweet, sweaty cheek resting on his. This celebration of life had to be a victory over death.

Then he would realize that he was only repeating her
thoughts and her worries in his mind, that he was forgetting that the bullets of the Lighthorse would not be killing him, but sending his spirit from this world into the next. It seemed like death, though, thinking that he’d be leaving Cotannah behind.

She was enchanting him, mesmerizing him, fascinating him, and it was all he could do to keep his mind on what he should teach her.

So, one afternoon in the middle of the week, while they were making their daily exploration of the river with its quiet pools and rocky waterfalls, he determined to fix both their minds on her lessons, on preparing her to live the rest of her life in this world without him. She was becoming far too accustomed to being with him, just as he was to being with her.

“Why do you think that we come to the water to say incantations?” he asked her.

He was stepping from rock to rock out in the middle of the river, where he could see through the clear water to watch the fish swimming by.

“For the same reason we come to the water to get a drink,” she said, very sure of herself, looking up at him from where she was wading at the edge of the river with her thin, soft breeches rolled up above her knees. “Because water is life.”

The afternoon sun fell across her face in streaks of light and shade, the red and yellow leaves behind her shone like ripe fruit on the trees. Her eyes gleamed huge and dark in her perfect face, her loose mass of black hair framed it like a picture. She had tucked an old shirt into the waistband of the breeches, explaining that both had belonged to her brother Cade when he was growing up, and she looked infinitely more appealing than ever. The sunshine outlined her lush breasts straining against the
pale blue cotton, their fullness contrasting with her tiny waist.

His hands hurt, ached, to trace that sensuous curve.

A twisting torment of desire burned through him, fast and hot as a lightning strike. She saw it.

“I dare you,” she drawled, smiling at him across the chattering, rushing water of the river.

He smiled back at her. How could he not let her distract him from the lesson? A man would have to be carved of wood to resist her for a minute.

“To do what?”

She lifted her hands to the waistband of her breeches and slowly, slowly, began to unbutton them.

“Go swimming,” she said huskily. “Isn’t this a hot day?”

He began moving toward her, not even glancing down to see his stepping-stones, just feeling for them while his eyes feasted on her. She finished with the buttons and peeled the cloth down and down … she wore nothing beneath.

“You have no mercy,” he said, and he hardly recognized his own voice it was so gruff from wanting her.

But the wanting would wait. It would grow, no matter what either of them did or said. And the day was hot and tart and lighthearted and there wouldn’t be many more like it.

He held out his hand and she took it.

“You have no mercy,” he said, again. “And neither do I!”

He pulled her to him and jumped from the rock into the rushing middle of the river, laughing as she screamed and clasped him around the neck hard enough to strangle him, gathering her safe into his arms as they went under, her hair swirling upward in the water. When his toes hit
bottom he pushed against it and sent them back up to break the surface.

“It’s too cold!” she cried, as soon as she could speak, beating her small fists on his shoulders, his back, any part of him that she could reach. “The water’s too cold!”

He was numb. Absolutely numb and desperate to get out of the wet clothing weighing him down. He was freezing, and he’d nearly frozen her. Whatever had possessed him?

“You wanted to go swimming,” he said, trying uselessly to keep his teeth from chattering as he lunged toward the bank and water shallow enough to keep his head above. “Didn’t … you?”

That made her attack him with even more energy and try to kick him with her legs locked around his waist. She had glued herself to him, it was a wonder he could even move.

But he forced his unfeeling feet over the rough bed of the river, began dragging them up and onto the next pile of rocks and gravel, heading toward the bank that now seemed miles away. Cotannah gasped some more air into her lungs and began pummeling him again.

“You knew how cold it was out there in the middle,” she yelled, but now she was laughing, too. “You knew it, and now you can know that I’m going to get you for this!”