Читаем Winter Rain полностью

At first it had been funny to offer his own hair to his brother. Then, sometime this past winter, it had ceased being something to laugh at. Antelope had lost his sense of humor. He had even swung his short bow at Tall One, catching his older brother across the cheek and laying open the skin in a long gash where the browned skin lay taut over the bone. Still, it was more the wounded look on Antelope’s face that brought pain to Tall One.

He never joked about taking scalps again. No more did he offer his own to Antelope.

Whereas Tall One could wait to become a man in the blankets with one of these squat Comanche women, young Antelope was impatient to fully become a man by taking the scalp of the enemy.

“No, I don’t want to go with you to find a Tonkawa,” Antelope snarled when Tall One suggested the two of them go on their own raid into the land of the tribe that served as guides and trackers for the pony soldiers.

“You want to wait to go with many others?” Tall One had asked, wondering if his young brother might still be frightened.

“No,” Antelope said severely. “I don’t want an Indian scalp. I want the hair of a white man to hang from my belt.”

It would be the last time. Tall One vowed, that he would offer to take his brother on a raid. Better that someone else go with Antelope when he took his scalp. Perhaps his young brother did not remember much of what had gone before after all this time. More than eight summers now might make him forget. After all, they had been so young. Antelope … Zeke, yes! Zeke had been so young.

Tall One sensed the warming joy that it brought him to remember his brother’s white name: so long unthought, so long unspoken.

“Zeke,” he murmured it quietly, the sound sent into the wind in his face.

Far to his right his younger brother stalked through the brush, tracking deer into the wind. These last few years with the Kwahadi they had become proficient in riding the short-backed ponies, slipping to the side to hook a hand in a loop of rawhide lashed to the mane, one foot hung over a bony rump. Now they both handled the short sinew-backed bows as well as any Comanche boys their age. And Tall One could not remember the last time he had experienced any trouble in following the Comanche tongue. After all this time, both he and Antelope were proficient in their adopted language.

Long, long ago had they ceased speaking in English. There for a while, in private, stolen moments only, had they conversed in their birth tongue. Yet as the days grew into moons and the moons turned into seasons, then one winter after another drove this warrior band into the shelter of the deep canyons, the two brothers had spoken less and less of that birth tongue to one another.

No more did he find himself even thinking in that foreign language of a bygone time. It had been so long now, in fact, that Tall One genuinely surprised himself by remembering his brother’s name.

“Ezekiel,” he said unconsciously.

Antelope shushed him sternly from afar, pointing into the brush, making a hook of his right-hand fingers, setting the hand beside his head to show he was in range of their prey.

Thinking the name in English, more so saying something in that old tongue, immediately washed over him with some of the old longings he had buried in those ancient days when he first came to live with those people. They were mostly impressions. Nothing really remained clear enough to remember anymore.

True, what wispy memories there were flooded up to the surface from time to time, from season to season when certain smells reminded him of a life lived long, long ago. The feel of a blanket laid against his cheek in a certain way, the manner in which firelight fell on his brother’s face, casting shadows and flickering highlights, made his heart leap for an instant in unconscious recognition of someone important from that dim past, knowing he should remember a man who had the same nose, the same curve of the lips or the same solid, square chin—much of the same features as he and Zeke shared.

Antelope stopped suddenly and threw up his bow, releasing the arrow in a fluid movement. Out of the brush bounded a doe, the shaft deep behind a foreleg. She took a fourth and fifth bounce, then crumpled, thrashing briefly, then lay still, only her side heaving.

They both hurried to the doe, where Tall One knelt and dragged his iron knife across the soft underside of her neck. As the ground beneath the deep wound grew dark and moist, Antelope stuffed his bow away in the quiver and brought out his own knife. With it he opened the animal’s belly, then bloodied himself to his elbows gutting her.

When he was done, Antelope rose, red nearly to the shoulders, standing there between the deer and the gut pile. What he had to say surprised Tall One—for his young brother talked not of hunting, nor of the dinner on such fresh and tender meat they would have this night.

Antelope looked squarely at his brother. “I am going to marry.”