Tacoma dips a finger in the tallow and mixes it with a sprinkling of the red ochre. Carefully he draws a blazing sun on his forehead and the pug marks of a large cat on either cheek. Manny follows suit, marking his face with black arrows tipped in red.

Kirsten, who has watched with a look of rapt attention, accepts a bit of the fat from the bundle as Manny offers it to her, together with some of the red and black pigment. There is unexpected certainty in her movements, and Koda stifles the impulse to offer help. Deliberately, precisely, the other woman traces a double spiral in red on the back of each of her hands, a black lightning bolt down her cheek.. When she has finished, she turns to offer the paints to Koda.

Tacoma’s hand intercepts them. “Let me.”

Koda opens her mouth to protest, but Tacoma says, very gently. “No, tanski. Tshunka Wakan Winan. Let me.”

A tightening in her solar plexus sends alarm along her nerves, something near panic screaming down her blood. The calm of a few moments before is shattered, its fragments falling about her in brittle shards. All unexpectedly, she has arrived at a moment of crisis, something she knows she is not prepared for, something there is no way to prepare for. Her mouth goes dry as cotton, and her tongue feels thick and unwieldly as she forms the simple word she does not want to speak and knows she must speak. “Ohan.”

No sound carries her consent, and she repeats, whispering. “Ohan.”

“Washté,” Tacoma answers quietly, and begins to mix white pigment in his hand.

Koda feels the pressure of h is finger as he draws a jagged lightning bolt from her hairline to her chin. She swallows hard against the fear that rises in her, knowing somehow what is coming. When her brother begins to dot the paint onto her cheeks, she grabs his wrist. “Tacoma, no!”

He makes no effort to resist her, but says quietly, “It is right.”

The night has begun to fade around them, and she can see her brother’s eyes. They are a warrior’s, deep brown and steady, but there is a spark of the shaman’s gift in them as well. He says again, “It is right.”

She submits, then, allowing him to paint on her face the symbols that Tshunka Witco of the Oglala, Crazy Horse, saw when he cried for a vision. Ina Maka, she prays silently as a weight settles across her shoulders, a weight that now only death will lift from her. Mother of us all, help me to carry this burden and not to fail.

Above her in the fading darkness she hears the high scream of a hawk. Just as the sun clears the horizon, a red-tail settles in the bare sycamore above her. Crazy Horse had worn a red-tailed hawk in his hair. Wiyo, though, looks down at her with a clear golden gaze that is somehow both loving and pitiless. It is validation of her office, and completion.

Tacoma follows her gaze as she looks up at the hawk. “Hoka hey,” he says. “It is a good day.”

“It is a good day,” Kirsten echoes him. “A good day to fight.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE EARLY SUN lies lightly on the valley, spreading a transparent wash of gold over the new snow that blankets the meadow to the southeast of the river. From the low bank to the woods, still bare with the lingering cold, it lies porcelain smooth for almost half a kilometer. Branches of beech an sycamore cast their shadows across it in a grey-blue web as delicate as a spider’s. Here and there among the trees, a peeling of bark takes the light in a flash of silver, almost indistinguishable from the occasional glint off metal where the line of soldiers stands along the margin of the trees. Koda can make out the long barrels of the two howitzers drawn up behind them only because she already knows where to look. Below the downslope of the hill where she stands, mist rises off the Cheyenne to curl around the pylons and rails of the narrow bridge, coiling, loosing and coiling again as it spirals across the meadow, breaking like surf where it climbs against the steeply rising piedmont of the Paha Sapa to the northwest. Tacoma and most of their infantry lie concealed in the folds of those basalt ridges. The mist gives them further cover as it seeps by fissure and rock chimney into the badlands, though it cannot hide them from heat or infrared sensors.

By the time the enemy picks them up, though, it should be too late.

“I feel as if I’ve slipped back in time.”

Koda lowers her binoculars and turns to face Maggie. She gestures at her face, with its painted lightning bolt and hailstones, the devices worn almost a hundred and fifty years ago by Tshunka Witco, Crazy Horse of the Oglala. “You mean this?”

Maggie shakes her head slightly. “I mean this.” The sweep of her hand takes in the valley and its troop emplacements open and concealed. “The conventional doctrine of modern warfare is to pound the enemy down with bombs and missiles first. The ground forces only go in when you’re ready to mop up or have to fight house to house. There hasn’t been a true set battle like this in—oh, a century, not since the first of the World Wars.”

“Forward, into the past.” The voice is soft and lightly humorous.

Koda and Maggie both turn startled eyes on Kirsten where she sits in the back of the troop carrier. Her laptop is deployed on the folding table in the center, connected by a rat’s nest of wire and cables to the bank of communications consoles stacked up along and below one of the benches. A small smile starts just at the edges of her mouth, widens as Koda and the Colonel stare. Then she turns demurely back to her readouts, clicking rapidly through a series of equipment checks. “All on line, Colonel,” she says, serious again. “Please try your audio links now, Dakota.”

Koda slips off the hood of her jacket and secures the headset in place. “Tacoma.. Tacoma.. Ayupte.”

“Hau, tanksi. Manah’i blezela.”

She nods to Maggie and Kirsten, both of whom look relieved. They had been concerned that the radio signal might be blocked by the same rock formations that conceal the troops. Runners were not going to work in this kind of fight, not with a river in between them. And line-of-sight signals would only draw the enemy’s attention to the command post, where it was least wanted.

“Wikcemna-topa,” she acknowledges. “Manny.”

“Manah’i hotanka na blezela.”

Koda gives a thumbs-up as Manny breaks the link. He and his squadron of Black Hawks and Apaches wait five miles to the north of their position, set down on a straight stretch of farm road to await Maggie’s signal.

“Jurgensen. Major Jurgensen. Ayupte.”

Frank Jurgensen is a blond Wisonsin farm boy turned Marine Major who has not a drop of Lakota blood. He has not a word of the language, either, except for the half-dozen signals Koda has drilled him in. His answer is awkward but clear: “Ma-na-hee blay-zay-luh.” Then, for a flourish, because he is a Marine, “Wikeem-nah topa.”

“Wikcemna-topa,” she answers. Turning to Kirsten, she smiles briefly. “All good to go. No static, no language problems.”

“Good,” says Maggie. “At least we can get a courier to the guys on this side if we lose the major or he loses his vocabulary list.” To Kirsten, “Are you picking up any of their chatter?”

Kirsten enters a code on the laptop and listens intensely for a moment. “They’re coming straight down the road. They should be getting into the first of the anti-tank mines—“

A sudden soft thump sounds to the northwest where the road winds through a stretch of lava flats. Koda turns on her heel, focusing on a thin column of smoke that rises into the clear air.

“—right about now,” Kirsten finishes. She scowls, adjusting her headset. “They weren’t expecting that. They’ve stopped. An armored personnel carrier hit the mine; the passengers are all dead—they were all human, apparently—and the shrapnel’s taken out a couple droids.”

“That one of yours?” Maggie asks Koda with a grin.

“Mine or Tacoma’s. They—“

“They’re going off road,” Kirsten interrupts.

Maggie shoots Koda a questioning look and she answers, “They can’t go overland in this terrain, Colonel. They’ll have to get back on the highway. Not that it matters.”

A second muffled explosion follows, and a third.

“Off-road mines?”

Koda nods, focusing the binoculars, searching for smoke. There is none this time. “Military droids?” she asks Kirsten.

Kirsten holds up her hand for quiet. After a moment she says, “They’re going to stay on the road. They figure we can’t have mined the whole stretch of highway. . .. They’re sorting their troops out. . .. humans in front. . . regular droids off to the side. . . .their armor . . .heavy-duty metalheads last and further out.”

“They’ve sure as hell got their priorities sorted out,” Maggie snorts. “You know, I keep forgetting they’re machines. I keep hating the bastards.”

“I keep hating Westerhaus,” Kirsten bites the words off. “I keep hoping he’s alive.”

Koda opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it abruptly. She still remembers the sharp crack of Kirsten’s hand against General Hart’s cheek upon her arrival at Ellsworth, the sense of contained rage coming off the woman’s skin like heat. Instead she turns her attention back toward the road. It is a matter of minutes before she hears yet another explosion, this one slightly louder, slightly nearer. A second follows, and a third. Then nothing. She says, “They’re through the first stretch of mines. They’ll come on the next in about a mile.”

“Gods, I hope the fog holds,” Maggie mutters. “They’re what, about an hour away?”

“At regular marching pace, yes. They can go faster if they get all the humans and regular droids up onto vehicles, but from what I’m picking up they don’t have the wheels to do that.” Kirsten pauses, listening. “They know there’s a bridge here. They’re sending out a couple of scouts in a truck.”