Tworivers
Copyright© 2025 by Harry Carton
Chapter 3: The Blood in the Firelight
Drumbeats pulsed like a heartbeat through the settlement as roasted venison sizzled over fires, the rich fat dripping onto coals with a hiss that sent sparks swirling into the twilight. Warriors recounted the ambush with broad gestures, miming Crow deaths to raucous laughter. Yet Thomas noticed Winona sitting apart, sharpening Crow arrowheads on a whetstone. The rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape cut through the revelry. Her gaze lingered on Dawson, who flinched every time a warrior slapped his wounded ribs.
Nantan appeared silently, his shadow stretching long in the firelight. He held out a Crow war club studded with obsidian teeth. “The Crow chief’s son escaped. He saw your arrows fly farther than eagle wings.” The elder’s voice was low, gravelly. “He carries a story that will bring more Crow. Hungrier Crow.”
Thomas felt the familiar weight of command settle cold in his gut. Not insurgents this time, but a gathering storm of vengeance. Winona rose, wiping grease from her knife onto her dress. “Then we make arrows fly farther still.” She gestured toward the kiln, its mouth glowing faintly in the dark.
Dawson groaned, shifting his bandaged side. “More metallurgy? My head’s pounding like a damn drum.”
Winona tossed him a pouch of willow bark tea. “Chew. Or cry like a child.” She mimed chewing and Dawson understood. She turned to Thomas, her eyes reflecting the flames. “Show me the metal that sings in fire.”
Inside the kiln’s heat-hazed shelter, Thomas fed salvaged Crow iron into the crucible. Winona worked the buffalo-hide bellows with steady, powerful strokes, her arms corded with muscle. Molten metal pooled, swirling like liquid night.
“Iron is stronger than aluminum,” Thomas explained, his voice nearly lost in the furnace roar. “Heavier arrowheads. Deeper penetration.” Sweat carved paths through the soot on Winona’s cheeks as she nodded, thrusting a greenwood rod into the crucible to skim slag. The molten metal glowed with a malevolent orange heart. “But we must combine the raw iron with coal to make it stronger still. And we must cool it slowly in oil after it is worked in the forge.”
“What is ‘coal’?”
“A black rock which burns slowly that is found in the hills and mountains,” Thomas explained. He looked up, grabbing his bow quickly.
There were a large party of mounted and walking Indians approaching slowly toward the fires of celebration. Winona stilled his alarm.
“They are Kiowa Apache. Long time friends. They wear no warpaint,” she said.
Tall Pine, the leader of the Kiowa, rode up to Nantan. He dismounted and grasped Nantan’s forearm. “We saw the glow of your fires from far away, and came to see what happened,” he greeted Natan.
“Tall Pine, my friend, it is good to see the Kiowa again. Early yesterday, we easily defeated a large group of Crow at Dead Bear Pass. This night we celebrate,” Nantan smiled. “Tomorrow our warriors will be out hunting. We must replace the meat we have eaten. But tonight, you must join our celebration.”
“We are hunting buffalo or elk. Our supplies were raided eight suns past. Crow.” He spat into the fire. “So we hunt.”
“The Coyotero and Kiowa must work together to get rid of the Crow. Only when these are gone from our lands, can we grow corn and beans in peace,” Nantan said.
“Yes, but that is something we can talk about tomorrow. Tonight let us join in your victory dance.”
“I know of a black rock that can burn,” said Winona. “There is some that can be found easily. Tomorrow, I will show you where it lies ... tonight everyone dances. Come!” She took the Wind Rider’s hand and took him over to the celebration.
Tall Pine and Nantan shared the victory pipe, its pungent smoke swirling into the star-drenched sky. Warriors mingled, exchanging stories of Crow arrows that shattered against shields reinforced with salvaged helicopter skin. Kiowa hunters eyed the aluminum-tipped spears leaning against tipis, their faces unreadable in the firelight.
Winona urged Thomas toward the drum circle, her grip firm. “A warrior’s spirit must dance,” she insisted, her eyes reflecting the leaping flames. Thomas hesitated, muscles still coiled from battle, his mind replaying the Crow leader’s son escaping – that lone rider vanishing into the dust. A loose end. A future threat.
Dawson slumped nearby, nursing willow bark tea, his face pale beneath the flickering light. “Go on, Tom,” he muttered, wincing as a Kiowa warrior clapped his shoulder. “I’ll guard the forge.” Thomas nodded, letting Winona pull him into the throng. The drumbeat pulsed deep in his chest, syncopated and insistent. Apache women began a rhythmic chant, their voices weaving through the smoke like threads of sound.
Winona’s hand slid to his waist, guiding him into the circle. Her fingers were warm despite the cooling night air, calloused from bowstrings and bellows. “Move with the earth,” she murmured, her hips swaying in time with the drums. Thomas mimicked her steps, his combat boots clumsy on the packed earth. Laughter rippled around him—not mocking, but bright with shared triumph. He caught glimpses of Chooli spinning with a Kiowa woman, his wound forgotten, and Winona’s braid whipped his cheek as she turned sharply, her eyes alight with fierce joy.
He lost himself in the rhythm, the drumbeats echoing the thrum of helicopter rotors in his memory. Sweat stung his eyes. He tasted woodsmoke and roasted venison, smelled the tang of pine pitch torches mingling with crushed grass underfoot. Winona pressed closer, her shoulder brushing his as the dance quickened. Her breath warmed his neck. “You fight like storm wind,” she whispered. “Now dance like river current.” Her movements were fluid, hypnotic – a warrior’s precision softened by firelight.
They danced in the firelight, soon enough someone handed him a pipe. Taking a draught, he noticed a strange taste -- peyote? He passed the pipe to another warrior who took it eagerly. Thomas didn’t want to dull his brain, when there were still enemies out there.
Later, Winona led him away from the drumbeats, toward the quieter edge of camp where the horses nickered softly. She stopped beneath a sprawling cottonwood, its leaves silvered by moonlight. “You move like stone falling,” she said, a hint of amusement in her voice. “But your eyes ... they see far, like the hawk.” She touched the faded tattoo on his forearm—an eagle clutching arrows. “This mark? Is it of your spirit?”
Thomas hesitated. How to explain the Green Beret insignia? “It means protector,” he said finally. Her fingers traced the lines, rough and warm. For a heartbeat, the drums faded. He smelled crushed sage on her skin, mixed with iron-smoke from the kiln. Her gaze held his – unflinching, assessing. The dawn came early after the fires dwindled to embers.
The next morning revealed the cost of victory: Chooli’s wound festered, angry red streaks spiderwebbing from the gash. Thomas boiled the aluminum arrowheads into surgical tools while Dawson pounded willow bark into paste. “Infection’s deep,” Thomas muttered, probing with salvaged helicopter panel scrapers sterilized in the kiln. Pus welled thick and yellow.
Winona held Chooli’s shoulders, her voice low and steady as he writhed. “Breathe, brother. The metal-tooth healer cuts the poison.” Thomas sliced dead flesh with a honed flint shard. Chooli’s scream echoed off the canyon walls.
“He will be sore for a few days, nothing more,” Thomas said to Gouyen, the healer woman.
“Foolish warrior,” she said, “Wanted a scar to remember the fight. He will have his scar, and the pain of healing.”
Dawson winced, passing Thomas a strip of boiled hide for bandages. “Modern antibiotics would fix this in hours.” His voice was tight with frustration.
“Modern’s gone,” Thomas replied tersely, packing the wound with willow paste. Chooli’s feverish eyes flickered open, locking onto Winona. “Did ... did Tall Pine see?” he rasped. Winona nodded curtly. “The Kiowa saw Crow shields shatter. They know our arrows bite deeper now.”
“And they will bite even deeper with new bows,” said Thomas.
“New bows? We don’t have enough of the bows you showed us how to make,” Winona said.
He left Chooli with Gouyen. Walking over to Winona he drew in the dust: he sketched a longer bow with weights at the end, pulling the bowstring tighter. “We tie it tight using buffalo horn. Stronger pull, deeper and faster arrows.”
She looked at it. “How do you know these things? Bows? Coal?”
“The land that I came from -- before the winds came -- it has many things I can teach.”
That seemed to satisfy her ... for the moment. Winona gestured to Nantan to come. She said, “Wind Rider says we can make still stronger bows.” She showed him the drawing in the sand.
Nantan looked at it a moment. “Show Apache. Teach.”
Two days later, several Coyotero and Kiowa men were bending pine branches over forms to make the new recurved, weighted bows. Tall Pine and Nantan held long, quiet discussions in the latter’s tipi. When they emerged, Tall Pine talked to his second in charge, a medicine man named Dark Wolf. Then four of the Kiowa warriors rode off with Dark Wolf to gather the Kiowa settlement: there was going to be a merger of the Coyotero and Kiowa. The new name for the combined tribe was to be the Apache Nation.
When Winona wanted to ride off with Wind Rider, Natan halted her. He called to two warriors, Sky Eagle and Great Buffalo -- two of his experienced hunters. “Winona will ride out with Wind Rider. She says they are going to dig up some burning rock -- I believe her. But I have also seen how she looks at him, and he is a man. You two will go with them, to ‘protect’ them – from each other. If that is all they do, help them to dig. We will talk when you return.”
Thomas smiled to himself when he saw their escorts. Daddy ain’t no fool. He wants to make sure that his daughter is safe going out to look for rocks with a man who literally just blew into town. Now that he thought about it, he too had been aware of Winona’s attention, and he was glad to have a couple of chaperones.
Winona rode beside Thomas, her gaze fixed on the horizon where jagged peaks clawed at the sky. Sky Eagle and Great Buffalo trailed a respectful distance behind, their eyes scanning the sagebrush flats for threats. Thomas adjusted his improvised saddle – a folded blanket secured with rawhide straps – and felt the familiar weight of his combat knife against his thigh. The scent of juniper and hot stone hung thick in the air.
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