Death Rattle

24

He pushed the horses harder now than he ever had on their journey north.

Once Titus had them onto the bottom ground, he goaded the animals into a rolling lope across those last few miles as the setting sun first turned the layers of fire smoke to that dull, washed-out orange of the wood lily, eventually brightening into the same pale pink found in the shooting star that would poke its head out of the snow come early spring. Both dogs managed to match the pace he set, covering the icy ground beside the long-legged horses, their pinkish tongues lolling.

From the top of a low ridge he got his first look at the lodges. Cones discolored to various earth tones of brown, every pair of yawning smoke flaps blackened with unnumbered fires. A few of the lodges even supported by poles so long their shape was that of murky hourglasses plopped down in that narrow, meandering meadow beside the rocky creek he would have to cross before he was home.

Bass sensed his heart catch in his throat to look at what lay before him. The horse herd flooded much of the open ground where the brown cones did not stand in an irregular crescent, their doorways facing the creek. Knots of children engaged in the last games of the day, bundled warmly against the frightening cold, some of them trundling along the stream bank where free water coursed through a narrow channel between two borders of snow-covered ice. Each rounded rock along the shore was covered with a dainty dollop of fresh, white snow, like a scullery maid’s white mobcap perched atop her brown hair.

Of a sudden he heard their voices—excited children at play, the rattle of their sticks they raked along the rocks, chasing one another and scraping snow from the stones. Perhaps the older ones had been sent to gather up their younger charges now that night was imminent. Laughter, lots of laughter—

A handful of them stopped their running game and turned to face the ridge. Two pointed in his direction. More of their voices, louder now.

From the trees along the bank appeared more than a dozen riders an instant later. In that silence a moment ago filled only with the laughter of children, now intruded the clatter of pony hooves as the animals lurched off the low cutbank and onto the rocky gravel blanketing the sandbars.

He tore the old coyote-fur cap from his head and stood in the stirrups, waving the cap at the end of his arm. And began to shout, “Pote Ani! Pote Ani!” Four of the riders continued across the ford where the water slowed through a shallow stretch while the rest remained in position on the rocky ground.

“C’mon, boys,” he said quietly to the Cheyenne horses. “That’s home down there.”

After covering some forty yards, Scratch found a wide cut where the ridge had eroded, a cleft that led him and the horses down to the east bank of the creek where that quartet of riders was already waiting on the snowy sandbar.

“These are trading goods from the fort at the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue River?” asked Three Iron, a younger man, who inched his horse ahead to greet the white man.

“No, old friend.” Bass gasped with joy and surprise at seeing a familiar face. “They are presents.”

“So many presents?” Stiff Arm asked now as he urged his horse up beside that of Three Iron. “All these ponies are loaded with presents?”

“Yes!” Bass felt exuberant as he dusted off his rusty Crow, unused in so long. “My heart is so glad to be home again.”

A quizzical look passed over Three Iron’s face as the other two inched their ponies forward. “We … everyone thought you dead, Pote Ani” “It has been so long,” agreed Stiff Arm.

Bass suddenly felt some of his exuberance oozing as he realized just how long he had been away. “Yes, I have been gone many moons, but, look for yourselves … I am not dead.”

Three Iron gulped. “Your wife—”

“Waits-by-the-Water?” he interrupted the camp guard. “Does she believe I am dead too?”

With a wag of his head, Three Iron declared, “Like Stiff Arm said, you were gone so long.”

Then Stiff Arm himself explained, “And you did not come back.”

A sudden cold seized him. “My wife, and children … they—”

Three Iron turned on the bare back of his pony and pointed at the village. “They are camped at the southern end of the crescent, Pote Ani. Next to relations.”

For a moment he could not get the words out, his mind racing over the vocabulary, struggling to put voice to the question he most feared. Then, “My wife … Waits-by-the-Water, she did not give up on me to … to m-marry another?”

Stiff Arm shook his head, “No. She did not find a new husband.”

“S-so she is mourning?”

This time Three Irons nodded dolefully. “Yes. She has been alone for so long now.”

Titus was already jabbing his heels urgently into the ribs of the weary saddle horse as those last few words struck his ears. He yanked on the lead rope to the first packhorse as the whole string clattered onto the stony sandbar and entered the shallow ford. By now, more than fifty people had gathered on the far bank, a third of them children. They and a few camp dogs began to part as his roan came out of the shallow water, the horse’s legs dripping in the light that was leaking from the pale, pink western sky. His two dogs bristled warning at the curious curs that slinked too close, then stopped among the snow-covered rocks to give themselves a quick, vigorous shake from neck to tail root before racing to rejoin Bass’s horse as it lunged up the low cutbank and angled into the village.

The murmuring accompanied him as he turned among the lodges, sawing the saddle horse left as he hurried toward the southern end of the camp crescent. More and more of the people who had been on their way to the crossing came to a sudden halt, stopping to stare up at him as he led more than fifteen horses right down the main thoroughfare of the village. Some of them called out his name in excitement and relief.

Men who had known him as Rotten Belly’s white friend, who remembered him as Whistler’s trusted son-in-law, and those warriors who saw Titus Bass as the man who had honored Strikes In Camp with that final battle against the Blackfeet … many of them now raised their arms high in salute, some shaking their weapons to pay tribute to a fellow warrior.

And some of those women who recognized him quietly muttered his name. Many put their fingers over their mouths in shock and utter surprise, eyes wide as Mexican conchos.

“Popo!” the child cried.

A few yards ahead he spotted the short figure lumbering toward him across the trampled snow, one arm waving as she shuffled in an ungainly wobble, clearly hampered by the tiny blanketed bundle astride her hip.

“Magpie?” he cried in exuberance, although he was already sure as he yanked back on the reins. Fifteen yards behind her came a figure, not quite as tall, running to catch up. Titus sang out, “Magpie! It is you!”

“Popo!” she shrieked in excitement.

Titus hit the ground as his daughter crossed those last few steps to reach the horses. The moment he knelt she flung her empty arm around him. Clasping his daughter in a fierce embrace, he felt the tiny body at the very moment the small infant cried out.

Magpie was eight and a half years old now, he thought, surely old enough, responsible enough, to care for someone’s child—

Then Flea sprinted up, his copper cheeks red from his dash across the icy snow.

“Flea!” he cried, releasing Magpie so he could crush the boy who would soon be turning six. “Oh, Flea!”

He unwrapped one arm from around the boy and held it out for the tall girl, reminded how long-legged her mother must have been at the same age. Magpie stepped into that embrace he gave both of his children.

“Y-your mother?” he stammered. “Where?”

Flea pointed with his grimy hand at the far lodges, then held the hand up for his father to hold. “Come. I take you.”

“No, son,” he stood, nudging the boy against his leg. “Here. You will be old enough to serve as a pony boy one day soon. So you must take care of my horses for me.”

He looked at the long string, blinked, then looked up at his tall father. “Horses, Popo?”

“Bring them behind me.” Bass turned to Magpie and swallowed as he blinked his stinging eyes. Already the tears were beginning to stream down his sun and windburnt cheeks. “Take me to your mother.”

Gazing up at her father in wonder, Magpie laid her head against his side a moment as he enfolded her against his rib cage. She closed her eyes briefly. Then opened them. “We thought you … everyone believed … Mother knew you did not come back because you were—”

“I am not dead, little one,” Titus interrupted and squeezed her gently against him as they started walking toward the last of the lodges at the end of the camp crescent. “We need to show your mother what you can clearly see for yourself—I am far from being a ghost.”

Which suddenly caused him to remember. “Stop a moment.” Then he whistled once, and a second time. The dogs appeared among the lodges. “These are yours, my children.”

“Your dogs, Popo?” asked Flea as he stopped the saddle horse and sank to one knee, putting out his arms for the darker animal.

“That one is named Digger, son.”

“D-digger?” Flea repeated.

“Yes. It is the name of a poor tribe that lives far beyond the reach of the mountains. Out on the desert where little grows but cactus and scorpions, where those people have little to eat but rabbits and crickets.”

“Crickets?” Flea repeated. “They eat insects?”

“When they are hungry enough,” Titus told his son. “What they love to eat most is a stolen horse!”

The light-colored dog brushed against Magpie’s leg as it stopped by its master. “What do you call this other one?” his daughter asked.

“Ghost. Look at his eyes, and you will see his ghost eyes.”

“So these dogs followed you all the way back home?” Magpie inquired.

“Yes, I picked them out for you and your brother. They are your dogs now. But come—take me to your mother so she will see that I am not dead—”

His voice dropped off as the realization struck him every bit as cold and hard as an iron maul driving a wedge into a troublesome oak stump. His daughter’s long hair was gone. Uneven, shoulder-length tatters rustled in the cold breeze. It had been crudely done, hacked off with a knife as proscribed in mourning rituals. And Magpie’s hair wasn’t clean at all. Many of the greasy sprigs were still clumped with ashes now that he inspected her.

Titus quickly grabbed Magpie’s thin wrist and pushed up the loose blanket sleeve to expose her brown forearm. A lattice work of old, half-crusted wounds climbed from wrist to elbow in crude, parallel gashes, most nearly healed.

“How … how long ago did you cut yourself?”

“M-m-many days.” Her eyes began to tear as she slowly slipped her wrist from his hand. She started to step backward from him when he caught her and went to his knee.

“Magpie. You did not do wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of. I am proud of you—because you did this for me. Mourned me like your mother—”

He bolted to his feet, freeing her arm again. “Take me to your mother—now.”

Inside his belly, his guts felt as if someone had thrown alum on them, they pinched so bad. Shriveled up like a hide forgotten or ignored by a hunter, a hide that wouldn’t be salted for tanning.

“Hurry, Magpie,” he urged her as they lumbered past some of those last lodges in the crescent.

After all those miles and months—he suddenly couldn’t cross these last few yards fast enough. Afraid. Downright terrified at what Waits-by-the-Water believed had happened to him.

“There, Popo,” she said quietly as she came to a stop.

He halted beside her, looked into her face.

Magpie pointed. “There.”

Scratch swallowed as he turned to watch Flea come up, leading the saddle horse. More than two dozen people approached on both sides of his pack string. They stopped in silence, not uttering a sound as he quickly licked his parched lips and stepped over to the entrance of that lodge where a tiny tendril of smoke crept upward through a gaping, black opening between the smoke flaps. Already his hands were trembling when he reached out to rest his rifle against the lodge skins and shoved the door flap aside.

Ducking inside, he stood, waiting, adjusting his eyes to the inky darkness. Outside one of the horses snorted, and he heard the quiet murmuring of voices. Then it grew quiet enough that he could hear her breathing.

“Waits?”

There was no answer. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he was able to locate her in what dim light was radiated by the still-glowing embers in the fire pit. No fire, not even any low flames. Nothing more than a few coals left in that rocky circle.

Bass quickly knelt and found the firewood that she always stacked just to the left of the doorway. If their mother was in severe mourning, then Magpie and Flea would have gone in search of wood, collected water too. His hands felt along several small branches, then turned in a crouch and laid them on the coals. Grabbing his long hair with one hand to hold it out of the ashes, Titus bent low and began to blow on the coals. It took some doing, but after a few moments the dry wood leapt into flame.

Still on his hands and knees, Scratch crabbed around the fire pit toward the rear of the lodge—guided by the rasp of her labored breathing. Waits-by-the-Water lay beneath a buffalo robe, no—two of them lying askew and rumpled where she had crawled beneath them for warmth.

Frightened so much his own breath froze in his chest like a tightened fist, Titus pulled back the robe, finding her heavy winter moccasins. He instantly leaped in the other direction and dragged back the robe from her head. She had her face turned from him as she slept, her labored breathing hard and shallow.

“Waits … I’ve come home.”

When he had whispered, Scratch lifted her shoulders, pulled her upper body across his lap, turning her gently so that he could peer into her pox-ravaged face. The eyelids fluttered as he pushed some of the ragged shreds of her once long and beautiful hair from her eyes, her cheeks, the corner of her mouth where the lips were cracked and oozy. She smelled of old fires. Cold ashes. A stale, noxious odor of things dying was strong about her, permeating her hair, smeared on her face and neck.

“Is it really you?” she creaked in a voice so weak it reminded him of the time he almost lost her to that Blackfoot pox. “Not a ghost come to haunt my heart?”

“I am h-here, woman,” his voice cracked as the tears began to seep from his eyes anew. “Here, touch my face. Know that I am real.”

With one of his hands, he searched under the robe for hers. Finding it, he brought her fingers to his cheek, quickly guided it over his eyes, down his nose, from ear to ear in that graying beard. Then—consumed by his need to know—his fingers inched down her wrist to her forearm … feeling the striations of her self-wounding. Long ridges of new scabs intermingled with older scars where the bloody crust had aged and sloughed itself off over time. Reaching down, he gently ran his hand the length of her calf. It wasn’t as scarified as her forearm, and the scabs on them were older. No recent slashes.

So he wrapped her in his arms, squeezed her tightly against him, enfolding her as he cried. Rocking, rocking. Crooning to her one of those lullabies he made up and used to hum to their children as he cradled them in his lap—just the way he was holding her at this moment.

And she cried. Waits-by-the-Water reached up to touch his face, fingers brushing his eyelids, feeling his lips as he sang in a whisper. While she sobbed, her chest heaved with great convulsions.

“I was so afraid,” she eventually managed to choke the words out. “In the middle of the summer, when you did not come back—I began to worry. We had been together so many summers, I know it is never a good time for your trapping.”

Yes, she did know so much of who he was. More than any other person—man or woman—could ever know. His tears began to stream freely now.

“I hoped you would come back from the mountains for to trade with Tullock at his fort,” she whispered raspily, quaking against his chest. “But, I worried even more when the weather began to cool, and the leaves began to d—die.”

Bass bent his head and pressed his lips against her forehead, tasting the old, rancid ash she had smeared on her flesh. “It was unfair—what I’ve done to you and the children. I did not realize my journey would take so long.”

“I knew you had to be dead because you had never been gone from me, from your family, for so long.”

“Never again,” he promised.

“Sometime late in the summer, I realized it could not be the trapping that kept you from returning to us,” she continued, dragging a hand across her own cheek grown muddy with tears that streaked the ashes rubbed there. “It had to be something more than the trapping—”

“I rode far, very far away to steal horses.”

“Alone?”

“I went with old friends … and men who were my enemies too. We went to the land of the Mexicans.” And he spoke that last word in English.

“Mexicans?” she repeated in his tongue. “You went south to Ta-house to steal horses … where Magpie was born?”

“No, to the other land of the Mexicans. Far to the west, by the big water.”

“W-was it a pretty land?”

“To some it would be a pretty country,” he admitted, lifting her chin with a finger so he could stare into her red, punished eyes. “But, there is nothing so beautiful as this high land of rugged skies, far prairie, and tall mountains.”

“Did you bring your Mexican horses with you to Absaroka?”

“No. The ones I brought with me are better than any Mexican horse, because they are older than those we stole. I traded them from the Cheyenne down at Bents Fort.”

“I remember you showing me the fort of dirt walls when Magpie was a suckling baby.”

“All the rest of those horses I no longer wanted, I traded away for a few goods.”

“You are going to be a trader now, like Tullock?”

He finally felt relieved enough now to chuckle a little. “No. I could never be a trader, woman. The goods I brought back are gifts to my family, gifts to your people who watched over you and our children while I was away for so long.”

“So you did not steal many Mexican horses?”

This time he laughed louder. “Oh, we took nearly every horse we could find from those Mexicans—and they have many! Let me tell you that my old friends and me started out of the land of the Mexicans with more horses than all of Yellow Belly’s village has in its herd, twice as many!”

She stared at him in the firelight with such seriousness, gazing from his good eye to the bad one for some sign of betrayal. “No. There could not be that many horses except … except if you raided the land of the Blackfoot to the north—or maybe the Lakota far to the east.”

“I tell you the truth,” he said with pride. “We took more horses from those Mexicans than ever was taken from them before!”

“I cannot believe the Mexicans had that many you could steal from under their noses without a terrible fight.”

“Oh, they were sorely mad at what we had done and sent their fighting men after us—but we pushed them back and started across a great wasteland.”

“What is this waste … land?”

“Where there is little water, little vegetation, no food for the horses. We lost half of their number before we reached the mountains, crossed over, and started down to the fort.”

“So you had only a few by the time you reached the land of the Cheyenne?”

He gripped her shoulders as he explained, “My share was …”—and he grappled with finding the Crow term for so great a number—“more than any warrior of your people has ever owned before.”

She quickly put her hand over her chapped mouth. “You are making fun with me,” she snipped at him.

“It is true. I would not lie to you.”

For a long moment she gazed into his face, steadily—as if reading something of import there. “This was a dangerous trip you had.”

“No more dangerous than any trip I ever made with you at my side.”

She snuggled against his elkhide coat. “The most fearsome trips you ever made were always the ones without me. Because I am not beside you, I know you take chances you would not if I were with you.”

Scratch had no rebuttal, because she spoke the truth.

In his silence, she continued, “So, I have decided that—because you always do dangerous things without me along—I simply won’t let you go on any more journeys without me.”

“I won’t argue with you on that,” he relented immediately. “Never again will I go anywhere without you and our two children.”

She straightened a little and asked, “You saw Magpie? Flea too?”

“Yes, both of them—”

“Did your daughter have the baby with her?”

“Yes,” he soothed, remembering that tiny infant Magpie had on her hip. “She held someone’s young child in her arms. Carrying it when she came up to embrace me. Whose child is this—who our young daughter would be caring for?”

Waits’s eyes narrowed, staring at him strangely a moment, then quietly asked, “Ti-tuzz, did you look at this baby Magpie carried when you rode into camp?”

“I-I did not look at the child, no,” he apologized. “More than anything I wanted to hold Magpie and Flea—to assure them I was not dead, then find where your lodge was pitched so I could come hold you. I had no interest in someone else’s child—”

“That babe is yours, Ti-tuzz.”

His heart skipped a beat, then took off in a gallop. “M-mine?”

“Whose child do you think your daughter would be caring for?”

“I … I don’t—”

“Your son, Ti-tuzz,” she announced. “You have a new son.”

“No. It can’t be. When I left … you weren’t … I didn’t … no, it can’t be!”

“Do you remember the last time you held me in your arms?”

“That cold dawn when I was leaving on my hunt last spring?”

“Yes,” she replied. “There was still snow on the ground.”

“I remember, yes.”

Laying her hand along his hairy cheek, Waits explained, “I didn’t know that morning, but I was already carrying your child, Ti-tuzz. His life was already growing in my belly. I wouldn’t know for many days to come—and when I did know for sure, it was later in the spring. I carried this son of yours for many moons, hoping with each new moon that his father would be home before he was born. But—”

“But I was gone too long.” Titus felt the stab of pain pierce him as he clutched her tightly again. He had been gone while she went through her woman’s time all alone. “You gave birth to him while I wasn’t here to hold you, not here to see our child’s face, or to hold him while you gained back your strength. I love you for your strength, woman.”

Waits-by-the-Water asked, “Did you hear him?”

“The babe?”

“Yes, did you hear him cry?” she asked. “He has the lungs of a little buffalo bull, he is so loud.”

Wagging his head, Scratch replied, “No. He did not cry out but once when I squeezed him too tightly when I put my arms around Magpie.”

Again she smiled, warming her pocked, ash-streaked face. “You just wait, Ti-tuzz. You will hear that little bull bellow when he is hungry!”

“I will go fetch our children,” he said, starting to slip from her embrace.

“It must be dark outside,” she said, gazing quickly at the smoke hole. “I don’t think I have anything for you to eat here—”

“I have meat.” And he bent to kiss her forehead. “You clean yourself and make ready your pot. I will send Magpie in with our new son and a pouch of yesterday’s venison. Then I will take my big son to help me with our Cheyenne horses.”

Waits reached out for his bare hand. Grabbing it between both of hers, she brought the hand to her lips, then pressed it against her wet cheek. He sank to one knee and wrapped his free arm around her shoulders.

“I will never leave you again,” he vowed. “That is a promise that I will die before I ever break. Believe me when I tell you, I will never leave you, ever again.”

Her eyes were sparkling with tears as she peered up at him, releasing his hand.

“Prepare the pot, woman,” he reminded as he stood. “There’ll be no more starving yourself, for tonight we’re going to start putting some meat back on your bones!”

Ducking back through the narrow doorway, he stood in the deepening gloom of that winter evening. All round them the lodges were aglow with a dim, translucent light cast from the fires within. Magpie stood rooted right where she had been. Flea was beside her, the weary horses strung out behind them both.

“My mother—she’s seen you are alive?” the girl asked as Scratch appeared.

“Bring my new son to me,” his voice croaked as he started toward her.

Magpie held the bundle out to her father. “He doesn’t look a thing like Flea. I thought all brothers were supposed to look alike. But this little one, he is nowhere near as ugly as Flea.”

Behind her, Flea growled.

“That is just the sort of thing you expect a sister to say about her brother, Flea,” Titus confided as he pulled back a flap of that blanket wrapped around the infant.

Beneath the cold starlight, the tiny child looked no different than Magpie had in those days and weeks after she was born, no different than Flea. Not until they began to grow older, a month or two at least, did they begin to take on their individual appearance—differences that became more marked as time went by.

“What do you think, Popo?” Flea asked as he raised himself up on tiptoes to look at his baby brother. “Do you think he is better looking than me?”

“No, you are both handsome Ti-tuzz men,” Bass gushed, filled with such overwhelming pride to hold his new son.

“Then,” Flea declared, “he must be so much better looking than his big sister!”

She half swung a fist at him as he ducked aside.

“Girl,” Titus chided. “You go inside now. And take your little brother with you. He will be hungry soon.”

As Magpie folded the infant into her arms, her face went sad momentarily. “My mother has not always had milk for him. She has been too weak at times.”

“What did she do to feed your little brother?”

“Sometimes, other women brought milk from a mare,” she confessed. “And sometimes … I think they brought their own milk. We fed him all we could with a spoon.”

Titus wrapped his arms around his daughter and the baby. “You are very strong, a very good sister, Magpie. I promise you that you and Flea will never have to worry about such things again. I will never leave my family, ever again.”

“You make good promises,” Flea said.

“You know I never make a promise I can’t keep.”

“You have always kept your word to us, Popo,” Magpie said.

“Now, go, daughter! Get your littlest brother inside. Help your mother with the fire, and get some water on to boil. Or keep your brother happy till it is time for him to eat. Now, hurry inside!”

She studied his face. “What are you going to do, Popo?”

“Me? Why, my oldest boy and his father are going to see to these horses. We’ll unload all our goods right here beside the lodge, then find a good place for these animals, where they can fill their empty bellies.”

The boy admitted, “I am very hungry too, Father.”

“Do you like venison, Flea?”

“You know I love venison!”

“I brought some with me for us to eat tonight,” he said as Magpie turned and ducked inside the lodge where Titus caught a glimpse of the flames dancing against the inside walls. Waits had laid on more wood, warming the lodge—just the way things had been in those days before he had strayed all the way to California. “And you, my dear son—you can eat venison till you’re ready to pop like a fat tick!”

“Here, Popo,” and the boy held up the lead rope for his father.

“No, Flea. You are my oldest son. I count on you more now than I ever did before. You and your sister have shown that you are children to make a father very, very proud. Bring my saddle horse along.”

“The others will come with me too?”

“They followed you here to the lodge, didn’t they?”

His little head bobbed up and down. “I think they followed because your saddle horse led them all the way back to the land of the Crow.”

Titus looped his arm over his son’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze as they started away for the snowy meadow. He was filled with such an awesome sense of love for his son, Titus didn’t know if he could contain it right then.

“You are a smart boy too. You know the way of horses, eh?”

“I am learning,” Flea admitted. “I have paid attention to everything I saw you do with them. And I’ve watched the other men in the village—when they break horses, or cut them on their privates, or have them mount the mares.”

“You have been paying attention.”

“Horses. They are something very special to me,” the boy expressed. Then he spoke as if sharing something in the strictest confidence. “Sometimes, Father … sometimes I think they talk to me in their own language that no one else can understand, or even hear.”

Titus stopped as the string of ponies came to a halt around them at the edge of the snowy meadow. “Tomorrow, Flea—after breakfast, we will come out here together, a father and his son. And you will see which one of these Cheyenne horses talks to you.”

“Chey-Cheyenne horses?”

“Yes.”

Flea wagged his head sadly. “If these are Cheyenne horses, I won’t understand what they say to me.”

Titus put his fist beneath the boy’s chin and chucked it to the side gently. “If you are a true horseman, Flea—it doesn’t matter what language you speak, doesn’t matter what tribe the horses came from. In the seasons and years yet to come, you will steal horses from many tribes who do not speak the same language you speak.”

“Is this true, Father—that I can understand what these Cheyenne horses will say, just like I understand Crow horses?”

Dropping to one knee, Titus gazed directly into his boy’s eyes and said, “If you are the horseman I think you will grow up to be, my son—then you will understand every horse.”

“So, it really does not matter that these are horses from far away?”

He stood, tussling the boy’s hair. “Tomorrow we see which one of these horses speaks to you, my son.”

“Why are we going to see if one of them—”

“Because”—and Titus turned Flea so the boy could look up at him in the deepening twilight—“the horse that speaks to you will be yours to keep, son. It will be your war pony, Flea.”

The child’s eyes grew big, his face visibly brightened in the dim starshine. “Oh, Father—every boy should have a horse of his own!”

“No, Flea,” Titus corrected him with a warm embrace. “Every young warrior should have his own warhorse.”