Dan Simmons - Black Hills

I arched my head back once, but I did not close my eyes. The blue sky—it had turned into a hot May day after the early morning fog and mist—disturbed me somehow, as if the color were a portent. So I looked back down at you and what you were doing with me and to me.

I always look, my dearest love. You know that. You know everything about me. Any other woman doing such a thing—I have never known any other woman to do such a thing—would, I would think, look bizarre, absurd, perhaps obscene, but when you take me in your mouth like that with your head bobbing back and forth, your hands still moving on me, your lips and tongue rapacious, and your lovely eyes glancing up at me from time to time from under those beautiful lashes, there could be nothing bizarre, absurd, or obscene in the gift you are giving me, in the sort of love you are showing me. You are beautiful. It makes me excited this very second, here in the darkness, to think of you, your cheeks pink with the sun after that long day of riding and also pink with excitement, the top of your lovely head, the sunlight catching individual hairs on either side of the part, moving faster and faster.

When we were finished—it had only taken a minute, I know, but it was a minute of pure joy and pleasure before weeks of solitude and care and hardship for me—you removed the handkerchief you had brought, dipped it in the stream, cleaned me up, tucked me in, and set the buttons of my tough blue cavalry trousers to rights.

Then we went back and said our formal farewells in front of Burkham and the others. We both had tears in our eyes, but neither of us could keep from smiling, could we, my darling?

When the wagon and you and the other women were mere dots receding across the prairie, Burkham startled me by saying, “It’s hard, ain’t it, General?”

Again I wanted to smile, although I forced myself not to. Remembering that Burkham might be one of those interviewed by the press—several correspondents came with us, you remember, and more waited in Bismark and elsewhere for every word of our punitive expedition—I put on my saddest, sternest face and said to him, “Private, a good soldier—and I have always been a good soldier, Burkham—has to serve two mistresses. While he’s loyal to one, the other must suffer.”

Burkham grunted, evidently not moved by my eloquence. He swung up onto his gelding and said, “Shall we get back to the other mistress, General, before the tail-end of it gets out of sight?”

Libbie, my darling girl. I know you do not mind my talking of such things with you, since I have written you so many letters filled with such intimate thoughts, and whispered them to you while we lay together naked. You have always been more open and generous with your passion than any other woman in the world.

Do you remember the time when I could no longer bear to be apart from you (and I had heard that cholera had broken out at Fort Leavenworth, where you were waiting), so I wrote you from my Republican River camp telling you to come at once to Fort Wallace, where my men would bring you to my camp on the Republican, but Pawnee Killer and the hostiles were swarming everywhere there in Kansas, and I realized, too late, that they would almost surely attack the rich wagon train you would be traveling in, so I ordered the men who would be picking you up to shoot you rather than let the Indians capture you—later, you told me that this was terribly sweet and that you took it as a sure sign of my undying love—but when the wagon train (which indeed had been attacked by five hundred or so Sioux and Cheyenne, right where Comstock, the guide whom the Indians call Medicine Bill, had predicted they would attack, but the hostiles were driven off) returned from Fort Wallace, there was no sign of you and I went half mad with worry and passion? I love you so much, my dear, sweet, darling little girl.

You will remember that they had sent Lieutenant Lyman Kidder out from Fort Sedgwick to find my column, and he and his ten men had dropped out of sight right in the territory between us and Fort Wallace where I had feared for your life. I called for a forced march to Fort Wallace—primarily out of concern for you, my dearest—and we found what was left of Kidder and his men, stripped and hacked and scattered all over a little hollow. Comstock explained to us what the tracks told—of how Kidder and his small party had tried to run, how Pawnee Killer and his band had caught them from the rear, run them down, shot them with arrows, then murdered and mutilated them. It was a July day, and the bodies and men’s parts had been lying in that sun for days, and I took the lesson then—and shall never forget it—that when faced by any serious force of Indians, the thing to do is to stand and fight, using your far superior firepower to keep the savages out of arrow range. Kidder had galloped in panic for more than ten miles, and although our cavalry horses are faster than Indian ponies, the Indians are ingenious at swapping their tired mounts for fresh ones, and some of the Indian ponies simply never tire.

Never run from Indians was the lesson I learned that July day nine years ago, standing there in the Kansas heat and stench watching the burial party inter the awful remains of Lieutenant Kidder and his men. And all that time I was sick with worry about you, my dearest—so worried that my belly constantly hurt and cramped with anxiety.

Kansas was burning. Pawnee Killer and the other hostile Sioux and Cheyenne had slaughtered more than two hundred whites, including many women and children, in the area I was supposed to patrol on my first western expedition, and the cavalry had shot and killed only two of the redmen—and those had been killed by Kidder’s party before they died.

So I called off the campaign and drove a hundred men and horses one hundred and fifty miles in fifty-five hours. Stragglers fell behind and were killed by Pawnee Killer’s braves, but I would not go back to recover our dead or to chase the hostiles. You were all that I could think of. On July 18, I reached Fort Hayes and left ninety-four of the men there, taking only my brother Tom, two officers, and two troopers on a sixty-mile ride to Fort Harker, which we covered in less than twelve hours. There I left Tom and the four men behind and took the three a.m. train to Fort Riley, where—I prayed to God—I would find you waiting for me in relative safety.

Do you remember our reunion, my darling?

You were in your quarters, pacing, wearing the green dress I had praised at Fort Hayes the previous month. You wrote me later that the vision of me when I threw open the door and entered the room was brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun —There before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband!— you later told me that you wrote to your stepmother, but what you did not tell the dear second Mrs. Judge Bacon was that besides being visibly blithe and buoyant, I was also visibly aching for you, my sex as rigid and far more straight and much more in need of use right then than the securely sheathed saber banging at my leg.

Do you remember, my darling, me—still dusty from the trail and railway—slamming the door and lifting you up and carrying you to the bed there in your quarters, smothering you with kisses and fumbling in your clothes while you fumbled at my buttons, then you unlacing your stays and lowering the top of your dress while I tore off your petticoats and pantaloons? Do you remember my spurs gouging the footboard of that bed that had been so carefully brought out all the way to Fort Riley while you rolled me onto my back, mounted me as I might leap onto Vic, seized me in your eager hand, and guided me into you?