Sarah leaned forward, her forehead pressed against the smooth cedar pole that supported the center of the wickiup. Sweat dripped from the tip of her nose, soaking the neck of her deerskin dress. The contractions had begun at twilight, dull and rhythmic, but over the last four hours they had compressed into a relentless, battering cycle that left her no time to recover between waves.
Outside the lodge, a drum was beating.
It was not the steady, reassuring cadence of a dance. It was the rapid, frantic pulsing of a shaman's drum, coming from the rocky crest above the camp. Tah-zay was performing the ceremony of purification, singing his harsh, guttural chants to ward off the evil spirit he believed the white woman’s child would bring into the world.
Thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump.
The sound vibrated through the earth, passing through the sapling frame of the lodge and into Sarah’s very bones.
"Shut him out," Sarah gasped, her fingernails digging deep into the bark of the cedar post as another contraction gripped her body like an iron vice. "Tazhi... make him stop..."
"The drum has no teeth," Tazhi said firmly, wiping Sarah’s burning brow with a cloth soaked in cool mountain water. "Tah-zay beats the hide because he has nothing else to hold. You hold the life. Push your heels into the earth."
Two other Apache women—young mothers who had lost their infants during the hard winter—knelt beside Sarah. One held her right hand with a grip as unyielding as forged iron; the other rubbed warm sheep grease into her lower back, chanting softly in time with the laboring breaths.
Sarah felt as if her body was being torn in two along the grain of the bone. In the frontier cabins of Missouri, women spoke of childbirth in hushed, terrifying whispers, surrounded by camphor bottles, nervous doctors, and the smell of carbolic acid. Here, there was only the earth, the smell of grease and cedar, and the ancient, primal reality of birth stripped of all civilization.
A sudden commotion rose outside the lodge.
Shouts echoed through the camp, followed by the sharp crack of a rifle shot that shattered the night air.
The drum on the ridge stopped abruptly.
Inside the wickiup, the two young women froze, their eyes darting to the entrance flap.
"What was that?" Sarah cried out, panting, her voice laced with panic. "Is it soldiers?"
Tazhi rose quickly, drew a heavy iron butchering knife from her belt, and stepped toward the door.
Before she could touch the flap, Chato burst inside, his chest heaving, his face dark with fury. In his left hand he held his Winchester; his right hand was bloody where a lead splinter had grazed his forearm.
"Soldiers?" Tazhi barked in Apache.
"No," Chato answered in English, his eyes locking onto Sarah’s terrified gaze. "Not soldiers. Outlaws from the valley. Carpenter’s second band... twelve men from the Black Canyon trails. They found the pass while the moon was red."
Sarah’s breath froze in her throat. Another contraction tore through her, but she barely felt it through the icy terror that flooded her veins. "Carpenter had more men?"
"He had a brother," Chato spat, his jaw tightening into iron. "Eli Carpenter. He brought horse-thieves and bounty hunters from Tombstone. They do not come for gold; they come for blood. They want Goyahkla’s scalp, and they want the woman who brought down Dutch."
Outside, another volley of gunfire erupted, closer this time, accompanied by the high-pitched war cries of the Bedonkohe warriors rallying to defend the perimeter. Lead slugs tore through the pine branches above the lodges with sickening, whistling cracks.
"Goyahkla has taken twenty rifles to the narrow rocks," Chato said, reloading his magazine with three swift clicks of the brass lever. "We will hold them at the creek. But you must deliver the child now, Sarah. If they break the line, we move into the high caves."
"I can't move!" Sarah screamed, as the most violent contraction yet seized her lower body, driving her onto her knees with such force that her vision went completely dark. "He's coming! He's coming now!"
Tazhi dropped her knife, dropped to her knees between Sarah’s legs, and lifted the deerskin dress.
"The head is here," the old woman announced, her voice rising above the din of gunfire and shouting outside. "Push, daughter! Push for the father who died in the dark! Push for the son who must breathe!"
Chato stepped back toward the entrance, turned his back to give the women their dignity, and racked a cartridge into the chamber of his Winchester.
"I hold the door," the young warrior swore, his voice ringing like a bronze bell above the chaos of the night. "No wolf crosses this threshold while Chato draws breath."
Sarah took a deep, ragged breath of smoke and blood-scented air. She closed her eyes, shutting out the sound of the rifles, the shouts of dying men, and the crimson glare of the moon through the doorway.