The Touch of Fire Read online

  By dawn, five more people had died.

  Doggedly Annie made the round with yet more tea, her eyes dark-circled with fatigue. She entered one wickiup to find a warrior trying to roll to his side, his hand reaching out for the woman who lay beside him. Her heart catching, Annie rushed to the woman and found that she was merely sleeping. As this was one of the Indians whose lungs had been congested, she went almost limp with relief, and gave the warrior a blinding smile. His slanted, enigmatic black eyes studied her, then with a groan he collapsed onto his back again.

  She slipped her arm under his shoulders and eased him up so he could sip the tea, which he did without fuss. When she let him back down, he seemed to be a little dazed, but he muttered something to her in his guttural language. She placed her cool hand on his forehead and indicated that he should go to sleep. Still looking puzzled, he did so.

  She stumbled as she left the wickiup. Rafe was immediately beside her, his hard arm around her waist. “That’s enough,” he said. “You need some sleep.” He guided her to the blankets he had spread in the shade of a tree, and Annie gratefully sank down. She should have argued with him, she thought tiredly, but she had sensed that he wasn’t going to give in this time. She was asleep by the time her head touched the blanket.

  The two little boys had crept curiously near. Rafe put his finger to his lips in a hushing motion. Solemn black eyes looked back.

  He was tired himself, but rest could come later, when Annie was awake. He wanted to hold her in his arms while she slept, feel the warmth of her slight body and absorb some of her magic. It was enough, though, to guard her as she slept.

  By the third day, Annie didn’t know how she was going to make it. She had slept only in snatches, as had Rafe. A total of seventeen people had died since she and Rafe had entered the camp, eight of them children. It was the loss of the children that hurt her the most.

  Whenever she could, she would sit and hold the plump baby girl who glowed with health like an oasis in the midst of the desert. The infant cooed and squealed and waved her dimpled hands about, smiling indiscriminately at whoever held her. The weight of that small, wriggling body in her arms was infinitely soothing.

  The baby’s mother seemed to be recovering, as did her father. The young woman had smiled wanly at her daughter’s imperious wails. The round-faced warrior still slept a lot, but his fever seemed to have abated and his lungs were clear.

  Then, within a matter of hours, one of the little boys who had seemed so healthy began running a high fever and went into convulsions. Despite the willow-bark tea Annie spooned down him, he died that night without ever breaking out into spots. Only the circles on his gums indicated the disease that had burned through his young body. Annie cried in Rafe’s arms.

  “I couldn’t do anything,” she sobbed. “I try, but sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. No matter what I do, they still die.”

  “Hush, sweetheart,” he murmured. “You’ve done more than anyone else could.”

  “But it wasn’t enough for him. He was only about seven years old!”

  “Some younger than he was have already died. They don’t have any resistance to the disease, honey; you know that. You knew from the first that a lot of them would die.”

  “I thought I could help,” she said. Her voice was thin and desolate.

  He lifted her hand and kissed it. “You have helped. Every time you touch them, you help.”

  She still couldn’t feel as if she were doing enough. Her supply of willow bark had all been used. What she wouldn’t have given for more, or for meadowsweet, which was even better at lowering fevers but didn’t grow in the Southwest. Jacali had shown her some bark and indicated it came from a tree Rafe called a quaking aspen, but it seemed the women in the band had gathered it during a forage to the north and there was only a small supply of it. She boiled it much as she had the willow bark, and the resulting tea had helped the fevers, but it didn’t seem to be as efficient, or perhaps she was simply making it too weak. She was too tired to decide.

  Jacali shuffled around with the endless cups of jerky broth, coaxing nourishment down sore throats. The little boy whose friend had died began shadowing Rafe, often peering at Annie from behind the shelter of Rafe’s long, muscled legs.

  When some of the warriors began showing distinct signs of recovery on the fourth day, staring at her with their unreadable gazes, Annie expected Rafe to throw her on a horse and start riding.

  Instead, late that day, he came to her with the baby in his arms. She was crying ceaselessly, her tiny arms and legs jerking, and her dark skin was flushed even darker with fever. Black spots had begun breaking out on her stomach.

  CHAPTER

  16

  “No” Annie said hoarsely. “No. She was fine this morning.” Even as she said it, she knew what a useless protest it was. Illnesses didn’t always follow the same timetable or have the same symptoms, especially in infants.

  His face was grim. Only one of the Indians who had broken out in the black spots that signaled hemorrhaging had lived, and that one was a warrior, with a warrior’s strength. The man was still very ill and weak. Rafe knew as well as Annie that the baby’s chances weren’t good.

  Annie took the baby. The little thing stopped crying, but moved fretfully in her hands as if trying to escape the pain of fever.

  It was dangerous to give medication to a baby this little, yet Annie didn’t think she had a choice. Perhaps it was just as well that the tea from the quaking aspen was weaker than the willow-bark tea. She dribbled a small amount of it down the baby’s throat, then spent an hour gently washing her in cool water. Finally the baby slept, and Annie forced herself to carry her back to her mother’s side.

  The young woman was awake, her dark eyes huge with anxiety. She turned onto her side and touched her daughter with a trembling hand, then tucked the hot little body close to hers. Annie patted her shoulder, then had to leave before she began crying.

  There were still too many very sick people for her to allow herself to break down. She had to see to them.

  Rafe had noticed that a few of the warriors were recovered enough to sit up and feed themselves. He was right behind her every time she entered one of those wickiups, the thong slipped off his revolver, and his icy gaze saw every movement while she was there.

  The warriors, for their part, stared just as fiercely at the white man who had invaded their camp.

  “Do you really think this is necessary?” she asked when they left the second wickiup where the performance had been repeated.

  “It’s either that or we leave right now,” Rafe flatly replied. They should have left anyway, and he knew it, but he would have to tie her over the saddle to make her leave the baby, and something in him didn’t want to leave, either. The baby didn’t have much of a chance as it was; if Annie left, she wouldn’t have any.

  “I don’t think they’ll try to hurt us. They’ve seen that we’re only trying to help.”

  “We may have violated some of their customs without knowing it. White people are their hated enemies, honey, and don’t forget it. When Mangas Coloradas was tricked into a meeting under a guarantee of safety, then killed and his head cut off and boiled, the Apache swore eternal vengeance. Hell, who can blame them? But I won’t trust your safety with them for one minute, and for your own sake don’t ever forget about Mangas Coloradas, because they won’t.”

  So much pain, on both sides. It weighed down on her as she went from patient to patient, dispensing tea and cough medication, trying to soothe both fever and grief, for there wasn’t a family in the little band that hadn’t been touched by death. Jacali too made the rounds, talking to her people, so everyone knew the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen them. Annie heard the soft, stricken wailing within the privacy of the wickiups, though they never displayed their grief in her presence. They were both proud and shy, and naturally wary of her anyway. All of the goodwill on her part wasn’t going to wipe out the years of warfare between their peo