Bear's Heart

by Corie Weaver

  “Tomás!” She threw her arms up. “How can you be done in the fields already? You have your work to do as well.”

  He shrugged. “That is not important right now. Right now I need to speak to you.”

  “Tomás, stop.” She reached forward, grabbed his arm, halted his movement. “If I leave my chores, I’ll be scolded.” She laughed. “If Fray Alonzo even notices.” Her face sobered. “But if you are missing, he can have you flogged. I do not want that.”

  Tomás nodded. “I promise. He will not notice. I have made sure my work is done. And now,” with a final shake of the grain pail, “your work is done too.”

  They twisted through the streets until they reached the middle of the new town, the tall building of the mission in front of them, the wooden doors carved with stars and flowers.

  Tomás led her around the edge of the building to the narrow side door. He pushed it open a crack, looked around, then slipped inside, pulling her behind him.

  “What are you—”

  His hand over her mouth cut off her whisper. Her dark eyes widened as he bent his face down to hers.

  “You must be silent now, I will explain all later,” he hissed.

  She nodded, face white, eyes fixed on his.

  He uncovered her mouth, then moved away to kneel in the corner. Isabel crept closer, watched him work at the seam between two pieces of flagstone with a thin blade.

  “What—”

  His sharp look silenced her and he continued working while she bit her fingers.

  Within moments the stone was free and he lifted it and set it to the side. He reached into the hole and came out with a handheld lantern. He lit it and the faint glow revealed a ladder stretching down into the blackness.

  “Come on.” He sat on the edge of the hole and held the lantern out.

  Isabel shook her head. “No.” Her lips formed the word, but no sound came out.

  “Isabel, it is safe. Come down.”

  The girl shook, arms crossed over her chest. “I don’t want to go down there with the snakes and spiders.”

  “There are no . . .” He sighed. “If I go first, will you follow?”

  She nodded.

  “Really?”

  She glared at him. “I have never lied to you before; I am not about to start doing so now.”

  He climbed down the ladder, taking the lantern with him.

  The room darkened as the lantern descended and she crept closer to the hole and the light. Within moments his voice came from the pit.

  “It is all right. No snakes, no spiders.”

  She gathered her skirts around her legs and sat on the edge of the pit. She felt around for the ladder, then lowered herself into the hole.

  “Tomás!” she hissed.

  “What now?”

  “Don’t look up!”

  He sighed.

  The walls of the pit were formed of stacked stone. The bottom was packed earth, hardened with ox blood. The width of the chamber would easily surpass thirty paces. This was not a random hole in the ground, but a room, built deep into the earth.

  “What is this place?”

  Tomás shook his head and looked sad. “You are one of us, your mother was one of our people, but they took you away, took you from your heritage.”

  She glared at him. “I have heard this and heard this since I have been back to the pueblo. My family has taken me from nothing.”

  “Then how can you not know the kiva, the sacred space, sacred even though they build their buildings over it?”

  She spat the words, “My mother was a Christian, the same as me, the same as you and the people of the village, Spanish or Indian. You took their oaths, you come to Mass.”

  Tomás put the lantern on the floor, let its light cast their shadows on the walls where they flickered with agitation. “Yes, some of us believe truly. Your mother was one. She converted, she married one of the invaders, she left her home and people, she told you nothing of your true people.

  “But most of us do as they tell us because we have no choice. If we do not convert, if we do not work in their fields, then we have nothing to live on. Once we held our own lands, our own fields. Now the Spanish hold everything. They took our land, raided the grain we had stored. We have nothing to trade with the other villages, nothing to keep us through lean years, nothing at all now.”

  He looked up at her, face wild.

  “And our people can take no more.”

  Isabel shook her head. “Why do you tell me this? What do you want me to do?”

  “You must go, you must leave here.”

  She staggered back as if he had struck her. “What? You want me to leave?”

  He came towards her, held his hands out to her shoulders, but she backed away.

  “I thought you were waiting for my father to return. I thought, I thought . . .” She backed into the wall, could go no further.

  “Shhhh.” He held her arms. “I do not want you to go. But I think you should. I want you to go, to tell Fray Alonzo to go with you, to return to Santa Fe and if you can, to go south.”

  She shook her head. “But this is my home. If I leave, how will my father find me?”

  His hands closed on her arms, pressing through the thin fabric, shaking her.

  “None of that matters now. You must leave here, leave here as soon as you can.”

  She spun away from him and kicked over the lantern, dropping the kiva into velvet blackness.

  ~ * * * ~

  I woke up, choking. I could feel the marks on my arm where the boy had squeezed her, had shaken her.

  “Bear Girl, what is it?”

  Jack shot up next to me and looked around the room for danger.

  “A dream, the people from the vision. Something’s terribly wrong. Whatever it is, it’s getting worse, getting closer.”

  Jack lay back down. “Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re going to figure it out tonight.”

  He reached up and pulled me down until I lay against his chest. He wrapped his arms tightly around me and stroked my hair. “You sleep and I’ll watch for a while. Just have normal dreams, okay?”

  I smiled. I did not want to see further into their world and I did not think that Jack would be able to stop it. But it was nice that he would be willing to try. Sooner than I expected I drifted into dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  The first light of morning filtered in from the outer rooms and I untangled myself from Jack. I stretched, missing all the comforts of being home. Mother. Father. My throat caught. No. No time.

  “Jack,” I reached out and shook him. “Come on, we need to leave.”

  Asleep, I could see traces of the younger boy he had been, but as he woke the years fell into place.

  “Morning.” He stood, stretched. “Breakfast. Let’s get some breakfast.”

  We started down the road.

  “Where can we cook breakfast here?”

  He grinned. “You’re going to love this. Heck, I’m going to love this. I’ve never gotten to go inside before.”

  We went to a compact building with people streaming in and out the doors. Cars in a line wrapped around the building.

  “What is this?” I whispered.

  “A restaurant. They have a window they hand food out of. Dad takes us for breakfast burritos here sometimes on the weekends. Maggie gets the really big one so we can split it. Sometimes if the line is long she goes inside instead, but I have to wait in the car. Now I don’t!”

  I blinked. “You know, the only words of that I understood were breakfast and Maggie.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry. But I know you’ll like it.”

  We waited in line, amid a press of people dressed in all sorts of different ways. Women in skirts or in pants, men in long pants or short pants, woven of every color I could think of. The line shuffled forward and we eventually arrived at the front.

  “Two number ones, please, red.”

  Red? I wondered.

  Jack held out
a stack of the green papers from Maggie and the woman at the high table took some, gave him different papers back, then handed him a bag and turned her attention to the people behind us.

  We sat at a small table outside. “Jack, what just happened?”

  “We bought breakfast. I told you that was a restaurant.”

  “You can pay people to cook for you?” I thought about that, about all the mornings I had struggled to prepare food despite being half asleep. “So, you just give them money and they give you . . . what is this?”

  Jack had handed me a thick roll of flat bread wrapped around steaming contents. He busily ate his own. “Mmmph mmmh.”

  “That does not help.” But I took the bundle and nibbled at the corner of the bundle.

  “Mmmm!” Warm spicy food filled the roll and a red sauce spilled out over my hand.

  “Good, isn’t it? Eggs, potatoes, other stuff and this spicy red sauce. Best breakfast ever.”

  I kept eating and wondered how I could make something like this at home.

  We finished and licked the last of the sauce off our fingers, laughing.

  “I want to have someone cook for me all the time!” I declared.

  Jack shook his head. “We can only do it for a few days. Every time it takes some of the money from Maggie and in a while we’ll run out.” He looked up at me and I felt myself answer his smile. “But that won’t happen for a while yet, so no worries!”

  Breakfast was the only good part of the morning. It felt like the time for us to meet the buses would never come. We went back to the campus, to the place Maggie had told us was the building that the young man had mentioned. I drove Jack crazy, worrying if we were on the right trail, if I should be doing something else.

  Finally several buses arrived, painted differently from the ones we had already ridden. They parked in a line, and shortly after their arrival groups of people drifted in from all directions.

  "Those must be the families of the students," Jack whispered. "Dad tries to make sure there’s some sort of field trip for everyone at least once a year. He says if the whole family is interested, the students do better in school."

  I grunted, only giving him half my attention. Maggie’s father stood by the opening to the bus at the front of the line, so I pulled Jack towards one of the others, where we waited near several families. Jack’s plan worked. No one questioned us and soon we boarded the bus and were on the way.

  After we had taken a seat near the back a thought struck me. “Get out the map," I whispered. "Let us see if we can trace where we are going.”

  The bus twisted through narrow streets for a few minutes, but shortly entered a larger street and went straight.

  “We’re going south, I think,” whispered Jack. He glanced over at the mountains to be sure.

  After a few minutes, a young woman at the front of the bus stood up and spoke to the rest of the passengers.

  “Dr. Sanger would like to make sure that everyone has a little background on where we’re going. Since I’m one of his students, that would be my job. Let me know if you have any questions. Spanish explorers first came into the territory now known as New Mexico in 1532 and quickly spread the belief that rich treasures of gold and silver would be found here, just as they had been in New Spain, what we call Mexico, to the South.

  “In 1610 Santa Fe became the new capital. Caravans of colonists made the six-month journey north from New Spain. They brought cattle and sheep and the knowledge of forging metal.

  “They also brought their religion. The Spanish king, disappointed by the lack of treasure, considered abandoning the colony. But Franciscan missionaries had traveled through the region and they argued that it was needful to keep a Christian presence.

  “Villages that fought the Spanish faced severe punishment. The Spanish soldiers, poorly provisioned, demanded the villages turn over their stores of grain. When years of drought came, the Pueblo people had no choice but to move closer to the invaders and accept the new ways.

  “The land itself contributed to the hardship. The Rio Grande valley went through several years of drought. Years of drought and famine, as well as the forced service of the Pueblo people to the Spanish and repression of the native religion raised tensions to unbearable heights.

  “In 1680 those tensions boiled over. In August of that year, Pueblo warriors throughout New Mexico united, despite barriers of culture and language that had historically kept the Pueblos separate.

  “They burned the churches and killed many of the priests and settlers. The warriors then surrounded Santa Fe where many of the surviving settlers had taken refuge. After they cut off the water supply to the town, the governor Antonio de Otermín was forced to retreat. A thousand Spanish settlers fled to Mexico.”

  Otermín. I had heard that name in my vision. We were on the right trail, after all.

  “The Spanish returned to reclaim the territory twelve years later, but this was the first and last time that a European force would be removed from a colony in North America until the American war of revolution. What you’re going to see today is a truly interesting part of this story.”

  Her voice had not changed once, not throughout her tale of suffering and horror. I could not imagine what she would think was interesting.

  “Twenty years ago, the owner of some property in the South Valley cleared land to put up a new barn. Under the brush she discovered the remains of a previously undiscovered pueblo and mission. It must have been deserted after the revolt. We found the pueblo was called Santa Catalina. Having an untouched pueblo within a city is a great opportunity for research. A month ago, we had a fantastic discovery.”

  My ears pricked up. A month. How long would that be at home?

  “One of the student teams tested a new piece of equipment that uses sonar to look for things buried under the ground.”

  A woman in front of us raised her hand, and the young woman paused.

  “Sonar takes sound waves and pushes them through the ground until the sound waves hit something dense enough to bounce back and then the machine can see a sketchy picture of what’s down there. Almost like how a bat ‘sees’ in the dark.”

  I kept my face still. I wanted to yell that this did not help, but I supposed I had enough of the idea for her to continue.

  “They found that the mission had been built over the old kiva, an underground room where pueblo people performed sacred rituals. Actually, a lot of the missions were built that way.”

  “The sonar also found two bodies, not terribly well preserved, tangled together down at the bottom of the kiva. That was pretty unexpected. We don’t know how they died, or who they were, or what they were doing there. Our people had to separate them to get them out and now Dr. Sanger is leading a team running tests back at the University.”

  Bodies. Bodies disturbed after all this time. I thought of the pit Tomás had brought Isabel into. I wondered if she had ever come out of that dark place.

  The buses pulled into a dirt lot filled with other cars. I did not wait for Jack before leaving the bus, but flung myself towards a wooden bench and pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them as tightly as I could. Nothing warmed me. The sun’s light was far away and I shook, thinking of the horrors the woman’s voice had so calmly described.

  I heard someone approach from behind and Jack crouched next to me.

  “Bear Girl?” He said nothing else, but I heard the question in his voice.

  I shook my head. “I do not blame them. I do not blame the Spanish. In the span of days, I am sure all parties did only what they thought was needful. But,” I stopped, searched for words, for an explanation of the revulsion that shook through me. “My family, they are healers. We always have been. We always will be. That is what I am trained for.”

  Jack nodded, looked unsure as to where my words led.

  “For a healer, to hear of all those deaths, all of that anger, from both sides, the cruelty and the pain . . . and to know there is nothing to be done
, nothing that could have been done, even if I had been there. It breaks my heart.”

  He said nothing, but put an arm around me and I felt the warmth of his body sink into mine as I leaned back against his chest.

  I could hear him hum softly as he thought. “But . . . I don’t understand something. How did you not know about this? Isn’t it part of the past? Something you would know?”

  I squirmed in his embrace to face him. “What do you mean?”

  His brow furrowed and I could tell he was trying to put his words together. “Where you and Ash come from. I guess I always thought it was somewhere in the past, somewhere in history. So I figured you would know this stuff, about when the Spanish came and all that.”

  “I do not think it works like that.” I settled back and watched people flow around us. “The more time I spend here, the more time I have spoken with you and Maggie, the more I think there is something different between your world and mine. There is always Spider Old Woman and Coyote. Always our people. We have stories, tales of long ago, but our present does not seem to change as rapidly as your world.”

  “What about last summer? The evil old guy just about wiped out Ash’s village. That doesn’t sound unchanging to me.”

  I shook my head. “I had not forgotten. Ripples come and go, people change. Perhaps a new village will arise and an old one vanishes.” I bit my lip, remembering old tales. “We do have stories of people leaving, of them wandering away, looking for a different home. They never return and no one hears from them.”

  Jack grunted. “Huh. I wonder if maybe they came here. I know Maggie found stories about Spider Old Woman and Coyote in local folk tales. Maybe people from your world came here, started villages.” He sat up, excited. “Maybe the people here are your descendants, or part of your family. Long-lost cousins!”

  I laughed at him. “I don’t think so. Maybe they are related to Ash and his people, but I doubt they are from my family. Unless there are families of talking bears.”

  “No . . .” he laughed with me and I felt better.

  “So, do you think you found answers to what you were looking for?”

  I straightened. “We must find out more.”