“What was his name?” she asked, caught up in the story.
“Runs With Wolves.” The twenty-three-year-old boy and I had become close friends in the time I spent with the Apache. I often heard his loud laugh in my sleep, the picture of his tan face and brown eyes bringing memories of campfires and ridiculous stories he told to try and impress the woman he’d loved, Singing Bird. It was obvious to everyone but him that she wanted no one else; when she sang, her voice always had a way of conveying her love for him, no matter the tune or group she was with.
Coming out of my memories, I saw Sam staring intently, waiting for me to go on.
“I stayed with them for two years,” I continued. “Once I was healthy, I worked as a servant, but was well taken care of. Over time, I was treated like a member of the tribe. They called me Snake Eyes, because of the way I was squinting when they rescued me.” My smile grew wider then, a laugh caught in my throat.
“The Apache were like a family to me. After two years, though, I started to feel . . . useless. It was clear to me that I’d traveled through time somehow; I had a basic idea of when I was. Runs With Wolves could tell I was unhappy. After a while, it was decided I would leave and go home. Or least, what they thought was my home.”
“You never told them the truth?” She sounded more melancholy, even though there was nothing she could have done.
“Does your husband know the truth?” I asked, raising an eyebrow cockily.
“Yes, he does.” Smiling ruefully, she shrugged. “It’s a long story. Not ten years long, though, so you finish yours first.”
Nodding, I continued the tale, relieved to finally talk about what had happened to me, all those years ago.
“Runs With Wolves traveled with me when I left the village,” I began, remembering the man with fondness. His strong features were easily recalled in my mind, long black hair hanging freely past his shoulders. Sorrow had touched his features when we parted, but I knew he would be fine; he had a new wife and a child on the way. I was just another memory for him to forget.
“I don’t think so,” Sam disagreed when I said as much. “You lived with him for two years. He saved your life! You have to have been more than just a memory.”
“We were like brothers,” I confirmed. “But once I left . . . I don’t know. I never really belonged there. I felt like I needed to hold on to who I really was. In the process, I kind of stopped myself from becoming part of the tribe. Runs With Wolves didn’t seem to care, but others did.”
“Did they ever say anything to you?” Her voice was quiet and calm, not pushing in any way as she asked her questions.
Gratefully, I smiled at her, shrugging my shoulders. “No. They didn’t have to. I never participated in anything special or sacred to them, not until Runs With Wolves wedding, anyway. To everyone else, I was just a slave who had worked his way to freedom.”
Thinking back for a second, I saw the flames of the powwow fire, heard the chanting and celebrating on the night of my friend’s nuptials. His new wife, Singing Bird laughed delightedly as a young girl braided wild flowers into her hair. The memory easily sucked me in, bringing me to the happier moments of my life in the past. Thinking on to what had happened afterword, though, I quickly felt my stomach souring.
“Where did you go? When you left?” she asked, helping me find my place in the story again.
“We made the trip to Mexico City,” I continued, blinking hard and refusing to open them until the desert celebration had faded back into the darkness where I wanted it to stay. “Once I was somewhat settled, and he’d made the trades he wanted, he went back home.” Carefully, I locked the two years spent with the Indians back in their box in my mind. I’d never returned and didn’t see any reason why I would in the future.
There was still nothing I could do to better myself or them.
“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.” Sam stared at me with a dejected look. “To leave the only family and friends that you had in the world. It was very brave of you, albeit unneeded.”
“It wasn’t unneeded,” I replied, more forceful than I’d intended. “There was nothing else there for me. I had to go, or I would have lost myself.”
“Because they were so blood thirsty?”
Staring at her blankly, I tried to decide if she was serious. After a moment, I realized she really believed the stories that had been told about the natives.
“The Apache only fight when they need to, Sam. There was maybe one battle in the entire time I was there, and it lasted maybe a day. Just because history says something is true, doesn’t mean it is. You’re more likely to make a trade with an Apache than go to war with one.
Surfacing to the front of my mind, another memory surged through me.
“Fight only when there is no other choice,” Grey One had said, nodding wisely. “Life is the greatest gift we have. Do not take it unnecessarily.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” She spoke quickly, eyes wide at my sudden fierceness.
“It’s not you,” I sighed, rubbing a hand over my face. “Someday the Apache will be made into sob stories and villains. Life as they know it will be destroyed, all because someone decided they needed to spread hate.”
“You sound like one of them to me.” Her confession caught me off guard and I stared back with a slack jaw, not knowing what to say. Her words hadn’t been an insult—she hadn’t meant them that way—and they touched me in a way that was surprising.
“Thank you.”
“So, you spent two years with the Indians and then moved to Mexico City. What happened next?” Grinning, she encouraged me to continue, but her eyes still held the pain she felt for me.
Thinking back, I felt a pang of the loneliness and destitution I’d suffered with while in the great city. The citadel was magnificently huge and powerful; a center for education and religion, but none of it had been for me. “It was . . . simple,” I told her, shrugging. “The first year was the hardest. Most everyone knew I had come from the north, after living with the Apache. Work was scarce. I wasn’t much more than a beggar, really.”
Breath catching, her eyes widened, a hand going to her heart. “How? How did you survive if you had nothing? Why weren’t you able to make more, or even find more?”
“I didn’t try.” Laughing slightly, I looked away from her confused and affronted face. “I don’t want to change the future, Sam. What if I did one tiny thing and it changed the entire world as we know it? No, I kept to the shadows on purpose.”
“I’m sure the people of our time will be so happy to hear that you starved yourself for them,” she replied, somewhat snottily. “Sacrificing your own well-being for something that might not have made any difference.”
“I didn’t starve. There were enough odd jobs that I stayed fed.” Feeling like I wasn’t explaining well enough, I frowned, not knowing how to put into words that particular year of my life. Sometimes, I’d wished I’d stayed in Arizona, where it was less likely that I would have changed anything. At the same time, I’d really enjoyed the freedom of being on my own, as poor and lonely as I was.
“Keep going,” Sam said, obviously frustrated as well. She wasn’t understanding why I did what I did. Why should she? She had apparently let herself be adopted into this era without any issue at all.
“There was a woman named Angelina.” Pausing, I allowed myself to picture her in my mind, closing my eyes and sighing heavily. Her laugh tinkled in my ears like bells, big brown eyes staring at me happily. Swaying her hips gently, she motioned for me to come inside, the smells of dinner wafting out of the door behind her. Hunger for more than just food washed over me, my own chuckle responding to her beautiful form. More than anything, I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her close.
But love was not something I could risk.
“Her father was a pastor at a local church. They offered me a job tending the garden and a place to sleep inside. I never did decide if it was because they really needed
the help, or if they were trying to help me out. There wasn’t anything else for me to do, though, so I accepted.”
“And how long did you stay there?” I could see her thinking, the timeline she was forming practically written on her face.
“Another year.” Smiling, I silently said goodbye to the memory of Angelina, whisking the smell of her natural perfume back into the recesses of my mind, where they had been kept for the past five years or so.
“Why did you leave? Were you not happy there?” Her mild curiosity had returned, the annoyance at how I’d allowed myself to live seeming to diminish.
“I was more than happy,” I confessed. “But it was time to go. I don’t know how to explain it.”
But I did. The images were all there; a child wrapped in my arms, Angelina’s happy face smiling at me as she cooked dinner, holidays spent with her father, a house in the hills, everything. Loving her felt so natural, but there was too much time between us. My flight from her had been in the dead of night, without any goodbyes, a pack of my few belongings flung over my shoulder. Bumping right along with the cart I’d given the last of my money to take me to the coast, I remembered the coolness of the air that night, the smell of smoke hanging in the air, mixed with the chicken stench from the cage beside me.
Slowly, the smells changed to that of the sea, the sounds those of birds who frequent the waters, and the cart dropped me off on the docks, ships stretching down the shore, resting in the bay, their anchors resting on the ocean floor.
“At that point, I decided it was time to use the knowledge that I had. Understanding ships was easy enough; I’d studied them for years. I knew where the pirates liked to frequent, or at least where the history books had said they would be. Going to sea gave me the stability I’d wanted. I had a place to live, a steady income, and I got to see the world.” And there were no women to fall in love with, I added silently.
“So you’ve been a pirate for six years?” Her eyebrows rose and I knew what she was thinking. How was it possible, for her to have been a pirate herself for the last two years and never run into me at the usual ports?
“No. I’ve only been a pirate for the last year.” Moving to her side, I sat down, clutching the edge of the table. “I joined the crew of a vessel named Raggedy Maiden. I liked it so much, I remained a member until she was set upon by corsairs a year ago.”
“By Randall, you mean.” Glowering, she shook her head, her lips taking on a hard appearance. “That must have been close after I last saw him.”
“They took the ship, naturally. I was waiting below deck, with my friend Abel. He was the ship’s doctor.”
“Steady, Mark,” Abel had whispered, watching as I fidgeted at the surgery door. He held a pistol in his hand, and his large form pressed against the back wall, sweat shining on his Spanish skin. “We don’t know what they want. I’ll hand over the tools if it will keep us alive.”
“Damn pirates,” I growled. While I’d enjoyed studying them and learning in my own time, I found them quite the nuisance in this one. “You’d think they would recognize when to let things go and when to keep going.”
“We’d been trying to outrun them for three days,” I said, looking over at Sam. “The Navy regularly patrolled the area we were in, but it didn’t seem to matter.”
Thinking back to that day, the few moments that had altered the course of my life yet again, I suddenly felt grateful that it had happened. The events had led me back to Sam, as horrible as they’d been.
“We’ll be fine,” Abel said reassuringly. I heard the slight tremor in his voice, though, and pulled the hammer on my gun back, just in case.
The fight above us did not last long. Silence filled the air, the absence of sound making me even more nervous than I would’ve been otherwise. When the door in front of me finally opened, I started pulling the trigger, only to have the gun knocked to the side by a cutlass.
Cursing, I staggered away, holding a newly acquired cut. It didn’t appear too bad, but it stung some, the mark stretching from the top of my wrist to the base of my thumb.
“Gentlemen,” a voice easily distinguishable as English said politely. “There is no need for violence here.” The man strolled into the room, taking in its contents with a frown. His long, black hair was braided and pulled over his shoulder, a splatter of blood on his cheek that was obviously not his.
“I’m looking for crew members,” he said, motioning to someone out the door who came in and started taking everything out of the area.
“No, thank you,” Abel said ferociously, his gun still pointed at the man. The pirate, however, continued on as if nothing were happening.
“You’ll be given a fair share of every profit. Leave when we stop at port. And, you’ll have the honor of sailing under myself, Captain Thomas Randall.” He smiled, a sickly, evil expression, and I felt my breath stop for a second.
It was him. This was the pirate whose ship would sink in the Gulf of Mexico within just a few years. All of the questions I’d been trying to answer in my own time sprung up instantly, despite having been forgotten about for almost a decade.
“I’ll join.” I heard myself speak, the words coming out before I even realized what I was saying.
Abel gasped behind me, his eyes wide, and I gave him a quick, pleading glance. Slowly, he lowered his gun and nodded. “I’ll go, too,” he said stiffly, glaring at me.
Glancing away, I stared at Randall, hoping I hadn’t just killed us both. Abel was one of the people I trusted most since arriving here. It was both heartening and frightening to see him put that same trust in me.
I was now a pirate, on a ship that I knew would sink, with a friend who thought we’d made the switch just to survive and get home.
“What happened to Abel?’ Sam’s voice brought me out of my thoughts and back to her. “He’s not here any more.”
“He died. Nine months ago.” Flinching, the sound of the pistol that shot him rang in my ears. “Randall had him burned with the rest of the ship we’d taken.”
There it was. The last of the weight I’d been carrying around for ten years lifted off my shoulders. Someone knew what had happened to me. With the epistle finished, I looked over at her, relieved to have finally shared it all.
“And now you’re here. I don’t think Randall would be happy to find out I know his captive, too.”
She frowned, taking everything in as she nodded. “You can’t let him know, Mark. He knows about me, about how I’m from the future. If he discovers you are, too, he’ll keep you around, but it won’t be in the condition you are now.”
Flinching, I got the message, loud and clear. If I was found out, I wouldn’t be part of the crew anymore; I would be one of their treasures.
Silence hung between us, and I found myself thinking of the state things were in and how I’d gotten here. Suddenly, a memory from my own time surfaced and my mouth dropped open, my eyes practically bugging out of my head.
“Sammy, you’ve gone and married yourself to a pirate!”
“How did you know that?” Leaning back in astonishment, she regarded me with a cautious curiosity, as if she didn’t quite trust me all the sudden.
“I found a record of your marriage, back in our time. That’s a whole different story about how I came across it, but I know you’re married to Tristan O’Rourke. Do you have any idea what kind of man he is? Stealing a ship and turning pirate! And you’ve trusted him with the truth!”
“You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” she replied coldly, standing and glaring at me.
“Do you care to enlighten me?” I shot back. “I mean, you’re pregnant with his child! You’ve changed the future, Sam. That baby could grow up and get married, have kids, start a whole different line that never existed before. What if one of those people turns out to be the next Hitler? You could have practically destroyed everything that we know!”
“Shut up!” It was the first time she’d raised her voice at me and I didn’t like it
. I could tell she was getting worked up quickly, though, and bit back my retort.
“First, do you know if Tristan . . . is he still alive?” Fear flashed in her eyes, but she held her strong stance, her fingers forming tight fists at her side.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” I asked, caught off guard yet again.
“Your ship just came from England, didn’t it?” she asked through clenched teeth. “Tristan and a whole crew of men went to intercept it. They never returned.”
“If anyone ran into them, I didn’t know about it,” I replied honestly. “But, if he were dead, I would have heard about it. People have made more than a few threats against him over the months.”
She relaxed some at that, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. “I hope you’re right.” Her voice was soft, scared even, and I suddenly realized that her marriage wasn’t just some fling she’d joined to pass the time. She really loved the man, despite his character flaws.
“I broke into Oak Isle and climbed into the Treasure Pit.” The change in direction of the conversation was somewhat dizzying, but I stayed with her.
“I know. They caught you on camera—even if you’d gotten out, they would have had enough proof to lock you up.”
“It wasn’t about getting the treasure.” She sighed, sitting down again in a defeated sort of way. “I did it for Dad. He should have been the first one to see what was down there. I wanted to steal from McCreary what was taken from my father.”
“You made it down there before it flooded.” I’d long accepted that fact, since the vase that had surfaced in her place had basically confirmed the notion.
Nodding, she looked at me seriously. “I’ve been down there now, too. I helped build the Treasure Pit.”
Unable to respond, I stared at her with what I was sure were eyes so wide I looked like an owl.
“The first time—our time—I found a vase at the bottom and opened it. I later learned that it was Pandora’s Box. Instead of killing me, it decided I was worthy enough to know the answer to the question I had. It sent me to this time, where I would find out what was in the Pit.”
Carried Away (The Swept Away Saga, Book Two) Page 17
