I felt my blood surge through me from head to foot as though my whole body had swollen. I did not hesitate for a second. I picked up the necklace and bowed my head and fitted it around my neck, with the knot of its leather tie resting on my nape. As the weight of the silver pieces pressed against me, and I ran my hand across the decorations, caressing the contours of the animals and the hard protuberances of their jewel-eyes and jewel-borders, I thought my skin began to shine.
Natty appeared at my side. “Perfect,” she breathed, putting her face close to mine. She might as well have said I was perfect; she might as well have told me she loved me. I seemed to inhale the word rather than hear it.
“Perfect,” she whispered again.
I looked into her eyes and saw that the glow of the silver had carried into them; it was shining up at me like light reflecting off the bed of a stream.
“I know,” I told her, and wanted to say more. But she did not need any more. She dabbed her fingers against her lips, kissed them, and lightly touched the necklace, to show that she understood. Then she turned out of the bedroom and led me through the smaller courtyard, through the larger space where the eagles kept their vigil, and outside onto the veranda. It was astonishing to see our prison again, squatting on the rising ground to our right, and the village cradled in its valley. We had plunged so deeply into a different world, I thought the old one might no longer exist.
“Wait,” Natty told me, still very practical and busy, then doubled back through the entrance to the house. I could not think what else we might need, but stepped into the shadows of the veranda to wait for her.
We shall soon be away was all I could think, and away was everything I wanted. Away from Black Cloud. Away from the village. Away from lives that were never our own.
And toward…
But that would come later. For the moment there was only the wilderness stretching before me. A vast, flat, rolling ocean of grass and boulders and rocks and dust. Dust whispering when the wind rose, and dust lying in silence when the wind died.
Natty came back to me then. I had no need to ask what she had wanted, because she was already showing me: a hunk of flatbread; two pairs of moccasins; a water-bottle, filled with water by the sound of it; and a leather satchel. I clapped my hands when I saw them—but silently.
“Well, Jim,” Natty said. “What did you think we’d live on?”
“I…”
“And walk on?”
“I didn’t…”
“No,” she said, and then with a smile in her voice she added, “But you’ll have to keep me close now, won’t you, to look after you?”
“I will,” I told her. “And I will keep you safe, Natty.”
She smiled again—her wide smile!—then remembered we must hurry and made me take off the necklace, slide it into the satchel, and put the strap around my neck. When I had done this she dropped our flatbread into the other satchel, took charge of it herself, and said we should put on our moccasins.
We crept out from the veranda and toward the left-hand side of Black Cloud’s house, the part that was shielded by the windbreak, where the two ponies were tethered to their rail. Once again, their fidgets told me they thought we might feed them, and this time I did collect a bowlful of grain from a barrel that stood nearby, so I could look around for a pair of bridles while they were munching; we found these easily enough, then chose which of the ponies we wanted as ours and got them ready.
The whole turnaround took no more than a minute, but I have described it in detail because of the pleasure it gave me. Every action felt like a proof that we were ourselves again. And not only that. It reminded me of my childhood, and of the pony my father had bought me then. She had been an affable old piebald who greatly preferred snoozing to any sort of exercise; these two ponies were chestnuts, very lean and quick-looking, with white blazes on their noses and black manes and tails. I had liked them at once, when I first saw them led into the village; now I could see they would suit us very well.
We jumped astride and I looked back to our prison on the farther side of Black Cloud’s lodge, thinking we would ride toward it and then turn into open country; where we stood now we were prevented by the windbreak, which was raised about four feet tall.
But as I began to tug at my reins and set off, a demon entered into Natty, the same that possessed her to steal the necklace in the first place. For instead of following where I meant to go, she turned her pony to face this windbreak, thrashed with her heels, and leaped over it almost from a standing start.
My own pony immediately twisted round and leaped forward as well, so that before I knew it I had also left the ground—and landed on it again in a clattery scrape. I shook myself, settled the satchel around my neck, and looked up.
The emptiness before me tore open then. Tore open and began to fly past, becoming fragments of green and brown and gray and wind and thorn and our own voices shouting without a care who might hear us, because our enemies—oh! our enemies would never catch us now, nor would they ever find us again.
PART II
THE WILDERNESS
CHAPTER 11
Under the Stars
I had no idea how long we rode or how far; I was too excited. Too excited, too grateful to be free, too relieved, too astonished, and too frightened as well. Frightened more than anything, if I am honest. After weeks in our prison, after what might have been months, I had lost my sense of balance in the world, and careered headlong into the darkness.
In the end our ponies decided we must slow down, because they ran out of breath. And where were we then? Nowhere. A dry valley in an empty desert; a gully between walls of ragged stone. Logic told me it must be the dried-up bed of an ancient stream; now it was a natural trail where no one had walked before us.
“Still to the north?” Natty was breathless as well but her words swelled in the silence, echoing off the rocks.
“Yes, still north,” I told her, because I had managed to take a rough sort of direction from the stars.
“And after that?”
“Home,” I said.
Natty chuckled; she was already herself again. “North is home, I suppose.”
“North-east,” I said.
“So precise!”
“Well, isn’t home what you want?”
“And adventure as well.”
“I am sure that will come,” I said doubtfully. “But home at the end—I hope.”
“Hope,” Natty said in a sing-song. “Hope, hope, hope.” She was swaying in rhythm with her pony, still buoyant, still exultant. “And north is as good a direction as any; wherever we go, it takes us farther from Black Cloud.”
I let my reins droop in my hands. By mentioning Black Cloud at all, even so briefly, Natty had reminded me that our enemy could travel wherever he wanted, and equally well in darkness as light, because this was his world and he knew it minutely.
“What do you think?” I said. “Will we find people to help us?”
The walls of our little valley had suddenly melted away and we were riding through open country again, with the wind blowing dust in our faces. “Oh, friends are everywhere,” Natty said, and shielded her eyes to look around; I thought she expected faces would appear there and then, smiling among the dim rocks and shrubs.
“But how will we know they are friends?” I asked her doggedly.
“Because they’ll be enemies of Black Cloud,” she told me. “They’ll be our enemy’s enemy, you see? It’s the same anywhere. We know what he’s like. We know what he does to anyone not from his tribe.”
“But Natty, we don’t,” I said. “We saw the others, not him. We saw…” I could not finish what I had in mind, because I could not bear the memory of the fire roaring in its pit, and the punishment I had seen there.
“That’s not the point,” Natty replied, and although her voice was still calm, it seemed tighter now. “Black Cloud and his tribe are the same,” she said. “That’s why he must have enemies—thousands of them pro
bably. The whole country must be filled with people who want him dead.”
“But where are they?” I went on. “We haven’t seen anyone.”
Natty pointed up to the sky and the stars blazing above us—a river of stars, a torrent flooding the whole universe of the sky. She had run out of patience. “Jim,” she said with a sigh. “Look. It’s the middle of the night. In the daytime of course there’ll be people.” Then she dropped her hand and slapped it against her knee, before adding one more thing.
“He’ll come after us, though,” she said.
My hand darted to the satchel around my neck, touching the outline of the silver; I imagined it curled in its darkness like a dozing animal.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He’ll want the necklace back,” she said. “And he’ll follow us to the ends of the earth to get it.”
It was only what I knew in my heart, but it made me stop dead and for a moment the wilderness overwhelmed me. The barren land, the dry weeds scraping over stones, the little twisted trees—they were all different sorts of nothing. An immense nothing that renewed itself continually, and poured itself out continually over the whole surface of the world.
“Are you all right?” Natty asked; she had seen my head sink down, and now she was gentler again.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “But I was thinking—we’ve only tricked Black Cloud, haven’t we? We haven’t defeated him.”
“I dare say,” she said, not at all abashed. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll keep tricking him.”
“Are you sure?”
“To tell the truth,” she said, “I’m not sure of anything—but that doesn’t matter either, or not tonight. I’m sure we can find a way. We’ll get home somehow.” Then she unhooked our water-bottle from around her neck and offered me a drink, and took the flatbread from her satchel and tore off a piece for me to eat.
It was the simplest sort of kindness, the sort any good friend might do for another, but in that desolate place at that desolate time, the effect was very powerful. I felt the wide horizons shrink closer, and myself breathing safely at their center, and when I stared around me again I saw that the desert was not a barren wilderness any more, but dressed everywhere in sweet grass and sage and thyme. This is the beginning of my freedom, I told myself; the time I start to believe that I can live.
Half an hour later, when we had ambled forward another mile or so, I was almost lost again. We reached a point where our track took another turn between high rock walls, and because we could not ride two abreast in such a narrow space, we decided that Natty should take the lead while I followed behind. When this passage ended, we found ourselves in a natural enclosure surrounded by low cliffs—a shape like the crater a water-drop makes, when it falls onto a still surface. And in the center of this crater we saw a cluster of rough stone lodges, arranged in a grid of streets. Apparently they were all abandoned, standing silent and empty under the moonlight. But then, as we continued forward, we realized they were not merely abandoned. They were ruined. Destroyed. Every doorway was scorched, every roof broken, every little garden or field trampled down.
I wanted to turn and run at once; we both did. But our curiosity pushed us forward, and soon we found what I already knew we must. There were corpses lying among the ruins. Indians. Two dozen perhaps, and by the look of them all just a few days dead. Young men who had been hacked down by knives or shot by arrows, with the scalps sliced from their heads. Women stripped of their clothes and left to rot among the thistles. Children butchered beside their mothers—one still holding her toy, which was a stick carved into the shape of a snake, with bright little beads for eyes.
I could not speak, only glance and then glance away, and when I heard Natty trotting back toward the entrance-place I followed immediately. I found her sitting straight and still in the passage between the rock walls.
“Black Cloud?” she said, her voice echoing softly.
I shook my head. “It can’t be him,” I said, with the same hollow sound shadowing my words. “He can’t have done so much, not by himself.”
Natty kept still, her shoulders slumped and her eyes gazing into the distance. “Where were they, then?” she asked. “What was he doing, him and that other one, before they came back to the village?”
“I don’t know, Natty,” I said. “But they weren’t here. Think about it. There are only two of them and there are, what, twenty-five people here, thirty?”
But Natty would not answer me; she had decided Black Cloud was so powerful he could do anything he liked, and the longer her silence lasted, the more I began to doubt everything I had just told her. I remembered the scalps and other barbaric pieces I had seen dangling from Black Cloud’s belt. Had he really collected them here? All of them? I touched the satchel around my neck, and his face appeared to me beside the Painted Man on their nest of blankets. My heart had softened toward him then, because I had seen their kindness to one another; now it shriveled and shook.
“Are you coming?” Natty was suddenly impatient, kicking her pony in the ribs and expecting me to follow. At another time I might have felt this as a rebuke, because for a moment we had disagreed. Now, when I trotted after her and we headed toward the north again, I knew that her fears were the same as mine. Black Cloud was everywhere. He was racing in the star-rivers above us, and dancing behind us as lightly as the dust. He was the wind and the silence. He was the crackle of grass and the scuffle of claws.
He was here! On the crest of a small hill only a hundred yards ahead! But that was impossible. It was not a human shape—it was something even more astonishing. A building. A single tall room that seemed to have dropped from thin air. A room made of mud and straw with a pitched roof and a little crucifix above the door.
“A chapel.” Natty was the first to collect her wits, hauling on her reins and bringing us both to a halt. Her voice was full of wonder.
“A chapel?” I was much slower. “Why here? There’s no one to convert. There’s no parish.”
Natty laughed at the word, at the very idea. “No,” she said. “But plenty of heathen.”
“You mean those poor devils behind us? There was no sign there of…”
“Conversion?” Natty slid off her pony and I followed. We took our animals by their halters and tethered them to a stump near the entrance. It loomed at me, a square of velvety blackness, and to show that I had not deserved Natty’s impatience a little earlier, I pushed ahead of her and stepped inside.
After the cool breeze of the night, the air felt very hot—as close as our prison in fact, but with a sweet scent of sage and baked mud. And deserted. Not even an altar. Just a box of some kind, standing where an altar might have been, and lit by the moon shining in through the door behind me.
Then suddenly not deserted, because while I walked slowly forward the altar-box shifted, scraped across the floor, toppled over, and a wildcat scrambled out. A wildcat that turned into a rabbit, and I thought was about to streak past me and vanish into the night.
He did nothing of the kind. He advanced a few yards in ponderous hops and shuffles, then paused and looked at me with great curiosity.
But I was hungry and Natty was hungry. We had eaten nothing except bread and gruel for weeks or longer, and the sight of this plump animal was more than I could resist. I reached down to him, feeling his wet nose touch my skin. Then I closed my fingers around his throat and swept him off the ground, breaking his neck by swinging him like a rattle.
When I looked for Natty I found her in the doorway. “We don’t have a knife,” she said, very matter-of-fact. “Or anything to start a fire.”
“We can make do,” I told her just as plainly, and squeezed past her to search outside. After rejecting several little stones because they were too blunt, or not stones at all but clumps of crumbly mud, I found something to do the job and got to work, slicing the rabbit along its belly, then dragging the body out from the fur. Once this was done I tore the flesh into pieces and divided it be
tween us.
We sat side by side on a rock close to our ponies, who seemed to eye us very suspiciously as we chewed and swallowed the raw meat. It was the strangest meal, and we ate entirely in silence—in shock, perhaps I should say, because of the wilderness, and the massacre we had seen, and the chapel, and our exhaustion. For the same reasons, it did not surprise me at all that when we had finished and passed the water-bottle between us, we should lie down on the ground and still not utter a word.
Yet I could not just close my eyes and fall off to sleep.
There was Natty beside me, an arm’s length away; I brushed the hair from her eyes, which was all I allowed myself to do, and broke our silence briefly by wishing her goodnight.
There were the stars overhead, except it was not the stars I saw, it was Black Cloud padding through the desert, scouring for our footprints.
There was the Painted Man following him, his body flickering like firelight, his quick feet stirring the dust.
And there was the dust itself. Tiny pieces of red rock, and gray rock, and white rock that once had been mountains stretching into the sky, and now stirred under my head where no one had ever touched them before, and might never touch them again.
CHAPTER 12
The Hunting Party
Next morning, in the second between waking and opening my eyes, all the comforts sleep had draped around me were instantly torn away, because the world had come to an end: the sky was full of devils raging and screaming and I was already a dead man, with a white cotton sheet pulled over my face.
Then this cotton sheet began to shake, ripped into dozens of smaller pieces, and I knew better. Fifty feet above me an immense flock of white birds was traveling inland from the coast to search for food. In England a naturalist might see a flock of a few hundred and think it was remarkable. Here I must have seen a thousand birds, maybe a hundred thousand, enough to hide the sun when they flew across it, and all crying constantly about where they were, and what they had left behind, and what they might find ahead, and in this way making their prodigious rumpus.
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