They’d penetrated far into Mexico and ridden through small fields of withered com, strangling in the baked soil. The white-plastered adobes, looking like frosted loaves of bread, glowed and pulsed in the sun’s glare. The dirt grubbers rarely fought, but they did that time. They were a people born to be victims. To see them fighting with their shovels and hoes and sticks was like seeing rabbits challenging a pack of wolves.
Eagle had spotted the coin glinting on the rumpled white shirt of the first man he ever killed. Drunk with the ultimate power of life and death, he became careless. He jumped down from his horse to get it. Blind to the three men who ran toward him, he bent to pull the chain over the man’s head as it flopped loosely on the neck. He was tugging it from around the ears when Wanderer rode into the fight. He shot two of the peasants, pinning them together with one arrow. Eagle killed the third with his knife. He took the two scalps skillfully, even though they were his first. He was a born warrior, Eagle was. Making a deft, circular cut around the hairline, he braced his foot on the man’s shoulder and gave a quick jerk. With a loud sucking pop the hair came away in one piece, almost as neatly as if the victim had been alive.
It was satisfying to kill. Wanderer thought no more of the right and wrong of it than a hawk or a coyote does. It was part of the cycle of life. And a better death than wasting away of age and disease, like the old buffalo bull that stumbles after the herd, his hide lacerated by the horns of the younger males. Wanderer wished to die quickly of an enemy’s arrow or lance. He hated the thought of spending his last years like Name Giver, being led around by the hand.
He wasn’t sure which he liked better, to ride screaming into battle or to sneak into an enemy’s camp and steal whatever he wanted. Once he and Eagle had crawled into an Osage camp and touched each sleeping warrior before stealing their horses. He smiled to think of it. They’d been little more than boys, and his father still boasted of it.
He glanced back at Eagle. The coin was one of the newly minted ones, with an eagle on it. It was Eagle’s most sacred medicine. But he was too vain to hide it away with his other holy items in the small pouch that hung inside his breechclout. Still Eagle stroked the coin, and Wanderer waited patiently for his reply. He waited so long Wanderer was trying to imagine life without him as a friend.
“Yes, Tan-man. I will smoke with you.” The words fell into the hot air like pieces of metal into a brass kettle. They were quietly spoken, yet seemed to ring in the shimmering air. Wanderer gave a small sigh of relief. It was settled. Eagle would forget this folly and leave Something Good alone. The smoke sealed every important agreement between men. And the seal was broken only at risk of great shame and dishonor, a burden too heavy for a man to bear. He stood and walked to where his pipe and fire-making tools lay in their slender, painted bag. Now he could relax and enjoy the summer here. Whatever the Penateka’s reputation as warriors might be, their hospitality was the best anywhere. And he wanted to see how the yellow hair, Naduah, adjusted to her new life.
Cynthia knelt over the fresh hide, paring off the worst of the fat and muscle with the heavy elk-horn and flint adz. Star Name and Owl were working on their own hides nearby, and the hum of the women’s conversations droned around her. After three weeks she was catching many of the words she heard, but she couldn’t follow the gossip.
Pahayuca’s four-year-old daughter, Eta-si Kawa, Dusty, was tussling with a clumsy puppy, all ears and feet. They rolled in the dust, growling good-naturedly at each other and worrying a frayed piece of rawhide between them. Under a brush arbor fifty feet away Name Giver and his friends were practicing their stories in front of Owl’s lodge. Narabe, Gets To Be An Old Man was telling one that involved hopping around and cackling like a chicken with a hot foot. His friends were laughing and choking and slapping each other on the back. Cynthia wished she could hear and understand what he was saying.
Star Name and Owl were arguing happily about something, and Black Bird was chewing on a skin, a faraway look on her face, like a cow with a particularly juicy cud. Takes Down The Lodge was going through the last series of steps in the tanning process. After the antelope hide dried in the sun she’d be ready to smoke it to keep it supple. It would retain its shape even after getting soaked by rain and river crossings.
It had taken two weeks of watching Takes Down scrape and flay and bury and trample and beat the hide, but at last another of Cynthia’s whys was answered. Why did the People’s buckskins always look so much neater than those the men wore back home? The settlers’ leather pants turned black and greasy and stiff and misshapen with use. Getting caught in the rain with them was an embarrassment and a disaster. Cynthia remembered the wedding for that schoolteacher in Fort Houston. She giggled a little, bending to hide her face so no one would think she was laughing at them. She started working out the description in the language of the People. They’d appreciate the story. She would rehearse it and spring it on them one of these days. Right now it was still too hard for her to explain.
The schoolteacher’s name was gone. But she’d never forget him. He was the homeliest man she had ever seen, all knees and elbows and Adam’s apple. He was six foot six inches tall, and gentle. His wide, myopic eyes gave him the look of a startled ostrich. He was a good, kind, peaceful man. About as suited to the frontier as an ice flow in hell. But he jumped into the life with innocent enthusiasm. He had a suit of buckskins made for his wedding, then got caught in a rain, one of those Texas downspouts, the day before the ceremony.
The trousers did what they always did when they got wet. They turned to slimy mush and flowed down his ankles, collecting in a puddle around his moccasins. So he took a knife and trimmed off the excess. Then he sat next to a hot fire to dry them out. As they dried, the hems retreated back up his long, lanky legs, taking a stand somewhere near midcalf. The knees remained sitting, projecting out in rounded bulges. And that’s the way they preceded him down the aisle.
People had laughed quietly about it for months. They were probably still laughing about it. The thought disturbed her. Were they still laughing? Were they joking, gossiping, teasing as they always had? Were the men still cursing the Mexicans and boasting about their escapades in the war, as though nothing had happened at Parker’s Fort? Did they gather outside their doors in the evening to talk about the flight from Santa Anna, the Runaway Scrape? Did no one miss her? Not even her mother? Was her mother even alive? It was impossible that life could go on back home as before. That horrible morning, the dead and dying, the wounded and violated, the terror were always in the back of her mind like a scream that rang endlessly. It was a cry that could be muted by other noises, but never stilled completely. If she let herself think about it, the day came back to her, but with an unreal quality, like a recurring nightmare.
The world had ended that day, and would never be the same again. Surely they couldn’t forget. But if they hadn’t forgotten, where were they? Almost a month had gone by. The moon would be full again soon. She remembered what it had been like, riding under that moon, clinging to the silent, stony figure ahead of her. Wanderer had been part of the nightmare. The memory of it brought tears to her eyes, and one dropped onto the hide.
“Naduah.” Takes Down grunted as she lowered herself to kneel next to her daughter. Her voice was as close to reproachful as it ever got as she pointed out the lumps and ridges Cynthia had left while her mind roamed. The child ducked her head to wipe her eyes surreptitiously on her arm, pretending to brush the sweat from her face. The hide was staked down with small pegs pounded through holes punched around the edge of it, and her knees hurt from kneeling over it.
In the midmorning heat the smell of curdled blood made her gorge rise. The slime and grease were all over her in flecks that prickled her skin as they dried and hardened there. Sweat trickled down her forehead and into her eyes again. Her elbows and armpits and the backs of her knees itched. She wanted to walk away from it all and go swimming. The river was low and tepid, the color of weak tea, but at least she and O
wl and Star Name could lie in it and feel it surge sluggishly around them.
She knew they would go to the river later, but no one suggested quitting now. She set grimly to work, trimming off what she had missed. It was more painstaking than it looked. The hide had to be shaved down a little with each stroke. Takes Down had told her again and again how important it was to make the surface even and smooth. Not that this particular piece of leather was going to be used for anything good anyway. It wasn’t the right time of year for prime hides. The buffalo were shedding their winter coats, and the hair was matted with mud and dung, dust and dead insects. It flaked off in wads of filthy felt.
Getting all the hair off was going to be even worse than scouring the flesh. It was harder to pull out, scraping against the grain. It stuck to her wet skin, blew in her nose, and made her sneeze. The wood ashes and water that Takes Down worked into it loosened the hair a little, but not much. Maybe Takes Down would make soles for everyday moccasins out of it, or a rug or a pemmican box. So much work for a piece of roughly finished rawhide.
Cynthia’s arms ached as she dragged the flesher back and forth. It was hard to scrape just the right amount of flesh off. Sometimes she dug too deeply and then had to scrape the rest down to the level of the pit she’d made. The flesher had been made for an adult, and it was heavy, and getting heavier every minute. Fatigue was making it harder for her to stroke evenly with it. The rawhide lashing that held the flint blade at a right angle to the horn handle was rough, and her hands were raw. Calluses, in the form of blisters, were starting, but they were slow to form. She rested a moment, head down, while thousands of tiny, pinpoint lights exploded in front of her eyes and the world reeled around her. The talk seemed to be coming from far away, from deep in a cave. She closed her eyes and thought about flax. It was just as miserable to prepare. She had always hated scutching, beating the stinking, rotted flax stems to separate the fibers. And no one else here seemed as tired as she was. She had to finish what she had started. She couldn’t disappoint Takes Down The Lodge.
Takes Down wiped her hands on a scrap of leather to clean off the worst of the tanning compound that she was rubbing into her antelope hide for the fifth and last time. It was pernicious stuff, the tanning mixture. The first time Cynthia had seen it she had almost been sick to her stomach. Takes Down had opened the rawhide sack of it and scooped handfuls out onto the center of the hide they were working on. Cynthia’s nose had wrinkled when Takes Down began spreading it around, rubbing it vigorously into the leather. She had poked at it gingerly with one finger, dreading to get it on her hands. Finally, she had taken a deep breath and dug in. The compound was made of basswood bark pounded fine and mixed with grease and liver and buffalo brains. It was a revolting, smelly, slimy gray mess that didn’t improve with age. It took an hour of scrubbing with sand to get it all off her body. Even then, the smell lingered, though perhaps only in her imagination.
Takes Down knelt beside Cynthia again and reached for the flesher. Cynthia held onto it stubbornly and shook her head. She went doggedly back to work while Takes Down smiled at her. She got up, went into Black Bird’s lodge, and came out with another scraper. Together they finished the job. Later Takes Down would finish her own piece of buckskin, pulling and stretching it into shape around a sapling, then rubbing it with a smooth stone, pulling it back and forth through a rawhide loop to make it supple. Finally she would stake it out to dry and bleach in the sun one more time. After all that it would be ready for smoking, which was another process altogether.
“Enough.” Takes Down stood and carefully returned the flesher to her sister’s lodge while Cynthia wiped hers off and put it in its special case. Then Takes Down waddled toward the river with the three girls like ducklings in a row behind her. As they passed through the village, other women and girls put away their tools and joined them. Something Good brought along a gourd, and Cynthia knew they would have a lively game of water keep-away. They passed through the open area near Pahayuca’s lodges in the center of the camp, and Owl and Star Name stopped at the guest tent.
Eagle and Wanderer were sitting under the brush arbor, talking while Eagle repaired his hunting bow. Star Name chattered to Eagle, and Wanderer seemed to be ignoring them as usual. Star Name had developed a fondness for Eagle since the honey hunt. He had sworn them both to secrecy there, pantomiming passing the pipe with them. Star Name had been shocked at his joking about anything as serious as that, but she had enjoyed it. And under the laughter, the girls knew that their silence was important. Cynthia liked knowing something about Eagle that Wanderer didn’t. He always looked so cocksure of himself, that Wanderer, so smug. He looked that way now, acting as if they didn’t exist.
She watched him from the corner of her eye and thought she caught just a glimpse of a smile, like the flutter of a leaf when there’s no wind. But when she looked again to make sure, it was gone and he was studying the six-foot thong loop stretched between his fingers. He wound it around and around, sliding a middle finger under a loop on the opposite side and pulling it taut, then reversing the process and repeating it, until it looked like a hopeless tangle. By now he had both the girls’ attention and several young women had stopped to watch too.
Not that the women needed much excuse. Addlepated, was what Uncle Ben would have called them. Addlepated and cow-eyed. Always parading around in front of Wanderer. They were so obvious, giggling and cooing and batting their lashes at him. It was disgusting. They could have him. She wanted no part of someone who could treat an innocent child the way he had treated her.
He casually flipped the last loop over his fingers and pulled his palms apart, holding up an intricate lattice pattern. He looked straight at Cynthia then, and grinned, almost shyly. He beckoned her slightly with his head, and mesmerized by his piercing eyes, she came forward to where he was sitting. He carefully slipped the string figure from his own long, strong fingers onto her smaller ones. She flinched when they came in contact. It was the first time he had touched her since the trip from the fort.
“My heart is glad.” She stumbled on the words and blushed.
“Come back later. I’ll teach you how to make it.” He smiled at her again. As she walked to the river with Star Name, she wondered how she could keep the latticework intact. She’d rather figure it out herself and show him she wasn’t stupid, than have him teach her anything. If he thought he could win her over and make her giggle and moo like those other women, he was mistaken.
CHAPTER 10
There had been dew the night before, and ground fog that rose like thick steam from the warm earth. It still lay in the valleys between the rows of low, dark hills below Cynthia, like icing on a cake of many layers. The quilted mass of clouds overhead was a deep rose color, a vast satin comforter thrown over the world. The sun had just come up and would burn it all away soon. But for now she sat on the edge of the cliff with her long, tanned legs dangling, savoring the view and the solitude.
On the plateau behind her three hundred horses and mules grazed, making a steady, loud tearing and crunching sound as they ripped up the sweet grass. She was alone for the first time in her month with the People. She had gotten up before the sun on purpose, to have the dawn to herself. There had been a dance most of the night before, and she knew the village would sleep longer than usual. Below she could hear the first quavering notes of Lance’s good-morning song.
Star Name had translated the song as best she could, but basically it had no particular meaning. It had become as familiar to Cynthia as the songs of the birds. And like the birds, Lance sang every morning just for the joy of it, celebrating the beginning of the new day for himself and for anyone else who happened to be awake. She lay in bed each morning listening for it, and it gave her goose bumps and peace of mind all at the same time. She would have felt cheated in some way if she didn’t hear it. It reminded her of what Sunrise had told her when she woke up out of sorts one morning.
“You should be happy to greet each day. And if you’re n
ot happy, look inside yourself for the reason.”
Smoke began to rise from the lodges as the women built up the morning fires. She could picture them moving softly around their tents, trying not to wake their sleeping families as they raked back the ashes and blew on the tiny embers that nestled under the warm cover all night. Pahayuca’s camp spread out below her on the other side of the shallow river where the bottomlands were a quarter of a mile wide. The bluff where she sat rose steeply from the riverbank on her side.
She watched the tiny camp dogs separate from the piles they slept in and stretch, their hind ends in the air and their front paws reaching in front of them. Then they began their daily rounds, sniffing out offal and marking everything with their odor, setting up their territories. Soon the boys would come out, yawning and tightening their breechclout belts and pulling on their moccasins. They would splash in the river, taking their morning baths, then pad sleepily up the trail toward the horse pasture. Lance had ridden through the village at twilight yesterday to announce that they would be moving today.
Cynthia had moved six times in the month she had been there, and she knew the trips were leisurely affairs. There was no need for her to hurry. But the boys would begin moving the horses down onto the flat area outside camp. The herd was up here because there was a spring and better grass, but it was unusual for them to be this far from camp. It wasn’t a wise practice because it left the People vulnerable to attack. But they were rarely disturbed here, deep in their own territory and in such large numbers. Pahayuca’s band had seventy or eighty lodges and could gather sixty warriors in seconds.
She decided to leave before the boys arrived. The horse herd was their responsibility, and they didn’t like to see a girl doing their job. She wasn’t afraid of them. She had learned to glare them down the way Star Name did. But they were noisy and rude and it was too beautiful a morning for that. She looked for Night, hoping to give him the thistles she had brought for him. She knew it was unlikely he would be with the rest of the herd, but she looked anyway. He hadn’t been outside of Pahayuca’s guest lodge when she had passed it earlier, so Wanderer and Eagle must be off somewhere. Hunting probably.
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