“White-eyes women are no good for bedding.” Old Owl finally spoke up. “They’re only useful as slaves. It’s the difference between horses and mules. If you beat a mule enough you can get work out of him, but not companionship. They’re too stubborn and set in their ways.”
“They can’t be worth much, the white-eyes women. Look at the way their men leave them unprotected. They’re almost worse that way than the Mexicans.” Sibepapapi, Shaved Head, spoke for the first time. The long scar that stretched from behind his ear to the back of his head was hidden by his hair, except where it crossed the part between his braids, like a major intersection. His wife had shaved that side of his head when he had been wounded years before, and the name had been with him ever since.
“At least the Mexicans know how to ride. The white eyes look like sacks of meal in the saddle.”
“But they have such fine, big horses.”
“They’re slow, those horses. And they maneuver like boulders. By the time you get one turned around the buffalo are grazing in the Ute’s territory.”
“The whites must be almost as intelligent as the People. Their children make good warriors and wives if they’re stolen early enough.” Old Owl had become very fond of Bear Cub the white captive boy. He had been adopted by Old Owl’s nephew and had thrashed an average of two children a day for the first two weeks he had been in camp. Even the older boys left him alone now. And already he was riding almost as well as one of the People. Old Owl had given him a bow and quiver of arrows and a spotted pony of his own.
“Remember Tehan, with Satank’s Kiowa? There’s a warrior for you.” Many Battles’ voice sawed into the conversation.
“Is he the one with hair the color of live coals and orange spots all over his skin like a salamander?”
“Yes. And a good man to have next to you in a fight.”
“Then it must be that the white eyes have no training when they’re young. Otherwise why would they set up their lodges each by itself, with no one to help defend it? They must be crazy.”
“And they tear up Mother Earth and rip out her hair, the grass. When they die she won’t take their bones to her heart the way she does ours.”
“They are so careless with their horses that soon there won’t be any left. We will have stolen them all.”
“Then we’ll have to make those long trips to Mexico again.”
“White people are ignorant. They’ll never survive here. We should take all we can from them before they give up and go back where they came from.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Where the sun rises. They have big villages there, and all manner of strange things, I hear. But I think most of what I hear must be lies.”
“I don’t want them to leave before I steal one of their new guns. Have you seen the one Big Bow has?”
And so the talk went until the stars seen through the smoke hole showed that it was halfway between midnight and dawn. Old Owl didn’t relight the pipe when it went out, and his friends rose to go, their knees cracking as they stood.
“Wait.” Old Owl took a burning brand from the fire and a stick. Cub had been up to something. He knew that look. He’d have to teach the boy to rub berry juice on his face until he turned darker brown from the sun, or give him black paint to use as camouflage. He was too light to get away with tricks at night.
Old Owl held the brand up so he could see, and poked around with the stick outside the lodge door. Just as he thought. Hidden under a thin layer of dust was a pile of fresh dog dung. He pointed it out to the other men and they all chuckled. Cub was a fistful all right. And a fast learner.
Old Owl pushed the smelly mess out of the way so his friends could file out. They left, yawning and stretching in the cool black morning. They padded back to their darkened lodges in groups of two or three. Their paths were lit by a soaring sky full of stars, glittering and twinkling like embers flung across the blackness.
CHAPTER 14
The image of Something Good with the tip of her nose deformed and lumpy with livid red scar tissue and her delicate, flaring nostrils slit haunted Wanderer. He could remember the crone who had scavenged on the edge of camp when he was a child. She had lived on what families gave her to eat, and she had paid for it with their scorn. For a woman the price of infidelity could be high.
He didn’t want to consider the possibility that Eagle had gone back on his word, but he had been acting strangely lately. If Wanderer had been a woman there would have been no doubt in his mind. Women can smell love and its intrigue as rain can be smelled before the storm ever breaks. He only knew that the patterns of his friend’s behavior, which were as familiar to him as his own, had changed.
Eagle laughed less. Maybe he was finally maturing and taking life more seriously. Eagle went off by himself more often. Perhaps he was getting ready to go on another vision quest to ask for new medicine. That was something strictly between each warrior and his spirits. He didn’t even discuss it with his friend and brother. Most disturbing of all was that Eagle had been so lost in his private thoughts yesterday he didn’t notice little four-year-old Dusty walk behind him while he ate. Two captured eagles would eat with their backs to each other so that nothing could pass behind them. A man with eagle medicine kept the same taboo.
Wanderer had seen Eagle, in a mindless rage, almost strike a man who broke that taboo once. And he had never seen a grown man fight with his fists like a child. He remembered how upset easygoing Eagle had been after the desecration. He’d packed up and made the two-hundred-mile trek to Medicine Mounds to straighten things out with his eagle spirits. The wrongdoer had moved to another band rather than stay around Eagle.
Now Eagle was off somewhere again. Outside the scruffy brush arbor where Wanderer sat, the sun was sweltering. It baked the ground into hard clay, like the thin, brittle Mexican bread when it had been too long on the flat stones set beside their fires. He’d seen it there often, cracked and turning black, when the Mexican women were chased from their cooking and raped and slain or taken captive. He wondered idly if the sun was hot enough to cook such toth-tee-ahs now. Probably so.
Was Eagle avoiding him? His heart had always been a lodge where his friend was welcome to come and go at will. Now the door was not only down, but laced firmly shut. Whatever the problem was, it was time to get away for a while. Maybe on a hunting trip he could find out what was bothering his brother.
“Spaniard, will you come on a hunt with Eagle and me? Life here is too noisy and too quiet.”
Spaniard looked up and grinned. “Maybe so.” He went back to futilely digging with a small pair of clamshells at the splinter in his palm. Cruelest One loosened his breechclout and pulled out his medicine pouch. He fished around inside it until he found his pair of metal trade tweezers and tossed them to Spaniard, who grunted his appreciation. No one ever referred to Cruelest One as a Spaniard. Or a Mexican. Not unless one were making a collection of dangerous, implacable enemies and wanted to add a prime specimen.
Cruelest One wasn’t born one of the People, and if the People had forgotten that, Cruelest One never did. Mo-cho-rook, The Cruelest One Of All. Kwasinabo Nabituh, Eagle called him, Snake Eyes. And sometimes his eyes didn’t seem quite human. He was all right on a raid, but Wanderer would rather not choose him for a casual hunting trip. Cruelest One probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. He rarely stayed in one place. He had just come back from a visit and would be off soon for another band. He was a wanderer in a tribe of wanderers. He was searching for something he couldn’t find in his own soul.
Pahayuca had told Wanderer about finding Cruelest One many years ago in the raid on the Mexican village.
The men had been gone, grubbing in their fields as expected. But the women had fought.
As the party had approached the quiet village, they flushed a woman from the bushes. Laughing, a warrior chased her as she ran, screaming a warning. When he drew up with her, he leaped from his horse. His weight bore her to the ground as he fell on
her, ripping her white cotton blouse open at the same time. But she managed to reach up under her skirt and pull out the thin-bladed knife strapped to her thigh. She sank it to the bone handle in the man’s chest. They had both stared at each other in astonishment until he crumpled across her body. She pushed him off, the knife’s handle catching in the torn tangles of her blouse as she scrambled to her feet.
She was a young woman and a beautiful one, but the dead warrior’s friend raised his small hatchet and brought it whistling down. The blade, shaped like a miniature Spanish broadax, split her skull to the shoulders, the halves falling apart, and blood spraying. The friend regretted his rashness when he tried to take her scalp. He resolved to be careful to leave the head intact the next time. But to honor her, many of the men leaned down to touch her body as they passed, counting coup on a brave fighter.
The other women fought too. They fought with everything they could lay their hands on as the warriors swarmed down on them, like a school of sharks maddened by the smell of blood. In mindless hysteria one of them threw her baby at a raider just before he speared her. They screeched like wildcats and clawed and spit and hammered with their small fists until the last one of them lay hacked and broken in the pool of her own blood that soaked into the thirsty ground. Their children lay scattered around them too, like rotten fruit in the autumn. No one from the village was left alive, and the only sounds were the occasional whoof of a pony or the jingle of a bridle or the heavy breathing of the men as they looked around them.
Then there came a wail, very faint, from one of the white clay lodges, built up by hand like the home of a mud dauber wasp. Wedged up into the rough mesquite-log rafter poles, along with the strings of red and green chilis drying and maroon corn and crude metal graters, was a bundle of blankets and rags. The baby’s face inside was as wrinkled and red as wadded trade cloth. He squalled and kicked, his tiny features gathered in the center of his face like a rosebud and his stiff black hair sticking out in all directions from his head.
Cradling him in one massive arm, Pahayuca pulled the blanket away from his face. The infant grabbed his finger in a firm grip and his face opened up like a flower. He stared at the painted mountain looming over him with huge, fearless eyes, his cheeks glistening with tears.
Pahayuca had brought him home, and Blocks The Sun had raised him. But Cruelest One was no one’s son.
Maybe if he had been bigger, Wanderer thought. Or if no one had told him he was Mexican. But he was barely five feet tall, and he knew he was different. His whole life was spent relentlessly trying to be better and worse than all the others. Cruelest One never took captives. He killed anyone he could on raids. He never smiled, except when he was in the midst of battle and blood ran down the groove in his lance’s shaft and onto his wiry arm. Maybe he was brother to nenepi, the little men, the demons who stood only a foot high but who always killed the unwary with their tiny bows and arrows.
There were tearing and crackling sounds as Cruelest One steadily ripped pages from the big, black book. He crumpled them and added them to the pile of paper wads that lay next to him. When he had torn all the leaves from Elder John’s Bible, he began stuffing them into the opening left in the lacing of the two disks of tough buffalo hide. Paper made good insulation for shields. It was lighter than buffalo hair and it absorbed blows better than dried Spanish moss. Raiders were always on the lookout for books. From the way the white eyes studied them they must also be good medicine, which made them even more valuable.
Cruelest One’s arsenal was the most complete in the band, even more so than Buffalo Piss’s. Not many took the time to make their own double shields, even though the shield was their most sacred possession next to their medicine pouch. Cruelest One wouldn’t allow anyone to do even the preliminary fleshing and scraping. He patiently heated the tough hide from an old buffalo’s shoulder and steamed it several extra times to contract and thicken it as much as possible.
Then he cut two circles from it, and rubbed and pounded them with a smooth stone to make them flat and pliable. He stretched them over each side of a wooden hoop and sewed them together with rawhide thongs passed through punched eyelets. After he finished stuffing the shield and sewing up the remaining opening, he would paint his sacred animal on the front and decorate it with eagle feathers. Holes were already punched in the back circle for the wide strap to hold it on his arm. After all that was done, he would make the round case to store it in.
Cruelest One’s whole life was tooled for war, even more than the average Nermenuh brave. Wanderer mused as he watched him. What kind of old man would he be? Probably as cantankerous and ferocious as Satank, the Kiowa leader. Satank would die fighting if he had to get up off his deathbed and go looking for someone to kill. Looking at Cruelest One’s stony face, he wondered if he would ever be capable of loving a woman. He felt sorry for the one who finally married him.
Maybe that was Eagle’s problem. Perhaps he was involved in another of his flings with a married woman, consoling himself for not being able to have Something Good.
Privacy in a camp of the People was rarer than white buffalo and not nearly as prized. There was little need of it, except for forbidden trysts. But Eagle and Something Good had found a tiny, secluded valley not far from camp. Dozens of bubbling springs flowed down the valley’s limestone sides. It was cool here among the rocks and bushes, the air chilled by the misting waterfalls nearby and the trees overhead. If the village had been set on the open plain the task of finding such a place would have been much harder. Even so, the meetings were tinged with the danger of discovery.
Eagle nuzzled Something Good’s slim neck and began blowing on her throat and up into her hair, ending with a loud whiffle in her ear. She giggled and rolled on top of him, throwing a brown leg over his own. They lay a moment, drunk with the feel of each other’s bare skin. Their legs were almost the same length, and she tickled his foot with her toes as, propped up on her elbows, she glared down at him. Her hair flowed around his face, closing them off with a thick curtain.
“What are you doing?”
He stared up at her in wide-eyed innocence, blowing a tendril of her mane out of his mouth.
“You once said that your love was like a fire that lay buried under the ashes, waiting to be fanned back into flames. I’m just blowing on the coals.”
She collapsed laughing onto him, and he lay feeling the warm, lovely weight of her. It was good to take a woman. It was paradise to have one you loved. He ran his hands down the slope of her sleek spine and up the smooth curve of her rounded buttocks. Wrapping his arms around her slender back, he hugged her, dizzy with joy. She spoke against the hollow of his shoulder, and he could feel her lips moving on his skin.
“My dove, my swallow, my soaring eagle, what will happen to us?” From laughter she went quietly to tears. He could feel the wetness of them.
“Something Good, only death will separate us, I promise you that. I’ll find a way for us to be together.” He stroked her hair again and again to comfort her. “Don’t cry. Everything will be good with us, I swear. Do you believe me?”
“Yes, Eagle. I believe you.”
Naduah stood with her hands clasped between her knees, trying to peer over Medicine Woman’s shoulder and contain her own excitement. Medicine Woman had been working on something for weeks, but she always mysteriously put it away when Naduah came into the lodge. Now she was smiling her secret smile and rooting around in one of the boxes of rawhide stretched over a willow frame. From under one of Takes Down’s dresses she pulled something cream-colored. She shook it out with a lilting jingle of tiny bells and held it up. The dress was one piece, an entire deerskin with the legs dangling at the hem. Medicine Woman held it against Naduah while Takes Down looked on fondly. Sunrise put down his equipment repairs to smile at her.
“Kaku, Grandmother, it’s beautiful!”
“Try it on.”
Naduah slipped it over her head. The thick fringe hung from the neckline and shoulders and
brushed against her legs at the hem, which fell just below her knees. Dozens of small, metal cones were fastened in clusters at the side seams and yoke. They tinkled delicately when she moved. The doeskin had been tanned and chewed for hours, then smoked until it was as dainty as linen, as soft as velvet, and the palest of yellows, like rich, frothy cream. Even if it got wet, the smoking process would keep it supple. It fit Naduah perfectly.
But Medicine Woman wasn’t finished. She brought out a small pair of thigh-high leggings, painted a deep sky blue and also fringed and belled and beaded. The garters that held them up just below the knee were solid red, white, and blue beadwork. Next she handed Naduah a small pair of soft, high-topped moccasins with fringe at the calves and running down the single back seam. When she put them all on, tying the tops of the leggings to her breechclout, they seemed to hug her legs and feet, as though embracing her. She stroked the front of her dress, smoothing imaginary wrinkles.
She knew how much time had been spent making the new clothes. But there was more. Medicine Woman took the rabbit’s foot from her neck and put it over her grandaughter’s head. It had an intricate design of tiny beads at its base. Medicine Woman knotted the thong so that it hung, warm and furry, in the hollow of Naduah’s throat.
“Grandmother, not your medicine. You need this.” She groped for the words, frustrated that after two months she was still unable to express so many things.
“No, Grandaughter. I’m old. I have lots of medicine. You keep it and it will protect you as you grow.”
Naduah stood on tiptoe, threw her arms around Medicine Woman’s neck, pulled her head down, and kissed her on the cheek.
“What are you doing, little one? Are you trying to eat me? Do you think like the Nermateka that you can devour my medicine along with my flesh?”
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 17
