Native Gold
Page 13
But his worries ran deeper than her wounds. They were connected now, the two of them. Her blood stained his fingers, and her trust claimed his soul. He’d altered her fate, and she his. The path ahead was perilous, but now there was no turning from it.
"If you’ll put me down, I’ll be on my way." The woman’s voice was taut, almost frightened, and she shivered like a newly hatched cheeztahtah—robin.
Of course, he had no intention of abandoning her in the middle of the wood. She’d only lose her way again. Besides, she probably didn’t know which plants to use on her wounds. He must take her to a safe place where he could tend to her cuts. With his mouth full of the writing sticks, he grunted in reply.
While the woman was still slung across his back, he retrieved her sketchbook and boots and his hunting pouch. As for the kill he’d brought for her, he could see through the brush that Trickster Coyote was already slinking off with it, his teeth grinning around the rabbits. Sakote sighed in disgust.
"Sir."
He paused. Strands of the woman’s fine hair tickled his ear.
"Sir, I really must insist..."
Sakote had no time for her insisting. It was hazardous to stay so long in the open. He scrutinized several possible paths traversing the canyon and finally chose one of the deer trails. It wasn’t the best way to go. There were few places of concealment along the way, and he would leave footprints. But the trail was fairly level, and it led swiftly to his destination. He started forward.
"Mr. Indian!" The woman yanked the drawing sticks from his mouth, scraping them between his teeth. "Where are you taking me?"
"Not far, but we have to go quickly," he said, nodding. "Along the canyon."
"But where...what’s along the canyon?"
"A place, a good place." He could tell she didn’t like his answer. But, in the same way he’d taken the splinter from her, sometimes it was best not to know everything.
"But I don’t...I don’t want to go." She began to loosen her grip on him. "I want to go home."
He dropped her things and let her slide gently down, bracing her when she tottered on her injured leg.
"You weren’t going home when I found you."
To his amazement, she didn’t reply, but only blinked her eyes many times, soundlessly moving her mouth. It was an expression he’d seen on Hintsuli’s face many times when the boy was about to make up a story.
And like his little brother, the woman seemed to need answers for everything. She would probably hammer at him like the woodpecker all the way along the trail if he didn’t explain where they were going.
He sighed. "I know a good place to wash your wounds, where the miners don’t go to look for gold." He stopped, distracted for a moment by the color of the white woman’s eyes, so much like the eyes of the white eagle in his dream. They were all the various greens of the precious serpentine stone that lined the cave in the mountain beyond the village.
"I can wash my own wounds."
"You’ll lose more blood if you walk home. The mining camp is distant. The place I’m taking you isn’t far." His next words were not his own. He didn’t know where they came from. "It’s a beautiful place. Your body will find comfort there. Your heart will find peace."
The words slipped like sacred smoke blown by The Great Spirit between his lips. They twisted Sakote’s fate. They sealed the white woman’s destiny.
Chapter 11
Mattie soon discovered the Indian was right. The pain indeed came. And though he carried her with the easy grace of a wildcat, never jarring her, never even allowing a stray branch to scratch her, by the time they entered the shaded copse, Mattie’s arm felt on fire, and her knee throbbed like the devil.
The moment she spied the waterfall, however, she forgot all about her discomfort.
It was the most beautiful, idyllic spot she’d ever seen, something she might have sketched in her imagination. A grand tower of churning white water cascaded over black rock, plunging down two stories or more into a deep, dark, round pool. The sound was like thunder, softened only by the babble of the creek and the hiss of the spray obscuring the fall’s end. The pool was carved like a great jade bowl, with the middle so black it appeared bottomless, and the surface of the water rocked with gentle, widening rings that glimmered in the sunlight. Bright green mosses studded the vertical rock wall where the mist hovered. A huge boulder of granite intruded into the water, reflecting sunlight onto the undersides of the lush trees encircling the pond.
The moist air soothed Mattie’s parched throat at once. Her nose filled with the pleasant scent of wet rock and mud. And, true to the Indian’s promise, a sense of calm descended upon her as they climbed down the bank.
He set her down on a small, sun-splashed boulder at the water’s edge. It was warm, almost hot in contrast to the damp earth she could feel through her socks. She wanted to take them off, to feel the cool mud on the soles of her feet, to dabble her toes in the bracing water.
As if he read her thoughts, the Indian bent on one knee and began peeling off her white cotton stockings.
"It’s lovely," she sighed. "What is this place called?"
He shrugged. "The waterfall."
His hand still cupped her foot, and she realized with a jolt how natural it seemed to let him touch her.
"And what about you, Mr. Indian?" she breathed. "What are you called?"
He quirked up one corner of his mouth and wriggled his fingers beneath her foot, tickling her. "Why do white people need a name for everything?"
She had no answer for him—not that she could have formed syllables anyway. The twinkle in his eye and the curve of his lips—so sensual, so inviting—charmed the words right out of her head.
He tossed her socks aside. "We need to wash your wounds."
She didn’t think much about what he’d said until he reached around and began unfastening the buttons at the back of her dress.
"What are you doing?" She seized his wrist. Lord, it was thick and strong.
"These...buttons you call them? They’re difficult."
She flushed. "Well, maybe they’re supposed to be difficult," she said in a heated rush, "to keep men like you from..." The minute she looked in his eyes, she knew she had misjudged him. He meant no offense, and he certainly intended no seduction.
She glanced down at her dress. Of course, he wouldn’t dream of seducing her. She was a mess. Her gown was filthy, torn by the brush, and where he’d used a wad of it to stanch her blood, a giant macabre rose bloomed crimson against the brown. The garment would never be the same. And yet it was the only thing she had to wear back to the cabin.
He withdrew his hands, suddenly uneasy. "Don’t you wear the longhandles?"
She blinked. "The long..." When she beheld his solemn face and realized what he meant, she couldn’t help but smile. He’d obviously learned his English from the local miners. And he obviously knew nothing about women’s clothing. "Yes, Mr. Indian, I have, well, something like the longhandles."
She couldn’t very well swim in her dress. The wet linsey-woolsey would weigh her down on the trip home. She’d have to strip down to her cotton chemise, which would dry quickly. It was clear the Indian was one step ahead of her.
"Very well," she said as stoically as possible. "You may assist me with the buttons."
It took him a painfully long time. She supposed he’d had little practice with buttons, and there were at least two dozen down the back of this particular dress. She’d skipped a few of them herself, since she had no maid now and because her diminished size allowed her to slip the thing up over her hips. It wouldn’t have been so awful, except that the way he casually crouched beside her, she got a perfect view of his long, tan thigh, and it took every ounce of her will not to reach out and sample its smooth-muscled texture.
Despite his boyish look of triumph when he finished the task, Mattie blushed keenly at the thought of standing before him in her unmentionables. It was silly, really. After all, he seemed to think nothing of tra
ipsing all over God’s earth in scarcely more than a fig leaf.
With as little fuss as possible, and careful of her injuries, she stepped out of the ruined garment.
The sun felt delicious, the breeze decidedly wicked as it riffled the sheer cotton of her embroidered chemise. She shivered as a light gust blew waterfall mist over her.
"Is the water cold?" she asked as he began untying his moccasins.
He shrugged and gave her a dismissive shake of his head. "No."
Resisting the urge to cover herself, and falling short of limbs to fully accomplish the task anyway, Mattie studied her surroundings more thoroughly. A tiny gray lizard sunned itself on the biggest rock while vivid blue damselflies buzzed and nipped at the air. Water striders left tiny circles on the top of the pool, and here and there, she could see the sleek movement of fish beneath the surface.
He nodded toward her knee. "You’re bleeding again."
She followed his gaze. Bright red seeped through the white cotton of her chemise. She snatched the fabric up out of the way. Blood trickled lazily down her shin.
"Come," he said, and in one swift movement, he swept her into his arms, cradling her like a babe, and carried her toward the water.
His chest was firm against her, but resilient and warm, like her father’s leather wing chair after he’d been sitting in it. But unlike the chair, which smelled of pipe tobacco and macassar oil, the Indian’s scent was laced with wood smoke, rawhide, and a potpourri of intoxicating herbs.
The pond deepened sharply, and Mattie gasped as he fearlessly waded forward.
In three steps, he was thigh-deep in the water.
On the fourth, he dropped her in.
"Oh sh-!"
That was all the woman could yell before she went under. Of course, Sakote instantly hauled her up again by the waist and tugged her to shallower ground as gently as he could, despite her floundering like a netted salmon and sputtering words he’d never heard, even from Noa.
Her hair lay flat on her head now, wetted to the color of last year’s baskets, and her eyes burned through strands of it like hot coals prodded to life. She shuddered, and he wasn’t sure if it was with cold or anger.
"You said it wasn’t cold!" she finally managed to spit out.
"It isn’t cold." He settled her onto a ledge of stone just beneath the water’s surface and rucked up the drenched hem of her underdress to inspect her knee. "When the snows come, then it’s cold."
He washed water up over her leg.
"Ah!" she cried.
"Be still, Little Acorn."
"But it’s freezing!" she complained, shrieking when he splashed another wave over her.
"You scream like my little brother at his bath." He ladled more water over her.
"You make him bathe in th—?" She gasped again as he rinsed the wound. It was almost clean now. "What kind of heartless scoundr—?" She shivered at the next splash and fell silent, but that did not keep her from speaking to him with her eyes. They fired at him like serpentine-tipped arrows.
"Now your arm," he said, ignoring her glares as he’d done Hintsuli’s many times. Sometimes children didn’t know what was best for them. It seemed the same was true for Mati.
"I am not going to put my arm in that icy water," she said, thrusting out her chin like a Yana warrior.
Sakote considered her for a moment. She’d fight him if he tried to force her into the water, and she’d only hurt herself. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. Perhaps there was another way.
"What if I give you a prize for enduring this trial?"
That earned her attention at once.
"What kind of prize?"
He shrugged. He’d always offered Hintsuli small things for his concession—an arrow, an extra bite of his acorn bread, an afternoon playing the grass game. What would please a white woman?
"A squirrel for your supper?" he asked.
She wrinkled her nose. Perhaps, he thought sourly, she wouldn’t have liked the rabbits he’d killed for her either. He tried to think of the silly trinkets that gave his sister joy.
"A string of clamshell beads?"
She bit her lip, clearly not impressed.
How difficult this woman was. "A grinding rock."
She only stared at him blankly. He was about to make his final offer—that he wouldn’t “shake the stuffing out of her,” as Noa liked to say—when she came up with her own prize.
"I know!" Her face lit up. "You must let me sketch you."
"Sketchoo?"
"Yes. You must let me make a drawing of you. If I endure this torture without a peep, you must sit quietly for me so I can draw your picture."
How strange her request was. Why should she want to make a picture of him with the writing sticks?
He narrowed his eyes. "You won’t make magic with this sketchoo?"
"Magic?" She lifted her brows. "You mean, will I steal your soul?" She smiled. "Of course not. It’s only a picture."
He wasn’t so sure. He’d seen the pictures Hintsuli had stolen, and he understood why the boy believed the animals were trapped on the page. They were so perfect that they seemed to need only the breath of Wonomi to come to life.
But these were fears of old times. The white man brought many things, tools and toys, that seemed at first to be magic—the spinning top, matches, rifles—but they were no more magic than the caterpillar that turned into the butterfly or the oak that grew from the acorn. They were only unknown to the Konkow.
He nodded his agreement to the terms, and her smile blossomed as bright as a dogwood flower.
Mati was not quite silent while he bathed her, but she fought hard to keep her whimpers sealed behind tightly closed lips. There was little flesh left on the base of her hand, and just for a moment, before he remembered who she was, he felt sorry that she wouldn’t be able to grind acorns for many days. In the end, she was braver than Hintsuli would have been, despite the fact that her face was as white as birch bark and her lips pale and shivering.
He pulled her, dripping, from the water, and set her on a flat rock beside the pool. Then his gaze dropped past her face, past her shoulders and lower, and he stopped comparing the woman to his little brother.
He couldn’t understand why the white people wore such thin clothing. It offered no protection against the snows of ko-meni. Why didn’t they wear deerskin? Good white deerskin didn’t turn to mist when it became wet.
By The Great Spirit, he could see every part of her body as if she wore such a mist now—the points of her breasts, tautened with cold, the delicate ridges of her ribs, the shallow cave of her navel. And lower, he glimpsed the tousled nest of her woman’s curls.
Sakote swallowed hard, as if he swallowed an acorn, shell and all, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen a naked woman. He’d played pleasure games with many women from the surrounding Konkow villages. They seemed to enjoy his company and his body, and many wished to become his mate. But they were his people. They were Konkow. Never had he looked thus upon a white woman. Never had he imagined that their woman’s parts were nestled in gold.
It made him want to take her, here, beside the pond. He wished to lay her back on the sweet grass and lick the droplets from her shoulders, to fondle her breasts through the mist-cloth, to plunge his thickening spear into the golden tangle of her woman’s hair and...
"W-w-will you s-s-sit for me now?"
Her words startled Sakote from his vision, and he scowled in self-disgust. What was he thinking? How could he desire to lie with the woman? It was crazy. She was not of his world. She was white. And she was the mate of a bad kokoni. She was willful like the bear, stubborn like the coyote, and, like the squirrel, she seemed to chatter on and on. How could he want to lie with her?
And yet he did. He wanted to stretch out beside her, and he wanted to press his lips to hers in that white man’s ritual—the kiss—he’d spied between Noa and his sister late one night, the one that had made Towani sigh.
A tiny frown crossed her face, and he realized he hadn’t answered her question. He’d been wasting time with his dreaming. He forced his gaze back to her eyes, his thoughts back to her pain.
"First I must finish with your wounds." His voice was a hoarse whisper, and he hoped his breechcloth hid the proof of his lust.
A patch of milkweed grew in the crevice between two great slabs of granite. With a whisper of thanks to the plant, he plucked several stems.
"W-w-what is that?"
"It will heal you."
She eyed the plants with mistrust. "B-b-but it..."
"It will heal you."
He dribbled white juice from the plants onto her knee first, and she sucked a quick breath of pain through her teeth.
"It’s good," he assured her. "It will stop the bleeding."
He lifted her arm to drip the liquid down its length, trying to ignore her moon-white breast with the pink bud visible through the wet cloth.
For her forehead, he tore one leaf and gently dabbed the edge of it to her cut, holding her head still with his other hand. She winced, but didn’t complain.
"You aren’t cold anymore?" he asked.
"The pain has distracted me from the cold."
He grunted, amused. She sounded as grumpy as an old grandmother.
"Akina." Finished, he dropped the spent stems into the water. "Now I’ll bind your wounds."
He tore the edge of her brown dress quickly, before she could protest, for he knew how women were about their clothing. As he expected, her jaw dropped open and her eyes grew wide.
"What the devil are you—“
"I told you. I have to bind your wounds."