DEDICATION:
This one is for you, Dad.
I wish you were still here to read it.
Published 2008 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2008 by Helen A. Rosburg
Cover Model: Melissa Noble
Cover Illustration by James Tampa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro
ISBN# 978-193281564-1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Accolades for Helen A. Rosburg’s, Call of the Trumpet:
“Meticulously researched. A fascinating historical.”
—Heather Graham
FIVE HEARTS!
“Ms. Rosburg has done an incredible job of expanding this amazing plot into a riveting book you will be thrilled to read. The characters literally jump from the page and pull you (bring a Kleenex) into this astonishing story!”
—Brenda Talley, The Romance Studio
“CALL OF THE TRUMPET will sweep you away to a world of camels, beautiful horses, desert dunes, and of course, love.”
—Cat Cody, Romance Junkies
FOUR STARS!!
“Desert legends, slave auctions and life in the desert are only part of Rosburg’s latest historical. Death, love and politics also play a part in the lives of the hero and heroine in this compelling tale of trust and romance. Throw in a wolf attack and marriage as a second wife and you’ll be rapidly flipping pages.”
—Faith V. Smith, RT Book Reviews
“CALL OF THE TRUMPET is a sweeping historical romance researched with great attention to detail. Helen Rosburg brings the world of 1839 Bedouin life alive in her novel CALL OF THE TRUMPET. It is a sweeping historical romance filled with many realistic tidbits and interesting relationships that may, at first, seem foreign to the reader. Rosburg should be applauded for her ability to bring the reality of life for Islamic families to life in her novel…. As Cecile is pulled between the culture she has adopted and her western ideas of love and marriage. Most heart wrenching is the decisions that Cecile faces and the bitter agony in her journey to find love. CALL OF THE TRUMPET is not your conventional historical romance, but Helen Rosburg goes to great length to pull the reader into the world and culture of this strange society.”
—Tracy, Historical Romance Writers
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
WINTER’S FIRST CHILL WIND BLEW ACROSS THE PRAIrie, bending the long grasses that had been bleached and dried to the color of dust. It chased a bit of paper down the main street of the small town and set the general store sign swinging. Horses tied to hitching posts tucked their tails against their hindquarters, lowered their heads, and flattened their ears. A moaning sound came through the single window of the tiny jail.
The young woman in the cell, filthy and haggard, heard but did not listen, as she had once listened to the wind in the treetops that were her shelter, or over the plains that were her path. She felt dead to the world already. Certainly the cold did not affect her. She was used to surviving its treacheries. She was warm, in fact, within the bearskin cape she had cured and fashioned herself.
Footsteps approaching her cell door did not arouse her interest any more than the lonely sigh of the prairie wind. Neither did the smell of beans and coffee.
“Got yer lunch, lady,” the sheriff announced needlessly.
The young woman did not stir.
“Yer gunna die hungry.”
“Just as long as I die, what do you care?”
The sheriff had no answer. He seldom knew what to say to the strange young woman. He cursed the fates that had delivered her to his door and the jury that had convicted her, no matter how much he had wanted it and had a hand in it. She had become famous, much more than he had known, a bloody legend in the southwest and central plains. He suspected he was going to become infamous for hanging her. He only wished he’d known a little bit more about her when he’d let her get the best of him and thrown her in the cell.
“Suit yourself,” he mumbled, and returned with the tray to his cluttered desk. He thought about eating the food himself, but found he had no appetite. Just as well they were going to hang her at dusk. Then life would get back to normal.
“Good afternoon, Sheriff.”
“Afternoon, Father.” The sheriff glanced at the priest only briefly. He had never been a churchgoing man, and the sight of the cleric always made him feel slightly guilty. “Want me to unlock the door so you kin set inside with ’er?” “If you please.”
The sheriff sighed as he pushed his bulk out of the chair. He unlocked the cell door, but left the priest to open it himself, and returned to the desk.
“Miss Rodriguez?”
She had not meant to look up, but the sound of the long-forgotten name caught her by surprise. “You know that’s not what I’m called,” she said without expression.
“Louisa, then.”
“That name, too, belongs to the past. It’s as dead as I am. I don’t need you, Father.”
Her black eyes burned into him. The priest shifted uncomfortably on the stool he had placed opposite her narrow cot.
“I know something about you,” he persisted. “I know you have put your life, your faith, in the hands of another. In the hands of a man. But he cannot help you now. Only God can help you.”
The young woman spat defiantly. “God has never helped me, priest. He never helped anyone I loved.”
“His ways are mysterious, Louisa.”
“You speak the truth at last. Now you can go.”
The priest ignored her. “That person you put your faith in led you down the wrong road. It’s time to cleanse your spirit, confe
ss and repent, prepare yourself to tread God’s pathway.”
The young woman’s features softened almost imperceptibly. The trace of a smile appeared at the corners of her generous, sculpted lips. “The path I chose wasn’t traditional, I admit,” she said agreeably. “It was surely not the life a priest would approve of. But I don’t think my choice was necessarily condemned by God either. And if, as you and your kind would have us believe, God is a loving God, He would very much approve of my life. Because it was filled with love, Father. Glorious, passionate, enduring love.”
The priest colored, as she no doubt meant him to.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” the girl continued. “Our union was never sanctified by the Church. But I really don’t care. I did what I did, lived as I chose. Now I’m going to pay. But it’s ironic, you know. The crime I’m going to pay for I didn’t even commit.”
The priest cleared his throat. He did not want to debate guilt and innocence. He had never met a prisoner who admitted their guilt. “Repent then, child, for the things you did do, the sins you did commit.”
The young woman remained silent and stretched out on her cot. She folded her hands on her abdomen and turned her face to the wall. The small sounds the priest made as he left the cell went unheard, as did his final muttered blessing. Had she sinned? Thou shalt not kill. Yes, she had sinned. Did she repent?
Not for a moment. Those who died had deserved to die.
Had she put her faith and trust in a man, when she should have put it in God? Yes. Oh, yes.
A key clanged against the lock. “It’s time, lady.”
The first real fear assailed her, a ball of churning nausea in her gut. Her strength seemed to fail her when she tried to stand. She rose shakily to her feet, and the buffalo cape slithered from the cot to the floor. She bent to retrieve it, but the sheriff’s voice halted her.
“You’ll have to put yer hands behind you, lady.”
Of course she would. She let her eyes linger on the cape just a moment longer, let the memory and the meaning have a last, lingering tug on her heart—then she complied and the sheriff secured the handcuffs. She shivered briefly in the cold, but knew the physical discomfort wouldn’t last much longer. The shiver turned to a shudder of horror. A last glance at the buffalo hide washed away the adrenaline surge of fear.
“You walk on ahead of me. And don’t try nothin’ funny.”
It seemed a stupid thing to say. She walked out of the jail into the failing light of dusk. The wind picked up her heavy, matted hair and lifted it briefly from her shoulders. The sheriff poked her in the middle of her back.
“Keep movin’.”
The whole town had turned out, what there was of it. Men stood in the dusty street, while women and children were arrayed on the wood-planked sidewalks. They drifted along behind as she walked to the gallows.
The structure was silhouetted against the final pink light of the prairie sunset. The last sunset she would ever see. She was going to hang. Now.
Her bowels turned to water, and she was momentarily afraid she would shame herself.
Hanging. It was her only fear. Hanging. Not death.
And then she felt him, sensed his presence. Her fear floated upward from her and was blown away on the wind. She mounted the gallow steps.
He was near her. She had always known when he was near. The connection between them had been there from the first. It was strong, so strong. Someone slipped a hood over her head.
She wasn’t sure how he would save her, but she knew he wouldn’t let her hang. He knew her fear. They had made a pact. He wouldn’t let her die by hanging. She trusted him.
The noose settled around her neck. Tightened.
At that moment she heard the thunder, the thunder of hooves. Someone screamed, a voice in the crowd.
And then there was no more time for thought.
Her mind numbed and a long-forgotten prayer tumbled from her lips. The floor fell away from beneath her feet.
In the last moments of consciousness, Blaze heard the odd thunder of hoofbeats, a solid thump right behind her, and then she started swinging.
A single shot rang out.
CHAPTER ONE
NOTHING WAS MORE BEAUTIFUL OR WELCOMING THAN the high desert in the spring. Louisa could feel the warmth of the sand through the thin leather of her sandals as she walked along ahead of her burro. The familiar fragrance of bushy, blossoming mesquite was a balm to her senses, and the startling green of the leafless paloverde tree was a delight to her eyes. Tall and stately saguaro cacti were comforting sentinels as she passed among them. Mountains surrounded her like a blessing. She was home, in the place of her birth, the place she loved and never wished to leave. She was happy.
And she was hungry.
The rumbling in her stomach was fierce. She felt she hadn’t eaten in days, although her mother had sent her out that morning with a handful of corn tortillas. Soon, however, she would be home. The sticks she had collected would rekindle the kitchen fire, and there would be fresh tortillas, beans, and perhaps a stringy desert jackrabbit, if her father and brother had been lucky. Tomorrow, after they had cooked most of the day, there would be prickly pear jelly from the luscious, red cactus fruits she had carefully harvested. Louisa’s stomach grumbled again with impatience. It covered, momentarily, the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Then the ominous, distant thunder came to her ears.
Louisa froze. The burro’s ears pricked forward, and he raised his head, nostrils testing the air.
They needed somewhere to hide. At once. Riders, in these days and times, almost always boded evil. Louisa cast about her desperately.
Mesquite might hide her, but not her animal. The foothills of the bare, brown mountains shimmered tantalizingly in the heat, but were too far away to reach in time. Her only hope was an arroyo, a crack in the earth, a gully, formed by runoff rains from the mountains. But the only way to find one in the flat terrain was to stumble upon one. Louisa started to run.
The burro did not hesitate to follow. He had followed the girl every day of his life since being weaned from his dam. Never had he known an angry word, or the prod of a stick, and he trotted briskly at her heels. The bundles on his back bounced against his gray-haired hide.
Louisa’s path was tortuous. Rock and boulders strewed the sand. Barrel cacti were interspersed with patches of prickly pear and the occasional, dangerous cholla, poised to break off and cling to her should the vibration of her step draw too near. Lizards skittered away in advance of her flying feet and, growing ever closer, the cloud of dust raised by many hooves.
Abruptly, the ground crumbled beneath her feet, and Louisa found herself falling. She had come too quickly upon the edge of the arroyo, and the soft, dry earth could not support her. She tumbled to the smooth, sandy bottom of the gulch. Her burro slid down the slope she had made, and stood over her, completely unperturbed. Louisa scrambled to her feet.
She heard them clearly now, the rhythmic pounding of the hooves and the chuffing of the horses’ breath. She ducked instinctively, although the sides of the arroyo were higher than her head.
Who were they? Miners? Another group in the seemingly endless stream headed to California? A motley lot, they were known to take whatever they wanted or needed along their way.
Or was it a band of Apaches, traditional enemies of her people? Louisa’s blood ran cold. She had once had a friend near her own age, a beautiful girl full of promise. She now slaved in an Apache camp, counted as mere chattel of the brave who had captured and, hence, owned her.
Or was it someone even worse?
Louisa did not know she had begun to tremble until she felt a weakness in her knees. Her breath came in shallow, panting gasps. She sank to her knees and leaned heavily against her burro’s sturdy side.
Madre de Dios, she silently prayed. Deliver me from the devil.
For devil, indeed, he was. A man with no soul who collected Apache scalps for their bounty. And when he could find no women, or childr
en, or braves of the tribe he sought, he indiscriminately killed her people, took their scalps, and trimmed them to look like the ones that would fill his pockets with bloody dollars. Despite the heat, Louisa shivered uncontrollably.
Because the hoofbeats were fading away. Fading, but not toward the west and north, where she longed for them to go. They disappeared to the east, toward the small village where she lived with her parents, her baby sister, Inez, and adored older brother, Tomas.
Fear replaced the bones in her limbs with water. Her heart hammered so painfully against her ribs she thought they might break.
Calm. Be calm, she told herself. It is only a band of my people riding on some urgent errand.
But her people had few horses. They had fewer errands of urgency in this quiet corner of the desert.
And then she was running, running down the bed of the arroyo as fast as her legs had ever carried her. Somewhere outside the immediate focus of her mind, she heard the three-beat rhythm of her burro galloping along behind her. But her only thought was for her family. And what she might find when she reached her village.
Santa Rita crouched against the foothills like a timid fawn resting in the protective shadow of its mother. Even its color was like camouflage, tan and dusty, almost indistinguishable from the barren hills behind it. The narrow trail that led to the cluster of poor adobe huts was a considerable distance from the main road that traveled northward into Tucson and, as a result, few came upon the village purely by chance.
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