King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  They next went back to his campsite and collected his gear, as well as his tools stashed above, and brought it all into her cave.

  She got out another willow backrest specially for him and faced it to the hearth. She gestured for him to take his ease on it.

  Smiling, he tossed his sombrero to one side and let himself down and lay back.

  She pulled off his boots. She got cool water in a Sioux pot, and kneeling, and placing his feet in a basin in her lap, washed his feet, and rubbed his ankles, and soothed his calves.

  “A king never had it better.”

  She got kindling and firewood. Brushing away the ashes in the hearth until she found live embers, she soon had a little fire going.

  He glowed as he watched her.

  By the time the sun had sunk, she had a pot of soup and meat for him.

  He ate ravenously.

  After she had dampered the fire with a handful of ashes, she sprinkled the warm ashes with wisps of sweetgrass. Soon the cave and the little bedroom off to one side were filled with a sweetish smoking aroma.

  They went to bed early, naked.

  They slept sweetly together on a dark buffalo robe. He lay with his body curled around her. He did not touch her, though occasionally upon a deep breath her child-naked back brushed against his boy-naked belly.

  He reveled in the incense coming from the hearth and in the smell of dried sweetgrass rising from the woven mat beneath them.

  He couldn’t get over the sudden wonder of it all. It was almost a dream. Whatever it was, truth, dream, or parts of both, he wasn’t going to spoil it with lust.

  Early-morning sunlight struck into their hideout and woke them. They opened their eyes. At about the same time they turned their heads and smiled upon each other.

  He formed an incomplete circle with his thumb and forefinger and holding it horizontal to the left, raised it a little. “Morning.”

  “Hanhanna.”

  They smiled some more, each delighting in the sleepy appearance of the other.

  Ransom found his hand sliding under the warm robe and reaching for her bare shoulder.

  She appeared not to see it and before his hand could touch her, she was up and out of bed.

  “Erden.”

  She stretched deliciously in the cool air, rising to her toes at the end of a deep yawn, her young breasts flattening a little along the edges.

  “Erden?”

  Even as he spoke she skipped outside naked. He heard her bare feet padding on the path a moment; then silence.

  He rose on one elbow. “What the heck? Running outside stark nun naked?”

  A few minutes later she came back, dripping water, cheeks a dark rose-brown, eyes merry. She saw his questioning eyes, and said, “Oihduzaza hanhanna.” With her hand she made the sign for the morning bath.

  “So that’s what you were up to.”

  He loved her wet body. In the shadowy light of the cave he saw again how white her bell-like belly was. Her face, neck, hands were like those of a lighter-skinned Indian, but the rest of her as pale as shimmering egg peel.

  He loved the lithe form of her, especially her hips which had only just begun to swell with coming womanhood. She was almost too perfect to touch. He regretted having once touched her at the same time that he longed to touch her again.

  He thought to himself: “And then, there’s Katherine.”

  Erden turned. A questioning look opened her face.

  Quickly he made the sign for eating.

  She quirked her gray-ringed eyes at him. She’d caught on that he’d just then remembered someone else. She smiled, and with a wink forgave him, and motioned for him to stay abed while she got him something to eat. She put on her buckskins and skipped into the larger room.

  “The sweet little rascal,” he thought, stroking his beard, “she ain’t so dumb.”

  They had breakfast of roast venison and sliced pemmican and thimbleberries washed down with clear spring water.

  When he’d finished eating, he held his hand level against his heart and swung it briskly out and to the right. “Good.”

  She nodded. “Was-te.”

  He lay back on his willow rest, bare toes to the fire.

  She put the parfleches away.

  He brooded on the problem of what to do about Katherine. He wondered what Katherine might be doing at the moment.

  Erden tidied up the cave.

  After a while, musing on the fire, he got to wondering about the various Sioux words Erden had used the day before. Using sign language, he had her interpret them while she did her housework. “Paha Sapa” not only meant “the Black Hills” but also “that place where a dark jealous spirit full of great vengeance guarded many forbidden secrets.” “Wakantanka” meant “the Spirit of All Spirits.” “Sanyan” meant “whitewash.” “Poge we” meant “nosebleed” or “you have broken my maidenhead.” “Uwa” meant “come.” “Mazaskazi” meant literally “yellow silver.” “Sha” meant “scarlet,” “very wonderful.” “Kazanyan” meant “parting.” “Anawin” meant “to tell what is not true.”

  They talked in liquid gestures. Both were quick to catch the other’s thought.

  He made out that she did not remember anything about white parents. Her first memory of life was of riding a spotted pony very fast in moonlight. She had good Indian parents at first. They loved her dearly. She lived very happy with them for at least six winters that she could recall. Then the hated white man with his blue breeches and his terrible wagon guns came and wiped out her village. She herself had been wounded. She showed him a white bubble of a scar in her armpit. Somehow she had been overlooked by the bayoneting white man. Afterward she had crept, then run, to the safety of certain tribal cousins of her foster parents. Several winters passed. Her new parents had little to eat. They soon let her know she was not welcome. Besides, her skin turned white when she did not run naked in the sun as she had when a little girl. She became more and more unhappy living with them. On one of their trips to the Black Hills to get lodgepoles, and to treat themselves to thimble- berries, she jumped camp and fled into the higher Hills. She knew her second parents would not follow her because of their fear of the mad spirits in the Black Hills. They believed that the mad spirits deliberately sought to terrify man and beast with their vindictive lightnings and their terrible rumblings and their black snouts of whirling winds. She herself wasn’t too afraid of the spirits and their mad behavior. Soon she found the cave off the gulch and then the high little park. The place of the gold she knew about from her first Indian father’s description. It had not taken her long to learn to live alone, and like it. She’d felt terribly lonesome at first, yes, but soon the pines and the bushes and the streams and the flying two-leggeds and the preying four-leggeds got used to her, and she got used to them, and then they became friends.

  That spring, several months before Ransom came along, some white prospectors had stumbled upon her, and she’d almost been caught. But she was too swift, too wary, for them and their bullets. A few days later she managed to stampede their horses with a scaring robe. Later still she’d scared the daylights out of the grizzly prospectors themselves by yowling the Indian death cry and following it up by starting a small avalanche into their camp. The prospectors left in a rush, cursing and muttering about a “banshee.” She had to smile as she told about it.

  Then Ransom had come along.

  She had to know about him too.

  He told her some things about himself, about his adventures with Sam Slaymaker, about his attempts at mining, about his tries at driving mules.

  She had tears in her gray eyes when he finished signing that his early memory was wiped out and that like her he too was an orphan. The two of them were heart kin.

  He didn’t tell her about Katherine.

  She asked him by sign if he’d ever eaten the white man’s “snow in summer.”

  It took him a moment to understand what she meant.

  Then it came to him. Ice cream. He t
old her, yes, he had, and that someday when they should go to the great place of many wooden lodges at Cheyenne he would get her a whole parfleche full.

  “When?”

  “Soon. Perhaps before the snow flies.”

  That afternoon they checked the horses in the little park pasture. The horses were fine. The horses pricked up their heads and came trotting over to the pole fence and nuzzled them both. Ransom ran his hand over their backs for sores and found none. Sam would have been pleased with his grooming.

  Ransom wanted to see the mother lode of gold again. Erden frowned at the thought, but went along anyway. To her it was not a treasure to gloat over.

  He was struck again by the richness of the milky quartz and couldn’t help but fill a pocket with a handful of nuggets the size of rose hips.

  She frowned at that too.

  He dreamed ahead to that great day when, after he’d mined it himself or had sold it outright, he would be a wealthy man. He swore he’d build himself a great mansion in one of the little parks around. Katherine would adore him for it.

  Erden touched him on the elbow.

  He jumped. And then groaned as if struck in the belly by an arrow.

  She touched him again. “Uwa.”

  He made up his mind to push all thought of Katherine to one side and concentrate on Erden.

  She signaled that she had yet another secret place to show him.

  “All right, little Swallow Blue, lead on.”

  They climbed a small hogback to the northeast; filed past thrusting fingers of shining granite; dropped into a canyon with flared sides. The walls of the canyon were brilliant crimson sandstone and studded with patches of blue spruce. Then, going up a side ravine, they descended into yet another little perfect park. Here too the meadow was lush with wonderful grasses, and instead of daisies it was veiled over with myriads of nodding sunflowers.

  Ransom’s eye fell on some red deer grazing nearby. A big buck cropped alone off to one side of the herd.

  Erden put a finger to her lips. She threw a soft look back at Ransom, and then, seemingly out only for a stroll, casually headed toward the deer. She paused now and again to lift the sunburst head of a sunflower. She had the appearance of a red doe out grazing.

  The big buck lifted his head. Ransom could see him savor the scent of her, drawing in long slow breaths through slightly flared nostrils. Apparently the head buck didn’t mind what his nose found for he went back to grazing.

  Erden waded quietly through the grass, continuing to lift the head of first this sunflower, then that, until she was well amidst the red deer. She stopped. She lifted yet another sunflower. Then, easy, casually, she stroked the back of the nearest fawn. The mother’s head came up out of the grass. She too sniffed of the Erden smell on the air, then, satisfied it was well, went back to grazing. After a moment Erden touched the mother.

  Ransom couldn’t move.

  A crow came fluttering out of a stand of quaking aspen, its wings flashing an iridescent purple and a warm welcome in its caw-caw. It lighted on Erden’s shoulder.

  Erden turned her head, easy, and cawed a warm welcome in reply.

  The crow and Erden exchanged kisses.

  A tear jumped glistening down Ransom’s beard.

  The crow sat on Erden’s buckskin shoulder this way, that way. The crow’s feathers were exactly as black as Erden’s braids.

  The crow and Erden talked together. The crow spoke a parrot-like Sioux; Erden spoke a liquid Sioux.

  Presently the crow lifted off Erden’s shoulder and dipped over to the back of the head buck. Except for a slight shiver of hide over the back, the buck hardly noticed. The crow found something to peck at in the fur over the buck’s shoulder. The buck kept on grazing.

  The crow looked around, bright, perky; saw something in a far pine. It flew over, dropping a falling arrow of bird- splash on the way, and then vanished into the dark forest.

  Almost on the crow’s last caw and flap of wing, a male bobolink spurted up out of the grass at Ransom’s feet. The bobolink fluttered up in joy, not fear. It sang. It whistled its pleasure. It was as fat as a butterball. It somersaulted. Buff hindneck and white shoulders alternated with fat black belly and curt black tail. It tumbled and tumbled in midair, each tumble a little higher than the one before. It sang short quick bursts of liquid sound. It sang that the fat two-legged was very happy they’d come to visit him. It rose. The little meadow rang with its catchy airs. The little meadow widened as the bobolink rose higher and higher and as its melodious notes swelled and swelled in power.

  Ransom and Erden stood rapt.

  Of a sudden the bobolink speared straight up and its song became a frenzy of pure purling euphoria.

  Ransom gasped.

  “Sha,” Erden whispered.

  Up. Up. A form flashing off into delicious hysteria.

  “By the Lord, Robert’s going to explode.”

  “Wakan.”

  Up above the tree tips up above the mountain tops.

  And then the bobolink was gone. There wasn’t even a single drifting afterimage mote in the eye. Only lingering, very slowly fading, echoes. Eloquent gurglings receding to liquid purlings receding to little tinklings receding to tiny pink notes.

  “Angel heaven.”

  “Comes-through-the-Cloud.”

  A pair of blue swallows fleeted in. They’d spotted Erden from their mud nest up on a sandstone ledge. They flew directly toward her, and as they neared her they flipped iridescent wings at her black hair, and then rose and dove and swalved around her. They swept up all the flies. They too were at home with her. They were careful not to fly too near Ransom and showed him nothing but sharply forked tails.

  Erden began strolling again, touching this flower, that flower, with the two blue swallows forming a swift aureole about her head. She touched the tip of a blade of bluejoint grass. She touched a quaking aspen at the edge of the glade. She touched a spruce, a pine, a chance rare oak, an ash, an alder, a dogwood. She touched them as if they were the dolls of childhood. A sound came from her as of an inward murmuring.

  “No wonder she’s named after a bird,” Ransom mused.

  Presently Erden beckoned for Ransom to join her. She’d found something.

  He went over, eyes grave with love.

  “Kanta.”

  Wild plums. The plums hung in the midst of arrowhead leaves like big drops of scarlet blood. “Ripe.”

  She took up the corners of her fringed deerskin skirt and held them above her hips. She motioned for him to pick the plums and fill her skirt. Sunlight shone on her white nubile thighs. The small triangle of her dusky pubic fuzz seemed more a thing of innocence than entrance to a primal womb.

  He concentrated on picking the ripe plums. When his eyes did shy off a little, he made an effort to look up at the swealing swallows.

  Ransom picked plums until her buckskin skirt sagged with their weight.

  She motioned for him to take his sombrero and fill it with some scarlet bullberries from a nearby whitish thorny bush.

  He filled it heaping.

  They trudged back to the cave, she naked from the waist down, he bareheaded.

  It was all a dream, pure. If he could only hold his breath, forever, it would forever stay that way. He found himself thinking of Erden at last as truly a blue swallow, something to be looked at and adored but never caged.

  While she made supper, he fell into a study that quivered with holy green little lightnings. His thoughts sparkled more than drifted. He had fallen into the loving lap of a savage angel. Pray that he might not lose her by some foolish word or act on his part. He’d already taken her, mingled fleshes with her, but more and more that taking and that mingling seemed of another time and done by another man.

  They went to bed together as brother and sister.

  A couple of weeks went by.

  Green aspens turned gold. Prickles of frost caught at running water. Turtledoves sang late autumnal laments.

  Ransom went throug
h the days as though he’d smelled too many wild roses. He knew he should be staking out his claim. He knew he should be going back to tell Katherine about his great strike. But he couldn’t get himself to do it.

  Moods, suppers, sleeps drifted by.

  Erden got him to bathe every morning in the little brook, cold or not. They bathed unashamed together. The aroma of wild ferns and silver sage never left her. Her smell, like Katherine’s, became a part of his flesh: Erden’s pure wild, Katherine’s tinctured with manufacture.

  While Ransom learned to talk more Sioux, Erden refused to learn more American.

  “Why not, my little two-legged?”

  “It is not at home with my tongue.”

  “Someday you may want to live with the white again.”

  Erden shook her head. “I have found my true home. I wish for no other.”

  “Perhaps your children will wish to speak white.”

  “The mother carries the tongue. Therefore the children will speak Dakota.”

  “Do you not wish to please your husband?”

  “You keep the beard. I keep the tongue.”

  Inevitably he continued to make comparisons. Erden’s skin was as satiny as the petal of a sundrop; Katherine’s was as set as the leaf of a milkweed. Erden’s eyes were gray- ringed and trusting and bird-wise; Katherine’s one eye was brown and full of private shadows and citified. Erden’s hair, taken out of braids, rippled like a filly’s flowing mane; Katherine’s hair, a rust-shadowy gold, hung stiffish like a bell mare’s tail. Erden flowed, toes light through the day; Katherine strode, strong-muscled through the day.

  He loved them both, worshiping Erden and lusting after Katherine.

  When he tried to come to some kind of thought as to what he should do about Erden, his mind shied off into fantasy.

  He made it a point not to touch Erden, or reach for her, even though they slept together. It became a religion with him.

  Nightmares came to him. By the time he realized what they were, they already had him in the grip of something taking place. It was already too late. Later, when he finally came out of them, he couldn’t for the life of him remember what they were about.