by Anya Seton
Hugh reached his hand forward, clutching the rough speckled quartz, and twisted his head over his shoulder. “You’re crazy,” he whispered. “There’s a mine here. This is a vein. It’s bonanza....”
“No.” Dart shook his head. “I’m sorry, old boy, but you’ll have to face it. I can tell by the country rock, by the formation, there’s nothing here but what you see—a small pocket.”
“You lie, you bastard, you lie....” Hugh backed against the lump of quartz, throwing his arms out as though he protected it. “You lie”—he hissed again—“you want it all for yourself. I knew it. I knew this would happen—” The green eyes glaring up at Dart were like eyes under sea water, submerging, drowning.
“Hugh”—pleaded Dart on a long breath—“you know I’m not lying, it’s...” He stopped, standing there tall and helpless in the bright light of Hugh’s torch while Hugh with one clumsy, fumbling motion drew out his revolver and fired.
Amanda screamed, and in the echo of her scream a second shot detonated from the shadows in the back of the cave. Hugh gave a bubbling gasp and fell prone beside the glittering wall of pyrites.
In the confusion of blinding smoke and terror, Amanda ran to Dart, who had fallen to his knees, his head hanging forward on his chest. He was struggling to get up, and a stream of blood spurted from a hole in his leather jacket and ran down onto the ground.
“Darling—my darling,” she sobbed, kneeling beside him and holding him frantically against her breast as though to staunch that spurting blood with her own body. “Dart—my God—what happened——?”
“Hugh shot me—” murmured Dart in a vague dreaming voice. “But I didn’t shoot him.... How could I—unarmed—?” He struggled once more to get up, the blood spurted again, and he slumped against her into her arms. “Be careful, Andy—” he whispered, and his eyes shut.
She did not understand him. She laid him down on the ground and wadded her sweater under his head, she pushed back his jacket and looked at the hole in the cotton shirt, high up, thank God, near his armpit. Tourniquet, she thought—no, too high. She took her bandanna and stuffed it over the hole, pressing down hard.
There was a soft thud of leaping footballs behind her in the darkness of the cave, she heard them but she was beyond all fear, concentrated on the pressure she was applying, and praying underneath steadily, “Dear God, don’t let Dart die, don’t ... don’t...”
She saw a shadow approach from the darkness, the figure of a man who came and stood over them. She looked up and saw who it was, uncomprehending but without surprise. In this cave of nightmare and death there was no place for surprise. “John Whitman”—she cried on a low pleading note—“oh, thank God, you’re here—Dart’s hurt—help me.”
The Apache stiffened, behind his unwavering black eyes there flickered a strange expression. He rested the stock of his gun on the ground, staring down at Dart’s white face, ignoring the woman.
Dart opened his eyes, and looked at his boyhood friend. “So it was you—” The words drifted from his mouth like dry leaves on the wind.
“Eheu—Ishkinazi—” answered the Indian in Apache, bowing his head. “You have betrayed. I’ve followed many days, and watched. The secret of this valley was known to me also and better than to you. Did you in your white arrogance not think of that?”
Beneath the pressure of her hands on the wound Amanda felt Dart’s big body strain and gather itself together, the muscles tensing. She cried out in protest, but he stumbled to his feet and stood swaying leaning on her a little. The Indian’s hand tightened on his gun barrel, but he made no move.
“I’m weak as a child,” said Dart. “I cannot fight you. You will shoot if you like. Finish what the other started, but I beg you by all the friendship we once had, by the same blood that flows in both our veins—do not hurt her.”
The Indian was silent. He turned his head and looked at the shattered mummy. He glided to the pyrite wall and he kicked Hugh’s body over with his foot. “This pig is dead,” he said. “I killed him to avenge the desecrated spirit of our ancestors. Let him lie by the shining wall he slobbered over with such greed.”
He picked up his gun, cradling it in his arm. He glanced at Amanda and saw horrified comprehension dawning in her face. He spat on the floor and continued in English. “As for you, Ishkinazi, and your woman——” His narrowed eyes glinted. “You bleed fast, it may be that your wound will kill you. I do not know. But I leave you to the Mountain Spirits whose hiding place you betrayed. I leave you to Usen, who is the Giver of Life and Death.”
And he was gone, sliding swift as a panther between the graves and out of the cave.
Dart’s body slumped, falling against Amanda so hard that she staggered. “No,” he said through his teeth, straightening himself painfully, “we’ve got to get out of here.” He put his good arm around her shoulders.
He felt his wound. “Is there blood in back too—?”
“Yes...” she whispered, “not so much.”
“I think the bullet went right through, missed the lung. Bleeding’s the main—press here, Andy.” He guided her fingers to the hollow of his neck. The spurts lessened and thinned to an ooze.
They staggered slowly forward together, she supporting half his weight on her shoulders and pressing on the artery. They stumbled out of the burial cave and up through the kiva and the dozen deserted rooms in the silent city they had traversed with Hugh an hour ago.
When they stood again on the terraced ledge by the brink of the great cavern, she cried, “Darling—lie down here, don’t try to go further. I’ll get food and water up here from the camp.”
His lips were gray, and cold sweat dripped down his forehead, but he said, “No. Not here. We’ve disturbed them enough.”
They made their slow agonizing way together down the trail, and back across the creek to their little camp. Then he collapsed on his blankets beneath the brush shelter. Under weighted lids his gray eyes were full of light, and he smiled faintly.
“My poor Andy—” he said, as she bent lower to hear, “I’m in your hands—I’m not going to be much use to you for a while ... no good at all. This isn’t the way it was supposed to turn out, is it—?” His lids fluttered and fell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AMANDA knelt beside her wounded unconscious husband. Flickering light filtered through the leafy roof of the brush shelter. There was no sound but Dart’s quick, shallow breathing and the gurgling of the little creek. She was alone in the lost valley, face to face with the fear she had glimpsed and desperately warded off with anger and self-pity on the night she lost the baby.
No one at all to turn to now. No one to help you but yourself. And not only yourself in need of help this time. Relentless implacability that sneeringly demands a wisdom and a strength that is not there, that waits in ambush, laughing at your destruction.
Dart shuddered, and his body shook again with chills, though already he was wrapped in all their blankets. Her own heart shuddered and seemed to stop. She crept under the blankets with him, trying to warm him with her own body. On her breast through the cotton shirt she felt the sticky thickness of his blood. He muttered something and turned towards her a little, as though to pull her closer, but his arm slipped back. He sighed, and she felt with terror the faintness of the hurried tapping in his chest.
My love, my love—she whispered. Her words filled the shelter. They filled the valley. Nothing beyond the valley, nothing in the valley but love and death.
She had no ritual to guide her, no certainty of faith, and yet her soul obeyed the ultimate eternal instinct it hears when all else has failed. Her mind, her body, and her spirit rushed together like surging water, channeled into a formless, desperate prayer.
It seemed there was no answer. Dart’s shuddering continued, the shallow, sighing breaths became more rapid.
Amanda’s agony of tension snapped into a sudden deep exhaustion. She dozed for a few seconds. Behind her lids the reflection of the checkered light and shadow
in the shelter dissolved into blackness. The blackness faded and became a crystal mist. The mist was cool and passionless as though it floated from behind the stars. Woven through it, floating in a nimbus of cool light like a white flower, she saw a woman’s face looking down at her with an expression of tenderness and comfort. The dark, tender eyes were like those of Calise, yet the light and the peace that flowed around and through them was infinitely greater than Calise, for the crystal mist was but a thin and gauzy veil across the shining land beyond.
Dart stirred and murmured, “Water....”
She awoke at once, completely alert. The dream vanished, leaving no memory behind. She felt only refreshment and a keen competence of mind.
She slid carefully out from the blankets. Her brain, released from paralyzing fear, took command. It presented her with concrete remembrance and a plan of action through the practical medium of a first-aid course she had taken at camp when she was sixteen.
She added a little salt to the water she brought Dart, and holding his head and murmuring encouragement, she coaxed him to drink many cups. She made a fire, and put round stones in it to heat, and she put on the coffeepot.
Very gently, so that he did not waken, she cut the stiff, bloodsodden shirt from around his wounds, both back and front, under his left collarbone. She debated, to the best of her knowledge, the dangers of starting up the bleeding again by removing the fragments of shirt which had coagulated into the wound, as against the dangers of infection. She decided to compromise. She opened Hugh’s medical kit. She stared at the label pasted inside the lid. “Dr. Hugh Slater, Lodestone, Arizona.” The words swam before her eyes. A spasm of realization translated into actual nausea, her stomach heaved. She controlled herself, forcefully turning her mind back to the contents of the kit. She took out the bottle of mercurochrome, set her jaw and poured it over the wounds and the embedded pieces of cotton shirt.
Dart gasped.
“It’s all right, darling, she said, kissing his forehead. “Lie still.” Her voice was soothing and firm.
He looked up at her and tried to smile, then his lids fell again.
She took sterile compresses from the kit and placed them over the wounds, fastened them with adhesive tape, tightly so as to exert some pressure. She brought warmed stones from the fire, and wrapping them in Dart’s and Hugh’s and her own extra sweaters she put them at Dart’s feet and alongside his body. And she gave him a cupful of strong hot coffee. His shivering stopped.
When she went back to the fire he was breathing more deeply, his pulse was stronger. She sat down on the grass by the turkey he had shot that morning and began to pluck it, wrenching out great handfuls of feathers, and allowing them to float down the canyon on the freshening twilight breeze.
Her mind continued to function with clear precision. She could take it up like a reading glass and stand apart with it to view their situation with as much objectivity as though she were examining a photograph.
John Whitman was gone. He had left the valley, his mission ended. He had left them to fate, to the mercy of the mountain spirits he believed in. Had he also killed or taken the burro? This, now that Dart was as comfortable as she could make him, was her next practical consideration. The little beast was nowhere in sight.
She finished plucking the turkey, and went to the shelter for Dart’s hunting knife. She cut off the turkey’s feet and head, slit and disemboweled it, as she had seen butchers do. She cut and peeled an aspen branch, thrust it through the turkey, and suspended it above the fire on two piles of flat stones. Then she went up and down the creek looking for the burro, but she could not find him, and she did not dare to leave Dart alone for long.
It will be bad if Tontos gone, she thought calmly, we’ll have to carry extra water ourselves to cross the malpais. But when and how were they to leave this valley? She did not know, she ceased to think of it.
The only thing that matters is Dart, to make him well and strong again.
The turkey fat and juices fell hissing into the flames, while she turned the bird from side to side watching the skin brown and crackle. How many unknown skills attention and necessity called forth.
The turkey was tough and pungent, but it satisfied her hunger. She ate a pilot biscuit with it, and drank quantities of the pure sparkling creek water. She dared touch none of their few remaining cans, or the flour, for Dart would need the fullest diet she could provide. How much blood did he lose? she thought. Enough for shock and ghastly weakness. But he was strong, and if bleeding did not start again, if the bullet had done no greater internal damage than appeared from the hole’s position, if there was no infection...
She washed up her few utensils and doused the campfire. She made Dart drink again, rousing him only enough to swallow, and she gave him a sedative from the vial so marked. She took his gun and laid it beside her, then she crept close to him again under the blankets.
The shadows fell once more deep into the canyon, and the Pueblo Encantado glowed on the dark cliffside with its strange luminescence. But Amanda saw neither the shadows nor the Pueblo, she saw and felt only Dart.
The next morning he seemed a trifle better, his mouth was not so pinched, a faint color showed in the ash-gray of his cheeks above the stubble of black beard. She fed him coffee cream-thick with condensed milk, and bacon and pan bread. His wounded shoulder had stiffened in the night and throbbed violently. He was still dizzy and too weak to move, but his eyes followed her as she nursed him. “Thank you—” he whispered.
“Hush!” she said smiling. “Don’t talk. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry if you hear a shot, I’m going to practice.”
She took Hugh’s 20-20 and went outside. Long ago, she had gone duck-hunting with her father in South Carolina and fired a few shots, but never since. On this expedition it had not occurred to her to shoot, and neither of the men had suggested it. She had, however, watched Hugh. She knew his gun was loaded, and she intended to see if she could get a rabbit. The brush was teeming with curious jacks, remarkably tame for they had never seen human beings before. She did not manage to shoot any and she fired only twice, being afraid of wasting ammunition, but the shots produced an even better result.
She heard a startled bray, and a scuttling noise. The burro stuck his long mournful face around a clump of red-berried algerita.
“Tonto!” she cried joyfully. “It’s a good thing I didn’t shoot you. Come here, you little devil!”
But Tonto would not, he scampered off to the side of the canyon. Well, she thought, at least he’s here, and he certainly can’t get away. It’s a good omen. Contentment filled her.
A strange new happiness came to her during those days of nursing Dart in the lost valley, watching him grow slowly stronger. As his strength returned he told her how to find various foods to supplement their diet.
She ranged the little canyon bringing in finds for his inspection: the soft inner bark of the yellow pine, the cliff rose or quinine bush which made a strengthening tonic, algerita berries to stew into jelly, acorns from Gambel’s oak, and a low green plant for which he did not know the English name, but whose tender shoots could be cooked like spinach, and it was a prime Apache blood builder.
When he spoke to her during those days of his first recovery, it was in few words, and only of matters pertaining to their immediate joint welfare, but his voice had a humble, hesitating note she had never heard before, and he watched her lithe, graceful motions constantly, but averted his eyes if she chanced to look at him.
After the first night when his chills had passed, she no longer lay under the blankets with him, but slept across the shelter. Yet to her this was no hostile separation as it had been before. Her love demanded nothing now but his happiness and full recovery. She was content to respect his reticences and the special exigencies of his nature, and to wait.
On the fourth morning she shot a rabbit and bore it back to him in triumph. “Change of menu,” she cried gaily. “I’m getting sick of turkey soup, aren’t you?”
Dart was sitting in the sun by the fire, frying bacon. He was still too weak to walk more than a few steps. He looked up at her and smiled. “Swell. Give it to me—I’ll skin it.”
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “You can’t use that arm yet.”
“I can use the hand enough to hold the rabbit, while I flay him with the other. Give it to me, Andy, it’s all I’m good for. Woman’s work.”
He said this not bitterly, but in the wondering, hesitant voice which was new from him.
She laughed and gave him the rabbit. “Well, you don’t look like a woman, my bearded monster. Black Teach the pirate, more like.”
He grinned, rubbing his chin ruefully. “I’ll hack some of this off tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sorry, I must be a repulsive sight.”
“Good Lord, no,” said Amanda, turning the bacon. “I don’t mind.” Nor did she. And yet there had been a time when she minded very much, when she had nagged him into shaving twice a day, resentful that he was indifferent to her smooth, sophisticated standards. Effeminate standards, perhaps. She thought suddenly of Calise Cunningham and their first conversation together. Calise had asked why she had married Dart, and she had answered something to the effect that it was because he was big, strong, very male and different, and Calise had replied, “Then you must not at the same time resent the qualities you love.”
She had repudiated Calise’s remark with blank anger. But she understood better now. For had she not after all been forever trying to change Dart, dissatisfied with the uncompromising strength she had also admired.
“What are you thinking of?” asked Dart quietly.
“About Calise,” she said, startled into the truth. She wanted no reminders for either of them of the past yet, of the world beyond the enchanted valley.
“Ah,” said Dart, and a shadow crossed his face, as she had feared it would.
“No!” she cried. “Don’t think back, not of anything.”
