Woman of Three Worlds

by Jeanne Williams

  This man trotted away, high moccasins noiseless, going in the direction they had come. Towering above Jody, the leader stared at Brittany. She noticed for the first time that his eyes were green and his hair had reddish glints. He was considerably lighter than the others; probably he was born of a Mexican captive, like the beautiful daughters of Mangus Coloradas, who’d been advantageously married to leaders of various groups, including Cochise.

  “My son no wear Bluecoat rags!” he said in thick but understandable English. “These days I see him like that—” He didn’t finish, but Brittany could imagine, even in her dread, how he’d felt to see his son in the garb of the enemy. This must be Kah-Tay.

  Brittany said desperately, “Please send the little girl back safely!”

  The Apache frowned at the child whose blue eyes were dilated with terror. “Think I turn her Diné like her father do my boy.”

  “It wasn’t her father,” Brittany defended. “If you have to blame someone, blame me. Let her go home.”

  Kah-Tay spoke to Jody. Jody answered in a rush, his tone pleading, before he came to stand hopefully by Laurie. After a moment, Kah-Tay said, “He calls her ‘sister.’ Says she good to him. Her father good. She go back.” He paused. Brittany’s rush of relief was tainted by wondering what her own fate would be. “You come with us,” went on Kah-Tay. “I know you good to my son, but you no yell, no run away. You do, we kill.”

  Brittany believed him. She thought of poor young Harris with a rush of horrified pity. At least Laurie was being returned; at least she was still alive.

  Embracing Laurie, she warned her to be quiet and make no trouble for the warrior who was going to carry her back to the road so she could find her way to the stage station. Then the child was taken from her, and Kah-Tay lifted her back on her horse.

  Jody behind, he mounted Harris’s animal, and the other warriors took turns riding the third horse as they twined deeper and deeper into the canyon. At sundown the man who’d taken Laurie back caught up and Kah-Tay explained his report to Brittany.

  “Bluecoat still lie in road. No one find yet. Take little girl different way so she no remember directions.” He chuckled with satisfaction. “Bluecoats no find us now.”

  They traveled till dusk and stopped near a spring. The men took food out of buckskin pouches, acorn meal and dried berries, and mixed these with water and glazed, dried pieces of something that tasted a little like roasted sweet potato. After eating from a small gourd bowl, Kah-Tay handed Brittany the rest.

  She didn’t feel hungry but made herself take a bite and chew it slowly. The taste was strange but not unpleasant. Suddenly, she was voracious. She ate the last speck in the bowl. As she rose to rinse the gourd in the spring, Kah-Tay said, “Wash all. Woman work.”

  So she washed all the bowls and turned them upside down to dry on the rocks. Each warrior had a blanket. Two were army issue. They now rolled up in these, except for Kah-Tay, who tossed Brittany his striped wool blanket. He tied several thongs together and fastened one end around her ankle and the other to his own. There’d be no way she could work the knots loose without rousing him.

  He then put on a long buckskin shirt, took off his voluminous breechcloth, which hung to his knees in front and a bit lower in the back, and lay down in it on the high grass, cuddling Jody against him.

  None of the Apaches had made lecherous gestures or offered Brittany any reason to fear she would be molested in the night. She folded the blanket around her, grateful for its warmth in the cool mountain night.

  Laurie would have been taken home before dark by the stage people, but it would have been too late to mount a search. Brittany was sure that a party would try to follow her trail at first light tomorrow, but even if they found a few tracks, they’d be so far behind that Brittany despaired of immediate rescue.

  Would Zach Tyrell be sent for? The thought of him gave her more comfort than the imagined picture of Michael O’Shea or Major Erskine pursuing with troopers through the steep canyons and defiles that were the Apaches’ home ground. She wouldn’t try to escape while she was being watched closely. That would simply earn her the fate of Harris. But at some point in the future, surely the watch would relax. At the right time, she’d get away.

  To what?

  Starving or dying of thirst? If Kah-Tay released her next morning, she couldn’t find her way back. Panic overwhelmed her for a moment. Live with the Apaches all her life, a slave or, at best, wife to some warrior?

  She fought down these appalling prospects with a determined effort of will. She had to keep hold of herself. Today she’d been in a daze of shock and dread, but from now on, she must learn: how to live in this cruel land, landmarks, the ways of her captors; anything and everything that might help her survive as a prisoner and when she found a chance, or—escape.

  Something crawled along her back. There was an itching in her hair. The blanket had brought more than warmth. Scratching, she resisted the impulse to throw off the blanket and sit up. She wouldn’t last long without sleep. Lice were probably just going to be part of her life for the predictable future. She must hoard her energy for things that mattered.

  Kah-Tay didn’t seem brutal, and he apparently felt some gratitude to her, but she wondered how she’d fare when they reached the main band. She had heard that Apache women were often given captured enemies to kill and that they could make dying a blessed release. She might be lucky that Kah-Tay had no wife to abuse her.

  Or again, that might not be so lucky.

  At last, in spite of the scurrying of lice and her thoughts, she fell into stuporous slumber, never quite wholly asleep. In that drowse, she saw Harris fall again, and sometimes he turned into Zach. She was almost glad when Kah-Tay untied her in the first gray light and ordered her to mix ground berries and acorn meal for breakfast. Jody helped her carry the bowls to the men.

  He was so joyous at being with his father that Brittany had a glimmering of how terribly alone and alien the boy felt till he had Laurie’s company and the rough affection of the troopers. He must have remembered too and pitied her, for sometimes he spoke when the horses were close together.

  “You like ranchería in Mexico,” he promised. “Much food.” When they chewed on some of the dried sweet-potato–tasting stuff, he explained that it was mescal, from the century plant. “No good now,” he said, pointing out withering flower stalks growing from dull green spiky leaves with saw-toothed edges. “But before flower, heart and stalk nice. Bake in rock-lined hole.”

  As they rode, he gave her a lesson in Apache seasons, pointing and using words of both Apache and English. They were in the time of Thick with Fruit, the harvest time of late summer and early fall. Next would come late fall, the Earth is Reddish Brown. Ghost Face was winter, spring was Little Eagles, followed by Many Leaves and Large Leaves as late spring turned into summer.

  “Days long now,” he said. “Sun’s moccasin strings all rotted by rain. He has to fix them, travels slow. But in winter, he gets new strings. Runs fast.”

  They had to cross a stretch of open plain between ranges. The youngest warrior came behind to brush out the tracks with a thick piece of bush. Heat undulated from the earth. The mountains ahead loomed purple, then barren brown as they were approached, rocky and scrub-grown. Brittany’s lips were cracked and her throat felt split and baked with thirst. Hot air dried the inside of her nostrils.

  The warriors on foot paced along in their high-topped curl-toed moccasins without any signs of fatigue, but Brittany thought the journey would kill her if the Apaches didn’t. The horses were flagging. They were cavalry mounts, used to grain and hay, and the continuous travel gave them no chance to feed. At midday, in a wash shaded by walnut and hackberry trees, they stopped.

  Brittany saw no water, but the two youngest men went to where a fall of gray rock had been scoured by flooding torrents and began to dig in the soft sand at the bottom, where there was already a basinlike depression. Digging with hands for a while, then using sticks, they dee
pened the natural bowl till the sand turned damp and at last uncovered a seep from beneath the rocks. Jody brought Brittany a half gourd of water.

  It was gratefully healing to her parched throat, in spite of its muddy color and grains of sand. Nothing had ever tasted so good. When the people had drunk and saved water to mix with their rations, the horses were allowed to water, a little at a time so they wouldn’t founder.

  Wild grape vines festooned the trees. Handfuls of these and the sweet orange-colored hackberries made water-soaked dried mescal much tastier. Brittany recovered enough to help Jody gather high wild grass for the horses so they could eat more in their brief resting time.

  Within a few hours they were in mountains again, the trail across the plain obliterated. Brittany despaired of Zach or even an Apache scout being able to follow them. Apparently Kah-Tay felt that way too, for when they camped by a canyon stream that evening, they had a fire and meat for the first time, a pair of cottontails gotten noiselessly with arrows, though all the men had rifles and wore bandoliers, or cartridge belts.

  Kah-Tay told Brittany to dress and cook the rabbits. When she looked at them helplessly, for she’d never cleaned an animal, he impatiently told the youngest man to show her. With a look of disgust that even a white woman should be so useless, the thin, hatchet faced youth took his knife from its scabbard and deftly slit the skin, peeling it off. He removed some of the entrails and then spitted the small carcass on a peeled branch fixed over the fire on two forked limbs. Then he handed her the knife.

  She made a sorry mess of getting off the skin and removing the bowel but at last accomplished the task. “No eat what white man call jackrabbit,” Jody told her as they ate the rabbit along with corn gruel and cakes of dried prickly pear fruit.

  There were fish in the stream. When she asked why someone didn’t catch a few, Jody said, “No good. Frog no good. Snake no good. No eat wild hog because it eat snake.”

  Brittany stared. She’d heard Apaches called “gut eaters” and derided for eating mules and horses in preference to beef, but it seemed they too had decided ideas about what was fit to eat.

  Before dark she was commanded to extinguish the fire and do away with any signs of it. When she curled up in the blanket that night, she lacked the strength to even scratch the inflamed bumps that covered her from scalp to toe.

  They left the canyon stream they were following and entered another great plain between jagged lines of mountains. Brittany could tell the men apart now and had given them names of her own, though they didn’t call one another by name but used terms that meant friend or relative or defined their relationship. Kah-Tay was uncle to the youngest warrior, whom Brittany nicknamed “Skinny.” “Big Jaw,” a thick bodied man who looked oldest, had almost nothing to say, while a splendidly built warrior with hair that reached almost to his ankles chatted laughingly with a stern-faced young man with a scar running from cheek to ear. These Brittany dubbed “Long Hair” and “Scarred Face.”

  They all had long hair, though, flowing loose, kept out of their faces by strips of cloth or buckskin. When in brush, the men pulled up the folded tops of their moccasins to their knees or even to their thighs, a handy means of protection. The soles were tough rawhide, but Skinny and Long Hair, who were walking, wore through theirs and presented the uppers to Brittany along with extra soles. Once again, the annoyed Skinny had to show her how to use sinew and a bone awl to attach the new soles.

  That night they reached a cave where pottery, iron kettles, bolts of cloth, and food were stored. Jody said there were a number of such places scattered through the mountains.

  “Have more than we can carry, we leave it. Use later or when in hurry, no time hunt food.”

  While she used a kettle to cook stew, Kah-Tay rolled Jody on the earth outside the cave. “I was born here,” Jody explained later. “Each time we come by, I get strong from ground.”

  On the fourth day the horse Kah-Tay was riding went lame. It was slaughtered. The men skinned it, for the hide was too valuable to be ruined by Brittany’s amateur efforts, and the inside was rubbed with brains and tallow to keep it from drying out. Brittany cooked hunks of the meat but simply could not eat it, nor keep from crying at the fate of Laurie’s pretty, gentle mare.

  The rest of the meat was cut up to be carried in the hide to the ranchería. “Home tomorrow,” Kah-Tay said, pointing with his chin toward a divide in the nearing mountains. His strong teeth flashed and he glanced pridefully at Jody. “Home with son.”

  Brittany’s whole intent had been set on enduring the journey, learning whatever she could in preparation for escape. Her heart chilled as she realized she would soon face the whole band.

  What would her life be?

  Exhausted as she was, that night she barely slept.

  Next morning Kah-Tay lifted Jody up behind Brittany and led the way with a tireless stride that came close to a trot. The extra saddle was tied behind Long Hair and the butchered horse was packed on Long Hair’s horse while that warrior led it. The men had eaten pounds of the meat that morning, but when Kah-Tay had told Brittany to have some since they weren’t stopping till they got home, she shook her head.

  He shrugged and gave her some mescal, but she was hungry long before they reached the mountain divide and turned left on a side branch of a creek twining through grassy expanses of flat land with juniper and oak growing tall along the creek and smaller on the surrounding hillsides of the canyon.

  The plaintive call of mourning doves seemed unusually frequent. Jody hugged Brittany in excitement. “Guards passing on word we come!” he whispered.

  The whole village had turned out to greet them, shouting pleasure at Jody’s rescue, bragging on the captured horses and gear, exulting over Brittany. Kah-Tay motioned her down as a woman, tall for an Apache, came forward, straight black brows drawn into a frown. Her forehead was tattooed with dark blue dots that formed a small circle. She wore velvety buckskin trimmed with silver conchos and blue beads, moccasins with upturned toes painted red, and necklaces of shells, several heavy silver crucifixes, and a necklace of brass beads and bear claws.

  Deliberately turning her straight back on Brittany, she spoke with grave pride to Kah-Tay, then knelt to embrace Jody. Kah-Tay said something. The handsome woman looked less balefully at Brittany. She spoke in Spanish.

  In Apache Brittany said one phrase she had learned well by this time, “I don’t understand.”

  “Sara no speak White Eye Tongue,” Kah-Tay said. “She my sister. You do what she want.”

  The woman gestured for Brittany to come with her.

  Jody ran ahead of them toward three wickiups at the edge of the camp, which had a large open-sided thatched shelter nearby. Boys and girls crowded around him, big-eyed at his return. He’d have some stories to tell them.

  As she followed the swaying fringes of her mistress, Brittany wondered if her captivity would have as happy an ending.

  XIII

  The center of the wickiup they entered, where the supporting poles were tied together, was about nine feet high. From the central smoke hole, the bear grass thatched walls slanted down to form a dwelling at least fifteen feet in diameter. There was no thatch around the lower portion, and this admitted the breeze. There were leather bags of various sizes, baskets of several shapes, and pottery jars. Blankets were spread over beds of brush and grass raised a few feet off the ground by a wooden bed frame resting on poles.

  The Apache woman picked up a basket of small acorns, handed it to Brittany and led her out to the rectangular thatched shelter, where a girl who looked about twelve or thirteen was cracking acorns by rolling a stone cylinder across the flat rock where they lay.

  Indicating that Brittany was to do the same, Kah-Tay’s sister went to where the horsemeat was being divided and returned with a great chunk, which she sliced into several large kettles. To these she added water and several handfuls of dried white flowers before a monkey-faced old woman carried the pots to a cookfire between the shelter a
nd the wickiup and placed them at the edges.

  Jody left his admiring friends to come over to Brittany. Nodding his head toward his aunt, he said, “She make big meal, honor my father.” Comfortingly, he added, “My teacher, no one hurt you. I say you good to me.”

  He bounded off again, exuberant as a young deer released from a wearisome cage. Brittany’s knees ached from squatting over the stone, so she bent her legs to one side and bore down on the cylinder, picking yellowish kernels out of crushed shells and dropping them into a large bowl.

  The old woman began to grind the acorns in a hollowed stone with a stone crusher. Gray hair fell about her wrinkled face in unkempt tangles. She was weighted down with jewelry and wore a buckskin skirt, long moccasins, and a red calico blouse.

  Ignoring Brittany, she carried on a scolding monologue directed at the young girl, who worked in meek silence. Once the old woman cackled disagreeably. When Brittany glanced toward her, she met a stare of such malevolence that a chill shot down her spine and she worked harder, forgetting the ache in her shoulders.

  Kah-Tay might treat her comparatively well for Jody’s sake, but at least one member of his household hated her; and it was with the women that she must make a life till she had some hope of escape.

  When the acorns were cracked, the girl showed Brittany how to mix the ground meal with water and pat it into cakes, which they cooked on thin flat rocks and in skillets till long flat baskets were heaped with them.

  The old woman dumped more meal in the stewing meat and sliced dried mescal into another tray. She snapped something at the girl, who motioned to Brittany and ventured a shy smile that made her suddenly pretty. She had a straight, short nose, slanting eyes, and high cheekbones that accented the triangular shape of her face.