by Jeanne Rose
“The only sorcery I practice is healing the sick or seeking wisdom from spirits or ancestors.” Isabel added, “Or trying to protect my people.”
Fascinating. “But let’s get back to the dreamwalking. That’s why I’m here. If you can go into more detail, maybe I can figure out how I managed to do it.”
If dreamwalking were like meditation, there might be buzzwords or specific images on which to concentrate. The latter she could have picked up through Luke’s art.
When Isabel seemed to hesitate, Luke reiterated, “She’s not evil.”
Isabel leaned forward to slip a hand over hers. The Indian woman’s touch was light, her flesh warm and dry, the bones inside it fragile. Was she testing vibrations or something? Mara was certain she felt a slight tingle of energy before the older woman slipped her hand away and sat back in her chair.
“Luke is right. You are not evil.” Isabel explained, “Dreamseeking and dreamwalking are gifts handed down from one wise Kisi to the next. No one knows where they came from or when they began. Dreamseeking is the act of searching for a vision or a dream, either within yourself or someone else. Dreamwalking is actually entering someone else’s dreams.”
Dreamseeking. Dreamwalking. Mara could barely control her eagerness. “How do you do it? Control it?
“It is best and most powerful to have a sacred spot, a site you know so well, you can see it with your eyes closed – a dreaming place.”
“A dreaming place.” Mara glanced over at Luke and once more remembered the dream she’d shared from what should have been the privacy of her own bed. “I’ve never had anything like that.” She ripped her gaze from his in an attempt to dispel her growing tension that Isabel would no doubt sense. “This dreamwalking process is used to heal people?”
“Or to harm them. But the Kisi have traditionally avoided training the weak or the selfish, people who might be tempted into practicing witchcraft. We are careful. Only the wise should be powerful.”
Luke shifted in the doorway. “Grandmother is a finished person, a wise woman.”
“Or a corn priestess, if we still practiced the ceremonies. There are few elders left. Traditions are being forgotten.” Isabel stroked the beaded necklace she wore. “Perhaps evil is being conjured. That’s why I was concerned about your appearance in my vision.” She mused, “At first I thought you were the spirit of an ancient one, an ancestor who’d come to give me a message.”
“You can talk to the spirits of ancestors?”
“From time to time. Or to much greater . . . if you know the names to call . . . “
Mara’s eyes were drawn to the serpent kachina.
“That one is especially sacred.” In spite of her blindness, Isabel seemed aware of exactly what attracted her visitor’s attention.
The Indian woman continued, “The sacred spirits of animals and clouds and mountains are called upon when the Kisi are in great need.”
“And they protect you?”
“Or we protect ourselves,” said Luke. Appearing restless all of a sudden, he straightened. “I’m going out.” He looked at Mara. “When I come back, I’ll drive you to Santa Fe.”
Mara watched as he moved off, disappearing into the shadows beyond the kitchen. She felt empty inside without him near.
“He should truly be Stormdancer, a stormbringer priest,” said Isabel, her tone disapproving.
Mara knew too little to ask why Luke couldn’t or wouldn’t take up the calling. “A stormbringer?”
“He should be able to call the rain and lightning. If necessary, send fireballs at enemies.”
“Pretty powerful.” But could she really believe it? Mara wondered. Dreams were one thing, fireballs another.
“Any kind of Kisi sorcery can be powerful,” said Isabel, leaning forward again, making a sweeping gesture. “We can help plants grow, control animals and sometimes people for short periods of time. We can create illusions in both real life and dreams.”
“Dreams are what interest me.” What she’d already experienced was sorcery enough for Mara.
Isabel folded her hands in her lap and sat back. “But you do not know how you came to dreamwalk, and I’m afraid I’ve shared all that I can . . . with an outsider.”
Disappointment, as well as a distinct feeling of rejection engulfed Mara. “You can’t tell me anything else? I hoped to get some insight. Do you think I might be psychic? Is that what it could be?”
“Why should you turn your psychic abilities to us? Are you absolutely sure that you don’t have one drop of Kisi blood?”
Mara didn’t hesitate. “I’m certain. My mother traced our family tree. There were no Native Americans in it.”
“And you don’t think that someone else could have sent you into my dreaming place.”
“Sent me?”
“Ordered you to do his or her bidding.”
Mara hadn’t even considered that. But she thought about the way she’d asked Luke to wait, effectively banishing him from her dream, about how she’d resisted his trick with the voice command today. Furthermore, she realized she’d been able to disappear when Isabel had shouted in her face.
“I don’t think anyone exercises control over me.” And she knew she was speaking the truth, felt it in her bones. “For some reason, somehow, I did what I did by myself.”
Isabel nodded, her hands remaining folded, a thoughtful expression on her elegant aging face. “I must order you to stay out of my dreams from now on.”
Again the feeling of rejection. And hurt. Mara swallowed. She was being shut out. “I hope I can oblige. I had nothing to say about it in the first place.” No one controlled her but surely it was also obvious she couldn’t quite control herself.
“My visions are sacred to the Kisi. They are not for strangers.” Isabel added, “Do not tell anyone else about them.”
“If I did, people would think I was crazy.”
Isabel placed her hands on the arms of her chair to rise. “Our talk is finished.” She gestured toward the door. “Now I would like you to meet someone else – my friend and fellow elder, Rebecca Harvier. Onida is serving refreshments outside again. We can join them for tea.”
Tea? Mara hardly felt in the mood for a seat on the patio for refreshments. She wanted to find Luke, to demand he tell her more despite his grandmother’s wishes. But in the end, she did the polite thing and agreed.
MARA COULD TELL ONIDA was puzzled by her second visit, but the woman acted as gracious and friendly as she had the day before. Rebecca Harvier, a plump gray-haired lady in her sixties, stared suspiciously at Mara from behind plastic-rimmed bifocals as she worked on a crocheted afghan.
Frustrated and hardly enlightened, Mara nevertheless tried to make small talk. “How pretty,” she told Rebecca, admiring the afghan. “I like the desert colors – red and sand and turquoise. I used to crochet myself.”
Rebecca seemed to relax a little and took a cookie. “I’m making this for my granddaughter. She’s going to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.”
“How nice. What’s she majoring in?”
“Economics.”
“Not an easy subject.” Mara took a sip of tea.
Rebecca smiled, warming up. With a pleasant, ordinary face and multiple laugh-lines crinkling out from her eyes, she seemed far less formidable than Isabel. “Ginnie is as smart as she is pretty. Only one more year to go of college. She’ll be the first graduate in our family.”
“I bet you’re proud of her,” Mara said sincerely, having come from a blue collar family and a moderate income level herself. “I was the first in mine.”
“Luke went to college in Arizona,” Onida put in. “He took some art classes . . . but he didn’t graduate.”
“Where is Luke?” asked Isabel from the opposite side of the table.
Onida waved. “I saw him walking toward the community center. Maybe he’s working on the murals.”
The murals? Mara had thought he was planning on coming right back to the house for
the return drive to Santa Fe. She was getting anxious.
“It’s getting late.” She frowned at her watch. “I really should be going. Where’s the community center anyway? I’ll find Luke.”
After getting proper directions, she thanked the women and left, slipping her sweater over her shoulders. The afternoon had worn on and the air was growing cool. The sun blazed deep gold as it sped to the west and the mountains darkened to blue-violet.
Confusion over her dreamwalking having returned, Mara felt too distracted to fully enjoy the natural beauty. She might as well have been walking through one of her dreams.
Striding past Tom Chalas’ store, she noticed a crude metal sculpture sitting out behind it, the one that resembled an enslaved figure. She wondered if Tom had ever thought about apprenticing with another more successful sculptor. Perhaps doing so would help him.
Pondering that, she nearly missed the community center, a larger cinderblock building set some yards beyond the store. Only a bulletin board in front of the building caught her eye with its fluttering flyers and notices.
As Mara turned, she thought she heard a skittering sound. Footsteps on gravel? Uncomfortable, she had the oddest feeling that someone was watching her . . .
She beat a path to the community center. It had a set of double doors and several windows with curtains, all of which were drawn. Going inside, she let her eyes adjust to sudden dimness. Surely the lack of lights meant no one was holding a meeting now. Luke also wasn’t working on the murals. When she found the light switch, Mara caught sight of the wall-paintings on the far side of the building’s empty central room.
She gravitated across the linoleum floor as if drawn by a magnet, skirting chairs and circling a long table.
Spectacular. Surrounded by borders of traditional abstract designs and featuring the same haunting landscapes as his usual paintings, Luke had depicted small figures of the gods or spirits climbing up from the underworld in the first mural and was obviously meaning to continue with history and legends of the Kisi in the others to come.
For the murals weren’t finished. Against stunning mountain scenery and a shining sky, a sacred masked dance took place in one painting – figures swaying about a vivid blazing fire that seemed to have a life of its own. In the next, a pueblo had been sketched into the side of a cliff.
Something about the cliff-dwelling looked familiar. Because it resembled Mesa Verde, an Anazasi ruin farther north in Colorado? From reading a history of the region, Mara knew the Kisi had rebuilt and lived in an old Anazasi site, which was where they had taken refuge at the time of the Spanish massacre. After that, the pueblo had become ruins again and was located in such a remote area of the Kisi reservation, it was off-limits for tourists.
She stood on tip-toe, trying to get a better look. The sketchy walls of the pueblo were familiar, yet nebulous as smoke . . .
Bam.
She started at the sound of the door slamming.
Then whipped around to see two Indians staring at her, one of them the bad-tempered, heavy-set man she’d encountered in Chalas’ store the day before. Charlie Mahooty. He plodded toward her, his gait unsteady.
“This center isn’t open to tourists.”
“I’m not a tourist. I came here with Lucas Naha.”
But Mahooty came closer, his tall, stoop-shouldered companion on his heels. Both men wore unfriendly expressions and had alcohol on their breaths. The substance couldn’t legally be sold on the reservation but they’d gotten it somewhere.
“I don’t care who you are to Naha,” said Mahooty, poking at her arm, making her step back. “It’s ten dollars to get onto the pueblo and thirty-five to look at these murals.”
“Forty-five dollars?” Mara knew New Mexican pueblos often charged visitors for all sorts of things, but she’d already said she wasn’t a tourist.
“Fork over the cash, lady. You don’t want to spend the night locked up, do you?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m real serious.”
And belligerent-looking, she thought. “I told you I know Lucas Naha. He brought me here today. If you talk to his grandmother–”
”I don’t have to talk to anybody. I’m Charlie Mahooty, the governor of this place. I don’t give a damn about Naha.”
“And I don’t give a damn about you, Mahooty,” said Luke, suddenly appearing as if out of nowhere. “Leave the woman alone.”
With a snarl, Mahooty plunged toward him.
CHAPTER FIVE
“YOU’RE DRUNK.” Expression cold, Luke easily sidestepped the shorter man as he charged, missed, then came at him again.
Mara huddled against the wall, wondering if she should take some sort of action. Luke seemed to have things covered. When Mahooty threw a wild punch, he feinted and pushed his attacker backward so hard, the man stumbled and fell into a chair.
“You can’t treat the governor like that,” said Mahooty’s companion. “I’m arresting you.”
Luke made a menacing move, his jaw hard. “Yeah, Delgado? Go ahead, give me an excuse to rearrange your face for you.”
Luke’s intensity made his anger seem far more powerful than the simple belligerence of the other two men. Obviously rattled, Mahooty’s pal backed away, running into a couple of chairs before he beat a retreat for the door.
Luke then concentrated on Mahooty, looming over him to take hold of his shirt front. Though the older man was heavier and inebriated enough to be deadweight, Luke shook him like a rat.
“Don’t you ever threaten me or mine, Mahooty!” Fury obviously growing, Luke resembled a predator about to strike a fatal blow. His hands moved from the shirt front to Mahooty’s throat. “So help me, I’ll tear your head off. I’ll–”
Kill you?
His tone was so fierce, Mara feared she was about to witness a murder. “Luke!”
He glanced up, releasing Mahooty. The man fell back into the chair, head lolling. Perhaps he’d passed out.
“Please.” Mara touched Luke lightly. “You don’t really want to harm him, do you?”
Luke gazed down at Mahooty with disgust. “Yeah, I want to harm him, but I won’t.”
“He’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why don’t you let him sleep it off? You said you’d drive me back to Santa Fe.”
Luke muttered something unintelligible but at least he turned away. Mara sighed with relief as they walked toward the door. When it opened just as they were ready to exit the building, she wondered if it was Delgado returning.
Instead, Tom Chalas poked his head inside. “Something going on here?”
“Nothing you’d be interested in,” Luke told him.
Chalas backed away, holding the door open to allow them passage. As Mara brushed past, he nodded a tight greeting, his expression understandably puzzled. Having seen her earlier at the gallery, he probably wondered what she was doing at the Kisi pueblo. But then, she did have a business association with Luke and might be friends with him, too.
She almost smiled, thinking about the latter. Then she remembered Luke telling Mahooty not to threaten “me or mine.” Did he consider her “his”?
The idea titillated her.
It was all she could to keep the idea at bay as Luke helped her into the Jeep Comanche, his hand warm and brash on her arm. As he let go the backs of his fingers brushed the side of her breast. He stood there a second, his gaze meshing with hers, his expression as intense as it had been when dealing with the bully. As he rounded the vehicle, she shook off her very physical and all-too-familiar reaction to him.
And as he started the jeep, she told herself that Luke’s primary inclination hadn’t been to protect her from Mahooty. More likely the situation had merely triggered his fiery anger. He always seemed to be sizzling beneath the surface. She didn’t bring up the fight at all until they were a half hour down the highway and nearing the outskirts of Santa Fe. By that time, she’d begun to consider the repercussions.
“Will you really be arres
ted when you go back to the pueblo?” she asked. “Onida said that Mahooty was elected governor today.”
“I won’t be arrested. Mahooty knows he was out of line.”
Personally, she didn’t think the man should serve as any sort of leader. “It doesn’t look too good, does it, the governor being drunk?”
“He and his cronies were probably celebrating.”
She asked, “The man with Mahooty, was he tribal police? He was drunk, too. Isn’t that rather dangerous?”
“He was off-duty.”
And hadn’t been toting a gun, thank God. “So being off-duty makes drunkenness okay? Do the people of the Kisi pueblo really want men like that to have authority?”
Luke’s glance slid sideways. “How many more questions you got . . . forty . . . a thousand?”
She ignored his sarcasm. “I can’t help being curious, as well as concerned. I don’t like people who bully their way into positions of power.” Which Rebecca had indicated Mahooty had done during their tea. “How could you let that happen?”
“How could I let it happen? I stay out of the pueblo’s business.”
“Even though your grandmother and mother are worried?”
This time, Luke gave her a dirty look. “You came out to the pueblo to talk about dreamwalking, not get involved with how it’s run.”
Dreamwalking? The incident at the community center had temporarily driven the subject from her mind but now brought a new slant.
“Your grandmother is a wise woman. Can’t she stop a tyrant like Mahooty?”
“She’s always concerned herself with healing and wisdom. She’s never practiced any other sort of sorcery. And she would never try . . . unless what’s left of the Kisi people begged her to do it, I suppose. Or her family needed protection.”
“The Kisi respect her.”
“Some of them.”
“Only some? A person who can dreamwalk?”
“Not everyone thinks visions are important, that they serve a practical purpose.” He added, “Dreamwalking can’t get you a job.”
Perhaps not, but it meant a lot to her. “I think the whole concept is positively miraculous.”