by Carla Kelly
Still Marco waited; they all waited, horses laden with people, tipis and poles, but little food. That bald fact gnawed at him, because he was used to providing for his own. At some point, The People had become his own people, and he chafed because he had not done better. Maybe he was their juez, and they just didn’t know it.
As he sat musing over such a strange notion, Toshua rode toward him, two lances in his hand. The Comanche regarded Marco a long moment, then extended one of the lances. Marco took it, scarcely breathing.
“I should have told you last night. The elders in our band have named me war chief. They named you our peace chief, in charge of the camp and food. Let us ride.”
Marco knew it wouldn’t do for the newly appointed peace chief to weep, so he swallowed his tears with a mighty effort and watched how Toshua carried his lance, aiming for even a pale imitation. He glanced at Paloma, whose eyes were wide, her hand to her throat.
“Te deum laudamus,” he said to her, raising his voice over the noise of animals and people he had come to know in good ways.
“Is that your peace song?” Toshua asked.
“Hers and mine. Lead on, brother. We follow.”
They rode all day, but slowly, following one stream and then another. The canyon was crisscrossed with streams breaking free from winter. Paloma thought they might stop to nurse the babies, but The People were far more economical. Kahúa simply opened her dress, pulled up the cradleboard and nursed her daughter as they rode along. When she finished, she handed the cradleboard to Paloma and lifted her niece from Paloma’s pommel, the children trading places. When the baby had been fed, she switched them again. Paloma knew the babies were probably wet and messy, but they made no complaint, because that was the journey. When they stopped at night there would be time to take proper care of them.
She knew that as long as she lived, she would never forget the thrill of riding with people so at one with their horses. In the last month, she had become familiar with The People on land. They were not really tall—Marco towered over most of them—and not nearly as graceful as the Tewa and Navajo on the Double Cross. On horseback, they were transformed.
She vaguely remembered a book of Greek mythology that her father owned, and sitting on his lap and staring at pictures of centaurs—half man, half horse. Paloma was a skilled rider, but The People were centaurs. She rode now with the lords of the plains, and the knowledge made her sit taller.
As the day wore on, she observed that even lords had needs to meet. The men relieved themselves on horseback, except for Marco, who still wore his breeches. With a red face, the peace chief turned his horse aside and dismounted to take care of business. The People passed him with no comment, beyond a quick glance and a smile to see his bare rump as he pulled down his smallclothes.
With genuine amusement, Paloma noticed how some of the women craned their necks to look at that part of her man that Eckapeta had praised weeks ago. Paloma blushed when they regarded her with something close to respect. She would have to ask Marco if his jewels were something special. After all, she had no point of reference.
The day had begun cloudy, but the sun burned away the mists. Paloma stared upward at the height of the canyon walls, wondering if her fascination with this place would ever wane. The deeper they rode north—Antonio said it was north—the higher the walls. She stared upward, gawking at the sight, until the walls seemed to lean toward her, making her dizzy. She noticed Marco stared, too, open-mouthed and amazed.
“This is a wound in the earth. The People come here for protection,” Toshua said, as he rode back down the line to assure himself there were no stragglers. “We will probably sleep in the caves tonight.”
Caves came to Paloma’s attention sooner than nightfall, when Antonio rode forward to Toshua and started gesturing, his eyes full of concern. Toshua indicated Marco, the peace chief, because he must have divined this was not a matter of war.
By now, several of the women had begun to keen, a low sound that sent ripples down Paloma’s back. She turned around to see Ayasha leaning out of her saddle toward the old woman on the travois. Toshua halted the column and Marco, his face serious with responsibility, rode to the travois. He dismounted with Antonio and nodded as the doctor gestured.
“The old dear is gone,” Antonio said. “I did my best ….” His voice trailed away.
“What do we do?” Marco asked Toshua, when he joined them. The others drew closer until they had formed a circle.
Toshua stood looking down at the woman who had slumped sideways, her features peaceful on her last ride with The People. Paloma’s magic beads were entwined in her deeply veined fingers. Toshua called another warrior over and they discussed the matter, pointing to the canyon wall, now a greater distance from them as the wound in the earth had widened. The warrior nodded and rode along the wall some distance as they watched, then stopped and swung his blanket.
Toshua turned to Marco. Paloma and others had gathered closer, their faces solemn. “Marco, you will carry this Old One to that warrior, who has found a good cave. Place her inside and cover her with stones.”
This was the impressive man she had married. Her heart full, Paloma watched as Marco did as Toshua said, gently unstrapping the Elder from the travois, then wrapping her in a trade blanket someone handed to him. He mounted, then held out his arms for the light bundle, a woman of the high plains and grasslands who had survived her entire family.
“There is no ceremony?” Paloma whispered to Eckapeta, who shook her head, then took Paloma’s hand in hers.
“No, but we never leave the Old Ones to die alone as some tribes do.”
Paloma looked around at the serious faces, people who knew this woman well. “Did you know she gave me a carved bird for Kahúu’s niece?” she told Eckapeta. “I will give the little toy to her when she is older.”
“She told me she liked you,” Eckapeta said. “I cannot say her name now, because she is beyond our reach and we don’t want to call her back.”
Paloma bowed her head and let her tears flow. When her vision cleared, she watched her husband carry the Old One toward the warrior waving the blanket. Toshua gestured for them to fall into line again, and the orderly march continued. She watched as they passed the men, stooping now inside one of the smaller caves. The travelers kept going; Paloma looked back until the men finished their work and rejoined The People.
Marco rode beside her, so serious now. “It is a good place. We covered her with stones.”
“Will it keep out wolves and coyotes?”
“We’ll let the canyon do its work, my dear.”
They found a much larger cave as the sun’s rule finished earlier than anyone wanted and was replaced by clouds. Wind began to blow and Paloma looked up anxiously, remembering the deep blue of the clouds, the Apaches, and their desperate ride to the canyon’s rim. She wanted to leave her place and ride beside Marco, but did not know if there was some bit of Comanche etiquette she would be trampling on.
The column slowed, and she saw pleased looks on the faces around her. The women began to talk and joke together. They evidently knew this area, which took some of the tension from her shoulders. Maybe Marco would have time tonight to crack her neck and rub her back.
There it was, a cave that would hold them all, and maybe even the horses, too, if the wind proved too strong. Paloma watched as Toshua called for the flame bearer, an old fellow who kept the fire burning in some way like a slow match. Two of the warriors lit rush bundles the women had quickly gathered and tied together. They carried them into the cave, calling and holding their torches high, their lances at shoulder height, ready.
The women dismounted and Paloma followed, stifling a groan that would only have led to good-natured teasing. The little baby—oh, why quibble? Her baby—gazed at her out of bright eyes. Paloma smiled and made a face, and the little one chortled.
She was reaching up to lift the cradleboard loop off the pommel when her horse stiffened and started to dance. She grab
bed the cradleboard and yanked it away, the child tight in her arms, when she heard a roar from the cave and watched The People scatter.
Terrified, but silent this time, Paloma flattened herself against the canyon wall beside the cave mouth. Kahúu stood beside her, clutching her baby and looking at her husband, who was trying to dismount. She thrust her cradleboard at Paloma and grabbed for his bridle, leading his plunging horse off the trail and against the canyon wall, too. Paloma stared in amazement at her skill.
“Paloma, put the babies behind you!” Marco yelled as he rode his equally skittish horse to the cave mouth and dismounted as it still moved. He took a firm grip on his lance, looking down as if wondering how to use it to best effect.
“Please don’t go in there,” she whispered.
Another roar, closer now, the sound reverberating against the cave’s walls. She did as Marco ordered, and propped the cradleboards into a crevice, steadying them. Kahúu had calmed her husband’s horse and was helping him dismount, her eyes wild with worry for the babies and her man.
The babies were crying now, terrified as the roars grew louder. Paloma’s horse was a distant memory, racing up the canyon. Her hands shook but she yanked off her cloak and threw it over the babies’ cradleboards, mashing the fabric into the crevice, hoping that would quiet them.
As she did that, her hand brushed against the knife in its sheath on the back of her dress. She pulled it out, pledging in her mind to protect the babies. As she watched the cave, a bear cub ran out, and another. Her jumbled brain told her that The People probably only used this cave in the summer, when bears in hibernation were not in residence.
The cubs paused at the entrance, looking around, bawling in their terror, sounding disturbingly like human infants. She heard deeper roars and then anguished cries, and then the scream of a man.
“Please no, God,” she said, ready to walk into the cave, her mind and heart on her husband.
She was shouldered aside by Kahúu’s husband. He held his lance easily in his hand, steadied himself and started into the cave. He glanced back at her, made a chopping motion with his hand, and pointed to the cubs. He made the sign for food with his fingers, and gave her a fierce look she had no trouble interpreting.
She understood. No matter the outcome in the cave—this primitive contest between bear and men armed only with lances—The People needed food. The cubs bawled, the babies cried, and Paloma grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck, hanging on with determination as the terrified animal flailed and scratched her. She plunged the knife into the animal’s neck, striking over and over until it was still. Another woman killed the second cub after Ayasha tackled it.
The babies continued to wail, stopping only when Kahúu flung off Paloma’s cloak and pulled their cradleboards from their stony niche. As calmly as a woman could—one whose man had just staggered into a dark cave—she opened the front of her deerskin dress and nursed them both.
Carrying the old man’s lance, Eckapeta ran into the cave. Paloma wiped off her knife and followed her. The cave smelled of death and blood and animal droppings. They stood together, and waited, because all was silent.
Paloma dropped to her knees in relief when Marco and Toshua came out, carrying another warrior between them, his head drooping. The bear’s claw had ripped into his thigh, but at least the blood did not spurt. His woman ran to him as Antonio ran, too, intent upon the wounded man, his beaded medical bag on his shoulder.
Paloma had not the energy to stand. She stayed on her knees until Marco reached her. He knelt, too, and grabbed her around the waist, his face in her hair.
Neither of them said anything. What was there to say? Paloma just breathed in and out, grateful beyond measure because he still lived. They stayed there as The People hurried into the cave and began to shout, the echoes weird and wonderful, because there was food now, as much as they could eat.
“I ripped my pants,” he said finally. Paloma laughed.
“Now it is your turn to look like the rest of us, my juez.” She held him tight until her heartbeat returned to normal. “What will the governor think?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In which Marco finds more in the cave, and Eckapeta introduces Tatzinupi
Knives flashing, eyes intent, The People made short work of the bears. The fire bearer sent the children scattering to gather wood and built a fire inside the cave. After staring at the mound of bear meat and turning away with a queasy feeling, Marco appointed himself to round up the horses that had fled in terror. The old man who had helped him gestured that he would come, too.
Marco helped the elder mount his horse again, wondering how useful he would be. Before they rode from the clearing, he looked back at Paloma, who blew him a kiss and waved him on. She had taken the baby out of the cradleboard and held it in her arms.
The old man gestured to Toshua, and the two of them spoke in whispers. Toshua nodded, his eyes lively, then scratched his head as if wondering how to convey the message.
“I can manage whatever he says, Toshua,” Marco assured him.
Toshua waited a little longer, obviously trying to convert what he had been told into workaday Spanish. “Señor ….”
“So formal, my brother?” Marco teased.
“He, uh, hopes you give that woman lots of tipi time.”
Marco blushed and looked away, speaking to the distant canyon wall. “Let the old goat know that I do, indeed. By the way, has he a name?”
“It will come as no surprise to you that his name translates as Buffalo Rut.”
Marco threw back his head and shouted with laughter, which earned him stares, then smiles, then laughter from people relieved to have something to joke about, even if they hadn’t heard the conversation. Paloma gave him her look-down-the-nose stare, so he thought it prudent to actually search for the horses.
They left the area at a walk, and Marco was immediately impressed with Buffalo Rut, who went from elderly man to Comanche tracker. The old muchacho prudently did not lean too far out of his saddle to look for tracks, wisely leaving that to Marco.
The snow showed no signs of letting up, but the tracks were visible. After a mile or so they found Paloma’s horse calmly nosing aside snow and eating dry winter grass. Another mile, and the rest were gathered in.
“I wish I could talk with you,” Marco said to his companion, feeling the shadows of early evening creep around the canyon and into his heart. It was that time of day when, if he had paperwork to deal with, he would close his ledgers and clean off his desk—tidy fellow—and start to wonder what Paloma had ordained for dinner. There would be cheerful conversation, maybe a glass of wine in the sala, and then prayers in the chapel and bed.
Funny how the memory of a lifetime seemed to recede, the longer he stayed with The People. He closed his eyes and let his horse find the way back. He would probably tell Paloma about their quick work in the cave against an enraged sow protecting her cubs, but he doubted a wife even as well-tuned as his would understand what it felt like to take a stance, lance in hand, and wait for the beast to charge. All his life, he had heard Pueblo Indian tales of the Old Ones, and even seen the curious skulls and bones of giant animals found in their colony. A sublime storyteller, his mama had told fantasias of primitive people—half man, half beast—who had roamed their mountains, living short and terrible lives.
“Are we any different, Mama?” he murmured. All of a sudden, he longed to be back in those Sangre de Cristo Mountains, living the life he knew better than this one. He took a deep breath. And yet he could not deny the siren’s call of the life he was leading right now. Well, it would be something to think about, shoes off, Paloma in his lap, a glass of wine in his hand. It couldn’t come soon enough.
He looked back at Buffalo Rut. And yet ….
After a prodigious nursing, the babies were full and exhausted by their rare bout of crying. Paloma and Kahúu cleaned them and swaddled them with trade blankets and popped them into cradleboards, where the tight wrap r
eassured them and sent them quickly to sleep. Ayasha said she would watch them, while the women not preparing great slabs of bear meat for the fire had gathered to offer help to Antonio, if he needed any.
Tired down to her toes and pained by the scratches on her arms, Paloma sat on a rock by the cave entrance, her chin on her palm, her eyes heavy. She watched Antonio work quickly on the warrior with the bear claw scrape. He offered the man a leather strap to bite, but the warrior turned his head, looking faintly insulted.
“Suit yourself. You’re braver than I am,” Antonio said. Gently, he pulled the wound together and stitched away. The Indian began to sweat, but he made no sound.
Antonio surprised her then. When he finished, instead of walking away, he put his hand on the man’s heaving chest, patting him until his breathing returned to normal. He also did not object to the mash of something that looked to Paloma like beef gravy that Eckapeta applied to the wound. In fact, he smiled his approval when she took a smoldering stick of wood from the fire, blew it out, then waved the smoke over the man.
He must have felt her eyes on him, because Antonio joined her on the rock. She didn’t ask, but he pushed back the fringe on her deerskin sleeves and took another look at her scratches. He rummaged in his medical satchel and pulled out a tin of salve. He sniffed it and nodded. “Might help,” he told her, and applied it to her arms.
“But you don’t know for certain?” she asked, skeptical.
“It’s been a while since medical college, but I remember a doctor telling me, ‘Whatever it is, treat with white salve.’ There you are.”
She smiled at him, wondering what had changed.