Turning to Trace, I said urgently, “There really isn’t anyone. I just have to make my own home.”
“We can do a little better than send you out blindfolded. I have some friends in Hermosillo. I’ll take you and Sewa up there and get you settled, introduce you to folks who could look out for you. Chances are someone would have room enough for you to stay with them till you decide what to do.”
“You’re very kind, but since I must rely on myself, perhaps the sooner I start the better.”
“Miranda.”
Something in his voice stabbed to my depths. Why, oh, why did he have to have a wife? I wondered if Reina knew and if there was anything between them. He had been kind. I could scarcely help loving him. But he mustn’t guess that or he’d pity me, find me pathetic.
“Miranda,” he said again.
I slid down from the ledge, but he was suddenly before me, and though he kept his arms rigidly at his sides, I feared to move past him. I knew instinctively that a motion of mine could send him out of that tight control. Though I thrilled to the thought, whatever went on between men and women was to me a fascinating, somewhat terrifying matter of conjecture. The depth of my ignorance had me believing it was blood, not semen, that men discharged. In spite of what had happened after we watched the stallion, I still didn’t know exactly what went on between men and women, both wanted and feared it. I waited by the rock, pinioned by eyes that had taken on the cool glow of the moon.
“I never worried much about my crossed trails,” he said, keeping his hands at his sides. “But they’ve got me where I can’t say or do what I’d like to. I can’t—won’t—hurt you, Miranda.”
I was hurting, and I knew he was. A yearning that was more than desire was almost palpable between us. As if to break his silent intensity, he spoke in a louder tone. “I owe your parents my life. If you let me help you, it’s the only way I can ever pay them back.”
It would be ungracious and foolish to refuse an offer made like that. Even though the future could not be guessed at, knowing this enigmatic man would be my friend made me feel much safer. I managed a shaky smile.
“Thank you, Trace.”
He gave a quick nod of satisfaction. “Good. When Sewa can travel, I’ll take you to Hermosillo.” He slipped his hand beneath my elbow, turning back down the canyon. “Don’t forget, Miranda. As long as I live, you have a friend.”
Friend?
I should have been glad of that, but I felt a surge of anger at his marriage, the woman in his past who barred him from me, everything that forbade my loving him. Overwhelmed, I looked up at him. “Oh, Trace!” I said forlornly. Then, in this strange world of moon and shadow, I could say what I never would have by day. “Trace, kiss me.”
A tremor went through him. I felt a surge of power, of confidence, almost as if I were the older, experienced one. Taking his hands, I kissed them, carried them to my breasts, excited by his hesitation. His breath escaped in a shuddering sigh. He brought me into his arms, bent his head, and kissed me, parting my lips, finding my tongue with his.
“All right,” he said in a funny, ragged tone. “All right, my sweetheart. I can do something for you. Make you feel good without hurting you for marriage.”
“But that doesn’t sound fair for you, Trace.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry. I’ll love it—just seeing you, holding you, doing what I can.” He had brought me down on a flat rock ledge, his hands opening my bodice, freeing my breasts, molding them with his fingers, which lightly brushed the tips till I arched against him, avid for his caresses, his mouth, the long hard length of his body.
He nuzzled my nipples with lips and tongue. One hand pushed aside my skirts, stroked up to the eagerness between my legs, toyed in a way that brought parts of me alive that had slept till now. Then, as the friction of his hand, though pleasurable, became a bit painful, his tongue left my breast, and in a second I felt a slow deep stroking, an incredibly sensitive yet virile exploration varied with light, swift flecks that sent liquid fire through me, centered it beneath that sure expert tongue that stroked faster, faster, coaxing till that secret part of me seemed to burst into lovely puslating explosions.
My own voice, moaning, called me back to reality. “Trace! Oh, that was heavenly!”
He laughed softly, held me with my head on his shoulder. I could hear the heavy pound of his heart.
“Am I a woman now?” I ventured.
He laughed, held me closer, stroking my back. “Almost. Almost, Miranda.”
“Is that what happens?”
“What you felt should happen, but it can be caused in different ways. What you had was the pleasure without the problems.”
I thought about that.
“Is there a way for you? A way you can feel good without whatever it is we mustn’t do?”
He didn’t answer. I sat upright and tugged at his shoulder. “Is there, Trace?”
“Yes,” he admitted slowly. “But—Oh, hell, Miranda! You shouldn’t know such things! What are you getting me into?”
“Please?” The completion, the delight I had experienced, made me feel rich and generous, eager to make him happy, too. “Trace, show me what to do.”
“I don’t need paying back.”
“Show me.”
He took my hand, did something with his clothes. My fingers encountered something hard and warm, vulnerable and eager. The sharp intake of his breath, the way he lay surrendered with that strangely independent part absolutely rigid, filled me with wonder. I stroked and fondled, keying the pace to his response, my own excitement mounting as he thrust against my hand, pushed and delved and gasped, crying out my name. He spent it all in a convulsive arching that reminded me of the golden stallion’s final effort, lay back exhausted as a warm thick fluid filled my palm.
We lay under the moon on the stone slab. Whatever he said about virginity, I felt as much his as if we had been joined in front of an altar. I was only sad that the energy, the beautiful force he had vented in my hand, had not entered into me.
The next day was much like the one before, except that Sewa appeared a bit stronger, ate with more relish. Cruz taught her more tunes on the flute and she would practice to Ku’s glee. When she was absorbed with her music and the raven, Cruz told me more about the Yaquis.
They had lived since remembered times along the mouth of the Río Yaqui, which twice yearly overflowed the rich land along its banks so that corn, beans, and squash could be raised in abundance. According to tradition, after a great flood, a group of angels joined Yaqui prophets and traveled from south to north, “singing the boundary,” and ordaining the sacred limits of Yaqui territory. After that, the Yaqui prophets had visions at eight different places, locations for “the Eight Sacred Pueblos.” Though the Yaquis bloodily repulsed Spanish military might, they had accepted the Jesuit priests who came to live among them in 1617 and the Indians wove the Catholic faith into their own myths and traditions. Spanish religious policy clashed with political, however, and the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. From 1825 till his execution in 1833 Juan Banderas, the great Yaqui general, fought the Mexican government’s attempts to tax the Yaquis, divide their lands, and assimilate them. After his death, Cajeme and Juan Maldonado Tetabiate took up the struggle against the Mexicans.
Blending old patterns with the Jesuit mission system, the Yaquis had evolved a way of government that suited them very well. All matters of importance to a pueblo were discussed at a junta, or village council, attended by the five governors, church officials, members of military and ceremonial societies, and the elders. These leaders decided how problems should be settled; they could punish offenders by lashes of a rawhide whip, a time in the stocks, or even execution. Cruz had been sentenced to death by such a junta, but he still spoke of the system with respect. When more than two pueblos were concerned, a joint junta was held.
By 1900, the Mexican authorities had decided to settle the Yaqui rebellions once and for all. Yaquis would be, watched closely and
any resisters would be deported to work far away. The Bacatete Mountains, where rebellious Yaquis hid out and from which they conducted their raids, were surrounded so that Yaquis from the north who wanted to return home to fight could not get through. Since most supplies came from the north, especially Tucson in Arizona, this seriously hampered Yaqui patriots.
“Now Rafael Yzábal, who became governor of Sonora last year in 1903, thinks he has the answer,” Cruz said. “Since soldiers, settlers, and extermination have not worked, he’s got the federal and state governments to cooperate in a slave trade. Yaquis are sold and transported, men and women, for sixty pesos apiece, to henequen plantations in Yucatán or sugarcane fields in Oaxaca.”
“Like Sewa’s father,” I said, looking at the child, who had drowsed off with the raven crouched against her arm.
Cruz nodded. “Yzábal is killing babies, prostituting girls, and enslaving men and women. He thinks he will grind the Yaquis into the earth, but we are of the earth and we will be here after he’s dead—he and his friend Ramón Corral, who devised this. Corral is rotting even now of a disease he caught from a whore. I wonder if he thinks his blood gold will comfort him in hell?”
Cruz also told me that he wasn’t a witch but a sabio, “one who knows.” He hadn’t worked for the power or wanted it, and even now it wasn’t completely under his control. Sometimes he “saw” what was happening, or what would happen, or where a lost thing was, or what sickness a person had and what would cure it. It was when he hadn’t been able to heal the brother of one of the governors of his pueblo that he was accused of being a witch.
“And Yaqui law is that a condemned prisoner shall spend three days in the jail, arms tied, without food or water. Three madrinas and three padrinos, his godparents, make him a brown burial robe and each puts a Yaqui rosary about his neck. The maestros chant the funeral liturgy for three days and then most prisoners are shot. But a witch is tossed, bound, into the fire. And so, in my second night in the jail, I worked my bonds loose and escaped by the help of one of my madrinas who didn’t know whether or not I was innocent but didn’t want me to die in either case.”
“Was that long ago?”
“One forgets. It was before Cajeme drove out the Mexicans in 1876. Call it thirty years.”
“And you’ve never gone back?”
He gave me a wry look with those ash-colored eyes. “No. I am a bigger witch than ever since I got away. But some of the villagers come to me now and then and have all gone away cured.” He laughed. “A few very love-afflicted ones have come for ways to make their sweethearts love them, but in that witchcraft I do not meddle.”
I thought of Trace, that marvelous yet separated way we had made love, and asked before I could stop myself, “Can you see my future, Cruz? Any of it?”
“I have seen you high in the Sierra after great danger.”
“Do you know what will happen to Sewa?”
“I have seen her wedding with pascolas and a feast and you there watching.”
“Are you ever wrong?”
“Not that I know of.”
I wanted to ask about Trace, if there would come a time when we would marry, but I felt I had no right. Sewa woke then and we played a game we had begun that morning wherein she named things in Yaqui and I in Spanish. When Trace came with twilight, she played one of the tunes she had learned. Ku fluttered excitedly and joined in with cries that made Sewa stop playing and burst into giggles that flushed her cheeks, showed her dimples, and made her look like a happy child for the first time since I had met her.
Trace sang for us that night, cowboy songs that I understood little better than Sewa and Cruz because of the peculiar phrases. What, for instance, were “firies and snuffies”? Or little dogies? Surely one didn’t “ride round ’em slow” if they were actually dogs. But he sang one I understood, which was lovely and sad as the old English ballads I loved so well, and his eyes were on me so I could scarcely breathe. I longed for his mouth and hands till I burned as if with fever.
Eyes like a morning star, cheeks like a rose,
Laura was a pretty girl, God Almighty knows;
Weep all you little rains, wail, winds, wail—
Up along, all along the Colorado trail.
When Sewa had her sleeping draft, we went to our beds, but I was restless, anxious about the return to Las Coronas and how to find a home later for myself and Sewa. Most of all, I couldn’t put the refrain of Trace’s song out of my mind or forget the way his black head tilted back as he sang—how gentle he was with Sewa when he had carried her out to see the moon and smell the night scents for a while. What I would have given to have been in his arms like that again and not have him stop because of concern for me or his debt to my parents.
When I fell at last into shallow, dream-filled sleep, I seemed to be with a witch, a bruja, who was like Cruz but not him. And I asked for a philter, asked for a charm, the way to make Trace love me.
Then the witch’s eyes were turquoise, and he spoke to me in a voice I knew, in Trace’s voice, and he said, “I can give you a charm, but it would cost you more than you can pay.” And then he faded into the shadows, except for those blue-green eyes and the echo of his words.
Two days later Trace took Sewa and me back to Las Coronas. Cruz walked beside our horses to the end of his canyon and then gave me a bag of herbs I was to brew for Sewa till her leg was completely healed.
I didn’t realize how fond I’d become of the old Yaqui, how I’d come to depend on him, till that time of farewell.
“Oh, Cruz,” I said, breath catching hard. “Oh, Cruz, thank you—”
“It was my joy to help the child.” His eyes twinkled like pale bright stars. “And to hear the song at last of that miraculous Ku of a thousand colors!” He touched my hand to his heart, then spoke softly, strongly to Sewa, who watched him with beautiful grave eyes. He put a staff into her hand, set with turquoise in the top. Then he crossed himself and kissed her forehead before he shook hands with Trace.
The men had rigged a kind of sling on Sewa’s saddle so that her stump thrust forward in a cushioned split of bamboo. Ku nested in a basket molded against her saddle horn, cawing hoarsely at the excitement.
We traveled slowly, so that the late moon had set when we rode at last through the gates of Las Coronas. Dogs raised a bloodcurdling din and a man loomed out of the cottonwoods, his rifle barrel reflecting the little light there was. When Trace called out who we were, the guard bowed, escorted us to the house, and held the horses while Trace carried Sewa through the patio to my room and placed her on the couch. She was so tired that I didn’t make the tea, but told her good night and moved Ku’s basket close to her.
“You need to get to bed yourself,” Trace told me when I would have walked back to the horses with him.
“Will I see you before you go back to the horses?”
His teeth flashed in faint light from the bedside candle. “Unless you sleep till noon. Good night, Miranda. Have sweet dreams.” Before I could move, he dropped a swift light kiss on my cheek and strode across the patio.
My head and shoulders were being shaken violently. Wrenching away as I opened my eyes, I stared into my half-sister’s constricted face.
“Why did he leave without seeing me?” she demanded. “Why?”
I realized with shock that she’d been crying. Her eyes were swollen and her ivory skin had that mottled look that follows heavy weeping. At the same time I felt a stab of hurt disappointment.
“Trace?” I asked, sitting up. “Are you sure he’s gone?”
“Of course I am! The guard says he left a few hours after bringing you and this little scarecrow back.” Reina watched me narrowly. “He didn’t tell you he was going?”
I swallowed, forcing my head high. “No. In fact, he spoke as if he’d be here till noon.”
“Ah, you feel like crying!” she exclaimed with brutal satisfaction. “So you must be speaking the truth.” She glanced at Sewa, who watched with wide dark eyes, cradli
ng her raven. Reina’s gaze snagged on the bandaged stump. Her lips curled in disgust. “My God, your contribution to Las Coronas is a crippled savage. All this fuss for a girl who won’t even be able to work.”
For a moment I was too outraged to speak. Flashes of the last days, that first horrible night with the saw grating bone came back with dizzying force. Springing out of bed, I pointed to the door.
“Get out!”
“This is my home.”
“And mine, too, if you have any respect for our mother’s wish.” Checking, I brought my voice under control and tried to speak reasonably. “As I have told you, Reina, I intend to stay here no longer than is necessary.” Did Trace’s leaving so abruptly mean he had decided not to be concerned with my problems, where I went from Las Coronas? That he regretted making love to me? I writhed inwardly at that thought. “When Sewa is well, I shall take her and go.”
“Where?”
“That is none of your worry.”
She stared at me as if her probing eyes could pry out my thoughts. “Has that pistolero promised you help? The help you will get from that sort is a bastard.”
“I can’t imagine why you’re so interested in Mr. Winslade if you have such a low opinion of him,” I said. “This is a large house. If you’ll stay out of my room, you needn’t even know I’m here. Also, since you grudge it, I’ll leave money for our food when I go.”
“Is this how you speak to your guardian?”
“Guardian?” It was my turn to stare. My heart felt as if cold steel had closed around it.
“You will not be eighteen for another six months.” Reina smiled coldly. “Oh, yes, hermana mía, I remember very well when you were born. A useless ugly scrap, but everyone making such a fuss! Until then, as the oldest of your family, I’m responsible for you and also in charge.”
“But you don’t want me at Las Coronas.”
“True, but at least I can watch you here, take care you don’t disgrace our name.”
It had the horrid ring of fact—a woman seemed always under the command of men, fathers, brothers, or husbands, and a woman under legal age might as well be feebleminded. Desperately thinking back to the reading of the will, I challenged Reina.
A Lady Bought with Rifles Page 8