The headman, the one with the secret name, growled and abruptly slapped Skye’s hands and arms with an arrow. The blow stung. It was a command: no protests, no resistance, no signs, no words. Skye felt rage boil through him, found himself staring into three lance points and a nocked arrow, and he subsided.
The morning sun caught the cliffs high above the river bottoms and painted them gold.
“What are they going to do to me, Skye?” Mercer asked.
But Skye simply shook his head.
Several of the Sarsi headed for a willow grove with axes and cut two stout poles, each about six feet long. These they laid on the ground and forced Mercer and Winding to lie across them, so the poles were under their shoulders. Then the Sarsi bound the arms of each man to his pole with sopping wet rawhide. Their arms were anchored at elbow and wrist Skye knew that the rawhide would dry into a steely binding, and shrink in the process, gradually cutting off circulation at wrist and elbow.
Victoria muttered softly. Mary was horrified.
The Sarsi lifted each man to his feet. Now their arms were outstretched to either side and firmly anchored to the pole across their back. They could not eat or drink or perform any function with their hands. And in time the pain in their shoulders and arms would become excruciating.
Sharp commands from the headman made it clear that the Sarsi were leaving and taking their prisoners with them. A Sarsi youth collected the Skye horses. Jawbone had sense enough not to fight the cord that drew him. With a word, the headman started them all up a winding trail that climbed steeply through juniper to the rimrock high above.
“Where are they taking us, Skye?” Mercer asked.
Skye quickly shook his head. Silence was best just now.
It was hard for Mercer and Winding to climb that trail with their arms outstretched and tied to the pole. They were utterly helpless to balance themselves. Skye and Mary and Victoria followed, watched carefully. All of Skye’s possessions followed, on the packhorses.
The Sarsi traveled quietly, padding up the steep grade, sometimes over rock ledges, sometimes up cliffs that were hard for the horses to negotiate.
“My arms are killing me, Skye. Make them cut me loose. Beg them. I’ll do anything they ask. I’ll be their slave if they want a slave. Just cut my arms loose.”
The headman listened, no doubt surmising what Mercer was saying without requiring Skye’s translation. But he said nothing. The trail was steep and just staying upright occupied all of them. Then suddenly it topped the bluff and they stepped into harsh sunlight blazing out of the east. It was already heating the sandstone. In a few minutes the whole party collected on the flats at the top of the bluff. Below, the Missouri River ran its silvery way toward the east, still caught in deep shadow. The river flat and the sandstone ledge that protected the bones lay directly below, perhaps three hundred feet. Skye could see the high plains stretching toward the heavens at some hazy horizon an infinity away. Every rise in the land cast its long shadow as the sun struggled upward from its night-bed.
The headman studied the cliff below him. About twenty feet below was a narrow sandstone ledge that capped a stratum of rock. A game trail led down to that ledge. He motioned Mercer and Winding to follow him down there, and motioned Skye and his women to stay put.
Mercer warily slid down the game trail, obviously knowing he was helpless to stop the descent if he should lose his balance. Winding followed. Several Sarsi followed them, carrying more of the well-soaked rawhide thong. On the ledge they bound Mercer’s ankles and knees with the rawhide and tied the sopping leather tight. And then they did the same to Winding. Then they swung Mercer’s legs around until they dangled over the ledge. And Winding’s. Now both of them were poised on the lip of the ledge, their arms tied to the poles across their backs. They could not walk or stand. They could not untie themselves and escape. They could only sit on the brink of eternity.
Skye suddenly knew how this would end. When the deepening pain in their shoulders, or the tightening rawhide cut the circulation in their hands or forearms, or their thirst, or the heat of the midday sun, became more then they could endure, they would do the one thing they could manage: kick themselves over the ledge and fall a hundred feet free and clear and then bounce another hundred or more over scree and talus. They would end up on the sandstone overhang protecting the bones, and add their bones to the boneyard. The Sarsi had arranged it so that Mercer and Winding would, of their own volition, give themselves to the spirit of the bones.
Mercer saw it all now, and craned his head upward to Skye.
“Good-bye, then,” he said.
“I will do what I can, any way I can.”
“You were right, Skye.”
“We can go fast or slow,” Winding said. “Our choice. They ain’t killing us. We’ll be doing the job ourselves.”
“Tell the Royal Society. Write them. Don’t leave out anything.”
“How much time have we got?” Winding said.
Skye shook his head. How thirsty would they get? How hot? How long could they endure the pain in their shoulders and arms?
“Do not give up hope. I will return if I can, as soon as I can.”
A sharp rap from the headman’s arrow, which he employed as a nasty little club or crop, lashed Skye’s face.
Then several of the Sarsi brought twists of sweetgrass, coarse and dry, and laid them between Mercer and Winding.
“What are they doing, Skye?”
“Sweetgrass smoke purifies you, cleans your bodies for the sacrifice to the spirits.”
The headman glared at Skye but did not lash him.
The Sarsi struck flint to steel, showering the dry sweetgrass until it began to smolder. A pungent and pleasant smoke began to rise from the small pile, curling outward, drifting over Mercer and Winding. Skye had sometimes burned sweetgrass himself and bathed in its smoke. It was a tribal custom that he found comforting and cleansing, though he could not say why.
The sun rose higher, blinding the two on the ledge, who could not protect their eyes or turn away from its glare. Skye pitied them and felt sheer helpless anger roll through him. He searched wildly for a way, for a club. He would find a stick and wade in, crack heads, push Sarsi over the cliff, until the lances found him. But what good would that do?
It was all about religion again. Offend another man’s religion and hell would break loose. Challenge belief, question faith, desecrate an altar, violate a taboo, laugh at rituals, and you would stir the most volcanic emotions residing in the soul. Mercer had violated a religion. Skye doubted he would ever see the man again, and hoped he would push himself over the edge sooner rather than later; avoid suffering rather than torment himself to the last. By afternoon, at most, if the day was hot, both men would be out of their heads.
The Sarsi sat quietly, watching the sweetgrass smoke wash the sacrificial victims, knowing the smoke would prepare the two men for their rendezvous with the spirit of the big bones. The Sarsi were in no hurry. It was well to sit and watch, and know how perfectly the two suffered from heat and pain and thirst and hopelessness.
The sun climbed until the sandstone around them radiated its heat. And then the headman, he of the secret name, rose, gestured, and the Sarsi bone worshipers collected their own possessions as well as Skye’s laden horses, and prodded their other prisoners away from the fatal ledge. That country was impassable, and it was necessary to retreat from the headlands back to the high plains and pick up a trail there. Skye had no idea where he and Victoria and Mary were being taken. They were on the south side of the Missouri; the Sarsi lived far to the north. Fords of the Missouri were few and often dangerous.
He had been so absorbed with the explorer’s fatal circumstances that he hadn’t given much thought to his own or those of his wives. Now, back from the ledge, the prisoners were given their horses and Skye found himself astride Jawbone, who itched and twitched under him. He had all his possessions except his Hawken and axe, which the Sarsi wisely kept.
Victoria rode silently, her face stony, and Skye knew she thought the punishment was just and proper. Mary was far more anguished, fighting back her grief.
They rode west for miles, and then the headman of the unspoken name halted them at a high plains seep to water their horses and rest in the shade of two or three willows there. This was coulee country, a land of giant gullies each leading down miles of prairie to the Missouri River.
The women retreated to find some privacy down one of those giant grassy gulches, leading their horses with them. The Sarsi didn’t much care. Eventually Victoria returned with her horse, but not Mary, and in the milling of packhorses and Jawbone’s wild bunch no one noticed as they started west again, except Skye.
forty
Mary’s absence was soon discovered. The man whose name was secret approached Skye. “Where wife?” he signaled.
“Don’t know.”
“Gone to bones?”
Skye shrugged.
The headman issued a sharp command. Several Sarsi trotted their ponies back toward the coulee where Mary was last seen. Skye waited quietly. Victoria looked grim. She probably didn’t approve of Mary’s rescue attempt but it was her code to let anyone do what he or she would, and bear the consequences.
In a few minutes the Sarsi returned and consulted with the headman. They plainly had lost Mary and the rock-hard day of the area wasn’t providing a track. Skye figured that Mary might even have a mile head start by then if she had urged her pony into a lope.
Still, she was four or more hours from the bones. And the sun this late summer day had been relentless. If she did escape, she probably would find Mercer and Winding dead at the foot of the bluff. But she would try, and he marveled at that quality in her. His Mary, so newly his wife, had the same courage and spirit as Victoria.
The Sarsi were engaged in debate, probably whether or not to return to the bones, catch Mary, prevent her from saving those who had been sacrificed. Skye eyed them, eyed his pack animals, eyed his rifle snugged on one of them, wondered how to make use of this, wondered how to escape the four bowmen and lancers who were steadfastly guarding him and Victoria.
He edged Jawbone toward the impromptu conference and signaled: “Permission to speak.”
The headman stared, then nodded.
“Let us go. We have done you no harm. We did the bones no harm. Why do you keep us?”
The assembled Sarsi watched his hands work. Fingers were poor substitutes for talk, and he doubted he could do or say much that would persuade them. There were only a few hundred words in the sign language, and they had to do, and often didn’t do.
The headman stared at the sun, which was heading west now, well after noon. It was very quiet. Skye could pretty well read his mind. If he released the white man now, could they return to the sacrificed ones in time? Why keep them longer? Keep them? Kill Skye and his wife? Chase Skye’s younger woman who had escaped them?
The flinty headman stared proudly at Skye, and Skye wished he could befriend this one. He liked the man who had led a small group of young Sarsi to pay homage to the big bones. Maybe the headman liked Skye. He and his family had been treated with care and respect.
A bee hummed by, surprising them.
The headman with no name spoke abruptly to two of the boys. They trotted their ponies to the herd, cut out Skye’s horses but not Mercer’s, and brought them to Skye.
Skye lifted his hat. There was no good sign for thank you, so Skye signaled blessings.
The headman nodded. Skye took the reins, gave Victoria the lines of the pack animals, and turned away. For the briefest moment his back itched as if it would receive arrows, but nothing happened. Skye and Victoria walked their horses slowly back along the path they had taken, and in a while the Sarsi turned the opposite way, and receded from view.
“Oh, Skye,” whispered Victoria.
He saw the tears.
With the pack animals they could not hurry, but Skye thought they did not need to: Mary was hurrying. She had her moccasin knife. She would do what she could do if she was in time.
They rode steadily through the heat and the waning day. The sun was plunging below the horizon earlier now but Skye thought they would reach the bluff by daylight.
They paused briefly at a seep in a coulee, and Victoria dismounted, stretched, and smiled.
“I am going to put the tooth back in the jaw of the grandfather,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“Where it was dropped by the one whose name I will not say.”
That would be Mercer, whom she believed was dead now. Once the spirit had fled no plains Indian would name the departed.
“I will help you if you want me to.”
“It is for me alone. The bones are my grandmother.”
“We will watch for it, Victoria.”
Something in her face touched him just then. She loved him as much as he loved her. She loved him through best and worst, through times that challenged everything she clung to, believed in.
They mounted and rode steadily east, along the trail south of the Missouri River basin. The closer they came to the place of the bones, the more they rode deep inside of themselves. Familiar bluffs hove into view and finally the one that overlooked the flat, far below, where the monster lay in layers of sandstone, its bones a shrine to many peoples of the plains.
It was not easy to find the exact cliff; so many places like it crowded the river canyon, but slowly Skye and Victoria examined the likely places, one by one, until they did find the spot, and found fresh hoofprints in the dust. They dismounted. No one was sitting on that ledge below. Heat from the ledge still radiated fiercely, though the sun was now well to the northwest, and adding nothing to the temperature.
Skye walked down to the ledge itself, treading carefully because a misstep could send him sailing to his doom. He saw nothing there. He peered over the lip, and far below detected something crumpled, something he was sure was a body. He studied it, not knowing who, or whether the cloth heap down there was two bodies or one.
“Someone died,” Victoria said when he returned to the top.
“Maybe both.”
He stood a moment, feeling grief.
They mounted, followed the perilous trail down the cliff, and eventually reached the shadowed flat that lay very still, very lonely, in the late light of the day.
Skye was puzzled. Surely Mary would be here.
Then Victoria pointed. Mary was not near the big bones but some distance away, at the bank of the river, doing something. Her horse stood quietly near her.
Jawbone whinnied and Mary’s horse responded. Mary looked up, and then stood gently.
Skye and Victoria rode slowly there, through gloomy shadow.
At Mary’s feet was the body of a man, legs dangling in the river. Skye and Victoria hurried close. It was Mercer, and he was alive, his body writhing now and then. They gazed down from their horses at a man whose limbs were monstrously swollen, whose shoulders had puffed up, whose hands were purple, whose face was sun-blistered, whose whole body was sun-poisoned, and whose blue eyes were filled with madness.
Mercer stared up at them from eyes sunk in puffed flesh.
“Ahhhh,” he said.
“This man, I find him up there and cut him free. Somehow we get down to the river,” Mary said.
She had been cooling him, pouring water over his shirt and trousers, finding a way for him to drink. But he plainly could barely move his tormented arms and hands, which projected out like bloated sausages to either side, in much the way they had been tied all day.
“Ahhhh,” Mercer said.
Skye knelt, felt the man’s forehead, and found it feverish, as he had expected.
Victoria headed for her packs. She kept herbs in them for many an illness, including some that broke fevers.
“Winding is gone?” Skye asked.
“Ahhh.”
“You will survive this. You will be all right.”
Mercer groaned.
Skye and Mary pulled Mercer’s feet out of the water and laid him flat beside the river. The explorer stared.
Great shadows filled the canyon of the bones. Victoria returned with some bark in hand and began steeping it in a buffalo-horn cup.
Skye stood slowly, his gaze on that brooding cliff. Winding was somewhere partway up it. He felt saddened. He liked the teamster, a man excellent with horses and filled with the sage wisdom of the wild trail.
“I find him there, and he is still talking a little. I cut him free and help him down. Very hard, he cannot walk, so we drag down together. He falls into river, and I pull him out and get water into him. At first he talks a little, enough so I can get his words. The man who died, this man lasted until around the middle of the day. But the rawhide it tightens, making him crazy, and then bees come and sting, and he screams and pushes himself, and he goes down the cliff and his spirit leaves him,” she said.
“Bees?”
“Bees sent by the spirit of the bones.”
“Is Mercer bitten?”
“No, just the other.” She, too, would no longer name Winding out of respect for his spirit.
Mercer gazed wildly upward at them, struggling for air and life, and sanity.
“How long has he been like this?” Skye asked.
“He is mad, his spirit gone to be with the owls,” she said.
“The bones did it,” Victoria added. “That was what happened.”
forty-one
Mercer was out of his head. Sometimes he wailed. Sometimes he glared at one or another of them. “You have no right!” he said once. “No story,” he muttered. “Knight of the Garter.”
Skye wondered if the man even knew where he was or who he was with. Victoria tried to draw Mercer’s swollen arms to his sides but he howled with every gentle tug. He simply would not fold his arms to his sides; something about it was too painful.
The women began to make camp. Mary was propping up the lodgepole pyramid and laying the rest poles into it. They were going to get Mercer out of the night air if they could.
The Canyon of Bones Page 21