Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  Little Shreve sat cross-legged beside the fire, holding the scalps he had taken on the end of a forked stick. The hair was turned inward so it would not burn. Clear grease dripped from the scalps into a small trench he had dug with his knife.

  When the scalp grease cooled, Little Shreve dipped his fingers into it, and rubbed the tallow through his long hair.

  The horses were not up to riding through the night. For the truth of it, neither were the men. They were ripped and blood-chewed. Marwood felt he was coming to the end of his rope.

  They dismounted so the horses could rest, and walked for a lone hour through the grass spanning the horizon. While they walked they sometimes stopped to look behind before stumbling on.

  The early night was warm, the stars bright. Grass and wind smelled fresh and clean. Red Thunder and Little Shreve peeled off to find a watering hole. The company made camp in a buffalo wallow as large as a community amphitheater. Marwood was so exhausted he slept on the bare ground without blankets. In the morning everyone pulled out with hollow eyes and empty faces.

  The land was studded here and there with scrubby hackberry, clumps of mesquite, and wind-flagged trees. They saw buffalo grazing in the distance, a small herd of twenty. But they had no powder or lead, and could do little but watch the beasts graze unmolested.

  “What is that in the tall grass?” Lovich asked. He pointed to a lanky object walking their way. “By God, it looks like a woman.”

  Indeed it was. A naked woman stumbled aimlessly over the prairie a half-mile away. She had come around the low neck of a hill. Her shoulders and face were burned, blistered red by the fierce sun.

  The men rode close and brought their horses in a ring around her. She had been scalped. The naked red bone of her tonsured skull gleamed through a ring of wispy blonde hair. Her eyes were gouged out. She carried the broken shaft of an arrow in one shoulder. Dried blood stained her thighs and calves.

  She reacted slowly to the presence of horses around her and the sound of men talking. She sat down upon the prairie.

  Tunk Quillen swung off his horse and went straight to her. “She’s hurt for fair,” he said. He squatted on his haunches so he could look directly into her face. “They cut out her tongue, Captain.”

  “Wouldn’t think they’d let her live like that,” Spaw said.

  “They probably thought she was dead.” Quillen lowered his voice and addressed the men behind him. “She is, she just don’t know it yet.”

  “Get her a blanket,” Botis said.

  “Captain, that ain’t going to do her no good.”

  “Go ahead. So she can cover up her shame.”

  Quillen fetched a blanket from his saddlebag and draped it around the woman’s bloody shoulders. “It’s all right,” he told her. “You gonna be all right, now.”

  “I wish them Tonks would get back with the water,” Gratton said.

  “They will get here when they get here,” Botis said. “Which direction do you think she walked from?”

  The men looked around from the backs of their saddles. “I’d say she followed the run of the land,” Marwood said, studying the land around them. “Dying animals don’t go uphill. So I don’t expect she did any climbing.”

  “She couldn’t have walked far,” Botis said.

  “No.”

  They could make out her trail, where she had cut through and trampled nearby grass.

  “We will backtrack and see what we find,” Botis said. “Mount up, Doc.”

  Tunk Quillen finished tying a bandage around her lost eyes and got into his saddle. Marwood lifted the woman and put her in front so Doc could hold her while he rode.

  They followed her winding trail for five miles. The Tonkawas returned with filled waterskins, and they drank and watered the horses. No matter how much Quillen tried, the woman would not take water. He wetted a handkerchief and pressed it to her lips, but she turned away.

  Red Thunder lifted a corner of the woman’s blanket. He examined the broken shaft of the arrow embedded deep in her shoulder. He turned his eyes to Botis.

  “Penetaka,” he said, and let the blanket drop.

  “Oh, damn,” Spaw said. “I feared as much.”

  “Where did you find water?” Botis asked.

  “Seven miles,” the scout said, pointing in the opposite direction.

  “This woman didn’t walk no fifteen miles. We will continue on her trail. Let’s go.”

  “Captain,” Doc Quillen said.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “All right, Mr. Quillen. Wrap her up and lay her down here.”

  Quillen reposed her on the ground and left her body covered with the blanket. He climbed back on his horse. He looked at the body and shook his head.

  They followed her winding trail back farther and discovered a private stockade built on a rise of gold and yellow grass. There were cottonwood trees down in a coulee, and smoking cornfields, which had been trampled and burned. Fat hogs fed upon the ruined bodies. Some had gorged themselves until they lay bloated and supine under the hot sun, their big chests moving like a bellows.

  Marwood rode in silence between the massacred bodies. Botis called a halt. They got off their horses and searched for anything of value they might take from this wasted place.

  Everyone in the settlement was dead. Caught unawares with the gate to their stockade inexplicably left open, whole families had been trapped inside their homes and roasted alive. One or two fires were burning freely. Marwood saw incandescent skulls and hacked bones of children half buried in the quaking coal beds.

  Men and boys trapped in the open had been tortured and castrated, grinning mouths stuffed with their own black genitals. Everyone, far as Marwood could see, had been scalped, stripped, and left to die before the Penetaka Comanches had pushed on.

  Botis found the settlement leader hanging from a creaking cottonwood limb. His body was pincushioned with arrows. The war party had hanged him upside down over a slow mesquite fire.

  Lovich found a woman tied to a wagon wheel. She’d been scalped to the bone, and the wheel set afire. A girl lay outside the stockade gate, stripped and disembowelled. Her bruised white and purple flesh stank and festered with swarming maggots.

  Ed Gratton discovered what at first he thought to be a pile of skinned rabbits at the base of a tree. The children’s heads had been smashed with stones.

  Marwood walked through the middle of the devastation. He remembered Sand Creek and wondered why the world was so dark, and he knew it was because he was here.

  “They all dead, ain’t they.” A lone hunter limped up the dusty road into camp. He bore a slouch hat and scraggy brown beard. He was leading a pack mule. The mule was burdened with coyote and wolf pelts.

  “I saw it happen,” he said. He stopped and greeted Botis and the men of the company. “My name is Gerald Causey. I was camped up in them high rocks out of sight.” He turned and pointed behind them. “They came out of yon woodline with the sun on their nakedness and their lances glinting like steel. Their horses bit and snapped at the shreds of morning fog like wild dogs. You never heard such a caterwauling. Hell, in half an hour it was all over.”

  “You saw who did this?” Botis asked.

  “Comanche warriors. Penetaka. Biggest party of red niggers I ever saw. Must have been fifty, sixty of the bastards. They are hitting military presidios and Catholic missions up and down this country. Got the army all stirred up. Some say they might head south and kill all the way to Galveston. They’ve done it before, mister. They have a great reverence for the sea.” The pelt hunter spat. He looked at the men. “They took a little girl with them.”

  Marwood said, “Belike they mean to ransom her back to the army for guns and ammunition.”

  “That’s how I figure it,” Causey agreed.

  “They take anyone else?”
asked Botis.

  “Children, dead. Skewered by their heels from pad saddles. Likely skin them out on the prairie. Their pelts are much coveted by the women of their tribe. Stole the horses, but you would figure on that.”

  “Any chance getting that girl back alive?” Ed Gratton asked.

  “Hell for,” Causey said. “They like to never got that Parker girl back, and when they did she was no longer white. Mister, I watched a buck rut her right where you’re standing. She’s ruined for life and God. Ain’t nobody can do right for her now short of putting a bullet in her head.”

  Marwood turned and walked away.

  “What’s eating on him?” Causey asked Botis.

  “He’s seen this before. Out to Sand Creek.”

  There was something in his voice bordering on awe when next the hunter spoke. “That man yonder fought at Sand Creek?”

  “Yes.”

  He studied Marwood’s retreating back and swallowed. “Goddamn.”

  “Yes,” Botis said, “that’s what he says about it, too. Do you have anything to trade? We need lead and gunpowder.”

  “I ain’t got nothing to trade on, mister.”

  “Either you trade with us,” Botis said, “or we take what you have.”

  Causey poked a thumb at Acheron. “Okay, I will take some of those scalps off’n your hands, if you want to cut a deal. I can sell them in Austin.”

  The bargain was cut and they shook hands on a price. This, along with what little ammunition they gleaned from the destroyed colony, saw them in better stead.

  Spaw and Lovich found cartridges, pigs of lead, and a horn of powder under loose floorboards in a clapboard shack. Marwood pulled a .50-calibre Hawken rifle from under the bodies of two young men lying dead in a corncrib. The rifle had not been fired.

  Botis and his men ended up with three rounds between each of them. Marwood had two for the Hawken gun. “We are headed into Comancheria,” Botis informed Causey. “You are welcome to join our expedition.”

  “No, thank you,” Causey replied. He packed his scalps into a jute sack and tied it to his mule. “I am for home. I got a cabin on the San Gabriel. You ever in the area, you come see me. We can trade for scalps again.”

  Botis sent the Tonkawa scouts ahead to cut for sign. The day waned. They made camp twenty miles farther on at the bend of a creek. Spaw built a fire from buffalo dung and spitted and roasted an antelope Lovich shot.

  They sat around the fire, tearing into the charred and bloody meat with their teeth. Juice and grease ran into their beards. Their eyes glittered with hunger, and they gorged themselves like ticks.

  CHAPTER 21

  A week later they camped beside a vacated dugout at the root of a limestone bluff. The entrance to the bunker was overgrown with scrub and tall thistle. There was good water nearby, and the horses were rubbed down and allowed to drink and graze their bellies full.

  Marwood stood inside the dugout, the floor of which was littered with small bones. He smelled earth, rock, and an ancient, muddy past. He exited. Red Thunder stood outside waiting for him.

  “I must speak with you,” Red Thunder said. He stood with the sun behind him. Black tattooed lines covered the entirety of his body and he wore a soft breechclout of human skin. He held a Spencer rifle crooked in his right arm. The oiled barrel gleamed in the daylight.

  Marwood smelled rancid grease, which Red Thunder had covered himself with. Down by the creek Botis and the riders filled skins and canteens amidst hawberry shrubs.

  “What do you want with me?” Marwood asked.

  “I do not approach you as an enemy,” Red Thunder said. “I consider you ta’en.”

  Marwood considered this. “All right.”

  “We are riding into lands which belonged to my people,” Red Thunder said. “We will fight, and my brother and I will die there.”

  “Little Shreve? I thought he was your cousin, not your brother.”

  “When my first wife died I married Little Shreve’s sister. It was then he became my brother. But you cannot go with us into the lands of my past. You must go north. You are Long Blood. You are like Captain Botis, but you are also not like him. You must go north.”

  Marwood shook his head. He stared up at the trees and then at Red Thunder. “Why do Indians keep telling me to go north?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Red Thunder, I am staying with the band.”

  “No. You must not ride onto the Llano Estacado. Your destiny lies elsewhere. I tell you this as ta’en. I learned many things when I was taught in the Christian way. When this happened, I forgot some of the things I had learned as a boy growing up in the shadow of my father. But one thing I never forgot: there are men like the captain, and yourself. You do not belong with us. You must find your real home. You must find the place where you will die, because that is your true home.”

  “You’re not making sense.” Marwood remembered the incident in Piedras Negras with the ancient Mandan. “What does numank maxana mean?”

  A flicker of recognition passed across Red Thunder’s face. “That is a Mandan word of great medicine and power. No man may speak it lightly.”

  Marwood was a tall man, but still he had to look up into Red Thunder’s face. “I know it is a Mandan word because a Mandan spoke it,” he said. “What does it mean?”

  Red Thunder watched the men washing their hands and faces at the river ford. Botis was combing his beard with a cactus thorn. He focused his black eyes back on Marwood.

  “I will tell you something of my people,” Red Thunder said. “We hold the wolf sacred. We never kill the wolf because we believe we are descended from it. When the wolf runs among men we cannot kill him. But the wolf remains a wolf.”

  Marwood started away. Red Thunder stepped in front of him. “No. I speak to you as ta’en. I cannot use the words you want because their power would blacken my tongue. Let me tell you a legend of my people. Coyote found a woman crying in her tipi. She told him an evil monster had killed the villagers. Coyote promised he would kill the monster. Coyote went to the river and made a fire-hardened spear. The monster appeared the next day. It was red above the waist, and black below. Coyote and the monster fought. Coyote called upon the wolves, and together they killed the monster.”

  Red Thunder stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I tell you this because you have a destiny. There is a Great Spirit inside your heart. Botis has this ancient spirit, too. If you do not defeat it, the monster will consume you, and the spirit will walk away, red above the waist and black below.”

  The men were coming back from the sandy creek bed; they were eating red haws and talking cheerfully among themselves.

  “I have a Christian name,” Red Thunder said. “My Catholic name is William Stuart Miles. But I remain Tonkawa. I was born upon the prairie, where there is no roof to break the light of the sun. When I die, you will remember my Christian name, and my Catholic spirit will live on in this world. But my name Red Thunder will be forever in the spirit world of the Tonkawas, with that of my brother. Do not cross the Llano Estacado, John Marwood. If you do, Abram Botis will become your enemy. He will be red above the waist and black below.”

  Red Thunder turned and went back to his horse. He checked the bridle and swung onto its bare back. He looked at Marwood one last time. Little Shreve joined him on a sleek pony, and they rode side by side without speaking another word.

  The company crossed an undulating sea of trackless grass. Ahead lay the prominent Caprock Escarpment, which Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his conquistadors came upon 300 years past. They, too, had been searching for Cibola. But now the gears of time had turned, allowing Botis in all his madness to come, under this sun and this sky, to find what had eluded him his entire life.

  Botis glassed the natural rampart; he thought it safe enough to climb. They found a defile and rode up a craggy ramp of
caliche and lime. Marwood watched Red Thunder, but the Tonkawa paid him no further attention—and in truth, never spoke to him again.

  When they reached the top they rode a full mile onto the High Plains. The grass came to the bellies of the horses. Farther on they spotted the Comanche war lance, and a man tied to it with his own intestines.

  The poor, naked wretch sat cross-legged, head bowed, arms bound behind his back with raw buffalo hide. The hide had contracted, squeezing blood out until his hands were blackened stumps. He had been scalped, and his ears were gone. From a small red hole in his stomach, a wrinkled rope of purplish-pink gut lifted in a bow and was fixed to the middle of a fourteen-foot war lance, plunged into the earth twenty feet away.

  At the top of the lance, a black hawk feather lifted and snapped in the wind. The supple bois d’arc shaft vibrated and straightened. There was no sound but the keening wind, and the rustling grass.

  Botis and his riders regarded the grisly tableau, which had been staged as a warning meant solely for them.

  “This just happened,” Marwood said. He turned and surveyed the empty country from his saddle. “They tortured him and staked him out here for us to find.”

  Lovich looked over his shoulder at Botis. “Captain?”

  “We can’t waste ammunition on this man,” the apostate said. “Unless you want to cut his throat, then let’s go.”

  The riders reined their horses around the prisoner and left him to his fate. They rode mile after waterless mile toward an empty horizon.

  By late afternoon they were well within the ambit of Comancheria. Botis spied a lonesome hill through his field glasses. They rode around it, slowly climbing, and made camp on the side opposite from which they had approached. Red Thunder and Little Shreve gained the crown and stood as sentinels, watching their backbearing.

  They ate handfuls of dried apples and hard biscuit. Each man took a sip of water from a buffalo paunch. They sat like brutish Neanderthals around a pile of smoking buffalo chips.