Califia's Daughters

by Leigh Richards

  She pulled the heavy, razor-sharp hunting knife from its sheath with frigid fingers. Trying to jostle the shaft as little as possible, she set her thumb and the knife blade on opposite sides of the wood and squeezed. Her arm shook with the effort, but the sharp steel cut its way through the hard wood until it was nearly at her thumb. She slid the knife back in its sheath and reached down to break off the arrow, a small twinge that made her body go rigid from toe to scalp. Sweating freely now and panting with apprehension, she held out her arm until the callused palm was just brushing the splintered break, then lay completely motionless for a time, trying to brace herself against what was to come. Suddenly, with a cry and a sharp spasm, her hand slapped down flat against the front of her thigh, driving the vicious barb out of the back of her thigh. Thin, keening moans filled the creekbed, joined by the whines of Tomas. After another minute her shaking fingers crept around the bloody trouser leg until they encountered the protruding steel, and with exquisite care explored the object as if it might just fall out on its own. It did not. With a sob of anticipation, Dian arched her back, wrapped her hand around the shaft, and jerked. Blood flowed thickly from both ends of the arrow’s path, and Dian leaned forward and vomited onto the ground in back of Culum’s head.

  For several minutes she could only lie there, sobbing freely. When the first insult of pain had retreated a fraction, she whispered into Culum’s back, “Tomas.” His cold, worried nose removed itself from her neck, and she knew he would be watching her alertly, craving the reassurance of a command, any command. She cleared her throat. “Tomas, fetch the horse.” No movement came from behind her. She prayed silently and gave the command again, trying to summon a firm, clear voice as if this were only a training session, with all the time in the world. “Tomas, fetch the horse.”

  He stood up. She heard his claws dig into the hard-frozen sand as he stretched luxuriously. He moved around into her view, sniffed once at Culum’s dead ear, and wagged his long tail, looking down at her expectantly.

  “Yes, you’re a good dog, but I’m going to bleed to death here, boy. Tomas. Fetch the fucking horse!” She had to get her leg bound up, and the cloth she wanted was in her saddlebag. If he wouldn’t bring it, she would have to remove her coat and sweater to get at her shirt.

  She closed her eyes and snapped at him through gritted teeth. “Damn it, Tomas: fetch the horse!” And to her vast relief she heard him move away. She raised her head, and sure enough, he was trotting over to where Simon was trying to graze. The young dog seized the dangling reins between his teeth and backed up with them, tugging the horse along. Simon was amenable to the familiar exercise, and in a very short time Tomas stood before her proudly, tail wagging.

  “Yes, you are a good and clever dog, Tomas, and if we’re very lucky we may get me out of here alive.” She reached for the reins and looped them around her wrist, for the smell of her blood would make even Simon nervous and Dian knew that Tomas would never catch him if he actually bolted. The saddle looked a long, long way up from where she lay.

  She made it upright as far as the saddlebags, where she found a bandage to bind around her thigh, then loosed the sleeping roll and tossed it over Simon’s neck. She was then faced with the obstacle of actually getting up onto the horse. She was half-tempted to take off the saddle completely, both for the ease of getting onto the smooth back and because a small voice told her that it would be easier on the animal if he were not burdened with the saddle after his rider had fallen off and died. On the other hand, once up she could tie herself to the saddle, and that might give her a greater chance of finding help. Besides, the effort of going around and uncinching the girth was just too much. So, standing on the wrong side and scrabbling to hook her good left leg over the horse’s back, biting back curses and cries of pain so the already agitated creature didn’t bolt entirely, she somehow made it into the saddle and lay her swimming head against Simon’s neck so she didn’t faint again.

  When the blackness had retreated, she took out her knife and hooked its point into the fabric of the precious sleeping bag, slitting the bag straight across the bottom and halfway up one side. Down cascaded across Simon’s shoulders and onto the creek bank to mingle with the snow, but the chambered construction of the bag would keep most of the feathers in. She worked the resulting tube over her head and draped it across the top of her legs. The cold embrace of the storm retreated a step, and she blessed Susanna and the child’s mother and aunt from the depths of her heart.

  It took her a few more minutes to bind herself onto the saddle, hands clumsy with cold. By the time she had caught up the reins, cursing with the effort of leaning forward against Simon’s neck, there was a small red icicle hanging from the corner of her stirrup, and the light was beginning to leave the sky. She could see Culum, though, all too clearly. In death, his huge body looked almost small, a limp pile of fur with an arrow sticking from its broad and noble chest.

  “Thank you, my friend,” she whispered. “Go with God. I will come back and bury you if I can.”

  She turned upstream again. There was no point in turning back—the nearest friendly people were two days behind her, and she had seen no likely places to take refuge along the way. In the unknown ahead of her there could be help, or at least an abandoned shell of a house. Her attacker, slumped in a heap with a broken neck, was obviously not from the area, judging by the amount of equipment her horses carried. She only hoped that the woman had been alone, and that the next face she saw asked questions before shooting.

  Within the hour Dian knew vaguely that she had made a mistake, but by that time she was in no shape to do anything about it. Once darkness fell there was no way to see shelter unless she fell headlong into it, which was not likely with Simon and Tomas in charge. I should have taught him to fetch a house, thought Dian idiotically, and after that lost track of the world. There passed a time of darkness with great soft pieces of snow slapping against her face, and occasionally branches, and twice she would have been swept off but for being tied. Once she saw Tomas, or rather his outline, white and frosted against a piece of dark ground, and once a pale owl, startled from a low branch. Hours later she had a lucid patch and became aware that the stream had disappeared, that they were climbing now, through trees. Oddly, it seemed that Tomas was nipping at the heels of the tired horse, driving it up the hill. Dian knew then that she had to be dreaming, and laughed weakly. “You’re not a herding breed,” she told Tomas mildly, and fell back onto Simon’s neck.

  It was pitch black and still snowing when Dian woke to realize that they were standing still. Tomas was barking, for some reason, though it didn’t sound like his fighting bark, which confused her. It confused her even more when there came a sudden shaft of light from out of the darkness. Tomas went quiet. Something touched her knee, a pair of hands swam into her vision by the light of a lamp—Isaac’s hands, strong and sure, accompanied by a face that both was and was not his; startled dark eyes on a level with hers where she lay; long, sleep-tousled hair over a plaid shirt and deerskin coat. She looked into the unfamiliar face and smiled. “Good dog,” she murmured, and let herself go into a whirlpool of darkness.

  CALIFíA, DRESSED AS A WOMAN IN THE

  VERY BEST OF EXOTIC RAIMENT . . .

  NINETEEN

  THE ARROW CAME ON THE SEVENTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. For the next six days, Dian lay in the grip of blood loss and fever. Looking back, she could never decide whether she remembered the period as a myriad of tiny days or as one endless one, for she had no clear time reference in which to lodge her memories. Those memories were many and elemental: light and warmth and comfort and pain and fear. The strong hands and placid, ugly face of her rescuer—whom she slowly grew to recognize as a stranger, and a woman, not Isaac—were a constant presence, although for one period they were inexplicably absent. The renewed terror and loneliness and pain of Culum’s loss overwhelmed her, but at last the half-familiar hands and the warm, bittersweet drink returned, accompanied by a voice that told her over
and over that Culum was safe now, safe and cleanly buried and sleeping content in the knowledge that she was well, and Dian allowed herself to be soothed, even though she knew he was not safely underground, knew that he would never be, for she had abandoned his bones on the banks of the stream.

  It was the dreams she remembered most clearly, after her mind had cleared. The visions of Culum’s beloved and traitorously abandoned body torn by crows and coyotes haunted her and made her rage, until Tomas and the strong hands returned to calm her. Faces came and spoke to her, though she could hear no words. Isaac came—the real Isaac, not this caring stranger, and Miriam, and Peter, and Carmen came to unsaddle her horse and Teddy sang her a voiceless song. She waited for Kirsten and Judith, but they remained hidden, until she wondered if she had angered them. She called to them, begged them to forgive her, for leaving Culum and for destroying the beautiful sleeping bag, but they stayed away until the seventh night, the night the fever reached its climax.

  Kirsten and Judith came together, sitting on the veranda in the warm sun of a summer’s afternoon. They both looked young and happy and smiled at her with love, although something about them made her feel uneasy. She started to tell them how glad she was to see them, but Kirsten raised her hand to stop her. Kirsten started speaking, and to Dian’s relief, this was one voice she could hear.

  “When I was young,” Kirsten began, and smiled again. “When I was young, there was no death in the world. Nobody I knew had died. I did not know that anybody could lose a child.” She stopped, and she and Judith sat beside each other, gazing calmly at Dian, who knew then what was wrong: there was no baby in Judith’s arms. She cried out, but the old woman again held up her hand, and continued. “Death came when I grew older, when I grew old enough to begin to understand what it took to make a life.” Her eyes grew sad, and her face began to fade. “Some of us who are given great pain are given the ability to know great joy as well.” She looked intently at Dian, then the vision faded completely, leaving only an echo: “Take care of yourself, child. We need you here.” They were gone, and Dian dropped into the first true sleep she had had in many days.

  Late the next morning Dian’s nose woke her. Her body lay on its side, limp as an old dishrag, but when her eyes opened, they joined her nose in rejoicing at life, even though what dominated her vision was completely unidentifiable. The object before her looked like the wool duster Judith used, a brown fluff on a stick, except that this one seemed to be rattling. Dian regarded it blankly for a couple of minutes and had just become aware of a faint trickle of puzzlement when the brown fluff rose and turned to look at her. A cat, of a most unusual shading, light body and black boots and eyes almost as blue as her own. And it was indeed rattling, for the noise it made could hardly be called a purr.

  Feeling reassured that neither the universe nor her sanity had changed too drastically, Dian looked beyond the odd cat into the room. Although she had been there for some days, this was the first time she had seen her surroundings with lucid eyes. After studying the room for a few minutes, however, she wondered if she was indeed fully lucid. The room . . . sparkled. Not that it glittered—far from it, the furnishings were simplicity itself. There were chairs with cushions, a low wooden table, a brown and gray rug on the floorboards, a fireplace with carved mantelpiece, curtains on the windows, and a black pot near the fire from which came the marvelous smells that had awakened her. None of this was the least bit showy or out of the ordinary. The room sparkled because of the perfection of each object, how it was placed in relationship to the others, the way the colors blended to form a whole. She drank it in for several minutes, this woman who rarely noticed the ropes of cobwebs and mismatched oddments of furniture in her own house, and then closed her eyes. She must still be feverish, she thought.

  The next time she was awakened by her ears. A rustle and thump came from behind the door. When it opened, Tomas bounded into the room, pausing to shake a small snow drift from his fur before he crossed the rest of the room in one great leap that sent the cat flying for high ground. He thrust his big head gently into Dian’s chest, and when she started rubbing his ears he shut his eyes and crooned with pleasure. It took several minutes to relieve him of the most urgent messages of greeting, but when she weakly gestured for him to lie down, he flopped down on the floor next to her bed and sighed gustily with pleasure.

  Dian’s rescuer had come in behind the dog, dressed for the outdoors in jacket and gloves, a pistol on her hip, and her arms filled with a variety of leather pouches, reed baskets, and unglazed pots. She leaned against the door to shut it, her eyes lighting up when she saw her patient’s response to the dog. She turned to unload her burden carefully on the table, talking over her shoulder in that husky voice that had soothed Dian’s dreams.

  “It’s good to see you awake. I thought you might be joining us today.” Her arms free, she unfastened her deerskin jacket and the belt of her holster and hung both near the door, took off her gloves, and paused beside Dian’s bed to rest a cool hand on her patient’s forehead. “I’d like you to have something to eat, then later on I’ll help you get clean and clothed. All right?”

  Dian nodded, distracted by the intoxicating smells. The woman went over to the fireplace and pulled the pot from its hook, which loosed billows of fragrant steam into the room and set Dian to swallowing, although whether from residual queasiness or hunger she could not have said. The woman spooned some of the pot’s contents into a small bowl and picked a spoon out of a drawer under the table. At Dian’s bedside she hesitated, put bowl and spoon on the wooden stool previously occupied by the cat, and went through another door, which Dian had not noticed. Returning with an armful of pillows and quilts in autumnal colors, she inserted them behind Dian’s shoulders and head. When she was satisfied with the angle, she took up the bowl, sat on the stool, and began to feed Dian.

  The first mouthful confirmed Dian’s suspicions that she was still feverish. It looked like gray gruel, but it hit the tongue like a taste of paradise and settled her stomach instantly; Dian thought that she could eat it forever. She had no idea what it was, other than something with the texture of mealy porridge, but the exquisite salty–sweet flavors filled her with well-being, and she felt like a charged battery, tingling with energy down to her toes. It was the most completely nourishing food she had ever tasted, and even as the woman was removing the supports from her head, Dian slipped into a sound, dreamless sleep. And woke an hour later with two questions pressed against the front of her mind: Who was the woman, and did she have a toilet?

  When Dian’s eyes came open this time, the cat was gone and the woman was sitting in front of the fire, sewing together the bottom of Dian’s eviscerated sleeping bag, strong fingers working the needle with ease and precision. Looking at her, remembering her first sight of those hands by lamplight, Dian could not imagine why she had mistaken her rescuer for Isaac. Granted, this was not a pretty woman, although her smooth skin was a beautiful coppery brown and her eyes were dark and compelling. Her body was too thick and muscular to be considered graceful, her face disfigured by a long scar that ran from forehead to chin, narrowly missing her left eye. Dian later found that it had been left there by an enraged mother bear, many years before.

  In spite of her outer ugliness, the woman was possessed of an air of self-assuredness, of quiet strength and balance. She sat there like Kirsten, or like Ling after one of her meditations, in the hold of a serene centeredness. Dian wondered if her fever was rising again.

  Then the woman looked up from her work, and her eyes crinkled a welcome. She pushed the bag off her lap, picked up a cup that waited on the hearth, and anticipated Dian’s questions, both of them.

  “You probably want to know who I am. My name is Robin.” She came to sit next to Dian, holding her patient’s shoulders up so she could drink from the warm cup. Again, that wash of marvelously right flavors. Did fever affect the taste buds, or was it just that she hadn’t eaten in so long? When the cup was empty, Robin put it on
the small table.

  “I’m sure you’ll need a toilet fairly soon. I could bring you the pan, or if you feel up to it I’ll take you to the toilet. Do you think you could manage a bath?”

  Dian became immediately aware of how very dirty she felt, despite the numerous sponge baths she vaguely remembered over the past days.

  “I must be getting better,” she told Robin with an attempt at humor. “I feel filthy.” She started to sit up, and stopped abruptly as the pain shot up and down her leg.

  “Don’t you dare break open that hole of yours. I’m nearly out of things I can use for bandages.” The woman pulled the covers back from Dian’s body, which, the invalid noticed for the first time, was covered only in a long, soft, sleeveless shirt. With care and apparently no effort, Robin lifted her from the bed and carried her through the cabin, past a closed doorway, and into a small bathroom. “Relax your leg muscles completely,” she ordered, lowering Dian onto the ancient, cracked, but apparently still functional porcelain throne. “Don’t try to get up. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She reappeared through the doorway a discreet minute later with two large pails of steaming water, which she emptied into a large, half-filled tub in the corner of the tiled room. She went out and returned with two more steaming containers, emptying them, too, into the standing water. When she was satisfied with the temperature, she turned to Dian.