by Shirl Henke
Chapter Twenty
I'm being saved for something special, that much is for sure. Whether or not it would be a blessing or a hideous nightmare remained to be seen, but Rafe figured on the latter. Only his hate for Flores kept him from going insane over the next three days. They rode at a brutal pace, stopping at night only to eat strips of dried meat, drink a few swallows of fetid water, and sleep an hour. All too soon, they resumed the grueling return to their base camp deep in the heart of the southwest plains.
The men in the war party dressed in very little clothing, only breechclouts and blue-dyed leggings. Their hair was very long, braided, smeared with buffalo dung, and decorated with bones and feathers. Many wore the frightful war helmets, unique to the Comanche, great bison scalps with the horns attached. For war, their faces had been striped with black paint.
The first thing Rafe sensed when they arrived in the main camp was the overpowering stench of rotted meat and human and animal excrement. Crude brush arbors were strung out in no particular pattern, following the meandering course of a stream in a narrow, steep-sided ravine. Piles of bones and decomposing garbage littered the earth.
Women dressed in greasy yellow buffalo-hide tunics cheered as the captives and loot were brought home. Their faces were contorted as they cried fiercely, “Yee-Yee-Yee!” Gruesome circles of orange paint adorned their cheeks and ears. Their hair was hacked off short, and many were tattooed grotesquely with black dotted lines circling their breasts.
Rafe was hard put to say which was more intimidating—the warriors or their women. He had heard what the women could do to a male captive after the men broke his puha and made him scream. He vowed once more not to scream.
It was a night for celebration. There were two captives stripped naked, suspended between ash poles, bound hand and foot with leather thongs. With his arms and legs stretched tightly, Rafe fought pain with each breath. Stretching his broken arm had at least straightened the break, but if left this way for long, it would doubtless never mend. He laughed through his agony. Mend! I'll be dead by morning…if I'm lucky!
Sid Lattimer, the other captive, was a big burly teamster from Ohio who had arrived in Texas too late to serve in Houston's army, but still not too late to die in Texas. Rafe could see the man flinch and thrash, his eyes growing round with terror as two warriors approached him. Gritting his teeth, he rasped out, “Don't let them see fear! Taunt them so they kill you quick—otherwise they'll turn you over to the women!”
Even as he expended precious energy to speak, he knew it was useless. Lattimer no more than felt one knife slice across his bared chest than he was shrieking and babbling. Rafe let his head drop, unwilling to watch the systematic mutilation by knives and hot coals. Soon enough he'd know how it felt. After a few hours, Lattimer was cut down and thrown to a cluster of women at the edge of the fire. They eagerly took up their prize, dragging his mutilated body off to stake it to the ground. The pitiful devil might live for days before they were through with him.
Then, Rafe heard voices speaking in a polyglot of Spanish and Snake. One was Flores, the other Iron Hand. Flores was telling the Comanche about Rafe's fight with Grazer back in Nacogdoches, describing how he withstood the beating and kept coming back for more. Something to the effect that Iron Hand could have the Creole's puha if he could break him. The sadistic bastard wants to watch! It’s a game to him.
When Rafe sensed they had moved closer to him, he raised his head and stared into Flores's eyes. Using every last ounce of strength and what little moisture he had left in his mouth, he spat full in the comanchero's face. Flores lunged, but the chief caught his fist, stopping the wicked blow aimed at Rafe's groin.
Iron Hand issued a command and one young warrior went over to the fire. The crowd grew surprisingly still after all its chaotic chanting and yelling earlier. An air of expectancy fell over everyone as the brave returned with a pair of crude metal tongs, heated red-hot. He stood waiting for Iron Hand's command.
The chief spoke to Rafe in his guttural but serviceable Spanish. “You understand me? The other white eyes says your medicine is strong. How strong, I wonder?” With that he took his knife from its sheath and cut a thin, elongated gash down Rafe's chest, leaving a bright ooze of red seeping through the dark pelt of his chest hair. When Rafe made no sound or movement, only stared impassively at him, he grunted in approval. “I think you could stand much,” the chief said with deliberation as the youth with the glowing tongs stepped closer.
Rafe looked at the malevolent grin on the boy's face, then back at Iron Hand. “I know you will tell him to tear my manroot away with those,” he said in flat, steady Spanish. “I laugh at you. You will never have my puha!” With that he smiled evilly at the boy, who blanched at his bizarre behavior. Then, Rafe began to laugh, mustering all the contempt he could put into his performance. Let them think he was mad. There was magic in that, too. He fixed his eyes on Iron Hand and never let them waver.
Suddenly, with an abrupt shift in whim, Iron Hand dismissed the youth. Turning to Rafe, he said, “Your magic is strong this night. Maybe we will wait and see if it lasts.” With that he gave a command and two other warriors cut the prisoner down. When the tension on his broken arm was released, the bones snapped back in place. Luckily one of the men grasped him just as he fainted.
Rafe awoke to bright sunlight and the screams of Lattimer. The women, he thought helplessly, squinting to see where he was. He lay on a crude pallet of lice-ridden skins beneath one of the open brush lean-tos. His feet were staked securely with rawhide loops attached to small pegs driven deep in the ground, but his arms were free. Indeed the broken one, still throbbing steadily, had been bound with willow strips and lashed firmly into a serviceable splint with pieces of rawhide. It was still agony to move it, but he had to try. Despite the hammering pain, he could control the arm.
“The swelling is down. You are a strong man. The break was clean and pulled straight to mend well.” A woman's voice spoke in clear Spanish. Rafe sat up slowly, feeling the sharp sting of the slash on his chest. He shaded his eyes and squinted at the small figure of a woman who stood before him dressed in the same greasy yellow buckskins he had observed the other women wearing. She was slight and small and her short, cropped hair had a slight curl to it.
“You're white,” he said in Spanish.
She shrugged. “I am Little Willow, wife to Iron Hand. Once I was Lucia Maria Gonzalez y Garcia, but that was long ago. I was taken by comancheros, just as you were,” she replied.
His face darkened. “The one who betrayed me, is he still here?”
“No. He left this morning with many horses. The guns and bullets you had were worth much to Iron Hand.”
“But he will return,” Rafe said.
“He will return,” she echoed, understanding.
Just then another woman rounded the corner of the shelter. She spoke sharply in their language to Little Willow, who quickly scurried away. Then, she turned to Rafe and eyed him up and down with insolent slowness. She was tall for a Nerm and probably considered a handsome female by their standards with straight, unmarked features and large, upthrust breasts. However, like all the Comanche he had come in contact with, she stank. Joe had told him they only bathed for religious occasions. As Indians went, they were not particularly religious.
Her silent perusal began to make him uneasy. When she poked a heavy stick at him and pulled off the small robe covering his midsection, he knew his instinct was correct. She was inspecting him as if he were a stud horse! Or a slave on the auction block. The thought flashed into his mind as she grinned flirtatiously, revealing several blackened teeth.
“You strong—maybe too skinny, but good,” she said in crude but intelligible Spanish.
Good for what? She bent over and cut the bonds on his ankles with a sharp knife. Then, as several other women gathered around to watch, she tied a long, rawhide cord from his broken arm to her waist. Any time he dallied, a yank would quickly bring him to heel.
&nbs
p; “Plenty work. Come.” He was careful to keep up.
Rafe was forced to follow her down to the stream with a heavy iron cook pot; then she instructed him to fill it with water and lug it back uphill to her cook fire. He spent the day doing heavy chores at her beck and call with no rest and no food. As the sun arced high in the heavens, he knew his sunburn would hurt worse than the mortification of being paraded through the camp stark naked. Joe had told him all new captives were treated so in an attempt to break their spirit. He ignored the titters and stares of the pubescent girls as they viewed the tan marks at his waist. The lower half of his body was decidedly lighter than the upper.
Within two weeks his burned lower body had darkened and he forced himself to feel impervious to his nakedness. The grueling labor, dragging in firewood and pulling huge skin sacks of nuts and roots that the women had gathered, left him exhausted at night. He was given food at irregular intervals. It seemed the band members ate when they felt like it, at no set time. When his mistress sat down to eat she allowed him to do likewise. He thought it just as well not to know what was in the bowls of greasy, foul-smelling mush.
Sand Owl, his mistress, was the chief wife of Iron Hand, who had lent her the one-armed slave until he healed. Rafe was uncertain what Iron Hand planned for him then, but was positive it could be no worse than the squaw work he was given by Sand Owl. Working one-handed made him clumsy and Sand Owl would beat him with the large club she carried. The first time she did so, he made the mistake of trying to take it away from her. Three warriors with his new rifles materialized out of nowhere. One struck him from behind with a gun stock, knocking him unconscious.
Oddly, his defiance seemed to please Sand Owl. After that, whenever she clubbed him, she watched the fury blaze in his black eyes and seemed to feed on it like an aphrodisiac.
By the end of the month, his arm was almost knitted and he could flex his hand and ball it up into a tight fist. He practiced each night when everyone was asleep. They tied him now, staked to the ground spread-eagled to ensure that he could not escape. But escape was all he thought of.
“Whatever happened to the other captive?” he asked Little Willow one night when she brought him food. It was late and few people were around. Soon they'd stake him.
She did not meet his eyes but said, “They did an evil thing. They strangled him after only a day.”
Realizing the women could have kept him in agony for many more days, Rafe was relieved. “It's good he is no longer suffering,” he replied simply.
“But they think he is. I—I do not know.” At his puzzled look she explained. “The People believe if a man dies by strangulation, his soul rots with his corpse. It is trapped.”
Obviously, she remembered much of her white life. She spoke educated Spanish. “How long have you been here, Lucia?”
“Too long to ever go back. I have a son,” she said quietly.
He understood. She could not leave her child; and her Mexican family would never accept it, even in the unlikely event she could escape.
Changing the subject, she said, “Sand Owl wants to lie with you. The medicine man says she is barren, but she does not believe him. She blames Iron Hand and believes if you can get her with child, the chief will accept it as his.”
Rafe blanched but was not really surprised at Sand Owl's lechery or her deviousness. “You said you had a son by Iron Hand. Why aren't you chief wife?”
She hung her head. “I was raped by many warriors when I was captured. Iron Hand married me when I gave birth because I was proven fertile. The People have few children and fewer still survive infancy. Most women have many miscarriages.”
“So, he has no children, and she figures this is the way to guarantee her position and give him one. Why use a white slave? Why not a warrior?” I must figure a way out of this deadly tangle!
She shook her head impatiently. “A wife can be killed or have her nose cut off for infidelity. No warrior would betray his chief this way.”
“So, she figures to fool him with my get. Guess it'd for sure have black hair,” he said ruefully, but his stomach turned over in revulsion. “What happens if I refuse? Rape's pretty difficult in reverse.”
“She will say you tried to escape and will have her sisters kill you,” Little Willow replied simply.
He let out a deep, whistling breath. His life with the Nerms reminded him uncomfortably of that of a field slave on a Louisiana plantation. He'd heard rumors about the overseers and even some of their wives' appetites. He'd wondered idly if they were true.
For the past five weeks all Sand Owl had done was eye him lecherously and take him with her to the stream where she would occasionally disrobe and rinse off her tunic. He had known by the way she preened, thrusting out her tattooed breasts, that she was taunting him sexually.
Thinking of how she smelled, he knew he could be celibate indefinitely rather than touch her. But then looking down at his own sweaty, filthy body with shoulder-length matted hair and unkempt beard, he knew he must smell no better.
When Sand Owl came to tie him up that night he watched her closely. The looks she gave him in return made his flesh crawl. If only Iron Hand would notice that his arm was healed. He considered how to bring that fact to the chief's attention and thus escape Sand Owl. The next day he asked Little Willow to remove the splint.
“No. I cannot. It is for the medicine man to say,” she replied.
He knew she was afraid and he could press her no more. That afternoon while carrying a basket of grapes back to camp, he spied an outcrop of sharp rocks. Feigning a slip, he dropped the basket. Sand Owl turned angrily and gave him several stout whacks with her club. His body was covered with lacerations and bruises from her beatings, but he had become inured to the blows. As he gathered the spilled fruit, he managed to slip a sharp piece of shale into the basket. Later, when they stopped to eat, he turned his back carefully and sawed doggedly at the splint's bindings until the leather gave way. Then he dropped it in a thicket of chokecherries.
No one noticed until they were back at camp. Sand Owl was furious and began to beat him. Seeing no men around, but wanting to attract their attention now, he made a lightning lunge and caught her club, pulling her off balance. She fell at his feet. He stepped on her tunic, pinning her to the ground and used the club to knock her knife from her hand.
By the time the commotion brought several warriors running, it was apparent that Broken Arm, as he had been dubbed, had regained the use of his injured limb. That was how Iron Hand found him, standing over the thrashing, hate-crazed Sand Owl, her long, jagged pole in his hands fending off attackers on all sides.
Did the craggy, impassive face seem to smile? Rafe was not sure, but he knew his fate was now out of Sand Owl's hands and in her husband's.
“If you kill one of the People, you die,” Iron Hand intoned.
“If I let your woman have this, I may die anyway,” Rafe replied. He was certain then that Iron Hand did smile.
“Your arm has healed. You can leave woman's work now. Buffalo have been sighted. Or, would you rather gather wood?” It was the most contemptuous question a Nerm male could ever put to another man.
Rafe carefully sidestepped Sand Owl, pinning her to the ground with the pole until he stood before Iron Hand. He motioned to the long rope binding him to the woman. Iron Hand ordered one of the warriors to cut it. Following the chief, Rafe never looked back; but he knew he had made a dangerous enemy.
The next morning they left in search of buffalo. By midday the hunting party had found the vast herd, a brownish mass undulating against the horizon as far as the eye could see. Rafe was amazed at their numbers. The bison covered the deep grasses. He watched the other slaves dismount and followed suit. Most of the slaves were Caddoes or Shawnee with a smattering of Mexicans. He was the only American. Most of the captives had been castrated and were docile, beaten creatures who quickly leapt to do their masters' bidding.
The Comanche were the smallest in stature of all the Horse
Indians. But as Rafe watched the hunt, he realized why the Nerm were called Lords of the Plains. A Nerm warrior riding his pony at breakneck speed could put a flat-headed hunting arrow all the way through a large bull buffalo, just behind the short rib. Their saddles were no more than blankets and a few rawhide strips with stirrups attached. The riders hung at precarious angles, letting arrows fly while seemingly glued to the pounding backs of their horses. It looked like a magic act to Rafe as he followed the other slaves to gut and quarter the kills as they fell.
Women and children caught up with the men as the day wore on, eager to share in the delicacies of the hunt. After killing a large cow, one warrior slipped from his pony while the slaves butchered the buffalo. He then reached inside and extracted the warm liver, smeared it with the salty juices of the gall bladder, and devoured it hot from the body cavity. When women and children arrived, the favored sons and wives were allowed such treats as warm blood, brains, and sweet bone marrow.
Revolted by the smells and gore of the feeding frenzy, Rafe watched the slaves as they cried and pleaded for parts of the hot, vile-smelling entrails. When one warrior took a long strip of intestine and sucked the slimy green contents with his teeth, devouring the bison's predigested dinner, Rafe turned to keep from retching. He went to bed on a very empty stomach that night.
Winter came, bitter cold with deep snows, unusual in the sheltered ravines of central Texas. By the time the hunt had ended, Rafe had been blackened by the sun and his muscles had been honed to sinewy hardness. He could run alongside a horse until it dropped, do without food or water for days, and withstand heat or cold with the impervious calm of a Comanche.