The obviously pregnant Meija crossed the rancheria, waddling like a water buffalo toward Catherine. Watching the young Indian woman, Catherine mentally counted—five months since the brigade had arrived at the rancheria. That would make Meija due any day now.
Five months! Incredible, she thought. The passage of time in the tierra caliente was not to be measured by changes of season. Always the insidious green. Always the enervating heat.
What day was it? It had to be toward the last of September. Or was it already into October? It seemed to her that she measured time by the forays Law made. A week away fighting in the southern part of the state near the pueblo of Alamos. Four days spent disrupting French communications between Hermosillo and Ures. Five days riding to intercept pack trains loaded with silver bullion from Sonoran mines bound for French ships at Guaymas.
Meija approached now, shyly holding out a gift wrapped in a bandanna. "Café," she said.
“Oh, Meija, gracias!" Catherine could hardly believe her good fortune. How long had it been since she had had coffee? Almost three months, since Loco’s supply had run out. She wanted to say more to Meija—to ask her how she felt, if the baby had dropped—but Meija’s Indian dialect made it almost impossible to carry on any lengthy conversation.
Yet the language barrier had not kept Catherine from caring for the young Indian woman when Meija became ill in the first throes of pregnancy. It had been Loco who had recommended giving Meija lemonade, sumac, and powdered dry berries. After two weeks of feeding the nausea-weakened girl, Catherine had finally succeeded in restoring the healthy color to Meija’s bronze cheeks.
She opened the knotted bandanna. Inside was not coffee grain but ground corn and parched acorns. She tried to conceal her disappointment. And true, even this substitute for coffee was a welcome change of beverages from the water and fruit juices, or the fermented cactus brew which still flowed freely in the evenings.
She watched the young woman lumber away with something akin to envy. For a woman to know that she carried a child inside her—and the joyous knowledge that it was the child of the man she loved—surely had to be the greatest experience life could give. The gift of giving. She recalled the night before when she had lain naked in Law’s arms and his hands had stroked the smooth indentation of the waist and slid down over her stomach. He had been gone three days, and she wanted him to take her, to make her forget the lonely days and nights without him
But his hand halted over the concavity of her stomach. "When was the last time you had your flow, Cate?”
Color flooded her face. “Why?” she whispered, fighting back the tears of anger. "Are you afraid I carry your child?” She pushed away from him, so that in the darkness of the wickiup she could see only his thick wreath of yellow curls. “Are you afraid I'll force you to marry me?”
A light flared from a phosphorous match, and Law’s sun-goldened body was briefly illuminated, then there was only the soft glow of the rice-papered cigar. “You know that not even a child will force me into marriage,” he said softly but with a cool distance to his voice, which had previously been warm with Spanish love words.
"Then it should matter little whether I’m with child or not!” In the darkness his hand groped and found her wrist, and before she could pull free he tugged her back to his side. “Your health matters to me greatly. This is no place to have a child. Pregnancy can kill a woman, you know.” His voice grated low and harsh, though he held her gently in his arms. “Don Francisco’s unborn child killed my mother.”
She had not known how to respond to the grief in his voice. Instead, she laid her head against his chest, the skin warm and matted with curls, and let her hands show him her love. They had made love fiercely—fighting like two mating tigers. The urgency of death hung over them. He rode her with a smooth fast power. And she bucked and reared, giving him back that scalding, delicious fire that streaked through the two of them at the last.
This morning, as he dressed to leave once more, buckling on the pistols, sheathing the knife at his side, she caught his hands, holding them close to her breasts, away from the weapons. “I’m frightened,” she said simply. “Of what tomorrow holds.”
He looked down at her. “I think everyone is frightened before a battle.”
“Even yourself?” she asked. “Somehow I have the impression you aren’t afraid of anything.”
He smiled gently. “Me most of all. Sometimes to live when all those about you have fallen—I think it’s a torture worse than the quick blessing of death.”
She clutched at his arm. “Why then, Law? You don’t have to. You have everything you could want at Cristo Rey.”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I myself don’t understand why. Cristo Rey, the Stronghold, the cattle, the mines. They’re things. Things that will erode and rust and wither with time. But abstractions like liberation, freedom, justice—they’ve been in my blood like a fever.”
He pulled her in his arms against him then and said softly, “Just the same as you’re in my blood, Cate. I’ve told myself a hundred times over there is no room in my life for anything but the Juarista cause. Yet always thoughts of you creep into my mind. The prim, delicate Miss Howard with a strength of will that would defy an army.”
She knew it was as close to a declaration of love as she would hear from him, and she gave herself up to his demanding kiss and forced herself to hold back the threatening tears as she watched him ride away.
CHAPTER 22
Catherine tried to stay busy (and she was learning things about survival that no Eastern-bred lady would even think of), because it muted her preoccupation with Law's safety. Each night she went to sleep in their wickiup, she petitioned whatever higher power might be to return Law to her. And when she awoke each morning, she secretly asked herself if this would be the day the guerrillas rode in without Law at their head.
Six agonizingly slow days passed before he and his men rode into the rancheria again. She dropped the shirt she was mending and ran outside to catch the bridle of his sorrel. He dropped down beside her. Shadows encircled the tired eyes, and, as usual, his jaw was stubbled with a new growth of beard. He looped an arm over her shoulder and walked with her toward the wickiup. “I missed you, Cate,” he said simply, but he did not look at her.
She waited until they were safely inside to ask how the mission had gone. He shrugged. Leaving her at the doorway, he stretched out on the bed of fresh evergreens and blankets. “Little by little the French have taken each major city in Sonora. They control the whole province now and have forced Juarez to flee to El Paso. And they control the Indians now also. More and more Yaqui are going over to the French.”
“But why?” she demanded. “Surely they don’t think the French aristocrats are going to liberate them?”
“The Yaqui and Mayo did not do so well under the Mexican hidalgo either. What would make them think the Juarista government would be an improvement?”
She wanted to point out that the government had to be an improvement because Juarez was a pure-blooded Zapotec Indian, but Law said, “They don’t understand that we are trying to drag Mexico out of feudalism and end the control of the Church and military and large landowners.”
She went to sit next to him, drawing her legs up beside her, her palms braced on either side of his hips. “That’s not all that’s bothering you,” she said softly. “What else?”
He laced his hands behind his head and stared unseeingly up at the brush roof. “We traveled as far north as Arizpe. The loyal Juarista families around there had been executed. Entire villages.”
Her breath sucked in.
He continued, his eyes closed now, his voice low, almost monotonous, as it related the savagery he had witnessed. “It’s no longer a battle of armies—of soldiers, Cate. It’s a carniceria—a butcher’s shop. And the worst part of it all is that the Juarista general in charge of the Federal Army of the West, Ramon Corona, has sent in a general called Angel Martinez. My God, Cate, what a name
for a butcher such as he—Angel! The bastard commands an army of men infamously known as the macheteros. ’'
Law opened his eyes now and looked at her. “Our own men, Cate! I couldn't believe my eyes—the macheteros had entered a village loyal to the French ahead of us. And their machetes left nothing whole. A child’s head, a man's foot, a baby’s hand . . a woman’s breast.”
His voice cracked. ‘‘Coming back, I wondered if what I’m fighting for is worth it. The peones—those poor uneducated peasants—are so far from the seat of government in Mexico City that it makes little difference to their lives which side rules from Chapultepec Castle.”
Now. Now was the time to commiserate with him. To tell him all the bloodshed was not worth his effort. She knew that this was the moment. She must seize it and turn his shame to her own salvation. She must paint an alluring picture of what their lives could be like together in Tucson.
But she could not do it. Damn all the couples who ever lived and loved and married and had normal lives!
She ran her hands through his curls and tilted his jaw so that she could see the agony in those eyes she loved so. ‘‘You will fight though, my dear,” she said quietly. “You’ll fight because someone has to. Men like Juarez and you and Morales will always fight without considering the odds simply because it’s the right thing to do. You will not desert Mexico in her eleventh hour.”
He wrapped his arms about her and hugged her down against him, her forehead pressed to his. “It was easier for me before I knew you. Then it was easy to be courageous—to take daring chances. I had nothing to lose.” He kissed the center of her hairline where her hair dipped to lend the heart-shaped configuration to her face.
She turned her lips up to his, and he kissed them tenderly, his mouth moving slowly over hers. With great gentleness he lowered her to her back. He pulled the peasant blouse down over her shoulders and took one breast lovingly in his hands. His tongue traced the rose-brown rim of the nipple and licked it to life. A deep sigh shook her body as his hand sought her thighs, his fingers sliding in her womanhood’s moist warmth.
She grasped his narrow hips and pulled him down on her, her fingers working urgently at the buttons of his pants. When he was free to enter her, she held him back. “Not yet,” she murmured and rose to kneel over him. Her unbound hair fell across his stomach and hips as her lips loved him.
“To hell with the general,” he muttered as he drew her atop him. “He can wait. I can’t!”
“You were beginning to look like General Custer with all those blond curls falling about your shoulders,” she told Law. “Only his eyes are blue and his skin is much paler.”
Law cupped her buttocks and pulled her up against him, burying his head against her skirts. “That had better be all you know about General Custer,” he grumbled. “You're making me jealous.”
She slapped his hands and twisted away. “Stop that, Law Davalos. Everyone will see you!” But she was smiling. She sniped at another curl that persisted in wriggling its way out of Law’s newly shorn mass of ringlets, which now barely reached the collarless calico shirt. She stepped back, scissors in hand that Tranquilino had appropriated from one of the raids, and surveyed the work in process.
“Not bad. You’re almost as handsome as General Custer, in fact.”
Handsome? His looks were sensuously devastating, magnificently masculine! How could she ever have thought his face lacking, except, she thought, by the standards of the effete East?
Law crooked a grin. “I hope you aren’t playing Delilah to my Samson.”
“If it would make you my captive, I am,” she teased. She watched while he brushed at the wisps of hairs that still clung to the bronzed chest, which glistened sleekly in the sunlight. The skin was a beautiful color, she thought. A sun color.
Even she was tanned a becoming gold—looking a picture of health if she could not ignore the fever that persisted—not often or high enough, fortunately, to draw his attention. Had she caught some disease? She tried to recall if any of the soldiers at the hospital had experienced similar symptoms. She was certain that if Law suspected her deteriorating health he would forcibly gag and bind her and send her back to Tucson.
Was it really possible she had been gone from Tucson exactly a year? Tucson in February . . . there might be snow capping the Santa Catalina peaks at that moment, but the days and nights would be mild and balmy. In Baltimore, winter blizzards were probably icing the streets, yet there in the Sierra Madres of Mexico the weather was languidly hot, though not as steamy as it would be when summer came.
“Excelente!” General Morales said, approaching the two. “Is there any possibility, señorita, I could enlist your aid as the camp peluqueria? We need a barber badly.” He rubbed at the dark bristly head of hair he cropped himself.
Law stretched out an arm to encompass her waist. “Never, general,” he retorted with a mock fierceness. “The woman is mine.”
“Continue with your work, then,” Morales said, hunkering down across from Law. “1 only wanted to let you know the news. One of our agents rode in from Durango an hour ago.”
She felt Law’s muscle-ridged shoulder tense beneath her hand. Her own nerve endings flickered at the import of Morales’s words. Surely something important was about for the general to seek out Law immediately. The news could mean another raid against the French . . . and more torturous days to worry about Law’s absence.
“I will begin with the pleasant news, Law. Because of pressures put on Napoleon by the United States Secretary of War Seward and now that the American’s civil war is ended and Seward can back up his threats—and because of the Austro-Prussian war that has broken out in Europe—Napoleon wants his troops back in France. My agent tells me that Bazaine plans to begin withdrawing the troops by the end of the summer. ’ ’
”Gracias a Dios!” Law said fervently.
“I don’t need to caution you,” Morales said, “that it will be months, maybe a year even, before withdrawal is complete. Even then Maximilian will have his own troops and the Indians and Mexicans loyal to the imperialist cause. It will not be easy, but there is a glimmer of hope now in the black tunnel of this war.”
“With such news, compadre." Law said, leaning forward to brace his forearms on his thighs, "I don’t believe there is anything you could tell me that would be unpleasant.”
“There is. The Austrian butcher, Lamberg, has been appointed imperial commander of Sonora and joined forces with Alamada and the Indian Tanori at Guaymas to rid Sonora of its guerrilleros.
Law studied the other man while his fingers absently toyed with his mustache. “We expected this sooner or later.”
Morales looked pointedly at Catherine now. “I’ve just learned that Maximilian issued a decree—the Black Flag Decree, they are calling it. All people aiding or belonging to armed bands not legally authorized shall be executed within twenty-four hours of their sentence.”
She felt Law’s penetrating gaze switch to her as Morales continued. “Tanori knows these mountains like the back of his hand. If just once he should chance on our headquarters while we’re away, the señorita here would be given no quarter— American or not.”
"And would the other women be given amnesty—Filomena, Meija, and the others?” Catherine snapped. “No, of course not. And I am no different. So why the concern for me?” Fear that Law would no longer be so yielding but would force her to return to the States pitched her voice to a belligerent tone. “I will not leave!”
Law said nothing, which frightened her even more. Morales rose. “Pues, it seems your woman is certainly devoted to our cause.”
From the top of the creek’s bank Catherine watched Filomena wash Tranquilino’s hair. The woman giggled when the young Mexican sat back on his haunches and shook his shaggy head, showering Filomena with water. He looked up and saw Catherine and called out, “Come on down, Catrina. Tell this woman of mine that you do not drown someone when you wash his hair!”
Catherine laughed and be
gged off. She did not wish to interrupt their merriment . . . and then, too, Filomena was very obviously pregnant. As much as Catherine cared for the young Mexican woman, it still hurt her, like wrenching a tourniquet about her heart, to see the woman blossom with the growth of the child inside her—or to see the tiny daughter that now tugged at Meija’s breast.
Why could she not be pregnant? Surely then Law would not send her away. He had not said anything yet about her leaving. But he was withdrawn ever since Morales had talked with them the week before.
She turned from the laughing couple and made her way back to camp to find Loco sitting beneath an acacia oiling Law’s carbine. She squatted down beside him, Indian-fashion. “You are good with herbs,” she said straightforwardly. “I need an herb to conceive. Soon.”
The old Indian continued to rub the oil-coated rag over the barrel’s smooth stock. As if he had not heard the urgency in her voice, he said, “You need an herb for the chills and fever that feed on you.”
She glanced up in shock. “You know?”
He nodded.
“Does anyone else?” she asked breathlessly.
“No. He soon will, though.”
She caught the Indian’s calico sleeve. “Loco, I must have that herb then. He must not find out I am ill!”
“The herb comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. It sometimes grows in the moist places of canyons.” He met her gaze and said, “You should tell Lorenzo.”
She sighed then and laid her head against the tree trunk. “I don’t think he would understand.”
“You must understand him first," Loco said and returned his attention to the gun.
“Then tell me,” she prompted.
“You must understand how difficult it was for him to come home from the school to strangers. His mother had died, and there was Don Francisco and his family in the Stronghold. I think that Lorenzo had hoped that, returning as a man, he could do the things for Cristo Rey that Don Francisco had done. The two men, despite their continuing disagreements, have a great respect for each other. Don Francisco and Señor Sherrod are . . .” He searched for the right English word, saying at last in Spanish, “. . . energicos.”
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