Paloma and the Horse Traders

by Carla Kelly

  “I am Marco Mondragón.” He had not released his grip on Diego Diaz. “We must hurry.”

  “For her, I will speed along,” Diego said. “Kindly unhand me.”

  “ ‘For her’? Why do you say that?” Marco let go of Diego, but not without a little shake. Surely he wasn’t jealous of this smelly, bearded fellow?

  Diego had already started for the traders’ wagon. “She told me to go with God. No one has told me that in years. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Diego Diaz was as good as his word. Before the sun was much higher, he knocked on Marco’s door. Graciela was huddled in the corner of the room, her knees drawn up to her chest. Diego looked at her first and frowned.

  “Did these men hurt you?” he asked, giving Marco a look that even Toshua could not have bettered in his foulest mood.

  She shook her head.

  “It might be a while before she trusts anyone,” Marco said. “My wife will make things good.” He shouldered his parfleche and his blanket roll. “She always does.”

  “I already paid the bill. Caramba, so much!”

  “No one trusts a Comanche,” Marco said, his eyes on Toshua, who grimaced. “I had to pay more. I will add this to the bill for the horses.”

  “I told the innkeeper that I could sleep in the stable, but he didn’t like that, either,” Toshua said. He shrugged. “Maybe I will return and steal some horses, just to show him that he shouldn’t be so rude.”

  Marco sighed and held his hand out for Graciela. She hesitated.

  “I don’t have time to wait here,” Marco said, snapping his fingers. “The lady who will be your mistress needs us and I dare not delay. Come, please.”

  Still she hesitated, looking from one man to the other as if wondering which one would abuse her first.

  Diego lifted her to her feet. “You wouldn’t know friends if you saw them, would you?” he asked her, his voice kind. “Come along, and give me no grief. We haven’t time for it.”

  The sun was warming the adobe shops and houses when they rode out of Taos. Marco rose up in his stirrups and looked back. Some of the Indian trading partners had left, perhaps concerned that the Comanches were still not to be trusted, even with the Truce of God. He noticed more soldier presence in the plaza and briefly wished he had political clout. Valle del Sol deserved better than the useless soldiers garrisoned there.

  His first worry that Graciela wouldn’t be able to keep up vanished the moment he helped her onto the bare back of one of the carriage horses, after apologizing for not having an extra saddle. He had made a bridle out of a rope and she held it with ease.

  “Never mind, señor. I have no love for Comanches,” she gave a sidelong look at Toshua, who stared back, “but they did improve my riding skills.”

  Marco had to admit that she sat the lovely bay with the grace of one of The People and not their captive. Her ragged deerskin tunic rode up to her thighs, and he noticed Diego admiring her legs. He reminded himself that he might have done the same, during those bad years after Felicia’s death.

  Diego had made a point of buying tortillas and several handfuls of dried cactus fruit before they left Taos. “Since no one here has any money except me,” he said to the air, as they rode east toward the mountain passes.

  A trader he may be, but he is still just a pup, Marco thought as he rode beside Toshua. He knew his own life was a hard one, but he wondered how difficult it must be to negotiate with people who could lift your hair from your head or excise parts of your body if they weren’t happy with the trade. He thought of the little dead boy in the plaza and crossed himself, grateful beyond measure that his son was safely in the care of his mother.

  By unspoken agreement, Marco and Toshua rode first, so they were downwind of the trader. Marco didn’t think his pabi was particular about odor, but he had noticed his Comanche friend bathing in broad daylight in the acequia, so maybe civilization was rubbing off on him a little. That he bathed only when Sancha or one of the maids were hanging clothes out to dry or working in the garden wasn’t lost on Marco, either. And it was only when Eckapeta was not there.

  “You just do that to embarrass them,” he had told Toshua once, after watching his friend air-dry himself and strut back to Marco’s former office next to the horse barn.

  “Why else would I take a bath?” Toshua had asked.

  “To clean up?” Marco had said, knowing it was a feeble argument that he had already lost, without even understanding why.

  He smiled to think of the conversation. Funny what a man will drag through his mind to stay awake in the saddle. Thinking about Paloma always worked for a long while, so he wondered all over again at his good fortune at finding another wife as sweet as Felicia. He loved the way Paloma’s normally expressive face went slack after rigorous lovemaking and she relaxed into a boneless form that told him precisely how much she trusted his protection. Valle del Sol wasn’t a place where relaxation trumped extreme caution, at least not yet.

  In our bed you are safe, beloved wife, he thought. He chuckled as he remembered another time in their bedroom when she had stood straight up, hands on hips, splendidly naked, and asked, “Marco, do you think about me in bed with you twenty-four hours a day?”

  Of course he did; he was a man. He had taken too long to reply, apparently, because she threw a pillow at him. And then another, and then sure enough, they were back in that bed. “No, only when I am awake,” he admitted when they were cooling down. No reply. She was already asleep.

  He leaned over to make some comment to Toshua, but stopped, struck by the intensity of his friend’s gaze as he looked toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the first of many passes—beautiful and smelling of lemon thistle in high summer but treacherous and avalanche-prone in winter.

  “What do you see?” Marco asked in an undertone.

  “It’s what I feel,” Toshua said simply.

  Chapter Nine

  In which Marco gets his wish and travels fast

  They moved slowly into the canyon. Without a word spoken, each of them began a casual, continuous sweep of his head, looking right and left, and then up as the pass deepened, searching for something out of place, something not quite right.

  Before he even knew it, Marco had placed an arrow against the bow now resting in his lap. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Diego hand a knife to Graciela.

  Marco listened for the birds. Nothing. The wind wasn’t even ruffling the piñon pine. All he heard was the clop clop of their horses’ hooves.

  When an eagle screamed he jumped, then looked around in embarrassment, only to notice the others doing the same thing. They all managed a weak laugh, then stopped to watch a golden eagle tuck its wings and swoop down, as swift as la llorona—the crying woman used to frighten children into good behavior.

  Marco watched as the beautiful bird picked up speed and came so close to the earth that he knew it must slam into the ground, only to snatch a squealing rabbit in its outstretched talons and soar for a distant peak where babies probably waited, mouths open.

  And that was it. The tension left the canyon as quickly as it had blown in. Small birds began to twitter again, and even the stream seemed to resume its flow.

  “What happened?” he whispered to Toshua.

  The Comanche shrugged. “The bad medicine decided to leave brave warriors alone. How can we tell? I do know this: Great Owl and his men are ahead, between us and the Double Cross.”

  Marco felt his heart thunder in his chest. “Maybe they will move north,” he said, even though it sounded like a big bucketful of wishful thinking to his own ears. He wanted to bend low over Buciro and urge his mount into a three-league stride that would leapfrog them across peaks and valleys and bring them to his home, his wife, and children by tomorrow morning.

  “Our women will know what to do, won’t they?” he asked Toshua.

  Toshua pushed up the sleeve of the heavy cotton work shirt he wore and bared his forearm. Marco looked at the crisscross of scars
and what appeared to be a bite. It was a scar he had wondered about.

  “When I was much younger and not so smart, I tried to corner a lion and her kittens in a cave,” Toshua said. He rolled down his sleeve. “Chaa! What a fool. I didn’t understand how hard mothers fight to protect their young. Let me add grandmothers, for such Eckapeta is, whether you like that or not.”

  “I do like it,” Marco said. “Thank you. I should not worry.”

  “Worry all you want,” Toshua said with a shrug. “I won’t tell Poloma.”

  After dark they made a fireless camp. Marco sniffed the air for campfire smoke from other fires and found nothing. Toshua set two snares. “If Little Rabbit sees our plight and offers himself to feed us, we will skin him and cook him in the morning, when a fire is not so noticeable,” Toshua said.

  Diego passed around his tortillas, followed by the dried cactus fruit. When Graciela started to shiver, the trader pulled a blanket from his pack, shook it out—the stench made Marco turn away—and generously offered to share it with the young woman. He knew she must be cold, because she made no objection.

  They sat close together, the canyon wall at their backs, lances at the ready, bows and arrows close by.

  “Let us talk softly,” Marco said. “I would know something about you, Graciela. I think you must be Ute, from the cloud land to the north.”

  She nodded. “My mother, yes. My father was a garrisoned soldier in Milagro,” she said, naming an outpost to the north, abandoned now, that Marco knew had been even more isolated than his own Santa Maria. “When I was seven or eight, the soldiers were sent to Isleta, farther south.”

  “Did you go, too?” Diego asked.

  She shook her head. “The soldiers were told to leave behind their country wives and children. Mama and I returned to the cloud land.” Her voice hardened. She looked at Toshua. “That was where the Kwahadi Great Owl and his warriors found us nine years later, along with horses.” She turned that same look on Diego Diaz, a look so hard that Marco was grateful he had done nothing except rescue her. “If it wasn’t Comanche raiders, we could count on New Mexican traders to do the same thing. The Utes of the cloud land were greatly weakened by smallpox, and we were preyed upon.”

  “How long were you with the Kwahadi?” Marco asked.

  Her long, long sigh told him all he needed to know; he wished he hadn’t asked. “Four years,” she said. “How is it that time can go so slowly?”

  “And your mother?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “She was big with child and could not keep up. They violated her and killed her.”

  “I saw something like that once,” Diego whispered. “A baby ripped out and stuffed back in, once the men had finished with the mother.” He got up and left the circle.

  “Not so tough as he looks,” Toshua commented. “All that beard and stink hides a younger man, I would wager.”

  Graciela nodded. She looked from Marco to Toshua, and lip pointed to Diego. “Tell me now: which of you is it to be tonight? All three?”

  She swallowed and looked so brave that Marco’s heart cracked around the edges.

  “None of us,” he said softly. “I told you, I bought you for my wife and children, and because I didn’t want you to die. You will help my wife, because she is with child again. If I know her, and I believe I do, Señora Mondragón will teach you how to manage a household, as well. I can promise you your freedom and a small dowry someday so you can marry, if you will help her now.”

  Graciela’s eyes filled with tears. “No man will mount me?”

  “Not unless it’s your idea, too.” Marco swallowed his own tears, thinking how badly things could have gone for his beloved wives, because women had so little say about anything. “I expect him to be an honorable man, whoever he might be.”

  “It will never be my idea,” she muttered.

  “People change, Graciela,” he said. “Let us leave it at that. You have heard my conditions.”

  She said nothing. Marco sensed that she wanted to trust him, but trust wasn’t in her yet; he could tell that from the bleakness in her eyes.

  “All I require is that you help my wife and children,” he repeated. “If you prefer field work, I have no objections. Perhaps you can help the beekeeper. Sí o no?”

  “I will help la señora,” Graciela whispered. She reached for Marco’s hand and kissed it.

  “Very well,” he said, relieved that he would not come home empty-handed to Paloma. “You will come to love my wife; everyone does.”

  “Will I?”

  Marco looked around to see Diego standing there quietly.

  “You, señor, will be at the Double Cross long enough to receive money for your horses and the inn,” Marco said firmly. So you are a cheeky fellow? he thought. I shall tell you what I think. “I can tell you this, Señor Diaz: strong smells are a little hard for my wife right now. I doubt you will even see her.”

  Diego stared at him, then started to laugh. “I deserved that,” he said, finally. He pulled out another odiferous blanket from his bedroll, wrapped it around himself, and lay down to sleep. Marco just shook his head.

  “I’ll watch first,” Toshua said. “I also believe we should rise well before dawn and take up our journey. Great Owl and his men are in front of us, and I would rather put them behind us.”

  “So would I,” Marco said.

  Toshua shook him awake hours later, sitting back on his haunches. He looked at Marco as a cat might, patient and intent.

  “Is it my shift?” Marco whispered.

  “I let you sleep. It is time to ride now,” Toshua said.

  “That’s not how we were supposed to do this. You would take a shift and I would take a shift.”

  “You said what you thought, and I did what I wanted.”

  Marco laughed softly. “Toshua, do you ever obey an order?”

  “Not too often.” It was Toshua’s turn to laugh. “Maybe not at all. Let us ride.”

  They rode until daylight, taking a different trail home, this one skirting the more frequently traveled route and heading through a high pass Marco did not know. They traveled higher and higher, crested the top and started down, all before the sun was up. No one spoke.

  Graciela sucked in her breath a few times when she sensed the narrowness of the trail, with its steep drop to a river far below, but she did not call out. Marco didn’t know whether to credit her forbearance to the harsh school of life among The People, or to her own upbringing among the Spanish and then the Cloud People. He knew Paloma would tease out whatever information they needed about the young woman.

  “You impress me,” was all he said, when they finally dismounted for a rest and the remainder of Diego’s tortillas.

  She gave him a pleased smile, and then turned her head away, embarrassed. “I was afraid.”

  “So was I. I am not a friend of heights.”

  She pointed to Toshua. “I will wager he wasn’t afraid.”

  “I will never ask,” Marco joked.

  It must have been just the right touch, because the high lift to Graciela’s shoulders relaxed. She hopped down from the beautiful bay and led him toward the stream close by.

  She came back quickly, minus the horse, her face flaming red.

  “Is something wrong?” Marco asked.

  She put her hand to her mouth. “I think Señor Diaz took to heart your comment last night. He’s ….” She pointed, her eyes lively, which turned her almost pretty, despite her ragged deerskin dress and thin body.

  Curious now, Marco led his horse toward the water and watched, startled and then amused, as Diego, naked and shivering in the early-morning cold, rubbed his dirty arms with sand.

  The trader’s back was to Marco, and he saw the long scars, the kind that come from lashes with a whip, and an old, puckered scar on his side that looked like a wound from a lance—Comanche or Spanish, perhaps. Traders performed a balancing act between savagery and civilization, and hadn’t Diego himself pointed out that he tri
ed to avoid jueces de campo such as Marco?

  “Do you think he will tell us his stories?” Toshua asked.

  The Comanche had come to the stream to wash his hands, bloody from preparing the rabbit he had snared last night. Clad only in his loincloth again, he squatted by the stream and washed.

  I doubt we will ever know much, Marco thought, even as he wondered where the blue-eyed trader had come from. Marco had no cause to ask. He would give the man his money, feed him a meal or two, then wave goodbye to him at the gate of the Double Cross, as a good host should. Diego Diaz would melt back into the countryside, probably to join up with his equally disreputable compadres. End of story, business done.

  “Are you through with your shirt, Toshua?” Marco asked.

  Toshua dried his hands on his loincloth. “Until the next time you make me wear it.”

  “Give me your shirt and I’ll give it to Diego. He’s a little taller than you are, but it has long tails. More to the point, it’s relatively clean.”

  Toshua nodded and walked back up the bank with Marco. Graciela was on her haunches by the little fire that burned with no smoke. She had pushed several strips of rabbit onto a green stick and was expertly turning it over the flames, close enough to cook, but not too close to burn.

  “She knows what she is doing,” Toshua said. “I hadn’t even built the fire yet.”

  He removed his cotton shirt from the parfleche and handed it to Marco. Tucking it under one arm, Marco walked to the fire, welcoming what small warmth it gave off, because the morning chill had not yet burned away. He thought of Diego washing himself, grateful that when he got home Paloma would have a hot bath and clean clothes ready. If he was lucky—and he thought he would be since this was Paloma—she would probably even pat him dry. And since it was still Paloma, he knew he could anticipate a pleasant time in their bed, doing what made babies. Not for him, the life of a trader.

  “Here, lad, it’s cleaner,” he said after he returned to the bank, where Diego was just standing there wet, because he had no towel. Like a dog, he shook his wet hair, and the drops flew.