Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

  Finally Ahumado stood up and motioned for Tudwal to bring the prisoner. Tudwal cut the throngs that bound Three Birds' ankles and helped him to his feet. Ahumado led them to the base of one of the high cliffso, where there was a big pit. Tudwal led Three Birds to the edge of the pit and pointed down. In the bottom Three Birds could see several rattlesnakes and also a rat or two.

  "You can't see the scorpions and spiders but there are many down there," Tudwal said. "Every day the women go out and turn over rocks, to find more scorpions and spiders for the pit." Without a ^w Ahumado turned toward the cliff and began to climb up a narrow trail of steps cut into the rock. The trail led higher and higher, toward the top of the cliff.

  Ahumado climbed the trail quite easily, but Three Birds, because his hands were bound, had some trouble. He could not use the handholds Ahumado used, and Tudwal. Because of his difficulty with the steps Tudwal began to insult him.

  "You are not much of a climber," he said.

  "Ahumado is old but he is already almost to the top of the cliff." That was true. Ahumado had already disappeared above them. Three Birds tried to ignore Tudwal. He concentrated on making his feet go up the trail. He had never been so high before.

  In his country, the beautiful country of the plains, even birds did not fly as high as he was being asked to climb. It seemed to him he was as high as the clouds--only it was a clear evening, with no clouds. Behind him Tudwal grew impatient with Three Birds' slow climbing. He began to poke him with a knife. Three Birds tried to ignore the knife, though soon both his legs were bloody. Finally he reached the top of the cliff.

  The Black Vaquero was standing there, waiting. The climb had taken so long that the sky was red with sunset. When Three Birds reached the top he found that his lungs were hurting. There didn't seem to be much air atop the old man's Yellow Cliffs.

  Around him there was distance, though--a great distance, with the peaks of the Sierra Perdida, reddened by sunset, stretching as far away as he could see.

  Three Birds was so high he wasn't quite sure he was still on the earth. It seemed to him he had climbed into the country of the birds--the birds for which he was named. He was in the country of the eagles--it was no wonder he could hardly find air to breathe.

  Near the edge of the cliff, not far away, there were four posts stuck in the ground, with ropes going from the posts over the edge of the cliff. Nearby four men, as dark as Ahumado, were squatting by a little fire. Ahumado made a motion and the dark men went to the first post and began to pull on the rope.

  Suddenly, as the dark men pulled, Three Birds heard a loud beating of wings and several great vultures swirled up over the edge of the cliff, almost into their faces. One of the vultures, with a red strip of meat in its mouth, flapped so close to Three Birds that he could have touched it.

  Three Birds was wondering why the strange old man and his skinny pistolero had brought him so high on the cliff, but he did not have to wonder long, for the dark men pulled a cage made of mesquite branches tightly lashed together onto the top of the cliff. It was not a large cage. The dead man in it had not much room, while he was alive, but the vultures could easily get their heads through and eat the dead man, little by little. The man's bones were still together but a lot of him was eaten. There was not much left of the man, who had been small, like the dark men who raised the cage. As soon as the cage was on solid ground the dark men opened it and quickly pitched what was left of the stinking corpse over the cliff.

  Now Three Birds knew why they had brought him to the top of the cliff. They were going to put him in a cage and hang him off the cliff. He walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. There were three more cages, dangling below him.

  "There is a vaquero down there who is still alive," Tudwal said. "We only put him in two weeks ago. A strong man, if he is quick, can stay alive a month, in the cages." "Why does he need to be quick, if he is in a cage?" Three Birds asked.

  "Quick, or he don't eat," Tudwal said.

  "Pigeons light on the cages. If the man inside is quick he can catch birds to eat. We had a card sharp once who lasted nearly two months--he was quick with his hands." Old Ahumado walked over then. He did not smile.

  "The cage or the pit?" he asked. "The snakes or the birds?" "If I were you I would take the pit," Tudwal said. "It's warmer down there. There's some big rats you could eat, if they don't eat you first. Or you could eat a snake." Three Birds was watching the dusk fill up the canyons to the south. He felt he was in the sky, where the spirits lived. Perhaps the spirits of his wife and children were not far away, or the spirits of his parents and grandparents, all dead from the shitting sickness. They were all in the high air somewhere, where he was. It might even be that Kicking Wolf was dead, in which case his spirit would be near.

  "Choose," Ahumado said. "It is almost dark. It is a long way back down to the pit, if you want the pit." "Don't you have a better cage to put me in?" Three Birds asked. "This is a filthy cage. It has parts of that dead man sticking to it.

  I don't think I will be comfortable in such a filthy cage." Tudwal was astonished. He gave a nervous laugh.

  "It is the only cage we have," he said.

  "Maybe it will rain and wash away some of that blood." "It isn't the only cage you have," Three Birds pointed out, in a calm reasonable voice. "There are three more cages down there. You showed them to me." "They are full," Tudwal said. "There's that vaquero who's still alive, and two dead men." "You could throw the dead men out," Three Birds pointed out. "Maybe one of those cages would be cleaner." There was silence on the cliff. Tudwal was disconcerted. What did this Comanche think he was doing? It was crazy to bargain with Ahumado--it would only cause him to think up something worse to do to the prisoner.

  "He doesn't like our cage," Ahumado said. "Take him back down. We'll let Goyeto skin him." Before Tudwal could reach him Three Birds took two quick steps, to the very edge of the cliff.

  In only a second he could put himself beyond the reach of the old torturer and his blinking henchman.

  He only had to step backwards and he would be gone forever, into the fine air where the spirits lived.

  For a while he would fly, like the birds he was named after; then he would be where the spirits were, without having wasted any time in the dirty pit or the filthy cage. Three Birds had always been a clean man; he was glad they had brought him to a high place, where the air was clean. In a moment he would go backward, into his final home in the air, but he wanted to speak to Ahumado and his henchman before he left them.

  "You are stupid men," he said. "A child could fool you. Now Big Horse Scull is coming, and he is not a child. I imagine he will kill you both, and then you will not be skinning people and putting them in cages." Three Birds saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the dark men sneaking toward him along the cliff edge. The man was short, so short he must have thought no one could see him. But Three Birds saw him and decided he had lectured the two bandits long enough--somewhere behind him in the air, the spirits hovered, like doves. He began to cry out his death song and stepped backward off the cliff.

  When Kicking Wolf came to he was almost too weak to move. The tight bonds made his limbs numb and his eyes were strange. Not far away he saw a horse that appeared to be two horses and a cactus bush that seemed to be two cactus bushes. The horse was Three Birds' horse, the one he had been tied to. It was only one horse, and yet, when Kicking Wolf looked at it, it became two, and the one bush became two.

  Some witch had distorted his vision so that he saw two things when there was only one. It must have been Ahumado or someone who worked for him.

  Then he saw that the rope that had bound him to the horse had been cut. To his surprise, near his head, he saw Scull's footprint, a footprint he had often seen while he was following the rangers, before he stole the Buffalo Horse. Scull must have been the one who cut him loose, another puzzling thing.

  Kicking Wolf's tongue was thick with thirst.

  When he sat up the world turned around
. Three Birds' horse was still two horses, but the two horses were not far away. Kicking Wolf knew that if he could free himself he could catch the horse and ride it to water. There must be water nearby, else the horse would not have stayed.

  Because of his thick tongue it took him a long time to chew through the bonds on his wrists. It was dark when the rawhide finally parted.

  The vaqueros who had roped him had not taken his quiver--there were no arrows in it, so they had left it. But in the bottom of the quiver was a small flint arrowhead that had broken off one of his arrows.

  With the arrowhead he was able to cut quickly through the rawhide that bound his ankles. Flies were stinging him all over his body, where the skin had been taken off in the dragging. All he could do about the flies was throw sand on himself to cover the skinned areas. He found he could not hold his head up straight, either. Something had made his neck so sore that he had to keep his head tipped to one side or else a violent pain shot through him.

  When it became dark Kicking Wolf felt a little less confused. In the dark he could not see two of everything. He made his way slowly to where the two horses that were one horse had been grazing and when he got there one of the horses melted into the other. As soon as he mounted, the horse went trotting north. Kicking Wolf found that the riding made him sick--it also made violent pains shoot through his head, but he did not stop and attempt to recover a little. He was still in the country of the Black Vaquero--in his weakness he would be easy to catch if Ahumado sent his men back after him. He remembered Three Birds, who had gallantly come with him to Mexico, although he had no business there. Probably Three Birds was being tortured, but Kicking Wolf knew there was nothing he could do about it. The pains shooting through his own head were as violent as torture. He had to slow the horse to a walk or he would have passed out. In such condition he could not go back to the Yellow Canyon and try to save his friend. Perhaps, later, he could go back with many warriors and avenge him--even Buffalo Hump might join such a war party. He would not like it that the old man had tortured Three Birds to death.

  He might want to ride to the Yellow Cliffso and do some torturing himself.

  Near morning the horse found water, a little trickling spring high in some rocks. The pool was only a few feet across but it was good water.

  Kicking Wolf let the horse drink and then tethered him securely. Then he lay down in the water and let it wash his wounds. It stung but it cleaned him. He drank a little, and then drank more, until his tongue became the right size again.

  He wanted to sleep by the little pool, but was afraid to. Ahumado's men would know of the water hole. They might catch him there. He rested an hour, let the horse drink, and then rode on through the day. It was sunny; he began, again, to see two things that were one. He saw a deer running and the deer became two deer. Kicking Wolf knew a bad witch must have made his eyes untrustworthy.

  The pain in his neck and head was still violent, but he kept riding. He wanted to get back across the Rio Grande. Besides the pain in his head there was also a sadness in his heart. He had had too much pride and because of it Three Birds was lost. Everyone had told him that his plan was folly; even a foolish man such as Slipping Weasel, who did stupid things every day, had been wise enough to warn him against taking the Buffalo Horse to Mexico. But he had done it, for his pride--but his pride had cost his friend's life and he would have to go home humbled and shamed. Ahumado had taken the Buffalo Horse, the great horse of the Texans, as if he had been given a donkey. He had not acknowledged Kicking Wolf's courage, or anything else. Even courage, the courage of a great warrior, didn't matter to the Black Vaquero.

  It occurred to Kicking Wolf, as he rode north, that the problem with his eyes might not be the work of a bad witch; it might be the work of his own medicine man, Worm. The old spirits might have spoken to Worm and told him that Kicking Wolf had shamed the tribe by his insistence on taking the Buffalo Horse to Ahumado. The old spirits would know what happened to Three Birds--the old spirits knew such things. They might have come to Worm in a vision and insisted that he work a spell to punish this haughty man, Kicking Wolf. Because he had had too much pride, Worm might have made a spell to change his eyes so that they could never see accurately again. Always he might see two where there was one.

  Kicking Wolf didn't know. His head hurt, his friend was lost, and he had many days of riding before he got home. When he got home--if he did--no one would sing for him, either.

  Even so, Kicking Wolf wanted to be home.

  He wanted to see Worm. Maybe he was wrong about the old spirits. Maybe it was one of Ahumado's witches who had made the trouble in his eyes. Maybe Worm could cure him so that, once again, he would only see what was there.

  When Scull awoke Hickling Prescott was on his mind and the smell of cooking meat was in his nostrils. His mother, a Ticknor, had been a childhood friend of the great historian, whose house stood only a block down the hill from the great Georgian town house where Inish Scull had grown up. The world knew the man as William Hickling Prescott, of course, but Scull's mother had always called him "Hickling." As Inish Scull was leaving for the Mexican War he had gone by to pay his respects to the old man, then blind and mostly deaf. It was well to know your history when going off to battle, Scull believed, and certainly his mother's friend, Hickling Prescott, knew as much about the history of Mexico as anyone in Boston--or in America, for that matter. To Hickling Prescott, of course, Boston .was America --z much of it, at least, as he cared to acknowledge.

  Twice before, during the few weeks he had spent in Boston, Scull had made the mistake of taking Inez along when visiting the old man. But Hickling Prescott didn't approve of Inez. Although he couldn't see or hear and wasn't expected to feel, somehow Inez's determined carnality had impressed itself on the historian, who was not charmed. He didn't believe the sons of Boston should marry women from the South--and yet, to his annoyance, not a few sons of Boston did just that.

  "Why, the South's just that riffraff John Smith brought over, Mr. Scull," the old man said. "Your wife smells like a Spanish harlot. I sat next to her at dinner at Quincy Adams's and I smelled her. Our Boston women don't smell--at least they smell very rarely. The Oglethorpes were low bred, you know, quite low bred." "Well, sir, Inez is not an Oglethorpe, but I admit she can produce an odor once in a while," Inish said.

  "There are several appealing misses right here in Boston," Hickling Prescott informed him crisply. "I hardly think you needed to root around in that Oglethorpe bunch just to find a wife." He sighed. "But it's done, I suppose," he said.

  "It's done, Mr. Prescott," Inish admitted. "And now I'm off to Mexico, to the fight." "Have you read my book?" the old man asked.

  "Every ^w," Inish assured him. "I intend to reread it on the boat." "The Oglethorpes produced many fine whores," old Prescott said. "But, as I said, it's done. Now I'm working on Peru, and that isn't done." "I'm sure it will be masterly, when it comes," Inish said.

  ""Magisterial,"' I would have said," old Prescott corrected, sipping a little cold tea. "I don't expect we'll have to fight Peru, at least not in my time, and I have no advice to offer if we do." "It's Mexico we're fighting, sir," Inish reminded him.

  There was a silence in the great dim room, whose windows were hung with black drapes. Inish realized he had misspoken. William Hickling Prescott no doubt knew who the nation was about to go to war with.

  "It was reading your great book that made me want to join this war," Inish told him, anxious to make up for his slip. "If I might say so, your narrative stirs great chords in a man.

  Heroism--strife--the city of Mexico.

  Victory despite great odds. The few against the many. Death, glory, sacrifice." The historian was silent for a moment.

  "Yes, there was that," he said dryly. "But this one won't be that way, Mr. Scull. All you'll find is dust and beans. I do wish you hadn't married that Southern woman. What was her name, now?" "Dolly," Inish reminded him. "And I believe her people came over with Mr. Penn." "Oh, t
hat hypocrite," the historian said.

  "It must have been a great sorrow to your mother--yr marriage, that is. I miss your mother. She was my childhood friend, though the Ticknors in general are rather a distressing lot. Your ma got all the shine in that family, Mr. Scull." "That she did," Inish agreed.

  There were no black drapes in the stony canyon where Scull had awakened, thinking of Hickling Prescott. The walls of the canyon were pale yellow, like the winter sunlight. Scull had slept without a fire and awoke stiff and shivering. On such a morning a little of Inez's unapologetic carnality would not have been unwelcome.

  Of course, he was in Mexico, whose conquest Hickling Prescott had chronicled so vividly. Cort@es and his few men had captured a country and broken a civilization.

  When Scull had gone to the old man's house on the eve of his departure for the war, he had meant to probe a little, to get the old man's thoughts on events which he probably understood as well as any living man. But the old man had been indifferent, opaque; what he knew was in his book and he did not see the point in repeating it to the young man.