Comanche Dawn

by Mike Blakely

  Pulling himself up by the mane of his mount, he let his soul leap from the body of the pony. He rode high, watching the Yutas for more arrows. He beheld, spread upon the plains to the east, a sight so glorious that it almost looked like a vision.

  He had ridden into the valley of the shadow of the Breasts of Mother Earth. As he made the northern curve of his sacred circle, heading east, the dark shade of the two mountains stretched far to the eastern horizon and forever beyond. Horseback’s own shadow was long now before him, like that of a giant spirit-warrior. He raised his arms and screamed his battle song as the enemy passed by to his right. Ahead, his own party of searchers waited in the orange light for his return and the closing of the sacred circle.

  His enemies, his friends, the plains, the grass, himself, his shadow, his horse—they all stood in a swath of rich reddish-yellow light as Father Sun kissed Mother Earth between her breasts. And now the circle closed, and Horseback was powerful, and everyone under the gaze of Father Sun knew this, including the Yutas. A warrior rode out from the party of enemies, as Horseback rejoined the searchers.

  “One comes to talk,” Shaggy Hump said.

  Horseback left the searchers once again to meet this warrior halfway between the two parties. Approaching the Yuta rider, he counted three kill feathers whipping behind the warrior’s head.

  Bad Camper rode close enough that Horseback might have struck with his lance. Instead, he raised a hand in friendship and addressed Bad Camper, saying, “Brother of my father’s second wife.” But he said this in his own tongue, so that Bad Camper would not understand.

  “You have ridden far from your own country,” Bad Camper replied.

  “As I must. I obey my great vision. We wish to cross your country. We wear no paint on our faces. Our horses wear no feathers in their tails. Our arrow points carry no barbs.”

  Bad Camper studied Horseback for a long moment, then glanced at the party of searchers. “I know what you seek. I have been to that place to trade. The white men will not trade their ponies.”

  “I know little of white men. I have seen only one. He was ugly, his face covered with hair and his head bald. If they trade, that is good. If they do not, it is like wind through the grass to me. I only go there to obey my vision.”

  The sun plunged beyond the west, leaving both warriors in the shadow of the earth. The air was growing cool so quickly that they could feel it. This was a poor time to fight.

  “Do you carry a good lodge on the pole-drag behind that pony?” Bad Camper asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We must raise it in a sacred manner. I have tobacco. We will smoke a truce, and you will cross my country with me to the villages of the white men.”

  When Bad Camper turned back to his party, Horseback let his mouth spread wide in a smile. He felt his power growing stronger. Sound-the-Sun-Makes had surely blessed this journey. Scarcely now could he hear the voice of his naming father, Spirit Talker, warning of destruction that great medicine could bring.

  PART II

  Metal Men

  New Mexico, 1705

  29

  Jean L’Archeveque emerged from his bedroom, struggling with the silk scarf and the silver pin he used to fix it under his chin. It was not his everyday garb. He preferred his flared riding pants, cotton shirt, and leather jacket to all this silk and puffery.

  Entering the sala, he found the Pueblo servant girl, Tia, dusting the copper candlesticks with a strip of fleece; She looked at him, smiled, and laid the fleece aside to help him with the scarf. She was a willing servant. Especially in bed, he thought, remembering last night.

  “You look like a king,” Tia said.

  “I feel like a fool. Look at these ridiculous sleeves.” He shook the huge billows of cloth on either arm as Tia pinned the scarf for him. “A man could store a month’s provisions in there.”

  She laughed dutifully. “Where are you going, so fancy?”

  “I dine at the Casas Reales tonight, with Capitán Lujan, Fray Ugarte, and Governor Del Bosque himself.”

  “It is my pleasure to serve such an important master,” Tia said, playfully smoothing the spotless white blouse Jean L’Archeveque saved for important occasions.

  He smiled at her briefly, but only with one side of his mouth. “Are the boys in bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they say their prayers?”

  “They didn’t want to, but I made them.”

  “I hope they prayed for their father’s soul, for I am tempted by such a wicked servant girl.” He led Tia to the door that opened out into the placita, and gave her rear a swat with his palm as he sent her outside. “Have Paniagua saddle the stallion.”

  “Whatever you wish,” she said, dancing away across the placita, her eyes glinting back at him.

  A small tarnished mirror hung beside the door, suspended from a peg sticking out of the adobe wall. He peered into it to see what kind of job Tia had done with the scarf. “You damn Frenchmen are all alike,” he said to himself, exaggerating his acquired Spanish accent. “Lascivious rascals.” He chuckled as he fluffed the silk. Then he found his own eyes in the mirror, and his smile slipped away like the cold plunge of an avalanche down a mountainside.

  He didn’t often notice the tattoos after all these years, but sometimes they startled him when he looked at his own reflection, for he might not even have thought of them in weeks. The lines like black bloodstains dripping from the corners of his mouth might have been hidden by a beard, but nothing could conceal the dark mask around his eyes. He knew that when he blinked, the tattooed eyelids flashed like dark and empty sockets, handy for scattering pesky children or striking fear into the hearts of superstitious peons. Still, there were times when he wished he could just wash his face and see nothing but clean flesh.

  The tattoos also tended to have a negative effect on Jean’s matrimonial aspirations. There were not many eligible women at this remote outpost of civilization to begin with, and although Jean L’Archeveque increasingly became a man of substance in the so-called Kingdom of New Mexico, not many young brides-to-be cared to spend enough time with the tattooed widower to begin to see beyond his bizarre countenance.

  In the mirror, over his shoulder, he saw the portrait of his late wife hanging on the sala wall. Some of the superstitious peons and Indian servants were afraid of this portrait, especially Paniagua, the stable man, who said, “The eyes, they follow me when I go across the room. The soul, she lives in that wall!”

  But Jean knew the poor fool was wrong. Maria was gone, body and soul. Her laughter, her temper, her warmth, her impatience, her scent, her caress, her lust for love and life. Gone, gone, gone. He was still in love with her, though she had been five years in the grave. She was gone now longer than they had been married, for they had shared only three years together. Their two sons looked less like her every day, for they were growing up, looking more like tough little boys and therefore less like their sweet Spanish mother. With Maria, Jean had never thought about his tattoos.

  He considered it likely that he might never find another woman to marry, certainly he would not have another like Maria. Not that he lacked for female companionship. There was Tia, after all, and a couple of prostitutes he visited in Santa Fe now and then, and the occasional serving wench of some friend or trading partner. Women of the lower classes were often attracted by the tattoos. As for matrimonial prospects of proper social standing however, the outlook remained one of gloom.

  He placed his knuckles on the rough pine table carved by an Indio novice at the mission and leaned closer to the old mirror, making his eyelids droop sleepily. “Damn tattoos,” he muttered. But now Jean L’Archeveque remembered his dinner with the governor and drew upon his French bearing to bolster his spirits. “Stop whining,” he said, chastising himself. “Count yourself lucky. You have two handsome sons, a fine hacienda. You had no choice about the tattoos. You have survived where a hundred others did not.”

  This last was an understatement, f
or the death toll of the La Salle expedition had been 135 when Jean lost count. He had been a mere youth of thirteen when he first met the great world explorer, the Sieur de La Salle, on the West Indies island of Espanola, at the port of Petit-Goave. The Sieur de La Salle had anchored there, Jean’s home village, to make final preparations for his next expedition onto the wild continent of the New World. Oh, the stories told about the world explorer in the old pirate town of Petit-Goave. Jean and his young friends would follow the great man around the docks and the stores and warehouses, fascinated just to be in his presence.

  La Salle let it be known in Petit-Goave that his purpose was to sail past Spain’s Cuba, into the Gulf of Mexico, and thence to the mouth of the Colbert River, which he sometimes called the Messipe, after the name he had learned from savages. To young Jean’s amazement, it was told that La Salle had once floated all the way down this great wild river from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. From Canada! A place so far away in young Jean’s imagination that it had made his thoughts swirl like hurricane winds. The idea that La Salle had sailed to Petit-Goave from France was not so mind-boggling, for this was commonly done. But, Canada!

  Once he sailed to the mouth of the Messipe with this new expedition, La Salle intended to establish a fort and forge a new French colony, taking possession of the mainland for the crown of France. Anyone joining the colony would enjoy the ownership of immeasurable tracts of land, the protection of French soldiers, the full support of the crown, and the blessing of the Jesuit brotherhood. And though La Salle himself did not promise it, there were rumors of riches on the mainland: gold and silver, pearls and furs. Bursting with a boyish desire for adventure, young Jean L’Archeveque had joined the expedition.

  The 180 colonists—most of them illiterate French peasants—sailed on four ships: the La Belle, the Amiable, the St. François, and the Joly. They carried horses, seeds for crops, tools, weapons, and kegs of gunpowder. From the beginning, disaster seemed to descend upon them like a gull on fish bait. The Sieur de La Salle would not admit it, but he could not find the mouth of the Messipe. Goupil, mapmaker for the expedition, explained this to Jean with a length of hemp line, the end of which had become frayed.

  “The mouth of such a great river is like this rope unbraiding,” Goupil said, schooling Jean in the shade of the mainsail, “and so it issues into the sea in many tiny threads, any one of which resembles no more than a brook to a passing vessel.”

  Finally, the expedition sailed into an uncharted bay and began building Fort St. Louis on the banks of some small river, obviously not the great Messipe Jean had heard so much about. While the planting and building continued, La Salle took the ablest men back out to sea on the La Belle to search for the big river. The Joly sailed for France with a skeleton crew. A storm ran the Amiable aground, though her timbers were salvaged to use in building the fort. Pirates stole the St. François. Now, unless La Salle returned with the bark called La Belle, the colonists would be stranded.

  More ill fortune beset the colony. Two men drowned—one trying to retrieve a skiff that had drifted into the bay, the other getting tangled while gathering in fishing nets. Another was killed and eaten by a huge alligator. Some children, friends and playmates of Jean, were carried away by painted savages within site of the fort. Some hunters were murdered by natives shooting arrows from ambush. Another was gored to death by a wounded buffalo. Then the fever struck, and the death toll began to mount in earnest.

  Oh, the misery. Jean had not seen the likes of it before or since, and prayed every night that he never would. Even here, almost twenty years later, in his comfortable hacienda situated in the high, healthy climate of Santa Fe, in the Kingdom of New Mexico, he could still hear the moaning of the sick and smell the stench of death along that dank, mosquito-ridden coastline of brackish water and slime pits.

  They died daily—men, women, and children—while others fell sick, taking to their beds. Whole families perished, member by member. A man strong enough one day to pack a hundred pounds of buffalo meat on his back would awake the next day unable to stand, vomiting blood, moaning in agony. A few—very few—survived the high fever and recovered. Most died within days.

  One day, a lone member of the La Belle crew returned to Fort St. Louis: a peculiar little man named Minime, La Salle’s personal valet. To the distress of the colonists, Minime reported that the La Belle had run aground. Many of the horses had drowned. The Sieur de La Salle and his men had gone overland to the northeast, still searching for the Messipe. Minime had become separated from the party and had wandered back after many days of harrowing travel. Goupil, the mapmaker, suspected that Minime had deserted, but the valet claimed to have become lost accidentally, returning to the fort under great peril.

  Minime was a rude little buffoon whom Goupil despised. Minime’s childishness repulsed even Jean, who was hardly more than a child himself. Constantly twitching and jerking and making grotesque faces, Minime considered himself quite the jester, and unfortunately, many of the colonists encouraged his rude foolishness.

  In Goupil’s presence, Minime was forever convulsing and twisting, his eyes rolling horribly back and eyelids fluttering, choking and spitting froth, writhing on the ground like a dying snake. Jean could tell the fool did this only to antagonize Goupil. One day, he asked the mapmaker why Minime always acted the fool in his presence.

  “I once suffered from the falling sickness,” Goupil said. “I would have fits. Minime witnessed my suffering more than once on our previous voyages with the Sieur de La Salle. He mocks me, though I am cured now. A surgeon in Paris opened my skull and removed part of my brain. I haven’t had a fit since, but Minime continues to torment me. He calls me ‘Sieur Hole-in-the-Head.’”

  During the voyage from Petit-Goave, Jean had seen the Sieur de La Salle beat his valet for such displays, but afterward Minime would only laugh, then hop about crying, “Ouch! Oh, mercy! Ouch, ouch!” in the most convincing manner, as if still enduring the beating, though the Sieur de La Salle had already gone away. Then he would laugh again and go on with his mocking.

  Once, Jean saw Minime strut up to Goupil, shouting, “Sieur Hole-in-the-Head, I have completed my inventory of the storehouse!” This at the very top of his lungs.

  “Don’t scream,” said Goupil, maintaining his composure in the face of the fool.

  “I won’t!” screamed Minime. “I will not!” His voice became maniacal. “I will not scream!”

  Goupil’s dignity in the face of such mockery made Jean admire him. He was a good man, a hard worker. The mapmaker schooled Jean in reading and writing, and tried to ease the suffering of others in the fort. Aside from Father Membre, Jean admired Goupil more than any other personage in the colony.

  But it was still Father Membre who had earned Jean’s highest admiration for solitary devotion to duty after the death of Father Desmanville. As the fever continued to consume the bodies of the afflicted, Father Membre stayed with them day and night, bathing them, feeding the few who could eat, praying over them, comforting in any way he could. They were friends: Goupil, the mapmaker; Membre, the priest; and Jean L’Archeveque, the young adventurer. The two older men served as the youth’s mentors in the terrible surrounds of Fort St. Louis. Their influence stayed with Jean even now, almost twenty years later.

  Despite the efforts of Goupil and Membre, the cemetery outside the log palisades of the fort began to grow. Daily, friends and relatives of the departed would go to the graveyard to wail and mourn. Their piteous cries served only to depress Jean all the more. He did not understand the convulsing when it began, but Goupil explained it to him.

  “It started with Fleury,” Goupil said. “Fleury had the fever. He threw himself on the grave of Father Desmanville, hoping for a miracle. Strange to say, he rose and began to improve. In a few days, he had recovered. Hearing this, others began to fall on the grave to rub themselves in the dirt. They grovel in the dirt daily, and their writhings become more and more extreme. Minime mocks them, vicious scoundre
l that he is!”

  Goupil termed them “convulsionaries.” Every evening, Jean would watch them squirm in the dirt of the cemetery as Minime mimicked their antics. Then, one day, as Minime mocked and chided the convulsionaries, a seizure struck him. At first, Jean thought the buffoon was only tormenting Goupil again, as the mapmaker also looked on from the fort palisades. But the twitching and choking went on longer than any of Minime’s former travesties. The dumbstruck convulsionaries gathered around as Minime’s contortions continued in the dirt of the cemetery. His whole body would arch so violently that he would lift completely from the ground. Those gathered around him began to kneel and pray. Some began to convulse with Minime, so desperate were they for miracles.

  After almost an hour, Minime’s convulsions stopped. Recovering, he seemed strangely subdued and frightened. The incident only swelled the ranks of the convulsionaries, for many colonists considered Minime’s fit an act of God. Minime emerged as a leader among the convulsionaries, and their ceremonies became more violent. They began whipping and beating each other, to “triumph with Christ through suffering,” they chanted.

  During the height of this convulsionary fervor, the Sieur de La Salle returned with only nineteen of the fifty men who had sailed with him on the ill-fated La Belle. Eleven had died of disease. Several had drowned in the bay. One had been eaten by an alligator while crossing a river. The others had become lost, or had deserted, or had been murdered by savages.

  After sleeping a whole day, La Salle awoke and took charge of the fort. Once he had witnessed their antics, he banned the convulsionaries from further assembly and had a fence built around the graveyard to keep them out. Then he put the colonists to work cutting and hauling timbers to be used in building a new storehouse.

  The commander’s return seemed to give new purpose to the colony at first. A few days after his return, however, Goupil said to Jean, “My young friend, I am afraid for us all. The Sieur de La Salle has changed. I feared this before, but since his return I am sure. His mind is touched. One day he is the leader I followed down the great Messipe on the last voyage. The next day he is mad.”