Ride the Wind

  For an hour they swayed in the moonlight, circling, rising, and gliding to the hypnotic beat of the drums. The beat surrounded them and permeated them like the heartbeat of Mother Earth. Naduah danced with her hands on his hard shoulders and her eyes closed. Perhaps he was only being kind to her, to his little sister. But if she should die right then, this night would have made life worthwhile.

  "I don't want to get married." Naduah sat stubbornly against the bedstead. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her mouth was set in the stubborn Parker line.

  "Naduah, he is a chief. He will give you many things. It's an honor for him to ask you." Sunrise had given up and Medicine Woman was trying to talk reason into her granddaughter's head.

  Naduah didn't want Wanderer to marry anyone else. But the thought of marrying him herself terrified her. It had taken her years to reach the point where she was comfortable with him as a friend, an older brother. Now they expected her to rush into marriage with him. It was preposterous. Besides, she couldn't believe he really wanted her. She'd convinced herself otherwise.

  "He'll take me away from you. He'll always be in council or on the war trail. He'll take six other wives and have no time for me."

  "You'll be lucky if he has six wives," put in Takes Down. "There'll tie less work for you to do."

  "I won't marry him."

  It was unheard of. Sunrise shook his head in puzzlement. She couldn't refuse. He had made an agreement with Wanderer seven years ago. But Sunrise had learned from past experience that Naduah was as impossible to intimidate as a boy. He tried one more time to persuade her.

  "We'll visit you often."

  "Will you move to the Staked Plains with me?"

  "No. Our place is here with my mother and her brother."

  "And so is mine. How can I leave you and Pia and Kaku? Who will help Takes Down with all the work around here? Who will gather herbs for Grandmother? Star Name and Something Good and little Weasel and all my friends are here. I don't know anyone among the Quohadi. I'll be lonely. I won't go."

  Sunrise sighed and went out into the night. If Wanderer wanted her, he would have to persuade her himself.

  Naduah awoke with a start when a hand clamped tightly over her mouth. She stared up at the shadowy face above her, straining to see in the dark lodge. He slowly lifted his hand, and she looked around. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light from the banked fire and the moon shining through the leather wall, she recognized Wanderer.

  "There's no one here." His voice was low and soft in the darkness. She lay, tense and afraid. She had heard the women talk of this, of what men did when they sneaked into a lover's tent at night. But she couldn't imagine it. The thought of him entering her, invading her, was terrifying. Yet she dared not cry out. She'd never escape the gossip and the shame.

  She wore nothing under the thin blanket, and she felt helpless and vulnerable. Wanderer laid his fingers lightly on her lips and pulled back the cover. She shivered at his touch, and her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest. He placed a hand over it, cupping the full, round breast, and circled the nipple gently. She felt dizzy as his hands moved down her body, stroking and caressing, sending ripples of pleasure coursing through her. As his fingers wound into the golden hair between her legs, she cringed and whimpered, thrashing her head from side to side in protest.

  He had been sitting on the edge of the bed. Now he lay down beside her, his long body warm against her. He half covered her while his hand rested between her legs. They both lay still a few moments until she calmed a little. Then he spread her thighs slightly. She couldn't stop him. Her muscles had ceased to respond to her will.

  She felt his fingers probing, and there was fire in the tips of them. Waves of heat flared through her groin, and she felt a silky wetness there. He dipped into the source of it and spread it upward through her soft, swollen ravine. His fingers trailed fire in their wake until he touched the tiny mound. Her back arched and she threw her arm across her mouth to keep from screaming. Every nerve in her body seemed to meet in that nub. Her whole being was centered there.

  As he circled and stroked it gently with his fingers, the intensity built. She whimpered again, tossed by the waves of ecstasy washing over her. They left her arched and straining, for more and for an end to it. The crest came in pure, undistilled sensuality. When it ebbed, she lay there panting, drained and helpless. Her body still pulsed with a warm radiance that spread from her groin to her toes and her fingertips.

  She turned to look at Wanderer, whose face lay so close to hers. He was grinning. He was grinning like a wicked boy who's just pulled off a wonderful joke. She smiled back at him and, reaching out, touched his cheek with her fingertips. Remembering one thing from her past, she pulled his face toward her and kissed him lightly on his curved, sensual mouth.

  He pulled away and frowned a little, as though tasting the kiss. Then he kissed her back. He tickled her gently until she rolled over and wrapped her arms around him to make him stop. They lay entwined, their hearts beating in unison. Finally he spoke.

  "Will you come with me?"

  "On two conditions."

  "What?"

  "That you let me raid with you."

  "If you want."

  "And you do that again sometime."

  "We'll do it often. And we aren't even finished this time."

  As she pressed against him she felt him move, his cock hard and insistent. She buried her face in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

  "Wanderer, I'm afraid."

  "Don't be. We'll go slowly. I'll only cause you pain once, then never again."

  Two days later, not long after dawn, Naduah hid in her father's lodge with her family. They went about preparing and eating breakfast as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening. But Naduah could hear the stacatto "Li-li-li-li" of the women. The cry swelled as more of them joined in along Wanderer's route. He was coming with horses to buy Naduah from Sunrise, but there was no call for so much commotion. Men were shouting raucous, good-natured taunts, and the children were cheering. How many horses was he bringing? Sunrise probably knew, but he wasn't talking. His face was a maddening, noncommittal blank.

  The noise outside grew into an uproar. Naduah felt her face and neck heat up. She was blushing, and she was grateful that she was expected to stay out of sight. Then she heard the thud of hooves. She tried to estimate how many ponies there were by the sound. The blush deepened. The three women, Naduah, Takes Down The Lodge, and Medicine Woman, looked at each other. Sunrise stared at the ground to hide a tiny, secret smile.

  "A hundred horses," said Medicine Woman matter-of-factly. Her ears were the sharpest.

  "There can't be. No one pays that many horses for a woman." Naduah would have estimated that many animals too, but she couldn't believe it.

  "Wanderer does," said Takes Down.

  Unable to resist, Naduah pulled back the edge of the heavy hide door and peeked through the narrow crack. Outside, it looked as though a river of ponies had overflowed and flooded the village. They jostled in the spaces between the lodges. There were stockinged bays and toasted sorrels, blue roans, horses the color of rust, fox-colored ponies, steel grays, and gaudy paints.

  Naduah maneuvered the crack in the doorway until Wanderer filled the space. She shifted her position slowly to follow him as he rode toward the lodge. Her stomach churned with excitement, but also from pride and embarrassment and longing. He was beautiful, dressed in his finest clothes. But in her mind's eye she saw him as he looked best. Naked.

  While Spaniard brought up the stragglers. Wanderer piled the pony he led with presents and tied her apart from the others. The horse was the best of the herd, a young coyote dun with black legs and tail and a black stripe down her backbone. She was a gift for Naduah.

  Then, without a word, Wanderer turned and rode away with Spaniard. Sunrise waited an appropriate time, and then a little longer, before going outside. He had a wicked sense of humor that was so subtle many people didn't kn
ow it existed. It would be like him to let the village think he was spurning Wanderer's incredible offer.

  Finally, when Naduah thought she couldn't wait a second longer, he beckoned to her. Together they went out to collect the horses. They led them to the pasture where their own herd grazed, and turned them loose. Sunrise had accepted Wanderer as a son-in-law.

  That evening, as the sun was setting, Wanderer came for his bride. They walked side by side to the guest tent where he was staying. She stretched her long legs to keep up with his. It seemed as though the pounding of her heart must be loud enough to be heard over the muted noises of the camp. Activity had stopped as people watched them pass, and Naduah knew she was blushing again. She was relieved when they stepped inside the lodge and the hide cover dropped closed after them, shutting out the eyes.

  Before Wanderer led her to the bed of thick, soft buffalo robes, he gave her the silver mirror that he had carried with him for seven years. He stared at her intensely as she held it in her hands, turning it over to trace the raised design with her fingers. It was the same kind of inspection he had given it in the yard of a ravaged fort so long ago. He searched her face to see if the mirror brought back memories of the day his people had killed hers. She looked up at him and smiled her thanks, and the tension drained from him.

  She came to him silently, and he put his arms around her. She stood, caressing the small of his back and his firm haunches. She rested her cheek against his chest as he held her. They swayed' there slightly, eyes closed, lost in the feel of each other. Filled with the comfort and the joy of each other's presence.

  FALL

  "On the plains the senses expand and man begins to realize the magnificence of being."

  Col. Richard Irving Dodge, Hunting Grounds of the West

  CHAPTER 36

  The plateau loomed in the distance like a vast, flat-topped fortress. It brooded dark and solid against the wide, blue, cloudless sky. It was a citadel two hundred miles long, one hundred and fifty miles across, and eight hundred feet high. Its bulwarks seemed to soar straight up from the undulating swells of the plains around them. Vertical outcroppings of red sandstone looked like flying buttresses braced against the cliffs. Along the plateau's rim, the gypsum cap rock gleamed like burnished silver in the flaring sun.

  It was a desert, or so the white men believed. A trackless waste. Nothing grew there but grass. The only water was alkaline, poisoned by mineral salts. And there was damned little of it. bad as it was. The three forks of the Red River meandered through the plateau, their single source lost in a tortuous maze of ravines and gullies and plummeting gorges. No one had ever mapped the plateau, and no white man had ever tracked the Red River to its original spring. It was considered deadly country and few dared go there.

  In 1541, the Pueblo Indian, El Turco, led Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and three hundred of his soldiers on a chase across the top of it. El Turco would probably have led them to hell to get them away from his own helpless village. And there must have been some in the expedition who thought that was precisely where he was taking them. A la cola del mundo, to the tail end of the world, as they put it. But they followed him doggedly. They couldn't resist the promises of a land where King Tatarrax ate off golden plates and listened to the music of gold bells hanging in the trees. By the time the soldiers were well into the high plain, they would have been grateful just for the trees, without the bells.

  Mile after mile the Spaniards and their six hundred Pueblo slaves toiled across the high plateau. It was as level as a griddle and almost as hot. There was nothing, no trees, no boulders, no ridges or mountains, to measure their progress. There were ravines, but they were gouged into the surface of the plain, and invisible until one's horse teetered on the edge. The air shimmered and trembled incessantly. A raven in the distance would stretch and distort until it looked like a man approaching, giving the land the look of a place inhabited by phantoms. Groves and pools shimmered and beckoned, then vanished.

  The summer sun heated the men's heavy metal helmets and cuirasses until they were too hot to touch, much less wear. The soldiers baked inside them. Men born and bred in the harsh, hot hills of Salamanca and Extremadura began to sway in their saddles. If they took off their helmets, spots would heat up on the crowns of their heads, as though a magnifying glass were being held there. Dizziness swept them from their saddles. Many fell with a clatter, losing their lances and trumpet-shaped arquebuses in the grass.

  Sometimes they were dragged, their feet caught in the solid brass stirrups they wore like shoes. Many of them suffered dysentery, made worse by the brackish water. The sun blazed through their eyelids when they closed them, and they had seen no shade for days. The grass, only inches high and burned a dull yellow color, closed in after their horses passed. Almost a thousand men, their mounts and pack animals, left no mark of their passing, to the untrained eye, than a ship leaves on the ocean. So they cut slender saplings from among the few stunted cottonwoods and willows along the dry creek beds. And they staked their route with the poles. Some of them stood, years later, stark and mysterious sentinels against the sky. In time the plateau became known as El Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains.

  Naduah had watched it grow for three days as their small party meandered across the rolling prairie. Now it soared over them, filling the empty sky. A patchy growth of stunted red cedars clung to its vertical face. Naduah tilted her head far back as she craned to see the top of it.

  "We'll never be able to climb up there."

  Wanderer grinned at her over his shoulder.

  "You know better than that. Do you think I brought you all this way just to look at it?"

  "How will we reach the top. Wanderer?" yelled Star Name from behind them. "Pull ourselves up the sides by the cedars?"

  "There's another way," said Wanderer. "Be patient."

  Naduah searched for a path upward and could find none.

  Wanderer led them around the base of the plateau, picking his way through the labyrinth of ravines. Finally they all stood at the edge of the deepest one. Two hundred feet below them they could see the roiling water of the south fork of the Red River as it roared and churned out of the plain. Wanderer pointed out their route.

  "We'll go down to the river bottom, then follow along the cliff wall or splash through the shallows. We'll follow it upstream onto the plain. It's the easiest path."

  The easiest path. Naduah thought she'd rather haul herself up the side using the cedars. Wanderer disappeared over the edge of the deep gorge that pinched the river at its narrow base. Naduah followed him. As Wind braced and slid down the winding trail, Naduah felt the paws of her new mountain lion skin brush against her legs. The hide was draped across Wind's hindquarters like the brocaded quilts of the Spanish caballeros. When the People stole the Spaniards' ponies they took more than just livestock. They lifted the whole horse culture.

  The lion skin had been expensive. They had almost bought it with their lives. Naduah thought about how they had killed the lion, she and Wanderer. It gave her something to think about beside the high, narrow path she was following. The trail was so steep it would be easy to pitch forward and plummet to the bottom. She could imagine bouncing on the rocks below. The lion skin, and the look in Wanderer's eyes when he pulled my arrow from its heart, think about that.

  It had happened several days before, when the party stopped to rest after a long, hot ride that had started before dawn. It was late afternoon, and they were all lying propped against their saddles in the tall grass under a huge, spreading cottonwood. They had found a deep pool and bathed, then they watched, mesmerized, as the clear, shallow stream raced and chortled by them. The high boulder-strewn bluffs around them were covered with round, dark green cedars and scrub oaks. There were pale green feathery mesquites, plum and grape, raspberry, and currant bushes, and various kinds of cactus.

  Naduah lay on her back watching the tiny vultures circle and glide on the air currents at the cliff's edge high above them. She felt l
azy and at peace. She wished, in a way, that this trip could go on forever, traveling at their leisure across the plains, laughing and gambling at night around the fire. Telling stories with her friends. And loving Wanderer under their sleeping robes until they were both spent, then lying wrapped around each other until dawn.

  "Do you want to hunt a deer for dinner?" Wanderer had stood looking down at her.

  "Of course." She had gotten up, stretched, and yawned. Then she put on her moccasins and fetched her bow and quiver from the packs. Together, on foot, they walked down the river to where the canyon opened out and there was a large meadow of waving grass. Naduah moved silently and lightly, aware of everything around her. Sunrise had taught her well. It had rained the day before and the air was cool and clean, the bushes washed free of dust. Here, where there was enough water, the buffalo grass reached as high as their waists.

  Wanderer found a spot near the middle of the meadow and sat, pulling Naduah down with him. He stretched out on his stomach, and she did the same.

  "I thought we were hunting deer," she whispered in his ear.

  "We are. Hasn't anyone taught you to make a fawn's distress call?"

  "No."

  "You know that a doe will leave her fawn hidden and graze away from it, don't you?"

  "Of course. The fawn doesn't leave a scent trace when it's very young, and the mother knows it's safer hidden by itself than with her."

  "Right. So we make a noise like a fawn in trouble, and the doe will come to help it."

  "How do you know there are deer nearby?"

  "This is perfect country for them. And it's the right time of day. They'll be feeding. They're here." He cupped a thin reed in his hands and blew across it, making a frightened bleating noise, then another. Then they both lay still.