Ride the Wind

  Naduah listened to the wind soughing across the grass and the insects singing and buzzing all around here. Lying there in the tall, cool grass with the sun warm on her back, she felt like a child again. Wanderer made the call three or four times, and she inched closer to him. Finally her leg brushed his, and they lay with their bodies touching. That was the most difficult part of being Wanderer's wife and lover as well as his friend. She constantly wanted to touch him, to feel his body, his hands, his mouth. She never tired of watching him, when he sat quiet and pensive at the fire, or when he moved gracefully around the camp. Now, as he lured the deer, she realized something about him.

  "It's a game with you, isn't it?" She said it suddenly and very quietly.

  "What's a game?" He glared at her, pretending to be irritated at the disturbance.

  "All of it. This. Hunting. War, life, love." He stared at her as though he'd been caught at something.

  "Why do you say that?"

  "The look on your face. I used to think you were laughing at me. But I just realized you're laughing at everyone. At life."

  "I laugh at it." He thought a while. "But I take it seriously too. Enjoying life is serious business. You have to work at it."

  "Your friend and brother who died didn't work at it." She thought of his smile, his contagious laugh.

  "No, he didn't. He was a rare one." Wanderer rolled over to weave his fingers into her hair. She had washed it in the river and it hung loose and heavy around her shoulders. He leaned over and buried his face in it, breathing the clean odor of its warm dampness.

  "I like the way it curls on the ends, like pale oak shavings." She turned onto her back and twined her arms around his neck. She arched her body, straining to touch every part of him. He murmured in her ear.

  "You're right as usual, my golden one, my palomino. Life is a game. If it wasn't a game before, you've made it one."

  Looking over his shoulder, Naduah saw the mountain lion first.

  "Roll!" She shoved him off to one side and twisted in the opposite direction. She felt claws rake her arm as the cat's spring carried him to the spot in the grass flattened by their bodies. Without thinking, Naduah snatched her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired, in one flowing motion. Wanderer shot at the same time, and both shafts were fatal.

  "Some deer." She laughed, partly with relief and partly to keep from trembling. She wiped at the blood as it ran down her arm. Wanderer looked sheepish, and she laughed harder.

  "Woman, you have me so bewitched, I forgot that call sometimes attracts more than deer. Did Medicine Woman give you all her love potions before she turned you over to me?" He grumbled a little as they began skinning the animal. "You'll be the death of me if I don't break your spell." He looked up at her mischievously as they knelt with the carcass between them. "Of course, it wouldn't have been as noble as dying in battle, but not a bad way to go. Not a bad way at all." He rested his free hand lightly on her shoulder as they walked back to camp.

  Now he rode in front of her down the steep canyon trail as comfortably as if he and Night were out for a stroll at the edge of camp. She could see the long scar that curved under his shoulder blade. It was darker than the rest of his skin and freckled where the sun had burned the new scar tissue many years before. She smiled as she thought of the times she had traced it with her fingers, running them along the soft, velvety ridge as he lay on top of her. As though guessing her thoughts, he turned to look at her and shouted over the noise of the water.

  "Let Wind do the steering." He was trying to hide the fact that he was concerned about her, but she knew he was.

  "Wind's never traveled this trail either."

  "Trust her." Then there was no more talking. No one could be heard as the river roared down from the plain and crowded through the narrow gorge. The sound of it echoed and swelled as it reverberated between the two-hundred-foot high walls.

  Wind's hoofs dislodged pebbles that rattled and clattered on the stony trail before launching off the edge and sailing out into space. Naduah's stomach contracted with fear, and she tried not to look down at the ragged boulders and blood-colored rapids of the river. Wind lurched forward with each step. She carefully placed each hoof, then braked to avoid sliding with her own momentum.

  Naduah leaned over and pressed her cheek to Wind's cheek. Wind shook her head in response. Wind's ancestors had been raised in the desert, bred to eat sparse grass and travel long distances between water holes. Wind was only fourteen hands tall, a descendant of pure Arab mixed with tough little North African barb. A Texan would have called her shaggy, mean, and ugly, but to Naduah she was perfect.

  If anyone could travel this trail safely, she could. But what about skirting that mad river? A fish couldn't do it. She searched for a trail and found only fragments, tiny beaches eaten into by the swirling water. It's impossible. Maybe he's remembering when the river was lower. But even as she thought it, Naduah knew she was wrong. He knew what he was doing. He always did.

  She watched the dark, smooth skin slide over his shoulder blades as he eased Night down the slope. His muscles didn't bulge and swell like Pahayuca's, but Wanderer was strong. Sometimes when they made love, he held her immobile, paralyzed in his grip, as he stared down at her. It frightened her and excited her to see the wild hunger in his eyes then.

  He was strong and he was tall. So tall there were those who claimed he wasn't born one of the People at all. That he was a Mexican captured as an infant. She had heard the rumors. Now maybe she would learn the truth. She was riding to meet Iron Shirt, Wanderer's father.

  Wanderer's people, the Quohadi, ruled the Staked Plains. They were the fiercest warriors in a nation of them. They looked down on the rest of the world from their aerie, swooping from it to raid deep into Mexico or to plunder the Texas settlements. Then they disappeared back into their vastness. They lived confident and secure in the knowledge that white men would never dare enter their territory.

  There was only one group of people who invaded the Quohadi's land regularly. They were called ciboleros, buffalo hunters, and were from the New Mexican pueblos. The Pueblo, or Anazasi, were peaceful folk. Each year they ventured onto the plateau to hunt meat to feed their families and to sell.

  It was dangerous work. Not many were suited to it. But those who were came every year. They brought their families with them, their women and children, their dogs and oxen and their clumsy wooden carts. The hunt had been good this year, and the men and women of El Manco's party were packing the dried meat strips into their carts. El Manco steadied himself with his one hand on the cart's tall side and kneaded the meat into a compact mass under his bare feet.

  El Manco, One Armed, was still the mayordomo, the leader of the hunts. As he chased the buffalo, he held the reins in his teeth. Using one hand, he drove his lance in with the force of two. Now he climbed out of his cart, wiped his feet on the clumps of grass, and walked away to start the band moving.

  There was a stir in the vast, straggling camp around them. The oxen began to low in protest as the men rounded them up and hitched them to the carts. The heaps of buffalo skulls and bones buzzed with flies. The odor of putrifying meat was lying heavier on the camp with each hour. The women shoveled dirt over their cooking and smoking fires. They stepped back, shielding their faces from the wind-blown ashes, sparks, smoke, and dust.

  There were over one hundred men, women, and children, fifty carts and five hundred oxen and burros, and seventy-five horses to collect and organize and form into marching order. It was two hours before the procession pulled out. It looked like a band of gypsies on the move. Whips cracked, men shouted, the women screamed for their children. The oxen complained bitterly, and dogs barked along the edges.

  A caravan of carretas had no chance of proceeding with stealth. Even without the high-pitched squealing of their axles they could be easily tracked by the broken cottonwood axletrees that littered their trail. The two wheels were sliced from solid logs and stood chest-high to a man. They were only roughly cir
cular, and the holes for the axles were never exactly in the center. Supporting them as they ka-chunked over the rocky ground was a lot to ask of a cottonwood pole, especially since buffalo fat was the sole lubricant available.

  The T-shaped tongue held the oxen's heads at an unnatural angle. That, added to the weight of the carts, made it necessary to use four times the normal number of animals to pull a load. Carretas were a ridiculous form of transportation, but they hauled away the remains of ten to twelve thousand buffalo a year. Their catch was insignificant when compared to the millions of animals that blanketed the plains, but it supplied the pueblos and outlying ranches of New Mexico with food for the winter.

  El Manco rode to a place at the head of the line and led his people eastward.

  As he watched the band of Komantcia approach, El Manco noted that one of the women was blond. But that wasn't unusual. And except for her hair she was Komantcia in every way. The men behind El Manco were nervous. They were a fierce-looking lot, but it was mostly bluff. They knew they were no match for Komantcia on an equal basis.

  Fortunately, this wasn't an equal basis. The band coming toward them had only nine members. And of those, only five were warriors. So El Manco waited calmly. He had learned long ago not to worry about things he couldn't control. And death was the major one of those. The manner of it was unimportant, though he would prefer not to die by torture.

  The sixty Anazasi ciboleros crowded behind El Manco would have given most men pause. Even in the hot sun they wore leather pants and jackets. Round, flat straw hats protected their faces. Their lances rode upright, the butt ends wedged into leather cases and the shafts held in place by straps tied to their saddle pommels. A forest of slender lance points waved overhead, each decorated with a long tassel of brightly colored cloth that fluttered in the wind. The Pueblo's old flintlock muskets were also carried vertically on the other side of each saddle. Each had a tasseled stopper in the muzzle.

  The muskets were more for show than defense on the Staked Plains. The constant wind blew away the sparks and priming and made the guns almost useless. The men's long, wiry black hair was pulled back into thick queues. Their swarthy faces were grim as they fingered the fourteen-inch blades in their belts. They looked like a band of land-locked pirates among their beached spars.

  "Jesus, help Eulalia bring up the cart with the trade goods." El Manco beckoned with his right arm, and he heard the creak of the wheels grinding against their axle. The noise drowned out the fainter noises of creaking saddles and fluttering tassels. The Komantcia conferred at a distance, and the mayordomo waited patiently. He felt the small black buffalo gnats swarming around his face. They crawled down his shirt front and up his pants legs. He dared not mar the dignity of the occasion by slapping at them. And he cursed them under his breath. They left ugly, pus-filled welts that took days to go down. He hoped they were biting the Komantcia as badly.

  If they were indeed Komantcia. They could be Kiowa, but more than likely they weren't. He hoped not. The Kiowa were the Komantcia's allies. But they didn't have the same shaky peace with the people of New Mexico that the Komantcia had had for over sixty years.

  Suddenly the members of the small party spurred their ponies and raced toward the waiting ciboleros. The tallest warrior and the golden-haired woman rode in front, side by side. As El Manco moved out to meet them alone, he heard Hanibal behind him.

  "Madre de Dios! ¡Qué mujer, what a woman! I wonder if the chief would consider selling her."

  "In your whole life, Joven," said Jésus, "you wouldn't have enough horses to buy her."

  Then the Komantcia bore down on El Manco as if to crush him under their hooves, but slowly held his right hand up. With the palm forward, he moved it deliberately back and forth, signaling them to halt. If they didn't they were hostile, but it would probably be too late for El Manco. The ponies lurched to a stop just out of reach of a lance and danced there nervously. El Manco still held his hand up, but now he moved it from right to left and back again. "I do not know you," his hand said. "Who are you?"

  The tall, lean young warrior held his aim in front of him, the forearm parallel to his waist. He made a backward wriggling motion with it, around toward his side. El Manco gave a tiny sigh of relief. They were Snakes Who Came Back. Koh-mat, the Utes called them, Those Who Are Always Against Us. Komantcia. Comanche. Dangerous, but not as bad as Kiowa. They didn't look like they were the advance scout of a war party. They had too much baggage with them. They were young families on the move somewhere.

  El Manco raised his right hand and shook the stump of his left arm. "Are you friends?" he asked, giving the sign as best he could with only one hand.

  The warrior held both hands up high and locked his two forefingers. "Yes. We are friends." Then he rode forward to claim the gifts he considered his right.

  Gifts. Tribute. Bribe. It was all the same. It was a custom begun by a shrewd Spanish viceroy in 1786, and now no one questioned it. When the order first went out to buy off the ferocious raiders from the east, the Komantcia had tried to return gift for gift, as was their own custom. But they were assured it wasn't necessary. As the years went by, they took arrogantly what they considered their due.

  The cart had been turned around so Eulalia could see her husband. She sat with her short, plump legs dangling. As she watched the hand talk, she whispered the prayer said over each child at his naming ceremony.

  May you always live without sickness.

  May you have good corn and all good things.

  May you travel the sun trail to old age,

  And pass away in sleep without pain.

  Would this be the time they murdered El Manco? They were so unpredictable. It was hard to tell. A black shawl shielded Eulalia's face from the sun and shrouded her fear. Behind her on the bed of the cart were piles of flat, round, golden loaves of bread. She had spent many hours grinding the corn for them in a series of ever finer stone metates. There was always grit in the cornmeal, of course. "Every man must eat a metate in his lifetime," the saying went. But the Komantcia loved the bread. It was a major trade item. Not that they would be traded today. They would be given in exchange for safe passage across the Llano.

  She knew that the Komantcia considered them trespassers. But the Anazasi's Ancient Ones had been hunting buffalo here when the Snakes Who Came Back were still living in the mountains far to the north. Before they ever walked out onto the plains on their stubby, highlanders' legs, carrying their possessions on their bowed backs or making their dogs drag them. Before they ever stole their first horse and became a menace to everyone around them.

  Now bread and sugar, flour and coffee were the price the Anazasi had to pay to use what had once been theirs. Just as they had to pay taxes for the land that was theirs. Eulalia wished there were more left for themselves after the tributes and the taxes and the tithes. The Spanish took, the Komantcia took. The priests took. Especially the priests. Looking at her kind face and that of her husband, it was difficult to see the rage that made the Anazasi rise up every hundred years or so and slaughter when too much had been taken from them.

  Eulalia gathered up as many of the loaves of bread as she could carry and slid off the cart to offer them to her husband. He in turn solemnly handed them to the young chief and his retinue.

  CHAPTER 37

  As they rode away from the caravan of Pueblo buffalo hunters, Naduah could hear the carretas moving forward again. The oxen bawled loudly, and the wail of the axles against fifty sets of cart wheels sounded like huge fingernails scratching against slate. Naduah nibbled contentedly on the corn cake, glad she was one of the People and not a cibolero, crawling across the landscape like a slug.

  "This is delicious!" She waved the cornbread at Wanderer.

  "It's even better warm, with honey."

  Star Name and Deep Water cantered to catch up with them, and they rode together side by side. Spaniard's new woman and Big Bow's latest conquest stayed to themselves, gossiping and taking care of the pack anim
als. Lance, the Wasps' crier, had decided to come too. He was remote and preoccupied as usual, keeping to himself and chanting his songs through his nose all day. Naduah had asked him why he had come with them. He looked at her as though surprised by the question.

  "To see the world, of course." She knew it was probably the only answer she would get.

  Star Name looked over her shoulder at the crude, clumsy carts disappearing into a cloud of dust. Ahead of them, off to one side, stretched the broad, ravaged furrow left in the grass by the heavy wooden wheels and the hundreds of plodding animals that pulled them.

  "There's no mistaking their trail, is there?" said Star Name. "Not when there are this many," said Wanderer. "They don't always come in such a large party."

  Naduah studied the vast sweep of absolutely flat land all around them. The short, curly, yellow grass stretched to the horizon like a newly mown meadow.

  "How do you track a small party here?" she asked.

  Wanderer reined Night around in a tight circle to face in the direction they had come. The others did the same. He and Deep Water waited silently for the women to figure it out.

  "I see it," said Naduah. "Do you, Sister?"

  "Yes. The grass is slightly darker where we passed."

  "It'll stay that way for two days or more, depending on how dry it is." Wanderer turned and started moving again. "You'll learn to see the trails in the grass more clearly after you've lived here a while. One day they'll be so obvious you'll wonder how you ever could have missed them. You'll know when a deer has passed."

  Naduah unfastened her gourd canteen from the loop on her saddle. She took a sip and handed it to Star Name. Star Name tilted it up to drink, then looked over at Wanderer.

  "Should I save this?" She held the canteen up. "When will we find water?"