Nightway

Challenged…

“Damn you, Hawk!” She swore at him to mask her disappointment and snatched the bra from the hook of his finger. He laughed, a throaty sound rich with amusement. She struck at him, but he caught her hand before it reached his face and pulled her against him. “Brute!” she hissed.

“And you are a tease,” he accused softly and silenced any reply with his mouth. Instantly there was a wild, hungry response to the domination of his kiss. The stiffness fled from her body; every curve welded itself to him.

Passion flamed hot and unchecked in both of them. Hawk let it burn, the heat flowing through his sensitized flesh. Yet there was no haste, no urgency in him. He would take her in his own good time and not be hurried by Carol as she was prone to do if he let her set the pace.

His mind knew no guilt in taking her. In this, there was no confusion. For once, the practices of the Navaho and the white were in accord. Sex and the desire for it were natural things, as inevitable as life and death.

Books by Janet Dailey

The Great Alone

The Glory Game

The Pride of Hannah Wade

Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

Calder Born, Calder Bred

Stands a Calder Man

This Calder Range

This Calder Sky

The Best Way to Lose

For the Love of God

Foxfire Light

The Hostage Bride

The Lancaster Men

Leftover Love

Mistletoe & Holly

The Second Time

Separate Cabins

Terms of Surrender

Western Man

Nightway

Ride the Thunder

The Rogue

Touch the Wind

Published by POCKET BOOKS

An
Original
Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1981 by Janet Dailey

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN 978-1-4391-8914-6

eISBN 978-1-4516-4030-4

First Pocket Books printing January 1981

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POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U. S. A.

Navaho healing ceremonials, commonly known as “sings,” are properly called “Ways,” because of the precise manner in which they must be conducted. In these ceremonies, or ways, myth-dramas are acted out.

One of the more popular rites is Night Way. In it, Changing Woman (comparable to Mother Nature), who gave birth to the Navaho race, tried to create light in a world of darkness. On the floor of the hogan, she made a dry-painting: white first for dawn; on it, blue for morning; on the blue, yellow for sunset; and, finally, black for night on the yellow. She prayed but no light came.

She added turquoise and white shell beads. After her prayers, a faint light appeared. The twelve Holy People came to help, bringing more turquoise and shell beads to make a magic circle. Changing Woman held a crystal above it. A bright blaze appeared, but it was so hot and bright, they had to keep raising it and moving it to keep it at a safe distance.

In this way, light was created.

There are some 570 “songs” in Night Way. The verses quoted from selected “songs,” beginning each part of this book, are from translations by Washington Matthews, a noted authority on the Navahos.

“… With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us!
With your leggings of dark cloud, come to us!
With your shirt of dark cloud, come to us!
With your headdress of dark cloud, come to us!

… Today take out your spell for me.”

The land stretched out as far as the imagination, laced with arroyos and crowned with mesas and buttes. Cedar and pinon darkened the slopes while sage and grass tumbled across the floor of the empty plateau. Overhead, the dissolving vapor of a jet trail left a long, white streak in the bright blue sky above the Navaho Indian Reservation. Its boundaries spanned four states—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado—comprising an area larger than the combined size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

On the southern edge of its border in Arizona, a canyon was gouged out of a carmine-red sandstone mass. A giant cottonwood stood tall, its top branches straining to reach the rim. The thickness of its leaves hid the opening of a cave hollowed into the rock face of the wall. It was empty now, long ago abandoned by the ancient ones who had once found it a sanctuary, and had left behind footholds chiseled in the wall. The cave overlooked the entire canyon, which contained only a speck of habitation, a one-room, six-sided log structure with its door facing the sacred east. Near it, the non-walled, crudely constructed “ramada” offered shade from the hot sun. Beyond it was a stick corral, a
weathered buckboard outside it. The horse inside stood three-legged, its head hanging low, its scrub brush of a tail swishing at the buzzing flies. A mangy, rib-thin dog slept in a cool hollow, shaded by the hogan.

A boy, no older than nine, raced from the hogan in a skipping run. Clad in blue denim pants and a colorful clay-red shirt whose tail flapped free of the waistband, he wore soft leather moccasins on his feet. A yellow headband was tied around his unruly mop of hair, black and shiny as the crow’s wing. His skin was a copperish-brown, but his eyes were blue like the sky after it had been washed clean by a spring storm.

The bent figure of a young woman planting hills of corn straightened at the sound of running feet. She watched the boy approach, a smile of pride and deep affection lifting the corners of her mouth. Her eyes glowed like dark coals, radiating warmth and love. Straight and sleek black hair was smoothed away from her face and tied with a white string into a chignon at the nape of her neck, a style that emphasized her cheekbones and angling jawline. A silver concho belt circled the waistline of her blouse of green velveteen. Many petticoats billowed the long calico skirt, its hem touching the ankle-high moccasins of fawn-brown with their gleaming concho buttons. Her slender figure looked like that of a young maiden, high-breasted and with hips that hadn’t widened.

“Chizh kin góne yah ‘íínil.”
The boy stopped beside her, barely winded by his run from the hogan to the cornfield.

“No.” She corrected the One-Who-Must-Walk-Two-Paths with a shake of her head. “You must say it in English. He thinks you don’t speak it well. You must learn it because it, too, is your language.”

A look of calm acceptance stole over the boy’s face. “I carried the wood into the house in one trip.” He
repeated his previous statement, choosing his words with care. “Will he come today?”

Her gaze lifted from his upturned face to scan the land to the south. There was no road, only traces here and there on the hard ground to show a vehicle had found its way to this place. The Arizona wind was quick to erase any tracks. Some seventy miles to the east was the Arizona city of Flagstaff. Gallup, New Mexico, was one hundred twenty miles to the west. To the north, there was only Navaho land interlaced with rough trails, questionable roads, and rare highways. But to the south the ranch of her husband was located.

“Perhaps,” she hoped along with her son. The planting stick was in her hand, a reminder of the work to be finished. “Now that you have gotten the wood for our fire, you can help me plant the corn.” She handed him the pouch of seed kernels.

The corn was not planted in rows, which was the white man’s way, but in hills. The planting stick was the tool that poked many kernels nearly a foot into the ground where the Indian corn sent its long roots deep into the subsoil for moisture. “Four kernels for the cutworm, four for the crow, four for the beetle, and four to grow” advised an ancient proverb. Corn was the staple of their diet. Every bit of the plant would be eaten. The young sprouts would be boiled as greens; young, tender stalks would be roasted in ashes; undeveloped ears of corn would be made into soup; the first milk ears were to be used for mush and bread; and mature ears were ground into meal.

Corn was a sacred plant, not simply because of its value as a foodstuff. According to Navaho myth, the forerunners of man were made from two ears of corn, and it was only when four seeds of white, blue, yellow, and all colors were planted that the earth spread out.

White Sage knew this was not the way the white man
believed the earth was formed. On the Reservation, there were many missions operated by members of the white man’s religions. The churches of the Franciscan Fathers, Methodist, Baptist, Mormons, and Episcopal, all claimed that their religion was the right one. This confusion among the whites enforced her belief in the centuries-old way of The People.

Besides, these Christians spoke of a far-off land called Palestine and a place named Bethlehem which White Sage could not visualize. The People told stories about the four sacred mountains, and White Sage, herself, had seen the San Francisco peaks outside Flagstaff which was the Mountain of the West. The white man’s Holy Book talked only about a male God and leaders who were men. White Sage missed Changing Woman, the principal figure in so many of their stories, and others like Spider Woman and Salt Woman. The white man believed their God was all-good, yet she knew that in all things there was evil, as well as good. The beliefs of the white man did not make sense.

The boy crouched low to the ground to drop the seed kernels in a thick cluster. While she poked them into the hill, he straightened to watch. A thoughtful frown creased his forehead.

“Are we poor?” he asked finally.

“No, we are not poor. Don’t we always have plenty of food to eat and warm clothes to wear? Your father provides us with everything we need and more. He is ‘
rico.
’”

Mary White Sage knew this because only a man who was very rich could afford to keep two houses and two families. The white teachers at the Reservation school had always insisted it was wrong for a man to have two wives. Yet Laughing Eyes had told her that white men did it all the time. They had often laughed at the
foolishness of the white men’s ways, which dictated one thing while another was actually done.

She had understood when Laughing Eyes explained that his first wife would not like it if they all lived in the same house. His first wife’s ways were different from Mary’s. It had happened to a friend of Mary’s who had married a man who already had a wife. Her friend had constantly quarreled with the first wife because the woman was lazy. Finally, to ensure harmony, her friend’s husband had built a second hogan a mile away from the first and, thus, separated his two wives.