Scalpdancers (12 page)

Abdul chuckled, the sound of his voice deep and resonant like far-off thunder. Vlad turned toward Rossi, who avoided the black man's gaze.

“You're leaving?” the
capitano
observed. “Take me with you.”

“And leave your command? Your posting?” Vlad asked with false incredulity. Like a cat toying with its prey, Vlad smiled and stroked his moustache as he once again faced the gray expanse of water lapping at the shore. “Come aboard at night. Allow no one to see you. Remain below deck until we leave Macao. You may use my cabin.”

Vlad's brig was a sturdy, deep-draft ship, larger than the
Hotspur
had been and carrying a crew of thirty men. Thirty-one now, Vlad figured, for he would indeed put Jorge Rossi to work. His fine soft hands would be rope burned and calloused within a week.

Rossi almost wept for gratitude. He reached out to shake the Russian's hand, but Vlad ignored him.

“Take my horse back into town,” Abdul offered. “Then wait for sunset. Ride.”

“Yes … yes, thank you,” the
capitano
gasped, bowing toward Vlad. The wayward son of Portuguese nobility hurried back toward the horses. When he was well out of earshot, Abdul spoke.

“Do you think he suspects, Captain Vlad?”

“Once we're at sea, it won't matter,” Vlad replied. “Take care, though, that you spend none of Chiang Lu's gold. Some of the coins bear his name.”

“As you wish,” Abdul said. He waited on his captain, devoted in his loyalty to the exiled Russian. Vlad was a curious mixture of aesthete and bloodthirsty brigand. He had not batted an eye while slicing Chiang Lu's throat from ear to ear. Now he stood in abject appreciation of the lonely horizon and seemed at peace.

Miles from Macao Morgan Penmerry stood on the quarterdeck and braced himself against the rail while the
Magdalene
rode the swell and trough of the choppy sea. He was alone on the quarterdeck, his hands on the ship's wheel, getting the feel of the craft. He breathed deeply and felt his entire being restored with each lungful of the cool, briny air. He wanted to roar, to sing, to bellow to the men scurrying around the deck below or climbing the rigging to check the sails. Alone with his thoughts and grateful for the solitude, he allowed the past to peel away like curling paint. It was useless baggage. He was in the middle of picturing such an image when Julia Emerson made her way up from the main deck. She carried a cup of steaming black tea brewed strong and bitter, the better to cut the fog in a tired man's brain. But Morgan wasn't tired. Not yet. He's escaped the
polizia
, imprisonment, and a probable execution.

“I brought you drink,” she said as she stood beside him. She had changed her clothes and now wore a simple brown tunic and knee-length trousers, stockings, and black buckled shoes. Her long auburn hair was gathered by a strand of leather and hung down her back. Her well-rounded figure filled her new attire in ways Morgan found positively delectable. Things were looking up already.

“Well, if you must gape at me like a half-wit, I shall retire below.” Julia turned to go.

“Wait, lass. Allow a man his moment to appreciate beauty where he finds it.”

Julia paused, turned toward him, and mirrored his appraisal. His good humor left her all the more puzzled. “I don't trust you,” she said.

“Wisdom and beauty.”

“And you with naught but the clothes on your back and those soon worn thin, no doubt.”

“Aye.”

His attitude was infectious. Julia had to struggle to hold on to her gloom. She attempted to overpower him with the truth.

“You lost your ship.”

“Aye.”

“And all your money.”

“That's a fact.”

“Everything!”

“And then some.” Morgan's craggy, rough-hewn frame could no longer contain his emotions. He tilted his head back and began to laugh. His body shook, his features turned red, his eyes grew teary as the laughter coursed through his veins, and he had to struggle to keep the brig on course.

The crew below halted in their work. Temp Rawlins peered around the mainmast and forgot to bellow at the slackers nearby. Tim Britchetto dropped to the deck from the rigging and stared with the rest at Morgan Penmerry.

“Is he mad?” someone asked in a gruff low voice.

“No matter,” said Temp, and he squinted at the men around him. The leathery old seafarer wondered if there was one among them who could understand. “He's free.”

PART II

Backbone of the World

7

May 1814

“I sing that the world will not die.

I am the wind's daughter;

I am the fire's bride.”

The old woman outstretched her hand, keeping her wrinkled flesh just above the lapping flames. She unclenched her fist and dusted the blaze with sacred meal—a mixture of pounded roots, dried berries, powdered ram's horn, and a pinch of the soil in which she had been born so many winters past she no longer cared to count. She added a leathery morsel, brown as a button, a piece of what had once been her own umbilical cord saved for her by her shaman father, whose bones lay in Ever Shadow, the mountain ranges to the north.

As the sacred mixture disappeared into the heart of the fire, the flames took on a rose-colored glow. The old woman's eyes rolled back in her head and she loosed a wild, soul-wrenching cry that rose in pitch and volume like an onrushing torrent, a flash flood of unearthly sound. Her cry coursed through her frail-looking frame until it seemed she must split apart from the effort. Then the outburst faded, her endurance flagged, and she leaned against a willow backrest and listened to dying echoes of herself. The long, thin tufts of her snow-white hair spilled over her shoulders and the willow frame supporting her.

She placed a hand on her wrinkled breast and tried to remember when it had once been full of milk. She made soft cooing sounds, as a mother might make in the stillness of night as she nurses her young. The old woman pretended to nurse and watched the shadows on the walls of her dwelling shift and dance until at last, to her way of seeing, the shadows coalesced and a stygian shape hunched forward, coaxed out of the darkness by the flames and the old woman's song.

“I am the wind's daughter.

I am the fire's bride.”

Her eyes brightened in her hungry face, whose beauty had long since faded like wild strawberries in winter. Her lips had grown dry as leather. As a maiden she had sung for the green, unquenchable fire of spring coursing through her veins. Now she sang a different song, for the flame in her heart was wisdom, not desire. All that remained of youth were the eyes, fierce and unblinking as she peered from the world of her dwelling into the spirit realm, where the
Maiyun
danced and dreamed in timeless sleep.

“I see,” she said. “Tell me. Do the flames speak straight as a hawk plummets to his kill? Tell me. For I am she who was born to know. I am the song giver. Is it time?”

Embers cracked. Coals red as blood, bitter bright as vengeance, pulsed with a life of their own, as love and hate live on beyond one's final breath. A fire does not die with its maker, but lingers to warm or wound whoever comes to the circle of flame.

The old woman closed her eyes and listened to a voice another might say was merely the sighing wind or the singing creek—but she knew different. If her body lingered in one world, her heart and soul walked another.

She listened, and her parched lips whispered, “It is so,” to the revelation of the Above Ones—a truth she had sensed for days. The beginning had brought her to the end and the end was but the first step of another beginning. One lives, loves, dies along the path of the Great Circle.
She must be ready
. The hour was at hand.

It was good to know what had to be done. The old woman was afraid, yes, but it was good to know.

Lost Eyes stood upon the summit of the world—or so it seemed. It was always that way, vista after vista, whenever he found a break in the forest, whenever he followed a deer trail through the slanted sunlight in the high country. Here in the lost places there was peace. The
Maiyun
lived here, spirits of the green earth and purple crags, of the golden sunlight and black storms.

Today Lost Eyes did not stand alone in the sighing wind. Sparrow was with him, though she should not have been. Black Fox would be angry and punish her. How like her namesake was this girl, Lost Eyes thought as he watched her on horseback, hair streaming like the long mane of the brown mare she sat. She was slight and quick like a sparrow, though her fawn-colored eyes were full of daring and subtle promises.

It was the time of the New Grass Moon. And here upon the swollen hills that lapped at the Backbone of the World, spring was never more evident. Across the pass and another hour's hard ride for Lost Eyes and Sparrow, a cascade of icy blue water plummeted a thousand feet down the granite face of Singing Woman Ridge into a thirty-yard-wide pool. A perpetual rainbow formed in the spray that hovered above the sacred pond.

Spring lived in this pass; the world's rebirth seemed to begin right here in the towering stalks of Indian poke and corn lilies, some as tall as a man, crowned with yellow-green starlike flowers and bordering a yard-wide ribbon of water left by the thaw and runoff from the pond formed beneath the cataract. Here were the fragile stalks of glacier lilies, whose brilliant yellow upswept petals had attracted a swarm of bees from a hive in a nearby storm-shattered pine. Pink-and-white bitterroot blossoms added their pastel hues to nature's canvas.

Lost Eyes watched as Sparrow guided her mount around a cluster of orange mountain dandelion. She led her suitor's own sturdy gray, for he had walked the deer trail on foot, filling a pouch with mountain mint as he searched for an appropriate spot to rig a snare and catch one of the red squirrels so busily announcing his intrusion. Their strident piping had pierced the stillness as they fled from the forest path to the safety of the nearby pines. Lost Eyes sighed and tucked away his snare as Sparrow approached. The horses startled a pair of rosy red grosbeaks who shot skyward and raced toward the comparative safety of the tree line; they dipped and darted effortlessly against an azure sky.

Lost Eyes knelt and scooped a handful of dirt in the palm of his hand, then held his arm outstretched, allowing the rich earth to sift through his fingers.

“Truly this is ground-of-many-gifts,” he said.

“There is more for you to see—a mystery,” said Sparrow.

Being alone with her stirred something deep within Lost Eyes. He felt flashes of fire and ice from his toes to his testicles. “A woman is all the mystery a man ever needs,” the young brave said.

“It is one you will never understand.” Sparrow laughed. She struck Lost Eyes a gentle blow upon the shoulder with a willow rod. “Now I have counted coup on a Scalpdancer!” She galloped away, her merry challenge ringing on the wind.

Where was she leading? Lost Eyes shrugged and leapt astride the gray and rode off down the path Sparrow had blazed through the buffalo grass.

Woman and man rode at a breakneck pace that took them from the hillside to the sun-drenched floor of the pass. The brown mare was swift, but the long-legged gray soon pulled abreast. Yet every time Lost Eyes tried to count coup on the young woman with his bow, she would alter her course just enough to elude the warrior's grasp. And, oh, her good-natured laughter taunted him unmercifully. But Lost Eyes continued his pursuit, determined to catch her and return the strike and recapture his dignity. The chase lasted the length of the valley. It ended when Sparrow halted her mare near where the waters of the cataract plunged into the spring-fed pond beneath Singing Woman Ridge.

The rippled surface of the pond reflected the blue sky and the glacier-carved granite cliffs. The brown mare had come to a halt so suddenly that Lost Eyes momentarily lost control of the gray. He tugged on the rawhide reins and clamped his legs around the gray's belly, caught a fistful of mane, and just managed to stop himself from vaulting forward over the horse's head. The gray pranced at the edge of the pool in the spray of the cataract. A rainbow hovered above the pool, lending a magical aura to the place.

Lost Eyes had never ventured so far into the pass. Like the other men of the village, he kept to the ridges, for this was a sacred place and only a few shamans of the tribe had ever approached the waterfall. He dismounted only because Sparrow did. Man and woman ambled to the pool's edge. She knelt in the moist grass and cupped water to her lips.

Lost Eyes gasped and pulled the woman to her feet. Sparrow glared at him, caught off guard by his action. Too late, she had already drunk from the sacred pool.

“Do you not fear the water demons? They will pull you under!” Lost Eyes exclaimed. “Here is living water left by the Ones-Who-Came-Before, the Forgotten People. Now the
Maiyun
claim this place. Foolish girl, do you not know the truth of it?”

“Do you?” Sparrow said, hands on hips. She was not about to be scolded by him as if she were a child. “Old tales for old women and their men to whisper about on lonely nights when Cold Maker comes. But I am young and warm, and it would seem I have more courage than a Pikuni brave.” She faced him squarely, awaiting his reply.

“Bold talk for a girl of sixteen winters,” Lost Eyes scoffed. “I am not afraid.”

“Prove it. Drink from the pool,” Sparrow retorted, her lithe frame poised as if to dart away.

Lost Eyes studied her teasing smile, then glanced with some trepidation toward the pool of icy water. He dreaded the deed., It wasn't bad enough the Above Ones came down from the Backbone of the World to drink beneath the Bow-of-Many-Colors. Ghosts lingered here as well. Shamans told stories of hearing a woman singing the spirit songs, a woman unseen whose voice, it was said, drifted through the granite walls of the ridge itself. Some claimed it was the voice of Woodberry, a medicine woman who had defied the Above Ones and been carried away by water demons, pulled to her death beneath the glassy surface of the pool.