Woman of Three Worlds (19 page)

When Brittany tried to rub brains into the skin, she gagged and vomited. Grouchy jeered. Pretty Eyes stared in astonished sympathy. Sara's mouth twitched, but she took the evil-looking mixture and kicked dirt over the result of Brittany's revulsion.

“We need water,” she suggested.

Brittany gratefully escaped, but made up for her squeamishness after the treated hide had been hung in the sun for a time, by pulling and stretching it for the many hours necessary to make it soft and pliable. She was surprised and delighted when Sara looked speculatively at her ragged dress and ruined shoes and said, “We have enough skins to make you a dress and moccasins.”

The chill of autumn was already in the nights. Durable clothing would be a necessity before she attempted escape. “I will be glad,” she said gratefully.

The Apache word for “thanks” was used only in circumstances where a tremendous favor or service had been performed. Sara's keen gaze searched Brittany as if she were trying to read her thoughts.

“Not good for woman of my brother's house to look like a
bižan
,” she said.

Hackberries and squawberries were ripe now, but when they had been collected and the tanning and jerking caught up with, in between other chores, Pretty Eyes and Sara helped Brittany make a skirt that reached halfway between ankle and knee, loose tunic that came below the hips, and thigh-length moccasins. At first Brittany was clumsy at punching holes in the hide with a bone awl and threading sinew through them, but she gained skill with each stint till Grouchy stopped her derisive chuckling.

Though she was used now to unsalted food and had come to relish mescal and many things that had tasted strange at first, Brittany still avoided horse or mule meat and a delicacy produced by Kah-Tay's hunting, a deer stomach filled with blood, wild onions, and herbs and boiled till the blood thickened; nor could she eat pack rats, boiled whole and then deftly skinned and disemboweled.

“You eat pig, don't you?” Sara demanded once when Brittany made her meal of acorn cakes rather than sharing deer stomach. “We wouldn't do that unless we were starving! I suppose you like fish?”

“Yes,” Brittany admitted.

Everyone looked disgusted. “I have heard some white people like frog legs,” said Kah-Tay in a tone of disbelief.

“I don't,” Brittany assured him. “But in some cities they are thought very good.”

Her companions shuddered. Brittany was glad when Jody drew attention away from the nasty eating habits of White Eyes by asking for a story.

Kah-Tay glanced at Brittany. “Diné stories should be told in our tongue, Blanca.” It was the Mexican name he used for her, meaning white. “You understand a little?”

“I can't speak well,” haltingly returned Brittany in the dialect used by these Chokonen the most eastern group of Chiricahuas. “But I understand much.”

He looked pleased and graciously looked toward the hunched figure of Grouchy. “My aunt, since our niece will soon become She Through Whom We Are Blessed, it is good to remember White-Painted Woman. Will you tell the story as it was given you?”

Grouchy gave Brittany a grudging scowl, but being the focus of attention was too tempting to a childless widow to be refused. She settled herself more comfortably, turned her back on Brittany, and began.

“More harvests ago than anyone can count, there was a terrible drought. Plants died. Without them, so did animals. Without either, so did men. White-Painted Woman was pure and beautiful but had never wished to marry. There was a tradition that someday the people would be saved by a virgin who gave her life for them. White-Painted Woman loved the sun and air and flowers but she decided to be the sacrifice. She left her band, went to a big rock, and lay there awaiting death.

“There came a great storm. Thunder People shot fiery arrows and the clouds burst. White-Painted Woman trembled, sure the Thunder People would kill her, but Ussen, Creator of Life, made rain fall softly on her, and from it she conceived. The boy had no earthly father, so he was called Child of the Waters.

“No one remembers exactly what happened next, but by the time Child of the Waters was growing up, a monster giant named Yehyeh had eaten every human except White-Painted Woman and her son. She hid the boy till he was old enough to hunt. Then she made weapons. He brought in a deer and was roasting meat when Yehyeh came in and demanded it.

“‘I will fight you for it,' said Child of the Waters. ‘We will each have four shots. You take the first.'

“Yehyeh's arrows were big pine poles. His chest was protected by four layers of stone. Child wore just a breechcloth and moccasins. His bow was little and his arrows were grama grass.

“The monster laughed as he shot his huge arrow. The boy threw up his arms and shouted. The shaft splintered into useless bits. But Child's grass shaft struck the stone over Yehyeh's heart and broke the first layer.

“Yehyeh was a little worried now. He worried more when his next giant arrow broke in midair and Child's shot took away another coating of stone. Yehyeh's third and fourth shafts also shattered, but when Child took aim for the fourth time, only one layer of stone protected the giant and through it, Child saw the monster's heart beating.

“His grass arrow pierced stone and heart. The monster fell.” Grouchy cleared her throat and smiled into Jody's wide eyes. “After that, little son, Child killed other monsters till it was safe for people to come back. Ussen wasn't sure the boy was really his son, though, and tested him by throwing a thunderbolt at him. It turned aside and Ussen knew Child for his own. He let his son and White-Painted Woman stay on earth a while to teach people good ways to live. Then he called them up to live with him from a spot near Warm Springs, where four prairies meet.”

Again Grouchy paused. This time she placed her withered old hand on Pretty Eyes' firm, shapely one. “Before she left, White-Painted Woman gave the Diné some of her power. She told us how to give a big ceremony for each girl when she becomes a woman. For these four days the girl has White-Painted Woman's power to bless our people.”

Tenderness faded from her eyes and voice as she confronted Brittany. “White Eyes have nothing like this. When Jeffords was our agent, he told me white girls were scared to be women.”

“Your way is better,” Brittany acknowledged.

In the firelight Kah-Tay's gaze seized her. For the first time, devastatingly, Brittany felt man-woman awareness pulse between them. Fixing her eyes on the North Star, she invoked the thought of Zach, thrilled painfully to remember his arms and hard, sweet mouth.

She had hoped that somehow he might find her, ransom her, or help her escape. What if he had tried and been killed? No! She wouldn't let herself even think of that. Damaging as it was to her pride, she'd rather believe he'd never started out but had left the search to Erskine and Michael O'Shea—who would never find her here, forbidden as the army was to cross the Mexican border.

Rising, Brittany started for the wickiup, all too conscious that Kah-Tay was watching her. She couldn't wait for rescue. She must make her preparations and slip away before winter came.

Why?
one part of her asked.

She had no family to care about her fate. Erskine and O'Shea did, but they were soldiers and had always to deal with death and the loss of those they cared about. Though she could never accept some Diné ways, on the whole she fitted better with them than with artificial people like Regina. The freedom of their life and the marvelous though cruel land though which they ranged appealed to her as strongly as, in their different ways, Kah-Tay, Pretty Eyes, and Jody did.

She flung herself down and wept for the first time in weeks. Zach was the reason she couldn't stay here. She ached to see him again. But did he care at all?

XIV

During the next days she vacillated, terrified at the ordeal of trying to make her way back to the post yet increasingly sure that Kah-Tay desired her and would not long delay pressing his claims. She could refuse him now, but could she all winter long as life here became more and more the reality, Zach and her past the dream?

One day as she was working on her dress, Grouchy looked up from sewing cone-shaped tinklers on Pretty Eyes's tunic, which had been rubbed yellow to represent sacred pollen or
hoddentin
.

“You'd better hope no White Eyes or Mexicans see you in that dress and think you're Diné,” said the ancient woman spitefully. “They'd rape or kill you. Both, maybe.” She cackled at that thought.

“Mightn't Diné do that to a captive?” Brittany challenged.

“Did they to you?”

“No, but—”

“Diné kill women,” Sara explained as she stitched new soles to a pair of Kah-Tay's moccasins. “But they don't often rape. If a warrior does this on a raid, it brings very bad luck.”

“But I thought quite a few Mexican women captives became the wives of Diné.”

“They do.” Sara shot Brittany a questioning look and smiled slightly. “It's all right for a warrior to take a woman if he can make her love him.”

Something in her words and expression shook Brittany.
If he can make her love him
…

Brittany Laird loved Zach Tyrell, however he felt about her. But each day she became more and more Blanca, more part of Kah-Tay's household. If he really laid siege to her, when spring came would she have the will to go?

That very day she made a small rock-lined cache and began to save food, appropriating here a bit of mescal, there a little jerky, saving it from what she ate because working with these people had taught her how hard food was come by and she would have felt she was stealing to take more than her share. She would get her clothes made, and then, at the first good chance, she'd strike north.

While she hoarded food and waited for a time when Kah-Tay would be gone for several days so she'd have a chance at a head start, the life of the band went on. Death also, for a baby who was only a few weeks old died one night.

The tiny body was wrapped in its cradleboard and the parents took it away to return sorrowfully. Sara told Brittany they had placed the cradleboard in a tree, along with a
tus
of water for its journey, and would never go there again.

“Diné don't speak the names of those who are gone,” she added. “We think they will hear, even in the Happy Place, and have to come.”

“What's the Happy Place?”

Sara laughed. “Better than your heaven, I think.” She waved her arm to encompass the fertile valley and wooded mountains. “It will be a lot like this. Good grass and water, plenty to eat. Lots of game. No one will die or get sick. There will be feasts and games and races and gambling. All happy things with nothing bad.” Her smile faded.

“We believe that whatever is done to a person's body will be that way in the Happy Place. That is why we have never forgotten what soldiers did to the great chief who was father-in-law to our great chief.”

She spoke of Mangus Coloradas treacherously murdered on a cold February night when he came in to parley. His head had been cut off and boiled by an army surgeon so that the skull could be measured, as was the scientific craze, and then be sent to the Smithsonian Institute.

There were more rites of hope, though, in the camp than of mourning. One of Big Jaw's sons had left his cradleboard, so his First Moccasins ceremony was held. After praying, the
di-yin
, or person who had the power for this ritual, daubed the assemblage with pollen just before dawn. As the sun rose the
di-yin
lifted the baby four times toward it, then four times to each of the other directions.

As White-Painted Woman had done for her son, the
di-yin
marked four pollen footprints on a piece of buckskin and led the baby over them while saying a prayer about Child of the Waters's first steps. After more prayers, symbolic steps, and songs, the baby was carefully measured for his first moccasins.

Big Jaw's family, including Fawn, now very heavy with child, gave gifts to all the guests and served a feast. When the moon rose the boy was lifted toward it, and all prayed that he might grow tall and strong.

“Next spring, in the time of Little Eagles, he will have his hair-cutting,” Pretty Eyes told Brittany. “The
di-yin
, who must have thick hair himself, will brush the little boy's face with pollen and bury the cut hair under a budding tree.”

“I thought hair was only cut in times of mourning,” Brittany said.

“It is, for grown-ups,” Pretty Eyes smiled. “But starting in the time of Little Eagles, after the child leaves the cradleboard, hair has to be cut four springs to make it thick and healthy.”

A few days later several warriors and their families trudged in wearily from San Carlos with the shocking news that Taza, son of Cochise and elected leader of the Chokonen, had died during a trip to Washington with the young agent John Clum.

Clum and the other Indians who had gone swore that Taza had been looked after by the best doctors and buried with honor in a great cemetery for White Eye military heroes there in Washington, a place called Arlington, but, of course, the traditional burial rites hadn't been performed. Clum had hoped to influence the public and the government to deal more understandingly with the Indians, but some general named Custer had been killed with his soldiers up north by the Sioux, so the national mood was generally vengeful toward all Indians.

“We have been sent to San Carlos to die,” said one of the warriors bitterly. “Still, we might have endured if General Crook had been left in charge. He told us there must be an end to raiding but he was teaching us to grow cattle and raise our food.”

“The contractors don't like that,” said his companion. “They make big money selling supplies to the army and by feeding us bad food. They don't even want our women to cut wild hay and sell it to the post.”