"Tahkobe Ano. Broken Cup." The woman stopped and looked up at Naduah. "Have you seen my daughter? Her name is Broken Cup. She must have wandered off." The wind whipped the words around the young woman's head before splintering them and sending them flying. She was shouting, but Naduah could barely hear her. Turning, the woman wandered off again.
"Stop, Gray Cloud. Broken Cup is dead. You know that. I saw you bury her. Come back!" She screamed, knowing that the woman couldn't hear her and wouldn't turn back if she could hear. Knowing that she herself couldn't break from the line to go after her. The small figure vanished in the swirling snow as though swallowed in an ocean of foam. Grimly Naduah checked the stiffened hide rope that stretched from her pommel to her mother's. It would be easy to lose sight of the entire village in seconds.
The patched and blackened lodge was crowded. Star Name and Black Bird and Upstream had moved in to let a homeless family use their tent. Something Good had also loaned out her lodge, and she and little Weasel were staying with them. Weasel wailed as Medicine Woman rocked her futilely in her arms.
It was February, the Month The Babies Cry For Food, and spring was more than a month away. Winter had set in with a vengeance after the first blizzard, and they still camped alone. Game was too scarce to combine the bands in their usual winter encampment. The ponies were skeletal, their long, shabby coats rough and matted with dirt and burs. Their hipbones jutted from the hide stretched tightly over them, and their bellies were swollen and lumpy with sticks and bark. Like their owners', their eyes were listless from hunger.
For weeks the Wasps had grubbed for roots, chipping at the frozen ground. They'd eaten lizards and mice, snakes and rats and the bark from trees. The week before they'd feasted on a turtle that Star Name had found. Takes Down had thrown it on its back alive, onto the fire. They had all sat around watching it intently as it kicked its legs feebly, its head craning from side to side on its scrawny, wrinkled neck as the flames curled around the shell. When it had cooked, Takes Down raked it out and broke the bottom carapace open, releasing a thick, pungent steam. They gathered around to eat from the bowl of its shell, dipping through the broth and scooping the soft meat out with horn spoons. The children were allowed to eat first, but they handed their spoons over without taking much.
"Daughter, eat more. You've only had a mouthful, and you need strength."
"It's all right, Mother. I don't want any more." Naduah knew how many still had to be fed.
Now she could taste the oily meat in her memory and wished there had been more. Most of their meals were gruel made of mesquite meal laboriously ground from the beans, or a thin soup of pemmican mixed with water and a little parched corn from the precious supply. Naduah kept a close watch on the food dwindling in the rawhide boxes, most of which sat empty under the bed. She counted, over and over, the number of people to be fed and mentally measured out the daily amounts for each.
Sunrise went out on foot again and again, because the ponies weren't strong enough to carry a hunting party. He almost always came back empty-handed. He rarely spoke these days, despair gnawing at him as much as hunger. Something Good brought some food from Pahayuca's household, but there wasn't much there either. He fed everyone who came to his door hungry, and sent food to those who had none. And no matter how many times Naduah counted and measured, she always came up with the same answer. There wouldn't be enough.
She sat with her arms around Smoke, who nuzzled her hand. The doe was looking for the wisps of dry grass that Naduah searched the cold, wind-scoured plain to find. The pronghorn's thinness made her eyes seem even bigger and softer under their fringe of heavy black lashes. The lodge was empty except for the two of them and Dog and Medicine Woman, who slept. The women were out searching for food. Sunrise, in desperation, had gone with some of the men to raid the Texas settlements for horses so they could hunt again.
The bells on Smoke's collar jingled merrily in the chill stillness of the tent as she tried to push Naduah into playing with her. She butted her friend with the tiny buds of horns on the top of her head, and danced a little on her delicate, elfin hooves.
Naduah made one last calculation of the food supply, more to postpone what she had to do than through any hope of avoiding it. Tears spilled from her eyes, blurring her sight, and she gulped back sobs as she groped in the bag where she kept her skinning knife. With the knife in one hand and her other on Smoke's back, she led her out of the lodge and away from the village. Dog trotted a little ahead of them, and the doe frisked. She was looking forward to one of their runs out on the open plain. Naduah's family would have meat tonight, but she knew she wouldn't be able to eat any of it.
CHAPTER 27
The border into Oklahoma Territory wasn't inviting especially in November. The Red River was lined with dry sand hills thirty feet tall and covered with a sparse growth of brittle weeds. A month earlier, Terrible Snows, his women, and their few ponies had waded over the sand hills and splashed through the shallow, muddy river. They had been wandering from band to band for almost a year, moving gradually farther and farther north.
With each move Terrible Snows thought vaguely to improve his fortunes, either by finding new medicine or by buying more from yet another medicine man. He wandered with the belief that things would be better somewhere else. But they never were. The fall hunts had been scant everywhere, but his hunting had been even worse.
North of the Red River they had caught up with Tabbe Nanica, Sun Name, and his band of Yamparika, Root Eaters. A Little Less and Mountain and Rachel put up the lodge on the muddy hem of the village as usual, their tent smaller and shabbier than the rest. The smell of rotting animal carcasses left outside the village and the dung from the horse pasture was stronger here. But at least the ponies were closer and Rachel didn't have to walk as far to tend them. And the children left her alone. By now they avoided her as one who was touched by spirits. No one questioned Terrible Snows' right to be there. The People were free to live with whatever band they chose, and to leave it when they wanted.
The plain rose and fell in graceful swells that the lodges rode like small ships. But the ground was cold and dry and brown, as though crusted over. And the icy winter northers howled across the wastes with nothing to stop them east of the Rocky Mountains, hundreds of miles away. Many of the lodges had brush windbreaks around them, but there was no brush left when Terrible Snows arrived.
Now Rachel and Terrible Snows and A Little Less were in Sun Name's lodge. It had finally happened. New Mexican traders, Comancheros, were in camp. And they were bargaining for the white slave. Rachel's eyes flicked from the two mestizos to the meal they were eating, her body's hunger vying with her mind's hope.
"Cuánto cuesta la mujer, jefe?" José Piedad Tafoya swallowed the last piece of buffalo steak speared on the point of his long knife and wiped his hands on his vest. The grease added to several years of dirt that had dyed his clothes the color of old coffee grounds. Across from him, Chino used his lank black hair as a napkin. The flames carved his face into that of a cadaver. His ferocious, slanted black eyes and hawk's nose made him look like a bird of prey. Chino was restless. He was too new at this, or not suited for it. He wasn't used to even asking for something, much less paying for it.
José watched Sun Name through narrowed eyes. How much could the chief ask for the woman? She wasn't worth much, that was plain. He wasn't even sure if he could get her back to Santa Fe alive. And Anglos didn't pay much for carcasses. They paid handsomely for stock on the hoof, though, even if it was as bad off as this one was. When ransoming captives, one dwelt on the sentimental value of the merchandise.
As though reading his mind, Rachel tried to run her fingers through her hair. She couldn't penetrate the tangle as far as her ears. In the smothering heat of the leader's lodge, she shivered inside her thin dress. She constantly stroked her face and smoothed her torn clothes, picking at imaginary lint. Her eyes would focus briefly, then empty. She seemed to dart into reality, look around, then run back
to her cozy den of madness.
In the past year and a half, she had learned enough Comanche to get along. Commands mostly. But now the men were speaking in handtalk and pidgin Spanish. Somewhere in her battered mind, she knew something important was happening. In her lucid moments she stared at the men's faces intently, as though trying to read meaning in their expressions that she couldn't get from their words. Her lips moved in silent soliloquy pleading with them to help her.
Sun Name was not one to be rushed. Because José was young, he forgave him the breach of courtesy. Discussing business before establishing the proper atmosphere with small talk was like bathing with your clothes on: it just wasn't as effective. Sun Name would settle things in his own time. He took his pipe out, and A Little Less pulled Rachel roughly out into the night, harsh with the crystal edges of frost.
In broken Spanish and Comanche and graceful, flickering hand-talk, the bartering progressed. It wound its slow way through the the night, meandering and doubling back on itself like the slippery trail of a snail. Sun Name did most of the talking, since negotiations could hardly be trusted to Terrible Snows. The People didn't distinguish gender in their pronouns, so his pidgin Spanish translated something as follows.
"Terrible Snows loves the white-eyes woman very much. He won't want to sell him. You have to pay plenty blankets, coffee, guns, arrowheads, and horses. Maybe ten horses. Maybe twelve. Terrible Snows be plenty brokenhearted if white-eyes woman leaves."
"Jefe, Terrible Snows loves only his stomach and his dice game." José knew it was going to be a hard winter, and Terrible Snows didn't look like he could even feed his slave. "She'll die soon. We'll take her off your hands." He thought of the tiny stock of goods, maybe twenty dollars worth, packed on their worn-out burros. Guns and horses indeed. "We'll pay you a sack of coffee, a sack of sugar, three blankets, and a keg of whiskey." The whiskey was José's ace, though it wasn't always successful with the Comanche. If he could pull this trade off, it would set him up, give him the profit he needed to expand his inventory.
"Ho-say." Sun Name laughed and slapped José on the back. "Often have we traded together. We will trade for many seasons to come. I love you as my brother. I love you because you make jokes all the time. But this is serious talk. The white-eyes slave works hard. Without him Terrible Snows' kind old mother will be sad. Maybe die from so much work to do alone. Everyone loves the white-eyes woman as his own. The men enjoy him often. We could not part with him for less than eight horses. Good ones. Not the broken-down ones you sell to the Kiowa. And the blankets and the sugar and the coffee and the guns. And do you have any of those red beads? The big ones? We don't want your stupid water, though."
"All right. One horse and the coffee and the sugar and the blankets." Chino would have to walk back to Santa Fe.
"As long as we're joking, did I tell you about the time Dog Foot got drunk on stupid water?"
The pipe was lost in Sun Name's huge brown hand as he passed it to José. The hand reminded José of a bear's paw, with its long, dirty nails and short, stubby fingers. The leader's eyes twinkled with the joy of driving a bargain. José took a deep drag on the pipe and settled back for a long story and a longer evening. A cold wind whistled outside and he had no better place to go. He had no place to go at all, in fact.
From here they would head back to Texas and the Valley of Tears. Then they would go south and west, threading their way through Palo Duro canyon to the Palo Duro River's headwaters. They would water at Trujillo and cross the Puerto de los Rivajeños, the gap in the cap rock called the Door of the Plains. From there they had only to journey up the Valley of the Taos to Santa Fe. With the shape their burros were in and the miserable weather, it would probably take them at least two weeks to make the trip.
Donaho's in Santa Fe would be the first stop. He had put the word out that he would pay for any white captives ransomed from the tribes. Maybe there would be enough money to buy a wagon as well as more trade goods. Then José would head out again, zigzagging through the wild, barren Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains, and across the prairie in search of the Comanche. Tonight he'd talk to Sun Name about arranging a regular meeting place. It would save time and trouble. At twenty-two, José had ideas that were new to the Comanchero trade.
Like most of the Comancheros, José Picdad Tafoya was part Pueblo Indian. His Indian mother had named him Piedad. Pity. Compassion. The irony of the name never occurred to José. It was just another part of him, like the coarse black hair and the piercing dark eyes in his gaunt face. Already his skin was toughened and beginning to crack from the hundreds of blast-furnace days he had spent scrabbling with the crude, heavy hoe, spreading the moisture evenly from the irrigation ditches into the stony ground before it evaporated.
He had decided early that the life of a New Mexico farmer wasn't for him. Even if he could grow something, the bureaucrats of the south, from their offices and mansions in Mexico City, would strangle him. All they knew, those men, were regulations and tariffs and monopolies. Why be a poor honest man in a world of rich, dishonest ones?
So here he was, bantering with Sun Name, civil chief of the Yamparika Comanches. Sun Name wasn't much older than José, but he had the dignity of command and the respect of thousands of people. Indians maybe, but it still counted for something. José could never hope to attain that kind of position. He would have to make do with money instead. And he intended to make a lot of it. It was the only thing that mattered to him. Ransoming this woman would be a good start.
If they could get Terrible Snows drunk they might be able to pass off that goose-rumped, knee-sprung paint they'd found on the Staked Plains. Terrible Snows looked like the type to take to whiskey, if he could be pried away from Sun Name long enough to make the introduction. He must be desperate for horses to ask for them in payment. Usually the Comanche used them for currency. But Terrible Snows didn't look prosperous. Not even by Comanche standards.
The next problem would be to get the woman back to Santa Fe alive and unraped. Donaho had some crazy religious reason for ransoming captives. It wasn't a profit-making enterprise for him. Gringos were funny. They'd pay good money for a woman who'd been used by the entire Comanche tribe, but take offense if the loveless traders got a little use from her too. There was no understanding gringos. The Indians were much easier to get along with.
From a distance the city of Santa Fe looked like a feature of the landscape, a geologic formation raised from the surrounding clay. José and his partner, his merchandise and burros moved down onto the open plain, a plaid mantle of corn and wheat fields and irrigation ditches laid out around the city.
Santa Fe from closer up looked like a gathering of beached Ohio flatboats. A prairie-dog town, traders called it. A town of low mud houses on streets that were little more than trampled footpaths between scattered farm settlements. It was the capital city of a Mexican province and the home of three thousand people. To the west soared a snowy mountain, waterfalls cascading down its sides. The water rushed to join the clear stream that flowed through Santa Fe, but the stream wasn't as clear when it slunk out the other side.
It was twilight when Rachel, exhausted, aching, and coated with dust, rode into the main plaza behind José and Chino. Her moccasins had shredded on the stones of the mountain trails, and she was wearing a pair of Mexican straw sandals. Grateful not to be walking, she perched on the haunches of the little burro. And he in turn was probably grateful to have her light, accommodating weight rather than the heavy, awkward packs. Most of the ugly sores on his back were beginning to heal.
The group ambled past the governor's palace. It was a sprawling, one-story, four-hundred-foot-long mud hut. The crude portico was held up by roughly hewn tree trunks, and the doors were so low the tall Missouri traders had to stoop to enter. There were few traders in town now though. Most of them had headed back toward Independence. Their huge caravans of covered wagons wouldn't be pulling in, along with the rains, until July or August. Around the plaza, the stores they rented
for the summer and fall were shuttered and bare.
In the traders' absence, Santa Fe seemed almost asleep. The Indians and farmers, the merchants and housewives, their faces shrouded in seven-foot shawls, looked like sleepwalkers. It seemed as though time had slowed here. It was an easygoing city of rounded edges, flat, weed-grown roofs, and crumbling clay walls.
Rachel stared around her and clutched her only possession more tightly. José had given her a comb, a dirty, broken-toothed horn comb, that he'd found in the bottom of the pack. She had had to use a knife as much as a comb, but her hair was fairly untangled. José had watched her carefully as she used the knife. She wasn't right in the head, and he didn't want to lose her after going to so much trouble. Luckily, he had traded off the last of the mirrors, and Rachel couldn't see the pink scar tissue of her nose. She was spared the sight of dirt caked on her face, collecting in the wrinkles and accentuating them, and the spikes of chopped hair sticking out all over her head. Perhaps in her state of mind she wouldn't have recognized herself anyway.
From the military chapel across from the palace, a huge, brass bell began its solemn evening tolling. All movement ceased except for the clicking of rosary beads and the murmur of lips as everyone whispered their evening prayers. José and Chino weren't religious, but they stopped too, and bowed their heads. One can disregard law, but not custom. Jangling smaller bells interrupted the tolling, and the slow parade of strollers started up again.
José led the caravan around the fires that were being lit in the big square. Far into the night, men would stand around them, warming the seats of their baggy, white cotton pants and talking. In front of the palace a white-haired porter with long, drooping mustaches lit the torches that flared on poles jutting from the walls. The flames sent great gushes of greasy black smoke spiraling into the darkening sky. From a bar somewhere down a winding alley drifted the music of a guitar, rising and falling.