Robson, Lucia St. Clair Read online

  Something sharp was digging into her cheek. She tried to brush it away from her face, but found her arms were paralyzed. No, tied. The dream faded, and the nightmare came into focus. Still the animal screams went on. Cousin Rachel and Aunt Elizabeth were near the flames, their bodies painted in yellow light. They had been stripped and were bound spread-eagled to stakes hammered deep into the soft ground. The raw shame of their exposure shocked Cynthia almost more than the killing and tortures she had seen.

  A few Indians still jerked and twitched in a trancelike state in front of the fire, but most of them stood or squatted around the women. Ignoring their screams and moans, they laughed and joked with each other as they waited their turns. Men who had finished wandered off to sleep a few hours before the long day coming. The others were in no hurry. There were many of them and only two women, but they had all night. While they waited they recounted the stories of the morning’s coups and speculated about how the raid leaders would divide the wealth up among their men. It had been a very good day.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cynthia smelled coffee. Coffee and love and family and home. A rooster crowed in the chill hour before dawn. She and her brothers John and little Silas curled together under the huge, blue goose-down comforter. The smell of coffee drifted up through the cracks in the floorboards of the low loft where they slept. Her father’s big arms wrapped around her while they rocked in front of the morning fire. She ran her fingers through the thick, black hairs on the back of his hand as he held a mug of hot coffee. Aromatic wraiths floated over steaming bowls of cornmeal mush sweetened with wild honey.

  But the world had gone awry. Her beloved coffee was mixed with the stench of fresh dung and stale sweat. With rancid grease and the biting odor of urine that splashed near her head as she lay huddled against the tree root where she’d been thrown. She looked up to see an Indian shake off the last drops and shuffle sleepily back toward the fire.

  It was the hour before dawn. It was chilly. Coffee was in the air, along with death and terror and cruelty. Her breakfast was dirt, and there was grit between her teeth.

  “John?” No answer. He was gone.

  The coffee was being brewed in Mrs. White’s new copper kettle, now coated with fine black ash from the open fire. Drooping red banners of buffalo steaks hung from long, sharpened sticks planted around the fire. The flames popped and sizzled as the juice dropped on them. The rich odor of roasting meat knotted the child’s empty stomach with hunger. Raiders squatted on their haunches around the fire, tearing at the charred flesh, grease running off their chins and elbows as they talked in low, guttural tones. Others rounded up horses for the day’s ride.

  The Indians coalesced into separate groups. The lean Caddoans, with turkey feathers behind their ears, skinny legs, hooked noses, and bobbing crests of hair, looked like a flock of tattered birds. Their plucked skulls were painted with wavy red lines. Bright tin rings dangled from their noses. The paint on their faces was cracked and peeling, giving them a scabrous look in the dim dawn light filtering through the trees.

  Elizabeth Kellogg lay unconscious and almost naked across the flanks of one of their ponies. Her arms and legs were tied together by a rope passed under the horse’s belly. She seemed dead, her head lolling from side to side as the group moved off single file through the woods. Their course would take them north and out of Cynthia’s life.

  The Kiowa were a handsome and arrogant lot, much more graceful on the ground than the stockier Comanche. Many of the Comanche didn’t braid their hair but wore it pushed behind their ears.

  A thin, quavering wail rose over the camp’s clamor. Little Jamie Plummer had been snatched from his cold cradle of leaves and twigs and tied onto a horse. His mother followed him, her haunted, red-rimmed eyes sunken in the dark hollows of her gaunt face. Her shredded clothes fluttered about her. She walked stiffly, jerked along by Tsetarkau, Terrible Snows, her owner. Eyes bulging in his round face, he waddled ahead of her, balancing precariously on his strangely thin legs. His paunch hung over the edge of his narrow breechclout cord. His long arms ended in large, bony hands that dangled halfway to his knobby knees. Rachel shuffled after him to the horses. Head bowed, she was pulled through a gauntlet of men who reached out to pinch and slap her.

  Near the fire, Big Bow, Buffalo Piss, and the other raid leaders were huddled, dividing up the spoils that lay heaped around them. Runners delivered the goods to the men who were to receive them. Cynthia could see Wanderer’s head above all the others as he moved toward her, weaving in and out among the groups. Desperately she told herself that he couldn’t have been one of her tormentors the night before. She almost prayed it wasn’t so.

  Hunkering down, he untied her feet. With the black paint washed off his face, she had a fleeting glimpse of youth and innocence and intelligence before he lifted her head up by the hair and slipped the noose around her neck. Lights exploded in front of her eyes as he yanked her to her feet by the cord around her throat. She swayed and stumbled, needles shooting through her cold, numb legs. Her feet were lumps of clay hanging on her ankles. Every muscle was outlined in pain. Her back, legs, and arms were stiff with dried blood and scabs.

  Something in Wanderer’s eyes had seemed human, had tricked her into expecting some small kindness from him. She had been lured into thinking she could predict his behavior. She stared at his lithe, tapering back as he stalked ahead of her, trailing her leash loosely. And she felt deeply and brutally betrayed for the first time in her life. With the singlemindedness of a child, she blamed him for all that had happened to her and her loved ones.

  All she wanted in the world were freed hands and a long sharp knife. She would plunge it to the hilt between his tawny, smooth shoulder blades and hang on it until it sliced all the way down the length of his spine. She wanted to feel his blood spurting on her arms and watch him topple face down into the dirt. She hated him, and she knew she would always hate him.

  Maybe it was the hatred that kept her sane that second night. She concentrated on the revenge she would take when she escaped, and avoided the problem of how she would escape. A tight gag cut the corners of her mouth and soaked up what little moisture was left. Staked out on her back, her throat tethered by a thong passed tightly across it and tied to small posts on either side, she couldn’t even huddle up against the cold.

  She stared up at the stars glittering like slivers of ice in the black sky. The cool night air blew across her sunburned skin until she shook with chills that passed up and down her body. She had had nothing to eat and little to drink in the thirty-six hours since the attack. Her mouth was lined with dirty lint. Her stomach seemed shriveled. The insides of her eyelids were fine sandpaper. She couldn’t see John, but she could hear the slapping, slurping noises of the men using Rachel.

  They were back at the Navasota River in the small clearing where they’d picked up their horses the day before. Why were they here? Would they attack the fort again? Was she doomed to watch the same grisly scene over and over? It couldn’t be. There were only fifteen Indians now, and surely help was coming. Her family and friends must be searching for her. Cynthia pulled quietly and desperately at her ropes. If she could escape, she could follow the river home. This nightmare would fade into stories to frighten her own children. Her father would be alive and her mother would welcome her lost child back. But the rawhide held against her feeble tugging and she had to stop, weeping with frustration, when she saw Cruelest One watching her. He never seemed to take his black, glittering snake’s eyes off her, as though waiting for an excuse to kill her.

  She had no way of knowing that in the Comanche’s vast territory a hundred-mile detour for a rendezvous was nothing. They weren’t happy to be back at the Navasota, though. There was no fire and no noise. The few men still awake got up often to stand at the edge of the trees and stare out at the bright, moonlit hills. Scattered around the small clearing were the humped forms of the others, sleeping under warm buffalo robes.

  Cynthia could feel t
iny legs tickling her as night spiders explored her body. Jibbering thoughts of snakes slithering alongside her for warmth kept her tense and wide-eyed for hours. When she finally fell asleep, she never heard the eerie, bubbling call of the screech owl.

  There was an argument going on when she woke up. Without understanding a word she knew that she was its cause and that she might die. Cruelest One was talking softly but savagely. He stabbed the air in her direction with his bony finger. The others squatted or stood and listened attentively, their faces stolid and unreadable in the dim light. Wanderer spoke next, his voice almost too low to hear. When he finished, the rest grunted and went off to saddle their ponies.

  Wanderer walked over to her and sat on his heels. He studied her as though she were a kitten to be drowned. She stared up at him dumbly, her blue eyes enormous under the tangled straw of her hair. One tear sneaked from the corner of her eye and fled down her cheek, but she kept the rest of her face under control. He was so young to be a murderer, scarcely older than Robert Frost. Wanderer pulled his scalping knife from the leather sheath strapped to his bare thigh. Cynthia closed her eyes, tensed her muscles, and tried to remember the prayers her mother had taught her centuries ago. But there were no prayers left, only rivers of blood, mangled limbs, naked women, and babies with their heads burst like melons.

  She felt a slight tug at her throat. He was using the knife’s point to loosen the knots in the rawhide. When he had her neck free, he untied the gag in her mouth. He held the flat of the blade against her lips. Then he drew the tip lightly in a graceful, curving line from the hollow beneath her left ear, around under her chin, and up to her other ear. His meaning was clear. She nodded, assuming that he in turn would know what her nod meant. She could never take life for granted. Wanderer held it quivering in his hands.

  “He’s not so bad, you know.”

  “John, how can you say that?”

  It was the second day after leaving the Trinity River. The sun had burned off the morning’s haze and now blew its hot breath across the low hills. A fairy cloud of gnats danced around the children’s faces as they sat tied against an old pecan tree. Its rough, furrowed bark hurt the striped grid of bruises and scabs on their backs. They shook their heads, flailing their hair at the winged motes that tangled in their lashes and crawled over their mouths and nostrils.

  In front of them bucked the Brazos River, swollen by invisible spring rains somewhere to the north. The Comanche called it Tohopt Pah-e-hona, Blue Water River. Its sly, sapphire eddies and foamfrosted pools had almost drowned the lot of them as they swam their horses across. The last drops of their soaking were drying up, forming shrinking oases of coolness on their bodies.

  “Well, he hasn’t beaten me any more, and this morning we sneaked away and he showed me how to get honey. He let me have a little. His horse is faster than anybody’s except Wanderer’s. His name means Eagle, and he’s teaching me sign language. Did you know the word for honey is pena?”

  Cynthia was no longer nine years old. She had aged a lifetime in three days. Now her little brother was trading it all in for a fingerful of honey from a murderer.

  “John, listen to me.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you remember what they did?”

  “Eagle didn’t kill anybody. It was the others.” His small mouth set into the tight line that closed out all argument.

  Maybe he hadn’t noticed his father’s thick, curly brown hair hanging from the war lance nearby. Maybe he didn’t understand what was happening to Cousin Rachel. Rachel’s sweet, fey voice floated across to them from where she huddled among the roots of a cottonwood, suckling Jamie. Shame hovered around her like the cloud of gnats. She never raised her eyes, never spoke except to croon nonsense to her child. She was as alien as the Indians. And now John was defecting. Cynthia felt old and alone, but she tried again.

  “Don’t you miss Mother and little Silas and Orlena?”

  “Of course. Maybe tonight we can escape or the Rangers will find us….”

  Their whispering had alerted Cruelest One. He glared at them from the circle of men studying the notched sticks that guided them through strange territory. His look silenced the children.

  As they rode that day and the next through country that became flatter and more barren, Cynthia went frantically over each day’s march, searching for some carelessness that would let her and John slip away. Landmarks became fewer and fewer as they moved away from the hills and onto the plains. The sky soared higher over them, and the horizon stretched out into infinity. Hopelessness yawned at her feet, and she was sliding into it. But death in the desert was better than what was happening to Rachel. It was better even than watching it happen to her.

  Rachel knew she would never be clean again. An ocean of water and a continent of soap wouldn’t do it. Not all the world’s scrub brushes could scour the salmon scent of dried semen from her skin. Keening softly, almost silently, like the high-pitched whine of summer’s mosquitoes, she drew her finger up her arm. It left a furrow in the film of grease there, rancid beaver oil that their bodies smeared all over her.

  Absently she rubbed and kneaded the tattered rags of her skirt. The cloth around her thighs was stiff and black with grease and dirt and sweat salt. When they weren’t tied her hands were moving up and down against her legs, wiping and massaging first the palms and then the backs and the palms again.

  Maybe Luther, her husband, was alive and looking for her. And if he found her? What then? He would never want to touch her. No one would. She hated to touch herself. She saw herself back among civilized people. She heard the murmur of whispers that parted before her and closed in behind her back as she passed.

  Death tantalized her, dancing like a mirage of water in a baking desert. Die and abandon Jamie to the savage who hung him carelessly in a leather sack on his packhorse along with the other loot. Who fed him by throwing a pan of dirty, congealed corn mush in front of him and letting the child live on what he could dig out with his tiny, unlearned fingers.

  At least they let her nurse him now and then, not knowing that her milk was drying up, curdling inside her. The few minutes cradling him at her breast were all that kept her living. That and the necessity of killing Cynthia. Rachel didn’t know how she would do it, but she knew it would be inevitable eventually. It was only a matter of time before the child’s innocent, vulnerable beauty caught their attention. Rachel would try to be ready when it happened.

  Constant hunger ate at her insides, keeping her weak and disoriented. On the fourth night out her master tied her hands behind her and propped her against a prickly, stunted juniper tree just outside the warmth of the fire. As the raiders ate they occasionally tossed sizzling pieces of buffalo meat onto her bare thighs. They laughed at the sight of her crying from the pain and struggling to eat the small bits after they fell in the dirt. It gave them endless enjoyment, but not much nourishment for Rachel.

  That was the night they invented another new amusement. When those who used her finally finished and allowed her to fall into an exhausted sleep, two of them crept up with a glowing coal held between green sticks. Cruelest One thrust the live ember up her left nostril. He and Terrible Snows giggled when she woke up screaming and writhing, lashing her head from side to side and pulling at her bonds to rid herself of it. When she didn’t stop screaming Cruelest One placed his dirty moccasined foot in her mouth and, leaning down, held his knife’s point to her throat. Rachel stopped screaming. But whenever Cynthia awoke from her fitful sleep that endless night, she heard her cousin sobbing quietly.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ahead of the small party stretched a carpet of blue. The flowers flowed for miles across the gently undulating plain. At the horizon they curved upward and blended into the cornflower-colored sky. Cynthia sat loosely on the tattered old packhorse Wanderer had given her to ride. Her legs barely reached across his back and the leash was still around her neck, but she felt a twinge of pride in having her own mount. The ache in her body was now only
what she used to feel after a hard day in the fields back home.

  A gentle wind ruffled her honey-colored hair and sent the horse’s ragged tail fluttering out behind him. She was grateful for the bit of calm after five days of horror, even if it were the peace in the eye of the hurricane. That morning Cruelest One and three others had ridden off to the northwest. Another group had followed them with Rachel, Jamie, and John. Now she was alone with Wanderer, Eagle, Big Bow, Howea, Deep Water, one of the herder boys, and a warrior of Mexican birth named His-oo-san-ches and called Spaniard. The last one in the group was Buffalo Piss, the raid leader.

  She missed John, even though she’d been upset at how quickly he had begun to enjoy the wild, Indian life. He seemed more unhappy at Eagle’s betrayal as he had casually traded the boy off for two blankets, a bolt of cloth, and an iron skillet, than by all the atrocities he had seen.

  In a way the loss of the captives was a weight lifted from Cynthia. It had been painful to watch Jamie’s legs and arms shrink into sticks from malnutrition. She no longer had to see John turning into a savage or hear the nightly moans of Rachel and the obscene noises of the men rutting. Rachel had become a shameful reproach, making Cynthia vaguely guilty for not suffering more. Her presence constantly reminded the child of unspeakable acts and terrifying threats.

  There was a tug at her leash. While the other men discussed their route, Wanderer turned his black pony to face her. He pulled a small bag from his belt and poured black powder into the palm of his left hand. He mixed it with water from his pouch and, dipping his fingers into the paste, began smearing thick paint over the exposed area of Cynthia’s burned shoulders and face. Expecting blows, she flinched as his hands touched her. Now they were gentle and firm as he tried to protect her from the sun.

  When he stroked the sticky black paint onto her cheeks, she was startled by the intense look in his eyes as he stared into hers. Fear from a source too deep to have a name caused her to lower her head and jerk away. Frowning, he pulled her back roughly and held her until he finished. Everyone in her family had the same brilliant azure eyes; she couldn’t know the fascination they held for an Indian. The acres of blue brushing the ponies’ hocks intensified their color under her long yellow lashes, making her seem like a growing thing that belonged on the prairie.