Blaze (36 page)

He'd dozed a little during the night so he hadn't gone completely sleepless. But he'd spent a lot of time staring into the smoldering fire and analyzing the concept of his woman that had finally forced its way into his conscious thoughts. Problems arose; the obvious ones concerned the mine, less blatant ones involved the success of any future they might have. Not new problems, old ones. With an additional reflection to confuse an already muddled predicament. Was Blaze Braddock's unique sense of adventure, he wondered, simply spilling over and encompassing a sensual caprice as well, or was she capable of more? Were her feelings committed past a frivolous lark?

Hazard had been entertaining himself too many years with willing and amorous ladies to be certain himself where frolic stopped and love began. But while he came up with no answers, of one thing he was certain: he did want her as his woman. To relinquish her, to send her away, even to ignore her sexually for some moral concept of honor, as he'd first attempted, were no longer viable options. Selfishly, he wanted her. She pleased him in countless ways, brought joy to his life. And pleasure— more profound and intemperate than any he'd known before.

"I feel much better," Blaze purred, startling him from his musing. "What in the world is in that stuff?"

"Mostly buffalo fat," Hazard replied, adjusting his arm, stiff from its immobility, "with some yucca plant, nettle, camomile, and I forget what else. A few incantations and smoke from sacred tobacco," he added with a smile.

"Are you teasing me?" Blaze asked, nestling against him, her eyes the way he liked them best—enormous with cheerful curiosity.

"I forgot the hummingbird feathers."

"Now you're teasing."

"Nope. True as E-sahca-wata's laugh."

"One of your folktales?"

"This one about Old Man Coyote reminds us of our humanity, and frailty."

"Tell me."

"Sometime. Say tomorrow, when we're indulging our laziness in my lodge at the Arrow." His dark brows rose. "And now, bia, it's time to leave if we want to reach home before dark. Now, Boston princess," he whispered, brushing her hair aside from her cheek, "you have to get ready." And bending, he kissed her tenderly on the eyes, then dressed her, fed her, lifted her onto Peta, and swung up behind, arranging her in his lap. He wouldn't hear of her riding today, although Blaze insisted she was perfectly fine.

Hazard held her that day as they rode higher into the mountains, and only a man with muscles strengthened by years of physical training could have so effortlessly endured. They stopped at a creek just outside the range of the scouts—which he called wolves—set round the encampment and washed. Hazard dressed in full regalia with all the accoutrements of his position as chief: wolf tails at the heels of each beaded moccasin, indicative of striking coups; falcon tail feathers with eagle breath feathers tied behind one ear, his medicine and spiritual guide; iridescent blue and green sea shells from beyond the mountains by the Pacific where the Salish lived, hung from both his earlobes, pierced with a heated awl by his mother on the second day of his life;10 fringed leggings adorned with ermine tails that marked him a leader of an expedition returning with booty. A beaded shirt,11 half open over his strong chest, revealed a necklace of bear teeth.

Peta was decked out too, in a rich bridle and breastplate traded in the annual spring meeting with the Sho-shone—they'd obtained the Spanish riding gear from the Southwest tribes. The polished medallion glowed, ornamented with flowing feathers and strings of beadwork. A knotted rope hanging from Peta's neck told of the cutting of an enemy's picketed mount. And the number of horses captured could be read from the stripes of white clay painted under her eyes and on her flanks. Hazard modestly used the symbolic number three, his lucky number, knowing each stripe represented many more.

When he had finished dressing he added a heavy silver necklace to Blaze's costume, matching the pale saffron doeskin dress elaborately beaded in shades of silver and azure. Then he held her still and carefully combed her hair with the porcupine-tail comb common to the Northwest Plains tribes. His strokes were gentle and skilled, and under the late afternoon sun her red-gold hair soon shone like satin. When he was satisfied, he lifted her onto Peta and vaulted up behind. Carefully holding her across his lap, he nudged Peta with his knees. The breath feathers behind his left ear stirred in the light wind.

THE wolves spotted them first and sent out their wailing cries. Hazard smiled, the sound a familiar childhood memory.

Two scouts, eager in their youth, came galloping out of a draw and thundered across the open grassland toward them, hauling their ponies to a rearing halt a few short feet from Hazard and Blaze. "Welcome, Dit-chi-lajash," they cried, wide smiles of greeting on their handsome young faces. "We were afraid you weren't coming!" Blaze recognized Hazard's name in the flow of Ab-sarokee words.

"I missed you young cubs too much to stay away," Hazard smilingly replied to the eager youths on their prancing ponies. Noting their surreptitious glances at Blaze, he gestured gracefully at her and said, "Buah, Blaze Braddock." And Blaze smiled at them, understanding it was an introduction.

Still young enough to lack some of the necessary social graces, they sat open-mouthed for a moment when Hazard said, "bua." Speaking rapidly, Hazard prompted them and they both stammered an English "El-lo."

"That, I'm afraid, is about the extent of their English," Hazard said to Blaze. "They're sons of my mother's sister and," he finished with a smile, "a great nuisance at times." Hazard murmured a few brisk phrases in Absarokee to them and, with a gesture much like a salute, they wheeled their ponies and galloped away. "They're going to ride ahead. Something they're eminently suited for. At this age, they only know how to gallop."

So when Hazard and Blaze entered the village sometime later, the whispering had already preceded them as Hazard knew it would. Uah (his wife) drifted from mouth to mouth. "Hazard the Black Cougar has taken a wife" went from lodge to lodge. "A yellow eyes," they murmured, and the young women who had been recipients of Hazard's attention in the past whispered less charitable phrases. "He won't keep her long," they said. "A yellow eyes can't please him as a wife." Hazard the Black Cougar had long been famed for his beauty and attentiveness, and his former lovers disliked hearing they'd been displaced.

The tepees from the mountain and river divisions of the Absarokee spread across the whole grassy river valley. They were divided into clans, circles of lodges arranged in a familiar pattern with all doorways facing east. As with all Plains Indians, horses meant wealth. And this camp was rich. For miles around the hills were covered with ponies of all sizes and colors.

Hazard rode slowly through the crowds of people pressing around them. He smiled and acknowledged their greetings, answered dozens of inquiries with quips which made everyone laugh. They all noted how carefully he carried the yellow eyes woman. And none of them had forgotten the origin of the elaborately beaded dress the yellow eyes wore. They all remembered how many horses Hazard had paid for it. For his first wife. His Absarokee wife. How much power, they wondered, did the beautiful flame-haired woman hold over their chief?

Hazard stopped before a pure white lodge, taller than the others and beautifully painted, unlike most of the tepees. With Blaze still in his arms, he slid off Peta. Standing in the center of the admiring crowd, he spoke to those gathered round, listened to them, paused sometimes before answering—other times answered with no more than a smile. Small boys pushed to see him and those who dared touched him. He was the legendary Dit-chilajash, the chief who had more coups than anyone in memory. After a polite amount of time Hazard nodded, turning back to the lodge, then spoke rapidly and concisely as if issuing orders.

A pathway was cleared for him to the doorway of his lodge. He was, Blaze thought, like some conquering hero, and impossibly complicated feelings assailed her. It was as if he had a light side and a dark side—two different people—and she hardly knew either. Striding toward the entrance, he spoke twice more to a young man who bore a remarkable resemblance to him, although still in his youth and some inches shorter than Hazard. The boy laughed. Hazard smiled and murmured a few more words before bending slightly and passing into the interior of his lodge with Blaze.

Careful as he lowered her, he placed Blaze on a bed of fur robes, one of two on either side of the entrance. The dwelling was as elaborately decorated inside as out. Painted skins hung from above eye level, lining the entire inner surface. Light streamed down from the smoke hole high overhead, and a soft diffused illumination from the afternoon sun shimmered through the pale leather.

"Are you tired?" Hazard asked, pulling up a woven willow backrest and sprawling comfortably beside Blaze's bed, leaning against his own icereko' tsi 'te.

"No. You wouldn't let me do anything today," she replied, her smile mischievous.

"Later—tomorrow—you should be completely healed and you can have the run of the camp."

"And of you?" Blaze winsomely asked. "Since you turned me down this morning." She had wanted him so badly in their soft bed of ground cedar, but he'd gently refused, afraid of hurting her bruised body.

"For your own good, minx. Not for lack of wanting. And yes, tomorrow, I'm available. Remind me," he said grinning.

"With all those people who seem to know you and want your time, will it be possible?" she inquired, half in jest and half seriously. "You're extremely well known." It was a prodigious understatement of the chiefs position she'd just viewed.

"They're all from my clan, bia. I'm one of their chiefs, as was my father before me. I know everyone and everyone knows me," he casually answered, seemingly oblivious of his fame.

"How many are there?"

"My clan12 is one of thirteen and we've forty lodges." In terms of people, around four hundred. We're part of the Mountain Absarokee, sometimes called Many Lodges. In the summer, we meet with the River Absarokee, the Black Lodges, and socialize. Everyone's related in convoluted ways. It's like a large family gathering, with all branches present. Probably five hundred lodges altogether are here now."

"And you know them all?"

"Most, although I've lost track of some of the newer youngsters."

And they all know you, she uneasily thought; know you and want some part of you. She'd seen the women's glances. One would have had to be blind not to. She thought of the women's covetous eyes and said, "Do you have any?" ignoring the hesitancy of politesse.

"Any what?" he said in apparent ignorance. But it could be evasion; Hazard had never struck her as particularly slow.

She wasn't to be put off. "Children," she explained.

It was silent in the cool interior. Hazard's sprawl went suddenly rigid. Lord, he knew her so little, knew less what she was thinking. Knew only slightly more about his own thoughts concerning her. Why was she so damnably inquisitive? The answer to her question probably required an entire restructuring of her cultural ideas on family—of which there was no time, at present, he brusquely decided. "None by my wife," said Hazard shortly.

For once in her life, Blaze was shocked into silence. She tried to speak twice, but the words wouldn't separate neatly from the jumbled confusion in her mind.

"It's not the same in our clan," he said mildly after a very long time, after the silence had lengthened and the first suffused shock had subsided on Blaze's cheeks—and after his own painful memories had been locked away once again. "Men and women have lovers, wifes are abducted at times. There are different choices with us."

"Who has the choices?" Blaze asked, finally finding her voice, wanting to know how Hazard's children were born, wondering if the choices were masculine prerogatives as they were in her world.

"Men and women both. Since women own property as men do, they have more freedom. That's not to say most marriages aren't stable and long-lasting. Most are… but—"

"There are choices," Blaze softly finished.

Hazard sighed. "Right," he said, knowing his truncated version of a very complicated cultural phenomenon was not going to satisfy Blaze's inquiry about his children.