Rendezvous (19 page)

“But you said you were Absaroka.”

“Sonofabitch!” she snapped. She looked offended.

“I will give you a name,” he said.

“You give me name?” She smiled. “Hokay, damn, Mister Skye.”

“In my country there's a little girl who's the daughter of the chief, a princess. Her name is Victoria. I will call you Victoria.”

She smiled wryly.

“How old are you, Victoria?”

She frowned, and then pointed to her fingers. “This many winters,” she said, ticking off the count. It came to fifteen.

“Fifteen,” he said. “I'll teach you the numbers.”

“Hell, no. That's for winter. Now I sit here and make medicine. You like me?”

“Yes I do, Victoria.”

“Good, Skye, pretty damn soon we have a lodge,” she said. “I want a big-nose. You give ponies to my father, and we make more Kicked-in-the-Bellies, hokay?”

Chapter 24

Many Quill Woman liked the man sitting next to her beside the river, and knew exactly why. He had a certain gravity. Unlike the other pale-fleshed men, he didn't laugh much or slouch or talk too much. This one said little, but his eyes drank in everything around him. Some tragedy from his past clung to him; she knew he had endured something terrible and had emerged from it a man with strength and courage.

It frustrated her that she could say so little to him. When the American trappers had come to her village on the Elk River, which the white men called the Yellowstone, and spent the previous winter, she had learned their tongue—at least as much as she could. She didn't despise them the way the other village girls did, but tried to find out what she could. They were a strange and mysterious tribe, the Goddamns, and she doubted she would ever really fathom their ways. They came without women, and she wondered what the female Goddamns were like and why they were hidden away somewhere.

Some of them, like Ed Rose and Jim Beckwourth, were fine warriors and much esteemed by the Absaroka because they fought side by side with them in several skirmishes with the Siksika. But they told strange tales no one believed, and they wanted all the women in the village. The grandmothers enjoyed the pale men, and spent hours telling bawdy stories to them, and hearing bawdy stories from them, which made them all laugh and made the winter pass quickly. The trappers didn't conquer very many Absaroka women, though. Certainly not herself, though they tried.

The Absaroka had come to the rendezvous of the Goddamns to buy guns. Chief Arapooish had said they should, and had come himself with just a few lodges. They all bore many pelts to trade for the wondrous weapon that would help the outnumbered Absaroka keep their homeland. They lived in the most beautiful land there ever was or could be, a land of snow-tipped mountains, rushing rivers, sweet water, great plains filled with grandfather buffalo to feed and clothe and shelter them. But the Absaroka faced the cruel Siksika in the north, who were as plentiful as leaves on trees and who had gotten guns from the North West Company traders; and on the east the powerful Lakota, many times more than the Absaroka in number, threatened to overwhelm them and rob them of their rightful home in the center of the world.

So the wise Arapooish had led the People to ally themselves with the Shoshones and the pale men who had guns, and to welcome any of the trappers into their villages. And now, he and several Absaroka lodges had come over the mountains to this place where there would be traders with guns, and they had brought many pony-loads of beaver pelts, buffalo robes, deer and elk skins, ermine and otter. They had brought ponies to trade, too, because the Goddamns never seemed to have enough, and paid much for them—a pony for a gun. The Absaroka would go back to the Elk River with many guns and powder and balls, and iron arrow and lance points, and keen-edged hatchets, and flints and strikers, and awls and cloth and thread, and the Absaroka would be stronger and better fed and dressed because of these wonders.

She had seen this young man the day he arrived with the Shoshones, and something in him caught her attention. She had known from that moment that she and he would someday share a lodge; she had the inner vision that told her so. No white man had this inner vision, which is why they were inferior to the People. This man, Mister Skye, didn't see with knowing inner sight, but she would teach him how to look for the vision and see beyond what could be seen with the eyes.

She was glad he had found her there, far from the rendezvous.

“I teach you words, you teach me words,” she said. If she was going to know this Goddamn better, she needed to be able to talk with him.

He nodded, but then he said, “Teach me the finger signs. I want to learn to talk with my hands.”

That sounded like a good project to her, so she thought up signs to show him. She smiled, her face aglow.

She brought two fingers of her right hand to the right side of her mouth. Her fingers pointed left. Then she moved her hand leftward across her mouth. “Lies,” she said.

“Lies?”

“Lies, two tongues.”

He nodded and tried it. She laughed.

She clasped her hands in front of her with her left hand facing down and her right in the palm of her left. “Peace.”

“That's good,” he said. “Peace.”

She held up all five fingers of one hand in front of her chest. “People,” she said.

“Oh, that's easy,” he replied. “People.”

She eyed him mischievously, and crossed her wrists in front of her heart, her right hand nearer her body. She closed her hands, with their backs upward. Then she pressed her right forearm against herself and her left wrist against the right. “Love,” she said solemnly, her eyes dancing.

He had trouble with that one, and she finally guided his hands until he could do it. “I'm not much good at love,” he said.

She put the tips of her right fingers over her lips and inclined her head forward. “Be quiet,” she said. “Now, Goddamn, this for you.”

She closed her right hand and brought it to her forehead, thumb up, and then rotated her hand in a small horizontal circle, turning it up to the sun and then left. “Crazy,” she said, her eyes alive with mirth again.

He imitated her. “I suppose I am,” he said.

She pointed one finger of her right hand at him. “You,” she said.

“That's easy.” He pointed a finger at her. “You.”

She touched the center of her chest with her extended thumb. “Me,” she said.

“That's easy, too. Is there a sign for hunger?”

She held the little finger of her right hand alongside her stomach, and then moved the finger left and right. “Much hunger,” she said solemnly.

“Show me yes and no.”

She lifted her right hand in front of her to shoulder height, its fingers pointing up, her thumb on her second finger. Then she moved her hand down and left, closing her index finger over her thumb. “Yes,” she said, and waited for him to do it, too. Then she extended her right hand in front of her, palm upward, and swung her hand to the right while turning it, putting her thumb up. “No,” she said.

He wrestled with that a few times. “How do I say thank you, Victoria?”

She extended both of her hands outward, the backs up, and swept them outward and downward toward him. “Thank you,” she said.

He did that. “I like you, Victoria. I hope you will give me many more lessons.”

“Skye, you old coon, I show you how the stick floats.”

He stared blankly and she laughed. Pretty soon he would have the signs, and pretty soon she would have Skye.

They strolled back to the encampment through a brassy afternoon, with the heat thick in her nostrils. She tried to teach him Absaroka words. There were so many, and she wanted him to master every one so they could talk and she could plumb his secrets.

She spotted an eagle soaring above and gave him the word,
mai shu'.
She named the wild rose,
mit ska' pa.
She named the squirrels and the ravens and the hawks. She named their clothing, and then she named their body parts, eyes, ears, nose, chest, fingers, toes. She named the earth and sky and sun and stars.

All these he repeated, but she knew he was being dutiful rather than trying to learn them. He really wasn't interested in the Absaroka words, unlike the finger signs, which he made an effort to master. The signs he could use; her tongue he could not. She sighed. Maybe her inner vision had been flawed or she had not fathomed what she had seen. Maybe he would drift away with the rest of the Goddamns when this was over.

“You don't care about Absaroka words.”

He didn't deny it, but gazed at her directly in a manner very impolite. “I need the sign language,” he said. “You are a good teacher. The signs will help me when I go east.”

“East?”

“Yes. I will not be here long.”

She absorbed that, her confidence suddenly frayed. “Where are you going?”

He tried to frame a reply and couldn't, and finally shrugged. “I don't know how to tell you. But I have a long way to go.”

She squinted. “And never come back to here?”

“No. I won't be back.”

“You don't like it here? You don't like Absaroka? You don't like me?”

“I like you all. But this is not what I will do with my life.”

“Sonofabitch, what you gonna do?”

He seemed helpless to explain. “Go to the big villages of the Americans.”

“What there?”

“Go to college if I can. Someway, somehow.”

“What's that?”

“I can't explain it.” But then he tried. “Did your mother teach you how to sew a dress or tan a hide? Did she teach you how to cook? A college is where I will go to learn.”

“You don't need college. I teach you everything. I teach you many words and signs.”

“Yes, and thank you, Victoria.”

He smiled. He hadn't smiled all the way back to the encampment and his mind was drifting elsewhere, to some shores of memory where she could never walk. She wondered about him, about the sadness written on his big, creased face, and radiating from his eyes. This Skye was a sad man.

“How come you ain't happy?” she asked, a little cross.

“I am happy. I have not been so happy since I was younger than you.”

“What take your happiness away?”

“I was in a boat that sailed the water, and I could not escape.”

“I would be unhappy, too,” she said. “We live in a good land, the center of the world. There is no better place. Chief Arapooish has said it. To the north it is too cold, and to the south too hot and dry, and to the east too wet and flat and unpleasing to the eye. But here are mountains and forests and creeks to please the eye, and everything is just right for the Absaroka people. We love our land, which is just beyond the mountains on the Elk River, and we will never let others take it from us. We will die before we will surrender it.”

“I understand. I would die rather than surrender my freedom. That is because it means more to me than life.”

“Ah, Mister Skye, you are a man of much medicine,” she said.

“Medicine?”

“Power. You could be a holy man. You maybe have the medicine of the hawks.”

Skye laughed. She stared, amazed. He had been distant all the while they strolled back, but now his gaze met hers, and fires lit between them.

Chapter 25

Skye hunted for General Ashley. The time had come to make arrangements to go to St. Louis. He intended to work his way east in whatever capacity Ashley might use him. He'd heard that this rendezvous would wind up shortly, and Ashley was eager to get back. He had a fortune in beaver pelts that he would haul to St. Louis on the packhorses that had brought out the year's provisions.

He found the general at his tent, near his trading store, sitting on a stump and bent over a ledger. The man radiated a certain august presence that impressed Skye. The man's demeanor had helped him both as a politician and as an officer in the militia. He had a noble profile, and used it to advantage, often facing sideways from whoever he was addressing.

“A word if I may, sir,” Skye said, his topper in hand.

“Yes, yes, let me add up this column,” the general said, a bit testily.

Skye waited until the man finished and stared up at his visitor, his gaze assessive and neutral.

“I'm looking for a position—service to you on your trip east,” Skye began.

“Who are you?”

“Barnaby Skye, sir.”

“Oh, the deserter Diah Smith told me about.”

“Pressed seaman, sir.”

“It doesn't matter what your story is. The fact is, you deserted your post, failed your superior officers, your nation, and your shipmates.”

“I served Great Britain for seven years, sir.”

“Not voluntarily, so it's no sign of virtue in you.”

“I fought for the Crown in the Kaffir wars and once in Burma, and was blooded in Africa.”

“What you say doesn't matter. You deserted your post.”

“General, how much does a man owe his government?”

“Whatever it asks.”

“Seven years, sir?”

“More if required.”

“If your government bound you to service for seven years, with no recourse, would you serve gladly—your life disrupted?”

“That's hypothetical. Your desertion is real.”

“My question, sir—”

Ashley paused, softening slightly. “I would not serve gladly and I would seek avenues of redress. But desertion? Never.”

“What if there's no redress?”

“There's always redress.”

“Do you know that for a fact—about the Royal Navy?”

“Britain's a great nation—”

“That's not my question, general.”

“No, I don't, but I can't imagine there's any truth in your cock-and-bull story.”

Skye saw the way it was heading and abandoned that tack. “I'm looking for passage east. I'll work my way there in your service. I have a horse, and that would help you.”