The Valiant Women (65 page)

“Bandits don't burden themselves with little ones,” Belen said. “These didn't even bother with mules and horses.”

“Who do you think they were?”

“Probably some gang from Sonora. Lots of them are on the prowl, looting whatever they can now the soldiers are gone.” Belen picked up a shovel leaned against a nearby wall. “While I dig a grave for these poor bones,
madama
, you might see if there's anything of importance left in the headquarters.”

Reining her mare far around the scattered human ruins, Talitha rode to the long main building which served as office, store, and Don Elizario's quarters. Hitching Ceniza to a post, she saw many bullet holes scarring the adobe; percussion caps and spent cartridges lay about. The marauders had been well equipped, which argued for their being Americans, riffraff run out of California or Texas.

At least they'd met with a stiff fight here. Talitha pushed open the door hanging awry on leather hinges and sucked in her breath. Part of what had been the bearlike hulk of Don Elizario was staked to the wall, half skeleton, half mummy, ravaged by beaks and talons. The hip joints dangled loosely, while the leg and foot bones were scattered about the floor, gnawed by coyotes. Two other skeleton remnants lay near the small windows where they'd fallen.

Talitha hadn't liked the mine manager. His sly little eyes had lingered knowingly on her even when she'd been a child. But she hoped he'd been dead, or nearly so, when he was hung up like this.

Swallowing, she went into the storeroom. Bolts of cloth, blankets, boots, saddles, and tools had been dragged to the floor, grain, corn, beans, and other supplies spilled on them, and the whole set afire. Waste for the joy of it. The weapons had been taken, and the strongboxes which held the gold and silver received for the mine's ore had been blasted open and emptied.

In Don Elizario's rooms, as luxurious as the place allowed, carved wooden furniture had been hacked and fired, along with the huge mattress and pillows. A costly mirror lay shattered. The glazed windows were broken. Talitha went out the door and rode back to tell Belen there were more to bury.

Resting on the spade, he wiped sweat from his brow and frowned at the crimson sunset. “We'll have to stay the night in the basin,
madama
. Let's go unpack the mules and make camp. Another night won't matter to these poor dead ones.”

To try to sleep near this place of death? Talitha shuddered, but she knew it was impossible to go back up the cañon in darkness. “Why don't you dig till you're tired?” she suggested. “I'll find a good spot near the stream and unload the mules.”

He nodded. “The more I dig now, the sooner we can be out of here in the morning.”

Talitha collected the mules and led them down to good grass growing along the stream. Undoing the lashings, she lifted off first the boxes of cartridges on top of the pack frame, then the boxlike leather aparejos fitting to either side, praising the sturdy little gray-brown beasts, scratching them between their ears. They went quickly to water, but the ground was too wet for a refreshing roll, so they began to twist up satisfying bites of the lush grass. After unsaddling Ceniza, Talitha got out the coffeepot, tossed some jerky and pinole into the frying pan with enough water to soften them, and began to gather wood. A fire was always a dangerous signal, but she believed that she and Belen needed hot coffee and hot food tonight.

She was breaking a mesquite limb across her knee when long arms closed around her.

“Let me do that.”

Even through startled panic, she knew that deep, ever so faintly accented voice, though she hadn't heard it for over a year.

“Marc!” Turning, she threw her arms around him, joyously searching the squarish face with broad cheekbones, the old saber scar across his left cheek and eyebrow. The lines at the corners of his blue eyes were deeper, like those edging the good-humored mouth, and a few gray hairs were mixed among the thick brown ones. With laughter that changed to a sob, she buried her face against him. “Oh, Marc!”

“Why, I believe you're glad to see me,” he teased, stroking her head and shoulders, her friend, who'd given her her first glimpses of the world beyond. He'd taken her to her first dance, that wonderful Christmas celebration at Colonel Poston's mining headquarters in Tubac. That was when he'd first betrayed that he loved her as a woman. She'd seen him only a few times in the years between then and last summer, when he'd joined the party trailing Judah Frost and then brought Shea, wounded, back to the Socorro.

It was then, driven by a desperate need to be cleansed of Frost's use of her body, that Talitha had asked Marc to make love to her. She loved him as much as she could anyone except Shea, found comfort and healing in his strength and passion. But when he learned that she still wouldn't marry him, he'd ridden off in anger to the Tecolote mine southwest of Yuma Crossing near the Devil's Highway.

He brought her face up, brushed her mouth with his, then moved back, steadying her. “Prettier than ever, Talitha! Don't you know that women who don't marry are supposed to dry up and look like sticks?” When she didn't smile, he turned to look across the basin toward the settlement. “Where's Belen? Why are you here instead of at the camp?”

He heard of the outrage in silence, the muscles in his cheek going taut. When she'd finished, he gave her a little shake. “My God, Talitha! Surely this will persuade you to at least move in to Tucson!”

“You stopped at the ranch?”

“Of course. That's how I knew where to find you.”

“Then you saw that the El Charco people have joined us.”

He glanced through the twilight at the devastated village. “There must have been—what?—fifty miners here? With weapons.”

“They must have been taken by surprise. For the silver and gold. We have no big amounts of them at Socorro.”

“Raiders won't necessarily guess that—or care. Apaches don't hanker after coin, you know. They prefer stock and captive women and children.”

She turned away. “I
was
glad to see you.”

He caught her to him in exasperation. Even in the dimming light, his eyes blazed. “Damn you, Talitha! Can I love you and applaud your bullheadedness?”

“You don't have to applaud,” she said through her teeth.

“Shea wouldn't want you to stay now that the soldiers have gone.”

The way he spoke strangled the hope she'd had, that he'd come to stay with her, help run the ranch. Gripped with disappointment and bone-weariness, she tried to wrest free of him.

“I suppose you're going to join the army, too—the Union one!”

“You know how I feel about slavery, Talitha. And this country gave me hope and faith after I saw the start of freedom strangled in Berlin.” Pleading against her averted face, he said with that inexorable firmness she knew nothing could shake, “I owe my new country much, Talitha. I must pay what I can.”

“Pay,” she thrust. “But don't try to frighten me out of paying a debt myself!”

With a rough intake of breath, he forced her against him, set his hand at the back of her head, and kissed her till she was weak, desirous, clinging to him, her softness yielding to the hard demand of his body. He started to sink down with her on the grass.

“No!” she choked out as his fingers hurried to find and caress her breasts. “No, Marc!”

“You want me, Talitha.”

She didn't try to deny it, only put away his ardent, warm hands. “I—I'm engaged to Shea.”

“What?”

“I think you heard me.”

“But—there was only Socorro for him.”

Stabbed deep, Talitha struggled for calm. “I'm not a fool. He can't love me as he did her; I don't expect it. But he's promised to marry me when he comes back from the war.”

Marc released her and strode off a distance. His voice was strange. “To win this astonishing concession, you must have somehow tricked him into your bed.”

Talitha yearned to slap him; she had to clench her hands. “It's none of your business, but
that
came after the promise!”

After a moment he faced her. “I'm sorry, Talitha.” There was sadness in his tone, a compassion that was harder to bear than his scorn. “As you say, it's none of my business.”

“Don't sound like that!” she said fiercely. “As if you were sorry for me.”

He sighed, pushed back his hair. “You'll think it's jealousy, and I'm damnably jealous! But I
am
sorry. For you. For what you're getting in return for such total, terrible love.”

“And what do you think I'm getting?” she taunted, cruel in her hurt.

“You're beautiful. Shea has a man's needs. And of course he loves you—as a daughter, a child he protected. So he'll take you with his body and be ashamed of that, feel he's wronging you.”

She put her hands over her ears, trying to shut out his relentless words, suppressing flashes that betrayed what Shea must have felt in spite of their physical rapture that last long night.

“I'm not his daughter, not a child! I'm his woman.”

“No,” said Marc. It was like being forced to hear some true depth of her own self speaking. “You may be his pleasure, his last sweet flower, but his woman was Socorro.”

“She's dead! Eight years she's dead!”

“That has nothing to do with it.” He took her hands again and held them against his heart. She felt the pounding of his blood, powering the sure, massive strength she'd always found in him. “Talitha, my own dear love, you're my woman. Whether we marry, whether we ever lie together again, whatever happens. That's why I know how it must be for Shea.”

She bowed her head. His words echoed those she'd cried despairingly at Shea when he'd tried to persuade her she was mistaken in the nature of her feeling. “
But I have loved you! All these ways and all these years
.”

“Perhaps you're right,” she said miserably. “But I want Shea, want to make him as happy as I can. And yet—oh, Marc! I'm so mixed up! I love you, too, But it's different—”

“I know,” he said, with a soft, bitter laugh. “I'm only a man. Shea has always been your god.”

Small use to say that it had been Shea's devastation, his loneliness approaching that of a bewildered orphan, that made it impossible for Talitha to leave him. She might not be his woman, but he needed her. And when he came home …

Lifting her head, Talitha kissed Marc's cheek. “Please, Marc. Be happy.”

“Oh, I will be.” He got out flint and steel and knelt by her tinder, grinning up at her in the gathering night. “I still have the sun. And so do you, Tally. Remember that.”

Belen came up while Marc was coaxing the fire, delighted to have a friend to share their camp in that haunted basin. Marc had been given a parcel of tortillas by Carmencita, and these served as scoops for the pinole stew. They sweetened their coffee with chips flaked off a piece of hard brown sugar and talked of the war.

“The United States simply abandoned us,” Talitha accused. “We can't be blamed for siding with the Confederacy if they'll offer any sort of protection against things like this.” She jerked her head toward the mining camp.

“The Gadsden Purchase has been a funny case from the start,” Marc reminded her equably. “There've been very few real settlers. Buying and protecting it has been pushed by a bunch of Texas railroad men and mining interests financed by speculators from both coasts and Europe, helped by an expansion-minded Democratic administration. You could say Arizona was developed mostly because of the Democrats' increasing need to add western states to their balance of voting power.”

“Marc!” How could he put it that coldly?

Talitha thought of her friend Larcena Pennington, recovering from lance thrusts whose scars she'd carry to the grave; of doughty Pete Kitchen and his refusal to budge from his fortress on Potrero Creek; of Socorro's grave, and Santiago's. Surely this was how a territory was made, through the lives, courage, and suffering of its people. In the flickering light, Talitha looked at Marc defiantly.

“Whatever the government does, some of us will stay. And it's to us the land really belongs, not to those boards meeting in San Francisco or Ohio or New York.”

He raised his tin cup in wry salute. “The Apaches think it's their country. Papagos, Pimas, Maricopas, and Yumas say the same. Notwithstanding, the federal government has poured a lot of money into securing this southern link between East and West. Ten million for the Gadsden Purchase, hundreds of thousands on boundary commissions and railroad surveys. There was the wagon road built from El Paso to Fort Yuma, the exploration of the Colorado River, and the establishment of forts. Starting in 1858, the government subsidized the Overland Mail to the tune of six hundred thousand dollars yearly.” Marc spread his hands. “For all of this, Arizona's remained a no-man's-land. Even after this war's over, it'll be a long time before it's a place to live in in any safety.”

Belen shrugged heavy shoulders. “Don Marcos, in my country, the boundaries of which were sung by angels and Yaqui prophets, and the eight cities located by sacred visions, there is no safety. The
yoris
, the Mexicans, would take the fertile lands decreed to us by God. So there is fighting. So there will always be till we're left in peace. What is safety?” He spat into the dust.

They were all weary and soon unrolled their blankets. The men put Talitha between them, and though she was distressed at having hurt Marc again and disturbed by his assessment of how Shea felt about her, she was still grateful to have him close in this valley of death, to know that she could reach out and touch him.

Comforted, she slept.

They were up before sunrise. Marc helped Belen dig the long common grave and Talitha collected stones for heaping on top, not that there was enough left on the bones to tempt scavengers. By midmorning the pitiful fragments of what had been men, women, and children were decently covered, and the three of them heaped on rocks and stones. Don Elizario lay among his workers.