AZUL SMILED AS he accepted the coffee the young priest offered him. It was a rare luxury in an Apache village and he enjoyed the bitter, black liquid the way white men enjoyed whisky.
Duran’s adobe shack was small but comfortable: church-going Mexicans honored their priests, and the father’s home was as good as the parishioners of Cristobal could make it. Linda was outside, bustling around the veranda where Duran had located his simple kitchen, preparing a meal. It gave the two men a chance to talk.
‘What I cannot understand,’ said the priest as he sat down across the table, ‘is why you should risk your own life to save the girl and me.’
‘Why not?’ shrugged Azul. ‘She helped me, so can you. The ears of the church hear a long way.’
Duran nodded his assent.
‘But why should I help you to kill men?’
‘To save life, father,’ Azul said evenly. ‘If they live they will go on scalping.’ He watched the priest carefully, noting the doubt that showed itself in a tick that contracted Duran’s right cheek. ‘They are killers, as you know. Let them go free and more deaths will mark their path.’
‘Yes.’ Duran’s head was sunk on his chest, hands blocking his vision as though to shut out the sight of possible futures. ‘You’re right. Men who make a living from death are an abomination, an offence. They should be stopped.’
Yet he was caught between the probing horns of a personal dilemma: to prevent further killing he could advise this blond Apache, knowing Azul would hunt down and kill the scalp hunters; to do so meant condoning death. He fought with his conscience, and tried to buy time.
‘You hunt them because they killed your parents and your people.’ He gazed at Azul’s blue eyes and fair hair. ‘But you are not Apache. Why?’
The question tailed off as he caught the full, fierce glare of the younger man’s pale eyes.
‘My father was white,’ said Azul, his gaze lifting from Duran to a fly struggling in a spider’s web delicately woven across a corner of the adobe’s low ceiling. The insect’s struggle against inevitable fate served only to wrap it deeper in the sticky strands of its destiny. ‘He was looking for,’ he paused, ‘hope, I think. And freedom.
Kieron Gunn was the only son of an impoverished Scottish couple. A crofter driven off his land by the owner’s decision to graze sheep, and a serving girl from Dundee. His own fate had been a little better. Born in 1815 in Inverness, Kieron had come to America in 1817, when his parents signed the indenture papers of a Boston family seeking reliable servants. Bound irrevocably to their place in life, his parents had instilled in the child a longing for freedom, an escape from the bondage that indenture represented.
To the growing child these aims seemed distilled in the achievements of Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose epic journey across the American continent to the very edge of the Pacific Ocean fired his imagination with thoughts of far-travelling and great discoveries. As he grew he read avidly of the men who followed in the footsteps of the Lewis and Clark expedition; the Mountain Men, carving lonely kingdoms from the hinterland of modem America, became his idols. One of his most treasured possessions, kept even in the Chiricahua village, was a faded newspaper clipping, an advertisement. It read:
To
ENTERPRISING YOUNG MEN
The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN,
to ascend the river Missouri to its source,
there to be employed for one, two, or three years.
For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry,
near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington
(who will ascend with, and command the party),
or to the subscriber at St Louis.
Kieron Gunn was seven years old when he saw the newspaper carrying William H. Ashley’s plea for brave men to explore the hinterland, but it stuck in his mind. For five years, as the son of indentured parents, he carried the dream in silence. Then, when he was twelve, he ran away.
Hiking, fighting and begging his passage west he came, at last, face to face with one of his idols. Jedediah Strong Smith was a Mountain Man, one of the few Americans to wander the rocky wildernesses of the western seaboard. Kieron Gunn met him in 1830 and a year later, aged sixteen, joined Jed Smith’s great new enterprise.
With twenty-two mule-drawn wagons and seventy-three other men, Kieron headed south and west to cash in on the trade with Mexico. American industry swapped guns, farm equipment and general hardware for the furs and silver coming out of the Mexican possessions south of Santa Fe. The trade was centered around the old Spanish town. Americans, Mexicans and Indians met there in peace and fellowship, seeking only to obtain the best bargain they could.
Kieron Gunn loved it. He loved the bustle of the city and the argument of the trade. He loved the men who carried it on and, in 1838, he came to love one of the women he had met.
Rainbow Hair was the daughter of an Apache chieftain, Mangas Colorado, soon to win fame as the best war leader the Apache people would ever know. At twenty-three, Kieron knew only that he loved the beautiful, soft-eyed girl of fifteen.
They married in the same year, first in an Apache ceremony and later in the big mission church of Santa Fe. The union was welcomed by all their friends as a bond between the Apache people and the Santa Fe traders.
‘But it was not easy,’ Azul still stared at the web in the corner of the little room, ‘men do not like the mingling of blood.’
The spider was edging out over the filmy strands towards the trapped fly as Father Duran answered.
‘I know, my son. Men are afraid of what they cannot understand.’
The spider was coming closer as the fly grew weary of its struggles.
Kieron Gunn had made enough money from the trade to try his hand, modestly, at speculation. He entrusted his gains to a friend with a trading post in Santa Fe and went to live with his wife’s people. Something about the stark way of Apache life attracted his Scottish instincts and so, for the next twenty-odd years of his existence, he lived with Rainbow Hair’s people, organizing their trade in Santa Fe and dealing with his partner in the town.
Three times he got his wife pregnant. And each time the child died as it was born. Kieron and Rainbow Hair lived through the heart-renderings, the Apache woman cutting off her hair as custom demanded, then growing it again to try again. They lived through the Mexican raids and the American attacks; they lived through the bitter time of 1836 when the Chiricahua people hid Kieron Gunn from the troops of the Mexican General Santa Ana when he stormed and destroyed the Texan fort in Los Alamos.
In 1846 their stoic fortitude and very human love was rewarded with a male child.
The screaming infant was born with fair hair that grew even blonder under the hot sun of the Sierra Mogollon and pale blue eyes like his father.
The Chiricahua called him Azul, for the blueness of his eyes. With Rainbow Hair riding at his side and a mixed cortege of Apache braves and Santa Fe traders behind him, Kieron Gunn took the child to the city for his christening. With suitable pomp and due ceremony, the priest, an old friend of Kieron’s, splashed water over the baby and named him as his father wished: Matthew Gunn.
‘Then, padre,’ Azul continued, ‘we lived in peace. Our rancheria was away from the white routes and my father could guide the village. We raided only the Mexicans who set a bounty on our scalps.’
He stopped, watching the spider. It was almost up to the fly now, its wavering forelimbs stroking, caressing the prey.
Kieron Gunn raised his boy child as well as any Apache. The youngster was taught to speak English and to live amongst the white people; at the same time he learned the Chiricahua skills of hunting and fighting, tracking and simply staying alive in the destroying wilderness the Apache people called their homeland. He learned, from his father and the priest in Santa Fe, to both write and read English. At the same time Rainbow Hair’s people taught him the guttural Apache language and the flowing, soft words of Spanish that served as the general tongue of the tribes.
He learned, from his father, to use the white man’s handgun with deadly effect; and the use of the longer-ranged rifle. He became a hybrid, part Apache and part white, with the skills of both sides bonded to the problems of each in difficult alliance.
Then had come the massacre of his parents and his village.
‘God,’ murmured Father Duran, ‘I thought it was hard being a priest.’
Azul said nothing more. He was watching the spider strut across its web like a wolf over the winter snow. The thing came to the fly, now entrapped in the web, and began to eat.
‘Father,’ he murmured, ‘I owe a debt. Soon my enemies must pay.’