Standing Alone found herself in a chill adobe room along with Victoria Skye. A guard with a lance and lust had taken them to this place east of the plaza.
Through a small window she could see the dark mountains, the fierce blue of the sky, and the buildings of the village. Outside was freedom, a place to walk unimpeded across sunny fields. Never had she been without her freedom. This place called Mexico had a strange way of welcoming people, putting them in earthen boxes.
She had come a great distance. She had long since ceased to grieve her boy and girl, who were like the dead now, phantoms, fading spirits in her mind. This quest had become something else, and she didn’t know exactly what. If her children still lived—and she sensed that one of them did—she would find them and give them as a gift to the People, who needed understanding of where their flesh and blood were taken, and how they were used, for the loss of a child was a loss to the whole People.
This was new to the Cheyenne, this slavery, this using of children. Somehow she knew, and it was spirit-knowledge, that if she brought her children, or surviving child, back to the People, then the Cheyenne would triumph over the Ute
thieves, and over these strange Mexicans who lived inside buildings of mud.
She knew, too, that if she could find and free her son, Grasshopper, he would become a great leader of the Cheyenne, a tower of strength for his people. She burned to free him, not just for herself and her clan, but for the People themselves. He would take a new name and leave the boy’s name behind. Out of his captivity and suffering would come a man of such strength and spirit and holiness that his blessings would last for generations.
All this she had been given in four visions and dreams; all this she kept to herself, locking it in her bosom until the time might come to reveal it. This was her secret as well as her passion, and she would willingly die to fulfill the things she had seen in her dreams.
For years she had sat quietly at the gate of Bent’s Fort, listening to Americans and Mexicans. It was the Mexicans she studied the most because they might reveal the whereabouts of her children. Gradually, during those four years, she learned to fathom the words spoken by these people though she never uttered a single one. But there were many words still unknown to her. They had called her a concubina, which she had never heard, but she knew what a puta was, and because they said that of her she despised them right down to the marrow of her bones.
At least she despised the men. The old woman who had succored them and given her the shift she now wore she did not despise. She knew how thin was the loose-woven cloth, how revealing it was in sunlight, the shadows of her body always visible, and she had not missed the stares that pierced right through that thin shroud to her bosom and belly.
The Mexican women wore several layers and thus armored themselves from the stares of men. But she and Victoria had only the thinnest cover of this loose fabric they called linen. For this had the holy man, the Calf, stared at them both and the look in his eyes was unmistakable.
They were prisoners for the moment, but she did not intend to remain one. Neither did Victoria. They were not sheep to be herded by shepherds. They were women of the People, not Mexican women, and women of the People knew the arts of war. Victoria Skye was merely an Absaroka dog, and without the powers any Cheyenne woman possessed, but it didn’t matter. They would help each other. She had not come this far, looking for her children, to surrender.
She peered about her: this was a small storeroom. In the dim brown light she saw coarse sacks of beans, some dried red fruits strung on a cord and hanging. A closed door stained the color of the sky led to some other part of the building.
Then that door opened, and a voluptuous full-breasted Mexican woman appeared, looked them over, smiled, and closed the door again. This woman looked to be not more than twenty winters.
“We could go out that door,” Victoria said in the polyglot tongue they had evolved, half signs, half words.
Standing Alone shook her head. She had learned patience. “Let’s eat,” Victoria said. There was food if only they could prepare it. “I will even eat what these people eat.”
They converged on the sacks and earthen jugs looking for something to wolf down. But they found nothing like that. Grains in great crocks, oils in jars, beans in sacks. The thought of food made her salivate, and then ache for something, anything to assuage her hunger.
But she was a woman of the People and sternly contained herself. Her captors would not know of her desperation. She drew herself proudly, and stood still, while Victoria hunted relentlessly for anything she could eat, poking a hard bean into her mouth and trying, without luck, to masticate it.
“I will find a way to take some of this to Skye,” Victoria said, hunting for a cloth or a sack or a pouch she might conceal on her person. “I will help my man.”
Standing Alone was not sure Victoria would ever see her
man again. But they both hunted, and finally settled on tearing a piece of burlap out of a sack, using their teeth for the want of a knife. They realized that every scoop and ladle had been removed; there was no iron to turn into a weapon.
That’s when the door of the storeroom swung open on its leather hinges, creaking noisily. The walleyed holy man, Father Martinez, peered into the gloom, and motioned them out into a kitchen room with a beehive fireplace, tables, and benches to sit upon. The pretty young woman hovered behind him. The scent of meat stewing in a pot hung over the fire dizzied Standing Alone.
“Come, come,” he said in Spanish, motioning them out of the cramped dark storage room. “Do you understand my tongue?”
Standing Alone did not acknowledge that she understood him perfectly well. He stared a moment, his gaze roving over her.
“The sluts don’t understand,” he said to his young companion. “Very well, Juanita, I’ll show them things more ancient than words.”
The young woman laughed, baring an even row of white teeth that contrasted to her lush brown lips. Standing Alone looked closely at this woman and thought she might be pregnant. Was this holy man the sire? She had heard that the priests of these people never embraced a woman, but here was this young one living so familiarly with him.
“I will see what they understand,” he said, surveying them with some amusement.
What a strange man he was, with his huge head shaped by its bones into the face of a calf, with malice in his eyes and a certain slyness visible because he did not guard his spirit.
He turned to his captives.
“Is it that you speak Spanish?” he asked.
Standing Alone wondered whether to respond. Maybe it was best not to admit to it. But maybe it was better to find out what was in store. She nodded, slowly.
“Ah! It is good, bien. You have been the sluts of these Texas spies I caught, and that is a grave offense, and worthy of death. But I will spare you. A good, obedient savage, willing to work and sew and cook, willing to hoe the fields, weed, harvest, do whatever is required, can redeem her life.”
Standing Alone nodded. Soon she would translate for Victoria, but not yet.
“Ah, I see you understand. Now, first, to prepare you for your new life, I will baptize you, for this is required of all who live in Mexico. This will seal you in your new faith, and you will become Christians and your souls will be saved.”
Saved from what? She would find out. And she would find out what this baptism meant, too.
She nodded, and searched her mind for the words she needed to ask a question. “What of the hombres?” she asked, not able to summon more words.
The priest laughed. “The men? They will be taken to Santa Fe to plead before our governor. He will decide whether to execute them or send them to the City of Mexico to be tried.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Don’t trouble your head about it. They are gone. You will never see them again.”
He reached for a small bowl, which had the emblem of a cross upon it.
“Ah, what is your name, woman?”
“Call me what you will.”
“And her name?”
“That is for her to say.”
“No, it is for me to say, for the name your people gave you is gone, and you will receive a new one from the church and the civilized world, so that you can partake of the gifts of God. You will be Maria, and she will be Juana. It is so, yes?”
She fumbled for words. “So it is you name us.” Victoria asked what was being said. Swiftly, with the fingers
and hands, and with their patois, she explained.
“Sonofabitch,” Victoria said.
Standing Alone wished she might know what that meant. The Crow woman said it all the time. It was some holy invocation of the speakers of English.
The priest, meanwhile, lifted a lid from the vessel in his hands, and summoned them to him. He gestured that they should kneel before him. Standing Alone and Victoria both understood, and both refused.
“You must bow before God,” said the Calf.
Standing Alone stared.
The priest pushed her downward, but she refused to kneel.
“It will go hard for you, then, concubina,” he said, and she registered the word she did not understand.
The priest’s woman watched, her gaze somber for a change.
Then this padre, Martinez, she remembered, decided it didn’t matter: he dipped his fingers into that water and pressed his moist fingers upon her head, firmly, until she felt wetness. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said in his tongue.
He performed the same rite upon Victoria.
“Now you will know what sin is,” he said.
Standing Alone did not feel any different, but wondered whether she was cursed or blessed.