The camp of Salvador lay deep within a forest laced with animal trails. Only because Carlos had been there before did they know which trails to follow. Near the camp, however, the human trail became more distinct and Lucia herself could pick it out. She joked with Carlos, saying she would lead the way, and so he stopped and let her go in front of him.
She found it good to walk ahead, almost like being alone. For two days she had walked beside Carlos or behind him through the woods and fields, and the sight of him was such an amazement to her that her mind was continually preoccupied in its effort to absorb his reality and take for granted that he was there. It was a relief to be in front of him now, not looking at him and only barely hearing his footsteps as she walked along and watched the forest, heavy and green with summer. A brown thrasher, startled from its foraging in the leaf mold, flew up into a sweet gum tree and was lost in the foliage. Beyond the leafy canopy, high above them, the bits of sky were intensely blue. The midday sun was hot out there, but here beneath the green canopy it was cool.
Then suddenly, from behind, came the loud barking of a dog, and Lucia whirled to find Carlos smiling playfully. From the direction of the camp came an answering bark that faded to a tremulous howl, as when one dog hears another in the distance and sends up a song of loneliness.
“You made that bark?” she asked, laughing with him. “That was very good. And was that a sentry who answered?”
“We keep careful watch,” he said, motioning for her to go on. “Slave-catchers have never bothered us here, but there is always the danger of them.”
“And of Spaniards,” she said. She let him go first again on the trail, then followed along behind him.
“We are not worried about the Spaniards.” He spoke without looking back. “They would not come so deep into the forest. They no longer have the strength to do that.”
“But what stops the Creeks? They are strong.”
He shrugged. “Why should they treat us as enemies? We are not vassals of Spain here.”
“Nor vassals of England, either,” Lucia said. “It is reason enough to come against us if they can enslave us and trade us for guns to the English. Me, they would trade. You, they would kill.” She meant to say it lightly, but it stayed with her a moment too long. “And if I were a slave, I would die,” she said softly. “I would help myself into the Other World.”
“What is this?” He looked back at her. “What is all this gloom?”
“It is nothing,” she said, and reaching out she rubbed her hand over his back as they walked along. “How did you learn to bark like that? The priest never taught you.”
“It takes practice, that is all.”
“Do you think I could do it? I liked that other bark, the one the sentry made. I’m going to try it. Are you ready?”
“No. You will confuse the sentry.”
“I will do it softly.”
“It cannot be done softly.”
But she tried, making some yipping sounds and fading off on a wavering note. “I sound like a person trying to sound like a dog.”
“It is because you are doing it softly. You cannot do it if you hold back.”
“Someday when we are further away from the camp I will try it.”
“You are not laughing, are you?”
“No. I believe you can do it.”
“I know I can. At least as well as you.”
“At least.”
“And you do it very well.”
“A dog could do it better.”
She laughed and reached out and rubbed his back again.
When they came to the sentry, they stopped to exchange greetings with him. He was a young man whose eyes and complexion suggested Spanish blood, though only faintly, perhaps from his grandfather. He wore a Spanish shirt hanging over his breechcloth and was armed with a bow and a quiver of arrows.
“This is Domingo,” Carlos said to Lucia. “He is from San Luís.”
“We have come,” Lucia said politely.
Domingo nodded and did not reply, turning his eyes awkwardly from her. Through the trees she could hear the sounds of the camp. He looked at her again and said, “I do not know the proper greeting for the White Sun Woman.”
She laughed. “I do not know it either. Nor do I care about it. I liked the signal you gave, the bark with the howl on the end. I told Carlos I am going to learn that myself.”
Domingo shrugged. “It is just one that I do. A dog has many ways of barking.”
She looked at Carlos and said wryly, “Do you think it would be proper for the White Sun Woman to learn to bark like a dog?”
“We will ask Salvador,” said Carlos. “I think he regards the White Sun Woman very seriously.”
“Then we will not say anything about barking.” She nodded a friendly farewell to Domingo and they continued along the wooded trail toward the camp.
“Over there are some of the mounds that the old ones built,” said Carlos, pointing into the trees.
Lucia stopped at the sight of them—great flat-topped mounds, massive and silent, tree-covered, part of the forest now. They were much larger than the one near Ivitachuco.
“There are more of them further back,” said Carlos. “We cannot see them all.”
“Think what it must have been like,” said Lucia. “All of this a great town.”
Carlos shook his head. “It is hard to imagine. Our people were at their height when they lived here. Salvador chose this place for his new town because it is purely Apalachee. It had already been abandoned before the first Spaniards came. It has not been defiled, he says.”
They moved on along the path toward the camp, which was soon visible through the thinning trees. As they came into the clearing, Lucia could see that this was indeed a small town with regular houses, pole-framed with round wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs. There was a central plaza, and beside it a conical-roofed council house, the largest building in the town. Near the council house was a quadrangle of open sheds where men could escape the summer sun. Around a tall pole in the center of the plaza young men were practicing the ball game, an Apalachee sport outlawed many years ago by the friars. But here there were no friars. Nor was there a church, nor anything that was Christian. No stockade, no soldiers, no ranchers. Lucia had never before been in an Apalachee town in which there was not a Spanish presence. Was this what life was like in the ancient days? She tried to feel it that way. She wanted it to be so. But she could not forget the world outside. This was not the time of long ago, and this refuge could not erase the world as it was now. She knew she must not forget that.
She noticed how many men were here. There were women in the yards of some of the houses, and here and there children were playing. But mostly it was men she saw, far more in proportion to the women than she had ever seen in Ivitachuco. This might look like a town, but in fact it was more a warriors’ camp.
As Lucia and Carlos approached, people began to notice them, looking up from what they were doing and smiling, some raising a hand. Those from Ivitachuco who knew Lucia got up and came out to speak to her. But in all of them there was the same reserve that she had experienced with Domingo, as if they too were uncertain how to give greeting to a White Sun Woman. With Carlos they were less restrained, and some of them teased him for what they saw in the way the two of them were walking together—that she was his woman now and he was her man.
They found Salvador in the yard of his house sitting on a cane mat in the shade of a tree. He waited until they were almost to the yard, then rose to his feet and came out to greet them. He had a large white cloth folded over his arm, and there was a solemn air about him, so that the people who had come walking with them through the town fell silent and came slowly to a halt, letting Carlos and Lucia go forward alone. Lucia smiled at the shaman, preparing to give him a friendly greeting, but he lowered his eyes with great solemnity, inclining his head in deference to her, so that she did not know how to respond. Her smile faded, and for a moment she only looked at him.
“I have come,” she said at last, her voice grave.
“You have come,” he answered solemnly and raised his eyes. He looked at Carlos and nodded to him, not in greeting but to tell him to step back. There was a moment’s pause, but then Carlos did as he was asked and moved back several steps, leaving her to stand alone. From behind she could hear the shuffling of the onlookers and could tell that their number was growing.
Salvador took the white cloth from his arm and began slowly to unfold it. It was not Spanish cloth, but the old style cloth that the women of Apalachee used to weave from the fibers of mulberry bark. As he opened it, he had to hold his hands as high as his shoulders to keep it from touching the ground. Then he stepped away from Lucia and held it up to show it to those looking on. “The mantle of the White Sun Woman,” he announced.
Lucia glanced at Carlos, wishing she could convey to him the unease that she felt, but she kept her face blank because of the people watching.
Salvador came back to her now, and she stood stiffly and without expression as he put the mantle about her, hanging it over her left shoulder and tying the two corners beneath her right arm. Then with his hand lightly on her back, he turned her to face the people, and standing to one side of her, he said in a loud voice, “The White Sun Woman. She has come.” He dropped his eyes, folded his hands chest high, and said, “Hu!” Then the people, seeing now the proper way to greet her, did the same. At the sight of them all with their eyes to the ground, the blood rose in her face, and she looked at Carlos and saw that he, too, had his hands folded.
“This is enough,” she said very softly to Salvador. But he did not look at her. He was watching the people now as they began to look up, a few at first, and then more, and then all of them. Raising his arms in front of him, the shaman began to sing.
It was a song that Lucia had heard before, one that was sometimes sung at dances by some of the older men. It was called the Cougar Song, but it was one of those whose words had no meaning, or if there ever had been meaning in them, it was lost now. Salvador’s voice was strong and vibrant, and the people smiled as he sang. When it was over, they joined with him to cry out the “Hu!” that brought it sharply to an end.
Salvador was no longer solemn. “This is a time for dancing,” he announced. “A time for feasting. We will begin at sundown in the plaza.”
The people nodded in approval and began to drift away, talking among themselves.
Salvador smiled at Lucia. “I am glad you have come, my child.”
Lucia did not return his smile. “This is not what I expected,” she said. “I do not want it to be this way. I want to live here quietly.”
Carlos came over to stand beside her. He too was unsmiling.
“It is new to you,” said Salvador. “You will learn to be easy with it.”
She lifted the edge of the mantle and looked for a moment at the cloth. “This is very beautiful. Someone worked hard to make it. But I do not want to wear it. I do not wish to go about as the White Sun Woman.”
“Only on public occasions, my child. Tonight you should wear it to the dancing. The woman who made it belongs to the Hinachuba clan, a grandmother to you. She is the one you will live with until we build a house for you.”
Lucia looked quickly at Carlos and was glad to see his face hardening.
“She will live with me,” Carlos said bluntly.
Salvador looked at him, surprised and not entirely pleased. “This is new,” he said. “Are you the husband of the White Sun Woman?”
Carlos looked at Lucia.
“He is my husband,” she said.
Salvador nodded slightly, acceding. He kept his eyes on Carlos. “Yours is a position of honor.”
“So it seems,” said Carlos.
“But only as a reflection of her honor. In the end you are her servant, as am I.”
“In the end he is my husband,” said Lucia. “If there is honor, it should go to Isabel. She is the real White Sun Woman. I am not sure I want to be what you want me to be. I will keep on with my curing and sing the song to the Sun in the mornings. But as for the rest, it is not like anything I am used to.”
“And that is the only difficulty,” said Salvador. “You are not used to it. But in time you will be. Everything here is different from what you have known before. Here we are in the world of our grandmothers. It has come around to us again. The circle is closing and you are in the center of it. If it were an earlier time, it would be Isabel in the center. But she is old now, almost gone. You are the one, my child. No one chose you. You were born to this, and you will learn to be easy with it.” He reached out and took them both by their shoulders, a hand on each. “It is good that you are together. I should not have been surprised. I should have seen it in the way he was so willing to go back for you. It is only that I did not expect it from a man with so much Spanish in him.”
“I have no Spanish blood,” said Carlos coolly.
“Not blood. Mind.” Salvador tapped his finger against his own forehead. “But it is good,” he said. “There will be children now. They will be the new White Suns, a brother and sister to reign together as in the days of our grandmothers. It is good.” He patted Carlos on the shoulder and said again, “It is good.”
They sat together in the dim interior of the little house that Carlos had built for himself when he had come to the camp after the battle of Patale. He was by the door looking out into the hot afternoon, and Lucia sat on the bed. It was a hard bed, only one mat spread over the surface of cane poles. The white mantle of mulberry cloth lay beside her in a heap. The air in the small house was hot and still and she could feel a light layer of perspiration over all of her body.
“If you are unhappy,” he said, “I will take you back. I told you I would.”
“I am not unhappy, I would never want to go back.” She wanted to say that she would never want to leave him, but that was too difficult to say while he was across the room. Such words only came easily when he was close, when she could touch him as she spoke, and even then the words were not enough, her voice sounding the same as if she were speaking of food or the weather. “It is only this that bothers me.” She picked up the mantle and let it fall again. “It is not right for me. I am one for being on the edge of things, off to myself.”
“I did not know he was planning all this,” Carlos said. “I would have told you if I had known.”
“I would have come anyway. So long as you wanted me with you, I would have come.”
He looked at her, his face relaxing, light coming back to his eyes. “Then it will be all right. We will work things out with Salvador.”
“He has changed since Ivitachuco,” she said. “His power has grown.”
“Here it is in the open. He had to keep it hidden there.”
“It is more than that. He is stronger now. His power is greater.”
Carlos nodded. “Perhaps it is so. I hardly knew him before. You would know better than I.”
“He drops his eyes as if he would serve me, but the real power is his.”
“You would rather have it for yourself, then?”
“No. I would rather that he himself were the White Sun and I were out of it altogether.”
“But you were born to it and he was not.”
“Look what he has done to me,” she said. “Here I am hiding in the dark like a rabbit. I come to live in a new town and now I am afraid to go out and look at it.”
“There is nothing to fear,” said Carlos.
“Not to fear, no. But it is unpleasant to go walking about as the White Sun Woman with people staring at me and dropping their eyes, folding their hands, and feeling awkward when they speak to me.”
“Give it time. It will pass.” He stood up and held out his hand to her. “Come on. We will go out. You have not yet seen the lake. I think it will please you.”
“Yes. But first we are going to walk through the plaza. I think we should let people do their staring once and for all.”
She nodded, and with a sigh of resignation she got up and followed him out into the heat of the day.
The town was still, the dogs lying in the shade and the children playing quietly. Though many of the people were asleep in their houses, others sat outside beneath their porticos. When they saw the White Sun Woman, they stared and smiled, and some remembered to fold their hands and murmur, “Hu!” But the disruption that had greeted her earlier was not repeated and she began to feel better about things.
Carlos led her all the way through the town and then out to the far edge, where cornfields stretched away before them in the hazy sun. And there beyond the fields was the lake. She stopped to gaze at the scene—the green gold of the tasseled cornstalks, the wide water with sunlight bright upon it.
“It is beautiful,” she said, feeling happy again. She looked at Carlos, strong and calm beside her, and suddenly she marvelled that he should be here at all in this pagan camp, he of all people, who could read and write as well as any Spaniard, who was so much of the Church that he had once seemed like a priest to her. But now here he was standing next to her in this place, the husband of the White Sun Woman.
Aware that she was watching him, he glanced at her and then went on ahead, leading her down an open path in the corn, grasshoppers flying up from their feet as they walked along.
She lifted her face into the air and breathed in the musty sweetness of the ripening corn.
“It would be good to have a homestead out here,” said Carlos. “How would it be to look out your door and see the Sun rising from the lake?”
“It would be very good. I would not be so much in the center of things out here. I would only be the White Sun Woman when I went into the town.”
“Not in the mornings? Not when you are singing the song to the Sun?”
“That is different. I mean I would not be Salvador’s White Sun Woman. I would not be like a saint in one of Father Juan’s festival processions. It would be good to live in a place apart.”
“Out there,” he said, indicating a distant line of trees along the edge of the fields. She looked where he was pointing, her hand shading her eyes. The sun was hot on her head and shoulders.
“And what about slave-catchers?” she asked quietly. “A dawn raid and we would be finished out there.” She kept looking out, not wanting him to see her disappointment.
“That danger will be over some day,” he said.
She took her hand from her eyes and glanced at him. “Do you believe that?”
“I hope for it,” he answered simply.
She nodded. And so would she hope for it. How else could they imagine any future at all? “When the slave-catchers are gone,” she said, “we will make a homestead out here. Shall we choose the spot for it now?”
“At this moment? In all this heat? Tomorrow morning we will come out and do that. I will even start clearing the land for you, if you want.” Reaching out, he put his hand behind her neck and drew her to him and kissed her.
She laughed, pulling free. “If they see you doing that, they will tease you forever. They will say I have you too much in my power.”
“Then we should go back to our house. We will do it properly with no one looking.”
“In the Apalachee way,” she said smiling, and she turned to start back up the path.
“If this were our homestead,” he said, “we could do whatever we wanted right here in the cornfield.”
She stopped and turned around, her eyes playful. “It is very much the Apalachee way to do it in a cornfield. Anyone’s cornfield at all. It is only a matter of being discreet.”
He looked to see if she meant that as an invitation.
She did.
“You go first,” he said.
She kissed him flirtatiously and then left the path and walked into the corn, making her way among the high stalks, keeping on a long way, going deep into the field, beyond any chance of discovery. And as she walked she could hear him coming behind her, a steady rustling of the corn at a distance that was properly discreet.