MELANIE HEDGES WOKE up screaming.
The images of her dream stayed with her even after her eyes opened and she bit down on the knuckles of the hand thrust deep inside her mouth. Her mother was in the dream, blood spilling from her face and hands like in the pictures of Saint Sebastian Melanie had shuddered over back in Sunday School in Montana. But the Saint’s suffering had looked calm, almost enjoyable; not like the writhing, sweating body she had seen in the desert. Certainly not like the other images: a man mouthing curses as his legs and arms gave way under the impact of arrows and bullets. Saint Sebastian hadn’t been shot with bullets. Nor like seeing the head explode as though a massive hammer had smashed it into tiny pieces. Or the nice man in the black suit with an arrow in his shoulder and his throat spraying blood across the stagecoach as he cursed and choked and died.
A hand thudded hard across her face.
It cut off her tears and shattered the dream images in sparkling fragments that died like falling stars and gave way to the stark reality of the truth.
She opened her mouth to cry out again, but the hand swung back against her jaw, snapping her head sideways so that she bit down on her tongue and yelped.
She leaned over, spitting blood onto the sheets. No ... not sheets ... blankets. Blankets and hides that smelled of grease and sweat and other things too alien to recognize. Somehow the pain cleared her head and forced her to see her surroundings. A dark place with sunlight coming in through a narrow slit to one side. Though not a side, because tipis don’t have sides. Through the door, then, or whatever they called the entranceway. The floor was a spill of furry hides, an open space at the center where a small fire glowed within a ring of blackened stones. Across from where she lay there were two women. Fat. But young. At least she thought they were: they giggled a lot and their faces looked little older than hers. Decorations on the walls—did a tipi have walls?— that looked like streaks of paint. Slowly, she forced herself to recognize them: scalps, hung out on rawhide lines all around the place. Also shields with crude figures drawn on the hide coverings; and strange bags, all decorated with beadwork and quills.
Two scalps caught her attention. One was a fiery red, the other mousy brown. Both looked new. There were gobbets of drying blood still attached to hanks of skin, adding to the stink of the tipi, attracting flies.
She remembered the driver of the stagecoach and his companion. The driver had red hair. Had had red hair. The guard’s had been brown.
She fought down the nausea threatening to empty her belly over the smelly blankets and sat up, afraid of catching another blow.
‘Good,’ said Mahka carefully. ‘You learn.’
Melanie made herself smile and tried to remember the language she had sometimes heard her father use back on the ranch. When he caught his thumb under a misplaced hammer, or that time he’d been arguing with the storekeeper. The nice man in the black suit had spoken the same way until her mother hushed him down. Melanie looked up and used all the words she could recall.
‘You fuckin’ injun bastard! If I get a chance, I’ll take a knife and cut your goddam balls clear of your motherfuckin’ body. Then I’ll stuff them down your throat and shit in your eye when you fuckin’ choke!’
‘Good,’ grunted Mahka. ‘Pretty.’
He reached out to touch her hair, stroking it like a man strokes a cat.
‘Cunt,’ smiled Melanie. ‘Fuckin’ cunt.’
Mahka nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. Good ... pretty. Wife. Have ... children? Mother? Be good. Pretty.’
‘Over my dead body.’ She kept the smile on her face. ‘I’d sooner die than have you take me, you goddam motherfuckin’ injun bastard.’
‘Good,’ Mahka repeated. ‘Good ... wife.’
‘Over your dead body,’ murmured Melanie as he stood up and left the tent.
The two women stood up and shuffled over to her bed. Roughly, they peeled the blankets away and hauled her upright. Her own clothes were gone, though she couldn’t remember them being taken, and she huddled naked, trying to cover her small breasts and the bush of blonde hair between her thighs. The women laughed and began to dress her in an outfit of soft-cured skins. It fitted well enough considering, at least when she tugged the waistband tight, and the leggings were warm, as were the high moccasins they pulled over her legs.
She missed the customary strictures of a whalebone corset, but that was, if anything, a blessing.
The realization that the young Indian planned to take her as his wife was something that didn’t sink in until the women dragged her outside and began to holler for the camp to come see.
It dawned on her, like the aftermath of a delayed shock, when she was dragged back inside the tipi after the old man in the buffalo head-dress had shaken his rattles in her face and sprinkled powder over her hair. Men had clapped and shouted things she couldn’t understand as women pinched and prodded her body, gabbling comments in that strange, harsh language they used. Then they had walked her round the camp while cook-fires were lit and greasy hunks of meat set to broiling in the pots. After that, she had been sat down across the fire from the young warrior and forced to eat a bowl of sticky cornmeal with chunks of near-raw meat floating in the grease.
The women had giggled and poked her, making gestures she sensed were obscene as the men laughed and talked amongst themselves.
It was close on midnight, to judge from the position of the moon, before the two women she had first seen inside the tipi yanked her upright again and took her back inside.
They stripped her new clothes from her and then shoved her down on the blankets, chuckling and waving their hands like maddened birds as they arranged the furs and lit two bundles of sweet-smelling herbs that they wafted about the tipi.
Then the young warrior came back and peeled off his clothes.
He wasn’t wearing much, and Melanie stared with horrified fascination at his erection. When the women laughed and went over to the far side of the tent to curl up under their own blankets, she pulled a fur across her body and shut her eyes tight.
She opened them as the furs got dragged away and Mahka fell across her.
She screamed once as he forced her legs apart and wriggled between her spread thighs. Then his fist slammed against her jaw and stars danced over her vision. When she opened her eyes again, he was moving inside her, grunting and holding her hands pinned wide above her head.
Oddly enough it wasn’t at all like her mother had said. In fact, she enjoyed it: the feeling was warm and rather pleasant. It seemed to fill her up with something new, something she had never known existed. After a while she lifted her head and touched her lips to his neck. It tasted of strange things, curious things, salty and man-smelling.
Her body relaxed and she lifted her legs to tug him tighter against her. When his hands left her wrists, she fastened her arms around his neck and began to moan as the heat built up inside her body and rose to a strange, delightful climax.
Then he rolled away, smiling and shouting in his own odd language. Melanie lay back, panting as she luxuriated in the unknown warmth filling her body like the luxury of a hot bath, soft with oils and unguents. Except that this warmth came from inside.
And she forgot all her promises. And all about her dead mother. And the men on the stagecoach. And eased back against the furs and stretched her legs and arms and called for him to come back and do it to her again.
And he did.
Twice more through the night as his other wives slept and woke and chuckled their approval as Mahka won fresh breeding stock for the Kiowa people.
Melanie woke at dawn because the rest of the camp was up and moving, lighting cook-fires and chasing dogs from the scraps of the previous night’s feast. Men were out checking the horses, more riding patrol around the temporary camp.
She lifted up with a fresh dream stirring her mind. A better dream, without blood; only pleasure.
Mahka woke as she moved. One hand sprang to the big carbine he had set down beside their furs when he came in the night before.
Melanie looked at his face. It was a dark, almost mahogany brown, lines etched from nose to mouth by the sun, but it was still a handsome face. The nose was square and clean, the eyes a deep hazel that pitched midway between chestnut and green. His lips were full and hard above a solid chin. He looked more like a white man than her idea of an Indian.
And as she looked at him, he pulled her close and touched his mouth to her breasts.
She shuddered and eased his hand clear of the Sharps carbine.
‘You won’t need that weapon now,’ she murmured. ‘You got a better one.’
Mahka grunted and threw her over onto the furs. Outside, someone laughed and kicked the flap of the tipi closed.
Azul and Havee ate cold deer meat for their breakfast and then pushed on up the cleft through the Little Big Man hills onto the rimrock.
The sun was hitting the high slopes by the time they got their horses over the top and worked over through the stumble of broken ground to the farther edge. Far off, across the cut of deep valley separating the two edges of the hills there was a faint spill of glistening water, the narrow stream catching the light coming up the canyon from the east.
‘Little Man crick,’ grunted Havee. ‘The old camp was sited a mile down.’
‘Let’s go look,’ said Azul. ‘Maybe they still got a camp farther down.’
‘Doubt it,’ said Havee. ‘Kiowa don’t stay round places overlong. They like to stake out where the ground’s good.’
‘So do Apache,’ grunted Azul. ‘But if the water’s right, we rate it high.’