Marco and the Devil's Bargain (22 page)

She swallowed and gave him such a look then, fear followed by calm determination. He imagined she had looked just like that when she had stared at the mountains between her and the man whose yellow dog she was trying to return.

He felt his own pulse pick up speed, and he began to breathe faster. Everything from now on was new to him. He had spent his life on this bit of plain, tucked against the more familiar mountains. He wanted to grab Paloma's bridle and turn around. The only thing that stopped him was the look she gave him just then, as if she understood his sudden terror and his fervent wish to protect her.

She angled her horse closer to his until they were almost knee to knee, and she stayed that way through the long afternoon.

Paloma already knew one consequence of that great plain. When she had to make water, all she could do was gesture for them to turn around. He knew how modest she was about her functions, and how this mortified her. “Not even a bush,” she grumbled, when she finished. By the same token, she looked the other way when it was their turn. Hopefully, it would be dark when they had to squat. If not, well, that was the journey.

They made their puny camp smack in the open plain, an act that went against everything Marco knew about Comanchería. There was no alternative, not with miles of emptiness all around them. Marco's small fire of brush and dried buffalo dung struggled against the wind, even though the snow had stopped and bone-rattling cold clamped down. Paloma retreated to their tent, once he and Toshua set it up.

He and the other men stood by the fire, pretending to warm their hands. “Let me tell you now, if it gets too cold on this journey, we will be four in one tent, the better to stay warm,” Marco said.

“
I'm supposed to cozy up to that Indian?” Antonio said.

“
It would be better than freezing to death,
médico
.”

“
You would like that, wouldn't you? Then you could turn right around and go home.”

Marco rolled his eyes. He remembered a night by the fire with Father Damiano at the monastery where the Chama joins the Bravo—the spectacled priest telling him about pilgrims who complained about everything. “It's like this, dear boy,” Damiano had said as they toasted cheese. “In each group of pilgrims that comes to this monastery, I look at them and wonder which one is the complainer. It never fails.”

“
Which one, indeed,” he said out loud, which earned him a glare from Antonio Gil. He walked beyond the limit of the fire—if one could call it a fire—made sure the wind was blowing right and unbuttoned his breeches in the dark. He looked down at his barely visible stream, probably the warmest thing around.

To his horror, a hand reached out for that same warmth. Marco leaped back, shoving his member into his pants, his heart pounding. As he stared in fright, a naked man covered in pox flopped into the dampness he had left.

“
S
tay in the tent, Paloma!” Marco shouted as he staggered into the feeble firelight again. He gestured to Toshua, who came immediately to his side. Wishing his hand didn't shake, Marco pointed into the darkness.

Toshua walked to the same spot. Same reaction. He leaped back, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. Marco took another deep breath and came closer. He just looked at Toshua, and the two of them walked into the darkness to kneel by the figure lying there face down. Tentatively, Marco put his hand on the man's ruined neck, finding a pulse so puny he had to hold his hand there longer than he wanted, to be certain.

“
He's still alive,” he said. “Help me.”

They both hesitated, then gently, with hands under armpits, dragged the man into the light and turned him over.

“
Nurmurnah,” Toshua said.

By now, Antonio had joined them, his face registering all his disgust at the sight of the Comanche. Her eyes wide, Paloma looked through the tent flap.

“
Marco?” she said, her voice quavering.

I cannot shield her from this, he thought. “Come here.”

She did as he said, her reaction the same as theirs. It changed quickly as she knelt beside the man. “
Pobrecito
,” she whispered. “
Pobrecito
. What can we do?”

She was looking at the physician. They all were.

“
Nothing. I cannot help him. I wish I could.”

I believe you mean that
, Marco thought, surprised. “Isn't there something,
anything
?”

“
Of course there is,” Paloma said, taking charge. “Marco, get the sheet in our tent. We don't need it. Let us at least cover his nakedness. How cold he must be! Toshua, can you tell him we will take care of him?”

“
You, señora, are out of your mind,” Antonio snapped.

“
No, I'm not,” she said quite calmly. “I just decided that I can forgive these people. Don't get in my way!”

Antonio looked at Marco with a pout, almost like a petty child wanting a reprimand for a bully. Marco could only sympathize. “
Médico
, when she speaks in that tone of voice, I do what she asks.”

“
Oh, Marco, you do not,” Paloma scolded gently.

He brought the sheet to her. To his amazement, when he returned, she already had her arms around the dreadful sight that used to be a man. Even Toshua stared in disbelief.

I will never be worthy of Paloma if I live to be an old man of sixty
, Marco thought as he draped the sheet around the dying man and tucked it under his wasted body. He smelled as foul as he looked; thank God it was winter.

“
Can we give him something to drink? I remember feeling so thirsty,” she said, looking at Antonio.

“
You can try, but good luck to you.”

“
You can do better than that!” she snapped back.

Without another word, the doctor poured some wine into a tin cup. He knelt beside her. “Hold his head higher,” Antonio said. “He won't be able to drink it, but he will taste it.”

Paloma did as he said, sighing when the wine just dribbled out the sides of his mouth.

“
His throat is clogged with pox. That is the best he can do,” Antonio said. Tenderly this time, he dabbed at the man's chapped lips.

Marco squatted beside his wife, close enough so their shoulders touched. He felt the tremble in her body that seemed to come from some deep core, and knew how terrified she was. He stared, transfixed, as the Comanche opened his eyes and looked around, obviously startled at what he saw. Paloma patted his chest and he sighed so long that Marco was certain it was his final breath.

But no. He looked at Toshua with something close to recognition, Marco thought. He spoke and Toshua nodded.

“
He cannot sing his death song,” Toshua told them. “I will sing mine for him.”

Toshua began to sing, high and unearthly and weird, similar to the chorus of songs Marco had last heard when Governor de Anza and his soldiers—Marco among them—cornered Cuerno Verde and his Kwahadi at the Rio San Carlos nearly three years ago.

Marco felt the shivers travel up and down his spine, remembering. Toshua sang with his eyes closed; he sang with his whole heart.

“
Please stop,” Paloma said, her voice soft, but cutting through the song. Toshua did as she asked.

“
I think it is not good for you to sing your own death song,
pabi
,” she said, and began to sing a different song, one so familiar to Marco. She graciously took the burden from her adopted brother with a hymn of her faith.
O God we praise thee; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord
.

He already knew how sweet and pure her voice was. She had sung to him a time or two, late at night when no one else was listening. “
Te deum laudamus
,” she sang, “
te dominum confitemur
.”

In the cold and snow of a feeble fire that gave off little light and no warmth, his wife sang praise to God with a dying Comanche in her lap. Marco joined her on the “
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus
,” and then hummed with her when she was too teary-eyed to sing anymore.

When they were finally silent, the Comanche opened his eyes again, but only partly.

“
His shoulders aren't quite so tense,” Paloma whispered to Marco. “I wish we could do something.”

“
You just did, my love,” was all he could manage.

The Indian spoke again to Toshua, who nodded and unsheathed his knife. Paloma looked at him in alarm, but Marco was already tugging her gently away.

She let him pull her from the dying man. He picked her up and carried her to the edge of the light, where she shuddered as Toshua released the Comanche from terrible suffering. Marco kept his back to the fire until he heard the sound of a body being dragged into the darkness it had come from. When he set Paloma down, she sagged to her knees, then stood upright, hanging on to his belt.

“
This is a terrible journey, and we have only begun,” she said.

How could she sleep? She did, finally, huddled so close to Marco that it was a wonder the man could breathe. When Paloma made some sleepy remark about that, he just chuckled and kissed her forehead.

First light brought another terror, if not worse than the one the night before, at least as frightening. She left the tent first, hoping to have a tiny private moment before the men were up.

There before her, as far as she could see, was a carpet of the dead. She went to her knees again in absolute terror, then scrambled to her feet and backed up toward the tent.

“
Marco!” she called, wondering if he could even make out his name, because it sounded like a gargle to her.

The tent flap flew open and her husband gasped. “
Dios mio
!” he exclaimed, his voice sounding no better than hers. He stood by her side, his arm around her. That wasn't enough, so he put both arms around her, pulling her close to his body that shivered along with hers.

Others had seen their puny campfire, crawling from … somewhere. No one moved. One pox-covered person—man or woman she could not tell—must have frozen to death with one arm raised, begging for help. Paloma started to count the bodies, then stopped, because she was just saying “
uno, dos, tres
” over and over again like a lunatic.

“
Are we at the gates of hell?” she asked, her face turned into Marco's chest.

“
Somewhere very close.”

Rubbing his eyes, Antonio crouched out of his tent, then said something harsh in English. Toshua followed, staring and shaking his head, probably as stupefied as Paloma felt, if his expression told the truth.

He stared a long time, silent, then said, “There is nothing we can do except eat, break camp and give the wolves time to work.”

They did precisely that, mounting and riding in record time, all of them desperate to get away from their unseeing audience. Paloma tried to ride with her eyes straight ahead, but she couldn't help noticing how Toshua rode among the dead, looking. She thought once he was going to dismount, with his leg half over the saddle, but he must have changed his mind.
Who do you know here?
she couldn't help thinking.

“
Ten dead people,” Marco said, when their horses, shying and skittish, had picked their way through the dead. “Toshua, where were they going?”

The Comanche shrugged.

Antonio spoke up. “In their delirium, they probably didn't know what they were doing. Just following a leader. Toshua, think of the days when
your
mind wandered from the cut on your arm. Paloma?”

She nodded, keeping her face resolutely toward the plains before them, not willing to see the dead frozen and unburied. “I probably did some strange things, too.”

Marco chuckled. “Ah, yes. I had no idea I was married to a woman who liked to dance on tables.”

“
I didn't!”

“
You tried.” He laughed, and the sound seemed so out of place, until she realized how badly they needed to laugh. The other men laughed and Paloma patted her warm face. When they were silent, she leaned closer to Marco. “I didn't really do that,” she whispered.

“
You did.”

Paloma shook her head, embarrassed, but relieved that for at least a few minutes, she wasn't thinking of death.

For three days, they rode across a barren plain that soon began to look the same color as the leaden sky. It was gray everywhere, no matter what direction she looked. To her relief, there were no more dead bodies.

“
Where are the buffalo?” she asked Toshua on the second day. He had been riding ahead and by himself for two days since they left the camp of death. She knew him well enough to understand his long silences, even though she had questions. Marco and Antonio were talking, so she rode closer to the man whose life she had saved several times, noticing how much longer his hair was now. She remembered how mortified he had been when they were forced to cut his hair because of lice.

But now she just wanted to talk to him, to have him reassure her that he knew where he was going. How to begin? “Where are the buffalo?” she asked again, when she rode beside him.