[Montacroix Royal Family Series 03] - The Outlaw (16 page)

The chant was pounding in Wolfe's ears like a leather-covered drum while lightning flashed before his eyes. Corn pollen was sprinkled over the ash clinging to his body. The yellow dust would help make him invisible to the giant.

"I am hungry," a thunderous voice boomed from somewhere above his head, echoing off the juniper walls of the hogan. Wolfe knew the voice belonged to the giant Yei Tsoh. "I will eat a Dineh tonight."

"You will soon throw those words back into Yei Tsoh's ugly mouth," Many Horses assured Wolfe as he reached into a leather medicine bundle and took out a crow's beak.

He pressed the beak, known for its healing properties, to Wolfe's feet, then began working his way up Wolfe's legs, knees, chest, back and finally his head. That act completed, he gestured upward toward the open smoke-hole, the sacred motion designed to extract the enemy's taint from the patient.

When Red Hawk instructed Wolfe to leave the hogan, in order to motion, four times in succession, away from his body and toward the sun, Wolfe discovered that his legs had turned unreasonably wobbly. He was staggering like a drunk and having a difficult time focusing. The holy place of Dinetah had become a softhazed world alive with the buzz of insects, and brightened by dancing lights and swirling suns.

There were more songs. More chants. All day and all night, Wolfe relived the mythical battle between his Dineh ancestors, the children of the Sun, and that fiercest of all—the alien, man-eating god.

With a mighty roar, Yei Tsoh clawed him, slicing open Wolfe's arm from shoulder to elbow. Blood gushed forth from the torn artery, flowing over the land like a river. Just when he thought he'd lost the battle, that he was going to die, a silver-edged cloud floated down from the storm-tossed sky, and out of the cloud stepped a female with hair the color of moonlight.

She was carrying a pot of magic herbs. With soothing words and a calming touch, she tended to him, bathing his wounds with empathetic tears before rubbing the herbs into the cleansed flesh.

Healed, he returned to battle. A battle that raged inside him. Around him. Battering at his senses, raging through his blood. Ripping him apart from the inside out.

Then, finally, Yei Tsoh's massive body was pierced by a chain-lightning arrow hurled at him by this new Monster Slayer, Wolfe Longwalker. As he roared in pain and fury, another arrow struck its mark, scattering shells from the giant's armor. Yei Tsoh crumpled to his knees and was staring at Wolfe in fury and disbelief as a third, and fatal arrow hit the center of his heart. He fell onto his face with a force that made the world tremble. And then, he lay still.

There were shouts of victory from the observers in the hogan. A victorious Wolfe was helped into his buckskin breechcloth and led outside the hogan, where a man wearing a Yei mask and carrying a ceremonial staff and leather shield bordered by snowy-tipped eagle feathers, was waiting with Wolfe's mare. Both man and mare were bathed in a blinding golden light from the morning sun.

Refusing Many Horses's assistance, Wolfe managed to pull himself astride the mare, and together, the men rode up the steep trail to a jutting red mesa overlooking the canyon. From this location, Whiskey River was many miles to the south.

They sat on the ground, facing east, into the rising Father Sun as Red Hawk led Wolfe through one final prayer from the Blessing Way, designed to invoke good luck, good health, and take the evil enemy away, back across the vast red landscape, back to its origins in Whiskey River.

"
Hohzho naa haas glih
," the singer concluded the traditional prayer. "In beauty, it is done."

With that cue, Many Horses, Wolfe and the spear carrier sprinkled corn pollen over the edge of the cliff, where the western wind caught it and carried it out over the mesa.

Although his situation had not changed, as he watched the yellow dust ride the breeze, Wolfe felt blessedly at peace.

For the second night in a row, Noel tossed and turned, her mind filled with bloody, horrific warlike images too terrible to contemplate. At least once an hour she'd be jerked out of her restless sleep, surprised to find herself still in Wolfe's family's hogan.

Inside, the others' breathing was soft and slow and steady. Outside, the branches of the juniper and olive trees rustled softly in the wind. Every so often, a lamb would bleat, no doubt crying out for its mother. But mostly, there was only silence. Dark, lonely, disquieting silence.

And Noel's unceasing concern for a man she feared she was, against every vestige of common sense, falling hopelessly in love with.

Giving up on sleep, she retrieved her bag from a peg on the log wall and slipped quietly out of the hogan, making her way by moonlight back down to that peaceful spot beside the stream, accompanied, as usual, by the dog.

Her nerves felt as if they were on fire, images filled her mind like billowing smoke from a fire, images of Wolfe, caught in a desperate life-or-death struggle, images of armor-clad giants, biting heads off Navajo children, images of Wolfe as she'd first seen him in her vision, bare-chested, noble, astride his horse, accepting death not with honor, but scorn.

The problem, she considered grimly, was that try as she might, she could not see Wolfe saved, living a safe and happy life. Not with the members of his clan. Not with her.

"I'm so worried about him," she told the dog, who responded by wagging his tail.

Noel knew that the idea of giants eating children were as fanciful and illogical as those tales of trolls living in her own Montacroix forests. And if there was one word that anyone who knew her would use to describe Princess Noel de Montacroix, it would be
logical
.

"The problem is," she explained to the dog, who'd now tilted his head and pricked his ears forward as if listening to her concerns, "even before Sabrina gave me that invitation that set all this in motion, even before I found that book about Wolfe in the Road to Ruin, my own experience has taught me that some things can't be explained away by logic."

Her clairvoyance, for one, she thought. And now, this adventure through time.

After Wolfe had left her at the hogan and gone off to prepare for the ceremony, she'd tried to convince herself, one last time, that this was all just a dream, triggered by the woodcut on the invitation, the
Rogues Across Time
book and Wolfe Longwalker's own Native American stories.

Any time now, she'd wake up to the aroma of Audrey Bradshaw's rich dark coffee and crumbly blueberry muffins drifting up the stairs of the bed and breakfast. And she'd telephone Chantal in Washington and together they would laugh over the dream that had seemed so real.

The dream that Noel knew was no dream at all.

She sighed.

And then, beneath the cottonwood tree, in the same place where Wolfe had kissed her to distraction, Noel sank to her knees and began to pray.

The dawn was painting the sky with brilliant fingers of scarlet and gold when Noel reluctantly decided it was time to return to the village. Her gaze drifted toward a side canyon, where Wolfe had told her the ceremonial hogan was located.

All she could see was a faint puff of gray smoke rising into the unbelievably blue sky. But a feeling of dread continued to be draped over her like a wet and heavy cloak.

She reached for her bag and felt the familiar tingling in her fingertips. Drawn by a pull she'd felt too many times in the past to ignore, she retrieved the invitation.

As she watched, the woodcut image of the burning cabin disintegrated, replaced by a scene of a muddy road lined with frame buildings. One of the frame buildings had a sign nailed above the door: The Irish Rose.

As if in a dream, she felt herself entering the building, passing through the front parlor to the stairway, then up the red-carpeted stairs and down the hall to a room that was furnished a great deal like the bedroom in Belle's Road to Ruin bordello. A man with a handlebar mustache was lying on his back on the bed, drinking whiskey out of a bottle, while a fat redheaded whore straddled his bare thighs.

Although she'd never seen a photograph of the man, Noel knew she was looking at Bret Starr. Excited, and knowing that she'd just been given an important clue, Noel nearly screamed as the vision faded away. Scooping up her bag, she ran back to the hogan to await Wolfe's return.

The village had awakened during her absence. Outside several of the hogans she passed, people were sprinkling pollen to welcome the return of the sun.

In front of one hogan, a man was slaughtering a sheep hanging from a pole while his wife sat at her loom, creating a rug much like the one Noel had seen hanging on the wall in the lobby of the bed and breakfast.

Some children were playing, shooting small arrows with their tiny blunt-tipped bows, stalking one another. Noel realized that there had been a time when such play would have been meaningful, a prelude to the intense training they would have received when they were old enough to learn the ways of the warrior. Now, it was merely the last remnant of a history that was coming to an end, just as the absolute freedom of the people who had made that history had come to an end.

The thought saddened her terribly.

Outside the hogan where she'd spent such a restless night, Second Mother sat on a wooden bench, winding red clay into a coil. Nearby, a drying pot hung from the branch of a cottonwood tree.

"May I watch?" Noel asked, not wanting to disturb the woman's creative mood.

"Of course." The walnut-dark face wreathed in a smile. "I am not one of those who believes that I must isolate myself to make a perfect pot."

"Did you make the ones inside the hogan?"

"Yes." The fingers, gnarled with age and arthritis, deftly worked the clay with a grace and skill that Noel admired. She wished that Chantal could see some of the exquisite works of art being created in this isolated nineteenth-century village.

"They're quite beautiful. My sister is an artist. She paints. Having no talent myself, I envy hers, even as I'm in awe of it."

"You have simply not found your gift," Second Mother assured her. "The Holy People determine which talents we are all to be given. See over there? Where Running Girl is weaving her rug?"

Noel nodded.

"When she was a little girl, during her vacations from boarding school, she would sit with me while I worked my clay, always begging me to teach her how to make pots. It seemed that she wanted to make pots more than anything else in the world. But the pots did not want her."

"Clay has a soul of its own. Its own song. And prayer. I taught her the songs I sing when I make my pots. She tried very hard, mixing the clay just as I taught her, singing the songs, but whenever her pots were baked, they broke. Every one."

"That must have been horribly discouraging."

"She became very sad. I told her that she was trying too hard. That she must be patient and wait for the Holy Ones to choose her gift. And eventually, Spider Woman did give her the blessing of weaving. But while Running Girl was waiting, she would not listen to me." The older woman slanted a faint smile Noel's way. "You know the stone mind of young people."

"I've been called hardheaded a few times," Noel agreed with an answering smile.

"Of course you have. Wolfe is stubborn. Like a goat. As was his mother, my sister." A fond, faraway look drifted into the coffee-brown eyes. "My sister was a basket weaver."

"Tell me about Wolfe's mother."

The soft reminiscent smile turned into a frown. "It is taboo to speak of the dead. I should not have menthe basket weaving. Such talk brings witches."

With that door effectively shut, Noel tried another. She took a deep breath and asked, "What about his father?"

The hands that had been patting the clay stilled. Dark eyes drifted over the landscape, but Noel had the feeling that it was not the sheep and hogans the older woman was seeing, but something else. Something from another place. Another time.

"Some people believe you are a witch, come here to bring harm to my sister's son."

"What do you think?"

Second Mother gave her a long look that, as impossible as it seemed, went all the way through Noel, all the way to her heart. And her soul. And her mind.

"I have seen my own death," the woman finally answered. Although to some, such an answer may have seemed off the point, Noel grasped her meaning immediately.

"I once saw a threat against my sister," Noel revealed. "And another against my brother. But I seem to be mostly blind regarding my own life."

Second Mother nodded, satisfied. "It happens that way, sometimes." She treated Noel to another of those knowing gazes. "You saw my son in a vision. In danger."

"Yes." Noel dipped her head. "I did. And although I don't understand it, myself, I knew that it was my destiny to come here to Arizona Territory and save him."

"You succeeded in your destiny, then."

"But not permanently. Because men are still after him. Men who are lying about what they say he's done. Men who want to kill him because he tells the truth."

"Words are powerful," Second Mother agreed. "Wolfe's words are especially powerful because they take the truth of the Dineh out to the world. Something Anglos do not want."