The Seekers (66 page)

Perhaps twenty poles, most of them toward the rear, formed the skeleton of the tepee, which was reasonably large, and filled with a delicious warmth that prolonged Amanda’s sense of euphoria. Three very long poles, again in a tripod arrangement, shaped the tepee’s basic structure. Additional poles spaced around the perimeter, plus a cluster at the back, stretched and braced the hide covering. Outside thongs staked into the ground helped keep the tepee standing in high winds.

Slightly behind the center of the dirt floor, a small fire burned—buffalo dung, though Amanda did not know that. She was only conscious of a peculiar aroma she had never smelled before. From the various poles hung items that obviously belonged to the tepee’s owner. A large, ornately painted parfleche. A shield of bull buffalo skin decorated with a crude representation of a bird with a great curving beak and immense wings. A willow bow reinforced with sinew. A quiver of arrows. A medicine bag.

A long thong hanging from the smoke hole suspended a bundle of saplings above the fire. The smoke, rising straight upward, cured the saplings that would become iron-headed arrows—

Awareness was returning slowly. Amanda recalled that it was fall, and the evening was chilly. Hence the fire. Overhead, she saw that the smoke wings had been opened about halfway to permit air to circulate. Where the smoke drifted into the darkness, she glimpsed a few faint stars. She heard, then recognized, sounds—

Heavy thumping, as of hide drums beaten.

Stamping, rhythmic clapping, the chant of many voices.

Occasionally a man or woman shouted something in an unfamiliar language. Or a child squalled. Or one of the dozens of dogs she had seen in the encampment barked—

Encampment
—

She remembered where she was, and why.

With a low cry, she lunged upward to a sitting position, all at once feeling the thongs that bound her dirty wrists and ankles. As her angle of vision changed, she saw an object previously hidden by the willow backrest. A huge horned skull, the bone yellowed, the eye sockets black and terrifying—

She almost screamed aloud as it all came back.

The traders had brought her here. On a keelboat much like the one she remembered from another, almost unreal period in her life.

After the boat, the traders used horses. There were four of the white men, led by an immense, reddish-bearded fellow with a veined nose. His name was Maas. She had slept at the foot of his bed on the boat, and whenever he had wanted her beside him, he had dragged her up by the hair.

The scream gathered in her dry throat. She fought it. She was sickened by the filthy feel of her skin. Something crawled beneath her arm on her left side, under the greasy buckskin dress that had replaced her other clothing.

She ached from the days of traveling across the empty grassland, sometimes permitted to ride behind Maas when he was in a good mood, but most of the time walking, connected to his saddle by a halter looped around her neck. Gazing down at her unwashed feet, she saw half a dozen healed cuts.

When the traders had finally reached the encampment earlier in the day, they had met with the Indians in the open. Amanda was relegated to a position some yards from the large group surrounding the whites, and from there watched Maas communicate with the ferocious-looking brown men in a combination of their tongue and hand-signs. There was much display of, and haggling over, the contents of the bales the white men had brought with them.

One moment was unforgettable: when the crowd parted abruptly, and she saw a tall, well-built but cruel-looking Indian gazing at her.

The Indian, in his twenties, made more hand-signs at Maas. The final sign was a finger jabbed in her direction.

Maas grinned, nodded—and she knew without being told that she now belonged to the Indian, who wore a bonnet of eagle feathers.

The bonnet was a kind of cap with thongs hanging down. Some of the feathers projected from the back of the cap. Others were attached to the thongs. Each feather had an ornamental tip of white weasel fur. What struck her was the absence of such bonnets on most of the other young men.

She saw several bonnets on older Indians. Some of those bonnets had trains of feathers that reached all the way to the ground. Instinct told her the Indian who had pointed to her was very powerful and much respected—thus the honor of the bonnet—but because he was younger, his bonnet was not yet as impressive as those worn by his elders.

Tonight there was a celebration in progress outside the tepee. At dusk, Amanda had seen chunks of the carcass of some kind of animal being dragged toward blazing cook fires. She remembered an Indian carrying a hairy hump, its underside gory. Another proudly displayed what appeared to be a tongue.

Then Maas had come to her, and officially informed her that she had been sold to the young man in return for buffalo hides gathered in the hunt two days ago. The young man was the son of one of the tribal elders, Maas said. He had counted coup many more times than any other young man of the tribe. The number of feathers in his bonnet attested to that. At birth, the young man’s father had christened him with a name that anticipated this prowess—

Here Maas reeled off guttural syllables, then gave them an approximate English translation: Plenty Coups. The trader said Plenty Coups was further distinguished by belonging to the dog soldiers, the elite group that controlled and directed the all-important buffalo hunts.

In cynical fashion, Maas wished her well with her new owner.

Amanda was not permitted to take part in the feasting and celebration. She was led away by several young women, one of whom carried a sapling, and struck her in the face several times before supervising the tying of the thongs in the tepee. Amanda was deposited on the hide-covered bed. Miserable and exhausted, she fell asleep—

Now she was awake.
Remembering
—

Very little spare flesh remained on her rapidly maturing body. She had trouble recalling her last solid meal.

But that was of trifling importance. What mattered was the man who had bought her. He would surely come to her before the night was over. No doubt he’d do what she dreaded: strip her dress away, lower his body on top of hers, and heave back and forth until he had satisfied himself.

A sharp memory of the first time it had happened set her to shivering. She remembered faces—one of them fondly. She remembered blue eyes, tawny hair, kind and gentle hands that had helped her when she faltered—

Tears came to her eyes at the thought of her cousin Jared. Where was he now? New Orleans, she hoped.

She gazed at the bracelet of tarred rope, partially hidden by the thongs around her wrists. The bracelet was her last tangible link with the past—and Jared. As she looked at the blackened cordage, she knew she’d never see him again. But she’d keep the bracelet until she died.

She blinked the tears away as her mind conjured the other face. The man who called himself a preacher. The man who had inflicted the horrifying, unexpected hurt on her body ages ago, in Tennessee—

The day Blackthorn carried her off to his cabin, she wanted to die. She wanted to close her eyes and never wake again—especially after he raped her a second time, on the floor of his squalid shanty. She’d screamed, tried to flee from him. But he was too big and quick, even with his trousers fallen around his ankles. She remembered the bite of splinters against her bare buttocks, and the immense, ravaging feel of him jamming up inside her, filling her with a hateful, slimy wetness—

When they left the cabin, she was tied hand and foot. She lay on her belly behind his saddle, praying for death.

For days, jolted and bruised as Blackthorn rode toward St. Louis, that was her only wish: to die. To end the shame and pain that had become her lot. Virtually every evening on the long, nightmarish trek, he had undressed her and thrust into her. She fought him each time, shrieking and scratching and crying out to God to let her die and escape the torture. The harder she resisted Blackthorn, the harder he ravaged her—and he usually beat her afterward as well.

Then one night, in the stuffy little boardinghouse room in St. Louis, she was feeling so ill and so hurt that she vowed she’d throw herself out the window if Blackthorn touched her again. But she didn’t, because a peculiar insight came to her.

What triggered the insight was another memory: the memory of a man’s sly eyes in a Pittsburgh store. And words her cousin had spoken. Words about how men fancied her prettiness. The memory was tangled with the comforting feel of her cousin’s hand, and the taste of licorice—

Thus when she saw the preacher’s eyes looming over her, she recognized a gleam in them that reminded her of the eyes of the man in Pittsburgh—

That night, she didn’t struggle so much. She let Blackthorn have his way without quarrel. Though he was startled and suspicious, he seemed to enjoy himself a bit more.

From that hour, she didn’t even protest when the bogus preacher fondled her growing breasts, or spread her legs with his huge hands and lowered himself between. She pretended submissiveness—total fear of him—which wasn’t hard to do. As a result, he beat her less often.

When Blackthorn sold her to Maas, she began to realize the real value of her new insight. She never resisted when Maas wanted her in his bed. And if he wasn’t kind to her, neither did he abuse her excessively.

Slowly, a little of her confidence came back. Even if she
was
relatively helpless, trapped among strangers, she had a weapon, a way to mitigate her suffering—

Now another man had bought her. A man totally unlike the preacher or the trader. This one was young, arrogant. His fierce eyes frightened her. And she couldn’t even speak his language—

She heard a sound. Rolled her head sideways, alarmed.

The oval door cover of the tepee, located about a foot above the ground and hinged by a thong at the top, had been lifted aside. She glimpsed figures against the firelight. Then a silhouette blotted the glow—

It was not Plenty Coups who stepped through the three-foot opening. It was the young woman who had struck Amanda with the sapling.

The young woman let the oval door cover fall back into place. Outside, the hide drums pounded, and rattles kept the rhythm. Men yipped and barked, stamping in some ritual dance to celebrate the successful buffalo hunt. She heard one of the trappers bawl a few lines of a song in English, then discharge a gun—

The young Indian woman gazed at Amanda with unconcealed hatred. Though on the plump side, she wasn’t unattractive. Her plaited black hair was clean and glossy. She wore moccasins and leggings beneath a dress of elk-skin that reached below her knees. Across her shoulders and bosom, a separate yoke with long fringe gleamed and winked as she approached the younger girl. The yoke was decorated with tiny glass and porcelain beads worked into an intricate pattern. Maas had brought a bale that contained several large packages of such beads—

On the grass and hide bed, Amanda watched the Indian woman bend down beside her. The woman took Amanda’s chin between her fingers. Then, with a syllable of contempt, she reached for Amanda’s breasts and felt them one by one. It hurt. The woman meant that it should.

Next the woman explored Amanda’s legs and genitals, as a white woman might handle a purchase of doubtful worth. Somehow, Amanda understood what the woman was thinking about her: that she was little more than a child.

That it was humiliating for Plenty Coups to want her—and barter for her.

Amanda knew instinctively that the Indian woman belonged to the young man in the bonnet.

The girl’s fear sharpened as the other woman rose and shuffled to the fire. There she reached up, pulled down one of the saplings from the drying bundle. It was relatively thick. She tested it against her palm; it was stiff.

She lowered the end into the fire. Looking over her shoulder, she smiled.

White-lipped, Amanda watched the Indian woman heat the end of the stick until it shot off wisps of smoke and turned a cherry color. Flame spurted from the stick’s end. Hastily, the woman pulled it from the fire. The flame died but the cherry color remained.

The woman walked back to the bed and thrust the stick at Amanda’s right eye.

She screamed, twisted her head away, felt the heat of the stick as it plunged into her tangled hair. She smelled her hair burning.

The Indian woman seized her jaw again. Forced her head around. Amanda kept her eyes closed, writhing and struggling. The Indian woman knelt on her stomach. Heat bathed her face as the woman jabbed the stick toward her right eyelid—

Abruptly, the weight was gone. She heard scuffling. A series of heavy oaths, then the crack of a palm against flesh. The Indian woman cried out. Amanda opened her eyes—

She saw Plenty Coups, half-crouched and furious. The woman lay at his feet, the print of his hand still vivid on her cheek.

The young man drew back one of his moccasined feet, kicked the woman in the stomach. She wailed and seized her middle. Then she raised one hand and, to Amanda’s astonishment, showed no anger—she wept, and pleaded.

Plenty Coups kicked her again.

And again.

With swift, fluid motions, he signed her toward the oval door cover. The shamed, sobbing woman crawled to it and dragged herself through. The door cover fell back in place. Plenty Coups uttered a grunt of satisfaction.

He walked to within a pace of Amanda and stood gazing down, faint amusement leavening the harshness of his mouth. But he was still an imposing figure, and a forbidding one, clad only in his moccasins, his ceremonial bonnet and a peculiar clout decorated with an ornate feather bustle. Amanda had seen similar bustles worn by a few of the hardiest-looking young men in the encampment, and had assumed the bustles were symbols of some position of honor.

Plenty Coups’ body was coated with sweat, as if he had been dancing with the other celebrants. He unfastened the knot that held the bustle in place. After a lingering glance at Amanda’s body, he circled the fire and hung the bustle on the pole next to the one bearing his decorated shield.