Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (34 page)

She quivered under his frank regard of her.

“It was not my wish to show myself,” he said. “I saw that Sunned Hair wanted to make her way alone to the white man’s country. This was a good thing. I watched to see that no enemy stood in her path. I prayed to Wakantanka that he might give her a straight road, smooth waters, and a clear sky. Yet when Sunned Hair wished to”—he paused as if hunting for the right phrase—“wished to cry at the foot of the grave of a dead chief, it had to be told her that there was another way.”

She hated him. He had of course known she’d had cannibalism in mind but out of the largeness of his heart he had deliberately cast a favorable light on it. “Was this chief one of you? A Yankton?”

“He was one of Mad Bear’s band. Yet he was a brave man. His children loved him. We must honor him now that he has departed.”

“Where are we?”

“You have walked to a place where many grapes hang down.” He pointed ahead. “Do you see?”

About a mile ahead on the left, a small valley cut back into the line of bald bluffs. In it grew a grove of golden trees.

“Once again it’s prairies all around,” she whispered, “and then all of a sudden a little valley full of lovely trees. Some lost timber.” She nodded to herself. “That’s what gets you about these prairies.”

“It will be a good place to hide. I will bring home the game until Sunned Hair has found her flesh and is fat again. Then she can continue her journey to her white cities.”

She rolled over on her back. She gazed up at his red face. His exquisitely cut lips welled over in a richly expressive smile. It shot through her half-crazed mind it was too bad the Indians did not kiss. Because his lips were made for kissing.

“Arise. Come,” he said.

Hate changed to mad desire. She suddenly yearned with all her belly that he would pick her up and do with her as a man would. Her thoughts became plainly and deliciously shameful. It was sweet to think of kissing his large, warm lips. She wanted a spoonful of his bumblebee honey. Wild fruit was even sweeter than stolen fruit.

He divined her feelings. A sharpness came into his black eyes. The warm smile left his lips. His face went back to being impassive. At last he said, “Come, let us go to this lost timber you speak of. I will make you a shelter where you can rest. Soon you will be as sleek as a pony in the Moon of Making Fat.”

She made a show of getting to her feet; deliberately let herself collapse.

“Come, Woman With The Sunned Hair.”

She lay craven under his hawk look. She liked his cockarouse dignity. She twisted invitingly on the grass. She was a silly, dizzy hen.

“Come.”

Memory of romantic fantasies about him dreamed through her mind. Shameful. Lickerish. He reminded her of puccoons blooming in June, full of ecstatic scent, the blossoms gold, the roots yellow.

“The roses of starvation become thee, but there are better roses. Come.”

She saw him again as he’d once danced up the buffalo, dark body a gleaming bronze in the red firelight, a stud rampant. Her limbs parted slightly under her tunic. She willed it. He must possess her. He must. It was pagan. But it would be heavenly.

“Come.”

A wan coquettish smile opened her lips. Again she made a show of struggling to her feet. Again she let herself fall to earth.

A grunt of impatience escaped him. Then, face still impassive, he picked her up. He carried her along the creek, easily. She was hardly more than an empty parfleche to him.

He turned up a side stream and entered the golden grove. Steep, grassy hills slanted upward on either side. A wind rustled through the lemon leaves of the ash. The leather leaves of the oak barely stirred. Grape leaves, turning purple, hung in sweeping loops through the lower reaches of the trees. Birds had cleaned off all the hanging spikes. A small trickle of a stream glinted in the deeper shadows.

Scarlet Plume carried her well into the little hidden valley. Then, under a thick bower of grape vines beside an overhanging clay bank, he stooped and put her down on a bed of leaves.

She would not let him go. She threw her thin arms around his neck and held onto him. She gave him her most winning smile, white teeth open, eyelids almost closed on dilated blue eyes. She kissed his bold cheekbone. With her nose she pushed aside his heavy black hair and kissed his ear. She was surprised at how sweet he smelled, reminding her of a fresh buffalo hide scented with the smoke of burning sweet grass. She nuzzled through his long black hair and at last kissed his supple copper lips. She drew back and looked at his lips. She smiled. Next she nipped his lips. She could feel the full outline of his lower lip inside her own parted lips. She kissed and kissed him. A dark being awoke in her, took over all direction of her. She slid around in his arms, a lissome child at play in a tree house, became completely shameless, tunic well up over her hips, wildly scandalous, clasping him about the hips with her limbs, locking herself tight against him, undulating against him with utter abandon, until every part of her body seemed to be in motion at the same time.

Scarlet Plume suffered her. He still leaned stooped over her, unable to be rid of her.

She unclasped the gray wolfskin from his neck. It slipped away and fell on the bed of leaves beside them. She stroked his coppery body. The muscles of him were as the limbs of a young maple. She found the knot to the string supporting his breechclout and undid that too. The breechclout fell to his feet. He was again as she had once seen him dancing up the buffalo.

He endured her witchery in wondering silence.

“Lover,” she whispered.

At last he spoke. “What is this? Does Sunned Hair wish to be taken under the robe?”

“Yes, yes.”

There was more wondering silence in him as he suffered her her enticements.

“Lover,” she whispered again.

His eyes turned black in their sockets. “Why is this?”

“Yes,” she hissed in his ear.

“But the man you see before you does not have with him a proper courting robe.” There was a vibrant quaver in his voice.

“Yes, yes.”

“Sunned Hair is lonesome. She misses her white husband very much. I am sad for her.”

She swarmed his face with moist kisses.

“Perhaps when I meet the husband of Sunned Hair he will agree to become my kodah.”

“Yes.”

“A good Yankton knows a wife may be shared with a kodah without impropriety. But it is not the way of the whites.”

Fiercely she drew him down so that he sank to his knees. She took his hand and passed it between her thighs to let him know that the juices of love were ready. She cried huskily in his ear.

A relenting gentleness softened his heavy voice. “My helper is talking to me. He tells me it will be a good thing to do. Thus, if the white woman wishes it, it shall be done.” With fine delicacy, as if guardedly indulging a loved and willful child, he settled over her.

He moved too slowly for her. She took hold of his coppery knob and helped him. She saw that he had a wonderful cucumber of love for her. She gasped at the engorged red color of it. She helped him enter her. His proud flesh was already warm when it parted her. She could feel herself widening and deepening, and then surrounding him. She cried aloud. She drummed her pelvic bone up against him.

He loved her rhythmically, with a gentle motion.

Stars rose. Stars fell.

His insistent breathing was sweet in her ear.

A strange new feeling awakened in her womb. Her womb was like an animal inside her belly. She had never in her life felt such sweet burning. It was an urgent suckling, a ravening hunger, yet it was also selfless. It became clutching joy. Her thighs became bathed with sheathing dew. Her face crimsoned over with surprise and shame and wonder. What was it the minister back home said? That lust was a vile expression of one’s animal nature? Well, there the minister for once was wrong. Lust was wonderful. It was a radiant passage. Winged. Suddenly.

He loved her rhythmically, with a gentle suction.

She rose, rose. Lightning-like sensations shot through her belly. Fireflies darted through her brain. She began to tremble all over. She rose, rose. “God in heaven.”

He loved her rhythmically, with a gentle urgency.

She loved his arrogant flesh. She wished it were even more arrogant. She longed for a king. Let there come a king holding a golden bowl flowing over with cream. She drummed harder against him, swifter. Her eyes rolled bloodstone dark under tight lids. Her lips widened. Her teeth set. Extravagant raptures swelled in her. She was a great plum about to burst.

Abruptly Scarlet Plume changed in her arms. A dark being had also awakened in him. His breathing became a husky catching purr. The gentle lover in him changed into a demanding puma. The dark being made him thrust and thrust into her with abandon. Utterly necessary. It had to be. His purring deepened into a moan of vibrating guttural pleasure. Every part of him seemed to be in motion at once.

He was hers. He was hers. She responded to his imperious hips. “King!” Her velvet leaves slipped marvelous full around him.

A yell, gurgling, rose in his throat. Unfettered. Savage.

Suddenly knotlike spasms worked slowly and irrevocably in her womb. Her womb suddenly became her brain. The spasms ran their own course. A cry also erupted in her, free, from far within her.

“He-han!” he cried.

“O Lord!” she cried.

He wept tears upon her.

The beat of the overriding pulse throbbed in the depths of her quick. There was no stopping it. Never before had this happened to her. All of Vince’s wiles and tricks and strange demands in bed had never come close to awakening a blinding revelation like this in her. It was the first time. The first time. At last.

He lowered upon her.

A long sigh let her down, gently, into a lethargy as soft as cattail down. She sank away into oblivion.

She slept.

And slept.

When she awoke, slowly, sunlight struck across her face in a wide band of sharp saffron.

She didn’t know why but she felt new.

She remembered the claybank and the bower of wild grape vines and the golden grove. Lost Timber.

She found herself lying on an aromatic mat of woven switches. Under it rustled tree leaves. She was covered by the gray wolfskin. She remembered being pursued for many days by the haunt wolf. Scarlet Plume.

Scarlet Plume had been busy while she slept. He had built two walls of interwoven willows into the claybank. New bark shingles made the roof of the bower rain-tight. The east wall he left open, facing the stream.

She sensed his presence. Without turning her head, letting her eyes widen a little, she could make him out to the left of the opening. He was sitting on his heels and cleaning his teeth with a blade of grass. A small stick fire burned at his feet. Smoke from it rose in soft gray tendrils, gradually trailing off and disappearing against the matted roof. Above him, to one side, hung a strip of cured meat.

A crimson blush suffused her as she recalled their moment of love and the new sweet burning in her belly. She could feel the sudden blush heating her body like a warm silk nightgown falling to her feet. Yes. She had at last awakened to love and light. She let her eyes close as she relived again that moment of blinding revelation.

She stirred, languorously.

He instantly turned. A warm, grave smile curved his fleshy lips. “You have slept well.”

“Mmm.”

“You have slept two suns to bed.”

“Two whole days? In a row?”

“You also ate well. The she-wolf does not live that eats as well as Sunned Hair.”

She sat up on her elbows. Hair from the wolfskin tickled her chin. “I’ve been eating for two whole days?”

He threw a look at the strip of hanging meat. “Already you have devoured most of one doe. Much soup and boiled meat. Even the rib ends were well-chewed.”

She ran a hand over her stomach and found that her buttony navel was half lost in flesh again. So. Scarlet Plume had fed her then like she might have been a gravely ill one. Two whole days. Well. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember a thing of it.

“Sunned Hair came a great distance on foot with little food. She was not used to this. She was very tired. She needed the sleep and the food.”

She found herself desiring him again. She smiled at him in a winning way.

Scarlet Plume understood the look on her face. He turned slowly and gazed down at the little wriggling flames of the stick fire. He picked his teeth some more with the blade of grass. Reverie wavered in his black-glass eyes.

“He-han,” she said with a sweet smile. “To that place that far.”

He dropped the blade of grass in the fire. He glanced up at the strip of venison. “There is need for more meat. I will go hunt the game while you take the morning bath.”

“But—”

“I have made a watering place for you in the little stream. I shall remain within easy call of it.”

She saw there was no use talking to him, at least not for the moment.

With a slow hand Scarlet Plume picked up a little stick and stirred up the embers of the fire some and then placed the stick in the fire. Glints of an inward fire jumped in his dark eyes.

It came to her, as she studied him, that something was missing. Of course. He had washed off the face-marking on his left cheekbone, the yellow dot inside the blue circle.

She said, “I wish to ask my scarlet friend a question.”

“I wait to hear.”

“Why can we not shake hands?”

He gave her a tormented look. Abruptly he stood up, grabbed up a spear, newly made, and as quick as the flip of a beaver tail was gone.

Her eyes opened in surprise. “Why,” she said with a gasp, “he’s shy.”

She lay by herself awhile. She watched the little palpitating flames in the fire. Petulance twitched at the edges of her pink lips.

“It’s probably just as well,” she said at last. “And it is time I took a bath. Because I stink.”

She threw aside the wolfskin. As she was about to get to her feet, she noticed that her toes and shins gleamed as though greased. Wonderingly she touched them, then smelled her fingertips. Her nostrils opened. Scarlet Plume had more than just watched over her and fed her; he had also doctored her as any true medicine man was required to do. He had treated her bleeding skin with some kind of native salve, herbs in a film of venison grease.