The Pride of Hannah Wade (14 page)

G
ATITA APPROACHED THE MORNING FIRE WHERE
H
ANNAH
sat, absorbing some of its meager warmth. The Apache woman moved at the stately pace of a woman growing heavy with child. She stopped beside Hannah and dropped a worn pair of the distinctive curl-toed Apache boots on the sand next to her.

“N’deh b’keh,
boots. Wear feet,” Gatita told her.

“Gracias,”
Hannah responded in Spanish, and quickly gathered up the high moccasins with the red strip painted on the seams of the turned-up toes.

After a week of doing chores around the
rancheria
from dawn to dusk, she had almost reached the point where the bottoms of her feet were so callused she didn’t need shoes. Perhaps Gatita had noticed that and no longer regarded her bare feet as a guarantee that Hannah wouldn’t try to run away.

Her body had healed. Almost all the scabs were gone and her skin had turned a shade of toasted brown from
the sunburn. The meager helpings of food she received were not sufficient to enable her to put back on the weight she’d lost, but she was acquiring a wiry toughness, a resilient strength that came back after shorter rests. The diet of the Apache left a lot to be desired. She kept remembering what a delicious turkey galantine Mrs. Bettendorf made, and Maude Goodson’s salmon croquettes.

“Is time of Many Leaves,” Gatita said.

“No comprendo.”
Hannah shook her head, grateful for this second language they had in common. She could not imagine the terror of everything they said being so much gibberish to her.

“When things grow, Many Leaves.” Her explanations, if Gatita deigned to make any, were invariably curt.
“Ugashi,
we go—all women—gather mescal before flower come.”

This explained why she had been provided with the moccasins. But the expedition was not the simple foraging walk along the mesa top that Hannah surmised it would be. Supplies were packed to last for several days and loaded onto horses along with large baskets. Seven Apache women plus Hannah set out from the
rancheria
and took the rocky, boulder-strewn trail down the barranca. Three of the older women rode on horses.

Many exchanges were made in Apache as they traversed the rough trail, the voices pitched low but lilting with a gossipy flavor. Hannah listened to them, catching a feeling of sisterhood and a sense that maybe all women were the same when they got off by themselves away from the menfolk.

When they were out of the narrow, steep canyon, they headed in the direction of some dry hills. Gatita appeared to be tiring. When she stumbled, Hannah happened to be closest and steadied her with a supporting hand.

“Do you wish to ride the horse?” Hannah was leading the spotted horse. Always she seemed to be caught in a state of ambivalence toward Gatita, at one moment hating anyone who deprived her of her freedom and the next seeking a scrap of human companionship, Hannah didn’t understand it. This female Apache treated her like dirt, kicking and striking her; yet she also gave her salve for her burned skin, buckskin clothes and moccasins, food and water. Gatita was everything evil and everything good; she was the madonna with child and the mother carrying Satan’s seed.

“No horse,” Gatita said, and patted the rounded arc of her stomach. “Because of baby, no can ride horse, no can carry basket, no can eat piñon nuts, no can watch
Ganhs—“
The list of restrictions placed on her was enumerated in fun.

“—and no can have Lutero’s
pico,”
one of the other women giggled.

“No can do that till baby stops sucking. Be crazy by then,” another declared, and laughed with a tittering sound.

The conversation lapsed from Spanish into Apache and Hannah couldn’t follow it anymore. But she’d gleaned enough from the previous exchange to realize that an Apache couple were not intimate during the term of the woman’s pregnancy or while the infant nursed. So all the lust Lutero couldn’t expend on his wife he had unleashed on Hannah those nights on the trail. The wrenching physical and mental agony of all she’d been through nearly swamped her. Her mood veered toward rage. She didn’t deserve any of this!

But it was all so much wasted energy. The sun and the heat and the walking soon drained her of her anger.

The plant the Apache called the mescal was the same that Stephen had once identified as the century plant or agave. The heart of it, which the Apache women had
come to gather, was contained within the basal cluster of leaves. And the stretch of hills where they stopped abounded with the desert plant.

Once the base of the stem containing the head was cut off, the sharp-pointed leaves had to be trimmed. Hannah soon learned to keep her eyes half-closed against the squirting juice from the leaves as the women were slicing them off. The end result was a mescal heart about the size of a cabbage head with the appearance of a giant artichoke.

Not trusted at this early stage of her captivity with a knife, Hannah had the task of carting all the mescal heads, as well as the edible stalks, to a central location. A huge pit was dug, roughly three feet deep and twelve feet long. She lugged firewood to the spot until the pit was filed, then helped to bring flat stones to lay on top.

After two days of gathering mescal, the Apache women made a ceremony of lighting the pit fire while praying to their gods. When it burned down, all of them hurried to throw a thick layer of wet grass onto it, followed by a layer of mescal, more wet grass, and a foot of dirt. Then another fire was built on top of that mound. And the mescal baked.

All one day and part of the next, they waited for the mescal to finish cooking. The time wasn’t idly spent, since Many Leaves was also the season when the first wild onions appeared and other edibles were ready, certain flowers and berries. Hannah’s inexperience made her useless at foraging, so her tasks were mainly camp chores, the hard menial work she had always hired someone to do.

Not far from where the baking pit and their camp were located, some rock tanks provided their water source, reservoirs carved out of solid stone by the elements eons ago, natural containers to catch and hold the rare downpours of rain in the desert. Steep walls leaned protectively over the series of three basins and
shaded them from the sun, thus preventing rapid evaporation. They were completely hidden, no trees or green things growing within the barren tumble of stone and boulders to betray their presence.

Sent to fetch water, Hannah snaked in and around the maze of fallen rock worn smooth by time and the elements, following an unseen path whose twists she knew because she had traveled it so often these last few days. The natural tanks themselves were small, bathtub-size and almost that deep. The rock lip around them was smooth, a solid slab of stone. The stone retained a cool temperature, rarely getting much direct sunlight.

When the containers were filled, she surrendered to an urge that was too strong to resist and scooped up a gourd-full of water and doused her dirty, smelly hair with it. She had some of the soapweed Gatita used when she washed her hair, and quickly lathered her own with it. The sensation was as close to heaven as she’d come in a long time. When she rinsed, Hannah was careful not to foul the water in the tanks, and used as little as possible.

Then she sat in a wedge of sunlight, her long, burnished hair spread across her arms to dry, brushed straight with grass bristles as Gatita did with hers. As yet she hadn’t acquired the knack of fashioning her hair in the double loops and securing it with the
nahleen,
a strip of leather shaped like a bow. Among her many other duties, Hannah was also being trained to do Gatita’s hair.

The thought made her laugh aloud. The sudden sound in the stillness instantly silenced Hannah. She drew her knees up to her chest, the rawhide soles of her moccasins making little scraping sounds on the bald rock.

She looked to the south, an inner compass telling her that in that direction home lay. Tears trickled slowly
down her cheeks. The injuries of the flesh were almost all healed; there was no more pain. Yet she ached inside. She was aware of the distance, not merely in miles but in the vast change from that life to this one. That one had a dreamlike quality of unreality. It was another place, another time. And it was over.

The loneliness, desolation, and despair washed over her, and she cried. The tears she hadn’t shed during this whole ordeal flowed freely, while she wept for all the times she’d been afraid or in agony or humiliated or abused, for the rage that had no release.

When the emotional storm abated, she pressed at her eyes with a thumb and forefinger, pushing at the last few tears squeezing through her lashes. She breathed in deeply, sniffling at her runny nose, and lifted her head.

Slowly an idea took shape in, her mind. Instead of feeing sorry for her present state, she needed to change it. With the water bags filled, she’d have more than enough water. All she had to do was slip back to camp and take one of the horses. If she was lucky, she’d be miles away before anyone noticed she was gone.

When Hannah returned to camp, one of the older Apache women was tending the fire atop the baking pit. She didn’t even glance Hannah’s way when she walked past the camp to the tethered horses. Lutero’s spotted horse knew her and didn’t raise any fuss as she scrambled onto its back. She walked the horse quietly away from the others, her heart in her throat in anticipation of the cry of alarm that would give her escape away. But the silence held.

The minute they were out of sight, Hannah kicked the patch-colored horse into a gallop. The speed lulled her in the beginning, the miles falling away to accumulate and separate her from her Apache captors. When the pony slowed, she felt the first nudgings of panic. She was in unfamiliar country. The fort was somewhere
to the south, but that covered a lot of territory—and she didn’t even know if this was the right direction.

This mountain-wrinkled, boulder-tumbled stretch of country was an obstacle course. Rare were the places where she could ride straight ahead for a prolonged time. Usually she could only angle in a given direction, following a zigzag course. In some places a lot of zigging had to be done before the zag was available.

Hannah reined in her horse, feeling the weight of hopelessness. It was foolish to think she could make the fort. If there were settlements, ranches, or mines in the vicinity, it would be purely chance for her to find one. Behind her was the misery, drudgery, and abuse of Apache enslavement, and ahead of her was a maze of canyons. She had no food, but plenty of water and a horse to carry her.

The narrow-chested pinto looked to the side, its ears pricking and a low whicker vibrating from its chest. Following its glance, Hannah saw the four mounted Apaches, motionless as statues, watching her from the spiny ridge of a low bluff not fifty yards away. She recognized Lutero almost at once.

Her first impulse was to dig her heels into the ribs of the spotted horse and make good her escape. It lunged forward under the first prod. Two strides later, she knew she hadn’t a chance of getting away from the Apaches. This was their country, Apacheria. There was no place she could hide from them, even if she were able to outrun them.

She hauled back on the rawhide strip of rein hooked around the pony’s lower jaw and roughly checked its flight. Turning it, she rode toward Lutero and the other Apache riders. The look in his eyes when she stopped the horse in front of him made her blood run cold. Since he’d brought her to the
rancheria
and given her to Gatita as a personal slave, Lutero had not forced
himself on her. Now, his anger made her afraid of what he might do.

“I got lost.” She tried to Muff her way through it, speaking as always in border Spanish.

He snarled something in Apache and dropped a rope loop around her, snugging it tight, then wrapped more lengths around her, trussing her arms to her sides. Another Apache with a bad knife scar disfiguring his face rode close to take the braided rawhide rein and lead her pony. Lutero used the loose end of the rope to whip her several times across the arms and shoulders, the hard, sharp lashes numbing bands of her skin. Hannah could not hold in obvious than in Gathe low cries of pain that escaped each time he struck her.

The punishment was brief, almost a release of savage temper, but she could feel the welts raising on her skin. They moved out. Within minutes she saw the thin smoke from the baking pit, and the camp itself was in sight shortly afterward.

“I be here all time,” Lutero said, very much the predator playing with his captured prey.

“Como?
What?” Hannah frowned.

“We”—a circling slice of his hands included the other riders—“guard. Watch and see if maybe you try run away.”

It had all been a trap, a test to see how much they could trust her. Hannah kept her gaze directed to the front and her chin level. It had all been so easy because they let it be. There never had been a single chance of escape, she could see that now. And it would be a long, long time before her every movement would not be watched by one of them.

The women were grouped near the pit fire, awaiting their arrival. Their high-cheeked and wide-nosed faces were expressionless, yet the black wells of their eyes held a glare that was directed at Hannah. Nowhere was the enmity more obvious than in Garita’s look.

A shove of Lutero’s moccasined foot pushed Hannah off the horse. With her arms bound to her sides, she couldn’t break her fall and landed heavily on the hard ground near Gatita’s feet, momentarily stunned by the impact. Lutero tossed the free end of the rope to the pregnant woman, a returning of property.

The first bite of the rope across the fresh welts lifted Hannah from the half-daze of her fall, the new pain screaming through her senses. As more blows from the rope rained on her body, she hunched into the ground, the harsh desert soil swallowing her moans while its smells and tastes filled her nostrils and coated her lips. The other women joined in the beating, poking and kicking until it seemed that all her ribs were broken and every breath was torture.