The Gathering Read online

  “Lieutenant, take some men and search these dwellings.”

  Estevez dismounted and gave the order. Men came off the horses and ran toward the dwellings with their swords drawn.

  The old men started shouting and running after the soldiers as the old women came running out, shrieking in fear and dismay at the destruction of their belongings.

  One elderly woman swung a stone axe at a soldier, and the act triggered a melee. The soldier shouted, cursing at the woman as he ran her through with a sword. The sound of her shriek sent birds in a nearby tree in flight, and brought the old men running to her aide.

  When the woman dropped to the ground, an old man jumped toward the soldier. The soldier slashed the old man’s throat and he died between one breath and the next.

  It triggered the rage of the other soldiers still astride. They piled off their horses and came at the savages with weapons drawn. Some wore armor of padded leather while other had chain mail beneath their winter coats. The clubs and stone weapons the savages had were useless against the weapons of steel.

  Diego cursed. He had no intention of this happening, but when his soldiers began killing the savages and the females started running, it heightened their lust, and now they were out of control.

  One woman with long gray braids shed the animal skin she had held around her for warmth and chose to stand her ground, wearing nothing more than a shift-like dress that hung down past her knees. Armed only with a club, she waited as four of the soldiers surrounded her, laughing and poking at her with the points of their swords, drawing blood from her arms and the backs of her hands.

  Estevez already had a woman stripped naked on the ground and was humping her in unbridled lust. She was screaming as he pounded himself into her body, and when the climax overtook him, the next soldier in line was already undoing his clothing, ready to take a turn.

  The act of lust swept through Diego so fast that he was hard just from watching. He looked back at the woman still surrounded by the four soldiers and was taken by her defiance. Just the act of resistance heightened his lust and he began shouting as he dismounted.

  “Leave her! Leave her! That one is mine!”

  The four soldiers turned heel and took off in pursuit after the other old women who were running away.

  One of the dwellings had caught fire during the turmoil and the smoke was burning his eyes as he walked toward her. It never occurred to him that she was old enough to be his mother, maybe older. Like all the others, he’d been without a woman too long to consider some savage’s feelings.

  He walked up to her smiling, and when she swung the stone axe at him, he dodged it then knocked it out of her hand. The woman screamed at him and lunged for his throat. He side-stepped her move and as he grabbed her from behind was assailed by the scent of wood smoke and dirt. Wrapping one arm around her neck to hold her still, he cut the loose animal-skin shift from her body with one slash of his knife, then threw her to the ground.

  She was dazed and bleeding as he loosened his clothing, straddled her body and began pinching and pulling at her sagging breasts. Their continuing struggles stirred the dust in which they were lying until the air around them was saturated with it so thick that he could taste it on his teeth.

  The woman was screaming and writhing beneath him, hitting him with her fists and trying to blind him with her nails and he’d had enough. He doubled up his fist and hit her hard. Her head snapped as her eyes rolled back. Now she was unconscious beneath him, which heightened his excitement.

  He shoved a knee between her legs and rammed his rock-hard erection into her body without care that she was tearing. It had been a very long time since Diego had been inside a woman’s body and the sensation was too heady to control.

  One thrust into the warmth and he was gritting his teeth to keep from coming.

  His second thrust was so hard that her body moved upward in the dirt a good three inches.

  And the third thrust ended it. Blinded by the blood-rush of the climax, it washed him over the edge of reason. He fell forward, grabbing her by both breasts and humping erratically as his seed gushed into her barren womb.

  When he was finished, he rocked back on his heels and looked up. It appeared his soldiers were pleasuring themselves accordingly, passing around the dozen or so women they had caught. At first the women’s screams were loud and then they were not, and then the only sounds that could be heard were guttural grunts and male cries of satisfaction.

  The sounds stirred the Captain’s blood to the point that he took the old woman two more times before he was done. He did not know until he pulled away from her body that sometime during the act, she had regained consciousness and had been watching him with eyes as dark as night. The fact that she had not uttered a sound was unnerving and he pulled a hand back and slapped her just to hear her cry, only she disappointed him by her silence. Instead, she turned her head and spit out the blood gathering in her mouth then looked back at him again as if nothing had happened.

  Something about the look on her face made him nervous, and he yanked the bone necklace from around her neck for a souvenir and then kicked the bottom of her foot as he stood.

  She received the kick as silently as she’d received his seed. Shrugging it off, he put the necklace around his neck, letting it hang over the padded leather armor covering his chest, and then began rearranging his clothing.

  He picked up his weapons, slipped his knife back in the scabbard, and then stood, staring at her. The act of sex had linked them, whether he liked it or not. It was then that he also noticed the blood all over her belly and realized when he’d cut away her clothes, he’d cut skin as well. He looked down at his hands, somewhat shocked that he hadn’t noticed the blood on them before, then looked back at her. She was the oldest woman he had ever had and while she was nothing to look at, it had still felt good to be inside of her.

  Thinking he would calm her rage with a trinket, he dug into his pack, feeling around for some of the trade goods that they carried, and pulled out a necklace made of blue glass beads. He dangled it in the air above her head and then dropped it on her breasts and walked away to reclaim his mount.

  By the time his men were finished with the women, the scent of dust and blood was thick within the air as they rode into the west, still in search of the remaining soldiers they’d come to find.

  ***

  The smoke from the dying cook fire spiraled up through the small opening in the tipi while the people inside still slept.

  The camp consisted of misfits and outcasts, renegades from several tribes of the Plains.

  They were led by a Comanche called Crow Walks, a warrior who had slept with Red Deer, a woman who was his brother’s wife, then lied about the deed. Before that day was out, he had fought and killed his own brother for a woman he did not want.

  His family had denounced him and the chief had followed up by exiling him from the tribe, and all the while Crow Walks could not believe it was happening. He was the strongest warrior in camp and the one most favored by the Chief. He could run farther and faster than any other warrior and was, by all their standards, a man of great stature. His long black braids were wrapped in the whitest of rabbit fur, his spear held many notches for killing enemies in battle. He had driven many bison over a precipice to fall to their death below, thereby furnishing much food for the tribe. And it had all come down around him for taking his brother’s woman.

  Angry beyond words, he left the tribe with a pack on his back and a spear in his hand and never looked back. Red Deer did not escape her own brand of punishment. She had been held down by her own people and cut on both cheeks to make her ugly, then cast out as the tribe packed up and moved on, leaving her alone on the prairie without food or shelter and winter coming on.

  She walked for days until she found Crow Walks’s camp, found him trying to scrape the flesh from a deer hide, which was woman’
s work, and took her place in his life without asking.

  Crow Walks said nothing to her in the way of welcome and daily viewed her scars as a reminder of what he’d lost. He had fallen so far from grace that his resentment began to fester. Before long he was making raids on different camps, stealing what he wanted until he had what he needed to survive. Word spread from tribe to tribe about Crow Walks’s daring feats, and other warriors who had left their tribes soon joined him. The numbers slowly grew within his camp until he and his band of renegades had become feared by their own people on the plains.

  Crow Walks had heard the stories of a woman with great magic coming into their midst. The People called her the Dove and claimed she came with much knowledge and a message that would save the People from future ruin.

  He knew about the Gathering and rejected it outright. Even if he wanted to go he would not be accepted. He’d seen the white birds. He knew the signs. But he didn’t accept the reason she was coming or the need. He had not seen any sign of these strange men who would come into their land and take it from them. Even though he’d been driven out of his own tribe, he did not believe the People could ever be driven out of their lands. The People were many and the lands were vast. Such a thing was impossible.

  But on this night as a rainstorm moved over the land, he and his band huddled close inside their dwellings, satisfying their bellies with food and their sexual desires with their women until they were sated in every way. Finally the fires burned low, the coals were banked, and they fell asleep.

  As Crow Walks slept, he began to dream, and in his dream he saw a woman of great height leading a large tribe of the People into his land. In the dream there were white birds flying ahead of her and circling the sky around her, and he knew it was the Dove. He saw the people who came behind her and saw their numbers and in the dream the people turned into a herd of the great wooly beasts and ran his camp over.

  He woke up in a sweat, imagining he would hear the thundering hooves of a stampede. Instead, he heard the soft snores of his woman’s sleep. Still rattled by the dream, he got up, pushed aside the flap of his tipi and walked out away from the camp to relieve himself.

  As he looked out across his camp he saw a faint light on the horizon. The Great Spirit was pulling back the flap on His tipi to let out the sun.

  Crow Walks remembered the dream and turned to the East, waiting for the first rays of sunlight to strike his face. Dew was heavy on the long grass from last night’s rain. The air smelled fresh. The silence enveloped him.

  A short while later he heard his woman come out and walk away to relieve herself. When she came back she was carrying a basket back inside the tipi.

  Crow Walks did not greet her and she did not acknowledge his presence. They were where they were, not because of any affection toward one another, but because of their respective falls from grace.

  Red Deer shivered slightly in the chill of the early morning as she carried out a turtle shell full of smoking embers from the fire inside their tipi then rolled the embers out onto a handful of twisted grass she’d taken from the basket. After it caught and flared, she added dry buffalo chips until she had a small fire going, then went down to the creek to pick up more wood for the fire. It would all be wet from last night’s rain and it would smoke for a while, but it would burn and that was all that mattered.

  Crow Walks heard her walking away, but paid her no attention. He was still waiting for sunrise.

  Other members of the camp began to emerge from their tipis and before long everyone was up and about. Voices filled the empty space, laughter and jeers were traded. Two of the men in the camp had no woman of their own and woke up surly.

  Crow Walks was still staring at the horizon, watching it become lighter and brighter as Red Deer returned. Soon the fire began to smoke.

  “Stupid woman,” he muttered. “She does not even know how to build a good fire.”

  “Stupid man does not remember that rain makes wood wet and wet wood makes smoke,” Red Deer fired back.

  Crow Walks sighed, not for the first time wishing she had never been born and then he would not have been tempted. Frowning, he refocused his attention on the arrival of a new day.

  When the first slice of the white light rose above the horizon his pulse accelerated. He continued to wait, seeing it emerge bit by tiny bit until it was almost whole.

  He took a deep breath, holding it, holding it, holding—

  One moment he could see sky and the creek and the trees along the bank, and then he saw nothing but a painful blast of blinding light. Before he could look away, a vision came out of the light and began moving toward him.

  It was a tall figure of what he took to be a man wearing a dark jacket with dark fur lining the hood over his head. The stride was long, arms swinging with every step. The man came closer and closer and then all of a sudden the hood fell back and long black hair tumbled out around a face of such beauty it made him gasp.

  The only thing that registered was that it was a woman and not a man and that he never seen a woman that tall. And in the vision she raised her arms up over her head and flew up into the sky, then while he was watching her ascent, and eagle came out of nowhere, slicing Crow Walks eyes from his face with razor-sharp talons.

  Crow Walks cried out and covered his face to stop the vision, staggering backward and moaning with every step.

  Red Deer heard him and stood up from the fire.

  “Crow Walks! What is wrong?” she asked.

  He dropped to his knees, which brought the rest of the camp running toward them.

  Red Deer walked over to where he was kneeling and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  He shuddered. “No,” he said, and dropped his hands in his lap. “I had a vision,” he said, as the others all gathered around him.

  A small wiry warrior called Two Rabbits squatted down in front of Crow Walks.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “The Dove. She comes.”

  A warrior called Black Hand laughed.

  “I do not believe there is such a person. The Old Ones would not give their power to a woman.”

  “How do you know it was the Dove?” Two Rabbits asked.

  “She lifted her arms and flew up into the sky like a bird,” Crow Walks muttered, neglecting to mention what happened afterward. He stood up. In his world, when he was threatened, he fought back. “I, Crow Walks, will kill this witch, myself,” he said, and then he walked away.

  Red Deer frowned. If Crow Walks got himself killed, then where did that leave her? She glanced up and caught Black Hand watching her and relaxed. He had no woman. She would be fine.

  Chapter Four

  Tyhen was dreaming of a sky full of black birds that were trying to peck out her eyes when she heard someone cough. Thinking it was Yuma, she reached for his hand then realized he was gone. She rolled over onto her back and stretched, then sat up. Her hair was in tangles and her clothes smelled like smoke.

  Her belly growled as she crawled out of the tent and stood up. She was finger-combing her hair when someone tugged it from behind. She turned around, thinking it was Yuma, and came face to face with Adam and Evan. A big smile spread across her face as she threw her arms around their necks and hugged them.

  “My brothers! You are here! When did you come?”

  They were laughing, very happy to see her back to normal instead of the unconscious woman they’d found on the plains.

  Adam removed the silver chain with the bird charm from around his neck and dropped it over her head.

  “Time to return your property, I think,” he said.

  Tyhen thought of her mother as she fingered the little bird charm and then dropped it around her neck where it fell beneath her clothing.

  “How are they? Are they well?” she asked.

  The twins
didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. They knew she missed her parents, but she didn’t know how much they missed her.

  “It is because of your mother that we are here,” Evan said.

  Tyhen frowned. “I do not understand.”

  “She had a vision. She saw you flying into a fire and when you didn’t come out, she fainted. We had been planning to join you for several weeks but when that happened, Cayetano sent us early.”

  Tyhen groaned. “Oh no. My poor mother still doesn’t understand that I cannot die.”

  “It is difficult for us to accept that, too,” Adam muttered. “You are an anomaly.”

  She frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means there isn’t another person like you,” Evan said. “You are one of a kind.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know any other way to be but how I am.”

  “That’s why we love you,” Evan added.

  She smiled and in her excitement hugged them again, and then felt a hand slide beneath her hair and squeeze the back of her neck. She didn’t have to look to know. She knew his touch.

  “Yuma! Did you know our brothers were here?”

  Yuma kissed the side of her cheek and then glanced at the twins.

  “You didn’t tell her?” he said.

  “Tell me what?” Tyhen asked.

  “You didn’t come back. The Nantay brothers and I went looking for you, but the twins found you first. You had passed out on the prairie and they were bringing you to the camp when we met up with them.” His eyes darkened as he cupped the side of her face. “I was very glad to see you safe in their arms.”

  Tyhen sighed. “I was too tired to go any farther.”

  Yuma dropped his hands and stood quietly before her, remembering the power of that massive tornado, in awe of what she was becoming.

  “If I didn’t know that you would love me forever, I would be afraid of you,” he finally said.