King of Spades (22 page)

The big buck lifted his head. Ransom could see him savor the scent of her, drawing in long slow breaths through slightly flared nostrils. Apparently the head buck didn't mind what his nose found for he went back to grazing.

Erden waded quietly through the grass, continuing to lift the head of first this sunflower, then that, until she was well amidst the red deer. She stopped. She lifted yet another sunflower. Then, easy, casually, she stroked the back of the nearest fawn. The mother's head came up out of the grass. She too sniffed of the Erden smell on the air, then, satisfied it was well, went back to grazing. After a moment Erden touched the mother.

Ransom couldn't move.

A crow came fluttering out of a stand of quaking aspen, its wings flashing an iridescent purple and a warm welcome in its caw-caw. It lighted on Erden's shoulder.

Erden turned her head, easy, and cawed a warm welcome in reply.

The crow and Erden exchanged kisses.

A tear jumped glistening down Ransom's beard.

The crow sat on Erden's buckskin shoulder this way, that way. The crow's feathers were exactly as black as Erden's braids.

The crow and Erden talked together. The crow spoke a parrot-like Sioux; Erden spoke a liquid Sioux.

Presently the crow lifted off Erden's shoulder and dipped over to the back of the head buck. Except for a slight shiver of hide over the back, the buck hardly noticed. The crow found something to peck at in the fur over the buck's shoulder. The buck kept on grazing.

The crow looked around, bright, perky; saw something in a far pine. It flew over, dropping a falling arrow of bird- splash on the way, and then vanished into the dark forest.

Almost on the crow's last caw and flap of wing, a male bobolink spurted up out of the grass at Ransom's feet. The bobolink fluttered up in joy, not fear. It sang. It whistled its pleasure. It was as fat as a butterball. It somersaulted. Buff hindneck and white shoulders alternated with fat black belly and curt black tail. It tumbled and tumbled in midair, each tumble a little higher than the one before. It sang short quick bursts of liquid sound. It sang that the fat two-legged was very happy they'd come to visit him. It rose. The little meadow rang with its catchy airs. The little meadow widened as the bobolink rose higher and higher and as its melodious notes swelled and swelled in power.

Ransom and Erden stood rapt.

Of a sudden the bobolink speared straight up and its song became a frenzy of pure purling euphoria.

Ransom gasped.

“Sha,” Erden whispered.

Up. Up. A form flashing off into delicious hysteria.

“By the Lord, Robert's going to explode.”

“Wakan.”

Up above the tree tips up above the mountain tops.

And then the bobolink was gone. There wasn't even a single drifting afterimage mote in the eye. Only lingering, very slowly fading, echoes. Eloquent gurglings receding to liquid purlings receding to little tinklings receding to tiny pink notes.

“Angel heaven.”

“Comes-through-the-Cloud.”

A pair of blue swallows fleeted in. They'd spotted Erden from their mud nest up on a sandstone ledge. They flew directly toward her, and as they neared her they flipped iridescent wings at her black hair, and then rose and dove and swalved around her. They swept up all the flies. They too were at home with her. They were careful not to fly too near Ransom and showed him nothing but sharply forked tails.

Erden began strolling again, touching this flower, that flower, with the two blue swallows forming a swift aureole about her head. She touched the tip of a blade of bluejoint grass. She touched a quaking aspen at the edge of the glade. She touched a spruce, a pine, a chance rare oak, an ash, an alder, a dogwood. She touched them as if they were the dolls of childhood. A sound came from her as of an inward murmuring.

“No wonder she's named after a bird,” Ransom mused.

Presently Erden beckoned for Ransom to join her. She'd found something.

He went over, eyes grave with love.

“Kanta.”

Wild plums. The plums hung in the midst of arrowhead leaves like big drops of scarlet blood. “Ripe.”

She took up the corners of her fringed deerskin skirt and held them above her hips. She motioned for him to pick the plums and fill her skirt. Sunlight shone on her white nubile thighs. The small triangle of her dusky pubic fuzz seemed more a thing of innocence than entrance to a primal womb.

He concentrated on picking the ripe plums. When his eyes did shy off a little, he made an effort to look up at the swealing swallows.

Ransom picked plums until her buckskin skirt sagged with their weight.

She motioned for him to take his sombrero and fill it with
some scarlet bullberries from a nearby whitish thorny bush.

He filled it heaping.

They trudged back to the cave, she naked from the waist down, he bareheaded.

It was all a dream, pure. If he could only hold his breath, forever, it would forever stay that way. He found himself thinking of Erden at last as truly a blue swallow, something to be looked at and adored but never caged.

While she made supper, he fell into a study that quivered with holy green little lightnings. His thoughts sparkled more than drifted. He had fallen into the loving lap of a savage angel. Pray that he might not lose her by some foolish word or act on his part. He'd already taken her, mingled fleshes with her, but more and more that taking and that mingling seemed of another time and done by another man.

They went to bed together as brother and sister.

 

A couple of weeks went by.

Green aspens turned gold. Prickles of frost caught at running water. Turtledoves sang late autumnal laments.

Ransom went through the days as though he'd smelled too many wild roses. He knew he should be staking out his claim. He knew he should be going back to tell Katherine about his great strike. But he couldn't get himself to do it.

Moods, suppers, sleeps drifted by.

Erden got him to bathe every morning in the little brook, cold or not. They bathed unashamed together. The aroma of wild ferns and silver sage never left her. Her smell, like Katherine's, became a part of his flesh: Erden's pure wild, Katherine's tinctured with manufacture.

While Ransom learned to talk more Sioux, Erden refused to learn more American.

“Why not, my little two-legged?”

“It is not at home with my tongue.”

“Someday you may want to live with the white again.”

Erden shook her head. “I have found my true home. I wish for no other.”

“Perhaps your children will wish to speak white.”

“The mother carries the tongue. Therefore the children will speak Dakota.”

“Do you not wish to please your husband?”

“You keep the beard. I keep the tongue.”

Inevitably he continued to make comparisons. Erden's skin was as satiny as the petal of a sundrop; Katherine's was as set as the leaf of a milkweed. Erden's eyes were gray- ringed and trusting and bird-wise; Katherine's one eye was brown and full of private shadows and citified. Erden's hair, taken out of braids, rippled like a filly's flowing mane; Katherine's hair, a rust-shadowy gold, hung stiffish like a bell mare's tail. Erden flowed, toes light through the day; Katherine strode, strong-muscled through the day.

He loved them both, worshiping Erden and lusting after Katherine.

When he tried to come to some kind of thought as to what he should do about Erden, his mind shied off into fantasy.

He made it a point not to touch Erden, or reach for her, even though they slept together. It became a religion with him.

 

Nightmares came to him. By the time he realized what they were, they already had him in the grip of something taking place. It was already too late. Later, when he finally came out of them, he couldn't for the life of him remember what they were about.

His bad dreams troubled Erden. Several times he'd flailed out at enemies in his sleep and she'd had to tame his arms. “An evil spirit has entered your open mouth,” she said. “It has gone to live in your heart. Come, my husband, you must take the purification bath.”

That Indian wild he wasn't. “No, the morning bath in chilly water is sufficient.”

She held his bearded head against her bare bosom. She whispered in the dark, “Yet it is the evil spirit of a bad witch who has entered your heart. You must prepare for the purification hut.”

“No.”

“I would help you prepare it but the woman must not touch the purification hut.”

“No.”

After fright's sweat had dried, and his heart went back to beating normal, he withdrew from her taming touches. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he didn't.

“Come, sleep well, my husband.”

He shuddered.

“What, has the evil witch come again?”

God, God, if only he'd waited. As he'd wanted to.

 

One morning, after a bath in the brook, where they chased and splashed each other shrilling through stiff webs of frost, hilarious with the joy of being tinglingly alive so early in the dawn, he caught up with her, grabbing a braid just as they reentered their cave. She didn't resist; instead with a shy little ducking motion cuddled against him.

“A hawk has at last caught you, Little Swallow.”

“What have I done that my husband no longer looks for acorns?”

“What is this you say?”

“The wild squirrels still hunt for acorns in the forest.”

His breath caught in his beard.

“My foster father and mother sported on their sleeping robe together many winter nights. Now that I am a maiden and you are a brave, must it be forbidden us?”

Then he understood why it was she had been so willing and ready the first time.

“When I was a child it was explained to me that this sport was only for the grownups, and not for children. That
someday after my nose had bled it would also be granted me.”

He trembled.

“Husband?”

He picked her up. Convulsively, yet with an effort at tenderness, he carried her to their sleeping room and placed her upon their robe bed.

Drops of water still dappled her rose-brown cheeks. One glistening jewel stood trembling on the very point of her nose, reflecting her paired gray eyes. As she lay in his arms, she stirred, and a clear drop slid off her near nipple and ran over the curve of her plum breast. As it ran the drop collected other drops, and after a moment, hitting her slim arm where it lay tight against her body, it rivuleted onto his arm. The little pouring of drops was warm.

Lightly he stroked her belly. Her skin was still catchy with moisture.

“Husband.”

“Swallow.”

She raised a round knee and moved it coyly from side to side. “Husband?”

Two women called him husband.

“Bearded one?”

His hand moved. He had not willed the moving of it. The hand trembled between her plum breasts. The hand stole tenderly up to her slender neck and again played at choking her. Then the hand moved up to her hair and touched her braids.

A sliding smile widened her lips.

He'd often seen such a smile on Katherine's lips. It did not become Erden.

The edges of Erden's lips parted with a wisping sound.

“Yes?” He remembered what Katherine had taught him about a woman, how to kiss her behind the ears and over the closed eyes with the lips hardly touching, and behind the point of the chin with a quick darting tongue tip, and along
the patch of tan around the nipple of the breast with nipping lips, and finally in the soft depression in the V of the collarbone kissing in rhythm with the beat of the heart. This he could never do with Erden.

Another whisper parted her lips. “Husband?”

“Yes?” He recalled his ritual of touches with Erden the first time. It'd been a good thing to do. So with a fingertip he again touched her right brow and then her left, and touched the point of her nose, displacing the glistening jewel drop, and touched the point of her chin, and touched the point of her right shoulder and then her left, and ticked her right hip where the point of the bone whitened her white skin and then her left, and dropped a fingertip on her right kneecap and then her left, and tapped her right ankle bone and then her left, and took hold of her right big toe and gave it a pull, and then her left.

She quivered with delight. “That sport my Dakota father and mother did not have on the sleeping robe.”

The drops of water on her skin shrank before his very eyes. He watched one of them on her cheek diminish to a bead of dew, then close to nothing.

She moved her body to find his hand.

He savored the musky smell of buffalo rising out of the robe beneath them.

Again she undulated her body to find his hand.

He caught sight of his tumble of silken phallus. He remembered that when he'd been with Katherine there had been such an edge of lust for her that he thought he would break before she could give him enough of herself. Here with Erden it was pure.

Erden became impatient. She was gentle about it but she was firm. “Husband?”

“Swallow.”

She took hold of his hand and placed it where she wished it to be.

His middle fingers fell upon a wound, freshly cut. He
remembered when the knot of her had been as intricate as a rosebud.

A ripple began in her neck, moved down her body, ended with a comb of motion under his hand.

His tumble of flesh swelled. Silken skin began to shin.

“Husband?”

Of a sudden a bobolink began to sing in his head. Good. It must not be as with the ram, a brutal driving. Birds had it better. Especially the tinkling bobolinks.

She placed her hand on his hand and pressed down.

A fingertip broke through.

An undulation, as delicate as the sidewise sliding of an eye, touched the tip of his finger. “Husband.”

He held. He turned his head. Could this be woman? He had to know.