El Lazo - The Clint Ryan Series, Page 2

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  At first he thought someone was calling him… no… not someone… many… the caterwauling of the dead… his companions? It was too soon to be dead… or was it?

  He thought the raucous sounds must be Gabriel’s trumpets announcing his arrival in heaven or, more likely, the keening of the devil’s helpmates in hell. He forced open his eyes, looking directly up to the blazing sun.

  Burning hell!

  At the touch of cool fresh water trickling into his lips, he choked and coughed, then opened his mouth like a young robin receiving a fat worm. Clean, life-sustaining water caressed his parched tongue and throat. Not part of what he envisioned as hell.

  He heard the sounds again—seabirds. And he smelled wet sand and the pungent odor of rotting kelp. Flies tickled his face. He brushed at them with a weary arm. Rolling to his side, he rose to an elbow and waited for his salt-burned eyes to adjust.

  The men who surrounded him stepped back as Clint propped himself up on one hand, shading his eves with the other.

  He felt quietly ecstatic. He was alive!

  But they were not smiling.

  He tried to smile, but his dry, cracking lips refused. He blinked and moved his gaze from man to man. Dressed only in rabbit-or fox-skin loincloths, each man held a weapon. Several held bows with arrows notched; many clutched war clubs with stone heads. All had knives of chipped stone or metal. Each man wore a carrying net of woven milkweed about his shoulders. Some held shellfish, and Clint recognized a few seabirds among the bounty in the nets.

  They must be on hunting or gathering trip, Clint reasoned, but then noticed they were painted. Body paint of red and black covered the exposed body parts. War paint?

  Clint tried to gain his feet, making it to one knee before a broad-chested warrior with a feather cloak about his shoulders stepped forward and shoved his stone ax against Clint’s chest pushing him back to the sand.

  A creeping dread filled his gut, and he prayed for strength. Clint rolled to his side and covered his head as the man raised the ax. He heard an urgent shout, and another warrior, his chest painted pure white, stepped forward and grasped the man’s wrist in an iron grip.

  The two men stood eye to eye, trading guttural remarks then the white-chested man shoved the other back. Feathercloak stumbled a few steps then regained his threatening stance. A few of the men gathered behind him, and a few gathered behind Whitechest.

  Clint found himself in between. He glanced at the scrub oak forest at the edge of the beach and wondered if he could run. Again he managed to get to one knee. Feathercloak stepped forward, his ax raised, and Whitechest lifted his stubby three-foot bow and drew the arrow a few inches. Both groups were silent, the tension so thick it hung in the air like a bank of fog.

  Two tall sinewy men flanked the white-chested warrior, each with a six-foot stone-headed lance. Feathercloak curled a lip, made a guttural remark, turned on his heel, and led his band of supporters away.

  As Whitechest moved forward and knelt beside Clint, the others in his band returned to their search of the beach. Clint heard the sound of hoofbeats in the distance and presumed that the opposition had left. He breathed in relief.

  Whitechest sat, folding his legs, and setting his bow aside then handed Clint a gourd of water. The Indian was as tall as Clint and broad-chested, with a full head of braided and coiled hair.

  A stone knife was worn in the braids. A necklace of haliotis shells hung down to his muscle-defined belly, and olivella-shell bracelets encircled knotted biceps and calves.

  His eyes were inquisitive, and wrinkles at their edge hinted of times both joyous and sad. Clint nodded gratefully, managed to sit and raise the water to his lips. As he carefully sipped, letting the water rest in his month and relishing the simple wetness of it, the warrior gave him the slightest hint of a smile and patted his white chest.

  “Soohoop,” he said.

  Clint wondered if the man was trying to tell him his name and tried Spanish. “Su nombre?”

  The man shook his head adamantly. A young boy approached, and for the first time, Clint noticed that a group of women and children rested and watched from a nearby sand dune. The boy stood at a discreet distance, “No español.”

  “He doesn’t speak Spanish?” Clint asked in that language.

  “He won’t speak Spanish,” the boy replied. “His name is Soohoop, Hawk.”

  “I am Clint… Clint Ryan, Hawk,” Clint repeated, and the warrior smiled.

  The warrior rose and spoke to the boy in his guttural tongue, then walked away.

  “He wants you to rest until the gathering of shellfish is over. Then he will take you to our camp.”

  “Suits me,” Clint managed. The boy wandered away and began digging for clams with a sharpened fire-hardened stick. Clint worked his way to a rock and leaned against it, sipping water, watching, and feeling his strength return as the water worked its wonders in his system.

  He took a second to admire his surroundings. The sea broke in long rolling waves against the wide beach, which gave way to low dunes that in turn gave way to a brush and scrub oak forest. Beyond, sharp hills of laurel intermixed with tall arroyo willow, with ravines of short, brilliant green-leaved sandbar willow, rose to high live-oak-covered mountains. Great sandstone shoulders protruding out of green meadow and stately live oak rimmed the skyline in the distance.

  Seabirds—plovers, and stilts, and sanderlings—worked each wave’s edge, scampering back and forth across the hard-packed sand just ahead of the surf. California and Heerman’s gulls winged overhead, flashing white and black and gray. A flight of brown pelicans winged low over the water.

  He studied the men, women, and children who moved about the beach and the edge of the nearby woods. Each of them wore shell beads. For the first time he noticed two men stationed behind him, watching him closely. It seemed their only duty.

  Was he a prisoner? Did the man called Hawk save him only to kill later? He had read of the strange rites of primitive tribes. But the man seemed sincere in his friendliness. Clint hoped he was, for he was too weak to do much about it, at least for a while.

  All the men wore shell armbands about their biceps and calves, and the women, long necklaces that hung between exposed breasts. Even the children wore chokers of colored shells.

  The women, too, had skin loincloths and unlike the men, wore vests of skin or woven reeds, but they provided little modesty. A few of the men wore leather moccasins and leggings, but most, and all the women and children, were barefoot.

  The women wore carrying nets like the men, but also carried intricate conical baskets strapped to their backs. While they worked, they dropped shellfish and an occasional decorative shell over their shoulders. Some of the women bore a double load—basket in back and baby bound to chest in a woven reed carrier,

  Clint caught the eye of a young woman, slightly taller than the others and finer featured. She rose from her digging and crossed the sand to where he rested. He smiled, but her gaze remained serious and concerned.

  She knelt beside him, reaching into her carrying net to fish out the shell of a snail. Clint tried to keep his eyes on hers, as dark as the wing of a raven that cawed overhead, but could not help but lower his eyes to admire her proud breasts as she worked. She hardly noticed his gaze—or at least pretended not to.

  Dipping a finger into the snail shell, slowly so as not to startle him, she extended her hand and began to apply a greasy substance to his lips then to his burned forehead. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the rock to let her work.

  He heard the gruff voice of one of the warriors and opened his eyes to see that one of the men stationed to watch him had risen and come over to chastise the girl. She stopped and moved away, and Clint admired her calves, exposed upper legs, and swinging buttocks as she walked. “Thank you,” he called after her. She glanced over her shoulder coquettishly and smiled, but said nothing.

  The warrior gave him a hard look then silently returned t
o his post.

  Clint’s sunburned skin felt smoothed by the gel she had so gently applied. She had been kind, as had the warrior who had kept old Feathercloak’s ax away. But the two men between Clint and the shelter of the forest did not look in the least benevolent.

  And they watched him closely.

  Four

  Clint moved unsteadily along behind the women and children. Every step a chore, he stumbled at first, but soon got into the rhythm and was able to keep up.

  His stomach roiled with nausea, his arms and legs knotted with pain, his skin burned, his lips cracked, and his vision blurred at times—but he was alive.

  He hoped that at the end of the walk he would find more water and a soft place to rest and heal. And he hoped he would not find the hostile men who had ridden out ahead of them.

  The young boy, who like Clint walked instead of rode, kept glancing back at him. Finally, Clint mustered a smile, and the boy dropped back beside him. His hair had been recently trimmed, much as it would had he been in a New England town. Only shoulder high to Clint with the fresh face of youth, he flashed Clint a shy grin before he questioned him.

  “Cuomo está usted? The boy asked him how he was.

  “Bien, all right,” Clint answered.

  “My mission name is José,” the boy said.

  “You speak Spanish well.”

  “All of us used to speak Spanish.”

  “Used to?” Clint asked.

  “I have only joined the band this moon and have not taken the vow yet. But I caution you do not speak Spanish to them. It is now considered an insult.”

  “The vow?”

  “The vow of Sup. Our god.”

  “And what is the vow?”

  “It is the oath of the old ways. All of these men were at the mission; some of them born there. But the mission ways changed. No longer was there enough food. The cholera took many of us… and lues, the rotting disease that makes you loco. We are returning to the laws of Sup, the old ways that made the Chumash great, before the Spanish came and brought their god.”

  On the trek, Clint learned that the boy had been at La Purisima mission a few miles inland from Punta Concepción. His father had fallen out of favor with the padres and, with the cholos at his heels, left the boy and his mother and fled back into the mountains to join Hawk’s band. Soon many of the others joined them. The boy too fled into the mountains. He had heard of the band of converts and sought and found his father there.

  The boy’s Spanish was much better than Clint’s, but soon, the boy said, he would never be allowed to speak the Mexinanos’ language again. They talked until one of the men reined his horse around and started back to the end of the procession; then the boy hurried forward to join the women and children. The white-chested warrior called Hawk scolded him, and the boy did not come back again.

  Clint looked over his shoulder and noted that the same two men who had been stationed between him and the forest were now riding drag and keeping a constant eye on him.

  “To hell with them,” he thought, picking up a dead laurel branch, he used it as a walking stick and concentrated all of his effort on keeping up.