Navajo Sunrise. Elizabeth Lane
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The driver’s twangy voice broke into her thoughts. “If there’s any chance that Injun can hear you, you’d best not say nothin’ ’bout the hospital.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda glanced at him sharply.
“Navajos got some odd beliefs. They don’t like to go where a body’s died, somethin’ about ghosts. Hell, I’ve seen ’em burn a place to the ground ’cause a body’s died there—and the whole family just standin’ round with no place to live. Sometimes, if they know ahead, they’ll haul the poor soul’s bed outside so’s he won’t have to die in the house.”
“And that’s why they don’t like the hospital? Because people die there?”
The corporal laughed, a raw, humorless sound. “We hafta drag ’em there at gunpoint. Ain’t no use tryin’ to do nothin’ for ’em, miss. Navajos ain’t got no more gratitude than they got sense!”
“I see.” Miranda sank back into her own silence. The stars had come out, diamond pinpoints spilling across a black velvet sky. So far away. So cold.
The road was straighter and more level here, as if it had been recently graded. Bare cottonwoods, their skeletal branches clawing skyward, lined the road on both sides. This, Miranda realized, would be the final approach to Fort Sumner.
Straining her eyes into the darkness ahead, she could make out glimmers of light, lower and brighter than the icy stars. Soon she and her weary escorts would be safe within the boundaries of the fort. Soon she would be greeting the tough, taciturn near stranger who was her father.
Major William Howell, known as Iron Bill to his troops, had already made it clear that he could not leave his post to travel East for Miranda’s June wedding. Dear Uncle Andrew would be the one to walk her down the aisle and give her to Phillip in marriage. All the same, Bill Howell was her father. Even though she had seen him less than half a dozen times in the fifteen years since her mother’s death, Miranda felt a need to close the tenuous circle that bound them together. With Phillip planning to take over the London office of the family shipping business, who could say whether she and her father would ever meet again?
The man in her lap stirred and moaned. His moon-silvered eyelids twitched as if he were dreaming, but his eyes remained closed in the shadowed pits of their sockets. Miranda studied the proud, sharp planes of his sleeping face. The proud Navajo was pure trouble, she knew. By all rules of common sense, she should let the soldiers deliver him to the Indian hospital. He was certainly in no condition to protest or even to be frightened.
In any case, Ahkeah and his people were none of her concern. She had come to Fort Sumner to see her father, not to aid the downtrodden. Two weeks from today she would be leaving by this very road. She would be going back to her own familiar world, to finish out her school year at Radcliffe and prepare for her marriage to Phillip. Two weeks—why, that was hardly any time at all, certainly not enough time to make a difference in this miserable place. She would be foolish to try, foolish to get involved.
Miranda squared her jaw, her decision made. She would instruct the men to leave Ahkeah at the hospital where he belonged. Then she would put the tall Navajo firmly and permanently out of her mind.
Ahkeah drifted below the brink of consciousness, struggling again and again toward the surface, only to tire and sink downward once more into the enfolding darkness. Images floated through his mind—faces from the past, scenes of misery, horror and unspeakable sadness. The broken bodies on the floor of Canyon de Chelly…wise old Ganado Mucho lying in his own blood…the rocky earth falling onto Ahkeah’s wife’s lovely, cold face….
Surrounding everything was the aura of pain, spreading outward in quivering rings from his temple, like ripples on still, black water. He moaned, struggling to break into the light, then spiraling helplessly downward once more.
The fragrant softness that surrounded his body was alien to his senses, yet strangely familiar. Even in his semiconscious state he felt the nearness of the young bilagáana woman, the lean firmness of her thighs supporting his head and shoulders, the touch of her fingers like warm snow on his face. She smelled faintly of lilacs—an aroma he remembered and hated. Now he was floating in a lilac sea, drifting in scented warmth, in and out of awareness, in and out of pain. The scent was repellant, and yet, somehow, so arousing that he felt his body respond with a deep, stirring heat.
He had never considered bilagáana women attractive. The ones he’d known had been stringy, washed-out creatures with eyes like sheep and voices like wild crows—women like Mrs. McCabe, whose husband had bought him as a small, terrified boy from a Mexican slave trader. The nine years he had spent in the McCabe household still gave him bad dreams—the whippings to “break” his spirit, the crushing labor, the stream of shrill tirades from Mrs. McCabe’s hatchet tongue when he failed to speak English perfectly. And every spring the cloying scent of the blooming bushes that ringed the McCabes’ front porch. The scent of lilacs.
Now Ahkeah floundered in the shallows of a lilac sea. His efforts to break the surface were exhausting, even though he sensed the reality that his body had not moved. His eyelids were leaden, his limbs like stone, able to feel the jarring motion beneath them but with no strength to obey his will. He was trapped in this scented dream where pain swirled and dipped like a dancer in a floating skirt. And something else was wrong—an awareness that lay like a sheet of ice beneath the dream’s liquid warmth. What was it? Some word, something the bilagáana woman had said—
The sudden chill penetrated to Ahkeah’s bones as he remembered. They were taking him to the hospital, to that place of terror and pain where the ghosts of the dead lingered and the Holy People would not go. His fears were pure superstition, the bilagáana would say. But he had visited friends who’d been taken there, and on every visit he had felt the evil in that place, and had sworn he would never allow himself or any of his family to be taken there.
Wildly now, he began to jerk and thrash, willing his limbs to move, his voice to cry out in protest. But the lilac dream held him fast. He felt the woman’s soft, cool hand stroking his forehead, heard her whispering voice as he fought his way upward, struggling into the cold night air.
The Navajo’s head jerked in Miranda’s arms. His body twitched, quivering agitatedly along its length in the wagon bed. He muttered random words—at least she supposed them to be words—in his strange language.
“It’s all right,” she repeated, soothingly, her hand brushing tendrils of coarse, black hair away from his forehead. “You’re hurt, but you’ll be well taken care of. We’re going to—”
Her words ended in a gasp as his eyes shot open.
Miranda’s heart seemed to stop as the full fury of his anthracite gaze struck her. It was as if a sleeping tiger had suddenly awakened in her arms.
“What happened?” His voice was thick, the words slurred.
“You were hit. Your head is injured, and you need to keep still.” The words tumbled out of her as the heart that had frozen an instant before broke into a frenzied gallop.
“Where am I?” he demanded. “What happened to the old woman?”
“Nothing. She ran away.” Miranda’s outrage flared at the distrust his question implied. “No one would have harmed her, Ahkeah. I would never have allowed that to happen.” Her gaze flickered away as his cold eyes reminded her that she hadn’t stopped the soldiers from harming him. “One of the men struck you down to keep you from being shot. But the blow was harder than he’d intended. It was an accident, truly….”
Good heavens, she sounded like a fool, stumbling around in the morass of her own silly words. She shook off the condemnation in his hard black eyes and forced herself to continue. “You’ll be well looked after. I can assure you of that.”
“In the hospital?” He uttered the last word with the vehemence of a curse. Then, without waiting for her to respond, he rolled off her lap into the wagon bed and pushed himself to a shaky sitting position.
The lights from the fort were much closer now. Miranda could