Читать книгу The Man From Forever - Dawn Flindt - Страница 9

Six months later

Home.

No, not home, but understanding, maybe.

It was going to be a glorious day—hot but unbelievably clean—the kind of day that made a person glad to be alive and put life into perspective. At least it did if that person had a handle on herself. On that thought, Victoria—Tory—Kent opened her car door and stepped out. Although night shadows still covered the land, the birds were awake. Their songs filled the air and made her smile.

This land was so deceptively desolate, miles and miles of blackened rock. When she’d first seen the Lava Beds National Monument of Northern California, her impression had been that the country was a harsh joke, a massive, lifeless testament to the power of volcanic eruption and little more. But it wasn’t lifeless after all. She would have to share it with other visitors and park personnel. At least it was too early for anyone else to be at the parking lot near the site that had been named Captain Jack’s Stronghold, after the rebel Modoc chief who once lived here. For a little while, her only companions would be the deer and birds and antelope and scurrying little animals that somehow found a way to sustain themselves on the pungent brush and scraggly trees that found the lava-strewn earth, if not rich, at least capable of sustaining life.

A distant glint of light caught her attention, pulling her from the persistent and uneasy question of what she was doing here when the opportunity of a lifetime waited on the Oregon coast. Concentrating, she realized that the rising sun had lit distant Mount Shasta. Although it was June, snow still blanketed the magnificent peak. This morning, the snow had taken on a rosy cast, which stood out in stark contrast to the still-dark, still-quieted world she’d entered.

What was it she’d read? That the Modocs who once roamed this land, and who had murdered her great-great-grandfather, considered Shasta sacred. Looking at it now, she understood why.

“Are you still around, spirits?” she muttered softly, not surprised that she’d spoken aloud. Ever since her too-brief visit last winter, the isolated historic landmark had remained on her mind—although haunted might be a more appropriate term.

While at work, she’d managed to keep her reaction to herself, but no one was watching her today. In fact, even her boss, the eminent and famous anthropologist Dr. Richard Grossnickle, didn’t know what she was doing. She’d tell him once she joined him at the Alsea Indian village site, maybe.

After making sure she had her keys with her, she locked her car and started up the narrow paved path that would take her through the stronghold, one of the high points of the monument and where some one hundred and fifty Modoc men, women and children had spent the winter of 1873. She’d taken no more than a half-dozen steps before turning to look back at her car for reassurance. It was the only vehicle in the parking lot, the only hunk of metal and plastic and rubber amid miles and miles of nothing. Behind the car lay a surprisingly smooth grassland and beyond that the faint haze that was Tule Lake. The grasses, she knew, existed because years ago much of the lake had been drained to create farmland out of the rich lake bottom.

Ahead of her—

The land tumbled over on itself, a jumble of hardened lava, hardy sagebrush, surprisingly fragrant bitterbrush, ice-gray rabbitbrush. The plants’ ability to find enough soil for rooting here made her shake her head in wonder. She knew they provided shelter for all kinds of small animals and hoped her presence wouldn’t disturb the creatures.

It probably would. After all, this time of day—fragile dawn—belonged to those who lived and died here, not to intruders like herself. Intruder? If your ancestor had fought and died here, his blood soaking into the earth, did that give you some kind of claim to the land?

Was that why she hadn’t been able to shake it from her mind and had to come back? Because she had some kind of genetic tie to this place?

After a short climb, she found herself at the end of the paved area. Day was emerging in degrees, as if one layer after another was being lifted to reveal more and more detail. From the relative distance of the parking lot, the stronghold had looked like nothing more than a brush-covered rise, but she’d reached the top and was fast learning that depth and distance here obeyed different rules. One minute she was walking on level ground with nothing except weeds to obscure her view. Then, after no more than a dozen or so steps, she’d dropped into a lava-defined gully. The rocky sides trapped her, held her apart from all signs and thoughts of civilization.

There’d been a box filled with pamphlets at the beginning of the trail, and after depositing her twenty-five cents, she’d taken one of them. A wooden post with a white number 1 on it corresponded to a paragraph in the pamphlet. She was standing at the site of what had been a Modoc defense outpost. From strategic places like this one, the Indians had been able to keep an eye on the army. As a result, a fighting force of no more than sixty warriors had held off close to a thousand armed soldiers for five months.

A stronghold. It was aptly named.

As the day’s first warmth reached her, she stopped walking and concentrated so she could experience everything. In her mind, it was that fateful winter. Settlers had been living in the area for years, slowly, irrevocably encroaching on land that had always belonged to the Indians.

A fort had been built some miles away and the Modocs and Klamaths had been forced onto an uneasily shared reservation. Some of the Modocs under the leadership of Captain Jack had fled and taken up residence on the other side of Tule Lake. When the army, charged with recapturing the rebels, attacked one frozen dawn, the Modocs had scrambled into their canoes and paddled across the lake to take refuge here in what they’d called The Land Of Burned Out Fires.

Peace talks had been tried, and tried. Thanks to indecision on the part of the government and opposition from the Modocs, it had taken months to decide who would try to wrangle out some kind of settlement. Her great-great-grandfather, a distinguished veteran of the Civil War and commander of the troops stationed here, had been a member of that commission. On April 11, 1873, General Canby had been killed a few miles away, the only true general to die during the struggle.

Such a simple scenario. Wrongs committed on both sides. Forceful, clashing egos. An impenetrable hiding place. A hellish winter for everyone. Her ancestor’s blood spilled on nearly useless land.

The birds hadn’t stopped their gentle songs. Occasionally, they were interrupted by a crow’s strident call that made her smile. The wind had barely been moving when she arrived, but it was increasing, an uneven push of air that sent the brush and grasses to murmuring. She wondered what it had been like to be surrounded by little more than crows and other birds and wind for five months, to constantly listen for the sounds of the enemy. Thanks to the correspondence between Alfred Canby and Washington officials, she had a fair idea of what that winter had been like for the army troops, and looking at the land now she could understand why so many had deserted.

It hadn’t been that easy for the Modocs. They couldn’t leave.

Something in the sky distracted her. Looking up, she spotted an eagle floating in great, free circles over her. Not for the first time, she thought that birds had an ideal life. If it wasn’t for mealtime, she wouldn’t mind being an eagle. To spend one’s days playing with the wind, drifting high above the earth like a free-spirited, tireless hang glider, unconcerned about taxes, an aging car, job politics… Her contemplation of the eagle became more intense when she realized it was slowly but steadily coming closer. She could now make out the details of its proud white head, imagine its sharp eyes were focused on her. Were there such things as rabid eagles? Surely the creature hadn’t mistaken her for breakfast, had it?

Its circles became tighter, more focused until she had absolutely no doubt that she was what held its attention. Those talons would make short work of her cotton shirt and the flesh beneath. Her car keys were no match against its killing weapons. To be attacked by a bird of prey—

With a scream that sent a bolt of fear through her, it wheeled away, disappearing in a matter of seconds. Still shaken, she waited to see if it would return, but it must have decided that a mouse or snake would taste better. After longer than she cared to admit, she dismissed the bird and its unusual behavior and went back to her history lesson.

Captain Jack, she thought with a grim smile. The Modoc chief had had an Indian name, but she couldn’t remember it. From the pictures she’d seen of him, he looked like a peaceful enough man, but something had snapped inside him and his followers, and they’d gone to war against the United States Army, although she doubted he’d known the sum of what he’d been up against. Still, in 1873, after years of coexistence with whites, the Modocs of his time hadn’t been primitive savages, nothing like the cultures she studied as an anthropologist.

What brought the eagle back to mind she couldn’t say. Maybe because on a subconscious level she’d been asking herself how far the Modocs had come from their prehistoric beliefs. Surely they’d no longer perceived eagles and other creatures as gods.

There was, she admitted, a fine line to be walked between giving primitive people’s beliefs the respect they deserved and not laughing over the notion of coyotes who told tall tales, snakes that were thought to be immortal because they shed their skins, warning children not to harm a frog for fear of causing the closest stream to dry up. Despite six years of studying and working with Dr. Grossnickle, she’d been unable to determine to her satisfaction what had given birth to such legends. Certainly she understood early people’s need to make order out of the uncertainties of their lives, but talking animals or the belief that the Modoc creator went around disguised as an old crone… Well, to each his own. She’d talk the talk; she knew she had to do that if she intended to keep her job. But beyond that…well, let’s get real.

Still, she admitted as she moved on to the next marker, there was something about standing on the actual land in question that made logic and professional dispassion a little hard to hold on to. Thinking of everything the Modocs had lost, she stared at the magnificent nothingness of land that stretched out around her. Except for the trail and occasional markings, the stronghold hadn’t changed.

That’s why she’d come out here before visitors started arriving, so she could more easily capture the essence of that earlier time. She began walking again, a slow gait that hopefully diminished the likelihood of losing her footing. Although it took some doing, she managed to read a little more from the brochure. She was surprised to learn that the naturally fortified stronghold itself was little more than a half mile in diameter. The land for as far as she could see was so awesomely vast and rugged that where the Modocs had entrenched themselves seemed larger than it really was. Back then, Tule Lake had dominated the area to the north while most of the south was barren volcanic rock. The chance of sneaking up on the Modocs—

A sound overhead caused her to again stare at the sky. She spotted what she thought must be the same eagle silhouetted against the blueing sky, but this time it was far enough away that she didn’t feel uneasy. “What do you see up there?” she asked. “Are your eyes keen enough that you can spot the Golden Gate Bridge?”

Looking as if it weighed no more than a feather, the great bird dipped one wing. Sunlight caught the tip and gave her an impression of glistening black. “Forget the Golden Gate. You don’t want to get any closer to civilization than this. And if you stay up there, the two of us are going to get along just fine.”

As if taking her suggestion to heart, the bird floated away. When she looked around, thinking to reorient herself, the stronghold seemed to have lost a little of its definition. It was, she thought, as if night had decided to return. After blinking a few times, she dispelled that possibility, but the wind had picked up and the sound it made coated her thoughts, allowed her to dismiss everything she’d experienced in her life before this moment.

Not only that, she could almost swear she was no longer alone.

There was such a thing as too much solitude, Tory told herself a half hour later. You’d think that a person who could see so far that she was aware of the earth’s curve wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder.

Only, it wasn’t just the aloneness, and she knew it, damn it. Something—someone—was watching her. It could be the eagle, a rabbit, maybe even one of the antelope she understood made their home in the park.

“Say,” she whispered because she didn’t want to disturb the lizard staring at her from a rock. “Whoever you are, I don’t suppose you brought some coffee with you, did you?”

Silence, but then she didn’t really expect any different.

According to the pamphlet, she should be approaching one of the dance rings the Modocs had used during their shamanistic rituals, but because she’d veered off the trail while seeking the best vantage point to study Captain Jack’s wide, shallow cave, it took a little while to orient herself. She’d been right; it was going to be a clean day. Clean and clear and utterly beautiful in the way of a sky unspoiled by pollution. Just the same, she couldn’t help but be a little uneasy.

Grass grew between the large rocks that had been placed in a crude circle over a hundred and twenty years ago. She tried to imagine what the spot looked and sounded like back when the shaman—Curly Headed Doctor, the pamphlet said—strung red rope around the stronghold and then sang and danced through the night to ensure that his magic remain powerful.

A red rope to hold back an army. How simplistic. She’d seen a picture of the shaman and had been surprised by how young and untested he appeared, but apparently most, if not all, of the tribe had believed in him—at least they had until the army trampled his rope.

She sat on one of the rocks and faced into the center. If there’d been someone beside her, their shoulders would have touched, and she didn’t see how there would have been enough room for dancing in the middle if every rock had had an occupant. An incredible bond must have been forged here. All right, there’d been political squabbling, conflicts between Captain Jack and some of the more militant rebels, but on a cold yet peaceful night, surely the leaders had come here with a singleness of thought, a shared dream for freedom.

She rocked forward and rested her elbows on her knees, eyes closed to slits that blurred her vision and freed her from the question of who or what shared this place with her. To belong, to be part of a large clan, to put aside petty differences in order to survive, to have learned the necessity of depending on one another…

How long she’d been sitting here she couldn’t say. She didn’t think it had been more than a couple of minutes, and yet she was surprised by how quickly she’d gone from wondering if she should have brought along a can of Mace to losing herself in sensation.

She was suddenly restless, so uneasy with herself that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to conquer the emotion. It came at her more and more often these days—quiet and yet, rough questions about where her life was heading. She’d felt like that sometimes back in high school when warm spring nights and loud music and a grin from a boy sent her heart spinning out of control. She’d weathered those adolescent emotions, smothered them under work goals and ambition and the excitement of knowing that she and Dr. Grossnickle and the university that employed them were on the brink of the anthropological find of three decades. Colleagues, the press, even the bureaucrats and legal types she’d been butting heads with over excavation rights assumed she spent every waking moment immersed in exploring this primitive civilization.

What they didn’t know about was the search, a goal—or something—she couldn’t define.

She needed hard-driving music, to be behind the wheel of a speeding convertible with the wind screaming through her hair. She needed—all right, she needed a man to quiet her body.

After sucking one lungful of air after another into her, she managed to conquer the worst of her energy, but she knew it would only erupt again unless she started moving. Standing, she reached for the brochure, thinking to continue the history lesson. Then she froze.

There was someone out there—a man. Naked but for a loincloth. He clutched a gleaming black knife in strong fingers, and yet she couldn’t make herself concentrate on the weapon.

A savage. Savage.

The word slid inside her, solid and yet misty like a vivid dream that fades upon awakening. But this was no dream.

She stepped over the rock, freeing herself from the dance ring’s confinement, not so she could run, but because—

Because her legs had decided to walk toward him.

He didn’t move; she would swear to that. And yet he kept changing. It was, she finally decided, the way the sun greeted him, lent light to his dark flesh and made his ebony hair glisten. She couldn’t say how old he was; he stood too far away for her to make out his features. Still, if the truth was in his broad shoulders, the flat plane of his belly, the proud way he held his head, he was a man in his prime.

Prime. Savage. Warrior.

There wasn’t enough air at The Land Of Burned Out Fires. If he’d stolen it, she would soon have to demand he return it to her, but maybe—probably—the fault lay in her.

This wonderfully lonely land had remained locked in the past. She didn’t care why that was, didn’t care whether she ever left it. Somehow—although it was impossible—she’d found a primitive brave, and he was staring at her, and the space between them had become charged.

She moved closer, a skill so complex that it should have been beyond her, because her need to touch him, to look into his eyes, to feel his hands on her, was like an explosion inside her. She should say something, ask him to explain the impossible, but if she spoke, he might evaporate, and she needed to stretch out this moment, enlarge it until it became enough to last a lifetime.

One step, two, three, and still he remained. She could now see that he had a small scar over his right shoulder blade and the fine hairs on his arms and legs were as dark as the back of Captain Jack’s cave. His thighs—the loincloth exposed every inch of them—looked as strong and durable as the lava that dominated the land. Those legs could, she knew, lock a woman between them.

They could take her places only imagined before, awaken a gnawing beast of hunger that could only be filled by passion—raw and unadorned passion.

The air was gone again. She had to fight to breathe. The effort did something to her, snapped something deep inside and reminded her of who and where she was.

This man couldn’t be. He couldn’t!