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Published in Marchers of Valhalla, 1972.
Once I was Iron Heart, the Comanche war-hawk.
This is no fantasy that I speak, nor do I suffer from hallucination; I speak with sure knowledge, of the medicine memory, the only heritage left me by the race which conquered my ancestors.
This is no dream. I sit here in my efficiently-appointed office fifteen stories above the street that thunders and roars with the traffic of the most highly artificialized civilization the planet has ever known. Looking through the nearest window I see the blue sky only between the pinnacles of the towers that rear above this latest Babylon. If I look down I will see only stripes of concrete, over which pour an incessant stream of jostling humanity and wheeled machines. Here are no ocean-like expanses of naked brown prairie beneath a naked blue sky, here no dry grass waving before the invisible feet of the unseen people of the wastes, here no solitude and vastness and mystery to veil the mind with all-seeing blindness and to build dreams and visions and prophesy. Here all is matter reduced to its most mechanical tangibility—power that can be seen and touched and heard, force and energy that crushes all dreams and turns men and women into whimpering automatons.
Yet, I sit here in the midst of this new wilderness of steel and stone and electricity and repeat the inexplicable: I was Iron Heart, the Scalp-Taker, the Avenger, the Thunder-Rider.
I am no darker than many of my customers and patrons. I wear the clothes of civilization with as great ease as any of them. Why should I not? My father wore blanket, war-bonnet, and breech-clout in his youth, but I never wore any garments except those of the white men. I speak English—and French, Spanish, and German too—without an accent, save for a slight Southwestern idiom such as you will find in any white Oklahoman or Texan. Behind me lie years of college life—Carlisle, the University of Texas-Princeton. I am reasonably successful in my profession. I am accepted without question in my chosen social circle—a society made up of men and women of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. My associates scarcely think of me as an Indian. Apparently I have become a white man, and yet—
One heritage remains. A memory. There is nothing vague or hazy or illusive about it. As I remember my yesterdays as John Garfield, so I remember as more distant yesterdays, the life and deeds of Iron Heart. As I sit here and stare out upon the new wasteland of steel and concrete and wheels, it all seems suddenly as tenuous and unreal as the fog that rises from the shores of Red River in the early morning. I see through it and beyond, back to the drab, brown Wichita Mountains where I was born; I see the dry grass waving under the southwest wind, and the tall white house of Quanah Parker looming against the steel-blue sky. I see the cabin where I was born, and the lean horses and scrubby cows grazing in the sun-scorched pasture, the dry, straggling rows of corn in the little field near-by—but I see beyond that, too. I see a sweep of prairie, brown and dry and breath-takingly vast, where there is no tall white horse, or cabin, or cornfield, only the brown grass waving, and buffalo-hide tipis, and a bronzed, naked warrior with plumes trailing like the train of a blazing meteor riding like the wind in the mad gladness of savage exultation.
I was born in a white-man cabin. I never wore war-paint nor rode the war-path, nor danced the scalp-dance. I can not wield a lance or drive a flint-headed arrow through the bulk of a snorting buffalo. Any Oklahoma farm-boy can surpass me in horsemanship. I am, in short, a civilized man, and yet—
Early in my youth I was aware of a gnawing restlessness, an uneasy and sullen dissatisfaction with my existence. I read the books, I studied, I applied myself to the things the white men valued with a zeal which gratified my white teachers. They pointed me out with pride. They told me, and thought they were complimenting me when they did it, that I was a white man in mind as well as habit.
But the unrest grew, though none suspected it, for I hid it behind the mask of an Indian’s face, as my ancestors, bound to an Apache stake, hid their agony from the gaze of their gloating enemies.
But it was there. It lurked at the back of my mind in the class-room when I listened, hiding my innate scorn for the learning I sought in order to advance my material prosperity. It colored my dreams. And these dreams, dim in my childhood, grew more vivid and distinct as I grew older—always a bronzed, naked warrior against a background of storm and cloud and fire and thunder, riding like a centaur, with war-bonnet streaming and the lurid light flashing on the point of a lifted lance.
Racial instincts and superstitions began to stir in me at this repeated visitation. My dreams began to color my waking life, for dreams always played a great part in the lives of the Indians. My mind began turning red. I began to lose my grasp on the white man’s existence I had chosen for myself. The shadow of a dripping tomahawk began to take shape, to hover over me. There was a need in my mind, a lawless, untamed urge towards violent action, a restlessness I began to fear only blood would quench. I tossed on my bed at night, fearing to go to sleep, fearing that I would be engulfed by this inexorable tide from the murky, fathomless reservoirs of racial subconsciousness. If this happened I knew I would kill, suddenly, savagely, and, according to the white man’s understanding, reasonlessly.
I did not wish to kill men who had never harmed me, and to hang thereafter. Though I despised—as I still despise—the white man’s philosophy and code, I find—and found—the material things of his civilization desirable, since the life of my ancestors is denied to me.
I tried to work off this primitive, murderous urge in sports. But I found that football, boxing, and wrestling only increased the feeling. The more fiercely I hurled my hard-muscled body into conflict, the less satisfaction I derived from this artificial conflict, the more I yearned for something I knew not what.
At last I sought aid. I did not go to a white physician or psychologist. I went back to the region of my birth, and sought out old Eagle Feather, a medicine man who dwelt alone among the hills, scorning the white man’s ways with a bitter scorn. In my white man’s garments I sat cross-legged in his tipi of ancient buffalo hides, and as I talked I dipped my hand into the pot of stewed beef that sat between us. He was old—how old I do not know. His moccasins were frayed and worn, his blanket dingy and patched. He was with that band whom General MacKenzie caught in the Palo Duro, and when the general shot all their horses he beggared old Eagle Feather, for the medicine man’s wealth lay in horse-flesh, like that of all the tribe.
He heard me through without speaking and for a long time thereafter he sat unmoving, his head bent on his breast, his withered chin almost touching his bracelet of Pawnee teeth. In the silence I heard the night wind sighing through the lodge-poles, and an owl hooted ghostily deep in the woods. At last he lifted his head and spoke:
“There is a medicine memory which troubles you. This warrior you see is the man you once were. He does not come to urge you to strike an axe into the heads of the white men. He comes in answer to a wildness in your own soul. You come of a long line of warriors. Your grandfather rode with Lone Wolf, and with Peta Nocona. He took many scalps. The white men’s books can not content you. Unless you find an outlet, your mind will turn red and the spirits of your ancestors will sing in your ears. Then you will slay, like a man in a dream, without knowing why, and the white men will hang you. It is not well for a Comanche to be choked to death in a noose. He can not sing his death song and his soul can not leave his body, and must dwell for ever underground with his rotting bones.
“You can not be a fighting man. That day is past. But there is a way to escape the bad workings of your medicine. If you could remember—a Comanche, when he dies, goes for a space to the Happy Hunting Ground to rest and hunt the white buffalo. Then, a hundred years later, he is reborn into a tribe unless his spirit has been destroyed by the loss of his scalp. He does not remember—or if at all, but a little, like figures moving in a mist. But there is a medicine to make him remember—a mighty medicine, and a terrible one, which no weakling can survive. I remember. I remember the men whose bodies my soul inhabited in past ages. I can wander in the mist and speak with great ones whose spirits have not yet been reborn—with Quanah Parker, and with Peta Nocona, his father, and with Iron Shirt, his father—with Satanta, the Kiowa, and Sitting Bull, the Ogalalla, and many another great one.
“If you are brave, you may remember, and live over your ancient lives, and be content, knowing your valor and prowess in the past.”
He was offering me a solution—a substitute for a violent life in my present existence—a safety valve for the innate ferocity that lurks at the bottom of my soul.
Shall I tell you of the medicine ritual by which I gained full memory of my yesterdays? Alone in the hills, with only old Eagle Feather to see, I fought out my lone fight against such agony as white men only dream of in nightmares. It is an ancient, ancient medicine, a secret medicine, not even guessed by the omniscient anthropologists. It was always Comanche; from it the Sioux borrowed the rituals of their Sun-Dance, and from the Sioux the Arikaras appropriated part of it for their Rain-Dance. But it was always a secret rite, with only a medicine man to look on—no dancing, cheering throngs of women and braves to inspire a man, to stiffen his resolution by listening to his war-songs and his boastings—only the stark silent strength of his endurance, there in the windy darkness under the ancient stars.
Eagle Feather cut deep slits in the muscles of my back. The scars are there to this day; a man can put his clenched fists in the hollows. He cut deep into the muscles and drawing rawhide thongs through the slits, bound them fast. Then he threw the thongs over an oak limb and, with a strength that only a medicine man could explain, he drew me up until my feet hung high above the grassy earth. He made the thongs fast and left me hanging there. He squatted before me and began beating a drum whose head was the skin from the belly of a Lipan chief. Slowly and incessantly he smote it, so that its soft, sinister rumbling played an incessant undertone throughout my agony, mingling with the night wind in the trees.
The night dragged on, the stars changed, the wind died and sprang up and died again. On and on droned the drum until the sound became changed strangely at times, and was a drum no longer but the thunder of unshod horses’ hoofs beating the drum of the prairie. The hoot of the owl was a hoot no longer, but the death-yell of forgotten warriors. And the flame of agony before my misted eyes was a roaring fire around which black figures leaped and chanted. No longer I swung on bloody thongs from an oak limb, but I stood upright against a stake, with flames lapping my feet, and sang my death-song in defiance of my enemies. Past and present merged and blended fantastically and terribly, and a hundred personalities struggled within me, until time was not, nor space, nor form nor shape, only a writhing, twisting, whirling chaos of men and things and events and spirits, until all were dashed triumphantly into nothingness by a bronzed, painted, exultant rider on a painted horse whose hoofs struck fire from the prairie. Across a lurid sunset curtain of dusky flame they swept, in barbaric exultation, horse and rider, black against the glow, and with their passing my tormented brain gave way and I knew no more.
In the grey dawn, as I hung limp and senseless, Eagle Feather bound long-treasured buffalo skulls to my feet and their weight tore away flesh and sinew, so that I fell to the grass at the foot of the ancient oak. The sting of that fresh hurt revived me, but the nameless agony of mangled and lacerated flesh was nothing beside the great realization of power that swept over me. In that dark hour before dawn when the drum merged past and present and the material consciousness that always fights the more obscure senses had succumbed, the knowledge I sought had been made mine. Pain was necessary—great pain, to conquer the conscious part of the spirit that rules the material body. There had been an awakening and joining together of senses and sensibilities, and memory remained, call it psychology, magic, what you will. No more would I be tormented by a lack of something, an urge to violence, which was but implanted instinct created by a thousand years of roaming, hunting, and fighting. In my memories I could find relief by living over again the wild days of my yesterdays. So I remember many past lives, lives that stretch back and back into an antiquity that would amaze the historians. This I found—that no hundred years separated the lives of a Comanche. Sometimes rebirth was almost instantaneous—sometimes a stretch of years lay between, for what inscrutable reason I do not know.
I do know that the ego now inhabiting the body of the American citizen now called John Garfield, animated many a wild, painted figure in the past—and not so distant past, either. For instance in my last appearance as a warrior on the stage of the great Southwest I was one Esatema, who rode with Quanah Parker and Satanta the Kiowa, and was killed at the battle of Adobe Walls, in the summer of 1874. There was an interlude between Esatema and John Garfield, in the shape of a weakly, deformed infant who was born during the flight of the tribe from the reservation in 1878 and being unfit, was left to die somewhere on the Staked Plains. I was—but why seek to enumerate all the lives and bodies that have been mine in the past? It is an endless chain of painted, feathered, naked figures stretching back and back into an immemorial past—a past so distant and unthinkable that I myself hesitate before its threshold.
Certainly, my white reader, I shall not seek to carry you with me. For my race is a very old race; it was old when we dwelt in the mountains north of the Yellowstone and traveled on foot, with our scanty goods loaded on the backs of dogs. The researches of the white men stop there, and well for their peace of mind and their beautifully ordered theories of mankind’s past that they do; but I could tell you things that would shock you out of the amused tolerance with which you are reading this narrative of a race your ancestors crushed. I could tell you of long wanderings over a continent still teeming with prehuman terrors—but enough.
I will tell you of Iron Heart, the Scalp-Taker. Of all the bodies that have been mine, that of Iron Heart seems somehow more closely linked with that of John Garfield of the Twentieth Century. It was Iron Heart whom I saw in my dreams; it was the memories of Iron Heart, dim and uninterpreted, which haunted me in my childhood and youth. Yet as I speak to you of Iron Heart, I must speak as, and through, the lips of John Garfield, else the telling will be but an incoherent raving, meaning nothing to you. I, John Garfield, am a man of two worlds, with a mind that is neither wholly red nor wholly white, yet with a muddled grasp on each. Let me interpret to you the tale of Iron Heart—not as Iron Heart himself would have told it, but as John Garfield must tell it, so that you may understand it.
Remember, there is much I will not tell. There are cruelties and savageries which I, John Garfield, understand as natural products of the life Iron Heart lived, but which you would not, could not understand, and from which you would turn in horror. There are other things I will slur in the telling. Barbarism has its vices, its sophistries, no less than civilization. Your cynicisms and sophistications are weak and childish beside the elemental cynicism, the vital sophistication of what you call savagery. If our virtues were unspoiled as a new-born panther cub, our sins were older than Nineveh. If—but enough. I will tell you of Iron Heart and the Horror he met, a Horror out of a Time older than the forgotten ruins that lie hidden in the jungles of Yucatan.
Iron Heart lived in the latter part of the Sixteenth Century. The events I shall describe must have taken place somewhere about 1575. Already we were a horse-riding tribe. More than a century before we had drifted down out of the Shoshone Mountains to become plainsmen and buffalo hunters, following the herds on foot, from the Great Slave Lake to the Gulf, bickering eternally with the Crows, the Kiowas, and the Pawnees and Apaches. It was a long, wearisome trek. But the coming of the horse changed all that—changed us, within a short span of years, from a poverty-stricken race of shiftless wanderers to a nation of invincible warriors, sweeping a red trail of conquest from the Blackfoot villages on the Bighorn to the Spanish settlements of Chihuahua.
Historians say the Comanches were mounted by 1714. By that time we had been riding horses for more than a century. When Coronado came in 1541, seeking the fabled Cities of Cibolo, we were already a race of horsemen. Children were taught to ride before they were taught to walk. When I, Iron Heart, was four years old, I was riding my own pony and watching a herd of horses.
Iron Heart was a powerful man, of medium height, stocky and muscular, like most of his race. I will tell you how I got the name. I had a brother a little older than myself, whose name was Red Knife. Affection between brothers is not very common among the Indians, but I felt for him the keen and ardent admiration and worship of a youth for an older brother.
It was an age of racial drift. We had not yet settled upon the great Palo Duro Canyon as the cradle-land of our race. Our northern range still extended north of the Platte, though more and more we were encroaching upon the Staked Plains of the South, driving the Apaches before us in a series of whirlwind battles. A hundred and twenty-five years later we broke their power forever in a seven-day battle on the Wichita River and hurled them broken and beaten westward into the mountains of New Mexico. But in Iron Heart’s day they still claimed the South Plains as their domain, and more of our wars were with the Sioux than with the Apaches.
It was the Sioux who killed Red Knife.
They caught us near the shore of the Platte, about a mile from a steep knob crowned with stunted growth. For that knob we raced, with one thought between us. For this was no ordinary raid; it was an attack in force; three thousand warriors rode there, Tetons, Brules, and Yanktons. They meant to sweep on to the Comanche encampment, miles to the south. Unless the tribe was warned it would be caught and crushed by the Sioux. I reached the knob, but Red Knife’s horse fell with him and the Sioux took him. They brought him to the foot of the knob, on the crest of which, hidden from their arrows, I was already making ready to send up a signal smoke. The Sioux did not try to climb the knob in the teeth of my lance and arrows, where only one man could come at a time. But they shouted up to me that if I would refrain from sending the signal, they would give Red Knife a quick death and ride on without molesting me.
Red Knife shouted to me: “Light the fire! Warn our people! Death to the Sioux!”
And so they fell to torturing him—but I gave no heed, though the prairie swam in a sea of red about me. They cut him to pieces slowly, member by member, while he laughed at them and sang his death song until his own blood choked him. He lived much longer than it would seem possible for a man to live, sliced as he was sliced. But I gave no heed and the smoke rolling up to the sky warned our people far away.
Then the Sioux knew they had lost and they mounted and rode away, even before the first cloud of dust to the south marked the coming of my brother warriors. With my brother’s life I had bought the life of the tribe, and thereafter I had a new name, and it was Iron Heart. And the purpose of my life thereafter was to pay the Sioux the debt I owed them, and again and again I paid it, in singing arrows, and thrusting lance, aye, and in fire, and little, slicing knives—I was Iron Heart, the Scalp-Taker, the Vengeance-Maker, the Thunder-Rider. For when the rolling of the thunder across the echoing prairies made the bravest chiefs hide their heads, then I was wont to ride at a gallop, shaking my lance and chanting of my deeds, heedless of gods or men. For fear died in my heart, there on the knoll when I watched my brother die under the Teton knives, and only once again in all my life did it awaken for a space. And it is of that awakening that I would tell you.
In the autumn, that year of 1575—as I now calculate it—forty of us rode southward to strike the Spanish settlements. It was September, later to be called the Mexican Moon, when the warriors rode southward for horses, scalps, and women. Aye, it was an ancient trail in Esatema’s day, and many a time have I ridden it, in one body or another, but in Iron Heart’s day it was less than forty years old.
We were after horses, but this particular raid never reached the Rio Grande. We turned aside to strike the Lipans on the river now called the San Saba, and that was unwise. But we were young warriors, eager to count coupes on our ancient enemies, and we had not yet learned that horses were more important than women, and women more important than scalps. We caught the Lipans off-guard and made a magnificent butchery among them, but we did not know that there was truce between them and the cannibal Tonkewas, always implacable foes of the Comanches, until we settled that score once and for all in the winter of 1864 when we wiped them out on their reservation on the Clear Fork of the Brazos. Esatema was in that fight, and he—I!—dipped his hands in blood with an ardor that had its roots in a dim and forgotten past.
But that autumn of 1575 was a long, long time removed from the butchery on the Brazos. Following the broken, headlong fleeing Lipans, we ran full into a horde of Tonkewas and their Wichita allies.
With the Lipans, there were about five hundred warriors confronting us—too great odds even for Comanches. Besides we were fighting in a comparatively wooded country, and there we were at a disadvantage, because we were plains-born and bred, and preferred to do our fighting in the open where there was room for our primitive cavalry manoeuvres.
When we broke free of the thickets and fled northward, there were only fifteen of us left to flee, and the Tonkewas hounded us for nearly a hundred miles, even after the Lipans had given up the chase. How they hated us! And then, each was eager to fill his belly with the flesh of a Comanche, properly roasted, for they believed that transferred the fighting spirit of the Comanche to that of his devourer; we believed that too, and that is why, in addition to our natural loathing of cannibalism, we hated the Tonkewas as viciously as they hated us.
It was near the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos that we met the Apaches. We had struck them on our road south and sent them howling to lick their wounds in the chaparral, and they were eager for revenge. They got it. It was a running fight on tired horses, and of the forty braves who rode south so proudly, only five of us lived to cross the Caprock—that ragged irregular rampart that lies like a giant stairstep across the plains, mounting to a higher level.
I could tell you how the Plains Indians fought. No such fighting was ever seen on this planet before, or ever will be again, for the conditions which produced it have passed forever. From Milk River to the Gulf we fought alike—on horseback, wheeling, darting like hornets with deadly stings, raining showers of flint-headed dogwood arrows, charging, circling, retreating, illusive as wasps and dangerous as cobras. But this meeting below the Caprock was no fight in such a sense. We were fifteen Comanches against a hundred Apaches and we fled, turning to drive arrow or thrust with lance only when we could no longer elude them. It was nearly sundown when they started us, otherwise the saga of Iron Heart had ended there, and his scalp gone to smoke in an Apache tipi with the other ten the Tigers of the Prairie took that day.
But somehow, when night fell we scattered and eluded them, and came together again above the Caprock—weary, hungry, with empty quivers, on exhausted horses. Sometimes we walked and led them, which shows in what state they were, for a Comanche never walked unless the need was most desperate. But we stumbled on, feeling that we were doomed already, groping our way northward, swinging further to the west than any of us had ever gone before, in the hopes of avoiding our implacable enemies. We were in the heart of the Apache country and none of us had any hope of ever reaching our camp on the Cimarron alive. But we struggled on, through a vast and waterless waste, where not even cacti grew, and on which not even the unshod hoof of a horse left any impression on the iron-hard soil.
It must have been towards dawn that we crossed the Line. More I cannot say. There was no actual line there, and yet at one stride we all felt—we knew—that we had come into a different country. There was a sort of vague shock, felt by both horses and men. We were all walking and leading the horses and we all fell to our knees, as if thrown by an earthquake shock. The horses snorted, reared, and would have torn free and bolted if they had not been too weak.
Without comment—we were too far gone to care for anything—we rose and struggled on, noting that apparently clouds had formed in the sky, for the stars were dim, almost obscured. Moreover the wind, which blows almost incessantly across that vast plateau, had subsided suddenly, so it was in a strange silence that we staggered across the plain, stumbling ever northward, until dawn came slowly, sullenly and dimly, and we halted and stared haggardly at each other, like ghosts in the morn after the destruction of the world.
We knew now that we were in a haunted country. Somehow, some time in the night we had crossed a line that separated this strange, haunted, forgotten region from the rest of the natural world. Like the rest of the plain, it stretched drearily, flat and monotonous from horizon to horizon. But a strange dimness hung over it, a sort of dusky mist that was less mist than a lessening of the light of the sun. When it rose it looked pale and watery, more like the moon than the sun. Truly, we had come into the Darkening Land, the dread country still whispered of in Cherokee mythology, though how they came to know of it, I do not know.
We could not see beyond its confines, but we could see, ahead of us, a cluster of conical tipis on the plain. We mounted our tired horses and rode slowly toward them. We knew instinctively there was no life in them. We looked upon an encampment of the dead. We sat our horses in silence, under the leaden sky, with the drab, darkened waste stretching away from us. It was like looking through a smoked glass. Away to the west of us loomed a more solid mass of mist our sight could not penetrate.
Cotopah shuddered and averted his eyes, covering his mouth with his hand. “This is a medicine place,” said he. “It is not good to be here.” And he made an involuntary movement to pull about his shoulders the blanket lost in the long flight before the Tonkewas.
But I was Iron Heart, and fear was dead in me. I reined my terrified horse to the nearest tipi—and all were of the skins of white buffalo—and drew aside the flap. Then, though I was not afraid, my flesh crawled curiously, for I saw the inmate of that tent.
There was an old, old legend, which had been forgotten for more than a hundred years. In Iron Heart’s life it was already dim and vague and distorted. But it told how long, long ago, before the tribes had taken shape as men know them now, a strange and terrible people came out of the North which then was populated by many wild and fearful tribes. They passed southward, slaying and destroying all in their path, until they vanished on the great high plains to the south. The old men said they walked into a mist and vanished. And that was long ago, so long ago, even before the ancestors of the Comanches came into the Valley of the Yellowstone. Yet here before my eyes lay one of the Terrible People.
He was a giant, he who sprawled on the bearskin within the tipi; erect he must have stood fully seven feet in height, and his mighty shoulders and huge limbs were knotted with great muscles. His face was that of a brute, thin lipped, jutting jawed, sloping brow, with a tangled mop of shaggy hair. Beside him lay an axe, a keen-edged blade of what I now know to be green jade, set in the cleft of a shaft of a strange, hard wood which once grew in the far north, and which took a polish like mahogany. At the sight I desired to possess it, though it was too long-hafted and heavy for easy use on horseback.
I thrust my lance through the door of the lodge and drew the thing out, laughing at the protests of my companions.
“I commit no sacrilege!” I maintained. “This is no death-lodge, where warriors laid the corpse of a great chief. This man died in his sleep, as they all died. Why he has lain here so many ages without being devoured by wolves or buzzards, or his flesh rotting I do not know, but this whole land is a medicine land. But I will take this axe.”
It was just as I was about to dismount and secure it, having drawn it outside the lodge, that a sudden cry brought us wheeling about—to face a dozen Pawnees in full war-paint! And one was a woman! She bestrode her horse like a warrior, and waved a flint-headed war-axe.
Warrior-women were rare among the plains tribes, but they did occur now and then. We knew her, instantly, Conchita, the warrior-girl of the southern Pawnees. She was a war-bird, in truth, leading a band of picked fighting men in reckless forays all over the Southwest.
Vividly burns in my memory even now the picture she presented as I whirled and saw her, a slim, supple, arrogant figure, vibrant with life and menace, barbarically magnificent as she sat her rearing charger, with the fierce painted faces of her braves crowding close behind her. She was naked save for a short beaded skirt that lacked something of reaching midthigh. Her girdle was likewise beaded and supported a knife in a beaded sheath. Moccasins were on her slender feet, and her black hair, done up in two thick glossy braids hung down her supple back. Her dark eyes flashed, her red lips parted in a cry of mockery as she brandished her axe at us, managing her bridleless, saddleless steed with a horsemanship that was breath-taking in its negligent grace. And she was a full-blooded Spanish woman, daughter of a captain of Cortez, stolen from below the Rio Grande by the Apaches when a baby and from them stolen in turn by the southern Pawnees, to be raised as an Indian.
All this I saw and knew in the brief glance as I turned, for with a shrill cry she hurled herself at us and her braves swept in behind her. I say hurled, for that is the word. Horse and rider seemed to lunge at us rather than gallop, so swiftly did she come to the attack.
The fight was short. How could it be otherwise? They were twelve men, on comparatively fresh horses. We were five weary Comanches on foundered steeds. The tall chief with the scarred face came at me with a rush. In the fog they had not seen us, nor we them, until we were almost together. Seeing our empty quivers they came in to finish us with their lances and war-clubs. The tall chief thrust at me, and I wheeled my horse who responded to the nudge of my knee with his last strength. No Pawnee could ever equal a Comanche in open battle, not even a southern Pawnee. The lance swished past my breast, and as the horse and rider plunged past me, carried by their own momentum, I drove my own lance through the Pawnee’s back, so the point came out from his breast.
Even as I did so I was aware of another brave charging down on me from the left, and I sought to wheel my steed again, as I dragged the lance free. But the horse was foredone. He rolled like a foundered canoe in the swift tide of the Missouri, and the club in the Pawnee’s hand smashed down. I threw myself sidewise and saved my skull from crushing like an egg, but the club fell stunningly on my shoulder, knocking me from my horse. Catlike I hit on my feet, drawing my knife, but then the shoulder of a horse hit me and knocked me sprawling. It was Conchita who had ridden me down and now as I struggled slowly to my knees, half-stunned, she leaped lightly down and swung up her flint-headed axe above my head.
I saw the dull glint of the edge, knew in a slow, stunned way that I could not avoid the downward swing—and then she froze, axe lifted, staring wide-eyed over my head towards something beyond me. Impelled beyond my will, I turned my dizzy head and looked.
The other Comanches were down, and five of the Pawnees. All the living froze, just as Conchita had frozen. One who knelt on dead Cotopah’s back, wrenching at the scalp, his knife between his teeth, crouched there like one suddenly petrified, staring in the direction towards which all heads were turned.
For the fog to the west was lifting, and into view floated the walls and flat roofs of a strange structure. It was like, yet strangely unlike, the pueblos of the corn-raising Indians far to the west. Like them it was made of adobe, and the architecture was something similar, and yet there was a strange unlikeness.
And from it came a train of strange figures—short brown men, clad in garments of brightly-dyed feathers, men who looked somewhat like the pueblo Indians. They were weaponless and carried only ropes of rawhide and whips in their hands. Only the foremost, a taller, gaunter Indian, bore a strange shield-shaped disk of gleaming metal in his left hand and a copper mallet in his right.
The curious parade halted before us, and we stared—the warrior-girl, with her axe still poised; the Pawnees, afoot or a-horse wounded or whole; I, crouching on one knee and shaking my fast-clearing head. Then Conchita, sensing sudden peril, cried out a shrill, desperate command and sprang, lifting her axe—and as the warriors tensed for the onslaught, the man with the vulture feathers in his hair smote the gong with the mallet, and a terrible crash of sound leaped at us like an invisible panther. It was like the impact of a thunderbolt, that awful crash of sound, a thing so terrible it was almost tangible. Conchita and the Pawnees went down as if struck by lightning, and the horses reared in agony and bolted. Conchita rolled on the ground, crying out in agony, and clutching her ears. But I was Iron Heart, the Comanche, and fear slept in me.
I came up from the ground in a leap, knife in hand, though my skull seemed bursting from that awful blast of sound. Straight at the throat of Vulture-Crest I sprang. But my knife never sheathed itself in that brown flesh. Again the awful gong clanged and yet again, smiting me in mid-leap like a tangible force, hurling me back and back. And again and yet again the mallet crashed against the gong, so that earth and sky seemed split asunder by its deafening reverberation. Down I went like a man beaten to the ground by a war-club.
When I could see, hear, and think again, I found my hands were bound behind me, a rawhide thong about my neck. I was dragged to my feet and our captors began marching us toward the city. I call it that, though it was more like a castle. Conchita and her Pawnees were served in like manner, except one who was badly wounded. Him they slew, cutting his throat with his own knife, and left him lying among the others. One took up the axe I had dragged from the tipi, looked at it curiously, and then swung it over his shoulder. He must take both hands to manage it.
So we stumbled on towards the castle, half-strangled by the thongs about our necks, and occasionally encouraged by the bite of a rawhide lash across our shoulders. Only Conchita was not so treated, though her captor jerked brutally on her rope when she lagged. Her warriors looked haggard. They were the most warlike of the Pawnee nation—a branch which lived on the headwaters of the Cimarron, and which differed in many ways and customs from their northern brothers. They were more typical of a plains culture than their tribal relatives, and never came in contact with the English-speaking invaders, for smallpox exterminated them about 1641. They wore their hair in long braids that swept the ground, like the Crows and Minnetarees, and loaded the braids with silver ornaments.
The castle—I call it that in the language of John Garfield and in your own language; Iron Heart would have spoken of it as a lodge—the castle stood on the crest of a low rise, not worthy of the name of hill, which broke the flat monotony of the plain. There was a wall around it and a gate in the wall. On one of the flat stages of the roof we saw a tall figure standing, wrapped in a shining mantle of feathers that glistened even in the subdued light. A lifted arm made an imperious gesture and the figure moved majestically through a doorway and vanished.
The gate-posts were of bronze, carved with the feathered serpent, and at the sight the Pawnees shuddered and averted their eyes. Like all the plains Indians, they remembered that abomination from the days of old, when the great and terrible kingdoms of the far South warred with those of the far North.
They led us across a courtyard, up a short flight of bronze steps, and into a corridor, and once within all resemblance to the pueblos ceased. But we knew that once houses like this had risen in mighty cities far in the serpent-haunted jungles of the dim South, for in our souls stirred the echoes of ancient legends.
We came into a broad circular room through which the dim light streamed from an open dome. A black stone altar rose in the centre of the room, with darkly stained channels along the rims. Facing it, on a raised dais, on an ivory throne heaped with sea-otter furs, there lounged the figure we had seen on the roof. He was a tall man, slender and wiry, with a high forehead and a narrow, keen, hawk-like face. There was no mercy in that face, only a cruel arrogance, a mocking cynicism. It was the face of a man who felt himself above the human passions of anger or mercy or love.
With a cruel amusement he swept his eyes over us, and the Pawnees lowered their gaze. Even Conchita, after boldly meeting his stare for a moment, winced and dropped her eyes. But I was Iron Heart, the Comanche, and fear slept in me. I met that piercing stare with my black eyes unwinking. He looked long at me, and presently spoke in the language of the pueblo Indians which in those days was the commercial language of the prairies and understood by most of the horse-riding Indians.
“You are like a wild beast. There is the fire of killing in your eyes. Are you not afraid?”
“Iron Heart is a Comanche,” I answered scornfully. “Ask the Sioux if there is anything he fears! His axe is still sticking in their heads. Ask the Apaches, the Kiowas, the Cheyennes, the Lipans, the Crows, the Pawnees! If he were flayed alive and his skin cut into pieces no larger than a man’s palm, and each piece used to cover a dead warrior he has slain, the dead uncovered would still be more than the covered ones!”
Even in their fear the eyes of the Pawnees smoldered murderously at this boasting. The man on the throne laughed without mirth.
“He is tough, he is strong, he is nerved by his vanity,” he said to the gaunt man with the gong. “He will endure much, Xototl. Place him in the last cell.”
“And the woman, lord Tezcatlipoca?” quoth Xototl, bowing low, and Conchita started and stared wide-eyed at the fantastic figure on the throne. She knew the Aztec legends, and the name was the name of one of the sun’s incarnations—taken, no doubt, in a spirit of blasphemy by the ruler of this evil castle.
“Place her in the Room of Gold,” said Tezcatlipoca, whom they called the Lord of the Mist. Curiously he glanced at the jade axe which had been placed on the altar.
“Why, it is the axe of Guar, the chief of the Northerners!” quoth he. “He swore that the axe he wore would some day split my skull! But Guar and all his tribe have been dead in their caribou hide tents for more centuries than even I like to remember, and my skull still holds the magic of the ancients! Leave the axe there and take them away! I will talk to the girl presently, and then there shall be sport, as it was in the days of the Golden Kings!”
They led us out of the circular chamber and across a series of broad rooms, where cat-footed brown women, beautiful with a sinister beauty and naked but for their golden ornaments, crowded close, to stare at the prisoners, and especially the warrior-girl of the Pawnees. And they laughed at her, sweet, soft, evil laughter, venomous as poisoned honey.
We came into a long corridor, with heavy doors opening into it, and into each cell as we passed it, a warrior was thrust. I was the last and as I was dragged inside I saw terror bare in Conchita’s lovely eyes as she was led away. Within the cell I was thrown roughly to the floor, and my legs were bound with rawhide. Neither food nor water was given to me.
Presently the door opened and I looked up to see the Lord of the Mist looking down at me.
“Poor fool!” he murmured. “I could almost pity you! Bloodthirsty beast of the prairies, with your swaggerings and boastings, your tale of scalps and slayings. Fool! Soon you will howl for death!”
“A Comanche does not cry out at the stake,” I answered, my eyes burning red with the murder-lust. My thews swelled and knotted until the rawhide cut into the flesh. But the thongs held. He laughed and silently left my cell, closing the door behind him. Outside a bolt dashed into place.
What happened next I did not see, nor did I learn until long afterward. But Xototl took Conchita up a flight of stairs and into a chamber where the walls, ceiling, and floor were of gold. The doors were of gold and there were gold bars on the windows. There was a golden couch heaped with sea-otter fur. Xototl unbound her and stood gazing at her for a moment with hot desire in his eyes. Then, sullenly and grudgingly, he turned away and locked the door behind her, leaving her alone. Presently to her came the Lord of the Mist, tall, striding like a god, with his strange mantle of rich-hued feathers about hips and about his black mane a band in the form of a golden serpent with head upreared above his forehead.
He told her he was a magician of an ancient, ancient kingdom which was declining even before the barbaric Toltecs wandered into it. For his own reasons he had come far to the north and established his kingdom on that bleak plain, casting about it a mist of enchantment. He had found a tribe of pueblo Indians besieged by the invaders from the North, and they had appealed to him for aid, giving themselves fully into his hands. He had made magic and brought death to the Northerners. But he left them in their tents, and told the pueblo people that he could bring them to life whenever he wished. Beneath his cruel hands the people dwindled away until now not more than a hundred lived to do his bidding. He had come from the south more than a thousand years before. He was not immortal, but almost so.
Then he left her; and as he went the great serpent which did his bidding slithered silently and evilly through the corridors after him; this serpent had devoured many of the subjects of the Lord of the Mist.
Meanwhile, I lay in my cell and heard them drag forth a Pawnee and haul him along the corridor. After a long while I heard a fearful, animal-like scream of agony, and wondered what torment could wring a cry from the throat of a southern Pawnee. I had heard them laugh under the knives of the flayers. Then for the first time fear awoke in me—not physical fear so much as the fear that under the unknown torment I would cry out and so bring shame to the Comanche nation. I lay there and listened to the end of the Pawnees. Each warrior cried out but once.
Meanwhile Xototl had glided into Conchita’s chamber, his eyes red with lust. “You are soft, you are white,” he mumbled. “I am weary of brown women.” He seized her in his arms and forced her back on the golden couch. She did not resist. But suddenly the dagger that had been in his girdle was in her hand. She sank it into his back, swiftly and deadly. Before he could voice the cry that welled to his lips, she choked it in his throat and, falling with him to the floor, stabbed at him again and again until he lay still. Then, rising like a cat, she hurried through the door, snatching up a bow, a knife, and a handful of arrows as she went.
In an instant she was in my cell, bending over me, her wide eyes blazing. “Quickly!” she hissed. “He is slaying the last of the warriors! Prove that you are a man!”
The knife was keen, but the blade was slender and the rawhide tough. She kept at it persistently, finally sawing through. Then I was on my feet, knife in my girdle, bow and arrows in my hand.
We stole from the cell and moved cautiously down the corridor, to come face to face with a surprised guard. Dropping my weapons I had him by the throat before he could cry out, and bearing him to the floor, I broke his neck with my bare hands before he could release his spear and bring his knife into play.
Rising, we stole down the corridor toward the circular room of the open dome. Before it was the gigantic serpent which coiled menacingly at our approach. Quickly and silently I moved forward and placed a single arrow deep in the reptile’s eye, and we moved cautiously past its fearsome death throes.
We slipped into the domed room and saw the last Pawnee die in a strange and hideous torment. As the Lord of the Mist turned to face us, I drove an arrow straight at his breast. It glanced harmlessly away. I was paralyzed with surprise when a second arrow behaved similarly.
Casting aside my bow I leaped at him with knife in hand, and we rolled about the chamber seeking a death grip. He was alone; his retainers had been dispatched to another part of the castle while he worked his evil.
My knife would not bite through the strange, close-fitting garment that he wore beneath his feather-mantle, and, try as I would, I could not reach his throat or face. Finally he cast me aside and made ready to invoke his magic when Conchita stopped him with a cry: “The dead men rise from the tents of the Northerners. They march towards the pueblo!”
“A lie!” he cried, going ashy. “They are dead! They can not rise!”
“Nevertheless, they come!” she cried with a wild laugh.
He faltered, turned toward a window, then wheeled back in realization of the trick. Nearby lay the axe of Guar the Northerner, a mighty weapon out of another age. In the instant of his hesitation, I seized it, and, swinging it high, leaped forward. As he turned back to me, fear leaped into his eyes as the axe crashed through his skull, spilling his brains on the floor.
Thunder crashed and rolled, and balls of fire swept over the plains; the pueblo rocked. Conchita and I raced for safety, the screams of the trapped echoing in our ears. And when dawn rose upon the plains, no mist showed. There was only a rare, sun-drenched expanse on which a few bones lay moldering.
“Now we will go to my people,” I said, taking her wrist. “There are some horses which did not run away.”
But she tried to wrench away from me, crying disdainfully: “Comanche dog! You live only because of my aid! Go your way! You are fit only to be the slave of a Pawnee!”
Rarely a Comanche struck a woman; not because of any particular chivalry, but because we felt a woman was too low in the scale by which we judged mankind for a warrior to demean himself by striking. But I saw this was a special case, and there was no degradation in connection with coercing this spit-fire. So I took her by her glossy braids and flung her face down to the ground, and then I set a foot between her writhing shoulders and belabored her naked hips and thighs with my bow, without anger and without mercy, until she screamed for mercy and sobbingly acquiesced to whatever I might desire. Then I yanked her to her feet and bade her follow me to capture the horses, which she did, weeping and rubbing various smarting bruises. So then we were riding northward, towards the camp on the Canadian, and my beauty seemed quite content, now that she was on horseback. And I knew that I had found a woman worthy even of Iron Heart, the Thunder-Rider.
(And, yes, that is how the story ends, because: “The text for the story’s appearance in this collection was taken from the typescript of Howard’s first draft; unfortunately, what was becoming an intriguing second draft breaks off suddenly.”)