“If I don’t, Pela, will you sit toahmecu after now?”
She shook her head and sighed. “When God’n strong we go to village. Pela go home.” A great sadness crept into her voice. “Toahmecu done. Pela go home.” She cocked her head toward the shadows beyond the fire, her expression querying him regarding his creature search.
He shook his head.
That night Gordon watched Pela sleep. His gaze traced her eyelashes, the line of her lips, the turn of her nose. Dr. Taleghani had been correct. She was very beautiful. Pela: daughter of Cualu and Tahm of the Black Mountain Clan. Pela Sleih: Pela of the Furs. He caught himself thinking what it would be like awakening in this existence without that face as his first sight, her voice removed from his day.
He settled back and stared at the night sky above the dying fire. Gordon had been with women before. There was that psych major in Arizona when he had gone to college for a brief period after the Army. Before her was the high school English teacher in Columbus when he had been in sniper school at Benning. In between was that watercolor artist in Port Elizabeth in the Namibian Containment that crisped a third of southern Africa. They were all emotional parking places, though. The romantic love thing—commitment, attachment—had always eluded him. He’d never felt a sense of belonging anywhere with anyone—except through a sniper scope.
Over his life he had seen men who said they were in love. Some acted very silly about it. Some had been very dangerous. The sanest ones had been married. So too had been the most miserable.
Hosteen Ahiga had outlived three wives. He had loved, he said, the first and the last. The second he had married out of obligation. “She was a Christian woman,” he had said. “She talked with scorn about spirits I walk with. I must go to church and believe as she believes if I want to be saved and have her love.” He shook his head. “I don’t listen to her when she talked like that. I walk in beauty, my heart is calm. So then she wants a divorce. That’s best and I agree. Before she goes to the lawyer, though, she come down with sickness. All over in a few days. Her heart, says the Bilagana doctor down in Albuquerque. She had a Christian ceremony. I went to her church one time for that.” He turned his unwavering gaze toward Gordon. “They tell me, ‘Take off your hat.’ I went home.”
Gordon looked at Pela’s face again, uncomfortably reflecting that the most intimate relationships in his life had been with those images in the crosshairs just before squeezing a trigger. Pela had saved Gordon’s life, she cared for him, she had buried his comrades, she’d dressed his wounds; she was, as Dr. Taleghani said, very beautiful. Pela wanted him, she was a woman of substance who knew her way around in this world, and Gordon wouldn’t hurt her even for a ticket back to his own time. And there might still exist just such a ticket. In the future her God’n might just pick up and vanish. There would be no way he could bring her back with him. The Timespan chiefs would eat off their own faces first.
The future—Gordon reached to his pack, found the locater, and looked at the readout. Pela’s future was going to end in one hundred and ninety suns. Certainly simplified things. What if the marriage doesn’t work out? Six months. You can do anything for six months. Besides, he thought, what might it be to have an actual home? Aside from the insanity of Nascha’s hogan and the rough comradeship of Army barracks, he’d never had a home. Romantic love. Perhaps he could learn how to do that before the mountain vaporized. “That would be a gift,” he whispered to himself.
Pela wasn’t looking for a proposal. The custom, as he understood it, was to think about it. The Black Mountain Clan’s way of having a prospective suitor “think about it,” though, involved a number of things from qualifications, relationships, and ceremonies that had both man and woman think “for” each other, which was something more than thinking about someone. In thinking for, one considers the step one is contemplating—turning over the possible future relationship like a gemologist examining a rough stone from all angles, noting the flaws, attempting to see what could be made of it.
Gordon looked into the shadows past the fire, knowing that Yellow Eyes was keeping watch. There is the path, Coyote was saying with a wink of his eye. It’s beautiful, fur-lined, and chock full of healing promises. Gordon Redcliff could live happily ever after, maybe—or at least until those fellows from the future come looking for him or the floods come for him—
The reset alarm on the shockcomb invaded his thoughts, beginning as a low whine and increasing in pitch and volume until it achieved an ear-splitting magnitude. Gordon quickly reached in and hit the reset. He looked at the indicator. Another four seconds and it would have puckered itself, the locater, and Gordon’s change of underwear out of existence, not to mention a good bit of his right thigh.
“Pela hear scream, God’n.”
He looked at her. Pela’s eyes were open and they were very clear, very deep. “A thing of mine. I need to fix it sooner. Feel bad to wake Pela,” he apologized. Gordon studied Pela’s eyes seeing in them a strange mix of fear and longing. Something more, as well. Belonging. He felt as though he belonged with this woman.
This moment had been coming at him for a lifetime, it seemed. His surroundings couldn’t be more strange, yet he had a sense of belonging he had never before felt. He knew that when—or if—they came in a Timespan can to get him, they could either bring Pela back with him or leave him there with her.
“Perhaps I am your gift, Pela,” he said at last as he placed a hand on her cheek, surprised to be comfortable in meaning what his words said. “Perhaps, Pela, you are my gift. Gordon is thinking for Pela. Does Pela still think for Gordon?”
As her eyes welled with tears, Gordon wondered if Coyote was revealing yet another turn in his elaborate trick. Pela suddenly turned her head and buried her mouth in Gordon’s open palm, holding it to her lips, kissing it as she nodded. “Pela thinking for God’n,” she said, then whispered it again, “Pela thinking for God’n.”
There was a tender feeling in his heart, affection, a tiny crystal of joy and love that was instantly shattered as Pela turned her lips from his palm and let out an eardrum-shattering combination of screams and hollers in the direction of the village, the echoes bouncing off the cliff and facing hills.
A moment of silence, then more screaming calls came from the village below. Pela screamed back. The phrasing and pronunciation were different than Gordon had learned up to that point. It was a kind of yodeling. Gordon pieced some of it together: Pela was announcing to her clan sisters in the village that Tana had granted Pela’s wish. Pela had been gifted with a fine, strong, big, dark man from a strange place. Really big. Really dark. Really strange. He was thinking for her now and she was thinking for him.
Her sisters yodeled back their congratulations, their thanks to Tana for their sister, and their prayers and good wishes. Then they yodeled the news on to the ends of the village and beyond. The calls went on and were relayed for almost an hour. Long after Pela slept, Gordon remained sitting before the fire, catching occasional glimpses of the shimmering images, waiting for the secret visit from the village he was sure was coming.
The came long after moonset. Motionless in the shadows, the figure stood near the trailhead examining Gordon. He kept his gaze upon the figure as she moved nearer the fire. Her dark hooded garment brushed the ground and was made from rich sable. Within the hood was a woman’s face, her age hidden by the paint she wore. The right side of her face was black as soot. The left was colored burnt orange. “You know me,” she stated at last, her voice thin and reedy.