Looks Far awoke first. The fire was out and a chill had settled in the air, causing Woman Beneath the Stars to turn and tuck her shivering body against his own, her cold nose pressing into his chest.
He gazed at her face in the faint morning light which streamed through the top of the lodge. Her skin glowed and her eyelashes lay heavy and dark on her cheeks. Then he registered the hard points of her nipples pressing against his ribs. Against his will he felt his cock twitch to life in response. Enveloping her more fully in his arms, he pressed himself against her to relieve the ache, tucked her face against his shoulder so that her might forget her beauty, ignore the whiteness of her skin. But then she moaned and burrowed her smooth thigh between his own, pressing her moist sex to his flesh and causing a fresh wave of desire to wash over him. He slid up slightly to align himself with her and cursed his own weakness as he slipped the head of his penis between her folds, nudging her clitoris to life.
Half-rousing, Elaine adjusted herself to allow him entry. When at last he was inside her warm, snug passage, he lay perfectly still and breathed in the smell of her skin at the base of her throat. He could feel the blood pulsing in her body around the throbbing of his own. They seemed in time, in harmony. He had never felt such closeness with another human being.
With small rotations of his hips, he began a dance far removed from the one shared hours before. Slow and deep he luxuriated in the feel of her. Awakening further but still caught in the reverie of dreaming, Elaine held tight to Looks Far and pressed her lips along his cheek. Her breath chuffed his ear and he increased the force of his movements. Now she was fully awake and her mossy green eyes met his fathomless black depths.
This time he did not look away. He watched as her desire rose and lips parted in a sharp intake of breath. Impulsively he caught them in his own and held them softly. It was not a custom among the people, no, but she had sought it the night before and now he was curious to know this pleasure he had seen the wasicu engage in. At this unexpected surprise, Elaine pressed her mouth more fully to his own and lightly traced her tongue along his bottom lip. Looks Far would have been disgusted at the thought of anyone else doing such a thing, but with Woman Beneath the Stars, he found himself wanting more and bringing his tongue to meet her own.
Just then Elaine broke the kiss and gasped as he touched a place deep within her. Looks Far softly chuckled.
"Does this please you, woman?"
She was beginning to pant and speaking was a challenge, "Han, this is a very hehanni waste (good morning)"
At that she clenched her walls around him and pulled him ever closer, her hands clasping at his muscular buttocks as they tensed and relaxed with his efforts. Looks Far could not suppress his low groan of pleasure as she pulled him impossibly deep inside her. Their bodies were becoming sweat-slick and their breath fogged in the cool air of the lodge.
Elaine watched as his hairless brow -- for he plucked it clean like all plains men of the time -- knit in concentration. She sensed his peak was drawing near and withdrew him quickly with her hand, holding him close as he bucked and came against the softness of her stomach, breathlessly murmuring unfamiliar words in Lakota as the orgasm swept over him.
For a moment they lay in the sticky, sweet afterglow, simply gazing at the others' face in silence. Looks Far slightly squinted his eyes, as if trying to see back into her own. Elaine averted hers at this unexpected scrutiny and instead followed the contours of his cheekbones and lips, overcome with how unusually beautiful and almost alien he appeared with those slightly tilted eyes and that browless, smooth-skinned countenance. It was a face she would not mind waking up next to for the rest of her days. Why couldn't she have met such a man in her own time? Surely this could not last, surely she would not be here forever, but as long as she was here, she would revel in having found someone with whom she could connect.
Without warning, Looks Far withdrew himself and started the lodge fire anew, drawing the now-dry buffalo robe around his shoulders.
"You should return to Calls to Them, she would wish to know where you have been."
He sounded morose and withdrawn. There was no time to tarry and ask questions, he was right, she needed to return. Throwing her dress back over her head and pulling on her tall moccasins, Elaine made her way to the door, turning back to look at Tehanl Wanyanke as he crouched, staring in to the fire.
"I am glad to know you," she said. And like that, she was gone.
Once she departed, Looks Far cast his eyes over to a neatly folded bundle tucked under his clothing and accoutrements. He had carried it all these years but never opened it lest it bring back painful reminders of a life he had never asked for. Now, he wondered if it might hold something new for him. He willed his shaking hands still as he untied the sinew binding.
Inside were three books, one of his dusty old ledger books, a collection of poetry with lines from Blake to Byron, and finally, The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
He began to thumb through them. Inside the ledger book were writing lessons and drawings he had made while at the mission school. Within he had attempted to capture all he could recall of his life before he was taken, everything except the one event which had so cruelly snatched him from his world. In between these illustrations, in steady cursive hand, he had written the wasicu alphabet, Biblical proverbs, simple sentences, and lessons in grammar. He traced the lines with his fingers, remembering how strange and pointless it felt to be forced to perform such exercises.
Next he came to the book of poems, riddles which, once he could understand them, had swept Looks Far away with the power of their words. The book fell open to a poem by Lord Byron:
"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies..."
He thought on Woman Beneath the Stars, for the lines seemed to have been written just for her. Impulsively he tore the page free then folded and tucked it beneath the robe where she had laid not long before.
Finally he reached the book of Shakespeare. Inside were tales of valor and betrayal, not so unlike those told by the elders which had captivated Looks Far as a child. He opened the tome to "Romeo and Juliet," the one story that held little meaning to him but which as a boy he had been forced to memorize passages to recite before his classmates. Now the story seemed of greater interest. Scanning the pages, his eyes fell to a line which chilled him:
"These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder..."
It was Friar Laurence's warning to Romeo for having fallen so quickly for Juliet, his sworn enemy. Pushing these thoughts aside, Looks Far continued to thumb through the book until he arrived as the final page. There, tucked within a slit he had made in the leather binding was a tattered and bloodied bit of white cotton fabric. Taking it in his hands, he began to weep as a long-faded memory came into clear focus.
It had been a warm morning in the season of the Tall Grass. Few had risen in the camp, but Looks Far, then a child of 10 winters known as Sparrow, lay awake, excited and eager for his father to take him on his first hunt as had been promised. Outside, he could hear the dogs barking and beyond that, the sound of some strange music growing nearer and louder by the moment. Sparrow went and shook his father awake and asked if he, too, could hear the sound. The man's eyes flashed with alarm and he quickly tied on his clout, waking and urging his wife to do the same. As they dressed, a rising din of screams, shouts and gunfire began to erupt outside. The family had yet to put on their moccasins when the wasicu men in blue coats burst into their lodge.
When he saw them enter with guns drawn, Sparrow's father unfurled the small white flag of peace in his hands and threw himself before his wife and son as the soldiers came upon them with their bayonets. Sparrow had no time to act, he was afraid and disoriented and could only watch helplessly as the soldiers ran his mother and father through with their long knives so many times and with such force that the spray of blood filled the air within the lodge like a fine mist, raining down upon them. A trumpet call sounded from outside and as the soldiers turned to retreat, Sparrow pulled the skinning knife from his mother's belt and made a leap onto the back of one of the men, driving the blade with full force into the man's shoulder. But Sparrow was small for his age and the man, even in his pain, easily flipped the boy from his back onto the ground and pressed his glossy black boot into the child's chest.
With his hobnailed sole pinning Sparrow down, the blue coat bent and retrieved the white flag from where it lay, wet with the blood of his parents. He laughed cruelly, crouching low and dangling the flag before the boy's eyes. The man's pained and labored breathing came hard against Sparrow's face as he began to speak. Sparrow didn't understand the meaning of the soldier's words then, but the man he had become, Looks Far, did.
"Listen boy and remember: There is no peace for your kind, only death. Embrace it."
He withdrew his boot and dropped the bloodied flag to the child's chest before he and the others exited the lodge, leaving Sparrow to stare heavenwards in shock as the sun came high through the smoke hatch and cast its radiant light upon the abattoir. The world seemed to have fallen silent when mere moments before he could hear little over the deafening cries of the people, the claps of gunfire, and the shrieks of panicked horses. The silence was broken by a low rumble follow by the sounds of popping and crackling. Still he lay, unmoving within the circle of the lodge. Soon, the walls around him began to blacken and curl as smoke filled his lungs and clouded his sight. Clutching the flag to his chest, Sparrow sprung up and dashed through the doorway just as the long lodge poles began to collapse over the bodies of his parents. Turning back, his eyes filled with fire as all he had known burned before him. He stood, mesmerized by the sight and motionless until he was pulled up from the earth by a force he had neither seen nor heard. He did not fight back.
Wiping the tears from his eyes, Looks Far gently folded the last reminder of his parents and pressed it between his palms. He had kept their ghosts too long, they deserved release. With a murmured prayer, Looks Far cast the flag into the fire. It quickly turned to ash before his eyes, drifting up on the grey plumes to meet the late morning sun.
