Conquering Horse Read Online Free PDF Page B

with you.”
    Her white teeth laughed at him. “My mother and father know very well how to bind their daughter so she cannot move.”
    “My father taught me how to loosen the tightest knots, silently, so that no one can hear.”
    “Have you stolen a favorite horse from a Pawnee chief then?”
    “Also my father told me that when one desires a maiden very much it is good to cut the ropes with a knife.”
    She laughed. “I have a lover who sounds very clever. Yet he has no honor feather.”
    He groaned.
    Abruptly his white buffalo robe was jerked away and the headof an old woman appeared between them. It was Leaf’s mother Full Kettle. “Daughter,” Full Kettle said, holding her face averted to No Name, “your father cannot sleep. There is too much talk near his tepee.”
    Without a word, crestfallen, No Name slipped away in the dark. The skunktails on his heels fluffed across the grass, erasing his trail.
    2
    When he returned to his father’s lodge the fire in the center had fallen to pink embers. He stole around to the right, careful not to step between his father and the fire, and in the back of the tepee settled on his knees beside his fur bed. He slipped off his buckskin shirt and leggings and breechclout. He stretched out, feet to the fire, then snuggled under his sleeping robe, pulling it up to his chin. The buffalo fur comforted his naked skin. The grass under the fur bedding made the earth feel soft.
    “Son?” It was his mother Star That Does Not Move calling him. He could hear her stir beside his father Redbird. “Son?”
    “I have come.”
    The pink coals fell in upon themselves with soft sounds. His father’s favorite hunting pony, Swift As Wind, stomped in sleep outside. The wind rose again and moaned low in the smokehole above.
    He lay waiting for sleep.
    Hard fingers touched his throat. “Little Bird?”
    It was his father’s other wife, Loves Roots. Loves Roots was one of those who fancied skunk meat because she had noticed skunks ate many roots. She was calling him by his baby name, Little Bird, the one his uncle Moon Dreamer had given him at birth. No Name wished Loves Roots would leave him alone. She was always seeking to ensnare him in a love embrace.
    “Little Bird?” Her calloused fingers stroked his high nose.
    He lay very still.
    “Little Bird?” Her fingers moved down under his robe and touched his thigh.
    “I am known as No Name,” he said bitterly. But even as he spoke desire moved warmly in his limbs. His body could not help itself. He pushed her away, gently, because he did not want her to be angry with him. An angry second mother was even worse than an angry father.
    Her hand touched him again and she tried to slip under his sleeping robe. She too was naked. “I am still young.”
    “I cannot defile my father’s house.”
    Her hand stroked him. “They are old and will not hear us.”
    “Go. I love my father.”
    “Your father is old and sometimes neglects his wives.”
    “Go.” No Name’s flesh burned for her. It would be an easy thing to wive her. “My father is a great chief.” Again he pushed her away, this time more firmly.
    “Son?” It was Star That Does Not Move calling suspiciously from beside Redbird. “Son?”
    “I am trying to sleep, my mother.”
    Loves Roots slid back to her bed. She lay across the lodge from Redbird.
    No Name sighed. Tomorrow Loves Roots would give him covert glances while pretending affection for his father.
    The moon came up outdoors. Its rays slowly began to bend into the smokehole. Gradually they filled the cowhide lodge with silver light. He could make out the meat curing over the fire. A stone ax hung caught behind a lodge pole. His father’s medicinebag and war gear dangled from a tripod just inside the door. Two forked sticks beside the fire held his father’s redstone pipe. Kettles and baggage and parfleches of food stood against the wall behind the inner tepee lining. He could even make out the muffled forms of his father