The Man From Forever. Dawn Flindt

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СКАЧАТЬ through the harshest winter. His eyes knew to scan the horizon for the first glimpse of the winter birds that came to the vast waterways.

      This warrior with his war-hardened body had hands made for hunting and fighting, for wrestling what he needed for life from land that offered nothing to more civilized people. Although they now hung along his naked thighs, the fingers curving in slightly, tendons standing out in stark relief beneath deeply tanned flesh, she imagined them cradling a child.

      What would those hands feel like on her?

      Made breathless by the question, she tried to step outside the dance ring, but the rocks expanded until she was trapped within the walls they’d become. Despite that, she could still see him and shrank a little from a gaze that told her he had the power to control these hard stones. She gaped in amazement and yet acceptance when he used his powerful hands to push one boulder aside so he could step inside.

      She couldn’t take her eyes off his thighs; a dusting of black hair draped flesh that had known years of heat and cold and physical life. Beneath the sheltering skin lived muscle and bone. His calves and ankles and feet were like the rocks that held her, made for eternity. She saw in them the runner he must be, the tireless hunter, protector of women and children.

      He hadn’t said a word. Still, she knew what had brought him here. The answer lay in the way he used his body, the arrogant strength of him, the blatant sexuality. Although she shrank from him, at the center of her being she wanted what he was. She faced the challenge and danger, the volcano. Their coupling would be as rough and wild as the land he called home. There’d be no gentle whispers, no lengthy foreplay. Instead, he would take what he needed from her, and she would do the same to him. Again and again until her strength gave out.

      He lay on his back on his bear-pelt bed. Since awakening—he could think of nothing else to call it—he’d cleared the brush from the slit of an opening above him. Although it was too narrow for him to get his body through or give the enemy access, it allowed enough sunlight to enter during the day that he could easily study the countless etchings that were his people’s history. At night, especially when the moon was full, the cave took on a silver cast.

      Staring at the opening, he tried to imagine how the land his people called The Smiles Of God had looked when it was painted in the colors the creator had used to bless the moon. But although he gave thanks to Kumookumts for his generous gift to the Maklaks, he couldn’t keep his thoughts on what the world must have been like when Kumookumts was creating it.

      The woman filled him. He’d watched her today. Often her car—how he hated the harsh word—took her far from where he was, but she seemed to have no purpose to her wanderings, and several times came close enough that he could truly study her. Like so many of her kind, she carried that thing they called a camera. He would like to know what they did with their cameras once they were done pointing them. At least they didn’t make a noise like a gun, and he guessed they weren’t weapons because they often pointed them at each other.

      She’d come here alone. He’d seen loners before, but there was something about her that made her stand out from the others. He’d tried to tell himself it was because he held her responsible for his awakening, but tonight, with Owl foretelling of death and his body restless with his man-need, he knew it was more than that.

      He wanted her. He’d been awake for six moons and looked at women with lust and then acknowledged that he couldn’t have them. He’d spent his lust-need by running until his lungs screamed. But what he felt for her was different. Like the power of a volcano, it held him in its fiery grasp and warned him that if he didn’t run until his legs gave out, he might take her. If he did, she would alert the army men and they would kill him.

      Was that Owl’s warning? That his need for this woman would mean the end to him?

      A growl of anguish rolled up from deep inside him and pushed its way past his lips. Shaking his head, he tried to deny the depth of his craving, but it was no good. He’d had a wife, a woman chosen by his family because of her social standing in the clan. Although she’d been older than him with interest in little more than digging camas bulbs and drying and storing them for winter, she’d let him climb atop her and he’d spent his energy inside her. She’d given him his son. For that he would always be grateful to her.

      But she was dead and energy fed upon him the way lightning-born fire feeds upon trees and brush.

      When another cry threatened to find freedom, he shoved himself into a sitting position. The moonlight now slid over his head and shoulders, carved his legs in shadowy relief. Gripping a calf, he thought about the great distance he’d walked today, not hunting as he should have, but searching for the woman again.

      She carried herself as few of the enemy did. Instead of lumbering like a grass-fattened cow, she walked with an ease that drew reluctant admiration from him. She must spend much of her life, not in a small, cramped house, but where her legs could find exercise. She was tall, slender. Her hair flowed long and straight and dark down her back; the wind loved to play with it. He wondered where she’d come from, where she would go when her time here was done. He wondered what had brought her here. Most of all he asked himself what she’d thought when he showed himself to her.

      She’d known he was watching her today. He’d seen the truth in the way she looked around, the wariness in her bear-brown eyes. After spending the morning pointing her camera at anything that moved, she’d joined some of the enemy. Even when she was surrounded by them, there were times when she scanned the horizon, and although he was so far away that he couldn’t read the truth in her gaze, he’d sensed it in what her body said to him.

      Her body, her hated woman’s body.

      He flopped back on his pelt but a moment later scrambled to his feet and strode to the nearest wall. Although it lay in complete shadow, he placed his hand flat over a drawing of men herding elk into a brush-and-rope enclosure. When the settlers came bringing their hungry cattle with them, the elk had fled to the mountains and there had no longer been a use for the enclosures. Still, this drawing, like others of Eagle and Bear and Frog and Weasel, of generations of Maklaks life and ways, remained. As long as they did, as long as he devoted himself to their care and protection, he wouldn’t be alone.

      Guided by instinct, he ran his hand over his people’s entire history, ending with the winter when the army burned a small village and forced them to take shelter in caves under land capable of sustaining only rabbits and mice. The men, himself included, had searched for food to fill their families’ bellies and when, in desperation, they’d killed some of the enemy’s cattle, they’d known they were doing something that would never be forgiven. There were no drawings of that because what today’s enemy called Captain Jack’s Stronghold was far from this sacred place. There was only what he’d created last winter—proof that the Maklaks weren’t all gone after all. He remained.

      Alone.

      She should have come to Canby’s Cross yesterday. Loaded down with fresh film and a container of water, Tory left her car at yet another of the areas designated for vehicles. As she’d done yesterday, she’d chosen early morning so she could absorb the area’s essence without interference from her fellow travelers. Yesterday, compulsively taking pictures and finding people to talk to, she’d kept this particular site at the back of her mind. However, as she was waking this morning, she decided to make coming here the first order of business. After all, this was why she’d come to the lava beds, and activity, particularly this activity, should bury last night’s dream.

      Maybe.

      It took no more than a couple of minutes to walk the short distance to a large white cross designating where General Canby, her ancestor, had lost his life. СКАЧАТЬ