Page 31 of The Business of Blood
I scowled. Mostly because he’d made an excellent point. In truth, I had the impression turquoise wasnotso easily obtained. But I could be sorely mistaken. I might make a comfortable living now, but life had taught me that I still had much to learn about the value of things.
“Aren’tyoucurious as to the owner of these?” I asked.
“No. I have plenty of turquoise of my own.” He parted the open collar of his dark shirt to expose a string of similar beads artfully set in silver. The necklace gleamed against the smooth, hairless amber hue of his chest above a different strand that seemed to have been intricately carved from ivory. Or bone.
“Even though you’re a foreigner, you mostly wear English fashion…why not a cravat?” I asked. I thought he’d look rather smart in one, and then his chest wouldn’t be on distracting display.
“I don’t like cravats,” he answered simply.
“Oh…” As far as reasons went, it was a sound one. “But still, if these beads are from—”
“Does it matter to me where someone else’s beads came from?”
“It does if they imply that you’re a murderer.”
“Iama murderer.” He said it as though reminding a simpleton that the sky was blue or that rain was wet. “My people were not miners or workers of turquoise. Though we traded for it on occasion with people from the south. The gems we found were usually glass or sometimes sapphires. If I’m honest, I’m not fond of the stone.”
“Then why wear it?”
He scrutinized me for a long moment before he answered. “It identifies me.”
“Oh.” To my eternal discomfiture, I sort of ran out of things to say. Did he mean he identified with the stone? Or that the stone identified him to others?
A safer question leapt into my mind like a startled rabbit. “Do you know of any other Indians? Hereabouts, I mean. Anyone to whom these might belong?”
To say his displeased frown dismayed me would be a gross understatement. “The only Indians I know are from India.”
“Right. Well…any other of…yourpeople, then.”
“Allmypeople are dead,” he informed me drolly.
I ceased to breathe for a full minute as I gaped at him, doing my best to make sense of the words he’d so blithely strung together to form one of the most lugubrious statements imaginable.
“Certainly not—notallof them,” I stammered. “I mean, I know a great deal of…youhave been… killed in the wars…” I faltered, stuck on his revelation. “But,surely,some of your people survived. That is to say,youdid.”
I couldn’t tell you if it was exhaustion or astonishment causing my witlessness. But, suddenly, I didn’t want to know what I knew. For nigh on two years, Aramis Night Horse had been an absolute enigma to me. A sort of preternatural being who melded with the London mists. A primal hunter who’d adapted to urban environs but still capable of some primordial brand of mystic slaughter.
At the moment, he was a man. One who’d lost what I had lost. Maybe on an unimaginable scale.
He regarded me with a touch of pity as though he understood my inner struggle. “Your people. Irish people. They live in tribes.”
He posed it both like a question and an assertion, so it took me a bemused moment to reply. “We call them clans, but yes, they do. Or did. That way of life isn’t so prevalent anymore.”
“My nation is the Niitsitapi. In English, we are called the Blackfoot. We once numbered as many as the Irish, and our lands were twice as vast. Your tribe—your clan—is the Mahoney Clan.” He paused, his eyes shifting to catch an errant thought. “What means Mahoney?”
My Aunt Nola had taught me this when I was young. “In the old language, it wasO’Mathghamhana,which loosely meansClan of the Bear.”
My answer seemed to please him as he peeled his shoulders from where they rested against the seat and shifted toward me. “My tribe—my people—were thePeenaquim. It meansseen from afar. There were so many, you could find our village for miles.”
“I see,” I whispered, and I did. But that didn’t stop him from explaining.
“If the Mahoney Clan is…exterminated, there are still Irish, are there not?”
Mutely, I nodded. A lump of emotion lodged in my throat.
“There are still Blackfoot,” he said.
But no Peenaquim.
