She said, "He'll have to, unless one of us means to ride atop a dead man or walk that far. I wish you'd stop calling me Princess, by the way. I'm not even the porivo my mother was. But no matter how often I try to explain that to Shoshoni Sam he keeps insisting nobody would understand what a porivo was and that princess seems close enough."
Longarm chuckled and took the reins so she could vault lightly up on her gray, to land astride as well as bareback, giving him quite a view of her long tawny legs.
It wouldn't have been polite to ask if she was wearing any underdrawers. So he just forked aboard behind her, holding the lines of both ponies in his left fist as he swung the Winchester around her slim waist to ride across her lap, with his gun hand still gripping the action. His right wrist fit into the nice angle formed by her trim pelvis and widespread right thigh as if it belonged there.
She didn't argue about that, but warned him she'd better hold the lead pony's single rein. He let her, even though it meant a left fist down against his own less interesting hip as he asked her which of them ought to heel the critter's ribs.
She said, "Neither. This one's Penataka bred and broken. He'll buck if anyone tries to abuse him Taibo-style."
She proved that by clucking softly to the gray. The next thing Longarm knew they were moving out at an easy mile-eating trot he should have found ball-breaking with no stirrups to stand in, but didn't, thanks to the smooth gait and springy spine of the pony.
It wasn't true all Indians were natural cavalry generals,
any more than it was true every Russian wood-carver had the makings of a Cossack. Some nations would as soon eat a horse as get on one, and as dangerous as Lakota could be coming at you at full gallop, they still called their mounts tashunkas, or big dogs, and tended to be rougher on them than green cavalry troopers because they set great store in stealing the horses they rode, and thus had little time to waste on breaking them gently.
Other nations, the Cayuse in particular and the Comanche, Shoshoni, and Utes in general, tended to baby the ponies they bred, as well as stole, with a mighty good eye for horseflesh. So they tended to ride the ideal Indian pony of Ned Buntline's Wild West Romances, and this dapple gray he was riding with a lady in wine-red Indian duds was a swell pony, even by Comanche standards. When she modestly denied breaking it herself, they established she'd been educated as white as the white kids of the boarding school her Indian trading pop had sent her to would let her act. She'd been baptized Mary Jo, but took an adult Indian name, as Indians got to, once she'd run home to her momma. Tupombi meant no more than Brunette, which got less odd when you considered her Comanche kin had allowed her to choose it, and that the white kids at that boarding school had been inclined to call her Nigger. She said a porivo, which her momma had been, translated more as a woman who was allowed to be heard with as much respect as a powamu, or important man with medicine, than a regal title such as Shoshoni Sam had suggested.
He said he savvied some of the more open customs of Ho-speaking folk who shook their feathered pahos at Taiowa, the Great Creative Mystery. When she told him she could see he really had been paying attention, he felt bold enough to ask, "So what's all this nonsense about asking Sacajawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to join a Wild West Show at this late date?"
Tupombi said, "It's not nice to call a story nonsense before you've heard it. The one I'm sure they told you,
in your own Taibo schoolbooks, is pretty silly in its own right."
He asked how so, even as he tried to recall the little he'd read and heard about old-timers who'd died before he'd been bom. The pretty little thing sort of riding in his lap began with, 'That name they put down as her real one was awfully dumb. She was a Shoshoni girl, captured by Minnetaree Hidasta and sold to a metis or half-breed French Canadian that Lewis and Clark soon hired for a guide. His name was Charbonneau. He is not important to my true story of Boinaiv."
Longarm frowned and said, "Lewis and Clark didn't think much of old Charbonneau, who seemed to know less about the mountains ahead than his pretty young squaw. But who was this Boinaiv?"
She sounded impatient as she answered, 'The one everyone keeps calling Sacajawea, of course. Her real name, Boinaiv, means Daughter of Grass. I don't know the vision that inspired that. When Boinaiv cried so much because she'd been captured and taken east across the Shining Mountains, her captors, not any Ho-speakers, started to call her Bird Woman, or Sakaka Wea, as you'd say that in their Sioux way. Sacajawea means nothing sensible in Ho."
Longarm thought and decided, "By gum, wihaw does sound the way Lakota and such refer to their womenfolk. They don't like it when you call 'em squaws. But hold on, I do recall reading somewhere about Sacajawea meaning something about canoes in her own native lingo."
Tupombi snorted. "A bird woman riding in a canoe being pulled? Some so-called Indian scholars have tortured Sacajawea into such Shoshoni baby talk, and Shoshoni Sam keeps saying nobody will ever pay a dime to meet anyone called Grass Baby, and I fear he may be right. I only agreed to help him and Miss Marvella to find Boinaiv. I owe them for getting me out of a fix a lot like the one the crying Boinaiv found herself in when Lewis and Clark came along. I was stranded in Kansas City when the owner of an other Wild
West Show decided he didn't like my stuck-up-ways. Then the manager of my hotel insisted on being paid or taking it out in trade, in bed with me."
Longarm grimaced and said, "That's how come mothers warn their daughters about show folk, ma'am. But even assuming way nicer show folk took you under their wing and asked you to help 'em track down a more famous Indian lady, what in thunder makes you think a gal who marched over the mountains with Lewis and Clark back in the days of the first Napoleon, as a woman grown, would still be—"
"Somewhere in her nineties," Tupombi cut in. "She was in her early teens, pregnant or not, when she led the way west back in 1804. But there's more to it than the mere fact it would be possible for most any healthy person to live to be a hundred or more. If you know my mother's tongue at all you know the people you call Snakes and Comanche are really one. So both nations tell the same tale of a proud Ho woman leaving the breed brute who beat her and his other Indian wives. They say that to avoid Charbonneau and other Taibo mountain men who might have helped him she rode far south, far, to fall in with the Quohada or Antelope People you also know as a Comanche band. They say an important powamu made her his paramount wife because she was not only beautiful but knew so many secrets of both his red and white enemies. I cannot tell you his name because nobody knows it now. You know how my mother's people are about the names of those who have gone back to Taiowa."
Longarm nodded soberly and observed, "Makes the true history of you all a chore to figure too. But we can still talk about Bird Woman because she's still supposed to be alive?"
Tupombi nodded the back of her head to him but said, "She was given that name by enemies. I know you find this hard to understand. Shoshoni Sam finds it impossible because he understands no Ho at all. He keeps trying to
say things to me in baby-talk Algonquin. He thinks squaw, papoose, and moccasin are Shoshoni words."
Longarm said, "Well, he does call himself Shoshoni Sam. What makes you think Sacajawea or, all right, Boinaiv would be way up at Fort Hall, dead or alive, if she was last seen married to a Comanche chief down around the Staked Plains?"