to save their fallen souls.” He looked at her, his expression grave as though he was recounting something that had happened to people he knew personally. “If they cooperated, they were spared, though enslaved, used as trappers for the furs he sold to enrich himself. If they didn’t, the men were pushed into the canyon and if the fall itself didn’t kill them, the elements or wild animals would. If it was a woman who refused, she was made a whore for Hubert and the other male leaders in his ministry.”
“No,” Scarlett breathed, swallowing thickly. “That’s awful. God, the things people do in the so-called name of religion.”
Camden’s gaze speared her, and something that looked like deep sorrow moved through his eyes. “Yes,” he said. He was quiet for several long moments, his fingers still now, and Scarlett wondered if he’d go on or if that was the end to the tale, so when he began speaking again, it startled her. His fingers began twisting the blade of grass once more.
“One such indigenous woman was named Taluta.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “The name means red, like yours, but she was named for the color of her hair,” he said glancing at Scarlett’s light brown ponytail. “Anyway, Taluta refused to convert, and apparently violently rejected the advances of one of Hubert’s men. They were able to restrain her, however, and threw her over the canyon cliff, but not before raping and brutalizing her.”
Scarlett blinked at him in horror, rendered mute by the unthinkable hypocrisy of men proclaiming to act in the name of God, when in actuality, they were committing atrocities against people whose only “crime” was to be different than them.
He stared off into the tree line, reciting the story as if from memory. “When they left her, she lay at the bottom of the canyon in a pool of blood and brokenness. Her husband, only just returning from a hunt for their tribe, learned what had happened to his wife. Refusing to allow her to die alone, he donned his horned war garb, painted his face the way a warrior does when he knows he’s heading toward his certain death, and then scaled the canyon wall as far as he could and dropped to the earth, crumpled beside her, his own injuries surely extensive as well.
“But when Bancroft’s men returned the next morning to sate their depraved curiosity, neither one was there. Instead, a red fox, its fur the exact color of Taluta’s unusual auburn hair, with eyes the precise amber shade as hers, darted from the bushes at the top of the canyon and escaped into the forest.”
“They thought she’d turned into a red fox and climbed out of the canyon?”
“That’s what the legend says.”
“And him?”
“They say he still roams the forest, his cold heart full of vengeance. People have reported hearing his war chant carried on the wind and seeing the shadow of a horned dead man searching to avenge the wrongs committed against his love with the sacrificial blood of others.”
“That’s . . . quite a story,” Scarlett said.
“They called it Novaatngar after that,” he murmured. “The canyon. It means, the dark place.”
She repeated the name softly, a chill causing her shoulders to rise and the tiny hairs on the back of her neck to prickle. And what he’d said about himself was wrong. He was a very good storyteller. He’d moved her, not just with the words that conveyed the tale, but with the emotion he’d infused in the telling.
“Are there any Serralino people still left in these parts?”
He shook his head. “The very last of their tribe died a couple of years ago and took their language with her. An old woman named Narcisa Fernando who lived in a small, one-room house a few miles from here. She was a midwife once, but in her old age, she sold dried herbs and soaps, things like that. She’d catch a ride with a local fisherman who came up this way once a month or so. He’d drop her at the edge of town and then she’d walk to the center, despite a severe limp. When no one had seen her through the winter, the sheriff went to check on her and found her dead in her bed.”
For several moments, Scarlett could only sit in silence, the sadness of the story, and the idea of dying alone in your home and not being discovered through a long winter, both a heavy weight