The People of the Horse — the empire that made Spain sue for peace

Transcript

Bram: I am going very fast and I am not in charge of it. That is the first fact, and for a while it is the only fact I can hold. There is an animal under me the size of a small boat, and it is at full stretch across country I cannot see because the sky is the colour of wet slate and the sun is not up yet, and my thighs are locked around a ribcage that is working like a bellows, and I am not holding a rein, because there is no rein — there is a single loop of braided hair round the lower jaw and it lies slack across my left hand like a lead rope on a sleeping dog. There are others. I can hear them more than see them, twenty or thirty horses running in the dark on either side of me, and the ground is coming up through the soles of my feet before it ever reaches my ears — a hum, a drumming under the earth. And I am counting. Not out loud. That is the other thing I do — one, two, three, four, in the back of my skull, the way you'd count stairs in the dark — and I am counting hoofbeats, which is a completely useless number, and I cannot stop. And underneath the counting I am screaming. Not out loud. Inside, in the small back room of this skull where I live, I am screaming in the extremely specific way of a man who has spent several hundred years being ferried around history and has never, not once, learned to ride, and who has just discovered that the body he has woken up in did learn, at about four years old, and is currently doing something at a flat gallop that I would not attempt at a walk. So let me get the introductions over with, because I always do this bit and I like to do it while I still have hands. The hands are young. Sixteen, seventeen, hard across the palms, and there is a bow in the left one and a fistful of mane in it too and neither of those things is bothering the hands at all. Bare legs against horsehide. A short bow, very short, the kind you'd think was a child's until you understand it's short because a long one is no use at this speed. And when I turn my head, the men beside me turn theirs, and one of them grins at me — grins, at this speed, in the dark — and says something short in a language that arrives in my chest already meaning what it means, and what it means is: stay left of me and don't be brave. Oh, that's what I am. I'm the young one. I'm the boy they've brought along to hold horses and learn the work, on his first ride out, and the reason my heart is going like a bird in a box is that only about half of it is mine. And then I smell it before I see it, which is how I meet most centuries: woodsmoke gone cold, and dung, and wet straw, and — underneath — sixty horses standing close together in the dark. We come over a low swell of ground and there it is below us in the grey: a scatter of adobe buildings, a threadbare little rancho on the northern edge of what the Spanish call New Mexico, a chapel roof, a corral of juniper posts, and inside the corral — and I feel the whole line of us lean at the sight of it — sixty or seventy horses, penned, asleep on their feet, standing in the smell of their own night. And then we are among them and everything happens at once and none of it in the order you'd expect. Two riders go straight for the corral rails and lift them out like men taking down a gate they own. Somebody sends a cry up that isn't a whoop and isn't a scream — it's a note, held, that a dozen throats take up and throw at the buildings to freeze whatever is inside them — and the penned horses come out of the corral in one body, and my body, my clever traitor body, is already moving to the flank to turn them, because that is the job, that is why the boy is here, and I go along the outside of sixty running horses in the dark on the back of a sixty-first, whooping, and I would like it on the record that for about four seconds I am the happiest I have ever been in any century. Then a door bangs. A man comes out of the adobe house with a long gun and no shoes, shouting a name — his son's, I think, or his brother's — and one of the riders turns his horse on the spot the way you'd turn a key, and there is a sound like a hand slapping wet cloth, and the man sits down in the doorway with an arrow in him and does not get up. Nobody stops. Nobody even slows. It takes less time than it has taken me to tell you, and it is done with the exact economy of men doing a thing they are extremely good at, and my body is still whooping, and I have stopped. And then, on the way out, we take the boy. He is maybe eight. He has come out of the second house to see the horses, because he is eight and there are horses, and a rider comes past him at a canter and takes him up by the arm the way you'd pick a cup off a table, and he is across the withers and away and it is not even slightly difficult, and the last thing I see of that rancho is a woman running out into the churned-up dust of the corral with nothing in her hands. We ride until the sun is properly up and then we walk, and the men are pleased, and the boy is put on a horse of his own because a captive who can herd is worth ten times a captive who can't, and someone gives him water first, before the men drink, which is not kindness and is not cruelty and I will need the rest of this hour to explain to you what it is. So. Here is where I've brought you, and here is the only question I want in your head. You know how the story of this continent goes. You have known it since you were small: the ships come, the peoples who were already here fall back, the map goes one colour, and it is a sad and settled thing that happened in one direction and could not be stopped. That is the story you were given. It is not the story I have just ridden into. Because these people, on this grass, in this decade, are not losing. They are the strongest thing on this continent and they know it — and within seven years the greatest empire in the Americas will stop trying to beat them, and will come to them instead, with gifts, and ask for terms. And the price of that will be paid in a dry gully, and in a lodge full of a man's own people, and by a boy on a stolen horse who will never see his mother again. Come with me. This one runs the other way. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. Episode nine. The People of the Horse — the empire that made Spain sue for peace. Right — off the horse, thank goodness, and let me stand you somewhere you can see. First things first, though, because we have to sort out a name before we go a step further. The people I have just been riding with are, in every book you have ever opened, the Comanche. That word is not theirs. It is a Ute word — Kɨmantsi — and the Utes lived north and west of them and did not care for them at all, and what it means, roughly, is the enemy, or more exactly the ones who fight us all the time. Spanish soldiers heard it from their Ute scouts, wrote it down as best they could, and that is the name that went into the record and stayed there for two hundred and fifty years: a name for a people, borrowed from the neighbours who liked them least. In their own mouths they are Numunu — the People. That's it. That's the whole word. I'll call them the People, mostly, because that's what they call themselves, and I'll call them Comanche when I'm standing in a Spanish room, because that's what the Spaniards are saying — and you should hear the difference every time it happens, because a name given by an enemy is a small quiet fact that carries an enormous amount of weight, and we will trip over it again before the end. Now. The year is seventeen seventy-nine, and I want to explain how these people got here, because it is, genuinely, one of the great stories of the human capacity to reinvent itself, and almost nobody knows it. Go back a hundred years from where we're standing — to the sixteen-eighties — and the Numunu are not on this grass at all. They are a small, poor, foraging people up in the cold country on the edge of the Rockies, related to the Shoshone, gathering roots and hunting on foot, at the thin end of everybody else's map. Not a power. Not close to one. The kind of people the big neighbours push around in a hard winter. And then they get the horse. There had been no horses in the Americas for ten thousand years — the Spanish brought them back — and for a long time Spain kept a very tight grip on who got to ride. Then in sixteen eighty the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico rose up and threw the Spanish out of the province entirely, and when the Spanish ran they left their herds behind, and horses went out of New Mexico in every direction like water out of a broken jar. The Numunu got them early, through Ute hands, a full generation before most of their rivals, and they came down out of the mountains onto the southern plains and they did something with that animal that nobody else did. Because here's what I want you to hold: the horse didn't make them faster. The horse rebuilt them from the ground up. A people who had walked now moved sixty miles in a day. A people who had hunted buffalo by creeping up on them on foot and driving them off cliffs now hunted from the saddle, at a gallop, and could kill more meat in an afternoon than a village could eat in a month. And the meat wasn't the point — the surplus was. Suddenly there were hides, hundreds of them, thousands, and hides were money, and the whole shape of the society reorganised itself around the new wealth. Boys herded. Herds became enormous, and the herds were the wealth — a man's standing, his marriage prospects, his voice in council, all counted out in horses. Women worked the hides, and that work, the scraping and the brain-tanning and the smoking, was the labour that turned a dead animal into a tradeable good, which means the wealth of this whole ascendancy came out of women's hands. And men rode: scouting pasture, breaking wild horses off the plains, raiding, trading, riding astonishing distances for both. Within two generations a people who had been at the edge of somebody else's map were, by the unanimous testimony of everyone who ever tried to fight them, the finest light cavalry in the world. Not in the Americas. In the world. That is not flattery. That is the professional opinion of Spanish officers who had served in Europe. So by seventeen seventy-nine there is a thing on the southern plains that the maps of the period do not show, because nobody in Madrid quite has a word for it. Comanchería. A domain that runs across what is now Texas, Oklahoma, eastern New Mexico and southern Colorado, bigger than any European colony on this continent, and it is not an empty space between the colonies — it is the thing in the middle that the colonies arrange themselves around. And there are two other things in that space you need, because the episode turns on both. The first is the Apaches — Lipan and Mescalero and the rest — who were on this grass before the People came down onto it and who were driven south and west off it by them, decade by decade, into the Spanish frontier, where they now raid the same towns from the other side. Spain's Apache problem and Spain's Comanche problem are the same problem seen from two ends, and the People know it, and that is going to be worth something at a table one day. The second is guns. Comanchería sits between two European suppliers: Spain in the south-west, which will not sell firearms to indios bárbaros on principle, and the French traders out of Louisiana in the east, who sell to anybody and always have. Every musket on these plains has come up the eastern rivers. Hold that, because in seven years a Spanish governor is going to try to buy that trade away, and it is the single hardest thing he will ask for. And it is bleeding New Spain white. The northern frontier of the Spanish empire here is a thin string of presidios and mission towns — Santa Fe, Taos, San Antonio, a handful of others — small, poor, badly supplied, at the end of a supply line thousands of miles long. Against people who can put five hundred riders in the field and dissolve into grass, a fort is a place to be raided around. Spain has been losing horses, cattle, harvests and people out of that frontier for fifty years and has not found a single thing that works. Which is a good moment to check where you are, in the frame you were actually taught. Seventeen seventy-nine. Across the Atlantic, Britain is three years into a war with its American colonies, and in June of this year Spain declares war on Britain and lays siege to Gibraltar — the longest siege in British military history is starting right now. Captain Cook has been dead since February, killed in Hawaii. Mozart is twenty-three and stuck in Salzburg, hating it. And out here, four thousand miles from all of that, the Spanish crown is about to make one last attempt to solve its Comanche problem with a sword. The man who will make it is the ablest frontier soldier Spain has: Juan Bautista de Anza, governor of New Mexico, born on this frontier, the man who opened the overland road to California. And he will do it brilliantly. That is what makes this story what it is. He does not blunder. He plans a campaign of real elegance, he executes it perfectly, he kills the man he set out to kill — and it settles absolutely nothing, and seven years later he will be sitting in his own council room signing terms he did not write. That's where we're going. And we start in the mountains, at the end of August, with a war party coming home from a raid that went wrong — and a boy in it who believes, the way you believe the sun comes up, that the man riding at the front of them cannot be killed. Come on. Same body, and a long way north — up in the high country under the Sangre de Cristo mountains, cold at night in August, snow still on the top of them and the great blue wall of them standing off to our left. Three weeks older. A great deal tireder. And the mood has gone out of everybody. Because Taos went badly. That's the short of it. We went to Taos — a pueblo town under Spanish protection at the top of the New Mexico valley — and Taos was ready for us, and we came away with nothing, and two men did not come away at all. In a war economy that runs on what you bring home, coming home with nothing is not a small thing. It is a debt. The men have been quiet for two days. And at the front of us, at a walk, on a bay horse with a white face, rides the man this boy cannot stop looking at and I have not once been close enough to see properly. His name, in the mouths I am standing among, is Tabivo Naritgant, which means something close to Dangerous Man. The Spanish do not call him that. The Spanish call him Cuerno Verde — Green Horn — and they call him that because of the thing wrapped in hide behind his saddle, which the boy I am has seen unwrapped exactly once, and which the boy thinks about the way you might think about a cathedral. It's a war-bonnet, and it has horns on it — real ones, worked and mounted and painted green — and it is not his. It was his father's. His father wore it and his father was killed by the Spanish, and the son took it up and has worn it in the raids ever since, and here is what that means to everybody riding here: it means the Spanish killed the man in the green horn and the green horn came back. It came back and it went on riding. There is a boy on this horse beside me who has never in his short life been able to hold in his head the idea that the man in front could simply stop. And that boy is me, at the moment, all the way down. The scouts come in at the wrong speed. That's all it is at first — two riders coming back down the valley faster than a scout should ride, and the column stops without anyone giving an order, and there's a fast hard conversation up at the front, and then the whole shape of the war party changes. I don't need the language for it. Men reach for what they reach for. The spare horses are pushed together. Somebody takes my arm and shoves me toward the middle of the line, which is where you put the boy, and I go there with a burning humiliated gratitude that I would like to pretend is not mine but very much is. And then over the rim of the valley behind us — behind us, not in front, which is the whole trick of it — comes Anza's army. Six hundred men. Presidial soldiers in leather armour, New Mexican militia, Pueblo auxiliaries, and riding with them, and this is the part that lands like a slap among the men around me, two hundred Utes and Jicarilla Apaches. Anza has spent three weeks doing something no Spanish commander here has ever done: instead of coming up the road, he went up the wrong side of the mountains entirely, through the San Luis Valley, crossed over, and came down behind. He has not come to find us. He has been sitting on our road home. And then there is no more thinking, there is only the next four hours, and I am going to give them to you straight because there is no honest way to hurry this. We run. That is the correct decision and everyone makes it instantly — you do not stand and fight six hundred with sixty, you scatter and you draw them out and you come back at their flanks in an hour when their horses are blown and yours are not, and that is the tactic that has beaten Spain on this frontier for fifty years. So we go, south and east, down the valley toward the river country, and it becomes a running fight over broken ground with men firing from the saddle in both directions. I hear a musket volley go off behind us and to the right, ragged, four or five shots, and the boy's shoulders come up around his ears and stay there — and one of the horses on our left drops as if the ground has been taken out from under it, and its rider hits and rolls and is up and a man swings past and takes him up behind, and neither of them says a word about it. And the man who grinned at me in the dark three weeks ago takes a ball through the left forearm on the first turn. I see it happen. He does not fall and he does not stop — he changes hands, gets the loop of the jaw-rein into his teeth, and goes on shooting with the arm hanging, and blood goes down the horse's shoulder in a line and dries there — and for the rest of this fight he is one arm, and one arm on a horse at speed is half a man, and both of us know it, and neither of us says it. He will be with us in the gully. He will be what is left of the men on the lip who cannot get down. Twice we turn and go back at them. That is the thing they do not tell you about this kind of fighting — it isn't a rout, it's a series of sharp turns, and each turn costs the pursuers something. I am close enough the second time to see a man beside me put three arrows into the air in the time it takes a soldier to reload once, at a canter, past the horse's neck, and to see one of them go into a militiaman's thigh and see the horse he's on start to fight him. That is what a short bow is for. And a musket ball goes past my head. I want to be exact about this, because it is the most frightened I have ever been in any body in any century, and I have stood in Pompeii on the day. It does not sound like a bang. It sounds like a wasp the size of a fist going past your ear at an unsurvivable speed, and it arrives before the shot does, and the boy's whole body flinches sideways into the horse's neck and the horse takes the flinch as an instruction and swerves, and we very nearly go down in a gopher-cut, and I am fine, and I am absolutely not fine, and there is no time to be either. And then the ground betrays him. Somewhere in the fourth hour, in the cut-up country above a little river — the St. Charles, it will be called — the fifty of us still together come down into a gully, a dry watercourse with sides too steep to take at speed, and it does not go anywhere. The horses jam. Half the band gets out to the left. And Cuerno Verde and perhaps a dozen men, and his eldest son, and an old man who has been carrying medicine for the party, do not. He could have run for it, up the slope, on foot, and he might have made it. He does not. He puts his horse between himself and the mouth of the gully and he keeps it there, and when the horse is shot he does not move away from it — he goes down behind it and uses it as a wall, and the sound the horse makes is the worst sound in this whole hour, and he pulls the green horn out of the hide and puts it on. In a gully. With the sides too steep to climb. Muskets at the mouth of the gully — forty of them, men going down on one knee to steady, powder smoke standing in the cold air because there is no wind down there to take it away. And he stands up behind the dead horse in the green horn and says something to them, in a language most of them do not have, and one of the riders beside me on the lip translates it under his breath as if it were being said to him:

Cuerno_verde: Come in, then. Come in and see whose son I am.

Bram: His son is killed first, three or four feet from him. I am on the lip of the gully with two other riders who have turned back and cannot get down and cannot leave, and I watch a man of about forty do the arithmetic of his own last ten minutes and choose, deliberately, the version of it that can be told afterwards. He shoots until there is nothing to shoot with. And he is still standing when the second volley takes him, and he goes down against the horse, and the noise of that fight stops in about the time it takes to say it, and what is left is a lot of men breathing. They come down and take the bonnet off him. I see it go up in a soldier's hand. And the two riders beside me turn their horses and go, and my body goes with them because my body is seventeen and wants to live, and the last thing the boy sees of the man who could not be killed is four Spaniards standing around him in a watercourse, arguing about who gets to carry the hat. We ride all night. Nobody speaks. And somewhere in that ride, with the coyotes going in the dark and the horses walking themselves home, the thought arrives in the boy's chest and sits down in it, and it is not grief, not yet, it's something simpler and colder: oh. He was a man. He was only ever a man. I'm going to stay quiet with him for a while. Come up out of that gully with me. Leave the boy riding through the dark, he has a long night and I don't want to crowd him — and let me show you why the greatest victory Spain ever won out here landed like a stone dropped into a lake the size of a country. Because I don't think you have the shape of it yet, and everything after this depends on the shape. When Anza rode home to Santa Fe with that green bonnet in his baggage, what he believed he had done was cut the head off the Comanche. What he had actually done was kill one war-leader belonging to one band belonging to one division of a people who had no head to cut off. Start with the ground. Comanchería is not a country in the sense you're picturing. There is no capital, no throne, no tax, no border you could draw a line along — and it is nonetheless the largest domain on the continent. It runs, roughly, from the Arkansas River in the north down to the hill country of central Texas, and from the front range of the Rockies east into the flat. A quarter of a million square miles of it. Put that against the European colonies of the same date and it dwarfs Spanish New Mexico — some ten thousand Spanish and casta settlers and about as many Pueblo people again, all strung along one river — and it is larger than any single one of the thirteen states that are at this moment three years into a war about liberty. And it is not one people acting as one. It is divisions — big, autonomous groupings, each with its own country and its own politics, and in this era and this corner the ones that matter are the Kotsoteka — the buffalo-eaters — out on the middle plains; the Jupe; and the Yamparika, the root-eaters, up north. Those three deal with New Mexico. Away east on the Texas plains are others again, with their own relationship to their own Spaniards, and their own view of what any of this is worth. Cuerno Verde led a band. He did not lead a nation, because there wasn't one to lead — and that is precisely why killing him bought Anza nothing at all. And what does the whole thing run on? Three things, braided together, and you have already touched all three. Horses — bred, raided, driven north in their thousands and sold to peoples who cannot get them any other way, so that Comanchería becomes the horse-market of half a continent. Buffalo — the meat, and the hides, and the robes that go down into the Spanish towns and out along a trade that reaches, eventually, into Europe. And captives — people taken in raids, from Apache camps and Pueblo villages and Spanish ranchos and other plains peoples, and I will come back to that one properly because it needs more than a sentence and it deserves more than a sentence.

So: three things I want you to actually keep, and then we move. One — nobody in Santa Fe has a map with this on it, and the men who write the reports to Madrid describe a frontier, when what is out there is a neighbour. Two — there was never a single Comanche leader to defeat, which means Spain's entire military theory of the problem was aimed at something that did not exist. Three — the People's power was not a fighting power, in the end. It was an economic power that could fight. That distinction is going to decide everything.

Bram: And so when I take you forward now — and we're going forward two years, into a summer, into a camp so rich it will make your eyes water — I want you watching for the wealth, not the war. Because Spain spent fifty years trying to break a war machine, and the thing it was actually up against was a business. Two summers later, on the Canadian River, and the smell arrives before anything else does, the way it always does with me: smoke, and sun-hot hide, and horses, and underneath it all something sharp and animal and frankly appalling that I will identify in about a minute and immediately wish I hadn't. I am kneeling. The hands are a woman's, and they are extraordinary — thick across the base of the thumb, scarred, absolutely steady — and they are working a scraper made of elk bone along the inside of a buffalo hide pegged flat to the ground, and every stroke lifts a curl of flesh off it, and the hands do not need to look at what they are doing. There is a mind in this body that is doing arithmetic while the hands work, and I can feel the arithmetic more clearly than I can feel the hide. Twelve robes finished. Nine to go. The trader from Taos will be at the river in four days. And when I sit back on my heels and look up — oh. Look at it. Look at it with me. I have been to Rome and I have been to Tenochtitlan and I am telling you that this is one of the great sights of the world and nobody ever painted it. We are on a river flat under cottonwoods, and there are perhaps forty lodges in a long crescent along the water — big smoke-blackened cones of hide, painted at the tops, doors east — and between and behind them, going away in every direction until the eye simply gives up, are the horses. Not a paddock of horses. Not a hundred horses. Thousands. Grazing in loose bands as far as the grass goes, moving the way weather moves, with boys out at the edges of them doing nothing at all in the manner of people whose job is to do nothing until it matters. The husband of this body owns two hundred and forty of them. She knows the number. She counted it this spring, and she counted it with a certain expression that I recognise from every wealthy household in every century, and it is the expression of somebody enjoying a number. And there is meat drying on racks in the sun in quantities that make no sense to a European eye, and there are packs of finished robes stacked and tied, and there is a copper kettle by the fire that came up from Santa Fe, and a Spanish bridle-bit hanging on a lodge-pole being used to hang things on. And at midday somebody hands me liver. Fresh, warm, raw, from an animal that was walking about this morning, dipped — and I want to be exact, because it is the correct way to do it — in the gall. It is a delicacy. It is offered to me first, which is an honour. Two children have stopped what they are doing to watch. And this body's hands take it happily, because this body has eaten it four hundred times, and the small horrified Englishman living behind this body's eyes says mm and oh, that's — that's very rich in a voice like a man describing a wine, and eats all of it, and is then given more, because I was enthusiastic. Let it be recorded that it is genuinely good and that I would not choose to do it again. And somewhere down the camp a man is playing a flute — a courting flute, four notes, over and over with a hopeless persistence — at a lodge where a girl is very deliberately not coming out. He has been at it since yesterday. Her father wants eight horses. His brother thinks he can raise six. A marriage here moves horses between families, and a young man's whole prospect in life is his herd and his record on a raid. The women near me have been enjoying it enormously for two days. Now. The appalling smell. It is the tanning — brains and smoke and worse, worked into a hide over days to turn a dead animal into something soft enough to be worth money — and I want you to smell it, because a raid brings home horses and people, and neither of those is money yet. Three days of a woman's hands is what turns a buffalo into the robe somebody wears in Paris. And there are, in this camp, more hides than the free women of it can possibly get through. Which brings me to the woman kneeling twenty feet away, whom I have been not-looking at since I arrived, because this body has been not-looking at her, and the not-looking is itself information. She came in with the horses in the spring, from a rancho down near the Rio Grande. She is perhaps twenty-five. She works the hide in front of her with hands that have learned this in one season and are not good at it yet, and her wrists are raw, and she works considerably harder than anyone else on this ground because she is doing the arithmetic too, and hers is simpler and much worse. She belongs to this household. She belongs to it the way the kettle does. And the arithmetic she is doing, every hour, is this: a woman who is useful is kept. A woman who is kept long enough is, sometimes, in the end, made kin — married, adopted, folded in, her children born free among the People with no mark on them at all. A woman who is not useful is walked to the fair at Taos in the autumn and sold, and Taos is where you stop being a person and become a price. So she is useful. She is aggressively, exhaustingly useful, and she has learned six words and uses them constantly, and she smiles at the senior wife — at me, at this body, whose good opinion is the only wall between her and the autumn — and the smile is a piece of work, done with the face, in the same spirit as the hide. And at night she goes where she is told, into the lodge of the man who owns two hundred and forty horses, and there is no consent in it anywhere, and no one in this camp would use a word for that, because in this camp it is simply what a captive is, and I am not going to walk you any further into that lodge than the doorway, but I am also not going to pretend the doorway is where it stops. And the body I am inside — and this is the part I find hardest — is not a monster. She is a competent, funny, tired woman in her forties who is kind to her own children and generous to her sisters and who, this morning, gave that captive the better scraper without being asked, and who has also, quite calmly, already decided that if the woman is not carrying a child by next autumn she is not worth her food. Both of those things are in the same head at the same time and neither of them is hidden from the other. In the afternoon riders come along the river and the camp goes up on its feet, because one of them is somebody — and I get a full four seconds of pure etiquette-terror, which is my most reliable emotion in any century: who is he, where does a senior wife stand, do I look at him, is it worse to look or worse to be seen not looking. This body knows perfectly well. This body keeps working and does not look up until he is past, which turns out to be exactly right, and I take no credit for it whatsoever. He is not young. He rides badly-well, if you know what I mean — no display in it at all — and over a buffalo robe he is wearing, of all the things in the world, a Spanish shirt of mail, iron rings, rust-brown at the shoulder, the sort of thing a conquistador's great-grandfather wore. The Spaniards who deal with him call him Cota de Malla. Coat of Mail. That is not his name. That is what they call the shirt. He is a paraibo out of the Kotsoteka, and he has come to talk, and the talking goes on for two days at the long fire, and the body I am in listens to a great deal of it while her hands keep working, because nobody tells the women to leave and it would not occur to anyone to. He does not raise his voice once. He asks questions he already knows the answers to. He gives away, in two days, four horses, a bale of hides and a knife, to men who did not ask him for anything — and every one of those gifts is a small deliberate weight laid on a scale I cannot see yet. And on the second evening he finally says the thing he rode here to say, and he says it to the fire rather than to any man at it, which is a way of saying a thing nobody wants to answer:

Ecueracapa: We win every year. And every year we are fewer. Count your dead against your horses. Then count them again, and tell me which of the two is growing.

Bram: And a big man across the fire tells him, politely and to general amusement, that he is getting old. A MAN AT THE FIRE: Old men count. Young men ride. You have been counting since the winter I was born. And this body, whose hands have not stopped, thinks: he is not wrong about the counting. And then thinks about the trader coming in four days, and goes back to the hide. The trader comes. He is late, he is apologetic, and he has been in three camps before this one. And nineteen days later this camp has a sickness in it that nobody here has ever seen and no one has any answer for at all, and the first one it takes is a child, and by the end of that autumn it has gone through the divisions like fire through grass and through the peoples north and south of them worse — and I am not going to dramatise a pox for you, because the thing about this kind of dying is that it is quiet and it is domestic and there is nothing to watch. There is only, at the end of it, a camp with fewer people in it than it had, and forty lodges' worth of horses standing out on the grass with not quite enough hands left to be worth what they were. The captive woman lives. So does the senior wife. Neither of them, I think, ever puts together what came up the river with the copper kettles. And somewhere south of here a man in a rusted mail shirt is counting his dead against his horses, and getting an answer he does not like, and beginning — slowly, and against enormous opposition — to do something about it. Let them work. I want to stand out on the grass a minute, away from that lodge, because I owe you the sentence I put off in the last camp and I am not going to bury it in the middle of something else. The People's ascendancy rested on captives. Not incidentally. Structurally. Every part of what you just watched — the two hundred and forty horses, the stacks of finished robes, the surplus that made a marginal people into the pivot of a continental trade — runs on labour, and there was never enough of it. A great herd needs herders. A hunt that kills forty buffalo in an afternoon needs hands to process forty buffalo before they spoil. So the raids that went out for horses came back with people, and the great majority of the people taken went straight to the herds: Apache children, Pueblo boys, Mexican and Spanish sons and daughters off the ranchos, and men and women from other plains peoples too, because this was not a thing done only to Europeans and it did not start with them. You watched one woman run that arithmetic in her own head, so I won't run it again. What she could not see from inside her lodge is the size of it, and the direction. This is not a handful of stolen children. It is a continental market, with prices and brokers and seasons, and the People are its largest single supplier and one of its largest buyers — and every neighbour they have is in it too, and so are the Spanish, on a scale that dwarfs anything on this grass, in mines and missions and in the households of Santa Fe. And the road that ends well ran through years you did not choose, and work you did not choose, and a bed you did not choose. A captive who was adopted — and a real number were, given a name, raised Numunu, married Numunu — got there by surviving all of that first. The People had no race theory. They had a household, and a household could absorb you. That is genuinely different from what was happening in the Caribbean at the same hour. It is not the same as being free. Here is why I am putting this here, at the height of the story and not tucked in at the end. Because the tidy way to tell you about the People of the Horse is either as a triumph with the cost filed off, or as a tragedy where nothing they did was theirs. Both are lies, and both are, in the end, the same lie: they turn people into a category. What was actually true is harder to carry: the freest people on this continent had built their freedom, in part, out of other people's, and knew it, and did it anyway, in a century where every power they had ever heard of was doing the same. So hold both. Hold the herds and the flute and the woman's hands and the astonishing thing they made. And hold the boy from the rancho, who is by now a competent horse-herder with a Numunu name, who has stopped crying at night, and who will one day have to decide what he is. And the sickness you watched arrive in one camp went through the whole plains and the peoples around them by the end of eighty-one. Understand what that does to a calculation. It does not make the People weak — they stay the paramount power on these plains for another two generations. But it is the first problem they have ever had that riding faster does not solve. And in a society where every death gets counted against every horse, a man in a rusted mail shirt has started saying a thing out loud that nobody wants to hear. And now the scene changes completely, because I want to take you to the other side of this — into a small whitewashed room four hundred miles south-east, in a Spanish town, where a governor with no army worth the name is about to try something that no Spanish governor on this frontier has ever seriously tried. Not winning. Buying. A bell across the river in San Antonio has just rung for something, and nobody in this room so much as looks up, so it is not important. October, seventeen eighty-five. San Antonio de Béxar, on the edge of Spanish Texas — a dusty little town of adobe and whitewash with a mission on the far bank and cottonwoods along the water. I am standing, not sitting, in a room where everyone else is sitting, which tells you what I am. The body is a man of about thirty. Spanish clothes that do not quite fit the shoulders. And the strangest set of reflexes I have ever inhabited, because when the Comanche chiefs across the table speak, this body relaxes, and when the governor of Texas speaks, this body braces — and it should be the other way round, and it is not, and it takes me most of a minute to work out why. His name is Francisco Xavier Chaves. He was taken as a boy, off a New Mexican settlement, and raised out on the plains among Comanche and Taovaya families, and he came back — grown, ransomed, returned to a Spanish world that is very glad to have him and does not remotely know what to do with him. He speaks the plains languages the way you speak the language of your childhood, which is to say he thinks in them. He is, today, the single most important man in this room, and everyone in it outranks him. Across the table are three principal chiefs of the eastern Comanche, who have ridden a long way to sit in a Spaniard's room, and beside me is Pedro Vial, a French-born frontiersman in Spanish service who went out into Comanchería this summer with gifts and came back with these three, and who is at this moment doing what he does best, which is being enormously relaxed in a room full of tension. And at the head of the table, with a scribe at his elbow, is Domingo Cabello, governor of Texas, who has spent his career watching this province bleed. Nobody in this room can check him. Because Chaves does not translate. Chaves decides, forty times an hour, what a thing is going to mean. Listen to one go past.

Cabello: Say to them that His Majesty is disposed to receive them into his royal protection as loyal vassals of the Crown, and to number them among his children.

Bram: Vassals. That is what the Spanish crown thinks it is offering — subject status under a king — and if that word crosses this table intact the parley is finished inside four seconds, because these three men have not ridden eleven days to acquire a king. So it does not cross. What crosses is this:

Chaves: He says the road between his people and yours is to be an open one, and that those who travel it are to be counted his friends, and that his hand is over them on it.

Bram: And this body's heart goes like a hammer while its face does absolutely nothing at all. He says everything twice in his head before once aloud. I can hear him do it. It is exhausting, and he has been doing it since he was nine. And it goes the other way too. The eldest of the three chiefs says something quite hard, and says it slowly, so that the interpreter cannot pretend not to have heard all of it:

The_eldest_chief: Twice in my life your people have asked us for peace, and twice they have put it down again when it stopped suiting them. So do not begin with his hand over anybody. Begin with what is different this time, and I will listen to that.

Bram: And Chaves does not soften it. He passes it across the table whole, in Spanish, in the governor's own register, and Cabello's jaw does something small, and this body's hands stay flat on the back of the chair in front of it and do not move at all. And the chief's question is still lying on the table, and the governor has not answered it, because the governor has not understood that it was a question. So this body answers it. Not as the interpreter. As himself, in the plains language, with his eyes on the man who asked — and then, because he has to, in Spanish, to the room, so that nobody can say afterwards that anything was hidden.

Chaves: What is different is that last time they were asking you to stop taking from them. This time they want to sell to you.

A_younger_chief: Sell what?

Chaves: Powder. Iron. Cloth. Maize in a bad year. And they want your robes and your horses badly enough that the man in this chair will be ruined in Mexico City if the road closes again. That is different. A promise can be put down. A debt cannot.

Bram: There is a long pause, and I am in the body that has to stand through it.

The_eldest_chief: And when they stop wanting robes?

Chaves: Then you will be where you are today, and no worse, and you will have had twenty years of not burying young men in between.

Bram: Cabello, who has followed about half of that, and who is nobody's fool, does the one thing that saves the parley: he does not ask me what I said.

Cabello: Tell him the fair at San Antonio will be open to his people from the spring, that my soldiers will stand at the scales, and that I will put it in writing over my own name and not the Crown's, so that if it fails he knows exactly whose word it was.

Bram: Over my own name. Cabello says it the way a man says a small procedural courtesy, and across the table three heads come up at once, and I carry it over as carefully as anything I have carried in my life. It takes three more days. But they make it. Of the twelve eastern Comanche groups, all but one sign on, and the one that doesn't — a chief called Pobea — comes in later anyway. The eastern half of the People has made peace with Spain, and Spain has paid for it, and it is October seventeen eighty-five, and nobody in New Mexico has done anything of the kind yet. Cabello is delighted. Cabello writes a magnificent report. Vial gets a fresh commission and a horse. And Chaves stands at the door as the chiefs go out and one of them says something to him on the way past — in the language he dreams in — and it is a joke, a small one, about how thin he has got living among Spaniards, and this body laughs before it can stop itself, out loud, in front of the governor. And then the room is Spanish again and he is standing in it with his hat in his hands, and the laugh is still somewhere in his chest with nowhere to go, and he waits to be told whether he may leave. There is a courier leaving in the morning for Santa Fe with a copy of the terms. Follow it with me. Because it lands, six weeks later, on the desk of the man who killed Cuerno Verde, and it ruins his evening. Ride with the courier a while. It's six weeks from San Antonio to Santa Fe with the winter coming on, and I want to use them, because something has changed in Madrid and it is the reason everything after this is possible. Spain in the seventeen-eighties is in the middle of the most serious attempt at reform it will ever make. The Bourbon kings have looked at an empire that is enormous and broke and decided to run it like a business instead of a relic, and one of the things they look at is this frontier, and what they see is a war that costs a fortune every year and is not being won. So they reorganise it. They pull the northern provinces out from under the viceroy in Mexico City and put them under a single soldier — the Commandant-General of the Provincias Internas, an office Teodoro de Croix built out of nothing from seventeen seventy-six — so that for the first time somebody can run one policy from Texas to California instead of eight governors each losing their own private war. And then comes the doctrine. It belongs above all to Bernardo de Gálvez, who took Pensacola off the British four years ago and who this summer has become Viceroy of New Spain — the whole enormous enterprise, from Guatemala to the Californias, is his desk now. And what Gálvez thinks about this frontier is, depending on how you feel about empires, either brilliantly pragmatic or quietly appalling, and it is certainly both. Stop trying to defeat these peoples. You cannot. Instead — trade with them. Give them presents, generously and every year, to the chiefs who keep the peace. Open the fairs. Sell them what they want. Sell them guns, even — he will put this in writing — sell them Spanish firearms, which need Spanish powder and Spanish gunsmiths, so that in twenty years the weapon in their hands only works if we are still friends. Sell them brandy if it comes to it. Make them need us. Peace, bought and then owned. He will set the whole thing down formally next year, in the instructions of seventeen eighty-six that his officers will work from for a generation. But the policy does not wait for the paperwork. It is already moving down the chain this autumn as permission — as the sentence a frontier governor needs before he can do the unthinkable — and it is the coldest colonial reasoning I have ever read, and also the first Spanish policy on this frontier in a century and a half that is based on an accurate description of reality. So that is what is arriving in Santa Fe with the courier, along with the news from Texas. Not an order to make peace — a permission, and a budget, and a theory. And the man it lands on is the one man in the empire who has actually beaten these people in the field, which turns out to matter enormously, because when he says the sword does not work, nobody can tell him he simply lacks the nerve to swing it. I want you in the room when he reads it. It's a small room and it's cold and there is nobody in it but him, which is a strange thing for me to say to you at this point in the story, but it is the truest scene in the Spanish half of it, and I have decided you should see it from the inside. November, seventeen eighty-five, in the Palace of the Governors at Santa Fe — which is a grand name for a single-storey mud building with a colonnade, and I am in a low adobe room off the long portal of it, and it is the northern end of everything the King has, and it is freezing. I am forty-nine years old and my back hurts. That's the first thing. The body is a soldier's body that has been in the saddle since it was a boy — Sonora-born, frontier-born, a criollo, which means Spanish blood and American dirt and a permanent low-grade suspicion from anyone born in Spain — and it has ridden to California and back twice opening a road nobody believed in, and it is now sitting at a table with a Franciscan's blanket over its knees like an old man. There is a map on the table. It is a bad map, and he knows every one of its lies, and there is a place on it, up near where the mountains meet the plains, where the paper has act…