Alarms of Struggle and Flight 7 страница

Kezzie’s expression throughout this recital hadn’t changed; I wasn’t sure how much of it he had heard, but he didn’t appear surprised. His hand rested on his twin’s arm for a moment, then slid off, reaching for a skewer of meat.

Brianna’s laughter had subsided, and she had been listening to Josiah’s confession with a furrowed brow.

“But you didn’t—I mean, I’m sure you didn’t take the baby in its cradleboard. And you didn’t kill the woman who was partly eaten . . . did you?”

Josiah blinked, though he seemed more baffled than shocked by the question.

“Oh, no. Why’d I do that? You don’t think I ate ’em, do ye?” He smiled at that, an incongruous dimple appearing in one cheek. “Mind, I been hungry enough now and then as I might consider it, if I happened on somebody dead—providin’ it was fairly recent,” he added judiciously. “But not hungry enough as I’d kill someone a-purpose.”

Brianna cleared her throat, with something startlingly like one of Jamie’s Scottish noises.

“No, I didn’t think you ate them,” she said dryly. “I just thought that if someone happened to have killed them—for some other reason—the bear could have come along and gnawed on the bodies.”

Peter nodded thoughtfully, seeming interested but unfazed by the assorted confessions.

“Aye, a bear’ll do that,” he said. “They’re no picky eaters, bears. Carrion is fine by them.”

Jamie nodded in response, but his attention was still fixed on Josiah.

“Aye, I’ve heard that, forbye. But Tsatsa’wi said he did see the bear take his friend—so it does kill people, no?”

“Well, it killed that one,” Josiah agreed. There was an odd tone to his voice, though, and Jamie’s look sharpened. He lifted a brow at Josiah, who worked his lips slowly in and out, deciding something. He glanced at Kezzie, who smiled at him. Kezzie, I saw, had a dimple in his left cheek, while Josiah’s was in the right.

Josiah sighed and turned back to face Jamie.

“I wasn’t a-goin’ to say about this part,” he said frankly. “But you been straight with us, sir, and I see it ain’t right I let you go after that bear not knowin’ what else might be there.”

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and resisted the sudden impulse to turn round and look into the shadows behind me. The urge to laugh had left me.

“What else?” Jamie slowly lowered the chunk of bread he had been about to bite into. “And just . . . what else might be there, then?”

“Well, ’twas only the once I saw for sure, mind,” Josiah warned him. “And ’twas a moonless night, too. But I’d been out all the night, and my eyes was well-accustomed to the starlight—you’ll know the way of it, sir.”

Jamie nodded, looking bemused.

“Aye, well enough. And ye were where, at the time?”

Near the village we were headed toward. Josiah had been there before, and was familiar with the layout of the place. A house at the end of the village was his goal; there were strings of corn hung to dry beneath the eaves, and he thought he could get away with one easily enough, provided he didn’t rouse the village dogs.

“Rouse one, ye’ve got ’em all a-yowling on your tail,” he said, shaking his head. “And it wasn’t but a couple of hours before the dawn. So I crept along slow-like, looking to see was one of the rascals curled up asleep by the house I had my eye on.” Lurking in the wood, he had seen a figure come out of the house. As no dogs took exception to this, it was a reasonable conclusion that the person belonged to the house. The man had paused to make water, and then, to Josiah’s alarm, had shouldered a bow and quiver, and marched directly toward the woods where he lay hidden.

“I didn’t think as he could be after me, but I went up a tree quick as a bob-tail cat, and not makin’ no more noise than one, neither,” he said, not bragging.

The man had most likely been a hunter, making an early start for a distant stream where raccoon and deer would come to drink at dawn. Not seeing any need of caution so near his own village, the man had not displayed any, walking through the forest quietly, but with no attempt at concealment.

Josiah had crouched in his tree, no more than a few feet above the man’s head, holding his breath. The man had gone on, disappearing at once into the heavy undergrowth. Josiah had been just about to descend from his perch when he had heard a sudden exclamation of surprise, followed by the sounds of a brief scuffle that concluded with a sickening thunk!

“Just like a ripe squash when you chunk it with a rock to break it open,” he assured Jamie. “Made my arse-hole draw up like a purse-string, hearin’ that noise, there in the dark.”

Alarm was no bar to curiosity, though, and he had eased through the wood in the direction of the sound. He could hear a rustling noise, and as he peered cautiously through a screen of cedar branches, he made out a human form stretched upon the ground, and another bending over it, evidently struggling to pull some kind of garment off the prone man’s body.

“He was dead,” Josiah explained, matter-of-factly. “I could smell the blood, and a shit-smell, too. Reckon the little fella caved in his head with a rock or maybe a club.”

“Little fella?” Peter had been following the story with close attention. “How little d’ye mean? Did ye see his face?”

Josiah shook his head.

“No, I saw naught but the shadow of him, movin’ about. It was full dark, still; the sky hadn’t started to go light yet.” He squinted, making a mental estimate. “Reckon he’d be shorter than me; maybe so high.” He held out a hand in illustration, measuring a distance some four and a half feet from the ground.

The murderer had been interrupted in his work of plundering the body, though. Josiah, intent on watching, had noticed nothing, until there came a sudden crack from a breaking stick, and the inquiring whuff of a questing bear.

“You best believe the little fella run when he heard that,” he assured Jamie. “He dashed right past, no further from me than you are now. That was when I got the only good look I had at him.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” I said, as he paused to take a gulp of his beer. “What did he look like?”

He wiped a line of foam from the sparse whiskers on his upper lip, looking thoughtful.

“Well, ma’am, I was pretty near sure he was the devil. Only I did think the devil would be bigger,” he added, taking another drink.

This statement naturally caused some confusion. Upon further elucidation, it appeared that Josiah merely meant that the mysterious “little fella” had been black.

“Wasn’t ’til I went along to that Gathering of yours that it come to me that some regular folks just are black,” he explained. “I hadn’t never seen anybody who was, nor heard tell of it, neither.”

Kezzie nodded soberly at this.

“Devil in the Book,” he said, in his odd, gruff voice.

“The Book,” it seemed, was an old Bible that Aaron Beardsley had taken somewhere in trade and never found a buyer for. Neither of the boys had ever been taught to read, but they were most entertained by the pictures in the Book, which included several drawings of the devil, depicted as a crouching black creature, going about his sly business of tempting and seduction.

“I didn’t see no forked tail,” Josiah said, shaking his head, “but then, he went by so fast, stood to reason I might have missed it in the dark and all.”

Not wanting to draw the attention of such a person to himself, Josiah had stood still, and thus been in a position to hear the bear giving its attention to the unfortunate inhabitant of the village.

“It’s like Mr. Peter says,” he said, nodding at Peter Bewlie in acknowledgment. “Bears ain’t particular. I never did see this ’un, so I can’t say was it the white one or no—but it surely did eat on that Indian. I heard it, chawin’ and slobberin’ like anything.” He seemed untroubled by this recollection, but I saw Brianna’s nostrils pinch at the thought.

Jamie exchanged looks with Peter, then glanced back at Josiah. He rubbed a forefinger slowly down the bridge of his nose, thinking.

“Well, then,” he said at last. “It seems that not all the evil doings in your brother-in-law’s village can be laid at the ghost-bear’s door, aye? What wi’ Josiah stealin’ food, and wee black devils killing folk. What d’ye ken, Peter? Might a bear take a taste for human flesh, once he’d had it, and then maybe go to hunting humans on his own?”

Peter nodded slowly, face creased in concentration.

“That might be, Mac Dubh,” he allowed. “And if there’s a wee black bastard hangin’ about in the wood—who’s to say how many the bear’s killed, and how many the wee black devil’s done for, and the bear takin’ the blame?”

“But who is this wee black devil?” Bree asked. The men looked from one to another, and shrugged, more or less in unison.

“It must be an escaped slave, surely?” I said, lifting my brows at Jamie. “I can’t see why a free black in his right mind would off go into the wilderness alone like that.”

“Maybe he isn’t in his right mind,” Bree suggested. “Slave or free. If he’s going around killing people, I mean.” She cast an uneasy look at the wood around us, and put a hand on Jemmy, who was curled in a blanket on the ground beside her, sound asleep.

The men looked automatically to their weapons, and even I reached under my apron to touch the knife I wore at my belt for digging and chopping.

The forest seemed suddenly both sinister and claustrophobic. It was much too easy to imagine lurking eyes in the shadows, ascribe the constant soft rustle of leaves to stealthy footsteps or the brush of passing fur.

Jamie cleared his throat.

“Your wife’s not mentioned black devils, I suppose, Peter?”

Bewlie shook his head. The concern with which he had greeted Josiah’s tale was still stamped upon his grizzled face, but a small touch of amusement gleamed in his eyes.

“No. I can’t say as she has, Mac Dubh. The only thing I recall in that regard is the Black Man o’ the West.”

“And who is that?” Josiah asked, interested.

Peter shrugged and scratched at his beard.

“Aye, well, I shouldna say it’s anyone, so to speak. Only that the shamans say there is a spirit who lives in each o’ the four directions, and each spirit has a color to him—so when they go to singin’ their prayers and the like, they’ll maybe call the Red Man o’ the East to help the person they’re singing for, because Red is the color of triumph and success. North, that’s blue—the Blue Man, to give the spirit of the North his right name—that’s defeat and trouble. So ye’d call on him to come and give your enemy a bit of grief, aye? To the South, that’s the White Man, and he’s peace and happiness; they sing to him for the women with child, and the like.”

Jamie looked both startled and interested to hear this.

“That’s verra like the four airts, Peter, is it no?”

“Well, it is, then,” Peter agreed, nodding. “Odd, no? That the Cherokee should get hold of the same notions as we Hielanders have?”

“Oh, not so much.” Jamie gestured to the dark wood, beyond the small circle of our fire. “They live as we do, aye? Hunters, and dwellers in the mountains. Why should they not see what we have seen?”

Peter nodded slowly, but Josiah was impatient with this philosophizing.

“Well, what’s the Black Man o’ the West, then?” he demanded. Both Jamie and Peter turned their heads as one to look at him. The two men looked nothing alike—Peter was short, squat, and genially bearded, Jamie tall and elegant, even in his hunting clothes—and yet there was something identical in their eyes, that made little mouse-feet run skittering down my spine. “What we have seen,” indeed! I thought.

“The West is the home of the dead,” Jamie said softly, and Peter nodded, soberly.

“And the Black Man o’ the West is death himself,” he added. “Or so say the Cherokee.”

Josiah was heard to mutter that he didn’t think so very much of that idea, but Brianna thought even less of it.

“I do not believe that the spirit of the West was out in the woods conking people on the head,” she declared firmly. “It was a person Josiah saw. And it was a black person. Ergo, it was either a free black or an escaped slave. And given the odds, I vote for escaped slave.”

I wasn’t sure it was a matter for democratic process, but I was inclined to agree with her.

“Here’s another thought,” she said, looking round. “What if it’s this little black man who’s responsible for some of the half-eaten people? Aren’t some of the African slaves cannibals?”

Peter Bewlie’s eyes popped at that; so did the Beardsleys’. Kezzie cast an uneasy look over his shoulder and edged closer to Josiah.

Jamie appeared amused at this suggestion, though.

“Well, I suppose ye might get the odd cannibal here and there in Africa,” he agreed. “Though I canna say I’ve heard of one amongst the slaves. I shouldna think they’d be verra desirable as house-servants, aye? Ye’d be afraid to turn your back, for fear of being bitten in the backside.”

This remark made everyone laugh, and relieved the tension somewhat. People began to stir and make preparations for going to bed.

We took especial care in putting the food into two of the saddlebags, which Jamie hung up in a tree, a good distance from the camp. Even if the ghost-bear had been revealed to be less powerful than previously supposed, there was an unspoken agreement that there was no sense taking chances.

For the most part, I managed to put aside the knowledge that we lived in a wilderness. Now and then some tangible evidence would shove the fact under my nose: nocturnal visits by foxes, possums, and raccoons, or the occasional unnerving screams of panthers, with their uncanny resemblance to the crying of women or the shrieks of small children. It was quiet now, where we were. But there was no way of standing in the center of those mountains at night, submerged in the absolute black at their feet, listening to the secret murmurs of the great trees overhead, and pretending that one was anywhere but in the grip of the forest primeval—or of doubting that the wilderness could swallow us in one gulp, if it cared to, leaving not a clue behind of our existence.

For all her logic, Brianna was by no means immune to the whispers of the forest—not with a small and tender child to guard. She didn’t help with the readying of camp for the night, but instead sat close to Jemmy, loading her rifle.

Jamie, after a quick look at Brianna, announced that he and she would take the first watch; Josiah and I the next, and Peter and Kezzie the last watch of the night. Heretofore, we hadn’t kept a watch, but no one complained at this suggestion.

A long day in the saddle is one of the best soporifics, and I lay down beside Jamie with that utter gratitude for being horizontal that compensates for the hardest of beds. Jamie’s hand rested gently on my head; I turned my face and kissed his palm, feeling safe and protected.

Peter and the Beardsley twins fell asleep within seconds; I could hear them snoring on the other side of the fire. I was nearly asleep myself, lulled by the quiet, half-heard talk between Jamie and Bree, when I became aware that the tenor of their conversation had changed.

“Are ye worrit for your man, a nighean?” he asked softly.

She gave a small, unhappy laugh.

“I’ve been worrit since they hanged him,” she said. “Now I’m scared, too—or should that be ‘scairt’?” she asked, trying to make a joke of it.

Jamie made a low noise in his throat, which I think he meant to be soothing.

“He’s in no more danger tonight than he was last night, lass—nor any night since he set out.”

“True,” she answered dryly. “But just because I didn’t know about ghost-bears and black murderers last week doesn’t mean they weren’t out there.”

“My point precisely,” he replied. “He’ll be no safer for your fear, will he?”

“No. You think that’s going to stop me worrying?”

There was a low, rueful chuckle in reply.

“I shouldna think so, no.”

There was a brief silence, before Brianna spoke again.

“I just—keep thinking. What will I do, if something does happen—if he . . . doesn’t come back? I’m all right during the day, but at night, I can’t help thinking . . .”

“Och, well,” he said softly. I saw him tilt up his head to the stars, blazing overhead. “How many nights in twenty years, a nighean? How many hours? For I spent that long in wondering whether my wife still lived, and how she fared. She and my child.”

His hand ran smoothly over my head, gently stroking my hair. Brianna said nothing in reply, but made a small, inarticulate sound in her throat.

“That is what God is for. Worry doesna help—prayer does. Sometimes,” he added honestly.

“Yes,” she said, sounding uncertain. “But if—”

“And if she had not come back to me”—he interrupted firmly—“if you had not come—if I had never known—or if I had known for sure that both of you were dead . . .” He turned his head to look at her, and I felt the shift of his body as he lifted his hand from my hair and reached out his other hand to touch her. “Then I would still have lived, a nighean, and done what must be done. So will you.”

A DARKENING SKY

ROGER PUSHED HIS WAY through a thick growth of sweet gum and pin oak, sweating. He was close to water; he couldn’t hear it yet, but could smell the sweet, resinous scent of some plant that grew on streambanks. He didn’t know what it was called, or even for sure which plant it was, but he recognized the scent.

The strap of his pack caught on a twig, and he jerked it free, setting loose a flutter of yellow leaves like a small flight of butterflies. He would be glad to reach the stream, and not only for the sake of water, though he needed that. The nights were growing cold, but the days were still warm, and he had emptied his canteen before noon.

More urgently than water, though, he needed open air. Down here in the bottomland, the stands of dogwood and sweet bay grew so thickly that he could barely see the sky, and where the sun poked through, thick grass sprang up knee-high and the prickly leaves of dahoon caught at him as he passed.

He had brought Clarence the mule, as being better suited than the horses to the rough going in the wilderness, but some places were too rough even for a mule. He had left Clarence hobbled on the higher ground, with his bedroll and saddlebags, while he thrashed his way through the brush to reach the next point for a survey reading.

A wood-duck burst from the brush at his feet, nearly stopping his heart with the drumming of its wings. He stood still, heart thumping in his ears, and a horde of vivid little parakeets came chattering through the trees, swooping down to look at him, friendly and curious. Then something unseen gave them alarm and they rose up in a bright shriek of flight, arrowing away through the trees.

It was hot; he took off his coat and tied the sleeves round his waist, then wiped his face with a shirtsleeve and resumed his shoving, the weight of the astrolabe swinging on a thong round his neck. From the top of a mountain, he could look down on the misty hollows and wooded ridges, and take a certain awed pleasure in the thought that he owned such a place. Down here, come to grips with wild vines, burrowing fox-tails, and thickets of bamboolike cane higher than his head, the thought of ownership was ridiculous—how could something like this—this fucking swamp primeval—possibly be owned?

Ownership aside, he wanted to finish with this jungle and get back to higher ground. Even dwarfed by the gigantic trees of the virgin forest, a man could breathe in the space beneath. The limbs of the giant tulip trees and chestnuts stretched in a canopy overhead that shaded the ground beneath, so that only small things grew beneath—mats of delicate wildflowers, lady’s slippers, trilliums—and the trees’ dead leaves rained down in such profusion that one’s feet sank inches into the springy mat.

Incomprehensible that such a place should ever alter—and yet it did, it would. He knew that fine; knew it—better than knew it, he’d bloody seen it! He’d driven a car down a paved highway, straight through the heart of a place once like this. He knew it could be changed. And yet as he struggled through the growth of sumac and partridgeberry, he knew even better that this place could swallow him without a second’s hesitation.

Still, there was something about the sheer awful scale of the wilderness that soothed him. Among the gigantic trees and teeming wildlife, he found some peace; peace from the dammed-up words inside his head, from the unspoken worry in Brianna’s eyes, the judgment in Jamie’s—judgment withheld, but hanging there like the sword of Damocles. Peace from the glances of pity or curiosity, from the constant slow, aching effort of speech—peace from the memory of singing.

He missed them all, especially Bree and Jem. He seldom dreamed with any coherence; not like Bree—what was she writing now in her book?—but he had wakened this morning from a vivid impression of Jem, crawling over him as he liked to do, poking and prodding inquisitively, then softly patting Roger’s face, exploring eyes and ears, nose and mouth, as though searching for the missing words.

He hadn’t spoken at all for the first few days of surveying, terribly relieved not to have to. Now he was beginning to talk again, though—disliking the hoarse, mangled sound of the words, but not so bothered, since there was no one else to hear.

He heard the gurgle then of water over stones, and burst through a screen of willow saplings to find the stream at his feet, sun sparking off the water. He knelt and drank and splashed his face, then chose the spots along the bank from which to take his sightings. He dug the ledger book, ink, and quill from the leather bag over his shoulder, and fished the astrolabe out of his shirt.

He had a song in his head—again. They sneaked in when he wasn’t looking, melodies singing in his inner ear like sirens from the rocks, ready to dash him in pieces.

Not this one, though. He smiled to himself, as he nudged the bar of the astrolabe and sighted on a tree on the opposite bank. It was a children’s song, one of the counting songs Bree sang to Jemmy. One of those terrible songs that got into one’s head and wouldn’t get out again. As he took his sightings and made the notations in his book, he chanted under his breath, ignoring the cracked distortion of the sounds.

“The . . . ants go . . . mar-shing . . . one . . . by one.”

Five thousand acres. What in hell was he to do with it? What in hell was he to do, period?

“Down . . . to . . . the gr-grround . . . to ggetout . . . atha RAIN . . . bum, bum, bum . . .”

I DISCOVERED QUICKLY why my name had appeared to have significance to Tsatsa’wi; the name of the village was Kalanun’yi—Raventown. I didn’t see any ravens as we rode in, but did hear one, calling hoarsely from the trees.

The village lay in a charming location; a narrow river valley at the foot of a smallish mountain. The town itself was surrounded by a small spread of fields and orchards. A middling stream ran past it, dropping down a small cataract and flowing off down the valley into what looked from a distance like a huge thicket of bamboo—a canebrake, it was called, the leafy giant canes glowing dusty gold in the sun of early afternoon.

We were greeted with cordial enthusiasm by the residents of the town, lavishly fed and entertained for a day and a night. In the afternoon of the second day, we were invited to join in what I gathered was a petition to whichever Cherokee deity was in charge of hunting, to invoke favor and protection for the expedition against the ghost-bear that was to take place next day.

It had not occurred to me, prior to meeting Jackson Jolly, that there might be as much variance in talent among Indian shaman as there was among the Christian clergy. I had by this time encountered several of both species, but buffered by the mysteries of language, had not previously realized that a calling as shaman did not necessarily guarantee a person the possession of personal magnetism, spiritual power, or a gift for preaching.

Watching a slow glaze spread across the features of the people packed into Peter Bewlie’s wife’s father’s house, I realized now that whatever his personal charm or connections with the spirit world, Jackson Jolly was sadly lacking in the last of these talents.

I had noticed a certain look of resignation on the faces of some of the congregation as the shaman took his place before the hearth, clad in a shawl-like blanket of red flannel, and wearing a mask carved in the semblance of a bird’s face. As he began to speak, in a loud, droning voice, the woman next to me shifted her weight heavily from one leg to the other and sighed.

The sighing was contagious, but it wasn’t as bad as the yawning. Within minutes, half the people around me were gaping, eyes watering like fountains. My own jaw muscles ached from being clenched, and I saw Jamie blinking like an owl.

Jolly was undoubtedly a sincere shaman; he also appeared to be a boring one. The only person who appeared riveted by his petitions was Jemmy, who perched in Brianna’s arms, mouth hanging open in awe.

The chant for bear-hunting was a fairly monotonous one, featuring endless repetitions of “He! Hayuya’haniwa, hayuya’haniwa, hayuya’haniwa . . .” Then slight variations on the theme, each verse ending up with a rousing—and rather startling—“Yoho!”, as though we were all about to set sail on the Spanish main with a bottle of rum.

The congregation exhibited more enthusiasm during this song, though, and it finally dawned on me that what was wrong was probably not with the shaman himself. The ghost-bear had been plaguing the village for months; they must have gone through this particular ceremony several times, already, with no success. No, it wasn’t that Jackson Jolly was a poor preacher; only that his congregation was suffering a lack of faith.

After the conclusion of the song, Jolly stamped fiercely on the hearth as punctuation to something he was saying, then took a sage-wand from his pouch, thrust it into the fire, and began to march round the room, waving the smoke over the congregation. The crowd parted politely as he marched up to Jamie and circled him and the Beardsley twins several times, chanting and perfuming them with wafts of fragrant smoke.

Jemmy thought this intensely funny. So did his mother, who was standing on my other side, vibrating with suppressed giggling. Jamie stood tall and straight, looking extremely dignified, as Jolly—who was quite short—hopped around him like a toad, lifting the tail of his coat to perfume his backside. I didn’t dare catch Brianna’s eye.

This phase of the ceremony complete, Jolly regained his position by the fire and began to sing again. The woman next to me shut her eyes and grimaced slightly.

My back was beginning to ache. At long last, the shaman concluded his proceedings with a shout. He then retired into the offing and took off his mask, wiping the sweat of righteous labor from his brow and looking pleased with himself. The headman of the village then stepped up to speak, and people began to shift and stir.

I stretched, as unobtrusively as possible, wondering what there might be for supper. Distracted by these musings, I didn’t at first notice that the shiftings and stirrings were becoming more pronounced. Then the woman beside me straightened up abruptly and said something loud, in a tone of command. She cocked her head to one side, listening.

The headman stopped talking at once, and all around me people began to look upward. Bodies grew rigid and eyes grew wide. I heard it, too, and a sudden shiver raised gooseflesh on my forearms. The air was filled with a rush of wings.

“What on earth is that?” Brianna whispered to me, looking upward like everyone else. “The descent of the Holy Ghost?”

I had no idea, but it was getting louder—much louder. The air was beginning to vibrate, and the noise was like a long, continuous roll of thunder.

“Tsiskwa!” shouted a man in the crowd, and all of a sudden there was a stampede for the door.

Rushing out of the house, I thought at first that a storm had come suddenly upon us. The sky was dark, the air filled with thunder, and a strange, dim light flickered over everything. But there was no moisture in the air, and a peculiar smell filled my nose—not rain. Definitely not rain.

“Birds, my god, it’s birds!” I barely heard Brianna behind me, among the chorus of amazement all around. Everyone stood in the street, looking up. Several children, frightened by the noise and darkness, started to cry.

It was unnerving. I had never seen anything like it—nor had most of the Cherokee, judging from their reaction. It felt as though the ground was shaking; the air was certainly shaking, vibrating to the clap of wings like a drum being slapped with frantic hands. I could feel the pulse of it on my skin, and the cloth of my kerchief tugged, wanting to rise on the wind.