Drums of Autumn, Page 29

  arms around my waist, holding on for dear life. I patted one of the hands clutched about my middle, and she squeezed tighter, but made no other move or sound.

  Little wonder if she was terrified, I thought, turning my horse’s head to follow Myers’s. She might not know about the hullabaloo Murchison was raising in the district, but she could have no illusions about what might happen if she was caught; she had certainly been among the crowd at the sawmill two weeks earlier.

  As an alternative to certain death, flight into the arms of red savages might be slightly preferable, but not by much, to judge from her trembling; the weather was far from cold, but she shook as though with chill.

  She nearly squeezed the stuffings out of me when Rollo appeared, stalking out of the bushes like some demon of the forest. My horse didn’t like the look of him, either, and backed up, snorting and stamping, trying to jerk the reins away from me.

  I had to admit that Rollo was reasonably fearsome, even when he was in an amiable mood, which he was, at the moment—Rollo loved expeditions. Still, he undoubtedly presented a sinister aspect; all his teeth were showing in a grin of delight, his slitted eyes half closed as he whiffed the air. Add to that the way the grays and blacks of his coat faded into the shadows, and one was left with the queer and unsettling illusion that he had materialized out of the substance of the night, Appetite incarnate.

  He trotted directly past us, no more than a foot away, and the woman gasped, her breath hot on my neck. I patted her hand again, and spoke to her, but she made no answer. Duncan had said she was Africa-born and spoke little English, but surely she must understand a few words.

  “It will be all right,” I said again. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Occupied with horse and passenger, I hadn’t noticed Jamie, until he appeared suddenly by my stirrup, light-footed as Rollo.

  “All right, Sassenach?” he asked softly, putting a hand on my thigh.

  “I think so,” I said. I nodded at the death-grip round my middle. “If I don’t die of suffocation.”

  He looked, and smiled.

  “Well, she’s in no danger of fallin’ off, at least.”

  “I wish I knew something to say to her; poor thing, she’s so afraid. Do you suppose she even knows where we’re taking her?”

  “I shouldna think so—I dinna ken where we’re going.” He wore breeks for riding, but had his plaid belted over them, the free end slung across the shoulder of his coat. The dark tartan blended into the shadows of the forest as well as it had the shades of the Scottish heather; all I could see of him was a white blotch of shirt-front and the pale oval of his face.

  “Do you know any useful taki-taki to say to her?” I asked. “Of course, she might not know that, either, if she wasn’t brought through the Indies.”

  He turned his head and looked up at my passenger, considering.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s the one thing they’ll all know, no matter where they’ve come.” He reached out and squeezed the woman’s foot firmly.

  “Freedom,” he said, and paused. “Saorasa. D’yke ken what I say?”

  She didn’t loosen her grip, but her breath went out in a shuddering sigh, and I thought I felt her nod.

  * * *

  The horses followed each other in single file, Myers in the lead. The rough track was not even a wagon trail, only a sort of flattening of under-growth, but it did at least provide clear passage through the trees.

  I doubted that Sergeant Murchison’s vengeance would pursue us so far—if he pursued us at all—but the sense of escape was too strong to ignore. We shared an unspoken but pervasive sense of urgency, and with no particular discussion, agreed to ride on as far as possible.

  My passenger was either losing her fear or simply becoming too tired to care anymore; after a midnight stop for refreshment she allowed Ian and Myers to boost her back on the horse without protest, and while she never released her hold on my waist, she did seem to doze now and then, her forehead pressed against my shoulder.

  The fatigue of long riding crept over me, too, aided by the hypnotic soft thudding of the horses’ feet, and the unending susurrus of the pines overhead. We were still in the longleaf forest, and the tall, straight trunks surrounded us like the masts of long-sunk ships.

  Lines of an ancient Scottish song drifted through my mind—“How many strawberries grow in the salt sea; how many ships sail in the forest?”—and I wondered muzzily whether the composer had walked through a place like this, unearthly in half-moon and starlight, so dreamlike that the borders between the elements were lost; we might as well be afloat as earthbound, the heave and fall beneath me the rise of planking, and the sound of the pines the wind in our sails.

  We stopped at dawn, unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and left them to feed in the long grass of a small meadow. I found Jamie, and curled up at once into a nest of grass beside him, the horses’ peaceful champing the last thing I heard.

  We slept heavily through the heat of the day, and awoke near sunset, stiff, thirsty, and covered with ticks. I was profoundly thankful that the ticks seemed to share the mosquitoes’ general distaste for my flesh, but I had learned on our trip north to check Jamie and the others every time we slept; there were always outriders.

  “Ick,” I said, examining a particularly juicy specimen, the size of a grape, nestling amid the soft cinnamon hair of Jamie’s underarm. “Damn, I’m afraid to pull that one; it’s so full it’ll likely burst.”

  He shrugged, busy exploring his scalp with the other hand, in search of further intruders.

  “Leave it while ye deal with the rest,” he suggested. “Perhaps it will fall of its own accord.”

  “I suppose I’d better,” I agreed reluctantly. I hadn’t any objection to the tick’s bursting, but not while its jaws were still embedded in Jamie’s flesh. I’d seen infections caused by forcibly interrupted ticks, and they weren’t anything I wanted to deal with in the middle of a forest. I had only a rudimentary medical kit with me—though this luckily included a very fine pair of small tweezer-pointed forceps from Dr. Rawlings’s box.

  Myers and Ian seemed to be managing all right; both stripped to the waist, Myers was crouched over the boy like a huge black baboon, fingers busy in Ian’s hair.

  “Here’s a wee one,” Jamie said, bending over and pushing his own hair aside so I could reach the small dark bleb behind his ear. I was engaged in gently maneuvering the creature out, when I became aware of a presence near my elbow.

  I had been too tired to take much notice of our fugitive when we made camp, rightly assuming that she wasn’t going to wander off into the wilderness by herself. She had wandered as far as a nearby stream, though, returning with a bucket of water.

  She set this on the ground, dipped up a handful of water and funneled it into her mouth. She chewed vigorously for a moment, cheeks puffed out. Then she motioned me aside and, lifting a surprised Jamie’s arm, spat forcefully and profusely into his armpit.

  She reached into the dripping hollow, and with delicate fingers appeared to tickle the parasite. She certainly tickled Jamie, who was very sensitive in that particular region. He turned pink in the face and flinched at her touch, all the muscles in his torso quivering.

  She held tight to his wrist, though, and within seconds, the bulging tick dropped off into the palm of her hand. She flicked it disdainfully away, and turned to me, with a small air of satisfaction.

  I had thought she resembled a ball, muffled in her cloak. Seen without it, she still did. She was very short, no more than four feet, and nearly as wide, with a close-cropped head like a cannonball, her cheeks so round that her eyes were slanted above them.

  She looked like nothing so much as one of the carved African fertility images I had seen in the Indies; massive of bosom, heavy of haunch, and the rich, burnt-coffee color of a Congolese, with skin so flawless that it looked like polished stone under its thin layer of sweat. She held out her hand to me, showing me a few small objects in her palm, the gene
ral size and shape of dried lima beans.

  “Paw-paw,” she said, in a voice so deep that even Myers turned his head toward her, startled. It was a huge, rich voice, reverberant as a drum. Seeing my reaction to it, she smiled a little shyly, and said something I didn’t quite understand, though I knew it was Gaelic.

  “She says ye must not swallow the seeds, for they’re poison,” Jamie translated, eyeing her rather warily as he wiped his armpit with the end of his plaid.

  “Hau,” Pollyanne agreed, nodding vigorously. “Poi-zin.” She stooped over the bucket for another handful of water, washed it round her mouth, and spat it at a rock with a noise like a gunshot.

  “You could be dangerous with that,” I told her. I didn’t know whether she understood me, but she gathered from my smile that I meant to be cordial; she smiled back, popped two more of the paw-paw seeds into her mouth, and beckoned to Myers, already chewing, the seeds making little crunching pops as she pulverized them between her teeth.

  By the time we had eaten supper and were ready to leave, she was nervously willing to try riding alone. Jamie coaxed her to the horse, and showed her how to let the beast smell her. She trembled as the big nose nudged her, but then the horse snorted; she jumped, giggled in a voice like honey poured out of a jug, and allowed Jamie and Ian between them to boost her aboard.

  Pollyanne remained shy of the men, but she soon gained enough confidence to talk to me, in a polyglot mixture of Gaelic, English, and her own language. I couldn’t have translated it, but both her face and body were so expressive that I could often gather the sense of what she was saying, even though I understood only one word in ten. I could only regret that I was not equally fluent in body language; she didn’t understand most of my questions and remarks, so I had to wait until we made camp, when I could prevail on Jamie or Ian to help me with bits of Gaelic.

  Freed—at least temporarily—from the constraint of terror, and becoming cautiously secure in our company, a naturally effervescent personality emerged, and she talked with abandon as we rode side by side, regardless of my comprehension, laughing now and then with a low hooting noise like wind blowing across the mouth of a cave.

  She became subdued only once: when we passed through a large clearing where the grass rose in strange undulant mounds, as though a great serpent lay buried underneath. Pollyanne went silent when she saw them, and in an effort to hurry her horse, instead succeeded only in pulling on the reins and stopping it dead. I rode back to help her.

  “Droch àite,” she murmured, glancing out of the corner of her eye at the silent mounds. A bad place. “Djudju.” She scowled, and made a small, quick gesture with her hand, some sign against evil, I thought.

  “Is it a graveyard?” I asked Myers, who had circled back to see why we had stopped. The mounds were not evenly spaced, but were distributed around the edge of the clearing in a pattern that didn’t look like any natural formation. The mounds seemed too large to be graves, though—unless they were cairns, such as the ancient Scots built, or mass graves, I thought, uneasy at the memory of Culloden.

  “Not to say graveyard,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “ ’Twas a village once. Tuscarora, I expect. Those rises there”—he waved a hand—“those are houses, fallen down. The big ’un to the side, that will have been the chief’s longhouse. It be taken no time atall, the grasses come over it. From the looks, though, this ’un will have been buried a time back.”

  “What happened to it?” Ian and Jamie had stopped, too, and come back to look over the small clearing.

  Myers scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

  “I couldn’t be sayin’, not for certain sure. Might be as sickness drove ’em out, might be as they were put to rout by the Cherokee or the Creek, though we be a mite north of the Cherokee land. Most likely as it happened during the war, though.” He dug fiercely into his beard, twisted, and flicked away the remnants of a lingering tick. “Can’t say as it’s a place I’d tarry by choice.”

  Pollyanne being plainly of the same mind, we rode on. By evening, we had passed entirely out of the pines and scrubby oakland of the foothills. We were climbing in good earnest now, and the trees began to change; small groves of chestnut trees, large patches of oak and hickory, with scattered dogwood and persimmon, chinkapin and poplar, surrounded us in waves of feathery green.

  The smell and feel of the air changed, too, as we rose. The overwhelming hot resins of the pine trees gave way to lighter, more varied scents, tree leaves mingled with whiffs of the shrubs and flowers that grew from every crevice of the craggy rocks. It was still damp and humid, but not so hot; the air no longer seemed a smothering blanket, but something we might breathe—and breathe with pleasure, filled as it was with the perfumes of leaf mold, sun-warmed leaves, and damp moss.

  By sunset of the sixth day, we were well into the mountains, and the air was full of the sound of running water. Streams crisscrossed the valleys, spilling off ridges and trickling down the steep rock faces, trailing mist and moss like a delicate green fringe. When we rounded the side of one steep hill, I stopped in amazement; from the side of a distant mountain, a waterfall leapt into the air, arching a good eighty feet in its fall to the gorge far below.

  “Will ye look at that, now?” Ian was openmouthed with awe.

  “ ’Tis right pretty,” Myers allowed, with the smug complacence of a proprietor. “Ain’t the biggest falls I’ve seen, but it’s nice enough.”

  Ian turned his head, eyes wide.

  “There are bigger ones?”

  Myers laughed, a mountain man’s quiet laugh, no more than a breath of sound.

  “Boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  We camped for the night in a hollow near a good-sized creek—one big enough for trout. Jamie and Ian waded into this with enthusiasm, harrying the finny denizens with whippy rods cut from black willow. I hoped they would have some luck; our fresh provisions were running low, though we still had plenty of cornmeal left.

  Pollyanne came scrambling up the bank, bringing a bucket of water with which to make a new batch of corn dodgers. These were small oblongs of rough cornmeal biscuit made for traveling; tasty when fresh and hot, and at least edible the next day. They became steadily less appetizing with time, resembling nothing so much as small chunks of cement by the fourth day. Still, they were portable, and not prone to mold, and thus were popular traveling fare, along with dried beef and salt pork.

  Pollyanne’s natural ebullience seemed a trifle subdued, her round face shadowed. Her eyebrows were so sketchy as to be almost nonexistent, which had the paradoxical effect of increasing the expressiveness of her face in motion, and wiping all expression from it in repose. She could be as impassive as a ball bearing when she wanted to; a useful skill for a slave.

  I supposed that her preoccupation was at least in part because this was the last night on which we would all be together. We had reached the backcountry, the limits of the King’s land; tomorrow, Myers would turn to the north, taking her across the spine of the mountains into the Indian lands, to find what safety and what life she might there.

  Her round dark head was bent over the wooden bowl, stubby fingers mixing cornmeal with water and lard. I crouched across from her, feeding small sticks to the infant fire, the black iron girdle standing ready-greased beside it. Myers had gone off to smoke a pipe; I could hear Jamie call to Ian somewhere downstream, and a faint answering laugh.

  It was deep twilight by now; our hollow was ringed by brooding mountains, and darkness seemed to fill the shallow bowl, creeping up the trunks of the trees around us. I had no notion of the place she had come from, whether it might be forest or jungle, seashore or desert, but I thought it unlikely to be much like this.

  What could she be thinking? She had survived the journey from Africa, and slavery; I supposed whatever lay ahead couldn’t be much worse. It was an unknown future, though—going into a wilderness so vast and absolute that I felt every moment as though I might vanish into it, consumed without
a trace. Our fire seemed the merest spark against the vastness of the night.

  Rollo strolled into the light of the fire and shook himself, spraying water in all directions, making the fire hiss and spit. He had joined in the fishing, I saw.

  “Go away, horrible dog,” I said. He didn’t, of course; simply came up and nosed me rudely, to be sure I was still who he thought I was, then turned to give Pollyanne the same treatment.

  With no particular expression, she turned her head and spat in his eye. He yelped, backed up, and stood shaking his head, looking thoroughly surprised. She looked up at me and grinned, her teeth very white in her face.

  I laughed, and decided not to worry too much; anyone capable of spitting in a wolf’s eye would likely cope with Indians, wilderness, and anything else that came along.

  The bowl was nearly empty, a neat row of corn dodgers laid on the girdle. Pollyanne wiped her fingers on a handful of grass, watching the yellow cornmeal begin to sizzle and turn brown as the lard melted. A warm, comforting smell rose from the fire, mingled with the scent of burning wood, and my belly rumbled softly in anticipation. The fire seemed more substantial now, the scent of cooking food spreading its warmth in a wider circle, keeping the night at bay.

  Had it been this way where she came from? Had fires and food held back a jungle darkness, kept away leopards instead of bears? Had light and company given comfort, and the illusion of safety? For illusion it had surely been—fire was no protection against men, or the darkness that had overtaken her. I had no words to ask.

  * * *

  “I have never seen such fishing, never,” Jamie repeated for the fourth time, a look of dreamy bliss on his face as he broke open a steaming trout fried in cornmeal. “They were swarming in the water, were they not, Ian?”

  Ian nodded, a similar look of reverence on his own homely features.

  “My Da would give his other leg to ha’ seen it,” he said. “They jumped on the hook, Auntie, truly!”

  “The Indians don’t generally bother with hook and line,” Myers put in, neatly spearing his own share of fish with his knife. “They build snares and fish traps, or sometimes they’ll put some sticks and rubbish crost the creek to prevent the fish, then stand above with a sharp stick, just spearin’ them from the water.”

  That was enough for Ian; any mention of Indians and their ways provoked a rash of eager questions. Having exhausted the methods of fish-catching, he asked again about the abandoned village we had seen earlier in our journey.

  “Ye said it might have happened in the war,” Ian said, lifting the bones from a steaming trout, then shaking his fingers to cool them. He passed a section of the boneless flesh to Rollo, who swallowed it in a single gulp, temperature notwithstanding. “Will that ha’ been the war wi’ the French, then? I didna ken there was any fighting so far south.”

  Myers shook his head, chewing and swallowing before he answered.

  “Oh, no. It’ll be the Tuscarora War I was meanin’; that’s how they call it on the white side, at least.”

  The Tuscarora War, he explained, had been a short-lived but brutal conflict some forty years before, brought on by an attack upon some backcountry settlers. The then governor of the colony had sent troops into the Tuscarora villages in retaliation, and the upshot was a series of pitched battles that the colonists, much better armed, had won handily—to the devastation of the Tuscarora nation.

  Myers nodded toward the darkness.

  “Ain’t no more than seven villages o’ the Tuscarora left, now—and not above fifty or a hundred souls in any but the biggest one.” So sadly diminished, the Tuscarora would quickly have fallen prey to surrounding tribes and disappeared altogether, had they not been formally adopted by the Mohawk, and thus become part of the powerful Iroquois League.

  Jamie came back to the fire with a bottle from his saddlebag. It was Scotch whisky, a parting present from Jocasta. He poured out a small cupful, then offered the half-full bottle to Myers.

  “Is the Mohawk country not a verra great distance to the north?” he asked. “How can they offer protection to their fellows here, and they with hostile tribes all round?”

  Myers took a gulp of whisky and washed it pleasurably around his mouth before answering.

  “Mmm. That’s fine stuff, friend James. Oh, the Mohawk are a good ways off, aye. But the Nations of the Iroquois are a name to reckon with—and of all the Six Nations, the Mohawk are the fiercest. Ain’t no one—red or white—goin’ to mess with the Mohawk ’thout good cause, nossir.”

  I was fascinated by this. I was also pleased to hear that the Mohawk territory was a good long way away from us.

  “Why did the Mohawk want to adopt the Tuscarora, then?” Jamie asked, lifting one brow. “It doesna seem they’d be needing allies, and they so fierce as ye say.”

  Myers’s hazel eyes had gone to dreamy half-slits under the influence of good whisky.

  “Oh, they’re fierce, all right—but they’re mortal,” he said, “Indians are men o’ blood, and none more than the Mohawk. They’re men of honor, mind”—he raised a thick finger in admonition—“but there’s a sight of things they’ll kill for, some reasonable, some not. They raid, d’ye see, amongst themselves, and they’ll kill for revenge—ain’t nothin’ will stop a Mohawk bent on revenge, save you kill him. And even then, his brother or his son or his nephew will come after you.”

  He licked his lips in slow meditation, savoring the slick of whisky on his skin.

  “Sometimes Indians don’t kill for any reason a man would say mattered; specially when liquor’s involved.”

  “Sounds very much like the Scots,” I murmured to Jamie, who gave me a cold look in return.

  Myers picked up the whisky bottle and rolled it slowly between his palms.

  “Any man might take a drop too much and be the worse in his actions for it, but with the Indians, the first drop’s too much. I’ve heard of more than one massacre that might not have been, save for the men bein’ mad with drink.”

  He shook his head, recalling himself to his subject.

  “Be so as it may, it’s a hard life, and a bloody one. Some tribes are wiped out altogether, and none have men to spare. So they adopt folk into the tribe, to replace those as are killed or die of sickness. They take prisoners, sometimes—take ’em into a family, treat ’em as their own. That’s what they’ll do with Mrs. Polly, there.” He nodded at Pollyanne, who sat quietly by the fire, paying no attention to his speech.