Chapter Seventeen

INDIANS

“I unmanned them,” I complain to Stella from the doorway of her cabin.

The atmosphere was so thick on deck after the boys flew off, I sent the men off to the beach for one of their football matches with the black and white leather ball Nutter brought back from the other world. They’ve been testing their insulted manhood against each other all day, and come back stinking, bloody and begrimed, in no less foul a humor than when they set out. Having spent my afternoon sweltering in the top, spelling Gato, I too am spoiling for a fight. “Thanks to you,” I mutter.

“They’re alive, aren’t they?” she parries, closing her book. She too has retired from the field today, holed up with her Milton.

Lubricious yodeling wafts down from on deck, accompanied by Gato’s mournful guitar-strumming. They’re all awash in rum, tonight, drowning the memory of their wounded pride.

“What use is prolonging their lives in this place?” I shoot back, a question I’ve grappled with all day. Twice, now, I’ve protected the men from violence, with the result that my crew grows mutinous and Pan more determined than ever to torment me. “When they die fighting at least they have their honor,” I grumble to Stella.

“Tell that to your Jesse,” she bristles at me. “Much good his honor does him now.”

“Much good our lives are to us here.”

She glares at me through another volatile moment then smacks down her book on the bed. “Oh, I give up! It’s hopeless. I was a fool to come here.”

At last we agree. “You wanted to be a mother.” I can’t keep the sneer out of my voice.

“I thought I might have a chance to raise boys,” she corrects me, “to help shape them before they grow into cruel, warmongering men.”

“There is no creature on earth more cruel than a boy.”

“But are they beyond all possibility of redemption?” she persists. “Can’t they be taught compassion?”

“Like sums?” I suggest. “Like Latin?”

“By example. From someone who cares for them.”

I shake my head. “Your teacher would have to be a saint. And they would have to grow up.”

“Yes,” she agrees, with a wistful sigh of her own.

No noise wakens me. But I am suddenly alert to the blackness, the stillness, the absence of any sound, not even the tread of the watch. There’s something eerie afoot. Not boys, not at night. Fairies? I shudder and sit up, straining to hear. Then I think of Stella alone in her cabin, and my feet touch the deck. I creep out in my nightshirt, pausing only to grasp my sword, make my way into the absolute gloom of the passage.

I hear nothing on the other side of Stella’s door, the silence portentous. I touch the door with the elbow of my sword hand. It gives way a fraction of an inch. I press it open another inch, then another. All is silence and darkness, yet I sense something alert and waiting in the dark, something more than Stella. Peering in, I make out the nap of buckskin only inches away, just inside the door, smell the mingled fragrance of cured leather and crushed grass and pine.

Indians.

Where is the watch? How have they come aboard? But the braves are stealthy as ghosts, and my men blundering fools.

An errant streak of late moonglow through the skylight illuminates shine on a long black braid, and a shine in the black eyes watching me, as the door yaws open in silence. He’s tall and heavy-chested, a single eagle feather woven upside-down into his braid.

“Red Eagle,” I breathe, straining to conceal my alarm.

“Your memory is strong, Captain.” The voice is low, terse. The big brave nods once. “Red Eagle was my grandfather. I am Eagle Heart.”

And I am Methuselah, but of course I don’t say it. I know better than to raise my weapon or rouse my men, now the braves are already on board. How many of them stand in the shadows? Enough to hold Stella fast, a glimmer of white in the darkness. Enough to make painful mincemeat out of me. I glance at the pale smudge that is Stella. She found something to her liking in that trunk after all, a long white nightdress. I’m absurdly touched.

I’ve no prayer of fighting them off, but none makes any move toward me. It must be Stella they want. Did they mean to butcher her, they’d have done so already. They’ve bound her hands behind her, and tied a clout of buckskin over her mouth, I see it now, but her expression betrays no more emotion than the warriors’ own. Eagle Heart stands implacable as an oak before me, face impassive but for his keen black eyes, awaiting my next move.

“There’s no need to bind her mouth,” I hear myself say quietly. “Who will she cry out for? I am already here.”

Eagle Heart regards me a moment, nods once again. From the corner of my eye, I see the cloth fall away from Stella’s mouth. She makes no sound, continues to stare straight ahead. I keep my eyes on Eagle Heart.

“Now you will let us pass, Captain,” he says to me. He makes no move to grapple me out of his way nor raise his knife to me, but that doesn’t mean he won’t, if provoked. But for this moment, I’m still extended the courtesy of a parley.

“What do you want with her?” I ask him. “Have you not women enough of your own?”

Eagle Heart raises his chin a degree and glares down at me. “We do not need your woman.”

“But…”

“She is not for us,” he declares. “She is for Little Chief Pan.” He makes another subtle move of his head, scarcely more than a shiver in his eagle feather; a blade snicks out of the shadows and up under Stella’s throat. “And now you will let us pass.”

How can I do otherwise? I back into the passage as they file out, Eagle Heart in the lead and four or five of his men behind, mustering Stella between them. It takes all of her attention to manage her bare feet and long gown over the door sill and up the ladder with the knife at her throat. She does not look at me.

My woman, he called her.

“Captain.” Brassy stands in my cabin doorway. It’s barely dawn, yet he finds me awake and dressed, my hook buckled in place, grim purpose in my eye. “The woman,” he mutters, his voice low and wary. “She’s gone.”

“I know.”

My men were not slaughtered this time. Gato and Nutter were on watch, the one half-drowned in sentimental ballads, the other capricious at best, and every man jack of the crew basted in rum. The braves didn’t even bother to kill them; they must have been insensible already. Now, in the blazing morning sun, they swear and posture impotently to hear that redskins boarded the ship, give thanks they weren’t scalped in their hammocks. Time was my men went about festooned in feathers from the war bonnets of the braves they’d killed, but those were not these men. Indeed, I disrecall the last time we skirmished with the braves at all.

For Stella to be in the possession of the Indians is not necessarily a sentence of death; she might be a pawn or a hostage. But she’s not in their custody, or so Eagle Heart told me. They captured her for Pan.

“Oi! Call the cap’n!”

It’s Nutter out in the skiff pulling for the Rouge as if pursued by the Furies of Hell. Dispatched to the creek for fresh water an hour ago, he leaves Swab in the boat, hauls himself up the chains and clatters straight over to me.

“Cap’n, look,” he gasps, and hands me an Indian arrow fletched with a single eagle feather, a scrap of pierced buckskin halfway up its shaft. On the nappy side, a crude representation of a hook has been etched with a hot implement; on the reverse, an image of the waning moon in its current phase.

“Come out of the brush when I was at the creek,” Nutter pants. “Shot into the dirt right beside me. Coulda nailed my foot to the damn bank.”

“It would have, had that been its object,” I assure him.

“Some kinda message, Cap’n?” Filcher asks at my elbow.

“I’ll soon find out,” I mutter.

It’s hours past midnight when I tie up the skiff at the creek mouth and debark into the shadows. The late moon is on the rise, a lascivious green grin in the black night. My black coat renders me as obscure as possible, and I carry my sword, but I come alone. Did Eagle Heart desire to harm me, he had ample opportunity last night. The sender of this arrow has something to communicate to Hook at this hour, and I will hear it.

Aside from the unwholesome purple mist curling above the water, oozing out of the loreleis’ fetid jungle, nothing appears to move, but I know the stealth of the braves. I set my hat so the feather cocks jauntily upward and step out onto the creek bank. Without so much as a rustling of leaves, a tall, sturdy silhouette separates from the dark mass of the underbrush and steps out as well. Eagle Heart, himself, his expression stony, black eyes agleam.

“I am alone, Captain,” he tells me.

“As am I,” I respond.

Eagle Heart slowly spreads open his arms so I can see the only weapon he carries, a sheathed knife stuck in the beaded, plaited belt round his buckskins. I do the same, revealing the hilt of my sword. Our eyes lock; he moves very slowly to pluck his knife out of his belt and place it on the ground at his feet, straightens up, takes one step backward. I again follow his lead, place my sword on the ground, out of my reach, back away. We stand unarmed, regarding each other. How like his grandfather he looks, although he does not affect the same long headdress of feathers. His face is scarcely lined at all. Hard to believe this youthful sprout is their chief, but for his imposing demeanor.

“You wish to speak to me?” I say in the pregnant silence.

Eagle Heart nods. “I am glad you have come.”

Slowly he reaches for the medicine bag hanging from his belt, its brave beading worn away in patches, its leather fringe in tatters; I recognize it as the one Red Eagle once wore. My muscles tense, ready to dive for my weapon should something unpleasant emerge from that ancient pouch, but all the young chief withdraws from it is another scrap of hide. With a wary glance at me, he lays the thing on the ground between us, smoothing it more or less flat, rises again, backs toward the shadows, and nods at me to pick it up.

Slowly, I grapple out my spectacles, peer at it by pale moonlight. It’s a map, burned into buckskin. There are simple renderings of points I recognize: a familiar stand of willows in the wood, a fallen log, an outcropping of rock. A path twists through them to a black spot in the center.

“Tomorrow she will face a council called by Little Chief Pan,” Eagle Heart tells me. I don’t have to ask who “she” is. “To answer for her crimes.”

“What crimes?”

But the young chief will not be baited. “This is where the council will be held,” he says, nodding at the map.

Pan’s various lairs in the wood have always been protected by enchantment. On the rare occasions that I or my men stumble across one by sheer blind chance, the boy merely dreams a new part of the wood into existence that we have never seen and builds himself a new one. But never before have I had a map.

“Remember it,” Eagle Heart intones, and when I’ve fixed the route in my memory, he rolls the buckskin back into his pouch.

I stare at him. “Why show this to me?”

“Our women,” he begins, “my mother, they fear he will do her some mischief. He is only a boy. And boys can be … reckless.” We regard each other in a moment of empathy I should never have thought possible. “We will very much regret an innocent life come to harm,” he goes on.

Easy enough take the high moral ground, now he’s delivered her to the Pan. And yet, he brings me the map. “Can you not advise him to be merciful?” I fence. “You are his allies.”

Eagle Heart slowly shakes his head. “My men will not oppose him. We do not wish to lose our homeland.”

Of course, the Indians can ill afford to anger the boy. Their crops would fail, the buffalo would die off, their villages would not survive. They’d be banished to make their way in a hostile world that’s long since passed them by.

“You risk much coming to me.” I eye him keenly. “Why?”

His gaze does not waver from mine, although another beat of time passes between us. “Our elders tell us that innocent blood must never be spilled in this place.”

“That has never pertained to my men,” I point out.

“Your men engage in warfare. My men, too, are warriors. When we pledge to fight each other to the death, we are no longer innocent.”

“The boys make war,” I protest. “How can they be thought innocent?”

“The boys do not understand what they do,” the young chief replies. “They forget their actions and can not learn from them.”

“They have license to murder at will,” I say sourly.

He fixes me with his flinty gaze. “The wisdom of our elders is very old. Older even than you, Captain. It is said that if one innocent life is lost here, this place, the Dreaming Place, all of it will end.”

End? Can such a thing be possible? No wonder the chief is desperate enough to seek my help. “But I am no barrister; I cannot speak on her behalf,” I try to reason. “It will go much harder on her if the boy believes she is valuable to me.”

The young chief does not ask me the obvious question, the one I cannot, dare not answer. What exactly is her value to me? But it’s plain in his penetrating silence as he gazes at me.

“Well, what can I do about it?” I grumble.

“Our storytellers say you have lived for many suns and moons in this place,” replies Eagle Heart. “The elders tell us that great age brings wisdom.” He eyes me pointedly. “You must be wise.”

I stare back at him.

“If you bring your men,” he adds quietly, “we will kill them all.”