15

Ten days later, as he scrambled in the lead up the Koasati bluff, Tristan flexed his scarred hands, remembering the day many years ago when Marc-Antoine had burst into their father’s drafting studio, smelling of fish, spring air, and wet dog. Tristan, seated at the drafting table opposite the door, where he was occupied in copying a map of Lake Huron’s western shore, grabbed for his parchment before it could fly away with the sudden gust of wind. His ink pot fell over, ruining the map.

Marc-Antoine, of course, paid no attention to Tristan’s growl of frustration. “Tris! Did you know Iberville is looking for a language expert for the southern expedition?”

Mopping up ink as he avoided his father’s kindling gaze, Tristan shrugged. “No. Why would I care?”

“You are good with languages! Your Latin is as good as your French—and you’ve even learned that barbaric English tongue!”

“Moderate your tones, if you please.” Father got up to take the stained parchment from Tristan with two fingers and set it aside for cleaning. “Where have you been today, to get so filthy and smelly? Your mother will have a fit of vapors.”

Marc-Antoine waved a hand. “At the docks. Tristan, it’s your patriotic duty to join the marine. Bienville says they must have a full crew, or the expedition will be canceled. You should go talk to him now! He’s still at the tavern.”

Tristan met his father’s eyes. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, the young Sieur de Bienville, had always had a knack for dragging his friends into adventure. Mad to prove himself the equal of his older, more celebrated brothers, he had joined the French marine when barely out of short coats, following his older brothers off to help wrest the great lakes of Illinois away from the Huron Indians. When King Louis XIV decided to extend his influence along the great rivers that bisected the American continent, the Le Moynes were chosen to lead the establishment of forts and settlements along the Mississippi and on down to the gulf coast. Bienville had apparently been chosen to visit all the local gathering places and recruit necessary manpower.

Father scowled as he provided Tristan with a new parchment. “Bienville is a stupid young warmonger, and his brothers aren’t much better. You will stay away from him, Marc-Antoine, or I shall cut off your allowance.”

Tristan could have predicted his brother’s reaction.

“Why?” Marc-Antoine rounded on his father. “Bienville is only providing opportunity for advancement and fortune for men who would otherwise be stuck here in this frozen wasteland for years on end! You are afraid to leave, and so must be everyone else.”

Father’s face went white as the parchment in his hand, and then flushed with fury. “What did you say to me?”

Marc-Antoine’s extravagant eyebrows, so like their mother’s and Tristan’s own, met above his nose like the wings of an angry hawk. “I’m tired of playing at life like a child! I’m capable of choosing my own friends and making my own destiny. And that is exactly what I plan to do—beginning right now!”

Tristan pushed back his chair. “Marc, be careful.”

“Careful never got anybody anywhere.” Passion vibrated in every line of Marc-Antoine’s tall, gangly body. “If you won’t go with Iberville, then I will.” He glowered at his father. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

Tristan’s hands stung with phantom pain as he recalled the lengths to which his father had gone in the attempt to keep Marc-Antoine from leaving home at the age of fourteen. In the end they had both gone—Marc-Antoine in wild-eyed resentment and Tristan with a promise to watch after the young prodigal. Only, unlike the protagonist of Christ’s story, the two of them had received neither inheritance nor tearful goodbye. Furthermore, far from coming to his senses in a foreign pigpen, the younger brother had discovered fame and fortune with the Le Moyne brothers and never spared a backward glance.

Tristan, the elder, had met his own destiny in the beautiful dark eyes of Sholani—who bound him to this wild land as surely as his father’s whip had driven him from home.

But—not his father, as Father Mathieu had just informed him. Deep in his spirit, he’d known it all along, had recognized a fundamental distance in his relationship with Antoine Lanier, compared to the blistering rage and unspoken pride that had pulsed in nearly equivalent measures toward Marc-Antoine.

Was the dead Comte de Leméry his father in truth? A man he had never met, certainly never loved. A man who, far from loving his mother, had sold her, for the price of silence, to a Canadian mapmaker.

Turning to give a hand up to the men behind him, Tristan pondered whether he should speak of his doubts to his brother. Would his parentage matter to Marc-Antoine? He suspected not. And, as he had said to the priest, it mattered little with regard to his life here in New France. Nothing fundamental had changed.

His brother came over the edge of the bluff, rolled, and landed lightly on his feet, then helped Tristan assist the panting priest. When Mathieu was safely out of the way, the surgeon, followed by Saucier and Guillory, climbed onto the landing. They all took a moment to brush sandy clay off their hands and knees, somber now that they had arrived at their destination. It had been ten days since Tristan’s conversation with Father Mathieu, over three weeks since they had first set out on this journey. Since it was almost dark, the plan was to make camp for the night, then approach the Alabama village in the morning. None of them could predict how the natives might receive them, but experience had taught Tristan that the Indians would be less threatened, and therefore more receptive to gestures of friendship, during the early hours of the day.

“What’s the matter, Tris?” Marc-Antoine pulled him aside, his expression quizzical. “I remember this place from my trip back four years ago, and it was a good camping spot because of the spring on the other side of those trees. You look uneasy.”

Tristan shrugged off his brother’s worry with a smile. “No, just tired of fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll take my bow and see if I can get a rabbit or a deer before the sun goes down.”

Marc-Antoine nodded, clearly not convinced. “Good idea. We’ll set up camp, build a fire. It will be good to sleep on dry ground.”

Bow in hand, Tristan set off along the stream trickling through the woods. Dusk was falling, and he knew he wasn’t likely to find much in the way of game, but he needed the time alone. He was going to have to talk to Marc-Antoine about the priest’s crazy tale, get his take on it. He needed his brother to laugh and tell him not to be soaking in fairy tales. They were brothers, in the most important sense of the word, and nothing could change that.

Shaking off his turbulent thoughts, he continued deeper into the woods, walking without a sound in the manner Deerfoot had taught him. Before long he heard the distant gabbling of a flock of turkeys. Slipping closer, he saw a broad-bottomed tom with brilliant comb and wattle. Drawing an arrow from his quiver, he nocked it against the string and aimed at the nearest fowl.

A second later the turkey was dead, the arrow having clipped it through the eyes and gone to rest in the trunk of a pine tree. As the other birds in the flock flapped awkwardly and noisily away into the forest, Tristan retrieved his arrow, wiped its soiled head on a patch of moss, and returned it to the quiver. Picking the bird up by its feet, he swung back toward camp. He was perhaps a mile away when he stopped at a loud cracking sound perhaps thirty yards away. Something much heavier than any forest animal had stepped on a limb. Heart thudding, he listened to the stillness.

He was alone and outside shouting distance of the rest of his party. Utterly foolish to have left on his own. He backed toward the closest tree, an ancient oak with a broad scarred trunk and mossy gnarled roots. Almost he thought he had imagined the noise, but then he heard a muffled but unmistakable sneeze. He slowly lowered the turkey to the ground, then reached over his shoulder for an arrow. Just as he got it nocked, three Indian braves in Alabama dress melted out of the forest with their own bows armed and aimed. He was surrounded.

The hair on the back of his neck rose. The dark faces were inscrutable, the mouths clipped into tight lines, the eyes narrowed. They were young, perhaps still in their teens, each sporting a single combat feather in the light headdresses woven into their long, black hair. Come upon like this, apart from the village, they must be considered hostile. If he shot first, he could kill one, even as the other two sent arrows into his own heart. If he yielded, they would take him prisoner and torture him before murdering and scalping him.

Frozen with fear, he prayed for wisdom.

Nika ran through the darkening forest alone, but sometimes when she listened, the pounding of her heart sounded like someone running near her. Out of habit, she looked over her shoulder, though she was confident she was not being followed. Mitannu had left to go hunting yesterday, and her sister-in-law, Kumala, was busy tanning hides for winter use. Nika had told Kumala that she wanted to visit an old friend who now lived in the village of the Apalachee, so that if she and the boys were missed, no one would come looking for them.

When they had first left the Mobile village, Chazeh and Tonaw ran ahead of her. No matter how many times she had cautioned the boys to silence, they were too young to remember for more than a few minutes at a time. She hadn’t been able to tell them that this hunting game was deadly real. Frightening them would have done no good, and might even have slowed them down.

The three of them had walked along the Mobile River toward the Apalachee village, skirting it for safety’s sake, then headed due north through the forest west of the winding Alabama River. Though paying someone to paddle her and the boys upriver would have been less tiring, the detour cut off several hours of travel. By the time they reached the Little Tomeh in late afternoon, both boys were whining about food, so she had gone directly to Azalea’s hogan.

Nika and Azalea had grown up together in the Kaskaskian village of the Alabama nation, a loose confederation of clans located near the juncture of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, which together flowed south, forming the Alabama River. The two girls had been close friends until the young Frenchman called Bright Tongue came to live in their village. Nika’s father chose her to tutor their guest in the Alabama language, and that was that. Azalea had warned her that the beautiful white boy would not stay, but Nika didn’t want to hear it. She had swallowed his sweet words whole, eagerly fed him kisses in return, and soon the seeds of two little boys grew in her belly.

Such grief and such joy she had known since those two were placed at her breast. She would sacrifice anything to keep them safe. Leaving them with Azalea had been the hardest thing she had ever done, even harder than leaving her home to follow Mitannu, the Mobile headman’s eldest son, all the way to the mouth of the big river, where it gushed into the bay that opened like a blessing into the wide waters. She had seen the great gulf once, and it was just like Bright Tongue described it—though even he could not do justice to the vastness, the power, the crashing noise of it. She had begged Mitannu to take her back to the Mobile village, and he had laughed at her—not kindly, as the Frenchman would, when he teased her about her funny way of saying his name. Mah-Kah-Twah.

“Mah-Kah-Twah.” She said it aloud again, savoring his name on her tongue as she had once felt his lips upon hers.

Suddenly she stopped running to cast her arms around an oak tree in her path, pressing her forehead hard into its wooden skin so that the harsh reality might banish the foolish dreams that caught her off-guard more and more often in these unhappy days under Mitannu’s domination. For now, the boys were safe with Azalea, and no one would think to look for them there. Mitannu didn’t want them anyway, for she suspected he knew they weren’t his. She was going to deliver this one last letter into the British stronghold in Carolina, accept payment for it, and then return for her children. She would take them to live with her mother’s people in Kaskaskia, far away from Mitannu. Her father might beat her, but he wouldn’t turn her and the children away.

And most importantly, she would be far from Bright Tongue, who didn’t want her or the boys either. If he had, he would have stayed. He would have demanded the right to take her from her father’s hogan. But he had not. She had awakened one morning to find him gone, vanished with his older brother, leaving her to mourn like a widow. How could a man who loved her walk away? Even a very young man who spoke another language?

She relaxed her arms, turned to brace her back against the tree, and felt in her pocket for the paper Ginette had given her. It had been folded many times and sealed with a blob of greenish wax. She fingered it, wondering what message was worth risking so many lives for. Ginette said the Huguenot priest would pay well for it. She hoped so, for it would take money to safely transport those two little boys such a long distance. And her father would more readily accept her if she could offer to pay for their food and shelter. Perhaps there would be enough to buy a hog, a milk cow, or even a horse, livestock valuable to the northern Alabama culture.

Her fingernail slipped under the edge of the wax, loosening it just a bit. What if it came off? Bright Tongue had been teaching her to read French just before he left the Tuskegee village. She might be able to decipher the note, and perhaps she might sell the intelligence elsewhere. On the other hand, removal of the seal might decrease the letter’s value to its recipient.

She smoothed it back down and lifted her skirt to tuck the paper back into the pocket tied around her waist inside her dress. After all, she doubted that a nice Frenchwoman like Ginette would have anything to say that would be of any real interest.

Unmoving, Tristan watched the eyes of the closest Indian flicker toward the turkey at his feet. The boy’s nostrils flared.

Tristan waited until his heartbeat receded from his ears and settled back in his chest. He must not display weakness. He stood with the bowstring taut at his cheek and ready to fire.

The brave with the Roman nose lowered his arrow to aim at the ground. “You shoot turkey?” he asked in the Koasati dialect.

Tristan nodded. “Yes. You hungry?” It dawned on him that the young men were painfully thin, their ribs prominent above the pale leather breechclouts. What had happened to the game near their village?

“Hungry,” the brave repeated, dropping his bow with a sweeping gesture that commanded his companions to follow suit.

Tristan lowered his own weapon, full of wonder at this turn of events. “Koasati?” When the brave gave him a wary nod, he bent down to pick up the stiff turkey and offered it to the Indians. “I come with French warriors and black robe, to make peace with your people.”

“Peace,” the young man grunted, stumbling over the word as if it were foreign to his tongue. He brought one fist to his chest in a theatrical and oddly young gesture. “Our chief sends us to greet the French brothers from the south river. We welcome them to our village to smoke the calumet of peace.”

Tristan wondered what the Indians would do if he fainted from relief. He gestured once more with the turkey. “First we eat. Then I will go with you.”

The Koasati spokesman took it, shaking the bird’s tail into a gigantic, brilliant fan, which he somberly admired. “Our brothers have found food where there has been none for many days. It is a sign of the French God’s favor. We are honored to eat with you.”

Peace, Tristan thought. Perhaps God was listening after all.

When she came upon Mitannu and his men, Nika was about to slide down a steep bluff covered in vines, briars, ferns, and pine striplings. At the bottom of the bluff burbled a spring that became a rushing little icy-fingered creek she and her cousins had swum in when she was a girl. She had been running without stopping for two hours, and she was mortally thirsty. Besides, it was time to stop for the night. The outermost Alabama village should be nearby, if she remembered correctly. It had been years since she had traveled this route herself, though she had sent her runners this way every so often.

She had knelt to choose a safe footing, when movement among the trees on the other side of the creek caught her eye. Instantly she flattened herself, melting into the brush. Heart pounding, she lifted her head just enough to peer down into the bowl of the creek.

It hadn’t been her imagination. Even with his face painted in the alien clay-reds and ocher-yellows of the Koasati tribe, his hair twisted into the topknot favored by northern hunters, she would know her husband’s guttural voice among ten thousand others.

She pressed her cheek against the ground, almost glad of the briars driving into her skin, because the pain kept her from blacking out. He had followed her after all. Hunting had been a pretext to make her relax her guard. And if he had followed her, then he also knew where the boys were. What if he had taken them? What if he had hidden them somewhere, where she wouldn’t be able to find them? He was just spiteful enough to have done so.

Eyes squeezed shut, she crammed her fist against her mouth to keep from groaning aloud. Think. Nika, think. She could not. Thought burned in a flaming burst of fear. Then something Ginette had once said came to her. When my father was murdered, all I could do was pray. And God came to visit me in my anguish. Just like he did for men and women of the Bible. He came.

God?

It was a weak, tentative plea. She didn’t even know how to ask for help. But he could see her. Yes, and he saw Mitannu. Her little boys too. Had she been a bad wife in trying to keep them safe? But she had to ask.

Please show me what to do.

Bit by bit her shivers stopped. The fear was still there, a knife at her throat, but as she gained control of her body, she opened her eyes, slowly turned her head, and looked over the rim of the bluff.

What she saw almost made her smile. Mitannu and five braves, all adorned in Koasati war regalia, knelt in the creek shallows, noisily slurping the water like dogs.

I am but a woman, fearful and weak, she told herself, one against six proven warriors. But with God I am all my children need. After all, he gave them to me, and he has kept me hidden thus far.

Her heart lightened. What she must do now was stay out of sight, follow Mitannu, and see if he led her to where he had hidden the boys. Surely she would think of what to do next.

She relaxed. But just as she did so, Mitannu abruptly raised his head, water dripping from his yellow-and-red-striped chin. His narrowed gaze pointed right at her.

“Who’s there?” he demanded.