Red Prophet Part 26

"Save your breath," said de Maurepas. "I am no longer deceived. Your witchery, your satanic influence, it floats past me like bubbles in the air, it means nothing to me. I am stronger than you thought. I have secret strengths!"

"It's good that you do, since all you have in public is idiocy," said Napoleon. "The defeat you will suffer without me will mark you as the champion fool in the history of the French army. Whenever anyone suffers an ignominious and avoidable disaster, they will laugh at him and say that he committed a Maurepas!"

"Enough," said de Maurepas. "Treason, sedition, malfeasance, and if that weren't enough, now insubordination. M. Guillotin will have business with you, I'm quite certain, my vain little bantam c.o.c.k. Go, try your spurs on His Majesty, see how deep they dig when your limbs are in irons and your head is forfeit."

The betrayal was not obvious till morning, but then it was swift and complete. It began when the French quartermaster refused to issue gunpowder to Ta-k.u.msaw's people. "I have my orders," he said.

When Ta-k.u.msaw tried to see Napoleon, they laughed at him. "He won't see you now, or ever," he was told.

What about de Maurepas, then?

"He is a Comte. He does not treat with savages. He is not a lover of beasts, like little Napoleon."

Only then did Alvin notice that all the Frenchman they were dealing with today were the very ones that Napoleon had been circ.u.mventing; all the officers Napoleon preferred and trusted were not to be found. Napoleon had fallen.

"Bows and arrows," said an officer. "That's what your braves excel with, isn't it? With bullets you would cause more damage to your own men than to the enemy."

Ta-k.u.msaw's scouts told him that the American army would arrive by noon. Ta-k.u.msaw immediately deployed his men to hara.s.s the enemy. But now, without the range of muskets, they could do little more than annoy Old Hickory's army with the stings of feeble arrows fired from too far off, where they had meant to cripple the Americans with an irresistible storm of metal. And because the bowmen had to come so close to the Americans in order to fire, many of them were killed.

"Don't stand near me," Ta-Kurnsaw told Alvin. "They all know of the prophecy. They'll think my courage only comes because I know I cannot die."

So Alvin stood farther off, but never so far that he didn't see deeply into Ta-k.u.msaw's body, ready to heal any wound. What he could not heal was the fear and anger and despair that already gathered in Ta-k.u.msaw's soul. Without gunpowder, without Napoleon, the sure victory had become a chancy thing at best.

The basic tactics were successful. Old Hickory spotted the trap at once, but the terrain forced him to fall into it or retreat, and he knew that retreat would be disaster. So he marched his army boldly between the hills filled with Reds, funneling into the narrow ground where French cannon and musketry would rake the Americans while the Reds killed any who tried to flee. The victory would be complete. Except that the Americans were supposed to be demoralized, confused, and their numbers deeply reduced by the Red men shooting at them all the way here.

The tactics were successful, except that when the American army came in view of the French, and hesitated before the muzzles of nine cannon loaded with canister, and two thousand muskets arrayed to sweep and doublesweep the field, the French incomprehensibly began to move back. It was as if they did not trust the impregnability of their own position. They did not even try to withdraw the cannon. They retreated as if they feared immediate destruction.

The course of the battle was predictable, then. Old Hickory knew what to do with opportunity. His soldiers ignored the Reds and fell on the retreating Frenchmen, slaughtering all who did not run, seizing their cannon and muskets, their powder and shot. Within an hour they had used the French artillery to break down the fortress walls in three places; Americans streamed into Detroit; there was b.l.o.o.d.y fighting in the streets.

Ta-k.u.msaw should have left then. He should have let the Americans destroy the French, should have taken his men to safety. Perhaps he felt a duty to help the French, even after they had betrayed him. Perhaps he saw a glimmer of hope that with the Americans involved in battle, his army of Reds might win a victory after all. Or perhaps he knew that never again would he have the power to gather all the fighting men of every tribe; if he retreated now, with the battle unfought, who would follow him again? And if they would not follow him, they would follow no one, and the White men would nibble their way to conquest, devouring now this tribe, now that. Ta-k.u.msaw surely knew that it was either victory now, however unlikely, or the struggle would be over for all time, and any of his people who weren't slaughtered outright would either escape into the west, a strange land to them, lacking in forest; or would remain as a diminished people, living like White men instead of Red, the forest forever silent. Whether he hoped for victory or not, he could not surrender to such a future, not without a fight.

So armed with bows and arrows, clubs and knives, the Reds attacked the American army from behind. At first they reaped the Whites in b.l.o.o.d.y harvest, clubbing them to the ground, piercing them with flints. Ta-k.u.msaw shouted at them to take muskets, powder, ammunition from the dead, and many Reds obeyed. But then Old Hickory got the disciplined core of his men into action. The guns were turned. And the Reds, exposed on the open field, were felled in great swathes of grapeshot.

By evening, the sun going down, Detroit was on fire and the smoke filled the nearby wood. In that choking darkness stood Ta-k.u.msaw with a few hundred of his own Shaw-Nee. Other tribes made isolated stands here and there; most despaired and fled into the forest, where no White man could follow. Old Hickory himself led the final a.s.sault against Ta-k.u.msaw's wooded fortress, bringing with him the thousand Americans who weren't busy looting the French city and smas.h.i.+ng the idols in the Papist cathedral.

The bullets came from all directions, it seemed. But through it all Ta-k.u.msaw stood upright, shouting to his men, urging them to fight on with muskets stolen from fallen Americans in the first attack. For fifteen minutes that seemed like forever, Ta-k.u.msaw fought like a madman, and his Shaw-Nee fought and died beside him. Ta-k.u.msaw's body blossomed with scarlet wounds; blood streaked down his back and belly; one arm hung limp by his side. No one knew how he found the strength to stand, he had so many wounds in him. But Ta-k.u.msaw was made of flesh like any other man, and at last he fell in the smoky dusk, bearing half a dozen wounds, any one of which would surely have been fatal by itself.

When Ta-k.u.msaw fell, the firing slackened. It was as if the Americans knew that they had only to kill that one man, and they would break the spirit of the Red man, now and forever. The dozen surviving Shaw-Nee warriors crept away in the smoke and the darkness, to bear the bitter news of Ta-k.u.msaw's death to every Shaw-Nee village, and eventually to every hut where Red men and women lived. The great battle was hopeless; White men could not be trusted, French or American, and so Ta-k.u.msaw's great plan could never have succeeded. Yet the Red men remembered that at least for a time they had united under one great man, had become a single people, had dreamed of victory. So Ta-k.u.msaw was remembered in song as Red villages and families moved west across the Mizzipy to join the Prophet; he was remembered in stories told beside brick hearths, by families who wore clothing and worked at jobs like white men, but still remembered that once there was another way to live, and the greatest of all the forest Reds had been a man called Ta-k.u.msaw, who died trying to save the woodland and the ancient, doomed Red way of life.

It was not only Reds who remembered Ta-k.u.msaw. Even as they fired muskets at his shadowy figure in the woods, the American soldiers admired him. He was a great hero out of olden times. Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart; Ta-k.u.msaw lived a story like Achilles or Odysseus, Caesar or Hannibal, David or the Maccabees. "He can't die," they murmured as they saw him take bullets and still not fall. And when at last he did fall, they searched for his body and did not find it.

"The Shaw-Nee dragged him off," said Old Hickory, and that was that. He wouldn't even let them search for the Renegado Boy, figuring that such a White traitor was no doubt as faithless as the French and snuck off during the fight. Leave be, said Old Hickory, and who was going to argue with the old man? He won them the victory, didn't he? He broke the back of Red resistance once and for all, didn't he? Old Hickory, Andy Jackson they wanted to make him King, but they'd have to settle for President someday. Yet in the meantime they could not forget Ta-k.u.msaw, and rumors spread that he was alive somewhere, crippled by his wounds, waiting to get healed up and lead a great Red invasion from across the Mizzipy, from the swamps of the South, or from some secret hidden fastness in the Appalachee Mountains.

All through the battle Alvin worked with all his might to keep Ta-k.u.msaw alive. As each new bullet tore through flesh, Alvin mended broken arteries, trying to hold Ta-k.u.msaw's blood inside him. The pain he had no time for, but Ta-k.u.msaw seemed not to mind the savage injuries he took. Alvin crouched down in his hiding place between a standing tree and a fallen one, his eyes closed, watching Ta-k.u.msaw only with his inward eyes, seeing his flesh from the inside out. Alvin saw none of the images that would haunt Ta-k.u.msaw's legends. Alvin never even noticed as bullets sent a spray of leaf bits and chips of wood falling on him. He even took a sharp stinging bullet in the back of his left hand and hardly felt it, he was concentrating so hard on keeping Ta-k.u.msaw on his feet.

But one thing Alvin saw: Beyond the edges of his vision, just out of reach, there was the Unmaker like a transparent shadow, s.h.i.+mmering fingers slicing through the wood. Ta-k.u.msaw, him Alvin could heal. But who could heal the greenwood? Who could heal the tearing apart of tribe from tribe, Red from Red? All that Ta-k.u.msaw had built was s.h.i.+vered apart in that single fraction of an hour, and all Alvin could do was keep a single man alive. A great man, true, a man who had changed the world, who had built something, even if it was something that in the end led to more harm and suffering; Ta-k.u.msaw was a builder, and yet even as Alvin saved his life, he knew that Ta-k.u.msaw's building days were done. Likely enough the Unmaker didn't begrudge Alvin his friend's life. What was Ta-k.u.msaw, compared to what the Unmaker was consuming at this feast? Just like Taleswapper had said so long ago, the Unmaker could tear down, eat through, use up, and crush things faster than any one man could ever hope to build.

All the time, though Alvin scarcely noticed where Ta-k.u.msaw was what with worrying about what was going on inside him, the Red man circled Alvin's hiding place like he was a dog tied to a tree, winding around and getting closer and closer. So when the bullets finally became too much for Alvin and the blood flowed so fast from dozens of wounds that Alvin couldn't stanch them all, it was into Alvin's sheltered place that Ta-k.u.msaw fell, sprawling across Alvin's body, knocking the wind out of the boy Alvin scarce heard the search go on around him. He was too busy healing wounds, binding up torn flesh, connecting severed nerves and straighterung broken bones. In desperation to save Ta-k.u.msaw's life he opened his eyes and cut into the Red man's flesh with his own flint knife, prying bullets out and then healing up where he had cut. And all the time it was like the smoke gathered above them, making it impossible for anyone to see into the little sheltered place where the Unmaker had got Alvin holed up in hiding.

It was afternoon next day when Alvin awoke. Ta-k.u.msaw lay beside him, weak and spent, but whole. Alvin was filthy and itchy and he had to void himself; gingerly he pulled himself out from under Ta-k.u.msaw, who felt so light, as if he was half made of air. The smoke was gone now, but Alvin still felt invisible, walking around in broad daylight dressed like a Red man. He could hear drunken singing from the American camp near the ruins of Detroit. Stray smoke still drifted through the trees. And everywhere Alvin walked were the bodies of Red men cast like wet straw on the forest floor. It stank of death.

Alvin found a brook and drank, trying not to imagine some dead body lying in it upstream. He washed his face and hands, dipped his head into the water to cool his brain, the way he used to do at home after a hard day's work. Then he went back to wake Ta-k.u.msaw and bring him here to drink.

Ta-k.u.msaw was already awake. Already standing over the body of a fallen friend. His head was tipped back, his mouth open, as if he uttered a cry so deep and loud that human ears couldn't hear the sound of it, could only feel the earth trembling with the vibration of the shout. Alvin ran to him and flung his arms around him, clinging to him like the child he was, only it was Alvin doing the comforting, Alvin whispering, "You done your best, you done all that could be done."

And Ta-k.u.msaw answered not at all, though his silence was an answer, too, like as if he was saying, I'm alive, which means I didn't do enough.

They walked away in the afternoon, not even bothering to conceal themselves. Some White men later woke up with hangovers, swearing they saw visions of Ta-k.u.msaw and the Renegado Boy walking through the corpses of the Red army, but n.o.body paid them mind. And what did it matter? Ta-k.u.msaw wasn't no danger to the Whites now. He'd broken against them like a great wave, but they stood against him; he thought to shatter them, but they broke him and his people into spray, and if some drops of it still clung, what did that matter? They had no power anymore. It was all spent in one brutal, futile blow.

Alvin spoke not a word to Ta-k.u.msaw all the way south to the headwaters of the My-Ammy, and Ta-k.u.msaw spoke nary a word to him as they dug out a canoe together. Alvin made the wood soft in the right places, so it took scarce half an hour, and another half hour to shape a good paddle. Then they dragged the canoe to the river's edge. Only with the canoe half in the water did Ta-k.u.msaw stop and turn to Alvin, reach out a hand and touch his face. "If all White men were true like you, Alvin, I would never have been their enemy."

And as Alvin watched Ta-k.u.msaw paddle steadily down the river out of sight, it occurred to him that it just didn't feel like Ta-k.u.msaw had lost. It was as if the battle wasn't about Ta-k.u.msaw. It was about White men, and their worthiness to have this land. They might think they won, they might think the Red man slunk away or bowed his head in defeat, but in fact it was the White man who lost, because when Ta-k.u.msaw paddled down the Wobbish to the Hio, down the Hio to the Mizzipy, and crossed the fogs of the river to the other side, he was taking the land with him, the greensong; what the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it.

But I'm a White man, not a Red, whatever anybody might say. And rotting underfoot or not, this land is all the land we have, and our people all the people that we've got. So Alvin walked along the sh.o.r.e of the Wobbish, heading downriver, knowing that where the Tippy-Canoe discharged itself into the larger stream, there he'd find his pa and ma, his brothers and his sisters, all a-waiting there to find out what had happened to him in the year since he set out to become a prentice blacksmith back at Hatrack River.

Chapter 19 Homecoming.

Napoleon did not wear irons on his way back to France. He slept in the second cabin, and ate at table with Governor La Fayette, who was only too glad to have him. In the hot afternoons of the Atlantic crossing, La Fayette confided all his plans of revolution to Napoleon, his dearest friend, and Napoleon offered helpful advice on bow to make the revolution go much faster and more effectively.

"The best thing about all these sad events," said La Fayette the day the lookout first spied the coast of Bretagne, "is that we are friends now, and the revolution is a.s.sured of success because you are a part of it. To think that once I mistrusted you, figuring you to be a tool of the King. A tool of Charles! But soon all France will know you for the hero that you are, and blame the King and Freddie for the sacking of Detroit. All that territory in the hands of Protestants and savages, while we are here to offer a better way, a truer leaders.h.i.+p to the people of France. Ah, Napoleon, I have yearned for such a man as you through all my years of planning for democracy. All we have needed, we Feuillants, was a leader, a man who could guide us, a man who could lead France to true freedom." And La Fayette sighed and sank deeper into the cus.h.i.+ons of his chair.

Through all this Napoleon listened with satisfaction, yes, but also sadness. For he had thought that La Fayette was immune to his charm because of some great inward strength. Now he knew that it was only a foolish amulet, that La Fayette was like any ordinary man when it came to resisting Napoleon; and now that the amulet lay buried in a ma.s.s grave outside Detroit, no doubt still chained to the moldering vertebrae of Frederic de Maurepas, Napoleon knew that he would never find his equal in this world, unless it was G.o.d himself, or Nature. There would be no man to deny him, that much was sure. So he listened to La Fayette's babbling with a wistful longing for the kind of man he once thought La Fayette could be.

The men on deck bustled and hurried and made ten thousand clumbing noises, for they were heaving in to land; Napoleon was home in France at last.

Ta-k.u.msaw did not need to fear the thick fog that descended as he reached the Hio's mouth, pouring into the Mizzipy and getting lost in those stronger currents. He knew the way: west, and any sh.o.r.e would be his refuge, his safety, the end of his life.

For that's all that he could see ahead of him now. The land west of the Mizzipy was his brother's land, the place where White man would not come. The land itself, the water, every living thing would work to bar those White who were foolish enough to think that the Red men could be defeated again. But it was the Prophet's gifts the Red folk needed now, not those of a warrior like Ta-k.u.msaw. He might be a figure of legend in the east, among fallen Reds and foolish Whites, but in the west they would know him for what he was. A failure, a b.l.o.o.d.y-handed man who led his people to destruction.

The water lapped at his canoe. He heard a redbird singing not far off. The fog grew whiter, dazzling; then broke, and the sun shone bright, blinding him. In three paddlestrokes his canoe nosed the sh.o.r.e, and there, to his surprise, was a man silhouetted in the late afternoon sun, standing on the bank. The man sprang down and took the end of Ta-k.u.msaw's canoe and pulled it tight against the riverbank, then helped Ta-k.u.msaw out of the little boat. Ta-k.u.msaw couldn't see his face, his eyes were so bedazzled; but he knew who it was all the same, from the touch of the hand. And then the voice, murmuring, "Let the canoe drift away. There'll be no more crossing to the other side, my brother."

"Lolla-Wossiky," cried Ta-k.u.msaw. Then he wept and knelt at his brother's feet, clinging to his knees. All the anguish, all the grief spilled out of him, while above him Lolla-Wossiky, called Tenskwa-Tawa, called the Prophet, sang to him a song of melancholy, a song about the death of bees.

Things were changed somewhat when Alvin got to town. There was a sign right out on the Wobbish Road, saying: Pa.s.s by, stranger, if you can. Or hear a tale unfit for ears of man.

Well Alvin knew the purpose of that sign. But he was no stranger here.

Or was he? As he made his way along the little spur of the road toward Vigor Church, he saw that new buildings had been put up, new houses built. Folks were living pretty much cheek-by-jowl here now, and Vigor Church was a proper town. But no one greeted him in the road, and even the children a-playing in the commons had no word for him; no doubt their parents taught them not to welcome strangers, or maybe they just were sick of hearing their fathers and older brothers telling their awful tale to whatever stranger came to call. Better not to welcome any man or woman here.

And the past year had changed Alvin. He was taller, yes, but also he knew that his walk was different, more like a Red man, unaccustomed to the feel of a White man's road beneath his feet, wis.h.i.+ng for the greenwood song, which was near extinguished in these parts. Maybe I am a stranger here these days. Maybe I seen and done too much this last year to ever come back and be Alvin Junior anymore.

Even with the changes in the town, Alvin knew his way. This much hadn't changed: there was still bridges over every little stream on the roadway up to his father's house. Alvin tried to feel the old way, feel the anger of the water against him. But the black evil that once was his enemy, it hardly knew him either, now that he walked like a Red man, all at one with the living world. Never mind, thought Alvin. As the land gets tame and broken, I'll be White again in my step, and the Unmaker will find me. Just as he broke the Red man's healing hold on this land, he'll try to break me too, and if Ta-k.u.msaw wasn't strong enough or Tenskwa-Tawa wise enough to stand against the old Unmaker, what will I ever do?

Just make my way, day by day, like the old hymn said. Make my way, day by day, Lord above, light and love, in my grief bring relief, fill my cup, lift me up, heal my soul, make me whole. Amen. Amen.

Cally was a-standing there right on the porch, doing nothing, like as if he was just watching out in case Alvin Junior should come home today, and maybe that's what he was doing, maybe it was. Anyway it was Cally shouted out, Cally who knew him at once despite all changes in him.

"Alvin! Ally! Alvin Junior! He's home! You're home!"

First one to come at his call, running around the house with his sleeves up and the ax still trailing from his hand, was Measure. Soon as he saw it was truly Alvin, he dropped the ax and took Alvin Junior by the shoulders, looked him over for any harm, and Alvin done the same, looking for any scars on Measure. None at all, healed proper. But Measure found some deeper injuries in Alvin, and softly said, "You got older, Al." To which Alvin had nary a thing to say, it being true, and for a moment they just stared into each other's eyes, each knowing how far down the long road of the Red man's suffering and exile the other had walked; no other White man could ever know what they knew. Then Ma came out onto the porch and Pa out of the mill and up to the house, and oh, there was hugging and kissing and crying and laughing and shouting and silence. They didn't kill the fatted calf, but there was a young pig didn't see another sunrise. Cally ran to the brothers' farms and Armor-of-G.o.d's store and gave notice what was up and soon all the family was gathered to greet Alvin Junior: who they knew wasn't dead but had given up hope of seeing again.

And then, as it was getting late, there came a time when Pa hid his hands in his pockets, and the other menfolk all grew still, and then the womenfolk, till Alvin nodded and said, "I know the tale you have to tell. So tell it now, all of you, and then I'll tell you my part in it."

They did, and he did, and there was more weeping, of grief this time instead of joy. This valley of the Wobbish was all the home they'd ever know now; it was the only way they could bear to live, all the folk who'd done murder at Tippy-Canoe, was right among each other and seeing no strangers. Where could they go and live in peace, what with having to tell all comers what it was they done? "So, we got to stay, Al Junior. But not you or Cally, you know. And maybe your apprentices.h.i.+p is still a thing that we can do, what do you think?"

"Time to think of that liter," said Ma. "Time for all those questions later. He's home, that's all for now, you hear me? He's home, who I never thought to lay eyes on again. Thank the Lord G.o.d that he didn't make me a prophet, when I said I'd never lay eyes on my sweet little Alvin anymore."

Alvin hugged his ma back just as hard as she hugged him. He didn't tell her that her prophecy was true. That it wasn't her sweet little Alvin who'd come home this time. Let her find that out on her own. Right now it was enough that the year was over, that he'd seen the unwinding of all the great changes, that now, however different it might be, however bitter, life could go on in a steady path, with no more breaking of the ground underfoot.

At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful even though the forest was getting so spa.r.s.e, even though the future was so dim. Cause there's no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment. That's all I want right now, thought Alvin. The present moment, which is good enough.