Witch Child: Sorceress Part 7

'Very well. I will return and tell Hoosac what you have said.'

The young man went, running off into the forest. White Eagle withdrew into the Chamber of Visions and did not come out again that day.

'We must leave. Go after him. For I fear what Hoosac will do. He has not the wisdom of his father and he is greedy. He might well trade all for a handful of trinkets. Besides, the year is turning. Eyes of a Wolf will need the company of other women. We should not stay for another winter here.'

Jaybird looked at his grandfather, then at me, his face breaking into a smile. White Eagle knew, or guessed at, something I had told no one. I was with child.

18.

Looking Gla.s.s Lake, sweat lodge Agnes stirred and groaned in her sleep, but Aunt M knew not to rouse her. Aunt M opened the flaps to let in the air. The day was cooling to evening. She dipped water from an earthenware pitcher on the floor and sprinkled drops over Agnes to cool her hot skin. All the time she sang her song as she fed the fire outside and put more stones to heat. When these were hot, she brought them to replace the ones cooling at the centre of the lodge. She let the flaps fall back and threw herbs and then water over the stones, humming her song low now and softly to herself.

She cast more water on the glowing stones, filling the darkness with steamy heat, then Aunt M sat down to watch her niece. Agnes had lost all sense of herself. Her breathing was even and deep as though she had gone to a state beyond sleep. If her skin was p.r.i.c.ked, cut with a knife, she would not feel it. She lay insensible to the world around her, as if she'd been carved from wood or stone.

Aunt M had helped many people on quests such as this. Ever since a childhood vision had marked her out as a special person, she had been open to the spirit world. Back then, when it first happened, Aunt M had felt wonder, fear and confusion, pretty much as Agnes had. Her grandmother had helped her, acting as guide and protector. Aunt M had learned from her wisdom; she called on her now to bring strength to herself and Agnes. Aunt M had gone on to help others, to act as a contact between seeker and spirit. She saw it as a service and she was proud to give it; but she had never worked with anyone she loved the way she loved Agnes. Fear for the girl welled up inside her, seeping into her concentration, threatening to dissolve her resolution to stay calm and not to interfere with what was happening here. She fought hard to banish it from her mind. To intervene would be to put her niece at very great risk. Agnes had gone beyond her power to help or hinder. She had gone to a place where only spirits could reach.

Aunt M watched on through the night. Watch was all she could do, apart from making sure that her niece was comfortable, that her body did not take chill. It was cold now. Aunt M pulled on her old plaid s.h.i.+rt and went out to set fresh stones to keep the lodge warm, then she went to Agnes and tucked a blanket round her.

For a moment the girl's eyes flared open, but it was not Agnes looking back at her. These eyes were a lighter grey, more heavily flecked with gold, the irises ringed and striated with black. Eyes of a Wolf, isn't that what the Pennacook called you? A good naming. The eyes closed and Agnes sighed. Aunt M continued looking down at her.

'You sought her, and you found her. All I ask is you do not harm her. Or I will ... '

I will what? Aunt M knew she could do nothing but watch and wait it out. She burnt a little sweetgra.s.s and pinches of tobacco to honour the spirit and then set herself to watch again, sitting on the opposite side of the lodge from Agnes. She had placed Agnes in the west, the seat of woman power, the home of the spirits, the place of dreaming; she herself sat in the east, the seat of the shaman, the place of mystery, of mirrors and echoes. She sat hardly moving, as immobile and ageless as a wooden carving. She began to hum soft and low, then to chant. She sang to keep Agnes from harm, to lend her strength, and as her song went on she beat out time with a turtle rattle.

g Agnes came back to her just before dawn, just as the forest around echoed with the first bird calls. Aunt M went over to her, helping her up. She rose with difficulty, her legs wobbly, giving at the knees. She felt unused to her own body, as though she'd been ill and in bed for a long time.

The very early morning cast its pearly light over everything as they left the sweat lodge. Aunt M led her down to the water's edge. Agnes did not mind the swim this time. The water was bitingly cold, but it was refres.h.i.+ng. It woke her body, if not her mind.

Her head was still in some other place. Aunt M wrapped a towel around her and led her back to the cabin. Agnes lay down on the bed, suddenly weary. Her mind began sliding away. She was becoming Mary again, this time she felt it happen. There was something else. In the second it took to slip into her skin, she knew that she was not a girl any more but a mature woman.

19.

Weatuck at the village The life was hard, but what life is not? The words come slowly. I rarely think in English any more.

The child I carried in my womb from the mountain was preparing for his winter quest, the time when he would go to the woods as a boy and come back a man. My son, Black Fox, had already earned his name through stealth in hunting. Fierce and skilful in the games the boys played, he had done as much as a boy could do to live up to White Eagle's prophecy on the day of his naming, saying that he would grow up to be a great warrior and a chief. My mother's heart had swelled with pride at that moment, never doubting that it would be so.

I had my place. I was accepted as Eyes of a Wolf, wife to Jaybird, mother to Black Fox and Speckled Bird. I worked with the other women in the endless round of sowing and planting, tending and harvesting. I learned to cure skins and work them to softness. I did not mind the work. I found it no more or less arduous than the work to be done around a settlement homestead, or an English cottage. A woman's work is never done, here as anywhere, but with one difference. We worked all women together with no husband, father or overseer to chivvy, chide or criticise. We helped each other, and there was often much laughter and high good humour. No man told us what to do. No man would dare. The children ran round scaring crows or played where we could see them. When he was younger, Black Fox would sit with Speckled Bird, fas.h.i.+oning dolls from corn husks for her while she made a village from leaves.

Each time of the year brought different work and it might have gone on in that way until I was old and grey and a grandmother. A life at least as good as any other. But trouble was coming from the south like the scent of smoke blowing on the wind, like the smell in the air when the forest takes fire.

A night since, there had been a sign, a portent, one so full of foreboding that it set the hair to creep and the flesh to crawl. A shadow had pa.s.sed over the moon, turning her face to blood. Then, as we watched, the shadow seemed to ma.s.s and take the shape of a warrior's scalp lock hanging from the back of a b.l.o.o.d.y skull.

White Eagle was needed to augur this and I had been sent to ask him what it meant. He was of a great age and lived more and more in the world of the spirit. He had little use for this world and longed to leave it. He had withdrawn from the life of the village, saying that he had no more counsel to give. Ordinarily his wishes would have been respected, for he was revered by all, but the scalp-lock moon was a sign that could not be ignored.

I was one of the few allowed to approach him. It was rare for a woman, but I was now a powwaw, and a powerful one. He had taught me all he knew and although I took little part in ceremonies, my counsel was heeded, and I was needed as a healer, as my grandmother had been before me. From White Eagle I had come to know the use of every bark, root and leaf in the forest, but it was not just that. I had the power in my hands, more than when I was a girl.

'It must come from here.' White Eagle formed a fist and thumped his chest. 'As well as here.' He tapped his brow.

I learned to tend well and sick alike and was skilled in treating the illnesses that came from the white people. The spotted sickness, which was the name for smallpox, and the agues and fevers that ravaged whole villages. I did not succ.u.mb, so I could nurse the sick and prepare the dead for burial.

But I was more than a healer, I had other powers. I was feared for the same reason as the ones called witches: I could summon spirits, I could change my shape to that of an animal, I could harm as well as heal, I could kill as well as cure.

White Eagle chose his camp carefully. Few would risk crossing ground this holy, this sacred. I trod carefully so as not to disturb the dead, brus.h.i.+ng through their tattered clothing which hung from the trees like cobwebs.

There was no smoke rising as I approached the clearing. His wigwam was empty. His fire was cold. The camp was swept clean and left neat, but his few possessions had disappeared. He had gone. We would have to face the future without him.

I journeyed back to the village with a heavy heart, reluctant to be the bearer of such bad tidings, to pile one omen upon another. I arrived when smoke was rising from the evening cooking fires, wisping up from long house and wigwam. Soon families would gather to talk over the day and to eat together. I stopped on the hill above the settlement. A group of men on horseback were leaving, picking their way down the narrow track in single file. Horses and hats gave them out to be English.

I waited for them to be well on their way before starting down the hill. I took care never to be seen by any of them. I did not want it to be known that one of their own dwelt with the native people. Not that they would have noticed. I was a native woman and therefore invisible. Nevertheless, I made sure to stay in the gardens or keep to the wigwam when Yenguese came to the camp, be they neighbour or trader.

I could see Jaybird coming back with the other men from the hunt. They had been successful. Bulging game bags and bundles of fur and feathers hung from their belts and they were laughing, carrying a deer slung on poles. Speckled Bird ran out to meet her father. He swooped on her, scooping her up, carrying her under his arm as if she was a creature he had caught in the forest. She giggled, wriggling with delight. It was a game that they had played since she was a tiny child. He swung her round and up on his shoulders, although she was eight now and her legs dangled to his belt. She held his braids like a horse's reins and kicked him in the ribs, none too gently at that, to make him paw the ground and canter for her. He stopped at her command and looked up at her, they both laughed at something that she said and I laughed with them. Something of the sort had happened almost every day since Speckled Bird crawled from her cradle board. She was his favourite and he spoilt her. He would deny her nothing.

I stood and watched, the smile dying on my mouth. I knew this was a moment caught in time. The last of its kind. A moment to be savoured and kept in the mind; a moment not to forget.

Beside him walked Black Fox. He was nearing fourteen years and big for his age, almost as tall as his father, and puffed by the importance of being part of the hunt. He was trying to speak of serious things and resented his sister's interruption. She had taken Jaybird away from him. Black Fox was my firstborn and darling of my heart, but a mother's love was not enough. He wanted his father's respectful attention. He stared down to the ground, trying to master his anger. In a moment he would stalk off by himself. His playfulness had gone from him. He wanted to be a man, although he was still boy enough to sulk.

In the distance, across the other side of the snaking silver river, lay another village. Smoke was rising from there also, curling up from stone chimneys to lie in drifts in the still July air. The settlements hid from each other behind high stockades but for years they had lived in peace together, even friends.h.i.+p. I looked down and my sadness deepened. That was about to end.

I had never been near the English settlement, although I could see how it grew and developed. I could see the pattern of the lives they led there and it reminded me very much of Beulah. Soon husbands would be returning with sons beside them, just as John Rivers had; mothers would stand at the door, like Sarah, calling for their children to come in to supper. I had lived in English settlement and Indian village and reflected on how little really divided them in the things that matter: home, hearth and family.

Both believed in dreams and portents. The scalp-lock moon shone down on all alike, and they would have looked back with equal disquiet. A time of trial approached and both would look to some great spirit for guidance and blessing. Be it G.o.d or Manitou, what did the naming of Him matter?

g For months past runners had been arriving, sent by Metacom, sachem of the Wampanoags, whom the English called King Philip. The present quarrel lay between Metacom and the men of Plymouth, but the grievances he held were common ones. Everywhere the English settlers were encroaching, cheating the Indians out of their tribal lands, fencing in hunting grounds. But the trouble went deeper, for the Puritans would brook no difference. They wanted the Indians to deny their own beliefs and become Christian. They wanted them to stop their wandering way of life and exchange buckskin for broadcloth, breech clout for breeches. They wanted them to live in permanent settlements, like the Praying Indians, and yoke themselves to the plough.

Finally it had happened. Metacom had broken out of his tribal lands, burning settlements, killing soldiers sent to protect them. Signs lay along the trails, cut into the bark of trees for all who pa.s.sed to read, but to the settlers the war would come all unexpected, just as rain falling in distant mountains surges down the rivers to flood the plains.

The Englishmen I had seen leaving the village had been frightened, shocked at the news from the south. They had come for a.s.surance that the like would not happen here. Although the sachem was minded to offer those a.s.surances, some among the English company had been arrogant and swaggering, threatening what would happen should the tribe join Metacom. This caused anger, among the young men in particular. The joy of a successful hunt was forgotten. I entered a camp torn with dissension, full of tension and full of fear.

That evening a council was called. I was asked to join them round the council fire. I was a powwaw, one whose dreams and visions are true. I had been apprentice to White Eagle. If he could not be there, I would stand in his stead. I was also Eyes of a Wolf. They all knew my story. I knew the ways of the English, for I was once one of them.

The long house was crowded, the air thick with smoke from the fire which burned in the centre and from the pipes of the men seated in a circle about it. Hoosac, the sachem, sat with his brother Coos, who was muckquopauog, war leader; across from them were his ahtaskoaog, princ.i.p.al men and elders. The clan mothers were there, too. I took my place beside them.

Firelight flickered over faces set and grim, gleaming on muscle and skin. There was a stranger among us. His hair and dress proclaimed him from a different nation. His face was painted for war. He was a Wampanoag sent by Metacom. He bowed and asked permission to address the people. When he received the sachem's a.s.sent, he began to speak.

'Metacom sends his greetings and many wampum belts.' He held out the wide bands of purple and white sh.e.l.l beads. 'He sends these to show his love for the Pentucket people. He says he will fight alone if need be, but he is calling on you as his brothers, he is calling on all of the nations to band together to help him drive the English from the land and back into the sea.'

When he had finished, Hoosac thanked him for his words and the wampum and turned to his council, wanting to know what others thought.

'I say this.' Coos spoke from his place on the sachem's right-hand side. 'We must fight. Metacom has called for our help and we must join him. It is time we rose up against the English. It is time to take back what is ours and send them back to their wooden s.h.i.+ps.'

'It is too late for that. There are too many. We should have done that when they first came to the land.' Hoosac turned to the stranger. 'Besides, Wannalancet says that we should keep out of this quarrel. This matter would not have arisen if Metacom's man had not killed another and then refused the punishment set for this by the laws of the English.'

There was nodding all around the circle. Wannalancet was Ketasontimoog, chief sachem of the Pennacook. Hoosac's band owed allegiance to him.

'Why should we obey their laws?' The Wampanoag sneered. 'They are cowards. They are soft. If we take arms against them, they will run from us like a bunch of women! If we do not fight, how can we live as men?'

There was nodding at that also. Then I spoke.

'They are not soft. They will fight fiercely and they can be more ruthless than any of you guess.'

The Wampanoag warrior glared at me. I was a woman and a Yenguese, he did not consider that I should be heard at all.

Hoosac saw the look he gave me.

'All who are invited to council have the right to be heard,' he said, his tone mild but full of authority. 'You have spoken, now it is her turn. That is our way.'

'And she says the truth.' One of the old men, Black Feather, spoke up for me. 'Who can forget how the English dealt death to the Pequot people? I was a young man then, but I remember when the news came of what the English had done to the Pequot at Mystic Fort. They attacked at dawn, firing the encampment and killing any who sought to flee: men, women, children, shooting them down with muskets. Four hundred all told. The slaughter was so great that even the Narrangset and Mohegan, who were allies of the English and enemies of the Pequot, even they were shocked and made sick by it.'

'Black Feather is right.' Another elder spoke up. 'And it didn't end there. The English did not rest until all of the Pequot were dead or dispersed. They were thorough.'

I spoke again, telling them about when I was a child and England was rent with civil war and how fiercely they had fought one another, brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. How in Ireland, Cromwell had put entire towns to the sword.

'And these were Yenguese, their own people?'

I nodded.

Hoosac shook his head at such savagery. He was getting on in years now, a gentle man and cautious. The thought of war did not fire his blood as it did his younger brother's. He would want to keep his people out of the fighting for as long as he could.

The debate went on but Hoosac had decided. The tribe had no quarrel with the English hereabouts. They would not commit themselves, not yet anyway. They would wait and see.

The sachem's decision was not heard by everyone. The crowd in the long house had been thinning. The Wampanoag warrior and Coos, the sachem's brother, had already left and other young men had gone with them, slipping off into the night, determined to join the fight.

g Life went on as usual through summer towards the autumn. We hoed and cared for the plants growing in the gardens: corn, pumpkin, beans. We made mats from the bulrushes, prepared hides for clothing and moccasins, smoked and dried fish and flesh for the winter months. But the work was done without the usual leavening of humour. The mood in the gardens was subdued, as it was in the village. When the men were away fis.h.i.+ng or hunting, the women went about their tasks almost in silence, hardly noticing what they were doing, each one lost in endless calculation of what this war could cost them. Even the children ceased their chatter and playing and looked to their tasks scaring crows, carrying water, picking pests off the growing corn, for every ear grown and safely garnered was insurance against hunger and want.

Even when the men were about, the atmosphere barely lightened. The hunt returning was generally a time for feasting, a time of plenty, but now there was little rejoicing. We dried and smoked the meat the men brought us and put it into storage pits, while the men cl.u.s.tered in groups, talking in low tones.

On past summer evenings, after we had eaten, Black Fox and Speckled Bird would sometimes play together outside our wigwam. He had taught her knuckle bones, a game with five stones I remembered from home, showing her how to throw them up and catch them on the back of her hand. He liked to carve things and had fas.h.i.+oned dolls for her, or made stick figures for her village, helping her mark out paths with the pretty stones and sh.e.l.ls that she collected. Speckled Bird's village changed with the season. Now a palisade of sharpened sticks bristled round it and a war post stood in the centre, a squat stump of wood, stained red as if by blood.

Black Fox rarely found time to play with his sister now. Most nights saw him slipping from our wigwam to join other firesides where the talk was of war. In the daytime he went to help the men who were looking to their weapons, making and fletching arrows, working the blades of their tomahawks on whetstones, grinding the edges to wicked keenness, keeping everything in sharp repair.

All summer long it was as if a storm was brewing. The war flickered like distant lightning, playing across the mountains to the south, to the west, to the north, then all around. News of the fighting growled in our ears like thunder. Each day the atmosphere grew more ominous. The war was coming upon us, like it or not.

20.

War trail It came at the time of the green corn harvest when the first corn was brought in from the gardens. The kernels were plump and fat with milky sweetness and were roasted and boiled with fowl and venison. Plums and grapes and different berries were mixed for a pudding with corn meal and maple syrup. It was a time of plenty, a celebration of earth's bounty.

Coos, the sachem's brother, turned this time of festival into a war dance.

He came back from the fighting in the south a honed and hardened warrior with a fresh scar seaming his face from ear to chin. He had his war band with him. They were honoured, given the best place at the feast, the choicest of meats. After the feasting was over, he stood up, arms outstretched, and addressed the men about him.

'My brothers, I bring greetings from Metacom ... '

He went on to describe Metacom's triumphant progress and his own part in it: the soldiers killed, the towns burned, the settlements sacked. Black Fox leaned forward, drinking in every word he said. Coos called for warriors to stand up and join him. First one man, then another moved to form a circle. He asked who else would come to him. Black Fox stood up to join the dance.

'You cannot join! You are too young!' I called out to him but he walked away as if he had not heard me. I turned to Jaybird. 'You must stop him.'

'It is too late. He has been accepted.'

Jaybird rose from where he was sitting.

'You cannot!'

I held his arm, but he shook me off. He was moving away from me now.

'I must! Would you see me dishonoured? Shamed by my own son, a boy of barely fourteen summers? If he is prepared to take the war trail, I cannot stand by like an old one.'

A deep-throated shout went up as Jaybird joined the other men, for he was a skilled hunter and tracker and had proved himself a courageous and cunning fighter on the war trail against the Mohawks. In normal times I would have been proud of him, but now I rued his prowess and wish him lame, sick, weakly anything to keep him here with me.

I saw my anguish reflected on the faces of other women as their men rose to leave their hearths and fires and gathered at the centre of the village.

Flames grew and sparks flew up into the dark night sky. The powwaws shook their turtle rattles, an empty, ticking, scratchy sound, and then the drums started, beating out a steady and strong rhythm. The war dance was starting. The ground shook with the thump and stamp of feet. The firelight shone on the dipping, swaying dancers, turning their sweating skin and muscle to burnished copper. Then the chanting began as each warrior added his song to the rhythm set by the drums beating and the feet stamping. War cries rang out, inhuman shrieks, like the calls of owl or eagle. Coos raised a ball-headed club with a great spike in it, smeared with vermilion as if blood was already upon it, and struck at a quintain set in the centre of the circle. Other men smote the post in turn, while still others held their hands to the sky to bring down the spirits.

Jaybird and Black Fox merged in with the others. I could not tell any man apart in the whirl and turn. They were all caught in the drumming and chanting, blind to those outside them, moving as one thing, like a monstrous snake or serpent. Women and children could only stand and watch in resignation, for they knew that once joined, there could be no leaving. The only honourable way to quit the dance was death.

g The dancing went on far into the night but I was too sick at heart to watch further. I withdrew to our wigwam and lay alone on our sleeping platform, gathering the furs about me, but I could not sleep. Speckled Bird woke, wanting to know what the noise was. I took her in my arms and held her to me, rocking her to sleep to the rhythm of the war dance.

Jaybird came to me as day was dawning. I nearly cried out; he had to put a hand over my mouth. For a moment I failed to recognise him in the darkness of the wigwam lit only by the embers of the fire. He was stripped for war. His head was shaved save for a single crest of hair running from front to back; his face was painted half red, half black. I would not have known him except for the gorget he wore about his neck. I had made it as a wedding gift to him, threading beads and sh.e.l.ls together. The half-silver coin at the centre glittered against his throat as he bent to touch Speckled Bird's sleeping head.

He gathered me up and held me in his arms and kissed me for one last time. I wanted to whisper my love to him, to beg, to implore, to plead with him, but I remained silent. My heart was too full, words would make the tears spill, and I would not shame him by weeping.

Black Fox was outside, his head shaved also, his eyes ringed with black like a racc.o.o.n mask. The sight of him, I must confess, caused my tears to spill. He was just a boy and much too young to go with the warriors. In my eyes he was still a child, my child, but I knew that I could not keep him. My woman's words would not be heeded. I could not make him stay, he would follow anyway. All I could do was give him my blessing.

I might never see them in life again, but they left without a word being spoken. To break custom would be a bad omen and among Jaybird's people there is no word for farewell.

21.