BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (28 page)

§ CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO §

Before the geese had honked southward that autumn, the corn dance was celebrated. It was the most joyous of traditions, one the Natchez had brought with them ages before when they migrated eastward from an Aztec influenced west.

The Great Sun of the tribe was borne swiftly on his litter by relays of bearers, taking him to the harvest celebration. Feasting and laughter, stately speeches and games filled the afternoon. Then as evening descended, cane torches blazed as brightly as the last rays of the sun on the lowlands beyond the river.

A drummer began to beat a skin stretched across a pottery bowl. Around him circled the young Natchez females, then the warriors. Each carried a gourd filled with pebbles. The women moved from left to right and the men in the opposite direction. During all this, they kept time with their bodies and their gourds to the beat of the drum. When the dancers wearied, they dropped out into the darkness beyond the torches and other men and women took their places.

Celebrating the harvest, fulfillment, and fertility, the dance continued until dawn. But this year what the Natchez Nation celebrated most was a harvest of hatred.

The Great Sun’s plan went into effect on the 28 of November 1729, reckoned by the Natchez as the ninth moon, that of the buffalo. By European concepts, the time specified for the attack, the fourth hour, would have been the fourth hour after midnight, but for the Natchez the time was the fourth hour after daybreak, or about nine o’clock in the morning.

Natalie was sitting on the gallery with Jeanne-Antoinette, shelling peas, when three Indians approached carrying baskets of dried and husked corn. Smiling broadly, they spoke with Jeanne-Antoinette in a mixture of French and Indian, and she explained to Natalie what she understood about the tribute the commandant had demanded.

“They carry arms for hunting, for a great feast, they say.”

Natalie couldn’t shake an uncomfortable feeling. While the Indians talked, she noted that small groups of other Indians entered other houses. Suddenly, from the commandant’s quarters, came musket shots. As if it were a signal, the three Indians fell upon Jeanne-Antoinette and Natalie. What happened next seemed to occur all at once.

From the basket, one Indian whipped out a
wooden head-breaker and, with a mighty swing, brought it down on Jeanne- Antoinette’s head, caving in her skull as if it were an eggshell. Blood and brain matter flew everywhere. Natalie screamed and shot to her feet. The bowl in her lap thudded onto the wooden floor. Shelled peas rolled across the gallery like marbles.

One of the Indians, a short, stocky brave, pinned her arms behind her and prodded her down the gallery steps, but not before she saw one of the warriors take his hunting knife and slit open Jeanne-Antoinette’s bulging stomach. The red-fleshed baby was still kicking when the Indian swung it by its tiny ankles and bashed its head against one of the gallery’s cedar posts.

After that, Natalie’s body responded to the grunted instructions of her captor, but her mind was hazed over like the morning fog off the swamp. When she finally took note of where she was, she wasn’t certain just how much time had elapsed, perhaps a full day, maybe two. She only knew that she blinked and looked up from the hands that lay palms up in her lap to see that she was in another house much like that of Hervé and Jeanne-Antoinette’s. Other Frenchwomen, along with some Negresses, sat in the room with her or paced the floor. They all wore the same vacant look.

Natalie recognized a woman Jeanne-Antoinette had introduced several days earlier, the German widow Schneeweis. “I see you’re coming to yourself,” the stout woman said in her mildly accented French, leaning down to peer at Natalie.

Up close, Natalie could make out the widow’s faint moustache. “What time is it?”

“About four in the afternoon.” The widow nodded her head toward the window. “The massacre looks to be over. The red devils are dividing up the spoils among themselves.”

Natalie rose from where she sat on the planked floor and crossed to the window. She felt a sharp pain grind through her at what she saw. The heads of all the French dead were being brought into the public square. Disbelieving, she watched as
Hervé’s houndlike face was mounted on a staff. Most of the heads lacked scalps. In the center of the square, the mutilated bodies, some of those children, were piled to be left to the dogs and buzzards.

Sometime between that grisly moment and the forced march to the Grand Village, Natalie miscarried for the second time in her life.

A woman’s blond scalp tied to a tree limb was the first of a series of gruesome warnings that Nicolas encountered on his trip downriver to New Orleans. A full scalp, taken just above the ears, could be made into several smaller ones, equally negotiable for ten ecus, if the scalp looked to be Indian. But a blond one . . . Clearly, an Indian uprising was in the air.

Three days after, word of the massacre at Fort Rosalie reached the capital along with a more accurate tally of the dead given by Father Philibert, Capuchin priest and missionary. Of about 500 settlers, 144 men, 35 women, and 56 children were killed.

Nicolas, sharing confidences in one of the New Orlean’s seedier rum houses with a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, heard the story as it passed in French from slurred lips to slurred lips. “To Governor Perier—and revenge,” toasted an older Frenchman whose wig was askew.

Nicolas, though seeming to have hefted his share of mugs, had actually drunk very little, yet the room seemed to expand, the customers and the walls fading away to be replaced by Natalie’s face. Often he had put miles and months between himself and Natalie, yet she still managed to claim comers of his mind at the most unsuspecting times. He would love her as long as there was breath in him. All his wanderings would never change that fact.

With painful clarity, he realized that as long as he had known she was alive and all right, he had been able to remove himself from her life. That independent woman with her cool, regal beauty, hadn’t she always been able to take care of herself, to adapt, even in the midst of a wilderness? But now . . .

It didn’t take him long to gather the few facts and learn that the governor was planning to unite the French forces with the Choctaws and attack. While revenge might be sweet, it could endanger the lives of the captives. Nicolas knew he had to reach the Grand Village ahead of the French and the Choctaws.
Le bon Dieu
willing, Natalie had either escaped, though few had, or she was a captive. The chances of the latter were good since it appeared that for the most part the white women and the slaves, both men and women, had been spared.

He left at once, taking a pirogue, which, even going upriver, was faster than trying to guide a horse through the mire and swamp and tangled underbrush of the trackless forests. Fringed leggings had replaced his satin
knee breeches and deerhide moccasins his gold-buckled pumps.

Before he drew near the village, he rechecked his musket’s firing pan and priming pin. His knife and tomahawk were fastened to his side like old friends but hung loosely enough. For nigh half a day, he patiently reconnoitered
the area, gliding over the withered grass and brown leaves like a light bark canoe over water so that his passing left no trail. The woodsman in him summed up all in his field of vision as either being normal or else unnatural. When his woods sense sounded no alarm of suspicious signs, he at last approached the stockade.

The Natchez houses were made of mud and cane and were dome-shaped like the windmills of La Cadie. Those occupied by the nobility were approximately thirty feet square; those of the lower class were about half as large. The main temple faced east, squatting on a mound of earth about eight feet above the rest of the terrain. On another mound, the house of the Great Sun stood facing the temple.

The Great Sun emerged from the low doorway of his hut. His face was painted vermilion, and he wore a half-crown of flamingo feathers and a loincloth, along with a fur robe mantling his shoulders. In his head, he carried a red stick decorated with not white but red feathers—symbolic of war.

A war dance was already in progress. The warriors had painted different parts of their bodies with various colors of mud—black, red, yellow, gray, smeared from hand to foot. Their belts were ornamented with bells or shells filled with pebbles that clicked and clanked. The braves cavorted about the village’s central plaza. Meanwhile, the old men were coloring war clubs red, obviously preparing for a large-scale attack.

Nicolas had learned enough about this particular tribe to know that captives were usually made to sing and dance for several days in front of the temple before they were delivered as recompense to the relatives of persons who had been killed. With the time that had elapsed, he figured that Natalie, if she was, indeed, alive, was no longer held in a communal building but had integrated into one of the households. Which?

Occasionally, a bedragg
led Frenchwoman crossed the compound, weighed down with an armful of logs or toting heavy kettles of water. None of them was Natalie. Time was running short, and a stealthy search of each hut was out of the question.

A frown creased the high bridge of his bladed nose. He was attacking the problem as a white person would, looking at the problem from the aspect of the difficulties rather than searching for the simplistic approach.

It would be his
manito
against theirs.

He rose from his surveillance spot at the base of a twenty-foot canebrake and sauntered boldly into the village. At first, no one took note of him, but as his confidence-proclaiming strides took him nearer to the plaza, heads started to turn. The naked Natchez children ceased playing
pelotte
with the fist-size ball of deerskin packed with Spanish moss and stared at the buckskinned stranger. A weathered old woman grinding maize paused and flicked him an impassive glance. The village’s mangy curs snapped at his heels, and scrawny chickens pranced quickly out of his path.

Two painted warriors halted their dancing and descended on him. Ignoring their hostile looks, he walked directly to the temple and removed the white-clay peace calumet that hung from the tall red pole near the doorway.

“
Mikilish hatak
!” shouted the chief, demanding he halt.

Pipe still in hand, Nicolas, looking down from his greater height
, asked guilelessly, “Am I not covered by the smoke of peace?” Purposely, he spoke in English.

The warriors slowed their charge. With the British as allies of the Natchez, they assumed he was an English trader. Safe for the moment, he launched into Creek then, which the Natchez understood for the most part, at least better than English. “I have trade goods that are both superior and cheaper than the French stock, and the English rum is as potent as the best French brandy.”

Invited into the Great Sun’s cabin, he accepted the calumet’s bowl, which was passed from the chief to four or five of the more distinguished princes. Atop their heads, they wore a tuft of longer hair, which hung over the left ear. After Nicolas inhaled and passed the pipe to the malodorous prince on his left, he proceeded to relate that his trade goods were in his canoe cached upriver beneath the riverbank underbrush. Deftly, he turned the discussion to the white captives he had noticed in the village.

The chief launched into a wordy description of the coup the Natchez had performed on the French. For all the Great Sun’s boasting, Nicolas could see that the chief was concerned about the consequences of having defied the mighty French nation. Eagerly, he questioned Nicolas about the possibility of support from the Cumberland settlements, which were English.

Nicolas let a suitably lengthy interval pass in which he seemed to be giving much consideration to the Great Sun’s question. At last, he drew dramatically on the calumet’s stem, exhaled, and replied, “Great Sun, I’d be willing to act as one of your emissaries on my travels back through the Cumberland to the English seaboard colonies. If I take one of your French captives with me, I could better convince my government of your magnificent feat against our shared enemy, the French dogs.”

The suggestion did not work quite as he had hoped, for the Natchez chief clearly meant to make the choice of the captive who would accompany Nicolas. After all, the chief explained, relieving one of the warriors of his reward could result in bitter feelings. The choice would have to be considered and Nicolas would be informed the following day.

That evening, he ate a rancid stew of dog meat and watched the monotonous ceremonial dancing about the smoky fires. The warriors wore water-repellent swanskins about their shoulders as mantles. The bucks were growing inebriated with the plunder of wines and liqueurs taken from Fort Rosalie. Syphilis, smallpox, and alcohol were gradually decimating the native population.

Casually, his gaze moved beyond the pall of smoke to the doorways of the various cabins. Did Natalie watch from within one of those cabins?

The pain of loving her and never having her had filled him with rancor over the years, making it difficult to think of her without anger. Now, all he could think was that she had to be alive. Or else he faced the yawning emptiness that had been his life before she came into it with her imperious little gestures and those quick flashes of humor that had wedged between the panels of emotional armor he had donned as the son rejected by Sieur Damien du Plessis.

When the earlier group of dancers withdrew beyond the ring of firelight and others took their places, Nicolas thought it time to seek out the cabin appointed to him, smaller than those of the nobility. Inside waited the Natchez maiden who was designated as his for the night. A banked fire gave off subdued light. He saw that she was tall and comely despite the tattoos that marked her chin. She wore a soft deerskin skirt that was beaded at the hem and a tunic banded with shells—and the mirror necklace he had given Natalie.

Pushing back her back curtain of hair, she rose from the fur-covered platform and crossed to him. “
Tsitshia
?” she asked. Her brown fingers indicated the area of her groin. Unselfconsciously, she took his hand and drew him back to her bed.

He lay beside her and stared into her sloe eyes, but it was pale green eyes and sun-drenched hair spilling over the platform that his mind’s eye saw. Nevertheless, the Natchez maiden was going to be insulted if he did not take advantage of the gift offered a guest by the host. And an insult wouldn’t prompt her to talk about the necklace.

Tentatively, she touched his crotch and said, “
Atcha
," referring to his sex organs in general, then asked, “Mishmish-kip táma’l?”

“No,” he told her, she wasn’t a homely woman. That wasn’t the reason for his soft manhood.

Satisfied, she set out to rectify the problem. Even with Natalie’s face haunting him, his body responded to her seductively manipulating hands and lips. He took her at once, feeling the intense but fleeting pleasure of muscle contractions that convulsed his entire frame. Afterward, she curled up, her back to him, prepared to sleep, but he began to talk to her, stroking her nape and occasionally plying her with seemingly aimless questions.

At last, he had the information he sought. A brave had given her the necklace. Four or five women with blond hair and of Natalie’s height and slenderness had been taken captive. Their ages could vary; it was difficult to tell from the Natchez descriptive term of years. Two captives were lodged with the same warrior and his family. Two or three more were distributed throughout the huts of the lower ranks of the Natchez. One was housed with a prince of the tribe.

Seeing that the Indian maiden was becoming aroused again, he ceased his stroking, which she dutifully accepted and went off to sleep.

He stepped out into the frosted moonlight and marked the hut where Natalie might be. Once again, he opted for boldness. He began to sing drunkenly in English and staggered along. At that time of night, few were sober enough to question him. At the predetermined cabins, he introduced Natalie’s name in a slightly louder singsong.

The first of the described huts elicited no response, but from the second he heard, “Nicolas, here!”

Abruptly, he halted before the hut. She was alive! A smart slap came from the cabin’s exterior, followed by the cursing of an old woman in the Natchez language, something about Natalie awakening the dead. Nicolas wasn’t that fluid in the Tunican dialect.

He sang again, introducing the French word patience several times between two bawdy English stanzas. He could only hope she understood. After a while of rambling drunkenly about the area, he circled behind the hut where Natalie was. Recalling the cabin he had just quitted, he tried to judge where the platforms would most likely be situated in Natalie’s hut. With his knife, he passed a good hour and a half sawing as quietly as possible at the cane-and-mud wall. He dared not go any slower, for fear the cabin’s resident warrior would return from the dance. A two-foot square took shape, large enough for a slender woman to wriggle through.

Carefully, so carefully, he removed the loosened portion, hardly daring to breathe. When he perceived that a human back blocked
the hole, he lost all his breath. Then Natalie’s face appeared. Incredibly, she was smiling, with tears glistening on her cheeks. He took her outstretched hands and pulled her through the aperture.

When she could stand, she flung her arms about him and wept silently, her narrow shoulders quaking convulsively. He held her for a moment and caressed her matted hair. She would need to draw strength from that small comfort before they began the arduous undertaking of making good their escape. That they would escape offered no problem; he was that sure of his capabilities. What he would do once he reached Natchitoches with Natalie, or without her, was the problem. The woman that had fascinated him from the first, and continued to do so after all these years, possessed a manito equal to his.