Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (101 page)

He studied her for a moment, but she meant it. He sighed and dug out his purse.

“Ye’ll need money for the wagon.”

IT WAS COLD, BUT
the air of dawn was clear as broken glass and just as sharp in the lungs. Ian was hunting with Thayendanegea this morning, and they were following a glutton. Following, not hunting. Fresh snow had fallen in the night—was still falling, though lightly for the moment—and the animal was visible, a tiny black blot on gray snow at this distance, but moving in the stolid, rolling fashion that spoke of long patience, rather than the graceful diving lope of pursuit. The glutton, too, was following something.

“Ska’niònhsa,”
Thayendanegea said, nodding at a patch of muddied snow, in which the curve of a hoofprint showed.

“Wounded, then,” Ian replied, nodding in agreement. A glutton wouldn’t take on a healthy moose—few things would—but it would follow a wounded one for days, patiently waiting for weakness to bring the
ska’niònhsa
to its knees. “He’d best hope the wolves don’t find it first.”

“Everything is chance,” Thayendanegea said philosophically, and brought his rifle down from its sling. The rifle notwithstanding, Ian thought the remark was not entirely philosophical. Ian tilted his head to and fro in equivocation.

“My uncle is a gambler,” he said, though the Mohawk word he used didn’t carry quite the same meaning as the English one. It meant something more like “one who seizes boldly” or “one who is careless with his life,” depending on the context. “He says one must take risks, but only a fool takes risks without knowing what they are.”

Thayendanegea glanced at him, slightly amused.
And that wee bit wary, too,
Ian thought.

“And how is one to know, then?”

“One asks and one listens.”

“And have you come to listen to me?”

“I came to see Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa,” Ian said courteously, “but it would be wasteful indeed to leave again without listening to a man of your experience and wisdom, since you are good enough to talk with me.”

The chuckle that came in response to that was Joseph Brant, not Thayendanegea, and so was the knowing look that came with it.

“And your uncle, of course, might be interested in what I have to say?”

“Maybe,” said Ian, equably. He was carrying his old musket; good enough for anything they were likely to find. They were passing through a growth of enormous spruce, and the snow was sparse beneath the prickly branches, the thick layer of needles slippery underfoot. “He told me to judge whether I should say to you what he knows.”

“I suppose you’ve decided to do so, then,” Brant said, the look of amusement deepening. “What he
knows
? He said this? Not what he thinks?”

Ian shrugged, eyes on the distant glutton.

“He knows.” He and Uncle Jamie had discussed it, and Uncle Jamie had finally left it up to him to decide how to tell it. Whether to pass it off as knowledge gained from Jamie’s time as an Indian agent and his connections with both the British government and the Continental army—or tell the truth. Brant was the only military commander to whom this particular truth
could
be told—but that didn’t mean he’d believe it. He was still a Mohawk, though, half-Irish wife and college education notwithstanding.

“My uncle’s wife,” Ian said, watching the words leave him in small puffs of white mist. “She is an
arennowa’nen,
but she is more. She has walked with a ghost of the Kahnyen’kehaka, and she has walked through time.”

Thayendanegea turned his head sharply as a hunting owl. Ian had nothing to hide and was unmoved. After a moment, Thayendanegea nodded, though the muscles of his shoulders did not relax.

“The war,” Ian said bluntly. “You have so far cast your lot with the British, and for good reason. But we tell you now that the Americans will prevail. You will, of course, decide what is best for your people in light of that knowledge.”

The dark eyes blinked, and a cynical smile touched the corner of his mouth. Ian didn’t press things, but walked on tranquilly. The snow squeaked beneath their boots; it was getting colder.

Ian lifted this head to sniff the air; despite the clearness of the air, he felt a sense of further snow, the faint vibration of a distant storm. But what he caught on the breeze was the scent of blood.

“There!” he said under his breath, gripping Thayendanegea’s sleeve.

The glutton had momentarily disappeared, but as they watched, they saw it leap from rock to rock, like water flowing uphill, and come to rest on a high point, from which it looked down, intent.

The men said nothing but broke into a swift jog, their breath streaming white.

The moose had fallen to its knees in the shelter of a cluster of dark pines; the strong scent of its blood mingled with the trees’ turpentine, eddying around them. The wolves would be here soon.

Thayendanegea made a brief gesture to Ian, to go ahead. This wasn’t a matter of bravery or skill, only speed. The animal had broken a hind leg—it stuck out at a disturbing angle, the splintered white bone showing through the hair, and the snow around it was splattered and speckled with blood.

Weakened as it was, it raised its chest free of the icy snow and menaced them—a young male, in its first winter. Good. The meat would be fairly tender.

Even young and weakened, it was still a full-grown moose, and very dangerous. Ian dismissed any notion of cutting its throat and dispatched it quickly with a musket shot between the eyes. The moose let out a strange, hollow cry and swayed empty-eyed to one side before collapsing with a thud.

Thayendanegea nodded once, then turned and shouted into the emptiness behind them. A few men had come out with them, ranging out to hunt and leaving them alone to talk, but they would still likely be in earshot. They needed to butcher the carcass before the wolves showed up.

“Go find them,” Thayendanegea said briefly to Ian, drawing his knife. “I’ll cut the throat and keep the glutton off.” He lifted his chin, indicating the high rock where the wolverine kept a beady-eyed watch.

As Ian turned to go, he heard Thayendanegea say, almost offhandedly, “You’ll tell this to the Sachem.”

So he was taking it seriously, at least. Ian was grimly pleased at that, but not hopeful.

Before he had run a hundred yards, he heard the crunch of a riding animal’s hooves, and rounding a bend in the trail found himself face-to-face with what had to be Gabriel Hardman, riding a big, rawboned mule with a mutinous eye. Ian took a step backward, out of biting range.

“I killed a moose,” Ian said briefly, and jerked his thumb behind. “Go help him.” Hardman nodded, hesitated for a moment as though wanting to say something, but swallowed it and snapped the reins against the mule’s neck.

THE MEN WENT
back together, laden with meat and exhilarated with cold and blood. It was midmorning when they returned to the house, and Rachel was looking out for them, peering out of the front window. She waved and disappeared.

Ian saw Hardman come out of the barn, where the man had helped finish the butchering.

“May I ask,” Hardman said, giving Ian a direct look, “how it came to be that you were traveling with my—with Silvia and the…girls? I take it that you were not aware I was here, as plainly Silvia wasn’t.”

“No. I came to visit the woman who was once my wife,” Ian replied. No point in being secretive; the whole of Canajoharie would know about it by this afternoon, if they didn’t already. “I had word that she and her children were in Osequa when the attack there happened, and that her husband had been killed—but none of my friends kent anything of her condition. So I thought I would come and see.”

“Indeed.” Gabriel Hardman glanced at him, one eyebrow raised.

“I have a new wife,” Ian said equably, in reply to the eyebrow. “She’s with me, and so is our son.”

“So I understand,” Hardman said. “I hear that she is a Friend?”

“She is, and she’s told me that Friends dinna hold wi’ polygamy,” Ian said. “I didna have that in mind, but if I had, I wouldna have brought her with me.”

Hardman gave him a sharp look and a short laugh.

“Silvia told you, then. Why is she with you? Why did you bring her here?”

Ian stopped and gave Hardman a look of his own.

“She did a great service for my uncle, who sent me to see after her welfare. If ye want to hear the state in which I found her and her daughters, I’ll tell ye, man, and it would serve ye right if I did.”

Hardman reared back as though he’d been punched in the chest.

“I—I couldn’t—I
couldn’t
go back to Philadelphia,” he said, furious. “I was a prisoner—a slave!”

Ian didn’t reply to that, but looked deliberately around him—at the house, the woods, and the open road.

“I’ll leave ye here. Go with God,” he said, and walked away.

BRANT HAD SEEN WORKS
With Her Hands the evening before, and told Ian that she would welcome his visit today, in the afternoon.

“Ye’re goin’ with me,” Ian had said firmly to Rachel. “You and the wee man both. I’ve come to see to her welfare, not to court her; it’s right for my family to be with me. Besides,” he added, breaking into a sudden smile, “I dinna want ye back here by yourself, takin’ potshots wi’ the Sachem and imagining it’s me tied to the tree.”

“And why should I do that?” she asked, hiding her own smile. “What is there about thee visiting thy former wife by thyself that should give me a moment’s uneasiness?”

“Nothin’,” he said, and kissed her lightly. “That’s my point.”

She was happy that he wanted her to go, and in fact she felt no uneasiness whatever about meeting this woman who had shared her husband’s bed and body—and a good bit of his soul, too, from the little he’d told her of his dead children.

Ha,
she thought.
So I am to walk up to this woman, carrying Ian’s large, healthy, beautiful son. Plainly he wants her to see that—and I am ashamed to admit that I want that, too, but I do. It is
not
right that she should see my inner feelings, though. I am not come to triumph over her—nor cause her to doubt her wisdom in dismissing Ian.

Consideration of what she should wear for this occasion wasn’t vanity, she assured herself. It was a desire to look…appropriate.

She had only two dresses; it would have to be the indigo. Beyond that…

Catherine had taken her to the Sachem, who had listened carefully to her request and looked at her with the sort of keen interest she’d seen on Claire Fraser’s face—and Denny’s, for that matter—when presented with some medical phenomenon like a teratoma, a hollow tumor filled with teeth or hair. But the Sachem had nodded, and with great care had shown her how to make the paint from white clay and a handful of dark dried berries, soaked in what was likely deer urine from the smell, then ground into a blue paste and mixed with some of the white clay.

Catherine had watched the process, and when the pigments were prepared and approved by the Sachem, she had taken Rachel to her boudoir so that she might use the looking glass there to apply them neatly with a rabbit’s-foot brush.

Rachel had combed and tied her hair carefully back, then painted only the upper part of her face, from her hairline to just below the eyes, a solid white, and below that—after some thought—a narrow band of blue that crossed the bridge of her nose. Ian had told her some months ago—and Catherine Brant, though somewhat amused at her intent, had confirmed it—that to paint your face white in that manner meant that you came in peace, and that blue was for wisdom and confidence.

Rachel had wanted to ask Catherine whether she thought this course a wise one, but didn’t. She knew quite well it wasn’t, but the blue band was meant as an exhortation to those who saw it, as well as she who wore it.

“It
is
done?” Rachel asked; she’d asked before, and asked now only to hear reassurance. “Women do paint their faces, as well as men?”

“Oh, yes,” Catherine assured her. “Not war paint, of course, but to celebrate an occasion—a marriage, the visit of a chief, the Strawberry Festival…”

“An occasion,” Rachel said, with certainty. “Yes, it is.”

“Remarkable,” Catherine said happily, gazing over Rachel’s shoulder at her completed reflection in the mirror. “With those dark brows and lashes, your eyes are…startling. In a good way, to be sure,” she added hastily, patting Rachel’s shoulder.

WAKYO’TEYEHSNONHSA HAD A
modest but good farmhouse on her land—and, like Thayendanegea, had a longhouse behind it, standing at the edge of the forest, so the wood and the hides and the leather thongs that bound it together seemed to melt into the trees.

Like a large animal lying in wait,
Rachel thought.

She had met them in the yard before the farmhouse, invited them in, and offered them milk and whisky, with little sweet biscuits. Admired Oggy with what seemed great sincerity, and though she had blinked at sight of Rachel’s paint, treated her with a delicate respect, though never quite meeting her eyes.

She
was
lovely. Dressed in the Mohawk fashion of shirt and trousers of soft deerskin, decorated with a dozen small silver rings, small and still lithe, despite having birthed three living children and Yeksa’a, Ian’s stillborn daughter. Rachel thought they were much of an age, though Works With Her Hands bore the marks of weather and of sorrow in her face. Her eyes were still warm, though, and lively, and she met Ian’s glance often and fully.

The children had come in briefly, brought by an older woman who smiled at Ian. The two youngest, girls of maybe four and two, were lovely, with their mother’s soft dark eyes and solid, handsome faces that perhaps resembled their late father’s. Rachel refrained from looking too closely at the eldest boy—perhaps seven or eight—and successfully fought the temptation to look from the boy’s face to Ian’s.

He resembled his siblings, but didn’t look as much like them as they looked like each other, she thought. His face was lively, but charming rather than beautiful, and his eyes didn’t look like his mother’s. Dark, but with a glint of hazel that the others didn’t have. He was tall for his age, but thin.

“This is my eldest son,” Emily said, introducing the children with a smile of pride. “We call him Tòtis.” Tòtis looked curiously at the visitors, but seemed mostly interested in Oggy and asked his name, in English.

“He hasn’t yet got a real name,” Ian said, smiling down at the boy. “We called him for the governor of Georgia, a man named Oglethorpe, until his proper name should come.”

The children were taken away, and they made conversation over the food. After they had eaten, Works With Her Hands said she must go to the longhouse for a few moments—and invited Ian to come, saying that perhaps it had been a long time since he had been in such a place. She said nothing about Rachel, leaving it to her whether to come, too, but Rachel nodded politely and said she would feed Oggy and then perhaps follow them.

“I confess to curiosity,” she said, smiling directly at Works With Her Hands. “I should like to see the sort of place that my husband called home for so long a time.”

She had a very good idea as to Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa’s motive in inviting Ian to attend her in the longhouse. This was the setting in which Ian had first become attracted to her, the sort of place they had lived in together. The thought made her heart beat faster.

For the first time, she wondered whether Ian had desired her to come with him as a form of protection.

“God knows,” she said to Oggy, undoing her laces. “But we’ll do our best, won’t we?”

IAN COULD SMELL
it long before she pulled back the bearskin that hung over the door of the longhouse. Smoke and sweat, a trace of piss and shit. But mostly the smell of fire and food, meat and roasted corn and squash, the tang of beer—and the smell of furs. He had done his best to forget the touch of cold winter on his skin and the smell of her smooth musky warmth in the furs. He shoved the memory aside now, with the ease of long habit, and stepped inside. But the heavy air touched him and followed him into the dark like a hand laid lightly on his back.

It was a small house, only two fires. Two women sat by one of them, tending a couple of pots, while three small children played in the shadows and a baby’s squeal was cut short by its mother putting it to her breast.

The squeal raised the hairs on his neck in reflex. Another memory, and one he
had
forgotten: Emily’s silent tears in the darkness, after the loss of each of their bairns, when she heard the mewling of new babes in the longhouse at night. But Oggy was older and louder. Much louder. Strong, and the thought comforted him.

She led him to her sleeping compartment and sat down on the shelf, gesturing him to sit beside her, against the dark soft mass of the rolled-up furs.

They were far enough from the women outside as not to be overheard unless they shouted, and he didn’t think it would come to that. The glow from the fires was enough, though, to see her face. It was beautiful; still young, but serious, and shadowed with something that he couldn’t name. It made him uneasy, though.

She looked at him for a long moment, unspeaking.

“Do you not know this person anymore?” he said quietly in Mohawk. “Is this person a stranger to you?”

“Yes,” she said, but with the trace of a smile. “But a stranger I think I know. Do you think you know
this
person?” Her hand touched her breast, pale and graceful as a moth in the semi-dark.

“Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa,” he whispered, taking the hand between his own. “I would always know the work of your hands.” It was rude to ask someone directly what they were thinking, save when it was men planning war or hunting, and he laid her hand back on her knee and waited, patient, while she gathered either her thoughts or her courage.

“What it is, Okwaho, iahtahtehkonah,” she said at last, using his formal name and giving him a direct look, “is that this person will marry John Whitewater. In the spring.” Well, so. Clearly she had taken Whitewater to her bed already; a man’s stink was noticeable in the furs behind him. It gave him an absurd pang of jealousy—followed by guilt at the thought of Rachel—and he wondered for an instant why it should be worse that now he kent the man’s name?

“This person wishes you happiness and good health,” he said. It was a formal statement, but he meant it and let that show. She drew breath, relaxed a little, and suddenly smiled back at him—a real smile, which held acknowledgment of what had been true between them and regret for what could be true no longer.

She put out her hand, impulsively, and he took it, kissed it—and gave it back.

“What it is,” she repeated, her smile lapsing into seriousness, “is that John Whitewater is a good man, but he dreams of my son.”

“Of Tòtis? What does he dream?” It was plain that the dreams were not good ones.

“He has dreamed that when the moon begins to wax, he sees a boy standing there”—she lifted her chin to point to the entrance of her sleeping compartment—“against the moonlight that comes from the smoke hole, and the boy’s face is not seen, but clearly it is Tòtis. Waiting. He dreams that the child comes, night by night, the light growing stronger behind him and the child growing bigger. And John Whitewater knows that when the moon is full, a man who is my son will come in to kill him.”

“Well, that’s not a good dream, no,” Ian said, in English. “Ye havena had this dream yourself?”

Emily grimaced and shook her head, and the live thing quivering in Ian’s backbone settled. He didn’t ask whether she believed that Whitewater had in fact dreamed this; that was clear. But if she had been dreaming the same thing, that would be very serious. Not that it wasn’t anyway.

“I have not shared his dream,” she said, so low that he barely heard her. “But when he told me…The next night I, too, had a dream. I dreamed that he killed Tòtis. He broke my son’s neck, like a rabbit.”