Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (73 page)

Reload. Fire. Reload. An arrow hit the side of the pirogue with a solid
thunk.
Cyrene could hear Gaston cursing and knew he had been hit. The sharp cries of the Indians were louder, closer. She looked up to hand the loaded musket to René. The dugout was so near her breath caught in her throat. She was staring into the eyes of a warrior with his teeth bared and his bow drawn with an arrow pointing straight at her. There was no time to aim. She pointed the musket at him, pulled the hammer back to full cock, and squeezed the trigger.

The warrior’s eyes widened. His arrow was released as he began to topple backward. It flew high, arching, falling, falling. Cyrene watched helplessly as it curved over her head, wobbling in its descent, striking toward Pierre, slicing into his back. He let out his breath with a soft oath, but the rhythm of his paddling did not falter.

Fear and sickness made a hard knot in her stomach, but there was no time to acknowledge it, much less give in to it. Blindly, she turned from Pierre and began to reload the weapon in her hands. She reached to hand it to René. For an instant their eyes met, and in his she saw a hard flash of something that might have been admiration but could equally have been derision for her lack of sensibility.

The renegade Choctaw were closing in. They meant to strike between the two pirogues, engaging both, which was odd; their surest chance of booty was to concentrate on one. It might be a tactical error, but it could also mean they intended that no one should escape.

They reckoned without the Bretons’ skill as boatmen. As the dugout drew even, Pierre in one pirogue and Gaston in the other dropped their paddles and grappled with the attackers, but Jean rose up with an axe and began to smash the prow of the Indian dugout near the waterline. The fighting took on a frenzied edge. A warrior slashed at René with a knife. René smashed his musket butt into the painted face, knocking the Indian over the side, then turned to face another one with a hand axe. That man was not after him. He was making toward Cyrene with the fanatical gleam of vengeance in his eyes.

Cyrene fended him off with the musket she had been reloading, stabbing at him with the ramrod that protruded from the end. He dodged aside. She drew back. The warrior rose up, preparing to leap across the few inches that divided the gliding span of boats. She scrambled to her knees, the better to face him.

“Fire, Cyrene, fire!” René yelled.

There was no other choice, though she knew it was wrong the moment she felt the musket explode with the shot. The ramrod flew like a spear, impaling the warrior, but the recoil from firing that heavy projectile threw her backward. The pirogue rolled. She flung the musket from her as she fought for balance. She could not gain it. She struck the water with a solid splash. It closed over her, taking her down. The sounds of the struggle, the yells and grunts and thuds, receded as the boats moved away with the current and their own impetus.

The shock of being catapulted into the ice-cold water held Cyrene immobile for drifting, slow-moving seconds, but then she felt the imperative need for air. She kicked out, shooting toward the surface. She broke free in time to see the three boats heading around a bend. They were apart, and the pirogues were in the lead once more.

Then beside her was a roiling splash in the water. She was caught by hard hands, dragged against a strong, lean body. Water dashed across her face. It caught in her nose, almost strangling her.

Her knife was in its sheath at her waist. She closed her hand around the hilt and dragged it free, then raised it to strike. The man lunged aside at the last moment. Her wrist was caught, twisted; the knife left her grasp. She lashed out with her fist and felt it land on solid flesh and bone, a square hit. They both went under. Pulled down, her legs entangled with those of the man who held her, and hampered by her skirts, she could not find the air she needed. When she came up again, she was coughing, blinded by the water.

“It’s all right. I have you.” The voice was rough with concern and all too familiar. René. He must have been thrown from the pirogue with her.

“Let me go, damn you!” She pushed at him, kicking.

“I’m trying to help you. Be still before we both drown.”

“I don’t need your help,” she gasped in frustrated rage and mounting panic as she felt herself sinking once more. She thrust back from his hold, almost pushing him under in her frantic need to be free of him. “I can—”

She never finished the words. The blow came out of nowhere. She felt the pain of it on the point of her chin, then there was nothing but floating gray darkness.

6

“YOU CAN SWIM. That’s what you wanted to say.”

Cyrene stared up at René as he hovered above her. His gray eyes were bleak yet narrowed with concern, and a lock of his hair, shining black with wet, dangled across his forehead. His words, ringing in her ears, had the sound of an accusation. Cyrene’s jaw ached and her very bones felt limp. She was lying on the ground under the cover of a thicket of evergreen myrtle shrubs well back from the bayou. Her clothes were sodden and water oozed from her hair. She was cold but not freezing as she might have been. The reason was the close hold of René’s arms around her and the weight of his wet coat that lay over them both.

She tried, abruptly, to sit up, but fell back with a gasp as sickness rushed in upon her. She closed her eyes tight. “You bastard,” she said through gritted teeth. “You hit me.”

“You were trying to kill me, and damned near succeeded.”

“Why not? You were drowning me.”

“I was trying to save you.” His voice was grim.

“Thank you very much. I was perfectly capable of doing it myself.”

“I realize that, now. Only a woman in a thousand knows how to swim, and you have to be that one.”

She would have liked to berate him further, but she didn’t feel like it. Besides, it would be best to keep their voices down until they knew where the Choctaw renegades were. After a moment, she said more quietly, “I really thought you were one of the Indians.”

“I realize that, too,” he said shortly. From the ground near her head, he picked up the knife he had taken from her and presented it with the hilt forward in a gesture of studied politeness. “Your weapon, if you are still determined to use it.”

She brought her hand from under the coat and snatched the knife from him. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“There was always the possibility.” When she gave him a dark look without answering, he went on abruptly, “I’m sorry I struck you. It seemed necessary, and I just… did it before I thought.”

“Never mind.” It was embarrassment that made her words so short. She tried again. “There’s no harm done. What about — what about the others?”

“The last I saw of them, they were pulling ahead, going around the bend. The savages were having to bail.”

“Pierre and Jean will come back for us.”

“Yes, when they can.”

And if they were able. Neither spoke the words, but both acknowledged them with a long glance. In the meantime, they did not dare light a fire to warm themselves and to dry their clothing. They had no weapon beyond Cyrene’s knife, no shelter, nothing to eat. To move from where they were might be to run into the Indians, either in their retreat or, if they had been victorious, in their search for them. For the moment, there was nothing they could do but lie still and wait.

It was not a comfortable situation by any means. It was not just the wind that whispered through the leaves above them, chilling damp flesh and turning wet cloth icy cold, nor was it the uneven ground under them with its litter of leaves covering sticks that grew sharper as the minutes passed. It was the enforced closeness, the touch of thigh against thigh, breast against breast. As a reminder of things better forgotten, it was nearly intolerable.

“Are you all right?”

“Well enough,” Cyrene answered, her eyes closed. She thought René was watching her as he lay with his head propped on his hand, but she did not care to make certain.

“Are you sure?”

She lifted her lashes, caught by something in his voice. “Yes, why?”

“I hardly expected you to take this part of it so calmly.”

“You mean lying here with you?” She could feel heat in her face.

“In a word, yes.”

“We are both cold, unless you are immune to the weather. It would be a ridiculous martyrdom to deny it or to try to keep you at a distance. We need each other, need the little warmth we can find between us.”

“A very practical view.”

“Here in the wilderness you learn to be practical, to cooperate with each other in spite of — of differences. Those who don’t have a way of dying.”

“I have no intention of dying.” He meant it, he found, with a fervor he had applied to few things in his life. His intention was to discover in what other ways this woman was different from all others.

He could think of no other female of his acquaintance who would accept his presence after what he had done without screaming in rage or shrinking from him in abject fright, none who would be resigned to the discomfort of their position without complaints and demands that he do something, and certainly none with the courage and knowledge to lend her aid to the repulsion of the Indian attack in the first place. Such a paragon he had never seen, most particularly one who could appear delectable, in the fashion of a half-drowned mermaid, through it all.

Somewhere a bird called, a faint, plaintive sound. A limb fell from a tree behind them, clattering through the branches, snapping in two as it thudded to the ground. Cyrene became aware of the steady beat of René’s heart against her shoulder and the rise and fall of his breathing. Her own pulse was ragged, throbbing against her ribs. A sense of emptiness began in the lower part of her body and slowly spread upward. As an added danger in their situation began to make itself known, she hurried into whispered speech.

“Why — why did you come after me? Why did you leave the boat?”

“I was the one who told you to fire, else you wouldn’t have gone overboard. On top of that, if you will remember, I thought you needed saving.”

“I would have fired, anyway.”

“Would you? But the fault was still mine.”

“Not at all,” she insisted. “Anyway, I’m surprised Pierre, or Jean either, let you do it.”

“Instead of one of them? They had no choice; their hands were full at the time.”

“But you must have been quick to beat them to it.”

He raised a brow. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“You are under my protection.”

“Surely it doesn’t extend to this?”

“Why would you think otherwise?”

“It isn’t the same thing at all!” Her tone was cross, mainly because she suspected him of baiting her.

“What is it, then?”

“You have no obligation to save my life, for one thing.”

“What about the right?”

“That either! You make it sound as if you think I belong to you.”

“Don’t you?”

“I do not!” She raised herself up on one elbow, her eyes hard with anger and her voice sibilant in its quietness. “I don’t care what Pierre and Jean said, I belong to me. I’m grateful that you dived in after me, but that doesn’t mean I accept any part of this bargain you made with them.”

“What happened,” he drawled, a smile rising in his gray eyes, “to cooperation? To needing each other?”

Their faces were only inches apart. Cyrene’s gaze dropped to his lips. She could feel the magnetic force of the attraction between them, sense its slow pull. It would take only a little, a slight swaying, the parting of her lips, and their mouths would be joined. She knew it.