Savage Lands (15 page)

‘What if ten is not enough?’ he had demanded. ‘Shall you protect us then against the wrath of the Great Spirit?’

The tincture was black with a dark vegetable odour. Elisabeth’s hand shook as she poured a measure into the cup and carefully placed the sealed jar back in the basket. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the cabin a dog barked. It was late. Soon Jean-Claude would be home. He would slip into bed beside her, bringing with him the tavern smells of meat and tobacco and cheap brandy, and he would fall asleep and the room would be silent but for their exhalations, as quietly he breathed in her air and she his. Her hands were tight around the cup, her fingers stiff. She swallowed, forcing down the knot in her throat, not troubling to wipe away the tears that spilled from her eyes.

Then, very quickly, she raised the cup to her lips and drank.

T
hat winter, when the birds were silent and the mist-veiled air hung in chill swathes over the canebrakes, the dog died. It died in the night, unexpectedly. In the morning Auguste discovered it curled in its habitual pose, nose under its haunch, but when he tried to rouse it, its body was cold and stiff. He buried it in the forest by a weed-choked bayou where the soil was soft and the worms curled like bruised fingers in its black crumb. He did not mark the place. When Issiokhena gave him deer meat, he shook his head and told her the dog had run away. She said nothing, but the pity in her face made him want to hit her.

When winter was over and the thaw come, Babelon came once more to the Ouma village. When Auguste returned from the fields, he saw the ensign leaning on the palisades, a pipe clamped between his teeth. He smiled, and Auguste smiled too and the tightness in his chest shifted a little. Babelon jerked his head towards the boy’s ankles.

‘No dog?’

Auguste shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Babelon said gently, and he put one hand on Auguste’s shoulder.

‘Yes,’ Auguste replied, and he stood very still as the shape of the ensign’s hand burned through his shirt and into his skin.

That night Babelon showed him a letter he had brought from the commandant. It requested that Auguste accompany him upriver to the villages of other savage tribes north of the Ouma in order to assist in matters of translation.

‘Pitiful, I know, but for all that I have lived alongside savages since childhood, I have never mastered their languages.’

‘You speak some Mobilian.’

‘What I have mastered might be covered quite as well with hand signals. It is strange. I had grown accustomed to that dog.’

Auguste shrugged, scouring his prickling nose with the back of his arm. He was not surprised by Babelon’s failure to master other languages. Accustomed to shuffling words like playing cards, the ensign would abhor the tongue-tied awkwardness of ignorance. More than that, he was too much himself, his lines too decisively drawn. He lacked the unformed elasticity of self that expands to accommodate the patterns and peculiarities of another’s tongue. More than once he had declared Auguste’s fluency manifestly unnatural. If Auguste was damp clay, Babelon was a pot, glazed, fired and finished. He could no more bend himself to a new language than a pot could fold itself in two.

The primary purposes of the expedition were to negotiate with the savages for corn and other foodstuffs and, where possible, to acquire slaves who might profitably be traded with the settlers in Mobile. In addition Auguste assisted in the commerce of those goods that the ensign brought from Mobile on the commandant’s private account. These were dealt with separately and the skins taken in their payment stored in a separate pirogue.

Auguste asked no questions. It was his job to translate the words, not to make them. The matter was none of his business. But when Babelon had returned south and he was once more alone among the Ouma, he could not shake the persistent mosquito-whine of suspicion that sang in his ear. It was not the commandant’s ethics that troubled him. Auguste was no magistrate and cared little for the law. The Sieur might do what pleased him. It was Babelon’s duplicity he feared, the gnawing fear that his unquestioning collaboration was exactly what the ensign had counted upon. It tormented him that Babelon might have seen the weakness in him and seized upon it. He had begun to trust in the possibility that the ensign was his friend.

When the next
coureurs-de-bois
passed through the village, Auguste made sure to ask about the commandant and his trade with the savages. Though their accounts differed in some details, the thrust of the story was always the same. Since the founding of the colony there had been allegations of corruption, rumours that the commandant sold Crown supplies for his own profit. But some years ago there had been an investigation, a most rigorous investigation. Many of the settlers had been required to give evidence. The commandant had been tried before a new commissary despatched for the purpose from France and exonerated in every particular.

Generally it was agreed that this brought to a just conclusion what had been a sorry affair. Even among those who suspected that he still contrived to skim for himself a little of the colony’s sparse cream, there was a grudging acceptance that Bienville was at least as good a commandant as any other and likely better. With a force of fewer than one hundred men, he had held the territory firm against the twin perils of savage and Englishman. He might feather his own nest a little, as men were inclined to when the opportunity arose, but his devotion to the colony of Louisiana was beyond reproach.

As for Babelon, he was thought to be a decent fellow. He could hold his liquor and he was not a bore or a killjoy like some of his senior officers. Beyond that nobody knew much about him. He was a man who kept himself to himself, they said. Then, tired of the subject, they ran on with their usual tales as Auguste drank from their proffered flasks of brandy and tried not to hope.

The leaves were black underfoot when Babelon returned to the Ouma village, the end of the season’s trading. Babelon stood beside the pirogue, regarding Auguste with a smile twisted up into the corners of his mouth into which he pressed his forefinger and thumb, as though he meant to trap it there.

‘I understand you have been conducting something of an investigation.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Really?’

Auguste kicked at the ground with his toe.

‘I needed to be sure,’ he muttered.

‘And are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The smile escaped Babelon’s fingers and carved deep grooves of amusement in his cheeks.

‘
Vierge
, Auguste, who would have known you were such a suspicious little bastard? It is good to see you again, my friend.’

Auguste nodded. His ears burned.

‘Here, help me with these. And careful with that one. There is something for you in it.’

Auguste frowned.

‘I am not a savage to be bribed with favours,’ he said sharply. ‘I have said yes, have I not?’

Babelon glanced up at him, one eyebrow raised.

‘For the love of peace, Auguste, I do not seek to buy your favour,’ he said. ‘As my friend I trust you give it freely. Go on then. Open it.’

The basket had a lid secured with a leather strap. The boy hesitated. Then he knelt down and unknotted the strap. Inside was a curled ball of grey-white fur.

‘You can touch it. It’s quite tame.’

Carefully Auguste reached out with one finger. The creature raised its pointed slender face, its pink nose twitching, and stretched. Two little pink hands reached up to take hold of the edge of the basket.

‘For me?’

‘For you.’

‘You brought me an opossum.’

‘I thought you Frenchmen called them woodrats.’

‘I like the Ouma word better.’

‘Well, I know you are interested in animals. You can study it or make a pet of it or eat it if you wish to. It is all the same to me.’

Auguste swallowed but still his throat felt very full.

‘I cannot accept it,’ he said at last.

‘But of course you can. What use do I have for a woodrat? I was tricked into taking it, frankly. It didn’t cost me a
sou
.’

Babelon stayed for four days. On the last night they sat in their usual places before the fire, the opossum a warm, dense weight in Auguste’s lap. It was a frolicsome creature and much favoured by the savage children. They would be disappointed when he gave it back.

‘Shall it be difficult for you to leave here?’ Babelon asked when the fire was almost gone.

‘Leave?’

‘You cannot stay here forever. You are too useful to the commandant.’

Auguste thought of the forest at dawn, when the early sun caught in the spiders’ webs, and butterflies hung in the air like coloured thoughts, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, pressing tight against the squeeze of his ribs.
I was born by these waters
, the chief of the Ouma had said to him once, when he was first come.
The trees of the forest are my bones, and the creeks and gullies that run between them bear my blood, which is the blood of my nation
. It seemed a long time ago now, when he was still a child.

‘Not difficult,’ he said at last. ‘I do not belong here.’

‘It would be fine to have you in Mobile,’ Babelon said. ‘The winters are long there and decent companionship rarer than wax candles.’

‘You have your wife.’

‘Yes. I have my wife.’

They were both silent, staring into the fire.

‘I should like to meet your wife. If you do not object.’

‘Why on earth should I object? You shall like one another.’

There was another silence. Then Babelon began to laugh.

‘What is so funny?’

Babelon shook his head, convulsed with merriment.

‘Your face. How could I not have seen it before? The two people in the world of whom I am fondest and both of you have that exact same way of looking at me, the way you look at me at this very moment, Auguste, if you could only see yourself.’

‘What way?’

‘As if you do not trust me further than you could throw me.’ He laughed harder, his arms pressed against his belly. ‘Oh, yes. You and Elisabeth shall like one another exceedingly.’

E
lisabeth crouched before the fire, blowing on the damp tinder. Even when the wood caught, and the flames licked up towards the blackened kettle, she remained where she was, her arms around her shins. The pains in her belly eased a little when she squatted.

Jean-Claude leaned against the jamb of the door, his head tipped back and his arms crossed over his chest. He might have passed for a man ten years younger, Elisabeth thought, watching him out of the corner of her eye. Most of his fellows in the garrison had begun to sag, their bellies pouching over their breeches, their turkey jowls slack above the knots of their neckcloths. Their faces, besieged for years by a strong sun and stronger liquor, were blotchy and scribbled with red. It shocked Elisabeth to see the indefatigable Jean Alexandre limp down the rue d’Iberville with his stiff-legged old man’s gait, or Jeanne Deshays’ husband, who always smiled at her as though the effort might undo him, his yellowy eyes like battered coins in their little purses of flesh. It shocked her more to see Jeanne’s daughter, a poised and pretty child of almost six. When she looked at Jean-Claude, it was possible to pretend that no time had passed at all.

It was fortunate, perhaps, that they possessed no looking glass. Elisabeth knew that she was hardly the smooth-faced young girl who had first come to Louisiana. Though she had not spread and slackened like the other wives, grey streaked her hair and the skin around her eyes was worn and creased. The old strength was lacking in her. The second infusion of belladonna had taxed her gravely and months later she continued to be crippled by violent cramps. It had been another long winter, not cold so much as relentlessly wet, the low sky bulging and dripping in wet pillows, and several times she had succumbed to fever and to chills upon the stomach. The boy Auguste had brought savage remedies, offering them to her uncomfortably, without looking at her, and she had thanked him, and when he was gone she had poured them away. She had had quite enough of medicine.

She no longer assisted Guillemette le Bras. She had told the midwife that her husband objected to the work and Guillemette had only nodded, jutting her sharp chin. She had not attempted to change Elisabeth’s mind. Some time later Elisabeth learned that the midwife had asked Marie Nevette to take her place. The news had come as little surprise and yet it had pained her. The wife of the gunsmith was well liked among the women of the settlement. Besides, she had a child of her own.

Elisabeth stirred the sagamity so that it would not stick to the bottom of the kettle and burn. Beneath the table she could see her trunk, its lock rusted, and the mark on the floor where Guillemette’s basket had once been. When she had returned the basket to the midwife, it had contained everything that might be required for a lying-in. Everything, that was, but the tincture of belladonna. Months before, when at last she had been able to rise from her bed unassisted, she had wrapped it in a cloth and taken it outside. The very thought of it in the basket had become unbearable to her.

She had thought she would hurl the jar into the trees. She had imagined it, the dark impact of it in the shadows, the furious cawing and crashing as the birds took flight. But as she stood on the porch, she thought of the jar smashing, the fugitive liquid leaping up to splatter her hands. She thought of its vile fumes rising like wood-smoke, twisting in the air to insinuate themselves into her mouth, her nose, through the jelly of her eyes and the cracks in her coarsened hands, and the agitation had caused her stomach to turn over so sharply she had thought she might vomit. Half bent with the effort of it, she staggered across the yard to the wood store and, reaching behind the woodpile, she thrust the jar deep into the barrel where once they had hidden meat. Clattering back the lid, she had tumbled logs over the barrel until it was quite sealed up.