Shadowbrook (15 page)

Genevieve had done exactly that. She looked as the wife of prosperous John Lydius should look. Black hair twisted in a neat knot; a fine dark red dress trimmed with lace, the skirt fashionably wide, swishing when she walked; a shawl made of soft blue wool. But half her blood was Piankashaw; her mother’s people were a sister tribe of the Miami. Chief Memetosia had come to Albany for reasons of his own that Genevieve did not pretend to fully understand. But no man, not even an honored Miami chief, could change his fate. The old man had become ill in Albany; it was entirely proper that he rest and recuperate in the home of a daughter of his people. Besides, keeping everyone happy was good for trade; French livres and English pounds enriched the Lydius accounts equally.

“In here,” she said, taking Cormac’s hand and leading him forward. The armed braves continued to stare straight ahead, but they stepped aside. “You understand the Miami ways? Memetosia is a full chief, remember.”

“Yes, I know how to behave.”

She seemed satisfied. “We keep the room very dark because the light hurts his eyes, but he can see us quite plainly. And there is nothing wrong with his hearing.” Genevieve opened the door.
“Teepi nko hka neewaki,”
she murmured, bowing low. I beg to be admitted to your presence.

There was no reply, but the old man raised a hand from a sofa piled high with cushions and blankets against the wall near the fireplace. Mostly white man’s furnishings, but the blanket wrapped around the chief’s shoulders had been
woven by a Miami squaw. Even at this distance Cormac could make out the crane symbols.

“I have brought you Cormac Shea, revered Uncle,” Genevieve said. “He is the Potawatomi brave you asked to see.”

Cormac took a few steps closer to the sofa and squatted, waiting for Memetosia to acknowledge his presence. After some seconds the chief waved a carved stick that ended in a sheaf of crane feathers in the direction of each of Cormac’s shoulders.
“Teepahki neeyolaani.”
It is good to see you. Corm stood up. “Now,” Memetosia said, “send the squaw away and we will talk.”

Cormac turned to Genevieve, who was already backing out of the room.

Memetosia coughed. Cormac made a move to help him, but the old man waved him off. Memetosia spat repeatedly into a bowl beside the sofa; finally the fit passed. “You must forgive me if I do not speak of the things that should come first, but I am ill and soon I must sing my death song.” He was apologizing for not asking about the last time Cormac had hunted and how things were in his village, the common courtesies that should begin any conversation among
Anishinabeg
who met in friendship. “There are things I must say quickly, while I still have the strength. I am told, Cormac Shea, that you met with the Ottawa, Pontiac, and that your brother who marked your face was with you. I am told that either he would have killed Pontiac or Pontiac would have killed him if wiser men had not stopped them.”

“Memetosia hears all that happens in our world, as is fitting. But it was not Uko Nyakwai’s choice to fight Pontiac, revered Chief. Pontiac questioned Uko Nyakwai’s right to the totem given him by the great Ottawa chief Recumsah.”

Cormac was puzzled by the lack of anger with which the old man talked about the Ottawa. It was the Ottawa who, after everything else in Pickawillany was destroyed, had killed and eaten the old man’s grandson, Memeskia.

Cormac’s eyes had adjusted to the near-dark of the room. He could see the chief clearly now. Despite Memeskia’s fierceness in battle the French had called him
La Demoiselle,
the Young Woman, because of the delicacy of his features. Memetosia had the same small nose and large eyes and thin face as his grandson. In his youth he, too, would probably have made a pretty girl. Now he looked gaunt and gray with illness, and beneath his many tattoos his cheeks were covered with the marks that showed that sometime in the past he had survived the great sickness, the smallpox, that had slaughtered so many of the Miami.

The rheumy old eyes studied Cormac. He seemed to know what the younger man was thinking. He made an impatient gesture, as if he did not wish to discuss the wrongs he and his clan had suffered at the hands of the Ottawa, who were brothers to the Potawatomi. “You call Uko Nyakwai by a name that makes him a Real Person,” Memetosia said, “but he is white.”

“He walked through the Potawatomi fire, revered Chief.”

Cormac let the words hang in the air between them. Memetosia knew this to be so; it meant that Quent was Potawatomi by adoption and despite his white skin he was truly
Anishinabeg.
That could never be undone, not even by a full Miami chief.

“
Ayi!”
the old man grunted. “Do not tell me things I know. You waste my time!”

Cormac quickly bowed his head low. “I beg your forgiveness, revered Chief.”

The crane-feather stick was waved over his head, dismissing his impertinence and accepting his apology. “They say that you are wise in the two worlds, that you do not give yourself to one at the expense of the other. From many people I have heard this. It is true?”

“It is as true as I can make it, revered Chief.”

Memetosia started to say something, but another fit of coughing stalled his words. Cormac looked around, spotted a tankard, and sniffed it. Water. “Will this help you, revered Chief?”

The old man sipped the water, letting Corm hold the tankard for him. He spoke again. “There are others who are like you and the Piankashaw squaw.” The old man nodded in the direction of the double doors where he knew Genevieve waited. “Others who have the blood of both the whites and the Real People. This is true, is it not?”

“There are many of us, revered Chief. Some call us métis.”

Memetosia nodded agreement. “That is true. The one called Charles Langlade, he too is a métis, is he not?”

Langlade, who had led the raid on Pickawillany, was half French and half Ottawa. Cormac had heard it was Langlade who threw Memeskia into the pot.
Ayi!
How could he be so stupid as to have forgotten that. “He is, revered Chief, but—”

Memetosia cut him off with another wave of the crane feathers. “A man can be good or evil and be all
Anishinabeg
or all white. Why should a mix be any different? Tell me something else—Lantak, the outlaw who no longer obeys his own chiefs, you know him?”

Cormac tried hard not to show his shock Memetosia seemed to be implying that Lantak was also a métis. He’d never heard that before. “I have seen Lantak, revered Chief, but only down the barrel of my long gun.”

“It is a pity you never shot him. He is a danger to Real People and whites alike.”

“I agree.”

“So will you shoot him now?”

Cormac had no idea where this conversation was going, or what was truly being said. “If I find him in my sights, I will shoot him. It is as you say, Lantak cannot be trusted by either side. And he preys on squaws and children.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. That is all true. But usually white squaws and white children. They are our enemies, too, are they not?”

Cormac spoke slowly, choosing his words. “I have much reverence for your great age and wisdom, Memetosia, Chief of the Miami. But I have also spent many moons thinking of this thing that has come to the lands of the
Anishinabeg.”

The old man’s gaze became more intent. Perhaps everything he had heard about this young man was correct. “Your skin is white, Cormac Shea. But they say you are truly of the
Anishinabeg.”

“I am truly red and truly white, Revered Chief. When the white men came to our land they created some like me who have inside them the blood of two worlds.”

Memetosia nodded, encouraging the younger man with his eyes. He waved the stick of crane feathers in a gesture of agreement.

“I take neither one side nor the other when I say that if the
Anishinabeg
continue trying to fight the white men, the
Anishinabeg
will lose. Eventually there will be no Real People left in the woods beside the salt waters, or the great waters without salt, or even in the high hills.” Passion rose in Cormac as he spoke and his white skin no longer mattered. He was truly Indian. “We are no longer happy simply with knives of flint and tomahawks of stone. We want their iron weapons. We want their cloths and their ornaments. We have killed nearly every beaver in our lands attempting to satisfy their hunger for skins, and ours for what they have. But our hunger is never satisfied and we are always at their mercy. We get guns and they come with bigger guns. And there are many more of them than of us. They enslave us with their firewater and sicken us with their diseases. We must find a way to live in peace with the
Cmokmanuk,
and at the same time remain who we are: Miami and Potawatomi and Fox and Ojibwe, even
Irinakhoiw.”

“Even
Irinakhoiw
were put in this world by the Great Spirit,” the old man agreed softly. “I have heard what you said. And I take it you do not believe what Pontiac says. That we must band together to fight the whites if the
Anishinabeg
are to survive.”

“It may be true, revered Chief. But I do not think it can ever happen. For Pontiac’s plan to work, all the Real People would have to forget all their ancient grievances and fight side by side.”

Memetosia made a sound in his throat. “To fight beside the
Irinakhoiw,
the snakes … The sun will fall out of the sky before that will happen.”

“Yes, I think so, too. That is why Pontiac’s way cannot come to pass.”

“The squaw out there,” he nodded toward the part of the house beyond the double doors where Genevieve waited, “she tells me you have another plan.”

At last Cormac understood what he was doing here: Genevieve had told Memetosia of his dream. And if Memetosia had summoned him to his deathbed to discuss it, then the old man must believe that it could be effective. “Revered Chief,” he said eagerly, “I believe we and the whites must divide the land. They will stay in one part and we will stay in the other. We will take the land of cold and snow because we are the great hunters. They will take the rest, the land where the sun shines in every moon, because their crops will grow there. We will trade when it suits us and suits them, but we will have no need to spill blood over the land.”

“And on which side will you be, Cormac Shea? With the
Anishinabeg
or with the whites?”

“I cannot change my destiny, revered Chief. I and those like me will always move between two worlds.”

The old man nodded. “Yes, that is so. But it is also true that no one can own land. It belongs to the Great Spirit who created it.”

“I know. But people can divide the land according to how it is to be used, and who may be permitted to make their villages and live in peace.”

“That is the question,” Memetosia said softly, speaking it seemed more to himself than to Cormac. “Can the whites ever be made into Real People? Can they be trusted to give their word and keep it?”

“Some of them can.”

The chief nodded. “So you say. So others say. Tell me, my son,” it was the first time he had used that form of familiar affection with Cormac, “did your totem reveal this plan to you in a dream?”

Cormac lowered his head, thinking deeply about his answer. A plan revealed in a sleeping dream would carry much more authority, but to lie about such a thing … He could not hope for success if he made a mockery of everything he’d learned at the fires of Singing Snow. If he allowed himself to be more white than Potawatomi, he would no longer be a bridge and nothing he hoped for could come to pass.

“The way was not shown to me in sleep, revered Chief. It was revealed slowly. Many times in my village, as a boy and later as a man, I would go to the cleansing place, and after I was purified I would open my mind and let the Spirit show me truth. It was in this manner that the way for the two worlds to live in peace was revealed to me. After a long time and much purification.”

Memetosia nodded, slowly and with much gravity. “Sometimes that is how the Spirit speaks. Yes. I, too, have opened my mind to my totem in these last days of my time here.” He reached beneath the blankets and came up clutching a medicine bag. “I came here to this place, even though I knew I was beginning to let go of my spirit, to speak with the white chiefs,” Memetosia murmured. “I thought I must try one more time …”

“Try what, revered Chief?”

“It doesn’t matter. They are more concerned with each other now than with us.” The rasping whisper was weaker now and Cormac had to bend close to hear the words. “There is going to be war between the French and the British.”

“There is always war between the French and the British.”

“Yes. But with every sunrise the drums grow louder in their ears. There was a fort made by the ones who call themselves Virginians, where the two rivers meet in the country of the snakes called Mingo.”

“Fort Necessity,” Cormac said. “Uko Nyakwai told me about it. The young man who is called Washington, he—”

“He was surrounded by the French and their big guns, and they killed all his horses and mules and oxen and he surrendered. The French were fools and let their enemies walk away, so they must fight them again, but someday—soon I think—one will truly win and the other will truly lose. When that happens the winner will be strong enough to crush the Real People entirely. We must protect ourselves against that day. Perhaps by Pontiac’s way, perhaps by yours. But some method must be found. If we go on as we are, they will eat our flesh and throw our bones into the fire.”

“Memetosia speaks wisdom.” Cormac could smell the sourness of the old man’s breath, the unhealthy reek of his ebbing life.

The hand holding the medicine bag snaked toward Cormac. “Take this, Cormac Shea who is both white and
Anishinabeg.
It is the most precious gift I can give. Take it and when the time is right, use it.”

“Revered Chief, how will I know—”

The old man had closed his eyes. He turned his face away and made a languid, dismissive gesture with the crane feathers. There would be no more talk.

The medicine bag was a pouch smaller than the palm of Cormac’s hand and made of fine, very soft deerskin, pure white and decorated with red and black crane symbols, tied tightly with a long deerskin thong fashioned into a large loop. Corm fingered it cautiously. There were a number of hard, uneven objects inside, not flat like coins or small and tubular like wampum.