The Pelican Bride (28 page)

Tristan shrugged off his brother’s worry with a smile. “No, just tired of fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll take my bow and see if I can get a rabbit or a deer before the sun goes down.”

Marc-Antoine nodded, clearly not convinced. “Good idea. We’ll set up camp, build a fire. It will be good to sleep on dry ground.”

Bow in hand, Tristan set off along the stream trickling through the woods. Dusk was falling, and he knew he wasn’t likely to find much in the way of game, but he needed the time alone. He was going to have to talk to Marc-Antoine about the priest’s crazy tale, get his take on it. He needed his brother to laugh and tell him not to be soaking in fairy tales. They
were
brothers, in the most important sense of the word, and nothing could change that.

Shaking off his turbulent thoughts, he continued deeper into the woods, walking without a sound in the manner Deerfoot had taught him. Before long he heard the distant gabbling of a flock of turkeys. Slipping closer, he saw a broad-bottomed tom with brilliant comb and wattle. Drawing an arrow from his quiver, he nocked it against the string and aimed at the nearest fowl.

A second later the turkey was dead, the arrow having clipped it
through the eyes and gone to rest in the trunk of a pine tree. As the other birds in the flock flapped awkwardly and noisily away into the forest, Tristan retrieved his arrow, wiped its soiled head on a patch of moss, and returned it to the quiver. Picking the bird up by its feet, he swung back toward camp. He was perhaps a mile away when he stopped at a loud cracking sound perhaps thirty yards away. Something much heavier than any forest animal had stepped on a limb. Heart thudding, he listened to the stillness.

He was alone and outside shouting distance of the rest of his party. Utterly foolish to have left on his own. He backed toward the closest tree, an ancient oak with a broad scarred trunk and mossy gnarled roots. Almost he thought he had imagined the noise, but then he heard a muffled but unmistakable sneeze. He slowly lowered the turkey to the ground, then reached over his shoulder for an arrow. Just as he got it nocked, three Indian braves in Alabama dress melted out of the forest with their own bows armed and aimed. He was surrounded.

The hair on the back of his neck rose. The dark faces were inscrutable, the mouths clipped into tight lines, the eyes narrowed. They were young, perhaps still in their teens, each sporting a single combat feather in the light headdresses woven into their long, black hair. Come upon like this, apart from the village, they must be considered hostile. If he shot first, he could kill one, even as the other two sent arrows into his own heart. If he yielded, they would take him prisoner and torture him before murdering and scalping him.

Frozen with fear, he prayed for wisdom.

Nika ran through the darkening forest alone, but sometimes when she listened, the pounding of her heart sounded like someone running near her. Out of habit, she looked over her shoulder, though she was confident she was not being followed. Mitannu
had left to go hunting yesterday, and her sister-in-law, Kumala, was busy tanning hides for winter use. Nika had told Kumala that she wanted to visit an old friend who now lived in the village of the Apalachee, so that if she and the boys were missed, no one would come looking for them.

When they had first left the Mobile village, Chazeh and Tonaw ran ahead of her. No matter how many times she had cautioned the boys to silence, they were too young to remember for more than a few minutes at a time. She hadn’t been able to tell them that this hunting game was deadly real. Frightening them would have done no good, and might even have slowed them down.

The three of them had walked along the Mobile River toward the Apalachee village, skirting it for safety’s sake, then headed due north through the forest west of the winding Alabama River. Though paying someone to paddle her and the boys upriver would have been less tiring, the detour cut off several hours of travel. By the time they reached the Little Tomeh in late afternoon, both boys were whining about food, so she had gone directly to Azalea’s hogan.

Nika and Azalea had grown up together in the Kaskaskian village of the Alabama nation, a loose confederation of clans located near the juncture of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, which together flowed south, forming the Alabama River. The two girls had been close friends until the young Frenchman called Bright Tongue came to live in their village. Nika’s father chose her to tutor their guest in the Alabama language, and that was that. Azalea had warned her that the beautiful white boy would not stay, but Nika didn’t want to hear it. She had swallowed his sweet words whole, eagerly fed him kisses in return, and soon the seeds of two little boys grew in her belly.

Such grief and such joy she had known since those two were placed at her breast. She would sacrifice anything to keep them safe. Leaving them with Azalea had been the hardest thing she had ever done, even harder than leaving her home to follow Mitannu,
the Mobile headman’s eldest son, all the way to the mouth of the big river, where it gushed into the bay that opened like a blessing into the wide waters. She had seen the great gulf once, and it was just like Bright Tongue described it—though even he could not do justice to the vastness, the power, the crashing
noise
of it. She had begged Mitannu to take her back to the Mobile village, and he had laughed at her—not kindly, as the Frenchman would, when he teased her about her funny way of saying his name.
Mah-Kah-Twah.

“Mah-Kah-Twah.” She said it aloud again, savoring his name on her tongue as she had once felt his lips upon hers.

Suddenly she stopped running to cast her arms around an oak tree in her path, pressing her forehead hard into its wooden skin so that the harsh reality might banish the foolish dreams that caught her off-guard more and more often in these unhappy days under Mitannu’s domination. For now, the boys were safe with Azalea, and no one would think to look for them there. Mitannu didn’t want them anyway, for she suspected he knew they weren’t his. She was going to deliver this one last letter into the British stronghold in Carolina, accept payment for it, and then return for her children. She would take them to live with her mother’s people in Kaskaskia, far away from Mitannu. Her father might beat her, but he wouldn’t turn her and the children away.

And most importantly, she would be far from Bright Tongue, who didn’t want her or the boys either. If he had, he would have stayed. He would have demanded the right to take her from her father’s hogan. But he had not. She had awakened one morning to find him gone, vanished with his older brother, leaving her to mourn like a widow. How could a man who loved her walk away? Even a very young man who spoke another language?

She relaxed her arms, turned to brace her back against the tree, and felt in her pocket for the paper Ginette had given her. It had been folded many times and sealed with a blob of greenish wax.
She fingered it, wondering what message was worth risking so many lives for. Ginette said the Huguenot priest would pay well for it. She hoped so, for it would take money to safely transport those two little boys such a long distance. And her father would more readily accept her if she could offer to pay for their food and shelter. Perhaps there would be enough to buy a hog, a milk cow, or even a horse, livestock valuable to the northern Alabama culture.

Her fingernail slipped under the edge of the wax, loosening it just a bit. What if it came off? Bright Tongue had been teaching her to read French just before he left the Tuskegee village. She might be able to decipher the note, and perhaps she might sell the intelligence elsewhere. On the other hand, removal of the seal might decrease the letter’s value to its recipient.

She smoothed it back down and lifted her skirt to tuck the paper back into the pocket tied around her waist inside her dress. After all, she doubted that a nice Frenchwoman like Ginette would have anything to say that would be of any real interest.

Unmoving, Tristan watched the eyes of the closest Indian flicker toward the turkey at his feet. The boy’s nostrils flared.

Tristan waited until his heartbeat receded from his ears and settled back in his chest. He must not display weakness. He stood with the bowstring taut at his cheek and ready to fire.

The brave with the Roman nose lowered his arrow to aim at the ground. “You shoot turkey?” he asked in the Koasati dialect.

Tristan nodded. “Yes. You hungry?” It dawned on him that the young men were painfully thin, their ribs prominent above the pale leather breechclouts. What had happened to the game near their village?

“Hungry,” the brave repeated, dropping his bow with a sweeping gesture that commanded his companions to follow suit.

Tristan lowered his own weapon, full of wonder at this turn of
events. “Koasati?” When the brave gave him a wary nod, he bent down to pick up the stiff turkey and offered it to the Indians. “I come with French warriors and black robe, to make peace with your people.”

“Peace,” the young man grunted, stumbling over the word as if it were foreign to his tongue. He brought one fist to his chest in a theatrical and oddly
young
gesture. “Our chief sends us to greet the French brothers from the south river. We welcome them to our village to smoke the calumet of peace.”

Tristan wondered what the Indians would do if he fainted from relief. He gestured once more with the turkey. “First we eat. Then I will go with you.”

The Koasati spokesman took it, shaking the bird’s tail into a gigantic, brilliant fan, which he somberly admired. “Our brothers have found food where there has been none for many days. It is a sign of the French God’s favor. We are honored to eat with you.”

Peace, Tristan thought. Perhaps God was listening after all.

When she came upon Mitannu and his men, Nika was about to slide down a steep bluff covered in vines, briars, ferns, and pine striplings. At the bottom of the bluff burbled a spring that became a rushing little icy-fingered creek she and her cousins had swum in when she was a girl. She had been running without stopping for two hours, and she was mortally thirsty. Besides, it was time to stop for the night. The outermost Alabama village should be nearby, if she remembered correctly. It had been years since she had traveled this route herself, though she had sent her runners this way every so often.

She had knelt to choose a safe footing, when movement among the trees on the other side of the creek caught her eye. Instantly she flattened herself, melting into the brush. Heart pounding, she lifted her head just enough to peer down into the bowl of the creek.

It hadn’t been her imagination. Even with his face painted in the alien clay-reds and ocher-yellows of the Koasati tribe, his hair twisted into the topknot favored by northern hunters, she would know her husband’s guttural voice among ten thousand others.

She pressed her cheek against the ground, almost glad of the briars driving into her skin, because the pain kept her from blacking out. He had followed her after all. Hunting had been a pretext to make her relax her guard. And if he had followed her, then he also knew where the boys were. What if he had taken them? What if he had hidden them somewhere, where she wouldn’t be able to find them? He was just spiteful enough to have done so.