A Dark and Promised Land (4 page)

Lachlan looks down at the body. A middle-aged man, naked but for a wrapping of polished green seaweed over his belly and legs. He is on his back, eyes open and staring. Tiny puddles of seawater had collected over his shrunken orbits, and he appears to be studying the sky through spectacles. Lachlan wonders if he had met the man, had spoken to him. He does not remember the face. He reaches over and closes the eyes, wiping his wet fingers on his breeches.

“We cannot leave them here to the
whitemaa
or be washed out to sea. If we have no means to bury them then we must bring them above the tide, cover them with boughs, and stand watch. This much must be done.”

“But which of us will go with the heathen?”

“I shall go. And my daughter shall go with me as she has lost her habiliments. The Company officer will know from whom at York Fort we should procure assistance. I do not know whom else. You, perhaps.”

The man, a muscular Highlander with a black scraggly beard and weary eyes, nods at him.

The task of gathering the dead is a grisly one, as scavengers have already defiled some of the corpses. At least half of the ship's complement has died, though most are not accounted for in the pale forms scattered on the beach.

As the day lengthens, the clouds begin to dissipate and a weak sun gradually emerges. The breeze dies and biting insects flow down from the wall of trees the way a cool air flows from a height with the coming of night. The Indians start a smudge fire of seaweed, but it doesn't help much against the onslaught.

The men carry the bodies to a spot above the high-water mark as far from the forest as possible, the Indians warning that there are animals who will and can walk off with a corpse or part of one at the turn of a back: bear, lynx, wolf, marten, wolverine, and lion, plus a host of small and furtive beasts happy to snatch a mouthful of carrion.

The women take axes and cut spruce boughs to cover the bodies, the beach echoing with the sound of distant chopping. Although she is not expected to work, Rose feels she would be remiss to not contribute. She stands in a bog and hews at tough, pitch-covered spruce branches while mosquitoes and blackflies crawl over her hands and face. It is more difficult than anything she has experienced, and sweat runs into her eyes. With each step, she sinks ankle-deep into wet peat. Moss hangs from overhead branches, dragging through her hair, and coating it in cobwebs and pine needles.

The axe handle suddenly shatters, the ricocheting head scoring her forehead. Blood quickly begins flowing. She stumbles and sits heavily in the peat, weeping. Isqe-sis yanks the broken handle from her hand and throws it into the forest.

“This what you
Êmistikôsiw
, you Whites trade with us, this …” and she begins a long diatribe, not a word of which Rose understands, although the anger is unmistakable. Still cursing, the woman presses a handful of the moss to Rose's wound.

“In winter such axe could kill a man or his family,” she says. “Bad guns, bad axes, sick clothes …”

Rose cannot help but feel that although Isqe-sis is tending her, the Indian would just as rather leave her to bleed. She feels a rising indignation; what has
she
done to incur this person's wrath? Was not
she
the offended party? She sees a small, silver crucifix peeking from a fold in Isqe-sis's capote.

“You are baptized? You are Christian?” Rose asks, surprised. Isqe-sis nods.

“How…”

“There is camp of the Black Robes.” Isqe-sis waves her arm southward. “Port Nelson. My father had the water magic for me. In the name of Jesus they save my spirit.”

Black Robes
, Rose thinks.
She must mean Jesuits. So she's a Papist
.

“Are many of you are Christian?”

“Not so many. Most Home Guard, yes, rest Cree, no.”

“Home Guard, what is that?”

Isqe-sis frowns. “We are poor people, needing White man's trade.” She spits in the direction of the axe handle. “Live York Fort. Not now, not since White sickness come.”

“White sickness? What is that?”

Isqe-sis looks away. “Sickness come from Whites. Fever, then death. Sometimes sores on face, hands. Sometimes not. But always fever and death. This why we no longer live at York Fort.”

Sitting in the slender vessel and clutching the gunwale, Rose is ill at ease. The boat is several feet long and constructed of woven bark. One man in the bow and another in the stern propel it with short, carved paddles. Her father sits in front and behind her, the big Highlander, Declan Cormack, looking thoughtful as he watches the Indians at their work. Behind him, the Company officer sits in the stern, scowling whenever Rose turns and looks at him.

She feels the movement of the sea through the slight material of the craft and it seems as if they are perched on a feather. They glide up one wave and slide down another in a gentle, regular rhythm. She watches the man in the bow, the pumping of his thin, muscular arms. Red ochre covers the faces of these men, their heads shaved except for a single topknot wrapped in hide.

Each stroke of the paddle is short and sharp; stroke following stroke. No words, no rest, no complaint, and Rose is reminded of an oxen tied to a mill wheel, doomed to forever circle the same spot.

She thinks of the distance between her and her old life back in Stromness, in the Orkney Islands. Their house in Stromness was small and cold, with a solitary hearth inadequate for the job. Built of stone with dark, walnut doors and wainscotting and tiny windows painted closed to fend away the unhealthy night air.

Rooms were usually closed tight to conserve heat in main living areas, and her father's library (her favourite room) grew innumerable moulds. Many dismal afternoons had been spent engrossed in distant worlds, while against the window an ancient and gnarly crabapple tree tapped when the wind blew from the sea, scattering hard knobs across the courtyard in the autumn. The damp, musty smell of books had whispered freedom to her.

At first Rose had found the written world to be preferable to the lived, in part due to the regime that her father imposed on the household, their lives neatly bookended by fears of God and personal anarchy. Simple foods and unpretentious clothing has been her lot, although they could afford far more.

But as womanhood arrived and with it a sense of her own desire and will, she learned to explore ideas with others. The relationships people wove amongst themselves lit a candle in her imagination, and in a city like Stromness, with a busy port and entire populations passing from somewhere to another where, it was possible to explore the meaning of many an intriguing concept with any number of strangers.

It was not excitement that she sought, but the young adult's earnest need to decipher the paradox of what the world presented with a sly wink on one hand, while condemning it with the other. To her, moving anonymously through the city was like rolling over a large stone to uncover the secret, mysterious world inside an ant's nest.

Like one of her fictional heroines, she wrapped herself in stranger's clothes and went down to the taverns along the waterfront and met life head-on. Power especially interested her — the various forms it took, the disguises it embraced. She saw it manifest as physical strength and as a dour uniform, as money and a flashing blade. What really surprised her was how often it rested in a look and a powdered décolletage.

When not fascinated by the struggles of man against man, she often wandered the labyrinths of love. In her stuffy tomes, the poets and philosophers waxed at length on the meaning of that ineffable beast, and she refuted them both. The first was too wild-eyed earnest while the latter too removed from anything that pumped hot blood. As Leeuwenhoek glared down his glass and trumpeted on the unseen nature of things, she felt his ilk no closer to expounding on love's mystery than the contents of a chamber pot.

Sometimes these back-room truancies were hard and brutal, at other times they recalled the delicacy of a chrysalis.

Things could become complicated. One time a Mr. Wells, post captain in the British Navy, was one with whom she had explored the more esoteric and violent forms of passion. He was short and fat, with bright, hard eyes and a face almost as scarlet as the Royal marines that guarded his quarterdeck. Upon receiving his admiralty packet commanding him to India, he informed Rose that he desired her company on the long voyage. Wells had not reached his station by deferring to another's will, and her careful, coquettish demurrals moved him not a whit. He would not be put off by a mere girl, and once word reached her ear that he had commanded she be brought to his ship, in irons if need be, she refused to leave her home.

Although a studious woman, Rose was no church-mouse and this sudden reluctance to go for air or visit her friends raised Lachlan's concerns; he noticed an unhealthy pallor and soon called for a bleeding, a process she loathed as much as being trapped in their home.

But of course, Wells was not aware of who Rose really was or where she lived, and the sailors and press gangs searched high and low for her to no effect. At last, in a great rage, he was forced to sea without his love's interest to warm his bed. Rose felt relieved to see his sails on the horizon, and thought it a miracle that the city was not bombarded as a token of his thwarted passion.

After the danger of Wells, Rose kept much closer to home. But the unrelieved routine of their life quickly grated on her spirit and the old ache, once masked by curiosity and excitement, soon returned. Her father's concern remained high; her complexion did not improve and neither did her mood. She was short with the servants and himself, and a veritable parade of physicians marched through their home poking and prodding her, asking veiled questions regarding her woman's functions.

Rather than seek an explanation within her own soul, she blamed her ennui on the ritual of walking her father to the school each morning and the afternoon tea with her friends. There was the constant turning away of the boorish suitors that every mother in Stromness seemed to send to her door; the banality of the middle class was hers and she would not, could not take to it. It was not long before she found herself once again in unfamiliar alleys and hallways.

Not all of her quests were lascivious in nature. Far from it. She had quickly learned that the bodily passions, while interesting in their own right, left little in their wake besides messy hair and possessive lovers. She was driven by something deeper, more innate. Curious and insatiable was how she described herself when musing on her odd and dangerous behaviour with her friends (some of whom thought her much like a goddess); life was short and living was truly made for the young, and best to just get on with it.

The young man from Ronaldsay was the not her first aboard, but almost certainly the last. It was an impulse fired as much by risk as any real interest on her part; her father had been nearby and that was a true novelty for her as he knew nothing at all of her trysts. She rarely gave her companions much thought; they simply amused her. At best, her feelings went so far as a benign complacency, the way one might offer a stray dog an uncertain pat on the head.

But though her need had not been sated in Stromness, she at least enjoyed the luxury of her unhappiness. Though occasionally placing herself in various compromising positions, she had always enjoyed the luxury of sneaking home for a bath in the small hours (and if by unhappy chance the servants encountered her in the hall or stairwell, they discreetly looked through her in a manner she found quite unnerving, as if she had become a ghost). Father and daughter had been toppled from a comfortable station in Orkney to break bread with the wild and the savage awaiting in Rupert's Land, and she did not much like it: hers was a sensitive heart, one that should not have to endure such trials.

After several hours of following the coast, the Indian in the bow pulls up his paddle and shouts, “
Wapusk, wapusk!”
They crane to look; there is something in the water, swimming parallel with them. A wedge-shaped head leaves a trailing wake.

The Indians veer closer, Rose spotting a large, pale body, indistinct beneath the blue of the water. A black nose and small, dark eyes.

“'Tis an Arctic bear,” Lachlan says in awe.

The Indian in the bow nods.
“Wapusk.”
He brings out his trade musket or
fuke
and directs them alongside the swimming animal. They see the great paws swinging as it dog-paddles; it turns towards them, but the Indians veer away, maintaining a careful distance.

“Sometime they jump at you,” the Indian says. “And then …” he makes a slashing gesture across his throat.

They follow alongside for several minutes with Rose leaning over the gunwale, admiring the animal. The bear turns to them again, and the Indian in the bow raises his fuke again; a sharp report and water fountains beside the bear's head. The animal thrashes about, throwing blood and spray. A pall of gun smoke drifts over the canoe.