Blood Ties (40 page)

‘Look to Beck?’ she cried. ‘I will look to myself, as always, Jean Rombaud. You think I need a man’s protection because I am so womanly, so weak, that I … I …’ Her throat tightened as the tears came.

The words were faint now, so only Beck could hear them. ‘You are a warrior – and my own true love.’

She whispered. ‘And you are mine.’ As she bent to kiss him, the first of her tears ran from her face and onto his.

He tilted his face up to them. They were like grace falling from heaven and, feeling that grace at last, Jean Rombaud died.

She rocked him, began to keen, Hebrew words on a low note. Maria had joined her father and now the two Fuggers, Haakon and Erik turned to stare at Jean Rombaud’s son.

‘You don’t understand.’ There was a note of pleading in Gianni’s voice. ‘He opposed the will of God.’

‘Your God, Gianni,’ the Fugger said softly. ‘Your interpretation of His will.’

The voice changed, hardened. ‘He served the Devil in serving that English witch.’

‘He served his own truth.’

‘No!’ Gianni howled, glaring back at the eyes before him. ‘He cursed us, all of us. And only I can lift that curse.’

‘And only I can help you.’

The new voice came from the limping, black-cloaked man they’d run past on the jetty.

Thomas Lawley moved to Gianni’s side now, bent, helped him from the ground. ‘Come away, Gianni. Come!’

Shaking off the supporting hand, Gianni made to turn. Then he looked down, saw his dead father in his mother’s arms, took a step toward her. In a voice drained of defiance, he said, ‘Mother?’

Beck’s eyes were filled, the figure of her son appearing as if through a veil. She shook her head once, to clear her vision. When she had, she simply looked for a moment, with the glance one gives to a stranger. Then she bent again and resumed her low keening.

This time Gianni accepted the tug of the arm. The first step was hard, the second a little easier. Soon he was pulling the limping man down the jetty, away. He had seen the caravel slipping across the waves, bearing his family’s curse. And he had seen other boats still tied up in the harbour.

They watched them leave, turned back to the two on the ground, to the living and the dead.

‘We must bury him,’ said the Fugger.

Haakon shook his head, bent to touch Beck on her shoulder.

‘I have another idea.’

They were ready near sunset. They had staunched his wounds as best they could, washed his face, wrapped him in a new cloak. Erik had placed a scimitar between his hands.

‘It may not be his own sword,’ said Haakon as he rested a hand on his son’s shoulder, ‘but Rombaud was a man with an eye for a fine cutting edge.’

He bent again to the prow of the skiff they’d laid him in, using his knife to carve the last curl of a giant ‘R’ there.

‘A rune for journeys,’ he said.

The Fugger placed a flagon of wine near Jean’s feet. ‘You’ll want a drink when you awake, old friend. It will not be as good as that from your vineyards. But it gives you something to compare your next vintage to.’

Haakon rowed; Beck sat in the stern; Erik followed in a second boat with the Fuggers. A calm sea was burnished red by the setting sun. When Haakon shipped his oars, Erik brought his vessel alongside, held the two together. The Norseman climbed over, leaving Beck holding the body.

She whispered, ‘I have nothing to give you, Jean. Nothing except this promise – you will never be forgotten. We will tell your tale often and we will tell it in the courtyard of the Comet. For I
will
get it back – that I vow to you. Farewell.’

She kissed him, then took Haakon’s hand and climbed over into the other boat. She looked down at their expectant faces.

‘No words,’ she said, ‘for he was not a man of words but of deeds. And such deeds.’

She took the torch Haakon had lit for her. At her nod, Erik released the skiff which immediately began to move away. She let it drift, the tide took it and, just when they all thought it had gone too far, she stooped and threw, the shoulder that had wielded a slingshot still strong, her thirst for a target still unerring. The torch flared through the air, spinning, then plunged down, onto the straw that was his bed. It caught, instantly, and the boat, Jean Rombaud’s funeral pyre, drifted blazing into the sunset.

Tagay crouched at the centre of the blackened circle, sifting ash, letting it fall like so much sooty snow. She had called him from the edge of this clearing that had once held a village; he’d pretended he had not heard. For what could he say that he had not said the day before and the one before that? He had promised her a New World. And he had brought her to a wasteland.

‘Tomorrow, Tagay.’ Anne spoke now from just behind him. As ever, he had not heard her approach, not a crack of twig or footfall on the charred earth had alerted him. He had always known how she was born of air. The first time he’d seen her she’d floated down from a palace roof. Yet wasn’t he a native of this land, even if he’d never been here before?

Surely, a hunter of the Bear clan, of the tribe of the Tahontaenrat should be able to hear the approach of a white girl?

But, of course, he wasn’t a hunter. He wasn’t anything. All he knew in life was across the other side of the ocean. And standing in the ashes of the fourth village they had found in as many days, he wished he were back in Paris now, safely drunk, about to be shown to another woman’s bed.

He stood, brushing his hands against his breeches. They could not get any dirtier; seven weeks at sea had turned their green velvet into a dull and muddied grey. Yet he could not take them off, nor his lawn shirt and brocade doublet, to dress as his mother had told him his people did in the summer, in a simple strip of skin around his waist. That would be as false as his dream of a homecoming.

At least he sensed her hand reaching for his shoulder. He stepped beyond it, out of the circle of soot, his back still to her.

‘Tomorrow? You think tomorrow will be any different from today?’

Anne’s hand caressed the space he’d lately occupied. ‘Yes, I do. You said yourself, your people move on when the land is tired. We just have to catch up with them.’

He turned, yet still avoided her eyes. His tone was bitter. ‘You’ve seen the fields. The earth here is rich. The corn fattens on the stalks, though the weeds now seek to choke it. These people did not move on. These people were driven out.’

She noticed how he no longer said ‘my people’.

‘Then we will find where they have been driven, Tagay. We will.’

Before he could muster a reply, a voice shouted their names from beyond the clearing, from the path back toward the river.

Anne was grateful for the interruption. ‘Here, Captain,’ she called, ‘ahead, in the village.’

Jacquet appeared, moving swiftly on the makeshift crutch she’d fashioned for him when they’d first reached land. He had broken his leg badly in a fall to the deck during a storm in the middle of the Atlantic. She had set it expertly, made him a cordial from her scant supplies that calmed his impatience, sat by him in his tiny cabin nursing him through the fever that followed. He had worshipped her ever since.

Two of his crew followed him. Young though they were they struggled to keep up.

‘Must you always go rushing off like that?’

He balanced on one leg and shook his crutch at them, breathing heavily. He found it hard to be angry with Anne, so he turned his venom on Tagay. ‘You may think you are one of them, my lad, but you hardly look like it in your Paris finery.’ He gestured at the soiled, tattered remains of Tagay’s clothes. ‘They are more likely to stick you full of arrows than to greet you as a lost cousin.’

‘I wish I could offer them a target,’ Tagay grunted before walking away, black dust rising from his footfalls, disappearing swiftly into the tree-line.

‘Come back here, boy.’ Jaquet hopped after him, and only Anne’s hand held him from pursuing further.

‘Leave him, Uncle Pierre,’ Anne said softly. ‘He is disappointed.’

‘As I am,’ said the Captain. ‘How can I trade my goods if we don’t find any Indians, eh? Tell me that! And if we can’t trade, we have to get back up to Gaspe´ to fish soon. You didn’t pay me enough to return to France with empty holds.’

His words were angry but the tone wasn’t. As always, the touch of Anne’s hand calmed him.

‘I know.’ She smiled. ‘A little more time, eh? Soon we will all find what we seek.’

‘Well, we won’t here. Something’s wrong in this land. When I was here in thirty-six with the Admiral, each of these places was a thriving village. If memory serves, this place was called Satadin. So see if you can get our friend back and let us push on upriver. The next village should be Stadacona and if they are not there, they are gone from this land and it’s Gaspe´ for us on the morrow.’

While Jacquet clumped back the way he’d come, Anne followed the small path Tagay had taken into the forest, grateful that she was out of sight of either man. It didn’t take Tagay’s disappointment, or Jacquet’s concern, to tell her something was wrong. The further they proceeded down the river the Captain called the St Lawrence, the more uneasy she felt. It wasn’t her uncertainty after the seven weeks at sea, nor the anticipation of the task ahead that caused her concern. It wasn’t the strange beauty of this land so different from anything she’d ever known, in its swathes of huge cypresses and cedars, walnut and spruce, its rocky inlets and towering cliffs. No, it was the one similarity with the three cities where lately she’d spent her life – Siena, London and Paris. Like each of them, this land reeked of death.

She climbed a hill through a series of stony terraces, like stairs hewn for giants, the forest thinning as she got higher. Where the hill levelled, wild grapes grew in random profusion. She found him there amongst them, his hands stripping the little green globes from the vines, chewing and spitting out tiny seeds.

He was aware of her but did not turn. Pulling a grape bunch towards her, she bit into the fruit.

‘Ach! Do you not think they are too young, Tagaynearguye? Wait another month and they may be sweet.’

‘And six months after that we could have wine, if we knew how to make it.’ Since she spoke to him in his own language he replied in the same. ‘What I would give for a glass of Bordeaux now.’

His voice had lost the harshness that the burnt village had brought to it and she moved toward him. ‘I know how to make it. My father made wine that would make you think your Bordeaux was vinegar.’

‘I doubt that.’ He watched her approach, held, as ever, by the smile in her eyes.

‘Shall we set up the first vineyard in the New World then, Tagaynearguye? Perhaps here, since you seem to like the fruit so much?’

Her hand descended to rest lightly on his. He let it lie for a moment only, then took it away. As always, the touch confused him, so he sought refuge in her words.

‘Why do you call me by my full name?’

‘Did you not tell me that “Tagay” only meant “Little” and the rest was “Bear”?’

‘Yes. But the French were too lazy to say the whole name. And “Little” was a good name for a pet!’

‘So perhaps I should just call you “Bear”. Since you have returned to your native forests.’

Tagay sighed. The sun had just ridden to its mid-point in the sky, and it beat down through the thinner foliage here. His skin felt sticky under his clothes.

‘I do not think I want my people to know wine, good or otherwise. Its pleasure comes at too great a price.’

‘Is that why you did not drink it on the crossing?’

He nodded, waving a hand at the insects that surrounded his head like a buzzing helmet.

‘Then we will make none, Little Bear.’

The heat, the insects, the taste of too-young grapes souring in his mouth. ‘Will you stop using my name like that?’ He saw her smile flee, startled by his sudden anger. ‘I will regret teaching you my tongue if you use it to plague me like one of these biting black flies.’

He slapped at his head, ran a few paces away. The horde merely shifted with him. He began to curse, as if he were still in Paris, waving his hands in the air, shuffling now this way, now that.

Anne did not try to follow. She felt stung, as if one of the biting creatures that harried him had remained behind for her. She had spent the seven weeks on the ship learning the tongue of the Tahontaenrat. There was nothing else to do on the tedious voyage and she had always been good at languages. She saw it as a way of knowing him. But the more fluent she became, the more he had closed off from her.

‘Why are you here, Anne?’ He shouted at her in French now, as if his own tongue pained him.

‘You know why. I am here for my father, to finish what he began. And I am here for you,’ she replied, her voice low.

‘For me?’ Words he wanted to hear tormented him like biting insects. ‘For me? And who am I?’

She began to reply but he cut her off. ‘I thought I would learn that answer for myself, from the land I never knew, from my people. But that land is a pyre of ashes and my people are scattered by the winds. And I cannot even shed these clothes.’ He clutched at his doublet front so violently that two of the last buttons popped off. ‘Anything else I put on would be false. False! I am not Tagaynearguye. I am the French Court’s little pet.’

‘You carry your people there, Tagay.’ She pointed at his chest. ‘I know by the way you have talked of them, of the dreams you have recounted to me. I know about dreams. I know the truth of you in them.’

‘Dreams?’ His laugh cracked and he began scrabbling in the little leather pouch at his belt. In a moment, a small stone was in his hand. It was a deep, almost obsidian black, with a series of fine, sandy lines running up its squat, squarish shape.

‘This was my uncle’s dreamteller, his “Oki”. He found it in the belly of a huge fish he caught somewhere near here. He was the chief of the tribe and Cartier stole him and his sister, with me in her belly, and took him to die on the banks of the Seine. If dreamtellers told true, would it not have told Donnaconna never to have left the shores of his own river?’