Blood Ties (51 page)

He staggered up. ‘Anne. I must … I must go to her.’ He took a few weak steps. ‘Where am I?’

Thomas was beside him in a moment. ‘Sit, friend. I do not think you would get very far now.’

‘But she is in great danger.’

‘Then sit, and we will talk of how to best help her.’

Tagay allowed himself to be guided back down. Thomas handed him the flask again, then pulled, from a pocket in his cloak, some of the flat bread studded with dried fruits that the tribeswomen baked on stones. Choking on it at first, Tagay gradually managed to swallow some. Between each bite, he told the story of the threat to Anne as he had overheard it.

Thomas fought down his own immediate desire to emulate Tagay’s, to take again to the canoe and paddle to Anne’s rescue. He had barely made it across the river to where he was now. In the dark, with a man who had only just survived drowning, it was impossible.

Breathing to calm himself, he said, ‘We must wait till the light comes, when you are a little recovered. Then perhaps we can take this boat to your village.’

Tagay was looking out to the river as if for the first time. Lightning again lit up the far shore. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Are we on the northern banks of the water?’

‘Yes. I found you nearly halfway across. We could not return to the island with the war party there.’

‘But that means we are in the land of the Tahontaenrat, my people.’ He stared upstream, as if his eyes could pierce the darkness, the walls of rain. ‘We have pathways that go the length of this shore, so runners can bear messages to all of our scattered tribe. All we have to do is find the path. We can run to the village.’

He began to rise. But even the weight of Thomas’s arm laid gently on his was enough to pull him back down.

‘You would not get a hundred paces tonight. You must sleep and pray for strength to rise up with the sun.’ As Tagay began to protest, he added, ‘She is among your people, is she not? Surely she will be safe till the morning?’

Tagay nodded, reluctant. But the Englishman was right; he would not get far tonight. And he would be of no use to Anne if he died trying to find a trail in the dark.

‘With the dawn then,’ he said. He lay down and, as sleep took him, mumbled, ‘We will run to rescue her.’

Thomas smiled, stretched out his knee, rubbed its soreness. What he needed was Anne’s healing touch upon it but even with that he knew that his days of running were long past. Inept though he was with a canoe, it was his only means away from there.

Shivering, he eyed the cloak spread over Tagay with envy, then resignation. Charity was the Jesuit way, after all. Curling up on the opposite side of the fire, he thought he would be unable to sleep, driven by wonder, by his need to contemplate the words that had coalesced around his visions of Anne. But he had underestimated the effect of his exertions. Soon, two snores duetted above the snapping of flames and a beautiful, clear dawn came and went, undetected by either man.

Tagay used the last of the embers to burn the tobacco. It was still damp, despite his efforts to dry it out, and took a while to catch. When it finally did, he piled the burning shreds of leaves on top of Donnaconna’s stone, inhaled the sweet fumes, and uttered a prayer.

When he opened his eyes, Thomas was before him again, having returned from the canoe.

‘This was my uncle’s Oki,’ he said, holding up the stone with its distinctive even lines. ‘His lucky spirit. I have asked for blessing upon my journey.’

‘It’s a similar smell to the incense we use in Church.’ Thomas inhaled, then smiled. ‘And has a similar effect. As for asking blessings … I wonder if your Donnaconna and Saint Christopher, to whom I just prayed, are so very different.’

Tagay stood. ‘It is you who are different. You are unlike any priest of your faith I have ever met.’

‘But I am not a priest, Tagay. I am a Jesuit. I have taken vows to my order but have never been ordained.’

‘Well.’ Tagay looked at the black-grey hair of the man, at the pale blue eyes, then remembered the other reason he did not think him priest-like – his words from the night before, the feeling in them when he had spoken of Anne.

‘I will go,’ he said. His moccasins had been sucked away in the river, but his feet had hardened in the time he had been back in his land. His breech cloth was also lost, so the only covering his body had was the hide belt and the deer skin pouch that contained Donnaconna’s Oki. In one hand he clutched an ash staff whose sharpened end he had fashioned with the Jesuit’s knife.

‘Are you sure you don’t want this?’ Thomas held out the small blade to him. At the shake of his head he held up the cloak. ‘Or this?’

Tagay smiled. ‘Are you afraid that Anne will see me naked and forget you?’

Thomas’s smile in return was sad. ‘I am sure she does not even remember who I am. No, I just want to help you get back to her.’

‘Then let me run with nothing but my Oki and my spear. If they help me, and I am not eaten by wolf or bear, I could get there by the middle of the day. Ask your spirits to help me do that.’ He tipped the shaft once in salute and disappeared between two trees.

‘Go with God, my friend,’ Thomas said, adding, ‘and may both your Oki and Saint Christopher watch over you.’ Crossing himself, he turned and made for the canoe.

Tagay followed a deer track up into the forest. In his time spent with the Bear clan in the lands above the cliffs, they had taught him to look for the smallest of paths, but even so he nearly missed it. Bending over a muddy patch, he saw the faintest imprint of a human foot, its edges blurred by rainfall. Runners, looking for any who had been scattered by the burning of the outlying villages, must have passed this way, and recently. Otetian had boasted how runners like himself could traverse half the country in a day, because they never stopped for a rest.

‘Otetian,’ he said to the forest. The man had saved his life, so that he could take the warning to the tribe of their betrayal. ‘Anne.’ The woman who had fallen to the earth to lead him to that tribe. The woman he had ignored in his quest to return to it.

Otetian. Anne.

Chanting their names under his breath, Tagay began to run south through the forest. For the first little while, his legs were weak, making him stumble. Gradually, he felt them settle and he hit his stride, the words melding into one inside his head.

Ote-Anne. Ote-Anne. Ote-Anne
.

The cage was one of three set near the trenches dug for human waste. Made of saplings lashed together with woven reed, it was just tall enough for the dogs it had lately contained to stand and thus not for her. They had moved the former inhabitants to the cages on either side and there had been a near continuous snapping and growling since. The dogs in these cages may have been old, or lame or simply bred for the pot, but they were still territorial.

The stench was appalling. Anne had managed to use an old bone to rake a little area clear for her to sit in. But excrement was piled up on all sides. The rains that had come in the night had done little to wash it away and the summer sun, now nearing its zenith, had returned to the new washed sky, ripening the floor she sat on, striping her through the bars in burning lines. Flies droned ceaselessly, some leaving the feast of ordure to feast on her.

No one came near her. There was no water now, for she had drunk the murky contents of the one bowl left there hours before. Once, she had looked up to see Do-ne limping toward her, flask in hand. But his mother had followed him and jerked him away, doing something Anne had never seen in her entire time in the village, beating the child as she dragged him, whimpering, by one arm out of sight.

Such is the terror I inspire
, she thought.

She had wept then, silently, her head folded down upon her hunched knees. Despair took her. Tagay was dead. Betrayed somehow, she felt sure, by the tattooed man who was her accuser. And even though Tagay had turned away from her since their arrival, the feeling she had since the first moment she saw him remained – the only man she could love was dead. And she was to be tried for a witch, the very accusation that had condemned the queen she had now failed. She had betrayed the cause her father, Jean Rombaud, had died for. And she, who had led him to that death, was about to die too, condemned for her visions, the arrogant belief that she had the one and only answer – to take the hand to a world where such evil did not exist. But evil was everywhere. She remembered her mother’s words, the night in Montalcino when Beck had begged her not to join a quest that had already destroyed her family.

You want to stop evil, daughter? Then do not go to France to seek it out. It begins there, at our front door and it runs from there through all the world
.

She had come much further than France to realize the truth of those words. And the vision of the mother she’d never see again brought more tears.

She heard shuffling steps and, through the mist of her eyes, she saw Gaka.

‘Get away from me, Aunt,’ she cried. ‘I am lost and they will beat you for talking to me.’

With some effort, the old lady bent and finally sat on the ground near Anne.

‘They will not beat me, child. They know I am so old that one blow could send me to the Village of the Dead.’ She pulled out a flask and thrust it through the bars. Anne gulped the cool water down. ‘And the rest follow close behind me to take you before the elders. Ayee’ – she waved her hand before her face, wrinkling her nose – ‘you have not chosen a clean lodge house for your rest, child.’

Anne returned the empty flask. ‘What will happen to me, Aunt?’

Gaka sighed. ‘It is very serious. Even if you murdered someone, you would not die for it. You would have to appease the family of your victim, with gifts, with service. Our tribe only kills its own for two causes – betrayal of the people to our enemies. And witchcraft. Usually there is no meeting of all for this, the witch is accused in secret and if the elders judge the person guilty they are secretly killed. But it is different for you.’

‘Different? Why?’

‘The accusation was made before the whole tribe, so you could not be killed secretly without everyone knowing the reason. And you are not one of the people, no matter how well you speak our tongue – a gift some already say proves you are a witch, for no Pale Thief has spoken like you. The tribe saw you accused. The tribe want to see you condemned. This is bad and good.’

Anne leaned till her head touched the wooden slats. ‘How?’

‘Bad because many of the women, especially those whose husbands went on the hunt, have already condemned you. They beat you before and want to share in your killing now.’

‘And the good?’ Anne asked, her voice a whisper.

Gaka smiled. ‘I can be there.’ She rose shakily as they heard the buzz of approaching people. A chant came.

‘Heh-ah, heh-ah, heh-ah, he-hah!’

She looked down and a finger came through into the cage, just reaching the end of Anne’s nose, stroking it.

‘There is hope in this, White Cedar. I am one of the leaders of the Awataerohi, the Healing Circle. Many people who are sick are cured by our ceremonies, by the summoning of our Oki. I have cured many here and they respect me so they will listen when I speak for you. If I can show Black Snake is sick with some spirit and that made him accuse you falsely, then perhaps I can save you.’

‘But he tried to take me by force, twice.’ Anne had risen to her knees. ‘Is that not enough?’

‘They will say your witchcraft made him do it. It would prove his truth, not yours because everyone knows how Black Snake loves the woman who adopted him when he was a prisoner so that he would not die.’

The chant came again, louder, nearer.

‘Heh-ah, heh-ah, heh-ah, he-hah!’

Then six figures ran round the corner of the lodge. Their bodies were human, streaked with ochre paint in swirling patterns. Their loins were barely covered with a thin band of hide, their backs bore each a frayed and tattered deerskin. But they had the faces of devils, were fully covered by a mask of red cedar bark – huge eyes painted above a beak-nose, a shrieking mouth with a lolling pink tongue thrust from the side, the whole slashed from one side to the other with deep black furrows. What looked like real hair hung in long shanks down either side to the shoulders. In their right hands each clutched a rattle fashioned from a turtle’s shell.

‘Gagosa,’ Gaka said. ‘The False Faces. Demon hunters.’

The masked men approached, almost in step, chanting their chant, shaking their rattles. Gaka moved aside, as the men formed a circle and danced around the cage, first one way, then the other. After three turns they stopped, all the masks lowered, painted eyes studying her. Then the False Face who had stopped closest struck the cage near her head with his rattle. Instantly, the others moved around it, levering out the pegs that held it to the ground. With the final one gone they ripped the cage from its place. Muscled, painted arms reached for her, dragged her to her feet. With a man either side and holding her tight she was half-carried, half-dragged through the village. But no one had gathered to witness her progress and the open space within the main gates, which could have held a crowd, was deserted. Only two men waited there, young men who Anne recognized from Gaka’s lodge, both grandsons.

The aunt had struggled to keep up with the demon hunters. Now she sank gratefully into a chair basket that her two grandsons produced.

‘I will follow. They take you to the game field. The village is swollen with all those who have fled the burning of their villages. It is the only land where all can watch.’

Anne scarcely heard the last words. The men had begun to run, her legs dragging, passing her on as each pair of bearers tired. This transfer happened more often on the cliff path, especially near the top. But those who were not doing the carrying had begun to chant again: ‘Heh-ah, heh-ah, heh-ah, he-hah!’ As they neared the summit, Anne heard that chant echoing from above her. Then she realized it wasn’t an echo but the voices of all the Tahontaenrat, awaiting the arrival of the witch.

The giant circle was triple ranked – the children and the old sat at the front, the women standing behind them, their men at the back. When Anne emerged from the shadow of the oak where she and Tagay had first been discovered, the tribe’s chorus swelled to a roar that continued as the ranks parted to admit her. The False Faces carried her to the very centre of the circle, dropped her there, and all save one retired to squat before the rank of the elders, a solid group of some forty men.