Blood Ties (58 page)

‘Tagay,’ she said, ‘Little Bear.’

He was surprised, for just a moment. And then he wasn’t.

‘Anne,’ he said, ‘White Cedar.’

He stood by the deer hide blankets that were, in turn, piled over a bearskin. It lay on the floor, not in the very centre of the lodge but down near the end, below and before his aunt’s platform. But the lodge that had been empty when they talked earlier was now full of men and women, their faces emerging or disappearing according to the swirling of the tobacco burning on their hearths. They swayed and chanted, ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh’, the rhythm dictated by the tortoise-shell rattles that Tangled and his fellow chiefs were shaking at the other end of the lodge.

He was wearing only a breech cloth. His body had been painted with lines of red river mud, swirling patterns of stars, of animals and birds. His head had been partially shaved, the hair left long in the middle, curled and oiled, put up into a long tress, held in a deer skin band.

His hands shook. Mouth dry, he licked his lips repeatedly, watching the entrance of the hut, waiting for the quiver of the deerskin that would show she was about to appear. He had started with every arrival, as each member of the lodge made their entrance, moved to their place, took up the rhythm of the chant. But it had been a while since the last. And his shaking was growing.

When he’d seen her before, he’d only had time to whisper, in French, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ and she’d only had time to reply, ‘I know,’ before the maidens of the lodge swept in, swept her away. The men had come for him then, taken him to the river to bathe, used the mud there to draw the elaborate patterns and symbols on his body. He knew that if such a thing were possible in France he would have been surrounded by men making obscene jokes, commenting on the night ahead, disparaging his anatomy. But the men of the Bear clan, when they talked, talked of war. Mostly, they sang their songs. No reference was made to what lay ahead of him that night, for it was sacred.

A flourish of rattles, the chant ending on a high note. Then silence, save for the wind outside the lodge and the crackle of fresh tobacco thrown on the fire.

And then she was there. Her hair was pulled back, set high as well. And her body was painted too. He had never seen her like this, for she had been clothed as a Frenchwoman when they’d met and had worn bead dresses since her arrival in this land. Now, she was dressed like any other maiden of the village in the summer, with just a short shift around her waist that scarcely reached to the middle of her thighs. Beads hung down them from a wampum belt. Around her neck, more lengths of river shell hung, concealing, but only a little, her nakedness.

Anne had meant to stride in unafraid, head high, like a princess. But when the deerskin was flung back and she saw him there, she suddenly had to raise her arms, cross them before her, as protection, as concealment. Only a gentle prodding made her step forward. More of a stumble, she thought, ungraceful as that. She was suddenly unsure if she could remember how to walk.

In a moment, she realized she must have, because she was standing before him and the rattles that had ceased on her entrance had begun again, as well as the chanting. In those sounds, it felt as if there was less attention on her. She could at least breathe, though she couldn’t bring down the barrier of her arms, had indeed lost the ability to move them at all.

He stepped in to her, close, so she could smell the river on him, a clean, good scent that transcended the tobacco smoke. There was something else too, as good. The scent of him.

‘Anne,’ he said, ‘we don’t, you still can …’

He’d had words before, words he’d stored up in the time he’d waited there, words to excuse her, to release her. He’d even formed a plan – there was a pile of skins to lie beneath, they could hide there together, movements made, sounds, enough to satisfy the watchers.

He’d had a speech. And it vanished from his mouth and mind as he saw the beauty of her, a beauty he’d recognized once and had lost somehow.

She’d wondered if she could go through with it. Had decided for and against it with every long minute that had passed since Gaka had told her of her dream. Now, as she looked into his eyes, she saw in them what she’d first seen when she’d woken in the royal palace in Paris and he’d been by her side. And all the darkness between them since, the misunderstandings, the pain as he searched for himself in this world, vanished.

In their silence, the chants and the rattles once more built under their thoughts. Then;

‘You don’t …’

‘I’ve never …’

They both stopped as they started, together. They both laughed. And the sound of the laughs, hers to him, his to her, chased away all the other sounds.

‘I’ve never … loved anyone else,’ she said. ‘No man has ever … I’ve never wanted to be with anyone.’

‘Then it is the same for both of us,’ he smiled. ‘For I have never loved anyone either.’

‘I thought, in France …’

‘That wasn’t me. That was someone else. I think … I think I was only conceived when I saw you fall from the Paris sky. I was only born when I returned to my tribe.’

He swung his head to either side, raised his arms to gesture to those who chanted in the smoke. She saw the way his body moved, how it had grown even in the short time that he had been there. She reached out then and touched him, on the big muscle of his back. He turned at her touch and she kept her fingers there, dropping her other arm away. His eyes lowered to her breasts and when she saw him shudder, she felt happy and excited, in a way she never had before.

‘I do not know what to do,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he replied and he took her hand and laid her gently down onto the skins.

‘Do not think of the people,’ he said.

‘What people?’ she said and smiled.

Even though the others seemed far away, their chanting felt near, surrounding them. The rhythm of it took them both and though there was a little pain to start, it receded swiftly, diminished by the strange, the wondrous sensations that their bodies’ joining was causing her. And the chants changed as she did, becoming more urgent, and soon, as he moved in different ways inside her, as his hands stroked and caressed her in ways she could never have guessed at, she found she was chanting too, and her cries and then his rose to mingle with the sounds above them both. She gathered in the smoke, the rattles, the rhythm, the way they moved, until her whole body rushed to a point where everything was one.

There was no moment in the night they were not together, asleep, or awake and moving again, joined by the sounds around them that did not cease.

It was the morning light streaming through the vent in the roof, falling on her face, that woke her. She was on her side and he was curled around her, so that they still touched, at every part of them that could. She moved and he groaned but did not wake, so she slipped out from under him. Gentle snores came from mouths that had chanted all night.

Then she remembered what all the magic had been for. And she ran the few paces up to the platform.

Gaka was on her back, her eyelids half open. The one eye was still rolled over, the other stared straight out.

‘Oh, Gaka, oh Aunt,’ Anne cried, slipping down beside her. Then she noticed two things. The smile on Gaka’s face, and her hand, the one that had been bent and twisted by her sudden sickness. It was open now as if, at the end, she’d reached out for something. And resting in that hand, was Anne Boleyn’s.

The full moon did not have the sky entirely to itself. Columns of cloud rolled across it, as they had all day, so that land and water would be suddenly concealed or as swiftly revealed. The clouds pressed down, holding in the day’s heat. The air crackled, filling every nostril with the promise of rain.

The heat was fiercest at the entrance to the lodges for fires burned before each of them, huge pyres consuming all that was thrown on them in moments. It was flesh that burned, but not such as would delight the stomachs of the hungry. For each family had gone to the graves of their dead, all those who had stayed above the earth since the last Kettle, three years before. They had taken them down from their platforms, out of their bark coffins. They had stripped them of the beaver skins that had covered them and, if there was flesh still on their bones, that flesh was purged in a crucible of flame. Then the bones were raked from the ashes, washed, and wrapped again in fresh beaver skins.

Gaka’s relations attended to her body differently, for she was of the most recent dead. As soon as it was discovered, her body had been curled up, chest to knees, hands clasped before her face. Now she lay on a bear skin robe close to the fire as if asleep. Anne sat right beside her, enjoying the heat on her near-naked skin. One hand rested on Gaka’s shoulder, marvelling at the intensity of the dead woman’s smile.

Something moved through her hair. She reached a hand up, thinking it must be another of the giant moths that had gathered around the firelight. But her brushing fingers encountered others and she lifted her head … to a vision that only the presence of so many dead could have conjured up.

She scrambled away, a cry caught in her throat. He followed her, his white hands raised toward her in a gesture of calming.

‘I am sorry, Anne,’ Tagay said. ‘I did not know how to come to you.’

Her breath returning, she studied him. Every part of his body was whitened, except for his face and even that had streaks of the dye across it, five parallel lines the width of each cheek. His breech cloth, even his hair, was covered in the same compound, the stickiness of which she discovered as she raised her hand to it.

‘Ugh! What is it?’

‘A mixture of river mud and shavings of a special rock, ground to powder. Oh, and we each put blood into it, though I think that was more ceremonial.’ He laughed as she tried to wipe her fingers on his chest, increasing the amount she had. Then she laughed too, and wiped them in lines across her own face, a faint mirror of his.

His laughter stopped when he looked down at Gaka. He was silent a moment, studying her. ‘She looks content,’ he said.

She took a sticky, white hand in hers. ‘She begins her journey smiling. Is that not a lesson to us all?’

‘It is. I hope to have a similar smile on my face when I start on mine. And probably thinking about the same thing, the last thing she saw.’

He looked down at her, hoping that she would join him in a memory of the previous night. But the look on her face was sad.

‘Do not make that smile too soon, Tagay.’

‘Not for twenty summers. More,’ he said quickly, but not quick enough to stop the tear that formed in one of her eyes. He reached up to her face, stopped the tear as it ran down her cheek, raised it on a finger’s end, watching it catch and hold the firelight.

‘You promise?’ Both her hands clasped his. ‘When these painted lines are wrinkles?’

‘I promise.’ Then she pulled him to her, careless of the paint, needing to feel his body against hers. Their skin touched and a heat came that had nothing to do with the proximity of flames.

They held each other till they became aware of other sounds around them. The families of the lodge were gathering the last of the bones burned cleaned, wrapping them in skin bundles. Two women came for Gaka and began to fold the edges of her blanket around her. From the far side of the open space, they heard the shiver of tortoise-shell rattles, the first soft chanting of, ‘Ha-eh-eh, Ha-eh-eh.’

Tagay shivered, muttered, ‘I must go.’ He half turned, then hesitated, turned back. ‘There is something else. You must take this.’

She looked down. There was now a dark centre to the whiteness of his hand.

‘Donnaconna’s Oki.’ She pulled her hand back as he lifted the smooth stone toward her. ‘I stopped you throwing it away once. I told you then, it is power. Why do you seek to give that away when you need it most?’

His voice stayed soft. ‘We do not take Oki over there. Only weapons.’

‘Tagay …’

‘I have prayed to it, burnt tobacco for it.’ He hesitated, and she could see the struggle within him. ‘I do not want to lose it in a fight.’

It was an excuse and they both knew it. He wanted it to survive, even if he didn’t.

For a long moment they stared at each other across the stone. Then her hand closed over it and they held it between them. ‘I will keep it for you. But only for tonight.’

She took it and he sighed. Then, looking down at the paint that daubed her, laughed. ‘It is difficult to clean off.’

‘We will clean it off together,’ she replied fiercely, ‘when I give you your Oki back. At the rendezvous.’

‘At the rendezvous.’

Bending to the blanket at his feet, he said, ‘Goodbye, Aunt.’

‘I will see to her, Tagay. I loved her too.’

‘I know.’ He hesitated. ‘Anne, I …’

‘I know. Go on. Go! I will see you at the rendezvous.’

He walked swiftly away toward the river. She watched him until he was out of sight. Then she dropped the Oki into her pouch, and bent to help Gaka’s nieces lift the bundle of skins that contained their aunt. Together, they joined the procession from the village and up the cliff path that led to the Feast of the Dead.

Still the thunder would not come. The air was agitated, the wind building in gusts and sudden short rushes, then dying away to a heated stillness. Changing directions too, bearing sounds to where they lay on the beach. It would blow from behind them and they would hear the tortoise-shell rattles, and the cries of, ‘Ha-eh-eh, Ha-eh-eh.’ Then many of the warriors would turn into the wind, sending muttered prayers toward the sounds, for all had relatives who were beginning their journeys that night to the Village of the Dead. And they all knew that, all too soon, they could be following them on that journey. But when the wind switched and blew into their faces from the water, other sounds came to them, faint but unmistakable. On the far shore, the Tattooed people were holding a feast of war.

Tagay turned his head, looked down the beach to either side. Though the moon was hidden, the ghost warriors were easy to see. Eighty of them, ten from each clan but all intermingled, each clutching their bows and quivers, their war clubs and knives, their own protective Oki of stones, sticks, bones. The ten nearest to Tagay were his guard – older, more experienced fighters. The rest were younger, full of the crazed courage of youth. These also were mainly bachelors, with no families dependent on them in the village.