Blood Ties (59 page)

A hand pulled at his elbow. Nishane, an older member of the Beaver clan, whose scars testified to his history in war, gestured to the water. Carefully, Tagay peered through a little gap in the foliage that hid them. At first, all he could see was what he’d seen in the hour or more they’d waited there – the river glittering or dull depending on the position of clouds and moon, and still maintaining their position against the flow of the stream, the enemy’s cluster of five canoes. There were two men in each and every so often a new craft would appear as a replacement, the one relieved taking back the same message to their camp – that their Tahontaenrat prey were feasting in their village.

Nishane drew Tagay’s attention to other movement in the water and he could now make out the shapes that drifted with the stream toward the enemy’s canoes. Shapes that to most eyes would appear merely as branches of old trees that had fallen into the water. But as the moon suddenly appeared, Tagay could make out the darker shapes at the heart of the floating wood. Not all the warriors of the Deer people had painted themselves as ghosts. Some had found black mud, darker rock powder, though they had still bound it with their blood.

The canoes began to separate to allow the branches to pass between them, a paddle stretched out to fend off a collision. And it was when the paddle reached into the leaves that ten black shapes disengaged themselves from the five, floating trunks. From being stationary in the water the canoes were suddenly all moving agitatedly. Then four of them flipped over, flailing bodies falling. A bone knife that had been covered in mud flashed clean in the moonlight. Cries carried, swiftly cut off as water filled mouths.

One canoe had survived. Tagay could see the two warriors in it, frantically turning the craft toward their own shore, thrusting their paddles into the water, striking at hands that tried to hold them. A paddle was seized but the canoe broke free and immediately began to surge away. Drawing breath now, its occupants began to shout. But the wind was in their faces, bearing the sounds of their tribe’s feast.

One of the other canoes was righted. Two black shapes slipped into it and paddles immediately dipped into the water. The pursued were several canoe lengths ahead but they had only one paddle between them. The gap was closed, the boats merged into one shape. There were grunts, a howl of pain. Then, as the moon hid again, silence. And the five canoes, all righted now, began to pull strongly for the Tahontaenrat shore.

Eighty silent, white figures rose as one from their hiding. The canoes grounded, and ten black shapes leapt out, pulling their craft higher. One of them was limping and it was this shape that made his way straight to Tagay.

The only part of Sada that could be seen clearly were his eyes and his teeth, these because they were bared in a smile.

‘First blood, War Chief,’ he said, dropping something wet at Tagay’s feet.

Tagay looked down. Even in the half light he could see the scalp, the hair pulled up into a single top knot. There was even a trace of a tattooed line curling down from it.

‘First blood.’ He raised his arm, turning to either side so all could see. Instantly, the white figures began to pull larger canoes from their hiding place into the water, six or eight figures climbing into each of them. From behind them other, unpainted men appeared, laying logs along the beach down which they began to roll rafts.

‘Are you sure I can’t come with you, Tagay?’ Sada’s eyes gleamed up at him.

‘We talked of this, cousin. Your leg was good enough for swimming, not for running along a beach, dodging arrows.’

‘It is true.’ Sada reached down, rubbed his ankle, then bent and picked up the scalp. ‘I just wanted a few more of these for my lodge post.’

‘Then I will bring some back for you.’ Tagay looked around, saw that his war party was all embarked. The canoes floated just offshore, all save one nearby. At its prow, Nishane held two paddles. ‘And you have made me a promise.’

‘I know. White Cedar.’ Sada grinned up at him. ‘I heard that you were so tireless at the andac-wanda that the Gods came to chant by the hearth and envy their new rival.’

Tagay smiled. ‘Watch for her, Sada.’ Then he headed to the water.

‘I will. And later we will smoke pipes together in our new lodge near the Big Lakes and you will tell me the story of your feats this night. Night after night, season after season after …’ He faked a huge yawn.

Tagay laughed, then moved down the beach. When he’d climbed into the canoe, he lifted the paddle high so all could see it. As it rose, the moon appeared again in a rent of cloud as if summoned by him.

Glowing in its light, the Ghost Warriors set out across the water toward the village of their enemy.

The song ended. Thirty pairs of feet thumped down together on the dense packed earth, the deer-hoof rattles at each knee shaking in unison with the force. The leader, who had been crouched in an attitude of attack, now swung his club high into the air using its trajectory to pull him up. As the weapon reached for the sky he let out the war whoop, starting high on a note then running down to a moment’s pause before reaching again for the same note but louder, wilder. As his cry finished, every dancer took it up. ‘Ah-aaaaa -Ah,’ burst from thirty throats.

Then the drums came with a slower beat, and the dancers walked to its rhythm around the huge circle of people. Since no one strode forward to make a speech – and there had been many in the hours of the feast – Thomas took the opportunity to move across the circle to Gianni. It would have been rude to do so while the war chief, Falling Day, the man who had first captured them, declaimed the glory of their tribe.

‘Will they have any strength left for their dawn battle?’ Gianni gestured to the dancers.

‘From what I’ve seen of them, they could dance all night and still fight all the next day.’ Thomas lowered himself onto the ground beside the younger man. ‘But these are only a few. How many warriors do you think have gathered here?’

‘It is difficult to say. Six hundred? Seven?’

Thomas nodded. He thought it might be even more. The allies of their hosts had been coming, in smaller and larger bands, for the entire time they had been there. Through their interpreter he had learnt that those who came were of different tribes yet bound with the Great Hill People in a confederacy of five nations. It was always hard to tell time with them, everything was just ‘before’. But their own tribe had been the last to join the compact, the Hodenosaunee, as it was called. And they had been members for at least twenty summers, it seemed.

‘Do you still hold to your plan, Gianni?’

‘I do. And do you still hold to yours?’

‘What choice have you left me?’

The younger man looked over at him. ‘The choice to wait here till the battle is over and I return. With the hand of the witch.’

‘And with your sister.’

Gianni coloured. ‘Yes, of course. With my sister as well.’

Thomas started to speak again, but there was no point. The younger man would never be dissuaded. He had been very disappointed when Black Snake had failed to return with what they sought. But reasoned argument – that the hand was lost this night of the full moon – was only met with a grunted, ‘Then we will make her find it again.’ Thomas knew that the hand was still Gianni’s obsession. So Anne had to be his. He need not tell her brother why.

‘Remember, Jesuit, you will have to look to yourself. I will not take care of you over there.’ Gianni gestured to the far shore, just visible as a shadow in the moon-hidden night.

Despite his training in calm, something in Gianni’s arrogance could still prickle Thomas. ‘And how many battles have you fought in, boy?’ he said.

‘Well, I …’

‘Exactly. I know you have killed in alleys. You know all about the knife in the dark. But I was storming breaches when you were chasing chickens on your farm! So you look to
yourself
.’

As the two men glared at each other, a whoop from the war leader, immediately answered by his dancers, signalled another round of the dance. Gianni rose. ‘I will go see to my gunpowder and leave you to your prayers.’

The drumbeats doubled as Gianni walked away.

‘Well reminded,’ Thomas muttered to himself. From where he sat he could see through the dancers and between a gap in the lodgehouses and the trees to the river. It was lit by the sudden appearance of the moon and black shapes moved on its surface, like insects on the surface of a pond. He struggled up and onto his knees and, as another war song started, began his prayers.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, hearken to my pleas. Keep safe your daughter Anne. Holy Jesus, Blessed Saviour, listen to …’

‘Ah-aaaaa -Ah.’ The war whoop rang out again and again, drowning the words of his prayer, even in his own ears and heart. ‘Ah-aaaaa -Ah.’

‘Ha-eh-eh, Ha-eh-eh.’

The last group of the procession had arrived from the village. They were from one of the destroyed villages and they took their allotted place at the circular pit’s edge. The women laid out the bundles of presents that they had managed to save from the destruction of their homes, supplemented with gifts from their relatives and clan fellows in Stadacona. The men of the group clambered up onto the wooden platform that had been erected around one half of the pit. There they attached the bundles of skin that contained the bones of their dead to poles and wedged these so they reached out above the void.

Anne stood with the people of Gaka’s lodge, their aunt’s body still wrapped in skins at their feet, as were all the other bodies of the recent dead. The pit she stood above was at least two large men deep and perhaps five across, its floor completely lined in beaver robes.

As the cries of the last of the arrivals died away, Tangled stepped forward and raised his arms. Drums murmured lightly under the words that followed.

‘You are all welcome here, both you who have brought your dead and those you have brought who continue their journey this night.’ He reached behind him and was handed a large wooden ladle. He stretched it out over the pit. ‘Let us give them our gifts, so that their journey to the next village will be easy and they will have many feasts on the way.’

He dropped the ladle. Instantly, from all around the pit, utensils were thrown in, kettles, bowls, sieves and trays, pipes and mortars and deer hide bags. When the last of the gifts had fallen, Tangled spoke again.

‘Now, let us feast our relatives.’

Immediately, food was produced, bowls of stew ladled out from kettles, dried deer meat handed around, roasted fish on skewers. The Tahontaenrat sat and ate and talked as if they had all the time in the world.

Anne felt it was her, and her alone, who could not eat, was the only one who looked back now beyond the village, over the water. Toward their men, the other ghosts at this feast.

At last the thunder came, in the wake of a stab of lightning that cut down in jagged lines to strike the high country, lighting the white-daubed warriors as if they were shards of its power. And the roll that followed coincided with the sound of their canoes grounding on the beach. It was like a small shoal of fish joining a huge host of them, for the canoes of their enemy were drawn up rank on rank, hundreds and hundreds, from little two-man craft to boats that could hold twenty. On and on they stretched, from water’s edge to the first trees.

They had sent one canoe in first, men of the dark mud who had swiftly killed the two men who watched the water. They came to Tagay and reported now.

‘They are holding their feast in the open space at the centre of their village,’ one said.

The other added. ‘This path here leads to it. It is the only one to the beach, but four paths join it up ahead to the different gates of their palisade.’

‘Which gate lies closest to the forest?’ Tagay asked.

‘The west,’ the first man replied. ‘Low bushes run almost up to it.’

Tagay spoke swiftly to the clan leaders. The plan had been decided before they set out, it just needed refining now. The ten youngest men were to stay on the beach and destroy the canoes and the more solid rafts. Ten more, who were the best archers, would go to the crossroads of paths ahead and wait for the swift return of the rest – sixty of them, who would enter the village by the west gate. Tagay knew it would only be a matter of time before a Tattooed warrior came across them on the beach and raised the alarm. He didn’t want to be trapped there by overwhelming odds. The only way to get enough time to do the job was to create panic at the feast fires of their enemies.

To the sound of cedar bark splintering behind them, they set off from the beach. Twice they saw pairs of men coming their way, twice a dozen arrows sang through the night. At the crossroads of the four paths, the ten dispersed through the trees, some to climb, some to take advantage of a slight rise of ground where they planted arrows tip down in the earth before them.

Tagay led the remaining men west at a gentle run. Within a minute, they were crouched in bushes before the palisade gate. It was closed and would be barred on the inside. Two points glowed atop it, showing where the night guards sucked on their pipes. From beyond them, came the cries of the feast, the never ceasing beating of drums.

At a signal, each man slipped an arrow onto a bow string. Tagay strung the one given him as war chief by Sada, the Arrow That Flies True. The best archers may have been left behind at the crossroads but of the sixty arrows that were given flight, more than enough struck home to send the two men reeling backwards, their pipes a crescent of sparks in the darkness. Pale wraiths moved forward, throwing hide lassoes over the palisade posts, then climbing swiftly up. A moment later the gates swung open and the warriors of the Tahontaenrat were inside the stronghold of their foe.

They gathered just within the gateway. Tagay knew that they would not have much time before discovery and the fight that would follow. They would kill silently for as long as they could do so. They would spread through the camp in their groups of ten and try to wait for his signal.

‘Our people should now be embarking on the rafts,’ he said. ‘Soon our wives, our children, our parents, our sisters and brothers will be past us and on their way to safety in our new lands. We only have to stay and hurt them here a little, to give our brothers on the beach time to destroy their boats. Listen for the cry we discussed, the call of the crane, for when I, or if I am killed, one of my ten, give it, then it is time to run for the beach. Do not stay for scalps and do not stay too long to prove your bravery. It is already proved by being a Ghost Warrior. I want us to sing the song of this night together to our grandchildren in the new lodges our people will build.’