Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (19 page)

“She chose your brother to be the Great Sun?”

“In part. Primarily she chose me to go with my father because she thought I would have the best chance to survive the submersion in another culture, to benefit from it, and to return to her. It was later that my brother became the Great Sun on the death of our uncle. The next Great Sun is always the eldest son of the eldest sister of the dead ruler.”

“Then if you had not gone to France, you might have been chosen since you and your brother were twins?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Was it — very difficult, adjusting to life in France among your father’s people?”

He leaned his head back against the tree trunk, a faint smile lifting a corner of his mouth. “The hardest thing was learning to pronounce the letter ‘r.’ There is none in the Natchez language.”

Was he telling the truth? She would have liked to probe deeper, but could not find the words to ask if his father’s half-Indian bastard had been made welcome or instead had found scorn and rejection. Finally she asked, “Do you regret going?”

“No.”

The negative was bald, perhaps out of loyalty to his mother and the choice she had made, perhaps as a defense of his brother who had stayed to preside over the massacre of his father’s people. At any rate, she did not doubt it. “It seems odd that your mother was given the choice.”

“She was not given it, but rather exercised it as her right.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She is of the Sun class, the ruling class. My father, being a Frenchman, was considered of the Noble class only, which made it proper in the beginning for her to marry him. A Sun cannot marry in their own class, but must find a mate in the lower ranks. Because of this, however, my mother was superior in status to my father, at least by the lights of the Natchez. The decision was her privilege.”

The children of a female Sun retained their mother’s rank, though the children of a male Sun became Nobles, Elise knew. Therefore Reynaud and his brother were of the Sun class, their rank reckoned through the female line. It often happened that a female Sun would marry a Stinkard, merely to avoid any challenge to her superior standing. The Stinkard husband of a Sun could not sit in her presence, could never walk before her, and must ever obey her commands. Since it was also the custom for the spouses of the Suns to be strangled and buried with them, it sometimes happened that a Stinkard husband outlived a Sun wife and was sacrificed. There had been a great scandal in the Indian villages not so very long before when a Stinkard husband, on the death of his Sun wife, had run away, escaping his fate. The most outraged people in the village had been his own relatives, who would have been exempt from such a death for the rest of their lives if he had taken his rightful place in the funeral procession.

Elise tried to picture Reynaud as a part of such a rite, perhaps as one of the men who held the strangling cord. She could not. Once it would have been easy. Had a change of clothing made so much of a difference in her ideas of him?

“What are you called when you are among the Natchez?”

“My name? I’m known as Hawk-of-the-Night.”

“And your brother?”

“Now he is only the Great Sun. Once he was Diving Hawk.” He went on before she could comment. “You spoke not so long ago of the cruelty of the Indians, of their habit of torturing prisoners, male ones that is. There is no way to justify such a thing to the European mind and yet the custom serves its purpose. It allows the people of the victorious tribe to see that their foe is not a monster or a devil, but only a man who bleeds and dies as they do, plus it gives an outlet for the terror and horror of war endured by the women and children since they often participate.”

“You don’t condone it?” she asked, frowning at him.

“But neither do I condemn it as the practice of barbarians. That would be hypocrisy, for the annals of the world are filled with such cruelties. The ancient Phoenicians scalped their dead enemies, and some scholars think the Indians of the southern Americas may have the blood of these seafarers, blown off course long ages ago, in their veins. The hordes of Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane massacred thousands upon thousands and left their skulls to dry in the sun. The Gauls, the Franks, and the Crusaders put whole towns to the sword, not excluding the women and children, while rapine and pillage have often been the order of the day in the wake of such armies.”

“That was ages ago!”

“Perhaps, but even now the dungeons of Europe are filled with instruments of torture that are regularly used on the innocent in the sacred name of God or to achieve confessions for crimes as small as the stealing of bread — bread that would have been freely given to the hungry by any Natchez. The difference, you might say, is that the torture is done in concealment, the screams muffled. That is true. But criminals are flogged, branded, and hanged in public execution of sentence. Where then is the dividing line between those of European blood and the barbaric natives of the new world?”

“It — it’s just that they derive such inhuman pleasure from it, or so I’ve been told.”

“They enjoy their triumph, as do we all. Still, they can be just and even humane. The torture of a prisoner can be stopped. There is a way for the man — it is always a man despite the practices of some of the eastern tribes in torturing females and children — to be saved. It requires only a single woman, a widow who has lost her husband in battle. If she will ask for the man to be given to her — as a slave, servant, the husband she has lost, in way she desires — he will be handed over without question. From that moment he becomes one with the Natchez and is never again an enemy.”

“And he will be trusted not to harm the widow?”

“He will owe her his life and feel the debt to the center of his being. He will not harm her, but is likely to serve her with honor all her days.”

Elise lifted a brow. “What keeps him from creeping away in the night and going back to his own tribe?”

“Honor and gratitude, most of the time. But if the widow is old, or ugly, then he may disappear one day.”

“And no one minds?” The lazy humor in his tone gave her a peculiar feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“The widow cries since she usually enjoys owning a slave and now has no one to warm her bed or perform the duties she has assigned. She will have lost great prestige also, for you realize that a male slave is rare; most are women and children.”

“Yes.” Her voice was subdued as she thought of the French even now serving as slaves at the Natchez village. She thought Reynaud gave a soft exclamation of annoyance with himself, but she could not be sure, for in that moment there came a distant hail from the direction of the house. They swung to look and saw the figure of a man coming toward them.

Reynaud was on his feet instantly, every sense alert. He put his hand out to take her arm, drawing her behind him, but so taut was his stance that she could not be sure he was aware of making that protective gesture.

In any case it was unnecessary.

“
Sacre bleu!”
the man called as soon as he was close enough to be easily heard. “What has become of the great warrior that he sits under a tree stuffing himself on persimmons like a ‘possum? That I should live to see it! And with a pretty woman beside him? This is a sorry pass, indeed. It makes me want to cry — with envy!”

“Pierre,” Reynaud called and strode to meet him. They flung their arms around each other, buffeting each other on the backs and shoulders as they stood in the center of the trail.

Elise moved forward slowly. Reynaud turned, drawing her nearer. “Elise,
ma chère
, permit me to present to you my good friend Pierre Broussard. Pierre, Madame Laffont.”

“
Enchanté
… madame?” Pierre Broussard swept off his hat, revealing fine blond hair worn long around his face in the cavalier style. Of medium height and perhaps a year or two younger than Reynaud, he had an open, merry countenance. He lifted one brow in comical disappointment over her married state as he bowed over her hand.

“I am a widow,” Elise said, a smile coming unbidden to her lips. “It is a great pleasure to meet you at last, m’sieu. We have been waiting for you for what seems an age.”

“Waiting? Now how is this? Not even I know where I am going to be next.”

“Oh, but—”

“Shall we go back to the house?” Reynaud interrupted. “I am sure that you would like a drink to wash the dust of travel from your throat, Pierre, and I have other guests who would like to meet you.”

Did the two men exchange a steady glance over her head? Elise thought so, but when she looked quickly at Reynaud, his face was relaxed in a smile as if his sole thought was of his duties as a host.

Pierre Broussard, the orphaned boy who had been placed with the Natchez to learn their language for the good of the French government, had become a trader. He traveled from New Orleans up the great Mississippi and its tributaries as far as the Illinois country, and fanned out over the myriad Indian trails from the domain of the British on the east to that of the Spanish on the west, and sometime even beyond. In pirogue and on pack animals, he carried rings, boxes, brass wire, needles, awls, bells, combs, scissors, drinking glasses, looking glasses, Flemish knives, woodcutter’s knives, hatchets, mattocks, gunscrews, musket-flints, powder and ball, sabers, fusils, shirts, materials such as red and blue limburgs, and, often, bags of salt. He visited the forts, settlements and Indian villages, taking the pelts of beaver, fox, bear, deer, and smaller animals, and also the soft, cured and beaded leather of the Indian women and their decorated and baked pottery and woven baskets in exchange for his wares. Sometimes he traded for the stocky plains ponies with the Caddo farther north or for the horses of Spanish breeding with the Avoyels that lived to the southeast, well below the fort of Saint Jean Baptiste in the lands of the Natchitoches.

His friends were many, for he was well liked, and so he was welcome everywhere. Any chance-met stranger was invited to his fire, given a share of his food. Because of this, he was a repository of information, a traveling crier of the births and deaths, the feuds and scandals of the country. In common with most traders, he could always be depended on to know the latest news.

It was this secondary function that was of interest to the group from Fort Rosalie. The man had hardly been presented in the salon and a glass of wine put into his hand than they crowded around him. Elise was no less interested, though she stood back with an arm across the back of Madame Doucet’s chair. The older woman’s composure, gained during the last few days, was in jeopardy. She leaned forward with her hands twisting in her lap, her eyes red-rimmed and staring, and her face pale.

“What of Fort Rosalie?” Pascal demanded. “Have you news?”

“The fortification, the houses, all burned. I am told the powder magazine on the side of the bluff made a magnificent explosion, awe-inspiring. As for the settlement, it is no more.”

“But the people?” Madame Doucet asked, her voice quavering.

“It is said eight men, perhaps other than yourselves, escaped death in the main attack. Four were killed in their pirogue on the river, two made their way to New Orleans to raise the alarm. These men arrived there in pitiful condition, weak from hunger and exhaustion, their clothing smoked and burned, their faces swollen from mosquito bites. The remaining two, a tailor and a cart driver, were taken prisoners, the first because of his usefulness and the last in order to drive the cart that took the spoils to the village. I regret to be forced to say that all others were killed.”

How many men had been at the settlement and the fort? Three hundred, four? Elise thought it nearer to the last number. Dead, all dead. They had known it must be so; still, it was a shock that left them silent for long minutes.

“And the women and children?” The words were little more than a whisper as Marie Doucet stared, trembling, at the French trader.

Pierre frowned, looking down at his glass. “The word is … They tell me that some one hundred fifty women and eighty children were taken to the Indian village as slaves.”

Two hundred thirty women and children. There had once been a counting at the settlement that had shown some seven hundred souls in residence there. The counting was not exact and yet it appeared that seventy or eighty women and children must have died on the day of the massacre. It seemed to Elise that for an instant she could hear the screams and smell the smoke that had been greasy with the taint of burning flesh.

St. Amant lifted his head from contemplating the wine in his glass and there was a blue line about his mouth. “What will become of them?”

It was a reasonable question. The French, due to the enlightened Indian policy of that wily old campaigner and founder of the colony, Bienville, had suffered little trouble with their Indian allies. Unlike the British Carolina colonies where such things were common, there had been few uprisings and therefore few French prisoners in Indian hands. But Bienville, due to political maneuverings in Paris and the general unproductivity of the colony, had been stripped of his position as governor, and now French women and children were at the mercy of the Natchez. All they had to go on as to their probable treatment were rumors and whispered stories of starvation, beatings, and maimings.

“They will be divided among the families according to rank and position. Young children will usually be-allowed to stay with their mothers, though older ones may be separated. Tasks and duties will be assigned — the gathering of firewood, grinding corn, cooking, the cleaning and preparing of furs — whatever is in need of doing. They will be treated well enough — after the first frenzy of victory — so long as they show themselves to be willing and cooperative.”