The Seekers (67 page)

From the opposite side of the tepee, Amanda stared at the bright, hard musculature of the Indian’s body, at the shining black strands of his shoulder-length hair revealed when he removed the bonnet and carefully suspended it by a thong on another pole.

Then Plenty Coups unfastened his clout. He turned back toward her. She saw his maleness standing out in a clump of black hair. His prideful smile grew, just as he was growing—

Deep within herself, she felt the old urge to close her eyes and escape this endlessly repeated nightmare. But just as quickly as the desire seized her, she resisted. Life was precious. That was what she had come to realize in the dreadful days after the preacher had stolen her. Life was precious, and she would not give it up easily, no matter what else she might be forced to surrender—

Yet the panic and terror persisted.

To fight it, she summoned another memory as Plenty Coups walked slowly back to the grass bed. Dimly, she perceived a glittering length of metal jutting from his hand. A knife—with which he slashed the thongs binding her wrists and ankles. The point of the knife just missed the cordage bracelet.

But she saw that through a haze overlaid with a picture of a comfortable, shadowed room where a fire burned in a hearth, and a sword hung above a mantelpiece, a sword and a long gun like Maas and the trappers carried. On the mantel proper stood a small green bottle. Just in front of it and slightly to one side, a gaunt man—her father—spoke with great seriousness.

She didn’t know what he was saying, except for one sentence—

You are a Kent.

It was said to Jared, who hovered wraithlike at the periphery of the vision. But she knew it applied to her as well. She was not a lump of clay, nor a person without a name or identity—

You are a Kent.

She clung to those words, and to the compelling impression she had of the objects on the mantel. They were important to her father, immensely important. Therefore they were important to her—

She knew their location. Boston. Where Papa had died. And Mama—

Boston was the city from which she’d fled with her cousin Jared, beginning the long journey that had ended in such totally unexpected fashion here, in the middle of a vast prairie, far from the sheltered and comfortable existence that had once been hers—

You are a Kent.

She must never forget that. When she wanted to die, she must remember—

As she did now.

The blind panic lessened a little.

Plenty Coups knelt beside her, supping his knife out of sight beneath the hides on the bed. She kept concentrating on the images in her mind. She knew, without quite knowing how or why, that the precious objects glimpsed in her imagination were the tangible symbols of the reality of her earlier life, and must be sought one day, and reclaimed, if it were possible—

How would it be possible? she thought, despairing again. She was a prisoner. Bedraggled, hungry, not even certain of her exact age any longer—

Even as the young Indian reached for her, the image of her father seemed to burn within her mind.

You are a Kent.

She
must
live,
must
struggle against the hopelessness, the—

Plenty Coups seized her arm. He was scowling as he dragged her upright, pressed his other hand to her buckskin dress and began fondling her breast roughly.

She bent over his forearm and bit him.

Astonished, he yelped. She shoved. He toppled over backwards, almost singeing his hair in the fire. He came scrambling up, dark eyes murderous. His right hand shot under the hides, seeking the knife.

Amanda clambered to her knees, watching the sharp blade swing upward then down toward her shoulder—

She shot up her left hand, caught the powerful wrist—

That in itself would never have stopped him from cutting her. What stopped him was the way her expression changed. Though she still felt terror, she willed herself to smile.

Baffled, he wrenched free of her grip. He shook the knife at her several times, plainly unfamiliar with this sort of behavior from a member of the female sex.

She grasped his left hand, placed it carefully on her breast.

Then, still holding his hand, she moved it back and forth. Gently.

And smiled.

She thought she saw comprehension in his eyes. Comprehension—and outrage that stunned him to inaction.

To capitalize on the momentary advantage she sensed, she let go of him, seized her left arm with her right hand, shook her arm—then scowled and shook her head. The young Indian looked thunderstruck.

Once again she guided his left hand to her breast, letting it rest easily.

There was a moment in which she thought she’d failed, thought that the gap between his world and hers was too wide, and he could not understand what Maas and the preacher had come to understand—and that even if he could, he would refuse to accept her terms.

But slowly, the mouth of Plenty Coups lifted at the corners. His eyes filled with hard, grudging admiration.

He laughed loudly.

So did she.

He was handsome when he laughed, she thought. She was capable of admiring him even though her heart was beating fast and her breathing was strident.

The young Indian’s eyes moved to her mouth, then down her throat to her breasts. He laughed again, this time in almost childlike pleasure. He recognized her willingness to fight—something his mate probably never did. It delighted him. She experienced a moment of joy as she realized again that, young as she was, she could protect herself with her wits, and her body—

The Indian’s erection, shriveled during the byplay with the knife, quickly reasserted itself. He picked Amanda up in his arms. His face was quite close to hers, his eyes mirthful. But the cruelty she had seen in them before was gone.

He bore her to the bed with the willow backrest, putting her down with great care. Then he touched her buckskin dress.

She nodded, and reached for the hem.

The drumming outside grew louder, the laughter and the chanting more shrill. Naked, she reclined on the hides with her shoulders braced against the backrest. Plenty Coups slipped his arms around her waist and kissed her breasts one by one. Though she was still frightened and a little repelled by what was about to happen, it no longer held the terror it once had. She was able to stroke the side of the young Indian’s face.

He crouched above her for a moment, then lowered his hips toward hers. As he pushed himself against her, firmly, yet not so hard as to hurt her, she closed her eyes.

She blanked her mind as he penetrated her, thinking two connected thoughts—

Thoughts which gave her hope for a certainty that, one day, she would escape from the snare in which fate had trapped her:

I will live.

I have found a way.

I will live.

John Jakes is a bestselling author of historical fiction, science fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction. He is best known for his highly acclaimed eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles series, an American family saga that reaches from the Revolutionary War to 1890, and the North and South Trilogy, which follows two families from different regions during the American Civil War. His commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title “godfather of historical novelists” from the
Los Angeles Times
and led to his streak of sixteen consecutive
New York Times
bestsellers.

Born in Chicago in 1932, Jakes originally studied to be an actor, but he turned to writing professionally after selling his first short story for twenty-five dollars during his freshman year at Northwestern University. That check, Jakes later said, “changed the whole direction of my life.” He enrolled in DePauw University’s creative writing program shortly thereafter and graduated in 1953. The following year, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Ohio State University.  

While at DePauw, Jakes met Rachel Ann Payne, whom he married in 1951. After finishing his studies, Jakes worked as a copywriter for a large pharmaceutical company before transitioning to advertising, writing copy for several large firms, including Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. At night, he continued to write fiction, publishing two hundred short stories and numerous mystery, western, and science fiction books. He turned to historical fiction, long an interest of his, in 1973 when he started work on
The Bastard
, the first novel of the Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes’s masterful hand at historical fiction catapulted
The Bastard
(1974) onto the bestseller list—with each subsequent book in the series matching
The Bastard
’s commercial success. Upon publication of the next three books in the series—
The Rebels
(1975),
The Seekers
(1975), and
The Furies
(1976)—Jakes became the first-ever writer to have three books on the
New York Times
bestseller list in a single year. The series has maintained its popularity, and there are currently more than fifty-five million copies of the Kent Family Chronicles in print worldwide.

Jakes followed the success of his first series with the North and South Trilogy, set before, during, and after the Civil War. The first volume,
North and South
, was published in 1982 and reaffirmed Jakes’s standing as a “master of the ancient art of story telling” (
The New York Times Book Review
). Following the lead of
North and South
, the other two books in the series,
Love and War
(1984) and
Heaven and Hell
(1987), were chart-topping bestsellers. The trilogy was also made into an ABC miniseries—a total of thirty hours of programming—starring Patrick Swayze. Produced by David L. Wolper for Warner Brothers
North and South
remains one of the highest-rated miniseries in television history.

The first three Kent Family Chronicles were also made into a television miniseries, produced by Universal Studios and aired on the Operation Prime Time network. Andrew Stevens starred as the patriarch of the fictional family. In one scene, Jakes himself appears as a scheming attorney sent to an untimely end by villain George Hamilton.

In addition to historical fiction, Jakes penned many works of science fiction, including the Brak the Barbarian series, published between 1968 and 1980. Following his success with the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South Trilogy, Jakes continued writing historical fiction with the stand-alone novel
California Gold
and the Crown Family Saga (
Homeland
and its sequel,
American Dreams
).

Jakes remains active in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright. His adaptation of
A Christmas Carol
is widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama Shakespeare Festival and theaters as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds five honorary doctorates, the most recent of which is from his alma mater Ohio State University. He has filmed and recorded public service announcements for the American Library Association and hasreceived many other awards, including a dual Celebrity and Citizen’s Award from the White House Conference on Libraries and Information and the Cooper Medal from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. Jakes is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the PEN American Center, and Writers Guild of America East. He also serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.

Jakes and his wife have four children and eleven grandchildren. After living for thirty-two years on a South Carolina barrier island, they now reside in Sarasota, Florida, where Jakes has resumed his volunteer work on behalf of theaters and libraries while he continues writing.